November 1915
The northeast tower is awash with tears and prayers.
It has been months since her arrival and yet it seems that I have been her mother an eternity, holding her in my arms as the doctors and priests arrive and depart, ordering the servants to take the bloody dressings away after cleaning her wounds, examining her bizarre features, staring into her large eyes searching, forever searching, for some sign of God.
We named her Vittoria, but I call her Vita, denoting life. Vitality. Yet, surely, Vita is not meant to persist in this world much longer. God will repossess His creation and cleanse it of the spirits that have taken hold of her soul. Is it wrong to question such a creation? It seems to me that such a child was not meant to be born. It shames me to admit that I wish Vita dead.
“You received the child from God,” the priest said, when I confessed this terrible hope to him. “And He may see it right to call her back to Him. But she is yours to guard until that day comes.”
I endeavor to keep his words with me. But even this morning, when I heard her strange, garbled cry—a sound unlike any I have heard before, as if she is choking on her tongue—I slipped my fingers around her tiny throat and pressed until the baby turned red, then blue under my white knuckles.
Am I capable of murdering my own child? I believe I am. If one is capable of creating such a creature, one must be capable of destroying it as well.
Yet, I submitted to the priest. I promised the Lord that I would keep the child as best I could. I would shield her from those who would harm her, which, if her existence becomes known to the villagers, will be many. But later, alone in my chapel, I begged the Lord to let Vita die peacefully in her sleep, to take her gently and easily, so that her disfigurements of body and soul might disappear from God’s earth.
If Vita had come into the world in a violent storm of pain and suffering, I might better understand God’s intention in sending this punishment to us. But she did not. Her birth was quick, almost painless. She was my fourth child, and the first to survive outside of my body. One would think that such an accouchement would bring forth a child full of strength. A blessed child. But I understood something was wrong immediately. The infant did not cry. There was no sound at all, save a horrified gasp from the nurse.
I looked at the nurse and saw she was white with fear.
“It is alive?” I demanded, for my first thought was that the child had arrived stillborn. When she did not reply, I asked again: “Does it live?”
“Yes, madame,” she said, something odd in her voice, something fearful. “A girl. I believe.”
And with that she swept the baby from the bed to a tub of water, to wash and swaddle my daughter. To examine her again.
I thought she would clean her and bring her to me immediately, but the room became quiet for many more minutes. When I heard the nurse sobbing, I knew something was frightfully wrong. I pushed myself up and looked across the room. The nurse stood over the child, looking down upon it, transfixed.
I was too weak to walk, but determined to see the infant. If she had died, I would hold her a moment before relinquishing her to the priests. If she lived, and was ailing, I would hold her to my breast until the doctor arrived.
I called my maid to help me stand. A rush of blood slid down my thighs as I walked across the room, leaving a trail at my feet. The last thing to catch my eye before I looked upon my daughter was a bright stain of blood blooming like a poppy over the stone floor, its vermillion hue a shock of beauty against the dull stone. I remember this stain clearly, as a sign of innocence, the way Eve may have looked at the fruit before biting it.
Then I gazed down upon the beast lying before me, and everything in the world changed.
My child was deformed. That much was clear immediately. Her head was too large, and her eyes enormous, so big that they appeared to comprise half of her face. Her features were not regular, but marred with what I have come to think of as an animal quality—her nose was flat, the nostrils open and exposed to view. The mouth was thin and wide, like that of a lizard, and, to my horror, there were rows of sharp teeth in her mouth, as if she were born to devour all that came near. The forehead was large, with a distinct ridge over the eyes, and her ears were shaped in a fashion most unnatural. While the head was overdeveloped, the body was shriveled and insubstantial, weak and small. The chest and stomach were covered in a coat of thick hair that, as the nurse washed the blood away, revealed itself to be white. The arms and legs were normal in appearance, and the sex clearly formed between her legs, but her feet were of a most strange shape. And her skin! It was so white, so thin, so unnatural. After the blood had been washed away, I could not help but trace my finger over the skin of her chest. Through it, I saw muscle and bone and veins.
I felt no desire to hold my child, but I reached out to take a small, bizarre foot in the palm of my hand. It was warm, soft, just as one would expect to find the flesh of a baby. My heart folded into a tight package, one that would never open. I could not love this creature.
Vita didn’t cry or whimper. While her eyes were fixed upon me as I touched the deformed foot, she did not pull away. It seemed she was assessing me with the same scrutiny that I assessed her.
It was then that I turned to the midwife and asked a question I would often repeat: “Tell me, what in the name of God is it?”
“It is a monster,” Ambrose pronounced, when he visited the northeast tower some days after the birth. I had dismissed the servants and led him to the baby. He looked her over, saw what I had seen, and said, “Leave it to the wolves now, before it grows bigger.”
“Is it possible that you are so cruel as to kill your own child?” I asked.
“We would show mercy to kill it now, before it grows stronger. We cannot allow it to live. Can you imagine bringing this into the family? It is impossible.”
