For days after finishing Eleanor’s memoir, I could think of little other than the terrible history I had discovered. The strange scenes of Vita’s childhood—the crushed butterfly, the exorcism, her encounter in the village—haunted me, filling me with an immense sense of sadness, not only for the little girl born into an era of ignorance, to parents who could not comprehend her mental and physical challenges, but for the teenaged girl who had been the victim of sexual violence. That my grandfather had grown up in the shadow of this violence, the child of rape, the child of a mother incapable of caring for him, explained a lot, as did the fact that Vita had clearly suffered from a serious genetic disorder.
And yet, discovering that my family carried a congenital illness lifted a heavy weight from my shoulders. Giovanni and Marta’s stillborn babies, my dead brother and sister, my own series of miscarriages—they were all the result of some error in our genetic code. For the first time in months, I felt free. I wasn’t to blame for my inability to have a child. I, like Vita, was a victim of inheritance.
Reading Eleanor’s memoir made me want to meet my great-grandmother more than ever. If only I could see her, I believed, I could reconcile Eleanor’s exaggerated and emotional account with my own. All that week, I waited to see Dolores, but after our talk in the portrait gallery, she had taken ill and had not left her rooms. I was alone for much of the time, left to wander the castle and the courtyard, which left me edgy and ill at ease.
But I didn’t truly begin to panic until the end of the week, when Zimmer did not show up. No one at the castle appeared to place any importance on the day of the week, but after I had counted seven days, and Zimmer had not returned, I knew that Basil had been telling the truth: Zimmer was not coming back for me.
Down the corridor from the grand hall, tucked in a nook, sat the single connection to the outside world: a rotary telephone.
The castle was isolated, but if the telephone worked—and Basil had said that he was constantly making calls for Dolores, so it must—then we were not entirely cut off from the world. I could get in touch with someone in the nearby villages of Pré Saint Didier or Palézieux. I could try to call Luca. I could try to get ahold of Enzo. It didn’t matter who I called. As long as I made contact with someone outside of Nevenero, they would surely get me a helicopter.
The trick was getting to the phone without anyone finding out. Dolores was aware that I wanted to leave, and there was no objective reason I should hide the call, but I felt an instinctive fear of being overheard, as if Greta or Sal would stop me. And so I waited until the middle of the night before slipping from my room. I didn’t turn on the lights, and I felt my way into the corridor, fingering my way along the rough stone walls, inching forward through the darkness. The stone steps of the stairwell had been worn down over the centuries and were so slippery that one misstep would send me tumbling headfirst into a deep, twisting abyss. Finally, I sat and slid the rest of the way down on my butt, like a child sneaking downstairs after bedtime.
I was just feet from the telephone nook when I heard the muffled sound of footsteps. Fearing that Sal had come in from the mews, I ducked behind a curtain, pressing myself against the window. Holding my breath, I looked outside. The world appeared fractured, distorted by the honeycomb pattern of blown glass. The shuffling came closer, then closer still. What would Sal do, I wondered, if he found me? What could he do? I was free to walk through the castle. There was nothing to stop me. Yet, I was sure that if he discovered me hiding behind the curtain, there would be trouble.
When the sound passed, I peeked out from behind the curtain and found not Sal but Greta shuffling slowly away. What she was doing there in the middle of the night was beyond me, but I had more urgent business to worry about, and I hurried into the alcove, where I fell into a velvet chair next to an old-fashioned rotary telephone perched on a wooden table. That there was a working landline telephone at all was a testament to the Montebianco wealth. Even if the village had been populated, and the service was paid for by more than a single family, it would have been a technical feat to get the wires all the way up to Nevenero, let alone to keep service in repair through the winter. However they had managed it, the important thing was that it was there. And it worked.
I picked up the receiver and listened. The tone beeped in intervals, insistent, waiting for me to dial a number. The only number I knew was for the Miltonian; I had called Luca there every day for years. A clicking tapped in my ear as the number registered, but I couldn’t get through. I was met with nothing but an incomprehensible recording in rapid Italian. Finally, I managed to reach an operator, and in a matter of seconds, I heard the jarring sound of country music under Luca’s sweet, somewhat querulous voice.
“Luca,” I said, feeling suddenly panicked, breathless. “Hello? It’s me. Bert. Can you hear me?” I glanced at the cuckoo clock in the hall. It was four a.m. in Italy. That meant it was about ten at night in Milton. I had no idea what day of the week it was, but from the sound of it, I guessed Friday.
“Bert?” Luca said. It was more a statement of disbelief than a question. “Where are you? Is everything okay?”
“Yes—I mean no,” I said, standing and walking into the hall to make sure I was still alone. “I need your help.”
I could hear Luca picking up the base of the phone and walking to the far end of the bar. I could picture it all perfectly—the whiskey shots with beer chasers all lined up on the bar.
