"Settle down and marry. Or marry and settle down. Or marry and don't settle down—keep riding the Reichsstrasse, for all I care, though your wife may have different ideas. But marry."
Martin Wackernagel left Frankfurt am Main with his mother's admonitions ringing in his ears. This time with the variation that now that his sister Merga and her husband Crispin Neumann had taken in "that unmanageable boy"—otherwise known as Emrich Menig—if he didn't marry and settle down, everything would, in all probability, be inherited by a stranger.
"Emrich's not likely to be a stranger by the time we all die," which had been his first ploy, didn't go over very well.
Neither did, "Abraham named Eliezer of Damascus, a stranger, as his heir. And Eliezer would have been, if God hadn't intervened with a miracle for Sarah. If he wants Merga to have a miracle at her age, I presume that he's still perfectly capable of giving her one."
Nor even, "There's always Juditha." His younger sister, Juditha, almost fifteen years younger than Merga and ten years younger than himself, wasn't married yet. Nor did she come home regularly to let her mother complain about it. She had gone into service in the household of a Lutheran pastor at fourteen, followed her mistress to Strassburg when the pastor received a new call three years later, and wrote, perhaps, once every three months. If she was in the mood. Over which Mutti was greatly aggrieved, of course, moaning on and on about, "what is the point that she has saved a good dowry, above and beyond what your sainted father left for her and which I have invested so carefully and preserved from loss through the miseries of this entire war, if she shows no inclination to ask for it?"
Once he safely made his escape from the pursuing maternal voice, he followed his regular route—extended, now, beyond what it had been a few years before. From Frankfurt am Main by way of Gelnhausen, Steinau, Fulda, Vacha, Eisenach, Erfurt, yes. He still rode that part of the Reichsstrasse, the Imperial Road. But rarely, any more, the occasional further leg to Leipzig. Rather, from Erfurt, his regular path went through Arnstadt and Badenburg to Grantville.
Badenburg. Ah, Badenburg had many attractions. Prominent among them was a young woman named Helena Hamm. Not a girl. Wackernagel wasn't that interested in girls any more. He greatly preferred women.
He hadn't asked, but he had a fair amount of experience in observing women. He would place Helena at twenty-five or twenty-six years old.
"Three separate damnations, may all of them fall upon your head, you shrew." Willibald Fraas jerked his head up. "You have ruined this pour, coming in and startling Dietrich like that. Freytag in Arnstadt expects delivery of these steins within a week. Whose work is it pays for the costs of this household?"
"If you weren't so lazy, the steins would have been done last week. Last minute, everything at the last minute. You have no more sense of timeliness than a stewed prune." Agnes Bachmeierin slammed her fist down on the table where her husband and son were working.
"Don't think to browbeat me with your shoe, you grumpy old sow."
Helena Hamm watched the customer she had been serving leave the shop. Knowing that he had heard her stepfather and her mother. Knowing that one more story of the battles that occurred at the Sign of the Platter would go out into the gossip of Badenburg.
If her father had not died . . .
She shook her head impatiently.
Her father had been dead for a decade. Her mother, the formidable Agnes Bachmeierin, had fought the pewterers' guild with every devious legal device at her disposal in order to keep the family business for her sons. She hadn't managed to avoid remarriage to another master pewterer. That had been too much to hope for. However, Georg Friedrich Hamm (the Elder, deceased) had not been an ordinary pewterer. It was a specialty shop. He had supplied orders from all over central Thuringia. The marriage contract stipulated that Willibald Fraas would run the shop only until such time as her oldest surviving son by her first husband—whichever son that might turn out to be—qualified as a master and was ready to take it over.
Yes, her mother was clever. If Dietrich or Georg Friedrich the Younger should die or not wish to take over the shop, the daughters of her first marriage were the next in line. If neither of them had married a master pewterer, then Fraas had the first refusal right to buy the shop for any children he might have in his marriage to Agnes. Not inherit it. Buy it, at a fully and fairly assessed market price, to be split between the girls from the first marriage as their dowries. The marriage contract didn't even allow him that privilege for children of a possible second marriage, should Agnes have died without bearing him children. He would have had to compete with—bid against—any other pewterer who might be interested in the purchase.
But Agnes had borne him four. Three, two boys and a girl, were still alive.
There was no love lost between Willibald Fraas and his wife. There never had been.
Love? There wasn't even any mild friendship between Willibald Fraas and his wife. There wasn't even a truce or a cease-fire, such as that which seemed likely to occur in the Netherlands very soon now.
But . . . Helena was the oldest. She had been fifteen when her father died. She remembered perfectly well what things had been like between him and her mother.
Exactly the way they were between her mother and stepfather. Agnes Bachmeierin was not an easy woman to live with. Especially not during those months when she suspected she was pregnant again but had not yet felt the baby's movement to confirm it. Particularly when she had no desire to be pregnant again, at all.
Months like this month. And, probably, next month.
"So, I suppose, whether you admit that she startled me or not, once more you will declare that my work isn't good enough." Her brother Dietrich Hamm, his voice as whiny as usual, had joined the fray in the back of the shop. "I can see it now. No matter what I achieve, it's never going to be good enough for a masterwork, is it? And you'll use your influence with the rest of the guild to bring the others around to your point of view. In spite of the fact that my father served as guildmaster."
"Boy, you have less brains than you do ear wax," Fraas exploded. "Your mind is like a rotten nut with no kernel."
Dietrich was completely convinced that his stepfather was trying to exclude him from achieving his mastership. Which, Helena had to admit, was not beyond the realm of possibility. The marriage contract, combined with their father's will, ensured that Dietrich would take over. According to their provisions, if Dietrich survived another three years, Willibald Fraas would be working for his stepson.
"Tickle-brained, clumsy, ill-nurtured—"
"If I am badly trained, then it was you who trained me badly."
If, of course, Dietrich had qualified as a master pewterer by then.
If not, Fraas could hang on for another ten years, until her younger brother could qualify. Willibald was cranky, obnoxious, unpleasant, and capable of making the lives of everyone around him miserable. He was not just uninterested in the changes that Karl Schmidt was bringing to the guilds in Badenburg. He was hostile to every one of them.
Dietrich, encouraged by his mother and the Bachmeier uncle for whom he had been named, wanted to pursue every one of them.
But not with any real energy, much less hard work. Part of Helena had to admit that even if everything Dietrich claimed about their stepfather's intentions was entirely true, he was still basically a dissatisfied whiner and always would be.
He wasn't a very good pewterer, either. Even if Mama hadn't disturbed him, the odds were high that the pour would have had flaws.
Which Willibald knew.
Which to some extent justified Mama's complaints about his having left it too long. He should have allowed for the distinct possibility that, with Dietrich involved in the project, they would need to pour these elaborate handles again.
Martin Wackernagel paused at the door. The best description of the usual tone that he encountered when he stopped at the Sign of the Platter might be "constant sniping." Fraas provided him with a lot of commissions, but he had a nasty temper, which was most frequently directed at his wife; then at his three stepchildren; then at his own children. Not that he was a violent man—just a hostile one. Though his life as a place-holder for his stepsons couldn't be easy.
Helena was in the retail shop when he came in. She usually was. So he smiled at her. "Over in Grantville," he said, cocking his head in the direction of the back room, "they call it 'stress.' "
Helena was more than content to find a bit of respite from the hostilities by flirting with a good-looking courier whenever he dropped in with orders and letters. It wasn't as if anyone else was seriously courting her.
So, Helena thought. Flirt I will. Twenty-six going on twenty-seven and no serious suitor in sight. Wackernagel was a good-looking man and she was old enough to know what she was doing. She deserved a little harmless, inexpensive entertainment delivered right to her doorstep.
Since the weather was warm, Wackernagel took advantage of an outdoor "Old Folk's Music" night at the Thuringen Gardens. A man could get away with buying just one beer at the outside tables, if he sat at the edge, by the fence. With his responsibilities, he didn't have a lot of spare change most of the time.
