1635: The Eastern Front Read Online Free PDF Page A

husband had been able to afford it was because he'd gotten it for free. The company could just as easily have been named Fassbinder-Stearns, given that Michael was one of the company's two partners, along with Heinrich Fassbinder. He'd insisted on the name Lionel instead of his own, though. For the sake of tradition, he claimed. Rebecca suspected it was more because Michael saw no reason to stir up charges of conflict of interest any more than was necessary.
    In truth, there wasn't any in this instance. An army general—even a prime minister, as he'd once been—would have precious little occasion to favor the fortunes of a toy train company. But there were other areas in which Michael's financial dealings were grayer in nature.
    This very mansion, for one. They'd only been able to buy the house because of a loan extended to them by some wealthy members of the far-flung Abrabanel family to which Rebecca herself belonged. True, the loan was secured—but the collateral was the royalties that were expected to come in two or three years from the sales of Rebecca's book on current political developments.
    Which she hadn't started writing yet. And whose royalties would depend on enforcement of the copyright legislation passed by the USE's parliament so recently the ink was barely dry on the bill sent up to the new prime minister for his signature.
    Wilhelm Wettin had signed it readily enough. Whatever other disputes his Crown Loyalists had with Michael and Rebecca's party, they'd agreed that establishing up-time style copyright was a good idea. Still, no one really knew yet how well or easily the new laws could be enforced. There might be wholesale piracy, in which case those royalties would be mostly a chimera.
    Not that the Abrabanels who'd extended the loan would care that much. The reason they'd made the loan was political, not economic. Whether or not they ever saw the money paid back, they had a keen interest in seeing to it that the leaders of the July Fourth party stayed alive and well. Their own prosperity, even possibly their very survival, might depend on it.
    To be sure, no one thought the new prime minister was himself an anti-Semite, much less a rabid one. Wettin was an eminently civilized man. But it remained to be seen how well he controlled the political forces he'd help to set in motion. The Abrabanels, like many people, thought his control was shaky—and there were people and groups under the umbrella called "the Crown Loyalist Party" who were quite certainly anti-Semites.
    Rebecca hadn't hesitated at accepting the loan. She understood the political logic quite well. But she also knew—so did Michael—that there would inevitably be charges of conflict of interest. Especially if it became known that the man who'd arranged the loan was none other than Francisco Nasi, himself a member of the Abrabanel clan and Michael's former head of security and espionage.
    Fortunately, Francisco was superbly adept at keeping his doings out of the limelight. And, who was to say? If the copyright laws held up, there might in fact be a large income derived from her book. There would be keen interest in it, certainly. Even if the market was restricted to CoC members and sympathizers, that would be a lot of books sold.

    Rebecca let the children play with the train set for a full hour. Her magnanimity had a cold purpose to it. The toy train sets, Michael had told her, were much like the train sets his father and grandfather had played with. That was to say, not very concerned with the fussbudget latter-day up-time obsession with child safety.
    "There's no way in hell to play with these trains," he'd said, "without getting an electric shock from time to time. No real harm done—and it teaches kids to respect electricity."
    So it proved. Only two of the children got shocked, as it turned out—one of them being her own daughter Sepharad, who promptly wailed as loudly as you could ask for. But within an hour, all of the children