The Ram Rebellion(6)
"Are you saying that I could rent this farm, and some joker could still come and tell me how to do my business?"
"I'm not sure. Might be." McTavish grinned. "Reckon it'll be fun finding out, won't it?"
* * *
"They have no concept of their place in the world." Claus Junker complained again.
His wife Clara, though in basic agreement, had heard it all before.
With the uptimers' proven knowledge and ability, they should have been acting like nobility. Instead, they permitted the marriage of a camp follower to one of their young men. That support was a slap in the face for all the nobility.
Claus felt this slap especially keenly because he wasn't quite noble. His mother had been of noble blood but his father was no more than a wealthy merchant. His parents hadn't had a very happy marriage. His father had married because that's what his family wanted. His mother had felt that she was being married beneath her station and had virtually been forced by her family to accept the marriage. It hadn't taken long before both had become convinced that each had gotten the worst of the deal. The result was that Claus' mother had focused on her pedigree, clouded as it was, and impressed her son with his rank and the noble blood of his ancestry. He had been her pet, and had not gotten along with his father.
Clara had known all this for years. She was the daughter of another wealthy property owner. Her marriage to Claus, while more romantic than his parents' marriage had been, had still had a significant mercantile component.
Sometimes Clara felt that Claus' emotions got in the way of his normal good sense. Areas like his unreasonable rejection of certain offers from certain uptimers. Not to mention the way he objected when she ventured to offer an opinion on his business ventures. Clara had been raised to be the wife of a man of business like her father and brother, the social half of the equation and a help in business matters. Claus was all right with the social part but less comfortable than her family with the business part.
She manipulated Claus subtly, which didn't come naturally to her. Still, she had had a lot of practice over the years. "Yes, Husband, but we must still deal with them, like it or not. They have the force of arms to coerce our compliance. Besides, they don't seem to have the subtlety of nobles. With care, these uptimers should be easy enough to manipulate to our profit."
"And how, my dear wife, do we profit by the loss of our lands? The Ring of Fire took land that had been in my mother's family for over a hundred years and replaced it with this West Virginia. The Ring of Fire left people that will not recognize my claim or pay my rents. How does that profit us? Now, to add insult to injury, this Newhouse person calmly informs me that he would like the rest of Sundremda to add to what he's already living on."
"All these things haven't been decided, not yet. The uptimers talked about reasonable compensation when they met with the council," Clara answered. "Besides, it's all the more reason to do business with them. Doing business offers the opportunity to regain at least a part of what we have lost. If we refuse to talk to them or deal with them, how can we persuade them that our claims are truly just?" This isn't going very well, Clara thought as she spoke.
The paper Claus was waving about as he talked was the problem. The paper contained an offer to buy both the land and rents for five farming plots in the village of Sundremda. Herr Newhouse wanted to gain clear title to the land if he could. He offered what Clara considered a fair price for it. If that wasn't possible he wanted to buy, for less money, the rents for the same five farming plots. Failing that, in turn, he offered to rent the five plots for a lot less money.
It was clear that Mr. Newhouse wanted to actually farm the land, whether as owner, Lehen holder or tenant. The offer was for far more land than would normally be used by a single farming family, and it included provisions to treat the "tractor" as a replacement for several teams of horses. How did one judge the value of a tractor? If tractors were as good as the reports suggested, perhaps it could replace several teams of horses.
The offer was a godsend for the Junker family. The village farms would be fully rented and that would be a windfall. The Junkers had expected to lose most of the rent this year and probably next year as well. This farmer, Mr. Newhouse, had done his homework. He was offering what the other farmers in the village paid, maybe a little less, but that was understandable, given the circumstances.
Claus' problem with the offer was that it came from Mr. Newhouse. Mr. Newhouse's farm within the Ring of Fire was on land that would have been part of Sundremda, if the Ring of Fire had not happened. To Claus, it seemed the Ring of Fire had deposited squatters. Worse, they were squatters who then refused to pay his lawfully due rent. The fact that the land that was there now was worth considerably more than the bit of forest that had been there before only made it worse.