He leaned back, listening to the band. They'd been appearing occasionally for close to a year now. One of the women got up and made an introduction of something called, "Please help me. I'm falling in love with you." It seemed like a very long name for a song. One of the men . . . Wackernagel thought a moment. His name was Jerry Simmons. Simmons started on the plea of a lover who was asking the object of his affections to reject him.
Wackernagel smiled into his beer. Now, that was unusual. He didn't think he'd ever heard a love song with that theme before. Mostly the lover was asking the girl to let him into her heart and her bed—not keep him out of it.
Simmons moved on to the second verse. The man was unhappily married but determined to remain faithful. Now, wouldn't that make the priests and ministers happy? Too bad none of them seemed be here tonight. This song could be turned into a whole sermon theme. But wait. At the end of the second verse, it looked like the guy might succumb to temptation. Wackernagel perked up. Maybe it was just as well that the upstanding Pastor Ludwig Kastenmayer was safely at home in the rectory next to St. Martin's in the Fields Lutheran Church, probably reading edifying bedtime stories to his numerous preachers' kids.
But no. The singer concludes that it would be a sin. The girl must close the door to temptation on him. Damn, what an anticlimax. Nice tune, though. He called, "Encore, encore." Which, one of the down-time mail carriers had told him, in the Thuringen Gardens, meant just what it said. Not, "sing something more." It meant, "sing it again, Sam."
Why, "Sam?" Not a single one of the acts he had heard in Grantville had a singer named "Sam." He would have to find out when he had a chance. Before he left tomorrow, he would stop at the public library and ask.
Jerry Simmons sang it again. Wackernagel listened, committing the tune to memory and writing the words on a piece of scratch paper. It would be an excellent song to sing to girls he wasn't really serious about.
He couldn't afford to get serious very many more times. His income was stretched about as far as it would go, even with Maria's market garden for the Erfurt trade, what Rufina could bring in with her spinning and hostel for travelers, and the fact that Edeltraud had been able to continue on as a waitress when her father's inn was sold after his death.
He could sing it to Helena Hamm in Badenburg on his way home. It was a very pretty song.
The gossip in the Fulda Barracks was better than that in Fulda itself. Things were pretty quiet, though, in spite of the Ram Rebellion going on in the other sections of Franconia. Dagmar, Sergeant Hartke's wife, said that the main concern of the soldiers was whether or not it would extend into Stift Fulda, since it was certainly lively enough down around Würzburg and Bamberg. And whether they will be allowed to go out and shoot some peasants if it did. Life had been dull.
Martin taught them his new song, admitting that he didn't know whether it was a "genuine Hank Williams" or not. The woman who introduced the singer hadn't said, and he'd forgotten to ask that when he stopped at the library to find out about "Sam."
As a kind of consolation prize, he treated Dagmar and the sergeant to a synopsis of the plot of Casablanca. One nice thing about regular visits to Grantville was that a man always came out with something to trade. Not goods—he was a courier, not a merchant. But ideas.
By the time Martin got to Badenburg again, the kidnaping of Clara Bachmeierin in Stift Fulda was old news. Old, but crucial to the household in which Helena Hamm resided. Clara was her aunt, the sister of the inestimably belligerent Agnes. So he delivered all the information he had gathered.
"It's not that we don't care about the other people that the SoTF sent over there," Helena said, "but none of the rest of them are related to us. What do you really think?"
"They're doing their best." What else did he have to say?
From the back room, the apparently interminable family squabble flew on. This time, a new voice. A young one. Screaming, "But I don't want to apprentice as a pewterer. I don't want to spend my life molding tableware and figurines. I want to stay at the Latin school and then go to the university."
"Want, want, want. Why should it make any difference what you want, you little pipsqueak? Did anyone ask me what I wanted? Metals are important."
"The only metal I want to deal with is those new steel pen nibs that they're making in Jena, now. I want one for my stylus. Or . . ."
Helena sighed. "Jergfritz. My younger brother. Georg Friedrich Hamm, the Younger."
Wackernagel grinned. "Just as charming as your other brother, I perceive."
"Willibald has no patience with him. But Dietrich doesn't, either. Dietrich knows that if he should die, and all men are mortal, perhaps more so in the middle of this war than in a time of peace, then Fraas will have another ten years of controlling the shop before Jergfritz is old enough to take over. By that time, my stepfather will be close to sixty and a daily routine of pouring hot metal may have lost some of its appeal. So Dietrich is convinced that my stepfather's nefarious plot is to shut him out in favor of his younger brother."
They could still hear invisible dialogue going on.
"You want to be a pen-pusher instead of a respectable tradesman? Scribbling your life away instead of making something useful? It's high time for you to be articled."
"Or a key," Jergfritz yelled back. "I'd be willing to deal with a piece of metal if it was a key to my office in a fine government building."
Martin flirted a little longer and then proceeded along his route to Grantville. Where the news arrived that all was well in Fulda, the SoTF administrators having been retrieved.
Which, he hoped, might improve the general mood of the Fraas/Bachmeierin/Hamm household in Badenburg. But he doubted it.
In Grantville this time, he also discovered that the mayor, Henry Dreeson, was planning a "good will tour" of Buchenland, which would culminate in Frankfurt. And which would involve him.
That was genuinely new news. He stopped in Badenburg, where he told Helena. He stopped in Bindersleben bei Erfurt, where he told Maria. He stopped in Vacha, where he told Rufina. He stopped in Fulda and at the Fulda Barracks, where he saw Sergeant Hartke, Dagmar, David Kronberg, other friends, and picked up messages to be delivered to the Hanauer rabbi and to Meier zum Schwan in Frankfurt. He stopped in Steinau, where he told Edeltraud.
Between Steinau and Frankfurt, he thought long and hard. Maria had been very excited. So had Rufina. And Edeltraud. Each one of them insisted that he must bring his honorable charge, the mayor of Grantville, to stay overnight with the family in Bindersleben. And in Vacha. And in Steinau.
His heart was sinking. He could feel it dropping. By now it was somewhere in the region of his bowels, likely to be expelled on his next visit to a latrine. He was experiencing a feeling that he identified as "terrible dread." There wasn't a Good Omen that he could discern anywhere. Whereas there were a lot of distinctly Bad Omens.
Maria. His first and, therefore, legal wife. They'd been married nearly ten years now. She was a true orphan—parents dead, no aunts and uncles. A hired girl in a dairy. Mutti would have been furious that he chose such a wife. But she'd been so cute, and she smelled intriguingly like cheese. Where he got the idea of telling the pastor in Bindersleben that he was an orphan from Breslau himself, he couldn't even recall any more.
He'd already been making good money on the road. With no one to spend it on but himself, he had quite a bit saved, which impressed the Bindersleben pastor. He bought the lease of a little cottage with a garden and set her up in her own little cheesemaking business. Fancy cheeses, soft cheeses, for the weekly Erfurt market. When the Swedish army came through in 1631, she'd had a setback, because the foragers confiscated every cow in the village of Bindersleben, but they left the people unharmed. Cows could be replaced. They rejoiced at the births of four children; mourned the death of one of them. Little Margaretha, their Gretel, in 1631, had not been old enough or strong enough to survive the famine time.
Maria was a darling girl.
But, then, so was Rufina. They married in Vacha. A month after Maria's first child was born. Maria had been a bit ill-tempered during that first pregnancy and Rufina was, so, um, available every time he traveled through Vacha. Which meant that even though she was a Catholic, from the Fulda side of the town, the priest had approved her marriage to a Lutheran orphan from Breslau in September. Late September. Followed by the birth of their first child in February. Early February.
It had worked out well, though. He was able to buy the lease on a little cottage with a garden, right on the outskirts of the town, a block from the Reichsstrasse. She provided rooms to travelers and also was a spinner. They had rejoiced at the births of three children; mourned the death of one of them.
Rufina was a darling girl, too.
