O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,34

sure what.”

A grandfather clock in the hall chimed three times.

Sweeney handed him the copy of the poem she’d written out. “I don’t know if you remember the poem that’s on the stone, but I’m wondering if you could help me out with it. I’m really at a loss.”

It took him quite a long time to read it, his chin tucked against his collarbone, and Sweeney wondered if he had fallen asleep. But then he sat up and grinned.

“Well! I haven’t seen it for years. It’s quite something, isn’t it?”

“It’s pretty bad, I know. But if I can figure out who wrote it, it may bring me closer to knowing who the sculptor is.”

“Well,” Dammers said, “there weren’t many poets and writers in the colony. A few journalists. It was mostly Morgan’s sculpting cronies. And the painters, of course.”

He stood up again and got a copy of his own book from a box on the floor.

“That’s for you,” he said. “The new edition. I write about Matthew Bentley. He wasn’t a very good poet, but he wasn’t that bad. Besides, his work is very different. That sounds like the ruminations of a romantic schoolgirl.”

“Or someone over-enamored of the Victorians,” Sweeney said. “It’s like the author had made kind of a hodgepodge of different themes, if you know what I mean. The thing that strikes me as strange is that the monument is clearly by a Pre-Raphaelite. But why haven’t we heard of him? Or her, I suppose.” It hadn’t struck her before that the artist could be a woman.

He smiled at her. “That’s a very good question, my dear. I don’t know. Perhaps he or she died young. As for the Pre-Raphaelites, it’s interesting, you know. There were some connections. Morgan met the Rossetti brothers once, in London, before he emigrated.”

“But I looked them up in your book.”

“Yes, it’s only in the new edition. I received a letter from a scholar at Cambridge after my book came out, telling me of the meeting. It was only a dinner, but I think it must have smoothed the way for him when he arrived in New York.”

“Was Morgan influenced by them?”

“No, not really. But there may have been connections that we didn’t know about. Perhaps a young protégé came over to study with him one summer.”

His eyes were tired and Sweeney decided she only had a few minutes left. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. You grew up here. What were things like between the artists and the people in town?”

“Good question.” He grinned at her. “That’s one of the things I’ve always thought is most interesting about Byzantium and other arts colonies in this part of the world.” He settled back in his chair.

“You have to understand that most of the people who lived in Byzantium before the artists arrived were farmers, small town businessmen. My own father kept a feed and grain store. They didn’t understand the artists, I think, didn’t understand them spending days in the studio or writing, looked down on the parties.

“But then, many of the people in town—the natives, they were called by the artists—made extra money cleaning or cooking during the summers and, of course, it meant that there was a kind of interest in the town. You know, Byzantium would be written up as the most beautiful place in America, things like that. The gardens were famous. Many of the people in town modeled for the artists, too, the children especially.”

“How did that work? Would they pay them.”

“Yes. Not much, though. Sometimes they paid in work.” He was looking over her shoulder, off into space.

“It was very complicated,” he said finally. “As most things are. Colonial, almost. If you think about the word colony. Well, that’s what it was. They colonized . . .” He trailed off and Sweeney had the feeling that he was winding down, like a music box. But then he seemed to come back from wherever he had been.

“The interesting thing is that you can still see the dynamic at work today. I’ve always fancied I was quite separate from it, since I wasn’t exactly a native and wasn’t exactly a colonist and most of the time I feel as though that’s okay. But there are times when a dispute will come up about something and I can tell that they want me to choose sides. This thing about Ruth Kimball’s land, for example.

“Of course I felt it was imperative that we keep The Island the way it was.