O’ artful death

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  Or did they? She hadn’t thought about that. What if . . .?

  Sweeney thought about the three deaths that were now all a part of this. Her father had loved engines and had entertained himself when the painting wasn’t coming by buying small appliances or lawn mowers and disassembling them into a heap outside his house in Boston. She’d hated it when he did that. It had always made her feel unsettled, empty inside. But she recognized now what the appeal had been and wished she could put this thing together like an engine, the many disparate parts, perfectly oiled, working together as a practical unit.

  She heard the dogs rushing toward the stairs and then footsteps sounded in the hall. She stood up suddenly to find Ian watching her from the doorway.

  “I guess I’m not the only one who can’t sleep,” he said casually, coming over and sitting down in a chair across from her. Her heart sped up a bit.

  “Guess not.” She forced herself to stay calm and she wrapped the comforter around herself more tightly.

  He leaned forward, and she saw a scratch on the side of his face. She hadn’t noticed it. It must have been from scrambling down over the brook to help her the night before. “Are you okay?” he asked. “You must be very shaken.”

  “I’m all right.”

  There was an awkward silence and then he said, “I came down to read. I couldn’t sleep, after . . . everything.”

  She nodded. “Me, too.”

  “What are you reading?” He stood up and came over to sit next to her on the couch, his hands folded in his lap. He was wearing a bathrobe, sweatpants, a pajama top and dark leather slippers—an old man’s slippers. It was hard to think of him as anything other than a shy, intelligent Englishman who seemed to have a crush on her.

  “Nothing.” She tucked the hand holding the notebook under a fold of the comforter.

  Ian watched her for a moment, then said quietly, “Why do you seem so scared of me? You make me feel like Mr. Hyde.”

  “I’m not scared of you.”

  “Then why do you act like it?” He was trying to keep his voice down, but he was angry and his anger pissed her off. What right did he have?

  “You ask me questions about why I’m here and what I’m doing like you’re some kind of a detective or something. I could ask the same of you, you know.”

  “Look, I know, I know.”

  Watching Ian, she was aware that the line of thought she’d been pursuing before he came downstairs had pushed itself again to the surface of her consciousness and was forcing her to come back to it. She didn’t think Jean Luc Baladin had any relatives in the colony, but . . .

  He turned on the couch so he was facing her. “Look here,” he said. “I’m sorry about what I said at the party. When we were in the sleigh.”

  “What do you mean?” She had no idea what he was talking about.

  “What I said about artists offing themselves. I didn’t know who your father was until Patch told me today. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh God. I didn’t even . . .” But now she did remember him saying it. Strange, it hadn’t even registered. “That was a long time ago. I’ve pretty much dealt with all that stuff,” she told him nervously.

  “So you didn’t answer me. How are you holding up?”

  “Not very well. I keep seeing her face. Every time I close my eyes.”

  Pain crossed his face; he almost winced, and something about his eyes made her think of the picture of Jean Luc Baladin and Mary. Ian’s brow had the same brooding set to it that Baladin’s had. In fact, when she thought about it, Ian looked remarkably like Jean Luc Baladin. She hadn’t seen it until that moment.

  And suddenly, her mind was a confusion of thoughts. She could hardly put them into order.

  “Ian, remember when you said that you were from Sussex? Did you mean that you lived there or that it’s where your family’s from?” She took a deep breath, trying to make sense of everything that was running through her head. “I mean, where is your family from?”

  He flinched and then watched her for a few seconds, blinking once before saying carefully, “Sussex.”

  “And are they all English?” It was quiet in the living room and her question seemed very loud to her, a disruption of the silent room.

  Ian looked down at his hands, then up at her, his eyes darting away nervously. “Why the sudden interest in Ball family history?”

  She sprang up from the couch. Ball, Baladin. Of course!

  She looked down at him, her heart racing, uncertain if she should be afraid or triumphant. “I think I know who you are.”

  Ian stared at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I think I know who you are,” she said again. “I think you’re related to a French sculptor named Jean Luc Baladin.”

  He looked so surprised that at first she thought she’d gotten it wrong. But then he smiled a small, sad grin and looked into her eyes. “Yes,” he said simply. “Jean Luc Baladin was my great-grandfather.”

  Sweeney stepped back. “But, was there something between him and Mary Denholm? Did you know that . . .” She wasn’t sure now what to ask him. “Did you . . . Did you come here to kill Ruth Kimball?”

  “Kill Ruth Kimball?” He looked genuinely shocked. “Why would I . . . Sweeney, Ruth Kimball was my cousin.”

  He smiled when he saw her face. “You see, Mary Denholm was my great-grandmother.”

  SWEENEY PACED UP and down the room while Ian watched her in the low light, a small smile on his lips. She tried to put it all into order—the stone, and Ruth Kimball’s death, and then Sabina’s—but it refused to fall into place.

  She sat down next to him on the couch. “Help me out here. Obviously she had Jean Luc Baladin’s baby before she died. Or wait, did she die? Or did they . . .?”

