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Murphy's Law

Written by Virginia DeMarce

Spring, 1634

"I have to decide within the week," Leopold Cavriani said. "I have no hesitation, of course, about leaving my daughter Idelette here with the Reverend and Mrs. Wiley. She will learn practical business from Count August von Sommersburg's factor, the count being one of the clients I am serving as a consultant. However, the question of her preparation in the theory of mathematics and accounting as applied to business still remains. The thought of apprenticing her to another woman is one that appeals to me. Your up-time concept of 'role model.' However . . ."

"I can't tell you whether Aura Lee would be a good person to apprentice your daughter to, Mr. Cavriani. I've only got an eighth grade education. She's got a degree from WVU and she worked for the state government for years before she married Joe. Then she worked for the county right up until the Ring of Fire. I can't judge how good she is at her work, but they kept her on at those two jobs. They were the only ones she had during twenty years. She wasn't what they call a job-hopper." Juliann Stull looked across the table at Inez Wiley and Leopold Cavriani. Cavriani noted that the woman did not have the near-perfect teeth of so many up-timers. Hers were crooked and discolored, one of them visibly missing.

"I can talk to other people in regard to your daughter-in-law's professional qualifications," Leopold Cavriani answered. "But in regard to Idelette's training here in Grantville, I am concerned with more than that. Mrs. Wiley does not personally know the younger Mrs. Stull well." He smiled. "She did, however, suggest that no one is likely to have a more realistic appraisal of a woman's character than her husband's mother. Perhaps, even, a critical appraisal. I have learned a great deal about Mrs. Aura Lee Stull—that, for example, she is one of the daughters of Willie Ray Hudson of the Grange and thus stems from a family of political influence in Grantville. I am concerned now with her . . ."

"Morals." Inez said flatly. "Ethics. 'Role model' in that sense, as well as her education and social status. Mr. Cavriani is concerned about his daughter's well-being in all ways."

"If you're thinking about that story that went around, about what happened at the restaurant in Fairmont," Juliann answered, "it's true. That's exactly what they did, her and Joe."

"If you might pardon my ignorance," Cavriani said, "what story?"

Juliann leaned forward a little, her arm resting on the back of her chair. "It was in September. That would have been 1987. Joe called and wanted us—me, Dennis, Tom and his wife and Harlan—to come over to dinner at a fancy restaurant in Fairmont. When we got there, it was all set up. Not one of those banquet rooms but a big table set up in the regular dining room. Flowers and candles on it and stuff. With Willie Ray and Vera, Debbie and Chad, Ray and Marty and their kids arriving at the same time and the waitress taking them to the same table. And I thought, 'Oh, hell and damnation.' Pardon my French, if you will, since Methodists aren't supposed to cuss. Not even to themselves."

The heavyset old woman paused and took a drink from her root beer. For her, Cavriani thought, "old" was the right word rather than "elderly." The mother of Chief Justice Riddle, the formidable head of the Grantville League of Women Voters, was "elderly." Eleanor Jenkins, the president of the Red Cross, was "elderly." Juliann Stull was just old. Old and worn, in the way old people were worn in his own seventeenth century. She was over eighty, Mrs. Wiley had told him. Tough, but old.

"So we sat there," she continued. "The waitresses brought salads and everybody sat there being real polite about what they said. Then the waitresses brought roast beef and baked potatoes with broccoli and everybody sat there being real polite some more. It's not as if the family of the state representative had a lot in common with the family of a miner who got crippled up with black lung, started drinking too much, ran out on his family, and died in a flophouse in Florida fifteen years later. I was a cleaning lady when Joe was growing up, working two jobs to keep food on the table. The only reason I ever knew that Garland had died was that the black lung people in the regional office in Parkersburg tracked me down and told me I was entitled to widow's benefits. But everybody was real polite. Especially because the restaurant had a lot of perfect strangers in it who were eating their dinners, too. Which might be why Joe and Aura Lee had the table set up out there instead of in a banquet room."

"I think I can visualize the scene," Cavriani said. He was also keeping in mind that this woman's son Joe was currently serving as secretary of transportation for the State of Thuringia-Franconia and had become, since the Ring of Fire, a man of considerable political importance and influence in his own right, given the importance of roads and railroads in the new world that was developing. Owing little or nothing to his father-in-law's influence. From the origins his mother was now describing. With Marcus von Drachhausen, the noble son-in-law of Count August von Sommersburg, who was in turn one of Cavriani's own employers, serving as deputy secretary under him. Wheels within wheels . . .

Juliann heaved herself to her feet. "I don't mean to be rude by standing up, but I've got to straighten this bad leg out every now and then. Then, the waitresses brought the pie and coffee. Before people could go on being real polite, Joe got up and said that he and Aura Lee had gotten married at the courthouse in Charleston the week before. That the state transportation department had transferred him from Clarksburg to Morgantown, that Aura Lee had quit her job with the state and gotten on as a budget officer for Marion County, and that they'd bought a house and would be living in Fairmont."

Inez Wiley smiled.

"That just sort of laid there for a while," Juliann continued. "Then Dennis called for the waitresses to bring champagne for a toast, which sort of distracted all the other Methodists into wondering whether they really ought to drink it or not, even though there wasn't any minister at the table. That brought a little relief. And the waitresses brought fancy glasses with stems and poured the champagne and Dennis toasted the bride and groom. Then Joe said, 'Plus, we're going to have a baby in March.' And Aura Lee said, 'We didn't see any point in prolonging the agony by putting off telling you that.'"

"That's what I thought, perhaps, that you needed to hear, Mr. Cavriani, before you made your decision," Inez Wiley said. "Something else to take into consideration, perhaps, is that the only other woman in Grantville who really has the academic preparation to provide Idelette with the level of training you want for her is Carol Koch. Her mother-in-law was left up-time. But, uh, Ron and Carol got married in December 1979 and Ronella was born in June 1980. So in a way, it's six of one and a half-dozen of the other. Not to mention that neither of them is Calvinist."

"Do you have any Calvinist female mathematicians or accountants in Grantville?" Cavriani asked.

"Not as far as I know. Not up-time trained ones. Ashley Jennings was brought up PCUSA-Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, which is real liberal—and joined the Church of Christ when she married Terence Sterling, which is probably worse than not ever being a Calvinist at all. Enoch would think so, at any rate." The wife of Grantville's Free Independent Presbyterian minister and by default universal Calvinist minister smiled.

"You observed Carol in action at the Rudolstadt Colloquy, of course," Inez continued. "Shortly after that, when Leahy Medical Center in Grantville began cooperative efforts with the medical school at Jena, the faculty there asked for someone to teach statistics. So Grantville sent them almost the only person we had available to teach statistics for a year. Someone told me that when the dean looked up and saw who their new adjunct faculty member was, he came close enough to dying of apoplexy that the cooperating medical team had to be called in."

"If Mrs. Koch is in Jena, then she would not be available as—what was the word—Idelette's mentor, would she?" Cavriani asked.

"After the end of the current semester, Carol will be working for the state government. Tony Adducci has asked her to take a job at the Department of Economic Resources. Aura Lee works for the Grantville/Ring of Fire local government, so you might want to think, too, which level of government you'd rather have Idelette studying while she is with us."

Juliann, who was still standing, looked down and interrupted Inez. "I've never had a thing against Aura Lee, mind you, since that's the question Mr. Cavriani came to get answered. I don't have a thing in common with her, but nothing against her. She must have had a dozen chances, in all those years between when Joe started going out with her and she finally married him, when she could have done something that would have broke his heart and spirit. But she never did. So I'm not going to hear anyone say a word against her."

"All those years?" Cavriani asked.

Juliann switched her gaze to him. "They were already eyeing each other before Joe went into the army after he finished his junior year. Back before Grantville had this big consolidated high school. That was 1973 and she was sixteen, then. They saw each other whenever he came back and they wrote back and forth. I know that because when he got out of the army, he had a box with five years' worth of letters from Aura Lee saved up in it. Which makes me sort of think that it would have been when he was home on leave the summer of '74 that they got to the point of 'gone fishin',' instead of just 'a wishin'.' If you take my meaning. He even managed to get leave and come back to take her to her senior prom. That was '76; they cut it so close that Dennis picked him up at midnight after the prom itself was over to take him to Fairmont to catch the bus back and her father came later and picked her up from the after-prom party."

"Knowing that she had attended with Joe?" Inez asked.

"There ain't no flies on Willie Ray Hudson, Inez." Juliann picked up her root beer. "There wasn't nothing sneaky about it. I know they saw each other as regular as possible all the time she was at WVU. He got out of the army in '79. The army was the best deal anyone could have imagined for Joe. He came out with his high school diploma plus all sorts of certifications, including fire fighting. He was in transportation the whole time. Then he got the GI bill to take a technical course. She graduated in '80, right in time to land in the middle of the storm about her sister Debbie seeing Chad Jenkins and then getting married to Chad Jenkins. Which she ducked out on by getting a job in Charleston and not coming back to Grantville."

Juliann took another sip. "I guess you could put it this way. I don't think they got married because they were having a kid. Not a case of, 'you can't fool Mother Nature.' I think they decided that the time had come to have kids if they wanted them at all, so they got married once Mother Nature decided to pick up the option they gave her, so to speak."

It didn't take Leopold Cavriani long to sort through the implications of that rather convoluted statement. He still found the marriage customs of the up-timers somewhat confusing, as in this apparent case of fidelity precedent to matrimony for a period of nearly a decade and a half—not unique by any means, he knew—whereas others entered into formal matrimony and then dissolved it with quite dizzying speed. Not to mention the concept that in the up-time world, children had been regarded as an . . . optional . . . aspect of marital relations rather than their essential purpose.

