“Your father?”
She shook her head. “No, no, not that.” She smiled, still against his chest. “I do not think, now, that will be the problem I once assumed. I am not certain, but after what Melissa said—”
She nuzzled his shoulder. “He has been reading this philosopher named Spinoza, lately. He smiles a lot. At me, especially. And now and then I see him smiling at you. As if he knows something we do not.”
Mike chuckled. “He probably does, at that.”
Rebecca leaned back and looked Mike in the eyes. “I will do whatever you wish,” she said softly.
Mike studied her in the moonlight. Her eyes were like dark pools, soft, limpid, loving.
“You would prefer it slowly,” he said. The statement was a simple declaration.
Rebecca hesitated. Then, ruefully: “Not entirely!” Her hands were suddenly pressing into his ribs, kneading, almost probing. Mike felt the passion flashing from her fingers down to his heels, back to his skull, down his spine. He swayed giddily, and pressed her close.
“Not entirely!” She laughed, turning her face eagerly to meet his. Five minutes more elapsed.
When they broke away—maybe an inch—she was smiling warmly. “But—
yes.
If you don’t mind. I am still—” She hesitated, fumbling for the words.
Mike provided them for her. “You are in a new world, and pushing yourself as hard as possible to grow into it. You would like time, to fill every room properly, before you move into the house.”
“Yes!” she said. “Oh, yes. That is exactly it, Michael.” She stared up at him. “I love you so,” she whispered. “Believe me that I do.”
Mike kissed her forehead. “All right, then. That’s how we’ll do it.” For a moment, feeling her shoulders under his hands, he almost hissed.
Desire.
Then, laughing softly. “What the hell? My grandpa always used to say we youngsters didn’t know what we were missing.
Anticipation
, he’d say. ’By the time you little twerps get married, you’re already bored with sex.’ ”
Rebecca giggled.
How easily they talk and joke about this!
Mike stepped back. Two inches, maybe three. “All right, then,” he repeated. “We’ll get engaged. A long engagement, just like in the old days. As long as you want, Rebecca Abrabanel.”
He stepped back another few inches, slowly and reluctantly, but firmly for all that. “I will speak to your father tomorrow.” Then, he was walking away.
Standing on the porch, Rebecca watched him recede until, with a last turn of the head and wave of the hand, he rounded the corner. Her head was straight, her hands clasped together, fingers pressed to her lips. Simply savoring the passion which flowed up and down through her body, like a surging tide.
Not so long as all that, Michael! Oh, I love you so. Oh, I
want
you so.
Chapter 27
Gretchen awoke in a panic. Disoriented in time, confused in space—but, mostly, petrified by a memory.
Her eyes sped to the door. Closed. For a moment, she was relieved. There was nothing in the door to say that her memory was false. She remembered closing that door, on a smiling face.
Still—
She sat up. Her eyes scanned the room. That act of long-practiced vigilance brought back a measure of calm. Her family was piled all over the floor, clustered in little heaps, arms and legs entwined in sleep. The automatic snuggling of people for whom winter was a familiar assassin. Even in midsummer, the feel of another body—
warm, warm—
brought a primordial sense of safety.
Smiling, Gretchen looked down. Her own baby was cradled in her arm. Wilhelm was still fast asleep. To her left, Annalise pressed herself against Gretchen’s hip, reacting to the sudden absence of a shoulder. To her right, Gramma did the same. Muttering, now half-awake with the light hold on sleep of the elderly.
Gretchen’s eyes went back to the door. The memory poured back in, demanding, insistent.
I must know!
As gently as possible, she disentangled herself from the others. Gramma awoke fully, then. The old woman was obviously confused and disoriented by their surroundings. Gretchen handed Wilhelm to her. Automatically, Gramma took the baby. The familiar act brought reassurance.
Gretchen arose and stepped to the door. She could hear the faint sound of voices coming from the corridor beyond. No words, just voices. She hesitated.
I must know.
Firmly, decisively—almost frantically—she opened the door.
