Ring of Fire III (50 page)

“Anna, I’m not going to do anything that will hurt you. I’m just going to shine a light in your eye and put some lenses in front of it, like this.” He knew that a demonstration helped calm any apprehension a child might have. It even worked on some of his more highly-strung adult patients.

He selected a lens and held it in front of Anna’s eye and shone the light from the hand held retinoscope through it. The reflection of the retina still showed movement, so he tried another lens.

“Ursula, come try this. I want you to see how when I move the beam from the retinoscope across the pupil the reflex moves the same way as the light and how it moves faster at the forty-five degree angle than the hundred thirty-five degree angle. It’s really easy to see here, because the difference is so great.”

He gently coached Ursula through the steps to neutralize the refractive error in the right eye, and after checking for himself, fitted the selected lens into the trial frame before repeating the process on the left eye. With two lenses selected, he passed the loaded trial frame to Ursula and crouched down so he was at Anna’s level.

“Now Fraulein Sprug is going to hold this funny-looking thing in front of your eyes. It’s called a trial frame. And we’re going to try some more lenses.”

With Ursula holding the trial frame, which was too big to fit Anna comfortably, Ezra used cylindrical lenses to correct both eyes for the other meridian with the same method.

“There. Now that wasn’t so bad, was it? Let’s see what you can see on the chart.”

In a few minutes Ezra finished measuring Anna’s vision through the trial lenses. She was now seeing 20/30. Or more correctly, she was reporting 20/30. Young children had an unfortunate tendency not to want to reply when the pictures got very small. Not great, but probably the best they could do with purely objective measurement. In a couple of years’ time, when Anna was old enough to give reliable subjective feedback, Ursula could refine the prescription closer to 20/20. However, there was still the matter of convincing the mother to purchase glasses she might not really be able to afford. He glanced over at Anna. She was a sweet little girl. She didn’t deserve to be condemned to a world permanently out of focus just because of a few dollars.

“Frau Lortz, your daughter needs a high prescription. As Miss Sprug has already told you, if we don’t correct her vision now she will have blurred vision later in her life that we will be unable to treat. It is imperative that we fit her with glasses as soon as possible. Now, you’re probably worried about how much they’ll cost. Because they’re for a child we can make them up for...” He glanced at Juliane’s worried face. Ursula had warned him about the price she’d quoted and why. He might have gone lower, but Ursula had also commented on the poor but proud appearance. “Three hundred dollars.”

The mother reached out a hand to run it gently over her daughter’s head. She looked at the eye chart and back to Ezra. Then she reached under her jacket and pulled out a crumbled piece of paper, which she handed him.

Ezra flattened out the paper and read it. It wasn’t cash, but it the next best thing, a note from the local branch of Boot’s Bank saying that Juliane Lortz had the ability to pay Ursula Sprug up to three hundred dollars for glasses for her daughter Anna. He passed it over to Ursula. “I’ll get onto Anna’s new glasses as soon as I get back to Grantville. Ursula should have them inside a week.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

* * *

“You’re supposed to be running a business, not a charity.”

“I know, but well...” Ursula sighed.

“Yes, I know. You can’t condemn a child to an out of focus world just for the sake of a few dollars. But you have to earn a living. Can you afford to subsidize Anna’s glasses?”

Ursula nodded. It would be hard, but not as hard as knowing that Anna would continue to live in her out of focus world.

“It’s good to see you’re not in the business just for the money, but just this once, I’ll carry the cost.”

“Thank you, Dr. Shipley.”

“Now, about that sign outside your shop...you’re not going to tell me you’re performing free examinations, are you?”

Ursula shuffled her feet and bowed her head to break eye contact. “I had to, Dr. Shipley. Hardly anybody came in for an eye examination when I was charging for them. Now I have half a dozen or more examinations every day, with most of them leading to orders for glasses.”

“You’re making up for the examinations on the glasses?” Dr. Shipley shook his head in disgust. “You’re putting the profession back decades, Ursula.”

“What? Back decades? I thought what I can do was supposed to be years ahead of the general standard of optometry.”

