Grantville Gazette VI

  Her mother, Carol Koch, most widely known among down-timers for her role as an up-time delegate to the Rudolstadt Colloquy more than a year before, had steadfastly refused to sell the stepladder for its aluminum content, no matter how many anxious buyers appeared at her doorstep. In fact, after receiving several urgent appeals, she had removed the stepladder from the tool shed in the yard and now kept it under her bed in the house. As she said with perfect logic to a would-be purchaser who was pressing her very strongly, "It doesn't matter how much more money I would have in the bank. If I sell you that, we won't have a tall stepladder that's light enough for Ronella and me to carry around when we need it. And we probably never would again. So there."

  "Stick your head in next door, will you, and ask Jonas if he needs anything put up, taken down, or changed around while I have the ladder here?" Ronella started to tack the last few letters to the molding.

  "Will do." Maria Blandina ducked out the door.

  * * *

  In the next classroom, Jonas Justinus Muselius was looking glumly at his friend Gary Lambert. "I don't see why not?" he said. "It would be very suitable."

  "I don't want to marry Ronella," Gary answered. "Any more than you wanted to marry Maria Blandina when the pastor asked you. Even aside from the fact that she's ELCA rather than LCMS, I don't want to marry her. I like her, but I just don't see her as wife material. At least not wife material for me. I haven't met anyone I've seen as wife material since Sheila was left up-time." He paused. "There's nothing wrong with Ronella. I'm sure she'd make a perfectly nice wife for someone else," he added charitably.

  Jonas looked glum. "She's old enough that she's bound to be getting married pretty soon. We can't expect her to stay unmarried much longer. Somebody needs to make sure that she has a husband who appreciates her and will be kind to her. We ought to find her the right kind of husband. Someone with a sense of humor. Otherwise, since I'm sure that her parents will want it to be someone with a university degree, she'll end up stuck with someone like Johann Georg Hardegg, who never laughs at all. Just because he's a lawyer and suitable."

  Gary would never have described himself as an intuitive type. Nevertheless, he looked at Jonas, suspicion dawning.

  Jonas was thirty-two. Five years older than Gary. Jonas would never consider himself suitable for Ronella Koch, daughter of a prosperous up-time mining engineer. Not for Ronella, just turned twenty-three and already with a faculty appointment at the prestigious Grantville high school. Not with only one good arm. Not on the salary of a down-time elementary school teacher. Not.

  So he was trying for what he considered the next best solution. A suitable husband. One who would make Ronella happy in the long run, even if it left him utterly miserable himself.

  Jonas was that kind of person.

  Gary was still thinking about this when Maria Blandina stuck her head in the door asking about any possible stepladder needs.

  Jonas hated not being able to do things that required two hands. He was also realistic about not being able to do things that required two hands. He had a list of a half dozen little classroom chores that could benefit from the attention of Ronella and a stepladder.

  Maria Blandina went back to her own domain. Ronella appeared with the stepladder.

  Ronella didn't make concessions to Pastor Kastenmayer's flinch reactions. She was definitely wearing jeans. And a tee shirt. She scurried busily up and down, Gary moving the ladder from place to place for her.

  Jonas sat there, watching the passing scenery a little wistfully. He saw no objection to jeans at all. Especially not on Ronella. There was nothing at all about jeans on Ronella that would delude anyone in the world into thinking that they pertained to a man. As an attempt at cross-dressing went, they were a total dud. When she wore them, it was perfectly clear that she was female.

  Of course, that was always perfectly clear to Jonas. Meaningfully clear. Crystal clear. Increasingly clear. More transparently clear with every day that passed.

  * * *

  "Do you suppose," Ronella asked Maria Blandina rather wistfully, "that Jonas is ever going to make a move?"

  Maria Blandina's life thus far had left her with few illusions. She had managed to hold onto a few dreams. Illusions, no. Approximately eighty children, first and second graders, day in and day out, did that to a young woman. Although she, like Ronella, was twenty-three, she had been teaching full time for five years already. Part time since she was sixteen.

  "Probably not," she answered.

  Early in the spring, Ronella had decided, "That one!" after she heard Jonas leading the prayer before the upper grade girls' softball game between Countess Kate, as the Lutheran elementary school was known almost universally among the up-timers, and the middle school in Grantville. He chose the first verse of Psalm 26. In the King James Version, since Countess Kate was playing an English-speaking school.

  "Judge me, O LORD; for I have walked in mine integrity: I have trusted also in the LORD; therefore I shall not slide."

  "That one!" she had said to herself. "The one with a wicked sense of humor. The one with a bilingual wicked sense of humor."

  Now she asked, "Is there anything I can do about it?"

  "Would your father be willing to propose to him for you?"

  Ronella jumped.

  "Well, you know," Maria Blandina said in a reasonable tone of voice, "Papa asked him if he would be willing to marry me and he just said no. So we know that he'll say no if he isn't interested. How much worse off would you be if your father asked him and he said no?"

