Each had a neatly typed sheet of paper with the name, birth date and death date of the subject. In Ethel’s folder, there was a photocopy of a short newspaper piece announcing that Miss Ethel Denholm, of Byzantium, was to be married to Mr. Asa Hurd, of Manchester. The file indicated that she had given birth to a son and a daughter; the son had been Ruth Kimball’s father. A note in the file also mentioned that Ethel had actually been a cousin of Mary’s rather than a sister, though she’d been brought up in the family.
Elizabeth’s file was even more spare, filled by just the paper with her essentials. She died in 1902, Sweeney noticed, twelve years after her eldest daughter.
Her husband’s, on the other hand, was much more interesting. Louis Denholm, Sweeney discovered from his file, had owned one of the more prosperous farms in town. He’d had sheep until the 1890s and then dairy cows.
Also in the file were thirty or so photocopied pages of a book. Someone had handwritten at the top, “Byzantium’s Places and Faces.” From the typeface and the writing style, Sweeney decided it was a locally produced history book and settled back in her seat to read the pages. The first part of the section detailed Louis’s status as a pillar of the Byzantium Congregational Church. A deacon for twenty-eight years, he had helped build an addition to the church in 1875 and had been a devoted member of the “Men’s Faith Club,” whatever that was. The pages also recounted an anecdote about an argument at the General Store between Louis Denholm and Herrick Gilmartin about the goings-on at the Gilmartin house.
“Mr. Denholm was upset about the colony and women on the lawn during the parties, and told Mr. Gilmartin that he was corrupting his daughters,” the author noted, “but William Hohrmann, the storekeeper, stepped in and the argument was soon resolved.” Sweeney felt a sudden surge of sympathy for Mary and Ethel, growing up under the thumb of such a father. The history went on to say that Ethel’s son Geoffrey had inherited the family’s home by the river and that his daughter Ruth now lived in it with her husband William “Choke” Kimball. The book, Sweeney saw on the last photocopied page, had been published in 1971.
Also in Louis Denholm’s file was a faded, yellow-tinted photo of the man himself, suited up in formal dress, with a large belly and a walrus mustache, and wearing a pair of thin spectacles. From the sheet, she saw that he had lived to be eighty-four.
Sweeney had saved Mary’s file for last and as she opened it, she prepared herself to be disappointed, because it was very thin. But as she turned the front leaf, it revealed an old photograph lying on top of the papers.
It was a traditional Victorian portrait of two girls and on the back, written in a spidery hand, it said “E. Denholm and M. Denholm, ages 10 and 17.”
Sweeney sat up in her chair. The gravestone had without a doubt been modeled on the real Mary Denholm. In the photo, Mary’s dark, waving hair was styled up on top of her head, and she had on a dark, high-necked dress, but the strong lines of her face were unmistakable.
Ethel, who was dressed in a white dress and had her fair hair cut in a tomboyish page boy, seemed somehow contained, not a hair out of place, her dress perfectly pressed. But Mary was different. Though her hair was put up neatly, a few coiling tendrils had managed to escape and hung down around her face. There was something wild about her eyes and a feyness about the set of her mouth. She was a strangely, hauntingly beautiful young woman.
Sweeney looked through the rest of the file. The last item was another stapled sheaf of photocopied pages from the local history book. This chapter was entitled “Byzantium Tragedies—Past and Present” and included a macabre listing of the untimely deaths of scores of Byzantium residents. On the fourth page of the section was a highlighted paragraph and a poorly rendered drawing of Mary Denholm’s gravestone.
“Perhaps one of the most terrible tragedies of the 1890s was the untimely death of Miss Mary Denholm, a local girl who worked as a maid and housekeeper for many of the Byzantium colonists. On a hot summer day in August, 1890, Miss Denholm was swimming in the Green River below her house on The Island when she was pulled under the water and drowned. Her body was found later that day, and she was returned to her home, where she was buried later that week. An unusual gravestone, a monument to Miss Denholm’s grace and beauty (artist unknown) stands in the Denholm family cemetery on The Island.”
