by Eric Flint
No one was sure how he had gotten the print plates. Perhaps he hadn't; perhaps all he had done was use their book as a model. That's what Herr Gruber, the engraver, insisted. There were, he said, little differences in the Gerber book and the Wish Book. They actually talked to a lawyer about suing Gerber, but the lawyer told them it probably wouldn't do any good because the guy was based in Halle. Even if they won, the suit was likely to cost more than it would gain them. No one was sure what it would do to sales but they were all worried.
* * *
Johan groaned and stretched. "My pills, dear. Please."
Barbara nodded. She was happy that Johan had discovered the Blue Pills of Happiness. He was much less grumpy these days. She had used them a time or two herself, when the monthly cramps got out of hand.
All in all, she thought that many people in the village were a good bit less grumpy these days. Even her mother, who took the pills for the constant toothaches she suffered. "It's getting to be time to order more. But I think we should try the ones from the Bargain Book. They're cheaper."
"I'd be afraid they wouldn't work as well. Let's stick to the Gribbleflotz brand . . . just in case."
"Those are in the Bargain Book, too."
"But we know the ones from the Wish Book work."
Barbara shrugged. "As you wish. And your trousers are worn to the weft again. How about you try a pair of torberts?"
* * *
Ursula sighed. There were order forms in the Wish Book which made it easier to tell what was being ordered, in spite of which a lot of people put their orders in letters. People just didn't follow instructions. Still she had a job to do. She opened the letter and quickly realized that there was, in this case, a good reason for not using the order form.
Dear Sirs,
I would have used the order form but the item that captured my interest possessed neither order number or price. This is entirely understandable, for the young lady displayed on the cover and in your Mail Order Bride Section is clearly a pearl beyond price. Capture my interest, did I say? Nay, more. The kindly sparkle of her eyes, the clever wit of her smile, hold me an entranced prisoner even now.
I am not a fool, good sirs, though I know I must sound one. Such a one cannot exist in our poor earthly world. Not unless an angel from heaven snuck to earth in the fabled Ring of Fire. No, it must be the work of a latter day Michelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci, who has, in turning from uncouth men to lovely ladies, put Michelangelo's David to blushing shame. And in his model found a smile that causes the famed Mona Lisa to raise her hand to hide the smile that, until now, men so remarked upon.
Still, even the greatest artist must needs have inspiration to work from. And the inspiration for these works of art must have been more than a mere physical model. Clearly the artist has managed to capture a bit of the beauty of the model's soul. Nor, I know, can such a thing be bought. It must instead be won. Did I but live in an earlier age, I would don armor and seek out a dragon to slay or perhaps take up my lute and compose ballads by the score.
But we do not live in such times and my singing causes children to flee in fear, convinced, no doubt, that some horrible monster approaches. I am but a man of accounts. A merchant, who even now kicks himself for not having the wit to offer my customers such a compilation of products to be ordered with such ease. So, while I would willingly and happily order all of the items in the Mail Order Bride section of your Wish Book—did I have such a bride as the one you show to gift them with. Alas, the one that would make the others worthwhile is unavailable. But, on the infinitesimal chance that I am wrong . . . that there is such a paragon of the womanly virtues as the pictures display . . . How might she be contacted?
Yours Most Sincerely,
Paulus Sandler
Ursula sat frozen in her chair, staring at the letter, unsure whether to laugh or cry. Clearly the letter was intended to offer the writer up for friendly ridicule for the amusement of the reader. But she was sure that there was a touch of genuine desire hidden in its lines. There was a loneliness in it that she recognized as her own. A loneliness that didn't really expect to find easing. It was that realization that tipped the balance in favor of tears, for she could almost—but not quite—believe that she could ease that loneliness and her own into the bargain. And the certainty that she couldn't weighed on her with a weight she couldn't bear. Tears filled her eyes, a little for the letter but mostly for the knowledge that she would live and die alone. Leaving the letter where it lay, she got up and ran from the room.
* * *
"What was that all about?" Gary asked.
Joyce was quicker. She went to Ursula's desk and looked for what some cretin could have written that would upset the normally unflappable young woman to the point of tears. Ready to give the cretin a piece of her mind, she of course saw the letter immediately. And began to read. Gary shortly was reading over her shoulder.
"What's the big deal?" Gary asked, just like a man. "So the guy was over the top. Why not just trash it if she didn't want to answer it."
Joyce slammed him with an elbow to the ribs. "Don't be more of a jerk than you have to, Gary. The problem is she does want to answer it."
Gary stepped out of range because he knew he was about to earn another elbow. "So why not answer it?"
Joyce didn't answer, she just looked at him and sighed. "Stay here. And don't say a word about this to Ursula. Ever! I'm going to talk to her."