I thought of Isabelle of Savoy, my husband’s ancestor, and her reputation for crime and infamy. Perhaps such was the Montebianco blood. “God would not forgive us if we should murder this child.”
“This is not a child,” Ambrose said, looking at the fur, which had by that time spread over most of Vita’s body, leaving only the head, the hands, and the feet fleshy. “This is a beast. If the villagers discover her existence, we will be burned out of Nevenero.”
“But look. Do you see? She is little threat. She was born weak.” I turned the baby over on its stomach to show Ambrose the spine. The creature’s skin had not closed over the column of bones. At birth, there had been a milky trail of raw muscle. The midwife had sewn her closed, leaving a long line of black stitches from buttocks to neck. “She will not live long, being so malformed,” I said. I believed this, as I believed in God’s mercy.
“Let us pray that it dies soon,” Ambrose said, looking away from the child with disdain. “We cannot have the devil living here among us.”
For the first time, I felt a flare of maternal feeling. This poor, wretched creature might be monstrous, but she had come from my body. She was, despite everything, a Montebianco. When my husband accused me of keeping a demon, I responded:
“If she is a devil, what does that make us?”
Ambrose settled his eyes upon me. He knew very well of what I spoke. We had always ignored the stories of madness and deformity that appeared in the Montebianco lineage after the time of Leopold. We believed the misfortunes of his ancestry to be inconsequential. Now, with this child, we could not deny them any longer. Vita had emerged as proof of his terrible heritage.
“She is sickly,” he said at last. “Surely, she will expire soon.”
“And if she survives,” I whispered, turning her over on her back so that her large blue eyes fixed upon me, “I will keep her. I will protect her.”
“And who will protect you?” Ambrose said. When I did not reply, he walked to the door. As he left, he turned and said, “As Lucifer came to curse his creator, this beast will turn against its maker.”
July 1919
There are times when I almost believe she could become a normal child.
Yesterday, in a spasm of optimism, I dressed her in a blue silk dress and took her into the gardens to take the sun. The sky was clear, the pond glistened in the light, and the mountains were colored by wildflowers. It was as calm and pleasant a scene as one could imagine. The servants set up a chaise near the pond, not far from my precious grove of Mûrier blanc, and brought us our lunch, making sure no one was about to witness our strange, secret party. We have learned to be careful in recent years. I allow no one in the northeast tower save our priest, and he has sworn to remain silent on the matter of my daughter. Half the servants have been dismissed. The other half are kept far from the east wing of the castle. The truth is: I fear them, fear they will gossip in the village, fear their talk of the monster child of Eleanor Montebianco.
When I was certain we were alone, I instructed the nurse to let Vita go free. She unharnessed the child, then placed her on her extraordinary feet, and let her go. At first, she was timid. She had never been allowed to play in such an open space before. Then the child began to run. What speed she has! I could not match it, nor could any in our household. It wasn’t long before a Papilio machaon, with its brilliant yellow butterfly wings, came flitting down from the heavens, pausing on a bush of pink flowers. Vita, her eye drawn to its quick, colorful movements, endeavored to catch it. Of course, the butterfly lifted into the air, eluding her with ease. As it flitted away, she watched it, her large blue eyes filled with wonder, but also something more. Something intelligent and calculating. I could see that she wanted to capture the creature. She wanted to catch it and possess it.
Vita waited and watched for many minutes until the beautiful thing flitted back to the bank of flowers. Slowly, quietly, Vita closed in. Soon it was within her reach. With a ruthlessness that one might find in a mantis, Vita snapped the butterfly in her teeth. I gasped in horror. There it was, her true nature, plain as the sunlight on her white-blond hair. One minute, she was a child at play. The next, an animal.
The moment has stayed with me, bolstering my resolve to keep her from contact with the exterior world. If others see her instincts at work, she will not survive long.
Aside from physical dexterity, and a sharpness of eye, the incident showed me that there is more to this small unfortunate creature than the ruins of a human being. No, there is more to my child than monstrous deformities. God has not abandoned her, as Ambrose claims. Rather, He has blessed her with unseen gifts, given her a richness of physical gifts that, because they are not like ours, we call demonic. But she is not a devil. She is not a curse. She is special. We must only wait and allow her nature to unfold so that we might see her for what she truly is.
Against the wishes of Ambrose, and the warnings of the priest, I brought the child to Pré Saint Didier to take the waters. Ambrose planned to make the journey, and as the carriage had been prepared and he would have our usual rooms at the hotel, I insisted he bring us along. The waters are miraculous, rich with iron and arsenic, their curative powers discovered by the Romans and known to one and all in these mountains. How could I, who has tried every other method, deny my child the benefit of this source of health?