"I've never had a thing against Aura Lee," Juliann repeated. "Especially not since they named their girl for me instead of for Vera Hudson."

Even though Juliann's voice was raspy from years of chain-smoking, the cream in it could have been skimmed, whipped, and spread on top of strawberry shortcake, Inez Wiley thought.

"You do not know of Barbarossa?" Count August von Sommersburg looked at the secretary of the treasury of the State of Thuringia-Franconia and blinked. The story of Barbarossa was well known. "Even the encyclopedias of the up-timers recall the emperor who is said to be sleeping beneath the Kyffhäuser mountain in northern Thuringia, not far from my own lands."

"I don't doubt that they do," Tony Adducci said. "I've just never happened to come across him myself. My wife Denise might have, or my sister Bernadette. They have more education than I do."

Leopold Cavriani looked at him, thinking that the man was extremely intelligent, although he had little formal education compared to several other of the SoTF officials, with only two years of what the up-timers called "college." This did not bother Leopold, since he had no university training at all, himself. The Cavrianis sent only those family members who appeared to be in need of a somewhat more sheltered life into the academic world.

Adducci, an UMWA man, had become widely respected since the Ring of Fire for his reading into economic issues—partly, as he said himself, courtesy of his librarian wife's research skills. He had run for election under the Fourth of July Party right away in 1631 and was surprised when Mike Stearns picked him for secretary of the treasury of the NUS, now the SoTF. One son in the army, two sons still dependent upon him, and—Cavriani smiled—a daughter whose arrival two months before had bemused her parents more than a little. Baby Rosemary was twenty-one years younger than Tony, Jr.

Since the Ring of Fire, Adducci had been diligently reading up on the financial material that his wife and sister loaded on him and complaining with some humor that the Chinese word for strife was two women in the household. For three of those years, his statement that if a daughter was added, he might as well resign like the original secretary of treasury had been considered a joke by his colleagues.

"By those writers and dreamers who have had a vision of a Germania greater than the thousand squabbling principalities of the Holy Roman Empire," Cavriani said, "Emperor Frederick Barbarossa has been considered greater than Charlemagne in some ways. If he had not been betrayed by Henry the Lion, he might have been greater in all ways. Historians say that he died as an old man during the Third Crusade, drowned while crossing a river in Asia Minor. His body was never found."

"Then what's he doing in Thuringia?" Adducci asked.

"German folklore says that he never died at all," Cavriani answered. "That he, with his heroes, is there in the bowels of the Kyffhäuser, under the ruins of the Hohenstaufen castle. That in the hour of Germany's direst need, he will reappear in all his one-time power and glory."

"Sort of like King Arthur." Tony got up to refill their coffee cups.

"Supposedly," Count August said rather ruefully, "all of this is no idle fancy. It is said that once upon a time a peasant entered into the great cavern on the south side of the mountain and saw the emperor sleeping there in a magnificent room. He was sitting in an ivory chair at a marble table. His red beard had grown right through the table. There is another story of a piper who played for him, to entertain him during his centuries of sleep, and received a hat full of gold as a reward. Or other musicians who were rewarded with poplar branches that turned into solid gold as they walked home. About every century, it is said, a living person has been admitted into the presence of the sleeping emperor."

"Was this because he was interested in current events?" Adducci asked rather drily.

"It is said that each time he asked three questions. 'Are the ravens still flying over the mountain? Are the dead trees still overhanging the cliff ? Has the old woman awakened ?' Each time, the visitor answered, 'Yes, Yes, and No.' Each time, Barbarossa replied, "Then I shall have to sleep another hundred years."

"What did each question mean?"

"The ravens led him to battle. So if they were still at his mountain, there was no battle he needed to fight. The dead trees would blossom when it was time for him to come forth. Those who study the lore of the ancients believe that the old woman was the giant druidess who confronted Drusus and prophesied that the Romans would come to disaster, who was too old to follow Widukind's retreat, so he buried her under a pile of stones with the words, 'She will come back.' Come back to prophesy disaster to the enemies of the Germans, of course."

"I think I've got it," Tony Adducci said. "Frederick Barbarossa is for you guys here in Thuringia what Jock Yablonski was for us in the United Mine Workers back in West Virginia."

Count August blinked in turn.

"Here," Tony said. "Let me tell you about Jock."

He'd tell him about Jock, Tony thought to himself. He just wished that he didn't have to tell him about Tony Boyle at the same time. Sommersburg had found that history of the Pendergast Machine in Kansas City that Melissa Mailey stuck into the books designed to teach him about the American political system a lot too inspirational already.

"His name was Jablonski, really, but he spelled it with a 'Y' so people wouldn't pronounce it wrong. Joseph Jablonski. Jock Yablonski."

Tony got up. He talked better when he was standing up, walking back and forth. "Jock was born in Pittsburgh—that was in Pennsylvania, the state just north of West Virginia. As far as geography went, it was all part of the Appalachian highlands, all part of the great coal fields. He went into the mines as a boy. His father was killed in a mine explosion. He moved up through the business side of the union. When he was only twenty-four years old, he was elected to represent fifteen thousand miners on District Five's executive board. That board made union policy. He was active in UMWA politics for nearly forty years. John L. Lewis, the greatest of the UMWA presidents, called him his right-hand man. Lewis said, 'Whenever I have trouble in the coal fields, I need him.'"

"John L. Lewis?" Cavriani asked.

"You can find him in all the encyclopedias if you look. He was famous," Tony shrugged off the interruption. "There wasn't any real democracy in electing the UMWA presidents. When Lewis died, an old man, one of the vice-presidents, stepped into the office, and he appointed Tony Boyle as vice-president, who succeeded in turn. Boyle was no militant—didn't confront the owners on safety issues, for example. He actually opposed the extension of benefits for black lung disease—coal miners' pneumoconiosis—by the Pennsylvania legislature, and was furious when Yablonski went over his head to get it passed. Called it insubordination. Boyle was also a manipulator—turned the districts into trusteeships, which meant that the membership wouldn't be allowed to vote for their district officers any more. He'd appoint them."

"I take it," Count August said, "that democracy was not universally appreciated up-time. Not even in your West Virginia."

Tony Adducci smiled grimly "You take it right. It's funny in a way. Just like you have your Barbarossa right here in Thuringia, the crisis in the conflict between Boyle and Yablonski came to a head right near Grantville. You've maybe heard people singing the song about the 'Mannington Mine Disaster.' It was at Farmington, right beyond the border of the Ring of Fire, heading east past the high school. There was a big explosion in Consolidation Coal Company's number-nine mine. Ninety-nine miners were inside; only thirteen managed to escape right away. They got eight more out later. That left the rest of them to die underground. Seventy-eight men."

He continued to pace. "It was a disaster, but it wasn't a surprise. Safety people had known for a long time that cold weather increased the danger of methane. But there weren't any special warnings; they didn't follow the federal safety regulations, either. Boyle didn't show up until more than two days later. All dressed up, with a rose in his lapel. He didn't say anything about the safety violations; he didn't speak with the families of the victims; just went back to his office in Washington, D.C. Even praised Consolidation. After fifteen more explosions, the company sealed off the mine to cut the fires off. With the men still down there."

"This, I take it, was not a popular move," Cavriani commented.

"According to Jock's son Ken, Jock said, 'But that sonovabitch Boyle. With those people dead in the mine, how could that bastard stand up and praise the company's safety record the way he did?' And Jock decided run against Boyle in the next election."

Adducci slammed his fist down on the table. "Boyle had control of the machine. Jock lost. But Tony wasn't satisfied with that. He set some goons from District Nineteen to get rid of Jock. Three months later, about, Ken wondered why his father hadn't shown up for the Inauguration Day events. He went to the house and found his father dead. And his mother and sister. Brutal. Jock had five gun shells pumped into him; his wife Margaret two; his daughter Charlotte two. They were shot in their beds. Blood all over their beds."

"Somehow," Count August commented, "most of your books about American politics do not seem to include episodes such as this."

"Of course they gloss over them, especially the school texts. That's why it's up to us to remember. What's that quote? 'People who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.' In short, then," Tony Adducci summed up, "Jock Yablonski led the fight against corruption in the UMWA. He fought against Tony Boyle and his machine. He didn't go away just because he was dead. A couple of months after he was murdered, people organized the Miners for Democracy. It tried to accomplish reform from inside the organization. Also worked to improve mine safety conditions. To get better health benefits for all miners.

"Three years later, a federal judge overturned Boyle's election on the grounds of massive vote fraud. The court ordered a new election. MFD ran a slate and won. It wasn't all over like magic, then. There was vote fraud again in District Thirty-One a year later. It was five years before Boyle was convicted of arranging the murders. As they say, 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.'"

"It is," Count August said, "a truly magnificent mythos. Worthy indeed of comparison with Barbarossa. I had not realized that you had such."

"Myth?" Tony was shocked. "I was eight years old when Boyle's thugs shot Jock Yablonski. My daddy had taken me to lots of his rallies." He reached out across the table, extending his arm and turning his hand upwards so that the count could see his palm. "I've shaken his hand. There's a snapshot at home, somewhere, showing me doing it. I was just a little kid, four or five years old, maybe. But I shook Jock Yablonski's hand myself."

He got up. "Dad's here in town. He's not in very good shape, but if you're willing to come and listen to him, he'll spin you yarns about Jock Yablonski for hours."

"Arch Moore's problem," Horace Bolender said, "was that in his last term, after 1985, he got so greedy that he didn't stay bought. He'd take a bribe from one party; then go out and take a bigger one from someone else. Now that was corruption for you—more than would fly even in West Virginia state politics. Gaston Caperton beat him in 1988. Gerry Simmons worked on Caperton's campaign. If you look at his kids, the first one was born that year and they named him Gaston C. Then the other two boys are Jay and Bobby, for Jay Rockefeller and Robert Byrd. Big time Democrats politically, those Simmonses, most of them."

