As to her dear husband, he was there when we pulled into the station and kissed me once on each cheek in the European style when I got off the train. When he tried to kiss her, his own wife, she told him it had been a long journey and that it was his fault for insisting she travel with me.
There is so much to tell, I hardly know where to begin! We drove in a smart carriage through Suffolk, a bustling little town where there are a great many factories and shops that turn out all manner of engines and machines. Dearest Bryn told me that I ought to come with him some day and see the women at work in the factories. He said it is quite amazing and that they work very hard and make their own money. We followed the river out of Suffolk and started for Byzantium. All along the way, field turned to forest and then to field again, the green pastures dotted with wildflowers and lilacs. A very sad-eyed creature, standing in the road, forced us to stop so as not to hit it and I recognized it as a milk cow, which Bryn said I would see lots of in Vermont and I had an idea for a piece featuring a milk maid, sitting by her cow. Bryn said there were lots of local girls who were willing to pose for the artists.
The house is heavenly, a white palace covered with climbing vines and Mrs. Morgan’s famous gardens all around. They really are beautiful, sculpted out of the land, the pink and blue and red and yellow spots of color like a French painting. Bryn took me to the studio and showed me what I am to do. He said he was glad to see me and that he thinks I will enjoy Byzantium, then took me back to the house to meet Mr. Gilmartin, the painter, who is only just out of the Academy and very handsome and looks at one as though he could see right through your skin and bones and clothes. He and his wife have only recently built a house over on The Island. I also met the Morgan girls, Gwenda and Martha, who are cunning and bright, with mischievous spirits. I think we will be great friends.
My room is on the third floor, next to the servants, which doesn’t bother me, though Bryn said he felt awfully about it, but the house is so full there were no other rooms. It is very quiet, compared to the city, and at night I lie in bed and listen to the sounds of insects through the open window and smell the lilacs on the air.
Sweeney read on for a few pages, as Myra Benton described her work in the studio—mixing clay and sweeping seemed to be her main responsibilities—and a party at Upper Pastures that she described with gusto. But it wasn’t until July third that something really interesting happened.
. . . Bryn took me into Suffolk to buy drink for the Independence Day party at Upper Pastures and on the way back we came upon Miss Mary Denholm walking along the Suffolk Road. She is the daughter of Louis Denholm, who lives next-door to Gilmartin’s home Birch Lane, on The Island, and she is quite an interesting-looking girl, not exactly beautiful, but she contains beauty if such a thing can be said of someone. And she chooses when to let it out, I think.
She is quite thin and pale, though womanly, with remarkable, coiling dark hair like an Irish princess and haunted eyes the color of coal.
She had the sleeves of her dress turned up and was perspiring and covered with dust from the road and when we stopped and offered her a ride, she smiled broadly and said she’d be glad of one since it was so hot. I judged her to be about 16 years of age and immediately thought of her for my Juliet piece, with her fine dark hair tumbling down around her face. When I mentioned it to Bryn later, he said that Gilmartin had also seen the potential in her and asked her parents if she might pose sometime.
Throughout the rest of that summer of 1888, there were hardly any mentions of Mary, except for a reference to a picnic upon the mountain which she came along on and which included Gilmartin, Morgan and some of the children.
Thankfully, Sweeney was able to skim quickly over the parts of the diary which were not about Byzantium and after a somewhat exhaustive description of the end of the school year and what appeared to have been a brief love affair and a broken engagement, the account picked up again in a new volume dated June third, 1889.
It is good to be back in Byzantium after a year away and all the trouble of these past months. I have vowed not to think of Arthur and when Bryn saw me on the stairs this morning and said “Will Mr. Pettengill be coming for a visit this summer, Myra,” in that twinkly, insinuating way of his, I looked him right in the eyes and told him that there was no possibility of it. He looked sad for me, but did not say anything.
