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Chapter 37


Dinner had been a quiet meal. Despite Lady de Beauchamp’s attempts to draw everyone into casual conversation, too many of the people at the table were mired down in their own concerns. The only ones who seemed to be positive were Nat and his two younger sisters.

“I am gaining mastery of another new song,” he said. “It is a narrative about a man in his later years and his life with the woman he loves. I think it’s charming.”

“I like it,” Petronella said. “I could listen to you play it over and over again.” She had been making up dances to Nat’s newest tunes.

“But Aaron dismisses it as not being enough ‘rock and roll.’ Don’t you, my friend?”

Aaron stared down at his plate. Usually a hearty eater, he picked at the meat with one tine of his fork.

“Aaron,” Delfine asked gently. “Do you not care for goose?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “It’s delicious. I just can’t stop thinking.”

“Is there anything that we can help you to decide?”

“Nothing for me to decide, ma’am. I feel guilty that I can’t make the two extra sets of aqualators work. I blame myself for not checking over everything. I guess I thought that all of them would be right. I feel I’ve let everyone down.”

“That’s not true, son,” Martin said. “Look what you’ve all accomplished! The others are working great. Everybody is impressed.”

“Young man, I feel as if I am in the center of the Renaissance, and you are one of the great minds that brought scientific advances to light. Is that not right, my dear Margery?” Sir Timothy turned to Margaret.

She had caught her name in time to look up from her plate and away from her own thoughts. She had left the letter from Rita in Sir Timothy’s study, awaiting a moment to take him aside and discuss it. Her head had been on a swivel since reading it. She worried about her family, and the possibility that their name would have at last come to be associated with the escape from the Tower.

“Yes, Father. It has been a dream come true.” She tried to put the good things in mind that had happened because she had met the Americans. True friendship, exposure to new ideas and new places, experiences that she had never dreamed of, such as riding in a train and a motor car.

Unbidden, the memory of the men on the dock returned to her, and she shuddered. Her mother put a gentle hand on hers.

“Why don’t I put you to bed, my dear,” Delfine said. She smiled at her eldest daughter. “So much has been going on. Perhaps you need an early night. I will come and sit with you for a while.”

Margaret looked into her mother’s eyes and found understanding. Because of her delicate health, people often overlooked Delfine’s observant mind. Lady Pierce had once said that Delfine could sense what was going on in a person’s heart. Margaret felt an outpouring of love for her mother. It would be so very nice to be coddled for an evening as though she was a small child once again, and not the captain of a growing industry.

“I would like that so very much, Mother,” she said.

On her way to bed, she left the letter on the desk in Sir Timothy’s study.

* * *

All the dogs in the house were barking wildly. The brass knocker on the front door was being wielded as though it was a blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil. A housemaid, in cap and wrapper, came to pull it open. Diccon Linden all but fell inside, out of breath.

Everyone came hurtling down the stairs from the family quarters and the servants’ rooms and into the foyer. Diccon’s huge eyes reflected the flames from the candlesticks.

“Sir Timothy!” he exclaimed. “The shed! People broke in! Dozens of them!”

“What?” his employer asked. He had a coat on over his nightshirt. “Who were they? Where did they come from?”

“I don’t know, sir! I was asleep on a bale of wool in front of the door. I had a bale hook to hand. Then, I heard the door creaking. They were forcing the latch open! I threw myself on it to hold it down. Then it flew up in the air, and I was flung back. They came through the door, all of them! They had knives, sir. I called for the men, and ran up here.”

“Good boy,” Sir Timothy said. He kicked off his slippers and stomped into the boots next to the door. “Nat, go get the gardeners. Tell them to bring axes and billhooks. Percy, run down and see what’s going on.”

“Yes, Father,” Nat said.

“Yes, Squire!” The two youths set out at the run.

“I’ll come, too,” Margaret said, reaching for her boots.

“No, Margery!” Sir Timothy said. “You stay here. Defend your mother. I must go check the looms.” He beckoned to the footmen. “Come with me.”

Margaret and her mother and sisters huddled together in the sitting room. They heard shouting and banging coming from down the hill.

“It was only a matter of time,” Delfine said, her arms wrapped around Margaret. “No one could resist the aqualators. They are the only ones in the country. They envy our good fortune.”

Martin came into the room, blinking sleep from his eyes.

“What’s all the commotion?” he asked.

“Someone’s broken into the shed,” Margaret said.

Martin ran out. She heard his footsteps on the stairs. In a few moments, he came thundering down in shoes.

“Have you seen Aaron?” he asked. “He’s not in his room.”

“Could he have heard the noise and gone to investigate?” Lady de Beauchamp asked.

“I’ll check,” Martin said. “Stay put.”