With Edeltraud, things had been a little more complicated. But also, in a way, easier. Old Caspar Kress at the Blue Goose in Steinau had only the two daughters and didn't really want to give either of them up. But only one son-in-law could take over the inn.
Caspar had married off Anna, the younger girl, to Thomas Diebolt, the younger son of a prosperous Gelnhausen innkeeper, the year before. Thomas had moved in and would take over the inn. His father had bought out a half-share; that money went to the dowries for the two daughters—which meant, of course, that Diebolt got half of his expenditure returned to the family for investment right away. The other half of the inn would be divided between the daughters, with Thomas having the right to buy Edeltraud out when the time came.
So far, so good. But Caspar would still have lost his second daughter when she married and moved away. Which would have been a small tragedy. Edeltraud was an excellent cook and waitress. So he had seen possibilities in his older daughter's interest in a courier. A man who traveled the Reichsstrasse and would leave her at home. Even though Caspar was a Calvinist, he made things right with the minister when it turned out that the courier, an orphan from Breslau, was a Lutheran. Thomas and Anna were happy too, since she was content to continue working at the inn after her marriage and they wouldn't have to find the capital to buy out her quarter-share when old Caspar died.
They married in July of 1629. Late July. Little Caspar was born early the next January, but he was sickly from the start and soon died. Since then, though, Edeltraud had given him three healthy, lively sons. Since old Caspar's death, she continued to live and work at the inn, her children penned up in a little room behind the kitchen along with Anna's two. Her quarter-share of the profits, above and beyond what he could contribute, made a decent income, with no rent or food to pay for out of pocket.
Edeltraud was a darling girl.
But none of them knew about the others. Of course. He was not some kind of Turk, to have a harem. He was a respectable married man.
Three times, but these things happened. None of them could ever learn about the others. O Lord above, what a disaster that would be.
And he couldn't have told Mutti about either Rufina or Edeltraud, even if he had been single when he married them. They weren't Lutheran. And Rufina, in particular, expended a great deal of effort trying to convert him to her own faith. It was her least attractive characteristic. But tolerable, entirely tolerable, given that all the rest of her characteristics were most attractive. Especially her . . . His mind temporarily wandered off into the realms of remembrance.
Maria and Rufina and Edeltraud really, really, wanted to see a horseless carriage up close. They were extremely excited about it. And so did all the children. Well, not Maria's Otto and Edeltraud's Conrad, because they were too young. But all the rest of them.
There was no point in not telling them. The trip was going to be in the newspapers. The Grantvillers intended to get a lot of publicity out of Mayor Dreeson's tour. They would certainly find out that he was going to leave his horse in Grantville, ride to Frankfurt and back in an "ATV." With cushioned seats. And a driver. Who might even teach him to drive it.
So he probably wouldn't be able to get out of stopping to show them all the ATV and introduce them to the mayor. Strike the word "probably." There would be no way to get out of stopping at all three of his households.
He was the guide, Mayor Dreeson said. Because he knew the route.
What to do?
Publicity. Have the vehicle go slowly, with frequent stops at many villages. Mayor Dreeson had a bad hip. He was an old man, with the physical needs of old men. Stop at almost every village on the route. Get out. Have the drivers explain the vehicle to the children.
He could suggest it, at least.
Maybe he could arrange the schedule so the stops in Bindersleben and Vacha and Steinau were short ones. Midday. With everybody's attention on the vehicle. Not overnight, with a chance for conversation.
Please, O Lord, not overnight with a chance for conversation. Thank you, O Lord, that women in the Germanies do not share the idiotic up-time custom of adopting the family name of their husbands. Please, O Lord of Hosts, make the children so interested in the ATV that they do not call me Papa. Or, if they do, please make it happen at only one of the stops.
On his next return from Frankfurt, Wackernagel stopped in Fulda to pick up paperwork from Wes Jenkins, for Ed Piazza, to set up Dreeson's trip to the Fulda area. Dreeson had agreed to go, contingent upon getting his wife Veronica and Mary Simpson successfully retrieved from Basel, so planning was in full spate. That wasn't the only thing Wackernagel carried on the trip, of course: a courier would go broke if he only took one commission at a time. But the paperwork was urgent, so his pleasant interlude spent chatting with Helena Hamm in Badenburg was brief. Unfortunately.
He also pitched his inspiration to Ed Piazza. "It's a political trip, I understand. You should have the driver to make stops in a lot of towns and villages. The mayor can get out, move around. He won't get so tired, that way. The cars will attract crowds of fascinated kids, whose parents will follow them. From here to Badenburg, not so much. It's close to Grantville, so the people are used to seeing cars and trucks. Not just driving on the road, but parked. Beyond Badenburg, though, even through Arnstadt, and up to Erfurt, people mostly see up-time vehicles going back and forth. Driving on the road. They've seen that plenty of times. They haven't, most of them, seen one stopped, where they could take a closer look, with a driver who was willing to explain how things worked."
Ed nodded.
Wackernagel clinched the deal. "You want to get votes for the Fourth of July Party all along the route, don't you? Not just over in Buchenland."
"I have the record here somewhere," Henry Dreeson said. "Somewhere in this pile." He started sorting through a batch of old 33 rpm LPs. "It was real popular, back in its day, and it was German, too, so maybe the down-timers would like it. Margie—that was my daughter, you know, Margie—sang it when she was in the Girl Scouts. And my granddaughter sang it in Girl Scouts, too. It's a kind of perennial. The kind they call a 'golden oldie.' Ah, here it is." He pulled a disk out of its cover. "It should suit you very well, Wackernagel. You're a 'happy wanderer' yourself, back and forth on your route all the time."
Wackernagel didn't like it as well as he liked Hank Williams.
On the other hand, it was Henry Dreeson's "Your Local Government in Action" tour through Buchenland: not his. If the mayor thought that this would be a good theme song, then maybe it would.
Then the singer came on with a verse in German. Oddly accented German, but definitely German. Cunz Kastenmayer, one of the numerous sons of Pastor Ludwig Kastenmayer, who had been recruited to serve as Dreeson's translator on the tour because of his linguistic talents, asked, "When was this sung, and where?"
The other half of the audience was a professional courier. "Where's this 'Rennsteig,' " Wackernagel asked.
"Right here in Thuringia," Cunz answered. "Or, rather, it runs down the ridges of the Thüringerwald and generally marks the border between Thuringia and Franconia. It goes right through Suhl, almost. It's been there as long as anyone can remember, back into the media aeva between classical times and the modern. A messenger route, about a hundred of your up-time miles long, Mayor Dreeson."
"Nowhere near as long as the Imperial Road, the Reichsstrasse," Wackernagel remarked with satisfaction.
"Needs a lot of repairs, too. The encylopedia says that in the other history, it was Duke Ernst—Wettin's brother, the one who's regent in the Upper Palatinate now—who fixed it up, a few years from now in their future, as a fast way to move German troops into Austria in case of attacks by the Turks."
"Is it as old as the Reichsstrasse?" Wackernagel asked with some interest.
Cunz shook his head. "I don't know."
"Did either of you ever hear of Al Smith?" Dreeson asked.
Neither one had.
"Ran for President against Hoover in 1928. On the Democratic ticket. They called him the 'happy warrior.' Way back. Well, not as far back as Wordsworth. If you look in that book over there, Cunz, next to the bay window, you'll find the Collected Works of William Wordsworth. My grandfather died when I was just five years old, but he left that book to me in his will. The poem's in there, if you want to read it.
"Then later, in my day, that's what they called Hubert Humphrey, too. I listened to his speech on the radio—the one at the Democratic national convention in 1948. I was about fifteen, I guess. Old enough to pay attention. 'To those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states' rights, I say this, that the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.'
"Hell, even Reagan used it. 'So, let us go forth with good cheer and stout hearts—happy warriors out to seize back a country and a world to freedom.' No point in tossing out a good slogan just because you didn't agree with the guy who said it. What else are we trying to do—the Fourth of July Party, I mean?"
Dreeson started the record playing again.