* * *
Ursula was crying in her pillow when she heard the knocking and realized that she had run out of the room. Embarrassment fought grief and won, at least for the moment. She wiped her eyes and went to open the door. When she saw the letter in Joyce's hand, a new embarrassment added its weight to grief and the tears came again.
"I knew I shouldn't have agreed. I knew it."
"Honey, it's a beautiful letter. It's kind of like the man really wants to know you. He sounds very sweet." Joyce pointed to the phrase "children run screaming in fear." "You've got to like a guy who can put himself down like that."
Ursula blinked back tears. "And now I have to tell this perfectly nice man that I am not what he thinks. I knew Herr Gruber was doing wrong, making me too pretty. No one has ever offered me marriage. My family didn't even want to look at me, not after. . . . Mama cried every time she looked at my face. That is why I left. I could bear it no longer."
Joyce patted her shoulder. "You are too that pretty. Why, if we were back up-time, they could fix that in a heartbeat."
"But we are not." Ursula stood, then wiped her eyes. "We are not."
* * *
Dear Sir,
I regret that I must decline your kind offer. It is quite true that nothing was added to that drawing, that I will attest to. But I'm afraid something was left out of it. I feel that it would not be to your advantage, or mine, to correspond.
I thank you for the letter you sent and will treasure it.
U.R.
Ursula considered and worked on her response for a week. Even though Joyce had offered to write it, she felt that she must. After at least fifty starts and stops, she finally decided that short and simple was best. But she couldn't resist letting Paulus Sandler know that she did treasure his letter.
* * *
"She writes a beautiful hand," Albrecht pointed out. "I wonder what she means, 'something was left out of it.'"
"Pox marks, I'd bet."
"Fat as a house, maybe?"
"No teeth?"
Paulus read the letter again. Something about it spoke to him. But he didn't know what. "I suppose we'll never know. I told you there would be something like this." Even as he blustered, he tried to hide his disappointment.
"Business is slow," Albrecht said. "You could go see. Don't even have to give your name. Just go and look."
"Bah! Pointless."
"Well, there's always my niece, Anna."
Paulus flinched. Anna was, in his opinion, a shrew and as close to witless as he had ever seen.
&nb
sp; "Then you ought to go. Every man should travel now and again." Here, fishy, fishy.
"Pointless, I say."
"Dare you. Besides, we need someone to have a look at those railroads and see if we can get shipping contracts from Grantville. We got some from that Simpson fellow in Magdeburg."
"We don't have much in the way of connections in southern Germany. We always thought they weren't needed."
"True enough, before the Ring of Fire happened. Now I'm not so sure. It's been a couple of years and they're still there. Even getting bigger. I really do think it's time we started paying attention, don't you?"
* * *
The suppliers, some of them, were doing it again, in spite of the contracts. "Unavoidable delays." "We're sorry, but there are just so many hours in a day and we're working our fingers to the bone as it is." It was even true. Of course, some of the stuff they were working their fingers to the bone making was going to Halle to the Gerber warehouse. Gerber's advantage was that he had more startup money. He could make bulk orders, put them in his warehouse in Halle and have them ready for the orders to come in.
"I'm getting worried about this," Joyce said. "This is the fifth 'out of stock' letter I've had to write this week. If this keeps up, it's going to ruin our reputation."
"It's going to ruin us entirely. Waiting for those products is costing us money. And we're still getting orders from last year's Wish Book at last year's prices." Muriel was getting worried. When they had decided to seriously expand the Wish Book for 1633, they had put up the house as collateral for a large loan. They had gone with a truly monstrous print run, fifteen thousand copies and hired extra people. All of which would have been fine if they had or could get enough product to support their orders.
At seven months after the publication of the 1633 Wish books they had filled sixty-three thousand orders and had just under twenty thousand waiting, at an average of three point seven items per order. Mostly small ticket items: measuring cups and spoons, scales, even fabric tape measures, were selling faster than they could be produced. So they had a fair-sized staff that was mostly sitting on its hands waiting for the manufacturers to deliver the product so that they could package it and ship it. And they couldn't let their people go; they had become like family. Instead, she had missed the last two payments on the house. The worry was affecting her temper, which was none too even to begin with.
* * *
Paulus Sandler couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. The Wish Book came from here? A small, inconspicuous building, off the main streets of Grantville? There was no warehouse. There was barely room for a person to turn around in the crowded space. How could this possibly be the headquarters of the Wish Book?
He stopped staring in the window, squared his shoulders and tapped at the door. In the few hours he'd been here, he'd already learned to call this kind of building a "garage." It appeared that many of these garages had been converted to living spaces or workshops for various manufactories.
"Come in!"
Paulus flinched. The voice was very high-pitched and screechy. Perhaps that was what U.R. meant when she said that something had been left out. He cracked open the door. "Hello?"
"Come on in. I'm in the back."
Paulus made his way around a stack of barrels. "Ah?"
