1635:The Dreeson Incident (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  "Who?" asked her daughter-in-law Debbie. "And, uh, it's not going to be 'just family,' Mom. Not even near-family, like Chip's Katerina."

  "Wes and Clara. I see them coming around the corner. And what do you mean, 'not just family?'

  "Missy asked Ron Stone and his little brother. That was when we thought the dinner would be at our place; before we decided to have it here with you. Gerry's come down from Rudolstadt for the holiday. They're out in your side yard, talking to Chip, right now. When they saw that Missy was heading straight for the kitchen, they sort of ducked around coming inside and having to talk to the grownups."

  She frowned, mentally identifying and classifying the Stone boys, and then looked around. "What do you think about it, Chad?" she asked her son. "Really. About Wes' getting married again."

  Charles Jenkins got up and looked over her shoulder. "Big brother? We couldn't have expected him not to, I suppose. By nature, he's inclined to go out of his way to be a happily married man. I know that you and Dad had more than a few doubts about Lena, too, at first, when he fixated on her when he was barely seventeen. I was five years younger, but even at age twelve I was old enough to figure that much out. That one certainly lasted. Clara seems okay, I guess. At least they didn't rush into it." He grinned. "Except right at the end."

  Eleanor looked out through the curtain again. Her older son and his new wife had paused on the sidewalk. Clara looked up at Wes' face and gave a little skip; he put his arm around her shoulder.

  "I worried about Lena," she said. "More than I did about Wes, really. When he started going out with her, she used to look at him more like a startled doe caught in the headlights than a girl in love. As if she were hypnotized but barely conscious enough to realize that something odd was going on. It didn't strike me as the best foundation

  … But Wes isn't… Never mind. As you say, it certainly lasted and they were happy together. At least it's pretty clear that Clara does love him dearly, his little foibles and all. Which is just as well."

  "Wes isn't what?"

  Eleanor was still looking out the window. "Callous, I suppose. I guess that would be the best word. He never has been."

  "Why 'just as well' for Clara?"

  "I don't want to criticize Lena now that she's gone, but she was always very willing to let Wes make up her mind for her. All those years. This time… I have a feeling, Chad, that he has acquired about as much woman as he is likely to be able to handle." She chuckled. "It will be good for him, I think."

  One of the cooks was also looking out the window. "Here's Dad and Clara," Chandra said.

  "I get to run and hug Grandpa." Mikey was proud of his status as oldest grandchild, which brought him privileges, such as running outdoors by himself, that the younger ones had not yet earned.

  "Coat, mittens, hat. Okay." Chandra opened the kitchen door.

  "You really like Clara, don't you?" her aunt asked. "No problems that your dad married her."

  Chandra grinned. Smirked, more precisely. "I sent her to Ed Piazza to apply for the job in Fulda in the first place."

  Deborah Jenkins looked up, startled. "I didn't know that. Neither did Chad."

  "I didn't exactly announce the plan with trumpets. I couldn't be sure that it would 'take.' I was beginning to think that it wouldn't, until Kortney Pence came home after last Christmas and reported that there was definitely a mutual attraction in place. Clara had qualms because she didn't have kids during her first marriage, Kortney told us. She thought Dad deserved a second wife who could give him sons. Kortney did a gyne exam while she was over there in Fulda and told Clara there wasn't anything obviously wrong, so if Dad ever got around to making a move, she could do what came naturally with a clear conscience. Lenore said that Dad would be utterly, totally, completely, and abysmally humiliated if he knew that we were sitting there discussing his prospective sex life with Kortney, but we both said that neither of us was ever going to tell him that we had, so that only left her as a possible tattletale."

  "And now," her Aunt Debbie giggled, "us. 'Two can keep a secret' and all that. Talk about the blackmail possibilities when I need help from my nieces."

  "Why did you pick Clara?" Missy asked.

  "Well, because she's different from Mom. At least, she's as different from Mom as a woman could be and still get Dad interested in her."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "Well, not just that they don't look alike. Though that's true enough, and I didn't think it would be a good idea to try for a rerun. Mom was so 'West Virginia' if you know what I'm trying to say. Lanky, nearly as tall as Dad, straight sandy blonde hair, light blue eyes, oblong face. And Clara…"

  Missy laughed. "Is seven or eight inches shorter than he is with curly dark brown hair and a round face. Generally rounded. Yep. Differences duly noted."

