O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,19
before saying quietly, “There’s something . . . See, with everything that was going on. When you . . . well, I was in here and I was listening to the boys shooting and suddenly I felt scared, I don’t know why, and I went to find you and I couldn’t.”
“I went around the corner. I was cutting some brush and I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything up against the house, what with all the burglaries. I didn’t want anyone to be able to get in through a window.”
Britta, relieved, turned and smiled at him. “That’s where you were. Of course. I didn’t go around the front. I just looked by the woodpile and . . . that’s where you were, of course.”
“Sweetheart, don’t worry about this. Let’s try and enjoy Christmas.”
“Yes,” she said, going back to the window and looking out as though she expected to see someone there. “Yes. Christmas.”
SEVEN
THE BRIGHT MORNING had turned into a frigid afternoon, the late light thin and sickly on the snow. As they walked down to the cemetery, tiny puffs of mist hovered before them and Sweeney’s lungs ached with the cold.
“So what did you think of la familia?” Toby asked.
“They’re nice. And you seem really happy with them.” She didn’t say anything more. She wasn’t sure what she thought of them yet and people were always sensitive about their own families.
They walked in silence for a few minutes, then Sweeney asked, “How did your great-grandparents end up here anyway? I thought they were from New York.”
“Well, the sculptor Bryn Davies Morgan was the first artist to come to Byzantium,” Toby said. “He built a house up the river a bit called Upper Pastures—I’ll take you up and show you sometime—and then he convinced my great-grandfather, who was quite a bit younger, to buy some land. The story goes that Morgan was an ugly drunk and he and my great-grandfather used to get into these knock-down, drag-out fights, so my great-grandmother said she’d only move to Byzantium if they lived on The Island, so that Morgan wouldn’t be around too much. They built Birch Lane and my grandfather built his studio down near the river.”
He slowed down and Sweeney spotted the river, silvery and wide, snaking away from them beyond the house. “Morgan’s son built over here, too,” Toby went on, “because his father could be such a son-of-bitch when he was drinking. And much later, in the ‘20s, I think, Marcus Granger, another painter, built his house at the other end of The Island. His widow, Electra, still lives here; she’s a great friend of Patch and Britta’s. Her granddaughter is Rosemary. She’s the woman I was hanging out with at Thanksgiving.” He blushed.
“Who are the rest of the neighbors? Are they all colony families?”
“Pretty much. There’s Willow and Anders Fontana. Willow is Morgan’s granddaughter, and she and Anders live in the house her father built. He works in Boston during the week and comes up weekends. You’ll meet Sabina Dodge, too. She used to live with one of the artists. As I said, they’re a pretty tight bunch.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes before Toby said, “Hey. Speak of the devils.” Sweeney looked up to see a small group of walkers approaching them on the path, carrying armfuls of evergreen boughs. With the deep green woods and the white-shrouded Vermont hills all around them, the effect was lovely, as though they’d stepped out of a Christmas card.
“Hello, Toby,” called an elderly woman in a velvet turban, long mink coat and rubber boots. She was a formidable physical presence, nearly three hundred pounds, Sweeney guessed, deciding she’d never seen so much mink in one place in her life.
The large woman wrapped Toby in a furry hug with her free arm when the little group had reached them on the path. “Patch said you were coming for Christmas. How delightful.” She turned to Sweeney. “And you’re the art historian. Patch has told us all about you. Gravestones, he said. How macabre!”
A pretty blond woman behind her gave Toby a hug, too, and Sweeney watched him hang on for a second longer than necessary. Aha. The beloved Rosemary. She flushed slightly when Sweeney met her eyes and Sweeney felt a little flash of humiliation, realizing that Toby had told this woman about her. Stop it, Sweeney, she told herself. Just stop it.
The woman in the mink waved her arm at the little group. “We,” she announced, “are the neighbors.”