The Ancestor Read online

  We began to descend. Down we slid, through sheets of fog, each filmy plateau revealing the landscape in layers: rock, ice, spruce and cedar trees, snow, and, at last, the outline of a stone structure rising up from the scoop of a valley—Montebianco Castle.

  “All this,” Zimmer said, as we hovered over an outcropping of black granite studded with ice, “belongs to you.”

  As I gazed down at the vastness and desolation of the valley, a chill went through me. I shivered not from the cold—it was warm enough in the helicopter—but from something else, a swelling fear of what waited below. Some part of me knew, even then, that my inheritance was not the stroke of luck one might imagine it to be.

  “There is the family estate,” Zimmer said, pointing to the castle nestled in the palm of the valley, the mountains clutching it like fingers. “And over there is the village of Nevenero.”

  If he hadn’t pointed it out, I would have missed Nevenero entirely. There were no lights and no roads that I could see. Not a single car or truck. Just dark houses clustered together like mushrooms on birch bark.

  “But there’s nothing but snow,” I said.

  “The road to Nevenero is blocked until spring,” he said. “Which is precisely why we are up here.”

  The whirling of blades shifted as the pilot angled toward the castle.

  “The castle depends entirely upon air transport at this time of year. Food, medical supplies, everything they need is dropped in. I will return for you next week, with the helicopter that brings supplies. The castle has seen better days, but Greta, the housekeeper, has been instructed to make you comfortable.”

  As the pilot descended, I got my first real look at Montebianco Castle. It was a perfect square held by four massive towers, one at each corner. Zimmer explained that the original thirteenth-century structure had been a squat, one-story fortress built to defend the family from belligerent rivals, but was razed in the late sixteenth century and rebuilt in the fashions of the period—an elegant castle with a large, Renaissance-style courtyard filled with potted trees, a jewel-box Baroque chapel at one corner, and a series of outbuildings at the other. The towers were topped with conical slate roofs, the windows fitted with blown glass panes, and an ornate ironwork gate blocked the entrance. Nothing remained of the original fortress except the foundation: the perfect square, each corner held in place by a strong, fortified tower. At the top of each tower flew the brilliant flags of the House of Montebianco, bright streaks of yellow and blue flapping in the wind.

  The helicopter touched down on the flagstones, and I jumped out. Zimmer handed me my suitcase and gave a terse wave—crisp, impersonal, as if he were sending me on a covert mission. Then the helicopter lifted into a swirl of fog, leaving me alone in a vast, ice-covered courtyard.

  Everything was still and silent. Night had come, and banks of fog had fallen to earth, leaving the air heavy, granular, obscuring the mountains in a smudge of smoke. The courtyard was immense and perfectly enclosed. I looked around, searching for the housekeeper. A few lights flickered in the castle’s windows, but no one had come to greet me.

  I zipped my coat closed, bracing against the sharp wind. The cold was so domineering that it had overtaken the stone: an entire wall of the castle was encased in ice, as if a wave had washed up on it and, in a snap of subzero wind, frozen in place. I had landed in an unwelcoming, desolate place, one that matched the mountains that surrounded it.

  I looked up to the star-spattered sky. It was a black bowl filled with diamonds—glittering and inaccessible. The helicopter was gone. I was on my own.

  Grabbing my suitcase, I started across the flagstones, the needling wind pricking my skin. I had just passed the main entrance of the castle when I saw it: a flicker of candlelight in a small window at the top of the tower. For a fraction of a second, a face appeared, terrible and twisted by shadow. It was a woman, her brow heavy, her hair wild. I dropped my suitcase, surprised by her sudden appearance. That must be Dolores, I thought. Her illness explained the ravaged visage, her unnatural pallor, the strange features, the monstrous expression. Then, in a flash, the candle went out. The window turned black, and I was left breathless, my heart beating hard, my hands trembling.

  A shuffling of feet alerted me that someone was coming. I turned to find a short, fat woman in a heavy wool coat. Greta wore a wool stocking cap pulled down over her ears, and I could just make out a series of scars on the left side of her face.

  “Hello,” I said. “You must be Greta.”

  She stared at me, silent. I glanced up at the tower.

  “There was someone standing there just now,” I said. “Did you see her?”

  “That is the northeast tower,” Greta said, without answering my question. Her mouth went lopsided when she spoke, as if her jaw had been broken.

  “Was that Dolores Montebianco?”

  She shrugged and said nothing.

  I considered this cryptic response as she continued to stare at me, blankly, without affect. I offered my hand. “I’m Alberta,” I said, raising my voice, in case her hearing was bad. “Here to see Dolores Montebianco.”

