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The Savage Garden
Mark Mills


The No.1 bestselling novel and Richard & Judy Summer Read: a haunting tale of murder, love and lost innocence for fans of Carlos Ruiz Zafon and Jed RubenfeldBehind a villa in the heart of Tuscany lies a Renaissance garden of enchanting beauty. Its grottoes, pagan statues and classical inscriptions seem to have a secret life of their own – and a secret message, too, for those with eyes to read it.Young scholar Adam Strickland is just such a person. Arriving in 1958, he finds the Docci family, their house and the unique garden as seductive as each other. But post-War Italy is still a strange, even dangerous place, and the Doccis have some dark skeletons hidden away which Adam finds himself compelled to investigate.Before this mysterious and beautiful summer ends, Adam will uncover two stories of love, revenge and murder, separated by 400 years… but is another tragedy about to be added to the villa's cursed past?







THE

SAVAGE

GARDEN










MARK MILLS















CONTENTS


Dedication

Epigraph

August 1958

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Sample from House of the Hanged (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Praise

Also by Mark Mills

Copyright

About the Publisher




Dedication


For Caroline, Gus and Rosie




Epigraph


We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets




August 1958


Later, when it was over, he cast his thoughts back to that sun-struck May day in Cambridge – where it had all begun – and asked himself whether he would have done anything differently, knowing what he now did.

It was not a question easily answered.

He barely recognized himself in the carefree young man cycling along the towpath beside the river, bucking over the ruts, the bottle of wine dancing around in the bike basket.

Try as he might, he couldn’t penetrate the workings of that stranger’s mind, let alone say with any certainty how he would have dealt with the news that murder lay in wait for him, just around the corner.




1







He was known, primarily, for his marrows.

This made him a figure of considerable suspicion to the ladies of the Horticultural Society, who, until his arrival on the scene, had vied quite happily amongst themselves for the most coveted award in the vegetable class at their annual show. The fact that he was a newcomer to the village no doubt fuelled their resentments; that he lived alone with a ‘housekeeper’ some years younger than himself, a woman whose cast of countenance could only be described as ‘oriental’, permitted them to bury the pain of defeat in malicious gossip.

That first year he carried off the prize, I can recall Mrs Meade and her cronies huddled together at the back of the marquee, like cows before a gathering storm. I can also remember the vicar, somewhat the worse for wear after an enthusiastic sampling of the cider entries, handing down his verdict on the marrow category. With an air of almost lascivious relish, he declared Mr Atherton’s prodigious specimen to be ‘positively tumescent’ (thereby reinforcing my own suspicions about the good reverend).

Mr Atherton, tall, lean, and slightly stooped by his seventy-some years, approached the podium without the aid of his walking stick. He graciously accepted the certificate (and the bottle of elderflower cordial that accompanied it) then returned to his chair. I happened to be seated beside him that warm, blustery afternoon, and while the canvas snapped in the wind and the vicar slurred his way through a heartfelt tribute to all who had submitted Victoria sponges, Mr Atherton inclined his head towards me, a look of quiet mischief in his eyes.

‘Do you think they’ll ever forgive me?’ he muttered under his breath.

I knew exactly who he was talking about.

‘Oh, I doubt it,’ I replied, ‘I doubt it very much.’

These were the first words we had ever exchanged, though it was not the first time I had elicited a smile from him. Earlier that summer, I had caught him observing me with an amused expression from beneath a Panama hat. He had been seated in a deck chair on the boundary of the cricket pitch, and a burly, lower-order batsman from Droxford had just hit me for six three times in quick succession, effectively sealing yet another ignoble defeat for the Hambledon 2nd XI.

Adam turned the sheet over, expecting to read on. The page was blank. ‘That’s it?’ he asked.

‘Evidently,’ said Gloria. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s good.’

‘Good? “Good ” is like “nice ”. “Good ” is what mothers say about children who don’t misbehave. Boring children! For God’s sake, Adam, this is my novel we’re talking about.’

Probably best not to mention the over-zealous use of commas.

‘Very good. Excellent,’ he said.

Gloria pouted a wary forgiveness, her breasts straining against the material of her cotton print dress as she leaned towards him. ‘It’s just the opening, but it’s intriguing, don’t you think?’

‘Intriguing. Yes. Very mysterious. Who is this Mr Atherton with the prodigious marrows?’

‘Ah-ha!’ she trumpeted. ‘You see? Page one and you’re already asking questions. That’s good.’

He raised an eyebrow at her choice of adjective but she didn’t appear to notice.

‘Who do you think he is? Or, more to the point: What do you think he is?’

She was losing him now. The wine wasn’t helping, unpalatably warm in the afternoon heat, a wasp buzzing forlornly around the neck of the bottle.

‘I really don’t know.’

Gloria swept the wasp aside with the back of her hand and filled her glass, topping up Adam’s as an afterthought.

‘He’s a German spy,’ she announced.

‘A German spy?’

‘That’s right. You see, it’s wartime – 1940, to be precise – and while the Battle of Britain rages in the skies above a small Hampshire village, an altogether different battle is about to unfold on the ground. As above –’

‘– so below’

Were they really quoting Hermes Trismegistus at each other over this?

‘And who or what is Herr Atherton spying on?’ he persevered, regretting the question almost immediately.

‘A secret submarine base in Portsmouth harbour.’

So this was where two years of English literature studies had led her, all that Beowulf and Chaucer, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: to a secret sub marine base in Portsmouth harbour.

‘What?’ demanded Gloria warily.

‘I was just thinking,’ he lied, ‘that your narrator’s a man. Unless she’s a woman who happens to play cricket for the village team.’

‘So?’

‘It’s a challenge, I imagine, writing a male narrator.’

‘You don’t think I’m up to it?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Four brothers,’ she said, holding up three fingers. ‘And it’s not as if you’re the first chap I’ve ever stepped out with.’

This was a truth she liked to assert from time to time, dishing out unsavoury details to drive home her point, although she was too angry for that right now.

She tossed the remainder of her wine away, the liquid crescent flopping into the tall grass. She got to her feet a little unsteadily. ‘I’m going.’

‘Don’t,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘Stay’

‘You hate it.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘I know what you’re thinking.’

‘You’re wrong. I could be jailed for what I’m thinking.’

It was a crass play, but he knew her vulnerability to that kind of talk. Besides, this was the reason they’d skipped their lectures and come to the meadow, was it not?

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, capitalizing on her faint smile, ‘I suppose I’m just jealous.’

‘Jealous?’

‘I couldn’t do it, I know that. It’s great. Really. It hooked me instantly. The drunken vicar’s a great touch.’

‘You like him?’

‘A lot.’

Gloria allowed herself to be drawn back down on to the blanket, into their sunken den, out of sight of the river towpath where the stubby willows bristled.

His fingers charted a lazy yet determined course along the inside of her dove-white thigh, the flesh warm and yielding, like new dough.

She leaned towards him and kissed him, forcing her tongue between his lips.

He tasted the cheap white wine and felt himself stir under her touch. His hand moved to her breasts, his thumb brushing over her nipples, the way she liked it.

Sexual favours in return for blanket praise. Was it really that simple?

He checked his thoughts, guilty that his mind was straying from the matter in hand.

He needn’t have worried.

‘You know,’ said Gloria, breaking free and drawing breath, ‘I think I’ll give Mr Atherton a granddaughter. My hero needs to lose his heart.’



The note was waiting for him in his pigeonhole when he returned to college. He recognized the handwriting immediately. It was the same barely legible scrawl that adorned his weekly essays. The note read:

Dear Mr Strickland,

Apologies for making this demand upon your busy schedule, but there is a matter I should like to discuss with you regarding your thesis.

Shall we say 5 p.m. today in my office at the faculty? (That’s the large stone building at the end of Trumpington Street, in case you’ve forgotten.)

Warm regards

Professor Leonard

Adam glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes to get across town. The bath would have to wait.



Professor Crispin Leonard was something of an institution, not just within the faculty but the university as a whole. Although well into his seventies, he was quite unlike his elderly peers, who only emerged from their gloomy college rooms at mealtimes, or so it seemed, shuffling in their threadbare gowns to and from the dining hall across velvet lawns whose sacred turf it was their privilege to tread. Few knew what these aged characters did (or had ever done) to justify the sinecure of a college fellowship. Authorship of a book, one book, any book, appeared to suffice, even if the value of that work had long since been eclipsed. For whatever reason, they were deemed to have paid their dues, and in return the colleges offered them a comfortable dotage unencumbered by responsibilities.

Professor Leonard was cut from a far tougher cloth. He lectured and supervised in three subjects, he continued to offer his services as a college tutor, and he remained involved in a number of societies, some of which he had also founded. And all this while still finding time not only to write but to be published. By any standards it was a remarkable workload, and one he appeared to shoulder quite effortlessly.

How did he manage it? He never hurried and was never late; he just loped about like a well-fed cat, giving off an air of slight distraction, as if his mind was always on higher things.

He was deep in slumber when Adam entered his office. The first knock didn’t rouse him, and when Adam poked his head around the door and saw him slumped in an armchair, a book on his lap, he knocked again, louder this time.

Professor Leonard stirred, taking his bearings, taking in Adam. ‘I’m sorry, I must have nodded off.’ He closed the book and laid it aside. Adam noted that it was one of the professor’s own works, on the sculpture of Mantegna.

‘No court in the land would convict you.’

Professor Leonard invited irreverence, he actively encouraged it, but for a moment Adam feared he had overstepped the mark.

‘That might be funnier, Mr Strickland, if you’d ever bothered to read my book on Mantegna. Which reminds me – how is your serve?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Well, the last time I saw you, you were cycling down King’s Parade in something of a hurry. You were gripping two tennis rackets, and the young lady riding side-saddle was gripping you.’

‘Oh.’

‘Has it improved?’

‘Improved?’

‘Your serve, Mr Strickland. We would all feel so much happier if you at least had something else to show for your absence.’

‘I work hard,’ bleated Adam. ‘I work late.’

Professor Leonard reached for some papers stacked on the side table next to his chair. ‘Since you’re here, you might as well take this now’ He flipped through the pile and pulled out Adam’s essay. ‘I probably marked you lower than I should have done.’

‘Oh,’ said Adam, a little put out.

‘Thinking about it, you might have had more of a point than I credited you with at first.’

‘Which point was that?’

‘Don’t flatter yourself, Mr Strickland. To my knowledge – and I read it twice – you only made one point. The others were lifted straight from the books I suggested you read.’ He raised a long, bony finger. ‘And some I didn’t suggest…which, I grant you, displays more initiative than most.’

He handed the essay over.

‘We’ll discuss it at greater length another time. Now, your thesis. Have you had any further thoughts?’

Adam had flirted with a couple of ideas – Islamic icon ography in Romanesque architecture, the use of line in early Renaissance drawing – but the professor would recognize them for what they were: lazy speculations on some well-trodden fields of study. No, best to keep quiet.

‘Not really’

‘You still have a year, of course, but it’s advisable to start applying yourself now, certainly if you wish to show us something of your true colours. Do you, Mr Strickland?’

‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘Of course.’

‘How’s your Italian?’

‘Okay Rusty’

‘Good, then I might have something for you.’

The professor explained that he had recently been contacted by an old acquaintance of his. Signora Docci, the lady in question, was the owner of a large villa in the hills of Tuscany, just south of Florence. ‘An impressive, if somewhat pedestrian, example of High Renaissance Tuscan vernacular,’ was how the professor described the architecture of the building. He saved his praise for the garden, not the formal arrangement of Renaissance terraces abutting the villa, but a later Mannerist addition occupying a sunken grove nearby. Conceived and laid out by a grieving husband to the memory of his dead wife, this plunging patch of woodland was fed by a spring and modelled on Roman gardens of the period, with meandering pathways and rills, statues, inscriptions and neoclassical structures.

‘It’s a very unusual place,’ the professor said. ‘Extremely arresting.’

‘You know it?’

‘I did, some years ago. It has never been altered -which is rare – and I know for a fact that no proper study has ever been conducted of it. Which is where you come in, if you want to, that is. Signora Docci has kindly offered it as a subject for one of my students.’

Mannerist was bad, too overblown for Adam’s taste, and he’d have to do a lot of reading up. Italy, on the other hand, was good, very good.

‘Maybe a garden isn’t quite what you had in mind, but don’t dismiss it…Art and Nature coming together to create a whole new entity – a third nature, if you will’

Adam didn’t require any more encouragement. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes please.’




2







Exams were upon them before they knew it, and gone just as quickly. They celebrated, got drunk, punted off to Grantchester with picnics, danced at college balls and hurled themselves fully clothed into the river – memories irreparably tarnished for Adam by Gloria’s decision to end their relationship on the last night of term. The situation was non-negotiable and, true to character, Gloria made no attempt to feign a remorse she clearly didn’t feel. She did manage, however, to offer him one scrap of consolation: as he would no longer be coming to stay at her family’s pile in Scotland, he would be spared the maddening attentions of the summer midges.

‘Cattle have been known to hurl themselves off cliffs because of the midges.’

These were her last words to him before he stormed out on her, slamming the door behind him.

The following day everyone trickled back to their real lives. For Adam, this was a faceless suburb to the south of London, and a Tudor-style villa with Elizabethan yearnings. Thrown up just after the war, the house only existed because a German air crew had taken one look at the lethal hail of flak over the city and promptly jettisoned their payload before running for home.

