Grantville Gazette.Volume XVII (ring of fire)

by Eric Flint

  "We'll be provided with good beds and everyone will have their own room, when the factory is built," was one of them.

  So was, "Ha! We'll never see another sunrise after we finish spinning all this wool."

  One of the most reliable of the new women had indeed been a servant in Don Ramon's household. Lucia listened to her particularly well, as she might have greater insight into their employer.

  What she heard was most distressing.

  ***

  "I should say not!" Ricardo had decided to make a visit to the village and see if he could figure out what the holdup was. It was all well and good that the wool was being carded and spun, even if the spinning was still by hand. But this was outside of enough. "The mother of those rabbits belongs to the de Aguilera family. Therefore so do the offspring."

  He was looking at rows of cages, each of which contained a half- or three-quarter bred Angora rabbit. The hair varied in length, and the colors tended to be much less spectacular than the colors of the purebreds. But for villagers to attempt this! Never would he allow it. Never! "These rabbits belong to the de Aguilera family," he repeated. "And they will be taken to the de Aguilera estate. Tomorrow!"

  It was a bit cavalier of the steward, but not beyond the law. Agustin kept his mouth shut, although it was a struggle. It was obvious that the de Aguilera family intended to keep the Angora as their monopoly, at least in Spain.

  "Foolish," Lucia muttered. "Pure foolishness." It was obvious to Lucia that the effort at monopoly would fail. Among the rumors the spinners brought was confirmation that the rabbits came from the up-timers in Germany, where they were sometimes even given away to poor women. If there were enough that up-timers would give them away, they must be very common and others would buy them.

  Worse, many of the better of the half- and quarter-breed rabbits had belonged to her little brother, Juan. And Juan was very upset, since he loved those dratted bunnies.

  The action with the rabbits did give credence to some of the other, less rational, rumors. Like the one that said every one in the valley would be held there for the rest of their lives to keep the secret safe. And the one that suggested those lives might not be all that long for most of them.

  ***

  "Damn that woman!"

  Agustin and Luis jumped. Lucia rarely cursed, and Beatriz never got angry. It was just the way these women were. Now Beatriz was cursing?

  "What's wrong?" Luis asked. "Let me fix it."

  Beatriz was apparently not in any kind of good mood. "You'll just mess it up, Luis. Stay where you are."

  "But at least tell me the problem, mi corazon," Luis begged. Quite literally, Agustin noticed, trying to hide his grin. Lucia elbowed him in the ribs, but she was trying not to smile, he could tell.

  "It's that dratted Isabel," Beatriz groused. "She never gets this right. Always, always, the strips she tears from the batts of wool are too fat. Always. She's in too much of a hurry."

  "It's an easy fix, Beatriz," Lucia said. "Heaven knows, we've done it often enough."

  Beatriz began stretching out the too-fat strip of wool. "I know that. The point is that I shouldn't have to. It was her job today, not mine."

  Agustin found that his mouth was hanging open. He'd never seen Lucia do exactly what Beatriz was doing with the wool. The rope, when Beatriz was finished pulling, which she did very gently, was at least five feet longer than it had been, possibly more.

  "I am an idiot!" Agustin shouted.

  "Well, that's common knowledge." Luis grinned at his friend. "Lucia could have told you if you didn't know," he added winking at her.

  "Ha! You're an idiot too!" Agustin answered back.

  Agustin's shout had distracted Beatriz who had seen Luis wink and giggled at his surprised look. "That too is common knowledge. But what is the idiocy of the moment?"

  "All this time we have been trying to figure out a machine to tear ropes from the batt. We could have been making a machine to stretch batts into ropes."

  "That sounds like a lot more work," Lucia said. "Tearing them is easier. That's why we do it that way."

  "Yes! Easier for a clever girl with clever fingers. A girl with the wit and skill to keep watch on how the wool batt is coming apart into ropes. But not easier for a machine that has no eyes, no fingers and no wit at all."

  Luis was nodding. "Machines are stupid, even the most complex ones. They can't change what they are doing, can't adjust themselves."

  ***

  Don Ramon de Aguilera was severely displeased. They had been pouring money into the spinning machine for two years now, and at the suggestion of his nephew. And now the boy had gone off to the Low Countries to save the guilder. What should a proper Spanish gentleman care about the Dutch guilder?

  The idea had been that while there were restrictions on who could make cloth for sale, there were no such restrictions on who made thread. So if they could use the machines to make fine high-quality thread quickly and cheaply, they could have the savings of the improved production and slip through a loophole in the laws by exporting not washed wool, but thread. Carded wool was wool under the law. They could export no more of it than washed wool. They got a slightly better price for it, true.

  He wasn't sure whether he was more displeased by Don Alfredo or the disloyalty displayed his shepherds. Don Ramon felt he was a generous, if not extravagant, lord. He didn't approve of extravagance, especially in regards to dealing with the lower classes. It only lead to trouble.

  In Don Ramon's world, there was a place for everyone and everyone belonged in their place. He was born a hidalgo and a Spanish noble, a defender of the church and of Spain. His shepherds had been born shepherds. He, like his father before him, generously allowed the shepherds to trap rabbits. But that was a matter of generosity, not of law.