  "I'd make it nine or ten inches shorter. My knee-length skirts are floor-length on her. But they're also enough alike. People may go around saying that 'bad girls have all the fun,' but they sure aren't going to have any of it with Dad. He may see bad girls in the sense that he perceives that they exist, but he's just not interested. He wants 'everything nice,' like in the rhyme. Mom was really nice, and so is Clara. But…"

  "But what?"

  "On the rest of it, sugar and spice, Mom was really heavy on the sugar in the mix. Clara's got a lot more spice, I think." Chandra winked.

  "Not exactly," Gerry answered Chip. "I do expect to go to the university of Jena, yeah. That's why I decided to attend high school in Rudolstadt rather than here in Grantville, really. I'm not interested in law or medicine. I'm interested in theology. For that, the Latin School in Rudolstadt is head and shoulders better preparation than anything the high school here has yet, even if it did hire several Latin teachers. I want to become a Lutheran minister."

  For a minute, Chip stared at him. Then he remembered that Gerry's stepmother Magda was from Jena, and things sort of clicked. He looked at Ron's little brother with considerably more interest.

  "I'm going to have to take instruction about becoming Lutheran in order to marry Katerina 'properly,' " he said. "When you come right down to it, in order to marry Katerina at all. There are a few things that seem to be nonnegotiable. Exactly what's involved in it?"

  All of a sudden, Gerry's expression changed. Intent. With his red hair, Chip thought, in spite of the round face, it made him look like a setter on the point.

  "Before you go back to Jena, you ought to talk to Teacher Muselius. He and Pastor Kastenmayer here have more experience than anyone else in providing instruction to up-timers. Saint Martin's is right on the road outside town leading to Rudolstadt. When are you leaving, you can stop and see them on the way. I'll go with you."

  Gerry's description of what he would be expected to do didn't seem too bad. A little tedious maybe, but not bad. Chip listened for a while; then started to retaliate with an equal amount of sententious advice for Gerry.

  "You really ought to take at least a few law courses," he said. "Lutheran pastors have to sit on consistorial courts, sometimes. I expect that will keep on happening as long as any of the territories in the USE continue to have state churches. You might as well resign yourself to learning this sort of stuff as well as theology."

  Gerry groaned dramatically.

  "I mean it," Chip said. He waved his hand toward the sidewalk. "Look there. When Uncle Wes married Clara over in Fulda, I looked up some of the background, and it can get really complicated. Up-time, one day you weren't married; then you got married; the next day you were married all the way, so to speak. Here, there are centuries of accumulated laws, some of them civil, some of them canon, some of them customary. And at least a half-dozen different stages of being married, depending on the jurisdiction. When couples start fighting, the marriage courts-and there are pastors serving on those, too-have to sort the tangles out."

  "So that's where the negotiations stand on the marriage contract right now," Chad was saying to his mother. "Dieter von Thierbach has b
rought up a lot of issues I never would have thought of. Sometimes I long for the 'good old days' when two people just went out and got married."

  His wife Debbie shook her head. "They didn't, quite. There was 'going steady.' Letter jackets. Class rings. 'Engaged to be engaged.' There was a song my father used to play. 'Me and my girl are goin' steady, We're not married, but we're gettin' ready.' Maybe we didn't notice it, didn't think of them as 'betrothal rituals,' because we were used to it all."

  She turned, hearing a sound at the door. Katerina, the other half of Chip's future marriage contract in person, coming down late. "Why don't you go on into the kitchen," she suggested. "It will be more fun for you with the younger women."

  "Hey, Katerina, come in," Missy called from her perch among the pie crusts. "I can use some company. This is our cousin Chandra. Lenore is over at Bryant's sister's." Missy proceeded with the pie crusts.

  About fifteen minutes later, Debbie shooed Katerina outside to join Chip. "Go out with the guys," she said. "This kitchen isn't all that big to start with, and it's getting crowded. They're around in the side yard."

  "Poor kid," Missy said. "I sort of like her, but talk about a fish out of water."

