“Bernadette is good with knives,” Sal said by way of introduction.
I looked up to see the cook looking down upon me. She had a plump, cheerful face with round, rosy cheeks, huge eyes, and a double chin, giving her the appearance of a ghoulish child. She stood next to Sal, her skin glistening with candlelight.
“Ready?” Sal asked Bernadette.
Bernadette nodded and held up a short, sharp kitchen knife.
I gasped and pulled away, but Sal held me down. Pinned, I took in my surroundings. I was on a mattress in the mews, near the dog cage. It was dark except for candles burning nearby. Greta stood by Bernadette’s side, a bottle of Genepy des Alpes in one hand and a shot glass in the other. She filled the glass and gave it to me. “Drink,” she said, pushing it to my lips. “Now. Before Bernadette begins.”
I later learned that Genepy des Alpes is distilled from the herb genepy, or artemisia, known in English as wormwood—the primary ingredient in absinthe—and was used in the Alps to cure any number of maladies—altitude sickness, wound disinfection—and as a digestive aid. But unlike commercial Genepy des Alpes, with its regulated quantities of the psychoactive element of wormwood, thujone, Bernadette’s homemade version caused hallucinations and had the power to put me out cold.
Greta fed me shot after shot, creating a fire in my throat and a sickening warmth through my limbs. When I tried to sit up, everything fell away. I drank a good half bottle of the stuff and descended into a strange, surreal darkness that I have not experienced before or since.
I don’t remember much of the operation itself, but Greta told me later that I lost a lot of blood. From the look of the scar on my thigh—oblong and uneven, shiny and pink as pulled taffy—I know that Bernadette, with all her expertise with knives, didn’t perform the most elegant of surgeries. She removed the bullet the way one might have done during the Napoleonic wars—with a sharp blade and lots of liquor.
While my body lay in a state of profound trauma—opened and bleeding under Bernadette’s knife—my mind sank to a deep, fortified place of protection, a faraway bunker where it carried on untouched by pain. I was, suddenly, transported to the trophy room, where I stood before animal heads mounted across the wall. The bear, the mouflon, the deer, the thousands of ibex horns—everything twisted around me like branches in a forest. All was as it existed in real life. But it was the Iceman that I saw most clearly. In the workings of my hallucination, the man in the photograph lived. It stood upright before me, its eyes gleaming with vitality, its long hair cascading over its shoulders, no longer just a trophy in a cabinet but a living being. It spoke to me in a language I couldn’t understand, and yet, somehow, every word made sense: A long, long sleep. A famous sleep. I backed away from the creature, terrified, screaming.
I woke, startled, gasping. I had never felt anything like it, that pain mixed with the disorientation of my hallucination. I cried out as the knife dug into muscle, prying the bullet from my tissues. Leaning over the side of the mattress, I threw up.
Greta poured a shot and brought it to my lips. I drank it down and lay back again. My mind was bombarded with strange images, so vivid, so real, that I couldn’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. Where had I been? Where was I now? The pain paralyzed me, but so did the genepy. The whole world seemed twisted and unreal. Bernadette, standing over me with her bloody knife. Greta, holding a blood-soaked cloth. I fought to sit up, struggling to get off the mattress, but Sal pressed his forearm against my windpipe, pushing me back down onto the table. “Stay still, madame,” he said, as my consciousness slipped away again.
Back in the trophy room of my hallucination, the Iceman was gone. Instead, I found another creature, a female, her face an echo of the Iceman’s face, a pallid, pitiful thing, her skin tight against her cheekbones, her nose flat, the jawline hard and exposed. A single blue blood vessel, thick as a garden snake, pulsed across her forehead, throbbing and twitching over her scarred cheek and cleft chin. The image seemed to waver, the edges bend away, as if melting. I tried to touch her, but my hand hit a hard, reflective surface. It was my own image, reflected in a gilded mirror, my own pallid face, myself asking: What are you?
I screamed and felt a hard whack across my back. I had vomited in my sleep. Once, then again, a hand slapped me. Suddenly, a shot of air rushed into my lungs. The jarring experience of coming back to reality left me dizzy. I gasped for breath, inhaling with all the force I could muster, shivering with sweat and agony.
“Breathe,” Greta said as she helped me sit up. I felt nauseated, beaten. “That’s right. Breathe. You are fine, madame.”
As I woke, the world seemed to swirl and buckle. I heard the dogs barking in their pen, and above, in the rafters of the mews, a row of crows sat watching, silent witnesses to my suffering.
My wound sutured, Bernadette said something I couldn’t understand—I later learned she spoke Franco-Provençal—and jumped off a chair onto the floor, like a child escaping from the dinner table. I blinked, trying to see clearly through the thick miasma of my stupor. Bernadette was half the size of Sal but wearing the same burlap trousers and boots. I watched her walk across the room, sure that I was hallucinating. But it was no hallucination. Bernadette the cook was a cretin.
When I woke—treacherously hungover, everything throbbing with pain—I lay behind the curtains of my four-poster bed. A fire burned in the kachelofen, and a makeshift nursing station had been set up nearby—bandages, scissors, a glass bottle of disinfectant, and the bottle of Bernadette’s homemade genepy. The bed was made up with clean white sheets. Pulling back the covers, I saw that Greta had dressed the wound, but my thigh was as swollen as a tree trunk. When I tried to get up, an explosion of pain shot through my body. The very thought of drinking more made me ill—the gin hangovers of my previous life were nothing in comparison to what the genepy did to me—but the pain was so strong that I poured myself a shot and drank it down.
The next days passed in a blur of sleep and misery. The wound became infected, and I could do nothing but stay in bed, suffering. I slept and woke and slept more and woke again. I swallowed more genepy, trying to stop the pain. The images in my mind bled into the reality around me until everything took on the hue of a dreadful hallucination. Soon there was little to separate the dream world from the waking one.