Adam and his brother had once dug a trench at the end of the garden – the first line of defence against invasion by some imagined enemy force – only to find themselves unearthing the remains of the terraced houses that had previously occupied the plot. Harry had taken those fragments of brick and tile and glass, sinking them in plaster of Paris, producing a mosaic in the shape of a house: the first tell-tale sign of his calling that Adam could recall.

Adam searched out old friends from the neighbourhood. They drank beer together in the garden of the Stag and Hounds, trading stories and trying their best to ignore the inescapable truth – that the ties that once bound them were loosening by the year and might soon be gone altogether.

His mother was delighted to have him home and keen to show it, which usually meant she was unhappy. Whenever she smothered him with affection, he had the uneasy sensation she was using him as a rod with which to beat his father: You see what you’re missing out on? His father was more withdrawn than ever, and not best pleased. He had wanted Adam to give the summer over to work-experience – a placement with an acquaintance of his at the Baltic Exchange. It was a wise thing to develop a working knowledge of the Baltic Exchange before a career in marine insurance at Lloyd’s. It was a wise thing to do, because that’s exactly what he himself had done. In the end, though, he conceded defeat.

The arrangements had gone without a hitch: a letter to Signora Docci, her reply (typed and in impeccable English) saying that she had secured a room for him at a pensione in the local town. Aside from rustling up a bit of funding for Adam from within the History of Art Department, Professor Leonard had not needed to involve himself. He did, however, suggest that Adam meet up with him in town before leaving for the Continent.

The proposed venue was a grand stone building close by Cannon Street station in the City Adam had never heard of the Worshipful Company of Skinners, although he wasn’t unduly surprised to discover that the professor was associated with a medieval guild whose history reached back seven centuries. They passed through panelled chambers en route to the roof terrace, where they took lunch beneath an even layer of cloud like a moth-eaten blanket, the sun slanting through at intervals and picking out patches of the city.

They ate beef off the bone and drank claret.

The professor had come armed with a bundle of books and articles for Adam’s mental edification.

‘Read these right through,’ he said, handing over copies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti. ‘The rest are for reference purposes. You’ll find the family has an impressive library, which I’m sure you’ll be given access to.’ The professor was reluctant to say any more about the garden – ‘You don’t want me colouring your judgement’ – although he was happy to share some other background with Adam.

Signora Docci lived alone at Villa Docci, her husband having died some years before. Her eldest son Emilio was also dead, killed towards the end of the war by the Germans who had occupied the villa. There was another son, Maurizio, soon to take over the estate, as well as a dissolute daughter, Caterina, who now lived in Rome.

The rest of lunch was spent talking about the professor’s imminent trip to France. He was off to view the Palaeolithic cave paintings at Lascaux – his third visit since their chance discovery by a group of local boys back in 1940. He recalled his frustration at having to wait five years for the war to end before making his first pilgrimage. Thirteen years on, he felt it was now possible to trace the influence of that primitive imagery on the work of contemporary artists. In fact, it was to be the subject of an article, and possibly even a book.

‘Europe’s greatest living painters drawing inspiration from its oldest known painters, seventeen thousand years on. If that isn’t art history, I don’t know what is.’

‘No.’

‘You don’t have to humour me, you know’

‘Of course I do,’ said Adam. ‘You’re buying lunch.’

Later, when they parted company out on the street, the professor said, ‘Francesca…Signora Docci…she’s old now, and frail by all accounts. But don’t under estimate her.’

‘What do you mean?’

Professor Leonard hesitated, glancing off down the street. ‘I’m not sure I rightly know, but it’s sound advice.’

As Adam sat slumped and slightly inebriated in the deserted carriage on the train journey back to Purley, he was left with the uneasy sensation that the professor’s parting warning had been the true purpose of their meeting.



A week later, Adam was gone. He changed trains in Paris, aware that this was as far south as he had ever travelled in his life. On Professor Leonard’s advice, he slipped some francs to the guard and was allotted a spare sleeping compartment to himself.

He didn’t sleep. He tossed in the darkness, France rattling by beneath him, and he thought (far more than he would have liked) of Gloria and of the look on her face when she had said to him, ‘I don’t know why. I think maybe it’s because you’re a touch boring.’

He might have been less stung if they hadn’t just made love. Twice.

‘Boring?’

‘No, not boring, that’s unfair. Bland.’

‘Bland?’

‘No.’

‘What, then?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it. I can’t think of a word.’

Great. He was a category unto himself – a unique cat egory indefinable by words but falling somewhere between ‘boring’ and ‘bland’.

He had lost his temper, hurling a pillow across the room and swearing at her. He could still recall every moment of the long walk back to his own college, creeping down the staircase from her rooms, stepping through the pale dawn of Trinity Great Court, the bittersweet taste of self-pity rendering him immune to the daggered look from the porter on duty in the lodge.

Pathetic, really, when looked at from a distance, from the darkened sleeping compartment of a train hurtling through the French night, for example. He tried to stem the flow of his thoughts, or at least divert their course. When he failed, he turned on the light and worked on his Italian grammar.

Dawn rose, bringing with it the barely discernible mass of a steep Alpine valley. A few hours later, they were free of the mountains.

All he saw of Milan was the Fascist splendour of the Stazione Centrale as he hurried between platforms to make his connecting train. He was aware of the heat and the smell of unfamiliar tobacco, but not much else. He briefly glimpsed Shelley’s ‘waveless plain of Lombardy’ before nodding off.

A deep and dreamless sleep carried him all the way to Florence, where he was woken brusquely by the guard, who talked at him in a language quite unlike the Italian he’d learned at school and recently brushed up on. Ejected on to the platform, it certainly wasn’t the kind of reception he’d been led to believe he might receive in Italy.

He found a pensione on Piazza Santa Maria Novella, a short walk from the station. The owner informed him that he was in luck; a room had just fallen vacant. It was easy to see why. Adam made a speculative survey of the dismal little box in the roof and told himself it was only for one night.

He stripped off his shirt and lay on the sagging mattress, smoking a cigarette, unaccustomed to the humidity pressing down on the city Was this normal? If so, why had no one thought to mention it? Or the mosquitoes, for that matter. They speckled the ceiling, waiting for night to fall and the feast to begin.

He squeezed himself into the shower room at the end of the corridor and allowed the trickle of water to cool him off. It was a temporary measure. His fresh shirt was lacquered to his chest by the time he’d descended four flights of stairs to the lobby.

The storm broke as he stepped from the building, the sharp crack of thunder echoing around the piazza, the deluge following moments later as the amethyst clouds deposited their load. He stood beneath the awning, watching the raindrops dancing on the road. Water sheeted down from overflowing gutters; drain holes were lost to sight beneath spreading pools of water. And still the rain came, constant, unvarying in its strength. When it ceased, it ceased suddenly and completely.

A church bell struck half past the hour, and immediately people began to appear from the shelter of doorways around the piazza – almost as if the two events were connected, the bell alerting the inhabitants of the quarter to the passing of danger, as it had always done. The sun burst from behind the departing slab of cloud. It hit hard, flashing off the steaming flagstones.

Scuttling figures skipped over puddles, hurrying to make up for lost time. Adam joined their ranks, map in hand, heading south out of the piazza. In Via dei Fossi rainwater still streamed from jutting eaves high overhead, driving pedestrians off the pavements into the road, forcing them to do battle with squadrons of scooters and cars. The narrow street filled with the sound of horns and curses, the cacophony played out with leaps and bounds and wild gesticulations, the distant rumble of the departing storm like a low kettledrum roll underscoring the deranged opera.

A twinge of anxiety stiffened his stride, though not at the chaos unfolding around him. He knew the city intimately, but only from books. What if he was disappointed? What if Florence’s ‘unique cultural and artistic heritage’, which he’d detailed in his essays with such hollow authority, left him cold? As if on cue, he found himself on a bridge spanning the River Arno – no lively, sparkling torrent, but a strip of brown and turbid water, a river fit for a factory district.

Five minutes later he reached his destination, and his apprehension melted away. The Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine was deserted when he entered it, and it remained so for the next quarter of an hour. Michelangelo and Raphael had both come here to study, to copy, to learn from the young man who had changed the face of European painting: Tommaso Guidi, nicknamed Masaccio by his friends, the scruffy boy-wonder, dead at twenty-seven. Others had contributed to the same cycle of frescoes – Masolino, Fra Lippo Lippi, names to be reckoned with – but their work was flat, lifeless, when set alongside that of Masaccio.

His figures demanded to be heard, to be believed in; some even threatened to step out of the walls and shake the doubters into credence. Real men, not ciphers. And real women. His depiction of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden required no context in order to be appreciated. More than five hundred years on, it still struck home: the fallen couple, with their bare, rough-hewn limbs, granite hard from toil, cast out like country labourers by some unforgiving landlord. Adam’s face was buried in his hands, a broken man. Eve covered her nakedness in shame, but her face was raised, crying out to the heavens. All the anger, frustration and incomprehension in the world seemed contained within that gaping, shapeless hole Masaccio had given her for a mouth.

The more Adam stared at the image, the more he saw, and the less he understood. A definition of true art? He was still cringing at his own pomposity when a couple entered the chapel.

They were French. His thick dark hair was oiled back into two symmetrical wings that protruded a short distance from the forehead. She was extremely slender, quite unlike Masaccio’s Eve, or maybe as Eve would have looked some years after her banishment from the bounty of Eden – pinched and emaciated.

‘Good afternoon,’ said the Frenchman in accented English, looking up from his guidebook.

It rankled that he was so readily identifiable, not just as a fellow tourist but an Englishman.

‘American?’ asked the Frenchman.

‘English.’

The word came out wrong – barked, indignant – a parody of Anglo-Saxon self-importance. The couple exchanged the faintest of amused glances, which only annoyed him more.

He looked at the man’s perfectly coiffed hair and wondered just how distressing that flash downpour must have been for him. Or maybe the oil helped; maybe it assisted run-off.

He only realized he was staring when the Frenchman shifted nervously and said, ‘Yes…?’

Adam gestured to the frescoes. ‘Las pinturas son muy hermosas,’ he said in his best Spanish.

As he left the chapel, abandoning the couple to Masaccio’s genius, he wondered whether his antagonism towards them owed itself to their interruption of his experience, or whether the work itself had somehow unleashed it in him.




3







Has the Englishman arrived yet?

No, Signora.

When?

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow?

That’s what he said in his letter. The twelfth.

I wish to see him as soon as he gets here.

You’ve already said, Signora. You won’t forget?

Why would I forget? Move a little to the side, please.

Gently. Don’t push.

I’m sorry. Turn over, please.

You don’t have to do this, Maria.

I know.

I’m happy to hire someone else.

You really expect me to cook and clean for someone else?

You’re a good woman.

Thank you, Signora.

Just as your father was a good man.

He had the highest respect for you too, Signora.

There’s really no need to be quite so formal, not when you’re giving me a bed-bath.

He had the highest respect for you too.

You know, Maria, I believe you’re in danger of developing a sense of humour in your old age.

Turn over, please.




4







They left Florence through the Porta Romana, heading south to Galluzzo, where they wound their way up into the hills past a sprawling Carthusian monastery.

The climbing road was flanked by olive groves, neat rows of trees laid out in terraces, their foliage flashing silver in the sunlight. Vineyards and stands of umbrella pines studded the hillside. Every so often, an avenue of dark cypresses indicated a track leading to some isolated farmhouse, which invariably was also guarded by a small cohort of the tall, tapering conifers. Apart from the tarmac road along which they were travelling, there was little to suggest the passing centuries had wrought any meaningful change on the tapestried landscape.

Adam lounged in his seat, taking in the view, the cooling breeze from the open window washing over him, ruffling his hair. The taxi driver was still talking nineteen to the dozen despite Adam’s earlier confession that most of the words were lost on him. Every now and then Adam would catch the man’s eye in the rear-view mirror and grunt and nod his assent – an arrangement that seemed to work to the complete satisfaction of both parties.

When the road levelled out he turned and peered through the rear window, searching for a glimpse of Florence. The city was lost to view behind the tumble of hills rolling in from the south. Somehow it seemed appropriate; she was hiding herself, even now.

All morning he had walked her streets, the stone chasms hacked into her, grid-like. Her buildings were no more welcoming – the palaces of rusticated stone, modelled on fortresses (or so it seemed); the churches with their unadorned exteriors, many sheathed in black-and-white marble; the museums housed in all manner of forbidding structures. And yet, behind those austere façades lay any number of riches.

Adam had chosen carefully, almost mathematically, limited as he was by the short time at his disposal. There had been disappointments, acclaimed works which had left him feeling strangely indifferent. But as the taxi worked its way higher into the hills, he consoled himself with the knowledge that it had been a first foray, a swift reconnaissance. There would be plenty of opportunities to return.



San Casciano sat huddled on a high hill, dominating the surrounding countryside. Its commanding position had largely determined the course of its history, apparently, although the entry in Adam’s guidebook made no mention of the last siege the town had been forced to endure. Even as the taxi approached, it was evident that the ancient walls girdling the town had not been constructed to withstand an assault by the kind of weaponry available to the Allies and the Germans.

