O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,100
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.