Greta fed me my meals, sitting by my bed and spooning Valpelline soup—hearty fare made of cabbage and meat—into my mouth. She changed my bandages, put logs on the fire, dusted and swept, replaced empty bottles of genepy, and left. She emptied a porcelain bedpan that, she informed me with pride, had been in the family for three hundred years.
Some days after my surgery, when I was strong enough to sit up in bed and eat alone, Greta arrived one morning with a tray of coffee, slices of black bread, and a jar of strawberry preserves. A luxury, she said of the preserves, dropped with that month’s helicopter delivery and sent up by Bernadette.
“When was the helicopter here?” I asked, a rush of disappointment hitting me. The helicopter had come and gone without me.
Greta shrugged, then went on to explain the arrangements being made for Dolores’s funeral, describing the bouquets of flowers they had taken from the greenhouse, and the prayers they had chosen to say in the chapel, and the dinner Bernadette would prepare after the internment in the mausoleum. I stared at her in amazement. Greta behaved as if she were innocent, as if she had not colluded with Sal and Vita, and Dolores had died of natural causes.
Later that day, I woke from a nap to hear a flute playing in the courtyard of the castle. I pulled myself out of bed and dragged myself to the window, pain shivering through me each time I put pressure on my leg. Pushing back the heavy curtains, I found a small, morbid party below, dressed all in black and walking together to the chapel: Basil and Greta, Bernadette and the dogs, led by Sal playing the flute. At the tail end of this party came a large, limping figure wearing a black veil. Vita. The matriarch. The family secret.
That night, after Dolores’s funeral, when the castle was quiet and dark, I woke to a presence in my room. I strained to see, but the sky was cloudy and moonless outside my window, and the fire had gone to ashes hours before. And yet, I could feel the hot gaze of a living creature standing nearby. I heard the slow intake of breath, and the slow exhale of it. Fumbling with the matches at my bedside table, I lit a candle. The room popped into clarity, revealing Vita.
She stood at the side of my bed, gazing at me through the curtains, her fingers wrapped around the bedpost. She wore her funeral clothes, a black velvet coat and a black silk dress, the bodice dotted with dark embroidery, the skirt stiff with crinoline. She came closer, and I saw that the dark markings on her dress were not the silk of embroidery at all, but moth holes, large and frayed. Light from the candle fell over her pale face, illuminating the deep lines and wrinkles in her skin. Perhaps it was the weak light, but it seemed to me that Dolores’s death had brought her closer to her own. Her eyes seemed hollow, skeletal.
“What is it?” I whispered, hearing the tremor in my voice. I did not want her near me, let alone hovering over me like that.
“I came to help you.” She glanced at my bedside table, filled with bandages and bottles. She put her hand on my leg. I flinched.
“This is your fault,” I said, struggling to pull myself up in bed so that I could face her. “You sent Sal after me.”
“It wasn’t time for you to leave,” she said. Her voice was so low I could hardly hear her. “There is too much left to do. You haven’t the slightest idea of your responsibilities or how important you are. It is time for you to learn what must be done. I may not be here much longer to show you.”
“I want to know what we are,” I asked. “What happened to make us . . . like this?”
Vita sat on the bed at my side, her face filled with emotion. “That is not something I can tell you,” she said. “You won’t understand unless I show you. And in order for you to see it, you must be strong. You must heal.” She pulled the covers back from my leg and unwrapped the bandage. “Now, let me see the damage.”
The swelling hadn’t gone down. My thigh was thick, the muscle bursting the skin like cooked sausage. Green pus had seeped everywhere, suppurating at the suture, hardening to a yellow crust beyond.
Vita shook her head, dismayed. “There is something wrong here,” she said. “You aren’t healing as you should. I don’t understand. You are young and strong.” Her eyes fell on the bottle of genepy on the bedside table. Her expression soured. “Did Sal give you this to drink?”
“Greta,” I said. “To help with the pain.”
“Of course. When it comes to ignorance and superstition, you can always rely on Greta and Sal. This,” she said, taking the bottle in hand, “is as toxic as the wine I gave Dolores.” She turned, opened the window, and flung the bottle out. There was a crash of glass as it hit the flagstones of the courtyard below. Vita returned to my bedside, smiling, satisfied. “That takes care of that.”
Cold air had chilled the room. The image of Dolores, poisoned, her face twisted in pain, appeared in my mind.
“Here,” Vita said. She pulled a cloth bag from the bedside and removed a foil of capsules. “These are antibiotics,” she said. “Take them with food.” She pulled out another pack of pills. “These will kill the pain more effectively than genepy,” she said. “But they can be addictive as well, of course. You must only take enough to get you through this. Do not accept anything from Greta. Nothing. Do you understand?”
I took the pills and swallowed them with water.
“I know this is not easy,” Vita said, placing her hand on mine. “But life is not easy for us Montebiancos.”
“I read Eleanor’s memoir,” I said. “I know what you went through.”
Vita’s expression shifted, and she seemed to consider me with more care. “Do you?” Vita asked. “Do you really know what it is like to suffer?”
And in that moment, as we sat together in the candlelight, I almost confessed the one thing I had never told anyone, the secret I had carried with me every day since I lost the last baby. My child, born after many hours of labor, had not died immediately. When the nurse brought him to me, and I held him in my arms, he was alive. His body was small and his head large, and he was covered, as Vita had been, in fine white hair. His feet were wide and flat, with an elongated second hallux (as Dr. Feist had called it) clotted with blood. He stared up at me with large blue eyes, and in the seconds before he died, as he struggled to breathe, he opened his mouth, revealing rows and rows of tiny, sharp teeth.