“There was one Vittoria, then,” I said, sounding him out. “And this Vita had medical problems?”
“You could say that,” Basil said. “Others certainly did.”
“But you think there was something else going on?” The altar with the list of unbaptized babies, the death certificates of stillbirths in Milton, my own difficulties having a child—perhaps they were all connected. “Something hereditary?”
Pursing his lips, Basil pushed Eleanor’s book toward me. His thumb marked a paragraph:
No one, not even the other members of the Montebianco family, was allowed to see Vita. She was so hideous, so lacking in human refinements, that she remained locked away in the northeast tower, as if she were a devil in our midst. It was necessary to hide her. She could not, under any circumstance, be allowed to roam freely. I could only imagine what she would do with such liberty. No doubt she would feast on the village babies and dance naked in the moonlight.
I closed it quickly, as if the words might infect me. “That’s pretty strong stuff,” I said.
“One must remember,” Basil said, “that then, before modern medicine, diseases and physical problems were considered demonic manifestations or curses. And this part of the world modernized much, much later than other places.”
“Still, it seems so dramatic, don’t you think? Feasting on the village babies and dancing naked in the moonlight?”
“Quite right. Vita certainly never did any of that.”
I opened the book again and reread the passage. She was so hideous, so lacking in human refinements, that she remained locked away in the northeast tower, as if she were a devil in our midst.
“Eleanor must have really hated Vita to write this about her.”
Basil sighed. “I think her feelings were more complicated than hatred,” he said, as he pushed Eleanor’s memoir to me, urging me to read it. “You see, Eleanor was Vita’s mother.”
“And Eleanor’s memoir describes Vita’s illness?”
“It contains everything we know about it,” Basil said, closing the cover and putting the book in my hands.
Anticipation rising through me, I tucked Eleanor’s memoir under my arm and hurried back to my rooms to read it.
Interstitial
Memoirs of Eleanor Montebianco
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 he
at 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.
The Ancestor Page 12