  He said, “No, she didn’t die. She lived to the ripe old age of seventy-eight in England. I think they decided to run away to Europe when she found out she was pregnant and they staged the death so it didn’t cause a scandal. I’m still putting it together myself. But this will explain a lot. This is what brought me here.” He took a manila envelope out of his bathrobe pocket and handed it over. Sweeney opened it and found a stack of handwritten diary pages inside. They had been torn out of a bound book and she recognized the handwriting as Myra Benton’s.

  “My father died last year and when I was going through his things I found this. It had been sent to his father—Jean Luc’s son—years before by Myra Benton’s son and I don’t know if he knew what it was or what it meant.

  “The way I always heard the story was that Jean Luc swept Mary off her feet during the summer he was invited to Byzantium by Morgan and brought her back to England. That’s where they anglicized the name. For the rest of their lives, they lived between Paris and Sussex.

  “There was always this sense of something unexplained when my father talked about his parents and his grandparents. I always felt like there was something there that wasn’t whole, if you know what I mean. Before I found the diary pages, all I knew was that Mary was from New England. But no one ever talked about America, about her family. I’d always been curious. Then when I found these, I figured out part of it. Obviously there were still a lot of unanswered questions. I had been friends with Patch and Britta and after I did a little research into who Myra Benton was, it seemed like such a coincidence that they would be from Byzantium. I arranged an invitation and . . .” He shrugged. That’s why I came early, so I could find out more about the family. I panicked when you said you were looking into it, too.”

  Sweeney took out the pages. “I’ve read everything leading up to this,” she said. “You can’t imagine how frustrated I was when I discovered these pages were missing. And all the time you had them . . ..”She began to read aloud.

  August 31, 1890

  If I thought that the events of yesterday were strange, then I was mistaken, for today they grew even stranger. I awoke early, intent on going down to the studio to work for a few hours before breakfast, but when I got there, M. was a
lready there and refused to let me in.

  I know not whether it was the events of the past days or the snub I had received at the hands of J.L.B., but I found myself seized with a violent storm of anger and I pushed through the door, telling him that he had hired me to do a job and had no right to stop me from doing it. I scolded him for treating me so poorly and said that if he persisted in his behavior, I would assume that he had something to hide and I would accuse him publicly of murdering Miss Denholm. I blush to think of it now. I was so angry, I did not stop to weigh my words, and I went on at him like a fury, scolding and shrill. I said that I thought it was very strange that J.L.B. had left so suddenly and that I had overheard that conversation between him and G. and J.L.B. and that I had my suspicions about Miss Denholm’s death. And then I burst in to the studio and sitting there in the center was the oddest statue I have ever seen.

  It was a life-sized likeness of Miss Denholm, lying in a shallow boat and looking quite dead. Hovering over her was a horrible figure of Death, leering and grinning and looking down at her as though he were about to seduce her. It was such a strange thing that I gasped and looked up at M., accusing him of terrible things.

  But he only laughed quietly and told me I had got it all wrong and that he was going to tell me a story but that I musn’t ever tell the story to anyone.

  Quite soon after J.L.B. arrived in Byzantium, he said, he had asked Miss Mary Denholm to sit for him and they had fallen in love. M. said that he knew I wouldn’t be so silly as to ask questions about that or about why he hadn’t gone to her parents to ask for her hand or something like that. The truth was that they had fallen in love and within a few months, Mary found that she was going to have a child.

  Now, this was a problem for everyone. People in town would have been horrified, of course, as I was. Mary’s parents were against the artists and this would have given them more ammunition against them. But that wasn’t the biggest problem. The biggest problem was that Mary and J.L.B. announced that they wouldn’t just get married and pretend that the baby had been born early. They would be honest, they said, and tell anyone who asked the truth about themselves, because they didn’t think there was anything shameful about their love. They were going to tell the truth and run away to Europe, they said.

  M. hadn’t ever gotten along with her parents, but he knew what the news of their daughter running away with an artist would do to their reputation in town. Then there was Ethel Denholm. As much as M. and G.—who had been told of the difficulty as well—disapproved of what they liked to call “our goddamned society’s morals” they couldn’t be a party to ruining the marriage prospects and reputation of an innocent girl. So M. and G. came up with a plan. They would pretend that Mary Denholm had met with an accident and had died. It would be easy for Gilmartin to report that he had found her body in the river. Dr. Sparr, who was a doctor, after all, and knew all about delicate situations, would do whatever was necessary to make it all right and they would weight the coffin and have a sham funeral. Mary’s parents would have to be told, of course, but M. said that he had believed that they would go along with it—it was better than the truth—and they had.

  It took me some moments to absorb this grand deception and I had many questions that I asked M. about.

  Then I turned to the fantastic stone and asked him what on earth it was. He smiled and said that Mary and J.L.B. had gone along with the plan, but on one condition. They wanted to be able to make Mary’s gravestone. And they wanted to make a gravestone the like of which had never been seen before. J.L.B. and Gilmartin had lately gotten very interested in what they liked to call “drawing the dead,” but was really just painting or sculpting people to look as though they were dead. They had gotten the idea from some painters J.L.B. had known in England when he was a boy and they had been mucking about with it all summer, making people pretend they were dead so they could sketch them, and so they could get an idea of how dead limbs fell and how dead skin looked. Gilmartin even had Mary get into a cold tub and waited until her skin was blue and wrinkled before he let her go. She caught a terrible cold and J.L.B. said it was her sacrifice for art.

