The business empire 10/10

She sat down again beside George and explained herself. “All you have to do is find a centre somewhere, where the trading possibilities are good within a radius of say thirty miles. Then you deliver baskets of carrier pigeons to all the villages that sign up with you and wait for the messages to come back to your centre.”

George looked a bit bewildered, obviously wondering what good getting messages would do for him.

Jennifer Jane heaved a sigh and explained more details of her plan. “Now you know what people want and you haven’t had to go anywhere. Some of the messages are bound to be for goods which another village are offering and all you have to do is collect and deliver without having to spend all that time going everywhere to find out what people want. When you arrive at the villages where the requests have come from, you can restock them with carrier pigeons at the same time.”

George thought for a while and then smiled. “You know I think it might work at that. It shouldn’t take long to train pigeons to return over those short distances, feed is cheap enough.”

Jennifer Jane looked a bit puzzled in her turn. “I can probably get that for nothing,” explained George, “if the farmers let me glean their fields. Phil over at the timber yard at Lurbridge owes me a favour or two and he can repair the small amount of damage I’ve noticed on the cart and paint it up for me at the same time. Why I reckon in a year’s time I’ll be able to employ people to do all the hard work for me and I can just sit back and enjoy myself. It wouldn’t surprise me if I couldn’t expand with overlapping territories and eventually cover the whole of the south of England.”

Jennifer Jane left him sitting happily outside the Swan, planning his future. She was very pleased with herself now that she’d forestalled any trouble that George might have caused himself.

She’d also stopped her next door neighbour Eve thinking that she might be a real witch, so now she couldn’t see anything that might cause her any worries and stop her getting on with her normal life. She was wrong of course!