These weren’t the first scars of war Adam had witnessed. Even Florence, declared an ‘open city’ by both sides out of respect for her architectural significance, had suffered. As the Allies swept up from the south, the Germans had dug in, blowing all but one of the city’s historic bridges. They may have spared the Ponte Vecchio, but this consideration came at a price. The buildings flanking the river in the vicinity of the bridge were mined, medieval towers and Renaissance palaces reduced to rubble, the field cleared for the forthcoming battle. As it was, the Allied troops had simply crossed the Arno elsewhere on makeshift Bailey bridges and swiftly liberated the town.

Years on, the wound inflicted right in the heart of the old city remained raw and open. If efforts had been made to restore those lost streets to their former glory, it was not evident. Modern structures with smooth faces and clean sharp lines stood out along the river’s southern frontage, like teenagers in a queue of pensioners. The very best you could say was that the space had been filled.

In San Casciano that work was still going on. The town was pockmarked with the ruins of bomb-damaged buildings left to lie where they’d fallen. Impressively, Nature had reclaimed what she could in these plots. Young trees sprouted defiantly; shrubs had somehow detected enough moisture in piles of old stones to put down roots and prosper; weeds and ferns sprang from crevices in crumbling walls. The bland new concrete edifices that studded the historic centre were further evidence of the severe pounding the town had taken.

The Pensione Amorini had been spared. One part of the ancient vine clinging to its scaling stucco façade had been trained over a pergola, which shaded a terrace out front, overflow for the bar and trattoria occupying the ground floor. Signora Fanelli was expecting him – he had phoned ahead from Florence – and she summoned her teenage son from a back room to help with Adam’s bags.

‘Oofa,’ said Iacopo as he tested the weight of both suitcases. He left the heaviest – the one containing the books – for Adam to lug upstairs.

The room was far more than he had hoped for. Large and light, it had a floor of polished deep-red tiles, a beamed ceiling and two windows giving on to a leafy garden out back. It was furnished with the bare essentials: a wrought-iron bed, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. As requested, there was also a desk, though no chair, which brought a sharp rebuke from Signora Fanelli.

Iacopo skulked off in search of one, his parting glance holding Adam to blame for this public humiliation. He returned with the chair and disappeared again while Signora Fanelli was still demonstrating the idiosyncrasies of the bathroom plumbing to Adam.

Adam declared the room to be ‘perfetto’.

‘Perfetta,’ she corrected him. ‘Una camera perfetta.’

She relieved him of his passport, flashed him a smile and left. Only her perfume remained – a faint scent of roses hanging lightly in the air.

He hefted his suitcase on to the worm-eaten chest at the end of the bed and began to unpack. She must have had the boy young – seventeen, eighteen – though you’d have said even younger judging by her looks. For some reason he’d pictured an elderly woman, small in stature and of no mean girth. Instead, he was being housed by a stringier version of Gina Lollobrigida in Trapeze.

It was a pleasing thought.

Another image from the same film barged its way into his head unbidden – Burt Lancaster’s over-muscled physique squeezed into a leotard – and the moment passed.



The road to Villa Docci proved to be a dusty white track following the crest of a high spur to the north of town. It rose and fell past ochre-washed farmhouses, hay meadows giving way to olive groves and vineyards tucked behind high hedgerows ablaze with honeysuckle, mallow and blood-red poppies. His mother would have been thrilled, stopping every so often to call his attention to some plant or flower. That was her way. But all Adam was aware of was the mocking chant of the cicadas pulsing in time to the pitiless heat.

He was about to turn back, convinced that he’d made a mistake, when he saw two weathered stone gateposts up ahead. Beyond them an avenue of ancient cypresses climbed sharply towards a large villa, the trunks of the trees powdered white with dust thrown up from the driveway. There was no sign beside the gateposts, but a quick glance at the hand-drawn map Signora Docci had sent him confirmed that he had at last arrived.

Nearing the top of the driveway he stopped, uncertain, sensing something. He turned, glancing back down the gradient, the plunging perspective of the flanking cypresses.

Something not right. But what? He couldn’t say. And he was too hot to ponder it further.

The cypresses gave way to a gravel turning area in front of the villa. There were some farm buildings away to his left, down the slope, beyond a stand of holm oaks, but his attention was focused on the main structure.

How had Professor Leonard described the architecture of the villa? Pedestrian?

Admittedly, his own knowledge of the subject was drawn almost exclusively from a battered copy of Edith Wharton’s book on Italian villas, but there seemed to be nothing whatsoever run-of-the-mill about the building in front of him. Though not as large or obviously grand as some, its symmetry and proportions lent it an air of discreet nobility, majesty even.

Set around three sides of a flagstone courtyard, it climbed three floors to a shallow, tiled roof with projecting eaves. Arcaded loggias occupied the middle and upper storeys of the front façade, while the wings consisted of blind arcades with pedimented and consoled windows. There was not much more to it than that, but every detail of it worked.

The building felt no need to proclaim its pedigree; rather, it exuded it like a well-cut suit. You were left in little doubt that the hand of some master lay behind its conception – long-dead, unrecognized, forgotten. For if one of the more illustrious architects of the period had been responsible for bringing it into being, that fact would have been preserved in the historical record. As it was, he had found almost no references to Villa Docci during his preliminary research.

He skirted the well-head in the middle of the courtyard and mounted the front steps. There was a stone escutcheon set in the wall above the entrance door, a rampant boar the centrepiece of the Docci coat of arms. He tugged on the iron bell pull.

She must have been observing him from inside, waiting for him to make his approach, for the door swung open almost immediately. She was short and stout, and she was wearing a white blouse tucked into a black skirt. Her dark eyes reached for his and held them, vice-like.

‘Good morning,’ he said in Italian.

‘Good afternoon.’

‘I’m Adam Strickland.’

‘You’re late.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

She stepped aside, allowing him to enter, appraising him with a purposeful eye as if he were a horse she was thinking of betting on (and leaving him with the distinct impression that she wouldn’t be reaching for her purse any time soon).

‘Signora Docci wishes to see you.’

At either end of the long entrance hall was a stone stairway leading to the upper floors. When she made for the one on the left, Adam fell in beside her.

‘May I have a glass of water, please?’

‘Water? Yes, of course.’ She changed tack, heading for a corridor beside the staircase. ‘Wait here,’ she said.

He didn’t mind. It allowed him to cast an eye around the interior. Any suspicions that the quiet elegance of the villa’s exterior owed itself to little more than chance vanished immediately. You sensed the same poised hand at work in the proportions of the vast drawing room that occupied the central section of the ground floor, giving on to a balustraded terrace out back. The flanking rooms were connected by a run of doorways, perfectly aligned, which generated a telescopic sense of perspective and permitted an uninterrupted view from one end of the villa to the other.

Adam retreated at the sound of approaching footsteps, not wishing to be caught snooping by the maid, or the housekeeper, or whatever she was.



Signora Docci lay propped up on a bank of pillows in a four-poster bed of dark wood, reading. She inclined her head towards the door as they entered, peering over the top of her spectacles.

‘Adam,’ she said, smiling broadly.

‘Hello.’

‘Thank you, Maria.’

Maria acknowledged the dismissal with a nod, pulling the door closed behind her as she left.

Signora Docci gestured for Adam to approach the bed. ‘Please, it’s not contagious, just old age.’ She laid her book aside and smiled again. ‘Well, maybe it is contagious.’

Her hair hung loose, tumbling like a silver wave around her shoulders. It seemed too long, too thick, for a woman of her advanced years. A tracery of fine lines lay like a veil across her face, but the flesh was firm, shored up by the prominent bones beneath. Her eyes were dark and wide-spaced.

He extended his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

They shook, her grip firm and bony.

‘Please.’ She indicated a high-backed chair near the bed. ‘I’m glad you’re finally here. Maria has been fussing around for days, tidying and cleaning.’

It was hard to picture: stern, monosyllabic Maria preparing for his arrival.

‘She is a good person. She will let you see that when she’s ready to.’

He was slightly unnerved that she’d read the thought in his face.

‘So, how was your trip?’

‘Good. Long.’

‘Did you stop in Paris?’

‘No.’

‘Milan?’

‘Just Florence. And only for a night.’

‘One night in Florence,’ she mused. ‘It sounds like the title of a song.’

‘Not a very good one.’

Signora Docci gave a short, sharp laugh. ‘No,’ she conceded.

Adam took a letter from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. ‘From Professor Leonard.’

She laid the letter beside her on the bed. He noted that her hand remained resting on it.

‘And how is Crispin?’ she asked.

‘He’s in France at the moment, looking at some cave paintings.’

‘Cave paintings?’

‘They’re very old – lots of bison and deer.’

‘A cave is no place for a man his age. It’ll be the death of him.’

Adam smiled.

‘I’m serious,’ she said.

‘I know, it’s just…your English.’

‘What?’

‘It’s very good. Very correct.’

‘Nannies. Nannies and governesses. My father is to blame. He loved England.’ She shifted in the bed, removing her spectacles and placing them on the bedside table. ‘So tell me, how is the Pensione Amorini?’

‘Perfect. Thanks for arranging it.’

‘How much is she charging you?’

‘Two thousand five hundred lire a day’

‘It’s too much.’

‘It’s half what I paid in Florence.’

‘Then you were had.’

‘Oh.’

‘You should pay no more than two thousand lire for half-board.’

‘The room’s large, clean.’

‘Signora Fanelli knows the power of her looks, I’m afraid. She always has, even as a young girl. And now that she’s a widow, well…’

‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ she shrugged. ‘Men are as men are. Why should they change?’

Adam’s instinct was to defend his sex against the charge, but the news about Signora Fanelli’s marital status was really quite agreeable. He chose silence and a grave nod of the head.

‘How long will you be with us?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘Is it enough time?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never studied a garden before.’

‘You’ll find it’s a little neglected, I’m afraid. Gaetano left last year. It was his responsibility. The other gardeners do what they can.’ She pointed to some French windows, which were open, although the louvred shutters remained closed. ‘There’s a view behind those. You can’t see the memorial garden from here, but I can point you in the right direction.’

Adam pushed open the shutters, squinting against the sunlight flooding past him into the room. He found himself in an arcaded loggia. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he made out the commanding view Patchwork hills spilled away to the west, their folds cast by the lowering sun into varying grades of shade. There was a timeless, almost mythi cal quality to the panorama – like a Poussin landscape.

‘It’s special, isn’t it?’ said Signora Docci.

‘If you like that kind of thing.’

This brought a laugh from her. Adam peered down on to the gardens at the rear of the villa, the formal arrangements of gravel walks and clipped hedges.

‘There are some umbrella pines at the edge of the lower terrace, on the left. If you walk through those and follow the path down, you’ll come to it.’

Just beyond the knot of pines the land dropped away sharply into a wooded valley.

‘Yes, I see.’

He pulled the shutters closed behind him as he reentered the room.

‘Why put it down there? In the valley, I mean.’

‘Water. There’s a spring. Or there was. It’s dry now, like everything. We need rain, we need lots of rain. The grapes and olives are suffering.’ She reached for a slender file on the bedside table. ‘Here. My father put it together. It’s not much, but it’s everything we know about the garden.’

Adam was to come and go at his leisure, she went on. He was more than welcome to work out of the study if he wanted to, and of course the library was at his disposal. In fact, he was to have free run of the villa, everything except the top floor, which, for reasons she didn’t explain, was off limits. Maria would prepare him something for lunch if he wanted it.

‘We don’t stand on ceremony around here. If you need something, you just have to ask.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for everything.’

‘Non c’è di che,’ replied Signora Docci with a mock-formal tilt of the head. ‘Come back and see me when you’ve walked round the garden.’

Adam was leaving the room when she added, ‘Oh, and if you see a young woman down there, it is probably my granddaughter.’ A smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. ‘Don’t worry, she’s quite harmless.’



He passed through the drawing room and out on to the flagstone terrace at the back. From here a flight of stone steps, bowed with centuries of wear, led down to a formal parterre – an expanse of gravel laid out with low, clipped box hedges arranged in geometric patterns. Lemon trees in giant terracotta pots were dotted around. He had read enough to know that the climbing roses and wisteria trellised to the retaining wall were a later addition in the ‘English style’ which had swept the country the previous century, consigning so many ancient gardens to the rubbish heap of history. Parterres had been ripped up to make way for bowling-green lawns, which soon burned to a crisp under the fierce Italian sun. Borders had been dug to house herbaceous plants suited to far gentler climes, and all manner of vines and creepers had been let loose, scaling walls and scrabbling up trees like unruly children. In many cases, the prevailing winds of fashion had wrought wholesale destruction, but it seemed that here at Villa Docci the original Renaissance terraces had survived almost entirely unscathed.

This was confirmed when he descended to the lowest level. A circular fountain held centre stage, set about with tall screens of tight-clipped yew, dividing the terrace into ‘rooms’. The formal gardens stopped here at a high retaining wall which plunged twenty feet to an olive-clad slope occupying the sunny lap of the hill. There were stone benches set at intervals along the balustrade, embracing the view. At the north end of the terrace was a small chapel pressed tight against a low sandstone cliff, its entrance flanked by two towering cypresses, like dark obelisks. At the other end lay the grove of umbrella pines which Signora Docci had drawn his attention to from the loggia.

He settled himself down in the resin-scented shade of the pines and lit a cigarette. He looked up at the villa standing proud and grave on its knoll, like some captain on his poop-deck. All of the upper windows were shuttered, suggesting that the top floor was not only out of bounds but also out of use. He smiled at the thought of a deranged relative, some mad Mrs Rochester, closeted away up there.

