The Savage Garden

The Savage Garden

Mark Mills

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's

imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over

and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2007 by Mark Mills.

"Readers Guide" copyright © 2008 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Text design by Meighan Cavanaugh.

All rights reserved.

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BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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The Library of Congress has catalogued the G. P. Putnam's Sons hardcover edition of this book as follows:

Mills, Mark, date.

The savage garden / Mark Mills.

p. cm.

ISBN: 1-4362-1508-0

1. College teachers—Fiction. 2. College students—Fiction. 3. England—Fiction. 4. Italy—Fiction.

5. College stories. I. Title.

Acknowledgments

My thanks, as ever, go to my inimitable agent and friend Stephanie Cabot for—well—being Stephanie Cabot;

to my editors Julia Wisdom and

Rachel Kahan for their enthusiasm, wisdom and guidance; and to my

wife, Caroline, for her tireless patience and encouragement.

I am also extremely grateful to Francis and Rachel Hamel-Cooke,

Anne O'Brien and Jane Hall, as well as Charles and Angela Cottrell- Dormer,

whose hospitality and generosity of spirit account for much

more of this book than they are probably aware.

For Caroline, Gus and Rosie

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"

August 1958

LATER, WHEN IT WAS OVER, HE CAST HIS THOUGHTS BACK to that sunstruck 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.

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 fueled 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 seventysome 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 toward 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 whom 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 overzealous 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 toward 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?"

"Aha!" 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?

"I think it was Kent," said Adam.

"Kent?" "The Battle of Britain—Kent and a bit of Sussex, not Hampshire."

This news was clearly something of a blow to Gloria.

"Well, maybe some of the planes, I don't know, went astray or something."

Adam looked doubtful.

"Damn," said Gloria, "I wanted dogfights in the sky."

"Then move it to Kent."

"It has to be Hampshire."

"Why?"

He regretted the question almost immediately.

"Because it's all about a secret submarine base in Portsmouth harbor."

Was this really 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 submarine base in Portsmouth harbor?

"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 unsavory 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 onto 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 toward 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 favors 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, "Hampshire it is. Screw the Battle of Britain."

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 sidesaddle 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 iconography 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 colors. 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 modeled 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—that's 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, a little 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."

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 the term. The situation was nonnegotiable 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 off 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 defense 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 telltale sign of his calling that Adam could recall.

Adam searched out old friends from the neighborhood. 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 paneled 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 coloring your judgment"—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 toward 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 Paleolithic 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 humor 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 underestimate 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 car 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 traveled 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 category, 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 splendor 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 onto the platform, he felt this 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 free. 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; drains 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 sidewalks into the road, forcing them to do battle with squadrons of scooters and cars. The narrow street filled with the sounds 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: Tom-maso Guidi, nicknamed Masaccio by his friends, the scruffy boy- wonder, dead at twenty-seven but who had left his defining mark on these walls long before. 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 laborers 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 runoff.

He realized he was staring only 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 toward them owed itself to their interruption of his experience, or whether the work itself had somehow unleashed it in him.

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 humor in your old age. Turn over, please.

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 traveling, 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 rearview mirror and grunt and nod his assent—an arrangement that seemed to work to the complete satisfaction of both parties.

When the road leveled 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, gridlike. Her buildings were no more welcoming—the palaces of rusticated stone, modeled 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 facades 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 other 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 center 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 facade 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.

"Uffa," 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 onto 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 cameraperfetta."

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 onto 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 overmuscled 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 ocher-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 toward 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 handdrawn 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 on 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 stories of the front facade, 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 wellhead 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 centerpiece of the Docci coat of arms. He tugged on the iron bellpull.

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, viselike.

"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 anytime 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, and giving onto 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 toward the door as they entered, peering over the top of her spectacles.

"Adam," she said, smiling broadly.

"Hello."

"Grazie, 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?" "Twenty-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 louvered 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 mythical 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 onto 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'e 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 onto 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 terra-cotta 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 center 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 that 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 that 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, fortresslike quality. And yet somehow this seemed in keeping with both its setting and function. It was not a pleasure palace; it was the centerpiece 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 candor 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 moldering 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 socioeconomic 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 Medici, originated from the Mugello, a mountainous region just north of the city. Although they had never risen to the Medici's 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 handdrawn 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 graveled, 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 amphitheater, 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 amphitheater, 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 amphitheater. It bore an inscription in Latin, eroded by the elements, but just possible to make out:

anima fit sedendo et quiescendo prudentior

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.

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 toward 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.

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 downdraft. 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 behavior.

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 lackluster 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 wrenches. 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, molding 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 demigods 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 disheveled kind of way. He pushed his lank hair out of his eyes.

"Can I?" he asked in Italian, not waiting for a reply and 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 shard 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 from 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 defense south of Florence.

Despite this, Fausto seemed to harbor a grudging respect for the German military machine, which had so successfully slowed the Allied advance northward, 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 firsthand 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 breadstick 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 toward 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. "Good night, 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 percent, the poor things," she added with a distinct note of false sympathy.

Twenty-two percent 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 onto 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.

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 clamoring 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. 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 toward 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, marshaling 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 onto 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 that 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, and 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 that 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. "Orango-tanghi," 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. Toward 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 trailed 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, lsabella, 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, trucks 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. Fueled 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. In 1901. We were very aware of it here. She often came to Florence. Papa even had the honor 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 artifacts, 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 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-gray 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 skeptically and raised the saddle an inch or two.

Peddling 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: "Cost dicono."

So the story goes.

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 amphitheater, 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 amphitheater, 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 ponytail 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 toward 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 center. 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 that 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 amphitheater 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 amphitheater. 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 modeled 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 modeled 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 skeptically.

"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's 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 una innocente."

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 inquiry, 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 center, 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 heavenward 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 center was a female face in relief, staring heavenward, 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 program of the garden. The only false note was the broken-off horn of the unicorn crouched at Apollo's feet, its head bowed toward 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 draft 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 blanketing 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 freestanding 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 color. 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: that 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 orangutan 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 that 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 it 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 once must 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 center 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 program, 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 disorient, whatever the season. He had punched holes in this somber 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 enameled the ground in their respective areas of the garden every springtime.

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 anymore. 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 laborer, 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 semitrained eye, it could have been anything from the mid—fourteenth century to the mid—fifteenth, 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 were a name and a date etched into the stone:

EMILIO DOCI

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 little 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, reused. 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 dimmed visibly 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 easygoing charm and his wife's mischievous wit. They made an attractive couple. He was dark and trim and distinguished-looking, with a dusting of gray at the temples; Chiara Docci was a blond 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 wellhead.

"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.

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 does.

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.

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 that 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 toward 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 facedown 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 that 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 straightforward.

