Renee was chattering on. "Aunt Mildred says that they were all talking about it when it happened. Pat's sisters were left up-time, except for Suzanne Trelli, who's too young to have known, probably. She would only have been eleven or twelve when Pat and Francis got married. But Francis' sisters, Mag Farrell and Pauline Mora, are still right here in town. And his brother Andy. And so is Pat's mother. If anybody tries to prosecute Pat for bigamy at this late date, at least one of them will probably spill the beans."
She paused.
"Maybe it's not entirely proper legal procedure for me to clue you in, Mr. Judge. But there are just some things you need to know if you're going to make this jerry-built, winging-it, seat-of-your-pants administrative system run by a batch of under qualified, overstretched hillbillies that we're building work. Besides, if you had been born here, you'd know this stuff already, just by being alive."
"One of the books I was studying," Maurice pointed out, "said that the original idea of a 'jury of your peers' was not a jury of perfect strangers with no opinion on the case in advance, the way lawyers wanted jurors up-time, but rather a jury of your neighbors who could be expected to know something about the matter. In a way, I think, we're sort of shifting back to that idea. Getting the best information we can. The relevant stuff, no matter how it comes up."
* * *
"Bernadette headed straight over to St. Mary's," Tony Adducci said to his wife Denise. Denise was Pat Fitzgerald's first cousin, so she had a natural interest in all of this, considering that it was she and Tony's sister Bernadette who had bullied Pat into showing up at the visitation for Dennis' mother in the first place. Which had triggered the subsequent events when Francis tried to shoot her. "To let the Jesuits know about common-law marriage in Kansas and Iowa. I expect that at least one of them will shortly be descending on Tom Riddle for a briefing on the significance of 'full faith and credit' under the U.S. Constitution. The up-time one, that is."
"I'm going to talk to Mom and Dad," Denise said. "I'm not old enough to remember. I was only six at the time. But they must have known what Uncle Patrick and Aunt Mary Liz had in their heads back in 1968 when they pushed Pat into marrying Francis Murphy. There's just no way it would be fair for someone to prosecute her for bigamy after all these years, especially when she didn't have the vaguest idea that she was common-law married to Dennis."
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse."
"Well," Denise said, "sometimes it should be. Believe me, if Pat had the slightest idea that she was married to Dennis during all those years, she'd have spent them sitting in his lap."
October, 1634
"What is it likely to mean for Pat and Dennis?" Joe Stull asked.
"It's going to make things hellishly complicated, I think," Tony said. "I don't pretend to understand it all. For one thing, even though the common law marriage was—still is, for that matter—a legally binding civil marriage, it wasn't canonically binding on Pat, I'm pretty sure, since a Catholic can't—couldn't—well, could in the sense of being physically able to do it and could in the sense that it was legal under civil law but couldn't in the sense of having it recognized by the church-marry a non-Catholic in a non-Catholic ceremony."
"Ouch," Joe said. "Could you stop right there and draw a diagram of that?"
"No. I told you already that I don't really understand it," Tony said. "But still, I think that after a civil marriage, the church would have required her to get a civil divorce before she would be free to enter a Catholic marriage. I'm pretty sure of that. It wouldn't have just ignored the fact that she was married to Dennis, even if she didn't know that she was. I think."
"You think," Joe said.
"That's what I said. I think. That's my position and I'm sticking to it." Tony chewed on his mustache for a minute. "I don't know of any up-timer at St. Mary's who might really understand it all except Larry Mazzare, and he's still in Italy."
"Are Pat and Dennis married?"
"Yeah. Again, I think. At least if the NUS Constitution as we altered it to become the Constitution of the State of Thuringia-Franconia took over 'full faith and credit.' Somebody better take a look and see about that. If you want my advice, Dennis and Pat had better get a lawyer with more experience than Laura Koudsi and have the lawyer take a look and see about that. But I think they would still be married, because they would have been before the Ring of Fire."
"There aren't any lawyers with more experience than Laura Koudsi. She and Mary Kathryn Riddle are the first full-fledged new lawyers the system has hatched for us. Sort of full-fledged. Their pin feathers are starting to sprout, at least. Anyway, Mary Kathryn is working for Ed Piazza as legal counsel. Not to mention that she's the daughter of the chief justice and the granddaughter of the gray eminence who is mentoring our two non-lawyer other judges and educating all the rest of the upcoming baby lawyers to the best of his ability. Plus, she's the sister of the prosecuting attorney. It's practically incestuous."
"Is Pat a bigamist?"
Tony shifted uncomfortably. "Until the court issues some kind of a decision, probably God only knows. And I mean that literally. So it sort of depends on your view of God. Whether He's more into wrath or more into mercy. At least, that's the way the spirits are dividing at St. Mary Magdalene's these days. I'm sure you can guess what Tino Nobili thinks."
* * *
"I think," Bernadette said firmly, "that you had better hold a hearing. At least get the testimony down in black and white, while it's as fresh as possible in everyone's mind. If you want to wait until Larry Mazzare gets back to do anything about it, that's one thing. But the least you owe him is to get all the ducks in a row in advance. In my humble opinion, of course."
