* * * *
Mary Simpson made the diagnosis first, long before Bill Hudson had finished leafing through his manuals. Through the admiral's old friendships in the Netherlands, she knew people at the World Health Organization who had worked for the international center for vaccination when the disease made its way through the former Soviet republics in the early 1990s.
Diphtheria.
The down-time physicians concurred. It was the "strangling angel of children." They had, all of them, seen it before. All too often.
* * * *
"It's a kid's disease," Toby said, when Bill told him. "You get your DPT shots and that's that."
"They don't have DPT shots here," Bill pointed out. "And we don't have any magic bullet to cure it. Oh, yes, it's bacterial rather than viral. My little pamphlet says that it can be treated with penicillin. Or with erythromycin. Neither of which I happen to have available."
"Oh."
"Try to get through to Grantville tonight, will you, Toby? I know that reception in these hills has been driving you guys, crazy, but please try. If not tonight, then tomorrow morning. Keep trying. Get me one of the doctors. What I have is chloramphenicol, and not much of that. Ask them if it works on diphtheria. If it doesn't, there's no point in wasting what we have; I'll save it for something it does work on. If it does work, well . . . ask them if they can send some more. Please."
"People don't really die of it, do they?"
"According to what I have here, it was a major killer, right up through the end of the nineteenth century. There aren't going to be DPT shots for a long, long, time. I've put your tech into quarantine. Let's hope that it doesn't spread too fast. What about you. Are your shots up to date? When did you get your last DT shot?"
Toby didn't have the slightest idea. "Last time that I had to get one, I suppose. That would have been, uh, when I started high school, maybe?"
"And you're twenty-five now? So, about ten years. Well, let's hope that you still have antibodies." Bill stomped off, looking glum.
He was feeling frightened. That's about how old his shots were, too. He was just a year younger than Toby. Of all the up-timers in Amberg, only two had their immunizations up to date when the Ring of Fire hit. Keith Pilcher was one of them, because of the nature of his job He had to have tetanus shots, being a machinist, and diphtheria vaccine came with it. Mrs. Simpson was the other one, partly because she traveled so much; and partly because she was just naturally one of those super-picky people who kept everything up to date. Jake's last shot was before his and Toby's.
And there were a lot of down-timers who had never had diphtheria. Including, he found out, Mrs. Dreeson. She'd had a lot of stuff, but no diphtheria. Duke Ernst, yes; Böcler, no; Zincgref, yes; Hand, no; Brechbuhl, yes; Leopold Cavriani, no; Lambert Felser, no; Marc Cavriani, no. The "no" list went on and on. Not a virgin field, but bad enough.
Like the out-of-date immunizations, he hoped that the immunity gained from childhood exposure would last for the ones who had already had it. Diphtheria was one of those things you could get again, once the antibodies wore off. Strangling on the swollen membranes in your own throat wasn't a pretty way to die. Not that there were very many pretty ways. It hit children hardest, mainly because their windpipes were smaller, more quickly closed off by the membranes.
The pamphlet talked about complications, too. Severe heart and nervous system complications which develop after two to six weeks and can lead to collapse, paralysis, coma and death in about five percent of the cases. He guessed that real doctors found that sort of information fascinating. And stuff about possible long-term complications for people who survived. He'd worry about those later.
And how was he supposed to identify carriers? Not! At least, he could tell the down-timers that there were carriers and ask them to look for patterns. If person X's visit to a household is regularly followed by an outbreak, quarantine him, too. And tell them what the incubation period was. If he could convince them that it was contagious and that's how it was spread.
Oh, damn.
If he ever got out of the army, he was going back to Grantville. And going to work for Tom Stone. Let the other guys go to med school. He was going to make the medicines. Somebody else could deliver the doses.
* * * *
Caspar Hell's voice was steady. "I have closed the school because of the epidemic. Too many children are quarantined, or their parents are afraid to let them come, for us even to try to hold classes."
None of the other Jesuits disputed that.
