The Ancestor

by Danielle Trussoni

  “I was very young when he died.”

  Vita considered this. “And your parents? Are they still living?”

  “They are gone, too,” I said.

  Vita sighed and sat back down in her chair. “You are alone in the world,” she said. “Like me.” She returned to the fireplace, took a leather-bound book from a pile on the mantel, Emily Dickinson Poetical Works stamped on the spine. She opened the book and read:

  A LONG, long sleep, a famous sleep

  That makes no show for dawn

  By stretch of limb or stir of lid,—

  An independent one.

  There was sorrow in her voice as she read the words, grief softening her cold, hard features. “A long, long sleep,” she whispered. “That is how I imagine my mother in the mausoleum. It is how I imagine my mother’s mother. And her mother, too. They are all there, sleeping, waiting for me to join them. Just as I will wait for you, and you will wait for your children’s children.”

  “It is all well and good to quote verse, Vita,” Dolores said, shooting me a look. “But I can’t imagine that Alberta cares about poetry just now. She’s come a long way and suffered much inconvenience to learn about her family. Now, from what I know of Eleanor, she was a wonderful woman, well educated, and a poet in her own right.”

  “It is true,” Vita said ironically. “My mother had a way with words.”

  “Indeed she did!” Dolores said. “She was adamant about documenting the history of the Montebianco family, including certain elements that others might have wished to forget. It was Eleanor who brought in a naturalist, if you recall. Quel désastre.”

  “Mr. James Pringle was an expert,” Vita said. “My mother had every reason to trust him. He believed our situation was extraordinary. Special. Worthy of study.”

  “You know as well as I do,” Dolores said, “that the incident in the village nearly destroyed the entire family. Guillaume carried that burden his entire life. Giovanni left because of it.”

  Vita glared at Dolores, her expression tight. Greta, who had been watching from across the room, stepped in front of the fireplace, looking from Dolores to me, as if preparing for a fight. “Madame,” she said, her voice filled with anxiety, “I think we should be going now.”

  But Dolores wasn’t finished. “All my life I have cared for you, and I can tell you one thing: you have been nothing but a burden. And before I leave you to Alberta, whose existence you will ruin as surely as you have ruined mine, I want you to know that the Montebianco family will win in the end. They will survive you. You are an aberration, a freak of nature, one that will be overcome.”

  “Madame,” Greta said, her voice cracking with anxiety. “Please.”

  Vita stood and gestured for Greta to be calm. “Don’t worry, I am not angry, Greta,” she said, her voice gentle, as if she were speaking to a child. “In fact, I would like to ask that we stop this silly bickering and take a moment to welcome my great-granddaughter properly. Do you mind?”

  Greta took Dolores’s glass from the mantel, then ours from the table, and distributed them.

  “Come, my dear,” Vita said. “Let’s not fight in front of Alberta. Chateau Margaux heals all wounds.”

  “My feelings exactly,” Dolores said, taking a glass in hand.

  “A toast to Alberta,” Vita said, raising her glass. “Welcome home.”

  “To Alberta,” Dolores said. “May you survive this family better than I have.”

  We raised our glasses and drank the wine down. For a full minute, we sat by the crackling fire, silent. The tension between us was taut as a wire, as if we were all aware that a monumental act had taken place, yet no one dared acknowledge it. Adrenaline coursed through me as I glanced from Dolores to Vita. I couldn’t be sure Dolores had poured the poison in Vita’s wine—I had not actually seen her do it—but there was no other explanation for the empty vial. I struggled with what I should do. Confront Dolores? Warn Vita? But in the end, I didn’t do either. There wasn’t time. As I struggled to act, there was a great crash. Dolores had fallen to the floor.

  As the poison took hold, I understood that Dolores’s plan had backfired. The herbs Sal harvested served their purpose, but Dolores, not Vita, had drank the deadly wine. At first, I couldn’t understand how Dolores could have made such a mistake, but then I saw Greta standing by, doing nothing at all to help Dolores, and I knew: Greta had distributed the glasses. She had exchanged Vita’s glass, making Dolores a victim of her own scheme.