"I think we need a theme song for this tour we're taking over to Fulda and Frankfurt. Happy Wanderer should do it. It's close enough to 'happy warrior.' Even if it is about the wrong road."
Neither of them was in a position to argue. Not even when Mayor Dreeson decided that, in the absence of a sound system, the two of them would have the privilege of singing it at every single stop. Once Cunz had remodeled the German words a bit, to turn it into a political theme song.
"At least," Cunz said, "you can carry a tune. And I play the lute, which is a lot better than playing the bagpipes, for example, if he expects me to be singing, too."
Wackernagel breathed a sigh of relief when the motorcade left Vacha, escorted by a portion of the soldiers from the Fulda Barracks Regiment. Utt's arrival had certainly been timely. In the short period Mayor Dreeson was at Rufina's house, it hadn't dawned on him that those fascinated kids belonged to his friend Wackernagel. Whereas the insistence of the military commander on increased security had moved the mayor to a different location without raising Rufina's suspicions. Which would certainly have risen up if her husband had suggested that they shouldn't provide hospitality for such an honored guest.
Scot free.
Except.
"You do realize," Cunz Kastenmayer said, "that you're damned lucky they chose me to be the interpreter on this trip. Not my brother the junior minister. Not my brother the bureaucrat who has sworn an oath to uphold the laws. Just a law student."
Wackernagel started to answer when the bushes at the edge of the road parted and a girl jumped in front of the lead car.
Which wasn't that dangerous. Because of the condition of the road between Vacha and Fulda, along with having to accommodate the mounted escort, the ATVs weren't moving over five miles per hour.
A couple of the soldiers rode ahead.
The girl waved both hands in the air to show she was unarmed.
Wackernagel jumped out and yelled, "Liesel, what are you doing?"
"Running away," Liesel Bodamer answered cheerfully. "I hate my guardians. They're mean and make me learn to embroider. Papa might not have been much of a father in a lot of ways, but at least he didn't keep me inside the house all the time. So I'm going to Fulda. Mrs. Hill didn't want them to send me to my mother's relatives in Schlitz, to start with. So I'm going to her and I thought I'd hitch a ride."
"Tell her to hop in," Dreeson said. "We can sort it out in Fulda better then we can out here in the middle of the road."
Liesel hopped.
"How's Emrich?" was her first question.
The rest of her questions were so numerous that Kastenmayer had to give up on making any more comments until they got into Fulda itself and turned her over to Andrea Hill.
"Martin?" Cunz Kastenmayer said.
"Yes?" They were mounting their horses, having given up their seats in Henry Dreeson's ATV to Sergeant Hartke's wife Dagmar and her stepdaughter Gertrud.
"There's a familiar-looking female coming down the road. On foot."
Wackernagel looked back and emitted a hearty "Hell and damnation." Followed by, "Utt!"
Derek Utt turned around. "You want to take her with us?"
"Over my dead body," Wackernagel said.
Utt detailed a couple of his soldiers to return Liesel Bodamer to Fulda and the custody of Andrea Hill.
The motorcade moved on.
"At least we don't have to do it all over again on the way back," Cunz said.
Wackernagel smiled. "Would it be appropriate for us to pause and give thanks for life's small blessings?"
"Have you given further thought to the blessing I pointed out to you a few weeks ago? In regard to your luck in not having the company of either of my older brothers?"
"The junior pastor and the city clerk?"
"Precisely. We'll be at the inn in Steinau within a couple of hours. The Blue Goose, where we stopped coming down to Frankfurt."
Wackernagel nodded.
"Will you be spending the night in the family quarters again?"
"Do you care?"
"Oddly enough, yes." Cunz paused. "Also about the women in Vacha and Bindersleben. And the children."
Wackernagel winced.
"As will Herr Dreeson's wife. Although the mayor does very well, he still has learned German recently. He fails to grasp many of the nuances of how people address one another. The redoubtable Veronica does not share this handicap."
"Edeltraud would be very disappointed if I seemed to treat her coldly in the presence of influential associates."
Cunz shrugged. "It's your choice. Possibly your grave."
"Well, of course you'll come with us, Wes. You and Clara. With me. After what you went through with Gruyard and von Schlitz and their thugs, it's the least I can offer."
Wackernagel, listening, saw a light. "Well, then. You don't need a guide going back. The driver knows the road now, and you have Utt's soldiers as an escort. I'll just rent a horse in Fulda, pick up some commissions, and go back to riding my regular route, rather than accompanying the motorcade all the way back to Grantville."
Cunz Kastenmayer smothered a smile.
Especially when Mayor Dreeson's reply was a firm, "Oh, no, Wackernagel. I couldn't see my way to letting you do that, after all the help you've been. We'll leave the soldiers who were riding in the rear ATV to ride back to Grantville. You and Cunz come right along with us, in the other car." He paused. "But how are we going to split up the couples? Ronnie and I can take the back seat of the front car, but that means that Wes will have to be in one and Clara in the other. No, wait. Cunz can ride in front, in our car. You can be in front with the driver of the rear car, and Wes and Clara in back. Unless Wes and I have business to talk. Then he can ride with me and Ronnie back with Clara . . ." Henry limped away.
Although Henry remained happily oblivious to nuances and Wes equaled his inability to perceive them . . . Veronica and Clara did not. Not at Vacha. Not at Bindersleben.
Not in Badenburg. Where it became fairly clear that not only did the courier have three wives, but also a girlfriend. While waiting for a problem with the engine of the rear ATV to be repaired, which involved bringing a part from Grantville, they observed Wackernagel making a delivery to the Sign of the Platter.
And flirting.
With Clara's niece, Helena Hamm.
So what were they going to do about it?
"Did you know about this, young Kastenmayer?" was not a propitious opening sentence for any conversation.
Cunz felt like he was about ten years old again. In school. Caught.
"Ah. Well, not about your niece. We didn't stop long in Badenburg on the trip outward."
"I am going to stop this. What is it at they say in the movies that they show in Grantville. The westerns?"
He grasped the reference immediately. "Head them off at the pass."
"Yes. Precisely. Find Wackernagel and get him in here. I am going to tell Helena. At once. Also, he shall know that if he does not leave Helena alone, if he does not comply, I will tell the other women. He is not going to ruin my niece's life, the wretch. The miserable, irresponsible, abominable . . ." She searched her vocabulary. "Creep. That is what Andrea would say. Creep."
Veronica nodded.
"They made me so mad," Helena said. "It's not as if we were doing anything except laughing. Which I get little enough of. Self-righteous old . . . biddies."
Wackernagel shrugged. "You heard what they said."
"They can't do anything to me. Not really." Helena leaned her elbows on the counter. "It's not as if I had a fiancé who could break our betrothal in outrage. Or anything close to a fiancé. So, I suppose, it all depends on whether or not you want to risk it."
Wackernagel picked up his hat. "I'll plan on seeing you the next time I come through, then."
"I don't know when he'll be back, Clara," Wes said. "Someone else brought the bag in from Fulda this week. The guy said that the people in Fulda, Utt and the others, have been picking up some information about Gruyard and what happened to the abbot. Schweinsberg, that is. I wouldn't trust the new man, Hoheneck, farther than I could shake a stick at him, as Granny used to say.
"Meier zum Schwan in Frankfurt picked up some information. Sent it to the Hanauer rabbi, who diverted Wackernagel off to make a direct trip to Magdeburg with stuff for Francisco Nasi."
"Well, good riddance." She paused. "Wesley?"
"Ummn."
"Now that you have been assigned to this 'uniform matrimonial legislation' project for the SoTF and maybe the whole USE? What is the law on this man? What does it say? All three of the towns are in the SoTF now, but when he married, they were in three different countries. All in the Holy Roman Empire, but three different jurisdictions. Bindersleben, then, was under Erfurt, but over Erfurt, that part, was the archbishop of Mainz. Steinau belonged to the counts of Hanau. Vacha to the abbey of Fulda. Who is . . . responsible?"
