Grantville Gazette Volume 26 Read online

  Jim Baen's Universe

  Grantville Gazette, Volume 26

  Grantville Gazette, Volume 26, 1 November 2009

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this magazine are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Grantville Gazette

  A 1632, Inc. Publication

  Grantville Gazette

  P. O. Box 7488

  Moore, OK 73153-1488

  What is this? About the Grantville Gazette

  Written by Grantville Gazette Staff

  The Grantville Gazette originated as a by-product of the ongoing and very active discussions which take place concerning the 1632 universe Eric Flint created in the novels 1632, 1633 and 1634: The Galileo Affair (the latter two books co-authored by David Weber and Andrew Dennis, respectively). This discussion is centered in three of the conferences in Baen's Bar, the discussion area of Baen Books' web site. The conferences are entitled "1632 Slush," "1632 Slush Comments" and "1632 Tech Manual." They have been in operation for almost seven years now, during which time nearly two hundred thousand posts have been made by hundreds of participants.

  Soon enough, the discussion began generating so-called "fanfic," stories written in the setting by fans of the series. A number of those were good enough to be published professionally. And, indeed, a number of them were—as part of the anthology Ring of Fire , which was published by Baen Books in January, 2004. ( Ring of Fire also includes stories written by established authors such as Eric Flint himself, as well as David Weber, Mercedes Lackey, Dave Freer, K.D. Wentworth and S.L. Viehl.)

  The decision to publish the Ring of Fire anthology triggered the writing of still more fanfic, even after submissions to the anthology were closed. Ring of Fire has been selling quite well since it came out, and a second anthology similar to it was published late in 2007. Another, Ring of Fire III, is forthcoming. It will also contain stories written by new writers, as well as professionals. But, in the meantime . . . the fanfic kept getting written, and people kept nudging Eric—well, pestering Eric—to give them feedback on their stories.

  Hence . . . the Grantville Gazette. Once he realized how many stories were being written—a number of them of publishable quality—he raised with Jim Baen the idea of producing an online magazine which would pay for fiction and nonfiction articles set in the 1632 universe and would be sold through Baen Books' Webscriptions service. Jim was willing to try it, to see what happened.

  As it turned out, the first issue of the electronic magazine sold well enough to make continuing the magazine a financially self-sustaining operation. Since then, even more volumes have been electronically published through the Baen Webscriptions site. As well, Grantville Gazette, Volume One was published in paperback in November of 2004. That has since been followed by hardcover editions of Grantville Gazette, Volumes Two, Three and Four.

  Then, two big steps:

  First: The magazine had been paying semi-pro rates for the electronic edition, increasing to pro rates upon transition to paper, but one of Eric's goals had long been to increase payments to the authors. Grantville Gazette, Volume Eleven is the first volume to pay the authors professional rates.

  Second: This on-line version you're reading. The site here at http://www.grantvillegazette.com is the electronic version of an ARC, an advance readers copy where you can read the issues as we assemble them. There are stories posted here which won't be coming out in the magazine for more than a year.

  How will it work out? Will we be able to continue at this rate? Well, we don't know. That's up to the readers. But we'll be here, continuing the saga, the soap opera, the drama and the comedy just as long as people are willing to read them.

  —The Grantville Gazette Staff

  FICTION:

  Advice and Counsel

  Written by Virginia DeMarce

  Grantville, October 1634

  "I love October's bright blue weather." The Reverend Mary Ellen Jones stood on the rectory porch, just breathing, and almost regretted it when she saw her next appointment walking down the street. It wasn't as bright and as blue in Thuringia as it had been in West Virginia, but on a good day, it was good enough. More than good enough. Winter would start in earnest any day now. Each nice day was a divine blessing. It wasn't, however, an excuse for neglecting her duties.

  "Thank you for coming in, Clara," she said. "I do realize that you and Wes already got married in Fulda, but since he asked my husband for a Methodist ceremony in addition to the civil one, Simon feels that we should go through the premarital counseling procedure with you."

  "That is fine." Clara Bachmeierin, now the wife of Wes Jenkins, smiled cheerfully. "You can hardly ask me more questions than Andrea's lawyer did. Or have me fill out more affidavits swearing on oath that we really meant to do it—to get married, that is."

  Mary Ellen looked at her client. Client. She was a counselor today, not a minister. Clara was not a parishioner, not a Methodist, at least not yet.

  She tried to prepare thoroughly for these sessions. Increasingly, since the Ring of Fire, they were divided in two. It had become quite clear that the down-time brides chosen by up-time Methodist men were usually far more willing to speak frankly to her than to her husband. She thought briefly of Kortney Pence's description of the utterly cold fish that Clara's first husband had apparently been, realizing reluctantly that she would have to ask whether this background was, er, inhibiting Clara's ability to respond to her second husband. Postponing that task, she started marching through the other sections of the manual. The status of marriage in civil law . . . that would be a good starting point.

  "I think that I understand the legal theory behind your marriage," she said. "However, West Virginia law did not have anything comparable, so if you could give me the background from your perspective . . ."

  "Then we were married," Clara finished up. "And after that . . ."

