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.”
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?”
“I was very young when he died.”
Vita considered this. “And your parents? Are they still living?”
“They are gone, too,” I said.
Vita sighed and sat back down in her chair. “You are alone in the world,” she said. “Like me.” She returned to the fireplace, took a leather-bound book from a pile on the mantel, Emily Dickinson Poetical Works stamped on the spine. She opened the book and read:
A LONG, long sleep, a famous sleep
That makes no show for dawn
By stretch of limb or stir of lid,—
An independent one.
There was sorrow in her voice as she read the words, grief softening her cold, hard features. “A long, long sleep,” she whispered. “That is how I imagine my mother in the mausoleum. It is how I imagine my mother’s mother. And her mother, too. They are all there, sleeping, waiting for me to join them. Just as I will wait for you, and you will wait for your children’s children.”
“It is all well and good to quote verse, Vita,” Dolores said, shooting me a look. “But I can’t imagine that Alberta cares about poetry just now. She’s come a long way and suffered much inconvenience to learn about her family. Now, from what I know of Eleanor, she was a wonderful woman, well educated, and a poet in her own right.”
“It is true,” Vita said ironically. “My mother had a way with words.”
“Indeed she did!” Dolores said. “She was adamant about documenting the history of the Montebianco family, including certain elements that others might have wished to forget. It was Eleanor who brought in a naturalist, if you recall. Quel désastre.”
“Mr. James Pringle was an expert,” Vita said. “My mother had every reason to trust him. He believed our situation was extraordinary. Special. Worthy of study.”
“You know as well as I do,” Dolores said, “that the incident in the village nearly destroyed the entire family. Guillaume carried that burden his entire life. Giovanni left because of it.”
Vita glared at Dolores, her expression tight. Greta, who had been watching from across the room, stepped in front of the fireplace, looking from Dolores to me, as if preparing for a fight. “Madame,” she said, her voice filled with anxiety, “I think we should be going now.”
But Dolores wasn’t finished. “All my life I have cared for you, and I can tell you one thing: you have been nothing but a burden. And before I leave you to Alberta, whose existence you will ruin as surely as you have ruined mine, I want you to know that the Montebianco family will win in the end. They will survive you. You are an aberration, a freak of nature, one that will be overcome.”
“Madame,” Greta said, her voice cracking with anxiety. “Please.”
Vita stood and gestured for Greta to be calm. “Don’t worry, I am not angry, Greta,” she said, her voice gentle, as if she were speaking to a child. “In fact, I would like to ask that we stop this silly bickering and take a moment to welcome my great-granddaughter properly. Do you mind?”
Greta took Dolores’s glass from the mantel, then ours from the table, and distributed them.
“Come, my dear,” Vita said. “Let’s not fight in front of Alberta. Chateau Margaux heals all wounds.”
“My feelings exactly,” Dolores said, taking a glass in hand.
“A toast to Alberta,” Vita said, raising her glass. “Welcome home.”
“To Alberta,” Dolores said. “May you survive this family better than I have.”
We raised our glasses and drank the wine down. For a full minute, we sat by the crackling fire, silent. The tension between us was taut as a wire, as if we were all aware that a monumental act had taken place, yet no one dared acknowledge it. Adrenaline coursed through me as I glanced from Dolores to Vita. I couldn’t be sure Dolores had poured the poison in Vita’s wine—I had not actually seen her do it—but there was no other explanation for the empty vial. I struggled with what I should do. Confront Dolores? Warn Vita? But in the end, I didn’t do either. There wasn’t time. As I struggled to act, there was a great crash. Dolores had fallen to the floor.
As the poison took hold, I understood that Dolores’s plan had backfired. The herbs Sal harvested served their purpose, but Dolores, not Vita, had drank the deadly wine. At first, I couldn’t understand how Dolores could have made such a mistake, but then I saw Greta standing by, doing nothing at all to help Dolores, and I knew: Greta had distributed the glasses. She had exchanged Vita’s glass, making Dolores a victim of her own scheme.
I watched in horror as Dolores’s hands grasped at her throat. “Greta,” I said, my voice a plea and a question, as Dolores gasped for air. “Do something.” But Greta only watched as Dolores writhed before the fire. I knelt by her side, but there was nothing I could do: Dolores’s face flamed red, then drained to a pale gray, and set at last into a deathly stillness. And while I witnessed it all, and knew that Dolores was unquestionably dead, I couldn’t quite believe it. Not her horrid struggle, or the look of satisfaction on Vita’s face as she watched her rival die. Not the workmanlike movements of Greta as she collected the shards of glass and wiped wine from the floor with a cloth. The shock of it all made Dolores’s death unreal. But most horrible of all was the expression that had fixed upon Dolores’s face in death, an expression of betrayal that would remain burned into my memory forever.
Greta helped me to my rooms, where she ran me a bath and left me alone to recover. I sank into the water, trying to wake from the nightmare playing through my mind. One second Dolores had been drinking wine; the next, she was dead. Pressing my cheek against the marble bathtub, I tried to soothe the throbbing in my head.
Vita stood over every memory, returning to me again and again, so that I could almost smell the heavy floral scent of her perfume. I understood why my grandfather had left. I understood why Dolores had wanted her dead. Taking a cake of goat milk soap, I washed my skin until it was raw, but scrub as I might, I couldn’t remove the images from my mind. The crash of the wineglass as Dolores hit the floor. The desperate, dry bark of Dolores’s choking. The smug look of triumph on Vita’s face. And her voice as she said: In your veins, floating through your blood, there is ice.
By the time I got out of the bathtub, it was well after midnight. I put logs on the fire and opened the window wide, so that the night sky stretched before me. Rivers of freezing air filled the room, making the fire flicker and the candles snuff to black. I leaned against the window ledge, bathing in the bright moonlight, looking out over the mountains as Vita had only hours before. The air was sharp, like blades against my skin, and I wondered for a moment if Vita was right, and that I was, deep down, like her.
The cold air had the effect of shocking me out of my disordered state of mind. I began to see my situation with clarity. I couldn’t stay there another day. The moon had begun to set over the mountains, and shades of sunrise hovered in the east, giving enough light to see smoke rising from a house in the village. There were people down there. If I made it to them, they would help me.