In Grantville this time, he also discovered that the mayor, Henry Dreeson, was planning a "good will tour" of Buchenland, which would culminate in Frankfurt. And which would involve him.
That was genuinely new news. He stopped in Badenburg, where he told Helena. He stopped in Bindersleben bei Erfurt, where he told Maria. He stopped in Vacha, where he told Rufina. He stopped in Fulda and at the Fulda Barracks, where he saw Sergeant Hartke, Dagmar, David Kronberg, other friends, and picked up messages to be delivered to the Hanauer rabbi and to Meier zum Schwan in Frankfurt. He stopped in Steinau, where he told Edeltraud.
Between Steinau and Frankfurt, he thought long and hard. Maria had been very excited. So had Rufina. And Edeltraud. Each one of them insisted that he must bring his honorable charge, the mayor of Grantville, to stay overnight with the family in Bindersleben. And in Vacha. And in Steinau.
His heart was sinking. He could feel it dropping. By now it was somewhere in the region of his bowels, likely to be expelled on his next visit to a latrine. He was experiencing a feeling that he identified as "terrible dread." There wasn't a Good Omen that he could discern anywhere. Whereas there were a lot of distinctly Bad Omens.
Maria. His first and, therefore, legal wife. They'd been married nearly ten years now. She was a true orphan—parents dead, no aunts and uncles. A hired girl in a dairy. Mutti would have been furious that he chose such a wife. But she'd been so cute, and she smelled intriguingly like cheese. Where he got the idea of telling the pastor in Bindersleben that he was an orphan from Breslau himself, he couldn't even recall any more.
He'd already been making good money on the road. With no one to spend it on but himself, he had quite a bit saved, which impressed the Bindersleben pastor. He bought the lease of a little cottage with a garden and set her up in her own little cheesemaking business. Fancy cheeses, soft cheeses, for the weekly Erfurt market. When the Swedish army came through in 1631, she'd had a setback, because the foragers confiscated every cow in the village of Bindersleben, but they left the people unharmed. Cows could be replaced. They rejoiced at the births of four children; mourned the death of one of them. Little Margaretha, their Gretel, in 1631, had not been old enough or strong enough to survive the famine time.
Maria was a darling girl.
But, then, so was Rufina. They married in Vacha. A month after Maria's first child was born. Maria had been a bit ill-tempered during that first pregnancy and Rufina was, so, um, available every time he traveled through Vacha. Which meant that even though she was a Catholic, from the Fulda side of the town, the priest had approved her marriage to a Lutheran orphan from Breslau in September. Late September. Followed by the birth of their first child in February. Early February.
It had worked out well, though. He was able to buy the lease on a little cottage with a garden, right on the outskirts of the town, a block from the Reichsstrasse. She provided rooms to travelers and also was a spinner. They had rejoiced at the births of three children; mourned the death of one of them.
Rufina was a darling girl, too.
With Edeltraud, things had been a little more complicated. But also, in a way, easier. Old Caspar Kress at the Blue Goose in Steinau had only the two daughters and didn't really want to give either of them up. But only one son-in-law could take over the inn.
Caspar had married off Anna, the younger girl, to Thomas Diebolt, the younger son of a prosperous Gelnhausen innkeeper, the year before. Thomas had moved in and would take over the inn. His father had bought out a half-share; that money went to the dowries for the two daughters—which meant, of course, that Diebolt got half of his expenditure returned to the family for investment right away. The other half of the inn would be divided between the daughters, with Thomas having the right to buy Edeltraud out when the time came.
So far, so good. But Caspar would still have lost his second daughter when she married and moved away. Which would have been a small tragedy. Edeltraud was an excellent cook and waitress. So he had seen possibilities in his older daughter's interest in a courier. A man who traveled the Reichsstrasse and would leave her at home. Even though Caspar was a Calvinist, he made things right with the minister when it turned out that the courier, an orphan from Breslau, was a Lutheran. Thomas and Anna were happy too, since she was content to continue working at the inn after her marriage and they wouldn't have to find the capital to buy out her quarter-share when old Caspar died.
They married in July of 1629. Late July. Little Caspar was born early the next January, but he was sickly from the start and soon died. Since then, though, Edeltraud had given him three healthy, lively sons. Since old Caspar's death, she continued to live and work at the inn, her children penned up in a little room behind the kitchen along with Anna's two. Her quarter-share of the profits, above and beyond what he could contribute, made a decent income, with no rent or food to pay for out of pocket.