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."