“Understood,” Basil said, going back to the table and collecting his ledger. “I would be very happy to communicate with Mr. Zimmer on your behalf, but I will need permission to do so.”
“You don’t have to call yourself. You can just give me his number,” I pleaded. “Please, Basil.”
But Basil didn’t reply. He had walked to the far end of the trophy room, where he was returning something to a glass cabinet. I followed him and found a case filled with exotic objects—fossilized ammonites, butterflies pressed between sheets of glass, chunks of quartz, dozens of amethyst geodes, a stuffed hummingbird, and a string of sharp yellow teeth, perhaps fifty, bound together with twine.
“What is that?” I asked, walking to the cabinet.
“Trophies of another sort,” Basil said. “I have been cataloging the collection of rock crystals. They are extraordinary and should really be in a natural history museum rather than locked up in a dusty trophy room.”
I reached into the cabinet and took the string of teeth between my fingers.
“Wolves’ teeth,” Basil said. “Quite old, I believe. Collected for good luck and worn by generations of Montebiancos during the hunt.”
As I returned the teeth, something else caught my eye: a glossy white coil at the back of the shelf. “May I?”
Basil nodded in assent, and I lifted a long, thick braid of white hair from the cabinet. It was course, like horse’s hair, and thick as a rope. “What on earth . . . ?”
“Hair,” Basil said. “Quite a lot of it.”
I unfurled the coil. It slithered over the floor like a bullwhip. “Hair from what?”
“I cannot verify the story,” Basil said. “And it is, in all likelihood, apocryphal, but Guillaume told me that his grandfather Ambrose Montebianco, the twenty-sixth Count of Montebianco, your great-great-grandfather, killed the owner of that hair in the early nineteenth century.”
I turned back to him, fascinated. “Really?”
“The story goes that he came across a man while hunting. He shot him, then cut and braided his hair as a kind of trophy.”
“There’s so much of it,” I said, running the braid through my fingers as I wound it back into a coil and placed it on the shelf.
Basil lifted a photograph, tucked between two crystals, and showed it to me. “That is probably what the man looked like.”
I recognized the photo immediately as the one I had seen in Turin: the Beast of Nevenero.
“This fellow is not the owner of the hair, as this photograph was taken in the early twentieth century, but, from the account I heard from Guillaume, this man in the picture and the owner of the hair seem to be of the same breed.”
“How strange,” I said, examining the photo more closely. “I saw this photo before.”
“Let me guess: The Monsters of the Alps,” Basil said, shaking his head. “That book has done quite a lot of damage to this region. Look.” Basil turned the photograph over. Written in faint pencil was the word: Iceman.
“Iceman?” I asked, perplexed.
“That’s what the family called it,” Basil said. “Not very tasteful, if you ask me, to keep human trophies, but . . .” Basil returned the photograph to the cabinet and closed the door. “No one has asked me, so I leave it alone.”
With Basil’s help, I found Dolores’s rooms. She sat in her wheelchair near the fire and, hearing me at the door, asked Greta to show me in. I stepped into a huge, ornately decorated space, all silks and velvets, the colors bright and clashing. The decor was so different from the dour atmosphere of my rooms, so unexpected, that it felt like finding flowers and lemons in the greenhouse: a bright living thing in the dead of winter.
“Come in, child,” Dolores said, her green eyes fixed upon me. “Come in.”
Greta gave me a strange look, half frightened, half conspiratorial, and I realized she was trying to tell me that she had done it: the keys were back in the mews.
“That will be enough for now, Greta,” Dolores said, dismissing her and turning to me. “It is nearly time for my nap. Would you be so kind? My bed is there, beyond the chinoiserie.”
I steered Dolores between a pair of large oriental vases painted in jeweled colors and into a bedroom that was as Victorian as the salon: heavy brocade silk drapes, the floor covered with oriental carpets, every inch of the walls occupied by oil paintings of flowers. A cut crystal vase near the bed bloomed with pink peonies cut from the greenhouse.
“You look as strong as Greta,” Dolores said, eyeing me from her wheelchair. “Can you manage?”