Viewed from this angle, there was an air of austerity about the building, a robust, fortress-like quality. And yet somehow this seemed in keeping with both its setting and function. It was not a pleasure palace; it was the centrepiece of a working estate. The farm buildings, just visible from where he was sitting, were arranged around a yard below the villa. There was no shame in the association, and the villa declared as much with the artless candour of the face it chose to present to the valley. Again, he was left with a palpable sense of the mind behind the design.

In almost no time he had fallen under Villa Docci’s spell, and the idea that he might have to devote his time to the study of a small part of its garden, one component stuck way down in the valley, was already a building frustration.

The answer came to him suddenly and clearly. He would change the subject of his thesis. Who could protest? Professor Leonard? On what grounds? Their remit as students was broad to the point of being all-embracing. If Roland Gibbs had settled on a mouldering Romanesque church in Suffolk as a subject for his thesis, how did an Italian Renaissance villa-estate compare? He would have to play the Marxist historical card – that angle was increasingly popular within the faculty – not art and architecture for their own sakes, but as manifestations of the socio-economic undercurrents of the time.

His heart already going out of the matter, he opened the file Signora Docci had given him and began to read. The language was rich, formal, turn-of-the-century.

Flora Bonfadio was only twenty-five years old when she died in 1548 – the year after she and her husband Federico Docci, some two decades her senior, took possession of the new villa they had built near San Casciano. Not much was known of Flora’s history. Some had speculated that she was related to the poet and humanist Jacopo Bonfadio, but there was no hard evidence to this effect. As for the Doccis, they were a family of Florentine bankers who, like the Medicis, originated from the Mugello, a mountainous region just north of the city. Although they had never risen to the Medicis’ level of prominence – who had? – by the sixteenth century they were nonetheless established as successful financiers. They had to have been for Federico Docci to afford the luxury of carving out a country estate for himself and his young wife.

Villa Docci instantly became a port of call for artists and writers, and was renowned, apparently, for the extravagant parties thrown by its generous host. This was not an unusual development. To create a cultural watering hole in the hills was the goal of many wealthy Florentines, almost a necessary stage in their development; a chance to share some of their ill-gotten gains with the more needy while rubbing shoulders with the greatest talents of the age. High finance and high art coming together as they have always done. A simple trade in an age driven by patronage.

Adam recognized only two names on the list of those reputed to have attended Federico’s gatherings at Villa Docci. The first was Bronzino, the well-known court painter. The second was Tullia d’Aragona, the not-so-much-well-known-as-notorious courtesan and poetess. Her inclusion lent an appealing whiff of scandal to the list, hinting at dark and dangerous goings-on at Villa Docci. Whether or not this was true, Federico’s dream of a rural salon was abruptly shattered after a year with the death of his wife. There were no records as to the cause of Flora’s untimely demise. Federico must have been devastated, though, because he never remarried, the villa and the estate passing to another branch of the Docci clan on his death.

Amongst all this historical fog, one thing was clear: in 1577 Federico had laid out, according to his own design, a small garden to Flora’s memory.

Adam turned the page to be presented with a hand-drawn map of the garden. He instinctively closed the file. Better to approach the place blind and untutored the first time, as Professor Leonard had suggested.

The pathway meandered lazily down into the valley, a thread of packed earth, untended and overgrown. The trees on either side grew denser, darker, as he descended, deciduous giving way to evergreen: pine, yew, juniper and bay He heard birds, but their song was muffled, diffuse, hard to locate. And then the path gave out. Or at least it appeared to. Closer inspection revealed a narrow fissure set at an angle in the tall yew hedge barring his way.

He paused for a moment then edged through the crack.

Beyond the hedge, the path was gravelled, with trees pressing in tightly, their interlocking branches forming a gloomy vault overhead. After a hundred yards or so, the trees fell away abruptly on both sides and he found himself in a clearing near the head of a broad cleft in the hillside. This was evidently the heart of the garden, the central axis along which it unfolded.

To his right, set near the top of a tiered and stone-trimmed amphitheatre, stood a pedestal bearing a marble statue of a naked woman. Her exaggerated contrapposto stance thrust her right hip out, twisting her torso to the left, while her head was turned back to the right, peering over her shoulder. Her right arm was folded across her front, modestly covering her breasts; her hair was wreathed with blossoms; and at her feet flowers spilled from an overturned vase, like water from an urn.

Unless he was mistaken, Federico Docci had cast his wife in the image of Flora, goddess of flowers. This was not so surprising, but the conceit still brought a smile to his lips.

If there was any doubt as to the identity of the statue, on the crest above, a triumphal arch stood out proud against a screen of dark ilex trees. On the heavy lintel borne up by fluted columns, and set between two decorative lozenges, was incised the word:






The Italian for flower: ‘Flora’ in Latin. There was something telling, tender, about Federico’s decision to employ the Italian form of his wife’s Christian name -an indication, perhaps, of a pet name or some other private intimacy lost to history.

Two steep stone runnels bordered the amphitheatre, descending to a long trough sunk into the ground. Leaves and other debris had collected in the base of the trough, and a dead bird lay on this rotting mattress, pale bones showing through decaying plumage. A weather-fretted stone bench was set before the trough, facing the amphitheatre. It bore an inscription in Latin, eroded by the elements, but just possible to make out:

ASTIMA FIT SEDENDO ETQUIESCEKTDO PRUOENTIOR

The Soul in Repose Grows Wiser. Or something like that. An appropriate message for a spot intended for contemplation.

The presence of an overflow outlet just below the rim of the trough steered his gaze down the slope to a high mound bristling with laurel and fringed with cypresses. From here two paths branched off into the dark woods flanking the overgrown pasture that ran to the foot of the valley, and at the far end of which some kind of stone building lurked in the trees.

A flight of shallow steps led down to the mound. Adam skirted the artificial hillock, wondering just what it represented. It didn’t represent anything, he discovered; it existed to house a deep, stygian grotto.

The irregular entrance, designed to look like the mouth of some mountain cave, was encrusted with cut rock and stalactites. The angle of the sun was such that he couldn’t make out what lay inside.

He hesitated for a moment, shook off a mild foreboding, then stepped into the yawning darkness.




5







Did you see him before he left?

Briefly. I told him you were resting.

I wanted to see him. Wake me up next time.

Of course, Signora.

Did he say anything?

About what?

The garden, of course.

No.

Nothing?

He was very silent.

Silent?

Distracted.

He’s handsome, don’t you think? Tall and dark and slightly dangerous.

He’s too pallid.

It’s not his fault, Maria, he’s English.

And he’s too thin.

A bit, I agree.

He needs fattening up.

That will come with time. He hasn’t grown into his body yet.

I think he’s strange.

Really?

When he left, I saw him walking back and forth between the cypresses at the top of the driveway. Big long steps.

Interesting.

Worrying. It must be the heat.

No, it means he’s worked it out.

Signora?

The cypresses taper towards the top of the driveway.

Taper?

The two rows narrow as you approach the villa – to increase the sense of perspective.

I didn’t know.

That’s because I don’t tell anyone.

Why not?

To see if they notice. Only two people have ever noticed. Three now.

And the other two?

Both dead.

Let’s hope for the Englishman’s sake there’s no connection.

You know, Maria, you really can be quite amusing when you want to be.




6









Adam was awakened by a dull but persistent pressure in his right buttock. His fingers searched out the offending object but couldn’t make sense of it. He opened his eyes and peered at an unopened bottle of mineral water. Overhead, the blades of the ceiling fan struggled to generate a downdraught. He was flat on his back on the bed, fully clothed still, and the wall lights were ablaze, unbearably bright.

He swung his legs off the bed and made unsteadily for the switch beside the door. The beat in his temples informed him that he’d drunk too much the night before. And then he remembered why.

He searched the tangle of memories for irredeemable behaviour.

Nothing. No. He was in the clear.

He pushed open the shutters, allowing the soft dawn light to wash into the room.

Unscrewing the cap of the mineral water bottle, he downed half the tepid contents without drawing breath. He hadn’t registered it before, but there was a tinted print on the wall above the bed – a garish depiction of Christ in some rocky landscape, two fingers raised in benediction. Presumably the artist had gone for a beatific expression, but the Son of God was glancing down with what appeared to be the weary look of someone who has seen it all before – as if nothing that unfolded on the mattress below could ever surprise him. He might even have been a judge scoring a lacklustre performance: two out of five for effort.

Harry, thought Adam. Why Harry? Why now? And why hadn’t he, Adam, said no?

The only consolation was that when Signora Fanelli had come to his room just before dinner with the news that ’Arry was on the telephone, he had assumed the worst, that their mother or father had suffered some terrible fate. As it turned out, the news was only marginally less calamitous. Harry was coming to visit.

Reason had quickly stemmed the trickle of loneliness that welcomed the idea.

‘Why, Harry?’ Adam had demanded.

‘Because you’re my baby brother.’

‘You mean you couldn’t make my farewell dinner in Purley, but Italy’s not a problem?’

‘I don’t do farewell dinners in Purley, not when I’m in Sheffield.’

‘What were you doing in Sheffield?’

‘None of your business. Anyway, what’s the fuss – I phoned, didn’t I?’

‘No, as it happens.’

‘Well I meant to.’

Of course, Harry couldn’t say when he’d be arriving or leaving – ‘For God’s sake, Adam, what am I, a fucking train timetable?’ – only that he had things to do in Italy and that he’d fit Adam in along the way.

Fortunately, this time he’d be on his own, unlike his last impromptu visit. Harry had shown up in Cambridge earlier in the year with a fellow sculptor from Corsham in tow, a garrulous Scotsman with child-bearing hips and a face like a bag of spanners. Finn Duggan had taken an instant and very vocal dislike to the university and all associated with it. Leaping to his feet in the Baron of Beef on the first evening, he had challenged all the ‘snotty wee shites’ present to drink him under the table. A mousey astrophysicist from Trinity Hall had duly obliged, plunging Finn Duggan into a deep and dangerous gloom for the remainder of the weekend. Violence had only narrowly been avoided following Harry’s mischievous speculation that the loser’s beers had been spiked with some chemical cooked up in one of the university labs.

No Finn Duggan this time, thankfully, but Harry required maintenance, supervision even. And Adam had enough on his mind already.

For a brief while it had all seemed so clear: switching the subject of his thesis from the memorial garden to Villa Docci itself. But that was before he’d stepped through the breach in the yew hedge.

Even now he couldn’t say just why the place had affected him so much. All he could point to was a vague sensation of having been momentarily transported somewhere else, a parallel world, unquestionably beautiful but also disquieting.

No doubt the unassuming entrance was intended to produce the effect of stumbling upon a lost Arcadia, but there was something illicit in the act of pushing your way through a hedge that smacked of trespass, each subsequent step in some way forbidden. This sense of intruding was reinforced by the personal nature of what lay beyond the hedge: the touching tribute of a grieving husband to his deceased wife. The other Renaissance gardens Adam had studied in preparation for his trip were far grander stages on which the most high-blown ideas of the age were played out – Man and Nature in uneasy coexistence; Man imposing himself on Nature, moulding Her to his own ends, yet constantly fighting Her hold over him, struggling to rise above his baser instincts to the role ordained for him by God.

Not that God or any other Christian imagery figured in the elaborate cycles set out by wealthy Romans and Florentines in the grounds of their country estates. The language of the garden was purely pagan, its world a mythical earthly paradise populated with marble gods and demi-gods and other outlandish creatures from Greek and Roman legend, where water gushed from Mount Parnassus, pouring along channels, tumbling over waterfalls, spraying from fountains and trickling down the rough-hewn walls of woodland grottoes.

The memorial garden at Villa Docci sat firmly within this tradition, and although it couldn’t match its eminent counterparts at Villa di Castello, Villa Gamberaia and Villa Campi for sheer size and grandiosity, it stood out for its human dimension, its purity of purpose, the haunting message of love and loss enshrined in its buildings, inscriptions, and groupings of statues buried away in the woods.

The hour or so Adam had spent strolling the circuit had intrigued him, unsettled him, whereas the villa itself had simply awed him with its serene perfection. The choice was no longer clear to him. Which of the two should he spend his time on?

This was the dilemma he’d been struggling with over dinner at the pensione when a bottle of red wine had landed on his table with a thud.

It was attached by a lean brown arm to a man whom Adam had noticed drinking alone at the bar. He was dark, rangy, handsome in a dishevelled kind of way. He pushed his lank hair out of his eyes.

‘Can I?’ he asked, in Italian, not waiting for a reply but dumping himself in the chair opposite. He glanced at the open file beside Adam’s plate. ‘It’s not good,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Reading and eating at the same time. The stomach needs blood for digestion. When you read, the brain steals the blood.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s what my father used to say, but he was an idiot, so who knows? I’m Fausto.’

Adam shook the strong hand offered him. ‘Adam.’

‘Can I?’ Fausto helped himself from Adam’s pack, tearing off the filter before lighting the cigarette. ‘You’re English?’

‘Yes.’

‘I like the English,’ declared Fausto, sitting back in his chair and plucking a stray shred of tobacco from his tongue. ‘London Liverpool Manchester A-stings.’

‘A-stings?’

‘The Battle of A-stings.’