There were four young men there. Sitting easily, their backs leaning against the opposite wall of the corridor, legs stretched out before them. They had obviously been engaged in cheerful but quiet conversation.
The suddenness with which Gretchen opened the door startled them. Four faces jerked toward her.
She saw only the face in the middle. Smiling, now; beaming, now; rising to his feet; coming toward her—so eagerly—smiling, smiling. Green eyes like spring itself. Life, enlarged by spectacles.
Gretchen almost collapsed from relief. Shakily, she leaned against the doorframe, clutching it with a hand. A moment later, she was enfolded in his arms.
Safe.
She had noticed, without wondering at the reason, that one of Jeff’s friends had hurried down the corridor as soon as she appeared from her room. A minute or two later, he returned. With him came several older people.
Two of them, Gretchen recognized—the duchess and the war leader. To her relief, they were both smiling broadly. Gretchen had been half certain that the powerful figures in Jeff’s world would ban his marriage to such a one as she. Then, seeing the face of the young woman who accompanied them, her jaw almost dropped.
She had never seen one before—they had all been banned from her town long ago—but she had no doubt at all.
A court Jew—here?
That the woman was Jewish, Gretchen was certain. Her features, her skin tone, her long black hair—so curly!—fit the descriptions she had heard. And men always said Jewesses were beautiful, which she most certainly was.
That she was a court Jew, Gretchen was not so certain. She knew very little about noblemen, and princes and kings, and the life of their courts. But who else would have such poise?
Gretchen brought her surprised reaction under control immediately. She had no personal animus against Jews, and she had no desire to offend the woman. Leaving aside whatever influence the Jewess might have in the American court in her own right, Gretchen was quite certain from little subtleties in body language that the Jewess was the war leader’s concubine.
The duchess arrived first, arms spread wide in greeting, and Gretchen lost her self-composure again. The duchess was
hugging
her!
Gretchen couldn’t understand most of what the duchess was saying. She recognized many of the words, but the sense of them was simply gibberish.
“—get you some—
garble—
first thing! Can’t have you—
garble
—laugh—in a robe! Then—
garble—
help us.
Garble—
need good men but—
garble—
wheat from the—
garble
(chaff?).”
The Jewess began to speak, translating the duchess’ words. Her German was excellent. The accent was a bit odd—Dutch? Spanish?—and the intonation far more cultured than anything Gretchen was accustomed to, but she understood perfectly.
The words themselves, at least. The content of the words was insane.
Everything that happened that day was insane. And the next day, and the next. Gretchen obeyed, of course. She had no choice in any event, and the constant presence of Jeff kept her reassured. True, her husband to be was every bit as crazed as the other Americans, but Gretchen was learning to trust those green eyes. Very much.
By the fourth day, the day of her wedding, Gretchen would be reconciled to her new reality. And why not? There were worse things in the world than losing your mind and going to heaven. Much worse.
Chapter 28
Gretchen surveyed the scene in the large new building which the Americans had constructed next to what they called the “power plant.” Part of her found it hard not to laugh. The crowd of mercenary soldiers packing the room looked absolutely miserable. Some of that misery was due to their wet condition. The Americans had obviously put them through the same cleansing process which Gretchen and her family had experienced. But she suspected they had been much more abrupt about it than the duchess.
And that, of course, was the major cause of their misery. Men—soldiers especially—wearing nothing but towels wrapped around their waists do not
enjoy the sight of other soldiers holding weapons. Especially not those ferocious American guns with their bizarre mechanism for rapid fire. Pump-action shotguns, they were called. A few of the mercenaries had seen the weapons in action on the battlefield, and had quickly spread the word.
So they stood there, silent and unmoving. Shivering more from fear than the wetness.
Gretchen spotted a familiar face almost at once. Her amusement vanished, replaced by pleasure.
So he survived again!
“Heinrich!” she called out, and plunged into the mob. “Heinrich—look! It’s me—Gretchen!”
