Judy, in spite of herself, was following this. She couldn’t help her upbringing. “So the prices are going down but they should be going down more if the reichsthaler was respected as a currency?”
“Mostly, but if you will notice some prices aren’t going down. Eggs, for instance. Anywhere that the cost of production hasn’t decreased, the prices are actually going up.”
“But the price of wheat and rye are both down,” Hayley said.
“Sure. Because they can dump half their tenants off the land and still get in the crop with the new plows.” Which was overstating the case somewhat, but not unreasonably. That was why there were so many people in Vienna-because after getting thrown out of their homes, they didn’t have anywhere else to go.
“Speaking of which,” Karl said. “How are you managing this place, Hayley? It’s more active than I expected. There is a strong feeling of industry here.”
“Between the cash up front that Ron Sanderlin got for his 240Z and my drawing account with the Abrabanel family, SFIC had the start-up cash. But fairly soon we ran into the same problem everyone else in Vienna has: none of our potential customers had any money. It wasn’t that cut and dried. Most people had some money, but not enough to keep us going. So we had to offer credit to keep customers. But we are getting close to our credit limit and I am afraid that Moses Abrabanel is going to cut us off if we don’t get some sort of cash infusion soon.”
Trudi, who had been listening quietly, said, “You’ve told me before, Sarah, that money is a loan.”
Sarah nodded.
“So why don’t we make our own loan? Make our own money?”
“Because no one would accept it,” Sarah said. “If the governments of Europe don’t have the credibility to introduce new money, certainly we don’t.”
Trudi didn’t say anything else, but she had a thoughtful look on her face.
CHAPTER 22
July 1635
The Hofburg Palace, Vienna
“Charming,” Empress Mariana of the Austro-Hungarian Empire murmured. Judy the Younger curtsied quite well, she thought. Not that the others were bad at it, but it was clear that they lacked practice and seemed a bit uncomfortable. Judy did it with style and not the least bit of embarrassment or pugnaciousness.
As she recovered from her curtsy, the young woman winked at Mariana as if sharing a delightful joke and the empress of Austria-Hungary was hard put not to laugh out loud. The receiving line was dull, but not quite as dull as usual. Mariana had been reminded that these things were supposed to be fun, even if they rarely were.
Prince Gundaker’s bow could be measured with one of the new micrometers, it was so rigid. The rumors of a blowup at the Liechtenstein house were apparently true.
Moses Abrabanel was his usual reserved and cautious self. But Mariana could tell that he had things to tell. It was shaping up to be an interesting evening.
The receiving line being finished, some gifts from the new arrivals at court were offered. Bolts of fabric, some of the new paisley prints with the double eagle of the Habsburg crest woven into the fabric. Then it was time to circulate before dinner. Mariana got several versions of the events at the Liechtenstein house over the next fifteen or twenty minutes. She decided to see what the up-timers had to say and spotted Judy the Younger. Not surprisingly, Judy shone like one of the new light bulbs in a dark room. Mariana made her way to Judy, dispersing a bevy of young lords by virtue of her rank. And when she had Judy alone, she simply asked, “What happened that has Gundaker so upset?”
“We’re barbarians destructive of the good social order.” Judy grinned. “But I’m sure Prince Gundaker has already told you that.”
“I don’t think he put it quite that way, but that was the gist, yes. So are you barbarians?”
For the first time that evening Judy the Younger put on a serious mien. “It probably depends on where you’re standing, Your Majesty, whether it’s us or you who are barbarians. I understand that John George of Saxony indicates his readiness for another mug of beer by dumping the dregs of his last one on whatever servant happens to be handy. Did you know that?”
Mariana was surprised by the sudden turn of the conversation. “Yes, I am aware of it. An unpleasant quirk, but John George is an unpleasant man.”
“To us, the way John George treats his servants isn’t all that different from how you treat yours. Tell me, Your Majesty, were you to find yourself visiting a court like John George’s, would you then request a second drink by dumping the dregs of the first on a servant’s head?”
“No!”
“Neither would we. Prince Gundaker felt that my sister saying ‘thank you’ to a serving girl was an offense against the natural order of the world. In order to punish Sarah, he dismissed the servant.”
* * *
For her part Judy thought Empress Mariana might almost have been a third Wendell sister. An older sister; she was about thirty. Her hair was almost the same shade as Judy’s, though curly where Judy’s was mostly straight. Her figure was more like Sarah’s. Well, almost a sister-she did have the Habsburg lip. “We hired her. Anyway, we brought you some other stuff, just between us girls.” Then she told the empress about feminine hygiene as practiced in late-twentieth-century America and which of those products they had been able to reintroduce in the seventeenth century.
* * *
While Judy was chatting with the empress, Sarah and Karl were buttonholed by Moses Abrabanel. The question was: how can we make money magically appear the way you up-timers do? The problem was that they wanted to do it without accepting the worthless paper themselves.
What they wanted was a Kipper-and-Wipper-like paper money. Everyone else would be expected to take it at face value, but the crown would only accept it at a discounted rate.
That wasn’t how Emperor Ferdinand’s “financial managers” put it, of course. They talked about crown expenses and the crown’s special status. Sarah at least found it an interesting, if infuriating, conversation. Karl was a little bored by it, but you couldn’t date Sarah Wendell without learning something about economics, so he rarely got lost. He even winced at all the right times when Moses explained something about finance that was clearly wrong.
When all was said and done, Moses was what Adam Smith would later call a mercantilist, opposed to free trade and a firm believer that a nation needed a great pile of silver to be a great nation.
“No. It just needs a good credit rating,” Sarah explained.
“Ferdinand III is the emperor of Austria-Hungary. Of course, he has a good credit rating.”
Karl winced visibly.
“Not the emperor. The nation,” Sarah insisted.
“The emperor embodies the nation.”
“Then Ferdinand has a sucky credit rating,” Sarah shot back and Karl winced again.
Moses’ face was getting a bit red. Not, Karl thought, because he disagreed, but because he was supposed to disagree and couldn’t. The Austro-Hungarian reichsthaler traded at about half its face value, outside of Austria-Hungary, and that was an improvement over what the HRE reichsthaler had traded at.
* * *
Count Amadeus von Eisenberg was a wealthy young man whose father was even wealthier. He had spotted the daughter of the emperor’s auto mechanic and wondered what she was doing here. She looked out of place. Well, not exactly that. She looked uncomfortable. Partly out of Christian charity and partly out of curiosity, he went over to talk to her. “Miss Fortney, I’m Amadeus von Eisenberg.” He wasn’t going to use the silly title “von Up-time.”