1636 The Kremlin Games (29 page)

This was not flowers or candy, or even a bottle of wine. Vladimir had brought a bag of coffee beans. Brandy grinned. “Good. We’ll have some later.” She stood aside and waved Vladimir inside. “Dinner will be ready in just a moment. I hope you like it.”

Vladimir looked around the room. “You have changed a few things, Branya. Not much, just a little. The home seems somehow more your own, now.”

“Just a little.” Brandy felt sad for a moment. “I loved my mother, but I never cared for that ‘country’ look she liked so much. So I sort of streamlined the room a bit.” A dinging sound came from the kitchen. “One thing about a house this size, you can hear the timer. Come on in. The table is ready and it sounds like dinner is, too.”

Brandy ushered Vladimir into the small dining area where she had used Donna’s best china and crystal to set the table. “Have a seat. I’ll be right back.”

*     *     *

Brandy came back with a large platter of something. Noodles, Vladimir thought. He was fond of noodles. But what was covering them? It smelled wonderful, whatever it was.

Brandy set the platter on the table. “I’ve got no idea if this is really a Russian dish. But Cora said it was, so I tried it. I hope it’s good. I’m not really much of a cook. Mom tried, but I wasn’t very interested, to tell the truth.”

The smell had Vladimir salivating. “I don’t care if it’s Russian, Branya. It smells wonderful. Just wonderful.”

Brandy smiled widely and served Vladimir a portion of the dish, whatever it was. She poured wine for them both and indicated the salad and bread on the table. “Thank heaven for greenhouses. We always had lettuce back then. I’d miss it if we didn’t have it here, even if it isn’t the iceberg I’m used to.” Apparently noticing Vladimir’s hesitation, she urged, “Go ahead. Dig in.”

Vladimir did. The scent was marvelous and the taste even more so. It only needed one thing. “Is there, perhaps, some
smetana
?”

Brandy gave him a look and he grinned guiltily. Brandy had commented before about his liking for
smetana
. He put it in nearly everything he ate, including stew. “It has quite a bit in it already.” She passed him the dish full of sour cream. “But I knew you’d want more. Is it all right? Does it taste good?”

Vladimir nodded, busying himself with the dish. “Marvelous.” He added sour cream to his plate. “Marvelous. I’m afraid I’m ruined for Russian cooking, at least the cooking back in my Russia. Ruined. I may never wish to go back, just for the flavor of the food alone. What is this called?”

“Beef Stroganoff.”

Vladimir ate until Brandy was pretty sure he was about to explode.

“Marvelous,” he said. Several times. Well, it was, but that was only part of the reason he kept saying it. Vladimir was terrified.

*     *     *

After dinner, over coffee in the living room, Brandy began to feel a little awkward. What did you say now? How did you handle this kind of privacy when you didn’t have any intention of needing, well, this kind of privacy? Not yet, at any rate.

Vladimir solved the problem by beginning to speak. “Natasha tells me that the situation in Russia is quite tense. Czar Mikhail has vaguely suggested a constitution to replace the agreement he made on assuming the throne. Such a document would be binding not only on him, but on all future czars. Most importantly though, it would also be binding on the
Boyar Duma
and bureaus and replace the
Zemsky Sobor
with an elected legislature or perhaps turn the Assembly of the Land into such a congress.”

“Yes. Natasha mentioned it. I understand that the income tax and the business tax are meeting quite a bit of resistance.”

“That’s a diplomatic way of putting it.” Vladimir laughed. “I worked it out. It would cost my family several million of your dollars every year. While my family is quite well off, we’re not the richest nobles in Russia, not by any means. If that tax is done just a little bit wrong, it could ruin half the nobles in Russia. I sent my sister a description of your system of tax deductions for things like capital investment along with Cass and Bernie’s ‘Precious.’ Frankly, I don’t think it will happen unless Czar Mikhail can come up with something to sweeten the pot.”

“So, what can he give them?”

“For right now, I’m not sure.” Vladimir leaned back on the couch. “But in a few years, relief from having to have serfs might do it.”

“Don’t count on it, Vladimir.” Brandy shook her head. “The serfs could end up as factory workers and have even less freedom than they have now. ‘I owe my soul to the company store.’ If it could happen in America, where we—at least in theory—all had the same rights, think how much easier it could happen in Russia where serfs are already restricted in when they can quit.”

