Decent eyeglasses were being made and sold. I got into it when one of Krystyana's kids turned out to be nearsighted and I started to need reading glasses.
The never-ending work of animal breeding was still going on, and to encourage it Count Lambert had started a system of county fairs, with prizes for the best laying hen, the best milk cow, and so forth. The prizewinning animals were auctioned off, often at fabulous prices. I expanded Lambert's system of both fairs and prize herds and usually bought the best available at each county fair, often at huge prices. My buyers had fairly strict guidelines.
A sore spot was that a wealthy merchant from Gniezno, who always boasted about the quality of his table, was observed to regularly purchase prize animals to slaughter and eat just so he could brag about how good his meat was. This bastard was even slaughtering prize milk cows for their meat! I wrote him, politely explaining the purpose of the prize herds and the improvements that had been wrought because of them, but he went right on doing what he had been doing. When I had him banned from the auctions, he had his subordinates do the buying for him. So I contacted my accountants and suggested that this was a man deserving of a beating. Even then they had to work him over twice before he stopped his annoying practice.
Another example of the creative use of accounting, I suppose.
My sheep herds were expanding yearly, and for the last seven years all the males in the main herds had been culled from the prize herd. Improvements in both the quality and the quantity of the wool were manifest, but since my best sheep could produce three times the wool of the average sheep, there was obviously a long way to go.
The same was true of the dairy herds, except that there the best was five times better than the average. Do you begin to see why I was so annoyed at having prize animals butchered?
Our best chickens were laying five eggs a week, and some breeders were starting to ignore ducks and geese. They simply couldn't compete with the chickens in either egg or meat production. I tried to reverse this trend, but I had also shown them how to compute profits on livestock, and they knew.
Pigs were getting shorter-legged, bigger-bodied, and faster-growing. They were still hairy, though. Not only did they have to live through the winter in unheated barns, there was a big market for pig bristle, a market that is satisfied by plastics in the modem world.
My wild aurochs herd was now up to three hundred animals that had outgrown all three of the valleys that I had them in. We were feeding them a lot of grain to keep them going and culling half the bulls each year, selecting for size and meat production if not for placid temperament. Something would have to be done before too long. I needed someplace to fence in a big area for them. I checked with the Banki brothers, and Wiktor pointed out an area north of where Sieciechow had been that might be suitable. At least there were very few trees there and almost no people at all left. I sent a surveying team out to look at the possibility of walling it in. We had found out the hard way long ago that ordinary fences didn't impress not very domesticated aurochs much. They walked right through them! It took a thick masonry wall, built wavy in the Thomas Jefferson fashion, four yards tall to do the job. Huge animals!
In October another milestone was reached. From that point on our profits from our commercial services-that is to say, transporting passengers and goods as a common carrier, the mails, and Baron Novacek's mercantile enterprises-were higher than our profits from selling the output from our entire factory system. Much of the reason for this was that we didn't pay tolls, while the other merchants did when they weren't using our railroads, plus our communication system let our buyers know quickly about prices here and there.
The conventional merchant would buy goods, pay heavily to take them somewhere, and hope to be able to sell them for more than they had cost him. Since this was an inefficient way of doing things, they generally tried to make profits of from one hundred percent to five hundred percent to make up for their occasional losses.
We usually had the goods sold before we bought them, and our transportation costs were very low. Everywhere our railroads and riverboats went, people got more for what they had to sell and paid less for what they wanted to buy, and we made a whopping profit doing it. Of course, the merchants howled about it, but their shouts of anguish impressed neither Duke Henryk nor me. And we were the law. A lot of merchants gave up and came to work for us.
We moved my household and the R&D teams to Okoitz in the fall, and the researchers were soon finding uses for the large empty buildings that were scheduled to one day be cloth factories. To quote Parkinson's law, "Work naturally expands to fill the time available to do it in," I would like to add one of my own: "Building space is consumed in direct proportion to its availability, regardless of what, if anything, has to be done there."
There would be hell to pay when I threw the researchers out to make way for production machinery. I could see them kicking and screaming for days, trying to protect their precious little territories.
Nine R&D teams were set up to work on the various steps of producing cloth, and some progress was made fairly quickly. Some of the most complicated-sounding things worked fight off, and some of the most trivial seemed to take forever. What worked on linen almost never worked on wool, and vice versa. You never can tell about research.
As time went on, an increasing number of researchers were foreigners, since a lot of bright kids throughout Europe were reading our magazines and wanted to get in on the action. We let them in-once they survived the Warrior's School.
Baron Piotr went to Okoitz with us both as a member of my household and as a floating member of all the R&D teams. Whenever the teams ran into math problems they couldn't handle, they took them to Piotr. He was good as a general idea man, too. He stayed head of the mapmaking group, but now he rarely went out into the field. This got the mapmakers moved to Okoitz as well, with their lithographic machines set up in the new cloth factories.
The ladies at the cloth factory gave the R&D people a warm and friendly welcome and soon got to referring to them as "the Wizards." The guys liked the title, and the name stuck.
Chapter Twenty-nine
FROM THE JOURNAL OF DUCHESS FRANCINE
Childbirth was not as bad as I had been led to fear it would be, but it was certainly painful enough. The midwife had convinced me that at thirty I was too old to be having a first child, and indeed she had me quite worried, but my son and I came through our ordeal alive and in good health.
I secured a wet nurse for him immediately so that my nipples would not become unlovely. Within a month, by fasting and exercise, I fit well into my old dresses, but more months passed before I felt myself shapely enough to keep my bargain with Friar Roman. In all, he did four nude paintings and gave two of them to me. I put them away, to look at in my old age, I suppose. Soon I could ride Anna without pain or danger, and a fast run through the countryside, often in the company of the delightful Sir Wladyclaw, became my greatest pleasure.
Conrad did not ask to come to the christening, and so I did not invite him. Baron Wojciech stood in his stead, and Duke Henryk became my son's godfather. I arranged it thus so that Henryk might be more inclined to see that my son one day got his patrimony. We named him Conrad to remind my husband of his duty to our child.
Yet in truth I did not want to see my husband. My anger at the way he treated our child was such that years must go by before the hurt was eased. Instead, I put my mind to the problem of assuring my son's future. After much thought, it occurred to me that if I could do some service to Duke Henryk, some service greater in value than the three eastern duchies, he might be prevailed upon to see to it that my son was properly enlarged, as was his birthright.