O' Artful Death - By Sarah Stewart Taylor Page 0,2

and breasts as softly and expertly rounded as a Rodin or a Saint-Gaudens. What was the date?

She flipped through the pictures and found one that was a close-up of the tablet at the end of the stone. It was engraved with a few words and some kind of poem.

MARY ELIZABETH DENHOLM

January 3, 1872 to August 28, 1890

So it was late Victorian. That was puzzling. It was completely atypical for a Victorian stone. By the time this Mary Denholm had died, stonecarvers had moved on to the more familiar euphemistic images for death, such as willow trees, or romanticized cherubs and garlands. But here was this strange reaper, his figure so much more accomplished than those of his brethren on other stones. This Death was a man, with a man’s face somehow suggested in the familiar skull. He gazed down at the girl lying beneath him, his eyes soft, a dreamy smile playing at his bony lips. There was something familiar about the way he looked down at his prey, Sweeney realized, something loving.

She did a quick calculation. Eighteen. The girl had been eighteen. What had she died of? Childbirth was a likely cause, but there wasn’t a husband’s named on the stone, as in “Mary, Beloved Wife of James,” so perhaps it had been something else. She searched the marble surface, grainy in the photos. In all her years of studying gravestones and mourning jewelry, shrouds and death masks and funerary art, Sweeney had never seen anything quite as intriguing as this lovely, eroticized sculpture of a dead girl.

The verse below the name and dates on the tablet were inscribed in small, precise letters and Sweeney struggled to make them out. She tipped the surface of the photograph toward the fluorescent overhead light and there they were, as bizarre as the work on which they’d been etched.

Death resides in my garden, with his hands wrapped ‘round my throat

He beckons me to follow and I step lightly in his boat.

All around us summer withers, blossoms drop and rot,

And Death bids me to follow, his arrow in my heart.

There was more, but Sweeney looked up from the photograph then, for something about the dead girl, the strange poem and the smiling figure of Death had made her think of the early New England gravestones that described Indian raids or grisly murders. She wondered how this girl had died.

Voices sounded in the hall. She tucked the photographs into her bookbag and stood up to welcome her class.

“Hey, Sweeney,” said Brendan Freeman, one of her senior advisees. “How’s it going?”

Still two years away from her thirtieth birthday, Sweeney knew she wasn’t the model of a professorial authority figure. Her class outfits tended toward jeans or whatever she’d found that week at her favorite Cambridge vintage clothes shop, and her bright red curls, which fell halfway down her back, were often unruly, hastily pinned up with a pencil or a binder clip. But she hadn’t gotten to be twenty-eight without beginning to understand how she affected people, and she knew that there was something about her open, lightly freckled face, with its large green eyes and delicate nose, its almost-but-not-quite-beautiful expression of passionate expectancy, that put her students at ease, but that also made them want to work. Her department chairman had once told her he thought she was too familiar with her students, but insisting on “Professor St. George” seemed a hollow gesture.

“Hi, Brendan. Hi, everybody. How are you all holding up?”

It was the last class before the winter vacation and they filed in lethargically, lugging backpacks and textbooks. The shabby carpet and sickly green walls of the seminar room reflected their moods. When they were seated, she could see she’d lost about half of them to early flights home or late nights in the library for other classes.

She took a deep breath. She just had to get through this lecture and one more and she’d be done until January. “All right, let’s get going. Today’s lecture is entitled ‘The Triumph of Death.’ Ring any bells? Come on, let’s see what you remember from the reading.” A few tentative hands waved back at her.

The strange gravestone would have to wait.

SWEENEY WAS ALMOST through with the class when Toby DiMarco slipped in and sat down in a chair at the back of the darkened room, grinning at her and then bowing his head of dark, Italian Renaissance curls to the table in mock concentration. Toby, who was not in the class, was Sweeney’s best friend