Under the Wide and Starry Sky

by Nancy Horan

The boy was on his belly, molding something. “He’s perfect, Luly. I’ve got his horse right here.”

  Luly. Sammy has already given Louis a new name.

  He read to the boy from The Pilgrim’s Progress and Tales of a Grandfather and deftly spun stories out of his head. There wasn’t a drip of condescension in his voice when he addressed Sammy. One night Louis led both of them down to the river. They gathered dry sticks from along the bank and built a fire, where they cooked apples over the flames.

  “We’re Crusoe-ing now!” Louis shouted. “If it weren’t so blasted cold, mates, I’d say we should sleep outside tonight.”

  It had been hard to get the boy to bed after that. Once Sam’s eyes finally closed, Fanny returned to the dining room, where Louis was clutching a stack of papers.

  “‘The Suicide Club,’” he said.

  “You finished the story?”

  “Close enough. Would you have a listen?”

  “I’d be thrilled.”

  As Louis read, she realized he had taken Bob’s idea and transmuted it into something entirely new. It was now the tale of a penniless young man without prospects who resembled Bob quite a bit. He had spent the end of his money to buy tarts and pass them out as a last act of generosity before he headed over to the suicide club. By the end of the story, the young man was saved from death, and the club closed down.

  “I love happy endings,” Fanny said, lifting her wineglass to him. “Bravo! You are a fine writer, and I am not just saying that because you wear a velvet jacket and a red sash. You are very good. Truly.”

  Louis looked as if he had just won a boxing match. They spent the next hour taking apart the story, with Louis asking her questions about whether a particular line worked or if a scene made sense. Now and then, he made note of her responses with rapt attention, saying softly, “You have a wonderful ear.”

  When they said good night outside her room, he kissed her on the cheek. Fanny was surprised he had not pressed himself upon her more, despite her initial warning. Most men would have made stronger overtures. She was grateful for that; she didn’t know if she wanted him to. With Sam Osbourne, there had never been a question. This slender, cerebral young man with the soft white hands confused her. She wondered if Louis was hankering after some idealized notion of a woman but, in the presence of a real one, lost his nerve.

  “I have started writing again,” Fanny said one afternoon as they stood on the stone bridge near the inn. A cool wind from upstream blew against her face.

  Louis was tossing orange peels to cackling mallards below. “Since you got to Grez?”

  “Yes. Only in the past few weeks have I been able to put words together again.”

  “Why did you wait so long to tell me that?”

  “I’m not like you, I’m a novice. I have sent stories in to some journals,” she said sheepishly. “I still like stories of the supernatural.”

  “Nothing to be ashamed of. Scots have a weakness for ghosts and dungeons and blood. That we do.”

  “I’ve only managed to get one small thing published—not the least bit mystical—in a magazine you’ve never heard of. “

  Louis shook his head. “It’s very hard to get published.”

  She shrugged. “Everything has been hard.”

  He touched her shoulder. Below them, the river headed toward the little rapids where they had taken canoes a few weeks before to shoot over its edge.

  “As sick as he was, I refused to believe Hervey would die,” she said. “He suffered for five hideous months but never complained. My boy never complained.” Fanny leaned on the bridge rail with her face in her hands. “I keep thinking, if I hadn’t brought Hervey to Europe, his health would not have broken. Or maybe if I had taken him back to the States from Antwerp, he might have made it. My brain won’t stop asking, what if?”

  “I’m so sorry, Fanny.”

  She wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. “My boy will never have the chance to canoe down a river or discover if he likes to paint or to write. Why should I be happy? How dare I?”

  Louis took her in his arms and rocked her there on the bridge. Peasants returning from the fields stared as they clomped past in their wooden shoes, with hoes and shovels resting on their shoulders.

  That night, when the inn was silent, they lingered near the stove. The coals spilled a circle of light on the floor.

  “What is it you want, Louis?”