There wasn’t anything else in Mary’s file, just a handwritten note saying that researchers interested in more information about Mary Denholm could find references in the journal of the Byzantium sculptor Myra Benton.
Sweeney took it up to the front desk, where the librarian was now typing circulation cards at an old electric typewriter. She handed him the files and he placed her request slip on a stack of other slips. Then she told him about the note in Mary’s file. “I was interested in having a look at that journal,” she said. “Is it something you’ve got here?”
“It should be here.” He sniffed. “But it’s in a collection of personal papers down in Cambridge. Benton had a son—illegitimate, all very scandalous back then, you know. Anyway, the son went to the University and when his mother died, he left them all of her papers. We’ve tried to get copies for our files, but they’re pretty possessive down there.”
“Oh.” Sweeney tried to hide her disappointment. She could see it when she got home, of course, but she wanted to look at it now. It was only eleven and Ian wasn’t coming back until one. Damn. But then she looked down the quiet street and saw a squat brick building with a sign over the door reading “Harpett Memorial Library.” Her spirits lifted. There was nothing she liked better than a new and unknown library, the stores of old novels and art books yet to be discovered.
The little library was cluttered, but cheery. A fire burned in a high fireplace taking up a wall of the lobby and a couple of big leather armchairs were set around a circular oak table. In the middle of the table was a pile of books—Gaudy Night, Sweeney saw—and a placard reading “University of Vermont Community Reading Series. Dorothy L. Sayers, Theologian and Shamus.”
She decided to sit down and work on the poem for a bit.
An academic problem—such as Sweeney’s task of explaining the poem and relief on Mary’s gravestone and figuring out who might have done them—had to be approached from a couple of different angles right at the beginning. Otherwise, you risked going off in the wrong direction and wasting a lot of time.
So she went to the stacks and took down books on a wide range of subjects related to the poem. Then she got out her copy and read it over again.
Death resides in my garden, with his hands wrapped ‘round my throat
He beckons me to follow and I step lightly in his boat.
All around us summer withers, blossoms drop and rot,
And Death bids me to follow, his arrow in my heart.
We sail away on his ocean, and the garden falls away
where life and death are neighbors, and night never turns to day.
A wind comes up on the water, Death’s sails are full and proud
My love I will go with thee, dressed in a funeral shroud.
Now her tomb lies quiet, the shroud is turned to stone
And where Death had been standing, is only the grave of her bones.
The reference to Death’s arrow was very strange. A number of early American stones featured Death or his imps holding darts or arrows over the prone figure of the hapless human who was buried beneath the stone. Sweeney had once written a paper about the iconography of the dart or arrow and she remembered how medieval peoples had assumed that Death plunged it into the hearts of his victims, since no matter what it was the victim had been suffering from, he always died when his heart stopped. But the image was hardly used by the early nineteenth century, much less by 1890.
Then there was the reference to Proserpine. She opened Bulfinch’s Age of Fable. Sometimes it was good to go back to basics.
In the vale of Enna there is a lake embowered in woods, which screen it from the fervid rays of the sun, while the
moist ground is covered with flowers, and Spring reigns perpetual. Here Proserpine was playing with her companions, gathering lilies and violets, and filling her basket and her apron with them, when Pluto saw her, loved her and carried her off. She screamed for help to her mother and her companions; and when in her fright she dropped the corners of her apron and let the flowers fall, childlike she felt the loss of them as an addition to her grief.
She thought of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine, her crimped black hair like coal, the flowing peacock-colored robe and red lips.
It seemed likely that the stone had been made by someone who was a later, much younger member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or someone who wasn’t a contemporary but was sympathetic to their philosophy and tastes. Mary had died in 1890. The unnamed artist must have been a young protégé who left England and settled in Byzantium, or an American who had adopted the Brotherhood’s themes.