"Ah," Marcus von Drachhausen asked, "what was the final disposition of this governor's corruption?"

"He was prosecuted and sentenced to five years in prison in 1990. If he'd been content with what he collected from 1969 to 1977, he'd have got away scot free. There's a lesson in that. 'Don't let your reach exceed your grasp or what's a prison for,' to misquote somebody."

"It didn't hurt Shelley, though," Norman Bell pointed out.

"Shelley?" Drachhausen raised his eyebrows.

"Arch's daughter, Shelley Capito, that's her married name. She got elected to the United States House of Representatives five years after Arch went to prison. That would have been ten years before the Ring of Fire happened. It was a political family, after all. Arch served in the House himself. You can't keep them down for long."

Drachhausen understood how that worked completely. He was, after all, married to Louisa, the elder daughter of Count August von Sommersburg. The von Sommersburg line had not survived in Thuringian politics for almost four hundred years by allowing occasional setbacks to get them down.

"One of the U.S. attorneys who prosecuted Arch came out and made some mealy-mouthed statements. Stuff like, 'Throughout the history of man, government officials have strayed from the straight and narrow. Other states have had a history in the past of having very serious corruption problems.'"

"Haw, ain't that the truth, though," Daniel Cunningham said. "Compared to New Jersey, West Virginia smelled a lot like a rose. Though, of course, Wally Barron—he was governor back in the early sixties—ended up in prison for corruption, too. Though it took the nice Nellies ten years and he eventually went down for jury tampering connected with the trials in which he was acquitted."

"The fact is, though," Bolender pointed out, "that there was just about always some do-gooder chasing down people and putting them on trial. That's one of the hazards of doing politics American-style, Drachhausen. I used to keep a scorecard. Between 1984 and 1993, the U.S. attorney's office convicted nearly a hundred state and local officials. That included five people pretty high up in the governor's office and four members of the state legislature. Nine sheriffs, thirteen deputy sheriffs. Several lobbyists or staffers. Busy little beavers, those federal prosecutors."

"The immediate problem," Bell pointed out, "is that your boss, and Marcus' boss here"—he pointed to Drachhausen—is one of those do-gooder types. Personally, I think we're going to have to keep an eye on Tony Adducci. Or he's going to be racketing around yelling about rigging of state purchasing contracts. Or about taking bribes from big companies." He threw a significant look at Drachhausen. "If they can't get you for what you actually did, they'll get you for extortion, mail fraud, obstruction of justice, or tax evasion. If we all tried to run a railroad their way, nothing would ever get done."

Bolender shook his head. "The fact remains, Arch took twenty-five thousand dollars as a political contribution on the understanding that the contributor would get a bank charter, but the corporation never got it. That's just not honest. The least you can do, when you take a bribe, is deliver the goods. Especially when you're putting on the pressure and saying that if you don't get the bribe, you'll see to it that the charter or whatever never makes it through the normal channels. It was that second part that let them get him on extortion."

"What I find most unnerving," Marcus von Drachhausen said to Bell in private after the meeting, "is not that your officials were corruptible but that, ultimately, your prosecutors indicted them and your juries convicted them."

"Hell, Marcus," Norman said. "Nobody ever claimed that it's a perfect world. You do your part. Keep an eye on Adducci for us. We'll do our part.

"Part of the problem, of course," August von Sommersburg said, "is that the county itself will become extinct at my death. As Gleichen did with the death of the last count, which has posed so many interesting administrative and legal problems for the administration of Thuringia."

"But you have daughters," Tony Adducci protested. "One thing that I do know is that back early on, when we were still the NUS rather than the SoTF, Congress changed the law so that daughters can inherit equal with sons. You were in the House of Lords then, what's the Senate now. You voted for it yourself."

"Louisa and Elena can now inherit my property. They cannot inherit my title and jurisdiction. There is a distinction."

"Well, why not?"

Count August looked a little abashed—an expression that did not sit well on the face of a man who normally resembled a portrait entitled "Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken as a Pirate."

"I was a second son. While primogeniture does not generally prevail in the Germanies as it does in England, nonetheless there is a limit to how often a small principality can be subdivided and still support its rulers. When my father died in 1603, my older brother was already married to a woman of equal birth and had two sons. He and his wife were young and healthy. I had become very fond of one of my mother's ladies-in-waiting. A noblewoman, of course, but of the lower nobility. Not of equal birth. I bargained with my brother. If he would consent to a morganatic marriage for me, I would, naturally, not have children with inheritance claims. It was done. I married in 1603. All seemed well. My brother and his wife had two more sons before his death in 1607. But all four died as children, the last of them in 1608, just a year after his death. So I became count and count I still am. But my daughters cannot become reigning countesses; they do not hold the rank."

"Your wife has been dead for years. Why didn't you remarry?"

Count August provided him an explicit, not to say somewhat embarrassing, explanation of the medical problems that, occurring as a result of advancing age, made it impossible for him to contract a canonically valid second marriage and rendered such an attempt at marriage futile for the purpose of producing heirs in any case.

Count August didn't seem to find it embarrassing at all.

It occurred to Tony that any number of Grantville men with whose wives the count had flirted unashamedly over the past three years would be most relieved to hear it. Not, of course, that he would ever violate a confidence. On the other hand, this wasn't the confessional. Perhaps just a hint, in a couple of cases, wouldn't come amiss.

Count August, however, was proceeding onward to other thoughts. Primarily those associated with his disappointment in his son-in-law, Marcus von Drachhausen. The man was turning out to be, as time went on, not to mention as the military successes of Gustavus Adolphus went on, too Saxon in his allegiance for Count August's tastes. Given the nature of the divorce laws that prevailed within the Ring of Fire, and that the laws of the Ring of Fire did not automatically assume that a wife's domicile was that of her husband, might it be possible for his elder daughter Louisa to shed this encumbrance and retain custody of their three children?

"I know that I used my position as senator to get him appointed as your deputy in the first place," the count said rather apologetically. "But I really did not have many options two years ago. Now, however, if I can arrange a divorce for Louisa once the child she is currently expecting has been delivered . . . If we get rid of him, then so can you."

"Might your daughter not object to this?"

"I can't imagine why. He's closer to my age than he is to hers, not to mention that he is often personally unpleasant. We had to accept him in order to placate Saxony in the matter of a border dispute—a lawsuit that went bad, unfortunately. If she comes to Grantville to receive its superior medical services during her delivery—why, I really do not see any pressing reason that she should leave again."

Tony advised him to consult a lawyer. Preferably two lawyers, one up-time and one down-time. He mentioned in passing that Laura Koudsi had just opened a suitable practice. Not that he would ever resort to steering, but Laura and her family were also parishioners at St. Mary's.

"Why don't you meet with both of them?" Inez Wiley suggested. "Together. I called Ron Koch and Carol has come to town for a meeting with Tony Adducci. That might give you a better idea. I'll see both of them at the League of Women Voters this noon, I'm sure. Carol would never miss it when she's here. Lunch is about the only time that working women can get together, so we keep the meetings short and snappy."

Cavriani nodded. "That might be best."

"May I make a suggestion?" Inez asked.

"Since this will profoundly affect a girl whom you have agreed to foster in your home, most certainly."

"Bring Idelette along. So you can see whether she hits it off better with one of them than the other."

The people who hit it off were Carol Koch and Aura Lee Stull. They had seen one another at meetings before, but their paths had not really crossed previously. While Cavriani, Inez, and Idelette watched with fascination, they sank deeply into shop talk, digressed into the fact that they both missed jogging even though it really wasn't necessary in a world where most people walked everywhere they went, and then meandered into children.

Although they were only two years apart in age, with Carol actually the younger, her children were several years older, so she started discussing opportunities for higher education, down-time apprenticeship possibilities, and similar matters that were clearly of enthralling interest to both women. After which they went back to shop talk and provided an entertaining version of what each knew about the adventures of the three draconian lady auditors who had taken on Franconia and triumphed over it, more or less.

"I have been lonely, a little," Carol was saying. "Almost all my friends were over in Fairmont, in the church there, and clubs. Or wives of men we knew through Ron's work, though those were more acquaintances. Pleasant to see, now and then, but not really friends. We hadn't had our house in the country here very long before the Ring of Fire and I'd never really had any reason to come west, over to Grantville. The only thing that kept me sane, that first year, was that Ron is really my best friend and always has been, ever since we met."

That led to a discussion of their meeting while she was an exchange student in Germany, the fact that they had known right away, "um, about ten minutes later," that they really must marry each other just as fast as they could persuade their respective families that it was a good idea, the negotiations with the families that took quite some time since they thought that this decision was too impulsive to be wise, and the like.

Aura Lee reciprocated with her own confidences. Her friends, too, had been in Fairmont. At the time of the Ring of Fire, they had only recently purchased a house on the far eastern edge of the territory included in it. "It's near the Edgertons," she said. "In fact, it was Ardelle Edgerton who told us it was on the market. It's been interesting, I suppose, but overall, I wish now that we'd stayed in Fairmont."

She paused. "Except, of course, that Joe has done so well here. This time suits him. He has a real career, not just a job. Not that he wasn't doing fine up-time. Joe's fifteen years younger than Tom, you know—that's Harlan's father, Tom and his wife were left up-time—and thirteen years younger than Dennis. Far from a spoiled youngest. That's not really irrelevant. He went into the army in 1973. Missed the fighting in Viet Nam. Spent his whole time in transportation and then went to work for the state highway department when he got out in 1979 and finished his technical course. Joe's not the . . . smoothest . . . guy in the world. His edges have filed down quite a bit over the fifteen years since we got married, just maturing, but . . . when I got out of college—that's nearly twenty-five years ago now—he certainly wasn't what my folks, especially not my mother, would have preferred for me. Much less five or six years before that, when we started dating."