Father Athanasius Kircher looked at the opinionated middle-aged woman who might possibly, depending on how things worked out, become the most influential mother superior in the German church one of these years. If she got the new women's religious order she was proposing off the ground. That, too, was waiting for Larry Mazzare to get back from Italy. In her humble opinion. Hah.
"I'll consult with the others," he said. There were a half-dozen down-time Jesuits in residence at St. Mary's parish these days.
"Take a hard look at consent," Bernadette said. "Have Hanni Heinzerling look around in the storage rooms and attics to see if she can find the applicable edition of canon law. The parish should have had a copy back in 1968. From everything I've picked up, it's entirely possible that when Pat married Francis, she wasn't capable of rendering informed consent. I was only twelve or so at the time, but Mom and Dad say . . ."
"My," Kircher said at the end of her story. "That's astonishing, if true. And the canon lawyers will be fascinated, because it will, indeed, revolve around the consent issue. Well, in essence, marriage questions almost always do. It's too bad that in the absence of a bishop, Thuringia doesn't have a properly constituted Ehegericht. There's nobody who can establish a marriage court. Administratively, we are still in a mess with Larry Mazzare being a cardinal but not, as far as we can tell, a bishop. There's just no clear jurisdictional chain of command between St. Mary's parish and, well, the pope himself. And it's not much better in Franconia, with Hatzfeld in exile still. There's only so much that a suffragan can do."
January, 1635
Francis Xavier Murphy himself refused to testify in the matter. The fact that his lawyer, Johann Francis Hardegg, was a Lutheran complicated his appearance before a Catholic canonical hearing quite a bit. Hardegg just kept getting up and repeating, "My client is not obliged to testify. This hearing is a purely ecclesiastical matter and the laws of the state do not require him to participate against his will."
This was most certainly true.
* * *
Dennis Stull also refused to testify in the matter, on the grounds that he was a Methodist, that Judge Tito said that he was married to Pat, she was wearing his rings again, and as far as he was concerned any more, that was the end of it. If someone charged her with bigamy, he added, he would spring
her from jail and elope somewhere that was out of the local jurisdiction. All they needed to do was find someone to hold a wedding for them to make it feel a little more real.
Although he didn't say so, he thought, "and to make the rest of the Grantville women in Erfurt a little nicer to her when she moves up there with me, too."
* * *
"I think," Pastor Ludwig Kastenmayer said to Justus Jonas Muselius, "that as peculiar as it may seem, I had better be present at this Catholic marriage hearing. Just as a spectator, of course."
Kastenmayer had been to consult with the Lutheran theological faculty at the University of Jena numerous times in regard to the question of whether a spouse left up-time by the Ring of Fire should be adjudged to be legally dead, thus freeing the other spouse, the one transported to Thuringia in 1631, to remarry. His tact in bringing forth the case of Roland Worley as a stalking horse for the upcoming case of Gary Lambert had been sincerely appreciated by the ecclesiastical hard hitters of Thuringia.
Since his treatise on the matrimonial difficulties of Wesley Jenkins and Clara Bachmeierin had also been well received in academic circles, Count Ludwig Guenther was planning to appoint him to the Lutheran Ehegericht for the county of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. With special expertise in conflicts of matrimonial law between up-time and down-time statutes.
All of which led to Kastenmayer's next statement. "The more I can learn of the up-timers' practices and expectations, the better, I suppose."
"It will take several days," Jonas pointed out. "It's not as if you don't have other things to do."
"I know," the pastor said regretfully. "Given the size of St. Martin's in the Fields parish, even with the opening of St. Thomas the Apostle on the Badenburg side, I should by rights have two junior pastors to assist me by now. But with war levies, the count's budget is in enough trouble without increasing appropriations to the consistory. It's a case of 'needs must,' I suppose."
* * *
"How old were you at the time of your attempted marriage to Francis Xavier Murphy?" Nicholas Smithson, S.J. asked. This was by no means his area of expertise, but the other Jesuits at St. Mary's had designated him to ask the questions because English, albeit seventeenth-century English, was his native language.
"I was twenty-one," Pat answered. "I was twenty-one on December 29, 1967, and we married the next March. So I was of age by anyone's definition. Under up-time law, I'd been of age since I was eighteen. That's why I was able to leave home and go live with Dennis at Leavenworth and my parents couldn't stop me."
Laura Koudsi anxiously signaled to her, a sign that meant Just answer the question. Don't volunteer information. Sometimes Laurie thought that Pat was her own worst enemy.
Smithson looked at Ms. Koudsi a little nervously. It was his first experience with a female lawyer present at a hearing in regard to matrimonial causes. She upset him a bit just by being present.
Not as much as having a Lutheran lawyer there did, though. Ms. Koudsi was at least Catholic.
He pulled himself back to the list of questions.
* * *
"I didn't want to marry Francis," Pat said. "I never wanted to marry Francis. I told my parents so. I told Father O'Malley so. Dad and Father O'Malley are dead, but you can ask my mother. She's here in town. You can ask Francis' sisters. You can ask my friends."