Wes sighed. "Clara, honey, have you seen any of those little statues around Grantville. The ones with the three monkeys. One with his hands over his ears, one with his hands over his eyes, one with his hands over his mouth?"
"Yes. Someone, I can't remember who right now, has one on his desk."
"There's a lot to be said for that motto."
"What motto?"
"The monkey statue motto. 'Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.' "
"I sort of hope you didn't arrive by way of Badenburg," Wes said.
Wackernagel gave him one of those smiles. "By way of Jena, this time. I rode the railway from Halle. It was . . . interesting. I had heard of the surveying being done up north of Fulda, of course, through southern Hesse-Kassel. But until I experienced it for myself . . . I suppose it's something I will have to factor into my future plans."
"All right, then. My wife is a woman with strong opinions, you understand."
"I agree entirely."
"You know what they are, too." Having disposed of family obligations, Wes got back to government business. "Now, I have something that has to get to Derek Utt as fast as you can move it. The boy's taking every drop of advantage he can squeeze from the lemon during this interregnum over there, without a civilian administrator to ride herd on him. Since I left and before Mel Springer can get there to take over. He took it hard when Hoheneck let us know what had happened to Schweinsberg. Real hard."
Wackernagel took the packet.
Wes reached into his shirt pocket. "Take this to him, too. It's a letter from Mary Kat."
Wackernagel raised his eyebrows.
"His wife." Wes grinned. "They were married last February and haven't seen each other since the honeymoon. Which lasted three days. Remind him from me that if he doesn't take his long-overdue leave and come home for Christmas, he's going to have a really pissed lady lawyer on his tail."
"Ah," Wackernagel said. "The fair Helena, whose face launched a thousand ships."
"This face," Helena said, "has never seen a boat bigger than a barge on the Ilm."
"Must you disillusion me? Such a skewering of my best efforts is positively discouraging."
She leaned forward, her elbows resting on the counter. She knew she shouldn't be doing this. Not for her sake, but for his. She had no doubt that Aunt Clara sincerely meant every threat she made.
On the other hand—he was by far the most entertaining man she had ever met. She was old enough to know what she was doing.
"If not a thousand ships," Wackernagel said, "then a hundred small barges, at the very least." He kissed her fingertips.
She giggled. And told herself that she could manage Aunt Clara. If it came to that.
Etienne Baril, the Huguenot lawyer who worked for Andrea Hill in Fulda, still regarded Wes Jenkins as his real pipeline into the SoTF and, therefore, the USE governmental structure. The next time Wackernagel came through, he gave him a letter when the courier dropped in to ask how Liesel was doing.
"She's in school," Andrea said. "As long as the roads are bad, I think she'll stay there. Liesel may be a little hard to handle, but she certainly isn't dumb."
Wes looked at the letter, took off his glasses to polish them, and said, "Can you hang around for a day or so and then go up to Magdeburg for me? I'd like Clara to do an analysis of this before I send it on to Nasi."
"If it doesn't go beyond a couple of days. I'll send a message with Wattenbach that I'm delayed and have him cover my usual stops. But Mutti expects me home for the holidays. She'll fret if I'm not there."
Wes had a little difficult juxtaposing the concepts of "Martin Wackernagel" and "fretting mother" in his mind.
It didn't work out too badly. He got the packets to Magdeburg, hit Bindersleben on Christmas Eve, Vacha a couple of days later (he and Rufina had given the children their presents earlier in the month, on the Feast of Saint Nicholas, as was the Catholic custom), Steinau for New Year's, and Frankfurt for Twelfth Night.
He'd had practice, of course. Although some years, he made the stops in the reverse order.
Something was wrong. He knew it as soon as he tethered his horse and stepped into the tavern.
"Martin. Oh, Martin," the tavernkeeper's old mother said. "I'll call the pastor." She turned toward the kitchen. "Hanni, run, put on your cloak and run. Bring the pastor right away." Then she put her hand on his arm. "Don't go to your cottage, Martin. Wait for Pastor Asmus. Don't go to your cottage. There's no one there."
"It was so sudden," Pastor Asmus's wife said. "Just last week, and we had no way to reach you. We knew you would be on the Reichsstrasse, somewhere. She had just told us that she was expecting another child. Another blessing. Then, Tuesday evening, little Kaethe came running up to Midwife Knorrin's house, saying that her mother was lying on the floor, bleeding. We called a physician from Erfurt. He came riding out in the dark and the cold, but by morning she was gone. Oh, poor Maria. Not that she isn't in a better place. But the children? She has no relatives and you are an orphan. Plus you are scarcely here more than a day in each month."
Wackernagel rested his forehead on his fists, his elbows on his knees.
"Eight years old, Kaethe," Pastor Asmus said. "Six, two; Otto not yet a year. I remember when I married the two of you, thinking that if she had family to investigate your background, they would worry about just such a thing, with you on the road all the time."
Wackernagel raised his head. "If she had family to investigate my background, the children would be with that family now."
"The Schultheiss has taken them in, temporarily. But he and his wife have six of their own. It's not a permanent solution. But there's the cottage and garden. It's not as if they will be charity cases. You can afford to have them bound out to good families. The village council and church elders are already making inquiries for you."
Wackernagel shook his head. Thinking, thinking. No. He could not endure to have them bound out. Separated from each other. They slept in a single trundle bed at night, cuddled together like a litter of puppies in this cold winter weather.
But, since he had represented himself as an orphan for so long, he couldn't say that he had family in Frankfurt who would take them.
"Or," the pastor was saying, "if you want to keep the household together, to continue its existence more or less undisturbed, all of us will be happy to try to find you another nice wife. Within the next month. I think that is as long as you can really presume on the kindness of the Schultheiss, and it takes three weeks to read the banns."
The pastor's wife and the tavernkeeper's mother both nodded solemnly.
He shook his head.
"I need to see the children," he said. He looked out at the snow-covered ground. "I can't leave my horse standing there. It's so cold. Could you bury her?"
"Don't worry about the horse," Hanni said. "On my way back from the rectory, I took him to the stable and groomed him."
Pastor Asmus answered the other question. "Not yet. She is in the crypt. We loaned her one of the church's shrouds. Burial will have to wait for a thaw. So I waited until you came to preach the funeral sermon. Shall we do that tomorrow?"
Wackernagel stood up. "I guess we might as well. Thank you, Pastor Asmus. All of you. Thank you for everything."
Rufina would not be understanding. He sat in the church, listening to the words of the twenty-third psalm. And Maria would not have wanted her children brought up by a Catholic. Edeltraud might be understanding. Growing up in an inn tended to make a young woman a little more . . . comprehending of the ways of the world. But . . . Thomas and Anna were not likely to be, and it would be a burden on the two sisters, as well, to have four more small children to care for, in the middle of a busy hostel, in addition to their own six. Plus, they were Calvinists. Maria would not have wanted her children to be brought up by Calvinists.
"Our father, who art in heaven." The words of the prayer, recited by the congregation, passed over him. Almost the whole village had come to the service.
Maria had been a darling girl.
"We think it would be best," the Schultheiss said.
"No. It's not what I want for them. For me."
"What do you want to do, then, Martin?"
"Can I leave my horse in your stable, Hanni?" He turned to the tavernkeeper. "For a couple of weeks?"
"Of course."
"Then, I'll go into Erfurt tomorrow. See a lawyer about the cottage and garden—he'll come out to talk to the village council. You'll have approval of anyone who assumes the lease or buys it out, of course. Maria bought one of those new handcarts—the kind farm wives are using to take produce to market in the summer. For her cheeses. I've made friends, along the road. People who will take my children in, keep them together, long enough for me to deal with this. I'll pack them and their things in the cart, good and warm, with hot bricks and pans of coals, and take them down to Badenburg.
"I can't thank all of you enough, for everything you have done. But I just can't bear to bind them out.
"I'll bring the cart back. It's part of Maria's estate. The lawyer can put it into the inventory before I go.
