"I am an idiot!" Agustin shouted.

"Well, that's common knowledge." Luis grinned at his friend. "Lucia could have told you if you didn't know," he added winking at her.

"Ha! You're an idiot too!" Agustin answered back.

Agustin's shout had distracted Beatriz who had seen Luis wink and giggled at his surprised look. "That too is common knowledge. But what is the idiocy of the moment?"

"All this time we have been trying to figure out a machine to tear ropes from the batt. We could have been making a machine to stretch batts into ropes."

"That sounds like a lot more work," Lucia said. "Tearing them is easier. That's why we do it that way."

"Yes! Easier for a clever girl with clever fingers. A girl with the wit and skill to keep watch on how the wool batt is coming apart into ropes. But not easier for a machine that has no eyes, no fingers and no wit at all."

Luis was nodding. "Machines are stupid, even the most complex ones. They can't change what they are doing, can't adjust themselves."

Don Ramon de Aguilera was severely displeased. They had been pouring money into the spinning machine for two years now, and at the suggestion of his nephew. And now the boy had gone off to the Low Countries to save the guilder. What should a proper Spanish gentleman care about the Dutch guilder?

The idea had been that while there were restrictions on who could make cloth for sale, there were no such restrictions on who made thread. So if they could use the machines to make fine high-quality thread quickly and cheaply, they could have the savings of the improved production and slip through a loophole in the laws by exporting not washed wool, but thread. Carded wool was wool under the law. They could export no more of it than washed wool. They got a slightly better price for it, true.

He wasn't sure whether he was more displeased by Don Alfredo or the disloyalty displayed his shepherds. Don Ramon felt he was a generous, if not extravagant, lord. He didn't approve of extravagance, especially in regards to dealing with the lower classes. It only lead to trouble.