The steep rise housing the amphitheater 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 amphitheater itself, why nine levels instead of the seven on display in the amphitheater 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 toward 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 pen- sione 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 anytime 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 a 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, skeptical.

"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 terminated 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 amphitheater 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 colored his judgment. 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 amphitheater? 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 amphitheater 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 amphitheater.

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 commentaries, 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 or 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.

It didn't matter, though. He could recall enough of The Divine Comedy to know that there was some kind of connection with the memorial garden.

Finding himself lost in a dark wood, Dante is approached by the spirit of the poet Virgil, who guides him down through the nine circles of Hell and on into Purgatory. The spirit of Beatrice— the love of Dante's life, long since dead—takes over as guide for the last leg, escorting Dante up through Paradise toward a final meeting with God.

Adam's interest lay in the opening of the story: Virgil leading Dante from the dark wood and through the Gates of Hell. Was it by chance that a dense wood of dark ilex trees bristled menacingly at the head of the memorial garden? Or that the triumphal arch stood so close by? Or that if you read the two curiously unsymmetrical decorative motifs flanking fiore as the letter n, then you had an anagram of inferno, of Hell? Was it possible that Federico Docci had moved, if not Heaven, then earth, and lots of it, to shape a steep slope for a simple amphitheater? Or had he done so in order to re-create the plunging layers of Hell so vividly detailed by Dante in the first part of his poem?

These were some of the questions that had carried Adam up the hill from the garden at a run, and that now had him furiously flipping through the old book.

He found what he was looking for in the fifth Canto of Inferno:

Cosi discesi del cerchio primaio giu nel secondo ...

So I descended from the first circle down to the second...

His eyes roamed over the text: a dark place . . . the cries and curses of the sinners as they're whirled around in a vicious wind that never stops . . . i peccator carnali.

He read on a little to confirm that he hadn't misunderstood. He hadn't.

If the ilex trees stood for the dark wood where Dante lost his way, and the triumphal arch represented the Gates of Hell, then Federico Docci had chosen to place the statue of his dead wife in the circle of Hell that housed the carnal sinners, the adulterers.

He was still trying to take this on board when Maria entered the library from the drawing room.

"Maria."

"Sir." Why had she taken to calling him "sir"? "Signora Docci wishes to see you."

"Thank you."

He didn't move.

"Is everything all right, sir?"

"Yes."

His mind was still reeling from the discovery, yes, but his sweat- soaked shirt was also glued to the back of the leather chair, and he worried what sound it would make if he got to his feet in her presence.

He was right to have waited till she left. It was a ripping sound, a bit like Velcro.

Signora Docci wasn't in her bed, which threw him at first. She had only ever been in her bed. But now it was empty, neatly made, the white cotton counterpane smoothed flat as ice.

"Out here," came her voice from the loggia.

She was seated in a rattan chair, and she was wearing a navy blue skirt and a white cotton blouse. Her feet were bare and resting on a footstool. Her hair, which she had always worn loose, was drawn back in a ponytail; and in the sunlight flooding the loggia, her face had lost some of its pallor. She looked like a passenger lounging on the deck of an ocean liner—the first-class deck.

"I thought we'd have tea al fresco today," she said matter-of- factly. Unable to keep up the pretense, a slow smile broke across her face. "You should see your expression."

"I'm surprised."

"It's hardly the raising of Lazarus. Anyway, it's your fault." "My fault?"

"Well, not directly. It's the shame of talking to you every day from my bed. It's not dignified."

"You don't have to feel dignified on my account."

"Oh, I don't—it's entirely on my own account." She turned her face into the sun. "It is a long time since I felt the sun on my face." She gestured toward the tea service laid out on the low table. "Do you mind?"

Adam poured the tea, as he always did. She was very particular— milk first, then the tea, then half a spoon of sugar.

"You were running," she said.

"Running?"

"Well, trying to. I saw you from there." She pointed toward the low wall of the loggia.

Instinct told him to keep the discovery to himself. If indeed that's what it was. Maybe he had imposed Dante on the garden, or the garden on Dante. He needed to be sure. And that would take time.

"I thought I was on to something. I was wrong."

She wasn't going to let him get away with it that easily. "What?"

"Zephyr," he replied, still formulating his response.

"Zephyr?"

"The west wind."

"Yes, I know."

"Well, in the myth he's Flora's husband; in life Federico was her husband. I suddenly thought, I don't know, that maybe the statue of Zephyr had been modeled on Federico. I wanted to see if there was a resemblance with the portrait in the study."

"Interesting."

"Except there's no likeness." He shrugged.

If she sensed his evasion, she didn't say anything. What she did say surprised him.

"There's a bedroom in the north wing, big, with its own bathroom. It's yours if you want it."

He wasn't sure if he'd heard right.

"It's an invitation."

"To stay?"

"Not forever," she said with a small smile. "Think on it. You don't have to decide now. And I won't be offended if you say no."

"Thank you."

"It will save you money."

"It's not my money, it's the faculty's."

"That doesn't mean you can't spend it on something else. Crispin doesn't need to know. And if he did, he'd hardly ask for it back. Am I wrong?" "No."

"So?"

It wasn't the money. Something else altogether accounted for his hesitation.

"My brother's coming to stay."

"You never mentioned you had a brother."

"I try not to think about it too much."

Signora Docci smiled. "When is he arriving?"

"That's not the kind of question you ask Harry."

"And what does Harry do?"

"He's a sculptor."

"A sculptor?" She sounded intrigued.

"Of sorts. He's very modern—lots of welded steel dragged off scrap heaps."

"Is he presentable?"

"That's not a word I've ever associated with him."

Signora Docci laughed. "Well, there's another room for Harry if he wants it. You decide. It doesn't matter to me either way."

But it did, he could see that; he could see an elderly woman about to be displaced from her home and extending an invitation of hospitality, possibly her last. What settled it for him, though, was the chance it offered to see more of Antonella. If their paths hadn't crossed in the past few days, it was only because he was always long gone, back at the pensione in San Casciano by the time she showed up to visit her grandmother in the evening.

SIGNORA FANELLI WAS A LITTLE PUT OUT TO HEAR THAT Adam would be leaving, less so when he offered to cover the cost of the room for a full week.

"When will you go?"

"Not tomorrow, but the day after that day." He made a mental note to look up the Italian for "the day after tomorrow."

Signora Fanelli was busying herself in the trattoria, polishing glasses in readiness for the evening trade. The front of her dress was cut lower than usual, and a gold cross dangled alluringly at her cleavage. He hadn't registered it before, but there was something of Flora in her high collarbones.

"The Signora really invited you to stay?"

"Yes."

"Strange."

"Why?"

"She's very private."

"She doesn't seem very private." "She wasn't. Before. She was very . . . vivacious."

"What happened?"

She looked up with her large dark eyes. "The murder, of course."

"You mean Emilio?"

