I found a sewing kit, and threw it in with Roxanna’s booty, along with a few pounds of tea for myself.
“You’ll especially want to throw away the thread, from what Adam tells me about your clothmaking abilities here, but you might find the scissors, needles, and thimbles useful,” I said.
“Yes. Thank you, my lord, but why would you want scissors with a sewing kit?” She said, “But no matter, they will be very useful. But more to the point is that smaller boat.”
The inflatable life raft was there, and still fully inflated, but I think perhaps that Roxanna didn’t recognize it as being a boat. She was gesturing towards the yacht’s twenty-foot-long tender.
“The Concrete Canoe. Yes, what about it?”
“I was going to suggest that it could be put to good use as a fishing boat, my lord. I saw no nets among your equipage, but there were many hooks, lines, and such,” she said.
“I don’t know as how I would like to be a full-time fisherman.”
“No, of course not you, my lord. But a crew could be easily hired. It could be very profitable, as well as providing both your household and your friend’s with the freshest of fish.”
“Okay, if you wish. Would you see about hiring some suitable men?”
“Certainly, I would contact them, and select the best, my lord, but as to my actually paying their wages . . .”
“You can’t, because you are just about out of money,” I said, handing her one of the sacks of old silver quarters. “You should have said something about that sooner, but here. Take this and figure out how much more I owe you.”
She spilled some of them into the palm of her hand and turned pale. “It . . . it is too much,” she stammered. “This is a hundred times, more than that, more than I have earned for my hosting of you!”
“That much, eh? Well, keep it anyway.” What I’d given her couldn’t have been more than fifty dollars in quarters. I wasn’t sure what the old silver ones were worth, but certainly I hadn’t given her much more than the price of a good meal for two at a nice restaurant. Adam had definitely been right about metals being worth a lot here! I left Roxanna staring speechless at the money and went to scrounge up some food.
Everyone had gone to Communion except me, so we had skipped breakfast. The munchies were hitting pretty hard, so I broke out some food, the sort that didn’t need cooking. Corned beef, Spam, Pringles and bean dip, some warm Cokes and some Snickers bars for dessert. Everybody loved everything, even the Spam.
On board, our usual “glassware” was plastic, but I’d found an unopened case of champagne glasses that had probably been saved for some celebration. These surprised them more than anything else. They’d heard of glass, but they’d never seen it before. I used the glasses to serve the Coke in.
We ate our fill, and I had Felicia take the leavings and an extra can of Spam to the guards. I was wondering where we should throw the trash when Roxanna carefully collected up all the tin cans and such and gave them to the cook for washing and preservation. Metal was that scarce here. I imagine that some craftsman will someday end up making something useful out of them.
It was well past noon before we were finally ready to leave. I gave two pouches of silver and one of gold to Felicia’s husband Jacques, and told the three male servants to take them to Adam along with his share of the housewares, air mattresses, some instant coffee, sugar and a jar of Cremora. These people didn’t drink anything with caffeine in it, and Adam used to need a few gallons of coffee a day to keep himself going. The men were to tell him that I would be dropping by tomorrow morning. The servants and Roxanna were astounded at my trust in the men, but I wasn’t really worried. I mean, it was only a few hundred bucks worth, so what the heck.
Roxanna felt otherwise. She took the money back from Jacques, opened each of Adam’s pouches and carefully counted out the contents, recording the amount, before returning the money to him.
“It is not polite to lead a good man into temptation, my lord,” she said.
I tipped the guards a quarter each, thanking them for guarding my property so well, and telling them that I wanted them to keep up the good work. The truth was that mostly I just wanted to see the expressions on their faces. It was worth it, even with the one who couldn’t believe that a coin so large could actually be made of solid silver!
Roxanna scolded me about it on the way home. I’d given each of them a half a year’s pay!
I laughed at her, and gave each of our servant women four of the quarters, telling each them to give half of the money to her husband. It was fun. I hadn’t exactly been poor in America, but here I was rich!
FIFTEEN
“Sorry to be so long reporting back to you sir, but Lord Felix’s people have managed to damage our listening equipment an average of three times a day since I installed it for them,” Aldrich Skybolt said. “Since our illustrious nobility wouldn’t admit to being able to tighten a loose wire, even if they did know how, they’ve been keeping me busy.”
“Easy, my young friend. If they didn’t think they needed us, they wouldn’t support us, and we’d all have to go out and get honest jobs,” the warlock chuckled.
“If you can call this business honest. Really, sir, we’re snooping on three honest widows and a pair of shipwrecked yachtsmen. It’s dishonorable, it’s illegal, and it’s a waste of time.”
“It’s also necessary. We have some very serious problems on this little island of ours, problems that we can’t solve on our own. Maybe, just maybe, these Yanks will have what we need to survive. The duke needs to know how far he can trust our new guests, and we need to know what the duke’s up to. I only wish we had a better way to keep an eye on the good archbishop’s boys and girls.”
“Yes, some of those monks think that it is more important to maintain our version of Christianity than it is to keep our people alive.”
“All too true, my boy. As to our eavesdropping, there can’t have been much to report yet. Our visitors can hardly be out of their sick beds yet.”
“True enough, sir. In the course of keeping the duke’s microphones working, I’ve managed to read everything his snoops have written down, and what they’ve learned isn’t much more than that our guests aren’t anything more than what they seem.”
* * *
* * *
The next day, I shaved before breakfast. Roxanna was shocked.
“I saw your face that way when first you came here, my lord. I thought at the time that you must have been badly burned. You did this to yourself deliberately?”
I said that I had, that it was the custom of most men in my culture to shave regularly, and that I couldn’t grow a decent beard in any case. Roxanna shook her her head but said nothing.
I took Felicia along so I wouldn’t get lost and set out for Adam’s place. I found him with some wooden poles lashed together to form a tripod, with a thin string hanging down, supporting a series of heavy weights. Apparently he was doing some tests on the strength of materials.
“Hi, boss. You look better without the beard, but I think I’ll keep mine. Thanks for the money and the coffee. Both have already come in handy. Besides squaring up with the girls, I’ve bought me a sedan chair, only it’s more like a chaise longue. That and I hired six guys to carry me around in it. Mostly, I want to get down and check out the boat.”
Six men was about right, Adam’s size being what it is.
“I’ve already been down there, of course. She’s not in bad shape, all things considered. The hole in the bottom is about a foot and a half across, and the deck is cracked up a bit, but if you stored some cement on board, we should have her in shape in a month or two.”
“No sweat. We had six bags, and each was wrapped up separately. We got everything else we’ll need, too, if not too much is missing.”
“Adam, I don’t think that anything at all has been stolen. All the electronic stuff is gone, and so are all the books and maps and such, but I think that they did it just for safekeeping. I mean, if they were going to steal, they would have taken the gold, don’t you think?”