  Now, taking that generosity as license, his shepherds were stealing from him… stealing the expensive angora rabbits imported not just from Germany, but from the future. Apparently egged on by the over-educated craftsmen he'd had to import to build the spinning machine. Proving that education, especially of the lower classes, was a threat to the faith and to the social order. Where was the loyalty?

  ***

  Machines, it turned out, were even stupider than Agustin or Luis had thought. To stretch a batt into a rope, what the papers called a sliver, they were using a series of rollers, like those they had built for the spinning machine. Each roller turning a bit faster than the one before. "I don't understand it, Lucia." Agustin complained.

  "Never mind about that!" Lucia said. "Don't you pay any attention to what is going on in the world?"

  "What?"

  "One of the other families in the Mesta has started selling limited quantities of Angora wool. From what I hear, the de Aguilera family is convinced that they got the rabbits from us." She looked down at the table. "It might even be true. A lot of people in the village were upset when they took our rabbits. And they didn't get all of them.

  "They've placed guards at the mouth of the valley and no one is allowed to leave."

  "It'll be all right," Agustin insisted. "Once we get the spinning machine working, everything will calm down." He tried to carry conviction in his voice, but it was hard going. The truth was that the improvements already made should have satisfied the de Aguilera family, at least for now. Cleaning and carding took at least as much of the time in going from wool to wool thread as spinning did. The project was already a success.

  Not all the notes from the German source were directly on spinning. There had been some on more general mechanics and their impact and how that lead to the industrial revolution. Based on those books, they had done a couple of studies. The time saved by the cleaning cages, the drying racks, and the carding machines meant that more man hours, woman hours, could be spent on spinning. From the books, they had also made some improvements in the spinning wheels. They were producing a lot more thread for a lot less labor than before the project had started. Why didn't the de Aguilera family see that?


  Things like this had happened before. The contractors would complain about a project, generally in preparation for extorting the costs back from the craftsmen or running the craftsmen out of town without the final payment. But that wouldn't work here because of the major concern with secrecy. It was starting to feel like a story from ancient times, about the workers buried with the Pharaoh to keep the secret traps secret.

  To avoid thinking about the unreasonableness of the de Aguilera family, Agustin turned his mind back to the unreasonableness of the rope stretcher. It was at least something he had a hope of solving.

  ***

  The rope stretcher consisted of five sets of rollers each turning a bit faster than the last, and each a little closer to the next than to the last. Agustin had figured that the wider the rope, the more distance you needed to give it to stretch. Luis figured that it didn't matter, so he didn't argue the point, though-as a matter of aesthetics-he would have preferred that all the rollers be the same distance apart.

  The first set of rollers was a foot from the second, the second was a half a foot from the third, which was a quarter foot from the fourth, which was only an inch and a half from the last set. But in spite of that, it took them a while to realize what was happening. Because you couldn't always tell that the batt of wool had lost cohesion between the first and second set of rollers, sometimes it looked like they were coming apart between the second and third sets. Or it looked like the third, fourth or fifth set was causing the problem by pulling too hard.

  It was Luis that saw it. He was watching the stretcher shred rather than stretch another batt of carded wool and picked up a single strand of wool. He stretched it out as long as it would go and then pulled on it some more. Naturally, it broke. It really didn't have anything like the stretchiness of a piece of thread.

  He looked back at the stretcher and began to visualize what was happening to the hairs as they went through the rollers. It wasn't that they were stretching; they were sliding against each other. At least he thought they were. He picked a fragment of the wool batt and pulled it apart. Slowly, carefully, watching the individual strands. Yes. It was the strands slipping past each other that allowed the wool to stretch. They were tangled together, but after being carded they weren't that tangled. Sort of half tangled.

  He looked back at the rollers. Then he remembered something from the spinning machines. He was pretty sure that the rollers were all the same distance apart on the spinning machine. He picked up another bit of wool and slowly fed it into the stretcher. He wasn't really trying for a rope now, he was just carefully watching to see what would happen. He used very little wool because he wanted to be able to see what was happening to the threads. And see he did. Suddenly, he saw it all. A bit vaguely to be sure, but he saw it.

  He started adjusting the distance between the sets of rollers. No easy job, because they weren't designed to be adjustable. That was what Agustin found him doing. He tried to explain what he was doing to the carpenter but the words came out jumbled. He wasn't used to being the one who wanted to try something different.

  Even after the second run through Agustin didn't get it, but he just shrugged and said, "Tell me what you want me to do."

  ***

  BLAM! The sound of a shot woke Lucia. Then there was shouting. "Somebody catch that rabbit!"

  Still only half awake, Lucia looked around and noticed that her little brother Juan was missing. Suddenly she had a bad feeling. She quickly put on a shawl over her shift and ran out of the cottage. And almost ran over a rabbit glowing white in the moonlight. The rabbit dashed around the corner and was gone.

  Lucia could see lights waving in the distance, and went to investigate. The de Aguilera guards were milling around with torches, scattering in all directions. Except for one, who was bending over a slight form that lay in the dust. "Juan!" Lucia shouted, and ran toward the guard.

