by Eric Flint
"Anyway, I let it be known via the kids that the crop is severely limited in quantity, and if there was so much as a single leaf missing, the culprit would be found and I would personally spread his name to all the women and let them take matters into their own hands." He'd been rather proud of that solution—having had to pacify the commune women himself when a crop came up short in similar circumstances.
"Damn!" Stearns laughed. "That's harsh!"
He shrugged. "I can't stop them from getting seeds and growing their own in the woods, but that's not my problem, that's Grantville's problem and you'll have to figure out how the town wants to handle recreational smoking yourself."
"Well, let's pack up and get out of here," Nichols decreed. "Good operation, Stoner."
Tom wasn't unhappy with the exchange, because it was an exchange. He had gotten something from Grantville for his contribution to the public good. Free electricity from the power-plant, some help with fixing things up around the place, including more insulation against winters that were undoubtedly going to be a lot harsher here than they'd been in West Virginia. The free electricity had allowed him to put the wood-walled extension he'd just added to the greenhouse under the powerful lights he'd bought specifically to grow enhanced pot, but never used, because his own power reserves weren't up to it. That made the Wildwood Weed a lot more potent, true medicinal quality, which made both the Doc and the dentist very happy when they tested and found it powerful.
"You got any more plans for the greenhouse?" Doc asked, as they loaded up with bricks to take them out to the cart.
"More medicinal herbs next, I thought—it makes a lot more sense to use it for things that no one else can grow or preserve, not without lights or protection from the harsh weather." He got a raised eyebrow from Stearns.
"Opium-poppies?" Doc asked carefully.
He shook his head. "I was talking to some of Rebecca's relatives. It's cheaper to buy the raw opium through them and crank out something approaching the morphine you're used to using, Doc. Something that you can inject without lumps clogging the veins of your patients, anyway, something with a consistent strength. What I had in mind was things like foxglove, hyssop, coltsfoot—I've got seeds in the freezer for a lot of stuff out of Culpepper's that I never got around to growing and using. Doctor Abrabanel will probably recognize a lot of them."
"I think we might have to put you on the town payroll," Mike offered.
But Tom shook his head. "You've got some regular pharmacists in town. One of them probably still has all his old compounding manuals, and between him, the chemistry teacher, Rebecca's dad, and the lab at the High, you've got more expertise and equipment than I have. This—" he waved his hand at the piled-up bricks in the back of the cart. "This is a public service. It costs me a little time. Grantville's giving me juice and help with the greenhouse when I need it, and the kids and I are getting medical and dental and that's enough. I'm no good at fighting, never was, so I'm useless for community defense. You've got to have analgesia and anesthetic, whisky isn't good enough, and since I'm not toting a gun, I owe it to the rest of you to do this as my share."
Mike Stearns laughed, and the Doc snorted. "You really are a holdover hippie, aren't you?"
"No income," Klaus said, gloomily.
* * *
The kids came home from school to find him moping around, puttering in the greenhouse with some defrosted foxglove seeds. Frank unbent enough to give his old man an awkward hug. He looked just like his father had at the same age—skinny, puppy-dog eyes—well, except for the hair. Instead of Tom's mane, his boy had a buzz-cut, something that he couldn't understand. . . .
"We heard about it, Pop," he said, without specifying it. "Wish we could do something to help. Magdalena's pretty cool, I think she'd make a great stepmom."
"Stepmom, heck," Gerry said, a wistful expression on his round, freckled face. "She can cook."
Tom's throat ached, and his chest felt squeezed with misery. What kind of cruel fate was it for him to find his soulmate four hundred years in the past, only to have her wrenched away from him? And the worst irony of all of this was that up until the moment that Tom had evidenced interest, Magdalena had been the "unwanted" spinster-daughter of her family—a victim of her times. Betrothed three times, all three of her husbands-to-be had met with nasty demises, and after that, a combination of a lack of suitors that met her father's rigorous standards and the reputation for being a romantic jinx kept her on the shelf.