"A bad thing." She crossed herself with the barest of movements, drawing his eyes once more to her low neckline.

The family had never really recovered from the death of Emilio, she went on, although Signora Docci's husband, Benedetto, had taken it worse than she had. He faded from view. He was rarely seen out and about, not even at harvest time when the grapes and the olives were picked and pressed. Then suddenly he was dead, of a heart attack. In her opinion, those Germans might just as well have shot him too, because he was dying from the moment they killed his eldest boy.

"What happened to them—the Germans?"

"Killed, both of them, in the battle of Florence."

"Justice."

"You think so? Two lives for one? Ten, maybe . . . fifty ... a hundred of their lives. To kill him like that, a man who had welcomed them into his own home."

The memory still angered her. It was a physical thing, shocking to an English eye.

She swept a stray strand of hair out of her face. "They changed this place. It's not the same. Everyone knows what happened here, and we still feel it. What they did in a moment, we live with forever."

Later, when he had showered, he read through the letter he'd written to Gloria, relieved that he hadn't got around to posting it. He thought he'd struck just the right note of magnanimity, forgiving her for the brutal termination of their relationship, but there was something pompous and self-pitying tucked away in his words. What did she care what he thought? She had wanted company to see her through to the summer break. He shouldn't be forgiving her; he should be admonishing himself for failing to read the signs earlier.

His mind turned to Signora Fanelli, to the flash of fire in her eyes and the dark passion in her voice when she had spoken about Emilio's murder. He also dwelt on her parting words to him downstairs.

"I'm sorry you're leaving, but I understand."

It was a simple enough statement, but her gaze had faltered, as if with embarrassment, as if she had revealed too much of herself. Had there been something provocative in that bashful glance? It wasn't impossible. Their relationship had hovered somewhere between easy familiarity and flirtation since their very first exchange, when she had corrected his Italian with a wry little smile. Over the past days they had joked, he had flattered her, and she had found any number of pretexts on which to playfully chide him. It wasn't exactly a remarkable relationship, but there was no denying a certain alchemy.

When he headed downstairs for dinner, there was nothing in Signora Fanelli's manner to suggest that any of these thoughts had ever occurred to her. She was too busy to show him to his table as she usually did. Instead, she pointed to the terrace and barked, "Outside." And when she finally got around to taking his order, there was none of the usual banter while he prevaricated (far more than was ever necessary). She insisted that he start with the cacciucco, whatever that was, then hurried off.

Cacciucco proved to be steamed mussels in a spicy red sauce. It was excellent, certainly too good to do anything other than eat, not that the messy operation allowed for a book on the table, let alone three. The moment the debris was cleared away, he opened The Divine Comedy. Many of the words didn't even appear in his dictionary, and it soon became depressingly clear that he could spend the rest of his time in Italy toiling through the text and still not reach the end. He persevered, though, the thrill of the breakthrough fresh in his mind.

He had punished the evidence, but everything still pointed to a clear link between the garden and Dante's Inferno. Just like Dante, Federico Docci had constructed his own multilayered Hell, and by placing Flora on the second tier from the top he was sending out a message about his young wife, he was saying that she was an adulterous whore.

It was no longer a question of whether or not Federico Docci had made this damning declaration, but why? Why bother laying out a garden to her memory at all if that's the way he felt about her? It didn't make sense, not unless there was more to the story, more that Federico had buried away in the rest of the cycle.

This called for a close examination of Dante's poem; it demanded a thorough search for any further associations with the garden; it meant ploughing on regardless. Which is precisely what he did—right through the main course of spit-roasted Val d'Arno chicken, a warm and windless night descending on the terrace.

Dante and Virgil had barely breached the Gates of Hell when Signora Fanelli arrived at his table with a complimentary brandy.

"You work too hard."

"Feeling better?" he asked.

She gave a coy and contrite smile. "I'm sorry. It's been a bad night. I'll tell you later."

She never got a chance to. Some late diners and the usual diehards at the bar meant she was still working flat out when he finally headed upstairs to bed.

He was awoken by a swath of light cutting through the darkness. There was a figure silhouetted in the doorway of his room.

It was Signora Fanelli.

He closed his eyes, feigning sleep, his mind struggling to digest this new development. So he hadn't been wrong, after all.

"Adam," she whispered, creeping toward him. Her hand settled gently on his shoulder. "Adam."

He did a poor job of pretending to stir. "Yes ... ?" he croaked weakly.

"It's 'Arry," she said. "On the phone."

Harry went straight in without so much as a "hello," and from that moment on Adam was behind in the story, struggling to make up ground.

It had something to do with being in Milan and meeting a girl at the station and the girl was Swiss and she was lost and it was late and she had an address of a hotel nearby and they went there and it was a cheap place with no porters and Harry had carried her bag upstairs for her while she checked in and when he came down he found that she had checked out. Permanently. With his bag. The one he'd innocently left in her company. The one with all his money in it.

It was not unlike a number of stories Adam had heard from Harry over the years.

"Harry, what time is it?"

"What, late for the fucking opera, are we? Christ, it's late, okay, and I'm stuck in this shitty hotel in Milan with a suitcase full of newspapers belonging to a Swiss girl."

"I doubt she was Swiss."

"You doubt she was Swiss!?"

"I doubt it."

"Well, she didn't have pigtails and a bloody great milch cow on a leash, if that's what you mean!"

"Calm down, Harry."

"You calm down. You're not the one in Milan with the suitcase full of newspapers."

"Do you have your passport?"

"Of course," sighed Harry indignantly.

"Any money?"

"Not enough to buy a ticket out of here or I wouldn't be calling."

"Where are you phoning from? The hotel?"

"Yes."

"Do they speak English?"

"They think they do."

"Okay, listen. This is what I suggest. . . ."

As Adam talked, he watched Signora Fanelli going about her business, closing up for the night. She bolted the shutters to the terrace but left the doors open so that the cool night air could circulate. She was wiping down the counter when he finally replaced the receiver on the cradle.

He was suddenly aware of himself standing there barefoot in his pajama bottoms and the grubby T-shirt he'd pulled on hurriedly.

"Problems?" she asked.

"Do you have a brother?"

"Yes."

"Is he a disaster?"

She laughed. She laughed some more when he related the story of Harry's plight. She then poured them both a nightcap and apologized for being so short with him earlier in the evening. Lucrezia, one of the cooks, had shown up drunk again. Signora Fanelli sympathized—Lucrezia's husband was a violent brute, he had always been a violent brute, even as a boy—but the drinking was getting out of hand. She didn't know what to do. They talked her quandary to a standstill before making their way upstairs to bed.

Adam's room lay on the corridor leading to her apartment. When they reached his door, he said good night to her. She didn't walk on, though; she didn't even reply, not at first. She stared at the floor, then looked up at him and said, "Iacopo's not here tonight. He's staying with a friend."

