1635: A Parcel of Rogues - eARC Read Online Free PDF Page A

supposed to be guarding nearly die in one. His queen actually did die in it. And come right to it, he was a career soldier, a man who knew exactly what excessive complication did under pressure.
    “I’ll have to check it carefully, but I think I can arrange it so the axle fails back into the mountings it’s in now. Won’t be perfect, but it’ll stay driveable, and still have all the advantages of the stuff Harry did. If we’re going a long way, we’ll have a chance to test it.”
    Gayle nudged Vicky. “Cute, when he talks dirty, ain’t he?”
    Vicky grinned. “Very.” She’d made her way over and hugged his arm.
    Darryl decided he could take a lot of mockery for the sake of that. “Keep it up, ladies, I’m on the way to a sensitive artistic disposition as it is.”
    “Keep it up by all means,” Cromwell butted in. “The humility will do him good, but let us keep it up on the journey. Fifty miles at least to Cambridge, and we need to find shelter before dark.”
    “Now that is the Cromwell I learned about at my momma’s knee. Malicious.” Darryl grinned. He genuinely couldn’t take it amiss. He’d got his girl on his arm, he’d just done an interesting nearly-an-auto-and-as-close-as-it-got-hereabouts job, and there was a possibility of tinkering with a vehicle to make it go faster in the near future. There were ways for life to get better, but mostly they involved huge amounts of cash, unlimited free beer, and Vicky turning out to have a frisky twin sister.
    That night, they stopped at a barn they’d paid a small handful of farthings for the use of, along with some firewood and a basket of what the farmhouse had to spare by way of food. Darryl took an early watch since he wanted the last of the daylight to make sure he was up to speed on maintaining his guns. It was hardly comfortable working on a spread of cloth while he sat cross-legged on his coat, but an armful of hay helped. He hadn’t fired anything since the last time he’d cleaned them, but a long ride in a wooden box in a grubby wagon would probably have gunked up the oil some. And care was more important now than ever. Replacing these was getting more and more possible as down-time metalwork caught up to twentieth-century standards, but it’d be decades before it ever got as cheap as it’d been. He’d stripped his collection down to a basic rifle, shotgun and pistol when the call went out for stuff for the army. Back up-time they’d been his old reliables, all stuff he could keep and maintain on a young miner’s pay and for a pretty long time if he ever got laid off. Cheap, plain-vanilla stuff but in the seventeenth century, this was high-end work for a skilled gunsmith who’d charge a premium to cover the loans on the modern tooling he’d’ve bought to do this kind of work.
    Set against that, oil and pull-throughs and a little time and effort were pretty damned cheap.
    “I do like to see you working with your hands like that,” Vicky said, sitting beside him and resting her chin on his shoulder so she could watch him work.
    “I noticed you seem to like that kinda stuff,” Darryl said, feeling no more than a mild moment of panic. He’d almost started to appreciate Hamilton’s approval at a gut level, and anyway they were out in the evening sun in full view of everyone. Whatever the down-timers might say about approving of a betrothed “coming through the window” to get in ahead of the wedding, up-time that sort of thing was a big deal. And, well, scratch a hillbilly and you’ll find a bred-in-the-bone conservative-with-a-small-c.
    “I talked with Miz Melissa about that,” Vicky said, “and she said it was probably growing up surrounded by Yeomen Warders that did it. All of the decent men I’ve ever known have been men of their hands, both ways a body can mean that. So when I took a shine to you, it was so nice to see you could use your hands too. Proper manly, it is.”
    As she spoke, she was using her own hands, running