Martin sat down on the other end of the kitchen bench. "So far, your aunt has not carried out her threat to tell."
"So far, I haven't married you."
They looked at one another for a while.
"What you do in Steinau and Vacha will be your own business."
He looked at her sharply.
"We can see Pastor Schultheiss and have him start calling the banns before you leave this time. It takes three Sundays."
Badenburg, June 1635
"Actually, Cunz, it's really easier for me, don't you see, to marry Helena than it would be for me to explain the whole thing to either Rufina or Edeltraud?"
"I have no doubt at all." Cunz Kastenmayer smiled. "Have you tried explaining it to Steffan Schultheiss?"
"Helena thought it would be more prudent not to bring it up. She said that it might trouble his conscience." Martin looked at him anxiously. "You don't feel like you have to, do you?"
Cunz looked at him. "Why simpler?"
"They both think they are already married to me. When, actually, they aren't. Plus, I would have to choose between them—which marriage to legalize—which I could scarcely bear to do, because they are both such darling girls."
"Is Helena?"
"Is Helena what?"
"A darling girl?"
"She was, I thought. Last summer."
Clara Bachmeierin verw. Stade and verh. Jenkins traveled to Badenburg, her new daughter in her arms, to express the view that she was more than a little upset by this plan. Considering that the man had two other wives, which she told Helena months and months ago!
She arrived in the middle of a family battle.
"I'm not going to leave school and apprentice to a pewterer," Jergfritz proclaimed. If you try to make me, I'll just run away from home." He stopped a minute. "Like Liesel Bodamer did. Martin told me about that."
"You're the heir, now that Dietrich is dead."
"Let someone else inherit it." At thirteen, he was too young to focus on the economic realities, Clara thought.
But he wasn't.
"David Schreiner is going to marry Aunt Marliese next month."
Clara nodded. This was true. Maria Elisabetha and David had been betrothed since the previous autumn. She had told Wesley's family about it at Thanksgiving. She remembered that.
"He's the city clerk. He says that I can live with them while I finish Latin school. And he'll see to a university education for me. And find me a clerkship when I'm done, if I do well." Jergfritz looked up defiantly. "And if you let me stay with them, they'll take Hanswilli and Mag, too."
Those were Agnes's two oldest children by Willibald Fraas. Johann Willibald and Maria Agnes.
Now the boy had his arms crossed over his chest. "That will just leave Hansjerg and the baby for the rest of you to worry about. I think it's a good deal, myself. And I made it with them. Without help from any of you," he waved one arm, encompassing everyone else in the room, "grown-ups."
"But," Helena sputtered, "how did you figure all this out?"
"If the king of Sweden could fight battles when he wasn't any more than a year older than me, I figured that at the bare least I ought to be able to take care of myself." He reverted to looking like a sulky child. "I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my life in a pewter shop."
"I'm not about to marry Johann Drechsler just because he's a competent pewterer."
"But . . . what else can you possibly do, NaNa? He's willing . . ."
"Uncle . . . you didn't have to live with it." She turned her head. "But you did, Helena. You heard it every single day of your life, the way Mama and Willibald fussed at each other because he hated so much that it really wasn't his business. Do you think I want to live that again? What's so wonderful about this shop?"
"It's been in the family for generations untold. Our grandfather, our grandmother's father, and before him."
"I don't see you volunteering to marry Drechsler and take it over. You're marrying your courier and going off to live in Frankfurt."
"And if I did marry Drechsler, who's to say that Hanswilli or Hansjerg will want to be pewterers, any more than Jergfritz does? That's years away."
"What do you want, then?" Clara asked.
"Let's sell him the business on a mortgage. Drechsler can run it well enough to make a good living for himself. I think that with the changes in the guild rules that Karl Schmidt has pushed through, the Badenburg city council will let us do that. All of us will get some income. Not a lot, but some. Johann's sister Dorothea is already married to Jorgen Fraas, who's Willibald's nephew. Well, his father was Willibald's half-brother. So it's all in the family, sort of, even if he doesn't marry in."