Her family owed the village for their part of the generator use, as well as owing for their part of the rent. As it was, Marie was working constantly on building radios and their accessories just to keep her income up with the outgo.
In spite of all Marie and her mother could do, Papa tended to be a bit, well, extravagant. It was a worry. And a worry that was getting bigger each day.
****
Peter Kreger was worried, too. The price of wheat was down. Again. The village was producing twice as much as it ever had by using the proper fertilizer, but wasn't quite covering the debts they'd agreed to assume. The villagers held the debt for the generator in common, as well as the debt for the new plows. Then there was the thresher, the damned thing. Always breaking, it was. And new parts-those the blacksmith couldn't build himself-cost plenty.
Then there was the great idea of frozen vegetables that the women had. But no one thought of freezer burn. They should have; they had all seen the effects of freezing on plants and animals caught out in a blizzard. About half of the food the women had preserved had been freezer burnt and unsuitable for sale. Naturally, the village ate it, freezer burnt or not. In fact they ate an awful lot of fruits and vegetables that winter. Peter hadn't thought that you could get tired of fresh peas, but people were getting pretty sick of them by spring and there were still a lot in the freezer.
Still, if John George had left the borders open like he had in most of 1634, things wouldn't be too bad. But the major market for their wheat was Magdeburg and John George did not want his people dealing in American dollars. He wanted them to use his Saxony thalers, period. They could sell their wheat in Dresden, but that would mean going down the Schwarze Elster to the Elbe then back up the Elbe to Dresden, where they'd get a lousy price. In spite of Herr Berger's new steam barges, it was still more expensive to go upriver. Actually, that was the reason that the Elbe had been closed. Altogether too many people had shipped their crops down to Magdeburg last year. The village had made their second payments on the stuff they had bought, but just barely. It didn't look like they would be able to make the next one.
****
"They're lovely, dear." Greta tried to hide the worry. Karl was so proud of the dishes he'd ordered to surprise her. God only knew how they'd pay for them.
"Civilized, they are," Karl said. "Very up-time."
Greta was beginning to hate that term.
****
Marie wasn't blaming the up-timers She wasn't really blaming anyone. Aside from a few extravagances, they had mostly bought things that would-in the long run-pay for themselves. In the long run. They shouldn't have bought so much so soon. But everyone had been so happy about the good year in 1633. They had gotten almost twice what they got most years and their costs had been the same. The profit had been almost three times what it was in a normal year. They had seemed rich. They had been rich. It had seemed like a perfect time to be alive.
****
"I'm getting worried."
Anna Katherine Schuster didn't really want to hear this. Her brother Heinrich was close to impossible to live with in the first place. When he got worried he gnawed at problems like a dog with a bone. A little dog with a big bone, meaning he never got beyond scratching the surface of whatever he was worried about. "What about," she asked.
"Th-that fucking John George, is what. Things were going fine until he closed the border. We can't pay our debt in Saxony thalers! Have you heard what they're trading for in the Magdeburg market? It's-it's . . . they're worthless!"
That was only the truth, Anna Katherine knew. She and Heinrich-Schuster Finance Company, as they called their business-had made a lot of loans to villages in Saxony in 1633. Only the wealthiest and most productive villages had been offered credit, of course. It wasn't like there was any lack of productive villages that didn't have the cash to buy the new products.
Because Schuster Finance was arranging the sales-in effect buying the stuff and reselling it-they got volume discounts from the catalog stores, Burke's Wish Book, as well as the Gerber Bargain Book and others.
They hadn't passed those discounts on to their customers. After all, they were doing a lot of work and travel and deserved a fair profit. And it wasn't like they were short on customers. There might not be enough cash out there to pay for all the goods that the new factories were producing, but ten times what those factories were producing wouldn't make a dent in the demand.
They had taken the orders, offering "rent with an option to buy" contracts to the villages, in order to sell the stuff up the Elbe and its tributaries. They had had an inheritance, the rents on several villages in Saxony and had sold them for the startup money. They used that money to buy the goods from the catalog stores and have them sent to the customers. They had done their research before going into the business, and had learned that small loans were almost always paid back. It had seemed like a great business to get into-revolving credit with an initial interest rate of only eight percent . . . but as soon as the customer fell behind on payments, the interest jumped to twenty-five percent. It would give them a better income than the rents, they were sure.
With the first loans secured by the stuff being bought and subsequent loans secured by not only the new purchases but the old ones as well, business had boomed. Boomed to the extent that Anna Katherine wasn't sure where Heinrich had gotten the money for the later loans.
What they hadn't counted on was the closing of the Elbe. That had affected over seventy percent of their customers. It also meant that they couldn't repossess much-not with John George's troops in the way.
"We should be fine," Heinrich insisted, clearly trying to convince himself. "As long as we get paid. I used the collateral of the loans to leverage our investment. Got one heck of a good rate, too."
Anna Katherine felt her face pale. "Oh? You didn't mention you were doing that." This was a disaster. If they didn't get paid then the bank would foreclose, taking their paper and checking the books. Heinrich was in charge of getting the money and Anna of making the loans. There were some minor irregularities in their bookkeeping. Well, minor as long as most of the people made their payments. And it wasn't like they were the only company doing it. It was just that some of the customers didn't actually, literally, exist. Some products sold according to the books hadn't actually been bought or delivered.
Not to mention that the irregularities were minor, so long as Heinrich didn't pay any attention to her books. Which he usually didn't. Until now. She'd had a fairly free hand with the accounting and payments that came in. And there were things a girl wanted that her brother didn't really need to know about.
****
"I mean, it isn't all that different than what the Grameen banks did up-time. At least mostly, and the late fees would cover the rest. There would be no problem at all if my idiot brother Heinrich hadn't leveraged us so much."
Rodger Rude's hearing was fairly acute. It had to be. Of course, he didn't call himself Rodger Rude in real life. That was his pen name. He leaned back a bit in the booth, partly to hear better and partly to keep the woman in the next booth from noticing him. And especially to keep the man she was with from noticing him.
"Now, Anna," the man rumbled. "Don't worry. I did exactly what you said. The money is perfectly safe."