‘Oh, Hastings.’

‘A-stings. Exactly,’ said Fausto, not altogether happy about being corrected, although it didn’t stop him filling Adam’s glass from the bottle of red wine he’d arrived with.

Adam took a sip.

‘What do you think?’

Adam knew the word for ‘drinkable’ in Italian. So presumably ‘undrinkable’ was ‘ non potabile’.

‘Excellent,’ he replied.

Fausto smiled. ‘That’s why I like you English. You’re so fucking polite.’

Fausto, it turned out, had done his homework. He knew from Signora Fanelli the purpose of Adam’s visit, and even its intended duration. Not that that was saying much – everyone did – tourists being something of a rarity in San Casciano. Apparently, the last foreign visitors of any note had been a bunch of New Zealanders – the ones who’d liberated the town from the Germans back in 1944. Fausto described in elaborate detail, much of it lost on Adam, the fierce siege that had laid waste to his birthplace – a sad inevitability, given San Casciano’s pivotal role in the main German line of defence south of Florence.

Despite this, Fausto seemed to harbour a grudging respect for the German military machine which had so successfully slowed the Allied advance northwards, mining bridges and roads, its troops fighting a relentless rearguard action against overwhelming odds, taking severe casualties but never losing their discipline or their fighting spirit, forever melting away, withholding their fire until you were right on them, and always ceasing fire at the first sign of the Red Cross.

Fausto was speaking from first-hand experience. He’d been a member of a partisan group who’d assisted the Allies in their push on Florence, fighting alongside the British when they entered the city; men from ‘London Liverpool Manchester’.

And Hastings?

No, that was something else, Fausto explained – an interest in historic battles.

He was lying. He knew more about the Battle of Hastings than was healthy for any man to know. They were well into the third bottle of wine before Harold even got the arrow in the eye.

Fausto was enacting this event with a slender bread-stick when Signora Fanelli appeared at the table.

‘Fausto, leave him alone, look at him, he’s half-dead.’

Fausto peered at Adam.

‘Leave the poor boy alone. Go home. It’s late,’ Signora Fanelli insisted, before returning to the bar.

‘A beautiful woman,’ mused Fausto, helping himself to yet another of Adam’s cigarettes.

‘What happened to her husband?’

‘The war. It was a bad thing.’

‘What?’

Fausto’s dark eyes narrowed, as if judging Adam worthy of a response.

‘We were fighting for our country. Our country. Against the Germans, yes, but also against each other – Communists, Socialists, Monarchists, Fascists. For the future. There was…confusion. Things happened. War permits it. It demands it.’ He drew on the cigarette and exhaled. ‘Giovanni Gentile. Do you know the name?’

‘No.’

‘He was a philosopher. A thinker. Of the right. A Fascist. He had a house in Florence. They went to his door carrying books like students, carrying books to fool him. And then they shot him.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘When they start killing the men of ideas you can be sure the Devil is laughing.’

‘Did you know them?’ asked Adam.

‘Who?’

‘The ones who did it?’

‘You ask a lot of questions.’

‘It’s the first chance I’ve had.’

Fausto cracked a smile and he laughed. ‘I talk too much, it’s true.’

‘What?’ called Signora Fanelli from across the room. ‘I don’t see you for months and now I can’t get rid of you?’

‘I’m going, I’m going,’ said Fausto, holding up his hands in capitulation. Turning back to Adam, he leaned close. ‘Things can make sense at the time, but as you get older those consolations no longer help you sleep. It’s the only thing I’ve learned. We all think we know the answer, and we’re all wrong. Shit, I’m not sure we even know what the question is.’

Adam drew his own consolation from the words: that Fausto was even more drunk than he was.

Fausto drained his glass and rose to his feet. ‘It’s been a pleasure. You be careful up there at Villa Docci.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘It’s a bad place.’

‘A bad place?’

‘It always has been. People have a tendency to die there.’

Adam couldn’t help smiling at the melodramatic statement.

‘You think I’m joking?’

‘No…I’m sorry. You mean Signora Docci’s son?’

‘You heard about Emilio?’

‘Not much. Only that he was killed by the Germans during the war.’

Fausto crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. ‘So the story goes.’

There was no time for Adam to pick him up on this last comment.

‘Out!’ trumpeted Signora Fanelli, advancing towards them wielding a broom.

Fausto turned to meet his attacker. ‘Letizia, you are a beautiful woman. If I were a richer man I would try to make you my wife.’

‘Ahhhh,’ she cooed sweetly. ‘Well, you’re about to become even poorer. Three bottles of wine.’

‘I’ll pay,’ said Adam.

‘He’ll pay,’ said Fausto.

‘No he won’t,’ said Signora Fanelli.

Fausto delved into his pocket, pulled out some crumpled notes and dropped them on the table. ‘Goodnight everybody,’ he said with the slightest of bows, ‘Fausto is no more.’

He left via the terrace, the life somehow draining out of the room along with him.

Signora Fanelli set about stacking chairs on the tables. ‘Fausto, Fausto,’ she sighed wearily. ‘You mustn’t take him too seriously, he’s a bit depressed at the moment.’

‘Why?’

‘The Communists did not do well at the election in May…only twenty-two per cent, the poor things,’ she added with a distinct note of false sympathy.

Twenty-two per cent sounded like a not inconsiderable slice of the electorate.

‘You’re not a Communist?’ Adam asked.

‘Communism is for young people with empty stomachs. Look at me.’

He had been, quite closely, and he would happily have paid her the compliment she was fishing for if the Italian words hadn’t eluded him.

‘Fausto isn’t so young,’ he said.

‘Fausto was born an idealist. It’s not his fault.’

He had wanted to sit there, chatting idly, observing the play of her slender hips beneath her dress as she worked the broom around the tables. But she had dispatched him upstairs with a bottle of mineral water and firm instructions to drink the lot before bed.

This he had failed to do.

Instead, he had flopped on to the mattress and set about constructing a gratifying little scenario in his head. His last memory before drifting into drunken slumber had been of Harry barging into the room just as Signora Fanelli was peeling off an emerald green chenille bathrobe.




7









The walk to Villa Docci failed to clear his head; all it did was shunt the pain from the front of his skull to the back of it, where, he knew from hard experience, it would remain lodged for the rest of the day. The heat was building fast under a cloudless sky, and his shirt was clinging to him by the time he arrived.

He had anticipated having to force a decision on himself. In the end, it came naturally, when he was not even halfway through his brisk tramp around the memorial garden.

There was something not quite right about the place, and this was where its appeal lay. There were no great questions clamouring for answers; they were more like restless whispers at the back of his mind.

According to the records, Flora had died in 1548, the year after Villa Docci’s completion, so why had her husband waited almost thirty years – till the very end of his own life – to lay out a garden to her memory? Then there were the small anomalies within the garden itself, not exactly discordant elements, but somehow out of keeping with the mood and tone of the whole. Why, for example, the triumphal arch on which Flora’s name was carved in its Italian form? It was such a pompous piece of architecture, crowning the crest above her like some advertising hoarding. At no other point in the itinerary did the garden look to declare its purpose. Rather, it encrypted it in symbols and metaphors and allegory.

He was honest enough to know that a more pragmatic consideration was also pushing him towards a study of the garden over the villa: the file prepared by Signora Docci’s father. It offered a model from which to work, a template for his own thesis, a document easily massaged, expanded, made his own with the minimum of effort. It was short, and a tad dry, but thorough in its scholarship. There were numerous references in both the text and the footnotes, most of them relating to books or original documents to be found in the library. It would take a few days, but all of these would have to be checked out first, their suitability as potential padding material carefully assessed.

Retreating to the cool of the villa, he found Maria prowling around, marshalling a couple of browbeaten cleaning ladies and handing out chores to Foscolo, the saturnine handyman.

Adam set up shop in the study. Light and lofty, it occupied the northwest corner of the building just beyond the library, with French windows giving on to the back terrace. Unlike the other rooms of the villa, which were plainly and sparsely furnished, the study was crowded with furniture, paintings, objects and books – as if all the incidental clutter conspicuously absent from the rest of the villa had somehow gathered here.

On the wall beside the fireplace was the small portrait panel of Federico Docci which Signora Docci had mentioned to him the previous day. It showed a handsome man of middle years whose sharp features were only just beginning to blunt with age. He was represented in half length, seated in a high-backed chair, his hands resting lightly on a book; through a window in the wall behind him, hills could be seen rolling off to a distant ocean. Painted in three-quarter face, there was something fiercely imperious in the tilt of his head and the set glare of his dark, slanting eyes. And yet the suspicion of a smile played about his wide and generous mouth – a contradiction which seemed almost self-mocking, attractively so.

A vast glazed mahogany cabinet filled the wall behind the desk. Its lower shelves were given over to books, the majority of them relating to the Etruscans. A large section was devoted to anthropological texts. These were in a variety of languages – Italian, French, English and Dutch – and were decades old. The upper shelves of the cabinet were home to all manner of strange objects, mostly of an archaeological nature: clay figurines, bronze implements, bits of pottery, fragments of stone sculpture, and the like. On the very top shelf were two skulls, their hollow eye sockets deep pools of shadow behind the glass.

Adam opened the cabinet door and, with the aid of some steps from the library, found himself face to face with the macabre display. They weren’t human skulls, but they weren’t far off – primates of some kind. Although similar in size, there were distinct differences. The skull on the left was narrower and less angular. Its partner had longer canines, jutting cheekbones, and a bony crest rising across the skull from ear to ear, met at its apex by two ridges running from the sides of the eye sockets.

Adam reached out and ran his hand over the skull, his fingers tracing the cranial ridges.

That’s when he heard the footsteps.

He turned to see Maria enter the study from the terrace. The reproachful cast of her eye would have driven him from the library steps if he hadn’t already been descending.

‘Very interesting,’ he said pathetically, nodding behind him.

‘Would you like some coffee?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

Maria stopped and turned at the door to the library. ‘Orangotanghi,’ she said, her eyes flicking to the skulls.

‘Oh,’ he replied in English. ‘Right.’

The moment she was gone, he reached for the dictionary.

He hadn’t misunderstood her.



Despite her offer of coffee, Maria barely concealed her relief at not having to feed him at lunchtime. Towards three o’clock, she appeared in the study with a summons from the lady of the house.

He found Signora Docci sitting in her bed, patting at her face and neck with a wet flannel. A typewriter sat beside her on the bed, an unfinished letter in its jaws.

‘I’ve asked Foscolo to prepare a bicycle for you,’ she said. ‘To spare you the walk every day’

‘Thank you, that’s very kind.’

‘I don’t want your death on my conscience, what with this heat.’

She asked him how his work was going, and he came clean about his dilemma, now resolved.

‘You like the house?’

‘I do. A lot.’

She looked on approvingly as he spelled out why exactly. He asked her who the architect had been.

‘No one really knows. There is a reference somewhere to a young man, a Fulvio Montalto. My father looked into it, but he could find no records. It is as if he just disappeared. If it was him, he never built another villa. A sadness, no? A great talent.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m glad you think so. The house does not speak to everybody. Crispin never felt much for it.’

Adam hesitated, still not accustomed to hearing Professor Leonard referred to as Crispin.

‘No,’ he said, ‘he hardly mentioned it.’

‘What did he mention?’

‘Well, the memorial garden, of course.’

He could see from her expression that this wasn’t what she’d intended by her question.

‘He said you were old friends.’

‘Yes, old friends.’

‘He also said your husband died some years back. And your eldest son was killed during the war.’

‘Emilio, yes. Did he say how exactly?’

‘Only that the Germans who took over the villa were responsible.’

‘They shot him. In cold blood. Up there. Above us.’ Her voice tailed off.

He wanted to ask her why and how and if that was the reason the top floor was off limits. The pain in her drawn eyes prevented him from doing so.

‘You don’t have to say’

‘No, you might as well hear it from me.’

She spoke in a flat, detached monotone which clashed with the sheer bloody drama of her story. She told him how the Germans had occupied the villa, installing their command post on the top floor because of the views it afforded them over the surrounding countryside. She and her husband Benedetto were obliged to move in with Emilio and his young wife Isabella, who lived in the big house on the slope beyond the farm buildings.

Relations with the new tenants were strained at times, but generally civil. The Germans were respectful right from the first, giving them fair warning to vacate the villa, suggesting that all works of art be stored out of harm’s way, and even assisting in this exercise. At no point were the stores stripped, the cattle slaughtered, the wine cellar pillaged. The estate was allowed to function as normal, just so long as it provided the occupiers with what little they required for themselves.

On the day in question – an unbearably hot July day – the inexorable Allied advance rolling up from the south finally reached San Casciano, and the Germans began moving out of the villa. All day, lorries came and went to the sounds of the fierce battle raging just up the road. Her younger son Maurizio arrived from Florence to be with his family for yet another awkward handover to yet another occupying force. At nightfall, though, San Casciano was still firmly under German control. That’s why the family was surprised when, just as they were finishing dinner, they heard the sound of gunfire coming from up at the villa.

It was Emilio who insisted on going to investigate, more out of curiosity than anything, because the gunfire was accompanied by the unmistakable sounds of music and laughter. Maurizio agreed to go with him, along with a third man, Gaetano the gardener, who had also heard the ruckus.

