Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume XVII

"Can you spin this, Lucia?" Agustin asked. He presented her with a blanket of wool that was about two inches thick, nearly ten feet long, and about two feet wide.

She looked at it carefully. "I think so. But it's too wide. We need a way to draw it out."

"Into sliver, yes?"

"Pardon?"

"Sliver. Or top. That's what the papers call it. Long, thin ropes of wool are called 'sliver' or 'top.' They call this a 'batt.'"

"Why? If it looks like a rope, why not call it a rope? If it looks like a blanket, why call it a batt?"

At her curious look, Agustin laughed. "I have no idea. But you can read them for yourself." He stopped abruptly. Probably Lucia didn't know how to read. Why would she, living out here in the middle of nowhere?

She didn't get angry as he feared. She just shrugged. "Or you can read them to me, if you think it will do any good. Which I doubt. Meanwhile, let's try this." She took the batt of wool and began to tear it into strips. With care, she could tear a two-inch wide strip of it from the batt without the strip of wool falling apart. These she coiled in a basket, pinching a new strip to each end as she tore it. That took a while. The "rope" they ended up with was over ninety feet long. Finally she sat at the wheel. And began to spin. And spin. And spin. The only time she had to stop the wheel was to move the thread from one hook on the flyer to another, so that it filled the bobbin evenly. Then to change the bobbin, after each of them got full.

"Aunt Lucia! Aunt Lucia!"

Lucia went toward the garden, where her niece was supposed to be gathering vegetables for soup. "What, Elena? What is the problem?"

"Look," Elena said. She pointed to a row of beans. "I was pulling beans and a rabbit ran out. It was that rabbit, the one that got away."

Lucia looked at the row of beans, then kneeled down and fished around in the tangled plants. "Ah." She drew her hand out of the tangle. It was full of long, silky, white hairs. "Well, now we know where that dratted rabbit got off to. Perhaps we can trap it, now that we know where it is."

Elena tapped her on the shoulder and whispered, "Look."

Lucia did, then laughed out loud. The smaller rabbit, not quite as long-haired and not quite as white, ran away. "Well," Lucia gasped when she stopped laughing, "I see that Mrs. Bunny has been busy, hasn't she? We'll need several traps, I think."

In spite of the several traps that caught some of the half-wild, half-Angora bunnies, Mrs. Bunny managed to evade capture. That didn't, however, seem to lessen her fertility, as they continued catching an occasional half-breed rabbit well into the fall.

Which led to the question of who owned the half-breed rabbits. By long tradition, the wild rabbits of that portion of Spain belonged to the people that lived there. Mrs. Bunny would have been returned to the patron as a matter of course, but these weren't purebred Angora rabbits. These were the kits of Mrs. Bunny and the wild bucks of the valley, as could easily be shown by the fact that Mr. Bunny was still in his cage. And probably none too happy about Mrs. Bunny's errant ways. Those wild bucks had always been the people's rabbits.

If some of the villagers found occasion to slip a wild doe into Mr. Bunny's cage to give him a little consolation, what could be the harm in that? And later, how could anyone be sure that the newly-common long-haired rabbits weren't the offspring of Mrs. Bunny's wild shenanigans? Granted, Mrs. Bunny would put all other rabbits to shame in the productivity department if all the little kits that had been captured were hers. But in the case of any given rabbit, who was to say?

By the time anyone involved in the administration of the Angora project noticed anything odd, there was quite a little breeding program going on. Enough of the half-breed rabbits with longer hair had appeared that some Spanish Angora garments were appearing in the valley.

"Master Munos, what is the hold up?" Ricardo asked with a bite in his voice. "You promised us a spinning machine over a year ago. Where is it?"

Master Munos had been dreading that question. He considered claiming that the drawings and notes were incomplete but he suspected that it wouldn't work. It hadn't worked when the journeymen and other masters had tried it on him. "It's the journeymen. They talk back. They refuse to do as they are told." He honestly didn't remember that most of their talking back and refusing to do as they were told amounted to him telling them to make the thing work and them asking him how. They were, in Master Munos' memory, intentionally disobedient and disrespectful.

By this time, most of them were lacking in anything resembling respect for Master Munos. However, most of them were pretty good at faking it. Agustin Cortez was not so good at hiding his opinion. "That Cortez is the worst. He spends all his time with that village spinster. He claims that he is trying to come to know the process spinning. Ha! That is not the sort of knowing that he is after with Lucia. And he encourages dissension among the other journeymen."

"Do you think he should be fired?" Ricardo asked.

Master Munos froze for just an instant. He knew that firing Agustin Cortez would be a disaster for the project and for him. Though he would never admit it, even to himself, Cortez had been the spark that had led to several of the minor breakthroughs that had gotten them as far as they were. Master Munoz desperately needed a reason for keeping Cortez that wouldn't sound like praise. "I wish we could," he said, "but he knows too much about the project. He could take what he knows to someone else and let them catch up to us in a few months."

Ricardo nodded.

"I wonder," Master Munos mused, "could that be what he's hoping for? To delay the project until he's fired. Then go to someone else."

Ricardo looked doubtful.

Master Munos shrugged it off as a passing fancy. "In spite of the difficulties with the journeymen, I have managed to get built a simple but ingenious device to speed up the carding part of the process." He snorted a laugh. "Part of what makes it ingenious is that it is simple enough that even the journeymen couldn't mess it up.

"It has turned the warehouses full of washed wool into warehouses full of carded wool."

"I will see about sending you some spinners until you get the spinning machine operational," Ricardo said calmly. "Do you have more questions for our source in Germany?"

"Only a few." Master Munos wondered if perhaps he hadn't been overzealous in weeding out the questions from the journeymen and the other masters. But he certainly didn't want a repeat of that first meeting with Don Carlos.

In the little village in the Cantabrian hills, they did in fact have a spinning machine that worked. Unfortunately it was a spinning machine for cotton. They, of course, were in a wool-producing area. If they had had some cotton to try on it, it would have spun decent, but not spectacular, thread. But they didn't have cotton or even realize that they needed it. They didn't realize that to spin wool they would need to adjust the machine. Agustin had considered the possibility and even asked about it indirectly, in one of many questions that he had included in the latest information request to go up the line. But he didn't really think it was important because, after all, who would send designs for a cotton-spinning machine to wool country?

"That works quite well," Lucia admitted a bit grudgingly. Then she sniffed. Again.

Agustin hid his grin. "I'm pleased you think so."

It was shearing time again. And if they couldn't get the machine to work, Augustin, Luis and some other journeymen had decided that perhaps they could do other things to help speed up the process. They developed a wooden cage to hold the unwashed wool. Then they were able to lower it into the cold water bath, with ropes and pulleys to make the lowering and lifting easier and keep the wool from being manhandled. Some of the metal smiths managed to tinker together flat pots that would need less water, and therefore less wood, for heating.