1636: The Cardinal Virtues Read Online Free PDF Page B

sure we’ll get it. We can reach Lyon now, but the duke said that he needed to get a further reach—someplace like . . .”
    “Paris.”
    They both looked across at the voice. Terrye Jo sighed. Artemisio made a face, but not so the newcomer could see it. The young assistant was no fan of Dottore Umberto Baldaccio—and to be honest neither was she.
    “Might be,” Terrye Jo said. She put her hands on her hips. “Do you know something we don’t, Umberto?”
    He scowled: he preferred his title to his Christian name, which was why Terrye Jo didn’t use it.
    “I know nothing that you do not,” he said, walking across to his part of the workshop. He occupied roughly a quarter of the usable area with books and crates and jars full of who know what, and glassware and powders and strips of metal and all kinds of unidentifiable crap.
    When they’d installed and tested the equipment for the radio facility, most of the team had declined Duke Victor Amadeus’ offer to remain in Turin on retainer. There wasn’t anything wrong with Turin—it just wasn’t Rome or Paris or London or Magdeburg. Only Terrye Jo had stayed behind, as much an expert radio operator as down-time Turin had ever seen. The duke had assigned her this workshop but Baldaccio had already moved in, taking up from a third to a half of the available space. She’d gone to the duke herself and complained. He was a fraud, he was an alchemist , for Christ’s sake—but it turned out he was a well-established and well-connected fraud with the full confidence of the duke, who brushed off her protests. She’d gone away dissatisfied.
    Then she’d gone to the duchess.
    Christina Maria had been in Savoy for twenty years as the wife of the prince of Piedmont, who had come into his inheritance as Duke of Savoy in 1630. She was still thought of a foreigner even so. After her first son had died stillborn and her second had died young, during her third pregnancy (when she was lying-in here at Castello del Valentino) the duke had sent Umberto Baldaccio to her. He was a loyal retainer who had saved the duke’s life in some fashion that was never discussed, and he used all of the standard practices available to a seventeenth-century physician: purging and bleeding and hocus pocus and astrology. The baby turned out to be a girl (apparently Baldaccio’s prediction that it was a boy was conveniently forgotten) and the experience was enough for her to want to keep him as far away as possible. Thus, she warmed to the task of helping the young up-timer against the old charlatan.
    One morning, Baldaccio ambled into the workshop to find that Terrye Jo and a group of retainers had gotten there far earlier and had moved his equipment and tools and dusty books full of Latin gibberish into neat stacks in the draftiest corner of the big room, close enough to a window that he could point his telescope but far enough to keep from being underfoot. He had been furious—but when Terrye Jo had smiled sweetly and invoked the name of the duchess, he had gone quiet and set to work disorganizing his work area to his own satisfaction. A large metal crate part way down on the two closest work benches served as an effective barrier, preventing him from taking over any more territory.
    “At least in regard to politics,” Terrye Jo said.
    “Yes. Of course. As for the rest . . .” he settled himself in a creaky armchair and flipped a page in the book in front of him. “There is much I could teach you, signorina, if you would merely open your mind to science.”
    It was an old argument, and she bit back a reply. Him chiding her about science was . . . typical, if absurd.
    “Why do you think that the duke wants to contact Paris?”
    “Haven’t you heard?”
    “Heard what? I didn’t take breakfast this morning. Wasn’t hungry.”
    “We have a guest. His Highness Gaston Jean-Baptiste de France, and his lovely wife Marguerite de Lorraine. Come to pay his sister a visit.”
    “Gaston.” Terrye