Dr. Shipley grinned. “Back up-time it took the profession decades to make the practice of hiding the cost of examinations in the price of glasses illegal.”

“Why make it illegal? Why would people pay for an examination if they didn’t know they needed an examination? Quite a few of my customers didn’t think they needed glasses, but they wanted to take advantage of something that was free.”

Dr. Shipley opened his mouth as if to reply, then slammed it shut. He glared down at Ursula and gently shook his head. “It’s not professional.”

A week later

Anna stared at Ursula from her position high on the examination chair. “The man hurt me. You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”

“No, Anna. I’m sorry the eye drops hurt, but Dr. Shipley had to use them so we could check your eyes. Now, I just want you to look at the eye chart.” Ursula covered Anna’s right eye and pointed to the man on the horse on the on the top line. “What am I pointing to?”

“Horsie.”

“Very good. Now let’s try going down a line.” She pointed to the hand.

Anna shook her head.

Ursula repeated the steps with the left eye covered with similar results.

“Right. Now I’m going to put on your new glasses and we’ll try again.” Ursula removed the spectacles from their case, checked them for dust and finger prints, and then gently placed them on Anna’s face. She had to make a slight adjustment to the nose piece to position them properly, but soon she was happy.

She pointed to the hand on the second line. “What is this shape?”

“It’s a hand, and below it is a duck, and a fish, and a hand, and a man on a horsie.”

“Very good, Anna. What about this?” Ursula pointed to the cat on the fourth line.

“A cat.”

“
Very
good.” Ursula took Anna down the chart as far as she could go and then checked the other eye. It looked like Anna was now seeing at 20/30, just like Dr. Shipley had said she would. “That’s very good. Now, I want you to take very good care of your glasses. I’ll give your mother instructions on how to care for them.” She walked over to Juliane, leaving Anna to look around the room.

* * *

“Look at all the birdies.”

Juliane turned to see where Anna was pointing. There were sparrows pecking at something on the ground nearly thirty feet away. Anna had never noticed anything smaller than a horse that far away before.

“There are people riding on that wagon, Mommy.”

Juliane felt a lump in her throat. Anna was looking around and pointing at things as if she was seeing them for the first time. She looked around the street and tried to imagine what it must have looked like to Anna before she got her new glasses. And to think she and her husband had almost decided they couldn’t afford glasses for Anna.

She crouched down and hugged Anna. “Yes, darling. There are people in the wagon. What else can you see?”

Anna’s tiny hand reached out and brushed the eyebrows above Juliane’s eyes. “What are these?”

“They’re eyebrows. Feel above your eyes; you have them as well.”

Anna brushed a hand against her own eyebrows. “I do too.”

Juliane rose to her feet. The change in Anna already was astonishing. It was reward enough for the economies they would have to exercise to pay off the debt to the bank. Surely Joachim would be pleased for Anna.

* * *

Anna let her mother take her hand again. She didn’t really notice where they were going; she was too busy examining the new world that her glasses had opened for her.

They walked up to their home. Anna was able to recognize some things, but there was so much that she had missed in the past.

There was a man standing at the door. Anna walked up to her father, studying every detail. “Your eyebrows are bigger than Mommy’s.”

Make Mine Macramé

Virginia DeMarce

Prologue

Magdeburg, November 1634

“Bernhard is,” Mike Stearns said, “
your
brother. You might want to keep your tendency to view with alarm within pretty strict limits on this one, even if it did happen on my watch.”

Wilhelm Wettin looked at him sourly.

“We were preoccupied with the League of Ostend. I admit it,” Mike offered.

“Southern Alsace,” Wettin said. “Not only the Franche Comté, which is the problem of the Isabella Clara Eugenia and the king in the Netherlands rather than the USE, but all of southern Alsace, except for Strassburg itself.”

“Not all,” Francisco Nasi interjected. “Strassburg is a USE city-state and has managed to annex a considerable rural hinterland in the midst of all the confusion. Not to mention that it was Bernhard’s pulling his cavalry back to the line south of Strassburg last spring that permitted Nils Brahe to annex the Province of the Upper Rhine for the USE.”

