The next morning, a knock at the door woke me. It was Greta, carrying a tray with a porcelain coffee service. She left it on the desk and brought me a pot of ointment, homemade by the look of it, for the scratch on my face. I had washed the blood from the wound the night before, but it had grown sore during the night. The right side of my face was swollen and painful to the touch.
“I might need a doctor for this,” I said, dabbing the salve on my cheek.
“No doctors up here, madame,” Greta said.
“No doctors at all?” I said. “What do you do if you get sick?”
“See Bernadette,” she said, gesturing to the salve. “She made that for you.”
“Bernadette is a doctor?” I asked. The ointment smelled of eucalyptus and tingled on my skin.
Greta shrugged. I took this gesture to mean that Bernadette was a medical person of some sort. As she walked to the door, she said, “Madame Dolores would like to see you in her salon now.” Without further elaboration, she closed the door.
I climbed out of bed and examined the pot of hot coffee, bowl of sugar, and pitcher of cream on the tray on my desk. There was a linen napkin with the Montebianco coat of arms embroidered in a corner. I drank the coffee as I dressed in leggings, a sweater, and running shoes. Then I ventured out into the hallway to find Dolores.
With two or three turns, I was lost. The night before, I had followed Greta through dim corridors, up a set of winding stairs, around a corner, and past a large window. I hadn’t paid attention to whether we’d gone right or left, up or down. Now the house seemed a maze of mirrors and chandeliers, paintings and tapestries, like some twisted baroque nightmare. The more I walked, the more unfamiliar it all became. I wandered for some time before I heard a voice from the shadows.
“Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco.”
A wheelchair sat in a doorway. Like everything about the castle, it came from another century. The frame was formed of bronze, and the wheels were large and wobbly, like the tires of an old bicycle. In this contraption sat a thin old woman, her legs covered with a wool blanket, a pair of leather slippers sticking out at the bottom. Her white hair frizzed in a halo around her head. Two knotty hands—the fingers glistening with gemstones—gripped the armrests. This was Dolores Montebianco, my great-aunt.
“Mon Dieu,” she said. “I was sure I would be long dead before you arrived. Come, help me to the tea table. There is much to discuss.”
I took the wheelchair by the handles and pushed Dolores into the large salon on the first floor. The room was filled with Victorian furniture—red velvet sofas, mahogany side tables festooned with porcelain figurines, and a richly patterned silk wallpaper that wrapped the room in tangles of cherubs and harps. It was enough to make me dizzy. I didn’t plan to stay in Nevenero for more than a week, but the thought had crossed my mind that, should I stay longer, there would be some significant redecoration to be done.
“Near the window,” Dolores said, and I steered her to a table covered with a white linen cloth. As I pushed her closer, I saw that the seat of her wheelchair was fashioned of wood, which Dolores had made more comfortable with a stack of pillows. “Open the curtains. I want to get a good look at you.”
I pulled back a pair of green damask drapes, revealing a bank of medieval windows. Lozenges of thick colored glass captured the early-morning light. Nonna Sophia had said there was never sunlight in Nevenero, but she had been wrong: there was plenty of light, enough to see that Dolores’s eyes were pale green, her hair ashen, and her face so pale and wan, so thin and lifeless, as to give her the look of a skeleton.
A cut crystal bell had been placed to one side of the table, a china teapot on the other, its pattern a Bavarian farm scene with roosters and cows painted in gray-blue. I positioned Dolores’s chair near the bell and then sat across from her.
Dolores shook the bell, and Greta arrived to pour steaming black tea into our china cups. Dolores nodded, and Greta stepped back to a corner of the room.
“Those beasts,” Dolores said, gesturing at the wound on my cheek.
“There are more than one?”
“Oh, yes,” Dolores said. “One can’t go outside without fear of losing an eye.” Before I could ask why Dolores allowed such vicious creatures at the castle, she asked, “Are you happy with your rooms? They are exceptionally well placed, facing Mont Blanc and the village as they do. The furniture is a bit worn, true. The last resident of those rooms was Maria, une cousine germaine of my late husband’s father. A Spanish princess. Destitute, of course. But beautiful . . .”
“The rooms are fine,” I replied. I sipped my tea. It was bitter, overbrewed. I added sugar and milk.
Dolores held up a long, bony finger, a garnet ring sitting just below the knuckle. “That expression on your face just now,” she said, narrowing her watery green eyes. “It is the very likeness of my late husband. He was more masculine, of course, a bit thinner. And your hair is a different shade of yellow, but I see an exceptionally strong family resemblance. There is no denying it.”
“Really?” I said. “I know so little about my extended family. Do you have pictures of him? Or of Giovanni?”
“There must be photographs somewhere,” she said. “I will ask Basil, my secretary, to look in the library.” Dolores took a sip of her tea, then added in a spoonful of sugar. Her hand shook, spilling drops of tea on the linen cloth. “It is rather uncommon that we should meet this way, don’t you think? Through lawyers and such.”
“Yes, strange,” I agreed, suppressing an urge to go back to the subject of the photos of my ancestors. To ask all the questions that were floating through my mind. Questions about my great-uncle and my grandfather’s relationship: Had they been close or had they had a falling-out? Was that why Giovanni left Nevenero? I wanted to know why everything in the Montebianco family had gone so wrong. Why I was the last one left. “Not the usual family reunion, for sure.”