"We will offer the collegium to the city as a quarantine hospital. It is the largest suitable building. Those diagnosed can be brought here and we will nurse them. That may offer some hope, at least, that uninfected members of their families will escape exposure. Otherwise, the young medic, as they call him, tells us that whole families will die, one after another."
None of the other Jesuits disputed that, either. Most of them had seen it happen, when families, the sick and the well alike, were quarantined together in their own houses.
Duke Ernst accepted the offer of a lazarette with gratitude.
Hand crossed "espionage centered at the collegium" off his list of things to worry about for the time being.
* * * *
Bill Hudson's hopes sank. He had kept wishing for a magic bullet. That someone could dispatch a 4x4 from Grantville with a batch of a lifesaving drug. Instead...as best the medical personnel in Grantville knew, chloramphenicol would not work on diphtheria. They didn't know just why. Diphtheria was a gram positive bacilli, which chloramphenicol was effective against as a class. In short, it did work on the class of bacteria but they couldn't find anything in their searching that specifically said that it would work on C. diphtheria—on this specific organism. It probably wouldn't hurt someone, if he tried it on them as an experiment, Doc Adams had radioed. But they didn't have any evidence that it would help.
* * * *
Jakob Balde found it odd, having so many strangers inside the private portions of the collegium. There were usually students, of course. The few boarding students, however, had now been confined to their own quarters on the other side of the building, where the infection had not entered yet, and to the care of one of the cooks.
The Jesuits were not the only ones who volunteered to nurse. The older up-time man had been here, almost from the start. He wasn't squeamish, either. An up-time woman had volunteered to come, but Father Hell had drawn the line at having that. So she worked in the city, with the young medic, who insisted that he was not a full-fledged physician. Doing something that she called triage. The arriving patients were marked: those who, God willing, would benefit from nursing; those who, barring a miracle of God, probably would not.
* * * *
The other men who assisted the Jesuits in caring for the sick had only one thing in common. Chosen by Duke Ernst and the up-timers, they had all had the disease before and survived it. And, of course, a second thing: they were willing to come. Duke Ernst had not forced them, other than some of his own direct subordinates and some of the city employees. A few Catholics—there were not many Catholics in Amberg any more. Several Lutherans, several Calvinists. A Jew, just a peddler passing through the city. Two Swiss men who listed no religion when they arrived, which probably meant that they deserved burning for heresy. Jakob Balde, now in charge of the hospital, had chosen not to ask them for details.
Duke Ernst had not closed off the city; which was the reason the Jew and the two Swiss were here. One could not quarantine a city for every little disease that came along. For plague, yes, but not for diphtheria. Life had to go on.
Three deaths; five deaths; nine deaths. The count went up every day.
Father Hell among them. Also Oswald Kaiser, one of the lay brothers, a cabinetmaker who had been working on finishing the interiors of some of the rooms.
Balde, in the company of the regent, continued his tour of the sickbeds. And pulled the sheet over the face of another child.
* * * *
None of the rest of them would have believed that Keith Pilcher could stand up to Veronica Dreeson until he did it. Over his dead body, he announced, was Veronica going to be involved in the care of the sick.
"Because," he said, "you never had diphtheria and if you die on us here, everybody back home will blame it on Maxine's not liking you. They'll say that because the two of you don't agree about whether four-year-olds ought to learn conversational Latin, I didn't take care of the old woman. And I'm not going to put Max through that. You've got Henry waiting, you've got Annalise to send to school, you've got a dozen of Gretchen's kids who depend on you. So you're not going to go out and die of something on my watch. Like it or lump it."
He might not have made it stick by himself, but Mary Simpson agreed with him. As did Bill Hudson, Duke Ernst, and just about everybody else. Hand volunteered to keep an eye on her.
They couldn't precisely lock her up. She continued to investigate the situation with the Grafenwöhr properties. Elias couldn't help her; he was one of those at the hospital, caring for the sick. She continued to meet occasionally with Rastetter, her lawyer. Until his family became ill and he closed his office temporarily.
