“Why did you move around so much?” She looked up and down the table guiltily. She had felt for a second that they were alone.
“My father worked for what he called ‘The Government,’ but was actually British Intelligence. He was always going off on hush-hush little jaunts. Sometimes we went with him.”
“Where?”
“Belgium for a year. Then Egypt. And then Lebanon. Then military school and France, when I was older. That’s where I met Sylvie. Eloise’s mother.”
“That sounds so romantic. I had a roving, unsettled childhood, too, but we just roamed around backwater American cities. What happened with Sylvie?” Being tipsy made her brave.
“Oh. I don’t know.” He was uncomfortable. “The usual. We were too young. We grew apart. She fell in love with her psychiatrist.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Now let me ask you something. How did you get your name?”
“My mother was an actress. She had this thing about old Irish legends.”
He grinned at her. “Mad Sweeney?”
“I know. I think she just liked the name, the way it sounded.”
“It suits you, you know, in an odd sort of way.” He studied her for a minute and she felt her heart speed up under his gaze. “I’m not quite sure why. Are your parents still alive?”
She looked down at her plate. “My father’s dead. I don’t see much of my mother anymore.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”
“No, that’s fine.” But it was the end of the conversation.
They finished their meals and lingered over dessert and coffee. They were waiting for Patch to finish paying the bill up at the bar when an older man, very drunk, stood up and turned his back to them.
“Some people have a lot of nerve,” he said loudly to the bartender. “Coming down here when the cops are still sniffing around up on The Island. When old Cooper proves that one of them did her in, I’d just like to see if they have the guts to show their faces around her friends.”
The bar got very quiet as Britta gasped and hustled the children out of the restaurant. Before she joined them out on the sidewalk, Sweeney saw Patch step toward the man as though he was going to say something, then put his wallet back in his coat as he followed them through the door.
EVERYONE HAD GONE TO BED. Sweeney lay on the couch in the living room with a glass of scotch, listening to the end of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Someone had put it on and she had no idea where the stereo was. The music seemed to come out of the walls and ceilings and floors.
So she just let it play. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hall-ay-loooo-ya! She had never much liked Handel. She’d take Mozart’s Requiem any day.
“Feeling Christmasy?”
She jumped. Ian was standing behind her, still wearing the too-crisp black jeans and taupe sweater he’d had on at dinner. “You scared me,” she said, sitting up.
“Sorry.” He went over to the little bar and poured himself a scotch. “One thing about Patch. He knows his scotch. I try to send him a bottle of something interesting every once in awhile. The last bottle was Royal Brackla. Very nice. Want to try some?”
“Sure.” She drained her glass and held it out for him. He frowned, put it face down on the bar and got her a new one. “Musn’t mix our scotch up,” he said. He was clearly drunk.
“It’s lovely,” she told him after taking a sip. “Smoky and kind of peaty.”
“It’s one thing I hate about traveling. I always feel like I have to sneak around and keep my own bottle in my room. So,” he said, sitting down across from her. “Oxford. I should probably challenge you to a duel or something. You know, in the defense of dear old Cambridge.”
“Really? Do you duel? Wonders never cease.”
“Oh yes. All Englishmen learn to duel. It’s very important.” He got up and pretended to joust with the bookcase.
“I’m too drunk for a duel,” Sweeney said.
“So am I too drunk, come to think of it.” He went over to the bookcase and looked at the books, then picked up a little antique pistol that was lying on an ivory plate. “This is what I love about the Wentworths,” he said. “This is just the sort of thing they would have. What is this anyway?”
“Looks like an itsy bitsy gun,” Sweeney said.
He jabbed at the air with it. “On guard!” Then he saw her face and put it down. “Oh God! That’s tasteless.” He sat down again. “Forgive my boyish exuberance. We can’t keep it down, all those years of pretend war at military school.” He raised his eyebrows at her. “So, Toby was pretty angry at you yesterday.”
