His brother and wife, the Reverends Simon and Mary Ellen Jones, with children. Though, of course, Vanessa's husband, Jake Ebeling, was down in the Upper Palatinate with the army. He laughed to himself. While Simon was away in Italy, the Reverend Mary Ellen had unabashedly started a campaign for ensuring the future of Methodism in a time line in which John Wesley had never been born and never would be born by matchmaking among the church's younger generation. She had done more weddings in those nine months than First Methodist normally held in three years.
Then Mary Ellen's whole crew of Sebastian relatives. Well, except that Allan Sebastian's two girls by his first marriage had both gone up to Erfurt to spend a long weekend with their husbands, who couldn't get away to come to Grantville.
Finally, his sister Laura Ann had been left up-time, but her son Bill and family and Bill's Furbee grandparents were here. Bill's brother Johnny was out of town, gone back to his station with the army over in Fulda, where he had married a German girl. He'd brought Antonia to meet the family earlier in the fall. Their baby had been born and died last spring.
It was odd, in a way. Of all the families in Grantville, theirs had about the least marrying back and forth with down-timers. Only Johnny, of all of them, and that while he was stationed away for so long.
Even Jarvis Beasley had remarried to a German girl; he met her while he was in the army. That had sort of given his father Ken and the others who haunted the 250 Club a black eye. Jarvis wasn't welcome there any more.
So many people were more or less permanently out of town, now, because of the war effort.
First Methodist had done a lot of charity work among the refugees, of course. But it hadn't done much in the way of outreach, so far. Not much evangelism. A couple of down-time wives, like Farley Utt's Maggie, had joined the church, but most of them hadn't.
Maybe he ought to talk to Simon and Mary Ellen about evangelism. Being ecumenical had been all well and good in the twentieth century. If they relied entirely on growing their own in the seventeenth century, though, Methodism would be doomed to remain a minority sect. A tiny minority sect, if you looked at Europe as a whole.
Minnie Hugelmair had received her promotion from sixth grade to seventh the day before Thanksgiving break started. She was determined to have that eighth grade diploma by next spring. She didn't see any reason why she couldn't finish the other two grades of middle school in six months. School stuff wasn't exactly hard. All she had to do was read the books, fill out the assignments, and turn them in.
She owed Benny. She ate her Thanksgiving dinner with the Pierce and Coffman families like a proper lady, as Louise would put it.
Then she went up to the storage lot. Denise's dad had faith in her and she owed him for it, too. Denise had gone off somewhere, flying in a plane with those losers Lannie Yost and Keenan Murphy, chasing after defectors. Which had to be hard on Buster and Christin, not having their daughter here on a big, important, up-timer holiday.
So she ate Thanksgiving dinner again.
Rudolstadt
Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, aged fifty-three, looked proudly on the son he had never, during his long bachelorhood, expected to have.
Countess Emelie, aged twenty, smiled up at him, beatifically exalted in the realization of a job well done, a duty superbly performed, and having made her kindly husband possibly, at this moment, the happiest man in the USE. In addition to which, of course, she had a baby. The most wonderful baby ever born.
"What are you going to call him?" his widowed sister-in-law asked.
"Albrecht, I think, for our father. And Karl, for my brother."
Anna Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst smiled. She was the widow of the late Count Karl Guenther. "And, of course, naming him for your father will also provide a suitable opportunity to reach out to the Crown Loyalists by inviting Duke Albrecht of Saxe-Weimar to lift him from the font. An excellent choice of godfather, by the way."
"No Ludwig?" Emelie asked. Then with a little laugh, "No Guenther to join the forty or more previous Guenthers who have been counts in Schwarzburg?"
He smiled again. "Not this time, I think. God willing, there will be other sons to bear those names." He leaned over and placed the baby back in her arms. "But, I think, it is an opportune moment for a little 'cultural borrowing,' as they call it. I shall proclaim that this day of the year will henceforth be a Dankfest in Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, too."
PART FIVE
December 1634
Hovering on wing under the cope of hell
Chapter 30
Frankfurt am Main
"The anti-vaccination pamphlets are excellent. Perhaps we should make the effort to find out who Mauger's informant is. He appears to have some talent." Fortunat Deneau was actually smiling.