15: The Traveling Merchant Matthew / The Straw Hat of Wheat Straw Braided Cords / Iced Tea of Nostalgic Days 4

Time rewound to a few hours ago.

Jill visited the town of Shelland after a long absence.

The purpose was to buy food and materials. Additionally, she wanted to check the quality of her homemade clothes. She couldn’t resist the desire to walk around town wearing her homemade clothes rather than just looking in the mirror at her mansion.

However, she didn’t have the courage to walk around town in her dip-dyed dress yet. It was too flashy, so she sealed it in the cloakroom for the time being.

Instead, she chose a crimson robe for going out. Originally, it was a plain, cheap robe bought for everyday use. She dyed it crimson using roots of the Indian madder she harvested from the forest. She prioritized depth over brightness, resulting in a chic and calm atmosphere.

And there was something she was more satisfied with than the robe.

The straw hat.

(“Let’s make a summer hat,” I thought it was a miss at first, but it was a good book.)

It was a guidebook for making hats. However, upon reading it, she found that the content mainly assumed using threads with chemical fibers, like vinyl, available in modern Japanese craft stores. It was impossible for Jill to obtain chemical fibers.

Jill was disappointed but found an interesting discovery after reading through the book. It described how to make a traditional Japanese straw hat without using chemical fibers.

Jill had also made a straw hat as a child. Conrad had said, “It’s important to know what rural people do,” and had a maid from a farming village teach Jill how to make a straw hat. She remembered this as she turned the pages, but was greatly surprised to see a straw hat that looked completely different from what she expected.

The cause of the difference in appearance was barley straw twine.

Barley straw twine is a string made from barley straw. First, the straw is split and flattened into a board shape. Up to this point, it’s no different from ordinary straw crafts. However, barley straw twine goes further, splitting the board-shaped pieces vertically to make them thinner. The thinly cut pieces are then braided into a single string.

The resulting barley straw twine is stronger than ordinary straw. It’s also more flexible, allowing for various shapes to be made.

Additionally, barley straw twine has no length limit. Barley stems are about one to two meters long, and straw in its original form has limited uses. However, by adding fibers and braiding them, barley straw twine can be made into strings several meters long.

Upon learning about barley straw twine, Jill became immediately fascinated and started making it. Barley straw was common and easy to obtain. Jill got the dried, pre-treated barley straw cheaply from townspeople.

For the next step, splitting the straw into thin strips, she used the magic of [Scorching Light]. While she didn’t have the strength to burn through iron like her mother, Bazarde, Jill excelled in controlling weak power delicately.

However, the subsequent task of braiding the thin strips into strings couldn’t rely on magic. It was a continuous process of meticulous and detailed handwork. Jill spent three days braiding strings non-stop, worrying Karappa so much that he knocked on the mansion door frequently.

With the barley straw twine completed, Jill began the challenge of making a straw hat. After five failed attempts and experimental pieces, she succeeded in making a beautiful straw hat with a perfect hemispherical shape and well-balanced brim.

She also added decorative strings and artificial flowers, referencing a clothing catalog, resulting in a product indistinguishable from those made by professional hat makers.

Leaving the mansion, she was full of pride and high spirits, thinking, “How great is this!” However, by the time she reached the town, she started worrying. “Even if it looks beautiful, a straw hat is still just a straw hat, right?” “Why go to so much trouble for mere straw?” Jill thought she might be seen this way. Naturally, Jill didn’t want her hard work to be ridiculed.

Therefore, she hesitated whether to wear it while walking around town. Ideally, she wanted to talk to merchants knowledgeable about clothes or hat makers, but she had no connections. As she wandered the town in her dilemma, she eventually got tired and entered a coffee shop. There, she ended up showing her hat during a casual conversation with a person she met.

“Show me more of your products! Please, I insist!”

The merchant she met by chance at the coffee shop was a bit eccentric.

Even with a brief conversation, his good nature came through, and above all, Jill felt a sense of empathy and respect for his life philosophy conveyed in his words. She sensed his passion in the casual phrase, “It would be nice to have, wouldn’t it?”

However, Jill found it strange that a merchant could get so excited over a single hat, even though she was one to talk. She sent silent SOS signals to the waitress, who only shrugged.

“Well, yeah. He gets really enthusiastic about clothes and hats. He’s a bit… no, quite strange, but he’s not a bad person. Matthew, you’re not hitting on her, are you?”

“Of course not! I’m in love with the beauty of this hat!”

“See?”

The waitress smiled wryly.

Despite her troubles, Jill realized it was a stroke of luck.

Jill’s goal was to run a general store.

However, while she could make goods, she was an amateur when it came to the crucial aspect of “management.”

She knew she needed advice from someone actually in the business.