He knew what the words meant—her son was away, she was alone—but he didn't know what she meant. And he wasn't going to risk making a fool of himself.

He didn't have to. She took him by the hand and drew him into his room, closing the door behind them.

There was nothing urgent in her actions, not at first. She led him through the darkness to the bed, then eased his shirt up and over his head, discarding it on the floor. She ran her hands over his skin, her fingers tugging at the desultory thicket that almost qualified as chest hair. When she raised her face toward his, he stooped to kiss her. Her tongue was small, pointed, inquisitive. She must have felt him stirring against her belly, because she placed a hand in the small of his back and drew him closer.

They stood like this, kissing, for quite some while. His hands roamed, enjoying what they felt through the cotton dress, her nipples hardening beneath his touch.

Slowly, she dropped to her knees and drew his pajama bottoms down over his thighs. He felt her breath against him, and for a moment she seemed to be contemplating what to do next. Then she closed her lips around him.

She did almost nothing; she just let him grow there in the moist warmth of her mouth, the palms of her hands resting gently against his thighs.

Then her mouth was gone and she was standing once more, turning her back to him.

He slid the zipper down and eased the dress from her shoulders until it fell and gathered in a heap at her ankles. She didn't step free of it until he had released the clasp of her bra.

She beat him to the panties, bending to remove them, before turning once more to face him. She was breathing hard now, and she gripped him firmly in her hand as they locked mouths again, her tongue stabbing at his this time.

Without warning, she pushed him back onto the bed and was astride him before he had time to shuffle himself neatly to the middle of the mattress. Her pelvis pressing against his hardness, her hair dense, abrasive, already damp.

She cupped a hand behind his neck and drew his head off the bed, guiding his mouth to her breasts.

She arched low, pressing her lips to his ear. "This is our secret," she whispered. "You understand?"

He grunted.

She removed her nipple from his mouth. "Do you understand?"

"Yes."

She forced him back onto the mattress. There was nothing he wanted more than to enter her there and then, but she wasn't having it, not yet.

She edged her way up his body until her purpose was plain. Seizing the iron rail at the head of the bed to steady herself, she straddled his face and lowered herself toward him.

TO ANYONE WHO DIDN'T KNOW, THERE WAS NOTHING IN their behavior to betray what had passed between them. The elderly Roman couple—the only other residents of the pensione still at their breakfast when Adam headed downstairs—smiled at him politely, as they had done for the past few mornings. No evidence there that Signora Fanelli had shared with them the details of her nocturnal romp with the Englishman. In fact, no evidence at all that it had ever occurred.

It was only when she brought him his coffee that he detected something. She stood a fraction closer to him than she usually did when placing the cup and saucer on the table.

He lingered over his breakfast in the hope that a private moment would present itself, an opportunity to at least acknowledge their steamy encounter. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered so much if she hadn't slipped from his bed while he was sleeping. His last memory had been of her astride him, exhorting him with words he didn't understand, the crucifix swinging at her neck, brushing his chest. That second time had done for him almost immediately. Had he even held her afterward? He hoped he had.

The Romans finally pottered off, and when Signora Fanelli reappeared from the kitchen, she asked breezily, "Another cappuccino?

"Thank you."

The countertop coffee machine coughed and sputtered and hissed ominously. Adam pushed back his chair and strolled over.

"Did you sleep well?" she asked.

It sounded suspiciously like a dig.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Why?"

"I fell asleep."

She fired a furtive glance at the door to the kitchen. "That was my intention. I have a business to run here. I also need my sleep." There was a pleasing edge of irony to her voice.

Steam from a slender nozzle blasted some milk in a battered tin jug.

"Eight years," she said, under cover of the racket. "Since I made love."

"It's a long time."

She twisted the tap closed and looked up at him. "It was worth the wait."

"It was very special. No, incredible." He hoped she could see from his face that he wasn't being polite. She had taken him to a place he'd never been before.

At that moment Iacopo entered from the terrace, breathless from running. Adam was probably wrong to detect something knowing in the boy's look.

"Well?" asked his mother.

"He's leaving in twenty minutes." "Signore Carnesecchi," she explained, turning to Adam. "He's going down into Florence."

She was ahead of him, looking out for him. He'd told her he needed to send money to Harry.

Iacopo passed by them, out of the room.

"No one must ever know," she said.

"I understand."

"I live here. You don't. That's why it happened."

There must have been something injured in his expression, because when she slid the cup of coffee across the counter she gave his hand a brief and stealthy squeeze.

"Well, not the only reason."

Signore Carnesecchi made a living from fruit and vegetables, which was mildly amusing. His surname translated as "dried meats."

His wife and son were traveling with him to the market in Florence. They rode in the cab of the old open-sided truck while Adam squeezed in with the crates stacked in the back.

Tomatoes predominated, with beans running a close second. Judging from the smell, there was also a batch of strawberries buried away somewhere. It was a bumpy but fragrant journey down out of the hills.

Bouncing around on the boards, watching the world receding behind him, Adam caught himself in a flush of pride. Was it trivial that a beautiful woman had wanted him? He suspected it was. Was it immature and vindictive to imagine Gloria getting wind of the encounter? Certainly. But sitting there in the back of the truck, the sun warming his face, it felt good, he felt alive. And he hadn't felt alive for quite some while, he now realized.

Eight years since she last made love—that's what she had said— which meant that he wasn't the first person she'd given herself to since the death of her husband. Araldo had been killed in 1945, right at the end of the war. Adam knew this because he had asked her while they were lying damp and entwined after their first bout on the mattress.

It was a grim tale, which made her willingness to share it with him all the more touching. Araldo had been a victim of the bloodletting that followed the liberation of Italy by the Allies—an uncertain and anarchic time when many were held to account for their actions during the German occupation. If she knew the exact details, she didn't share them with him. She spoke vaguely of an accusation leveled against her husband. The word "collaboration" wasn't mentioned, but she did hint at an incident that had resulted in the arrest and execution of two local partisans by the Germans.

She was more specific when it came to the details of what subsequently happened. Araldo left the house one morning for Impruneta, where he worked as a stonemason. He never arrived. They dragged him from his car on a quiet country road and put three bullets in his head.

Who "they" were, she didn't know for sure, although she had her suspicions. A name sprang to Adam's mind too. Fortunately, it was the wrong name.

Fausto had played no part in Araldo's death, she went on, of that she was fairly sure. He had shown his face at the funeral. A number of his comrades-in-arms hadn't.

"You can't know a man—I mean you can't really know a man—unless you've known him as a child. I've known Fausto all my life, since we were babies in our mothers' arms. If I thought for one moment he'd had anything to do with it, or even that he knew it was going to happen and did nothing . . . well, I think I would have killed him by now."