It wasn't warm, not really. If if were April, it would be a chilly day. But it was warm for January. Helena stood on the steps, her apron wrapped around her hands, watching the early sunset of midwinter. There weren't any customers in the shop, she had caught up the bookkeeping, and right now she couldn't stand to listen to Willibald, Mama, and Dietrich in the back for one more minute.
She didn't notice the man with the handcart at first. Not until he stopped right in front of her. Even then . . . Martin did not look like himself.
"She died," he said. "Maria died. I've brought the children to you."
She picked them up, one at a time, and carried them indoors. After shooing Martin inside and telling him to get warm at the hearth.
The children were toasty. Not happy, and in the case of Otto in serious need of a clean diaper, but warm.
"It hasn't been bad, today," Martin said. "Except that my feet are wet. My boots are designed for riding, not walking."
"Well, then, take them off and put on dry socks. Surely you have some." Her voice was cross. "If you don't, I'll get a pair of Dietrich's."
She knew perfectly well that she was going to take these children in.
Just because Martin had brought them to her.
She also knew perfectly well how her mother would react. And Willibald. And Dietrich. And, for that matter, the rest of her siblings and half-siblings. Her aunts and uncles. Particularly Aunt Clara.
So much for any prospects of ever having a serious suitor. Much less a fiancé. Or a husband.
Old enough to enjoy a harmless flirtation with no repercussions. Like hell she was.
Maybe sometimes your mother and aunts really did know better.
She opened the door to the back of the shop. In the dying light, Willibald and Dietrich were clearing up the day's work. Mama, already heavy with this pregnancy, was perched on a high stool, tallying up the successful pours.
"Guess what?" she said.
"Agnes just couldn't believe that Helena did it," Clara told Kortney Pence. Anything to take her mind off the prodding and poking of a prenatal exam. "Without so much as a by-your-leave to anyone else in the family."
"The man can afford to pay for their keep," Kortney said. "It's not as if she was taking in charity cases."
"But the extra work. And with Agnes pregnant again. What do you suppose happened to that poor woman?"
Kortney looked down. Clara, pregnant for the first time at thirty-nine, did pretty well in hiding her panic as her due date got closer.
Not so well that an experienced nurse-midwife couldn't detect it, though.
"Nothing that's going to happen to you," she said firmly. "I didn't get to examine her, but from what Wackernagel told Helena, I'd bet on an ectopic pregnancy." She pulled a chart of the human female reproductive system down from the top of the metal closet. "Here . . . you've seen this before. I've shown it to you. The ovaries, where you store the eggs. The womb, where the baby grows. And these—the fallopian tubes. If the fertilized egg gets stuck before it reaches the womb and the baby starts to grow in the tube, well, there's just no room. You get a rupture. Hemorrage. And, a lot of the time, death. Always, with down-time medicine. Sometimes, even up-time." She put away the chart. "But you're well beyond that. The baby's fine. Go home and harass your relatives."
The rumors about anti-Semitic demonstrations kept coming in. Wesley was involved, of course, through the SoTF Consular Service. Plus, there had been those pamphlets in Fulda. There were new pamphlets now.
Harangues in the towns around Grantville.
Questions from Stearns and Nasi in Magdeburg.
Wackernagel, every now and then, bringing things in from Frankfurt am Main.
Nobody could quite put a finger on it.
Not until the fourth of March, when everything erupted. When someone, nobody knew who, shot Henry Dreeson and Enoch Wiley. In front of Grantville's synagogue. During an attack on it. Which the police weren't there to handle because of a demonstration against the Leahy Medical Center. A demonstration that turned violent.
"The rumors of a pogrom in Grantville," the Hanauer rabbi said.
"I rode down as soon as it came in on the radio," David Kronberg said. "We have a good receiver at the post office now. Better, actually, than the SoTF administration's own. Sometimes they come down and listen to ours."
"How many?" the president of the congregation asked.
David knew what they meant. How many new martyrs to commemorate.
"Um, none. No deaths. Some minor injuries. Everyone will recover. The attackers never actually managed to break into the synagogue. Which is good, considering how many were gathered there for Purim."
"We heard there were many dead in Grantville yesterday."
"Yes. The casualty count was pretty high. But none of ours. Nobody knows how it connects together yet. At the hospital, several of the Grantville Polizei and many more of the attackers. None of ours were there at all. In front of the synagogue, yes, there was an attack against it. The mayor and the Calvinist minister came to calm the crowd. Somebody—no one knows who, yet, shot them. Another up-timer who attacked the attackers, riding a hog, was killed with an axe. A piano, one of the great harpsichords they have, fell on the minister's wife and broke her leg."
A question.
"No. I have no idea why she was there with a piano. None at all. It was the Christian sabbath. They say that people came pouring out of the churches. But not to attack. To defend. All the rest of the dead were the attackers."
"A hog? In front of the synagogue?"
"Not a pig. A Harley."
David realized that didn't help.
He tried again. "A motorcycle."
Still no resonance in Hanau.
"A horseless carriage with only two wheels. Like the ATVs they showed during Mayor Dreeson's tour, cut in half. If anyone among you bothered to go look."
He sighed. He shouldn't have said that.
"They ride astride them, as if they were horses."
Another question.
"No, I have no idea at all why they call them hogs. But they are machines, not swine." Of that, at least, David was certain.
"If they never broke into the synagogue, how come some of ours were injured?"
"They were the Hebraic Defense League members who came to fight off the attackers."
A lot of questions, all at once.
"A better question," someone said, might be, "what is the proper commemoration of gentile martyrs killed while opposing an attack on a synagogue?"
The Hanauer rabbi sighed. "I expect that will occupy many a discussion for a long time to come."
"On Purim," someone else added. "Who is our Mordechai? Our Esther?"
"If you mean the Hebraic Defense League," David answered, "I think it has about fifty members. Most of them Sephardim. Which, if you ask me, ought to give us something to think about. But no Esther, as far as I know."
"Rebecca Abrabanel," someone else said. "Even if she was not present, she is the new Esther."
The Hanauer rabbi sighed. He did not care for visionaries.
"Wes," Preston Richards said. "I've got some bad news for Clara, I'm afraid."
"What now?"
"Well, we've been tracing the men who were killed in the demonstration out at the hospital on the fourth. It's pretty slow. But we did manage to figure out that most of the guys that Bryant Holloway brought in came through his fire department training contacts. So the fire watch wardens from towns around have each sent someone down to take a look in the morgue."
"And? Is it doing any good?"
"Fourteen identifications so far. But that leads me to the bad news. One of the corpses belongs to a boy—young man—named Dietrich Hamm, from Badenburg. Pretty well known as a malcontent. Not about anything in particular, most of the time. Just always unhappy about life in general. The kind of kid who carries a grudge against fate. But he was Clara's nephew. So—we'll need the names of next of kin, if you can give them to us. We can take it from there. Arrange for him to be sent back to his family. She doesn't have to do anything, considering that she's pregnant. And that you've got problems of your own with Bryant and Lenore."
"It was a brawl, Helena," the neighbor said. "Willibald objected to some things that people were saying about Dietrich—what he was involved in, over in Grantville. Defending the family honor. I don't think anyone meant to kill him, but these things can get out of hand. Meinhard was swinging a bottle. Just to hit him with, but it broke against the corner of the bar when he brought it around. It was sharper than any knife, what was left in Meinhard's hand. A point of glass. Thick glass. It just kept coming around, that swing. It slashed his throat."
"Helena?" Jergfritz asked. "Helena, what are we going to do now?"
She didn't say anything.
His voice got shriller. "What?"
"Right now?" She looked around the shop. "It's closing time. I'd better bar the door and pull the shutters closed." "Right now, I'm going to fix supper. All of us have to eat. Mama, you, NaNa, our half-sister and brothers, Martin's children. Me. No matter what happens, we still have to eat. The watchmen will be here soon enough."
