1635: The Eastern Front Read Online Free Page A

good.
    This, for several reasons. Some of them were obvious. The men were former Yeoman Warders in the Tower of London and would provide the household with the finest security force you could ask for. The women were generally pleasant and invariably hard-working, and would be a great help in managing such a huge establishment. The children were numerous, ranged widely in age, and would make good companions and playmates for her own children.
    Best of all, though, was that the family's unquestioned matriarch was Patricia Hayes, and Patricia was of the old school. Whatever the mistress of the house wanted, she got—and Patricia had figured out very quickly that Rebecca's attitude when it came to nicknames was quite unlike her husband's.
    And who cared what the husband thought? Michael Stearns was now a general in the army, about to go gallivanting off to some foreign war. The mistress of the house mattered. He didn't.
    So, it would be "Baruch," not "Barry." "Sepharad," not the grotesque "Sephie" favored by most up-timers including—
    Michael came into the foyer, followed by Anthony Leebrick and Patrick Welch. He looked down at his daughter and smiled.
    "And what are you carrying on about, Sephie?"
    Her husband.

    Later that morning, Michael made his farewells. By then, their younger daughter Kathleen was energetically crawling about the foyer and doing her own investigations. So, she participated in the leave-taking ceremonies along with her mother and siblings. Whether or not the nine-month-old infant understood the nature of the occasion was perhaps doubtful. Although, the way she clutched her father's shoulders when he picked her up for a good-bye kiss would seem to indicate some apprehension on her part at his coming absence.
    But maybe she just found the epaulets fascinating. They were the one feature of the uniform of an officer in the USE army that was unabashedly flamboyant. These were not the subdued shoulder straps of the up-time American military, but the sort of golden-tasseled insignia that were used by Napoleonic-era armies. On the otherwise rather subdued field-gray uniform, they quite stood out.
    Eventually, Kathleen released her grip and Michael handed her back to her current nursemaid, Mary Hayes. He then gave Rebecca a final kiss—nothing perfunctory, either, she made sure of that—and off he went, with his two new staff officers trailing in his wake.
    Some part of Rebecca wondered if she would ever see her husband again, but she squelched that quickly enough.
    He's a general, she told herself firmly. Ignoring, just as firmly, her knowledge that in the seventeenth century army generals often led from the front and were quite apt to be killed in battle.

    Rebecca spent some time thereafter restlessly moving about the house, doing her own investigations. She spent a fair amount of that time in the several toilets and bathrooms scattered through the huge dwelling, testing their various devices and taking what comfort she could from them.
    Which was considerable, actually. Newly designed and built, the house had modern plumbing. Rebecca had grown up with seventeenth-century sanitation facilities, and was certainly capable of managing with such. She'd been doing so again for the past two years, after all. But her stay in Grantville had spoiled her in that regard.
    Fortunately, it had done the same thing for every down-timer who passed through the up-time American town. By now, there was a flourishing new industry in central Europe and the Low Countries producing the wherewithal for modern plumbing. The same industries were beginning to appear in France, Italy and Poland, if not yet in Spain and England.
    The adoption of those new techniques was especially rapid in the Germanies and Bohemia. That was partly because the industries involved were further developed there. But another important factor was the stance of the Committees of Correspondence, who were more prominent in those areas than they were elsewhere