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