"Family problems?" Carol asked sympathetically.

"I wasn't going to sneak around the fact that I liked Joe a lot better than I liked any other guy. We wrote. Perfectly harmless letters, once a week. Spring of my junior year in high school, he'd written back in October about a racial problem that had broken out in the barracks in Louisiana. I was taking American Government, and I asked him if I could use the letters as part of a class presentation on the general topic of race relations in the armed forces. He said that was fine, so I did. There wasn't anything embarrassing in our letters—I took those two to class and used them as one of the exhibits. The teacher actually called Pop and asked him if he knew that Joe and I wrote to each other. When Pop said that yes, he knew, and the letters went out on Monday morning as regular as clockwork, that sort of took the excitement out of it for everybody else, I think."

After some time, Inez cleared her throat and suggested that they really ought to come to the topic of the meeting, which was the training of Idelette.

Leopold Cavriani smiled. "Tweedledum and Tweedledee went forth to fight a battle," he said.

Inez looked at him with some confusion.

"Papa has come to love your nonsense rhymes," Idelette told her solemnly. "I think he means that Mrs. Koch and Mrs. Stull are very alike. Such as both of the Tweedles had a common interest in the rattle. I do not think he means that they are likely to battle. Are Mrs. Fodor or Mrs. McIntire or Mrs. Utt back in Grantville yet?"

"No," Aura Lee said. "All three of them are still in Franconia."

"I would like to mentor, or be mentored if that is how it is said, with one of them," Idelette said. "It seems that their lives are more interesting than learning to be an accountant here in Grantville."

Leopold looked at her and said, "No." Quite simply, "No."

"I had a fight in an alley in Jena at the end of the Rudolstadt Colloquy," Carol offered helpfully. "The police actually put me in jail. Ed Piazza had to bail me out."

Idelette looked at Mrs. Koch with distinctly increased interest.

"Carol will be starting a new job," Aura Lee said. "I already have one trainee, so it would be less stressful for me to take a second than for Carol to try to mentor Idelette while she is starting a new job. Plus, she's pretty well finished dealing with teenagers and I have one who's fifteen and one who's twelve, so I'm still in the middle of it."

Carol looked at her gratefully. "Of course, that doesn't say that Idelette couldn't come over to the SoTF administration building occasionally, if something out of the ordinary is going on. Plus, I do have experience in mathematics tutoring, if she needs more work in theory."

Cavriani had a strange feeling that the decision had been taken out of his hands. And he wasn't even sure how.

This was not a common experience for him.

He was, at least, sure by now that either of these women, or both of them, would make a suitable "role model" for Idelette. He thought of one of the strange, wailing songs that Ed Piazza's wife Annabelle was accustomed to play on the mechanical music reproduction system in their home, the "stereo," about a "one man woman." These two, though, were each securely in possession of the husband she wanted rather than mourning for "the man who got away." He had no further qualms in regard to, as Mrs. Wiley had put it to the elder Mrs. Stull, "morals; ethics."

Not, in either case, a conventional role model. But then, by bringing Idelette to Grantville, he had determined already that her life would not be the conventional one of the daughter of an Italian merchant from Geneva.

"I do advise you, from a professional standpoint, that in the long run you will do better if you have somewhat less sticky fingers. As long as you are doing business in the SoTF. Specifically as long as you are doing business in the immediate region of Grantville itself. There are certainly a more than sufficient number of perfectly legitimate opportunities for making a profit. Such as the sale of gravel and concrete to the government at a reasonable price, without bribery to obtain the contract. If you are underbid, look elsewhere to make your sales. Presuming that you have presented an honest estimate, the contractor who underbid you will shortly be bankrupt and you will be able to obtain the contract the next time the state issues a request for proposals."

August von Sommersburg looked at his consultant. Facilitator.

Cavriani looked back. The Genevan was clearly unimpressed by the fact that he was addressing a member of the higher nobility of the Holy Roman Empire. Or, these days, of the United States of Europe. The hereditary head of the county of Sommersburg within the SoTF, at any rate.

"Owing to the fact," Cavriani continued, "that people like Adducci appear to have little patience with some of the scams currently under way in which certain individuals are tempting you to participate. It is also my impression that Mrs. Stull's husband, the secretary of transportation, has minimal tolerance for manipulation and rigging. Just because you have ascertained from statements made by your son-in-law that corruption was far from unknown in that up-time world does not mean that it would be prudent for you to engage in it here. As I read in the report that Marcus von Drachhausen provided to you concerning his conversation with Horace Bolender and his associates, those convicted and imprisoned in West Virginia included several legislators. They will not consider you immune because you are a senator."

"I will take your advice under consideration," Count August said rather mildly.

"Specifically," Cavriani concluded, "it is my impression that the project being floated for the construction of a baseball stadium in the Grantville-Rudolstadt-Saalfeld 'metro corridor' is something that the lovely up-time stories define as a 'tarbaby.'"

Count August fingered his beard. "In the meantime, I wish you well on your journey to the Upper Palatinate."

"So your assignment, should you choose to accept it . . ." Tony Adducci grinned at Carol Koch.

"Is to burrow into the Department of Economic Resources and get the goods on Horace Bolender at this end, while the auditors you have in the field get it in Franconia."

"I've specifically sent Noelle Murphy off to Franconia in the company of a couple of down-timers to see what she can turn up there. I told her to concentrate on the bid-rigging specifically rather than doing general auditing the way the gals have to. It's almost amusing that we have the cloak-and-dagger business stashed away in Economic Resources, right under Horace's own nose."

"I have to admit," Carol said, that I'm a little surprised to find out what family she belongs to. No one would dream that Noelle and that oaf Keenan Murphy who hangs around the 250 Club came from the same parents."

"They didn't," Tony said, almost a little reluctantly. He always felt a little bit like he was betraying the home team when he had to put one of Grantville's generally known but not officially public pieces of history into words for people like the Kochs who had not really been a part of the town before the Ring of Fire.

"Noelle's officially a Murphy, but Francis and Pat—you may have met Pat; she works for the sanitary commission—had been separated for a couple of years when Noelle was born. Pat took the three girls right after Patty was born and moved to Fairmont. She'd had it up to here with Francis' drinking. He came in thoroughly soused one Friday, four hours after he'd gotten off work, picked Patty up, and dropped her." Tony was uncomfortable. The episode of the Murphy separation had not been one of the high points of the history of St. Vincent de Paul parish in Grantville, the way it had been handled.

But he went on. "Keenan was a handful, even then. Now they would call it hyperactive, I guess. ADHD or something. He stayed with Francis' parents here in Grantville, but Paul and Maggie never could handle him. Never could control him."

"Oh," Carol said.

Tony chewed on his mustache a minute. "That was, I guess, about three years before Denise and I got married. Everyone at St. Vincent's was talking about it. Old Father O'Malley preached a homily about it, trying to shame Pat. Talk about a pre-Vatican-Two priest. Her parents walked out of mass. Anyway, Francis and Pat haven't lived with each other for twenty-five years, even though they're still legally married. Not divorced. Irish Catholic families, not Italian Catholic families—bunch of uptight Puritans, if you ask me. My wife Denise excepted, of course. She's Pat's cousin. Pat got Noelle baptized over in Fairmont. Denise and I are her godparents, so I feel some extra responsibility for shipping her off somewhere potentially dangerous."

"Nice men!" Carol said. "If they had their way, the women in their families would spend their lives neatly wrapped in cellophane, padded with cotton batting, and securely locked in a bank vault to make sure that no harm would come to them." Her tone was rather tart.

Tony looked at his new recruit a little dubiously. It was sometimes a bit hard to follow her train of thought. But he went on. "Pat only moved back to Grantville three or four years before the Ring of Fire, looking for someplace cheaper to live because Noelle wanted to go to college. Something had to give, money-wise. The three older girls were on their own by then. They didn't come through the Ring of Fire; they were living in Fairmont."

"I'll take the job on," Carol said. "Starting as soon as the semester is over in Jena. Even if I don't come up with any indictable dirt for you, Economic Resources has enough on its platter that they can keep me gainfully employed and I'll be earning my salary fair and square. But I'm going to have to ask around. Put some questions here and there. Not being a native of Grantville, I don't really know where all the bodies are buried and which closets have skeletons that rattle."

Tony nodded agreement. "Just be discreet."

"How close is Elaine Bolender who's the head of the state library to Horace Bolender and that bunch? Carol Koch asked. "You know, she's married to Albert Wilson, but she's gone back to using her maiden name since the Ring of Fire."

"Let me think. She's Pam Bolender's sister." Aura Lee started working her way through the complex web of Grantville relationships. "They're Dick Bolender's daughters. Dick and Jim are brothers, so they're first cousins."

Idelette sat listening, drinking a root beer and absorbing the things that she would need to know to meet the expectations that her father had for her when he brought her to this town.

"Elaine's married to Albert Wilson. Before the Ring of Fire, he taught industrial arts at the high school in Fairmont; he's been up at the oil field in Wietze now for almost two years, in the military. He was a veteran. Pam's married to Lowry Eckerlin, Lowry Junior. He's down in Franconia, doing law enforcement."

"Elaine and Pam aren't as close personally to Horace and Laura Jo as you might think, though, for first cousins," Inez Wiley inserted into the conversation. "Oveta and Mildred, Dick and Jim's wives, have always sort of rubbed each other the wrong way. Mildred's a Jenkins—some kind of cousin of Chad Jenkins' father. You've probably met Chad."

