It took my determined daughter ten weeks to accomplish the tasks we had set for her. The only reason it took that long was she only had one spelling test a week. A happy side effect was the sudden increase in literacy in the whole Keep.
On the day of her pony presentation, we brought the pony out, all brushed, and set up with a beautiful saddle. I cautioned Cathy to be careful when approaching the pony for the first time. The pony had to get to know her.
Instead, our daughter took off like a rocket. My heart stopped in fear, not really, as I saw disaster coming. There was no disaster; Cathy had an apple slice in hand, and the pony acted like it was expecting it.
We had hidden the pony on a farm and brought it to a side stable a week ago to familiarize it with its new home.
Turns out you can't hide anything from this kid. She had been feeding apples to the pony since day one. They were best friends.
With a groom's help, Cathy was soon mounted, riding her pony in a circle. The groom held a long lead to control the pony. Cathy was all smiles. Later, she told us we were the best parents ever. I grinned for two days.
Our son, Doug, Dougie, was an energetic three-year-old. As soon as Cathy was on a pony, he wanted one too. He had to settle on sitting on a calm old mare while riding in a circle. A groom led the horse as I held my son on the horse.
I wished I had invented a camera to capture the look of delight on his face as he rode in circles.
Thinking about it, we had the technology, and there was no reason we couldn't do it. But I had so many things going on I didn't want to spend too much time on the project.
So I described the process to one of the science classes in school. I asked if anyone would be interested in working on creating a camera and taking pictures. Only one young lady held up her hand.
I gave her the written description and drawings I made, one thousand silver, and told her to make it happen.
The camera was to be a double box, with a landscape lens fitted to the outer box and a holder for a ground glass focusing screen and image plate on the inner box. By sliding the inner box, objects at various distances could be brought to as sharp a focus as desired.
After a satisfactory image had been focused on the screen, the screen was replaced with a sensitized plate. A knurled wheel controlled a copper flap in front of the lens, which functioned as a shutter.
A high-contrast and extremely sharp image is achieved by exposing a plate coated with silver iodide and exposing the plate with a common salt solution.
It took her fourteen months for a working camera system. When she showed me her best efforts, I was thrilled. These were as good pictures as I had seen from the early days of photography. They weren't snapshots. They had to be posed for five minutes.
That may explain why people didn't smile in the first pictures.
She had been frugal with the one thousand silver I gave her and still had five hundred left. I told her to go into business. Travel around the country and get paid for taking pictures.
She took several photos of me and my family as samples of what could be done. She became wealthy in short order. I bet others in her class wished they had volunteered.
Other photographers emerged in the following years, but she was listed as the royal photographer. Our family posed with her every year for a series of pictures. Her oldest daughter took over when she couldn’t do it anymore.
Another project I gave away was the romance stories I had been dictating from memory. It took me about four hours to read a two-hundred-page romance out loud. That was four hours I could've spent dictating a technical book.
I complained about it to Eleanor.
"Dear, I know many people will be disappointed, but I have to stop doing the romances. I don't have the time."
"I wondered when you would figure that out. They are delightful, and we all enjoy them, but you should be working on books to improve our County."
"I know, and it is a shame. I know they will be missed. Our popularity rating will take a hit."
"What is a popularity rating?"
"The short explanation is to survey a bunch of people and ask them to rate how well we are doing. Ten being excellent, and one says we should be replaced. Doing this after big changes lets you know how you are doing."
"I just thought they showed up with torches and pitchforks."
"When that happens, it is a little too late to make changes."
"True."
"So I have to stop the romances."
"Maybe not. You know every book you read is written down and then rewritten by my writers circle to make it fit with our world."
"Yes, trying to explain an escalator would be difficult."
"What’s an escalator?"
"It's a- never mind, I will explain later. What are you thinking of with the writer's circle?"
"You have shared the book description to see if it was one we wanted to work with. Could you give us some and add how the story ends? We could write the story from that."
"You already know the ending to all the romances. They kiss and live happily ever after."
"Will you do it?"
"I will be delighted."
Instead of four hours per book, I had it down to ten minutes. The Writers Circle turned out some pretty good stuff, I read the first couple. The original author probably wouldn't recognize the story, but it was good work.
I never did explain an escalator.
During this time, Saxons kept showing up at our reception centers, asking to be allowed in. We didn't turn anyone away. We recorded their abilities and registered them in our census. Farmers were easy to place as we had plenty of farmland and empty houses for them to take over.
But they were required to take a class on how we farmed. Very few fought against our methods as they saw the results we had been getting.