  She didn’t take my hand. Instead, she grabbed my suitcase and shuffled across the courtyard. I followed her past a row of outbuildings, abandoned stone structures with heavy wooden doors—a granary, dairy, apiary, and abattoir. Zimmer had told me that, once, these buildings had sustained the castle, giving the Montebianco family flour, milk, honey, and meat. Now, like so much of the castle, they had been left to rot.

  Greta walked ahead, her thick-soled boots crunching over the ice. The night was bitter cold, the wind slicing through the courtyard, all sharp edges. I was eager to get inside and warm up. It had been a long, frustrating day. That morning, I spent hours trying to get in touch with Luca. When he hadn’t picked up his phone or answered my messages, I resigned myself to try again from Nevenero. But from the looks of it, I would be lucky to get even one bar of reception. Zimmer had mentioned the remoteness of the village, but I hadn’t had the strength of imagination to picture anything so isolated as this. I tried not to be too alarmed. I would go inside, get some sleep, and figure it out in the morning.

  We turned a corner, and—bam—I was on the ground. A heavy, hairy beast tore at my coat with its teeth, growling and straining to split me open. I struggled, kicking and pushing with all my strength, but it twisted and feinted, claws and teeth raking at me from every direction. The thing snapped at my face, my ears, my arms. I kicked, landing a few solid thrusts before realizing that I was fighting some kind of dog. I screamed and doubled down, kicking harder.

  There was a scurry of feet on the flagstones, and suddenly the dog was jerked away, leaving me gasping, my cheek searing with pain.

  “Jesus Christ, what the fuck was that?” I said, pushing myself up from the flagstones. I was shaky on my feet, hardly able to stand. I touched my cheek. My fingers were wet with blood.

  A man slipped a rope around the dog’s neck. He was talking to it in a language I didn’t understand, Franco-Provençal, I would learn, the local patois. The dog was as strange as the language, huge, with long black dreadlocks that gave it the look of an evil Muppet.

  The man gave the dog a command, and it sat.

  “You frightened her,” he said, his tone accusatory. His English was heavily accented, his voice little more than a growl.

  “I frightened her?” I said, incredulous. “Are you serious?”

  “This is Sal, madame,” Greta said. “He minds the grounds.”

  Sal turned to Greta and said something that I did not understand, but that I gathered to mean: Who the hell is this?

  Greta’s reply must have informed him that I was the Montebianco heir, for Sal’s features softened and he met my eyes for the first time. “Welcome, madame,” he said, his voice turning suddenly deferential. “I wasn’t expecting anyone and didn’t shut the dog in the mews. I am sorry she frightened you. I hope she didn’t scratch you too badly?”

  Scratch me? She had near
ly ripped my face off. I wiped blood onto the sleeve of my coat and looked at the man, taking in his rough leather boots, his battered hands. He wore the same brown burlap trousers and heavy-soled boots as Greta, but whereas Greta was short and heavy, he was tall and muscular.

  “Alberta,” I said, ignoring his question. “Alberta Montebianco.”

  “Salvatore,” he said, giving a quick nod.

  “What is that thing?”

  “A Bergamasco shepherd. Name’s Fredericka.”

  “What a terror,” I said, touching my cheek and feeling a hot, swollen lump.

  “She should be,” Sal said. “That’s how we trained her.”

  I glanced back at Fredericka, wondering why they needed such a vicious guard dog when there was no one around for hundreds of miles.

  “You’ve come from America, madame?” Sal asked.

  “Yes, that’s right,” I said, taking a tissue from my pocket and holding it over my cheek. I wanted to get inside and take a look at what the dog had done to me. I had a feeling I might need stitches.

  Greta picked up my suitcase, said something more to Sal, and started toward the castle. I followed, not quite finding my balance. The courtyard, the castle walls glimmering with windows, the enormous black sky—everything seemed to tip and waver around me. As I walked away, Sal called to me from behind.

  “Welcome to Montebianco Castle, madame.”

  Greta led me up a set of stone steps, pushed back a wooden door, and escorted me inside the castle. The wind died in an instant, and a pervasive silence filled the air. Over time, I would come to understand this silence, the thickness of it, its almost tangible viscosity, as the defining nature of the mountains—a quiet, choking presence that suffocated one slowly, breath by breath.

  But I didn’t know that at the time. Then I saw only evidence of bygone greatness. The rooms were filled with ancestral treasures: oriental vases, plush carpets, and Dutch still-life paintings of flowers, fruit, hummingbirds. These were the objets d’art the family had collected over the centuries, the bounty of their years of abundance and power. The family coat of arms had been molded into the masonry at every turn. Plaster medallions of my ancestors’ profiles filled an entire wall, perfect white orbs of noble faces. The Montebiancos may have been obscured by time, and their future had dwindled to a single heir, but here was proof that they had once been an important family. A great family.