“I think so,” I said, and after turning back the bed sheets, I slid my arms beneath her—one arm against her back, the other under her butt—and lifted. She was skin and bones against my chest, light as my suitcase, and I deposited her in her bed with ease.
“Would you mind putting some wood onto the fire?” she asked. “The cold creeps in so quickly.”
I took birch logs from a basket and lay them on the dying fire of the kachelofen.
“I’ve come to ask for your help,” I said, all my anger dissolving as I stood before Dolores. She seemed so frail and helpless. “Zimmer was supposed to return, but he hasn’t. Could you authorize Basil to call him?”
“Of course, I would love to help you,” Dolores said. “But it was not I who told Zimmer to stay away.”
“You didn’t?” I asked, perplexed.
Dolores shook her head, fixing me with a dark look. “You will have to speak to Vita. The servants answer to her.”
“But I thought she was . . .” I searched for the right word. “Disabled.”
“Her disabilities have never kept her from controlling the family,” Dolores said. “Her mother, Eleanor, was the only one who kept Vita in check, and while Eleanor died in nineteen forty-two, leaving the estate to her grandson Giovanni, Vita did her best to control things from behind the scenes.”
“But Giovanni was only”—I did the calculation with my grandfather’s year of birth, 1931—“eleven years old in nineteen forty-two.”
“There was a legal guardian installed, a version of Zimmer who managed everything until Giovanni and Guillaume were of age. When I met Guillaume in nineteen seventy-one, Giovanni was long gone and Guillaume ran the estate himself.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I loved Guillaume, but I admit, I didn’t have the clearest picture of his situation. My family had known the Montebiancos for generations—I am a descendant of the English Crawfords—and I was introduced to Guillaume on one of our skiing holidays. I married him before I understood what I was getting into, I daresay, and although we made the best of it, Vita made our lives impossible. We couldn’t invite friends to Nevenero. It was too difficult. We rarely traveled. Guillaume could never leave his mother. Not after Giovanni abandoned her. You know, Vita is a monster, but she suffered greatly after Giovanni left. She loved her sons to the point of obsession. Do you know that Giovanni didn’t even tell them—Vita and Guillaume—that he was leaving? He just took off in the middle of the night with one of the village girls.”
“My grandmother,” I said. “Marta.”
“Marta,” Dolores said. The name sounded ugly, coarse. “Well, Miss Marta was lucky. I imagine she and Giovanni had a splendid life in the New World. My life, on the other hand, was hell. Vita hated me because Guillaume loved me. He loved me more than he loved her—at least I have that to hold on to.”
Dolores glanced at me and, recovering her composure, said, “You might say that Vita and I have a long-standing feud. With time, it has become a kind of standoff. She has always had the upper hand—Guillaume protected her—but Guillaume is gone now. I just may win in the end. And if I do,” she said, smiling with pleasure, “you, and all the Montebiancos after you, win, too.”
The fire cracked and popped, the heat of it warming my back.
“I want to see her,” I said, determined to speak to Vita myself about Zimmer. “Maybe she will listen to me.”
“That can be arranged,” Dolores said, her gaze settled
on me, as if I had come around to the very subject she had been hoping to discuss. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we have a wonderful greenhouse here at the castle.”
“Of course I’ve noticed,” I said. “The citrus trees are amazing.”
“The blood oranges are a great luxury in this climate,” she said, her eyes flashing with a sudden complicity. “A great luxury to be sure. But I’m not interested in citrus trees, my dear. I am much more concerned with what Sal has been cultivating for us.”
I remembered the rows of herbs Sal had harvested, the clipboard and the paper with the Latin words.
“Sal is quite an adept horticulturalist,” Dolores continued. “He has been growing some treasures for me. They are fickle things, even in the best of conditions, and difficult to cultivate at this altitude, or so I am told. But Sal has managed it. Alone, the plants are more or less harmless. Ingest one, and there would be stomach problems and an extended stay in the water closet, perhaps. But together, they form a very powerful poison, one that can eliminate a person altogether, should that person drink it.”
