Sweeney turned away so as not to see the look on Toby’s face. She didn’t want to know.
“Darling,” Rosemary said, getting up and putting on her coat. “I really do have to go. I have to get Granny ready for bed. We have to talk to the police tomorrow and I want to make sure she’s rested.” She tousled his hair and put an affectionate hand on Sweeney’s back. “It isn’t you, Sweeney,” she said kindly. “Your friend here has bewitched me into staying much longer than I ought to have.” She gave Toby a kiss goodnight and left them alone.
“Sorry,” Sweeney said quietly. He lay back on his bed, a pillow tucked under his head.
“Spoiler.” He grinned at her, but when he saw the look on her face he said, “What? Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Fine . . .. Listen, The Lady of Shalott. Tell me about it.”
“It’s a Victorian poem.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“All right. Well, you know that Alfred, Lord Tennyson was one of the foremost poets of the nineteenth century, and he commonly wrote on Arthurian themes.” She nodded impatiently. “Let’s see. The Lady of Shalott was originally written in the 1830s, I think, and then he revised it later. There was speculation that the character of the Lady of Shalott was based on Malory’s Elaine in the Morte D’Arthur, but I’m pretty sure that Tennyson told someone or other that in fact it was based on an Italian folktale. But then, of course, later he found out about Elaine and wrote some poems about her. It’s funny how that happens, isn’t it? How storylines sort of exist in the collective subconscious. Very Jungian, you know.”
“No scholarly digressions. What else?”
“I don’t know. What else do you want to know? The poem’s about this mysterious woman who lives on an island. Because of some strange curse, she’s doomed to spend her days in a tower, looking at the reflection of the world in the mirror and weaving what she sees. Then one day she sees Sir Lancelot riding by her window and she falls in love with him. But when she turns away from the mirror and looks at life as it is, the mirror cracks, ‘from side to side,’ remember? She leaves the tower and gets into a boat and sails toward Camelot, but before she gets there, she’s killed by the curse.” He watched her for a minute. “Oh, I see. The boat. It’s like Mary’s statue.”
Sweeney nodded. “Yeah. I just can’t figure out why someone used it as the basis for a gravestone.”
His thoughts followed along the same lines hers had in the library. “Hey, Mary lived on an island. Maybe she felt there would be a curse on her if she left. What were her parents like?”
“Strict, from what I can tell.”
“There you go.”
“But she didn’t make her own gravestone.”
“Maybe someone who knew her thought the story resonated. You said yourself that the Pre-Raphaelites often painted literary themes. Ophelia and all that.”
Somewhere, deep down in Sweeney’s consciousness, Ophelia struck a chord.
“I don’t know.” She thought for a moment. “Did you know that Mary Denholm modeled for your great-grandfather? And he was the one to find her body.”
“No. Who told you that?”
“I discovered it today. When I was doing research.”
“Everybody around here modeled for everybody else.”
“Okay.” She thought for a moment.
“Are you sure you’re really okay?” Toby looked concerned. “You seem kind of weird.”
She looked up at him, but his eyes, when her own eyes met them, were distracted and tired. She forced a smile. “I’m just tired. So I’m going to bed.”
She made it out into the hallway before the tears rushed to her eyes. She rubbed at them angrily with the back of her hand, furious with herself, and as she climbed the staircase to the third floor, she almost ran into Ian coming out of the bathroom, his hair still wet from the shower. He smelled of lemons and cloves. He looked up and saw the tears. “Oh, good night,” he said awkwardly, casting his eyes to the floor.
Embarrassed, Sweeney crossed her arms over the front of her nightgown and nodded at him, then slipped into her room, shaking. She was angry at Toby, at Rosemary, at herself for caring. And most of all, she realized, she was angry at Ian Ball, though