Stupid, that was—she was clever, sweet-natured, attractive, and exceedingly well educated—the fact that she was over thirty shouldn't have mattered. They'd met quite by accident; she'd come along with her father when a group of guildmasters from Jena arrived as a trade delegation and Faramir had volunteered his old man to act as a guide for a small group that included her.
He'd never believed in love at first sight, and this wasn't it. It was, however, the attraction of kindred souls. Love came later. Not much later, but later.
And the irony was that if he'd just listened to her and let her handle her father, they'd be scheduling a wedding right now. She liked the commune, liked the boys, wasn't afraid of hard work, rather admired his public-spirited attitude—irony of ironies, because of his wardrobe, her father had thought he was rich. If he'd just let her handle it. . . .
"I dunno why you got as far as you did with her old man," Ron said callously, helping himself to a tomato—teenage boys took a lot of filling. "I mean, we're trailer-trash compared to the Edelmann family."
"Believe it or not, it was my T-shirts," he sighed. "Dyes like that, only the rich can afford—"
* * *
And that was when it hit him, and why it had taken so long, he couldn't imagine—except, maybe, that the Adventure of the Tie Dyed Festival Shirts had been something so traumatic that he had repressed the memory.
"Pop—" Frank said warningly. "If you're thinking what I think you're thinking—remember what happened the last time!"
"Yeah," Ron chimed in. "People want their shirts colored, not themselves!"
Which was what had happened, after a sudden heavy rain shower . . . rainbow-colored customers, dripping dye all over their pants, their cars, their friends. Not good. Not good at all. Lothlorien had folded the tent and snuck out the back way, leaving behind a lot of angry people looking for someone to strangle with tie-dyed rope.
The dyes got stored, the remaining shirts distributed among the rest of the commune, and no one, no one talked about it anymore.
"Yeah, but there's two things different this time—the big one being that I'm not stoned. Come on, give me a hand, let's see if the dyes are still any good!"
If they weren't—well, he still had some ideas, and he could not believe that no one else in Grantville had realized the profit-making potential lying around unused and dusty in the grocery, the hardware-store, and the pharmacy, all of whom had their own little racks of commercial dyes that no one had even looked at. This might work. This just might work!
"Mordants," he explained, as they headed for the barn, the loft of which formed the main storage facility for all the assorted flotsam and jetsam, useless for all practical purposes but too good to throw out. "That's what we need. Mordants."
"Sounds like an RPG villain," said Frank, holding open the barn door.
"Mordants are the things that chemically bind dye to fiber," he explained. "That was where I went wrong. I forgot about mordants." Then, shamefacedly, and because he had a policy of always being honest with his kids, "Actually, I was too stoned to remember about mordants."
That was when the unexpected happened, the thing that made every bit of the pain he'd gone through in the last several years worthwhile. Frank grabbed his elbow and stopped him.
"Pop," he said, looking straight into his father's eyes (when had he gotten so tall?), his own honest brown ones the image of Tom's own, "Pop, you have not once, in the past fifteen years, been stoned. Don't think we haven't noticed. Once in a while, about half as o
ften as most guys' dads drink a six-pack, you've been a little buzzed. Never when we needed you. Maybe the rest of the town thinks you're a doper, but we know better. Always have. You've been a damn fine dad, as good as the best, and better than most. No shit."
He was very, very glad for the whole honesty-policy then, because he honestly broke down and cried, and they cried, and everyone hugged. Then the kids got embarrassed and covered it by punching each other, he had to break it up, and they all went up into the loft to check on those dyes.
"The main problem is that I know what a mordant is and what it does," he continued, as he passed boxes of giant wooden beads back to Gerry, "But I don't actually know what any of them are."
"How hard can that be to figure out, Pop?" Gerry retorted. "After all, you made LSD in the sixties!" He screwed up his freckled face in a caricature of bliss. "Oh wow—like, taste the colors, man!"
Tom straightened, indignant. "I will have you know that LSD was a sacrament, not a—a—"
"Whatever." Gerry shrugged, and took the box out of his hands. "The point is, how hard can it be?"