She met my gaze and held it. A tingling grew in my chest, a chilling and horrible sensation as I realized the purpose of the herbs Sal had collected in the greenhouse.
“The only question remaining,” Dolores said, “is when.”
Seventeen
I remember it now, all these years later, as if I were still there, standing in the northeast tower. Everything I had heard said of Vita, all that I had imagined after seeing her portrait in the gallery, everything I had felt upon reading Eleanor’s memoir—nothing prepared me for what I found that night.
She stood near the open window. The moon had risen, and the glow of its light fell over her severe features and white hair. She seemed to swim in her black dress, which was many sizes too big for her. I understood from Eleanor’s memoir that she had no choice but to wear loose clothing—the abnormal formation of her spine and the wide bone structure of her hips made it difficult to wear anything else. The tight silk dress she had worn to sit for her portrait, with its row of shining buttons, must have been—like the beauty of her sixteen-year-old face—a fabrication.
Vita heard us come in, but she continued to stare out the window, her gaze fixed on the mountains, the bone-chilling cold of the Alpine air ruffling her hair. She seemed unaffected, even as I shivered. Greta had carried Dolores up the stairwell and was depositing her on a couch near the fireplace when Vita turned and scanned the room, her eyes sharp and intelligent. In the moonlight from the window, her skin seemed white as chalk, and the pearls around her neck gleamed. She wore large jeweled earrings, just visible through the streams of white hair that fell around her face and tumbled over her shoulders, thick as a shawl.
“Vita,” Dolores said slowly, as if speaking to a child. “Vita, I have brought someone to meet you.”
But Vita knew this already. She had been staring at me for a solid minute. “Please, come in,” she said, gesturing for me to join Dolores near the fireplace. “Sit where it’s warm.” She closed the window and walked to the center of the room. “Will you have some wine?”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling my voice catch in my throat. I don’t know what I had expected, but Vita, with her haunting blue eyes, her frightening pale skin, and her misshapen features, was not it.
I sat across from Dolores on another couch. While Vita went to a cabinet and poured out two glasses of wine from a crystal decanter, I glanced around the room. There was a table stacked high with books, a four-poster bed, a vanity crowded with bottles of perfume, twenty at least, elaborate crystal spray bottles and vaporizers with French labels. There was nothing in her living space that pointed to Vita as the horrid, uncivilized fiend Dolores had described. Or the kind of person who left a dead goat in her antechamber. The most menacing presence in the room was the heavy, floral scent, thick and sickening, of her perfume.
“Alberta would like to ask a favor of you,” Dolores said, giving me a look. “About her stay at the castle.”
“Of course,” Vita said, as she lumbered across the room, her gait uneven. She lowered herself slowly into a chair and stretched her legs, her large, flat feet proof—if I had needed it—of our blood relationship. She placed two glasses of wine on the table before us.
“No wine for me, Vita?” Dolores asked.
Vita gave her an amused look. “You are too ill for wine, Dolores.”
“On the contrary,” Dolores said, “I am too ill to abstain.”
Vita laughed, her earrings sparkling in the firelight. “Then, of course, you must have a glass of wine. It is a rare one, too, from my mother’s dowry collection. I asked Sal to bring it up for this very special occasion.”
As Vita went to the cabinet and poured another glass, I stole a glance at my great-grandmother, endeavoring to reconcile the expectations I’d had of Vita with the reality before me. She was very strange looking, yes, but the portrait in the gallery had caught a certain truth: her magnetism. An intensity in her manner. Her power.
Vita returned to the fireplace, the glass of wine in her hand. Dolores reached for it, but Vita swept it out of reach. “Let it breathe,” Vita said, as she placed the glass on the mantel. “It is an eighteen ninety-nine Chateau Margaux. It needs air. We will all drink a toast together in a moment.”
By then, Greta had the fire going strong. The room had begun to warm. In the light of the fire, I looked more closely at my ancestor. Vita’s skin was pale and deeply wrinkled, giving proof to her age. Her white hair was thick and glossy against her black dress. When she smiled, her teeth jutted this way and that, sharp and crooked and yellow. Yet, she was so filled with vitality that it was hard to believe she had been born a full century earlier.