“Where are you? You were supposed to be back by now. I’ve been so worried,” he said. “I’ve been calling that Enzo guy, but he’s not responding. Are you back home? Why would you just disappear like that?”
I felt a wave of love and gratitude wash over me. Even though I had caused him so much trouble, he hadn’t forgotten about me. He had been worried. He had called Enzo. There was one person in the world who had been looking for me.
I heard Luca’s father in the background, laughing and talking to one of the regulars. It was definitely Friday, everyone out spending their paycheck. Nothing ever changed in Milton.
Suddenly, the phone went silent. “Luca?” I said, afraid I’d lost him. I heard the panic in my voice. “Are you there?”
“I’m here,” he said. “Just moving to a quieter spot. So where are you? What’s going on?”
“I’m in Nevenero,” I said. “The estate told me that I needed to come here to meet my great-aunt Dolores, but there is way more going on here than they told me. Dolores is sick, and there is this crazy tower, the northeast tower, it’s called, where my great-grandmother—who is alive, it turns out, and has some kind of genetic disorder—is being held. Luca, things are totally fucked up here. I need to come home.”
“Hold on, hold on,” he said, his voice calm in an effort to bring me down a notch. “Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m okay,” I said. “But I need to get out of here. This guy Zimmer was supposed to get me, but he hasn’t come back, and it’s been . . . What’s the date?”
“Friday, January nineteenth,” he said.
“I’ve been here three weeks? Do you understand that I am trapped? We’re snowed in. There are no roads open. Nothing.”
“I understand,” he said. “I’m going to find a way to get you out of there. I’ll get in touch with Enzo somehow. If he doesn’t respond, I’ll come get you myself. But I need to ask you something first. What’s going to happen when you’re back home?”
Of all the questions he might have asked, it was one I hadn’t expected. And the one that hit me hardest. “What do you mean?”
“After what happened in Turin . . .” he continued. “Not the fight, but everything else. After that, I thought things would change for us.”
“I thought that, too,” I said, tears blurring my vision. I had hoped that we’d passed through the darkest part of our marriage and could start again.
His voice was soft, more tender than angry. “I’m sorry for what I said to you. I should have told you earlier about what Nonna said. I just need to know if we’re going to make this work.”
I wiped tears away with the back of my hand. “I’m sick of hurting you,” I said. “It’s all I’ve done for years now.”
“You know I’d do anything for you.”
My heart fell. Of course I knew that. He had proven it time and time again, sacrificing himself for me. I listened to the bar—the song on the jukebox, the voices in the background—and felt a deep, painful longing to be back home with him.
“I want to start over,” I said. “I know we can make things work.”
“We can adopt,” he said.
“I want that, too,” I said. “But there’s one thing I need to know.” I took a deep breath, finding the courage to ask. “After the baby was born, was there paperwork you filled out?”
“Just what the nurses gave me.”
“Did you have to write down a name?”
There was a long, tense pause, and I could feel the pain, months and months of mourning, collecting. “I called him Robert,” he said, his voice cracking. “After my dad.”
My eyes filled with tears. “That was a good choice, I think.”
We sat in silence for a moment, loss settling between us. Finally, Luca cleared his throat and said, “I’m going to talk to my dad. We’ll get you out of there.”
“I love you,” I said. “I can’t wait to see you.”
“I love you, too. I’ll be there soon.”
I hung up the phone and walked into the hallway, trembling with emotion, fear and relief and dread, all the feelings I hadn’t expressed to Luca. Now that he knew what had happened, everything would change. He would get in touch with Enzo, and Enzo would make Zimmer send a helicopter, and I would be on my way out of there. Soon, I would be thousands of miles away from the Alps, safe at home with Luca. We would be starting the next chapter of our lives.
These thoughts were going through my mind when I looked up and found Greta staring at me, her eyes huge with astonishment. Before I could utter a word, she turned and hurried down the corridor as if chased.
After my call with Luca, a desperate restlessness overtook me. I walked through the castle at all times of the day and night, searching for the helicopter from various angles, catching the sun from the salon and the moon from the grand hall and the snow-topped mountains from the library turret. I checked the sky from my bedroom every evening, opening the window wide and searching the crepuscular light for a helicopter on the horizon. Each morning, I prayed that Greta would arrive with news that I would be returning to Turin that afternoon.
One evening, as I was reading family records in the library, I wandered to the window. It was early, perhaps four o’clock, the sky darkening as the sun set. There was no helicopter on the horizon but, as I turned back to my reading, I saw a smudge of dark smoke drift across the sky. At first I thought it was a distortion created by the ice on the glass, or a low dark cloud, but when I opened the window to get a clear view, I knew for certain: there was smoke rising from the village below.