  "None, I guess," Ronella admitted. "But at least the way things are I can sort of hope. It would really sort of put the kibosh on everything if he refused."

  "But it would be a lot less embarrassing than if you just flat kissed him and he ran away," Maria Blandina pointed out. "Which I sort of suspect you're on the verge of doing any day now. Kissing him, I mean. It gives you a lot more room to save face to have your father do it."

  * * *

  "Maybe," Salome Piscatora suggested tentatively, "you could make your inquiries to the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance in Grantville. The association that quite a few of the different pastors belong to. They might have an answer."

  Pastor Kastenmayer regarded his wife with scandalized horror.

  "They use the same Bible," she pointed out. "Even if it's translated into a different language."

  He delivered an abbreviated version of his standard sermon on the hideous consequences of consorting with heretics.

  Salome had heard it all before. Her father had been a pastor, too, and both of her grandfathers had been school teachers.

  After long enough exposure, a sensible person got sort of inured to sermons and lectures.

  Not that she wasn't fond of Ludwig, of course.

  But she had no intention of giving up her divided skirts, culottes they were called, now that she had obtained them. They were such a convenience. She had the tailor cut them full enough and long enough that Ludwig would never even have noticed if he hadn't come in unexpectedly and seen her bending over.

  Which just went to show. If they had pertained to a woman well enough before he noticed, it made no sense at all to argue that they didn't after he had noticed.

  She would have to talk to Carol Koch about it. Carol was pragmatic and sensible, even for a woman. Much less a man.

  Ludwig went off to his study to prepare his next sermon. Salome sat down heavily on the bench under the window in the main room of the parsonage.

  Salome knew that she herself was pragmatic and sensible, even for a seventeenth-century German Lutheran pastor's wife, which was saying something.

  She hoped that Ludwig would talk to Jonas before he did anything rash. Jonas was the son of her much older half brother. Her mother's first husband had been named Jonas Musch; Muselius was one of those fanciful Latinizations to which academics were prone.

  She herself was the next to the youngest child of her mother's second marriage. An
other Latinization, this time from Fischer to Piscator. So she was called Piscatora rather than by the sensible German name of Fischerin. She had been four when her mother died in Ohrdruf. That was in the county of Gleichen, which did not exist any more. Her father, for a wonder, had not married again, even though he had small children. His widowed sister, whose second husband died the same year as Mama, brought her own five children from two marriages and came to take care of them all. Tante Margaretha had been a good and conscientious woman. She still was, for that matter. At the age of eighty-one, she lived with her oldest son in Weimar these days.

  Papa had become a pastor in Erfurt shortly after Mama died. Not a prestigious pastor in that great city. He had spent all the rest of his life as an auxiliary appointee, caring for parishioners in one of the poorest sections of the city to the best of his ability and maintaining his large household on a small stipend. This meant that aside from schools and books, their lives were in no way more luxurious than those of their neighbors. The schooling had to be reserved for the boys, who needed it to make their way in life. Papa had not died prematurely. He had been seventy-three, but it certainly had not helped that her two older brothers, Reichard and Thomas, had both died unmarried, just a couple of years before he did. He had not lived to see his youngest son marry so well, to the daughter of a Wittenberg professor no less, and begin to make a great success of himself.

  She had no learning but what Papa had time to teach her after fourth grade. He didn't have the money to send her to a city school for girls. No accomplishments suitable to a fine young lady other than how to play the lute, which he played himself. He had taught her and her older sister Anna what he knew himself. Latin and a little Greek. The ancient classics. Theology. Dull things, not likely to attract suitors. Otherwise, she worked in the house, helping Tante Margaretha. The four years after Anna married and moved back to Ohrdruf, she had worked very hard. Five grown men in the house to be clothed and fed, with Tante Margaretha so sad those first years after her only daughter died.

  The letter from Anna had come as an absolute shock. Their pastor had been widowed, she wrote, with five small children to care for. He needed to remarry as soon as possible. She had suggested her Salome and the pastor had said, "If you think she is suitable, which you must, then ask your father." Papa had considered it an excellent opportunity to place her in a household of her own. He had been afraid that Tante Margaretha would keep her home too long and she was not likely to have many chances. So at the age of twenty, she had traveled to Ohrdruf to Anna. Three weeks later, as soon as the banns had been read, she married a man she had never met before she got there. Ludwig was almost twenty-five years older than she was, three months a widower. A widower who had loved his first wife deeply.

  Overall, it was just as well that she hadn't expected more out of marriage than she got. In fact, she got more than she had expected. Kindness, absolute reliability, and no expectations that she should achieve more in the way of food and domestic comfort than was possible within the limitations of a pastor's salary. And, over the years, eight sons. By the will of divine providence, seven of them still alive and still to be educated. Joseph, the oldest, was nineteen, in his second year at the university in Jena. The youngest, Thomas, only three.

