Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [79]
Extending the kindness she had displayed in Baden, Madame Wallis went out of her way to introduce Lucia in Vienna. She organised a small birthday dinner at her house. Among the guests were Princess Stahremberg, Countess Maillath, Baroness Zois, Count Moravieff and Duke Albert of Saxony-Teschen, whom Lucia had heard so much about when she was still in Venice (grief-stricken after the loss of his wife, Archduchess Maria Christina, in 1798, the duke had commissioned a large funerary monument from Canova that was on its way to Vienna). These were the first names Lucia diligently wrote down, together with their addresses, in a brown leather notebook that was to become her personal social registry. She used those initial introductions to gain access to other illustrious houses, and planned her courtesy visits dividing the city up by areas and neighbourhoods. She called on an average of two to three houses a day, and always wrote down the address and the date. She drew a map and kept a precise tally.
Anxious to own property in Austria in order to demonstrate his allegiance to the Habsburgs, Alvise purchased Margarethen am Moos, a large estate a few hours south-east of Vienna that looked out on the plains stretching towards Hungary. Lucia was not enthused by what she saw when Alvise took her out to view the property before he left for Italy. The house was damp and austere-looking. The fields around it were soggy and teeming with mosquitoes. The garden had gone to seed long ago. She felt the place had never been happy. In medieval times, she discovered, Margarethen am Moos had been a frontier outpost. For centuries fierce Magyars had crossed the plains to make bloody incursions into Habsburg territory. In fact the main house had originally been built as a castle—a fortified quadrilateral with a tower and a moat and a rickety bridge over the water. The tower had been torn down in the eighteenth century by the Harsch family, the last owners, in an attempt to make the place a little more inviting. The facade was renovated in the Austrian neoclassical style. But the building never quite lost its dreariness.
Lucia tried to make the best of it, reminding herself, and her sister, that Alvise had purchased the estate principally “to satisfy his wish to own property” in Austria. “It is not intended as a country home at all, as Alvise doesn’t much like living in the country here.”11 If the estate at Margarethen am Moos was to serve a purpose, apart from making Alvise a landowner in Austria, it would be as a testing ground for crops and fertilisers and planting techniques that might eventually be used at Molinato.
One thing Lucia did not immediately realise, and which she discovered only after Alvise had left her in charge of the place, was that the Harsch family was still waiting to be paid. Alvise had sold part of Villabona to purchase a property in Austria, but in fact he had ploughed a substantial portion of the sale into Molinato. Once in Vienna, he had only enough cash remaining to make a down-payment of 25,000 florins to finalise the purchase of Margarethen. He signed an agreement to pay the balance of 105,000 florins within a year, hoping to raise the sum directly from the revenue of the estate. It was a risky gambit, but Alvise was convinced he could easily generate higher income by digging drainage ditches to improve cultivation, as he had done at Molinato, and by running the farm more efficiently. He drew