Free The Savage Garden by Mark Mills Page A

"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