“This is your fault,” I said, struggling to pull myself up in bed so that I could face her. “You sent Sal after me.”
“It wasn’t time for you to leave,” she said. Her voice was so low I could hardly hear her. “There is too much left to do. You haven’t the slightest idea of your responsibilities or how important you are. It is time for you to learn what must be done. I may not be here much longer to show you.”
“I want to know what we are,” I asked. “What happened to make us . . . like this?”
Vita sat on the bed at my side, her face filled with emotion. “That is not something I can tell you,” she said. “You won’t understand unless I show you. And in order for you to see it, you must be strong. You must heal.” She pulled the covers back from my leg and unwrapped the bandage. “Now, let me see the damage.”
The swelling hadn’t gone down. My thigh was thick, the muscle bursting the skin like cooked sausage. Green pus had seeped everywhere, suppurating at the suture, hardening to a yellow crust beyond.
Vita shook her head, dismayed. “There is something wrong here,” she said. “You aren’t healing as you should. I don’t understand. You are young and strong.” Her eyes fell on the bottle of genepy on the bedside table. Her expression soured. “Did Sal give you this to drink?”
“Greta,” I said. “To help with the pain.”
“Of course. When it comes to ignorance and superstition, you can always rely on Greta and Sal. This,” she said, taking the bottle in hand, “is as toxic as the wine I gave Dolores.” She turned, opened the window, and flung the bottle out. There was a crash of glass as it hit the flagstones of the courtyard below. Vita returned to my bedside, smiling, satisfied. “That takes care of that.”
Cold air had chilled the room. The image of Dolores, poisoned, her face twisted in pain, appeared in my mind.
“Here,” Vita said. She pulled a cloth bag from the bedside and removed a foil of capsules. “These are antibiotics,” she said. “Take them with food.” She pulled out another pack of pills. “These will kill the pain more effectively than genepy,” she said. “But they can be addictive as well, of course. You must only take enough to get you through this. Do not accept anything from Greta. Nothing. Do you understand?”
I took the pills and swallowed them with water.
“I know this is not easy,” Vita said, placing her hand on mine. “But life is not easy for us Montebiancos.”
“I read Eleanor’s memoir,” I said. “I know what you went through.”
Vita’s expression shifted, and she seemed to consider me with more care. “Do you?” Vita asked. “Do you really know what it is like to suffer?”
And in that moment, as we sat together in the candlelight, I almost confessed the one thing I had never told anyone, the secret I had carried with me every day since I lost the last baby. My child, born after many hours of labor, had not died immediately. When the nurse brought him to me, and I held him in my arms, he was alive. His body was small and his head large, and he was covered, as Vita had been, in fine white hair. His feet were wide and flat, with an elongated second hallux (as Dr. Feist had called it) clotted with blood. He stared up at me with large blue eyes, and in the seconds before he died, as he struggled to breathe, he opened his mouth, revealing rows and rows of tiny, sharp teeth.
Twenty-Two
My recovery was slow and painful, the days stretching around me, elastic. Basil came to my room bearing books, bags full of leather-bound classics he chose from the library. Stories became a place of respite, a refuge from the thoughts that swirled through my mind like acid in a stomach. I clung to these books with the same obsessive need I had felt for the genepy, reading them with an addictive greed. George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, the Bront?s. I became lost in these stories the way one might get lost in the hallways of the castle: one minute I knew my way, the next I was subsumed in a cataclysm of darkness. I read Frankenstein many times that winter, enthralled by the tortured monster who climbed through the very Alps that rose outside my window, a creature betrayed and