“But my cousins,” Ambrose objected, when he understood that I would not be dissuaded. His fear wasn’t without reason. The House of Savoy knows nothing of our misfortune. And yet I insisted, promising that the child would be treated privately, in the presence only of our doctor, and that not a soul from the House of Savoy would see her. It was a promise that I should not have made, for, as anyone who has taken the waters at the source knows, privacy is an illusion. Those of our milieu mingle in the waters freely. I would have to invent new means of discretion. I would have to find a way to hide Vittoria from them.
The hotel sits at the base of Mont Blanc, some distance from Montebianco Castle, in the flats of the Val d’Ayas, near a wide, cobblestone road. The hotel is large and modern, with many rooms, a restaurant, and a casino, where Ambrose plays vingt-et-un until early in the morning, winning and losing as the Lord should have it. The thermal baths are below the hotel, sunk into the rock of the mountain, the clear water bubbling up into pools. One can float for hours there, the warm water filling one with vitality. Attendants bring refreshments to the pools, and there is a room with a wood-burning stove. The heat causes the blood to rush through the limbs with such force that one can hardly move afterward. There is sorbet in glass bowls, champagne, berries, cakes. How civilized it all is compared to our corner of the mountains!
Before Vita’s birth, we took the waters at Pré Saint Didier often, and had formed the habit of spending our evenings with certain families. They will expect the old routines. Champagne on the veranda. Dinner. Walks by the fountain. Surely, they will inquire about our child—the only one the Lord has granted us. But perhaps not. Nothing is quite so boring as discussions of children. I will tell them that Vittoria is with the nurse, ill, in bed with fever. They will forget Vita exists.
We arrived, and the nurse carried Vita directly to the rooms as instructed. I met with the doctors and explained that my child was ill, with malformations of the bone. They believe the water will help relieve her swollen joints. When I requested a private bath, they complied. There is a small bathhouse away from the main source, where I can take her undisturbed. And so, the next morning, I wrapped her in linen sheets and brought her to the pools early, before the sun rose.
What a success it was, Vita’s first bath! At first, she merely sat in the bubbling pool, looking about with her enormous eyes. After some minutes, she began to smile. She began to splash and play, then to sing. The warmth soothed her, producing a wonderful calmness. It was as if the heat from the center of the earth settled her spirit.
But what gave me the most pleasure was the transformation that I saw in my child. Vittoria appeared, suddenly and inexplicably, beautiful. In that pool of Alpine waters, in the lemony light of morning, her abnormal features were radiant. Her pale white skin took on the quality of ice, giving her a regal bearing. I saw it. My daughter has the makings of a noblewoman.
I took Vita to the bath every morning for a week, and each morning she grew more confident in the water. Perhaps this triumph left me blind to reality, because I stayed later and later at the bath, until one day I remained too long and a very fine, very fat lady waded into the pool. I felt myself freeze as she approached, my body stiffening like a statue as she looked Vita over, her eyes showing first confusion, then horror. She screamed in fright, pointing at Vita, her voice rising to such a level that soon the attendants arrived. This unfortunate woman was so undone that they carried her away. And while I cared nothing about the state of this woman’s nerves, I did care about my poor Vita. She understood, with brutal clarity, how very monstrous she is.
In the four and a half years since her birth, she has grown into a stout and strong little thing. The wound along her spine has healed entirely, and as her back is covered in fine white hair, the scar is not visible. Her head is still unnaturally large; often it seems that she will fall over from its weight. But her shoulders and back are beginning to grow sturdy, and she has, in the past months, grown an abundance of lovely blond hair, which her nurse brushes and styles to cover her ears. Indeed, strange as she is, her body is taking on a more normal shape. Her arms and legs grow longer each month. And her eyes, while large and strange, have become intelligent. She sees and understands the world around her.
She has, of late, been learning the rudiments of the alphabet, and it pleases me to know that she has made progress. Victories come slowly with Vita, but it was recently brought to my attention that she has succeeded in writing letters, and these efforts have led to simple words: “oui,” “non,” “maman.” This leads me to believe that one day she will begin to understand complex language. We are introducing words in numerous languages, to gauge if one might be better suited to her abilities. The introduction of English has yielded the most words thus far. I have written to my cousin in London, asking her to send us an English tutor.
We had a British naturalist at our gate the other day. He had heard, on his travels through our mountains, of a noble-born, malformed child and, after making inquiries, was directed to the castle. I was enraged upon learning that our secret, so carefully guarded, could be discovered so easily as this! If that is the case, anyone throwing about questions and a few gold coins is able to discover Vita. I have spoken to Ambrose about this, and he agreed with me. We must suppress all talk of Vita among the peasants. We must hide her existence. We will announce that Vita has died, hold a funeral, and be done with it. We will hide her away. She must live in secret.
There is, as Ambrose warned, something devilish in her.
Sometimes she studies the world with a cold, calculating regard, one devoid of gentleness. It is an expression that chills the senses, it is so devoid of emotion, so outside the realm of human interaction. I wonder then if the defects of her body do not reflect the defects of the soul.
