"She's my wife and it is no business of yours to interfere."
"Why is it not my business? She is the daughter of my husband."
Lenore stood a little helplessly. Clara had read Bryant the riot act. Now, he was starting to focus his generalized anger against Grantville's immigrants against her.
"She is my husband's daughter. She is family. I will call the police if you harm her."
Bryant clenched a fist.
Lenore shrank back. If Bryant hurt Clara, Dad would… Dad would be perfectly capable of killing anyone who hurt Clara. Dad had a temper and when it came to Clara he was… well, more that way than ever. Protective.
The doorbell rang. She ran so fast that her stocking feet slipped a little on the waxed linoleum in the hall. She saw her boots sitting there and slipped them back on.
Brother Al Green from the Baptist church. Caroline Jones' husband, Trent Dorrman. Standing there, clutching a supply of helpful pamphlets, back once more in another effort to do counseling with Bryant. They had been here before, around New Year's. She didn't have any hopes that their attempts would do any good, but she had never been so happy to see anyone in her life.
"Come in," she said. "Please, please, please, please, please."
The situation had been defused, if that was the word for it. Brother Green was walking Clara back home. Trent had stayed to supper. Nothing but scrambled eggs. Fried apples. She hadn't had time to do anything more.
She left them at the table while she took Weshelle into the nursery to get her ready for bed. When she came back, Trent was just going.
She looked at him, thanked him, and asked how Caroline was. Caroline was fine, he said.
Once the door closed, she looked back at Bryant.
It had been the wrong thing to say. Something else to set him off.
"Caroline," he said. "Prim, prissy Caroline. Meddling Caroline. Caroline who sicced Dorrman onto me in the first place."
"I'm sure that she didn't have anything to do with it. She's a Methodist like me, not a Baptist."
"Who else would have? Miss Methodist who refused to obey my wishes and join the Baptist church? Tell me that."
"Maybe Brother Green thought of it by himself. I'll clear off and do the dishes."
He sat there at the table, watching her.
"I guess I'll go on, now. I'll sleep on the cot in Weshelle's room."
"No." He grasped her arm. "Damned if you will."
"Bryant, I don't want this."
"I don't give a fuck what you want."
"I guess I knew that already."
"If you think I'm going to let you near that phone again and sit through a rerun, think again."
"I do not want this."
"You gave up the right to 'don't want' the day you said 'I do.' "
She got up the next morning and got Weshelle ready to take to Chandra's. Got herself ready to go to work.
Chandra came to the door and looked at her. "I still have some cover stick," she said, brushing the small birth mark on her cheek. "If you want to use it. Silly to try to save it for special occasions. I don't go to that many parties. It's probably a little dried up already."
Lenore looked at herself in the hall mirror. "Maybe I'd better."
"You'd better," Chandra said. "You don't want to accidentally run into Dad looking like that. Or have someone tell him."
Bryant stayed in town a couple of weeks this time. He wasn't home much, though. He spent a lot of his time at the fire department, of course. That was why he had come back. For lunches, he was at the Willard, talking to Veda Mae Haggerty and that Dumais man.
As far as Lenore was concerned, that was fine. He was welcome to be anywhere as long as he wasn't home.
She really wished that he would never come home again. She wasn't even unhappy that he spent his evenings at the 250 Club.
He came home at night, though. But she had the cover stick.
He was not going to make her quit work.
She was glad when he went back to Naumburg, even though it would only be for ten days. He would be back early in March.
And she managed to avoid her father.
She managed to avoid Lola, too. Lola did not have the kind of temperament to go along with pretending that nothing was wrong. She'd have rung the curtain down, Bryant's sister or not.
"We ought to have done something right away," Donella Hardy said. She looked around at the small group of women who worked with Lenore. "We all suspected that something was wrong. Knew it, really. We ought to have told someone the first time. It's not as if we couldn't tell. Even with the makeup."
"Especially with the makeup," Catrina said. "Lenore doesn't usually bother to wear any at all. Maybe if we had done something then, it wouldn't have come to this."
"So are we all agreed to be ashamed of ourselves?" Andrea Constantinault had a tendency to take charge of things.
"Yeah," Faye said. "But I think we ought to do something more than that. Let's talk to Judge Riddle and Preston Richards. Maurice Tito. There ought to be something we can do. We've got a couple of weeks to get something in place before Bryant comes back again."
"Preferably something that keeps Wes Jenkins out of it," Linda Beth Rush added. "Wes has a temper. He always has had. Personally, I think we ought to call Lola."
"Lola?" Andrea had been one of the guests at Tom and Rita Simpson's wedding, not someone native to Grantville. Even nearly four years after the Ring of Fire, she didn't always come up with the connections right away.
"Bryant's sister. She works for Jim McNally, the optician."
"Won't she be more likely to try to shield him?"
Linda Beth shook her head. "There were problems with Bryant, even when he was a kid. Torturing kittens kinds of problems. He seemed to be normal enough when he grew up, as far as I know. But he had problems with a couple of his girlfriends over in Fairmont. Lola's a realist. She'll want Weshelle out of there."
Pastor Kastenmayer looked out over the gathering. It had ended up being a couple of dozen people, even though nearly half of them were his up-time catechumens and their girlfriends. A full half of them, counting sisters of the girlfriends. Walpurga Hercherin had arranged it.
Walpurga was perfectly capable of arranging such a thing. She would be capable of managing a household. A large household, with servants. That, of course, was what she had been expected to do, as the daughter of a village councilman, a Vollbauer. What she had been prepared to do, before the destruction of Quittelsdorf. She was standing behind Hedwig Altschulerin, a determined expression on her face.
The opinion she had expressed to the pastor had been utterly pragmatic. "What would you have had her do? An abandoned fiancee, working as a servant in Meiningen, considered fair game by half the men in the town, probably. Jarvis offered her a safe place. He was prepared to bring her here and marry her where it's legal. He's willing to work a job and support her and the baby as best he can. He is prepared to fight to protect her. He has shown that. He's willing to do things for her harder than that, such as going to talk to you. She figures she's well off. She is well off. Even with his father and brother making trouble for them, she's a lot better off than if she had stayed south of the Thueringerwald. Even if some day the law declares her a concubine rather than a wife, she is still better off."
He had told her that he would contact the chief of police and request riot protection for the occasion of the baptism.
She had looked at him then.
"Mitch and his friends have all been in the army, too. If there's more trouble, they can handle it."
He had repeated that he would call upon the police force.
"If the police handle it, that's well and good. If they don't.. ."
Pastor Kastenmayer had no doubt whatsoever that many of the witnesses to this baptism had come armed.
He had no doubt because Derek Blount had told Ursel Krausin who had told him.
Ursel said that the people at the 250 Club also had no doubt that many of the witnesses to this baptism had come armed. She said that, "the guys define this as a 'deterrent.' "