Approaching the villa from the rear, they saw furniture being tossed from the top-floor windows, splintering on the terrace below Incensed, Emilio stormed inside and upstairs, Maurizio and Gaetano hot on his heels. Most of the Germans were gone. Only two remained, left behind to burn documents and destroy equipment so that it wouldn’t fall into Allied hands. Fuelled by drink, they had overstepped their orders, using the frescoes for target practice and hurling furniture out of the windows – pathetic acts of destruction that enraged Emilio.

A fierce argument ensued. If Emilio hadn’t pulled out his pistol and fired a warning shot, it might have ended there, with heated words. But it didn’t. The Germans opened fire, killing Emilio before fleeing.

‘That’s terrible.’

‘Yes, it was. Just a few more hours and we would have come through the war untouched.’

There were questions Adam wanted to ask, but Signora Docci steered the conversation back to Professor Leonard, saying that he had shown himself to be a very good friend in the aftermath of the tragedy.

‘How did you meet him?’

‘Through my father. They worked together on an archaeological excavation. Well, not together exactly. It was an Etruscan site near Siena. My father was in charge; Crispin was one of the young people who did all the work – a student, like you, in Italy for the summer. It was the year your Queen Victoria died. 1901. We were very aware of it here. She often came to Florence. Papa even had the honour of meeting her once.’ She paused. ‘Anyway, he brought Crispin home one day, out of pity, I think, as you would a stray dog. He was so poor and so thin and so very intelligent. He stayed with us for a month that first summer.’

She smiled, remembering.

‘My sisters were very excited about him being here. Not me, though. I was very distant with him, very…haughty. And he completely ignored me. As you can imagine, this was very annoying. I thought he was just like my father, lost in his books and his artefacts, blind to the living world. Later I discovered he knew exactly what he was doing.’

‘What was he doing?’

‘Playing. The dance, he called it.’

‘The dance?’

‘Courting, of course.’

‘Really? I always thought –’ He broke off.

‘What?’

He hesitated. ‘I don’t know, that he was, you know…’

‘Yes…?’

‘Well, a homosexual.’

An incredulous expulsion of air gave way to helpless laughter. The application of the flannel to her mouth muffled the sound.

When she eventually collected herself, Adam said, ‘I’ll take that as a “no ”.’

‘No,’ she said emphatically. ‘No.’

‘He was never married, though, was he?’

‘There were lots of opportunities. He was very handsome.’

Adam couldn’t picture it, but that didn’t mean anything.

‘He has high praise for you,’ said Signora Docci.

‘Me?’

‘You sound surprised.’

‘I am.’

‘You’re here, aren’t you? Doesn’t that tell you something?’

‘Should it?’

‘It’s many years since I first suggested the garden to Crispin – as a subject for one of his students, I mean. He said he would wait for the right person.’

This didn’t fit with what the professor had told him: that the offer of the garden had only recently come from her. He wondered which of them was lying. And why?

‘Apparently, you have a good mind, an enquiring mind.’ She must have seen him squirm. ‘You’re not comfortable with flattery?’

‘No.’

‘He also said you were extremely lazy’

‘That’s more like it.’

This brought a laugh from Signora Docci.



He was able to put in a couple more productive hours in the library, despite the distraction.

Why had Professor Leonard not even hinted at the true nature of his relationship with Signora Docci? Unless he had completely misunderstood her, everything pointed to some kind of love affair between the couple. Maybe love affair was overstating it. In 1901 that probably meant little more than an unchaperoned stroll through the gardens, or a charged look across a crowded room, although somehow he doubted it. Signora Docci’s few words on the subject had shown the strain of many more left unspoken. And she had almost choked herself laughing when he’d cast aspersions on Professor Leonard’s sexuality.

He found himself speculating on what had happened to keep them apart. It was probably doomed from the start – a penniless student and a young heiress. Much would have been expected of any potential spouse of Signora Docci. He would have been well vetted, the future of the villa and the estate a prime consideration. And a young foreigner with an interest in Etruscan archaeology would hardly have offered much comfort in that department.

These were, of course, wild imaginings, but he let his mind roam the possibilities until it was time to leave.

Foscolo the rock-ribbed handyman insisted on being present when Adam took possession of the bicycle. He had a big square head planted on a small square body, and his iron-grey hair was clipped to a brush. There wasn’t much to say on the subject – it was an old black bicycle with a wicker basket – so Adam shook Foscolo’s knuckled hand and thanked him. This wasn’t good enough for Foscolo, who wanted confirmation that all was in working order. Adam dutifully cycled around the courtyard a few times for his audience of one and declared the brakes to be ‘eccellente’. Foscolo grunted sceptically and raised the saddle an inch or two.

Pedalling back to San Casciano, Adam deviated from the main track, exploring. The dusty trail petered out in an olive grove. It wasn’t a totally wasted detour. He found himself presented with an impressive view of Villa Docci. From afar, the shuttered, silent rooms of the top floor seemed even more striking, more ominous.

His thoughts turned to Signora Docci’s account of her eldest son’s death at the hands of the Germans. They also turned to Fausto’s curious, half-mumbled comment on the same subject just the evening before: ‘Cosí dicono.’

So the story goes.




8









Either he was so distracted that he didn’t hear her footfalls, or she deliberately set out to creep up on him. Probably a bit of both.

He was standing at the head of the valley, on the brow above the amphitheatre, staring up at the triumphal arch. A warm light from the lowering sun was bleeding through the trees, flushing the garden amber. Even the dense wood of dark ilex beyond the arch seemed somehow less forbidding.

It was here, just inside the tree-line, that the spring was located – a low artificial grotto housing a trough of rusticated stone. Under normal circumstances, water would have filled the trough before overflowing into a channel that ran beneath the arch to the top of the amphitheatre, where it divided.

He was standing astride this channel, staring up at the arch, when he heard her voice.

‘Hello.’

She was off to his left, beneath the boughs of a tree. Her long black hair was tied back off her face in a pony-tail and she was wearing a sleeveless cotton dress cinched at the waist with a belt.

‘You haven’t moved since I first saw you,’ she said in accented English, stepping towards him.

He thought at first it was the dappled shade playing tricks with the light, but as she drew closer he could see that her smooth, high forehead was indeed marked with scars. One was short and sat just beneath the hairline in the centre. From here, another cleaved a diagonal path all the way to her left eyebrow.

‘I thought maybe the garden had a new statue,’ she said.

Adam returned her smile. ‘I’m sorry, I was thinking.’

He held her dark, almond eyes, conscious of not allowing his gaze to stray to her forehead. Not that she would have cared, he suspected. If she’d wanted to conceal the disfigurement she could quite easily have worn her hair differently, rather than drawing it straight back off her face.

‘You must be Adam.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Antonella.’

‘The granddaughter, right?’

‘She told you about me?’

‘Only that you were harmless.’

‘Ah,’ she replied, a crooked gleam in her eye, ‘that’s because she thinks she knows me.’

She craned her long neck, looking up at the inscription on the lintel of the arch.






‘What were you thinking?’ she asked.

‘It’s not symmetrical.’

‘No?’

‘The decorative panels at the side – look – the diagonals run the same way’

It was hard to make out – the stone was weathered and stained with lichen – but there was no mistaking the anomaly.

‘I never noticed before,’ she said quietly. ‘What does it mean?’

‘I don’t know. Probably nothing.’ He glanced over at her. ‘It’s a bit overblown, don’t you think?’

‘Overblown?’

‘The arch. For the setting, I mean.’

‘I don’t know the word.’

‘Overblown. It means…pretentious.’

‘Pretenzioso? Maybe. A bit,’ she said. ‘You don’t like it?’

‘No, I do. It’s just –’

He broke off, aware that he was in danger of sounding a bit, well, overblown himself.

‘No, tell me,’ she insisted. ‘I think I know what you mean.’

The triumphal arch was a classical architectural form that had been revived during the Renaissance, he explained, but so far he’d found no precedent for this one in any of the other gardens he’d researched. Moreover, its inclusion seemed at odds with the discreet symbolism and subtle statements of the rest of the cycle.

Maybe Antonella was being polite, but she asked if he had any other insights he was willing to share with her. He should have confessed it was early days still, but the prospect of a leisurely stroll in her company overrode these thoughts.

The amphitheatre that fell away down the slope behind them was not exclusive to Villa Docci, he explained, although it was narrower and more precipitous than the one in the Sacro Bosco, the Sacred Wood, at Bomarzo near Rome. Interestingly, Pier Francesco Orsini had also dedicated that garden to his deceased wife, Giulia Farnese, although the parallels stopped there. The memorial garden at Villa Docci was an exercise in restraint compared to the riotous imagination on display in the Sacro Bosco, with its mausolea, nymphaea, loggias and temples, and its stupefying array of bizarre creatures carved from solid rock: sirens, sphinxes, dragons, lions, a giant turtle, even an African war elephant holding a dead soldier in its trunk.

The more temperate approach at Villa Docci was exemplified by the statue of Flora on the plinth near the top of the amphitheatre. The corkscrew pose, with the left leg bent and resting on a perch, was a traditional stance, typical of the mid to late sixteenth century – a form that had found its highest expression in the sculptures of Giambologna and Ammannati. In fact, as the file pointed out, the statue of Flora was closely modelled on Giambologna’s marble Venus in the Boboli Gardens in Florence, although like many of the imitations spawned by that masterpiece, it lacked the original’s grace and vitality.

‘I don’t know about the others,’ said Antonella as they circled beneath Flora, ‘but for me she is alive.’

Her look challenged him to contest the assertion. When he didn’t, she added, ‘Touch her leg.’

He wished she hadn’t said it. He also wished she hadn’t reached out and run her hand up the back of the marble calf from the heel to the crook of the knee, because it left him no choice but to follow suit.

He tried to experience something – he wanted to experience something – and he did.

‘What do you feel?’ asked Antonella.

‘I feel,’ he replied, ‘like a sweaty Englishman molesting a naked statue in the presence of a complete stranger.’

Antonella gave a sudden loud laugh, her hand shooting to her mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Maybe you will see her differently with time.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Go on, please.’

‘Really?’

‘I come here every day if I can.’

It wasn’t surprising, he continued, that the statue of Flora had been modelled on Venus, given the close link between the two goddesses. Both were associated with fertility and the season of spring. Indeed, it was quite possible that the goddess of love and the goddess of flowers appeared alongside each other in two of the most celebrated paintings to come out of the Renaissance: Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera and his Birth of Venus.

‘Really?’

‘It’s a new theory, very new’

‘Ah,’ said Antonella sceptically.

‘You’re right, it’s probably nothing,’ he shrugged, knowing full well that it wasn’t, not for her, not if she visited the garden as often as she claimed to.

‘Tell me anyway’

There was no need to explain Flora’s story; it was in the file, which she had surely read. Her great-grandfather had even included the Latin lines from Ovid’s Fasti detailing how the nymph Chloris was pursued by Zephyrus, the west wind, who then violated her, atoning for this act by making her his wife and transforming her into Flora, mistress of all the flowers.

No one disputed that Zephyrus and Chloris figured in Botticelli’s Primavera, but until now scholars had always read the figure standing to the left of them as the hora – the spirit – of springtime, scattering flowers. Hence the name of the painting.

‘But what if she’s really Flora?’ he asked.

‘After her transformation?’

‘Exactly.’

‘I don’t know. What if it is her?’

The painting could then be read as an allegory for the nature of love. By pairing Flora – a product of lust, of Zephyrus’ passion – with the chaste figure of Venus, then maybe Botticelli was saying that true love is the union of both: passion tempered with chastity.

It was possible to read the same buried message in the Birth of Venus. Zephyrus and Chloris were again present, suggesting that the female figure standing on the shore, holding out the cloak for Venus, might well be Flora.

‘And Venus again represents Chastity?’

‘Exactly Venus pudica.’

She smiled when he adopted the well-known pose of Venus in her shell, modestly covering her nakedness.

‘It’s a good theory,’ she said.

‘You think?’

‘Yes. Because if it’s right then Flora is a symbol for the erotic, the sexual’

‘Yes, I suppose she is.’

Antonella turned her gaze on Flora. ‘Do you see it now?’

He looked up at the statue.

‘See the way she stands – her hips are turned away, but they are also…open, inviting. Her arm covers her breasts, but only just, like she doesn’t care too much. And her face, the eyes, the mouth. She is not un’inno-cente.’

He could see what Antonella was driving at. Maybe he was wrong to have attributed the slight slackness of the pose to the inferior hand of a secondary sculptor. Maybe that sculptor hadn’t been striving for delicacy and poise, but for something looser, more sensual. No, that was wrong. He had somehow managed to achieve both – a demure quality coupled with an erotic charge.

‘So I’m not wrong?’

‘Huh?’ he said distractedly.

‘I’m not alone. You see it too.’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Possible? It is there or it isn’t,’ came the indignant reply.

‘You’re not wrong.’

‘Everyone else thinks I am. My grandmother thinks I imagine it, and this says very much about me.’

‘What does she think it says about you?’

Even as the words left his mouth he realized it was an impertinent question, far too personal.

‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she replied, ‘because we are right and she is wrong.’

He found himself smiling at the ease with which she’d deflected his enquiry, sparing him further embarrassment. His mind, though, was leaping ahead, questions already coalescing. Was it done knowingly? And if so, why? Why would a grieving husband allow his wife to be personified as some prudish yet pouting goddess, some virgin-whore?