When I try to give the child affection, which I admit is rare and unnatural for me—frankly, my heart closes when I see her; I reject this imperfect copy of myself—she stiffens, as if I have shown her violence. Perhaps she senses that I have no love for her, only compassion, tolerance, and duty. And, more and more of late, horror.
The other evening, for example, I went to her rooms in the northeast tower to wish her a good evening. Vita was with her nurse when I arrived, a collection of rag dolls scattered about her. I was pleased by this simple scene, as I thought she might be playing the kind of domestic games I played as a girl. Indeed, the doll had come from my own collection. But when I bent to see her, I found that every one of the dolls had been ripped and torn, violently denuded and decapitated. The child had gnawed through the dolls with her sharp, strong teeth. In the process, she had bitten her own flesh, and blood had dripped over the wreckage, drying brown and hard on their mangled bodies. When I asked the nurse about this state of affairs, she informed me that Vita had eaten every one of the dolls’ heads whole.
“Eaten?” I said, perplexed. “Surely, she could not have eaten rags. She would be ill.”
The nurse assured me that Vita had, in fact, devoured them.
Suddenly, there was a scratching in the corner of the room, a cacophony of claws, as a rat scrambled across the nursery. A look of fascination passed over Vita’s face, and she stood and darted about the room, following the noise. Her gait was uneven, her weight shifting from leg to leg as she moved, as if her hips were not joined to her body. Then, without a word of warning, she lurched at the rat, grabbed it by the tail, and bit into it. She struck so fast, and there was such elegant ferocity to her movements, that I wouldn’t have understood what had happened had it not been for the burst of blood spattered across the stone floor. As I watched, Vita devoured the rat, dropped the tail on the floor, and wiped the blood from her lips with her sleeve. She must have seen my astonishment, because she began to laugh.
“I believe,” the nurse said, her voice dropping to a whisper, “that she is catching more mice than the courtyard cats, madame.”
I stifled a sob in my throat and turned to hide my pain from the nurse. I thought of the butterfly Vita had killed some time before, the pleasure she had taken in the kill, how she had crushed its wings in her jaws.
December 1928
My child is possessed.
Satan has rooted himself into her body, and through his nefarious means—so cruel and various in their tortures—has created a vessel in the body of my girl. Priests from as far away as Turin have come to examine her and are in universal agreement: Vita houses the devil. She is a succubus. Her soul has arrived here from hell.
The incident occurred last week, in the gardens outside the northeast tower. These tranquil grounds around the lake have become the site, these past years, of Vita’s promenades outside the castle. She adores nature, and although she has been forbidden to venture out of the northeast tower without supervision, I occasionally allow her the freedom to ramble unattended. I have found that after she has been climbing in the foothills of the mountain, or when she has ventured into the great pines near the castle wall, she is almost content. I know that she is not to be punished for her monstrous form. I must help her to live inside the prison of her body. If she must run in the snow to soothe her distressed mind, so be it. If she must climb in the mountains to tire her limbs, I will allow it. I can offer these comforts, at least.
Such was my intention when I unfastened the lock on her door and let her go free. It was the feast of Saint Nicholas, and the village houses were illuminated with candles. We could see them glowing in the distance, pricks of light in the darkness below the castle. Snow fell softly, creating a powder over the evergreens. Vita wanted to ramble in the garden. It was a small indulgence, or so I thought at the time.
Later that night, a party from the village came to the castle. They demanded to speak with Ambrose, and when my husband opened the windows of the west tower, I saw twenty or so men gathered below. They held torches and screamed our name: “Montebianco! Montebianco!”
Looking down upon the crowd, my husband demanded to know why they had come at such an hour.
The crowd responded with shouts of rage and anger. “Beast,” they cried. “Beast!”
I knew at once that they were referring to Vita. Vita was being held in the home of the village magistrate. The men had come to inform us that she was being held on charges of grave wrongdoing.
“What has she done?” Ambrose demanded.
“She has committed murder,” came the response.
Murder! Vita’s fits of violence were well known among us, and I had observed that the instinct to hunt had grown more pronounced; the butterflies and rats had led to other, larger kills—marmots and rabbits and mouflon. But the murder of a human being? Vita had never shown such an inclination. I could not bring myself to believe it.
“They are wrong,” I whispered to Ambrose. “Vita isn’t capable. Demand proof.”
“What proof do you have?” Ambrose called down.
“I myself saw the act,” a man said, stepping forward.
“I, too, witnessed the violence,” said another man, as he stepped forward to join the first.
“And I, with the help of these others, endeavored to restrain the beast,” said a third.
Beast. The word echoed through our room, silencing Ambrose and myself.
Ambrose told them to go home, and he would come to Nevenero at once. He ordered the carriage be made ready and began to dress. When I saw that he would go immediately, I ran to my boudoir, dressed, and hurried to the courtyard, arriving before my husband, and I climbed into the carriage and covered myself in blankets. I knew he would order me to stay, but I would not abide being left behind. I would see for myself the crime for which my child was accused.
