The Ancestor Read online

  “Less than you would imagine,” Basil replied. “These books are like living creatures to me. Caring for them takes a great deal of time. I repair damaged spines, watch for mold and worms, and generally keep the collection safe from the all-too-inevitable ravages of time. No one ever thinks that books need tenderness, but they do, quite a lot, in fact.”

  He stood and walked beyond a row of shelves into a shadowy alcove, returning with a box.

  “But the most time-consuming aspect of my work, the one that has been the focus for the better part of a decade, has been archiving the Montebianco family’s records. You would think that this would be the work of months, perhaps a year at most. No such luck. While the marriages and births and deaths of the family are well documented, there are ancillary documents that must be dealt with, many hundreds of boxes of personal papers—correspondence, memoirs, diaries, and so on. It is my task to put them in order.”

  “How many boxes are there?” I asked, gazing back into the shadowy alcove.

  “Oh, hundreds. It isn’t difficult work, and I could get through it quite quickly, but the entire archive must be translated into English.” I gave him a questioning look—were they doing that on my account?—and he added, “Dolores, as you know, is English. She has insisted upon reading every last document in her native tongue.”

  “Your Italian must be very good to translate all this.”

  “French, actually. The language of the region was French until the late nineteenth century. Italian was not formally adopted until the unification of Italy, and even then, French—or, more correctly, a dialect of French called Franco-Provençal—was used in Nevenero. I am an expert in the dialect, although I don’t use it much. The Montebianco family spoke very correct aristocratic French.”

  “Is Franco-Provençal still spoken?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Basil said. “Although who can say? There could be crevices in these mountains that hide a whole community of Franco-Provençal speakers and we wouldn’t know. The Alps have the ability to do that—swallow something up and keep it hidden forever.” Basil sat down again and took up the fountain pen, as if to continue cataloging the books. “In my work here these past years, I have unearthed information that has been buried for generations. I’ve found diaries stashed in trunks in the west tower, lists of guests visiting the castle during the seventeenth century, Alberta and Prince Amadeo’s last wills and testaments, renovation plans after the fire of fifteen ninety-three. And, of course, the genealogical records. I am the only person who knows the entire Montebianco family tree.” He gestured to the murals, the incredible branching and flowering of my family. “All twenty-nine generations, if one includes you.”

  He stood, grabbed a cane with an ivory handle and pointed it at the ceiling. “We will need to get a muralist up here in the spring,” he said. He tapped a white space on the ceiling. “Your name will go right here.”

  I looked up at the Montebianco family tree, at the names of my relatives painted in a florid cursive and adorned with various coats of arms of noble houses that had, over the years, merged with the Montebianco clan. The branching off of names and dates and family connections started from two names at the top—Frederick and Isabelle—and ended at the bottom, with my grandfather Giovanni and his brother, Guillaume. With the other branches of the family included, the mural funneled up over the entire ceiling.

  “We’ll need to add my parents, too,” I said. “Giuliano and Barb.”

  “Giuliano must have been named after this Giuliano,” Basil said, pointing to a name. “Giuliano, Prince de Condé, a cadet branch of the House of Bourbon, a dashing rake who embarrassed the family with his voracious sexual appetite. He happened to have been married to another Alberta. There were many Albertas, all named, like you were, after the first Alberta Montebianco, born to Isabelle and Frederick in the thirteenth century.”

  I glanced at the union of Alberta and Giuliano, another meeting of the Montebianco coat of arms with that of an illustrious family.

  “We can have your parents painted here, and you right below,” Basil said. “Did she have a family coat of arms, your mother?”

  I shook my head. “Regular people don’t have coats of arms,” I said. “Or such elaborate family trees.”

  “It isn’t only about class,” Basil said. “It is about inheritance and tribal identity. The family tree as a recording device is thought to derive from biblical sources. It acted as a form of cultural identification, of course, but also was a badge of inclusion. If you recall, Jesus could trace his ancestry to the House of David, and this gave him a legitimacy that he would not have had otherwise. The practice of keeping track of genealogy was more vital to noble families. They were careful to delineate bloodlines, and to avoid mixing with undesirable families. The importance of genealogical records at that time cannot be overestimated. Now, as you very well know, everyone can create a family tree on the internet. What used to be an art is now a pastime.”