Carol nodded her head, glancing at Aura Lee. The expression of mild distaste on her face was quickly replaced by one of controlled neutrality.

One more thing that Aura Lee and Carol have in common, Inez thought. It was amazing how many women didn't particularly like Chad Jenkins. Well, perhaps not amazing. A lot of women, especially those who were securely attached to someone else, were annoyed by a man who was always more or less testing the waters. Not with serious intent, but just automatically taking their temperature.

What Inez said aloud was, "Oveta's a Sanderlin. They're from Marion County, but not from right around here. They didn't move to Grantville until the Depression."

Of course, Carol thought to herself. They've only been "right around here" for seventy-five years or so. I wonder how Inez classifies the Kochs. I'll have to ask Aura Lee when we're talking tete-a-tete some time.

What she said was, "In that case, I think that I will ask Elaine some questions in regard to Laura Jo Cunningham. Horace Bolender's sister, that is, who is the executive secretary of the Grantville Research Center. I haven't been on the job very long, but it seems to me that almost every new economic development proposal that comes along has gone through the research center at some point. It's often their researchers who put the actual paperwork together on behalf of the would-be investors. Somebody is feeding inside information to Horace Bolender before the proposals come up before the board. In a lot of cases, people I think are fronts for him are managing to tie up just one little thing that's crucial for each proposal before the boards ever consider them. Which means that once they are approved, he has leverage to get himself in on the ground level to take some shares or it can't go forward."

Carol sat in the back of the room, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. There was to be a joint hearing. The Schwarza-Saalfeld Enterprise District, for tax implications of the project. The Grantville Development Authority, for funding of the proposal. Both of them to consider the zoning aspects. She was representing Tony Adducci, who was ex-officio a member of both. As such, she would not be expected to say anything. Just to observe. In fact, Tony hoped that the mere fact that he had sent her rather than coming himself would send a signal that this was a low priority item as far as he was concerned. Not worth his personal attention. Useful as a training exercise for a new hire with little experience or expertise in the field.

Similarly, Henry Dreeson was not there. Michelle Mastroianni, his clerk, was.

The administrations of the SoTF and Grantville hoped that this apparent inattention would tempt the investors to become incautious.

She looked around. Marcus von Drachhausen was here. Interesting. He was certainly not here in his capacity as Tony's deputy. If he was representing Count August, his father-in-law, that would constitute a conflict of interest. Neither Horace Bolender nor his sister Laura Jo Cunningham. However, next to Drachhausen, Beverly Kay Cunningham, who was in charge of the resources overview section of the Grantville Research Center which Laura Jo ran. And who was married to Delton Cunningham, in Grantville's Streets and Roads Department. And Delton and Laura Jo's husband Daniel were brothers.

The members of the two boards overlapped quite a bit. A batch of them, naturally enough, were real estate types. Bunny Lamb was the chairperson.

Carol thought irreverently that any woman whose nickname was Bunny must have been passionately in love to marry a man named Lamb.

Huddy Colburn and Thurman Jennings, the other two important real estate agents.

Then the wheeler-dealers who always managed to deal themselves in on this kind of thing, she thought cynically, even if serving on committees and boards caused them some actual work. Keith Trumble, Chad Jenkins, Hugh Lowe.

Edgar Zanewicz, the vice president of the bank. Mary Ruth Caldwell, secretary to the Authority and also Thurman Jennings' daughter. She was bearing up well after the terrible injury her husband had suffered early the previous winter.

The baseball stadium proposal, with all its associated implications for rerouting of roads and traffic, was on the floor. Carol took meticulous notes.

Count August von Sommersburg did not appear at the hearing in regard to the baseball stadium proposal. Indeed, on that very morning, he and his unmarried daughter Elena were running completely unrelated errands at the SoTF administration building.

Starting in Ed Piazza's office, they left vases of fresh flowers everywhere they went. To greet the coming of spring, the count said gallantly, as he flirted with the staff, pointing out to them as he bowed that they were so essential to the smooth operation of the government, but alas so often underappreciated.

Liz Carstairs giggled. Her husband was one of those to whom Tony Adducci had passed a comforting word about the count's unfortunate medical problems. From across the room, Mary Kathryn Riddle, just married in February to Derek Utt who was over in Fulda, winked at her. Megan Trumble, as befitted a recent widow, was subdued, but Mallory Pierpoint flirted back without the least sense of shame.

Jamie Lee Swisher and Tanya Newcomb, who had been deemed too young and innocent to be clued in about what was going on by the others, just looked at the tableau in some confusion.

The "guys" on the President's immediate staff, who were all down-timers, sat transfixed by the count's daughter. Elena von Sommersburg was a truly bodacious twenty-two-year-old redhead. As Tony Adducci had said to Howard Carstairs, if the count's late wife had looked anything like that, a fellow could see why he had opted to marry a girl who wasn't standesgemaess.

Aura Lee Hudson looked up. Idelette Cavriani was peeking around the door. She smiled.

"Can we come in?"

"Sure," Aura Lee said, "but who is the rest of 'we'?"

"This is Annalise Richter. Do you know her? She is the granddaughter of Mayor Dreeson's wife and she is running the St. Veronica's schools this summer while her grandmother is away."

Idelette paused. She was beginning to learn how to swim in the fluid currents of Grantville's various Protestant denominations with their fluctuating boundaries, matrimonial conversions, and overlapping theologies, so different from Geneva. When she met Annalise, she had at first been a little cautious, fearing that Mrs. Wiley might disapprove of friendship with a Catholic as beyond the acceptable limits. However, Mrs. Wiley had pointed out that Annalise was also the step-granddaughter of Henry Dreeson, the mayor, who was a member of their own church. Relieved, if even more confused, Idelette had been happy to have a new friend.

Now she asked, "Do you have time to help us?"

A half hour later, Aura Lee looked at them. "I do not believe this! Do you mean to say that she just dumped all of this on your shoulders and took off?"

Annalise nodded. "My grandmother showed great confidence in me. And told me not to bother the mayor unless I had to because he is a very busy man. And most of it is truly all right. The part that they call policy decisions. In that, I try to think what would be best and then do it. But for all this . . ." She gestured to the piles of papers spread out on Aura Lee's desk.

"I agree. You need some help. Yes, I will approve that as part of Idelette's training; she can assist you with the business end of running your grandmother's schools this summer."

She thought that it was not every girl who would jump with delight and clap her hands at the prospect of taking on what was going to amount to several long evenings of extra bookkeeping per week, but Idelette did.

Carol, that evening, mother of children who were older than Aura Lee's, asked a meaningful question. "Are you really sure that two heads are better than one when both of the heads are seventeen years old?"

"Not really. But I am sure that Annalise probably needs some mentoring as much as Idelette does. Maybe even more. Idelette has Inez at home, at least. Annalise is trying to be a house mother, too."

Aura Lee and Carol decided that the girls were in need of mentoring in a lot more areas than just accounting, mathematics, and business procedures. Especially Idelette before she was tossed into the wilderness of a coeducational high school the next fall. Annalise at least had some experience at that. They started having regular dinners with talk once a week at Carol's.

"Now Annalise," Carol said, "is sort of immunized. That is, she's persuaded herself that she is deathlessly in love with Heinrich Schmidt. Since Major Schmidt, the possibly idealized object of her affections, is safely immured at the siege of Amsterdam, she can fantasize about him all she likes without coming to any harm and it gives her a socially acceptable excuse to fend off other advances."

Annalise did not take particularly well to this description of an infatuation that she had, with the assistance of innumerable Harlequin Romances, pumped up in her own mind to the status of an immortal love affair.

"You, on the other hand," Aura Lee said, pointing to Idelette, "are seventeen, currently unattached, and totally inexperienced at sorting out the nice guys from the jerks. Which means that you have a lot to learn between now and the end of August. And you either learn it or, I swear, I will home school you myself."

Carol giggled.

"I'm not joking, Carol," Aura Lee said a little impatiently. "You at least got engaged to Ron before you started sleeping with him. Even though you were too much of an innocent to get birth control first."

"But we didn't intend to . . ."

"Self-delusion. 'Nice girls don't and I'm a nice girl so I won't.' Can you look me in the face and say the real words. Not 'We didn't intend to' but 'I honestly didn't expect that we would'?"

Carol chewed on that one a while. "No," she finally said. "Of course, I didn't have any real experience in holding it off before we got engaged."

"How come?" Aura Lee asked.

"Because we got engaged two weeks after we met," Carol admitted. "And that was official, after we'd told our families. Ron actually proposed the night we met each other. About ten minutes after we met each other."

This time Aura Lee giggled. "How long were you engaged?"

"Not as long as we expected to be," Carol admitted. "About half as long as we expected to be. Because of Ronella. We were supposed to be engaged for a year after Ron finished all the paperwork for coming over to the U.S., because our families thought we should get to know one another better before we married. Because of the 'how to establish a lasting marriage' procedures manuals. The ones that urge you to get to know one another gradually if you want your marriage to last."

"You decided to marry on ten minutes notice and then you expected to arrive at your wedding night a virgin a year later? Honestly."

"I suppose I might have," Carol said, "If Ron had stayed in Germany and I'd stayed in America. But they did want us to get to know one another better. I was afraid that if my parents knew when he was coming, they'd come along to the airport and everything would be all stiff and miserable and uncomfortable. So when it was all done and he got his ticket, I didn't tell them. And I did know his arrival date far enough in advance that I could have gone down to the clinic and gotten the pill, but you're right. I didn't want to admit to myself what was likely to come next. The day his plane came in, I just drove to meet him all alone. And when I told him that they didn't know exactly when he would be getting in, he gave me this sideways look and said, 'In that case, I think that I am very jet-lagged and need a night to recover.' So we turned in at the first motel we saw. And when we got to the point, we sure intended to."