We found Vittoria bound with rope in a stable.
Covered in blood, her clothes ripped from her body, her feet unshod—she looked every bit the murderess the villagers had described. Ambrose, who could never stand to look at his daughter, even when I combed her hair and dressed her in fine clothes, turned away, his expression filled with disgust, and demanded to see what Vittoria had done.
They took us to a stone village house, one of the many that clustered around the center of Nevenero. As we walked through the door, we found a scene so shocking, so unlike anything I could have imagined. I surveyed the atrocities as if they were something apart from me, a pièce de théâtre being played out on a stage. Not even the nightmares of Dante could compare with the scene that unfolded before my eyes.
Two men, brothers, had lived. And two were now dead. That is the simple calculation of the damages wrought by my daughter. But the actual accounting of what Vita had done is harder to tally, as the amount of destruction—and the amount of blood—gave the illusion of a massacre. The bodies of those slain had been hideously disfigured. A limb torn from one body lay near another. A foot ripped from its ankle stood upright in a shoe. Hands, heads, arms, legs—incongruous pieces of the human form were strewn about the room.
A sensation of numbness fell over me as I took it all in. I believe I may have fainted, for the next thing I recall is the hand of my husband gripping my arm to help me stand. Blood stained the floorboards black. It was so thick that, as we left the room, the hem of my petticoat grew crimson.
As Ambrose led me back to the carriage, I saw that a small crowd had gathered outside the stable. Some held torches. Others carried axes and cudgels. I gripped the arm of my husband, terrified.
“They will kill her, Ambrose,” I whispered, so the peasants would not hear me. “They will burn her alive.”
“That would be the answer to my prayers,” my husband said.
“Please,” I said, knowing he was more concerned about what the incident would do to the Montebianco name than what would happen to Vittoria. “For the children we might have one day. They will kill first one, then all of the Montebiancos.”
Ambrose sighed, considering what he must do. Sacrificing Vittoria did not harm him, but the idea of losing our future children was not easy to bear.
“These are peasants,” he said, grabbing some coins. “I know how to placate them.” He put me in the carriage and secured the door. I collapsed into the cushions, covering myself with a rug. My whole body shook with fear. Although I had insisted upon coming to the village, I wished that I had spared myself. The mind is like warm wax, the world like a brass seal pressed into it. Such imprints are forever stamped into us. I am eternally marred.
Finally, Ambrose returned to the carriage, pulling Vita with him. As we climbed the road back to the castle, I took her hands in mine. Tears were streaming down my cheeks. I was ill with horror, but I found my will to speak stronger than my disgust.
“Did you kill those people, Vittoria? Tell me the truth. Was it you?”
My child answered in quiet, respectful French.
Ambrose’s face hardened. He looked at his daughter, hatred in his eyes. “Why?” he said. “Why would you do such a beastly, murderous deed? Are you a human being? Or a monster?”
They startled Vita, her father’s words. They were the first and last sentiments Ambrose addressed to his daughter. Vita’s large blue eyes were wet with tears, but she couldn’t speak to him. Instead, she came to me and whispered her response in my ear.
“What reason did she give?” he asked.
I lay back in the seat of the calèche, my heart pounding in my chest. “They attacked her,” I said. “She came upon them when she was walking. They attacked her and she defended herself. They struck first, Ambrose.”
Father Francisco, who came to Nevenero to christen Vittoria after her birth, and who has followed her strange development with such loyalty these past years, will perform the exorcism.
He took me aside late last night, after we brought Vita home from the terrible ordeal in the village, to tell me he believes the devil lives in the girl.
“You are not alone,” I told him. “The villagers believe so as well, and they would have killed her had Ambrose not intervened.”
Father Francisco promised that everything would soon change. He would make the devil confess to what happened in Nevenero. “An exorcism will liberate the child,” Father Francisco said. “It will free her from the spirits that have so twisted her soul. And it will, Countess, liberate you.”
I acquiesced, but insisted that I be present during the ritual. I wanted to hold Vittoria’s hand in mine when they tied her down. I wanted to speak to her as they subjected her to their holy oils, their golden crosses, their prayers. I would stifle her cries when they branded her with hot irons. In my desperation, I thought I might offer her some of my strength. But it is not strength she needs. She is thirteen, no longer a child. After what I saw in Nevenero, I know she is strong, so very strong.
Vittoria needs God to help her survive. I hoped that I could be part of His presence, a ministering angel to help her through the worst.
But when it came time for the ritual to begin, I couldn’t go into the northeast tower. It was too much for me to bear, knowing that I created such suffering. Or perhaps I was afraid that the priests would make me confess my sins. I would have no choice but to tell them the truth: I want to kill my daughter. I have protected her, and yet, in my weakest moments, I question the goodness of such protection. It is as Ambrose said: Vittoria should die. If God, in all His benevolence, does not take her life, it is time that I, who gave her life, take it away. God will forgive. Who is He to judge me? He in all His wisdom and glory has created a monster.
