The Savage Garden. Mark Mills

whispers at the back of his mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      That’s when he heard the footsteps.

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

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

      ‘Would you like some coffee?’

      ‘Yes, thank you.’

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

      ‘Oh,’ he replied in English. ‘Right.’

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

      He hadn’t misunderstood her.

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

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

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

      ‘Thank you, that’s very kind.’

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

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

      ‘You like the house?’

      ‘I do. A lot.’

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

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

      ‘Yes.’

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

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

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

      ‘What did he mention?’

      ‘Well, the memorial garden, of course.’

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

      ‘He said you were old friends.’

      ‘Yes, old friends.’

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

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

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

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

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

      ‘You don’t have to say’

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

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

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

      On the day in question – an unbearably hot July day – the inexorable Allied advance rolling