  “I want to travel and have real adventures. And when death comes, I want to be wearing my boots.” He leaned forward in his chair, gazing intently into the fire, and after a pause admitted, “The bigger truth? I desperately want to go in for literature! I don’t want to waste any more time, and certainly not on the law.”

  “Well, you have a gift with words.”

  “My father doesn’t think I can survive on writing.”

  “Hmm. I don’t know about surviving on it, but when you have a gift, it isn’t yours to keep to yourself. It’s the reason you’re here. It’s your purpose.”

  Louis studied her face. His eyes were the most disarming thing about him. Often he seemed to be noticing something just beneath one’s epidermis.

  “Have you been eavesdropping at the door of my heart? Because that is what I believe with every chamber of it. You understand, Fanny Osbourne. You’re good, and wise, and flaming courageous.” He took hold of her hands. “Can you fault me for falling in love with you?”

  She did not venture another word. She rose to her feet and went with him up the dark staircase and past her room where Sammy slept. In his room, Louis eased her down on the bed. He held her for a good while, moving his lips from time to time to her ear to kiss it. The warmth of his breath, the comfort of a man’s arms, caused her nearly to weep. When her hand brushed against his belt, he took it as a sign. She let him unbutton and unlace her, and when her garments were a pile on the floor next to his bed, she welcomed his body to hers. She felt his hipbone press against hers as he whispered how he had wanted her so desperately that day in the woods. His caressing accent was foreign and lovely. The way he whispered her name made it sound like a secret.

  Fanny found herself a little stunned afterward. Louis was not the boy she had first taken him to be. He was a confident, generous, hungry lover. Clearly experienced. The past hour was not like any time in her life before.

  Lying next to Louis, she remembered herself as a young bride. What had she known about love at seventeen? It was a wordless, crazy attraction that had flung her from stilts into adulthood. Sam had never talked to her about her spirit. He had devoured her in bed; hatched big plans about their future; impregnated her; been jealous when other men showed interest. He had given her the big revolver to protect herself, and bragged of her skill as a marksman. He had bragged, too, that she was the best-looking woman in Nevada and could cook beef fifteen different ways. But had Sam Osbourne ever really liked her? She didn’t know.

  That this brilliant, warm, funny Scotsman said he loved her spirit was enough for the moment. She didn’t want to think about his unfitness as a marriage prospect, his lack of money, or his youth. Good Lord, he was closer to Belle’s age than her own. You are thirty-six, Fanny. You’ve lived long enough to know better. He’s no solution to your problems.

  Someday years from now, she imagined she would read in a newspaper about Louis’s important new book or his latest lighthouse and would then feel a twinge of regret for their ill-starred timing. But for now, before she had to get up and go to her own room, she savored the comfort of his dear head on the pillow next to hers.

  CHAPTER 19

  1877

  It was the green hour in Paris, when people drinking emerald-colored absinthe filled the cafes. As he hurried along the snowy streets of Montmartre, Louis glimpsed couples inside bars sipping the elixir, their arms draped lazily around each other. The absinthe lovers flooded his mind with memories of Mentone three years earlier, when he had gone south to recuperate from lung troubles. Alone, free from his parents, he�
�d drunk absinthe and smoked opium into blissful stupefaction. It hadn’t helped his health one whit, but he briefly felt as untroubled as these people looked.

  When he turned now onto Rue de Douai and spotted Fanny’s stone apartment building, a vein in his neck began to thud like a steam hammer. He looked up, hoping to spot her in one of the tall windows, leaning over the black iron balcony and waving at him, but he caught no glimpse of her. She knew he was coming. Was her heart galloping the way his was right now?

  By their last day at Grez, they had nearly stopped talking. It seemed anything of importance had already been spoken or didn’t need to be. He could read in her eyes what she was feeling. The night before she left, he’d written a farewell poem for her.

  … On the stream

  Deep, swift and clear, the lilies floated; fish

  Through the shadows ran. There, thou and I

  Read Kindness in our eyes and closed the match.

