Gardens in the Dunes (49 page)

Hattie smiled and sat down on the edge of the bed next to him; she put her arm through his. She felt so much affection for Edward at that moment—more strongly than ever before—and she wanted to savor the affection she felt.

But Edward went on: here truly was an affront to science and scholarship! Hattie began to be annoyed by Edward's criticism of their generous hostess. Aunt Bronwyn said the
professoressa
took great care with the installation of each artifact. Shouldn't they see the arrangements made for the artifacts in the gardens first, before they condemned her? No, it was the principle of the matter; artifacts of the early millennia belonged in the hands of scientists and scholars, not in gardens! Edward felt confident in the glow of the wine and continued: a connection must exist between the absent husband and the exposure of the artifacts. Poor Laura must have suffered a breakdown! Hattie frowned; Aunt Bronwyn said nothing of the sort.

Indigo woke from her nap to a snapping, splintering sound of dry wood; for an instant she wondered what it could be; then she jumped up, her heart pounding, just as Rainbow took another colored pencil into his beak from the box. The black pencil that she used to outline and to write words was broken in half, so she could still use it; but splinters and bits of the silver and gold pencils littered the floor around the travel cage, where the parrot was perched on top. She felt lucky to wake up before he destroyed all the color pencils; she did not think she would have much use for those colors anyway. The gold and silver pencils left heavy, greasy marks. Please don't do that again, she told him as he watched her shut the pencil box.

As they came downstairs, Laura greeted them; Indigo and her parrot were already waiting in the green garden. Even the shadows and the shade
were green in this lovely garden. Indigo and the parrot raced around to each of the empty niches and pedestals they'd seen earlier.

The afternoon light was a lovely chrome yellow filtered through the great trees. Laura explained as they walked she made her decision carefully, over a year or more, after visits abroad to the most eminent collections of museums in Eastern Europe. The museums, public or private, were dour and depressing, even suffocating; fortunately she met Aunt Bronwyn then, and only Aunt Bronwyn's companionship and good cheer sustained her. The day she stepped out into the sunshine from a museum in Crakow, she made her decision: the figures of stone and terra-cotta must have fresh air and sunshine, not burial in a museum.

Edward set his jaw, determined not to betray his true feelings as their hostess explained how each winter when the first storm clouds gathered, the figures were wrapped in wool and placed in their boxes indoors. Birds of a feather, this woman and Hattie's old aunt; this was what happened when irreplaceable scientific data fell into the wrong hands. What a frivolous woman! She seemed to have thrown over her study of the fourth- and fifth-millennium artifacts to take up gladiolus gardening. Little wonder that her husband was gone!

They stepped down four stone steps through an old stone gateway, and suddenly, everywhere Hattie looked, she saw tall spikes of black gladiolus flowers more densely planted than she ever imagined possible. Hundreds—maybe a thousand—of corms were planted, at heaven knew what cost, to crowd the entire garden with tall spikes of black blossoms—black-rose and black-red was even more amazing. Hattie thought gladiolus came only in pink, white, or yellow.

From the back wall by the gate, terrace after terrace, all the way to the lily tank in the center below, were tall spikes of black gladiolus flowers. Her first glimpse startled her because for an instant she thought something had burned or blackened the garden, before she realized it was a black garden. Here and there the garden of black was accented with scatterings of white, dove gray, and blossoms of mottled lavender and rose. Indigo looked up at Hattie and both their faces lit up with excitement and they exclaimed together: “Look!” Indigo's eyes were wide and she did not gallop about with the parrot but remained next to Hattie. For just an instant when she first saw them, Indigo mistook the tall spikes of black flowers for a big flock of blackbirds sitting among green leaves, swaying ever so slightly in a current of air; in the afternoon light the blossoms seemed almost
to glisten like black feathers. Indigo took a deep breath and exclaimed with delight. Smell them! These gladiolus are perfumed!

Edward stopped for an instant at the sight of hundreds, maybe thousands, of the tall black flower spikes, rising out of the terrace flower beds like battalions of black knights. He had never seen such a luxury of Dutch bulbs as this planting of unusual hybrid colors. A display like this cost a great deal, though at least in Lucca's mild climate the bulbs did not have to be lifted in the winter.

