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of Jeff's father and my mother were first cousins, which makes me and Jeff second cousins." He rattled off the precise family relationships with the ease of any person raised in a small town. "You remember?"
    Jeff and Gretchen nodded simultaneously.
    "Well, after that I guess you forgot about it."
    "We were . . . ah, busy," said Gretchen.
    "Holed up in Amsterdam under Spanish siege, to be precise," added Jeff. "So, yeah. Sewing machine company stocks were not something we thought about much. At all."
    "Sure. But as you may have heard, Higgins Sewing Machine Company did really well. And when it went public, you wound up owning five thousand shares—which was two and half percent of the stock."
    "The sewing machine company did that well?"
    David tugged at his ear. "It did really well, yeah. But it wasn't just the sewing machine company. Since you weren't around we talked to Ronnie, and your grandmother told us to handle it however we wanted to." He looked defensive again. "She didn't seem interested when we tried to explain the ins and outs of it."
    Jeff wasn't surprised. Depending on who did the explaining—Bartley was actually better at this than most of his partners—Gretchen's grandmother would have probably had as much luck with a short lecture on quantum mechanics. It wasn't that she was dim-witted. She wasn't at all; in fact, in her own way she had a very shrewd grasp of practical finance. But Veronica's idea of practical finance focused on tangibles like property and hard cash. The sort of stock speculations and currency manipulations that David specialized in wouldn't have meant much to her.
    David went on. "So Sarah and I diversified your holdings. You've still got the five thousand shares in HSMC, but we invested all the earnings in other stuff. By now, you own sizeable amounts of stock in OPM—"
    That was Bartley's own finance company: Other People's Money. He was not given to euphemisms, which Jeff found refreshing in a financier.
    "—as well as several of the Stone chemical and pharmaceutical companies, Casein Buttons, Kelly Aviation, a little chunk of the Roth jewelry operations, a pretty hefty chunk of the new petroleum operations near Hamburg and an even bigger chunk of the port expansion projects—Hamburg's going to turn into a real boom town—and some railroad stocks. There are some other odds and ends, but that's the heart. Sarah and I didn't want to take too many risks with your money, so we invested most of it in stuff that was safe but reasonably profitable."
    It was Jeff's turn to shake his head. "If these are the kinds of returns you get on ‘safe' investments, I'd hate to see what you get on something risky that pays off."
    Bartley shrugged. "You've got to remember that ‘safe' is a relative term. The Ring of Fire triggered off one of the great economic booms in history. At least, that's what Melissa Mailey says. Almost any intelligent investment will pay off well, if you know what you're doing."
    Jeff didn't think it was really that straightforward. David Bartley was like most people with a genius streak at something. Doing that something seemed a lot easier to him than it did to most anyone else.
    Be that as it may, the end result seemed clear enough. Much to his surprise—and Gretchen's even more so—they'd wound up very well off. So, what had seemed like the sure prospect of several years of hard near-poverty while they finished raising Gretchen's little horde of adopted children had vanished.
    He could live with that. Quite easily.

    An hour later, when David got up to leave, Jeff escorted him to the front door. "When will we see you again?" he asked.
    "I don't know about Gretchen. But you'll be seeing me tomorrow, since your leave's up. We'll be on the same train."
    "Huh?"
    Bartley got a hurt look on his face. "Didn't you notice that I was wearing my uniform?"
    Jeff had noticed, in fact, but hadn't thought much of it. David was a member of the State of Thuringia-Franconia's National