O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,31

early nineteenth century, much less by 1890.

Then there was the reference to Proserpine. She opened Bulfinch’s Age of Fable. Sometimes it was good to go back to basics.

In the vale of Enna there is a lake embowered in woods, which screen it from the fervid rays of the sun, while the moist ground is covered with flowers, and Spring reigns perpetual. Here Proserpine was playing with her companions, gathering lilies and violets, and filling her basket and her apron with them, when Pluto saw her, loved her and carried her off. She screamed for help to her mother and her companions; and when in her fright she dropped the corners of her apron and let the flowers fall, childlike she felt the loss of them as an addition to her grief.

She thought of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine, her crimped black hair like coal, the flowing peacock-colored robe and red lips.

It seemed likely that the stone had been made by someone who was a later, much younger member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or someone who wasn’t a contemporary but was sympathetic to their philosophy and tastes. Mary had died in 1890. The unnamed artist must have been a young protégé who left England and settled in Byzantium, or an American who had adopted the Brotherhood’s themes.

Bryn Davies Morgan was the most famous Byzantium sculptor. Sweeney knew that he had immigrated from Wales. It was very possible that he had lived in London for a while and taken up with the Pre-Raphaelites in his younger years. She found a copy of Bennett Dammers’s biography of Morgan in the library’s small but well-stocked art section and searched for references to the Pre-Raphaelites. There was nothing. And when she looked through photographs of his works, she knew she was wrong. It didn’t take her Ph.D. in art history to see that Morgan hadn’t done Mary’s stone. It had to be someone else.

So she went and found the library’s only book on the Pre-Raphaelite movement and reviewed the history of the group of English painters, poets, journalists, and hangers-on who, in the mid-1800s, had reacted against what they saw as the overly mannered approach of most artists since Raphael had painted in the early 1500s.

She looked up the one Pre-Raphaelite sculptor she did know about—Thomas Woolner. Woolner had emigrated to Australia, though, and from what Sweeney could tell, the gravestone wasn’t his. But still, it seemed such a Pre-Raphaelite subject.

Her heart beating a little faster, she got out the photographs of the stone. The boat. The boat was referenced in the poem. She hadn’t taken it any further than that. But surely the boat was also a reference to another favorite Pre-Raphaelite subject—“The Lady of Shalott,” the famous piece of verse by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson that had always been one of her favorites. She went back to the bookshelves and got down a copy of Tennyson’s collected works.

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

And thro’ the field the road runs by

To many-tower’d Camelot;

And up and down the people go,

Gazing where the lilies blow

Round an island there below,

The island of Shalott.

Sweeney shivered a little. It was almost as if the poet were describing The Island.

But the Lady of Shalott hadn’t been murdered. She had sat in her tower, weaving as she looked at the world in her mirror and had brought death upon herself when she fell in love with Lancelot and left her tower.

Had Mary tried to leave her island?

Sweeney was sitting there wondering when she caught sight of a newspaper sitting on a table next to hers. “Local Woman Dead of Apparent Suicide,” the headline read, and in smaller letters, “Police Say Investigation Continuing.”

She began to read. “A local woman was found dead Tuesday, apparently killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Community members recalled a committed local volunteer and lifelong Byzantium resident this week as state and local police continued the investigation.

“Sources say that Ruth Kimball, 72, of Byzantium, went for a walk in the early afternoon. Kimball’s daughter, Sherry Kimball, 35, also of Byzantium, discovered the body at about 5:30 PM in a cemetery near the family’s home.”

Sweeney scanned the rest of the article. State police weren’t saying much, just that it looked like suicide, but that they always investigated carefully whenever firearms were involved, just as Gwinny had said. She was interested to read that the police had questioned Trip and Gally Wentworth at