  Mary Ellen reminded herself that the seventeenth century did not do euphemisms. It just didn't. Maybe, somewhere in Germany, there was someone who understood what a euphemism was, at least as a literary device. She would ask that nice Lutheran minister, Herr Meyfarth, who was also a poet, if he came to town again. The people she had met, though . . . Maybe in her spare time, between two o'clock and four o'clock in the morning, she could establish the Grantville Society for the Care and Feeding of Polite Euphemisms. Maybe . . . maybe she was a little delirious.

  "That's fine," she said. "I don't need the details."

  "Have you ever thought about how much skin people have?" Clara asked. "Somehow, in all that I imagined doing after I married Wesley some day, I imagined doing those things while Wesley was wearing a nightshirt and I was wearing a shift. But Wesley was sitting on the cot while he took his shoes off and he said that it was not just narrow, meant for one person to sleep on, but also tippy, so we had better slide the straw pallet onto the floor if we did not want to fall out of bed. So we did and I stood there, at one end of it. He came to me and took my shift off. He folded it up neatly and put it on the cot. Then he held me, just the way he had done when we danced at Christmas. It is really rather surprising to find out all at once how much skin there is on a person's body."

  "Ah." Mary Ellen swallowed hard.

  "And after . . . You never met my first husband Caspar. He was dead before the Ring of Fire happened. But he was older and, I think now, he perhaps did not really want a wife, even after he agreed that his mother should find him one because she was not really well and could no longer keep house for him. He always kept his own room, with his things around him. And went back there, to sleep. It was a little lonely, some
times."

  "I can understand that." Mary Ellen would happily have strangled the late Caspar Stade, if he weren't already dead.

  "So, after . . . I said to Wesley, 'Bitte, geh' doch nicht weg. Bleib' bei mir.' So foolish. We were locked in a pantry that was not very big at all. Where could he have gone? But I couldn't help it."

  Grasping at her memorized counseling routines for sustenance, Mary Ellen asked, "Was Wes, ah, responsive to your concerns?"

  "He said, 'You couldn't pry me away with a crowbar.'"

  In spite of herself, Mary Ellen smiled.

  "So then we went to sleep. I was rather embarrassed the next morning," Clara said. "I waked—woke—up feeling . . ." She paused and searched for a word. "Feeling . . . unsure. Thinking that I had perhaps been more than a little crazy when I made our marriage the night before, when Wesley had not asked me. Especially since nobody had come back to torture us, so perhaps there had been no emergency to justify what I did."

  "He hadn't asked you?" This was news to Mary Ellen.

  "Not with words. With his eyes, he asked me the first time we met each other. It was strange. I was by the window. He was on the other side of the room, by the mantel. Everyone was standing up during the meeting because the cleaners had taken all of the furniture out of the conference room so they could mop and polish the floor. Sun came through the window and reflected from his spectacles, but I could see his eyes. With his eyes he said, 'I admire you. I want you. Come.' and with his mouth he said, 'Brief me.' With my mouth, I answered about the political problems of the abbot of Fulda and with my mind I thinked—thought—that I do not want to die before I have married this man. It was very strange, I assure you. As if I were in two different worlds at once."

  "I, ah, yes. Well, I'm sure that it must have been."

  Mary Ellen told herself not to sputter. She grasped the arm of her chair tightly. For the hundredth time at least since the Ring of Fire she reminded herself that seventeenth-century Germany was before the nineteenth century. That people in the here and now casually said the kinds of things that the Victorians had been at such pains to exile from parlor conversation. That talking to down-timers was like talking to the kind of late twentieth century young people who gathered in singles bars or populated bad television shows. That, if cultural historians had realized this, the Victorian era would never have gotten such a bad rep. The modern civilized world had owed those bowdlerizers a lot. As she forced herself to relax, Clara went right on talking.

  "As I said, he had not asked me, even though his hands had also already said things to me that his mouth did not, every time he helped me mount my horse, or get down from the pony cart. So. I thought that maybe he would be angry. Instead, though, he said that he had waked—woken—up a lot of mornings dreaming that I was in bed with him. He said that it was much better to have me really there than just dreaming about it. Then he explained how much better it was. Mostly, though, his German lessons did not have words to talk abut these things and my English vocabulary lessons did not have the right words, either. We had no reliable basis for a detailed discussion of what we were trying to discuss just then. So he showed me. 'Explanatory gestures,' he said. We had a lot of explanatory gestures. And he said that he wished that he had a second set of hands."

  All Mary Ellen managed to do was nod. She was proud of having managed this. It was preferable, she thought, to strangling where she sat.

  "It was very comforting to know that Wesley had no regrets about being married to me." Clara paused. "My husband allayed my concerns entirely. It was also enjoyable. I felt much better after he explained how he felt."

  Mary Ellen turned bright red by the time Clara finished explaining the precise sequence of events that had made her feel much better. "I'm sure," she said, searching for some suitably neutral comment, "that your happiness pleases Wes."

  "It seems to," Clara answered with obvious satisfaction. "He says to me that I am 'just a cuddly little bundle of sexiness.' He finds this good."