The questions stayed with him as they moved on down the slope to the grotto buried in its mound of shaggy laurel. They entered silently, allowing their eyes to adjust to the gloom.

The marble figures stood out pale and ghostly against the dark, encrusted rock of the back wall. In the centre, facing left, was Daphne at the moment of her transformation into a laurel tree, her toes turning to roots, bark already girding her thighs, branches and leaves beginning to sprout from the splayed fingers of her left hand, which was raised heavenwards in desperation, supplication. To her right was Apollo, the sun god, from whom she was fleeing – youthful, muscular, identifiable by the lyre in his hand and the bow slung across his broad back. Below them, an elderly bearded gentleman reclined along the rim of a great basin of purple and white variegated marble. This was Peneus, the river god, father to Daphne.

The story was straight from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the nymph Daphne, fleeing the unwelcome advances of a love-struck Apollo, begged her father to turn her into a laurel tree, which he duly did. It was an appropriate myth for a garden setting – Art and Nature combining in the figure of Daphne. As the file pointed out, there was a relief panel depicting the same scene in the Grotto of Diana at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli. But here in the memorial garden the myth had an added resonance, mirroring the story of Flora – a nymph who also underwent a metamorphosis following her pursuit by an amorous god.

This last observation was Antonella’s. It wasn’t in the file, nor had it occurred to Adam, which was mildly annoying, although this wouldn’t prevent him, he suspected, from claiming it as his own for the purposes of his thesis.

Antonella explained how the water poured from the urn held by Peneus, filling the marble basin. A lowered lip at the front then allowed it to overflow into a shallow, circular pool set in the stone floor. This was carved with rippling water, and at its centre was a female face in relief, staring heavenwards, the gaping mouth acting as a sink hole. The hair of this disembodied visage was bedecked with flowers, identifying it as that of Flora: the goddess of flowers drawing sustenance for her creations from the life-giving spring water.

It was an exquisite arrangement, faultless both in its beauty and in its pertinence to the overarching programme of the garden. The only false note was the broken-off horn of the unicorn crouched at Apollo’s feet, its head bowed towards the marble basin. This was a common motif in gardens of the period. A unicorn dipping its horn into the water signified the purity of the source feeding the garden; it announced that you could happily scoop up a handful and down a draught without fear for your life. At some time since that era, though, the unicorn had lost the greater part of its horn.

Adam fingered the truncated stump. ‘It’s a pity’

‘Yes. What is a unicorn without its horn?’

‘A white horse?’

Antonella smiled. ‘A very unhappy white horse.’

They headed west from the grotto on a looping circuit, the pathway trailing off into the evergreen woods blanket ing the sides of the valley. They sauntered through the shade, chatting idly as they went. Antonella lived across the valley in a farmhouse she rented from her grandmother. The old building was delightfully cool in summer but bitterly cold in winter, and she had a rule that whenever the well water froze she would decamp to her brother’s apartment in Florence. She and Edoardo were the children of Signora Docci’s only daughter Caterina, a woman whom Professor Leonard had referred to as ‘dissolute’, something Adam found hard to square with the self-possessed creature stepping out beside him.

Her parents were divorced, she explained. Her mother lived in Rome, her father in Milan, where he was given to business ventures of a distinctly dubious nature, which promised (and invariably failed to deliver) untold wealth. She said this with a note of mild amusement in her voice.

By now they had passed through the first glade, with its triad of free-standing sculptures representing the death of Hyacinth, and were nearing the small temple at the foot of the garden.

‘And what do you do?’ Adam asked.

‘Me? Oh, I design clothes. Can’t you tell?’ She spread her hands in reference to her simple cotton shift dress.

‘I…Yes –’

Her smile stopped him dead. ‘My dresses have more colour. Although they’re not really mine. There is someone else’s name on everything I do.’

‘How come?’

‘I work at a fashion house in Florence. There can only be one name.’

‘Doesn’t that bother you?’

‘What a serious question.’

‘I’m a serious chap.’

‘Oh really?’

‘Can’t you tell?’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘All my friends are on a beach. Me, I’m here studying.’

‘Only because you have to, and only for two weeks. From what I hear, you will probably see a beach before the end of the summer.’

This meant one thing: the news from Professor Leonard of Adam’s indolence had not stopped with Signora Docci.

‘I dispute that.’

‘What?’

‘Whatever you’ve heard.’

‘The good things too?’ Her eyes sparkled with mischief. ‘My grandmother likes you, I think.’

Maybe it was something to do with the way she bared her teeth when she smiled, but at that moment it struck him that the long diagonal scar on her forehead exactly mirrored the cranial ridge on the orang-utan skull in the study.

Antonella turned away – feeling the weight of his lingering look? – and glanced down at the supine figure at their feet.

Narcissus lay sprawled along the rim of the octagonal pool, gazing admiringly at what should have been his reflection. Instead, he appeared to be searching for something he had lost, some trinket he’d mislaid in the debris of twigs and leaves which carpeted the bottom of the pool.

‘I’m sorry you cannot see it when the water is here.’

‘Will it ever come back?’

‘Who knows? But it is not the same without the water. The water gives it life. It makes them breathe.’

She had removed her leather sandals a while before – they now hung lazily from the fingers of her right hand – and looking at her there in her simple cotton dress he saw her as the child she must once have been, wandering the garden, gazing wide-eyed on the coterie of petrified gods, goddesses and nymphs playing out their troubled stories on this leafy stage.

When she made for the temple, he followed unquestioningly. It was a small structure – octagonal, like the pool – and crowned by a low cupola just visible behind the pedimented portico. The floor was of polished stone, the walls of white stucco, as was the dome. The building was dedicated to Echo, the unfortunate nymph who fell hard for Narcissus. He, too preoccupied with his own beauty, spurned her attentions, whereupon Echo, heartbroken, faded away until only her voice remained.

‘I love this place.’

Her words resounded off the clean, hard surfaces, the acoustic effect no doubt intentional. Simple painted wooden benches ran around the walls, and there was a lengthy Latin inscription carved into the architrave beneath the dome. According to the file it was a line from Socrates: The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.

He approached the cast-iron grille in the centre of the floor. This had puzzled him on his previous visits. There was no reference to it in the file, and all his efforts to dislodge it and discover what lay beneath had failed.

‘The water falls into a small well then carries on to the pool outside. The sound in here…it is not easy to describe.’ She thought on it for a moment. ‘Sussurri.’

‘Whispers.’

‘Yes. Like whispers.’

They covered the rest of the circuit in near silence, stopping briefly in the last of the glades, with its statue of Venus stooped over a dead Adonis – the final element in the itinerary, its message of grief and loss almost overwhelming after the other stories they had witnessed.

Any more would have been too much. The garden transported you just far enough. As soon as you felt the grip of its undertow, it released you.

Even without the sculptural programme the place would have exerted an unsettling pull. There was something mysterious and otherworldly about a wooded vale. Maybe it was the sense of enclosure, of containment, coupled with the presence of water, but it somehow reeked of ancient gatherings and happenings. You sensed that you weren’t the first to have been drawn here, that naked savages had also stumbled upon it and thought the place bewitched.

Federico Docci would have been hard pressed to find a better spot for his memorial garden than one already haunted by flickering figures from some spectral past. And he had cleverly turned the location to his own ends, planting large numbers of evergreen trees to screen off views, to guide the eye, to tease and disorientate, whatever the season. He had punched holes in this sombre vegetation, shaping glades that smacked of sacred groves, connecting them with curling pathways that widened and narrowed as they went, the loose geometry almost musical – a pleasing rhythm of space and enclosure, of light and shade.

Having laid out this new kingdom, Federico had then dedicated it to Flora, goddess of flowers, and populated it with the characters from ancient mythology over whom she held sway: Hyacinth, Narcissus and Adonis. All had died tragically, and all lived on in the flowers that burst from the earth where their blood had spilled – the same flowers that still enamelled the ground in their respective areas of the garden every spring.

Their stories cast a melancholy pall over the garden. They were tales of desire, unrequited love, jealousy, vanity and untimely death. But they also spoke of hope. For just as the gods had interceded to immortalize the fallen youths, so Federico had ensured that the memory of his wife, snatched from him at a tender age, would live on.

These were the thoughts swirling through Adam’s head as he and Antonella wended their way back up the hill to the villa. It was the first time he had fully grasped the beauty of the scheme – its logic, subtlety, and cohesion – and he wondered whether Antonella’s company had somehow contributed to this epiphany.

He glanced over at her, walking beside him with her loose springless stride, shoulders back like a dancer. She seemed quite at ease with the silence hanging between them.

She caught his look and a smile stole over her features. ‘It’s like waking up, isn’t it?’

‘Hmmm?’

‘Leaving the garden. It takes time to come back to the real world.’

He felt a sudden and foolish urge to tell her how beautiful she was. And why. Because she wore her beauty carelessly, without vanity – the same way she wore the wounds on her face.

He checked himself just in time.

She cocked her head at him. ‘What were you going to say?’

‘Something I would have regretted.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly, ‘it can do that too.’



It was Antonella’s idea that they stop on the lower terrace and settle themselves down on one of the benches overlooking the olive grove. She asked for a cigarette, which she smoked furtively, glancing up at the villa every so often to check she wasn’t being observed.

‘My grandmother doesn’t approve,’ she explained.

‘I think you’re safe. I mean, she’s bedridden, right?’

Antonella shrugged. ‘Maybe. She likes to create dramas.’ She paused. ‘That’s not fair. She was very ill this winter …una bronchite, how do you say?’

‘Bronchitis.’

‘The doctor was worried. We all were. She has stayed in her bed since then.’

‘Have you tried to get her up?’

‘Have we tried?’ She sounded exasperated.

‘You think she’s pretending?’

‘I think she does not care any more. She is leaving soon, before the end of the year.’

‘Where’s she going?’

Antonella turned and pointed, smoke curling from the cigarette between her fingers. ‘There.’

On a rise just beyond the farm buildings, a large house rose foursquare, its stuccoed walls washed orange by the sun and streaked with the shadows of the surrounding cypresses. Too grand for a labourer, but maybe not grand enough for the lady of the manor.

‘Why’s she moving?’

‘It was her decision. She wants Maurizio – my uncle – to have the villa.’

‘Maybe she’s changed her mind.’

‘She would say’

‘Maybe she’s saying it the only way she knows how.’

‘You don’t know my grandmother. She would say’

Strolling back to the villa, they passed close to the small chapel pressed up against the sandstone cliff. She asked him if he’d seen inside. He had tried, he said, but the door was always locked.

The key was conveniently located for all would-be thieves beneath a large stone right beside the front step - a fact on which he remarked. ‘You never know when someone might need it,’ said Antonella simply.

The lock gnashed at the key then conceded defeat. The interior was aglow, a ruddy sunlight slanting through the windows. Aside from a handful of old wooden pews the interior was almost completely devoid of furnishings. The thieves wouldn’t have been disappointed, though. The simple stone altar bore a painted triptych of the Adoration of the Magi. As they approached - silently, reverently – Adam tried to place it.

The colliding perspectives, the elongated figures and the warmth of the tones suggested a painter from the Sienese school. The date was another matter. To his semi-trained eye, it could have been anything from the mid fourteenth to the mid fifteenth century, later even. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was distinctive, an unsettling blend of innocence and intensity – like the gaze of a child staring at you from the rear window of the car in front.

‘I must go there,’ said Adam.

‘Where?’

‘Siena.’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘Don’t be. I couldn’t tell you anything else about it.’

‘No one can.’

‘I’m sure someone could.’

‘I hope they don’t. Then there would be no more mystery.’

They made a quick tour of the chapel, stopping at a small plaque set in the wall beneath one of the windows. There was a name and a date etched into the stone:

EMILIO DOCCI

27.7.1944

‘My uncle,’ said Antonella.

‘Your grandmother told me what happened. It’s a terrible story.’

‘He’s buried there.’ She pointed at the unmarked flagstones at her feet. ‘I never really knew him. We were living in Milan, and I was only ten or eleven when it happened.’

Which would make her what…?

‘Twenty-four,’ she said, reading his mind. ‘And you?’

‘Twenty-two next month.’

The words had a ring of desperation about them, as if he was trying to narrow the gap on her, and he quickly moved the conversation on.

‘Why did he keep his mother’s surname?’

‘To keep the Docci name alive. So did Maurizio. Not my mother – she’s a Ballerini.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m a Voli. Antonella Voli.’

He returned her bow. ‘Adam Strickland.’

‘Strickland,’ she repeated. It wasn’t designed to roll off an Italian tongue.

Adam glanced back at the plaque. ‘Is Emilio the reason the top floor of the villa isn’t used?’

‘Yes.’

It had been her grandfather’s idea, apparently. The day after Emilio’s murder, the Allies had liberated San Casciano. Soldiers arrived. They searched the villa for intelligence left by the Germans before moving on. Her grandfather then had all the broken furniture from the terrace carried back upstairs. When this was done, he closed and locked the doors at the head of the staircase, sealing off the top floor. The rooms had remained that way ever since – undisturbed – on her grandfather’s insistence. When he died some years later, people assumed that Signora Docci would have them opened up, aired, repaired, re-used. But she had left them just as they were, just as they had always been.

Adam lingered a moment when they left the chapel, casting a last look around the interior. Unless the information in the file was incorrect, then somewhere beneath the stone floor also lay the bones of Flora Bonfadio, dead some four hundred years.