The old stone terraces were carefully repaired but otherwise left untouched; the heavy rich Lucca soil had been leavened with the sandy loam favored by gladiolus. Edward had not seen or even read about such a display of gladiolus—tulips and narcissus, of course. He never cared for gladiolus; ordinarily, he found the tall spikes of flowers quite vulgar—tall upstarts and darlings of the florists that intruded here and there among other flowers in borders or in vases; but the grand scale of the old terraced garden displayed these black gladiolus to their best advantage.

Laura's hybrids were quite colorful and of interest for their strong fragrance, though she said they did not reproduce their fragrance in their offspring, a common failing in hybrids.

The old lindens along the walls cast welcome shade; otherwise the terraced garden was open to the sky; the stone path was crowded by spikes of red-black and rose-black flowers as tall as Hattie's shoulder. Hattie had never seen so many gladiolus planted together with not one other plant or flower, and no lawn to border them. Black flowering stems rose out of graceful arched leaves, from terrace to terrace—black gladiolus descending to the sunken stone lily tank. She could not take her eyes off the hundreds and hundreds of the black blossoms; on closer examination, Hattie noted here and there scatterings of mottled rose-gray and ivory-gray gladiolus accented the black. Pale pink and pale lavender flowers formed a narrow border between the frame of white gladiolus, which were shorter and branched; ah! what a fragrance these white gladiolus had! She closed her eyes for an instant and breathed in the perfume. If she felt tipsy earlier, now she felt drunk, surrounded, even embraced, by the profusion of flowers so tall that they shaded the edges of the garden path. Hattie sat a moment on a narrow ledge of the terrace wall to gaze about and fully realize the effect of the black garden.

Below the terraces of black gladiolus, at the center of the sunken garden, was a stone-paved oval with a shallow lily tank. Hattie saw a stone pedestal
with a stone figure of some sort next to the lily tank, but first she wanted to see the artifacts on the other niches and pedestals on the upper terraces.

In a niche of the garden wall, nearly hidden by the tall black gladiolus, sat a white pottery pitcher with black designs. When Hattie got closer she saw the spout of the pitcher was formed by a waterbird's head and beak; but most amazing yet, on the chest of the waterbird were women's breasts! Hattie looked over the tops of the black flowers to see where her companions were; the buzz of the bees in the flowers seemed amplified by the sunken garden, though she could not make out what Indigo was saying to Laura as they examined a figure on the terrace below.

Edward stood in front of a niche in the wall of the terrace nearby and glanced up at the sun from time to time as if calculating film exposures for his camera. Hattie slipped her arm into his as she joined him in front of the stone pedestal. The small terra-cotta was a snake-headed figure with human arms and breasts that held a baby snake, but her legs were two snakes!

“How odd this black garden is!” Edward whispered to Hattie. The sight of the breasts on the waterbird pitcher recalled the designs incised on the egg-shaped rock yesterday. Perhaps it might be better if Indigo took her parrot back up to her room in case other figures were unfit for a young girl.

They joined Laura as Indigo, the parrot gripping her shoulder, began to walk the narrow stone ledge of the raised flower beds; she was careful to push aside the gladiolus as she went.

“I assume black is symbolic of night and death,” Edward said; Laura broke into a smile. To the Old Europeans, black was the color of fertility and birth, the color of the Great Mother. Thus the blackbirds belong to her as well as the waterbirds—cranes, herons, storks, and geese. Laura confided she imagined the ancient people as she looked at these figures of clay and stone. After a long brutal winter, how they must have watched the sky of the southern horizon for the return of the nourishment givers!

Edward felt a bit sheepish as he inquired about the modesty of the remaining figures displayed in the gardens, but Laura graciously assured them not to worry. She led the way to the niche, where Indigo stood with her parrot, apparently spellbound by the figure, no more than eight inches tall—another of the crude terra-cottas that Edward did not recognize at once. Whatever it was, it held the child's attention, so he stepped closer to see.

The figure was a seated bear mother tenderly cradling her cub in her arms; Indigo could feel how much the bear mother loved her cub just from the curve of the clay. She stayed by the bear mother even after Hattie and
Edward followed Laura to the next niche; Indigo felt embraced by the bear mother, loved and held by her even as she stood there. The bear mother's affection made her smile for Mama and Grandma Fleet—they'd held Sister Salt and her just like that, even after they were big girls. They all used to laugh when Grandma pulled one of them onto her lap and pretended to cradle a big girl. The girls used to go along with Grandma's joke and pretended to be huge babies that made baby sounds as they laughed even harder.