  The guard sprang to his feet and pointed his gun at Lucia. "Get back!"

  "He's bleeding. Let me bind his wounds."

  "He's dead," the guard said harshly. "He tried to slip out of the valley carrying the white rabbit. Got shot for his trouble and now the damned rabbit has run off again." Then he shook his head and relented a bit. "Go ahead, girl. Talk to him while you can."

  "It hurts, Lucia!" Juan cried. It looked like half his belly had been ripped away.

  "Oh, Juan. What happened?"

  "They stole my bunnies." Juan repeated a complaint that he had made ever since the rabbit crossbreeds had been collected. Then he added, "I caught Mrs. Bunny in one of my traps. I guess I shouldn't have tried to sneak her out but it seemed only fair. They took mine, I'd take theirs." He tried to grin.

  "Oh, Juan," Lucia whispered. Then Juan died.

  ***

  "It's all that Agustin's fault," Papa said. Papa had been drinking ever since the burial. Juan was the youngest, and had always been Papa's favorite, as much for his independence of thought as for his resemblance to their mother.

  "Agustin didn't tell Juan to steal the rabbit, Papa."

  The look he gave her was ugly. Very ugly and scary. "Shut your mouth, girl. My son is dead, dead for a damned rabbit. I don't want to hear what you think."

  ***

  It didn't quite work the way Luis and Agustin thought it would. Granted the wool did spin into better thread than it had been, but the thread was still weaker than it should be. It was all Agustin could do to keep from beating the machine into splinters, but he drew a deep breath and kept trying.

  He went back to the papers. Finally, he had it. "Weights, Luiz. Weight on the first roller, to slow it down, so the wool will draw. A lighter weight on the second."

  "Are you sure?" Luiz asked.

  "When have we been sure of anything?" Agustin responded.

  ***

  Lucia walked into the old mill upstream of the village with a breaking heart. She had just realized that she was truly and deeply in love with Agustin. Two things had told her so. She looked at her future without him and it was a bleak gray place that didn't seem worth the trouble. And she was coming up here to send him away because she cared more about him than she did about that horrible life. She had to tell Agustin that he had to leave but the words wouldn't come. She cleared her throat to prepare the way for the words she didn't want to say.

  The two men looked up from the spinning machine. "We figured it out!" Luis said.

  Agustin grinned at her. "I was waiting until we got this to work to ask your father, Lucia. But we're close enough now we know we can get it to work." Then he knelt right there on the dirty stone floor of the mill. "Lucia, will you marry me?"

  "Yes!" came out of Lucia's mouth without her will. For a moment she forgot the news that had brought her here. Then they were kissing and the news was pushed back even further.

  When they came partway back to earth, Luis was sitting on the frame of the spinning machine grinning like a loon. "So when is the wedding? From what I saw you'd better hurry." He laughed. "Besides, you still have to convince her father."

  Suddenly, it all came back. "Father is on his way to the guards, to tell them that you're responsible, that you know where Juan hid his rabbit cages. You have to run, and you have to run now."

  "Not without you, I'm not!" Agustin insisted. Then he shook his head in confusion "What makes your father think I had anything to do with it?"

  "Papa doesn't like you," was all Lucia could think of. "The way you talk about master Munos. And not getting the answers to your questions. Papa is very conservative. He can't blame Don Ramon, Juan or himself. It must be someone else and he decided on you. He's been warning me about immoral townsmen for months."

  "You both need to run." Luis was nodding. Lucia knew that he was more politically astute than Agustin. "Look, when this comes out Don Ramon is going to be very angry. He is going to want someone to blame and the people here know that. Munos is going to be looking for a scapegoat.

  "I think they are misreading Don Ramon. He isn't stupid; h
e is just set in his ways. And Ricardo is a smart cookie. But they aren't here. What we have here are some guardsmen that figure they are going to be in trouble for letting Mrs. Bunny get away again, some scared masters and some upset villagers.

  Besides that, there is no way Munos is going to want anyone hearing your version of events. I'm fairly safe because I don't answer to Munos. Master Guiterez will protect me from overzealous guards. But no one is going to protect Agustin and if he runs they will know you warned him." He gave Lucia a serious look. "All the guard will see in you is a village girl whose brother was caught stealing from the don. No one who can is going to even try to protect you."

  "Are you sure that Master Guiterez will be able to protect you?"

  Luis pointed at the cots that had been set up in the mill house. "I was asleep on one of those. I never saw a thing." He grinned.

  More time was wasted while Agustin hugged Luis and Lucia kissed him on the cheek.

  Agustin started putting stuff in a sack. "We'll have to head into the hills. Then on to the coast and somehow get out of Spain."

  "Hills I know very well," Lucia said.

  "Ah."

  They looked toward Luis. "Ah. I know someone at the coast. He owes me a favor." He quickly wrote down a name and village. "Go to him. He'll get you out, if you can only get there."

  ***

  It was the middle of the night when they left the village. They could see torches beginning to move toward the village from the mouth of the valley, but they had a head start, unlike poor Juan.

  They ran toward the hills and didn't stop.