I must work harder than ever before now. My work must be my life and my life my work, and I must throw myself into the discipline and application of my skill. Bryn knows this and he will understand it without my telling him.
Though I am not the same woman I was last summer, dear Byzantium is as ever she was. There is a new flowerbed at Upper Pastures and Mrs. Morgan has planted it with foxglove and lilies and delphiniums. We are to have dinner at Birch Lane on The Island tonight, and Bryn tells me that Gilmartin has changed the house extensively over the spring and made it quite modern. As I was unpacking my clothes, I saw a lovely portrait hanging on the wall and recognized the subject at once as Miss Mary Denholm and the painter as Mr. Gilmartin. When I asked Bryn about it later, he said that she had been doing quite a bit of modeling for them all and revealed herself as a willing and untiring subject. He said I should let her know if I required her services.
June 4, 1889—I am quite myself again, dear diary. The fresh country air and beauty all around me have convinced me to live again and Bryn said he can hardly tell the difference between me and the local girls who help in the kitchen.
June 15, 1889—It is a rainy, despairing morning and I and the girls and Mrs. Morgan have settled into the drawing room with a fire until it clears. After lunch, I will help with casting in the studio, for Bryn is finishing his Proserpine and has dedicated himself to its completion.
I must take this opportunity to recount our delightful evening at Birch Lane. Mr. Gilmartin was in good spirits as always and drank too much and leaned too close when he spoke, but I forgave him it because of his great kindness and warmth. I hadn’t met Charis Gilmartin, and found her a lovely and bright woman, with a great interest in flowers and gardens, and a palpable disdain for her husband. When I remarked on it, Bryn said that it was just the way they were and that I was too much an innocent about men and women and how they got along.
But the most interesting thing that came out of our evening was the appearance, around six, of Miss Mary Denholm. We were sitting out on the terrace when she came over with a basket of eggs. She was about to go around to the back door when Gilmartin called her over to speak to us. He introduced me to her and said that he thought we might be good friends and that he had heard anyway, through the grapevine, that I might be interested in having her sit for me.
I told him that we had met last summer and wondered if she remembered.
Miss Denholm smiled and said she did remember and that she would be happy to sit, and that I should let her know when. She is truly a lovely girl—all tumbling hair and pale skin and a willowy figure and I imagined that she seemed somehow older this summer than last. Of course, she is now seventeen, only five years younger than myself.
She has a younger sister, a plain girl who seems much duller than Mary. I have not yet met Mrs. Denholm, but was introduced to her husband once at the train station. He was a very large man, with little spectacles and when I told him that I was working for Morgan, he said, “Ah, a sculptress” and gestured at my hair. I thought him odd until M. explained that he was a great one for puns.
In any case, I am newly interested in my work and will commit myself to the completion of a piece as soon as possible.
But Marlise, carrying a stack of books to put back on the shelves, intruded upon Myra Benton’s resolutions.
“Hey, Sweeney. I’m afraid I’m closing up in a few minutes.”
“Oh, shit. I didn’t even . . .” Sweeney looked through the pile of diaries. She still had a few to go. “Marlise . . .?”
“You’re going to ask me if you can take that box home with you, aren’t you?” Marlise
adopted the famously stern look that Sweeney knew terrified less intrepid researchers.
“Well, if I could just look at it for another hour . . .”
Marlise looked around the empty library. “Okay. Take the box. Nobody but you and some guy from the University of Wisconsin have ever wanted to see it anyway. But if something happens to it, I’m going to tell the powers that be that I never saw it before and you must have stolen it. Right?”
Sweeney grinned. “Thank you so much. And you don’t have to worry. I’ll have it back first thing in the morning and I’ll guard it with my life.”
“You better. We open at eight. Just bring it in and put it behind the desk. I’ll make sure it goes back where it’s supposed to go.”
Sweeney carefully tucked the box into her bookbag and patted it. “Thank you so much. I owe you one.”
“All right. Have a good Christmas.”
