Alice’s Secret Garden. Rebecca Campbell

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Alice’s Secret Garden - Rebecca  Campbell


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      I dreamt it last night that my true love came in, So softly he entered, his feet made no din;

      He came close beside me, and this he did say ‘It will not be long love, love, till our wedding day.’

      Based on ‘She Moved Through the Fair’

      – Padraic Colum

      The last and best Cure of Love Melancholy is, to let them have their Desire.

      Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       EIGHT: The Sublime Machine

       NINE: Drinking it Over

       TEN: Odette in Venice

       ELEVEN: Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, or The Quest for the Historical Noddy

       TWELVE: Country Pleasures, Suck’d on Childishley

       THIRTEEN: Thanks, Rosencrantz and Gentle Guildenstern

       FOURTEEN: The Return of the Gothic

       FIFTEEN: Of Monkey Nuts and Hard-Boiled Eggs

       SIXTEEN: Ghostly Limbs

       SEVENTEEN: The Hand that Rocked the Cradle

       EIGHTEEN: The Dead Boy

       NINETEEN: The Sadness of Everything

       TWENTY: Preparations

       TWENTY-ONE: Declarations

       TWENTY-TWO: Love for Sale

       TWENTY-THREE: Complicity

       TWENTY-FOUR: The Last Party

       TWENTY-FIVE: Two Interesting Occurrences

       TWENTY-SIX: The Mitre

       TWENTY-SEVEN: A Death at Heathrow

       Keep Reading

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       She Moved Through the Fair

      Alice had been thinking about the Dead Boy for nearly six months before anyone else at Enderby’s found out about him. And that was funny, because for those six months the Dead Boy was the most important thing in Alice’s life: more important than her job in the Book Department, looking after Natural History; more important than her mother in the tiny flat in St John’s Wood; more important than her friends, her living friends, scattered around London.

      Alice had never spoken to the Dead Boy. She had never felt, as she longed to feel, the fine dense blackness of his hair as it swept with such sensuous, careless, charm across his face, across her face. She had never touched the full Slavic lips that fell so easily into a pout – not the pout of a spoilt child or of a sulking teenager, but a little ‘o’, a pout of pure surprise, surprise at the onrush of death. She had never brushed her own lips against those high cheekbones, cheekbones which would have looked cruel, tyrannical, implacable, had they not slid into the fine smiling lines around the eyes. The eyes, to Alice, were something of a mystery. No matter how many times she replayed the incident, winding backwards and forwards, slowing it down or speeding it up, panning back to take in the whole street, or the whole of London, or zooming into ultra close-up, she could not settle on the colour of the eyes. It was not even the precise shade that was in question – it was not some unimportant semantic quibble about hazel or chestnut or rowan – it was that Alice could not even decide if they were blue or brown, dark or light. Sometimes they would burn through her with an intense cobalt light, or dazzle with shimmering bright crystal; at others they would fold in on themselves in wave after wave of growing darkness, like evening falling on a forest.

      Had Alice known the Dead Boy for more than four seconds, or had she never gone for that seemingly harmless stroll, but rather sat on the imposing steps at Enderby’s with Andrew that lunchtime, as she often did, to eat a sandwich and breathe in the petrol fumes, while they talked about the oddness of people, and he tried to think of something clever and nice to say that wouldn’t trumpet his devotion in her ear like an elephant in musth, then everything would have been different.

      Back in the office that afternoon, the afternoon when everything changed, Alice was surprised to find


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