  He pointed up at the top of the family tree, near Frederick and Isabelle.

  “The Montebianco family begins with the creation of the House of Montebianco in the thirteenth century with the marriage of Isabelle of Savoy to Frederick. We don’t know Frederick’s original surname, as it must have been one of the common names up in these mountains. The family was christened Montebianco after the great Mont Blanc rising above the valley. There are many elements of the Montebianco origin story the family chooses to suppress. Most families of their stature were created through an association with royalty or through knighthoods. But Frederick Montebianco, the first of your family line with a noble title, was a goat herder.”

  “A goat herder?” I said, astonished.

  “I thought that might surprise you,” Basil said, leaning back in his chair. “It used to be that Nevenero was nothing more than an outpost for goat herders—a few shacks where they could sleep before ascending into the mountains. Before Isabelle of Savoy arrived, there were no stone houses, no shops, and very few people in the village of Nevenero, nothing at all to distinguish this piece of terrain from any of the other ramshackle outposts scattered throughout the mountains. Those poor souls had no aspiration but to survive the winter months. They made cheese from goat milk, ground corn into polenta, and crushed bitter, heavy wine from what grapes they could manage to grow. It was primitive to be sure, but safe.

  “Then, one summer afternoon, a herd of ibex were grazing in a valley near the village when along came a small army of men, fifty or so soldiers on horseback, led by a nobleman with a red coat of arms on his jacket. Your ancestor, Frederick the goat herder, knew to stay away from noblemen, especially those wearing fancy labels, and so he led his ibex—those are the big mountain goats, the ones with the curved antlers, not the smaller chamois—away from the trail and into a valley, hoping to escape notice.

  “As it turned out, the group came from the House of Savoy in the Piedmont, and the nobleman was Amadeo, a relation of the king of Sardinia. He was on his way to Switzerland to fight some other nobleman—I have never quite been able to discover which offending family he was after—over some perceived insult, got turned around, and ended up in Nevenero, which they described as being akin to ending up in one of Dante’s rings of hell. The elements in the Aosta Valley are harsh, to say the least. If the sun doesn’t fry you in the afternoon, the wind will flay you when night falls. The air is thin at this altitude, and it was common for travelers unaccustomed to the lack of oxygen to turn blue and die before they dismounted their horse. That is what happened to the prince: as he arrived at the top of the mountain, he became light-headed and fell from his steed.

  “Frederick came out of hiding, revived Amadeo and brought the whole group to the village, where they were given wine, roasted goat, and lodging. When Amadeo recovered, he promised Frederick a reward for saving his life. Frederick, who most likely didn’t believe a word of it, said he’d gladly accept whatever the nobleman offered, and pointed them in the direction of Switzerland.


  “One year later, Amadeo returned. He had won his duel in Switzerland and believed that Frederick the goat herder had given him the strength and luck he’d needed. As promised, he brought a reward: a wife with a noble title and a fortune. This prize took the form of Amadeo’s sister, Isabelle, a beautiful girl of sixteen whose pale blue eyes seemed siphoned from the mountain sky. Isabelle was the youngest daughter of Peter I of Savoy. She was intelligent, educated, and undeniably wicked. She had been sentenced to death for some heinous crime—I believe it was murder . . . Let me check.”

  Basil stood and dug through one of the boxes until he pulled out a large, thick book, one that appeared—from the loose spine—to have been read many times. On its cover, stamped in gold, were the words The House of Montebianco.

  “There was no account of the founding union recorded at the time—we have very few documents from that early period in the family archive—but we do have an account set down by a later Montebianco, Eleanor, Countess of Montebianco, a French noblewoman who married Ambrose, a direct descendant of Isabelle and Frederick. Eleanor wrote this history of the Montebianco family. In my opinion, it is the most interesting account by far.”