“You, too.”
She walked down to Massachusetts Avenue and got a beer and a Reuben sandwich at a little pub she’d never been to. She desperately wanted to take the box out and keep reading Myra Benton’s diary, but Marlise would never forgive her if she got Russian dressing on the old documents, so she found a Boston Globe and read happily in a cozy corner booth. It was heavenly warm inside and she ate slowly, listening to other diners’ conversations and watching shoppers passing by on the sidewalk outside.
Then, with the box of Myra Benton’s journals safely locked in the trunk of her car, Sweeney decided to stop by the office to check her e-mail and see if she had any interesting mail. There wasn’t much of interest, but she spent a happy hour reading the proofs of her European Art Criticism piece and returning a couple of e-mails from colleagues interested in her book on gravestone iconography.
The air had warmed up a little by the time she got back outside, and in the dusky late afternoon light, Sweeney could smell the familiar odors of the city, cooking oil and fried onions emanating from a Chinese restaurant, cigarette smoke as a teenage girl walked by, scowling into the winter night.
The traffic was getting heavier as it got to be the rush hour and it took her nearly twenty minutes to get back to Somerville and circle her block twice, looking for parking. She finally found a space a couple of streets away and squeezed into it narrowly, then got all of her bags and the precious box out of the car.
It was as she crossed Davis Square that she saw the red car.
Sweeney jumped back and looked behind her for a place to hide and watch. It was Ian’s car. She was sure of it. It had the same Vermont plates—her good memory called up the sequence, BUI 178, and the shiny red finish and American make gave it away as a rental.
Luckily, there was a large oak tree along the street and on the other side, a small bench offered a comfortable post. She put her bags on the bench and sat down, pulling a hat and scarf out of the bag and wrapping her face so she wouldn’t be recognized. She hugged the box to her chest and waited.
It was ten minutes before she saw his tall, lanky figure coming out of a small convenience store on the corner. He looked to the right and then to the left and rooted in his pocket for a few seconds, presumably looking for his keys. Sweeney watched as he opened the car and dropped something that looked like a small paper bag on the front seat. Then he re-locked the car and started walking across the square, looking down frequently at what appeared to be a map.
After a couple of seconds, Sweeney got up, gathered her things, and followed at a safe distance. In movies, following someone looked so simple but, in fact, it was bloody difficult. He didn’t walk quickly, looking straight ahead, the way bad guys were supposed to. Instead, he turned around frequently, looking up at street signs and checking them against his map. Each time he stopped, Sweeney jumped back against a building, turning away to pretend to fumble in her bag.
They went on like that for a couple of blocks before she realized where they were going. Ian looked up at the street sign and turned right onto Russell Street, walking slowly along until he came to the big pumpkin-colored Victorian triple-decker where she lived.
All of a sudden, she wasn’t sure what to do. A cold web of fear had spread itself across her chest and she stood, rooted there on the sidewalk. She could confront him, of course, but the street was empty. No, she decided, it was better to wait and see what he was going to do. She ducked into an alleyway on the corner and kneeled down behind a pair of trash cans, still hugging the box.
From her post, she watched him stand on the sidewalk looking up at the house. His expression was inscrutable; he merely stood. And after a minute or two, he turned and passed by the alley, going back the way he had come.
She counted to one hundred and then stood up, her legs cramped from kneeling on the cold concrete. After looking up and down the street, she let herself in and climbed up the stairs to her third floor apartment, her heart beating and the back of her sweater damp with perspiration.
She stood in the hall for a moment, listening to the silence, then pressed the button that played the new messages on the answering machine. There wasn’t much, a reminder from the video store about Divorce Italian Style and a message from a student explaining why he wouldn’t be handing in his final paper for Introduction to Art History.
Then she poured herself a scotch and put on her favorite flannel pajamas. Comfortable and warm, she stood in front of the bay window in her little living room looking out over the square. She’d been living on Russell Street so long that she’d come to know the scene by heart, the neon-signed diner and the VFW hall across the way.
