the plaque I had found in the mausoleum that suggested she’d died long ago—I decided to go to the library the first thing the next morning.
Luckily, I found it more quickly than I had expected—it was on the third floor, in the northwest tower of the castle, a long, chilly hike from the first floor. Built into the turret, the library was a large circular room with bookshelves that followed the curve of the wall, the ceiling high and conical. My eye was drawn to an elaborate family tree painted overhead, the branches and leaves curling upward, filling the ceiling with the names of my ancestors and the dates of their births and deaths.
Basil was at a desk near a window, writing in a thick ledger. It had begun to snow, and a cyclone of white swirled against the window, obscuring the mountains. There was a pot of ink at Basil’s side and a black fountain pen in his hand. He appeared to be cataloging books—there were stacks and stacks of them on the table, fifty at least. A history of the Alps, collections of political essays, a biography of Mary Shelley, and a novel by Ann Radcliffe.
As I approached, he put down his pen, gave me a quick wave, and gestured for me to join him. I dropped into a hard, wooden chair. The room was cool, drafts of air slipping through the windows. I shivered and wished I had worn the mink coat, which I had left hanging in my rooms.
“You must have a lot of time to read,” I said, glancing at the biography of Mary Shelley.
“Less than you would imagine,” Basil replied. “These books are like living creatures to me. Caring for them takes a great deal of time. I repair damaged spines, watch for mold and worms, and generally keep the collection safe from the all-too-inevitable ravages of time. No one ever thinks that books need tenderness, but they do, quite a lot, in fact.”
He stood and walked beyond a row of shelves into a shadowy alcove, returning with a box.
“But the most time-consuming aspect of my work, the one that has been the focus for the better part of a decade, has been archiving the Montebianco family’s records. You would think that this would be the work of months, perhaps a year at most. No such luck. While the marriages and births and deaths of the family are well documented, there are ancillary documents that must be dealt with, many hundreds of boxes of personal papers—correspondence, memoirs, diaries, and so on. It is my task to put them in order.”
“How many boxes are there?” I asked, gazing back into the shadowy alcove.
“Oh, hundreds. It isn’t difficult work, and I could get through it quite quickly, but the entire archive must be translated into English.” I gave him a questioning look—were they doing that on my account?—and he added, “Dolores, as you know, is English. She has insisted upon reading every last document in her native tongue.”
“Your Italian must be very good to translate all this.”
“French, actually. The language of the region was French until the late nineteenth century. Italian was not formally adopted until the unification of Italy, and even then, French—or, more correctly, a dialect of French called Franco-Proven?al—was used in Nevenero. I am an expert in the dialect, although I don’t use it much. The Montebianco family spoke very correct aristocratic French.”
“Is Franco-Proven?al still spoken?” I asked.
“Not really,” Basil said. “Although who can say? There could be crevices in these mountains that hide a whole community of Franco-Proven?al speakers and we wouldn’t know. The Alps have the ability to do that—swallow something up and keep it hidden forever.” Basil sat down again and took up the fountain pen, as if to continue cataloging the books. “In my work here these past years, I have unearthed information that has been buried for generations. I’ve found diaries stashed in trunks in the west tower, lists of guests visiting the castle during the seventeenth century, Alberta and Prince Amadeo’s last wills and testaments, renovation plans after the fire of fifteen ninety-three. And, of course, the genealogical records. I am the only person who knows the entire Montebianco family tree.” He gestured to the murals, the incredible branching and flowering of my family. “All twenty-nine generations, if one includes you.”
He stood, grabbed a cane with an ivory handle and pointed it at the ceiling. “We will need to get a muralist up here in the spring,”