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in London. In the nineteenth century it had been built as a manufacturing and warehousing district, with stunning cast-iron architecture to be found in such abundance and variety nowhere else in the world. The innovative cast-iron construction permitted huge fluted pillars, marvellous exterior ornamentation, immense windows that admitted floods of sunlight, and enormously high ceilings. When Greenwich Village attics had become too expensive and the area too much of a tourist trap, artists, photographers, and artisans had begun to discover the huge lofts and low rents of SoHo ... the name not a copy of its British counterpart, but an acronym meaning simply South of Houston Street. Galleries and good restaurants had followed, and the revitalized district was now an exciting, energetic melange of art and industry, where twine factories and fantastic food emporiums existed side by side with jazz lofts and theatre workshops. Loft rents were no longer so low, as Domini well knew. But there were still pockets of poverty and low rental in SoHo, and the district continued to draw artists as honey draws flies.
    No, there was no particular astonishment to be found in Sander's presence in the SoHo art colony. Had he been living there all along, only a few blocks away from Domini and the daughter he did not know he had fathered?
    Even the carving of the unicorn ... that, too, Domini realized, had been no far-fetched accident of random chance. Sander had seen the famous painting in the Louvre; she knew that for a fact because he had told her so. At the time something in his words had conveyed the impression that he might have studied it with care. Perhaps he had memorized it with some subconscious part of his mind. He must have done, if he could remember the unicorn well enough to carve a fair copy four years later, even in the dark void of his sightless world. Perhaps he could see it in his mind, as she could see it in hers, just by closing her eyes.
    She closed them now, shutting out the gloomy wallpaper and the dingy panes of the attic window. Was it really only such a few years since she had been a forthright, fearless eighteen-year-old ready to conquer life? In terms of maturity, it might have been a decade ago. Sander had called her unreal at the time, and with hindsight Domini now knew it had been an apt description. What an odd mixture she must have been then, so knowledgeable in many ways and so naive in others. How much she had known of the world, and yet how little! Still, with the unconventional and extraordinary childhood she had had, how could it have been otherwise?
    Usually Domini tried not to dwell on the past, because to do so was to feel a great sadness for the lost simplicity of her childhood, the essence of joy that life and Sander had destroyed. But drifting in a strange bed, in a strange house, with a strange weakness assailing her limbs, the past seemed very close, very real. In her mind she could see old scenes like pages turning in a memory book ...
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    The unicorn had been given to her for her third birthday. At that age Domini had not been aware that she was the daughter of a famous man. To her, Le Basque was simply Papa, the centre of a small universe bounded by great stone walls, with the soaring strength of the Pyrenees towering in the purple distance. Her world extended no farther than the huge flagged courtyard where Papa kept his special stone and where sun glittered on a spilling fountain.
    Papa's stone was a central fact of his existence. But even now, with her third birthday nearly twenty years and many tears past, Domini was not sure why it was so important to him. It was a large piece of rough stone, crudely hewn out of bedrock, far heavier than a person could lift but not so heavy that it could not be moved by one powerful man with the help of chains and crowbars. From her earliest youth Domini knew that Papa had quarried it himself, high near a mountaintop, and somehow brought it down,