* * * *
"Hey, Toby," one of the down-time radio techs asked. "Why aren't you eating."
"I don't really feel like it, Franz. I'm getting a sore throat."
* * * *
"Where's Lambert Felser?" Marc Cavriani asked. "I don't think that I've seen him the last couple of days. Is he taking time off because Keith is busy at the hospital?"
"I'm not sure," Eric Haakansson Hand answered. "I don't think that I've seen him around, either."
"I'd better," Marc said, "check his room."
Felser wasn't there. The chambermaid at the inn said that, the morning before, she had come to clean and found him sick. So, according to the instructions that had been given to all the innkeepers, she told Hans from the stables to take him to the quarantine hospital. Had she told anybody? Well, no. She hadn't known whom to tell. Herr Pilcher, his master, was, like the others who cared for the sick, sleeping at the hospital.
* * * *
Balde made his rounds. More than seven hundred people were lying ill in the collegium, today. They were calling for more volunteers to care for them. For more people who had already survived the disease.
Three more of the Jesuits were among the ill.
There had been only about seventy deaths, though, so far. Most of them children.
A recurrence of the plague would have been far worse.
* * * *
By the end of the week, the tide seemed to be turning. The patient count was under five hundred. Not, of course, all the same people who had been there the week before. The acute period of the disease did not last long; many of those still in the hospital were clearly recovering. Those who had family to care for them had already returned to their homes for convalescence.
Balde completed the day's entries in his ledger. The death toll stood at ninety-three, including one of the sick Jesuits. However, no more of the brothers had sickened. So far.
During the plague epidemic the previous year, there had been nearly five hundred deaths in Amberg. God had been very merciful this time.
* * * *
Franz looked at his friend Toby. Then, had one of the stablemen load him into a cart and take him to the hospital.
Toby was likely to recover, though, Franz thought. He was a strong young man.
Franz, like the chambermaid at the inn, wasn't sure whom he should tell. Toby had been more or less the boss of the other radio techs. Franz wasn't really sure who Toby's boss was.
It wasn't as if he could just drop into the regent's office, even though he was living in the Schloss. Nor could he leave the radio room for a long time to go running around town looking for someone to tell. Finally, he just left a note on Böcler's desk and returned to the top floor. Someone had to watch the radio, now that Toby was no longer there to do it.
He looked at the familiar, comforting, scene with its blue Leyden jars. Tiptoeing across the room so as not to jar them, he lay down on his cot.
* * * *
Keith Pilcher was the first of the up-timers to learn that Toby was in the hospital, when he came to bathe him. Of the radio techs who had come with them from Grantville, this left how many on duty? Keith racked his brain. One of the down-timers, the first one who had become ill, was dead. Three more had been here and recovered enough to be sent over to the convalescent ward, because there wasn't anyone to take care of them at the Schloss. Now Toby. That left one more. What was his name? Oh, yes. Franz. He ought to remind somebody that they were down to one functional radio tech.
* * * *
Bill Hudson climbed up to the top floor of the Schloss and started to cuss a blue streak. It was one thing to say that the geeks were married to their work, but that didn't mean that all six of them had needed to have their cots crowded into one little room next to the array of Leyden jars. Not eight inches between them; they must have walked sideways to get into bed. Plus they worked together and ate together. No wonder they had infected one another.
He asked Franz whether he had diphtheria before. Franz went on the "no" list.
* * * *
Two days later, Bill ordered Franz to the hospital. Until one of the recovering techs was well enough to come back to work, Amberg would be on a radio blackout. No one else had the vaguest idea how to work the thing.
He notified Jake Ebeling. And Duke Ernst.
