Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [144]
Lucia stayed at Castel Gomberto until the end of June, when her curative cycle at nearby Valdagno was completed. She did not look forward to the difficulties and complications that awaited her at Alvisopoli and the other Mocenigo estates. But there was no more time for delay. Harvest season was nearing and she was determined not to let the agents and farmers undermine her authority at the beginning of her tenure. She ordered all the wheat cut by the end of July and had it spread out under the sun until it was time to sell it at auction at the local fairs. She decided the selling price and approved every contract after careful review. “Soon I will have the linen seeds laid out in the sun too,” she wrote to Paolina. “The silk is being treated and will shortly be ready for market.”16 In August she supervised the corn harvest; in September she moved to the estates further south for the grape harvest. After three years of crippling disruptions, the sprawling Mocenigo farming empire was beginning to function again, albeit at reduced capacity. Lucia was perfectly aware this was only the start of a long and uncertain struggle. She had the weather to thank if the harvest was not spoiled that year, and she knew it. But in her letters to Paolina she showed a new confidence, and a barely disguised satisfaction with her initial accomplishments.
Lucia remained very active in the early autumn, during the tilling and sowing season. When the autumn rains began, the water had to be drained immediately to save the new crops and avoid the unwholesome stagnation. More ditches were dug, existing levees were reinforced. She laid out plans to plant more poplars and willows along the roads and canals, and to embellish the town with catalpas and acacias, laurel hedges and flower beds. She invested in a mulberry plantation to revamp the silk-producing factory. She started work on a rose garden in the back of the main house, planting the many specimens brought back from Paris, and she surveyed the park begun years earlier with Alvise to see where to place the exotic trees she had picked out with Professor Des Fontaines.
All this activity, she knew, was forcing her to neglect Alvisetto, who had started his last year at the seminary in Padua. Fearful that her son might not understand why she was suddenly so absent, she entreated Vérand to explain to him “how busy I have to be here at Alvisopoli, making sure all the work proceeds as it should and plans are laid out for the future.” She was so taken up by her work that even her letters to Vérand—not an especially useful adviser on agricultural matters—became excuses to ramble on about “the general inertia” that slowed everything down in the fields or her doubts about whether this or that agent was running things as well as he should. “We have honest but not very enterprising workers,” she complained. The agents and stewards were weak, she said, while she was still looked upon with too much suspicion to be truly effective. “If only we had a person of real authority here, who could act as a permanent spur, then we might obtain, if not all we should, at least half of it, which would be enough to turn the tide.” She was endlessly frustrated by the wastefulness and lack of organisation. “Our agents want the oxen to work all day long except when the men in the fields take a long break for lunch and have a rest. Why don