They did, of course. Jesuits were nothing if not thorough.
The affiants were in unanimous agreement that Pat had not wanted to marry Francis Murphy. "Even though," her mother appended, "it was clearly her duty to do so."
"Actually," Pauline Mora, Francis' younger sister, added to her testimony, "I don't think that Francis was wild about marrying Pat, either."
Upon being questioned, Andy Murphy and Mag Farrell, Francis' older brother and sister, expressed the same opinion.
Andy said he was afraid it was partly his fault. He was the oldest, he was the only other boy, and he hadn't been showing any sign of getting married then. Hell, he hadn't even met JoAnn. And his parents were getting awfully anxious that they'd never have a grandson to carry on the name.
Maggie Murphy, Francis' mother, testified that she and her late husband had "nagged" Francis into getting married because they didn't want him sent off to Viet Nam and maybe getting killed without leaving a child behind. In her view, Francis didn't have any objection to marrying Pat Fitzgerald, particularly. He didn't especially prefer her to any other girl, but he didn't object.
"And after all," Maggie said, "after the way she had behaved, running off to live with Dennis Stull, Pat should have been grateful that any good Irish Catholic man was willing to take her, whether she wanted him or not. That's what her parents kept telling her."
"Were you ever present when she replied to her parents after they said that to her?" Nicholas Smithson, the English Jesuit, asked.
"Yeah," Maggie said. "She said that she didn't need anyone to take her out of pity. That she could just wait for Dennis Stull to come home. She was pretty stubborn about that no matter how Patrick and Mary Liz browbeat her."
"I thought," Smithson said, "that Stull did return from Viet Nam before this purported marriage was solemnized."
"He did," Maggie said. "He got discharged and by February he was working in Clarksburg. And Pat went over there and saw him at least twice that I know of. If not more. That was even after Father O'Malley had already scheduled the wedding. Pat was being really contrary about the whole business. She wouldn't go to pre-Cana or anything. She kept insisting that she wasn't going to marry Francis."
Athanasius Kircher sighed. Those visits to Stull were new information. It would have to be investigated. Even though Stull refused to participate in the hearing.
* * *
"It wouldn't have happened," Pat said, "if I hadn't been so upset. I had a job in Fairmont and I was taking college classes part time, waiting for Dennis to get back. Then this whole thing blew up. It wasn't right after I came home. Dennis shipped out in September of '66 and I came home from Davenport—well, I came to Fairmont, not to Grantville—and got a job and started college part time at Fairmont State. That was when I took off Dennis' rings and put them in the box on a chain around my neck, because people around here knew for sure that we'd never gotten married and they'd have thought I was crazy to have them on. But I did keep on wearing them that way."
"Was the marriage to Francis Murphy already projected at the time of your return?" Smithson asked.
"Mom and Dad and Father O'Malley and Paul and Maggie Murphy didn't start nagging me to marry Francis until right around Thanksgiving in '67, more than a year later. From that point on, they kept at me and kept at me. They were just determined that I was going to marry Francis. I thought that if I could stave them off until Dennis got back and got his discharge, I'd be okay. That was going to be in January. I was so upset about it all that I lost my job right after Christmas. I messed up a few sales and the store let me go. I'd just paid my tuition for my classes for the second semester, so I was short on cash. I didn't have any money to pay my rent unless I was working. I tried for a short-term loan from the student credit union, but something hung it up."
"How is this relevant?" Smithson asked.
"I needed a place to live. Dad wouldn't loan me any money. He said that I had to come back and live at home. So I did, the end of December, when my rent ran out in Fairmont."
"You state that you 'thought you would be okay' when Mr. Stull returned. What happened?"
"A month before Dennis got out, Mom and Dad put an announcement in the paper that Francis and I were engaged, with a March wedding date. All sorts of people sent it to Dennis. Dozens of them, I think. Grantville being Grantville. As far as he knew, I was waiting for him. He was having a lot of problems anyway, just back from Viet Nam and several mess-ups with his paperwork so he was under a lot of stress. I wanted to spare him, so I hadn't told him what they were doing, pushing me to marry Francis, so it was a terrible shock to him. You can't blame Dennis for being real mad when
he got back. I tried and tried to tell him that I was saying no, but we fought. He couldn't believe that they would have done that—published the announcement—unless I agreed to it. The last time that I drove over to Clarksburg to see him, we fought just terribly."
"How many times did you see Dennis Stull between his return from the army and the solemnization of your purported marriage to Francis Murphy?"
"Five or six, I think. I'm not exactly sure. He'd found a job in Clarksburg and was sharing a trailer on the job site with a bunch of other guys. It wasn't very private in that trailer, if that's what you're wondering."
Pat looked up. "You may not know enough about how things worked in West Virginia to ask me this next thing, so I'll tell you. I didn't go and apply for the marriage license, believe it or not. I don't know how they got it, but I know for certain that I never went to the courthouse with Francis to get one."