no longer reminded me of my own, as it had the first time I saw that painting. He reminded me of the Icemen.
I hurried to the very far end of the gallery where the portrait of Vita hung. Pushing aside the curtain, I stepped into the room. Someone had lit the candles, and the nook glowed with light. It was then, as I sat before the portrait of Vita, that I finally examined the book in my hands, the leather-bound journal that had contained the pages of Eleanor’s memoir. It was a thick book, fat with a thousand onionskin pages, and filled—I saw as I pressed open the cover—with handwritten text, sketches of caves, a makeshift map. The cover was battered and the spine warped, as if it had been exposed to the elements. Some of the pages had been damaged by water, leaving washes of streaked and unreadable words. A braid of long, white hair—a shorter version of the braid in the trophy room—had been attached to the back cover with a string. I sifted through the pages, trying to read the barbed cursive, but it was written entirely in French. I could understand three large, bold words on the first page of the book:
NOTES DE TERRAIN
Under these words I found the florid signature of Leopold Montebianco. These were Leopold’s field notes from his years living with the Icemen, the notes that Basil had been searching for.
In all the months I had known Basil, I had never seen his living quarters and didn’t know exactly where they were. I walked through the hallways of the west wing, tapping on doors, hoping to find him. I had almost given up when I heard a record playing—the low call of a trumpet.
I knocked on the door. There was a shuffling, some coughing, and then the door flung open. Basil wore a silk robe and house slippers and a pair of striped pajamas.
“Oh, hello, Countess,” he said, blinking with surprise. “Come in, please, don’t mind the mess. Right this way.”
He led me into his rooms—which were as big as mine—and I found myself pushing through a tidal wave of objects: flowerpots and empty wine bottles, paintings, old curtains. Books, hundreds and hundreds of books. A narrow passage had been made through the debris, winding through records and stacks of cookie boxes and crates of empty glass bottles and tins of prunes and newspapers, everywhere, stacks and stacks of newspapers. From floor to ceiling, everywhere I looked, was junk.
I squeezed my way into the room, pushing aside a steamer trunk to the small cleared space by the fire. Something in my memory clicked: the trunk was the twin of my grandfather Giovanni’s trunk, the one from the newspaper photograph Nonna had shown me. The fact that he had lived here as a young man struck me with renewed force. Everywhere I went, Giovanni had been before me.
Basil whisked a stack of records off a chair and waved for me to sit. The records were all jazz. The album on the record player: Miles Davis’s Blue Haze.
“I know what you are going to say,” Basil said, pushing a pile of papers off another chair so he could sit. “I need to make a wider path from the doorway.” He bit his lip, looking embarrassed and defiant at once. “And I plan to do that, as soon as I organize that . . .”
He pointed to a stack of leather boots in a corner. They were worn, with holes in the soles and mud on the laces. “Are those Sal’s boots?” I asked.
“And Bernadette’s and Greta’s as well,” he said. “They go through them faster than you’d imagine.”
I glanced back to Basil, who was fiddling with his mustache. I understood, suddenly, why Basil had not left the castle. He had hoarded piles and piles of objects and now he couldn’t bear to abandon them. He was a prisoner of his compulsions. No one was keeping him there but himself.
I gave him the pages from Eleanor’s journal. “I wanted to show you this.”
Basil took the pages, a look of astonishment growing as he read them. “This would certainly explain a few things.” He gave me back the pages. “If, that is, this account is true.”
“You think Eleanor could have made all of this up?”
Basil shrugged. “Well, clearly Eleanor believed it. But this account is not exactly firsthand knowledge. Her husband, Ambrose, told her the story of Leopold and the Icemen. Ambrose was dying. He could have