Vladimir sighed. “I know. Adam Smith and all your economists tell us that free labor is more productive than slaves or serfs. That slavery and serfdom is bad for the economy of the nation. But what they usually neglect to mention is that it’s still very profitable for the people who own the slaves.” He looked down at his coffee cup.

“Brandy, I’ve lived here for a long time and have accepted many of your principles, but that doesn’t mean my countrymen have. I agree that serfdom must be eliminated but I don’t see any way to do it.”

*     *     *

When Brandy got up to light the gas lights against the darkening of the room, Vladimir moved just a tad closer to her end of the sofa. Whenever she leaned forward to pour more coffee, or stood to busy herself with something, he moved just a little bit closer. Eventually, Vladimir was right where he wanted to be. Close, nearly touching.

Brandy looked a little nervous when she discovered just how close he was. Deciding not to give her, or himself, a chance to bolt, Vladimir took one of her hands in his own. “Branya, I have something I want to speak of, something that is not about Bernie or even about Russia.”

Brandy’s breath caught just a bit before she nodded at him. “You can speak to me about anything, Vladimir. What is it?”

He had been quite confident of her response when he had written the letters asking permission from Czar Mikhail and informing Natasha of his intent. Somehow, that confidence had disappeared when he had been informed that Mikhail had agreed to the marriage—at least conditionally. The condition being that she make a valid conversion. And Natasha had informed him that several ladies from Russia would be coming to Grantville to look Brandy over. At that point he had seen the looming disaster of the dragons arriving to inspect her before he even asked for her hand.

But Vladimir was still hesitating and Brandy was looking at him expectantly. “I am not one of your up-time men, Branya. And I may not have the correct words. But I have grown very . . . fond of you. Very fond. And I, I . . .” Vladimir paused a moment. “I wish you to be my wife, Branya. I wish it very much.”

Brandy’s eyes glittered in the candlelight. “Wife? You want to get
married
?”

“I do,” Vladimir said. He watched her face closely. What would she answer?

“Yes.”

*     *     *

Half an hour later, after some very pleasant kissing and some not so pleasant explanation. Brandy wasn’t quite so sure.

“We don’t do that,” Vladimir said, sounding a bit desperate. “Abandon thy family, abjure thy name.” He shook his head. “It sounds glorious, but Romeo and Juliet ended up dead. Were I to marry without the czar’s consent, our family’s property could be seized and my sister could end her life in a convent. Forced to take holy orders. Not because Mikhail would want to do it, but because the cabinet would insist.”

Brandy knew that was all too likely an outcome. But Vladimir was continuing. “If I asked the czar first and you said no, I would look foolish. But if I asked you first and the czar said no, I didn’t know what I would do. I didn’t wish to make a promise to you until I was sure I could keep it.”

*     *     *

“All right!” Judy the Younger Wendell was grinning from ear to ear. “So, when’s the wedding, Brandy? What are you going to wear?”

“I don’t know to the first question.” Brandy took a sip of root beer. “And I don’t know to the second one, for that matter.”

Brandy’s friends looked confused. As a group they were often called the Barbie Consortium because they were teenagers who had gotten rich selling their old dolls—which, in one of the Ring of Fire’s most quirky ramifications, turned out to be highly prized objects for Europe’s wealthy classes. They were quite bright, generally speaking, but as could be expected from girls most of whom were no older than sixteen, their experience with life in general was limited.

Marriage was simple and straightforward, in their world view. Fall in love; get married; the bride wears a really nifty outfit and the bridesmaids wear outfits that are almost as nifty, there’s a big cake which is usually cut by the groom and in the seventeenth century they thought he got to use a really nifty sword for the purpose.

“It’s more complicated than I knew,” Brandy sighed. “It turns out that Vladimir is sort of a prince or something like that. He can’t just get married, not to a foreigner, not to anybody, really. He has to get permission.”

Vicky Emerson looked outraged. “What, from his father? He’s a grown man! Why does he have to ask for permission?”

Brandy shook her head. “His parents are dead. Both of them. He’s got a sister, Natasha. No, it’s not his parents, it’s the czar. He had to get permission from the czar. He apparently asked him before he asked me. And the czar has already sent a bunch of dragon ladies from Russia to check me out,” Brandy added, with some resentment. Vladimir had explained that they had to do it that way but it still ticked her off. “And then there’s the religion thing, too.”