Sitting there in the back of the truck, this was a shocking and sobering statement to recall. At the time, however, it had exerted a strangely aphrodisiacal effect.

The warehouse was a low steel-and-concrete structure in the San Lorenzo district of Florence. The streets around it were thronging with people. They parted like a bow wave before a boat, closing in again behind the truck. Most ignored him sitting there among the crates; some waved. A knot of grubby children made obscene gestures. When he returned them, he was pelted with stones snatched from the gutter.

He helped unload the crates, then turned down Signore Carnesecchi's offer of a ride back to San Casciano in an hour's time. He said he'd make his own way back.

The city was in the grip of a stifling heat, and he baked himself for a while on the terrace of a cafe in Piazza della Signoria, the tourists pouring past him in weary droves. He dropped off two rolls of film at a photographic shop on Piazza Repubblica and parted with some of the money in his pocket for a crude straw hat and a pair of sunglasses—purchases that might have felt extravagant if the cash hadn't been destined for Harry. God only knew what he would spend it on.

There was no line worth speaking of at the American Express office. The counter clerk relieved him of his bundle of notes and, when questioned, pointed him in the direction of a reputable bookshop.

They didn't have an English language edition of The Divine

Comedy, but a long walk and four hundred lire later he was the proud owner of a battered translation by Dorothy L. Sayers.

He toyed with the idea of settling down with it in some shady corner of the Boboli Gardens, or of visiting one of the many museums, galleries and churches on his list. They were idle thoughts, though. He knew where he was really headed.

He had logged and stored away the name of the fashion house, as well as the district in which it was located. More than that, Antonella hadn't revealed to him. It proved to be enough. A newspaper vendor in Piazza Santa Croce directed him to the street and the building.

It was a large crumbling palazzo. Adam stepped through a small door set in towering wooden gates and found himself in a generous courtyard open to the heavens. It was a world apart, sealed off, immune to the amplified din of the cars and scooters in the narrow street outside. You could even hear the soft fall of water in the fountain. There were other sounds too, snatches of activity drifting through the open windows around the courtyard: the staccato beat of a typewriter, someone answering a phone, the scrape of a chair against a stone floor. If the brass plaques attached to the wall outside were anything to go by, the building was home to a number of businesses.

The fashion house where Antonella worked occupied the entire north wing of the palazzo, although you wouldn't have known it from the ground floor reception area. Cool and cavernous, it was also completely anonymous—no company name in sight, no products on show. A handful of modern leather chairs served as a small seating area, and an ornate rococo desk dwarfed the already petite receptionist behind it.

The rubber soles of his shoes squeaked painfully on the tiled floor as he made his way over. She only looked up from her magazine when the noise ceased at her desk. She studied him with some interest, but seemed to find little to repay her curiosity. When he asked to see Antonella, her manner grew more obliging. She straightened in her chair, requested his name and reached for the phone.

Adam cast an eye around him while he waited. The decor was a self-conscious blend of old and new. The chrome chandelier hanging from the high, beamed ceiling was positively futuristic, and there was an abstract metal sculpture bolted to the wall behind the receptionist's desk—a large circular monstrosity, some five or six feet in diameter, consisting of shards of steel welded together haphazardly. It would have had Harry in raptures.

"Adam . . ."

Antonella appeared at the foot of the stone staircase. She was wearing a navy blue linen dress that hugged her slender figure. Approaching, she kissed him on both cheeks.

"Nice hat."

"All the rage this season, or didn't you know?"

She smiled. "I'm surprised."

"Me too. I wasn't sure I had the right place."

She glanced around her. "Umberto thinks it's good for business. He says it's—how do you say?—enigmatic. The rest is not like this. Come, I'll show you. Do you have time?"

"I'm not disturbing you?"

She dismissed the question with a wag of the hand.

Adam thanked the receptionist as he passed by. "Don't mention it, sir," she replied sweetly, keen to win favor with Antonella.

She wasn't the only one.

The cutters and seamstresses toiling in the run of rooms upstairs all greeted her warmly. It didn't surprise him that she was liked, but she seemed to command a respect way beyond her years. The reason became clear when she pushed open yet another door.

"And this is where I work," she announced. "It's very messy."

Two windows, half-shuttered against the sunlight, overlooked the courtyard. There was a desk, some low bookcases, as well as a large workbench that filled the center of the room. She was right. Every available surface was loaded with clutter: piles of sketches, samples of cloth and leather, pots of pens and brushes, empty cups and overflowing ashtrays.

"I want to say it's not normally like this."

The only remotely clear area was an architect's drawing board against the wall, and maybe only then because it offered an angled surface. There was a half-finished drawing taped to it, a color sketch of a leather handbag. It was quite unlike any other handbag Adam had ever seen.

"It's our new thing. Umberto wants us to do accessories—bags, belts, scarves, maybe even shoes."

The walls were papered with more sketches, dresses mostly. They had loose, flowing lines, and all were cut from the distinctive cloths that were clearly the hallmark of the company: bold geometric designs in vivid colors. They were the same dresses Adam had witnessed taking life next door.

"Does Umberto do anything around here?" he asked.

"Umberto is a genius. I am only his hands." There was no trace of false modesty in her words. "I would introduce you but he's not here now."

"Out with the Americans?"

"Ah, you've spoken to my grandmother. Then you will know that she does not approve of what I do."

"Has she seen it for herself?"

Antonella seemed amused by the idea. "She thinks all fashion is trivial, which of course it is. But she doesn't understand that it can also bring pleasure." She picked up some material from the workbench. "Here."

Only when he took it from her did he realize it was a piece of suede, as soft as silk.

"Imagine that against your skin," she said. "Imagine a skirt made of it."

"That might be asking a bit too much."

She laughed and took the suede from him. "When are you moving in—to the villa, I mean?"

"She told you?"

"Of course."

"Tomorrow."

"You don't have to."

He hesitated. "You think it's a bad idea?"

"I think I haven't seen my grandmother so alive for a long time. But it doesn't mean you have to, just because she asked. She can be very ...prepotente."

"Overbearing?"

"I don't know the word, but it sounds right."

"I want to," said Adam. "It's good for work, I'm near the garden, the library's right there. . . ."

"And is this work?"

She reached for his copy of The Divine Comedy, which he'd abandoned on the work bench.

"No," he lied, "just never read it before."

It was her idea that they sneak off for lunch. Beneath the trees in a small piazza around the corner, they shared a carafe of Chianti and a thick slab of bistecca alla fiorentina done with a light hand.

The restaurant owner fussed around Antonella as if she were a long-lost daughter.

Adam filled her in on Harry's predicament, which had brought him down into town at short notice.

"When does he arrive?"

"God knows. Maybe never. As soon as he gets his hands on the money, anything could happen."

"But you want him to come or you would have told him not to."

