O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,1

grass.

He smiled. “What about right here? You could be buried in your boat under the willow tree, with the flowers all around, and all the colony will come visit you.”

“The colony,” she spat out. “I’m tired of the colony. I don’t care if the colony comes to visit me. You think the colony is all that matters. I don’t. I want to go away from here. I want to live in Europe.” Her cheeks were stained with pink.

He stroked her hair, trying to calm her. “No you don’t,” he said. “This is your home. This is where you belong.”

“I belong with you,” she said, reaching up and pulling his head down to her chest. He resisted for a moment, then lay his cheek on the buttons of her dress, the bone pressing against his skin.

ONE

DECEMBER 9

The colony at Byzantium was a paean to the beautiful, a monument to the idea that one could live more beautifully in the country.

For the artists, who flocked north come summer for the heady mixture of solitude and like-minded companionship, it was a place where, above everything, aesthetic perfection reigned.

Beauty reigned in the rolling hillsides of the Vermont countryside, it reigned in the silhouette of the staid, silent mountain, it reigned in the graceful, lovely homes and gardens and in everything the artists did. Birth, celebration, even death—all were made beautiful in Byzantium.

—Muse of the Hills: The Byzantium Colony, 1860–1956

BY BENNETT DAMMERS

THE GIRL’S NUDE BODY lay in the boat, her dead eyes staring heavenward, her long hair coiling strangely to the ground. One graceful arm was thrown across her breasts, covering them carelessly in a gesture more flirtatious than modest; the other arm trailed limply. Unmarred and impossibly smooth, the bloodless surface of her skin looked soft as soap.

Or soft as marble, thought Sweeney St. George as she flipped through the photographs she’d found lying at one end of the seminar table, for that was what the lovely, lifeless woman in the pictures was made of.

It was three weeks before Christmas and outside the windows of the worn and very green fourth floor seminar room, Cambridge was covered in a thin layer of brand new snow. Under the delicate coating, the buildings at this end of the Yard looked to Sweeney like gingerbread houses dusted with powdered sugar. There was something about a snowstorm that purified the city, made it cozier and even more lovely.

After removing her parka and checking the wall clock to confirm that her “Iconography of Death” students wouldn’t be arriving for several minutes, Sweeney had dropped the full slide carousel into the projector, placed her notes in front of her and settled her almost six-foot frame into one of the remarkably uncomfortable chairs around the table to look at the pictures.

The color snapshots had been taken in a New England cemetery, complete with slate and granite headstones typical of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a few marble examples from the late nineteenth and twentieth. The few older Puritan stones stood at attention near the back fence, the more recent dead resting nearer to the front gate, dry autumn leaves piled around their bases. As she always did when she saw photographs of cemeteries she hadn’t yet visited, Sweeney found herself wishing for a couple of hours alone with those stones and her gravestone rubbing materials. She loved the magic of making rubbings, the way long-obscured words and images revealed themselves under her hand. This one would contain a few good eighteenth-century examples, she was sure, and there would be some lovely carvings of willow trees and soul’s heads. But all in all, it was a thoroughly average graveyard in every way.

In every way, that was, except for the strange, life-sized monument of the young woman. Sweeney flipped through the pile and found the best of them, a head-on shot. She studied it carefully.

The girl was limp in the bottom of the shallow, vaguely fashioned rowboat and behind her, the stern rose like a hangman’s hood. Sitting jauntily upon it, and holding a scythe, was the remarkable figure of Death, his bony arms and legs intricately carved from the milky stone.

Sweeney looked again. That was strange. Images of the human face of Death were common on Puritan stones from the mid-1600s and even on stones made in the early nineteenth century, but the style of this stone was much more advanced than any Puritan stone she had ever seen. In fact, it was more like a sculpture, the dead woman’s face