around a certain member of the family: Leopold Montebianco, your fourth great-grandfather. He was a naturalist who explored these mountains and supposedly kept very meticulous records—records I have been hired to find. Unfortunately, I have been unable to do so.”
Basil turned back to Eleanor’s history of the family and paged through it.
“While it has always been more or less speculation, many in the family believed that it was Isabelle who brought the trouble into the family.”
“Was there something wrong with Isabelle?” I asked, feeling a tight ball of anxiety in my stomach as I remembered how Dolores had described Vita: a cursed heirloom.
“Not with Isabelle, no. But for centuries, the trouble was believed to begin with her.” Basil flicked the stick all the way across the ceiling, to point to another branch of the family tree. “But because of the misogyny of the times, when a tragedy of nature occurred, it was always the mother’s fault.”
Basil went back to Eleanor’s book and read:
With the marriage of Isabelle and Frederick began the House of Montebianco, whose progeny would dominate Nevenero for hundreds of years. Over time, the family would prosper, and the Montebianco influence would stretch from the mountains clear to the sea in a honeycomb of castles, fortresses, and forested estates. By the eighteenth century, it was said that a traveler on horseback could not ride a full day without hitting one of the family’s properties. They were rich; they were connected; and they, despite their noble breeding, or perhaps because of it, carried the seed of a monstrous nature that bloomed in Vittoria.
Vittoria. A heavy silence descended between us.
“This is the Vittoria born in 1915, the mother of Guillaume and Giovanni?” I asked, remembering the cartouche in the mausoleum. “My great-grandmother. Not some other ancestor?”
“That’s right,” Basil said, pointing the cane back at the ceiling and locating a name: Vittoria Isabelle Alberta Eleanor Montebianco, 1915– . No date of death.
“There is a Vittoria Montebianco buried in the mausoleum,” I said. “A plaque shows that she died in 1920.”
“Ah, you found that, did you?” Basil said, smiling slightly. “It was just a ruse. When it became clear that Vittoria would be an embarrassment, the family staged her death. They spread the word that she was ill. They had a funeral. They hid her existence from the world thereafter.”
“There was one Vittoria, then,” I said, sounding him out. “And this Vita had medical problems?”
“You could say that,” Basil said. “Others certainly did.”
“But you think there was something else going on?” The altar with the list of unbaptized babies, the death certificates of stillbirths in Milton, my own difficulties having a child—perhaps they were all connected. “Something hereditary?”
Pursing his lips, Basil pushed Eleanor’s book toward me. His thumb marked a paragraph:
No one, not even the other members of the Montebianco family, was allowed to see Vita. She was so hideous, so lacking in human refinements, that she remained locked away in the northeast tower, as if she were a devil in our midst. It was necessary to hide her. She could not, under any circumstance, be allowed to roam freely. I could only imagine what she would do with such liberty. No doubt she would feast on the village babies and dance naked in the moonlight.
I closed it quickly, as if the words might infect me. “That’s pretty strong stuff,” I said.
“One must remember,” Basil said, “that then, before modern medicine, diseases and physical problems were considered demonic manifestations or curses. And this part of the world modernized much, much later than other places.”
“Still, it seems so dramatic, don’t you think? Feasting on the village babies and dancing naked in the moonlight?”
“Quite right. Vita certainly never did any of that.”
I opened the book again and reread the passage. She was so hideous, so lacking in human refinements, that she remained locked away in the northeast tower, as if she were a devil in our midst.
“Eleanor must have really hated Vita to write this about her.”
Basil sighed. “I think her feelings were more complicated than hatred,” he said, as he pushed Eleanor’s memoir to me, urging me to read it. “You see, Eleanor was Vita’s mother.”
“And Eleanor’s memoir describes Vita’s illness?”
“It contains everything we know about it,” Basil said, closing the cover and putting the book in my hands.
Anticipation rising through me, I tucked Eleanor’s memoir under my arm and hurried back to my rooms to read it.
Interstitial
Memoirs of Eleanor Montebianco
November 1915
The northeast tower is awash with tears and prayers.