She sat up. “Oh, that? He’s just really emotional. He likes to play Papa Bear. We’ve made up already.”
Ian just watched her and it made her stumble ahead. “Toby and I have been friends for a long time . . . how do I explain it? You know how there are things that happen to you that are so overwhelming, so awful or beautiful or whatever, that whoever is with you when they happen is forever locked up in you?” Ian nodded. “Anyway, he’s just an emotional person.”
Ian smiled. “I don’t know. As a fellow man, I can say that we don’t take shows of emotion like that lightly.”
“Well, you’re an Englishman. Toby’s the hot-blooded Mediterranean type. Though, I have to say, you talk a lot for an Englishman.”
“Do I? I had no idea, I really didn’t. Do you really think I do? Really? That’s odd.”
She laughed, and spotted The Collected Robert Frost on the bookshelf.
“Hand me that,” she said, pointing to it. “I want to read that poem you were reciting. That day.” He hesitated, then got it down for her. It was one called Desert Places, she saw when she looked up the first line in the index. She began reading aloud, finishing with the lines, They cannot scare me with their empty spaces/Between stars—on stars where no human race is./I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places.”
He had his back to her and his shoulders seemed suddenly fragile. She was silent for a moment.
Then she asked, “What’s your daughter like? Eloise?”
He turned around. “She’s very small and dark and Sylvie keeps her hair cut in a pageboy. Like this,” he said, drawing a line across his forehead and down the sides of his face. “And she can be very serious and sort of melancholy. For a while I was terrified it was the divorce, but then I realized it’s just the way she is. Sometimes she looks at me and I think she feels sorry for me.
“But she can be silly, too. She has a stuffed cat called Pierre and she likes to go for walks in the park and as much as I would like to think she does, I don’t think she really likes museums. She doesn’t find them useful somehow. I think she will probably grow up to be a successful businesswoman. I adore her.”
Sweeney smiled at him.
“Did you like England?” he asked then, taking off his glasses and polishing them on the hem of his sweater. “A lot of Americans can’t take it. Too rainy. People take so long to know you.”
“I loved it. But then I’m sort of a gloomy, rainy person to begin with.”
“Isn’t it funny how we still talk about national character, even in our very global world?”
“Yes. I do think of the English as a type, though it isn’t strictly true. You, for example, are both the quintessential Englishmen and not a very typical one at all.”
He studied her again in a way that was becoming familiar, with serious eyes and a slight smile. “And you, I think, possess the best of the American type without the more unattractive bits. You’re industrious, but you aren’t simple. I suppose that’s not a very nice thing to say.”
“No. Lots of us are simple. And smug. But isn’t that the point about Americans? We aren’t a type.”
They went on like this for some time before he stopped and looked at her.
“Why don’t you see your mother anymore?” he asked after a minute.
“My mother? Oh, that’s very complicated.” Sweeney felt her stomach musc
les clamp together. “My mother is . . . sick,” she said stiffly. “We just don’t . . . We’ve lost touch is all.”
She could tell that he wished he hadn’t asked from the way he fidgeted and quickly changed the subject. “So why did you leave? If you liked England so much.”
She looked down at the glass in her hands. “You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“I was dating this man. He was Irish, from the west, near Galway, though he’d been born in the north. He told me once that his father had asked his mother to marry him by saying, ‘Would you like to be buried with my people?’ I always loved that.
“Anyway, he was at Oxford. Reading history, and we met in the library. We wanted the same book, but he got there first and he said that I could have it if I let him take me out for a pint.”
“What was the book?”
“Oh, a Yeats bio. I was writing something about epitaphs. He was writing something about the Irish Revival.”
“That’s right, Yeats’s epitaph. Horseman, pass by. Isn’t that right?” Sweeney nodded. “So what happened with your Irishman? Did you have a fight? Did you run away?” He made two fingers of his right hand, like little feet running. On his face was a strange mixture of concern and interest.
“No.” For some reason she smiled.
“What?”
