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Advice and Counsel

Written by Virginia DeMarce

Grantville, October 1634

"I love October's bright blue weather." The Reverend Mary Ellen Jones stood on the rectory porch, just breathing, and almost regretted it when she saw her next appointment walking down the street. It wasn't as bright and as blue in Thuringia as it had been in West Virginia, but on a good day, it was good enough. More than good enough. Winter would start in earnest any day now. Each nice day was a divine blessing. It wasn't, however, an excuse for neglecting her duties.

"Thank you for coming in, Clara," she said. "I do realize that you and Wes already got married in Fulda, but since he asked my husband for a Methodist ceremony in addition to the civil one, Simon feels that we should go through the premarital counseling procedure with you."

"That is fine." Clara Bachmeierin, now the wife of Wes Jenkins, smiled cheerfully. "You can hardly ask me more questions than Andrea's lawyer did. Or have me fill out more affidavits swearing on oath that we really meant to do it—to get married, that is."

Mary Ellen looked at her client. Client. She was a counselor today, not a minister. Clara was not a parishioner, not a Methodist, at least not yet.

She tried to prepare thoroughly for these sessions. Increasingly, since the Ring of Fire, they were divided in two. It had become quite clear that the down-time brides chosen by up-time Methodist men were usually far more willing to speak frankly to her than to her husband. She thought briefly of Kortney Pence's description of the utterly cold fish that Clara's first husband had apparently been, realizing reluctantly that she would have to ask whether this background was, er, inhibiting Clara's ability to respond to her second husband. Postponing that task, she started marching through the other sections of the manual. The status of marriage in civil law . . . that would be a good starting point.

"I think that I understand the legal theory behind your marriage," she said. "However, West Virginia law did not have anything comparable, so if you could give me the background from your perspective . . ."

"Then we were married," Clara finished up. "And after that . . ."

Mary Ellen reminded herself that the seventeenth century did not do euphemisms. It just didn't. Maybe, somewhere in Germany, there was someone who understood what a euphemism was, at least as a literary device. She would ask that nice Lutheran minister, Herr Meyfarth, who was also a poet, if he came to town again. The people she had met, though . . . Maybe in her spare time, between two o'clock and four o'clock in the morning, she could establish the Grantville Society for the Care and Feeding of Polite Euphemisms. Maybe . . . maybe she was a little delirious.

"That's fine," she said. "I don't need the details."

"Have you ever thought about how much skin people have?" Clara asked. "Somehow, in all that I imagined doing after I married Wesley some day, I imagined doing those things while Wesley was wearing a nightshirt and I was wearing a shift. But Wesley was sitting on the cot while he took his shoes off and he said that it was not just narrow, meant for one person to sleep on, but also tippy, so we had better slide the straw pallet onto the floor if we did not want to fall out of bed. So we did and I stood there, at one end of it. He came to me and took my shift off. He folded it up neatly and put it on the cot. Then he held me, just the way he had done when we danced at Christmas. It is really rather surprising to find out all at once how much skin there is on a person's body."

"Ah." Mary Ellen swallowed hard.

"And after . . . You never met my first husband Caspar. He was dead before the Ring of Fire happened. But he was older and, I think now, he perhaps did not really want a wife, even after he agreed that his mother should find him one because she was not really well and could no longer keep house for him. He always kept his own room, with his things around him. And went back there, to sleep. It was a little lonely, sometimes."

"I can understand that." Mary Ellen would happily have strangled the late Caspar Stade, if he weren't already dead.

"So, after . . . I said to Wesley, 'Bitte, geh' doch nicht weg. Bleib' bei mir.' So foolish. We were locked in a pantry that was not very big at all. Where could he have gone? But I couldn't help it."

Grasping at her memorized counseling routines for sustenance, Mary Ellen asked, "Was Wes, ah, responsive to your concerns?"

"He said, 'You couldn't pry me away with a crowbar.'"

In spite of herself, Mary Ellen smiled.

"So then we went to sleep. I was rather embarrassed the next morning," Clara said. "I waked—woke—up feeling . . ." She paused and searched for a word. "Feeling . . . unsure. Thinking that I had perhaps been more than a little crazy when I made our marriage the night before, when Wesley had not asked me. Especially since nobody had come back to torture us, so perhaps there had been no emergency to justify what I did."