The priests want a confession from the devil, but it is we, the Montebiancos, who must confess.
September 1930
The British naturalist returned to the castle this morning. It has been years since he first came to us. Years since I made it understood that he would not be allowed access to Vita. And yet, here he was again.
Ambrose has been dead a year, and still, I felt afraid of what he might say to find me alone with such a person. We do not receive visitors, even if they are known to us, especially foreign ones. I told the groundskeeper to ask the naturalist to leave, but the man was persistent. The groundskeeper returned with a stack of letters of introduction. His name is James Pringle, and he is apparently very well connected among the men of science in Germany and was a student of Dr. Huxley in London.
I invited him to sit with me in the salon for tea, fully intending to send him on his way back to Switzerland. But he was a charming man, and it was pleasant to speak English again; it has been so long. And so I invited him to join me for lunch in the grand hall. I ordered that a chicken be roasted and sent for a bottle of wine from the cellar. When we ate, I asked why he should be interested in my child, and he confessed that it was his specialty to document and study the irregularities of the human race. He apologized profusely, but was nonetheless bold enough to ask of the particulars of her affliction—from what did she suffer? How did it come about? Can she express herself with language? What is her diet? Could he sketch her? And, if he could be so bold, could he offer his learned opinion of a method of treatment for Vita’s ailments?
By the end of our lunch, he had charmed me. I trusted him and gave him permission to visit Vita.
In the northeast tower, we entered to find Vita bound to her bed. It had been a difficult morning, apparently, and the nurse had called for help in securing Vita’s hands and feet in restraints. She was quite wild when we arrived, screaming, uncontrollable. She made no sense whatsoever, and I blushed in shame at the exposure of her inferior mind.
It had little effect upon the good naturalist. In fact, this spectacle pleased him immensely. Upon seeing her, he went to the side of the bed, where he stared at her as if she were a rare jewel. He pulled up a stool and began to draw her. One hour turned into two, then three, and at the end of the afternoon, the naturalist had a book of sketches. He seemed overwhelmed by the experience and was in a hurry to go, presumably to show his sketches to colleagues. Of course, if he had known that my groundsman waited outside the castle gates to confiscate the drawings, he would not have been in such a hurry.
“Don’t let anyone tell you she is deformed,” he said, as he packed his pencils and brushes into a leather case. “She is not deformed. She is special. She has simply arrived here from another time.”
Arrived here from another time! Those words have perplexed and sustained me. She is not deformed; she is special, my Vita. I did not have the heart to tell him that my child has killed a human being.
Despite the seizure of his drawings, James Pringle returned the next month with books for our library. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, and other, more obscure authors whose names I came to know only after I began to study them in earnest. I found books on morphology and embryology from the nineteenth century, texts by Aristotle and Empedocles and Lucretius. At the suggestion of the naturalist, I read about how the natural world came to be populated so wonderfully, with such variety. But also about how the forsaken creatures fall to those more adapted, stronger and more aggressive than they. I told him it is a Godless theory, evolution, and he only smiled and pressed me to continue with my reading.
One day, we stood in the library together—James, Vita, and me—and he showed me a large folio of watercolors that illustrated Gregor Mendel’s famous experiments with peas. I studied these watercolors, taking in the combinations. They showed an explosion of varieties—short-stemmed peas with purple flowers, long-stemmed peas with yellow flowers, purple flowers with constricted pods, and so on.
The variety of Mendel’s peas interested the naturalist. In nature, he said, inheritance was a matter of endless mixing, new traits showing up with each generation. They were distributed and various, leaving no single trait to dominate a family indefinitely.
What he meant to say, I believe, is that Vita’s affliction may resurface, should she reproduce. Thank heaven that will never come to pass.
Rumors have come to Nevenero that avalanches are to blame for the loss of a hundred or more soldiers training in our region.
It is also said that the surviving men have passed along the edge of our domain, some distance from Nevenero village, and that they stopped to seek shelter. I hope they will leave us in peace. The billeting of soldiers is not a Montebianco tradition, by any stretch of the imagination, and Ambrose would have forbidden me to harbor our enemies in any case.
I cannot help but imagine avalanches. The great cracking of ice and the thunderous tumult of snow falling, crushing, killing. One hundred men buried in snow! Such devastation, and yet, they fight on. What strength they have, these men. What dedication. Endurance of this kind inspires resolve in me. It helps me bear my own avalanches. Vita tests my strength, and yet I battle her. Battle her hungers, battle her rages, battle the strangeness and shame until I am little more than a husk. The truth is that I am old and tired. I cannot fight much longer. Ambrose used to say I was ashamed of Vita, that my vanity was offended by her existence, but it is not out of pride that I have locked her away. I used to believe that terror would kill me, but it is not so. Exhaustion erodes the body more than fear. Vita will kill me, as I expected, not with her savage teeth, but with her relentless vitality.