  He flipped through the pages, looking for a certain passage. “This is the translated version, of course.” He stopped suddenly. “Ah, here it is,” he said, and began to read:

  Child of the nobleman Peter I of Savoy, Isabelle, the founding mother of the House of Montebianco, was, by all accounts, wild. The fair Isabelle was beautiful beyond measure, and while beloved by her father, the girl was tainted at the core. She was known to torture cats as a girl and, as a young woman, killed a suitor who had overstepped his bounds, stabbing him with a dagger and letting him bleed to death at her feet. For this, she was banished from the House of Savoy, sent to the treacherous lands of Mont Blanc, her hand given in marriage to Frederick Montebianco, thus beginning the noble line of the Montebianco family.

  “So,” Basil continued, again flipping through the book. “Isabelle of Savoy was a murderess. But, because of her family’s power and influence, her sentence was light—exile rather than death.”

  “She was sent to Nevenero,” I said, glancing out the window at the blizzard. “That doesn’t seem to be such a light sentence to me.”

  “On the one hand, Isabelle was exiled from her home at the Savoy palace, where there was certainly more excitement than could be found in Nevenero. But on the other hand, she found herself free of the restrictions of the highly codified etiquette of her medieval family. And Frederick was not such a bad deal either. There is a painting of him hanging in the portrait gallery. He was quite a handsome man. Very tall for the time. I suggest you go take a look. By all accounts, Isabelle and Frederick were very much in love.” Basil closed the book. “In any case, their union founded a dynasty. This castle was a wedding gift from the House of Savoy to Isabelle and Frederick, as was the coat of arms. Multiple family lines grew from Isabelle and Frederick’s union. As they had four children, the different lines of the Montebianco family can be traced from each of these descendants. Your branch of the family tree, as you can plainly see, begins with the eldest daughter of Isabelle and Frederick: Alberta.

  “As the line moves down through the centuries, and more families join the tree, one’s lineage becomes more complex. Family trees, however, diminish complexity. They simplify our origins, smoothing them out so that we can trace our heritage through one bloodline to a single—usually desirable—ancestor. In the process, we discard the less desirable ancestors—the criminals, the bastards, the deformed. The maternal lines are usually forgotten as well, as the mother’s name disappears in marriage. Only the most noble maternal lines—those with royal blood, usually—were celebrated.”

  I looked at my family tree, following the lineage of Frederick and Isabelle’s children. Alberta Montebianco had a robust line of descendants. The others were truncated, not even half the size of mine.

  “There are no living descendants from the other three offspring of Isabelle and Frederick,” Basil said, following my gaze. “Those bloodlines died out by the eighteenth century. The heartiest branch, aside from your ancestral line, grew from Frederick and Isabelle’s eldest son, Aimone Montebianco. His lineage produced heirs until eighteen sixty-seven, when all were killed in an epidemic of some sort. Leaving only the descendants of Frederick and Isabelle’s second child, Alberta.”

  Looking over the family tree, I saw that the links between my ancestors were embellished with leaves and fruit—pears and apples and cherries—to display the fecundity of these connections. Most of the couplings were distinguished with a coat of arms, the Montebianco coat of arms being most prevalent, but there were many others, too.

  “Those,” Basil said, noticing my interest in the family coats of arms, “are from most of the noble families of Europe, many of which are now long gone. The Montebiancos married into these families as often as possible to solidify their position and influence.” He pointed the cane at a coat of arms. “Once very powerful families have now gone the way of the dinosaurs. Just as the Montebiancos would have, if they hadn’t found you.”

  “What happened here?” I asked, looking at a branch that had abruptly ended.

