The Ancestor by Danielle Trussoni

Author:Danielle Trussoni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

With Basil’s help, I found Dolores’s rooms. She sat in her wheelchair near the fire and, hearing me at the door, asked Greta to show me in. I stepped into a huge, ornately decorated space, all silks and velvets, the colors bright and clashing. The decor was so different from the dour atmosphere of my rooms, so unexpected, that it felt like finding flowers and lemons in the greenhouse: a bright living thing in the dead of winter.

“Come in, child,” Dolores said, her green eyes fixed upon me. “Come in.”

Greta gave me a strange look, half frightened, half conspiratorial, and I realized she was trying to tell me that she had done it: the keys were back in the mews.

“That will be enough for now, Greta,” Dolores said, dismissing her and turning to me. “It is nearly time for my nap. Would you be so kind? My bed is there, beyond the chinoiserie.”

I steered Dolores between a pair of large oriental vases painted in jeweled colors and into a bedroom that was as Victorian as the salon: heavy brocade silk drapes, the floor covered with oriental carpets, every inch of the walls occupied by oil paintings of flowers. A cut crystal vase near the bed bloomed with pink peonies cut from the greenhouse.

“You look as strong as Greta,” Dolores said, eyeing me from her wheelchair. “Can you manage?”

“I think so,” I said, and after turning back the bed sheets, I slid my arms beneath her—one arm against her back, the other under her butt—and lifted. She was skin and bones against my chest, light as my suitcase, and I deposited her in her bed with ease.

“Would you mind putting some wood onto the fire?” she asked. “The cold creeps in so quickly.”

I took birch logs from a basket and lay them on the dying fire of the kachelofen.

“I’ve come to ask for your help,” I said, all my anger dissolving as I stood before Dolores. She seemed so frail and helpless. “Zimmer was supposed to return, but he hasn’t. Could you authorize Basil to call him?”

“Of course, I would love to help you,” Dolores said. “But it was not I who told Zimmer to stay away.”

“You didn’t?” I asked, perplexed.

Dolores shook her head, fixing me with a dark look. “You will have to speak to Vita. The servants answer to her.”

“But I thought she was . . .” I searched for the right word. “Disabled.”

“Her disabilities have never kept her from controlling the family,” Dolores said. “Her mother, Eleanor, was the only one who kept Vita in check, and while Eleanor died in nineteen forty-two, leaving the estate to her grandson Giovanni, Vita did her best to control things from behind the scenes.”

“But Giovanni was only”—I did the calculation with my grandfather’s year of birth, 1931—“eleven years old in nineteen forty-two.”

“There was a legal guardian installed, a version of Zimmer who managed everything until Giovanni and Guillaume were of age. When I met Guillaume in nineteen seventy-one, Giovanni was long gone and Guillaume ran the estate himself.

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