asked myself many times,” Basil said. “You read Eleanor’s memoir. You know that Vita’s condition has been the central question of the Montebianco family for generations. I myself have tried to look into it. There is a clue in Eleanor’s memoir, when Eleanor writes about the grandfather of Ambrose, Leopold Montebianco. Do you recall it? She wrote that madness and deformity began to appear in the Montebianco lineage after the time of Leopold.”
Leopold? I thought, taking a deep breath. Which ancestor was Leopold? I tried to recall the family tree, painted on the ceiling of the library. Vita’s parents, Ambrose and Eleanor. Vita’s grandparents, Vittorio and Flora, the woman whose portrait hung outside my room who had died in childbirth. And then Alberta and Amadeo, the prince of Savoy, parents of Leopold. Counting the generations, I calculated that Leopold was my fourth great-grandfather. “What did Leopold do?” I asked.
“It is hard to say, as he didn’t leave much behind. He has been mentioned in various documents in the archives as an amateur naturalist, an eccentric man who made discoveries of some significance in these mountains, but he has largely disappeared from the family records. There is a reference in one of the family catalogs to a field notebook, which I’ve been trying to get my hands on. But that notebook is gone. I have looked through every nook and cranny of this castle for it.”
“What do you think he discovered?” I asked.
“Something extraordinary, from the sound of it,” Basil said.
I remember that evening—Basil and I warm and tipsy near the fire—with a kind of longing, the variety of nostalgia one feels about a singular point in one’s life before everything shifts. Those last moments of ignorance before the telephone rings with bad news, the hour before the baby is born dead, the endless frozen swerve before the car crashes. When I reflected about that night later, it seemed an instance of innocence so pure as to be sacred.
The next morning, I was drinking coffee near the window when I heard the commotion in the courtyard. The dogs were going crazy, their barking high-pitched with panic. I heard Sal call out for Greta, and saw her scurry across the courtyard, joining him at the gate. They were looking at something just beyond, while holding back the dogs.
Luca! I thought. Finally, Luca had come. I had been wrong. He had come for me after all.
I opened the window and shouted at Greta that I was coming down. My biggest fear was that Sal would hurt him. He had shot Dr. Feist, after all, and he had shot me. There was nothing stopping him from shooting Luca, too.
I threw on some clothes and hurried to the corridor, scrambling down the steps as best I could. My leg had healed considerably, but it took nearly five minutes to join them in the courtyard. Everything was a jumble in my mind as I rushed to the gates—all that I had learned about the Montebianco family, my new commitment to adopt a child, our plans to start over. Now that Luca had arrived, all the difficulties that had happened would take on a different meaning—they were the backstory of a new and better future. My strange ancestry would be a puzzle we would solve together, our failing marriage the preamble to a new life. Whatever genetic problems I carried could be studied and overcome. That day would be a new beginning. We would start again, together.
By the time I arrived in the courtyard, however, I knew that these dreams could never happen. The first thing I saw was a pair of leather boots, the laces caked in ice, splayed open over the icy flagstones, followed by a hand, blue gray and mottled with black from frostbite. At last I forced myself to look at Luca’s face, which stared up at me, deformed, stiff and inexpressive. The dogs hadn’t been barking at Luca’s intrusion into the courtyard. They were barking at his corpse.
I threw my crutch aside and fell onto my knees next to him. He had been battered by the elements. His face was swollen, the skin distorted and hard, as if a plastic mask had been laid over his features. I grasped his hand. It was ice-cold, stiff, the fingers frozen through. A swath of skin on his chin was gone entirely, as if ripped away, and his eyelids had frozen open. I stifled a sob. This was my oldest and best friend, my husband,