The baby was crying. The midwife handed it over to Helena to clean up. She took a look. Another girl. Warm rose water. Dim light. A gentle welcome to a difficult world for this last child of the late Agnes Bachmeierin, verw. Fraas, verw. Hamm.
Twice a widow. Ten times a mother in two marriages. Seven children alive to mourn her.
"Helena," her sister asked. Her name was Anna Clara, now nineteen years old, but everyone had called her NaNa since she was a baby. "What are we going to do now?"
She finished swaddling the baby and turned around. "Hire a wet nurse. We don't have any time to waste. Get down to the pastor's house and tell him we need one right now. Get a couple of references. Whatever else happens, she'll need to eat if she is to live."
NaNa walked across the room to look at the baby. "What are we going to call her?"
Helena looked over to where the midwife was starting to prepare her mother's body.
"Willibald wanted to name Mag for his mother, but Mama wouldn't. We'll call her Herburgis." She looked back at her sister. "On the way back from the pastor's, stop at the sexton's. We'll need his horse and wagon for Mutti's funeral."
"Clara, I tell you," her brother said. "That man is not only still stopping in Badenburg to see Helena every single time he passes through, but he was married. His wife died in January. She's been taking care of his children ever since. And now, with Willibald and Agnes both dead. And Dietrich, too. The shop isn't bringing in a cent. There's nothing to sell. Willibald concentrated on meeting special orders—he didn't have much stock on hand. We have to do something."
Clara eyed him consideringly.
What should she say?
Her first temptation was to ask "which wife," but she was prudent enough not to.
Maybe she had learned something from Wesley.
At eight months pregnant, she was not going to risk Wesley's precious baby by running up to Badenburg to handle this, either.
"I'll do something," she promised. "Something drastic. The very instant that I have time. But with all the problems—Mayor Dreeson, Reverend Wiley. The person I would usually ask to assist me is Veronica, but she has her own difficulties. It was hard enough going up for the funerals."
He got up to leave.
"Wait," Clara said. "Just in case they don't have enough cash on hand to hire a really reliable wet nurse for the baby. I saved quite a lot, really, while I was in Fulda." She handed him a purse.
"Don't keep standing up," Helena said. "It doesn't make sense for you to stand up. I have to keep walking. She cries unless I walk with her. All night, sometimes."
Martin didn't sit down, but he did lean against the wall. "It's the only thing that makes sense," he said. Coaxing. "Come to Frankfurt. Mother my children. They have become very attached to you."
"How can I leave my brothers and sisters?"
"How can you stay?" he asked practically. "Are you willing to marry a man chosen for you by the pewterer's guild?"
She looked at him. "You already have two wives."
He inclined his head. Slowly. "But I am free to marry."
"You are also the sexiest damned man I have ever met in my life."
He smiled.
"What about the people who know? Aunt Clara. Mrs. Dreeson. Young Kastenmayer?"
"You will be my legal wife. In Frankfurt. The one my mother and sisters know about."
Herburgis's wails gradually subsided to sleepy sniffles. Her head drooped onto Helena's shoulder. Carefully, very carefully, she put her in the cradle. "And that will pardon the existence of the others in their eyes?"
Martin sat down on the other end of the kitchen bench. "So far, your aunt has not carried out her threat to tell."
"So far, I haven't married you."
They looked at one another for a while.
"What you do in Steinau and Vacha will be your own business."
He looked at her sharply.
"We can see Pastor Schultheiss and have him start calling the banns before you leave this time. It takes three Sundays."
"Actually, Cunz, it's really easier for me, don't you see, to marry Helena than it would be for me to explain the whole thing to either Rufina or Edeltraud?"
"I have no doubt at all." Cunz Kastenmayer smiled. "Have you tried explaining it to Steffan Schultheiss?"
"Helena thought it would be more prudent not to bring it up. She said that it might trouble his conscience." Martin looked at him anxiously. "You don't feel like you have to, do you?"
Cunz looked at him. "Why simpler?"
"They both think they are already married to me. When, actually, they aren't. Plus, I would have to choose between them—which marriage to legalize—which I could scarcely bear to do, because they are both such darling girls."
"Is Helena?"
"Is Helena what?"
"A darling girl?"
"She was, I thought. Last summer."
Clara Bachmeierin verw. Stade and verh. Jenkins traveled to Badenburg, her new daughter in her arms, to express the view that she was more than a little upset by this plan. Considering that the man had two other wives, which she told Helena months and months ago!
She arrived in the middle of a family battle.
"I'm not going to leave school and apprentice to a pewterer," Jergfritz proclaimed. If you try to make me, I'll just run away from home." He stopped a minute. "Like Liesel Bodamer did. Martin told me about that."
"You're the heir, now that Dietrich is dead."
"Let someone else inherit it." At thirteen, he was too young to focus on the economic realities, Clara thought.
But he wasn't.
"David Schreiner is going to marry Aunt Marliese next month."
Clara nodded. This was true. Maria Elisabetha and David had been betrothed since the previous autumn. She had told Wesley's family about it at Thanksgiving. She remembered that.
"He's the city clerk. He says that I can live with them while I finish Latin school. And he'll see to a university education for me. And find me a clerkship when I'm done, if I do well." Jergfritz looked up defiantly. "And if you let me stay with them, they'll take Hanswilli and Mag, too."
Those were Agnes's two oldest children by Willibald Fraas. Johann Willibald and Maria Agnes.
Now the boy had his arms crossed over his chest. "That will just leave Hansjerg and the baby for the rest of you to worry about. I think it's a good deal, myself. And I made it with them. Without help from any of you," he waved one arm, encompassing everyone else in the room, "grown-ups."
"But," Helena sputtered, "how did you figure all this out?"
"If the king of Sweden could fight battles when he wasn't any more than a year older than me, I figured that at the bare least I ought to be able to take care of myself." He reverted to looking like a sulky child. "I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my life in a pewter shop."
"I'm not about to marry Johann Drechsler just because he's a competent pewterer."
"But . . . what else can you possibly do, NaNa? He's willing . . ."
"Uncle . . . you didn't have to live with it." She turned her head. "But you did, Helena. You heard it every single day of your life, the way Mama and Willibald fussed at each other because he hated so much that it really wasn't his business. Do you think I want to live that again? What's so wonderful about this shop?"
"It's been in the family for generations untold. Our grandfather, our grandmother's father, and before him."
"I don't see you volunteering to marry Drechsler and take it over. You're marrying your courier and going off to live in Frankfurt."
"And if I did marry Drechsler, who's to say that Hanswilli or Hansjerg will want to be pewterers, any more than Jergfritz does? That's years away."
"What do you want, then?" Clara asked.
"Let's sell him the business on a mortgage. Drechsler can run it well enough to make a good living for himself. I think that with the changes in the guild rules that Karl Schmidt has pushed through, the Badenburg city council will let us do that. All of us will get some income. Not a lot, but some. Johann's sister Dorothea is already married to Jorgen Fraas, who's Willibald's nephew. Well, his father was Willibald's half-brother. So it's all in the family, sort of, even if he doesn't marry in."
Helena shook her head. "He isn't married. He'll still need a wife before he can take over as a master. The guilds won't change that rule. Someone needs to run the household and take care of the apprentices he brings in. Say that he does apprentice Hanswilli in a few years—would you want him living somewhere without a master's wife to look out for his welfare?"
"Well, let Johann find his own wife. It doesn't have to be me. Maria Anna Fraas would do fine. She's only three years older than I am, but she's Willibald's half-sister, even if she is twenty-five years younger than he was. She's our own cousin, too. Aunt Anna Catharina Bachmeierin's daughter, even if that aunt did die so young that I don't even remember her." NaNa grinned a little maliciously. "And I know she wants to get married. It's all she talks about. I expect she would marry a gelded ox if he agreed to put a ring on her finger."
"That says where you think you can get money. And how you think we should handle the shop." Clara looked at her niece again. "What do you want to do with the money once you have it?"