“We will,” Margaret assured him. Petronella huddled against their mother’s legs like a chick hiding in a hen’s feathered skirt.

The shouting went on. Through the small panes of the sitting room window, Margaret spotted the dancing flames of lanterns and torches. The voices came nearer. She slid out of her mother’s embrace and picked up the poker from beside the fireplace.

Sir Timothy, Martin, and all the men came through the front door. Percy locked it.

“The looms are intact, thank Heaven,” the squire said. “I have Noah and Andrew Catlow standing guard tonight. I sent Diccon home to bed. But the spare aqualator pieces are missing.”

“Did Aaron move them somewhere?” Margaret asked.

Martin’s face was grim. “We don’t know. He wasn’t in the shed. Or in his bedroom.”

Lady de Beauchamp turned to Percy. “Ask the housemaids to see if he is elsewhere in the house, please.”

The youth nodded and ran off.

“Did you find anyone else around the shed?” Margaret asked.

“No. By the time Diccon raised the hue and cry, they must have been long gone. I’m troubled because none of the dogs raised the alarm. That means,” Sir Timothy said, his face grim, “that at least one of the thieves was someone that they knew.”

“You could have used some security cameras down there,” Martin said, frustrated. “That’s what we would have had around locations with sensitive equipment. But nobody has those anymore. Yet.”

Percy came panting back with one of the housemaids in tow.

“He’s not in the house, my lady,” Liza said. “We’ve been everywhere about. All of the staff is looking.”

“Wasn’t he visiting Ivy this evening?” Nat asked. “Could he still be there?”

Margaret blushed at the notion, but her mother nodded. “Percy, please go and see.”

“Yes, my lady.” The youth went off at the run.

Struck by a sudden chill, Margaret wrapped her arms around herself. “He won’t be there.”

“How do you know?” Sir Timothy asked.

“I don’t know, but I do.”

Her dread proved to be true. Percy returned with Ivy and Alder, her older brother.

“He was with us for an hour after dinner,” Alder said. “But he said he was coming back here. Said he had homework.”

“Where could he be?” Ivy asked, wringing her hands. “He seemed to be well enough when he left us!”

“Ask Cedric,” Margaret said. The thought struck her out of nowhere.

“Margery, you can’t accuse a man of a deed like that,” Sir Timothy said, shocked.

“He knows something,” Margaret said. “I know he resents the aqualators, for all that he has been working them well. He’s been acting oddly. Anyone could see it. He knows something. Or perhaps someone.”

“Get the carriage,” Sir Timothy said. “We will ask him.”

“Wait a minute,” said Martin. He went upstairs and came down with a long, thin tube of metal bent in the middle at a hinge. Margaret realized it was a gun, with a triangular wooden stock at one end and two holes like baleful, black eyes at the other. She hadn’t even suspected until then that he had brought it with him from Grantville, or that he would use a weapon. He had always seemed so mild. But even the mildest of men might be ready to kill in defense of his children. “Let’s go.”

* * *

“Are you all right, boy?”

The rough cloth covering Aaron’s head was pulled off, and he took a deep breath. The smell of old cow manure and sour milk filled his lungs, and he coughed. He was half-sitting, half-lying on a pile of straw. The walls around him were of split boards, rough enough to catch on the fabric of his linen shirt. It was a stall in a barn, but he didn’t hear any animals moving around. His hands were free, but a rope still bound his ankles together. His shoes had been roughly pulled off. He didn’t see them anywhere close by.

Crouching before him was a small man with tousled light brown hair and pockmarks that underlined rounded cheekbones. He had a lantern beside him. He handed Aaron a leather jack.

Aaron waved it away.

“It’s all right. It’s only water.”

The man was speaking German, but with an odd accent.

“No, thank you,” Aaron replied in the same language. “I want to go home. Please let me go.”

The man let out a sigh of regret and looked off to the side. In the dancing shadows of the lantern, Aaron saw at least three dark forms with hoods pulled down to conceal their faces. He gulped.

“I cannot, boy. These men have questions for you.”

“Who are they? Who are you?”

The man glanced up again, then returned a worried gaze to his.

“I am a peddler,” he said. “I sell small iron goods, useful things, and other little items to people who need them. I like to travel around and meet people. My name is Osti. I come from Rotterdam, where my brother owns a smithy. What is yours?”

“Aaron.”

The figures seemed to nod.

“And you are from?”

“Hamburg.” He had gotten so used to saying the lie that it came out without hesitation.

“I know many languages,” Osti continued, “so they have offered me money to speak to a foreigner, they said. I did not approve of them taking you against your will. A man deserves better treatment. I am sorry for you.”