“Indeed,” she said. “You, raised in some obscure corner of the world, without hope or resources, childless, divorced—”
I felt myself recoil. After Turin, I had come to see my relationship with Luca in a different light. “My husband and I are back together, actually.”
“Suddenly arriving here . . .” Dolores lifted her arms and opened them, embracing the whole of the Montebianco Castle. “To us.”
I felt my cheeks burn. She made it sound as if I had crawled out of some ditch. “It is all pretty astonishing,” I said at last. “I’m still trying to get my mind around it.”
“Yes, well, to tell you the truth, even after Francisco Zimmer told me of your existence, I couldn’t be sure that you were . . . one of us. But Francisco says that the test you took—what is it called?”
“A DNA test?”
“Yes, that’s it. Francisco claims that this variety of test is always correct. Ninety-nine point nine nine percent accuracy, he claims.” She looked down her regal, beaklike nose. “When it comes to family, one must be sure.”
“Of course,” I muttered, feeling even more uncomfortable than before. I didn’t like the sound of my voice—part hopeful, part ingratiating. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, I wanted Dolores to approve of me.
“I must ask,” Dolores said, leaning close, her voice falling to a whisper. “Did they really trace your relationship to this family through saliva?”
“Through a genetic analysis,” I said.
“Heredity used to be verified through church records,” she said. “Marriages and christenings.”
“Now it’s done in a lab,” I said.
A look of wonder filled her expression. Picking up her teacup, she said, “How strange the world has become.”
Dolores lifted a silver spoon and tapped the side of her china cup, summoning Greta. She hurried to the table, filling first Dolores’s cup, then mine.
I straightened in my chair, determined to get somewhere with Dolores. However unworthy she thought me, I was the heir of the Montebianco family. I deserved to know about their history. “I was hoping you would tell me more about the Montebianco family. And my role here.”
“If there is anyone who can do that, it would be me,” she said, a hint of bitterness seeping into her voice.
“My grandfather was extremely secretive about his past. I don’t believe that my parents knew anything about his family. Did you ever meet Giovanni?”
Dolores waved a ring-encrusted hand. “Heavens no,” she said. “I married Guillaume when I was twenty-seven years old and he was forty. Giovanni left Nevenero long before then. But surely you knew your grandfather?”
“He died when I was five years old,” I said. “He killed himself.”
Dolores froze mid-sip, thought this through, then put her teacup down. “Suicide!” she said. “Well, that figures. He never did have the strength of character to face life’s challenges like a man. He ran off and left Guillaume to shoulder the family burden alone. My husband thought Giovanni would return one day to offer his assistance, but of course he never did. It was an enormous betrayal. No one remained to carry the family forward, you see.” She looked at me for a long, tense moment. “But now, there is you. Alberta Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria Montebianco. Do you know why you were given that name?”
I had yet to learn to spell the name, let alone parse its origin.
“They are ancestral names, passed down from generation to generation. If your parents were unaware of the Montebianco family, as you believe they were, it must have been Giovanni who christened you thus.” She narrowed her large green eyes and examined me, as if looking for something to prove me worthy. “Despite everything, he must have felt compelled to continue family traditions. Did your father have an Italian name, too?”
“Giuliano,” I said.
“Ah, well, there you have it. There are a number of Giulianos in the family tree, just as there are many Albertas. The first Alberta Montebianco was born in the thirteenth century. You are her namesake. Isabelle, the second of your four Christian names, was the founding mother of the noble Montebianco line, a member of the House of Savoy who married Frederick, a native of this valley. A great beauty, if her portrait is to be trusted. And Eleanor, your great-great-grandmother, was simply extraordinary. French. Came to Nevenero from Bordeaux. Which must have been something of a shock. The weather is so terrible up here.”
Dolores had explained all of my names except one. “And Vittoria?”
Dolores closed her eyes. Her cheeks flushed, and I wondered if she felt ill. Finally, she opened her eyes and said, “The family has changed over the generations. The Montebiancos have risen to great heights and fallen to unthinkable lows. But there are some elements of the family that have endured, characteristics that make you different from other families. You might say Vittoria is one of those elements.”
“Vittoria was one of my ancestors?”
“Yes, indeed,” Dolores said. “The mother of Guillaume and Giovanni, as a matter of fact, which makes her your great-grandmother. And although her given name is Vittoria, she has always been known as Vita.”
“Vita,” I said, rolling the word on my tongue. Vita. The sound itself seemed to pulse with energy. Life. Vitality. Vita. “It’s pretty.”
“If only the name matched the woman,” she said bitterly.
“Did Vita have something to do with why my grandfather left?”
Dolores gave me a withering look. “You might say that, yes.”
I waited for Dolores to continue, but I could see that the topic annoyed her. Finally, she said, “You were raised far from here, far from your birthright, far from the traditions and expectations of the Montebianco family. But now you are here, Alberta, and I will tell you this: You have a duty to fulfill. You have responsibilities to perform. You must come to understand your inheritance and take charge of it. Or you will find that your inheritance will take charge of you.”
Dolores lifted the crystal bell from the tea table and gave it a quick shake, its clear, high vibrato ending the conversation. Greta jumped to the wheelchair, gripped the handles, and pushed Dolores away. From the hallway, Dolores called, “Meet me at two o’clock in the portrait gallery, and I will show you what I mean.”