"I suppose," he said, surprised that it was so apparent to her.

Her own brother, Edoardo, sounded like an altogether different character—levelheaded, responsible and reliable. "I don't know where he gets it, but he is proof that two negatives can make a positive."

"And you?" asked Adam.

"Me? Oh, I'm not easy."

"What's your worst characteristic?" asked the Chianti.

She thought on it. "My temper."

"Really? I don't see it."

"Pray you never do."

Adam laughed.

"So?" she asked. "Quid pro quo—your worst characteristic."

"An uncompromising sense of justice. It gets me into all kinds of scrapes."

"Very funny."

"Jealousy."

"Jealousy?"

"Yes."

"Of what?"

"I don't know. Everything. Other people's success. My girlfriend's old boyfriends. It's very mean-spirited of me, I know." "You have a girlfriend?"

There was a satisfying note of forced indifference in the question. It suggested that the answer mattered to her. He was glad to be able to say, "Not anymore."

"What happened?"

"I'm not quite sure."

He tried his best to explain, though, raking over the dead embers of his relationship with Gloria.

When he was done, Antonella said, "I don't like the sound of her."

"I should hope not. I've painted the blackest picture I can."

The couple at the next table turned and stared when she laughed.

Have you finished?

Yes.

So, Doctor, your prognosis?

Your reactions seem fine. Your leg muscles are still very weak, though, from lack of use. You really shouldn't move around unassisted. There's a danger you'll fall.

And the pain?

The tablets I gave you before should help.

They did.

You've finished them already?

Something a bit stronger might be better.

I'm not sure that's ... advisable.

My son is coming to dinner this evening, to finalize the details of the party. You did get an invitation, didn't you?

Yes, Signora, and my wife replied promptly. We are always honored to be invited.

Call me a foolish old woman, Doctor, but I wish to be on my feet when I greet Maurizio at the door this evening. And as I say, the pain can be really quite unbearable at times.

I understand.

It shall be our secret. I wouldn't want to worry anyone. I'll return this afternoon with something a little more... appropriate. Cheer up, Doctor. At Christmas your patient was at death's door, and now she's on her feet.

IT WAS ANTONELLA'S IDEA THAT ADAM KICK HIS HEELS for a couple of hours after their lunch. What with it being a Friday, she could break early from work and run him back to San Casciano. Piazzale Michelangelo was the designated pick-up point because it lay on her route out of town. The large, sweeping terrace sat on the hillside south of the river, offering a panoramic view over Florence, the terra-cotta roofscape breaking like a muddy sea around the towers, domes and spires.

He headed straight there, the prospect of trudging the streets of the city center on a bellyful of raw meat and red wine not a particularly appealing one. Better to flee the heat and make for the higher ground, the tree-clad slopes. Besides, the Romanesque church of San Miniato al Monte was perched just above the piazzale, and it was one of the few places Professor Leonard had insisted he visit.

It didn't disappoint. It was a small building, beautifully proportioned and elaborately decorated, with an unusual elevated choir.

The interior was gloomy and pleasantly cool. He hovered close to a tour group of Americans, hitching a free ride. At a certain point, he allowed them to wander ahead. Something had caught his eye: a large zodiac set in the stone floor, like a giant clock face, the astrological signs of the twelve constellations made of inlaid white_- marble.

He patrolled the circumference, wondering just what on earth it was doing here, this pagan symbolism in a Christian church. Did anyone know the answer? Had the guide passed over it because there was no explanation? The guide did mention the zodiac before leading her party from the church but offered no real illumination. Its presence there was open to speculation, she said. Adam found this strangely comforting. If its exact significance had gone missing over the centuries, then why shouldn't the same hold true for the memorial garden? Maybe he really was on to something. Maybe the book in his hand really did hold the key to some lost interpretation.

He had found nothing new in Dante's words to suggest this was the case by the time Antonella showed up at the wheel of an extremely small car. She called it her "blue frog" and she said she loved it. This didn't square with the way she treated the little Fiat 600, hurling it around the corners, wrenching it up through the gears until it was screaming in protest.

Crammed into the passenger seat, hurtling down a precipitous cobbled street, Adam found himself wishing he had opted to thumb a lift back to San Casciano. The city ceased abruptly, cobbles giving way to dirt and dust, stone walls to high, banked hedgerows. It was a narrow country lane. Very narrow. Must be one way. Had to be, given the speed they were traveling at.

It wasn't. But it was nice to know the brakes worked.

He asked Antonella to drop him off on the outskirts of San Casciano. It wasn't that he feared for the lives of the residents— although the thought had crossed his mind—he was more concerned that Antonella might sense something of what had gone on the night before if allowed to come face to face with Signora Fanelli. He was only delaying the inevitable. When Antonella suggested coming by the pensione in the morning and transporting his bags to Villa Docci, he could hardly refuse the offer.

He found Signora Fanelli on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor of the trattoria. It was a position he recognized. She got to her feet, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, which didn't help.

It was lust, he realized, pure and simple, unassailable. He was no different from Paolo and Francesca in the second circle of Dante's Hell, blown about for all of time by fierce winds, doomed by their— how had Dante put it?—dubbiosi disiri. Their dubious desires.

"Is everything okay?"

"Yes," he replied absently, thinking that he'd already reached the fifth circle of Hell in Dorothy L. Sayers' translation and he'd yet to come across a sin he hadn't been guilty of at one time or another.

"The money for Harry?"

"Yes. No problem."

How much further would he have to descend into Dante's ordered underworld before he could finally declare himself innocent of the transgression on show?

"How did you get back?"

He told her.

"She's a beautiful girl, isn't she?"

"Is she?"

"You don't think so?"

"No. Yes. I suppose."

"She's wild, that one. Well, not anymore. But she used to be."

"Wild?"

"Like her mother. But it's different now. They say she's changed."

"Changed?"

"That's what they say."

He headed for the bar in Piazza Cavour before dinner, as he did every evening, aware that this was the last time he would watch the ragged boys playing football, scampering to and fro between the goalposts chalked onto the walls, stopping to splash their faces with water from the old stone trough whenever one of them scored. The piazza started to fill—slow but steady trickles of humanity from the side streets—and the young footballers grudgingly relinquished their pitch to their elders.

You could go a whole day in San Casciano barely seeing a soul, but come early evening, the entire town (or so it seemed) took to the streets, making for Piazza Cavour. Couples, families, black- shawled widows bent with the weight of years: They all gathered, sauntering around.

Signora Fanelli had painted a picture of a fractured community, yet here they all were, congregating, carrying on as normal. He wondered what their stories were, and whether thirteen years was really time enough to forgive and forget.