Bryn Davies Morgan was the most famous Byzantium sculptor. Sweeney knew that he had immigrated from Wales. It was very possible that he had lived in London for a while and taken up with the Pre-Raphaelites in his younger years. She found a copy of Bennett Dammers’s biography of Morgan in the library’s small but well-stocked art section and searched for references to the Pre-Raphaelites. There was nothing. And when she looked through photographs of his works, she knew she was wrong. It didn’t take her Ph.D. in art history to see that Morgan hadn’t done Mary’s stone. It had to be someone else.
So she went and found the library’s only book on the Pre-Raphaelite movement and reviewed the history of the group of English painters, poets, journalists, and hangers-on who, in the mid-1800s, had reacted against what they saw as the overly mannered approach of most artists since Raphael had painted in the early 1500s.
She looked up the one Pre-Raphaelite sculptor she did know about—Thomas Woolner. Woolner had emigrated to Australia, though, and from what Sweeney could tell, the gravestone wasn’t his. But still, it seemed such a Pre-Raphaelite subject.
Her heart beating a little faster, she got out the photographs of the stone. The boat. The boat was referenced in the poem. She hadn’t taken it any further than that. But surely the boat was also a reference to another favorite Pre-Raphaelite subject—“The Lady of Shalott,” the famous piece of verse by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson that had always been one of her favorites. She went back to the bookshelves and got down a copy of Tennyson’s collected works.
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.
Sweeney shivered a little. It was almost as if the poet were describing The Island.
But the Lady of Shalott hadn’t been murdered. She had sat in her tower, weaving as she looked at the world in her mirror and had brought death upon herself when she fell in love with Lancelot and left her tower.
Had Mary tried to leave her island?
Sweeney was sitting there wondering when she caught sight of a newspaper sitting on a table next to hers. “Local Woman Dead of Apparent Suicide,” the headline read, and in smaller letters, “Police Say Investigation Continuing.”
She began to read. “A local woman was found dead Tuesday, apparently killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Community members recalled a committed local volunteer and lifelong Byzantium resident this week as state and local police continued the investigation.
“Sources say that Ruth Kimball, 72, of Byzantium, went for a walk in the early afternoon. Kimball’s daughter, Sherry Kimball, 35, also of Byzantium, discovered the body at about 5:30 PM in a cemetery near the family’s home.”
Sweeney scanned the rest of the article. State police weren’t saying much, just that it looked like suicide, but that they always investigated carefully whenever firearms were involved, just as Gwinny had said. She was interested to read that the police had questioned Trip and Gally Wentworth at first since they had been target shooting nearby at the time of the murder. But, the reporter noted, a police source said that the boys had been shooting with brand-new .22 caliber hunting rifles, while Ruth Kimball had been killed with a World War II-era service pistol. Police refused to identify the weapon used or to say whether it had been owned by the dead woman, but they had reiterated that the Wentworth twins were not suspects, it was just that the possibility of an accident had to be eliminated. Sweeney thought of Britta Wentworth’s drawn face. No wonder she’d been upset.
A number of community members were quoted as saying that Ruth Kimball had been a model citizen and that she hadn’t seemed at all the type to do something like this. She was survived, Sweeney noticed, by her daughter Sherry and granddaughter Charley, both of Byzantium, and had been predeceased by her husband and son.
It hadn’t helped much, but it had given her an idea.
“DO YOU KEEP old newspapers on hand?” Sweeney asked the librarian. “I was actually interested in really old papers, from the 1890s.”
“We’ve got the Gazette and copies of the Watertown Herald for that period as well,” the woman said. “They’re in bound volumes downstairs. First door on the right. We’re trying to get them all on microfilm, but it’s expensive.”
“Thanks. I hate microfilm anyway.”
The bound volumes of both papers were stored chronologically and it was easy to find the ones marked 1890. Sweeney decided to start with the Gazette. She flipped through June and July and finally came to the August papers, which appeared to come out two or sometimes three times a week. Finally, after her eyes were nearly exhausted by the tiny type, she found the article she was looking for, on an inside page of the August thirty-first edition. “Tragic Drowning Accident” read the headline. But the piece contained exactly the same information as the Xeroxed book excerpts in Mary’s file.