  I watched in horror as Dolores’s hands grasped at her throat. “Greta,” I said, my voice a plea and a question, as Dolores gasped for air. “Do something.” But Greta only watched as Dolores writhed before the fire. I knelt by her side, but there was nothing I could do: Dolores’s face flamed red, then drained to a pale gray, and set at last into a deathly stillness. And while I witnessed it all, and knew that Dolores was unquestionably dead, I couldn’t quite believe it. Not her horrid struggle, or the look of satisfaction on Vita’s face as she watched her rival die. Not the workmanlike movements of Greta as she collected the shards of glass and wiped wine from the floor with a cloth. The shock of it all made Dolores’s death unreal. But most horrible of all was the expression that had fixed upon Dolores’s face in death, an expression of betrayal that would remain burned into my memory forever.

  Greta helped me to my rooms, where she ran me a bath and left me alone to recover. I sank into the water, trying to wake from the nightmare playing through my mind. One second Dolores had been drinking wine; the next, she was dead. Pressing my cheek against the marble bathtub, I tried to soothe the throbbing in my head.

  Vita stood over every memory, returning to me again and again, so that I could almost smell the heavy floral scent of her perfume. I understood why my grandfather had left. I understood why Dolores had wanted her dead. Taking a cake of goat milk soap, I washed my skin until it was raw, but scrub as I might, I couldn’t remove the images from my mind. The crash of the wineglass as Dolores hit the floor. The desperate, dry bark of Dolores’s choking. The smug look of triumph on Vita’s face. And her voice as she said: In your veins, floating through your blood, there is ice.

  By the time I got out of the bathtub, it was well after midnight. I put logs on the fire and opened the window wide, so that the night sky stretched before me. Rivers of freezing air filled the room, making the fire flicker and the candles snuff to black. I leaned against the window ledge, bathing in the bright moonlight, looking out over the mountains as Vita had only hours before. The air was sharp, like blades against my skin, and I wondered for a moment if Vita was right, and that I was, deep down, like her.

  The cold air had the effect of shocking me out of my disordered state of mind. I began to see my situation with clarity. I couldn’t stay there another day. The moon had begun to set over the mountains, and shades of sunrise hovered in the east, giving enough light to see smoke rising from a house in the village. There were people down there. If I made it to them, they would help me.

  Eighteen

  The magnificent landscape I had admired from above—the pristine craggy peaks and luxurious crevices observed from behind the thick Plexiglas of the helicopter window—became a series of treacherous obstacles on the ground. It was bitterly cold. I fought through knee-high snowdrifts, wind scraping my skin, ice crystals stiffening my hair. I blinked and my eyelashes clung together, freezing and melting, freezing and melting again. I hadn’t realized when I slipped out of the courtyard that I would be throwing myself into a glacial hell.

  Within minutes, my hands had gone numb, and my feet—buried in snow and protected by nothing more than my running shoes—became wet, then frozen. I knew I could withstand cold better than most people—my walks with my grandfather had taught me that—yet I wanted to lie down, curl up in the mink coat, and sleep. Thoughts of seeing Luca again pushed me onward. I had the leather pouch Enzo had given me in Turin and would use the money to hire a helicopter. Maybe, if I were lucky, my phone would have reception
in the village. If I could only get there, I would be on my way home to him.

  Just as I was beginning to lose hope, the spire of a church rose into view. I pushed ahead, moving toward it, ignoring the pain in my limbs as I entered the village. I knew that Nevenero had been abandoned, but I wasn’t prepared for the extent of the desolation. The buildings were in ruins, the windows broken, the doors unhinged. The houses were shuttered, some with boards nailed over the windows. Nevenero was a wasteland: deserted, lifeless, frozen. The smoke I had spotted at the castle was impossible to see from the ground. Storm clouds had rolled in, swallowing the smoke in a roiling, ashen sky. But there wasn’t time to lose: the brittle air, the murderous wind—if I didn’t find shelter soon, I would freeze to death.

  Just when I was beginning to panic I saw, behind a row of stone houses, a light flicker in a window. A person moved behind the slats of a shutter and disappeared into the depths of a room. Without thinking, I rushed to the door and began knocking. The door swung back.

  “Bonjour?”

