He was also to get Velma to sign a notarized statement that both she and Rodney had been unmarried, neither of them married to anyone else, when Pam was conceived and when she was born. That seemed to be important to down-timers. In the year 1635, it seemed, if you had to be a bastard at all, it was a lot better to be a plain bastard than to be an adulterine bastard. Calvinists weren't any more modern about it than Catholics were.

Apparently Velma had forgotten to mention that one of her daughters was illegitimate when she married Laurent. Jean-Louis thought that they had better not mention it to his uncle.

Haarlem, Netherlands

The second run of lava lamps that emerged from the laboratories of the University of Leiden commanded prices equally extortionate with the first. At that point, Jean-Louis, with the receipts in hand, approached his uncle's wife in regard to the forms he had brought to Grantville.

Velma could scarcely believe that he was willing to transfer half of his shares in the project to her simply for signing some forms from Jenny Maddox.

As for Rodney? Why did he want to put his name on Pammie's birth certificate? He wasn't going to get anything out of it. It wouldn't have occurred to her at the time. By then, she had assumed that he was shooting blanks, not that he hadn't been good at it. Good old Rodney hit the target right on the button, most of the time.

Damned old goat of a lawyer, dying when Pammie was just two, after he'd promised child support if she didn't make it public. Well, maybe that had been better. Lots of little kids were real blonde, but not many of them kept that hair when they got older. He'd been her divorce lawyer, after all. He'd seen Joe lots of times. What the hell? She'd sign the papers. Joe was somewhere up-time and he sure would never have claimed Pammie.