Duke Albrecht, who usually stayed home to run the Wettin family’s day-to-day business, so to speak, interjected, “He also had enough sense not to annex Mömpelgard—Montbéliard, as the French call it, when he took southern Alsace. That is a Württemberg exclave, you do realize? The young dukes are Gustavus Adolphus’ allies. And they are Lutheran! That’s one major potential point of contention that Bernhard had sense enough to walk away from.”

“He isn’t insane,” Philipp Sattler said. “He also left Mülhausen alone—Mulhouse, the French call it. Trying to annex a city that’s been an allied Swiss canton for over a century, even if it’s not geographically contiguous to anything else in the Swiss Confederacy, would stir up a hornet’s nest. Better just to pass it by.”

Wilhelm Wettin frowned and kept counting his youngest brother’s offenses on his fingers. “The Sundgau, formerly Austrian—Tyrolese to be more precise. The Breisgau, formerly Austrian—Tyrolese, to be more precise. Innumerable
Reichsritterschaften
and petty lordships. And in regard to those, he has the gall to say that he has done nothing different from what your own State of Thuringia-Franconia has been doing in Franconia.”

“Ah,” Mike said. “Actually, that last is pretty close to the truth, as far as I know.”

This did not seem to mollify Wettin at all.

Mike continued. “Also, he did leave the Basel border and has pulled his troops out of southern Swabia into the Breisgau, at least for the winter, which means that Horn can also go into winter quarters in a more favorable location than right on the northern border of Switzerland. And, as far as I know, the margrave of Baden-Durlach, as USE administrator of the proposed Province of Swabia, from the perspective of his headquarters in Augsburg, is not totally dissatisfied with the current situation.”

Wettin stopped counting off his fingers and examined his fingernails. “It is a lot to ask. I don’t make this request as the leader of the loyal opposition. We have come together to ask as his brothers. We have dealt with Bernhard all our lives, you realize.”

Duke Albrecht continued to sit quietly. Wettin, apparently, was not capable of continuing his request to the end.

Albrecht leaned forward. “Please,” he said. “We would like to have a copy of the ambassadress’ report. Frau Jackson’s report. We would like to know how she persuaded him to go away from Basel. Nobody else has ever managed to persuade Bernhard to do anything that he did not want to do.”

“By the time Diane was finished,” Mike said, “he no longer wanted to threaten Basel’s borders, at least if I understand Tony Adducci’s report correctly. It involves a map that Lee Swiger sketched, and all sorts of arrows that Diane drew on it, following lines that Archduchess Maria Anna had marked with her finger. In short, she illustrated that he is going to have enough on his plate for the time being dealing with the lands you just listed—so much on his plate that he should not be suckered into any more distractions on the right bank of the Rhine. He was convinced that he should focus on protecting his core territories, if he really wants to keep them. That wasn’t the purpose of the map, but that is how Diane used it.”

Duke Albrecht raised an eyebrow.

Mike cleared his throat. “Well, ultimately, Diane said she recognized the problem almost at once. Your brother never went to kindergarten. Therefore he never learned the lessons of
Everything I Ever Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.
She’s been giving Bernhard a ‘back to the basics’ course on prudent and proper sandbox behavior, so to speak. With flannel boards, cutout figures, and everything.”

“There should be a hiatus for a few months,” Nasi said, his tone placating. “Bernhard is going to be preparing and entrenching, organizing and making plans to deal with the plague epidemic ‘scheduled’ for Swabia in the spring and summer of 1635 according to the history books.”

Stearns nodded. “He’s already hired a nurse out of Grantville. He’s got three well-recognized down-time plague doctors coming in from Franconia right about now—the Padua men that Claudia de Medici, the regent of Tyrol, loaned our administrators in Bamberg to deal with the outbreak in Kronach. I think he’s smart enough to know that a ruler is a lot better off with living subjects than dead ones.”

Wettin’s face was still sour. “ ‘Dumb’ was never one of our touchy, overambitious baby brother’s problems.”

Chapter One