“He died,” she said. “In a bombing on the London tube. His name was Colm.”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea.” He got up and took his shot glass over to the bar. “Of all the moronic . . . Can you forgive me?”
But she couldn’t stop herself.
“This was a year ago, the one where they never figured out who it was. He had some things to do in London and I went up with him for the day. It was January and I remember it was really cold. We had this drafty little flat and I remember that when we woke up that morning, we could see our breath in the bedroom.” As she talked, Sweeney realized that she hadn’t told anyone the story since she’d told it to the police. No one had ever asked her. Even Toby had never asked her to tell him about that day.
“Anyway, I went to the Tate and then I had lunch in a pub while he did an interview with someone for his thesis. The cream they gave me for my coffee was sour. I remember that. I was supposed to meet him on the platform at Piccadilly Circus and then we were going to have dinner with some friends. He was late, but it didn’t matter. I had a book and I sat on the platform and read. Then the train came and it was the strangest thing, when I think about it now, it’s as though it came rolling in, kind of in slow motion. I can remember seeing the lights down the tunnel and feeling the wind, you know the way you do? The train came slowly, and I was searching the windows for Colm, to see if I could see him, and for some reason I have this memory of seeing him, standing at one of the windows, but I don’t think I did, because the train wasn’t even all the way in before there was this sound. I can’t even describe it, it was just this sucking, breathing sound and then a hollow boom, and fire burst out of the tunnel and we all ran.
“That was the only reason that those of us on the platform weren’t killed too, that the train, the compartment where the bomb was, wasn’t all the way in before it went off. I was burned. My . . . my arm. You can’t see it anymore. I didn’t know for a while if he was even on the train, I . . . but they found his wallet and then, well later they knew. But it’s weird, I still have that memory of seeing him in the window. It’s made me mistrust my own mind.”
Ian was watching her and in the strange light from the lamp near the couch, he looked very pale.
“We were going to get married,” she continued.
“That was when Toby and I got . . . what did I say? Locked up together? He came to Oxford. Took a semester off school. Gave up his tuition money and everything. He propped me up for months.”
“Sweeney . . .” He was pleading with her.
Suddenly she found that she was irritated at herself, for telling him about Colm, for letting herself relax around him, for whatever it was he wanted from her.
“People involved with me always seem to end up dying,” she said, putting her drink down and getting to her feet. “You should be careful.”
TWENTY-ONE
DECEMBER 18
“BUT IT’S SUCH A long drive to Cambridge, Sweeney. You won’t get down there until almost eleven,” Britta said. “And the Christmas party’s on Saturday. We wanted you to be here for the party.”
“Oh, I’ll be back tomorrow,” Sweeney said nervously. “It’s just that if I don’t have this meeting, I don’t know when I’ll be able to do it again. And there are a couple of errands I need to do while I’m down there. I suddenly realized I don’t have anything to wear to the party.” She gulped her coffee and tried to smile. Everyone else was still in their pajamas around the kitchen table, but thinking it would make it harder for them to argue with her announcement that she was going home for a day, she’d come down dressed and ready to go.
“If it’s just the dress, you’d be welcome to borrow something,” Britta said looking confused.
“Oh no, it’s really this meeting. I know I’ll be able to enjoy Christmas more if I can get it out of the way.”
“Who is it you’re meeting with?” Toby asked slyly. He knew her too well not to be suspicious.
“Oh, um, John Philips.” John Philips taught Modern Art and though she couldn’t think of a single good reason she’d have to meet with him seven days before Christmas, his was the first name that came to mind.
Toby looked skeptical.
“Well as long as you promise you’ll be back for the party,” Patch said. “You haven’t lived until you’ve been to a Byzantium Christmas party.”
“I promise.” She took her coffee cup to the sink and rinsed it out. “See you all tomorrow.”
Ian nodded at her as she went out the door and she nodded back, embarrassed.
