1635_ Cannon Law - Eric Flint [59]
"Most commendable," Father Gonzales said, a note of warm approval in his voice.
Slowly, carefully, not making any sudden movements, Don Vincente Jose-Maria Castro y Papas sheathed his sword without turning on the priest and hacking him into bloody hunks of tainted flesh. It was, he found, the hardest thing he had ever done in his life.
PART THREE
April 1635
Chapter 13
Rome
The mid-morning sun was making the paperwork on Sharon's desk glow in a way that was getting close to inducing eyestrain. Most of it was tedious stuff, but while she would have been happy to delegate, Adolf was not very good at accepting delegation. Preparing drafts for her approval or signature was as close as he was prepared to get. She wondered whether she should just start signing things without reading them—approvals of accounts, bread-and-butter correspondence with the embassy's suppliers and responses to invitations. Nothing earth-shattering. That gave her a slightly guilty start, though, and to be fair to her chief of staff he did manage to whittle the admin down to, on the worst days, about an hour. She sighed, and reflected that if she'd ever actually qualified as a nurse back up-time she'd have had more paperwork than this to reckon with.
The state papers, the copies of the intelligence briefings that had come in via radio over night and from the few USE agents in Rome who actually reported direct to the embassy via various channels, had been brief today. The twenty minutes of interest they generated hadn't been enough to sustain Sharon through an uncommonly large stack of, well, crap.
There had been a couple more near-riots. Nasty things were being said in Rome's tavernas about the way that second one had been handled. More than one informant had heard rumors that the slaughter had been deliberate, rather than the result of outrageous stupidity.
And rent-a-mobs were turning up elsewhere as well. Information on those was starting to trickle in as well, and whoever was organizing them—three different descriptions so far—was claiming to be either with the Committee of Correspondence or the Sons of Joe Buckley, a group apparently devoted to avenging Buckley's death at the hands of the Inquisition. That had caused Sharon a moment of grim amusement. The man who had almost certainly murdered poor Joe had, at the time, been a member in good standing of the Venice Committee of Correspondence. If they were a real group—and so far no one could say for certain that there wasn't a genuine protest or two happening among the hired demonstrations—then they were wildly misguided.
And, of course, the references to the Committee were bringing exasperated notes from Magdeburg, notes that had Don Francisco's style all over them. Sharon had sent back that she had Frank's personal assurance that he had nothing to do with the disturbances. Even if Frank had wanted to engage in that kind of shenanigans, he didn't have the cash, with his restaurant-cum-social club not yet breaking even, let alone turning a profit. Whoever was running these sideshows was spending money like water to get groups of several dozen out to each event, gathered in knots of half a dozen or so from across Rome. That suggested that there were whole teams of agitators at work, although there would be bound to be a few genuinely aggrieved folks joining in the fun by now.
She realized with a guilty start that she was woolgathering, and not getting through the day's paperwork.