“Religion thing?” Hayley Fortney paused in the act of sipping tea. “There’s a religion thing, too?”

Brandy nodded again, and sort of sighed. “Yeah. It’s all going to take a while, it looks like. I’d just as soon go down to City Hall and have a civil ceremony, get all the hoopla over with. But Vladimir’s church will not recognize a civil ceremony, he says. It’s against canonical law. And, it turns out that if he gets married in any church except a Russian Orthodox church, he could be charged with treason. So we figure we better wait.”

“That’s kind of hard, isn’t it?” Judy looked around at the girls. “Your Vladimir is a nice-looking guy. A nice guy in general, for that matter. I bet you hate waiting.”

“Well, one thing about it.” Brandy shrugged. “At least we ought to be really sure about it when it does happen. Vladimir says he probably ought to have a priest come here, anyway. Natasha is sending a bunch of people from his lands and they’re all going to go to school here. And to the oil field. So they need a priest. They wouldn’t be comfortable going to St. Mary’s. We’re probably looking at another three months to wait. If we’re lucky.”

“That’s just about enough time,” Judy muttered.

“Enough time?”

“Yeah,” Judy grinned. “Just about enough time to plan a really big, really nice wedding, no matter what else is going on here. Or in Russia, for that matter.”

Chapter 47

March 1634

Cass Lowry grinned as he idly played with an AK3 chamber, thinking about his profits. He was indeed still working at the Gun Shop, and it was proving very profitable. From his reassignment to the Gun Shop back in January, he had been helping Andrei, not just in gun production, but in gun allocation. Because in Russia everyone was on the take and everyone could be bribed. He casually slid the chamber back into his bandolier. It was nice, that bandolier. Tooled leather with gold leaf, and it really set off his midnight blue jacket.

Well, almost everyone. There were half-a-dozen steam-ram drop forges in Murom, the seat of the Gorchakov family, and one at the Dacha. But Cass and Andrei couldn’t get any of those. There were too few for any to get “lost.” A steam-ram was a single-cylinder steam engine, but it had to be a high-pressure steam engine because of the amount of force it had to deliver to lift the incredibly heavy weight of the drop hammer. Made of metal and with the need to withstand hundreds of pounds per square inch, they were very hard for the smiths of Russia to make, so there still weren’t many available.

Slaves and serfs, however, were not a problem. The Sheremetev family and their
deti boyars
had lands all over the place and they were looking for things to put their serfs to work on over the winter. And they weren’t the only ones. In winter you could get the labor of serfs for little more than their maintenance. So the Gun Shop had gone with the serf-powered-crank drop forge rather than the steam-powered one. It took ten minutes to slowly crank the hammer up to drop height, but that was still three chambers or chamber locks an hour. Besides, the time it took to crank the hammer up gave the die time to cool between drops, and given the quality of the metal, a hot die wasn’t a good idea.

The crank version, though simpler than the steam-ram would have been, still took a couple of weeks to build. Russia had lots of rivers but the Gun Shop had no waterfalls handy. There were, though, lots of peasants and more than a few out-and-out slaves. So a two-man crank to lift the hammer, which had a die of pretty good high-carbon steel, was more than possible. The hammer dropped on an anvil, which had its own matching die, and
wham
, one semi-finished part. The flash, the excess material, had to be removed and the part had to be finished, but that could be done by hand.

There had already been a couple of puddle steel foundries when Cass had gotten here. And the Gun Shop had a high enough priority to get some of the steel and have it shaped into the dies they needed.

It was when they were working on getting the steel that Cass remembered the advantages of a high failure rate. Andrei had been complaining about the crappy progress of the drop forge for making the chambers. Too many of the chambers were not fully formed. Cass remembered something about a supply of black-market computer chips, some spy story or cop story, where the chips turned out to be being made in the factory that made the legal ones, but were marked down as defective, then sold. So they worked out a deal where the parts that were “not good enough” were sold as scrap to an iron monger. They ended up having to cut in the iron monger for a small piece of the action and a cousin of Sheremetev for a bigger one, but it worked. And Cass had had a down-time made Colt six-shooter with him when he’d arrived. So they started making those on the side, and they were selling faster than he could make them. Not that they could make them all that fast here in Russia. These people were even more primitive than the Germans.