“Alberta,” Vita said. Her eyes lit up upon her saying my name. “Alberta Montebianco. Here you are. The granddaughter of Giovanni. Alberta.”
“She’s not the first Alberta in the family, you know,” Dolores said, glancing at the wine.
“The second child of Isabelle and Frederick was Alberta,” Vita said. “Back in the Middle Ages.”
“Correct. The name has been used many times since then,” Dolores said. “The Montebianco family has a rather limited imagination when it comes to the naming of offspring. They just recycled names ad infinitum.”
“True, very true,” Vita said. “We are not artists, the Montebianco family. We are nobility. Now, come, let me have a look at you.” Vita leaned close, so that her large blue eyes were level with mine. “I have waited so long to see you.”
I averted my eyes as she examined me, feeling something ferocious in her gaze. Maybe she was as curious as I about our resemblance: the large blue eyes, the white-blond hair, the broad shoulders, the cleft chin. Our peculiar feet.
“Now,” Vita said, smiling. Her mouth twisted, as if the jaw had been broken. “What was it you wanted to ask me?”
“She wants Zimmer to come with the helicopter,” Dolores said, speaking before I had the chance. “She feels like a prisoner here and would like to leave.”
Vita gave me a look of surprise. “Is it true that you feel like a prisoner here, Alberta?”
“Well,” I said, feeling blood rush to my cheeks. “It’s true that I would like to go back home.”
“Then, of course, you must call Zimmer,” she said. “Basil will assist you.”
“Thank you,” I said, embarrassed by how easy it had been to make my request, and reproaching myself for waiting so long.
Suddenly, Vita leaned to me and took my face between her hands. Slowly, she brought her eyes in line with mine. Closer. Closer she bent, so that the proximity became awkward, uncomfortable. Her perfume grew heavier; below this, the strong, animal smell of musk and sweat seeped from under her dress. Closer. Closer. So close, it felt as though she meant to kiss me. Then, closing her eyes, she took a long, slow inhalation.
“Come, Vita, now, really. C’est impolit,” Dolores said. “Ignore her nonsense, Alberta.”
&nb
sp; But I was too flustered to ignore Vita. The blood pulsed through my body as Vita pressed her lips to my ear. “You are one of us,” she whispered. “I smell it in you.”
“Smell what?” I asked, my heart pounding. My hands trembled. “What do you smell?”
“Please, Vita,” Dolores said. “Leave the poor woman alone.”
“What did you smell?” I insisted.
“Limestone and moss,” Vita said, her eyes fixed on mine. “Quartz and granite. Charred cedar. And ice. In your veins, floating through your blood, there is ice.”
“Vita believes she can smell a Montebianco,” Dolores said, shaking her head. “And while her sense of smell is quite good for an old relic, I do think she is being a bit fanciful.”
Vita turned to Dolores. “And you smell like generations of English peasants. Limitation and barley.”
I sank back into the couch, my heart lodged in my throat, and my palms wet. I desperately wanted to drink my wine.
“Things do get a little primitive around here,” Dolores said. “I daresay one gets used to it.”
I met Dolores’s eyes, and she flicked her gaze to a small vial that lay empty in her palm. I glanced at Vita’s glass sitting on the table nearby. While Vita had been looking at me, and her back was turned, Dolores had poured the poison into her wine. Suddenly, I understood: Dolores had brought me to the northeast tower to distract Vita. I had been used as a decoy.
“Tell me,” Vita said, sitting back in her chair. “How did you come to be here?”
As I told her of the letter that had arrived at my home and my meeting with the estate’s lawyers, Vita listened, expressionless. When I’d finished, she stood and walked to the fireplace, where a portrait of a woman astride a black horse hung above the mantel. The woman had dark, serious eyes; a long, narrow face; and thin, terse lips.
“That is Eleanor,” Dolores explained. “Vita’s mother.”
“I always thought my sons inherited her temperament,” Vita said, giving me a long, searching look. “Did you know my son Giovanni well?”
The Ancestor Page 16