There are times I observe her, as if watching an exotic animal in a zoo. She has become that to me, my daughter, a strange and unknowable thing. Something of the animal kingdom. Something studied by the likes of naturalists like James Pringle. I try to see her for what she has become. She is nearly fifteen years old, and has all the attributes of a woman. Sometimes, when I see her from a certain angle, she is almost pretty. And then she turns to me, baring her yellowed teeth, and I know her not at all. I see a monster. I look away in disgust. She understands that I am revolted. And again, we are at battle.
Perhaps the time has come for me to lay down the sword and surrender. Now that Ambrose has died, and I am alone to care for our child, I must accept that there are limits to my power. The Lord knows that I can’t do anything to change Vita. I have accomplished what I can. The greatest evils of her childhood have been subdued. The priests did much to alter her proclivities toward violence and their instruction has allowed her to read the Bible. She does not attack when we are nearby, but only surreptitiously, when she believes she is unwatched. As Ambrose used to say: the child has been trained like a dog—to be quiet, docile, tame. She follows commands without understanding them. Not that she could ever integrate into the world outside the castle. Even now, almost two years after the incident in Nevenero, the villagers have not forgotten her. They would kill her on sight if she were to go there. Instead, she has created her own solitary habits. She sits on the east lawn, by the pond. Sometimes, she disappears into the mountains. What she does there, alone in the snow and ice, I cannot imagine, but when she leaves, she is gone for many days at a time. She returns calm, almost at peace. This alone is enough for me to be thankful.
I passed an hour with Vita today before leaving her to the surgeon.
She was found in the mews in a terrible state. The groundsman came to me in the library, his face white and twisted with fear. “Mademoiselle is unwell” is all he said, averting his eyes in the way they all do when speaking of Vita: with shame and confusion. I put my book aside and followed him through the courtyard to the mews.
“She is in the northeast tower?” I asked.
“In the mews, madame,” the servant said. “Where the soldiers were sleeping.”
The soldiers may have left, but the smell of them remained, the scent of sweat and wine, and the mineral odor of blood and festering wounds.
Vita stood in the shadows, beyond the hay piles, her eyes wide. It was a look I had never seen before, one of confusion mixed with shock.
“Vita, come,” I said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
She stepped closer. The dead of winter, and she was without shoes—that was the first thing I noticed. The second was the blood on her hands and on her dress. On her legs and her feet. Blood everywhere.
“What has happened here?” I asked, beginning to fear that she had raided the barns again. The goats were always in danger when Vita was unattended. We relied on them for cheese and milk and meat all winter. We could not afford Vita’s plunder.
But as she came closer, I understood that this was not one of her usual episodes. My child was in pain. For the first time in many years, I felt something close to the sentiments I had felt at her birth: awe at what I had created. Compassion.
Vita threw her hands in the air, to show me the blood, waving her arms in a crazed fashion. She was not in her right mind. She howled and howled and howled, and the pain in that howl alerted me that something terrible had happened, some new violence. Finally, I understood that Vita had been violated.
I dismissed the groundsman, telling him to go to Nevenero to fetch the village doctor. Then I asked Vita to explain. In a number of gestures she made me understand that the soldiers had tied her hands to a post and covered her head with a sack. I could see that she didn’t understand what had happened. There being no hope that she should marry, I had never thought to explain the nature of men and women’s relations. She must have been utterly unaware of what the soldiers wanted from her when she came to the mews. She had wandered into a trap without knowing how to defend herself.
Later, in the tower, the doctor examined her, but his concern was less for mending Vita’s wounds than for discerning what variety of creature Vita was to begin with. He brought the candle close to her, illuminating the pallid skin of her cheeks and neck, the white hair that grew over arms and chest, the unnatural feet. He looked at her as if she were a demon.
“What kind of beast is this, madame?” he asked.
“She is a Montebianco,” I said. “And you will treat her with respect.”
What a look he had as he put the candle on the table! How his hands trembled as he took up the scissors and thread! I thought he would turn and flee the tower. I took out my purse and gave him an enormous sum so that he would stay and tend to her. Pocketing the bills, he lowered his eyes and did not raise them again. He sutured the wounds and promised to return with medicine from the village. “Do not speak of this to anyone,” I said as he left.
All that night, I sat at Vita’s bedside. She was asleep, spots of blood staining the sheets, and it seemed to me that, in her weakness, she was more my daughter than ever before.
The perfume pleases Vita. It came today with the shipments from Paris, a crystal bottle wrapped in cloth. I unwrapped it and the air filled with the scent of oakmoss and bergamot. I knew she would like this gift. Fragrance has always soothed Vita, her sense of smell being extraordinarily acute, and perfume has had the added benefit of brightening the atmosphere around her, which is often tainted by an unsavory odor. While I have given her vials of eau de toilette and some bottles of cologne, this is her first real perfume. It is called Mitsouko, by the French perfumer Guerlain, and is rather strong in character, which, I believe, suits Vita very well. After all that she has suffered, I hope the gift will give her some happiness. Indeed, she smiled for the first time since the incident after smelling it.