Aura Lee waggled her fingers at Annalise and Idelette. "Do you see what I'm getting at?"

Idelette nodded solemnly. Annalise looked out the window, studiously ignoring the conversation.

Aura Lee sighed. "Pay attention, Annalise. I was exactly your age the first time Joe and I did it together. In the back of his brother Dennis' pickup. Joe made it as nice as he could, hosed it out and everything, but it was still the back of a pickup with a camper top on it, smelling a little of oil and gas and the stuff Dennis hauled around in it. With two vinyl-covered lawn chair mattresses for padding. And since we planned ahead, we did remember about condoms."

Both girls just stared at her.

"That's what I mean about learning to sort out the good guys from the jerks first. Even so, I don't suppose there's a normal girl in the world who doesn't wonder what next. 'Just call me angel of the morning' and all that. The song was new back then. But Joe took me for burgers afterwards and sat with me with my friends instead of brushing me off as a fallen woman, someone to be scorned. And that evening, at the youth group activity at First Methodist, when we were supposed to present our private prayers, I sat there with my hands folded, thanked God that He'd let me do it with Joe, and prayed that He'd let us do it again."

Aura Lee lifted her head and smiled. "Not exactly what the minister would have wished in the way of a prayer, I imagine, if he'd had any idea."

Idelette sat there. She had a feeling that she was indeed learning a great deal in Grantville. Possibly not entirely what her father had expected.

"The point is," Aura Lee said sternly, "that you're not to let yourself be pawed by some over-sexed young klutz. Not one who will 'brush your cheek in the morning and then leave you.' The trick is to pick one you really like and who'll be inclined to hang around for the next thirty or forty years before you do anything you can't take back. And in the absence of reliable birth control in this day and age, keep your legs crossed until you're absolutely sure. If you're not sure, bring him around and Carol and I will take a look at him for you. If he won't come, classify him as a jerk."

Certainly, Idelette thought, this was not what her mother back home in Geneva expected when Papa assured her that her oldest daughter would be residing in the household of the Calvinist minister and his wife. It was far more enlightening.

Juliann Stull died on July 13, 1634. The visitation was scheduled for the afternoon of the next day, with the funeral to follow from Central.

Dennis made it from Erfurt; he was standing by the entrance, directing people to where they could sign the guest book.

Harlan was still over in Fulda, of course. No way he could get here for the funeral. His wife Eden was here with her parents, Nat and Twila Davis. Twila was watching the baby, just born the end of May. Joe and Aura Lee were over at the casket. Their Juliann was chasing after Eden's two-year-old, who was running around the way kids did, even at visitations for dead great-grandmothers. Especially at visitations, sometimes. Billy Lee was in a corner, dressed up, looking uncomfortable.

An awful lot of people were here, Dennis thought, looking at the pages of signatures. Not many of his mother's friends. She'd outlived most of her own friends. Mostly people who knew him, or Joe, or Harlan from business. Paying their respects to the family, really, not to the deceased.

Count August von Sommersburg, for example—he had almost certainly never even met their mother. But as a senator of the State of Thuringia-Franconia he had come to the visitation because she had been the mother of a cabinet minister and of the civilian head of military procurement for the state, the grandmother of the UMWA delegate in the administration at Fulda. Come early and stayed, mingling with others who came, using the event as one more chance to network.

Dennis stood there, feeling old himself. If they hadn't been brought to this time and place, he would have been old enough to take his early social security this year. Joe was thirteen years younger. Joe had been one of those unexpected kids and because of the way things worked out, had pretty much brought himself up.

He might have done it—taken social security early and gone to Florida or Arizona. Someplace warm. Instead of running a procurement operation in Erfurt, first for the NUS and now for the SoTF with several dozen people working for him. His people made a regular little community of up-timers in Erfurt now. He'd encouraged the men to bring along their wives and kids, start a little school, a health clinic.

He saw Tony Adducci coming up the walk and wondered if Denise was with him.

Denise was still at the car, getting little Rosemary into the chest sling she wore and picking up all the various impedimenta and paraphernalia that accompanied a baby through life.

"Denise, I don't think I can do this," a voice said from the back seat.

"Pat, if you don't, you're going to kick yourself for the rest of your life." Bernadette Adducci gave the woman next to her in the back seat an impatient shove.

"If I do, I may kick myself for the rest of my life, too."

"Well, at least it will be for a sin of commission rather than for a sin of omission," Bernadette said. "Get out, Pat, and walk up to that door."

So Denise's cousin Pat got out and walked up to the door, in between the other two women.

Thinking, when she stepped through, that it wasn't fair of God to have put Dennis right there next to the guest book.

"I'm sorry about Juliann," Denise was saying.

"It was better for her, in a way," Dennis answered for what seemed like the fiftieth time that afternoon. "She was able to keep going in her own house right up to the end. Ma wouldn't have liked a nursing home. Or having her mind slip."

Behind Denise. A neat cap of gray hair. Pat?

At the very least, Pat thought, he could have been at the back of the parlor somewhere. Maybe with his back turned, talking to Jenny Maddox. Not taking her hand and thanking her for coming.

What were they doing, Pat wondered, the two of them, standing here, in the way of other people who wanted to come in?

Bernadette grasped Pat's shoulders, turned her around so she wasn't blocking the door, entered the parlor, and looked for Tony. He was over next to Joe Stull and both of them were talking to the Reverend Mary Ellen Jones from the Methodist church, Henry and Veronica Dreeson, Enoch and Inez Wiley, and the two girls, Annalise and Idelette. What a world. Tony and Joe, cabinet secretaries for a cobbled-together state government in a world none of them had ever expected. Which they certainly wouldn't have been back home in West Virginia.

Behind her, Pat was saying something to Dennis. Not a platitude about Juliann. "Noelle is thinking about becoming a nun."

"For my part," Dennis said, "I'd rather that she managed to think around and beyond that idea. Considering that I'm a Methodist. Not that I have anything to say about it."

"She's down in Franconia this summer working for the Department of Economic Resources. But she's thinking about it."

"God Almighty," someone yelled from outside. "Look out. Get down."

Bernadette turned and ran for the door, pushing Pat farther to the side and grabbing for her police revolver. She might be "only" a juvenile officer, but that didn't mean she was unarmed. Older juveniles could be dangerous, if only because they were so much more unpredictable than adults. Not to mention their parents.

Someone out there had a gun. Joe Stull and Tony Adducci headed for the door after Bernadette. A wild shot came flying into the parlor. Maybe not that wild; two more went into the weatherboarding near the door. Then another one inside.

In the parking lot, a man was down; another man on top of him.

"God on earth, Keenan, what is going on?" Bernadette screeched.

Keenan Murphy looked up. "He's been working himself up to it ever since he saw in the paper that old Mrs. Stull was dead. Saying over and over, 'She didn't come and stand by me at my father's bier. If she goes and stands by Dennis Stull at his mother's bier, I'll kill her.' He was over at Grandma's. She was trying to talk him out of it, but he's as drunk as a skunk."

"Damn you, Francis Murphy," Bernadette said as she handcuffed him. She sounded like she meant it quite literally. "Somebody call the station and have them send an on-duty patrol over here. Is anyone hurt?"

"I hope not," Keenan said. "I really couldn't see that it would help things if he caused trouble here today. They've been separated for a quarter of a century. That was what Grandma said. That it wouldn't help things if he caused trouble here today and I should try to get him to come back. So I came after him. I didn't know he had a gun. That's a whopper of a handgun. I just thought he'd be likely to try to beat her up. And then he saw her, getting out of Tony Adducci's car and walking inside, and he pulled the gun out, so I tackled him. If he hit someone, I hope it was a Kraut."

Bernadette looked down. Keenan was still sitting on the asphalt next to Francis. Keenan was hostile, not particularly bright, prejudiced, a 250 Club regular, one of the town's constant brawlers and troublemakers. He was not an ornament to the military of the State of Thuringia-Franconia in which he served. Before the Ring of Fire, he had been chronically unemployed. However, owing to the fact that he had chased Francis and brought him down before he got inside the funeral home, they had probably been spared several injuries or worse. So she swallowed her bile and said, "Thank you."

"You're welcome," he said. "It's not as if this is something we can blame on being here and now. He'd have probably done something of the sort whenever old Mrs. Stull died even if we'd all still been back home in West Virginia."

"Tony," someone called from inside the funeral home. "Joe."

Joe Stull and Tony Adducci ran back toward the door. Aura Lee was standing there.

"Nat and Twila took Eden and the babies home."

"I sure don't blame them," Tony said. "Especially considering that Francis Murphy's been working for Ollie Reardon since the army threw him out. Even the fact that he was one of our few genuine Viet Nam combat veterans couldn't make up for the way he drank."

Joe stopped next to Aura Lee, putting his arm around her. Tony went on inside.

Pat Murphy was sitting on the floor next to Dennis, crying.

Tony stood there, looking at her.

"It was Francis," he said. "Drunk, with a gun. It's under control."

She looked up. "The church absolved me for everything else. For leaving Francis. For loving Dennis, for having Noelle. But Dennis wouldn't live with us unless I divorced Francis and married him, and that was the one thing the church wouldn't ever have absolved me from. For that, they would have excommunicated me until the day I died and sent me to hell."

"Yeah," Tony said. He couldn't think of anything else to say. It wasn't anything except the truth, after all.

