The various plantings had not suffered equally: the manicured privet borders with their deeper roots had fared the best, standing straight and neat; the shallow-rooted herbaceous borders and floral medallions were completely washed out, the few winter blooms bedraggled and bestrewn all over the place; the rolled lawns in between had lifted up in places, sheets and patches of sod laid back down further down the garden when the waters retreated. Ornaments stood straight or canted drunkenly in their places, and everything was covered in a thick film of browny-black silt.
Various objects apparently lifted from the bed of the Thames by the flood were littered about, as well: some dead fish and oyster shells being pecked at by enterprising gulls, bits of weed-furred lumber, broken crockery and furniture, and lumpy-looking sacks of God-knows-what were spread around evenly.
Halfway down the second parterre, however, I spotted a familiar shape that had me coving my face and muttering "Oh, for crying out loud."
One might have suspected it was a mummy from the museum, it was laying so neatly composed in a shallow depression surrounded by miniature hedges where clumps of colorful perrenials had lain, so perfectly molded in mud-soaked fabric that you could make out that the body was male, fairly young, and probably handsome. But instead of narrow strips of linen, the body was wrapped in a fine sheet that rippled over the body where it had billowed loose during the deluge without coming apart.
"Is that a statue?" Kiro wondered when he stopped to see what I was staring at so intently, "I don't remember any statues of that size in the garden, did it fall off the roof?"
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