pleasure, “you, and all the Montebiancos after you, win, too.”
The fire cracked and popped, the heat of it warming my back.
“I want to see her,” I said, determined to speak to Vita myself about Zimmer. “Maybe she will listen to me.”
“That can be arranged,” Dolores said, her gaze settled on me, as if I had come around to the very subject she had been hoping to discuss. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we have a wonderful greenhouse here at the castle.”
“Of course I’ve noticed,” I said. “The citrus trees are amazing.”
“The blood oranges are a great luxury in this climate,” she said, her eyes flashing with a sudden complicity. “A great luxury to be sure. But I’m not interested in citrus trees, my dear. I am much more concerned with what Sal has been cultivating for us.”
I remembered the rows of herbs Sal had harvested, the clipboard and the paper with the Latin words.
“Sal is quite an adept horticulturalist,” Dolores continued. “He has been growing some treasures for me. They are fickle things, even in the best of conditions, and difficult to cultivate at this altitude, or so I am told. But Sal has managed it. Alone, the plants are more or less harmless. Ingest one, and there would be stomach problems and an extended stay in the water closet, perhaps. But together, they form a very powerful poison, one that can eliminate a person altogether, should that person drink it.”
She met my gaze and held it. A tingling grew in my chest, a chilling and horrible sensation as I realized the purpose of the herbs Sal had collected in the greenhouse.
“The only question remaining,” Dolores said, “is when.”
Seventeen
I remember it now, all these years later, as if I were still there, standing in the northeast tower. Everything I had heard said of Vita, all that I had imagined after seeing her portrait in the gallery, everything I had felt upon reading Eleanor’s memoir—nothing prepared me for what I found that night.
She stood near the open window. The moon had risen, and the glow of its light fell over her severe features and white hair. She seemed to swim in her black dress, which was many sizes too big for her. I understood from Eleanor’s memoir that she had no choice but to wear loose clothing—the abnormal formation of her spine and the wide bone structure of her hips made it difficult to wear anything else. The tight silk dress she had worn to sit for her portrait, with its row of shining buttons, must have been—like the beauty of her sixteen-year-old face—a fabrication.
Vita heard us come in, but she continued to stare out the window, her gaze fixed on the mountains, the bone-chilling cold of the Alpine air ruffling her hair. She seemed unaffected, even as I shivered. Greta had carried Dolores up the stairwell and was depositing her on a couch near the fireplace when Vita turned and scanned the room, her eyes sharp and intelligent. In the moonlight from the window, her skin seemed white as chalk, and the pearls around her neck gleamed. She wore large jeweled earrings, just visible through the streams of white hair that fell around her face and tumbled over her shoulders, thick as a shawl.
“Vita,” Dolores said slowly, as if speaking to a child. “Vita, I have brought someone to meet you.”
But Vita knew this already. She had been staring at me for a solid minute. “Please, come in,” she said, gesturing for me to join Dolores near the fireplace. “Sit where it’s warm.” She closed the window and walked to the center of the room. “Will you have some wine?”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling my voice catch in my throat. I don’t know what I had expected, but Vita, with her haunting blue eyes, her frightening pale skin, and her misshapen features, was not it.
I sat across from Dolores on another couch. While Vita went to a cabinet and poured out two glasses of wine from a crystal decanter, I glanced around the room. There was a table stacked high with books, a four-poster bed, a vanity crowded with bottles of perfume, twenty at least, elaborate crystal spray bottles and vaporizers with French labels. There was nothing in her living space that pointed to Vita as the horrid, uncivilized fiend Dolores had described. Or the kind of person who left a dead goat in her antechamber. The most menacing presence in the room was the heavy, floral scent,