Down below, pedestrians crisscrossed the square. A couple looked for cars, then dashed across the street and disappeared into The Auld Sod, the best Irish bar in the neighborhood.
She looked down at the spot where Ian had been standing. What did he want? She hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that he had some business in Byzantium, that he was somehow wrapped up in the mystery of Mary Denholm’s death and Ruth Kimball’s murder. And now he’d followed her to Boston.
She remembered the credit card receipt she’d picked up accidentally with her books the day he’d driven her downtown. She’d forgotten to give it back to him, so it was still in the front pocket of her research bag. She got it out and found the name of the restaurant, “Jane’s Diner,” in Suffolk, a large town next to Byzantium, and saw that he’d spent $11.93 on eggs, bacon, coffee, orange juice and a cranberry muffin. She was about to put it back when she saw the date printed in small faint purple type. It was three days before she and Toby had arrived in Byzantium.
Yet, when Patch had introduced Ian to them, he’d said he had just arrived from London. She remembered it distinctly now. Patch told them that Ian was exhausted because he’d just that day arrived from London. Sweeney couldn’t imagine why Patch would have lied to them about it, so Ian must have lied to Patch.
But why?
Sweeney forced herself to stop thinking about Ian. She had the rest of Myra Benton’s diary to read and she settled down on the couch. She worked her way through seemingly endless descriptions of Benton’s work on a sculpture.
She had been reading for almost thirty minutes and she was growing bored of Myra Benton’s confessional. There was a sly intimation of some kind of romantic adventure with a student of Gilmartin’s, but no mention of J.L.B. She still hadn’t reached the summer Mary died.
Finally, in May of 1890, Myra Benton was back at Byzantium.
And then:
July 6, 1890—The girls and I went for a lovely picnic today at the pond and asked the Denholm girls to come along as they do not have much fun on account of their father’s strictness. We brought cold meat and drank water from the little spring on the way and Ethel said it was the first picnic she had ever gone on and that she was enjoying herself immensely.
It is just the time of year when the wildflowers are blooming and as we walked, we saw flowers of every variety. They were so beautiful, I could hardly believe they were of nature and we plucked them up and made little crowns f
or ourselves. I came upon Mary picking the petals from a daisy and saying, to herself, he loves me, he loves me not, and I asked her who her sweetheart was and she said she would not tell me and then flushed so deeply I could not help but laugh and tell her that she looked exactly like a blushing bride.
The next passage of interest was dated July twenty-sixth, 1890:
M. and J.L.B. had most terrible row tonight. I was coming back from the Ladies Guild meeting at the Church and when I had brought the horses into the stable and put them away I thought I would pass by the studio and have a word with M. about my “Hermione” work, since I have been so distracted and have made no headway these last three weeks. In any case, thinking M. might have some words of advice, I took a lantern and started for the studio when I heard them screaming at each other like jealous women.
“I won’t have it,” J.L.B. called out. “It’s madness, sheer madness. The deception, the lies, it’s too much.”
“My dear man, surely you see that it is . . . unavoidable.” M. was far more measured than J.L.B., but still his voice rose from the studio and reached me where I stood, shivering on the path. I would like to say, dear diary, that I turned on my heel and went straight back to the house, but instead I waited there and eavesdropped, knowing they were too involved in the discussion to leave the studio and find me.
Then, to my surprise, I heard G’s voice also. He spoke softly and I could hear only the fragment of a sentence, something that sounded like “. . . and I wish things could be different.”
The three of them fought on like that for a few minutes more and I was about to go when I heard M. say something about “Mary.” Mary Denholm it must have been, because J.L.B. said shortly after “the poor wretched girl, that Louis Denholm is a tyrant.” They must have moved to some other part of the studio because I could not afterward hear them so clearly.
O’ artful death Page 17