  I shivered as I followed Greta along the hallway of the ground floor. She introduced each room as we passed, and I had the eerie experience of realizing that everything I saw—every room, every carpet, every fireplace, every precious object—belonged to me. We passed a sitting room she called the salon, where embers glowed in a fireplace; the grand hall, where the meals were served; a nook with a couch and an elephantine Bakelite telephone, gray and heavy on a table. We stopped in a wide corridor where a cuckoo clock was mounted on the wall, its face all dials and mother-of-pearl disks, its trapdoors closed, waiting. It was a quarter after six o’clock. It felt like days since I’d left Turin.

  We climbed a set of stairs to the second floor, where rooms opened at every turn, many more than Greta could show me, hidden spaces that I would explore over time. It seemed to me, as we walked through the narrow halls, the arched doorways and vast corridors, every space communicating with the next, that we were not only navigating an old musty castle, but that the map of my vast family tree was unfolding before me.

  Finally, we stopped on the third floor, on the southeast corner. As Greta unlocked the door to my rooms, I waited at a large window overlooking the mountains. Shelves of ice and granite lifted before me, a dizzying panorama of snow and rock. The brutality of the wind, the torture of subzero temperatures, the distant moon that rose in the sky—this was the world of my forebears. I felt it then, the presence of something kindred in the landscape, an intimate connection between me and the mountains, and I understood that this savage place was in my blood. This vast, stark place, this thin air and soaring sky, this desolation—all of this had produced me.

  A bolt turned as Greta unlocked the door to my rooms and disappeared inside. I followed her, finding myself in a series of large and well-furnished spaces that, taken together, were bigger than my entire house in Milton. The first—with windows that framed a series of mountain peaks—was a sitting room with a large stone fireplace, a couch upholstered in striped silk, a writing desk, and shelves filled with old leather-bound books.

  Greta went to work building a fire. As she piled up birch logs, I went through an arched doorway, into a bedroom with an enormous four-poster bed, canopied and enclosed on all sides by curtains, a wood-burning stove, and a series of tapestries of hounds and antelopes. At the far end of the room, separated from the sleeping chamber by a green silk screen, was the bathroom. Passing by me, Greta stepped behind the screen and washed soot from her hands in a porcelain sink.

  “This here is the marble of Porta Praetoria,” she said, gesturing to a pedestal bathtub, its rich gray surface shot through with veins of mica and quartz. “The toilet won’t clog if you don’t throw paper in it,” she added, tugging on a silk cord attached to an overhead tank to draw my attention.

  “What’s this?” I asked, bending over a low marble sink with gold faucets.

  She smirked. “Guess you don’t have bidets in America.”

  Without further explanation, she walked back to the sitting room. The fire was roaring, filling the space with light and the scent of burning birch. Greta unpacked my clothes as I watched, hanging them in a large wooden armoire. She lined up my shoes and stacked the shampoo and soap I had taken from the hotel in Turin on the desk, placing them next to a note, written on Dolores Montebianco’s personal stationery, that read: Bienvenue, Comtesse.

  “Madame Dolores wants to see you tomorrow,” Greta said as she shut the door, leaving me alone.

  I opened my suitcase and pulled out the phone Enzo had given me in Turin. There was no reception, not even a spark of service. I turned it off and restarted it, hoping it would connect to some local network, but it didn’t. The mountains had surrounded me in a curtain of silence. I was cut off from the rest of the world.

  I sat at the antique writing desk, opened a drawer, and removed a pot of ink, a sheaf of paper, some old fountain pens, an ink-stained cloth, and a penknife. There were so many drawers, filled with so many old and neglected objects, that I could have unearthed treasures all night, but I was too tired, and too overwhelmed, to do more than stare out the window. Fractals of frost had formed around the edges of the pane, floral, crystalline, but I could see, through the clear glass at the center, Nevenero below, the houses layering down the side of the mountain. Superimposed over this panorama was a reflection of me, Bert Monte, the same person I had been just days before, yet now unrecognizable.

  I touched the wound on my face. Fredericka had scratched my cheek badly. It would scar, leaving a long, thin line across my cheek, a permanent reminder of my first night in Nevenero, but I wasn’t thinking of that then. Tears filled my eyes. Not out of pain—the scratch didn’t hurt that much—or out of vanity offended by the damage done to my face. No, it was something else. A sense of loss filled me as I looked at that person reflected in the window. Perhaps I understood that this was the last of Bert Monte, and that from that point forward, I would be Alberta Montebianco, heir to a sinister legacy tucked into a fold in the mountains. Perhaps I sensed that my fate had been waiting for me, and now that I had arrived, I would never be free again.

  Ten

  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, m
adame,” 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.