  Plus, they were to be blessed again. In October, if all went well. Two more months to go. She was forty-one years old now. In the heat of this summer, she occasionally had a little trouble persuading herself that the creator was entirely reasonable in the way he distributed his blessings. She could not help but think that here were many childless women in the world who would have welcomed this particular blessing a lot more than she did. Ludwig was sixty-five and could not be expected to live forever. At some point, probably not too far distant, she was going to be a widow with no income and a large family of sons to finish bringing up.

  And precious little help, probably, from her stepchildren. Matthaeus was a junior pastor now; Martin an assistant city clerk. Self-supporting, but in no position to assist anyone else. Johann Conrad still at Jena, soon to be a lawyer, which also meant several years before he had any significant income. Maria Blandina, dowryless, teaching for no salary at the school here.

  And Andrea. Andrea, the selfish little snip who in April had clouded Ludwig's life by showing so little gratitude for a lifetime of paternal care that she eloped with a Roman Catholic up-timer, a representative of the anti-Christ on earth.

  Salome knew that in this matter, at least, she was a failure and would be judged for it before God when the time came to separate the sheep from the goats. In spite of all her efforts, she had not managed to imbue her stepdaughters with sufficient common sense and pragmatism. Maria Blandina more than Andrea, but neither of them fully.

  They were both, especially Andrea, very much like their mother, from all she had been able to learn. So there was probably little she could do about it. Ludwig was inclined to indulge them because they were so like Blandina Selfisch had been.

  And she had been sitting long enough. She pulled herself up and went into the kitchen to see what the girl was doing. Thecla wasn't much of a servant. But she was fourteen and an orphan. By the time Salome was finished training her, she would be a competent housewife in a few years time. Competent enough, it was to be hoped, that some sensible man would overlook her lack of family and funds when he came to pick a wife. Or, if not, fitted to earn her living as housekeeper to a prosperous family.

  Somehow, their servants were always like that.

  * * *

  "If Papa thinks that he absolutely must," Maria Blandina said to Jonas, "then I guess that he absolutely must go walking into Grantville interviewing men as to whether or not these various up-time garments pertain to men. Though I have a terrible feeling that he's going to get himself into trouble."

  "How does he intend to do it?" Jonas asked, looking at his step-cousin. Now that her father had formally sounded him out about the possibility of a marriage between them and he had politely declined the honor, they had reverted to their normal ease with one another.

  Maria Blandina had been terrifically relieved that Jonas wasn't willing to marry her. As far as she was concerned, it would have been sort of—well, like marrying one of her brothers. In age, Jonas was right between Matthaeus and Martin and he had been in and out of the house ever since Papa married his aunt when he was eleven and she was two. She knew Jonas awfully well. Although she would have made the best of it if that had been her fate. She didn't expect to duplicate her older sister Andrea's dramatic elopement with an up-timer, but if she ever did find a husband . . . She paused and sent up a silent prayer. "Dear Father in heaven, if you ever give me a husband, I would like to have one who is a little different, if you don't mind. Someone I haven't known almost since the day I was born. That would be very nice, all by itself."

  She hadn't known the up-timer Gary Lambert since the day she was born, so she had thought about him occasionally. The thought, though, was that she didn't want to marry him, either. She might as well have known him since the day she was born. There must have been a lot of what Jonas now called "cultural continuity" among the German Lutherans who moved to America in that other world. Gary was very much like her brothers. A recognizable type. Even aside from the fact that he wasn't interested in marrying her any more than Jonas was. She sighed. Who would be?

  "Papa can't very well carry a huge suitcase with him as he walks around town. Not at his age. So I borrowed things from Walpurga Hercher. Things that came into MaidenFresh Laundries. Just temporarily, of course. She found a child-size version of each of the various styles for him to take with him on his researches. As examples." She opened the box on her desk to display her trophies.

  Jonas looked at the contents and shook his head. There was a divided skirt that would be knee-length on a small child, something called 'capri pants,' and jeans. The culottes were lavender, the capri pants were yellow and white checked gingham printed with daisies, and the jeans were embroidered. But the piece
de resistance was an up-time shorts/overskirt combination, the style which the pastor so nervously thought of as "That." Maria Blandina called it a skort. Both pieces were sewed to the same waistband, buttoning on the left side. In a floral print of white, lavender, light blue, and a darker pink, with dainty green vines tying the individual blossoms together. With a pale pink background. Trimmed with pink rickrack on the pockets and around the hems of both the shorts and skirt. And pink plastic buttons molded to match one of the kinds of flowers in the print.

  Poor Papa, Maria Blandina thought as she handed the box over to her father the next morning. With a certain amount of malice aforethought, she admitted to herself a little guiltily. However, as Jonas said, he would have to learn sometime.

  Magdeburg, August, 1634

  Mary Simpson's normal school committee got everything organized and sent off to Duke Ernst in the Upper Palatinate. It would open in the Jesuit Collegium in Amberg in September and start training elementary school teachers for the villages of the USE.