* * *

They found Maria spreading the table on the terrace with a coarse white linen cloth. When Antonella stooped to kiss her on both cheeks, there was no mistaking the unguarded look of warmth in the older woman’s eyes. It visibly dimmed when she took in Adam hovering at a distance.

‘You must stay and meet my uncle and aunt. They’ll be here soon. Also my cousins.’

‘I should be going.’

Maria’s expression suggested that this wasn’t such a bad idea. It also suggested that her grasp of the English language was far better than she liked to let on.

‘I insist,’ said Antonella.

He stayed for only half an hour, but it was time enough to be won over by Maurizio’s easy-going charm and his wife’s mischievous wit. They made an attractive couple. He was dark and trim and distinguished looking, with a dusting of grey at the temples; Chiara Docci was a blonde and sharp-featured beauty whose husky laugh betrayed her passion for cigarettes, which she smoked relentlessly, to the evident disapproval of her two children, Rodolfo and Laura.

‘Mama, please,’ said Laura at one point.

‘I’m nervous, cara. How often does one meet a handsome young man who also has a brain?’

Adam fielded her look and felt his cheeks flush.

‘Is it true?’ Maurizio asked. ‘Does he also have a brain?’

‘I’ve only just met him,’ Antonella replied, playfully noncommittal.

Chiara blew a plume of smoke into the air. ‘That’s all it takes, my dear. The moment I met your uncle I knew I would have to search for mental stimulation elsewhere.’

It was an odd sight for Adam, watching children openly laughing at a parent’s joke. And so wholeheartedly that he wondered for a moment if there wasn’t just a small grain of truth in Chiara’s quip. Somehow he doubted it, though. Maurizio was laughing along like a man who knows quite the reverse is true. His teeth were improbably white, Adam noted.

‘Your brain, my looks, wasn’t that the deal?’ retorted Maurizio, well aware that his wife left him standing in the looks department.

‘So what went wrong?’ said Antonella, nodding at her cousins, the offspring.

More laughter. And more wine. Then a discussion about a forthcoming party at the villa, which Adam would be a fool to miss. Adam, though, wasn’t really listening. He was observing them, with their lively banter and their air of easy affluence, their coal-black hair and their honeyed complexions. A breed apart.

He felt a sudden urge to be gone. Maria spared him having to make an excuse, materializing from the villa with the news that Signora Docci was ready to receive her family.

Antonella accompanied Adam to the courtyard, where the bicycle stood propped against the well-head.

‘My grandfather’s,’ she said, her long fingers sliding over the leather saddle. ‘He used to put us in the basket when we were young and make us shout Ay Caramba!’

She kissed him on both cheeks, her hand lightly touching his arm as she did so.

Negotiating the turn at the bottom of the driveway, he could still feel the delicate pressure of her fingers at his elbow.




9







Have they gone yet?

Didn’t you hear the car leave?

Are you angry, Maria?

Angry?

You always answer a question with a question when you’re angry.

Do I, Signora?

Or sad.

They were talking about the party like it is theirs already…all the friends they’re inviting.

We need their friends. So many of mine are gone.

But it’s your party, Signora, it always has been.

I thought you hated the party.

I do. But that’s not the point.

And what about Antonella? How did she seem to you?

Antonella?

Do you think she likes him?

Who?

Who do you think? Adam, of course.

I’ve hardly seen them together. How can I say?

Because you know her better than any of us.

Yes, I think she likes him.

A lot?

Maybe.

Oh dear.

Signora?

Sit down, Maria. The chair there. Pull it up to the bed. Closer. Good, now give me your hand. That’s right.

Signora…?

There’s something I need to talk to you about, Maria, something we should have talked about long ago.




10







Adam lowered the camera. ‘Damn,’ he muttered, not for the first time.

The light was perfect, clear and limpid after three days of flat summer haze, but now he found he was unable to photograph the glade in its entirety. The three statues distributed around the clearing resolutely refused to fall within the frame at the same time.

Waist-deep in the laurel at the southern edge, he was able to capture both Zephyrus – the west wind, his cheeks puffed out, blowing with all his might – and Hyacinth, supine on his pedestal, dead, the discus lying beside him. But Apollo was out of shot.

In fact, wherever Adam placed himself, the 50mm lens on his father’s old Leica ( ‘Don’t bother coming home if you lose it’) was unable to accommodate more than two of the three figures at any one time.

The story they enacted was simple enough, which only increased his frustration at not being able to trap it in a single shot: Zephyrus, jealous of Apollo’s love for Hyacinth, a beautiful Spartan prince, decided to take action. While Apollo was teaching the youth to throw a discus, Zephyrus whipped up a wind which sent the discus crashing into Hyacinth’s skull, killing him instantly The hyacinth flower then sprouted from the ground where his blood fell.

At the northern fringe of the grove stood Apollo, with his grief-stricken face and his arms outstretched towards the fallen boy. He was perched on a conical, rough-carved mountain peak. Maybe it was intended to signify Mount Parnassus, the home he shared with the Muses, but its inclusion seemed gratuitous. Mount Parnassus didn’t figure in the story as handed down by Ovid and, besides, Apollo was already identifiable from his bow and his lyre.

The statue of Hyacinth only raised further questions. Why place him face down in the dirt, his long hair sprawled across his features so that only a small section of his delicate mouth was showing? And why clad a young man renowned for his athletic prowess in a loose, long-sleeved robe, rather than baring his physique?

The file offered no insights. Nor, for that matter, did the copious notes amassed by Signora Docci’s father while preparing the document, although these had yielded some lines from Keats’ Endymion about Zephyr’s role in the death of Hyacinth. It was a nice fat chunk of poetry which would help flesh out his thesis, but like the other little discoveries he’d accumulated over the past few days, it left him feeling strangely indifferent.

He was safe now – he knew he already had enough to shape a convincing paper – and he should have been celebrating. He couldn’t, though, not with so many questions tugging at his thoughts. They had proliferated ever since his tour of the garden with Antonella, when for a brief moment it had all seemed so clear, so straight forward.

The steep rise housing the amphitheatre was evidently an artificial construct, but why had Federico Docci gone to the effort and expense of shifting so many tons of earth for the sake of one feature? Such a vast undertaking was hardly in keeping with the discretion he’d shown elsewhere in the garden. And as for the amphi theatre itself, why nine levels instead of the seven on display in the amphitheatre at Bomarzo?

Like false notes in an otherwise flawless piece of music, these questions jarred, they refused to be ignored. He had tried to dismiss them, but each time he breached the yew hedge at the entrance to the garden, he knew they’d still be there. Even now, while engaged in the purely practical exercise of photographing the garden, two more had just presented themselves to him in the form of the Apollo and Hyacinth statues.

He fired off one last shot of Hyacinth then made his way back through the woods towards the grotto. It occurred to him that he was developing an unhealthy fixation on the garden. This was hardly surprising. Since his arrival he had barely thought about anything else. When he wasn’t walking around it, he was invariably reading about it, shipping books and papers back to the pensione every evening in the bike basket so that he could continue studying through dinner and on into the early hours.

There had been no one in the trattoria to chide him for reading and eating at the same time. Disappointingly, Fausto hadn’t shown his face since that first evening, and was unlikely to do so any time soon according to Signora Fanelli. Apparently it was the first time in a long while that he’d stopped by her place. Adam might have been imagining it, but he’d detected a whiff of disappointment on her part, too.

No Fausto. And no Antonella, not for three days.

‘She is working very hard,’ Signora Docci had revealed to him during one of his regular audiences in her bedroom. ‘Apparently, there are important clients in town, buyers from big American department stores.’

She had made little effort to conceal the note of mild mockery in her voice.

‘You don’t approve of what she does?’

‘It’s the job of old people to disapprove of everything young people do.’

‘Oh, is that right?’

‘If we don’t disapprove, then the young have nothing to fight against and the world will never change. It cannot move on.’

‘I’d never thought of it that way.’

‘I should hope not; you have better things to think about.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, I don’t know’ – she waved her hand vaguely about in the air – ‘Elvis Presley’

‘I’m impressed.’

‘Antonella keeps me informed of these things.’

‘And you dutifully disapprove.’

‘Elvis Presley is clearly a young man of questionable morals.’

‘Based on your knowledge of his music’

‘And his films.’

‘Which you’ve seen?’

‘Of course not. You don’t understand. The old people are allowed to argue their case from a position of complete ignorance. In fact, it’s essential.’

Adam laughed, as he often found himself doing when in her company. ‘Maybe she likes what she does,’ he said. ‘Maybe she’s good at it.’

‘My friends who know about such things tell me she has great talent. But I always saw her as more than just a seamstress.’

‘I’m sure there’s a lot more to it than just sewing.’

Signora Docci gave a low sigh. ‘You’re right, of course. Ignore me. I think I am still a little angry’

‘Angry?’

‘You should have seen her before, before this –’ Her fingertips moved to her forehead. ‘She was so beautiful. Now she hides herself away in a back room and works with her hands. La poverina.’

Her words riled him, especially the last two, replete with pity: the poor thing.

‘I disagree,’ said Adam. ‘I can’t see her hiding herself.’

‘No?’ Her tone was flat, sceptical.

‘I know I’ve only met her once, but it’s what struck me most – that she’s not ashamed, not embarrassed. The way she wears her hair, the way she carries herself. She’s not hiding.’

‘You think she doesn’t look in the mirror every morning and wish it was different?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know. But she’s more beautiful because of it, because of the way she is with it.’

‘You really believe that?’

‘I do. Yes.’

At first he took her look for one of weary sufferance, and he suddenly felt very young, he suddenly felt like a person in the presence of someone who has spent considerably more time on the planet. But there was something else in her eyes, something he couldn’t quite place. He only realized what it was when a slow and slightly wicked smile spread across her face.

‘You’re playing with me.’

‘It’s nice to see you defending her. And you’re right – she is more beautiful because of it.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘It was near Portofino, at night. Her mother was driving. She was also lucky. She only broke two ribs.’

Signora Docci had not elaborated. In fact, she had termin ated the conversation then and there on some doubtful pretext, banishing him back downstairs to his books.

Maybe that’s what the problem was, mused Adam, strolling back past the grotto: the routine, the rigmarole, long periods of study broken by conversations with a bed-bound septuagenarian. Toss the pitiless heat into the pot, and it was little wonder he was losing his grip.

He climbed the steps sunk into the slope behind the grotto, resolving as he did so to break the pattern, to introduce some variety into his life, maybe eat out one night, cycle off somewhere for half a day, or even hitch a lift into Florence – anything to add some variety, jolt him out of his folly.

He stopped at the base of the amphitheatre and stared up at Flora on her pedestal near the top. He would never be able to see her as he had that first time. Antonella’s words had irrevocably coloured his judgement. When he looked on the goddess twisting one way then the other he no longer saw the classic pose borrowed from Giambologna, he saw a woman contorted with some other emotion, he saw the provocative thrust of her right hip.

Why put her there, near the top but not at the top? In fact, why put her there at all, in a nine-tiered amph i theatre? And why nine instead of seven tiers? Or five for that matter? What was so special about nine? The nine lives of a cat? A stitch in time…? The nine planets of the solar system? No, they hadn’t known about Pluto back then. Shakespeare, maybe – Macbeth – the witches repeating their spells nine times. Not possible. Shakespeare couldn’t have been more than a boy when the garden was laid out. Close, though. And the occult connection was interesting. How had the witches put it?

Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,And thrice again to make up nine.

The trinity to the power of three – a powerful number - thrice sacred, like the Holiest of Holies, composed of the three trinities. And something else, some other dark association with the number nine. But what?

He pulled himself up short, the resolution fresh in his mind yet already ignored. He lit a cigarette, dropped the match in the trough at the foot of the amphitheatre and made off up the pathway.

He was a few yards shy of the yew hedge barring his exit from the garden when the answer came to him.

The nine circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.

It was several moments before he turned and hurried back down the path to the amphitheatre.

It wasn’t that the statue of Flora was placed on the second tier from the top – he couldn’t remember just which category of human sin or depravity had been enshrined by Dante in the second circle of his Inferno - it was the inscription on the triumphal arch standing proud on the crest above that settled it:






It took him ten minutes to locate a copy of the book in the library, just time enough to recover his breath. He dropped into a leather chair and examined the tome: La Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri, an Italian edition dating from the late nineteenth century.

His dictionary was back at the pensione, but with any luck he wouldn’t need it, not immediately. Even his rudimentary Italian should be up to establishing which class of sinner inhabited the second circle of Dante’s Hell, his Inferno.

He had never actually read The Divine Comedy right through. He had skimmed it, filleted a couple of com mentaries, done just enough to satisfy an examiner that he was well acquainted with the text. He could have put forward a convincing argument for the timeless appeal of Dante’s epic poem, the crowning glory of his life, twelve years in the writing, completed just before his death in 1321. He could also have listed a number of great writers and poets who openly and willingly acknowledged their debt to the work – William Blake, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. He could even have come up with some specifics, lines in The Waste Land that Eliot had lifted straight from The Divine Comedy.

Never having read The Waste Land – or any works by Beckett and Joyce, for that matter – he would have been hard pressed to say what exactly these modern men of letters had seen to inspire them in a medieval poem about a lost soul’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.




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