She stood up. In the cradle, Herburgis was starting to fuss.
"I've told him that what he does in Vacha and Steinau is his business. I'll keep my word on that. But if he thinks that he's ever going to acquire another 'darling girl,' he'd better think again."
Grantville
"Cunz," Clara asked Pastor Kastenmayer's son. "How much danger is there that one of these days the pastors from Grantville and Badenburg, Bindersleben and Vacha and Steinau, might all get together—at a conference or something—and compare notes on Wackernagel and his multiple families? That all of it could come out?"
"Well . . . I'm speaking as a lawyer, now. Not to the morals of the matter."
"Yes."
"It's not very likely that their pastors would ever be at the same ministerial conference, since Rufina is Catholic and Edeltraud is Calvinist. Getting them together at one conference is more . . . ecumenical, I think the Grantvillers call it . . . than anything likely to happen in our lifetimes. If Maria's pastor ever got together with Steffan Schultheiss in Badenburg, there wouldn't be a problem. Maria was dead before he married your niece. That's okay—it's fine with the church if widowers remarry. Even rapidly, when they have children to take care of. Papa married Salome a lot sooner after my mother died than Martin is marrying Helena."
"Wesley?" Clara asked that evening.
"Mmm?" Her husband's head was bent over a pile of papers he had brought home from the office.
"You know that record keeping system that Jenny Maddox has in the Grantville Vital Statistics Office? The one with cards with holes punched around the edge, so you can pull out the ones you want with a wire rod?"
"Umhmm."
"Would something like that work for the whole SoTF. Or even the whole USE?"
Wes finally raised his head and focused his eyes on his wife. "I don't see why not, if you had a centralized office. People will still need the records locally, of course, so they shouldn't send in the only copy. But there's really no reason why they couldn't send in a duplicate. Or even two duplicates. One at the level of the provincial governments and one at the national level. It would take a lot of clerks to track it, of course. Increase the cost of printed forms a bit."
"Before the marriage takes place? Sort of like calling the banns, but with a . . . wider reach?"
"Sure, you could do it that way." Wes subsided back into his paperwork.
Clara settled the nursing Maria Eleonor a little more comfortably in her arms. A wolfish grin crossed her face. She took a silent vow to make it her personal project to see that the USE developed a system of centralized and cross-referenced marriage records.
Just as soon as possible.
Martin Wackernagel certainly had all the wives he needed.
Probably more than he needed, but there was nothing she could do about that without ruining her niece's future.
What did Kortney Pence say all the time? Yes. Prevention, the best medicine.
Frankfurt am Main
Wackernagel would have liked to return to Frankfurt by a different route. One that didn't involve Vacha and Steinau.
That, however, would have caused him to miss any number of scheduled pickups and deliveries. So he just made sure that they didn't stop in either of those towns.
This measure should have gotten him, and everyone else, to Frankfurt without incident.
Except that Andrea Hill buttonholed him in Fulda with the news that Liesel Bodamer was bound and determined to go to Frankfurt and find her friend Emrich Menig. Since the episode the previous October when she tried to follow Dagmar and Gertrud, but had been caught, she had tried four more times. Not in the middle of winter—the girl had enough sense not to want to freeze to death. But three times since early April.
"Menig's with your sister and her husband, isn't he?" Frau Hill asked.
Wackernagel had to admit that he was. Still alive. As amazing as that might be, considering the boy's inquisitive nature.
"Then take her along for a visit, please."
He shrugged. What was one more?
* * *
Mutti was happy. Her son Martin had brought home a wife. She was ecstatic. The wife was Lutheran. From an important guild family in Badenburg. Closely related to the wife of the former SoTF civilian administrator in Fulda. With a dowry and income from her late father's shop, to boot. How could he have done better?
Well, perhaps it would have been ideal if she wasn't encumbered by her half-brother and half-sister. Not to mention the four other children who were in her care. Nieces and nephews, presumably, since they called her "Auntie." Odd that they called Martin "Papa," but maybe they remembered their late mother better than they did their father. Helena said that she had died only six months ago. Poor little orphans.