Chapter 26
Occasio Rarissima
Amberg, the Upper Palatinate
Veronica sat in her room in the Schloss, looking out the window and tapping her fingers on the table. She had just finished breakfast, eating by herself, and reading the newspapers. It was old news, of course, by the time it reached Amberg. A week old, at least; more often two weeks old. Not that it would benefit her a great deal to have more recent news. She wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
Useless, useless. Of no use to anyone. Everybody else was busy. Useless old woman, shunted to the sidelines. Useless old woman, bossed around by the husband of that idiotic woman Maxine. Useless old woman, told what she could and could not do by the father of those two ungovernable children. He had it right, that old man in the Bible. Vanitas, vanitas. Everything was useless. She was useless.
She not only couldn't help others; she couldn't even help herself. Elias was busy; Rastetter's office closed. Useless, useless.
Until she got the wonderful idea.
What did they need next, in order to file suit for the rest of Johann Stephan's property? They needed affidavits from several people in Grafenwöhr. Since none had arrived at Rastetter's office, even though she knew that he had requested them using all the proper forms, and since everybody else in the city of Amberg was too focused on the diphtheria epidemic to pursue the matter, that was something she could do. She could go to Grafenwöhr and get the affidavits herself, or at least find out why they hadn't arrived. Kilian being the kind of man he was, she wouldn't put it past him to be either intimidating or suborning the witnesses, or both, or worse.
Things looked different, once she had made up her mind. She packed a few essentials into the trusty and capacious canvas tote bag that had served her so well since her arrival in Grantville three years before, put on her sturdiest boots, and marched down the stairs. On her way to the gate, she stopped at a shop and bought a walking stick; at another and bought some bread and sausage. It wasn't as if it were far to Grafenwöhr; less than twenty-five miles, with a decent road to travel. It was a nice summer day, early in June. She was starting early and she could easily reach the town before dark.
And it was her home town. She had relatives there—relatives besides her detestable brother-in-law Kilian Richter. Her own family. Schusters and Kleins; Herders and Rothwilds. None of her brothers or sisters were there; she had written long ago to find out. Two nieces, Jakobaea's daughters, Magdalena and Marga
retha. No one knew what had become of Hans Florian and his wife; they had left already in 1623. Casimir had died in Bayreuth in 1629. The family believed that his widow had still been alive a year later, and some of the children. Hanna Schreiner, Matthias' sister, had remarried last year to Wilhelm Bastl.
The Rothwilds were almost all fine people. Oddly, the only one who had gone to the bad, just about as far to the bad as a man could go, was Johann Stephan's own nephew, Johann, his sister Sara's son. He had gone all the way to the bad long before the war started. He wouldn't be around, though. The Grafenwöhr authorities had exiled him for good and sufficient reasons. She was surprised that they had not hanged him.
Sara's daughter, Magdalena, had been Wilhelm Bastl's first wife. Cousins. The comfort of kin. She wouldn't run into any trouble on a visit to her own home town.
She did leave a note. She put it under Mary's hair brush.
* * * *
Afra the chambermaid noticed that Frau Dreeson was carrying the bulging tote bag. It bulged much more than it usually did when Frau Dreeson left the Schloss to talk to her lawyer. She quickly checked the room to see what the old lady had taken. More than just papers. She slipped out the side entrance and followed the old woman, saw her buy the walking stick, saw which gate she left by, and ran to Augustin Arndt. More accurately, she had intended to run, but she wasn't feeling very well this morning. She had a bad sore throat, and it was getting worse. So she walked, but she did get to Arndt's office. For one thing, she believed in earning her money honestly. For another, her family had worked for the landgraves of Leuchtenberg for a long, long, time. Since the days of her father's grandfather, at least. The landgrave was her lord.
* * * *
Arndt was feeling uneasy. Really uneasy. He wasn't sure, any more, just what Kilian Richter's limits were, and Richter had threatened him about revealing that ... mess. He wasn't, thank goodness, dependant upon Richter, but he thought that he had better keep an eye on the old woman. He didn't want any fatalities—any more fatalities, at least. He could justify a billing to Richter for having Veronica Dreeson watched, especially if he didn't explain that in his own mind the observation was for the purpose of trying to tell whether his employer might be planning something that was not at all prudent.