  "They're not likely to settle in Grantville. The kind of career that Chip's aiming at, she'll be in her normal habitat ninety percent of the time, at least. And, as your dad says, a real asset to him."

  "Hey, Katerina, come on," Chip called. "I've got more family for you. Meet my uncle, Wes Jenkins, and his new wife, Clara. And Mikey, he's Chandra's oldest. She managed to get the other three down for naps right after she got here, or they would all be out here running us ragged. Plus Ron and Gerry Stone. Ron's sort of informally attached to Missy and Gerry is his brother. Uncle Wes, this is my just-about-to-be-a-fiancee Katerina."

  Wes smiled. "I would offer to shake hands," he said, "except that I am carrying two dozen eggs."

  Chip turned to the older woman. "I guess you're my Aunt Clara now, aren't you."

  She smiled. "Oh, yes. Though I have been someone's Aunt Clara for many years, already." Clara stood on her tiptoes, kissed Wes on the cheek, took the eggs from his hands, and said, "Have fun with Mikey. I'm going to run in and help Debbie and the girls."

  Chandra looked out the window, noticed that Mikey had diverted Grandpa and Clara as well as the boys for a visit to the swing set and that Katerina had found them. Then she sighed.

  "Aunt Debbie?"

  "Yes."

  "Have you noticed anything different about Lenore, lately?"

  "Like what?"

  "Lenore's quite a bit like Mom, you know. She's never been right up front when it comes to expressing her own opinion about anything."

  "Yes." Debbie sighed. "Every Thanksgiving, when we were deciding who would bring what, Lena would always say, 'everybody else pick and I'll bring whatever is left on the list.' "

  "That was Mom. Sometimes, at dinner, Dad would ask her questions for fifteen or twenty minutes trying to find out if she actually had a preference about where we were going on vacation or what color car they should buy. He was always awfully patient about it. More than I was, once I got into my teens," Chandra admitted.

  "So?"

  "So Bryant isn't patient like that with Lenore, Aunt Debbie. And he doesn't care at all what she wants, as far as I can tell. He was sort of squashing her between when he got back from Magdeburg and when he left for Frankfurt. At least, he was trying to. Lenore doesn't ever really want to speak up for herself. She's like Mom that way, but this time, she dug in her heels. He wasn't listening. I'm not looking forward to having him get back from Frankfurt next month."

  There was a tap, or a light kick to be more precise, at the back door. Missy, hands still sticky, opened up. Clara was waiting. "Hello Debbie, Chandra, Missy. Sorry, my hands are full, but it is eggs, because I promised to show you how to make the egg-glazed flatbreads we always had for the autumn Kirmess."

  Missy took the eggs so that Clara could get her cloak off, without interrupting the preceding conversation. "Like you said, Bryant isn't even in town most of the time, any more," she protested to Chandra. "He's off working on these big fire prevention projects. Lenore pretty much has to cope on her own."

  "That doesn't keep him from trying to boss her. This time, she honestly doesn't want to do what Bryant is telling her she has to. Not one little bit. I sort of like being a stay-at-home mom, but she went to all the trouble of learning how to read the German handwriting and stuff. She liked what she was doing at work and she doesn't want to give it up permanently. Lenore didn't mind staying home for a while after Weshelle was born. Well, she did, really, even though she went along with him on it, but Weshelle is completely weaned now, old enough that she doesn't have to be an 'office baby.' I can keep her along with my kids."

  "What is this leading up to?" Debbie asked.

  Chandra looked around from where she was chopping onions for the stuffing. "Lenore's going to go back to work after New Year's. She's already set things up with the judge."

  "Isn't that going to cause major problems?" Debbie frowned.

  "I don't know if they'll get to be 'major' as long as Bryant is out of town. All he can do from someplace like Frankfurt or Magdeburg is write letters complaining about it. But she hasn't told him. She's trying to evade. That's what bothers me. I'm getting nervous about what might happen when he comes back later on and finds out that she is working again, if she doesn't tell him that she's going to first. Or if someone who doesn't realize how touchy things are right now happens to mention that she's going to while he's here over Christmas. And now that Dad's back, she's likely to ask him to back her up against Bryant."