* * *
"Alum?" the town pharmacist looked at him with a puzzled and peculiar expression. "Yeah, I have alum. Why?"
"I want it. All of it," Tom replied, trying to look casual. "I've got a project. And I'll swap you a dozen eggs for every pound."
He'd already sent the boys around to corral every packet of dye and every bottle of food coloring in town. He'd decided, given the slim state of the family funds, he had to confide his plan to a few select movers-and-shakers. It was going to cost him later, in ten percent of the profit, but it was worth it.
A couple of days of research later—some of it in some pretty odd places, like historical novels—and he had his answer. The easiest mordant to get hold of and the safest to use was alum; alum had the added advantage that he could get more of it in the here-and-now once the last of the Grantville supply was used up.
A little dickering later, and he had his alum. And one more thing, his secret weapon—Magdalena.
His local fiber expert. She knew what he didn't—about fibers and dyeing, textiles and fabric, what would be profitable and what wouldn't. She suggested that he produce embroidery thread, not dyed fabric as he had originally planned. The town's relatively small stock of such things—Grantville hadn't had a hobby store—was long since exhausted by hundreds of color-starved handcrafters. Old clothing was being picked apart for the colored threads, for heaven's sake! If he could produce brilliantly colored, color-fast embroidery thread—he'd soon be as rich as her father had first thought he was.
That was what Magdalena said, anyway, and this time, he was going to let her run the show. Along with everything else in the loft had been skein after skein of fine cotton thread, bought surplus and mill-end, undyed cream and white and beige, meant to be used in a knitting machine that no one had ever been able to figure out. The machine itself was rusted into an unusable whole, but the cartons of thread had been right up there next to the boxes of dye. Later, Magdalena said, they would use fine-spun wool or linen, but this was going to be more than enough to prove to Herr Edelmann that Thomas Stone was going to be able to support a guildmaster's daughter, and any future offspring, in the style to which she was accustomed.
Two hours later, dye-pots a-bubbling, the games began.
The pigments were too precious to waste any, and dye-lots were not precisely an issue in the seventeenth century. The barn became a drying shed, with the bolts of cord from the macrame-business serving as clothesline, strung back and forth between the walls at just above head-height. When the bubbling pot held only dregs that wouldn't even produce a pastel, Tom went on to the next color, so that a literal spectrum spread itself across the twine. By the time he went to bed, exhausted, the barn was full—the barn floor looked like Jackson Pollock had come for an extended stay—and the tests he'd run on every new batch had proved that the dyes were as colorfast as anything contemporary, and more so than most.
He fell into bed, and for the first time in a week, really slept.
* * *
Edelmann didn't speak English; he left that up to his underlings, so Tom had recruited the sour and cynical Klaus. Somehow—he didn't ask how—Magdalena had persuaded her father to drive them all out to the commune in the Edelmann's own carriage. She and her father sat on the bench across from them; Magdalena with her eyes cast down and a deceptively demure expression on her face, her father wearing a frown. From time to time, he uttered something for Klaus to translate.
"He says dat he does not need to see dis farm to know it iss not sufficient to change hiss mind," Klaus would dutifully repeat in English. "He has done this as a favor to Magdalena, to make her be seeing dat dis iss impossible." Or, "Herr Stearns hass spoke vell uff you, but vords vill not support a vife."
After each such disparaging comment, Magdalena would murmur something to her father that Klaus did not trouble to translate. Klaus' glum expression would have dampened the spirits of a manic on the upswing, but Tom was armored in his secret, and kept smiling, something that clearly puzzled Herr Edelmann.
Edelmann's expression of disapproval changed only once in the walk from the yard to the barn, and that was when he dismounted from the carriage and was confronted with the dome. It clearly took him aback—but he recovered quickly. "A man vould go mad, liffing in such a place," he muttered, according to Klaus's dutiful translation.
Finally, they reached the barn, where all three boys waited, wearing their best—or at least, their brightest—outfits. Here Tom paused to make his own little speech.
