| abstract | - By Eric Flint Note: This story only appears in the print editions of Grantville Gazette III. This story is essentially part of a continuing serial by Eric Flint, as it follows Grantville Gazette I's "Portraits", wherein Anne Jefferson models for five different seventeenth century master painters as Mike Stearns hatches a plan to count another subtle-coup under the radar screen of the down-timer political opponents with their willing co-operation. As with his release of directions via Jefferson on how to make an antibiotic (See "Portraits" and culmination of the plot in 1634: The Baltic War), the politicians opposing the republic of the United States of Europe and democracy of the State of Thuringia-Franconia have no concept of the attack unleashed via the popular psyche. In this the third installment of the Nurse's Amsterdam tale, Jefferson sits for Peter Paul Rubens a second time—during or shortly after Stearns visits the "Siege of Amsterdam"—acting in furtherance of Stearns' scheme at the same time, for "the unknown" young master painter-to-be Rembrandt and the resident Dutch portrait masters, the brothers Franz and Dirck Hals. Meanwhile, Special Forces Captain Harry Lefferts appears in a scene suggesting skulduggery and underhanded dealings with a specific reference to Frans Hals' need for money and a Frenchman willing to outbid others in the Netherlands. The story ends with Cardinal Richelieu selecting a painter and planning to join the parade of states in the new service, despite the nominal hostilities, which makes the postal service a typical Stearnsian attack on the underpinnings of the old Europe, with untold and unexpected consequences for the down-time leaders adopting the new concept.
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