"They didn't hand annulments out back then they way they did later to Massachusetts politicians. And Father O'Malley said that even if I got one, the church would never let me marry Dennis because we had already committed adultery together and it was an 'absolute impediment to matrimony.' That we couldn't benefit from our sin. If I'd spit in his face then, we could have had these last twenty-five years together."

Denise handed the sling containing Rosemary over to Tony and knelt down next to her cousin. "Honey, I'm so sorry we talked you into coming."

Pat looked up. "I'm not. If I'd spit in their faces the first time Dennis asked me to marry him, back in 1965, we'd have had forty years and I'd have never been married to Francis at all. But no, it was my duty to marry a good Irish Catholic man and produce Irish Catholic children, Pa and Father O'Malley said. Marry Francis, so if he was killed in Viet Nam, at least he would leave a child behind him. See what it got me."

She looked toward the door. "What went on outside?"

"Keenan followed him from Maggie's. Tackled him," Tony said.

"Would you thank him for me? God knows, I've not been any kind of a mother to him. But I'm staying with Dennis. I figure that if I spit in their faces now, we might edge out five or ten years, still. More, if we're lucky."

An ambulance pulled up outside.

Bernadette, who was still standing there, not able to check on what was happening inside, said, "I asked for a patrol."

"They're on the way," Jenny Maddox yelled from inside the funeral home. "We called for the ambulance. The second bullet that came inside hit Dennis. He needs to go to the hospital. The other one glanced off Idelette Cavriani's shoulder and then hit Juliann in her coffin. I've done first aid for her. Idelette, I mean. Not Juliann. For Juliann, I just closed the coffin, considering that she was dead already. But if she hadn't been, she would be now."

Bernadette added "mutilation of a corpse" to the rest of the charges on which she was arresting Francis Xavier Murphy.

Once the ambulance and patrol car left, the visitation resumed, though only Joe and Aura Lee of the family remained to do the honors. And Billy Lee and young Juliann. Billy Lee went over to stand by the guest book, taking Dennis' place. Juliann went and stood by Idelette and Annalise.

"Maybe," Mary Ellen Jones was saying, "we should postpone the funeral until tomorrow."

"I don't think that would do any good," Joe said. "I don't think that Nat and Twila will be any happier to have Eden here tomorrow than to bring her back later today and it didn't look to me like Dennis will be up and about again by tomorrow."

Count August von Sommersburg had observed the entire event with considerable interest, admiring the general aplomb with which people had handled the shooting and feeling comfortably confirmed in his general Lutheran assumption that most of the bad things that happened in life were somehow the fault of the Roman Catholic church.

Now he found himself standing next to Charles Jenkins, whom he had already met through the Schwarza-Saalfeld Enterprise District and the Grantville Development Authority. Although not at that meeting in regard to a baseball stadium. On other occasions.

Jenkins' wife had come in with him, as had Willie Ray Hudson of the Grange. The wife of Joseph Stull had hugged them and called Jenkins' wife "Sis." Count August analyzed the family connection and decided this might be a favorable occasion to obtain some information.

Particularly in regard to the views of Secretary of Transportation Stull in regard to financial chicanery. The count was beginning to suspect that Cavriani had been quite correct in his assessment that a fair number of the up-timers had no patience with it at all, in spite of the assurances that Drachhausen had received from Daniel and Delton Cunningham that Stull could be "managed."

"What is the word?" he asked. "Righteous. Is Mr. Joseph H. Stull a righteous man?"

"'Righteous' is a mild word for it," Jenkins said. "Plus, Aura Lee is an auditor, you know."

The count had known that Stull's wife was an auditor already and had suspected the presence of righteousness, so he was not unduly disappointed. Cavriani had, after all, warned him.

"I'm not the favorite person of either Joe or Aura Lee," Jenkins went on, looking at the group gathered by the coffin. "Not that they haven't been perfectly polite over the years. They just don't particularly like me."

The count nodded.

"It goes back a long ways. Most things do, in a small town."

Count August understood that himself. The ongoing episode of the necklace bequeathed by his wife's aunt, for example, he thought absently.

"Aura Lee and I went all through school together in the same grade. She accused me once of 'taking advantage of my advantages.' Most of which consisted of unlimited access to cars. I've sometimes suspected that Debbie picked up Aura Lee's view that I was a 'lout' when I was in high school. I don't think I was worse than any other guy in my class. But Aura Lee was comparing me with Joe who was a couple years older and in the service. Debbie was enough older that she probably never noticed me back then. I was all of thirteen when she married Don Jefferson and quit school for a year to follow him to where he was stationed and then, when he shipped out to Viet Nam, to come back and have Anne.

"Aura Lee and I went to the same senior prom, naturally, since we were in the same class. May 1976. She pulled a surprise by showing up with Joe after she'd turned down every guy in the class who asked her. Which just about every guy did, naturally enough. All the ones who weren't either too shy or too intimidated."

Count August looked across the room toward the bier once more and nodded appreciatively. The two daughters of Herr Willie Ray Hudson were, even well into middle age, very pretty, like a pair of little ornamental figurines.

Jenkins looked in the same direction, fixing his eyes on Joe Stull. "He had managed to get home on leave. He was a couple of years older than us, in the army. He came in his dress uniform. At the time, I thought he was showing off. It was years later, after I'd married Debbie, that I realized that he probably didn't own a suit and couldn't afford to rent a tux."

Count August nodded, thinking of what Cavriani had told him of Stull's mother—the woman to whom, in theory, they were now paying their last respects.

"Anyhow," Jenkins continued, "a custom had grown up—the administration didn't like it, but it had grown up—that each couple at the prom dance would go into the spotlight and kiss during one particular dance. They didn't like it because of course a lot of the guys pushed it to the limit, almost pawing their dates. Including me. I'd brought Anita Shockley, who was a junior and willing to put up with quite a bit to have an invitation to the senior prom. She married Freddie Congden a year or so later, right after graduation, so being pawed by me was definitely not the worst thing that ever happened to her."

"Anita was?" the count asked.

Jenkins nodded. "The girl in regard to whom Aura Lee made that accusation about taking advantage of my advantages."

He smiled a bit sarcastically. "So that was how things were going. Then Joe and Aura Lee came up. They gave big smiles, clasped hands, and two-stepped out to the middle of the room, like 'promenade your lady' in square dancing, only it was something that he'd picked up down in Louisiana, where he was stationed. They got to the spotlight and he twirled her under his arm, he gave a formal bow, she curtsied, he brought her up, their lips barely brushed, he twirled her around again, back into place, and they promenaded to the other side. Well, that brought the house down. It really did. Everybody else looked pretty shabby after that performance."

"Ah," Count August said. "Perhaps they appeared somewhat more polished than the rest of you?"

"The rest of us were not very polished at all," Jenkins admitted. "So a while later at the punch table, I managed to remark to Joe that he really hadn't gotten much out of it. He gave me a disgusted look and said that Aura Lee was a princess and deserved to be treated like one. Added that the way I'd treated my date showed pretty well where I placed her on the food chain. Which pissed me off. Of course, he was a long way mentally from high school by then. But Joe still thinks I'm a clod. He thought so then and he still does. On the other hand, it demonstrates just how flexible his mind is. I'd never let a man like him work for me. All the flexibility of a rock. Doing what he does for the government, sure. But never for me."

Count August found it a little surprising that Jenkins was still so . . . discomfited . . . by his brother-in-law's opinion of him that he would remember that night so many years later. If Stull indeed had a personality that could create that kind of discomfort in an otherwise brash man and have it last for thirty years . . . But if they hadn't married sisters, it would probably be nothing more than a forgotten moment in time. Life was like that.

But. He pondered the situation for a few minutes, while continuing to make polite conversation.

It was useful to have confirmation of Cavriani's suspicion that there was another major obstacle, beyond Adducci, to Bolender's various plans. Jenkins was a deal-maker. Not unethical by the up-timers' standards, but a deal-maker. As was Willie Ray Hudson, for that matter. Stull? All the flexibility of a rock.

He decided that he would accept Cavriani's advice in regard to procedures for purveying gravel and cement to the government of the State of Thuringia-Franconia. He concluded that he would refrain from investing in the baseball stadium project.

Elsewhere in the USE, of course, other options and procedures would continue to be open for his corporation.

Politely excusing himself to Jenkins as a couple he did not know approached them, Count August made his way across the room to Tony Adducci.

"In the spring," he said, "you offered to introduce me to your father, that I might hear more 'yarns' about your quasi-mythical Jock Yablonski from a man who had known him in person. If that offer still stands, I would like to have this opportunity."

Part II: The Green, Green Grass of Home

July, 1634

"How's it going, Brother?" Joe Stull pulled up a chair next to Dennis' bed in Leahy edical Center.

"Not bad, under the circumstances. Looks like I'll make it. And I'll never have to worry about getting appendicitis any more, considering where the bullet went. The surgeon did a neat job, but says that my hip on that side will probably remember this in cold weather right to the end of my days."

"I came over between the visitation and the funeral to give them permission to operate. Everyone says that if Nichols is out of town, which he was, up in Jena, this Dr. Scultetus from Ulm is the surgeon to go with if a person needs to be cut and pasted. Pat agreed, and she should know since she works for the sanitary commission. But they wouldn't take her signature as next of kin, so she called me."

Dennis smiled beatifically. "She stayed all night. I don't think she slept. You just missed her. She went off to file divorce papers against Francis. She left in time to make sure that she'd be there when the office opens at eight this morning."

A little more seriously, he said, "Which means that she's decided that she would rather have me than heaven. I never doubted, you know, why she wouldn't marry me. Never thought that she was giving me excuses. She really did believe that if we married, God would send her off to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and all his angels, where there would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. I don't doubt that she still believes it. Not a bit."