The day was a good one for driving, the sun bright and clean on the white snow and as she headed south, past rest stops and gas stations and fast food restaurants, Vermont and the events of the past few days began to recede. The colony seemed suddenly a distant, rich dream from another time, hardly relevant.
Murder! Detection! It sounded silly now that she was speeding along, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong on the tape player doing Can’t We Be Friends. Ruth Kimball had killed herself. In the bright light of day, the act seemed commonplace, like the ones you read about on the inside pages of the newspaper.
But yet . . . But yet, she felt she had to follow the string that had been offered to her when the librarian at the Historical Society had told her Myra Benton’s journal was in Boston. Maybe it was the academic researcher inside her that was driving her on, but she felt compelled to follow the trail and it was just possible that there was something in the journal that might lead her to the truth. Something about Herrick Gilmartin, something about the unnamed J.L.B. She had called Bennett Dammers the night before, while everyone was getting ready for dinner and asked him if he had ever heard of a student with those initials.
“No, I don’t think so,” he had said in his quavering voice. “He’s not in my book, you said? No. If you knew the name . . .”
But, of course, that was the whole problem. She didn’t know the name.
She reached Medford by eleven and, after getting on 28, made it through Somerville and into Cambridge in good time since there wasn’t much traffic.
The yard and the rest of the campus were peaceful with most of the students gone and Sweeney parked just off Quincy Street and found Marlise, her favorite Fine Arts Library librarian, sitting at the front desk looking bored.
“Hi, Marlise,” she whispered. “How are you?” Marlise had dred-locks and a tiny pink gemstone in the side of her nose.
“Hey, Sweeney, I thought you were gone for Christmas.”
“Yeah, I am. Sort of. It’s a long story. Anyway, I’m trying to get hold of a collection of family papers donated to the library by Piers Benton. It would have
been in 1960, somewhere around there. His mother was the sculptor Myra Benton. It’s mostly her stuff.”
“Hang on.” Marlise tapped at the keys of her computer, and peered at the screen. “Oh yeah. Here it is—456778. Why don’t you go sit down and I’ll bring it over to you. It’s a big box.”
Sweeney sat down in her regular spot, a table tucked into an alcove under a big skylight, and spread out her notebook and a few new pens, ready for the ritual of research.
“Okay, this is it,” Marlise said a few minutes later, leaving a large box on the table. “You’ve got . . .” She checked her watch. “An hour-and-a-half. Vacation hours.”
“Oh, that’s right. Thanks, Marlise. This shouldn’t take too long.”
Sweeney opened the box, conscious that she’d have to hurry. The first item was a copy of a letter from Piers Benton to the trustees of the University libraries dated April sixth, 1963. It stated that he was donating his mother’s personal papers to the University and went on to say that she would have been happy to know that future students had access to them.
Next was a stack of photographs. Sweeney leafed through them quickly, noting familiar faces: Morgan, Gilmartin and some of the others. She would get to them later. Right now, she was impatient to see what the journals offered up, so she put the pictures aside and took the first leather book from the pile of ten or twelve similar volumes.
It appeared that Myra Benton had begun keeping her journal in 1886 as an art student in Philadelphia. Sweeney read carefully, enjoying the developing writing style of the obviously intelligent young woman, but growing impatient with her verbosity.
Finally.
June 10, 1888. We arrived into the Suffolk train station at about 9 o’clock, having slept well overnight despite the incessant ramblings of a fellow passenger who I suspected had been at the sherry most of the evening. I awakened at 7, when the sun shone through the sleeper car window and on to my berth and when I raised the shade, I saw outside the great form of the Green River and looking into its seafoam depths, I could see from whence the name had come. Beyond were hills as green as England and little farms where cattle dotted the fields. Mrs. Morgan rapped on my door before I was done dressing and when I told her I would be there in a moment, she snapped that she had been up for two hours already and that if I was going to learn to be useful in Byzantium, I would learn to rise earlier, the way the country people did. She is a terrible woman and no one at the Academy thinks she is the equal of her husband.
O’ artful death Page 16