Sveta shook her head. John's family was Catholic, but her father wasn't sufficiently interested in her to care about that.
"Right then. Sveta, you write your father asking his permission, and thanking him nicely for giving it. We'll post that off and set about posting the banns."
"And I'll start planning the wedding," Suzanne said.
****
Later that evening Sveta entered the kitchen with the letter for her father. It'd been a surprisingly easy letter to write, but while she'd chewed over how to explain becoming pregnant to a man she wasn't even betrothed to, she'd been reminded of something Julia had said.
She walked over to the table where Mama had spread out the contents of a large cardboard box, and sat opposite her. "Mama."
Suzanne looked up. "Yes, dear?"
"Who is Donetta?" Sveta didn't like the look that flashed across Mama's face. It looked too much like she'd bitten into something sour.
"Where did you hear that name, dear?"
Sveta recognized evasion when she heard it. Did that mean Donetta had been someone important in John's life? "Julia was asking me what it was like making love with John, and Janie was telling her to stop embarrassing me, but Julia said Janie wanted to know if he'd learned anything from Donetta just as much as she did."
Suzanne stared at Sveta, her eyes opened wide for a moment before she blinked and shaking her head. "No, they couldn't have, neither of them would have been more than thirteen or fourteen." She smiled ruefully at Sveta. "Sorry, ignore what I just said. Madam Donetta Leasure nee Frost had an affair with John right under her fiance's nose a few months before they were due to marry. Things got a bit messy when her fiance realized what was going on, and we had to ship John out of town until after the wedding for his own safety."
Sveta couldn't imagine a man marrying a woman who had a relationship with another man while they were betrothed, not unless there was a good reason. "Was her family very rich?"
"Donetta's parents? They run the tack shop in town."
So, if her family wasn't rich, that only left one reason why the man had married her. "Was she very beautiful?"
"She certainly thought so," Suzanne snorted. "You don't need to feel jealous of Madam, dear. She and her fool of a husband were left up-time."
Sveta wanted to protest that she wasn't jealous, she was just curious. She was left wondering what John had felt for Donetta. "Thank you for telling me. What is it you're doing?"
****
Back in her room Sveta pulled out her Bible and searched for the "destroy after reading" letter. When she'd first read it, she'd thought John was just making jokes at his mother's expense, but now she realized that John just knew his mother.
She glanced down at the list again. After two hours spent flicking through the wedding file Mama had been putting together ever since the birth of her first daughter, Sveta now understood his warning that his mother would insist on a "white wedding with all the trimmings."
September, somewhere en route to Poland
Puss sat in his tent looking at the photographs of the wedding. Sveta looked beautiful. The white princess-style off-the-shoulder dress suited her and he was glad that she'd let his mother have the wedding she'd dreamed of giving his sisters. Losing both of them left up-time had hit his mother hard, which was one reason he'd been sure she'd willingly accept Sveta. That Sveta was carrying her first grandchild had just been the icing on the cake.
And speaking of icing on cake, Mom had sent him a piece of the wedding cake. He savored it as he bit into it. It was a proper fruitcake, and mom had remembered to cut him a piece with plenty of marzipan. While he let the almond flavored icing dissolve in his mouth he checked the rest of the photos. His old friend from school, James Warren, was there with his wife Kelli, and their new baby. He was glad James had accepted his request to be his stand-in; there was nobody he trusted more, and if James had so much as thought about giving Sveta more than a peck on the cheek, Kelli would have decked him.
The thought made him smile. He was getting very possessive about his Sveta. It'd just be nice if he could believe she felt the same about him. But he knew she had only married him for the sake of the baby.
Two weeks later, outside Swiebodzin, Poland
Puss took advantage of the short break to sort through the latest package from home. There was the usual re-supply of the essentials-cake, coffee, cookies, sugar, hard candy, and toilet paper-as well as some writing paper, pens and ink. But more importantly, there were letters from home. Puss distributed everything else amongst his belt webbing and saddlebags, but kept the letters separate. He selected Sveta's and pushed the rest into a jacket pocket.
Breaking the seal he was soon back in Grantville watching the movie made from a screenplay he'd written while he was on the war bonds treadmill. According to Sveta, and she would know, as she'd had the task of typing up his hand-written drafts, they'd actually followed his final screenplay relatively closely. Even to the extent of actually filming the finale at the very castle he'd used as his model. He just wished he'd been there with Sveta to see it.
"Trelli, get your men together."
The sudden thump on his back brought Puss back to the present. "What's happening?" he asked as he hastily folded Sveta's letter and put it safely away.
"Some of the auxiliaries and men of the Gray Adder have run amok and are sacking the town." Sergeant Johannes Coper, the platoon sergeant, didn't seem too concerned that the Finnish auxiliary cavalry attached to 3rd Division had run amok, but he was clearly upset that proper USE soldiers had joined them. "The general has ordered the division in to deal with them."
Puss glanced in the direction of Swiebodzin. It wasn't as if there had been a long siege or anything that would normally justify sacking the place. He turned to ask Sergeant Coper some more questions, but he'd already moved on, which meant he'd better get a move on himself. "Behrns, Cleesattel, Klein, Poppler, get your gear together and saddle up."
****
They entered Swiebodzin behind the division's own cavalry. The MPs didn't do any fighting; the cavalry did all of it. They just got to pick up the pieces.
Puss badly wanted to throw up, but he had nothing left in his stomach. The dead adults had been bad enough, but the children had been much worse. Why would anybody want to bayonet a baby? He rewrapped the baby in its swaddling and placed it beside what he assumed was his mother, who'd been raped and murdered. He stepped back, and as he looked down upon the dead mother and son, he thought of Sveta and their baby, and he wanted to kill those responsible.
But that wasn't the worst. That came when he found a girl who couldn't have been more than eight. She was naked, battered and bruised, bleeding from both the vagina and anus, and white with shock. He'd carried her shivering body to the first aid station the medics had set up in the town square. She didn't make a sound the whole time. He wasn't even sure she knew what was happening to her.
****
Puss hadn't felt anything when he helped lead the twenty, mostly still drunk, rioters who'd been caught in the act to the fence line in a pasture just outside Swiebodzin. There, he'd helped tie the prisoners to the wooden fence before retiring behind the firing line. From there he'd watched the executions by volley gun before advancing to supervise men of the Gray Adder regiment as they collected the shredded remains of their former colleagues and dumped them into the mass grave they'd dug earlier.
It was different when it came to the officers. For a start, they were to be executed by a regular firing squad made up of members of the volley gun batteries.
Ex-Captains Hermann auf der Mauer and Traugott Nachtigall were lined up either side of their commanding officer, ex-Major Johannes Dietrich.