gestured for Greta to be calm. “Don’t worry, I am not angry, Greta,” she said, her voice gentle, as if she were speaking to a child. “In fact, I would like to ask that we stop this silly bickering and take a moment to welcome my great-granddaughter properly. Do you mind?”
Greta took Dolores’s glass from the mantel, then ours from the table, and distributed them.
“Come, my dear,” Vita said. “Let’s not fight in front of Alberta. Chateau Margaux heals all wounds.”
“My feelings exactly,” Dolores said, taking a glass in hand.
“A toast to Alberta,” Vita said, raising her glass. “Welcome home.”
“To Alberta,” Dolores said. “May you survive this family better than I have.”
We raised our glasses and drank the wine down. For a full minute, we sat by the crackling fire, silent. The tension between us was taut as a wire, as if we were all aware that a monumental act had taken place, yet no one dared acknowledge it. Adrenaline coursed through me as I glanced from Dolores to Vita. I couldn’t be sure Dolores had poured the poison in Vita’s wine—I had not actually seen her do it—but there was no other explanation for the empty vial. I struggled with what I should do. Confront Dolores? Warn Vita? But in the end, I didn’t do either. There wasn’t time. As I struggled to act, there was a great crash. Dolores had fallen to the floor.
As the poison took hold, I understood that Dolores’s plan had backfired. The herbs Sal harvested served their purpose, but Dolores, not Vita, had drank the deadly wine. At first, I couldn’t understand how Dolores could have made such a mistake, but then I saw Greta standing by, doing nothing at all to help Dolores, and I knew: Greta had distributed the glasses. She had exchanged Vita’s glass, making Dolores a victim of her own scheme.
I watched in horror as Dolores’s hands grasped at her throat. “Greta,” I said, my voice a plea and a question, as Dolores gasped for air. “Do something.” But Greta only watched as Dolores writhed before the fire. I knelt by her side, but there was nothing I could do: Dolores’s face flamed red, then drained to a pale gray, and set at last into a deathly stillness. And while I witnessed it all, and knew that Dolores was unquestionably dead, I couldn’t quite believe it. Not her horrid struggle, or the look of satisfaction on Vita’s face as she watched her rival die. Not the workmanlike movements of Greta as she collected the shards of glass and wiped wine from the floor with a cloth. The shock of it all made Dolores’s death unreal. But most horrible of all was the expression that had fixed upon Dolores’s face in death, an expression of betrayal that would remain burned into my memory forever.
Greta helped me to my rooms, where she ran me a bath and left me alone to recover. I sank into the water, trying to wake from the nightmare playing through my mind. One second Dolores had been drinking wine; the next, she was dead. Pressing my cheek against the marble bathtub, I tried to soothe the throbbing in my head.
Vita stood over every memory, returning to me again and again, so that I could almost smell the heavy floral scent of her perfume. I understood why my grandfather had left. I understood why Dolores had wanted her dead. Taking a cake of goat milk soap, I washed my skin until it was raw, but scrub as I might, I couldn’t remove the images from my mind. The crash of the wineglass as Dolores hit the floor. The desperate, dry bark of Dolores’s choking. The smug look of triumph on Vita’s face. And her voice as she said: In your veins, floating through your blood, there is ice.
By the time I got out of the bathtub, it was well after midnight. I put logs on the fire and opened the window wide, so that the night sky stretched before me. Rivers of freezing air filled the room, making the fire flicker and the candles snuff to black. I leaned against the window ledge, bathing in the bright moonlight, looking out over the mountains as Vita had only hours before. The air was sharp, like blades against my skin, and I wondered for a moment if Vita was right, and that I was, deep down, like her.
The cold air had the effect of shocking me out of my disordered