Joe tipped the straight chair back on its hind legs. "It's going to be a shock for Noelle when she hears about it."

"Yeah. There's that. It's nice that Maurice Tito is keeping the court offices open on Saturday. Otherwise, she'd have had to wait 'till Monday."

Joe steepled the tips of his fingers together. "I think they must have put something in Grantville's water in 1957. Something along the lines of 'ExtraZip' or 'SuperCharge.' That year didn't just produce Aura Lee and Chad. I remember one day in the summer of 1974. Aura Lee and I went for burgers. We picked them up and she marched me over to a booth where some of her friends were sitting."

He grinned. "Nat Fritz, Martha Wright, Renee Warner. That bunch. The other little college-bound princesses. Two teachers and a guidance counselor, now. That's Natalie Bellamy now. Martha married Keith Trumble; Renee married Maurice Tito, the judge, which is how come this sprang to my mind all of a sudden."

"I don't know," Dennis answered. "It may just be that for some reason, that year, Grantville's 'best and brightest' didn't leave to find jobs somewhere else. The kids born in '57 were just barely old enough to have gotten settled with jobs they could hang onto when the slump hit in the middle of the nineteen-eighties. For the next few years, maybe only half of the kids who went away to college or into the service came back. Or stayed if they did come back. It was quite a brain drain. A person can only speculate what kind of a dynamo we would have dropped into Thuringia if we'd had a set of people like those from every year since 1950 or so. Plus, when you come to think about it, Nat and Renee went out and recruited. Brought Arnold and Maurice back to town with them."

Joe nodded. "Eloise Agnew, too, though she wasn't sitting there that afternoon. She was the same year in school. She married Douglas Curtis and he's the minister at the Church of Christ, now."

He grinned. "They started talking about what to do that evening. Aura Lee said that she was expected to show up at some kind of wholesome activity for teens at the Methodist church and her dad would pick her up at ten. I asked if they all wanted me to drop them off there. Renee said that wholesome Catholics weren't supposed to go to wholesome Methodist activities. Martha ditto for Church of Christ, but Nat was also headed for First Methodist, so I dropped the two of them off to play musical chairs and see a slide show about needy people in Africa and went to the drive-in with a couple of guys. Ingram Bledsoe and Chuck Rawls, in case you're curious, and we saw Blazing Saddles."

Dennis wondered idly why one particular day in the summer, thirty years in the past, would still be so clear in Joe's mind. Memory was a funny thing, sometimes.

"You know what Bernadette said after you and Pat went off in the ambulance?" Joe went on.

"Not having been there any more, no."

"She said, 'That doesn't make sense. Father O'Malley told Pat that if she got an annulment, she still couldn't marry Dennis because she'd committed adultery with him. But what an annulment does is say that there wasn't any marriage. So if she hadn't been married, she couldn't have committed adultery.' The last I saw her, after the funeral, she was headed off to St. Mary's to quiz the Jesuits."

"It would be a big relief to Pat if she hadn't committed adultery," Dennis said. "But I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around this one. I'm damned sure she was married to Francis Murphy. I was working in Clarksburg then. I took off work and sat by the phone the day she did it. Until she hadn't called and I knew she'd gone through with it. Drank myself into a stupor, even though I normally don't drink much. I came so close to taking myself down that the other guys called an ambulance and hauled me to the hospital to be pumped out."

"It's a bit esoteric for a Methodist, yeah. Let them worry about it."

"I never looked her up, you know," Dennis said. "Not even after I heard that she'd left Francis. I ran into her again by accident, coming around a corner by the old hotel in Grantville. She had Maggy, Pauly, and Patty with her. A few crows feet around her eyes; she'd put on about a pound a year, most of it in her hips, and tired—she looked so tired. We just looked at each other and I said, "Come with me."

"Nothing like the direct approach," Joe said.

"So we went over to Ma's and I asked her if she could watch the girls for a bit. She got up and said, 'I'm Mrs. Stull. I've got some M and Ms and we're going into the kitchen to learn how to make big cookies with smiley faces on them.' Pat and I went up to my old room. When we came back down, the cookies had been baked and eaten and Ma was teaching them to sing parts. Maggy on lead, and the other two, even little Patty, who could barely talk, coming in on, 'It was an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny yellow polka dot bikini.' They'd saved us each a cookie."

"Yeah," Joe said. "Ma deserved a better visitation than she got. There should have been more people there who remembered her. We should write Harlan over in Fulda and get him to send us his favorite 'Ma story.'"

"What's yours?" Dennis asked.

"Aura Lee's family is a little screwy, and that's the truth. Nothing wrong with Willie Ray. Ray and Marty and their kids are okay. But Vera's been high-strung all her life and she took it out on Debbie. It made Aura Lee a bit antsy about settling down with me, being afraid of all those dramatic confrontations. In '83, when the federal black lung office in Parkersburg got in touch with Ma and told her that Pa had died in Florida and she was entitled to widow's benefits, we came up to Grantville. I stayed at Ma's, of course, and Aura Lee out at her folks. Never anything to embarrass the Hudsons. Since she was an accountant, she spent all day Saturday helping Ma fill out all those forms and papers. Vera was just furious. Then on Monday—I'd taken a day of leave—we took Ma to Parkersburg to turn them in. Aura Lee's name was on the papers as the person who prepared the forms."

"I don't think I ever heard this," Dennis said.

"Ma could keep her mouth shut. The claims examiner in Parkersburg asked Aura Lee what she was. She gave them her job title and bureau. The woman said, 'No, I mean your relationship to Mrs. Stull.' The two of us just looked at one another and finally she said, 'Joe here is her youngest son and I . . . we . . .' I guess she couldn't think of any word that wouldn't sound awfully stark if she said it out loud. Ma said, 'For close to ten years, now, Miss. I trust her.' The bureaucrat wrote down, 'family friend.' When we got back to Charleston, that was when I moved into her apartment, for all practical purposes. Which was where things stayed stuck for the next four years, but it was progress."

"Yeah," Dennis said. "Ma deserved for us to make a scrapbook for the kids, at least. With her name on the front, 'Juliann Stull.' And the dates."

"What are you doing about telling Noelle?" Joe asked.

"Pat's going to write her a letter. Tony will send it down to Franconia in the government mail bag and it should catch up with her eventually. Do you know what Pat was telling me, just when the bullets started flying?"

"No. I was over by Ma's casket."

"That Noelle's thinking about being a nun."

"Now that downright sucks."

"That's kinda what I thought. Not that I have anything to say about it. Pat and I were together over a year that time. I shouldn't have left her, but it just hurt so damned much when she still wouldn't divorce Francis and marry me, after she got pregnant. I went and watched when Pat had her baptized over in Fairmont. Not sticking my oar in. I just sat on a pew way in the back of the church and watched. She's grown up to be a fine girl."

"Since you'll be marrying Pat, you probably ought to practice saying 'daughter' now. At least, if she's willing to claim you after all these years." Joe tipped his chair down again and got up. "I suppose that I ought to be getting over to the office."

"Maurice Tito's not the only one who keeps Saturday hours these days."

"There's a lot to be done. And you know what they say about the early bird catching the worm. These days, more often than not, it seems that I'm spending more time trying to dig up slimy worms than actually making progress on improving transportation."

"Well, you know that you can rely on us in Erfurt. Anything even the least bit funny looking that comes through procurement will get flagged for your and Tony's attention right away."

"Tony," Horace Bolender complained, "will you please quite humming that horrible song?"

"Tut, tut," Tony Adducci answered. "Country music covers all the emotions and actions to which human flesh is heir. Especially country oldies. 'If you've got the money, honey, I've got the time.' With a nice dose of narcissistic self-pity frequently, I have to admit. 'Honky Tonk Angel.' What do you have against 'The Green, Green Grass of Home'? Why do you object to "Long Black Veil'? How can it be that 'Ring of Fire,' of all possible selections, offends you on this fine summer morning?"

Bolender glared at him and went on down the hall toward his own office.

Tony continued his less than fully melodious greetings to a new day as he sorted through his in-box.

Country music did just about say it all. Although Ron Koch, the engineer out at the mine, maintained that no American country song ever written could quite equal the classical simplicity of the German:

Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen,
Du, du, liegst mir im Sinn.
Du, du, machst mir viel Schmerzen,
Weisst nicht wie gut ich dir bin.
You, you, rest within my heart;
You, you, rest within my senses.
You, you, cause me a lot of pain.
You don't know how good I am to you.

That particular verse, Koch insisted, grasped the whole essence of the heartbroken misery of a male faced with a female who did not appreciate him even though he thought she should. It comprised, Koch maintained, the essential Platonic Idea of a lament on this topic, without complications and specifications, requiring no particular setting, but being of universal and worldwide applicability. It could be translated into any other language with no changes required. He and Tony had addressed the matter over many a beer at the Thuringen Gardens.

Tony rather liked Koch. He mildly resented the fact that he had never come up with anything to match that song, though. Some day, one would occur to him.

He made the in-box last as long as possible. Then he resigned himself to the need to think about other things.

One of the few topics that country music failed to address was the intricacies of Catholic canon law. Tony couldn't think of a single song about that. Bernadette had really set the Jesuits in a tizzy last night. The conundrum she had set them was just the kind of moral theology puzzle they could debate endlessly.

The practical answer, however, appeared to be that since Larry Mazzare was now a cardinal, if not, apparently, a bishop, the precise status of Pat and Francis Murphy's marriage, from the viewpoint of the Catholic church, was going to have to wait for him to come back from Italy and think about it.

Tony sat down and looked out the window, wondering what Noelle was going to think about it.

Pat said she was going to write, but who knew how long it would take her to get her nerve up an