"I have to go," Veronika called as she ran off.
Gottfried was a bit peeved that she could so easily break off such a mind-blowing kiss, but not so peeved as to miss that she remembered to recover her basket and the money for tomorrow's lunch orders. At the very least, that meant she expected to be back tomorrow.
****
Veronika was breathing heavily as she entered the town square leading to the office. A quick glance up at the clock tower showed she was going to cut it very fine, and in fact, she only just made it to the door as the clock chimed the half-hour. She scampered through the door into the office, to find Nikolaus Rorer standing at the counter, just as the last chime sounded.
"I really must talk to your supervisor about your time keeping, Fraulein Vorkeuffer. You've been getting later and later returning from your lunch break every day for the last month."
"But Veronika has never been late," Catrin protested.
Nikolaus gestured towards Veronika. "She hardly looks ready to start work on time. And for what? A few minutes with a man who isn't going to marry her."
"Gottfried is too going to marry Veronika," Catrin said.
"Why would a mill owner marry a girl like her, when he can have his pick of the daughters and granddaughters of the members of the Chamber of Commerce? You should have seen them at the dinner Tuesday night. They were all over your Gottfried." Nikolaus stopped as if an idea had suddenly come to him. "But of course you couldn't have seen that, because you weren't there. Your man didn't invite you, did he?" He threw Veronika a triumphant look.
She knew Nikolaus was trying to hurt her, and he was succeeding, but there was no way she was going to let him see that. Besides, she had the memory of that kiss, and the dazed look in Gottfried's eyes to hang her hopes onto. "Is there something we can help you with, Herr Rorer, or don't you have anything better to do than prop up the counter?"
"I can see you're putting a brave face on, but he won't marry you. We all know that." Nikolaus gave Veronika a last sneer before pushing off from the counter and disappearing down the corridor to his office.
"Somebody should do something nasty to that man, like maybe sit a bucket of water over his door, or . . ."
"No, Catrin. He isn't worth it."
"But imagine what he'd look like," Catrin said.
The image of a wet and bedraggled Nikolaus brought a smile to Veronika's face. "He'd raise such a fuss."
"Sure, but just thinking about it brought back the smile you had before the monster wiped it away. How did your time with Gottfried go today?"
Veronika knew Catrin was just curious about the progress at the mill, but she couldn't help remembering that kiss, and she blushed accordingly.
"Oh! Has something happened I need to hear about?"
"No," Veronika said, trying to brazen it out.
It didn't work. Catrin was studying her closely. Too closely. "Gottfried kissed you," she said. "What was it like?"
"Gottfried and I kissed each other, and it was . . . nice."
"Nice? Is that the best you could do?"
"That's all I'm saying," Veronika insisted. "And it's about time we got some work done around here."
"That means it was better than 'nice.' That's good. You don't want to marry someone whose kisses are only 'nice.'"
July 1633
Veronika accepted the invitation vouchers from the male half of the last couple and checked the name. Privately, deep inside, where Lyle Kindred couldn't see it, she was jumping up and down like an idiot. Herr Kindred was the publisher of the Grantville Times-the largest newspaper in the area. She picked up the last of the name tags she'd prepared and handed them to his wife. "It is good of you both to come, Herr Kindred, Frau Kindred."
Lyle was looking around, waving to people he recognized while his wife pinned the name card onto his jacket. "I couldn't afford to stay away. Mary Jo wouldn't let me."
"I wouldn't let you? Since when have you ever listened to what I've said?" She turned to Veronika. "Lyle insisted on coming just so he could get his hands on the free sample you promised in your invitation."
Veronika pointed to the stack of one-quire bundles of paper on the table. "The free sample packages will be handed to you when you leave, Herr Kindred. And I'm sure you'll appreciate the quality of the paper. Now, is there anything you would like to see?"
"Lyle wants to see the paper being made. Is that possible?" Mary Jo asked.
"Yes. We expected that request and have arranged for the machine to be running during the open house. If you'd like to follow me?"
"Come along, Lyle, don't keep the young woman waiting."
"The Spengler mill makes paper by an almost continuous process," Veronika explained as they walked towards the mill hall.
"How do you get continuous?" Lyle asked. "I've seen a few mills, and they all use paper molds on an endless loop. There seems to be a problem with the wire mesh breaking."
"Gottfried solved the problem of the mesh breaking by not allowing the mesh to flex. In place of an endless loop going around rollers, he has a single large roller with the mesh fixed to it."
"This I've go to see," Lyle said.
"And see it you shall," Veronika said as she guided the couple into the hall. "There it is."
The large mesh covered cylinder was about six feet in diameter and two feet wide. It rotated slowly as a constant stream of pulp poured out of the headbox.
"The paper's pretty fragile on the cylinder, so we have this felt roller here to remove the still wet paper," Veronika said as she pointed out the feature. "The paper then passes through a couple of squeegee rollers before being rolled up at the end."
"You're making paper in rolls? Can we buy it that way rather than ready cut?"
Veronika reluctantly shook her head. "You can buy the rolls, but all you'll be getting will be expensive artificial logs. There's still too much water in the paper, and we can't press it out once it's rolled up. So we have to take the rolls and move them to a cutting bench where the paper is unrolled and cut to size. We can then squeeze the rest of the water out of the paper the old-fashioned way."
"Pity," Lyle muttered. "It'd be good to have rolled paper for when we can get a continuous press."
"Oh, that's not to say Gottfried isn't working on solving the problem. It's really just a matter of getting the right materials to squeeze the water out of the paper before it is rolled up."
"So how long do you think it'll be before we can get paper by the roll?"
Veronika shrugged. "Nothing we've tried so far has worked, and we fear we might need rubber."
Lyle nodded in understanding. "Everything is waiting on rubber. We need it for some of the up-time printing innovations I want to introduce as well. So until you get some rubber you'll be making sheet paper? How much can you make?"
"How much would you like to buy?"
"How about thirty reams of Crown a week?"
Veronika whistled silently. Thirty reams was enough paper for fifteen thousand four-page newspapers. It was hard to imagine the people of Grantville were buying that many newspapers every week, let alone buying that number of copies of just the Grantville Times. "We can do that. The mill has a nominal capacity of thirty reams a day."
"If the Times were to become a daily, we'd be looking at something like a hundred reams a week. Would that present any problems?"
Veronika clamped down hard on her immediate desire to agree to anything to secure the order. Instead she stopped to think. "That'd be over half our capacity. I'm not sure how Gottfried would feel about being so committed to a single client. Could I get back to you on that later?"
"Sure," Lyle agreed. "I just thought I'd ask. We won't be going daily for a while yet anyway."
****