The Tangled Web(24)

"But he does it wonderfully. This job. I admire him so very much."

"But he thinks that he's a fake, Clara. Every morning he gets up thinking that this will be the day that some Leaguist with a lot more regiments than he has figures out that he's just blowing smoke and moves into the spot on the map that he's responsible for, slaughtering and raping his way across it. That's why he's so uptight about everything. Because it's his duty to protect it now, and he's not at all sure that he can."

"Perhaps he can't. But he tries his best, every single day." Clara crossed her arms across her chest, shivering a little, as if she were cold. "That's one of the reasons that I certainly would not object . . . But he should not marry me, you know, because I am barren. He has daughters, but if he marries again, he should choose a woman who can give him sons."

"What's the other reason you would not object?" Andrea was genuinely curious.

"Oh, there are many. He has a good job, his social position is suitable, my family would not protest, all of those. But the main one . . ." Clara winked. "When I dance with him, I do not think that he is 'way too old' at all."



Andrea looked down at her daughter from her perch on the desk. "Why do you suppose?"

Kortney shrugged. "It doesn't make sense. It just is. Line up a couple of hundred men and let a woman take a look at them. In front of a hundred ninety-nine, every internal organ from her eardrums to her kidneys will get together and announce, 'I would rather kiss a toad.' Perfectly nice, reasonably good-looking, reasonably sober, reasonably hard-working guys, a lot of them. Not losers. No obvious way to tell them apart. Then there's the one for whom the same organs all stand up and shout 'Boing.' "

"Maybe it's an anti-promiscuity gene," Andrea said. "But I know what you mean. It's probably the reason that the ladies who eat lunch at Cora's back in Grantville repeat the sentence 'I just can't tell what she sees in him' as often as they do. Bunch of gossips."

"Well, that's true. Because if you take the hundred ninety-nine leftovers and let another gal look them over, she'll react to one that the first one ignored completely. Some girls miss out on it, of course. They're mostly the ones that we keep seeing at the clinic, over and over."

"Clara's never said a word against her husband. But you pick up things, rooming together as long as we have now. To use your word, I have a suspicion that he was a platter of deep-fried toad, served up by her family, and she just made the best of it. So she hasn't had much experience with these kinds of feelings. And, of course, she's handicapped by wanting what she thinks is best for Wes instead of just wanting what she wants."

"Which is Wes." Kortney giggled.

"And even though he was obviously going 'wow' the first time he saw Clara, somewhere deep in his heart, Wes thinks that he's still married to Lena. And he's such an upright citizen."

"And you say the ladies at Cora's are gossips, Mom. We aren't?"

"Well, not malicious. Just trying to figure out a way to dig them out of this impasse."

Kortney frowned. "Did Clara ever have a gyne exam? That is, did the doctors or midwives or whatever have any idea why she never got pregnant?"

"You could ask her, I guess." Andrea folded her arms and stuck her chilly fingers up her sleeves. "That is, if you have the nerve."

"That's one thing you learn in nursing school, Mom. Not to be afraid to ask embarrassing questions. They really ought to make it a prerequisite for being admitted."

"Well, I don't think that she will be embarrassed. That's one thing that I've been learning this year. I guess I just assumed that since back in Victorian times, people were more prudish than we are, then a couple hundred years before, they would be even more prudish. It doesn't work that way. People in the seventeenth century haven't gotten to Victorianism at all yet. Honest to God, some of the things that Clara says just make me blush."



"Well," Kortney said, washing her hands, "I can't tell on the basis of a regular gyne exam that there's any reason at all why you didn't have children. All your organs are there, in the right place, healthy, no polyps, no obvious endometriosis, none of the stuff that we look for first. Maybe it was your husband's problem."

She launched into the next set of embarrassing questions.

"You've got to be kidding. On the average?" Kortney snorted her coffee. "Every three months?"

"Well, the first five years that we were married." Clara said. "After that, less often. You understand that Caspar was afraid that spilling his seed too often would weaken his vital humors and they were not strong to begin with. I know that one physician did tell him that it would improve his likelihood of begetting heirs if he increased the frequency to what was recommended in the Old Testament, but he changed doctors."