It wasn’t until she hunted down the Herald’s version of the same story that Sweeney hit paydirt. “Miss Denholm’s body was found on the afternoon of the 28th by Mr. Herrick Gilmartin of Byzantium.”
Now that was interesting.
IAN WAS WAITING for her in front of the historical society.
“I’m sorry,” she said breathlessly. “I ended up going across to the library and got wrapped up in my reading.”
“That’s just fine, I had to park down the street a bit,” he said in a friendly voice. He took half of the stack of books the librarian had let her borrow on the Wentworths’ card and tucked them under his arm.
Ian and Sweeney walked in silence for a few minutes before she spoke. “How was your afternoon? Did you find anything good?”
“Oh, yes. Everything went smoothly,” he said stiffly, and the finality in his tone of voice stopped her from asking any more questions. When they got to his car, he opened the door for her and she felt a sudden flash of irritation. Chivalry was well and good, but on him, it seemed overly decorous, as though he felt guilty about something and was making up to her. “I’m fine,” she said crossly, when he asked if she wanted to move her seat back.
This time, the silence in the car was awkward. Ian broke it by saying, “ ‘A few weeds and stubble showing last.’ It’s from a Robert Frost poem.” She looked at him in confusion, but then she saw that they were passing a broad expanse of snow-covered field where a few weeds and stalks poked through the white cover.
“I never liked Frost until I came to Vermont. Isn’t that strange?”
“No. It’s the same for me. I’ve always loved the Americans, but not Frost. Always found him too rural, I think. Then I came here and I thought of that poem about the stone walls, the . . .”
“ ‘Mending Wall,’ ” Sweeney said, and recited it. “Toby loves that poem. Loves Frost. Now I feel like I understand him a little better.”
&nb
sp; “Goodness. You’ve got it committed to memory.”
“Oh, it’s not as much a feat as it seems. I just have one of those memories. Photographic or whatever. If I’ve seen it on a page I can remember it, the image of it, you know?”
“Have you got plans this afternoon?” he asked as they pulled up in front of the house. “I was thinking about borrowing Patch’s cross country skis and going for a spin. Interested?”
She undid her seatbelt and tried not to flush. Suddenly, she could hardly look at him. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said awkwardly. “I’ve got that appointment. With Bennett Dammers. Apparently he’s the go-to man on the Byzantium colony. I’m just going over to ask him some questions. For my research.”
He got out of the car quickly and gathered up her books and notebooks and a small briefcase from the back seat. When he slammed the car door, Sweeney flinched.
“Fine, another time then,” he said smoothly, looking into her eyes before going into the house.
TEN
BENNETT DAMMERS’S HOUSE, Windy Hill, was in the section of the colony that wrapped itself along the curve of the river, stretching north toward town. Sweeney detected a slight difference in the architectural style of Windy Hill and the six or so estates around it. The houses in the “Upper Colony” had been built earlier and they were somehow grander, less eccentric than those on The Island.
Sitting in his study, Sweeney marveled at the small, strange worlds she and her fellow academics came to inhabit. A week ago, she hadn’t known much about the arts colony in Byzantium, Vermont. Now, here she was sitting in front of the undisputed expert on the colony, a man who, more or less, lived back in the world the artists had lived in.
When Bennett Dammers talked about them, it was as though they were old friends. Gilmartin this, Gilmartin that. They might as well have gone to boarding school together.
He even dressed like an Edwardian bohemian, in a floppy bow tie and wrinkled white shirt, a black hat on a stand by the door. In the pictures of picnics and parties in the copy of Dammers’s book in the Wentworths’ library, the artists were mostly wearing the same thing. His fine white hair had thinned down to a cottony tuft over each ear and his eyes were pale robin’s eggs surrounded by spidery red vessels.
O’ artful death Page 8
