“Then you don’t exist,” said Frank firmly, “on the best authority, Descartes himself—who’s still alive, remember—and so your opinion can and should be discarded. Just try and keep up, okay?”
“We are done here, yes?” asked Giovanna. “When can we go to the taverna?”
Frank hesitated. “Well . . . We won’t be unpacking any of the stuff for the pharmaceutical lab today. Dad told me he wanted to make sure we had a safe place to set it up first. But I promised Magda we’d go help them get moved in downstairs and we’ll probably run into Father Gus while we’re down there. Giovanna, I suspect it’s where you’re going to get sent next anyway. Our stepmom travels with enough stuff for a medium-sized army and it’ll take some doing to get them squared away. Sharon’s no piker either, widder’s weeds or not.”
Giovanna tilted her head on one side. “What is a ‘piker’ and a ‘widder’ and why would either of them want weeds? Your father is the buon Dottore, yes?”
“Uh, yeah—but he’s a chemist, not a doctor.”
Giovanna frowned. “We were told that Tomas Stone was a maker of medicine, the Indian Hemp?”
“Well, yes, he makes medicines, and he sets bones and some other simple stuff, but he’s not what you’d call a doctor. Sharon Nichols is really the Dottore in our delegation—uh, I think that should be Dottoressa, actually.”
That made her eyebrows shoot up. She rattled off something in Italian that Frank couldn’t follow at all.
“What? I mean, please say that again, slower?”
Giovanna tried it in English. “You have a lot of doctors—even female ones—that your father seems like nothing special?”
“Uh, I guess,” said Frank, unsure where this was leading.
“From what we hear, you see, he makes physics and medicines that are better than anything we have ever known. The mist that kills lice—the diditi, I think it is called—and the specific against all illnesses, the clorfeniculo—”
“Chloramphenicol,” Ron said.
“Si—chlorafenico, we hear that your father makes all these.”
“He makes some other stuff, too,” Frank said. His father would want to be modest, but Frank thought he overdid it. “He makes hash for pain, and some disinfectants and some herbal medicines. He consults for some of the other chemists on the drugs they make. Dad knows a fair bit about making medicines, but it’s not what he does for money.” He scratched his head a moment. “I guess you could say he’s the best . . .” He searched for the word in Italian, but couldn’t find it. “—drug-maker in Grantville, but that’s practical industrial chemistry. He’s one of the two with the theoretical training to understand how it all works, though. Dad’s good at research.” He grinned. “You won’t get what this means, but he made LSD in the sixties.”
“No,” said Giovanna, looking thoughtful, “I do not know what it means. Do I need to?”
Frank exchanged a look with Gerry and Ron. “On the whole,” he said, “I don’t think you do. Let’s just say it was a hard thing to do, and he did it. Now he makes dye and disinfectant and some other things. Yes, and medicines.”
“Anyway,” said Gerry, “what were you saying about Dad?”
“Oh,” said Giovanna, “only that it is always the way with the natural philosophers that they have a huge amount of baggage. There are many in town, and we have been working in many places that have needed extra chambermaids, and we see a lot.”
Frank nodded. “True enough. So let’s go see how they’re getting on.”
Chapter 11
“Tom?” Mazzare put his head around the door. Within was the kind of controlled chaos that Tom Stone either liked or just seemed to generate by his mere presence. The man still clung firmly to his relaxed sixties-era hippie ethics, principles and aesthetics—although he now owned the biggest and most profitable coal-tar dye works in Europe.
Which was to say, the only one. So far, at least. Years of recreational pharmacology on top of a nearly completed masters’ degree in the real thing made Tom Stone—also known as Stoner, for reasons that were not hard to deduce—the leading research, industrial and medical chemist in seventeenth-century Europe, if not the world. Not much in the way of spectacular dyeing chemistry was “scheduled by history” to happen until after the Napoleonic period—which meant that Stoner had better than a two-century lead on his competition. In their old timeline, dyes along with soaps had been the first real make-money-hand-over-fist branches of chemistry. So Stoner had a very profitable business ready-made once circumstances—and Magda and her money-minded father—had rubbed his nose in it.