I ran downstairs, thinking of how I could get to Nevenero. Sal had said it was too far to walk, but that was ridiculous: it was ten minutes away, maximum, even walking against the wind. If I could only get there, I would find whoever had lit that fire. With their help, I would be out of the Alps that very night.
I grabbed the mink from the cloakroom and ran out to the courtyard. It had snowed all afternoon, and while Sal had plowed the courtyard, pushing the snow up into piles along the perimeter, the flagstones were icy. I slipped, steadied myself, and, while regaining my balance, saw it: the enormous iron gate blocking my way. I walked to it and gave it a hard push. It didn’t budge.
While Greta and Basil (and Bernadette, I supposed, although I had still not met the cook) had rooms in the castle, Sal lived in a modern apartment in the mews. As I ventured through the open door, I saw that the ground floor was unfinished, unheated, and overflowing with equipment. To one side, a snowcat sat high on its wheels and belts like a miniature tank. Sal used the snowcat to groom the snow beyond the moat, including the east lawn, packing the surface to the texture of a ski run. The other side of the mews was cluttered with tools, boxes of trash bags, stacks of slate shingles, and plastic bins filled with dog food. There was a metal pen in one corner where the dogs slept—Fredericka and three other Bergamasco shepherds. A wooden staircase led up to Sal’s apartment, and just behind this staircase hung a corkboard filled with hundreds of hooks.
The dogs went crazy the second I stepped into the mews. They jumped up, scratching and clawing at their cage, barking and growling, desperate to get at me. I froze at the sight of them, and I wanted to turn and run, but I saw that the keys—the ring with the big, old-fashioned gate key—were there, not far away, hanging on the corkboard.
Suddenly, the door opened upstairs. I pulled back. Above a burst of Italian opera, Sal shouted for the dogs to shut up and then, without so much as looking in my direction, he slammed the door closed. Giving Fredericka a smile of triumph, I walked behind the staircase and grabbed the keys. But as I opened the gate, and pushed back the heavy door, my heart fell: the smoke was gone, blown away by the wind.
I was positive that I had seen smoke, but the only way to be sure was to go to the highest point of the grounds, where I could see the village clearly. Pushing the gate closed, I took the footpath around the exterior of the castle, relieved to find that Sal had shoveled. It was hard enough to fight the wind without wading through snow in my running shoes.
Nevertheless, my feet were soaked by the time I reached the east lawn. A full moon had risen into the clear, dark sky so that the snow glistened and the hedges fattened with shadow. I climbed past the pond, past the white mulberry trees, to the mausoleum, where I stood high above the village of Nevenero.
The village was tucked into a ravine below the castle, and I would have missed it entirely without the light of the moon. There were clots of houses, twenty, perhaps more. Between the castle and the village lay a smooth sweep of snow. The roads were buried. The houses were dark. There was nothing but gales of wind blowing down from the mountain, whistling. Nobody could possibly be down there. I could brave the wind and snow, but it would do me no good. Nevenero was empty.
I had turned to go when a sound came from somewhere beyond the mausoleum. I stopped to listen. There it was again: snow crunching as something moved over the east lawn. An animal, most likely, I thought as I walked past the white mulberry trees, straining to see across the lawn. At the edge of my vision, a flicker: someone walking near the greenhouse. There was a flash of white in the darkness as the figure paused, then disappeared behind the greenhouse.
My first thought was that Sal must be collecting herbs again, but I dismissed it: Sal was listening to opera in the mews. Then I wondered if it could be a large animal—perhaps a bear that had wandered down from the mountain. Or maybe I’d been tricked by fog settling over the pond. On cold, wet nights, sheets of mist collected over the valley, layering the lawn with a milky film. But while it might have been possible that a low cloud had twisted over the lawn, it was not the case on that particular night. The sky was clear, with a full moon and stars blazing overhead. No, it wasn’t fog. It could not have been anything other than what I saw: a person walking across the east lawn.
Whoever it was, I wanted to get as far away from it as possible. I hurried down the path to the pond, heading toward the gate in the hedge, the chill air sweeping over my skin. The temperature had dropped, and the air was so cold it caught in my chest and compressed, settling heavy in my lungs, making it difficult to breathe. The mink wasn’t enough to keep me warm, and my shoes were soaking wet, but it didn’t matter—I was too numb with fear to care.
I jogged past the pond and was almost at the gate in the hedge when I saw a figure standing in the distance, beyond the greenhouse by the castle wall. It was tall, with long hair, which made me believe it to be a woman, yet, as I strained to see more clearly, I couldn’t be sure.
Whatever it was, it seemed as surprised as I was. In that moment, the two of us frozen with fear, I became paralyzed, unable to breathe, unable to even blink. It stared at me, and I stared at it, stunned. My heart beat hard, the sound thrumming in my ears. Finally, I turned away, breaking the moment, and the figure ran.