"He hadn't asked you?" This was news to Mary Ellen.

"Not with words. With his eyes, he asked me the first time we met each other. It was strange. I was by the window. He was on the other side of the room, by the mantel. Everyone was standing up during the meeting because the cleaners had taken all of the furniture out of the conference room so they could mop and polish the floor. Sun came through the window and reflected from his spectacles, but I could see his eyes. With his eyes he said, 'I admire you. I want you. Come.' and with his mouth he said, 'Brief me.' With my mouth, I answered about the political problems of the abbot of Fulda and with my mind I thinked—thought—that I do not want to die before I have married this man. It was very strange, I assure you. As if I were in two different worlds at once."

"I, ah, yes. Well, I'm sure that it must have been."

Mary Ellen told herself not to sputter. She grasped the arm of her chair tightly. For the hundredth time at least since the Ring of Fire she reminded herself that seventeenth-century Germany was before the nineteenth century. That people in the here and now casually said the kinds of things that the Victorians had been at such pains to exile from parlor conversation. That talking to down-timers was like talking to the kind of late twentieth century young people who gathered in singles bars or populated bad television shows. That, if cultural historians had realized this, the Victorian era would never have gotten such a bad rep. The modern civilized world had owed those bowdlerizers a lot. As she forced herself to relax, Clara went right on talking.

"As I said, he had not asked me, even though his hands had also already said things to me that his mouth did not, every time he helped me mount my horse, or get down from the pony cart. So. I thought that maybe he would be angry. Instead, though, he said that he had waked—woken—up a lot of mornings dreaming that I was in bed with him. He said that it was much better to have me really there than just dreaming about it. Then he explained how much better it was. Mostly, though, his German lessons did not have words to talk abut these things and my English vocabulary lessons did not have the right words, either. We had no reliable basis for a detailed discussion of what we were trying to discuss just then. So he showed me. 'Explanatory gestures,' he said. We had a lot of explanatory gestures. And he said that he wished that he had a second set of hands."

All Mary Ellen managed to do was nod. She was proud of having managed this. It was preferable, she thought, to strangling where she sat.

"It was very comforting to know that Wesley had no regrets about being married to me." Clara paused. "My husband allayed my concerns entirely. It was also enjoyable. I felt much better after he explained how he felt."

Mary Ellen turned bright red by the time Clara finished explaining the precise sequence of events that had made her feel much better. "I'm sure," she said, searching for some suitably neutral comment, "that your happiness pleases Wes."

"It seems to," Clara answered with obvious satisfaction. "He says to me that I am 'just a cuddly little bundle of sexiness.' He finds this good."

Mary Ellen managed to transform her reaction to this unexpected insight into the nature of the Jenkins marital relationship into a discreet cough. No matter what Clara's first marriage had been like, it was pretty clear that lingering inhibitions would be way down toward the bottom of any listing of her potential matrimonial pitfalls.

"I think that we can probably skip over the rest of the chapter in the counseling manual that provides advice on the importance of expressing physical affection in a Christian marriage," she commented dryly. "Ah, what differences between you do you think might cause problems in your relationship?"

Clara cocked her head a little to one side. "Wesley is much more orderly than I am. That is a difference. I found that out right away. However, all I have to do is be more orderly myself, so I do not see that it will be a problem. When I waked—woke—up the second time the morning after we married, I wiggled away and shaked—shook—my leg that had been at the bottom of the pile of legs and my arm that had been under Wesley's head being a pillow until they were not numb any more. Then I saw that all his clothes were neat, so I quickly picked up all three petticoats I had dropped on the floor the night before and folded them up. Also my bodice and skirt and jeans in a pile. And found the pieces of hempcloth which the soldiers had used to tie us up and folded them next to the pitcher, for us to use to wash with, if Wesley thought we could spare some of the water. And I found my shoes and stockings and put them by the jeans. That was while I was looking under the cot to see if there was any vessel that we could use as a chamber pot."

I will not giggle, Mary Ellen thought. Not even hysterically. A slight gurgle ...