1635: The Eastern Front Read Online Free

the ceiling. "And look there! Murder holes! Ha! They'll be surprised to run into that , should the bastards made the attempt."
    He didn't specify the names or even the nature of "the bastards." For someone like Andrew Short, it hardly mattered. He and his small clan had transferred their allegiance from the king of England to the person many people called the prince of Germany. Princes had enemies, it was a given; and such enemies were bastards. Also a given.
    Rebecca stared up at the ceiling. Murder holes. She knew what they were, abstractly, but such devices were something she associated with medieval castles. Here, in a modern town house built as much as possible along up-time lines . . .
    Finally, she spotted them. They were cleverly disguised as further decorations in a heavily decorated ceiling. Wood inlays, to a casual observer. But she had no doubt the wood inlays were slats that could be easily slid aside, exposing any attackers below to fire from above.
    She shook her head and looked away. The headshake was simply rueful, not a gesture of denial or criticism. She knew all too well the risks she and her husband—and their children—were taking and had been taking for years. If any reminder were needed, the mayor of Grantville and one of the town's ministers had been assassinated just three months earlier. By fanatic reactionary anti-Semites, it was presumed—exactly the sort of people who hated Rebecca with a passion and had been writing and spreading vicious propaganda about her for at least two years now.
    True, the savage response of the Committees of Correspondence to those murders had resulted in the effective destruction of organized anti-Semitism in the Germanies. For a time, at least. But that made it perhaps even more likely that a fanatic or small group of fanatics might seek vengeance by assassinating the most famous Jew in the United States of Europe. Who was now Rebecca herself, without any doubt, much to her surprise.
    Her dark thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of her daughter Sepharad, who barreled into the foyer from another of the side doors. "Barreled," at least, insofar as the term could be applied to a toddler still some months shy of her third birthday.
    Sepharad also had dark deeds on her mind. "Mommy! Mommy! Barry's messing in the cupboards like he shouldn't!"
    Rebecca made a face. Not at the reported crime itself—two-and-a-half-year-old boys were given to rummaging in nooks and crannies; girls too, at that age—but at the name.
    Barry. Rebecca detested that nickname and refused to use it herself.
    The child's real name was Baruch. Baruch de Spinoza, originally. He'd been orphaned in the siege of Amsterdam and then adopted by Rebecca and Michael.
    Yes, that Spinoza. The Spinoza. Still some years short of his future as a great philosopher, of course. But Rebecca had high hopes. Surely his current investigations were a harbinger of things to come.
    Alas, hers was an uphill struggle against doughty antagonists. On this subject, even her husband and daughter were ranked among Rebecca's enemies.
    Barry, when it should be Baruch. And Rebecca knew full well that Michael was conspiring with Jeff Higgins to have the innocent boy fitted with a Harley-Davidson jacket and a Cat cap as soon as possible. They'd take him fishing, too, and teach him to ride a motorcycle. They'd already sworn they would.
    Before Rebecca could intervene, though, Jenny Hayes appeared in the foyer, holding the selfsame philosopher/young miscreant in her arms. Judging from the smile on the teenager's face, whatever Baruch might have encountered in his adventures had been harmless enough.
    "You shouldn't be spreading alarms, Sepharad," Hayes chided the girl. "Baruch couldn't have come to no grief. T'aren't nothing in those cupboards yet anyway, since we've just started unpacking."
    Rebecca returned the smile. She considered the addition of the very large Short-Hayes family to their household a great and unmitigated