Nor even, "There's always Juditha." His younger sister, Juditha, almost fifteen years younger than Merga and ten years younger than himself, wasn't married yet. Nor did she come home regularly to let her mother complain about it. She had gone into service in the household of a Lutheran pastor at fourteen, followed her mistress to Strassburg when the pastor received a new call three years later, and wrote, perhaps, once every three months. If she was in the mood. Over which Mutti was greatly aggrieved, of course, moaning on and on about, "what is the point that she has saved a good dowry, above and beyond what your sainted father left for her and which I have invested so carefully and preserved from loss through the miseries of this entire war, if she shows no inclination to ask for it?"
Once he safely made his escape from the pursuing maternal voice, he followed his regular route—extended, now, beyond what it had been a few years before. From Frankfurt am Main by way of Gelnhausen, Steinau, Fulda, Vacha, Eisenach, Erfurt, yes. He still rode that part of the Reichsstrasse, the Imperial Road. But rarely, any more, the occasional further leg to Leipzig. Rather, from Erfurt, his regular path went through Arnstadt and Badenburg to Grantville.
Badenburg. Ah, Badenburg had many attractions. Prominent among them was a young woman named Helena Hamm. Not a girl. Wackernagel wasn't that interested in girls any more. He greatly preferred women.
He hadn't asked, but he had a fair amount of experience in observing women. He would place Helena at twenty-five or twenty-six years old.
Badenburg
"Three separate damnations, may all of them fall upon your head, you shrew." Willibald Fraas jerked his head up. "You have ruined this pour, coming in and startling Dietrich like that. Freytag in Arnstadt expects delivery of these steins within a week. Whose work is it pays for the costs of this household?"
"If you weren't so lazy, the steins would have been done last week. Last minute, everything at the last minute. You have no more sense of timeliness than a stewed prune." Agnes Bachmeierin slammed her fist down on the table where her husband and son were working.
"Don't think to browbeat me with your shoe, you grumpy old sow."
Helena Hamm watched the customer she had been serving leave the shop. Knowing that he had heard her stepfather and her mother. Knowing that one more story of the battles that occurred at the Sign of the Platter would go out into the gossip of Badenburg.
If her father had not died . . .
She shook her head impatiently.
Her father had been dead for a decade. Her mother, the formidable Agnes Bachmeierin, had fought the pewterers' guild with every devious legal device at her disposal in order to keep the family business for her sons. She hadn't managed to avoid remarriage to another master pewterer. That had been too much to hope for. However, Georg Friedrich Hamm (the Elder, deceased) had not been an ordinary pewterer. It was a specialty shop. He had supplied orders from all over central Thuringia. The marriage contract stipulated that Willibald Fraas would run the shop only until such time as her oldest surviving son by her first husband—whichever son that might turn out to be—qualified as a master and was ready to take it over.
Yes, her mother was clever. If Dietrich or Georg Friedrich the Younger should die or not wish to take over the shop, the daughters of her first marriage were the next in line. If neither of them had married a master pewterer, then Fraas had the first refusal right to buy the shop for any children he might have in his marriage to Agnes. Not inherit it. Buy it, at a fully and fairly assessed market price, to be split between the girls from the first marriage as their dowries. The marriage contract didn't even allow him that privilege for children of a possible second marriage, should Agnes have died without bearing him children. He would have had to compete with—bid against—any other pewterer who might be interested in the purchase.
But Agnes had borne him four. Three, two boys and a girl, were still alive.
There was no love lost between Willibald Fraas and his wife. There never had been.
Love? There wasn't even any mild friendship between Willibald Fraas and his wife. There wasn't even a truce or a cease-fire, such as that which seemed likely to occur in the Netherlands very soon now.
But . . . Helena was the oldest. She had been fifteen when her father died. She remembered perfectly well what things had been like between him and her mother.
Exactly the way they were between her mother and stepfather. Agnes Bachmeierin was not an easy woman to live with. Especially not during those months when she suspected she was pregnant again but had not yet felt the baby's movement to confirm it. Particularly when she had no desire to be pregnant again, at all.