  "Oh." Missy frowned, glancing over at Clara, who was constructing the pastries. Uncle Wes had a temper, sometimes. She wondered if Clara knew that, yet. Probably. They'd worked together long enough.

  "You're smart to be taking the librarian training," Chandra said. "Dad would have been happier, you know, if we had both gone through college. Not Lenore taking a few courses here and there and me not going at all because I married Nathan right out of high school. I wasn't really thinking about it, then. Mom only finished high school, after all, and Nathan thought that I needed to work. But since he's been out of town on this armaments business, I'm beginning to think that Dad was right."

  "Any change in that argument?" Missy asked.

  "No, Nathan still doesn't want me to come to Frankfurt. He's still saying that health care and schools for the kids are so much better here in Grantville, and that's true enough. But he's been gone more than a year and a half. Other guys in other cities have their wives with them, now. And their kids. And he's only come home once. Suhl wasn't that far away, but he's never even seen Lena Sue and Sandra Lou. They're a year old, now. It's scarcely worth making a cake for the first birthday, is it? Sugar is so expensive. They don't really know what's going on, yet, and it's not as if we can take snapshots any more. And he's not coming for Christmas. I took the kids to that new old-fashioned photography shop downtown and got their picture taken together, to send him for a present. But if…"

  "If what?"

  "If he hasn't come by spring, I'm going to Frankfurt, whether he wants me to or not. Just to see what's going on. That was one thing that I wanted to ask you, Aunt Debbie. If I go to Frankfurt in the spring, could you and Missy keep the kids for a few weeks? Even though you're managing the teacher training now and she's going to school?"

  "I'm sure we can."

  Chandra looked down at the onions again, blaming them for the tears in her eyes. "Don't skimp on the teacher training program, though. If, well, if things don't work out with Nathan in the long run, I may need it. Or something."

  Tom, up from his nap, came wandering down the hall barefoot.

  Missy looked up. "Who's on babysitting patrol?"

  "You take it, honey," Chandra said. "Get all three of them up, will you, and then take them out where Katerina and the guys are to run off some steam before we start eating.
<
br />   "And talk to Katerina. She's bound to be feeling a little out of it. Keep her company."

  "Nani and Pop are having dinner with Aura Lee and Joe. Ray's family will be there, too. They all decided to go to Aura Lee's when we decided not to have dinner at home but come over to Gran's instead." Missy's tone was very neutral.

  "Presumably," Chip said, "Nani has her nose a bit out of joint because the rest of us are here."

  "She was expecting a formal presentation of Katerina."

  "There's time after dinner. Katerina and I can walk over there and I'll introduce her to everyone else."

  "You two," Missy said, "certainly do have an unending store of excuses to go for walks." She gave him a wink. Not only she but everyone else at the table could make a pretty good guess as to what they spent some of their time doing on those walks.

  Then she turned. "I'm sure this is exactly how you wanted to spend your first visit to Grantville, isn't it, Katerina? Meeting more and more apparently endless bunches of Chip's relatives, most of whom are going to give you that 'is she really suitable?' look. You'll survive. Clara had to go through it last month and she's flourishing. Aren't you?" She waved to Clara at the other end of the table, who waved back.

  Missy turned back to Katerina. "But, of course, she didn't have to face up to inspection by Nani. That's Mom's side of the family."

  Chapter 27

  Ron Stone was feeling rather paralyzed in the presence of Missy's grandmother. Not so much her parents. Chad and Debbie Jenkins weren't so bad. He'd seen them often enough when he was in high school. But as the conversation progressed, it was slowly dawning upon him that, necessarily, Missy had as many relatives as Chip did. All of whom probably took as much interest in her activities as they did in Chip's. This was just one grandmother. There was another one, somewhere out in the woodwork. A grandfather. More aunts and uncles.

  He advised himself to be cool. Yes, that was the word. Cool, Stone, cool. If you are totally casual, maybe they will all be so preoccupied with Chip's girl that they won't notice you. What was that word in the poem they had studied in English literature? Hecatombs? Yes, that was it. Missy didn't just have cousins. She had hecatombs of cousins, most of whom trailed spouses and children along with them.