Achieving her goal without involving others was impossible.

Alright, Jill steeled herself internally.

“Well, um… would you like to come to my house?”

“Yes!”

The merchant nodded energetically.

Along the way, they introduced themselves to each other.

He was a merchant named Matthew.

He was a tall man with a gentle face, wearing a white tunic, but he had a strange vigor about him.

Jill thought with a wry smile that this must be what merchants were like.

“By the way, Jill, at this rate, we’ll end up outside the town…”

“Oh, is it a problem if it’s outside?”

“No, not really, but… where is it?”

“It’s in the mansion just inside the forest over there.”

Matthew fell silent for a moment at Jill’s words.

Jill realized she had left out some important explanations.

“Oh, it’s okay! The forest creatures are calm and won’t attack! We also have guards!”

“Oh, I see… Sorry, I was just surprised. It’s fine, no problem.”

They spoke to the town gatekeeper and stepped outside.

Right next to the gate, Karappa was lazily dozing.

“Come on, let’s go, Karappa.”

“Clack.”

Karappa quickly woke up and snapped his pincers as if to say, “I wasn’t sleeping.”

“You were totally sleeping… Anyway, Matthew, let’s go. If anything happens, this crab will protect us.”

Thus, Jill and Matthew headed towards the mansion.

◆

After crossing the forest, Jill led Matthew into the mansion.

As she gave a brief tour of the first floor, Matthew inexplicably stopped in the kitchen and dining room, gazing around with deep interest. He looked visibly dumbfounded.

“Um, Matthew?”

Concerned, Jill called out to him.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I found it fascinating.”

“You wouldn’t expect to find a mansion in the middle of a forest, right?”

“Indeed. However, this dining room and kitchen are almost like those of a restaurant.”

“Now that you mention it, you’re right,” Jill thought.

The dining room and kitchen were originally equipped by the mansion and also seemed to contain items that likely belonged to Conrad. When Jill first explored the mansion, she thought it was natural for the kitchen to have cooking utensils and overlooked them. However, upon closer inspection, the pots, pans, plates, forks, and stored spices strongly reflected the tastes and aesthetics of the person who gathered them. She was now certain they belonged to Conrad.

As Matthew said, it was possible her uncle ran a restaurant. It seemed absurd for a royal family member exiled from the castle to run a restaurant, but with her uncle, it wasn’t entirely out of the question, Jill thought, finding the idea amusing.

“Do you enjoy cooking, Jill?”

“I don’t dislike it. But I can’t fully utilize such a splendid kitchen. Maybe the previous resident used it like a restaurant, considering he was someone who had a lot of fun with it.”

Jill said this while stroking the table in the dining room.

“I see.”

“Let’s go to the second floor. That’s where the clothes are.”

Jill had turned one of the guest rooms on the second floor into a closet room.

She invited Matthew to sit on a chair there and then thought about preparing some tea, heading back to the kitchen.

“I’ll make some tea.”

“Um!”

Matthew raised his voice unusually loudly.

Jill wondered what was wrong and responded.

“Is tea not suitable? Drinking too much tea isn’t good for the body…”

“Not at all. I’d love some tea. If possible, could I trouble you for iced tea?”

Jill interpreted this as a request for something cold or with ice.

Earlier, Matthew had used the magic of [Freezing]. Unless blessed with significant magical power or well-trained, one couldn’t use magic many times in a day. Jill had weak magic power at a time but could use magic many times. She wouldn’t get tired after ten or twenty uses.

“The sunlight was strong. I’ll prepare it right away.”

“No need to rush.”

Thinking Matthew made a serious face while joking amusingly, Jill went down to the kitchen and began preparing the tea.

Her uncle Conrad, who taught her how to brew tea, knew various tea leaves and even non-leaf teas. Green tea made without fermentation, coffee made from roasted and powdered beans, mushroom tea made from dried and powdered mushrooms with a broth-like flavor, and dandelion root tea—he knew many unusual teas.

But his specialty was black tea.

Black tea was easily obtainable on Argenes Island. Tea leaves had been cultivated in the island’s highlands for a long time and exported to foreign lands. There were even people called tea masters who used magic solely for cultivating and producing tea leaves.

Though their profession contradicted the national policy of the Dailan Magic Kingdom, their presence, power, and wealth were formidable. Even the royal family couldn’t interfere easily. They were obsessively devoted to making tea, never using their power for political purposes. Thanks to these tea masters, even the common people on Argenes Island could enjoy tea freely.

Incidentally, Jill didn’t know this, but the tea leaves available on Argenes Island were similar to what was known as “Ceylon” on Earth.

“Alright, let’s get started.”

Jill rolled up her sleeves and began boiling water.