  She had cast those brooding eyes of hers over the paper, smiled knowingly, and put it into one of her pouches. Then she’d boosted Sammy into the old donkey cart headed to Bourron, climbed up, and waved goodbye.

  Louis realized his nerves were wrecked from the fear that their separation over the past few weeks might have rubbed the bloom off the rose. He shook away the thought and bounded up the four flights of stairs to Fanny’s flat.

  “Louis!” Fanny shouted when she flung open the door of her apartment. Her kisses—unabashed, even loud—settled the matter. He lifted her tiny body and whirled her around like a doll. When a woman next door poked her head out into the gritty-looking hallway, Fanny slipped from his grip and straightened her dress.

  “Margaret,” Fanny said. “You remember Louis Stevenson.”

  The woman nodded, greeted Louis, and retreated.

  “She was in Grez for a bit, wasn’t she?” he asked.

  “Yes. She’s a writer,” Fanny said. “We met in art class, and now we’re neighbors.” She pulled Louis into the parlor, a bare little room with a ragged sofa and an ancient pair of chairs with punctured caning.

  Louis put his hand through a hole in one seat. “You could get your bum caught in there and never get out,” he said. He loved watching her laugh at his paltry jokes.

  She leaned back and clasped her hands together, her round eyes half-mooning with glee. “Flea-market treasures,” she said. “I’m going to make cushions for those chairs.”

  “Aren’t you a clever girl. And where might Sammy be?”

  “With Belle at the circus for another hour or two. They went to see the trapeze men.”

  Louis looked toward the open door to her bedroom.

  “What is it you have in mind, sir?” she teased.

  “You,” he said gently. “Us.” He withheld what was next on his tongue. French acrobatics.

  With a measure of awkwardness, they went in. The last of the day’s light was fading through the sheer curtains as Fanny removed her dress. He was struck by the white lace of her chemise, how it appeared to glow against her skin. He wound his arms around to her back to dispatch the corset, then pulled the chemise over her head. He tried to keep his eyes on hers as he undressed her, but it was a complicated set of moves that he managed with limited grace. Once she was naked, he couldn’t help gawking at the splendor of her full breasts. “Bless my eyes,” he muttered.

  Fanny pulled back the sheets and lay down, stretching one arm slowly across the far pillow. Her small hand, the color of old ivory, sank into the white down. He put his cheek on her neck, felt the warm pulse of her. His mouth went down to the marvelous breasts, around and into the moist spot between them. Soon she was moving in rhythm with him, and he thought, What else matters but this?

  After their lovemaking, she rose from the bed and kept her back to him as she dressed. When she was covered, she turned. “I don’t want Belle and Sam to … ”

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “The neighbors here … “ she warned.

  “I’ll see you in the parlor.”

  Fanny. Fanny. Fanny. How quickly she could shift. She was the most passionate woman he had ever slept with—leading, following, losing herself in trancelike forgetfulness. How then could she suddenly become modest?

  Louis reached down to his trousers on the floor to remove a pencil and notebook from a pocket. On Falling in Love, he wrote, and underlined the words. And so we go, step for step, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room—with both pleasure and embarrassment.

  Later, when they went out to walk, he told her, “I am French.”

  “And the Scotch accent?”

  “Well, I feel French, anyway.” He pulled up his collar to cover his ears. “A while ago I changed my middle name to the French spelling. It was L-E-W-I-S before. I took terrible ribbing from Henley for doing that. He still writes to me and uses the old spelling. I don’t care. It was my soul made the choice.

  “God, how I love Paris! I love every hair on its head. The street names alone are fit to open a novel. Rue de la Femme-sans-Tête—Street of the Headless Woman. Street of the Bad Boys. Street of the Bridge of Cabbages. When I was a child visiting Paris with my parents, my father used to make a game of finding street names like that. We used to go over to a crèmerie in St. Germain. It was amazing, not only for its tarts but because the owner kept the napkins of his regular customers locked up in a drawer behind the register. How I wanted to have my own napkin stashed there!”

