Bryant ignored her. "And after we got married, I thought, she would obey me, at least. We left that in the ceremony. I thought that after she agreed to be married by Brother Green, she'd change over to Baptist, but she won't. Just because, she says, I hardly ever go myself, so why should she change?"
"Well," Veda Mae said, "I'm Methodist myself, so I don't think that you should really complain about that. After all, Methodist is really the right church. The others just sort of try. And it's teetotal too, like the Baptists, or it should be. Though I have my doubts about the Reverends Jones. Maybe you could change."
Bryant glared at her.
"Get that expression off your face, Bryant Holloway," Veda Mae said. "I'm your cousin and old enough to be your grandmother, so I can say what I please. Especially when it's the truth. There's no reason for her to change churches."
"Plus, now she wants to go back to work. She has more education than I do and wants to show it off, I suppose."
"Maybe that's why she doesn't want to sleep with you," Veda Mae suggested. "Having another baby would interfere. But I already told you what I think of women who have more schooling than their husbands. I know what it leads to. I went through it myself."
"So I'm stuck, I guess. She'll never do anything to give me a reason to divorce her, now that we're married. Well, probably not. She acts as prim and prissy as old Wes Jenkins himself, but… You know. She wouldn't ever have been to my taste, up-time. I would never even have asked her out. The only reason I did was that she was the only American woman that I could date in Rudolstadt that fall."
Veda Mae nodded. "There's this guy here in Grantville," she said. "He's a foreigner, but not a Kraut. He's working for Gary. His name is Jacques-Pierre Dumais, and he's pretty nice. A good listener, as Oprah would have said. Maybe it would help if you could talk some of these things out with him."
She felt pretty pleased with herself, for a change. Jacques-Pierre was always so grateful for introductions. He was anxious to get to know more Americans, he said, to improve himself and get to understand how they did things. That was a really proper attitude for an immigrant to take.
Humble.
PART THREE
October 1634
Innumerable force of spirits armed
Chapter 13
Fulda
"There's not a place to stay anywhere in Fulda." Simon Jones' voice was very glum. "One of those 'no room at the inn' situations. We should have thought ahead. It's been in all the papers, after all. Henry Dreeson's little motorcade arrived early this afternoon. All the bright lights and would-be bright lights of Buchenland County have crammed themselves into town."
"Aw, shit." Okay, that might not be elegant. But it was exactly how Ron Stone felt. They'd been riding up and down hills all day. "I'm pooped. What next? Any place to camp?"
"There's not any place to hang by your fingernails, the way it looks. We'd better plan on going to the next village and hope someone has a spot. I sort of feel like we should try to say hello to Henry, but I don't think we could get anywhere near him."
"That probably means that his tour is a big success. I hope it is. You can say hello to him when he gets back to Grantville. To Ronnie and him both. Has anybody heard anything about the abbot yet?"
"Not a clue. Not one single everlovin' clue."
"Oh, well. Too bad we don't have an ATV. We'd be getting home a lot sooner than we will riding these poor beaten-down rental horses."
Gerry Stone just kept plodding along, not paying any real attention to the conversation. Artemisia Gentileschi and her daughter followed him, their heads drooping.
Suddenly, Ron pulled on the reins. His horse stopped, so everyone behind him stopped, too. They didn't have much choice. "Just a minute."
The Reverend Jones frowned slightly. He knew what happened when that gleam appeared in Ron's eye. It wasn't a new phenomenon. When Ron was in the lower grades, Jones had heard all about it from his brother David, who was principal of the elementary school. When Ron was in middle school… When Ron was in high school… And then, these last months in Venice and Rome, he'd seen the results for himself. He opened his mouth. "Whatever you're thinking…"
"We're not going on past Fulda, hoping to find an inn with space somewhere further along. It's already late and we're worn out, all of us. By the time we get around the city, the places on the other side will already be full with people coming from the other direction who know there won't be places to stay in Fulda itself and pulled over early. Everybody turn around. We'll backtrack a little."
"We've already checked with every inn along here," Simon protested.
"Yeah. That's right. Follow me."
"Barracktown?" Simon Jones exclaimed.
"It's obvious, when you think about it. All those orange uniforms out guarding VIPs means a whole batch of empty bunks in the barracks."
"We can't."
"Sure we can. You're a preacher from Grantville." He pointed his thumb. "She's a famous artist from Italy." He grinned. "The obligation of hospitality. Down-timers take it seriously. Just let me nose around and find someone I knew before we left for Venice last winter. Leave it to 'Stone the Golden-Tongued' or whatever some poet in a heroic epic might call me. If I didn't learn anything else from Sandrart-actually, to be honest, I learned quite a bit from him-he really improved my schmooze quotient."
"Hell, if that doesn't look like an Old West general store! What's it doing in Barracktown? Hold up, everyone." Ron dismounted with something of a groan and tossed his reins to Gerry. He was back ten minutes later with a young down-time woman following him. With something of a flourish, he bowed to Jones. "We're in luck. It's the sutler's cabin. The new guy remodeled. Everybody left in Barracktown seems to be shopping. Reverend Jones, may I have the privilege of presenting to you Antonia Kruger. She's married to Sergeant Johnny Furbee, who goes to your church in Grantville."
Antonia produced something that might have been a curtsey, if curtseys only involved a two-inch bob rather than a sweeping bend of the knees, and averred that she was honored by the privilege. She also took Signora Gentileschi and Signorina Constantia off to her own cabin, after having hauled a couple of half-grown boys out of the store, one to take the horses to the stables and the other to take the men to the barracks.
"Told you," Ron said, as they tucked into ham sandwiches. "Piece of cake."
Gerry looked at him. "It's rye bread."
"Whatever."
Buchenland
"Y'know," Mark Early remarked. "If Freiherr von Schlitz wasn't in jail again for plotting against the government of the SoTF, he'd hate this. Absolutely hate it."
Orville Beattie grinned. "Yup. Henry's holding up real well. Rip-roarin' job of stumping. God, what a stroke of luck that we managed to get Constantin Ableidinger to come at the same time. The newspapers are eating it up. 'Handing on the torch'-ain't that how the Magdeburg paper put it? I've got to say that Jason Waters in Frankfurt has been earning his keep, too." He looked at the back of the wagon bed that Henry was standing on. "What do they call it-what the Kastenmayer boy is doing?
"Simultaneous translation."
"I thought that was sign language."
"They do it from one language to another, too. Gets the words out in the second language while the audience can still hang onto the tone of voice that the speaker was using when he said them in the first language."
"Then when Henry gets tired, Ableidinger booms at them for a while."
"We ought to get some great publicity when Henry goes down to Frankfurt to meet Ronnie."
"If we don't, Wes wasted a lot of money on flyers. Wackernagel wangled the printing contract for his brother-in-law. Jason Waters promised to get it into the Frankfurt papers. We'll send a messenger down when the motorcade reaches Gelnhausen. We're pacing ourselves. Mainz is going to radio through when Ronnie gets onto the Main barge there, so we can stage an impressive reunion."