  The man was young and athletic, his features chiseled, his expression a mixture of amazement and suspicion. He wore a tight microfiber shirt, ski pants, and heavy socks. A woman in similar gear stood behind him, peering at me with astonishment. The air smelled of coffee and toasted bread. A fire—the very fire that had sent smoke signals to me at the castle—burned in a fireplace beyond.

  I was shivering so hard my words came out in a jumble. “Do you mind if I come in? To warm up a second?” I stammered. “Please. I’m freezing to death.”

  The man blinked. He was so surprised he couldn’t speak.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m very cold.” I stepped back and looked up the hill, toward the castle, its flags minuscule in the distance. “Could I come in for a just a minute? To use your phone?”

  The woman stepped into the doorway, rescuing me. “Of course,” she said. From her accent, I gathered that she, like her companion, was French. “Come in, you are looking like a glaçon.”

  I stepped into a room filled with climbing gear: boots and heavy jackets; backpacks and ice axes and reams of rope scattered over the floor. A black harness with buckles and straps lay on the table. I must have looked confused, because the woman said, “Alpine body harness. For ice climbing.”

  I rubbed my hands together, trying to bring some feeling into my fingers. The woman said something in French, and the man brought me a steaming cup of coffee. “Un café?” he asked.

  “Yes, yes, thank you,” I said, falling into a wooden chair, its thrush seat hard under me. I wrapped my fingers around the ceramic cup, the heat stinging my hands.

  The couple sat down and stared, waiting for me to collect myself. I looked more closely at them. The man was tall and athletic, with wide shoulders and a receding hairline. The woman was thin, with dark bangs that fell over penetrating brown eyes. They were young, in their thirties, sporty and very curious about me.

  Finally, the woman said, “I’m Justine. And this is Pierre. He didn’t mean to be rude, but you surprised him. There aren’t people up here. Ever.”

  “I’m Bert,” I said, relishing the sound of my name, my simple, familiar name. “Bert Monte.”

  “Here,” Pierre said, his English heavily accented as he moved my chair to the fireplace. “You’ll warm up much faster.”

  I sat, feeling the warmth of the fire against my skin. The caffeine spiked through my body, dispelling the cloud of disorientation that lingered from the cold. “Thank you. I didn’t expect to be out in the snow for long. I thought I’d find someone who could take me down the mountain.”

  “Find someone?” Justine said, and by her tone I knew she thought I was utterly crazy. “Here? The village has been empty for fifty years, at least.”

  “But you’re here,” I said, glancing around at the boxes of canned food, tins of coffee, and crates of bottled water. “I saw the smoke from your fire.”

  “Only for the week,” she said. “As you see, we like to climb. But I am also a journalist. I’m working on a book.” She looked down at my sopping-wet tennis shoes. “I’m sorry to be blunt, but what in the name of God are you doing here? The nearest town from Nevenero is a hundred kilometers away. The ski resorts are even farther.”

  “I’ve been staying at Montebianco Castle, helping a sick relative,” I said. “We scheduled a helicopter to take me to Turin, but it . . . didn’t show, and I need to get home as soon as possible.”

  Justine looked at me, wide-eyed. “Montebianco Castle?” She turned to Pierre and spoke in rapid French, gesturing to me and then in the direction of the castle. Pierre regarded me with curiosity, then suspicion, as he asked Justine a few questions. Finally, she turned to me. “We don’t understand how it’s possible for you to be staying at Montebianco Castle. It is empty except for an old lady and her domestic employees. I went there to inquire about an investigative article I was writing. I was told that the owner had died.”

  “The Count of Montebianco did die,” I said, considering my words with care. I could not reveal the truth about the Montebianco family to this stranger, or to anyone. “I was visiting his wife, my great-aunt Dolores, who was very ill. Cancer. She passed away last night.”

  “You are a member of the Montebianco family?” she said, incredulous. “An American?”

  “My grandfather was Giovanni Montebianco. He left after the Second World War.”