  He remembered one of those early visits, when he had spied a boy of about sixteen wearing a black velvet jacket and a beret. The moment had been spiritual. In that glimpse, he had found his style. How old was he then? Eleven?

  Even then when he came to Paris, his senses went on high alert, like those of a bird dog in the field. In those days, it was swords and military paraphenalia displayed in a shopwindow that could stop him in his tracks. Now he was a collector of characters. When he happened upon a big personality in a café, and he often did, he moved in close to watch and listen. He scribbled down the remarks of quieter types, too, like the dipsomaniacal bartender who adored discussing Flaubert. “I love books,” the man said, his eyes growing misty, as if he were talking of his mistress. He lifted his shoulders in resignation. “And I love gin.”

  Other days, Louis was satisfied with smaller hints of character: ambiguous smiles, arrogant nostrils, elegant diction emerging through bad teeth. He saw venality and courage played out on Paris’s streets, and he filled up notepads with the details: a cheese merchant furtively sweeping the day’s detritus from his sidewalk over to the chocolatier’s doorstep; a woman with a port-wine stain over half of her face, singing “Vive la Rose” on a street corner; a well-tailored old man with a telltale red nose whipping off sad little watercolors of hens and chicks for drinks in a café.

  During the years when Louis was ailing and needed a sunny climate, his parents had bundled him off with them to the South of France, but they always scheduled in a visit to Paris. It occurred to him that they had come here because they needed to fill their own lungs with a little freedom from everything back in Edinburgh. His mother and father always seemed more relaxed in France.

  French was sweet and liquid on his tongue. Sentences, paragraphs, coherent ideas flowed naturally, and he found himself in many a charming exchange. He read the great French classics with a dictionary at hand, but he gathered his spoken French from butchers, waiters, and landladies.

  The French could be brilliant conversationalists, honest and free from hypocrisy. But they kept a distance; he didn’t know if he would ever share a close friendship with a French person. He felt deep affection for Parisians nevertheless, because in their city, more than any other place, a man could devote his life to art—and be taken seriously.

  Fanny admitted that she did not love the city as he did.

  “I’m going to show you my Paris,” he told her. He did not have to say, “So you will fall in love with the things I love.” She understood that, and he could see she wanted
to.

  He took her to his favorite booksellers near Pont des Saints-Pères on the left bank, where he bought Victor Hugo’s Les Travailleurs, and from the slim offerings of English-language volumes, Fanny chose a book she loved, Middlemarch, and a children’s book for Sammy. In a public square, they warmed themselves near a blazing brazier, along with a circle of ragged women and men with whom he commiserated about the cold. On they went in the chill

  air, stopping often at shops and cafés where he knew the proprietors.

  Following the advice of Will Low, they went to hear his friend Emma Albani sing the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor at the Théâtre des Italiens. Later, they paid a visit to Will’s studio, where he was painting a portrait of the Canadian soprano. At the doorway of the building, two battered stone lions straddled the entrance wearing painted-on mustaches, courtesy of art students who lived there. Upstairs, they found the raven-haired Albani, dressed in her silk Lucia costume, standing erect with folded hands in front of Will and his canvas. The air smelled of mineral spirits; dust particles from ground pigments floated through streaks of afternoon sunlight. Louis and Franny quietly made their presence known, crept up to view the painting, then slid back

  into the shadows where he could still see, even in the dim light, the look of pure joy on her face.

  Every park or café became their own private place. They made up stories about the people around them. “That villainous fellow over there,” Louis would begin, glancing at a portly gentleman drinking his morning coffee at a nearby table. “Do you see his walking stick resting on that chair? Look at the top of it.”

  Fanny glanced surreptitiously at the handle, a carved ivory Turk’s head. “A courier, obviously,” she said, picking up the bait. “The shaft of the cane is hollow. He’s carrying rolled up sheets of paper inside …”

  “Antique erotic prints from Japan?”

  “Your mind does run in a certain direction, my love,” she teased. “They are priceless drawings, stolen, of course, and intended for that woman over there. The two of them are in cahoots.”