Read Online Writ on Water by Melanie Jackson - Free Book Online Page A

without your permission.”
    MacGregor nodded again and then turned and ducked under the low header that guarded the dark portal of the necropolis.
    â€œThen come meet the family.”
    The first monuments on the other side were a row of sepulchers carved in the Greek, Roman and Etruscan style, decorated with urns and life-sized muses in various languishing poses. The poor maidens of the arts wept lichen tears down their anguished faces, and had their stony hands shackled in living ropes of passionflowers. The themes were primarily Greek, but Chloe had seen enough funerary monuments to recognize the work of Italian stonemasons.
    â€œOh my sainted aunt!” she whispered, staring up into a pitted gray face that was forever frozen in a mask of profound grief.
    â€œFoggini,” MacGregor confirmed with satisfaction. “He did Galileo’s sepulcher. There’s Picchi and Brancusi. And Granddad.” MacGregor pointed as he spoke.
    â€œGranda—Oh, your
grandfather.”
    â€œTamlane MacGregor Patrick. He was a little bit eccentric.” They stopped in front of a vaguely neo-gothic marble tomb fronted with pillars and roundels of male and female masks representing the heavens and the earth.
    â€œThis looks vaguely familiar.”
    â€œIt’s by that Frenchie, Rodin.”
    â€œAuguste Rodin?” Chloe’s voice was feeble.
    â€œGranddad wanted
The Gates of Hell
, but Grandma wouldn’t let him have it. She commissioned him to do this instead.
The Gates of Heaven
, she called it.”
    â€œI think I’m going to faint.”
    â€œI’m glad you know your art. You’ll do a better job.” MacGregor’s face was smug, and another clear reminder that pashas, while sometimes generous, were not entirely saintly and benevolent. “Come along. I want you to see the Saint-Gaudens. He’s just about the only American sculptor we have in here. I like him a lot, even if he isn’t Italian.”
    Chloe liked him too. His brilliantly rendered marble angels looked happy.
    They soon passed into a lower rent district where the lesser family and their pets were put to rest. There were Celtic crosses overgrown with ivy and vervain, surrounded by picket fences made of stone, or ironwork hedges drowning in clematis. Obviously, the boys hadn’t been in with the pruning shears for a few months. That would make taking clear photographs of the monuments difficult, and perhaps even dangerous if Rory was right about the snakes, but the cat seemed to enjoy chasing invisible mice through the grasping bushes, and the feral plants lent the place a certain gothic air.
    Chloe didn’t stray off of the path in her bare legs, but she saw an array of arresting images that fired her imagination. There were the three-quarters eyes that were both the symbol of the Masons but also of the Holy Trinity. There were also lots of doves, suggesting that the inhabitants of those graves had either been Catholic or Jewish, and—sadly—the white lambs that marked the graves of children were abundant. There were a few anchors with broken chains that indicatedsome of the Patricks had been sailing men, and one out-of-place Muslim crescent.
    â€œHow large is the cemetery?” she asked finally, beginning to tire. A constant state of admiration was exhausting.
    â€œTwo acres. One hundred seven human graves and mausoleums. Ninety-three dogs. Eighty-one cats. Four horses—my great-grandfather buried his favorite team here. And one monkey.”
    MacGregor walked her slowly past aisles of eighteenth-century hands; praying hands, clasping hands, pointing and blessing hands. There were Saint Michaels and Francises and a bevy of Virgins. The end of the first corridor was marked with a particularly grisly carving of the Sacred Heart leaping out of Jesus’s chest, confirming Chloe’s impression that the majority of the Patricks had been Catholic.
    â€œ ‘For we do not