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, madame,” 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.
“Mon Dieu,” she said. “I was sure I would be long dead before you arrived. Come, help me to the tea table. There is much to discuss.”
I took the wheelchair by the handles and pushed Dolores into the large salon on the first floor. The room was filled with Victorian furniture—red velvet sofas, mahogany side tables festooned with porcelain figurines, and a richly patterned silk wallpaper that wrapped the room in tangles of cherubs and harps. It was enough to make me dizzy. I didn’t plan to stay in Nevenero for more than a week, but the thought had crossed my mind that, should I stay longer, there would be some significant redecoration to be done.
“Near the window,” Dolores said, and I steered her to a table covered with a white linen cloth. As I pushed her closer, I saw that the seat of her wheelchair was fashioned of wood, which Dolores had made more comfortable with a stack of pillows. “Open the curtains. I want to get a good look at you.”
I pulled back a pair of green damask drapes, revealing a bank of medieval windows. Lozenges of thick colored glass captured the early-morning light. Nonna Sophia had said there was never sunlight in Nevenero, but she had been wrong: there was plenty of light, enough to see that Dolores’s eyes were pale green, her hair ashen, and her face so pale and wan, so thin and lifeless, as to give her the look of a skeleton.
A cut crystal bell had been placed to one side of the table, a china teapot on the other, its pattern a Bavarian farm scene with roosters and cows painted in gray-blue. I positioned Dolores’s chair near the bell and then sat across from her.
Dolores shook the bell, and Greta arrived to pour steaming black tea into our china cups. Dolores nodded, and Greta stepped back to a corner of the room.
“Those beasts,” Dolores said, gesturing at the wound on my cheek.
“There are more than one?”
“Oh, yes,” Dolores said. “One can’t go outside without fear of losing an eye.” Before I could