June 1930
The doctor returned today to see Vita. Her recovery has been remarkable, he told me, much faster than expected. He watched her feed—one can hardly call it eating—in the chamber outside her rooms. We gave her a chamois, fat and old, with thick, curved horns, and it was reduced to bones in a matter of minutes. Our good doctor was astonished at this but said nothing. Money has made him discreet. The chamois will hold Vita for nearly a week.
Now that the village doctor is accustomed to Vita’s abnormalities, he has become a kind of guardian to her. He has taken to teaching her about the medicinal mushrooms he used to cure her—varieties that grow in the shady, moss-heavy crevices under the spruce trees. He explains how to find them and how they heal the body. One afternoon, after rambling in the mountains, Vita and the doctor made a list of the mushrooms they had collected:
Vita is happy—this child who grew up without a father’s love—to have a teacher. When they returned from their excursion, she placed the mushrooms in a line on her table and studied them, lifting the delicate caps, brushing her fingernails over the fibrous stems. Then she ate them and asked for more. The doctor asked if he might take her to the forest regularly, to show her where the mushrooms grow. “She might find pleasure in the hunt,” he said.
“But, Doctor,” I said, making sure we were alone. “You have heard of her violence. Aren’t you afraid for your life?”
He looked at me for a moment, as if weighing his response. Finally, he said, “No, madame. She is violent only when violence is acted upon her first. When shown kindness, she is kind. That is the way of animals and humans alike.”
I wanted to cry at this simple wisdom. He understood my child the way her father never had.
Promising to come back the next month, the doctor tipped his hat and left.
He kept his promise and returned some weeks later. He wore thick-soled boots made for climbing the foothills of the valley. But Vita was too ill to search for mushrooms. A malady had come over her suddenly, leaving her lethargic. She couldn’t eat or leave her bed. She stared out the window of the northeast tower, gazing past the pond to the mountains beyond.
I had brought in a priest, believing it a spiritual malady. The spring in Nevenero is a trying season, with its bursts of brilliant warmth obliterated by snow and ice. But it wasn’t melancholia that had got ahold of Vita. After the doctor examined her, he informed me that Vita would have a child.
There are many ways we could kill the child. The nurse could feed it poison. Or drop it from the window of the tower. Or bring it to the kitchen, where it would be quietly strangled. The only certainty is that it must be done. I must redeem myself for the weakness I showed with Vita. The legacy of the Montebianco family must dissolve into the mountain air, disappearing from the earth like the fog at sunrise.
It would be best if it were to die before it lives, its heart stopping in the womb, before it sees the world at all. I lost three children in this fashion. Stillborn, marbled in blood, they were taken away and buried before I could love them.
But Vita’s child is healthy. If one watches the strength of its movements in her belly, the thumping of its feet against her body, it becomes clear that there is little hope for a miscarriage. It is strong. It grows. And thus I must be resolute. I must become as hard-hearted as Ambrose.
The doctor comes every week to examine Vita. He has agreed to help me. He has promised to tell no one. And in return, I will give him land outside of Nevenero. A house for his son. Some goats. He will help me destroy this terrible legacy.
Each week he expects to deliver the child, and each week he returns to Nevenero. Lately, his manner has changed.
“It is very strange,” he said, swallowing back the words as if they were too angular. “The child should have been born many months ago. It is long overdue.”
“How long?” I asked, trying to count out the weeks, but I have no sense of time any longer. There are only the seasons. It was the beginning of the winter. November.
“Eighteen months have passed since the soldiers left,” he said. “And when I examine your daughter, I see no change. She fattens. C’est tout.”
It was true: Vita had become enormous, so large that she could not leave her room. She slept most of the time, her body round and ripe.
“It should have been born by now,” I said.
“In fact, we don’t know,” he said, without meeting my eyes. “A human infant remains three-quarters of a year in the womb. But a creature like Vita . . . We don’t know, madame.”
November 1931
The twin boys, Giovanni and Guillaume, were born on Toussaint, a sign, I believe, that we have been given a reprieve. After all I had feared, and all that might have been, we have avoided the worst.
Giovanni arrived first, claiming the title of his ancestors, but Guillaume was not inferior. He is a fine child, heavier than his brother, more alert. They are identical twins, not les faux jumeaux, but their behavior is nothing alike: as Giovanni cried, Guillaume looked about the chamber, astonished by the world. Not a sound. Not a cry. Simple acceptance that God has placed him here among us.
The doctor met my eyes after the boys were cleaned and wrapped in linen. We had an agreement. If the baby was like Vita, he would slit its throat and dispose of the body. If the baby was free of Vita’s deformities, we would allow it to live. Both boys are healthy. Both free from Vita’s afflictions. They will live, and with God’s blessing, Vita will pass away, giving over the future of Montebianco Castle to them.