"What can I help you with?" The woman who spoke was very old, but her eyes behind the thick spectacles were bright. "Were you looking for Gary or Joyce?"
"Ah . . . no." Paulus held out the letter he had received. "I am looking for the person who wrote this."
Muriel looked at the letter. She knew all about it, of course. You couldn't keep a secret in the Burke household. "You the man that wrote?" He wasn't a bad looking man, she thought. A bit beefy, maybe, but nice looking.
"Yes. And I could not help myself. I must know what got left out of the picture. I simply must."
Muriel picked up a copy of the Wish Book and pointed to the cover. Then, with a finger nail, she indicated a scar on the beautiful face. "Ursula has a scar here. A bad one, caused by one of the men who attacked her. But that isn't the worst scar she carries. The worst one is the scar she carries in her heart."
"Ah." Paulus stopped.
"So tell me, buster. Does that change things for you? She's not quite what the picture shows. But she's really a lot more than it shows, too. I've never met a more caring person, up-time or down. And as they say, beauty is only skin deep."
"How am I supposed to know that?" Paulus complained. "I have never met the woman. I don't know how things would go between us even if she looked exactly like the picture. What's she like? Will she find me an old, fat man?" Paulus wasn't fat but he was solidly built and not overly tall. Nor was he a doddering oldster, though there was some gray in his blond hair and lines of care on his face. He looked like what he was, a middle-aged, fairly prosperous merchant. But he knew that to the callow youth he had been, he would look an old man. "Does her smile in the picture there reflect her laugh or is it the artist's grace? Does she laugh with joy or at another's pain?"
He shook head unable to really explain what had brought him here "It's true that I came about the girl, but I knew it was probably a fool's errand even as I made the trip. I have no desire to hurt the girl nor any great desire to be hurt myself. The excuse I gave myself was that I was really coming to look over your business. Perhaps it's best we leave it at that for now?"
"Oh no! Gerber's already killing us. Now you want to jump in."
Paulus laughed. "Not necessarily. It's more curiosity than anything else. Is Gerber really hurting you that much? From what I hear back home, you seem to have plenty of customers."
"That's not the problem. It's the suppliers." And from there they went into a detailed discussion of what the business was doing and how it was working. That's what Ursula found Muriel and the stranger talking about over an hour later.
* * *
As she usually did around strangers, Ursula stood with the good side of her face toward anyone she didn't know well. This sometimes took some maneuvering, but to Muriel it seemed that it was almost second nature by now. "I'm back, Muriel. Shopping done and the day's packages delivered to the post. The new cart makes that job much easier."
Muriel smiled. "We're pretty much done for the day, then. And I'm tired. Ursula, this is—"
She stopped abruptly because Paulus cut her off. "Albrecht Pfitzer, at your service." He bowed. "Frau, ah, Muriel, rather, has been telling me about you."
Muriel kept herself from flinching. She could understand that Paulus might not want to embarrass Ursula, but she was pretty sure he was making a big mistake. "Albrecht is going to have supper with us, Ursula. He's got some very good ideas about how we could expand the business and I want to pick his brain a bit longer. We'll need to tell Joyce to set another place at the table."
* * *
Albrecht was a very nice man, Ursula thought. He hadn't visibly flinched when he saw the scar she bore and had kept up dinner conversation very well. He'd also borne up under the noise level, which was something that Gary didn't always manage very well. Ursula knew that Joyce, Mom Burke, and Muriel couldn't help the pitch of their voices. It did make for piercing conversation, though.
* * *
Paulus thought about the Burkes and Ursula all during the walk back to the Higgins Hotel. The Wish Book had been a good idea, one that was clearly working and that had a lot of profit potential. But, as good-hearted and kind as the Burkes were, none of them had a head for business. They'd done reasonably well, even so. What they didn't have was the capital to grow. And he knew, from talking to Muriel, that they were in serious danger of going under. It was a case of too much success, too soon, compounded by the problems with their suppliers.
He, though, had capital. And business sense. And it was clear that Ursula was a part of the Burke family, an important part. He doubted that she would look kindly on him taking over if she thought it would damage her adopted family.
And, now that he thought
about it, keeping his real identity a secret might have been a mistake. It had been a spur of the moment thing, an unthoughtout attempt to save them both embarrassment. It had suddenly occurred to him that maybe her letter had simply been a kind way of telling him she wasn't interested. He had never thought that before and nothing Muriel had said supported the notion. It was seeing her face. The unscarred side of her face. She had looked like the pictures. Just like the pictures. What could such a woman see in him? Now he faced another problem. How would Ursula feel when she discovered his deception? Having Ursula think he was dishonest would not make him happy, he acknowledged. She was beautiful in spirit and that spirit called to him. Probably he should have admitted who he was immediately.
Of course, if he helped the Burkes out of their troubles, surely that would make her look kindly upon him. Perhaps even enough that she would forgive him the deception.