Aaron’s body ached from the rough handling. From the first moment, when he had heard the sound of hoofbeats behind him on the twilit road, strong hands stuffed a cloth in his mouth, put a bag over his head, and lifted him off his feet, to being held down on the floor of a wagon that bumped unsteadily over the ground until it moved onto a lane that crunched under the wheels, to being dropped onto the floor here, he had been treated like a sack of potatoes.

“What do they want?”

“Ah. That I can tell you.” He drew the lantern a little to the right, to a squared-off stack of gray pieces of clay. Horror surged through Aaron’s belly. Had they taken the aqualators off the looms? No, on second examination, these were the two rejects, with a couple of Oliver Mason’s tries at firing substitute trays. “They want to know how to make these work. I admit I am also curious. What are they?”

Aaron didn’t want to speak. All he could think of were the man-shapes between him and the door, and how upset his mother would be that he had disappeared in a strange land all alone. What would his dad do now? He wished he could call them and ask what to do.

What if he yelled for help? Would anyone hear him? And what would those cloaked men do if he did? The hiss of metal and leather in the darkness told him that they were probably armed. He wore only his pajamas, and had nothing on his feet at all. The peddler smiled at him and gestured at the ropes around his ankles.

“These are unnecessary,” he said, and untied the knots. Aaron watched him warily.

A low growl from the tallest of the men near the wall.

“Be calm,” he said in English. “This will take time. Please be patient.” He turned back to Aaron, and gestured at the aqualators and asked in German: “What do these objects do?”

“They’re a system to tell a loom what pattern to make,” Aaron said. His voice trembled. He couldn’t help it.

Osti raised his eyebrows. “This is a remarkable notion. Is it like clockwork, to tell the clock when to chime the hours?”

“It’s related,” Aaron said, unable to get more words out of his dry throat. He wondered if the hooded men were weavers from a rival guild. Master Blackford had told Miz Margaret that others were jealous and getting impatient. After all the months that it had taken him to get these aqualators designed, made, and transported, he wasn’t surprised that everyone else wanted to get their hands on them. He never dreamed they would resort to kidnapping. What would they do if they weren’t satisfied with his answers?

“How related?” Osti pressed. “How do they chime the hours?”

“It’s not a clock, but it works on a similar principle,” Aaron said, trying to dumb down the explanation as much as possible. “They are a primitive form of a computer. The ridges inside the boxes tell the system to make choices on which threads to lift, and when to send the shuttles back and forth to make the pattern programmed into the trays.”

“What is a computer?”

“It’s…it’s a box that makes calculations according to the program inside.”

The peddler looked blank. Another growl from the wall.

“They want you to put the pieces together to make them work,” Osti said. “They want to see the cloth come out.”

Aaron realized in horror that none of the men were really weavers. They didn’t understand anything about machinery. Who were they?

“I can’t! They won’t work without the rest of the system. They have to be attached to a loom and to a dynamo.”

Osti patted his hand. Even terrified out of his mind, he knew the peddler wasn’t a bad man, but both of them were in a bad situation. Osti didn’t look as frightened as Aaron felt, but he was not as confident as his voice suggested.

“What goes into the box?” the peddler asked.

“Water. Only water.”

“So, you pour water into it, or lead it in from a pump? Why does it work?”

“The shape of the interior of the box makes it work.”

“Is it magic?”

“No, it’s science. It works because of scientific principles.”

“It makes a design on cloth? It does do that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why do they want it?”

“I don’t know. They aren’t men who work on cloth.” Aaron didn’t want to use the word “Weber” because it was too close to the English word, and he wanted to avoid words that were recognizable in English.

“I thought that as well,” Osti said, with a nod. “Can you make it work?”

“These are only pieces of the whole,” Aaron tried to explain. “They mean nothing out of context.”

“I don’t understand. What is context?”

Aaron gestured with both hands, but dropped them when the men growled again. “Without everything—the loom, the river, the pipes, the wires, it doesn’t do anything. All it can do is contain directions for a certain outcome and produce those.”

Osti translated pretty well, and the men shot him another question. Aaron heard it, and his heart sank. Osti turned back to him and fixed him with a kindly expression. “They are trying to understand. Does this computer do anything else? Can it be made to achieve other purposes?”

Aaron hesitated, reluctant to explain any more than he had to.

“Uh. Not really.”

The men recognized his hesitation and barked an order to hurry up. Osti patted the air with his hands. “Please be more patient,” he said in English. “Aaron, can this computer be made to do anything else?”

He made it emphatic. “No. It makes a pattern on cloth.”

Osti gestured behind him. “They do not believe you.”

“I can’t help that!” Aaron yelped. The men shifted, and he heard the hiss of metal. Someone had drawn a knife from a scabbard. He felt like pissing in fear.