  Mary Ellen managed to transform her reaction to this unexpected insight into the nature of the Jenkins marital relationship into a discreet cough. No matter what Clara's first marriage had been like, it was pretty clear that lingering inhibitions would be way down toward the bottom of any listing of her potential matrimonial pitfalls.

  "I think that we can probably skip over the rest of the chapter in the counseling manual that provides advice on the importance of expressing physical affection in a Christian marriage," she commented dryly. "Ah, what differences between you do you think might cause problems in your relationship?"

  Clara cocked her head a little to one side. "Wesley is much more orderly than I am. That is a difference. I found that out right away. However, all I have to do is be more orderly myself, so I do not see that it will be a problem. When I waked—woke—up the second time the morning after we married, I wiggled away and shaked—shook—my leg that had been at the bottom of the pile of legs and my arm that had been under Wesley's head being a pillow until they were not numb any more. Then I saw that all his clothes were neat, so I quickly picked up all three petticoats I had dropped on the floor the night before and folded them up. Also my bodice and skirt and jeans in a pile. And found the pieces of hempcloth which the soldiers had used to tie us up and folded them next to the pitcher, for us to use to wash with, if Wesley thought we could spare some of the water. And I found my shoes and stockings and put them by the jeans. That was while I was looking under the cot to see if there was any vessel that we could use as a chamber pot."

  I will not giggle, Mary Ellen thought. Not even hysterically. A slight gurgle emerged from her throat.

  Clara looked at her seriously. "After a certain length of time has passed, no matter what is going on in life otherwise, a person is more interested in chamber pots than almost anything else."

  Thinking back on several family visits to county fairs and similar outdoor events, Mary Ellen had to agree that this assessment was reasonable. She nodded.

  "There was one there. We guessed later that Ritter von Schlitz had been hiding in that room, himself, after he escaped from the administration's custody, and had provided for his own comforts. Wesley was still snoring—his snores are very nice, soft and smooth—so I used it. Then I sat down on the pallet next to him and said my morning prayers until he woke up. The pantry was orderly by then, and I have made myself stay orderly ever since because I know that it will please him, even though it is not always easy."

  "Is orderliness the only difference you have observed?"

  "Well, there is another one. Wesley told me that he mostly says his prayers when he has a necktie on. But he doesn't mind now that I say my prayers in bed 'naked as a jaybird' if I feel like it, so I don't think it will be a problem, either. I pointed out to him that God should not mind. God sees everything, so surely it doesn't matter to him if I am wearing clothes. He could look right through them if he wanted to, after all."

  "That is a very . . . interesting . . . practical application of the doctrine of divine omniscience," Mary Ellen said. Personally, being a Methodist herself, she could fully understand Wes' belief that the deity was best encountered on Sunday morning while appropriately dressed. "Are there any other significant differences?"

  "No."

  "Let's move on to the section that covers planning for children, then."

  "I do not think we need to plan, except to arrange for Mrs. Kortney Pence to come and serve as my midwife, because I am almost certain that I am going to have a baby. But I have not told Wesley yet, because I want to be absolutely sure."

  "You have missed a period?"

  "Two." Clara beamed.

  Mary Ellen mentally counted on her fingers the space of time from August to October and ended the counseling session ahead of schedule. Then she phoned Kortney, who attributed the whole sequence of events to pheromones.

  "If Clara was ovulating at the very moment that this torturer threatened to pull Wes' nuts off," Kortney put it crudely, as
Mary Ellen winced, "which it sounds like she must have been, then it's no wonder that she went a bit off the deep end, considering how patiently she had been waiting for him to make another move since that Christmas party last year. Honestly, Mary Ellen, the way they were dancing, none of the rest of us would have been really surprised if he had hauled her into the cloak room and shut the door then and there, leaving the rest of us to eat the leftover hors d'oeuvres."

  Kortney giggled. "But he managed to let loose of her and deliver her back to Mom, who points out that 'chaperone' was not included in her job description when she went to Fulda. I said that it was probably under 'such other duties as may from time to time be assigned.' Anyway, according to Mom, he just kept on hovering, while every month Clara edged a bit nearer to menopause and cried herself quietly to sleep."

  A sound came over the phone. Mary Ellen thought that it was probably Kortney tapping her fingers on her desk. Then the voice resumed.

  "She is down-time, Mary Ellen. Barrenness is still a stigma, here in 1634. She wants children so bad you can't believe it. I admit that my explanation still leaves the deeper question of why her subconscious decided to broadcast the pheromones on a tight beam specifically at Wes Jenkins unexplained, but you're the minister, so that's your problem. I'm just a nurse. She wants children passionately, she wants them specifically from Wes, and when push came to shove, she did whatever was necessary for her to have them, I expect. That's just the way it is."

  "Oh," Mary Ellen said. "Well, then. Thanks, Kortney."

  * * *

  "Did you finish your half of the marriage counseling session?" the Reverend Simon Jones asked.

  "More or less. When you're doing counseling with a widower and widow who already 'married themselves to each other' a couple of months ago, a lot of the usual content seems a bit superfluous. Or irrelevant."