He worked during dinner, although at a certain point it ceased to be work, Dante's wild imagination and spectacular imagery carrying him effortlessly along. On reaching the seventh circle of Hell, he was pleased to finally encounter a sin he hadn't committed: murder. Strangely, Dante rated this as a less grievous offense than both hypocrisy and flattery, which he had placed in the eighth circle. Here, a group of souls was walking endlessly around in a circle, a devil slicing them open from top to toe each time they passed him, only for the wounds to reheal. These were the Sowers of Discord and Schism, the prophet Muhammad chief among them. True to form, Dante had devised a punishment appropriate to the sin, splitting each of them apart for all eternity, as they had sought to divide others during their lifetimes.

But amongst all the unfortunates being eviscerated by devils, boiling in rivers of blood and choking on human excrement, there was still no sign of any of the characters from the garden. Frustrated, he started to skip ahead, skimming the pages for their names: Flora, Zephyr, Daphne, Apollo, Hyacinth, Echo, Narcissus. This is what he was doing when a figure appeared at his shoulder. "Hi."

Adam turned and looked up at Fausto. He appeared more presentable than before. His chin was still blackened with stubble but he'd run a comb through his long lank hair, and he was wearing a clean shirt, buttoned up to the neck—small concessions to smartness that didn't quite mask a congenital disregard for externals.

"Can I?" he asked, dropping into the chair opposite.

Adam pointedly checked the number of cigarettes in his packet. "Sure."

Fausto smiled. "Don't worry, I brought my own this time."

"How are you?"

"Good. Tired. Working too hard."

"I don't even know what you do."

"The minimum," grinned Fausto. "I have a small place on the hillside there. There's always something to do. Right now I'm building a shed for a pig."

"You have a pig?"

"Not yet. But it'll be the happiest pig alive when I do." He glanced at Adam's book. "Dante, eh? Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate.^,,,

It was a well-known line from the poem, the inscription on the Gates of Hell: Abandon all hope, ye who enter.

"You know it?"

"Do I know it? Do you know Shakespeare? Do you know Milton? Dante is a son of Tuscany." Fausto laid his hand on the book. "This is the reason the Tuscan language is the language of Italy, did you know that?"

"Yes."

When writing The Divine Comedy, Dante had shunned Latin in favor of his Tuscan vernacular, a clear break from tradition, and one that had enshrined the dialect as the national language.

"A great man—like Machiavelli, another Tuscan."

"I know."

"But I bet you don't know that Machiavelli wrote The Prince just down the road from here."

"Really?"

"Sant'Andrea in Percussina, not even three kilometers away. He was forced to leave Florence, like Dante. Two great works written in exile. Coincidence? I don't think so."

Fausto wasn't lying; he knew a lot about The Divine Comedy, right down to the names of the popes Dante had consigned to his Hell. In fact, Fausto seemed to know a lot about pretty much everything, which wasn't altogether surprising—he had been a student at the University in Florence when war broke out.

A member of the Partito Socialista at the time, he said he was involved in the struggle against the Fascists' creeping grip on the university. Then when the armistice was signed and the Italians suddenly found themselves under occupation by the Germans, their former allies, he became caught up in the fight for national liberation. At first, he helped distribute underground newspapers with punchy titles like Avanti! and Avanguardia. Then he picked up a gun and began to fight, heading for the hills and joining a partisan group. Many had, men of all kinds, all classes. Signora Docci's younger son, Maurizio, had done the same thing. A radical, a member of the Comitato Interpartiti di Firenze at the time, he had abandoned politics for the gun.

"I never fought with him, but he was known as a good leader, a good fighter." Fausto paused. "You see, in the end words don't count for much. You have to hurt your enemy. The Americans understood that—you English too. You have to kick him hard enough till he leaves you alone."

Fausto couldn't have been much more than Adam's age at the time, and Adam found himself reaching for equivalents in his own life. The best he could come up with was an unremarkable stint of National Service, and adding his name to a petition censuring Anthony Eden for his handling of the Suez crisis.

The liberation of Italy didn't bring happier times, Fausto went on. The socialist and communist factions, united under the banner of a common cause, fragmented once more. The Americans were damned if they were going to allow the country to go to that dog Stalin, and promptly set about showering the Christian Democrat party with dollars in a bid to buy the soul of the country. Years on, they still were.

"Really?"

"Millions of dollars every year. But a rich, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country can't impose its values on a poor, Latin, Catholic one.

We're poor. We earn a quarter of what you do in England—one sixth of what the Americans do."

"The country's getting richer, I heard."

Fausto exhaled, fixing Adam with a stare. "True. And if it continues, maybe the Americans will win in the end."

"Ah, the Americans, the Americans," sighed Signora Fanelli, approaching their table. "What have they done now, Fausto?"

"You want to know what the Americans have done?"

"Not really."

She flashed a wicked smile and replaced their empty carafe of wine with a full one. "On the house—a leaving present."

"What a woman," said Fausto with a strange mix of indignation and desire, watching her walk away. He topped up their glasses. "You're leaving?"

"Not Italy. I'm going to stay at Villa Docci."

Fausto nodded a couple of times. "I thought I told you to be careful."

"You said it was a bad place."

"And it is."

Fausto's evidence was pretty compelling. When he was done presenting it, it occurred to Adam that if you mined the history of any family you might unearth a grim catalogue of intrigues, deceits and unusual deaths; but somehow you couldn't help thinking that the Doccis had suffered more than their fair share of misadventure over the centuries.

As their fortunes had fluctuated, the estate had fallen in and out of the family's possession. Somehow it had always returned, though. Something—a marriage of convenience, a betrayal or a bribe—always ensured that the family and the property were never separated for too long.

The times they were together, it was rarely a happy union.

People died in fires, fell from their horses, smothered their loved ones or had their throats slit in the night. Presumably, many had led quite happy and uneventful lives at Villa Docci, but Fausto's point was this: the house attracted ill luck to itself, like a flame draws moths, and he selected his stories to bear out his argument.

"And Emilio?" asked Adam.

"What about him?"

"You think what happened is all part of the same thing?"

"Who knows what really happened?" Fausto shrugged.

"I do. Signora Docci told me."

"What did she say?"

Adam spelled out the bare bones of the story as recounted to him. When he was finished, Fausto sat in silence for a moment.

"Well, most of it's correct."

"And the rest?"

Fausto lit a cigarette. "Emilio was a Fascist, a party member, did you know that?"

"No."

"It's because of him the Germans were so respectful when they took over the villa. It's also the reason he was so angry when he saw the damage they were doing that night. It wasn't part of the agreement, the understanding. He lost his temper, I can see that. But I still can't see him pulling out his gun."

"But he did. There were witnesses. Maurizio and the gardener . . ." He couldn't remember the name.

"Ah, Gaetano," sighed Fausto. "Who knows what Gaetano saw, or what he heard? He didn't seem too sure himself at the time. That came later."

"I don't understand."