Watching her come toward him, Heinrich’s jaw dropped. Gretchen grinned. She was not surprised by the reaction. Heinrich had seen her many times. But never so clean, and never
wearing such clothing. Gretchen had just obtained them that morning, when the duchess took her entire family into something called the
Value Market
. The blouse was a bit odd, but not completely outlandish. But the rest!
It had taken Gretchen not more than two hours to make a transition which, completely unknown to her, another world had already made in another universe. She
loved
her new clothing, especially the “blue jeans” and—marvel of marvels!—the
sneakers.
And so, bouncing gleefully on magic feet, Gretchen approached the man who might have once become her own. Kind Heinrich, gentle Heinrich, canny and cunning Heinrich. Tough Heinrich, too. But not, alas, tough enough to dare challenge Ludwig.
Melissa gasped. “Is she crazy? We’ve got no way to protect her in that mob of thugs!”
Next to her, James shook his head. “Protect her? From what?” He pointed to the men beginning to cluster around Gretchen. Smiling men.
Relieved
men. “Look at them, Melissa. Do those look like thugs? Or—” He snorted. “Like kids running to their momma.”
Melissa stared. The crowd around Gretchen was swelling rapidly. The young German woman was becoming the focal point of the entire room. Gretchen and the men around her were now engaging in a rapid verbal exchange. Melissa couldn’t understand any of the words, but within seconds she grasped the essence. Much of it was questioning, of course. Frightened and confused men seeking explanations, reasons, bearings.
What is happening to us?
But then, more and more often, she caught the underlying banter.
“It’s like you said,” murmured Mike. “A natural born ’chooser of the living.’ ”
The first one she chose was Heinrich. Heinrich, and the twenty or so men who followed him. All of them had survived the battle. Completely uninjured, amazingly enough. Heinrich’s group, like Ludwig’s, had been in the front line. But they were arquebusiers, not pikemen. By good luck, they had been among the Catholic mercenaries ordered to attack Hoffman’s men. They had not faced the M-60. And the ensuing enfilade rifle fire had struck the men on the opposite flank of their separate contingent.
Gretchen would have chosen Heinrich and his men first, under any circumstances. The fact that he spoke excellent English was simply an added bonus.
She introduced them to Frank Jackson personally. Then, allowed Heinrich to speak for himself. Ten minutes later, Jackson nodded and extended his hand.
The American army had just gained its first German recruits.
And so the day went. And the next, and the next. On the first day, the Americans were tense. On the second, watching the relief and joy with which the German camp followers who were now packing the area greeted the men who emerged from Gretchen’s “choosing,” they were beginning to relax. By the third day—
“Jesus,” said Mike, wiping his face. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” He tried to block the sounds from his mind.
Grimly, the doctor surveyed the scene. Knots of women, children, old folks. Squatting on the ground outside the power plant, trying to cope with the news. These were the people who had come looking for men who were not to be found elsewhere. Hoping against hope that they might still be prisoners instead of battlefield casualties, and finding out otherwise.
“Yeah,” agreed Nichols. “It’s easy enough to kill a man. Something else again to listen to their families afterward.”
Mike’s eyes fell on a young boy, perhaps eight years old. The face was tear-streaked. Numb.
Daddy has gone away forever.
Mike looked away. “How many are left?” he asked, nodding toward the new building attached to the power plant. The “processing center,” as everyone was now calling it.
The third man in their party, Dan Frost, gave the answer. “Not that many. A lot fewer than I’d imagined, to tell you the truth.”
“I’m not surprised, Dan,” said Mike. “Not any longer. From what Rebecca and Jeff have told me, Gretchen and her people had the bad luck to fall into the hands of the worst types among the mercenaries. Most of them—”
James interrupted, pointing to a clot of people moving down the road, following a newly appointed American guide. At the center, still wearing nothing but a towel, was a man in his early thirties. “Most of them are like those.” He smiled, cocking his head at Mike. “What did Melissa say you called it? ’Just men, that’s all. Fucking up in a fucked-up world.’ ”