"I want to take my share and go to Grantville. Study to be an apothecary. I've talked to them, already—Raymond Little, the man's name is. And to Frau Garnet Szymanski at the Tech Center. I have to learn to be a nurse, first. Then I can apprentice at one of the 'pharmacy' businesses. It would take a long time, at least three or four years until I can start the apprenticeship, but I can do it."
She looked at the others, her expression an echo of Jergfritz's. "I know I can."
"Where will you live?"
NaNa relaxed. Just the question meant that Helena had surrendered.
"With us, this year." Aunt Clara answered the question for her. "Until there is room in Bamberg for the Bureau of Consular Affairs to be moved. After that . . . Lenore will be going to Bamberg even before we do, but I'm sure that Chandra—Wesley's other daughter—will be happy to have another adult in her house."
So much for complete independence, NaNa thought. But Chandra, whatever she was like, had to be a big improvement on Johann Drechsler as a prospective roommate.
"My share of the mortgage money coming in from the shop . . ." Helena said. "You'll have a big household to support in Frankfurt."
"Not that big," Wackernagel said. "You and my four children."
"You're forgetting Hansjerg and Herburgis. Plus a wet nurse for Herburgis. For quite some time, yet. If you think that I'm going to raise my half-sister on pap . . ."
"Of course not." That answer came fast. Fast enough to suit his—betrothed.
"You can't let your other children starve, so whatever you've been contributing to those households will have to keep going to them. I trust that you do have whatever money you got from selling Maria's cottage and garden put safely away for her children?"
"Yes." Wackernagel nodded. "With the mayor and pastor of Bindersleben as trustees, along with a banker in Erfurt."
"Good enough. Now about my share of the money from the mortgage . . ." Helena looked at her future husband consideringly. "Your income should be going up. With my share of the income invested, you can start expanding your business to include additional riders and small packages. You mentioned that idea, once, when we were talking in the shop, last summer, when you first began flirting with me at the retail counter of the Sign of the Platter. However . . . before you get the use of my money, there's going to be a prenuptial contract. Ironclad, believe me."
She looked at Cunz Kastenmayer. "Draw one up. I know you can use the money. I'll have a licentiate look it over, but paying him for that will be cheaper than paying him to do it from scratch."
"Helena," Clara asked that evening. A little anxiously. "What are you going to do if his other two wives die? What if you end up having to take their children into your household, too?"
Helena winced. She would really rather not think about that prospect. But she was a realist, so she had thought about it. "Open a school," she said a little snippily.
Which should have ended that particular conversation, but Aunt Clara wasn't a woman to let well enough alone.
"What if he has . . . you know . . . more children? With them?"
Helena's mouth tightened. "I can't see that it's any worse than whoring around. Which men do, often enough, when they are away from home. Probably better, since he's not likely to catch syphilis from them and bring it home to me."
"But . . ."
"Leave it be, Aunt Clara," Helena said firmly. "He's a courier. I won't see significantly less of him than if those other women were not in the picture. And I will be, after all, the legal wife. Plus, unlike Maria, I know the truth. Unlike her, I will have leverage if Martin gets out of line. Not to mention that since I have family here in Badenburg and in Grantville, I'll have a good reason to travel with him occasionally to see my brothers and sisters. To see you. Check up on what he's doing when he's out on the Imperial Road. And with whom. I know what I'm getting."
She stood up. In the cradle, Herburgis was starting to fuss.
"I've told him that what he does in Vacha and Steinau is his business. I'll keep my word on that. But if he thinks that he's ever going to acquire another 'darling girl,' he'd better think again."
"Cunz," Clara asked Pastor Kastenmayer's son. "How much danger is there that one of these days the pastors from Grantville and Badenburg, Bindersleben and Vacha and Steinau, might all get together—at a conference or something—and compare notes on Wackernagel and his multiple families? That all of it could come out?"
"Well . . . I'm speaking as a lawyer, now. Not to the morals of the matter."
"Yes."
"It's not very likely that their pastors would ever be at the same ministerial conference, since Rufina is Catholic and Edeltraud is Calvinist. Getting them together at one conference is more . . . ecumenical, I think the Grantvillers call it . . . than anything likely to happen in our lifetimes. If Maria's pastor ever got together with Steffan Schultheiss in Badenburg, there wouldn't be a problem. Maria was dead before he married your niece. That's okay—it's fine with the church if widowers remarry. Even rapidly, when they have children to take care of. Papa married Salome a lot sooner after my mother died than Martin is marrying Helena."
"Wesley?" Clara asked that evening.
"Mmm?" Her husband's head was bent over a pile of papers he had brought home from the office.
"You know that record keeping system that Jenny Maddox has in the Grantville Vital Statistics Office? The one with cards with holes punched around the edge, so you can pull out the ones you want with a wire rod?"
"Umhmm."
"Would something like that work for the whole SoTF. Or even the whole USE?"
Wes finally raised his head and focused his eyes on his wife. "I don't see why not, if you had a centralized office. People will still need the records locally, of course, so they shouldn't send in the only copy. But there's really no reason why they couldn't send in a duplicate. Or even two duplicates. One at the level of the provincial governments and one at the national level. It would take a lot of clerks to track it, of course. Increase the cost of printed forms a bit."
"Before the marriage takes place? Sort of like calling the banns, but with a . . . wider reach?"
"Sure, you could do it that way." Wes subsided back into his paperwork.
Clara settled the nursing Maria Eleonor a little more comfortably in her arms. A wolfish grin crossed her face. She took a silent vow to make it her personal project to see that the USE developed a system of centralized and cross-referenced marriage records.
Just as soon as possible.
Martin Wackernagel certainly had all the wives he needed.
Probably more than he needed, but there was nothing she could do about that without ruining her niece's future.
What did Kortney Pence say all the time? Yes. Prevention, the best medicine.
Wackernagel would have liked to return to Frankfurt by a different route. One that didn't involve Vacha and Steinau.
That, however, would have caused him to miss any number of scheduled pickups and deliveries. So he just made sure that they didn't stop in either of those towns.
This measure should have gotten him, and everyone else, to Frankfurt without incident.
Except that Andrea Hill buttonholed him in Fulda with the news that Liesel Bodamer was bound and determined to go to Frankfurt and find her friend Emrich Menig. Since the episode the previous October when she tried to follow Dagmar and Gertrud, but had been caught, she had tried four more times. Not in the middle of winter—the girl had enough sense not to want to freeze to death. But three times since early April.
"Menig's with your sister and her husband, isn't he?" Frau Hill asked.
Wackernagel had to admit that he was. Still alive. As amazing as that might be, considering the boy's inquisitive nature.
"Then take her along for a visit, please."
He shrugged. What was one more?
* * *
Mutti was happy. Her son Martin had brought home a wife. She was ecstatic. The wife was Lutheran. From an important guild family in Badenburg. Closely related to the wife of the former SoTF civilian administrator in Fulda. With a dowry and income from her late father's shop, to boot. How could he have done better?
Well, perhaps it would have been ideal if she wasn't encumbered by her half-brother and half-sister. Not to mention the four other children who were in her care. Nieces and nephews, presumably, since they called her "Auntie." Odd that they called Martin "Papa," but maybe they remembered their late mother better than they did their father. Helena said that she had died only six months ago. Poor little orphans.
"Martin," Merga asked. "Why on earth did you bring this girl along?"
"Frau Hill said that she kept running away. She wanted to get to Emrich."
"Do you expect Crispin and me to keep her?"
"If you can't make her go back to Frau Hill. Here's her address in Fulda. The two of you can work something out with the girl's guardians, can't you?" Wackernagel gave his sister his most engaging, impudent, mischievous, "have I been a bad little boy" smile.
A smile of proven value.
Merga drew a deep breath. "I am coming very close to choking you. On the general theory that you . . . you audacious and unrepentant scoundrel . . . have once more gotten away with your misdeeds. Not only free and clear, but with rewards."
She stood there, her hands resting on her ever more ample hips.
"I would choke you, if Mutti weren't so happy."
He smiled again.