Fausto leaned close across the table. "He changed his story."

"Why?"

Fausto shrugged. "I never asked him." "Why not?"

"You know the story of Pandora?" "Yes."

"Well, sometimes it's best to ignore the whispers inside the box."

ANTONELLA APPEARED PUNCTUALLY AT THE PENSIONE AT ten o'clock the following morning. The encounter between her and Signora Fanelli passed off quite painlessly, the two women exchanging easy pleasantries. The suitcases were loaded into the Fiat and Antonella sped off to Villa Docci. Adam followed on the bicycle. He was dispatched with a kiss on both cheeks from Signora Fanelli. Iacopo offered a limp and clammy hand by way of farewell, but only when prompted by his mother.

Arriving at the villa, he was surprised to find Maurizio unloading his suitcases from Antonella's car. There had been a family gathering the evening before to finalize the arrangements for the party, and Maurizio had stayed on overnight in order to make the rounds of the estate workers.

"They always have complaints, but this year is worse than normal."

"Because of the drought?"

"Exactly."

They carried the cases upstairs together. Adam already knew the bedroom assigned to him, but the dark, musty space he had briefly looked in on was almost unrecognizable now that the tall windows were thrown open, allowing light and air to flood it to its corners. Vases of sweet-smelling flowers were distributed around the room.

Even Maurizio was impressed. "Maria has been busy. I don't think it has ever looked so good."

Maurizio headed off on his duties, and Adam joined Signora Docci and Antonella on the terrace for coffee. Antonella had errands to run; she only stayed long enough to invite Adam to Sunday lunch at her farmhouse the following day. It was a chance to meet her brother, Edoardo, and some of their other friends. When she rose to leave, Adam also made his excuses, saying he had to work.

"But it's the weekend."

"He's not here for your amusement, Nonna." Antonella turned to Adam. "Don't let her tell you what to do. If you want to work, you work."

"He has the whole afternoon to work. I won't be here to distract him. I'm going into Florence."

"Nonna?" "What?"

"Are you ready for Florence?"

"The question, my dear, is whether Florence is ready for me."

She left just before lunch in a navy blue Lancia sedan, dragged from a barn and dusted down. She gave a mock-regal wave from the backseat as the vehicle pulled away. It might have been the wave, or maybe it was the sight of Foscolo at the wheel in a chauffeur's cap, but it was the first time Adam had seen Maria smile. The smile suited her face, although the moment she sensed his eyes on her, it was gone.

He unpacked his suitcases, then made for a shaded corner of the terrace with The Divine Comedy. He tried to progress, but his eyes kept sliding over the text. In the end, he closed the book, conceding defeat to the source of his distraction.

The top floor was reached by a lone stone staircase, centrally placed, in keeping with the perfect symmetry of the villa. Wooden double doors barred his passage at the head of the stairs. He wasn't surprised to find them locked. He was surprised, however, when a voice echoed in the stairwell.

"The Signora has the key."

He spun, startled. Maria was standing at the foot of the steps. He felt the weight of her flat, inscrutable gaze as he descended toward her.

"Can I prepare you something for lunch?"

"A sandwich, thanks."

"You should eat more. You're too thin."

"I eat a lot at dinner."

"I'll remember that," she said.

There was a levity in this last remark, which gave him the courage to ask, "Maria, why is it locked?"

"It was the Signore's wish. The Signora chooses to respect it."

"Don't you think it's a bit"—he searched for the word— "macabre?"

"Just a bit? It sits over this house like a curse. Not for much longer, though. Signor Maurizio has plans."

"Plans?"

"I don't know the details. The usual?" "Excuse me?"

"Ham and cheese?"

"Yes, thank you."

He took the sandwich with him to the memorial garden. He ate it on the stone bench at the base of the amphitheater, looking up at Flora on her plinth. She seemed to be taunting him. So did the inscription carved into the bench—"The Soul in Repose Grows Wiser"—a quotation from Aristotle, he now knew.

He was anything but "in repose," his thoughts turning once again to his conversation with Fausto the evening before. It had robbed him of sleep; it had hovered over him like a cloud all day.

If Fausto was to be believed, then Gaetano the gardener had changed his account of what happened the night of Emilio's murder. Why would he do that? More important, how could he get away with it? The truth was he couldn't, not without the collusion of Maurizio. Their stories had to tally. This suggested some kind of compact between the two men, arrived at subsequent to Emilio's death. From here it was a short step to the unthinkable—too short not to take, even if you didn't want to.

No, it was an absurd notion. He was drawing wild conclusions based on a couple of exchanges with an unkempt Italian communist he'd met in a bar.

He reached for his cigarettes and lit one. As he did so, he caught sight of Maurizio strolling down the path toward him.

Adam got to his feet as nonchalantly as he could. "Hi."

"Hello."

Maurizio looked up at the statue of Flora, then down, past the grotto to the Temple of Echo nestling among the trees at the bottom of the pasture.

"I haven't been here for a long time."

"You don't like it?"

Maurizio appeared intrigued by the question. "I haven't thought about it. But no, I don't think I do. I find it a bit. . . sombro."

"Somber."

"Yes."

"Death is, I suppose."

"I suppose," parroted Maurizio. "We came here a lot when we were children. This was our world." He glanced down at the trough sunk into the ground at the foot of the amphitheater. "The water was cold, even in the summer. Very cold." He looked up, smiling. "One minute and eighteen seconds—Emilio's record, for holding his breath. I was never close. Not even a minute."

The idea of Emilio prostrate in the narrow trough gave rise to another image, dark and unsettling: of Emilio stretched out in his coffin beneath the flagstone floor of the chapel. Adam shook off the fleeting thought.

"And your sister?" he asked, unable to recall the name of Antonella's mother.

"Caterina? Oh, she held the watch."

"What is she like?"

Maurizio gave a thin smile. "Difficult. You will meet her at the party."

"She's coming?"

"It is the only time she comes—for the party." He paused. "You will still be here, I hope."

"Yes. I mean, if that's okay."

"Of course it is. You must be there . . . after everything you've done for my mother."

It was a weighted compliment, and for a moment it seemed Maurizio was about to steer the conversation this way. He didn't, though; he asked if Adam would accompany him on a quick tour of the garden.

They had just passed through the glade of Hyacinth when Maurizio said, "Can I ask you to do something for me? A favor."

"Of course."

"It's about my mother. You have had a very good effect on her."

"I doubt that."

"It's true. She says so herself. Anyway, it shows. We can all see it." He paused. "But something worries me, something Maria has told me. She takes pills for the pain. Not Maria, my mother, I mean . . . although I'm sure there are times when Maria could use them too."

Adam smiled politely at the joke.

"Recently she has taken a lot. The doctor was here yesterday. Twice. He came back with more pills. Maria found them. She thinks they are even stronger than before."