  In any case, J.L.B. and Mary decided that this was the stone that was to mark her grave. He had been working feverishly at it for the weeks before they were to leave and toward the end, as he was finishing it, J.L.B. was in such a hurry that he forgot to sign it.

  It was such an incredible, fantastical story that by the time I returned to the house, I could scarcely believe it had not been a dream and I sat down immediately to write these words, in order to convince myself.

  September 3, 1890

  Today, Mary Denholm’s very odd gravestone was put in place down in the little island cemetery. We were quite an odd party watching its installation and her parents looked embarrassed by it, as though it were a monstrosity. Afterward, I heard G. and Louis Denholm saying something about a piece of land and when I asked M. about it, he said that Louis Denholm had been trying to get G. to buy a worthless strip of land between the two properties for years and that now it looked as though he would have to do it, to secure Mr. Denholm’s silence.

  M. and G. have once again implored me to be silent on the subject of J.L.B. and Miss Mary Denholm and I have decided to tear these pages from my diary in order to keep them from being read by unintended eyes. I shall keep them in a secret hiding spot, should I ever need proof of these events.

  “Ruth Kimball didn’t know,” Sweeney said, thinking out loud. “At least I don’t think she did. She believed that one of the artists had killed Mary.”

  “Ethel might not have known,” Ian said.

  “You’re right. The parents probably wouldn’t have told her. But I think she must have picked up on something, thought there was something odd about her cousin’s death, and I think she must have talked to her granddaughter, Ruth Kimball, about her suspicions. Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Well, once I’d figured this all out, I was a bit paralyzed. I thought if I could meet Mrs. Kimball and kind of see what the situation was, it would be easier to figure out what to do next. Then it got complicated, you see. After researching the family at the historical society, I realized that Ethel was a cousin, not a sister, and that Mary was the only direct descendant. I didn’t know if they knew this or not and I didn’t want them to think I was after their house or something. I don’t know. It seems so silly now, but I just thought that I should break it to them more, I don’t know, more gently. After Christmas.”

  “And then Ruth Kimball died.”

  “Exactly. And there seemed to be some suspicion about whether it was suicide. By then, I couldn’t come out with this big announcement, you know ‘Surprise! Mary wasn’t really dead. Hello! I’m your long, lost relative.’ ”

  “God, it’s incredible. So what happened to Mary and Jean Luc? He was so talented. Why haven’t we ever heard of him?”

  “He was talented. But his career seems to have ended when they moved back to Europe. I always had the idea that she became his art. It was a great love, you know. Unusual in those days. But, of course, they’d married for love, and they’d sacrificed much for it. He came into some family money and they were able to live on that. Mary, I’m afraid, wasn’t a very good poet, but they had this little medieval society and they put on plays and made little books and things. I have a few of them. What are we going to tell Patch and Britta?”

  “I think we better keep it between us for now,” Sweeney said. “It might just muddy the waters.”

  He nodded and they were both silent for a minute.

  “So that’s that then,” he said. “You know my secret. Have you stopped thinking I’m a murderer?”

  “Yes.” She smiled. “But what I can’t figure out is why you always seemed to be watching me. And why you went to Boston.”

  “I thought—I think—that you’re interesting,” he said simply. “I was telling you the truth before. I had to go to Boston anyway and I just . . . I just wanted to see where you
lived.” He was unashamed, and his open face made her shrink back as though she had seen something ugly or predatory there. He saw her do it and he stood up and went over to the fireplace, where he fiddled with a little brass Buddha sitting on the mantel.

  “But what about the murders?” she said, thinking out loud, trying to fill the awkward silence. “Ruth Kimball’s death—and Sabina’s—they must be related to something else. Unless someone found out that you were related to the Kimballs and . . . But that doesn’t make sense.”

  He took her hand and she found herself terrified, wracked with vertigo and uncertainty. And when he led her upstairs and took her pajamas off, carefully as though he didn’t want to wrinkle them, and then lay her down on his bed and kissed her, not quite so carefully this time, she found herself crying, from relief and release and for the sadness of the world, and the futility of knowing what she now knew.

  He kissed her face, his lips tasting the saltiness of her tears, and stroked a circle around the nipple of her left breast. He looked into her eyes as she shivered underneath him. Then she wrapped her legs around his waist, kissing him and pushing down his pajama bottoms so he could move into her. They struggled together on the bed, making love until they remembered what could happen and he pulled away from her just as her body exploded in joy, light breaking through the shadow of death.

  THIRTY

  DECEMBER 24

  THAT NEXT MORNING they went out the back door into the fresh air, holding hands, still sleepy and shy with each other. The sun hovered low over the river. The air was cold and dry. A granular layer of new snow had fallen during the night and it lay on top of the frozen crust that had been there, blowing this way and that when the wind came up.