Present.

He's really just been staying out of the debates and voting with Inquisitor Shawil but his wife spoke to the Duke's wife about her diligent matchmaking efforts in Grazalema and apparently this committee is about that, but writ large, so here he is.

"I'm Ser Elorri Goés with the Reclamation. There is something of a shortage of paladins who already have families of our own but with the war over it's not precluded and I was told that having grown up in a family would be enough to render my input potentially useful."

Victòria kind of thought they were just adding a paladin and is sort of confused about what this random foreign-looking Abadaran is doing here.

"Yes, your grace. My name is Fazil. I am a fourth circle cleric of Abadar, and the count of Pedraza, near Corentyn. I do not know very much about the situation in the rest of Cheliax but in Pedraza a great many young people were unmarried, to enormous and predictable social ill, so we have been attempting to get them all married and I suppose can speak to how we have approached it."

Now she is even more confused!! 

For someone who also wants to gently coerce everyone into getting married she is really incredibly suspicious about that. Didn't say whether he was married, either. Maybe he has six.

"Like a number of my fellow nobles of Longmarch, Count Fazil is from Osirion originally and appointed by Archduke Shawil. If there aren't any questions, I'd like to start by voting to add Ser Goés to the committee."

"In favor of adding Delegate Goés. ...The pamphlets say that in Osirion a woman isn't ever allowed to leave her husband no matter what he does to her, is that true?"

"Osirion does not provide for people to dissolve their marriage vows, not for men to do that nor for women to do that. I think this protects women more than it protects men; if a man abandons his wife and children she will in the typical case be ruined and he in the typical case will be perfectly fine."

Wow, what the fuck. "If a woman's husband... keeps beating her senseless, say, or maims her, apparently that's a thing some people do, what's she supposed to do about that?"

"That does not seem like a defect in character that would usually show up in someone as a complete surprise after getting married, so mostly a man like that would have a great deal of trouble convincing any family to let their daughter marry him in the first place, but if we assume he somehow managed this, I would expect that the man's parents or brothers would be the ones to intervene and cut him off from drink or get him inspected for demonic possession or whatever might be causing that."

"...and do you think the law in Cheliax should be the same as the law in Osirion? Uh, in Cheliax people sometimes do things that are really bad even if they aren't possessed by demons, and their family probably wouldn't try to stop them—"

"I don't actually have much of a guess on what the law should be in Cheliax. It seems to me that making laws is a very complicated thing and I haven't had any training in it and don't really know which laws would be any good. I know what we've been doing in the town in my county where I live, but we haven't been doing it with the law, just with payments. If the committee's interested in it I can speak to it and if the committee's interested in how Osirion works I can speak to that but I don't expect I'll have a guess about whether most laws are a good idea or a bad idea, unless it's terribly obvious."

Well, that's still kind of suspicious, but it's probably not so suspicious that she wants to try to keep him off the committee, if he's not going to try to make Cheliax copy Osirion. ...also they're voting on the paladin right now anyway.

"Payments?" That does seem, uh, extremely optimistic about why a husband might beat his wife or whether anyone is likely to care, but at the moment she's more interested in how you attempt to solve this with payments.

"So if you ask the young men why they aren't getting married, the answer is that they don't see any need to, as they can find women to sleep with them anyway, and they don't have any sense that it would be the responsible step, that it is a mark of maturity, that their friends and community will respect them more once they are married. So the people who do hiring for my properties tried to change that by saying that you can only serve in the militia, be a supervisor on the docks, or take out credit at the bank if you're a married man, which indeed got the young men interested in getting married, but they still mostly weren't very suitable matches. A man's only a good choice for a husband if he doesn't drink too much and has steady work and not too much of a temper, and we found that a lot of local men drank too much, didn't work steadily, and got worked up easily. Now, in most places, a girl's parents are looking out for that kind of thing, but in Grazalema they didn't seem interested in that, and half of them weren't around themselves. 

A fellow at the church figured that being a good husband's a skill kind of like being an accountant, and at home the church offers classes in accounting, and then a test, and people pay to take the class and the test because if they pass the test they can get hired just off that, so he tried offering a class and a test in being a good husband, and then once men passed, a matchmaker'd meet with them to set them up with a good girl. And then their employer would pay for the wedding feast and build them a new house, to live in with their wife, so the whole town could see that this was a place where people were settling down and doing things properly. 

It has worked reasonably well in that there are enough men who'll be good husbands for my wife to be able to get all the girls on her staff married."

"What's in the class?"

"...does it work in that they're also staying with and not constantly tormenting their wives and children?" Can you test for that???

Yeah, that seems like it could easily make things worse.

"Examples of how you are supposed to solve problems and how you are not supposed to, some practice being provoked and calming down instead of smashing a cup on someone's head about it, discussion of what it means to be a good husband and father. It's mostly very obvious things it would be difficult to get to adulthood not knowing, in other places, but not here, apparently, and some people you'll explain a thing five ways and then ask them a sixth and they clearly won't have grasped it, or they'll say they'll stop drinking and then sneak off right after class, or they decide it's not worth all this bother, or they can't seem to keep their temper and talk a problem out even when it's for practice.

None of the men who have married have left their wives but it does bother me, that the law doesn't protect the girls if they do. We can't even put it in the agreements of marriage, not enforceably, because there aren't civil courts, and it's unaffordable for most people to ask the Church to enforce a lifelong agreement. I don't think they're tormenting their wives or their children but of course one presumes they wouldn't say so. The girls meet with my wife for tea every day so probably if they had a complaint they'd bring it."

"In favor of this fellow and the paladin too."

"It sounds worth trying, and helpful for many men, but I don't think I'd trust my daughters to it until it's gone a few years with no bloody beatings or such found out. But in any case yes, I vote in favor of both as well."

"Oh, sorry, I didn't realize we were voting on Delegate Fazil too already, I'm in favor of him also."

Oh Josep likes this man, he seems like a sensible one with a good head on his shoulders. Probably has some foreign nonsense ideas, but well, you can't have everything. Josep is more worried about the paladin, paladins are supposedly the most impractical, naive sorts you ever meet, but he really can't say that out loud.

"In favor of both, yes."