It was earth, too, in which he had discovered that flowers and a multitude of ornamental trees and a variety of shrubs and other pretty growing things could flourish. When given care, their roots pulled the rich nutrients from the soil, transforming the rain and sunlight and black dirt into the most exquisite shapes and colors and fragrances his eyes and nose ever beheld.

With every passing year, the simple blossoms and buds and foliage of his garden revealed to the inner eyes of his being more and more of life’s mysteries, and more about the Maker of suns and earths and roses and men and women all together.

The countries and kingdoms of his ancestors were forgotten now. In their place, everyone said these days, was the greatest nation the earth had ever known, an illustrious empire destined to fulfill the dreams and ambitions of the mightiest people ever to march across its face.

He was one of those people.

Yet in his heart beat anxious forebodings. The world was changing. Rapidly… too rapidly. Empires were rising both to the east and to the west of him. Empires whose greedy grasp, he feared, would one day trample across this verdant plain upon which his eyes rested whenever he climbed to the roof of his country home and gazed around him.

He prayed it would not be so. Yet he could not quiet the tremors in his breast.

Baron Heinrich von Dortmann, of distant Prussian and more recent Pomeranian descent, came from a long line in one of the great landowning families of north-central Europe. The ancient kingdoms of Poland, Prussia, and Pomerania had all vied for control of this region between the mouth of the Oder and the Gulf of Danzig, stretching southward to the latitudinal flow of the Warta and longitudinal flow of the Vistula rivers. Each had in its turn, over the preceding half millennium, controlled and laid claim to the right of sovereignty.

They had ruled the land, but the scions of the Dortmann name had not themselves been ruled. The counts and barons and viscounts among them had walked comfortably in the corridors of power, mixing and intermingling with kings and queens. As the rulers had shifted back and forth over the centuries, the fortunes of the family von Dortmann had risen steadily. Its men combined financial cunning with the integrity of their pedigree, to great profit and influence in the northern Germanic, Polish, and Prussian kingdoms. By the mid-nineteenth century there were merchants and bankers, politicians and generals among them. And, of course, those who continued to work the land and bring forth its wealth into the interest-bearing Dortmann granaries in Berlin, Vienna, and Hamburg.