“What would it take for you to put enough pieces together to show them?” Osti asked.

“I can’t do that. These pieces are faulty. I don’t know how to fix them. We’re trying. I designed them, but I didn’t make them. I only brought them here.”

“From Hamburg.”

Aaron hesitated again, reluctant to speak. The sun was beginning to send faint light into the barn through gaps in the boards. Was anyone going to come here, or was the farm as deserted as the barn?

Osti carried on as if he had spoken. “Yes, from Hamburg. I can tell. You have the Hamburg accent. This is a new thing, a marvelous thing, a box that tells a loom how to make cloth.” He gave Aaron a knowing look. Without a doubt, he had guessed where Aaron was really from. Aaron felt grateful, realizing that the peddler wasn’t going to give them away. “So, these pieces cannot be made to go without the rest, without water?”

“That’s right.”

Osti translated for their captors.

“Then what good are they?” the tall man in the middle barked. “What else can they be made to do?”

Osti shrugged and conveyed the words in Amideutsch. Aaron’s heart pounded. Osti really had guessed.

“Nothing!” Aaron’s voice came out in a squeak.

The man in the middle, whose jutting chin Aaron could just begin to see in the nascent daylight, snarled at him. “You’re lying. These are too complex to be just looms.”

The man nearest the door of the barn, who somehow seemed more sinister than the others, shook his head under the concealing hood. “Cork is sure they are meant to be weapons of some kind. Or something else that will serve to overthrow the government.”

Cork? Could he mean the Earl of Cork, the Chancellor of England? The man Margaret was afraid of? Aaron wanted to shout that that was nonsense. On the other hand, computers were versatile. How the king would have found something out like that, Aaron had no way of knowing. But he couldn’t say anything. His heart pounded so hard he felt a lump in his throat.

“Come, come,” Osti said, as casually as if they were sitting together in a bar. “This is a boy! He knows nothing of weapons of war. He assembles devices to make looms move. They are toys, not cannons.”

The three men ignored him. Osti fixed his eyes on Aaron’s. The gaze was meant to be reassuring, but all it did was send Aaron’s imagination into overdrive. He wanted to get out of there alive. He wanted to go home!

“This is treason,” the dangerous man said. “Our Baronet of Churnet and Trent must have a plan. This so-called enterprise involves too many people. They’re planning to spread these devices across the land, under the guise of craft tools. Get rid of them.”

The broad-shouldered man who had not spoken stepped forward. Aaron caught a glimpse of cold blue eyes under the hood. The man lifted one set of aqualators, and let them fall to the ground with a crash. The trays fell into pieces. The man laughed at the horrified expression on Aaron’s face, and picked up the top tray of the second set. He smashed it down on top of the others, hammering at it until shards flew. Aaron and Osti shielded their faces.

“Now, no one can use them, for weapons or weaving,” said the dangerous man. “They’ll do his lordship no harm. I’ll report back, and we can catch Churnet in the act of using illicit machines against the interests of the crown.”

Aaron realized he knew the voice. It was the visitor, the one who had been hanging around with Cedric. Bob? No, Ben! Ben was a king’s man? Aaron did his best to suppress his reaction to the knowledge. He must remain silent. Margaret! She had drawn him into her dreams, and now everything she and her father had could be destroyed. He had to get back to tell them they were in danger.

He glanced at Osti, but the peddler seemed worried about his own fate. The men were talking freely in front of them, as though they had no concerns about being overheard. Aaron’s fear was confirmed in the next exchange.

“What do we do with the boy?” the big man asked.

“He’s no use,” said Ben. “Drop him down a mine?”

The man in the middle cleared his throat. “No pit mines here. Just clay.” He sounded frightened.

“Then cut his throat and leave him.”

“He doesn’t understand us. What can he tell people?” the speaker asked.

Ben snorted. “He knows some English. He’s been here long enough. You’ve no stomach for it?” He turned his head, perusing his companions. “Very well, there’s no need for it. His lordship will have to take the shed and its contents if he wants the secret, and the boy will show them all how it works. Or he won’t. It doesn’t matter. We’ve enough evidence now to seize the estate.”

The big man laughed. “Does his lordship want to go into the wool trade?”

Ben threw back his head, revealing his face as the hood fell away. “Hah! Anything that will make a fair bit of money. His lordship has hungry pockets. I heard these weavers talking about what a yard of this magical cloth is going for. It’s not a big fortune, but it could be one in time. Once the squire is off the estate. Then his lordship can peruse the machines at his leisure.”

“And how will we do that?”

“I’ve sent for help,” Ben said. “Tie the boy up and leave him.”

“And him?” The big man angled a thumb toward the peddler.

Ben spat on the ground and gave them a terrifying grin. “He’s of no use at all.”



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