  Justine stared at me, pale and somber. “My family comes from this village as well,” she said. “This house has belonged to my family for hundreds of years. My grandparents fled Nevenero in 1952 and immigrated to France. They were some of the last to leave. But my grandparents loved this place. My family have been goat herders and mountaineers for generations, which may explain why I have been drawn to ice climbing. These mountains are in our blood. My grandparents never wanted to leave. This house was all they owned. But no one could stay here. It is a dangerous place, the castle.” She fixed me with narrowed eyes. “I understand why you would want to leave.”

  “Then do you mind calling me a helicopter? Please? I will pay whatever is necessary.”

  “I can call the pilot who is supposed to come for us next week,” Pierre said. “The storm has made it difficult to get through, but I will try.”

  Pierre stood, went to the fire and threw in a log. It began to crackle and pop behind the screen.

  “Anything you can do would be great,” I said. I glanced at the fireplace. The smoke from the fire was visible in the sky. If I had been able to see it, so would Vita.

  “I grew up hearing about your family,” Justine said. “But to be honest, for most of my life, I thought these stories were nothing but a bunch of legends my grandparents told about their old village. A way to cope with nostalgia and a way of keeping these mountains alive for me and my brothers.”

  “What kinds of stories?” I asked, turning closer to the fire.

  “From the time I was very little, my grandparents would tell us about the monsters in these mountains. They had grown up hearing tales of demons, vampires, dragons, and devils. When a dog ran away, it had been eaten by a dragon. If the sheep’s wool was too thin, a vampire had sucked its blood. When a child disappeared—which happened with some frequency—it was stolen by an evil beast. Or so the stories went.” Justine shook her head, as if it were too outlandish to believe.

  “Cretinism existed up here until the early twentieth century,” Pierre added, as he collected the empty coffee cups and walked out of the room.

  “Well,” Justine said, turning to me, “cretinism is one thing. But there were so many old legends. My grandparents loved to scare us with tales of Krampus. Half devil, half goat, with twisting horns, with teeth like a wolf’s. Each Christmas Eve, Krampus would sneak into the village to punish the children who had been naughty. While Saint Nicholas would reward the good children with toys, Krampus would capture and torture the bad ones, biting and beating them to death. When misfortune occurred in these mountains, it was convenient to blame
these tragedies on the regional mythical creature. My parents grew up dismissive of their parents’ tales. But now I believe there is something to the legends. Not Krampus. Not dwarfs. Something else. I am certain there is something monstrous living in these mountains. Something that has lived here for many, many generations.”

  “You seem so sure,” I said.

  “I have good reason to be sure,” Justine said. “I saw it myself.”

  All the anxiety and fear I had felt the night before rose up in me again. “What do you mean?”

  Justine leaned forward, looking me in the eyes as she spoke. “Two years ago, we were here in Nevenero climbing on the glacier. I’d drifted away from Pierre, to a great mass of ice hanging between screes of granite. I was frustrated. I had dropped my ice ax. It was my fault—I should have had it tethered—and this made it even worse. If you have no experience on the mountain, you probably don’t realize what a handicap it is to be one hundred meters up a wall of ice with no ax, but I will tell you, it is a very uncomfortable feeling, like losing a shoe while running a marathon. Luckily, my ax had fallen within sight, onto the ledge of a granite plateau. I rappelled over, lowered myself down onto the plateau, and grabbed it.

  “It was then that I saw them: footprints in the snow. At first, I was sure they were human. But then I realized that this meant a human being would have been up on the glacier barefoot. It was February in the Alps, and totally unthinkable to be barefoot in those conditions.” She glanced at my flimsy shoes, as if to emphasize how crazy it was to be unprotected in the elements. “Also, there were drops of blood alongside the prints, which made me believe I’d come across a wounded animal of some sort. I got down and looked closer and saw that the prints were very wide. At least this big.” Justine used her hands to demonstrate the size of the prints. “Incredible feet, really.

  “I decided to follow the prints. It was snowing, and they would be covered soon, so I hurried along the granite ledge, my eyes trained on the prints. The path was narrow, only a meter wide, with an escarpment of rock to my left and a deep cavern to my right. I am used to heights, of course, but usually I’m clipped in to ropes. Yet, I was so focused on the prints that I paid little attention to the danger. I ran over the icy ledge, heedless of the fact I might slip. The prints went on for a kilometer or so when, all at once, they veered into a gaping passage in the rock.