even without the stage blood he'd offered to bring.
'I think there's a skirmish next month,' Michael said, taking a piece of parchment-colored paper out of an inside pocket. 'Yes. Around Thanksgiving.'
'I think both our families are expecting us for Thanksgiving,' I said.
'Great; that's perfect – I'm sure your dad would love to come, too. He's been having a great time; all the guys love his booth. I'll go ask him, shall I?'
He ran off, clutching his parchment, without waiting for an answer.
'Oh, Lord,' I muttered.
'What's wrong, honey?' Amanda asked, dodging a stroller as she crossed the aisle to my booth. 'You seem upset about something.'
'Michael's having much too good a time doing this reenactment stuff,' I said.
'Isn't it sweet?' Eileen said. 'They never really grow up, do they?'
'No, they don't,' Amanda grumbled.
'He's talking about keeping on with it after this weekend,' I said.
'Well, that's nice,' Eileen said. 'It's something you can do together, isn't it?'
'It involves camping out in ruggedly authentic colonial conditions,' I said. 'I'm not very keen on camping out under any conditions.'
'I'm a city girl; I know just how you feel,' Amanda said, looking around as if the nearby trees scared her more than muggers. 'And my idea of camping out is staying at a hotel without a four-star restaurant.'
'You wouldn't like these outings,' I said. 'The one I went to, they served salt beef and hardtack.'
'Is that stuff even edible?' Amanda asked, wrinkling her nose.
'Theoretically, I suppose; although if you ask me, they almost make starving to death sound like a sensible lifestyle option,' I said. 'I couldn't wait to get to a McDonald's afterwards. For that matter, neither could Michael.'
'Maybe he's not serious about keeping on with it, then,' Amanda said.
'Sounded serious to me,' I said. 'He's gone off to Dad's booth to enlist him, too.'
'I didn't know your dad had a booth,' Eileen said. 'What on Earth is he selling?'
'Band-Aids and cheap thrills,' I said, rolling my eyes.
'What?' Amanda asked.
'He volunteered to organize the first-aid station,' I explained. 'Somehow he convinced Michael's mother that it would be a good idea to have it serve as an educational tool, too.'
'What a wonderful idea,' Eileen said.
'So he's done up a replica of a what an army medical tent would look like in 1781, authentic down to the last gory detail.'
'Oh, gross,' Amanda said.
'Don't let Dad hear you say that,' I said. 'It's one of his hobbies, collecting antique medical equipment. He's absolutely tickled at having a chance to show it all off. Although all of the surgical instruments are reproductions that he had me make. You don't find that many genuine eighteenth-century scalpels and surgical saws floating around, and if you do, you don't take them out in humidity like this.'
'He's not actually getting any patients, is he?'
'He had a few people earlier who thought they had heat exhaustion, but the authentic colonial operating table seems to have marvelous healing powers. None of them felt the need to lie down on one of the camp beds after seeing that exhibit.'
'Imagine that,' Amanda said, chuckling. 'Oops – got a customer back at the booth; catch you later.'
Eileen and I had customers of our own, and for the next hour or so, my mood improved considerably as great numbers of sightseers and a smaller but satisfactory number of buyers wandered through the booth. The day stopped feeling like a ghastly mistake and more like a pretty normal first day at the craft fair.
Well, maybe not completely normal. In addition to a reasonable number of tourists and shoppers in modern dress, the aisles thronged with soldiers – redcoats sweating under bearskin hats; the occasional French soldier, scanning the ground for mud that might sully his spotless white uniform and hordes of blue-coated Continental soldiers, most with the red cuffs and lapels that indicated a Virginia regiment, but some with the white, buff, or pale blue trim representing other parts of the country. And occasionally unusual uniforms – a kilted Highlander; men in green whose waxed mustaches seemed to suggest Hessians; or a brace of frontiersman, ambling along in buckskins with long rifles over their shoulders.
And women in long skirts, most wearing corsets. Although they corrected anyone who actually said 'corset.' The proper term was either 'stays' or 'jumps,' and apparently there was a distinct difference between the two, though not one I could understand. They all looked the same to me, their upper bodies rising from their full skirts rather like ice cream cones and spilling out over the top to a greater or lesser extent, depending on personal preference or body type.
I assumed they'd look down their noses at my less-authentic natural figure, but apparently, running around uncorseted merely labeled me as 'slatternly.' They saved their most scornful glances for the women – – usually very young – wearing neither sleeves nor caps.
'Hmph!' one exclaimed when a bare-armed teenager ran by, looking more like a character from a Pre- Raphaelite painting than a proper eighteenth-century lady. 'Ought to run that strumpet out of camp!'
I deduced, from looking at the speaker's outfit, that a respectable colonial lady could display almost any amount of bosom as long as she kept her arms covered and wore a mob cap or a wide, flat straw hat to preserve her dignity.
At any rate, the colonial era was a great time to be a blacksmith. I'd brought a much larger than usual stock of small bits of hardware – hooks, tripods, trivets, and other old-fashioned oddments that people might find useful for cooking over an open fire, camping in an old-fashioned tent, and living generally under the eyes of the Authenticity Police. I was doing a decent business already, and I had a feeling things would improve after some of the shoppers went back to the colonial encampment and figured out what tools they'd forgotten to pack and how much more useful some of my hardware would be than whatever they had brought. Not to mention the large number of colonial dames and gentlemen I saw returning for a second or third time to study larger pieces with the sort of acquisitive look that crossed centuries. If even a tenth of them gave in to temptation before the end of the weekend…
Rob hung around underfoot, pretending to help out, while lying in wait for opportunities to pull out one of the flamingos and wave it around. I'd turn around to find a flamingo head peeking out through the opening in the back curtains or peering around the side of the booth. Once, when I left to run an errand, I came back to find Rob working on a ventriloquism routine, using the flamingo as the dummy.
'You need to switch roles,' I snapped at him. 'And you get to pay the fine if the Anachronism Police show up and catch you doing that.'
And they did show up, with alarming frequency. The fair had only been open an hour or so, and I'd already had to settle a dozen arguments between the Town Watch and the crafters about so-called anachronisms. After I'd officially pronounced a host of items historically acceptable – including glass bottles, learner shoelaces, iron skillets, corkscrews, potpourri, and an antique-looking abacus – the Town Watch had grown considerably more tolerant. Or at least more wary of bothering me. Although I wished I could shake the suspicion that they were down at the history section of the local library, looking for grounds to overturn some of my rulings.
And sooner or later, I was going to have to tackle Mrs. Waterston on the subject of the fines the Town Watch levied on anyone caught with an anachronism that even I couldn't explain away. I'd managed a temporary truce by decreeing that no one had to pay any fines until the end of the fair, which gave me until 2:00 P.M. Sunday to talk Mrs. Waterston into rescinding the fines.
But I'd worry about that later. For now, it was a beautiful day. I actually stopped feeling self-conscious about
