Andrea cleared her throat. "Speaking of land titles . . ."
"Yes?"
"I've made one great discovery. The monks took the archives, but most of the local district administrators and provosts of the abbey's estates kept duplicate copies on the local level, because it would take all day for someone to run over to Fulda and look something up. So if the budget has money for me to hire some clerks, we can reconstitute a working administrative archive. Not the historical papal bulls that were five hundred years old and stuff like that, but land documents and surveys from the last half century or so."
"The budget," Harlan said, "is very tight."
"Consider it an investment." Andrea reached up and pulled out the pencil she had stuck in her hair earlier in the meeting. "If we don't figure out who owes us how much in the way of taxes and rents and dues, there won't be a budget at all."
"Anything else?" Wes asked.
"We have a petition from a convent of Franciscan nuns here in the town of Fulda itself, phrased in such a way that it appears to be presented on behalf of the women of the town in general, on the subject of women's property rights. It's rather interesting." She picked up a piece of paper and started to read. "A laywoman who was a member of their Third Order . . ." She looked up. "That's sort of like a lodge auxiliary, by the way. Or it would be, if they were Disciples of Christ, like me." She went back to reading, ". . . made during her lifetime a contingent donation to them that was to take effect after her death. She has since died and her stepson, who does not deny that she had a right to make a gift while living, challenges her right to make a post mortem donation on the grounds that it is equivalent to a bequest . . ."
Harlan Stull's eyes started to glaze over. His definition of "interesting" rarely involved probate law.
"Andrea," Wes said. "Hire a lawyer. A local lawyer. Full time. That's an order."
Variant Visions
Grantville, January 1633
"We ought to give him some kind of a send-off," Linda Bartolli said, looking at the rest of Grantville's quondam St. Vincent's and current St. Mary's worship committee. "After all, he is an abbot and Fulda is really historical. I looked it up in the encyclopedia."
"It should be your call. You're the organist, so most of the extra work would fall on you," Denise Adducci said.
"Well, on Brian, too," Linda said. "And the choir."
"How's it going for Brian now? Is Tino still making trouble?" Noelle Murphy asked.
Linda sighed. When her brother agreed to take on directing the St. Mary's choir after the Ring of Fire, its former director having been left up-time, Tino Nobili had made a great big fuss. Brian's wife Debra was Methodist, which in Tino's view disqualified him for exercising anything that might be considered a public office in the church. What with Tino's wife Vivian being the parish secretary and her and Brian's parents now being full-time parish volunteers, things could get a bit touchy now and then.
"Tino seems to have settled down some. It helped that the only other person who volunteered to be choir director was Danielle Kowach. He likes the Kowaches and Mahons even less than he likes us, and having Danielle would have meant that both the organist and director would have been women."
Johann Bernhard Schenk von Schweinsberg assured himself that he supported the endeavors of the Jesuit Order and favored all its efforts in spreading the faith. The Jesuits were so—what was the English word?—dynamic. Not to mention incredibly numerous. They and the Capuchins—those two orders multiplied like rabbits, these days.
Nonetheless, he still found it somewhat disconcerting that the Jesuits seemed to have thrown themselves so very enthusiastically into the Grantville parish. Plus, of course . . . von Spee came from a respectable family, but . . . Athanasius Kircher was certainly an intelligent man—some people said that he was an outright genius—but by no means was his family upper class. Schweinsberg knew this perfectly well, since Kircher's father had been a minor civil bureaucrat from Geisa who worked for the abbots of Fulda and tried to support a large family on a small salary. Of course, the father had earned a doctorate, but the family's more distant ancestry consisted entirely of commoners. Quite ordinary ones.
"I would point out," Kircher was saying with some humor, "that it is also something of a stretch for men born into families of ordinary imperial knights to sit in the diet as princes of the empire. You and your predecessors have been there by virtue of your election as abbots, not by right of birth. The church provides this 'social mobility' for you, too."