Love Locked In by Barbara Cartland

Author:Barbara Cartland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788676199
Publisher: Barbara Cartland Ebooks Ltd
Published: 2022-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Everybody talked at once and for a moment through the mêlée of sound Syrilla found it difficult to make sense of anything that was said.

Then she heard one word ‘pyrale’ and understood what had happened.

Her father had told her often about the menace that different moths were to the vines. He had explained to her about the cochylis or night moth, which was first found in Champagne in 1771.

The cochylis strings threads of silk between the flowers and buds and late in the summer a second generation settles on the grapes, pricks them and causes them to turn mouldy.

There was also the vex blanc du Hanneton or the white moth of the Cockchafer, which is a particular enemy of the young vine and the grafted cuttings, besides the red cochenille moth which lays its eggs in June and its larvae a month later,

All these were feared and dreaded by the wine-growers, but then the pyrale, a large moth whose body is yellow, with yellow wings, was perhaps feared most of all.

The Comte had told Syrilla that caterpillars hibernate in the bark of the branches all the winter to emerge in the spring. After spinning webs over the vine they proceed to devour the buds, the young shoots and the leaves.

Syrilla had listened and remembered what he had said. However they had been fortunate at Monceau-sur-Indre and each year the grapes had ripened without any mishap, making the Comte delighted with the wine that he was producing.

Now she realised that she was seeing for herself the terrible devastation that the pyrale moth could inflict on a vineyard.

She knew only too well that there was nothing that could be done about it and the only remedy was for all the vines to be dug up, the stumps removed with as many of the roots as would yield to pressure.

When a vine has been in the ground for twenty-five years, its roots are embedded in the soil and enormous strength is required to uproot the stump.

This meant, Syrilla knew, scooping out a great hole round the dead vine with pickaxes and crowbars and then hauling out the stump with a chain harnessed to a horse.

This was usually done as soon as the disease showed and Syrilla could not understand why in this vineyard the vines had just been left and the men not ordered to remove them.

When she could make her voice heard, she had asked what the Duc’s Manager had done about the disease when they had reported it to him.

“He told us to find work elsewhere,” an elderly man answered.

“And was that impossible?” Syrilla enquired.

“Who wants us at this time of the year?” several of the men replied almost in unison. “In the harvest, yes, but we’ve been paid no money since the beginnin’ of April.”

Now Syrilla understood why they looked so ragged and why they seemed to be suffering from starvation.

They explained graphically how at first they had their vegetables to eat while the men from the village searched far and wide over the countryside for other jobs.

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