Rainbow became impatient with her for stopping so long and leaned off her shoulder to reach the black flowers with his claws and beak. She cautioned him to let the flowers be, and walked in the middle of the path, but the long flower spikes leaned toward them and the next thing she knew, the parrot clutched a blackish red blossom in his claws and held it to his beak for inspection. Indigo quickly looked to see if anyone witnessed the parrot's damage.

“Hurry up and eat it if you are going to,” she told him; he shredded the petals in his beak but did not swallow them; then casually dropped the remains on the ground. Indigo took a last look at the bear mother with her cub; she wanted to stay with them longer, but she could see Hattie looking back at her and just then Edward gestured for her to come.

Indigo didn't want to miss the figures in the other niches, so she took the long way around to join the others. The clay figure in the next niche was larger than the bear mother; it was also seated and appeared mostly human, but she was painted with black-and-white stripes and over her belly a snake curled in a spiral. She felt a chill of excitement when she realized that the figure had snakes for arms! She'd never seen or heard of anything like this before; she couldn't wait to tell Sister.

Indigo rejoined the others on the terrace below, where they stood before a stone pedestal with a seated figure of carved sandstone that gazed at them with the round eyes of a snake. The snake-headed mother had human arms and in them she cradled her snake baby to human breasts; but instead of legs, she had two snakes for limbs. Indigo took a deep breath and the others looked at her. Well, what did she think? Indigo didn't know what to say. Grandma Fleet used to talk to the big snake that lived at the spring above the old gardens; she always asked after the snake's grandchildren and relatives and sent her best regards.

“It's nothing like the minotaur, is it?” Edward said; he found the grotesque madonnas far more monstrous than the centaur or minotaur.

As they made their way to the niche on the terrace below, Laura described
the remnants of snake devotion still found in rural villages of the Black and Adriatic Seas. There, people believed black or green snakes bore guardian spirits who protected their cattle and their homes. In her travels, Laura saw ornamental snakes carved to decorate the roofs and windows for protection. Great good fortune came to anyone who met a big white snake wearing a crown; the crowned snake was the sister of the waterbird goddess, owner and guardian of life water and life milk.

Edward hoped to quicken the pace of their tour as he led the way to the small lily tank; above the lilies was a deep niche that held the bird-snake woman. Fragrant red water lilies as big as dinner plates rocked back and forth when Indigo stirred the green water with her hand.

Previously Hattie agreed with Indigo the bear mother and her cub were the dearest figures they'd seen; but when Hattie saw the carved stone figure of a bird-masked woman holding a bird-masked baby in her arms, she could not take her eyes from them.

Edward called the sculpture primitive, but Hattie disagreed; although the clay figures were simple in form, the expression of the mother's body as she cradled her baby in the arms touched Hattie deeply and she felt a surge of emotion that caught in her throat until tears filled her eyes. The bird goddess loved her baby as fiercely as any mother! Hattie wiped the tears away quickly with the back of her hand. Edward would not understand; he'd think she was ill again. How dare Edward call these Old European sculptures boring or ugly?

Hattie studied the terraces of black gladiolus all around her; the black-reds looked especially striking against the bright blue sky. She would never forget this black garden with its little madonnas, as Laura called them.

Edward knelt on the stone ledge of the pedestal. He examined the terra-cotta inch by inch to note any erosion of the surface or other damage of the slightest to the rare artifact. He noted one questionable spot on the clay of the right breast, but nothing more.

At first Rainbow was uncertain about so many tall black flowers all around, and he gripped Indigo's shoulder tightly as a breeze caused the black faces of the flowers to bow forward and back, nodding at them. What did the flowers mean by their nods? she asked the parrot. She sat on the bottom step across from the lily tank with the parrot in her lap. She wanted to remember everything she could so she could properly describe the garden to Sister Salt and Mama. She watched Hattie and Edward walk ahead with Laura while she sat with the bird-mask mother holding her baby. I was a baby like that and my mother and my grandmother held me, she told
Rainbow; that's why she wanted to stay there a while longer, though there was another garden yet to see.