“Limestone and moss,” Vita said, her eyes fixed on mine. “Quartz and granite. Charred cedar. And ice. In your veins, floating through your blood, there is ice.”
“Vita believes she can smell a Montebianco,” Dolores said, shaking her head. “And while her sense of smell is quite good for an old relic, I do think she is being a bit fanciful.”
Vita turned to Dolores. “And you smell like generations of English peasants. Limitation and barley.”
I sank back into the couch, my heart lodged in my throat, and my palms wet. I desperately wanted to drink my wine.
“Things do get a little primitive around here,” Dolores said. “I daresay one gets used to it.”
I met Dolores’s eyes, and she flicked her gaze to a small vial that lay empty in her palm. I glanced at Vita’s glass sitting on the table nearby. While Vita had been looking at me, and her back was turned, Dolores had poured the poison into her wine. Suddenly, I understood: Dolores had brought me to the northeast tower to distract Vita. I had been used as a decoy.
“Tell me,” Vita said, sitting back in her chair. “How did you come to be here?”
As I told her of the letter that had arrived at my home and my meeting with the estate’s lawyers, Vita listened, expressionless. When I’d finished, she stood and walked to the fireplace, where a portrait of a woman astride a black horse hung above the mantel. The woman had dark, serious eyes; a long, narrow face; and thin, terse lips.
“That is Eleanor,” Dolores explained. “Vita’s mother.”
“I always thought my sons inherited her temperament,” Vita said, giving me a long, searching look. “Did you know my son Giovanni well?”
“I was very young when he died.”
Vita considered this. “And your parents? Are they still living?”
“They are gone, too,” I said.
Vita sighed and sat back down in her chair. “You are alone in the world,” she said. “Like me.” She returned to the fireplace, took a leather-bound book from a pile on the mantel, Emily Dickinson Poetical Works stamped on the spine. She opened the book and read:
A LONG, long sleep, a famous sleep
That makes no show for dawn
By stretch of limb or stir of lid,—
An independent one.
There was sorrow in her voice as she read the words, grief softening her cold, hard features. “A long, long sleep,” she whispered. “That is how I imagine my mother in the mausoleum. It is how I imagine my mother’s mother. And her mother, too. They are all there, sleeping, waiting for me to join them. Just as I will wait for you, and you will wait for your children’s children.”
“It is all well and good to quote verse, Vita,” Dolores said, shooting me a look. “But I can’t imagine that Alberta cares about poetry just now. She’s come a long way and suffered much inconvenience to learn about her family. Now, from what I know of Eleanor, she was a wonderful woman, well educated, and a poet in her own right.”
“It is true,” Vita said ironically. “My mother had a way with words.”
“Indeed she did!” Dolores said. “She was adamant about documenting the history of the Montebianco family, including certain elements that others might have wished to forget. It was Eleanor who brought in a naturalist, if you recall. Quel désastre.”
“Mr. James Pringle was an expert,” Vita said. “My mother had every reason to trust him. He believed our situation was extraordinary. Special. Worthy of study.”
“You know as well as I do,” Dolores said, “that the incident in the village nearly destroyed the entire family. Guillaume carried that burden his entire life. Giovanni left because of it.”
Vita glared at Dolores, her expression tight. Greta, who had been watching from across the room, stepped in front of the fireplace, looking from Dolores to me, as if preparing for a fight. “Madame,” she said, her voice filled with anxiety, “I think we should be going now.”
But Dolores wasn’t finished. “All my life I have cared for you, and I can tell you one thing: you have been nothing but a burden. And before I leave you to Alberta, whose existence you will ruin as surely as you have ruined mine, I want you to know that the Montebianco family will win in the end. They will survive you. You are an aberration, a freak of nature, one that will be overcome.”
“Madame,” Greta said, her voice cracking with anxiety. “Please.”