  Basil looked at the union, squinting to read the names: Charlotte of Normandy and Lars of Denmark. “I imagine they had no children,” he said. “Or, wait, what was the date of their union? Eighteen fifty-six? There was a tragedy about that time, I believe. We have a news clipping of it somewhere. I cataloged it myself. Yes, yes, it was this couple. They died on their honeymoon, as a matter of fact. A fire in a hotel in Monte Carlo. But they weren’t the only ones to meet a tragic end. The Montebianco family is full of stories of insanity, murder, even infanticide.”

  “Infanticide?” I said.

  “Children born with severe physical or mental defects were often abandoned. Now we would recognize these defects by their medical names—Down’s or Prader-Willi or Marfan syndromes. We understand these disorders and can treat them. But then they were believed to be a curse. Sometimes these infants died on their own. Sometimes their families helped them along.”

  “I saw the tablet in the mausoleum,” I said. “The one listing the babies who died before baptism.”

  “The number of stillbirths, miscarriages, and so on was very high due to interbreeding—first cousins marrying and the like,” Basil said.

  “You would think they would just stop marrying close relatives,” I said.

  “That is easy to say now,” Basil said. “In the twenty-first century, marrying your cousin is a misguided practice to be sure. But remember, they knew nothing about the hazards of inbreeding back then. Families made choices in order to consolidate power, but also based on pure superstition and fear—they were afraid what might turn up if they married outside the family. This was especially true in royal families—look at Charles II of Spain, a product of Hapsburg inbreeding. His tongue was so large he couldn’t speak and his jaw so deformed he had difficulty eating. Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, was her first cousin, and their children were encouraged to marry within the family as well. There was real anxiety about maintaining superior blood, when, in reality, all that intermarrying made for some monstrous human beings. It’s no wonder, I say, that the Montebianco family has had so many problems.”

  “And what were they, exactly?” I asked. “All these problems?”

  Basil froze up, his expression turning hesitant. “I am not at liberty to discuss them at length,” he said quietly. “But I can tell you that the Montebianco story is quite complicated. I have found that there is much obfuscation, if not downright erasure, around a certain member of the family: Leopold Montebianco, your fourth great-grandfather. He was a naturalist who explored these mountains and supposedly kept very meticulous records—records I have been hired to find. Unfortunately, I have been unable to do so.”

  Basil turned back to Eleanor’s history of the family and paged through it.

  “While it has alw
ays been more or less speculation, many in the family believed that it was Isabelle who brought the trouble into the family.”

  “Was there something wrong with Isabelle?” I asked, feeling a tight ball of anxiety in my stomach as I remembered how Dolores had described Vita: a cursed heirloom.

  “Not with Isabelle, no. But for centuries, the trouble was believed to begin with her.” Basil flicked the stick all the way across the ceiling, to point to another branch of the family tree. “But because of the misogyny of the times, when a tragedy of nature occurred, it was always the mother’s fault.”

  Basil went back to Eleanor’s book and read:

  With the marriage of Isabelle and Frederick began the House of Montebianco, whose progeny would dominate Nevenero for hundreds of years. Over time, the family would prosper, and the Montebianco influence would stretch from the mountains clear to the sea in a honeycomb of castles, fortresses, and forested estates. By the eighteenth century, it was said that a traveler on horseback could not ride a full day without hitting one of the family’s properties. They were rich; they were connected; and they, despite their noble breeding, or perhaps because of it, carried the seed of a monstrous nature that bloomed in Vittoria.

  Vittoria. A heavy silence descended between us.

  “This is the Vittoria born in 1915, the mother of Guillaume and Giovanni?” I asked, remembering the cartouche in the mausoleum. “My great-grandmother. Not some other ancestor?”

  “That’s right,” Basil said, pointing the cane back at the ceiling and locating a name: Vittoria Isabelle Alberta Eleanor Montebianco, 1915– . No date of death.

  “There is a Vittoria Montebianco buried in the mausoleum,” I said. “A plaque shows that she died in 1920.”

  “Ah, you found that, did you?” Basil said, smiling slightly. “It was just a ruse. When it became clear that Vittoria would be an embarrassment, the family staged her death. They spread the word that she was ill. They had a funeral. They hid her existence from the world thereafter.”