to know only after I began to study them in earnest. I found books on morphology and embryology from the nineteenth century, texts by Aristotle and Empedocles and Lucretius. At the suggestion of the naturalist, I read about how the natural world came to be populated so wonderfully, with such variety. But also about how the forsaken creatures fall to those more adapted, stronger and more aggressive than they. I told him it is a Godless theory, evolution, and he only smiled and pressed me to continue with my reading.
One day, we stood in the library together—James, Vita, and me—and he showed me a large folio of watercolors that illustrated Gregor Mendel’s famous experiments with peas. I studied these watercolors, taking in the combinations. They showed an explosion of varieties—short-stemmed peas with purple flowers, long-stemmed peas with yellow flowers, purple flowers with constricted pods, and so on.
The variety of Mendel’s peas interested the naturalist. In nature, he said, inheritance was a matter of endless mixing, new traits showing up with each generation. They were distributed and various, leaving no single trait to dominate a family indefinitely.
What he meant to say, I believe, is that Vita’s affliction may resurface, should she reproduce. Thank heaven that will never come to pass.
Rumors have come to Nevenero that avalanches are to blame for the loss of a hundred or more soldiers training in our region.
It is also said that the surviving men have passed along the edge of our domain, some distance from Nevenero village, and that they stopped to seek shelter. I hope they will leave us in peace. The billeting of soldiers is not a Montebianco tradition, by any stretch of the imagination, and Ambrose would have forbidden me to harbor our enemies in any case.
I cannot help but imagine avalanches. The great cracking of ice and the thunderous tumult of snow falling, crushing, killing. One hundred men buried in snow! Such devastation, and yet, they fight on. What strength they have, these men. What dedication. Endurance of this kind inspires resolve in me. It helps me bear my own avalanches. Vita tests my strength, and yet I battle her. Battle her hungers, battle her rages, battle the strangeness and shame until I am little more than a husk. The truth is that I am old and tired. I cannot fight much longer. Ambrose used to say I was ashamed of Vita, that my vanity was offended by her existence, but it is not out of pride that I have locked her away. I used to believe that terror would kill me, but it is not so. Exhaustion erodes the body more than fear. Vita will kill me, as I expected, not with her savage teeth, but with her relentless vitality.
There are times I observe her, as if watching an exotic animal in a zoo. She has become that to me, my daughter, a strange and unknowable thing. Something of the animal kingdom. Something studied by the likes of naturalists like James Pringle. I try to see her for what she has become. She is nearly fifteen years old, and has all the attributes of a woman. Sometimes, when I see her from a certain angle, she is almost pretty. And then she turns to me, baring her yellowed teeth, and I know her not at all. I see a monster. I look away in disgust. She understands that I am revolted. And again, we are at battle.
Perhaps the time has come for me to lay down the sword and surrender. Now that Ambrose has died, and I am alone to care for our child, I must accept that there are limits to my power. The Lord knows that I can’t do anything to change Vita. I have accomplished what I can. The greatest evils of her childhood have been subdued. The priests did much to alter her proclivities toward violence and their instruction has allowed her to read the Bible. She does not attack when we are nearby, but only surreptitiously, when she believes she is unwatched. As Ambrose used to say: the child has been trained like a dog—to be quiet, docile, tame. She follows commands without understanding them. Not that she could ever integrate into the world outside the castle. Even now, almost two years after the incident in Nevenero, the villagers have not forgotten her. They would kill her on sight if she were to go there. Instead, she has created her own solitary habits. She sits on