“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 nearly 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