"Are you sure that this isn't a way to buy me off?"
"Absolutely not!" Brent said with such overdone offended dignity that Darlene knew he was joking.
Darlene didn't accept the job offer. Not then. She liked cooking and she had learned that she liked cooking for large numbers. She didn't want to go back to a job in a lab, spending her time assembling parts and soldering itty-bitty wires.
Johan Kipper got Darlene's first letter with considerable pleasure. She hadn't objected to his heading. Instead, hers had echoed it. My dearest Johan!
Meanwhile there were products to buy, arrangements to be made. The craftsmen in Amsterdam were starved for work and the negotiations were going well. More importantly, Don Fernando's army was in real need of things like cheap sewing, clothes washing, and all sorts of other things that an army needed to keep in good repair, and Johan Kipper, as David Bartley's man, had just the sort of stuff they needed and couldn't get, or at least was a lot more expensive when done by hand than when done by machine.
The second letter from Darlene arrived within a few days of their getting permission to enter Amsterdam. Darlene wasn't pleased to learn that Young Master David had checked her out. For that matter, Johan's first reaction wasn't one of unalloyed joy. But considering how many gold diggers he had discovered going after one of his charges-even little Master Donny, Master David's younger brother. . His second reaction was to wonder what David had found.
"Not all that much," Master David said when confronted. "She seems to be one of the ones who had real problems out of the Ring of Fire. Her husband and son were left up-time and she didn't get help with that grief. She just buckled down and did her job. But, by a few months ago, she was a burnout case at the power plant and quit to go to work in the school cafeteria, but the little kids at the elementary school were too much like her little boy. So she switched over to the high school. She had some pull to get the job, I think. There were dozens of down-timers who were actually better qualified to work in a large kitchen."
"Darlene likes to cook, she said," Johan pointed out.
"Sure, and apparently she does a decent job. But someone who was the chief cook for a down-time school or mine or whatever, where they had to feed lots of people had more of the sort of experience needed for working on a school lunch line. Even if they would need lessons on the up-time equipment. Besides, she does know about electrical instruments." David shook his head. "Never mind. It's not that big a deal. It just seems to me that she is wasting her talents and training."
Johan wasn't sure that he didn't agree with that, but it was Darlene's choice, not Master David's.
While David, Herr Wendel, Prince Lichtenstein and the rest were talking with the high and the mighty, Johan Kipper talked with the craftsmen of Amsterdam. "What is this project you have in mind for my shop, Herr Kipper?"
"Spinning thread."
"We already spin thread, Herr Kipper. Are you going to show us how to spin it into gold?" the man asked, grinning. "Normally, I would be thrilled with such an endeavor But just at the moment I would like to see a way of spinning thread into ham hocks or sides of beef."
"Granted, and I wish I could teach you that. No, actually I'm here for what I want you to figure out and teach us. We need more thread-wool, hemp, cotton, even silk. With the sewing machines, it takes much less time to make clothing so more people are buying clothes and the price of fabric goes up. But the weavers can't make more fabric without more thread to weave. We have two shops working on the problem back in Grantville and one in Magdeburg, and those aren't the only ones. The first people to figure a way to spin more thread faster are going to get rich. So we have several projects, trading information back and forth. All with an agreement to share information with each other."
"What does this have to do with me and my ladies, my spinsters?" Herr Kikkert asked. "We already make a lot of thread. Not that we have anyone with the money to buy it right now. The weavers have warehouses full of cloth and no money to buy thread to make more."
Johan knew that Kikkert was exaggerating. The bouncy little man hopped about the room like the frog he was named for. But the siege hadn't been in place all that long. There hadn't been time for the weavers still in Amsterdam to fill up their warehouses or even run out of money. Though they would run out of money sooner than they would fill up the warehouses. But Johan had a cure for that. "You need something to work on, something that will provide employment for you and your spinsters. And who knows more about spinning than spinsters?"
Johan pulled up his briefcase, a down-time made one which Johan thought was better quality than the few real up-time ones that had come back in the Ring of Fire. It was also much less expensive than the real up-time made ones, but it very much looked like an up-time made briefcase, especially with the little combination lock built in. He moved the numbers to the appropriate postings and snapped the briefcase latch open. All theater, there wasn't really anything all that secret in the case. He pulled out a file. "Up-time they had great factories that made hundreds of miles of thread in a few hours, operated by only a few workers."
While Johan had been opening his case, the spinsters had gathered around. Now one spoke up. "That would put us out of work. Now I know why the Spaniard let you through. It was to destroy our spirits by killing our futures. I'm going to report you to the Committees of Correspondence."
Johan smiled at the woman with his even, white, false teeth and said, "Say hello to Gretchen for me, but don't worry about your jobs. There will be better ones coming. Working in a garment factory with a sewing machine is probably a step up from spinning. And there are other up-timer jobs, assembly line jobs. There is work in Thuringia now, more work than there are people to do it." Johan didn't think he was exaggerating too much, but he knew that if the spinning machines were produced, some of these women would be left out in the cold by the new machines. But Johan had, in forty years as a soldier, killed people for causes much less worthwhile.
They gathered around and went over the drawings and the tricks that had been discovered. Great improvements in carding had already been managed, but spinning was still running into problems. Johan wished Brent or Trent was here to explain the problems or, better yet, Rob Jones, an Englishman who had gone to work for them on the spinning project.
"How was your day?" David asked him, tiredly, that evening.
"It went fairly well. The spinning shop will take on the project and several of the women there seemed to have some interesting ideas. It will be worth a try, and even if we get it first in Grantville or Magdeburg, it will still give us a place in Amsterdam to put the new spinning machines when they are worked out."
David nodded. "We'll need that, whoever gets a working model."
"Besides, it will give them employment." Johan added. "That has to be the hardest part of a siege for the townsfolk. Well, aside from the starving and the dying in the end, that is."
David snorted.
Johan's next letter to Darlene was mostly about the excursions into Amsterdam. The spinning project was only one of the problems being worked on. And OPM had all those Dutch guilders to spend. He added: I understand your being upset about Master David's actions, but I must admit that if the situations were reversed I would have done the same thing. In fact, I have. In so doing, I have discovered both venality and nobility. People who saw David as a meal ticket, and people who had only the noblest of motives. The only way to learn was to look. So I hope you will forgive him and me for the actions that our situation demands.