"Guildmaster," he said, speaking slowly, giving Klaus plenty of time to make a thorough translation, "I can understand completely why you felt that I was not worthy of your beautiful and gracious daughter, whom God has endowed with so many gifts."
Behind Edelmann's back, Gerry made a gagging face. Tom ignored him.
"But there is one thing that you may not understand yet about Americans," he continued. "And that is that we all live by the proverb, 'Where there is a will, there is a way.' I vowed that I would find a way to prove to you that I am worthy of her. I swore that I would make myself worthy of her. I pledged that before I asked you a second time for her hand, I would have the means, not only to support her, but to impress you with my ability to rise to exceed anything you could demand of me in order to win her. And here, Guildmaster, are the first fruits of my labors—"
Frank and Ronald flung open the barn doors. He'd run an extension cord out there, and set up a couple of flood-lights, which now played on the display that he and the boys had set up for maximum effect.
The drying cords had been restrung, so that instead of lacing back and forth the length of the barn, they went back and forth between the walls from floor to ceiling. And draped over the cords, skein after skein after skein of the dyed cotton thread, forming an entirely new wall of color. He'd used up all of the cotton, though he'd only made a dent in the amount of dye he had stockpiled.
Edelmann stared. Klaus stared. Magdalena looked up at last, and smiled into Tom's eyes, and his heart turned over in his chest. There was a long silence.
Then Edelmann stepped forward and reached for one of the skeins to examine it closely. Slowly he began to ask questions. Was the color impervious to wetting? How quickly would it fade? Was this all of the thread, or did he have more? Was this all of the dye? Tom fielded the technical questions with ease, having been coached by Magdalena in what her father would probably ask. Questions about marketing the thread, he left to her to answer, which she did. Her father didn't seem to notice.
Evidently he was so used to being managed that it didn't impinge on his conscious mind anymore.
Finally, silence again. And when Guildmaster Edelmann turned back to face them, he was wearing an entirely different expression than the one he'd arrived here with.
"Also," he said. "Ja, gut. Und wann moechten Ihr beiden heiraten?"
Tom didn't need Klaus's translation fo
r that. Magdalena's shining blue eyes were enough.
Preliminary negotiations over, Tom handed his betrothed back into the carriage, following her father, and waved at them until the vehicle was out of sight.
Boxes of thread adorned the top of the carriage; samples to go back to Jena with her father. He pretended he knew what he was doing, all the time basically repeating what Magdalena had coached him to tell her father, while she sat modestly out of earshot in the carriage, pretending that she hadn't any idea what was going on between the men.
Magdalena was going to take care of negotiating the sale of this first batch, and Tom was perfectly content to leave that part of it up to her. He knew he didn't have a head for business, and she clearly did.
"Well, Pop, what are you going to do for an encore?" Ronald asked, when the carriage was gone.
"Another batch with wool instead of cotton—or maybe linen," he said, vaguely, still basking in the roseate glow of knowing that Magdalena was his, his!
"Yeah, but the dye we've got isn't going to last forever," Ronald persisted. "Probably not even a year, so what are you going to do for an encore?"
"What'dye think? He'll come up with something!" Frank countered, punching Ronald's arm. "After all, he made LSD by the gallon in the sixties! How hard can it be to come up with dye?"
"Dammit, I didn't make it by the gallon, it was a sacra—" he began, but all that reading up on dyes and mordants was still in the forefront of his mind, and Ronald's question suddenly made his brain lurch down another path.
Coal-tar dyes . . . Victorian coal-tar dyes . . . ummm. Reds, purples, good god, mauve! Damn! What a great way to get Porter to put a smoke-scrubber on the power-plant stack, a profit out of selling me the acid and the tars! Eco-sound and profitable! Oh, man that's not all—coal-tar salve, microscopy stains—Doc will canonize me—by god, I'm going to convert Grantville to Green yet!
He heard himself start to chuckle with glee, and the boys stopped their roughhousing to stare at him.
"You're right!" he said cheerfully, lengthening his steps into a stride as he headed for the dome, already planning his next course of research. "I made LSD in the sixties! How much harder can it be?"