A basic health check was performed on every family member which brought to light several battered wives and one battered husband. The people doing the assaults were told to stop. That their families would be examined on a regular basis, and they would be punished if they kept it up.
All but one family agreed to this. A man was beating his wife and wouldn't agree to stop. We asked her what she wanted. She didn't want to leave him. They moved back into Saxon lands. Thankfully, no children were involved.
People with trades were easy to place. We needed every trade, everywhere. Not wanting too many Saxons clustered, we distributed them amongst the Baronies and Districts.
I say. "We," a lot. The County and its population had grown so much by now that I was distant from these decisions. I had good people, and as long as it was working, I would leave it alone. Not that I didn't do surprise inspections of the government offices.
My people knew I wouldn’t suffer any corruption, so they weren't afraid to report it. It kept things under control. There would always be minor corruption. Even the cops in my town took free donuts.
It was easy to tell the corrupt cops, they were fat. That was my humor, and when I tried to explain it at an advisor's meeting, it fell flat. They wanted to know why the cops weren't punished.
Trading caravans were becoming routine in Armorica. We were sending our mirrors, optical instruments, medicines, and other products, including our newspapers, and books, to Constantinople regularly.
In return, silks, raw opium, and dyes arrived. The caravans would be accompanied by fortune hunters. I didn't worry so much about the fortune hunters themselves. It is what they represented that concerned me.
We were fast becoming known as the land of milk and honey. Individual thieves were one thing. A King and his army another.
Some of the people looking to stay were wastrels who wanted to fleece us of our coin. Many were those who truly believed they could make a better life here.
The wastrels quickly ended up on road gangs. Those wanting a better life were given the opportunity. We picked up another five thousand citizens.
We were also receiving more silver than we could use locally. It got so bad that with Frank Goldman's help, we set up a bank in Constantinople. It lent to the Jewish banks. We were the bank of last resort. Even so, we had to be careful not to suck all the money out of the economy.
Even though I had my concerns, things were going well. I had been in this new life for six years now, and for the first time, I didn't feel like I had the devil at my heels.
My people were fed. They were healthier than any others in this day and age, even ahead of the nineteenth century, with antibiotics and pain relief.
Our borders were secure. People were employed. Probably the most important of all, there was an education system in place that was now self-sustaining. In the last three years, I transcribed all of my elementary and high school textbooks.
I was including all the sciences but leaving out history. I even did the English textbooks. Whatever was allowing my mind to translate the books from my American English to Cornish worked for those books. They were all in use in our schools.
We still hadn’t come up with a working rotary printing press and had to brute force with the Ben Franklin ones, but the job was getting done. The Monastery had built a huge addition that held fifty of these presses, and they were run sixteen or more hours a day to print required books.
We stopped exporting our books, but I'm certain some were leaving the County. We kept strict control of books that told how to build things, like how to build a printing press. A high school text on physics, while enlightening, wasn't as dangerous.
With this level of education, our population could continue to advance without my direct involvement. Currently, about five percent of our people were equal to a high school graduate. In the next five years, it would be twenty-five percent, another five years, and it would be eighty percent.
I was now working on college-level engineering books. The first would be civil and mechanical engineering. Some books I would never transcribe, such as Puppeteering. Why that was taught in college, I will never know.
I even reviewed basketweaving and realized the basket weavers of this world were ahead of my old world.
I stopped math books at calculus. Advanced math wasn't my strong suit, and no student had advanced that far yet.
I prioritized transcribing all the books noted in the main textbook as being helpful. These answered most of the questions.
Two types of people still came. Those with insightful questions that I was pleased to help, and those that were terminally stupid.
The stupid ones soon learned not to bother me. I spent time with those asking good questions. These would be our scientists, engineers, and leaders of the future.
The book that took me the longest was Grey's Anatomy. It was also the most worthwhile. It took me six months to go through it with all the drawings.
Lady Agnes considered it more important than the Holy Bible. She and her nurses studied it like crazy. They even had study groups. Talk about noisy arguments. Since I was considered the expert, they came to me to settle disagreements.
There arguments led to an appeal to Archbishop Luke to allow dissection of cadavers. He made Church history by ruling those who had been executed were outside of the Church, and they could cut them up to their heart's content. That’s how he said it. It was fancy when he wrote it up, but it was the same message.
Now, I was lobbied for more executions! I didn't give in but did rule that any prisoner who died while imprisoned could be dissected. This included any who died accidentally working on the road crews. It provided enough bodies to satisfy my ghoulish nurses.