A door creaked on its hinges and Fanny entered the room, her robe tied loosely about her, her bare feet shuffling with studied daintiness across the carpet. On her way to the window, she kissed him on the forehead, scarcely needing to bend.
“What of the night?” asked Stevenson, turning to watch her as she leaned out into the morning light.
“The perfect sleep of perfect satisfaction.” She took in a great breath before she turned towards him, leaning back against the sill. She smiled sleepily and crossed both ankles and arms.
“Moi aussi,” winked Stevenson. “Any dreams?”
Fanny laughed. “Not after I fell asleep. That was truly delicious, though, Louis. Being on French soil has clearly pumped iron into your veins.” She gave a little shiver of delight.
Stevenson felt himself on the brink of a blush. “Man of iron, am I? No wonder my feet feel so heavy this morning.” He thumped his heels on the tabletop. “And chilly.”
“Do you want me to warm them?” She opened her robe and began to walk his way. But for the robe, she was naked.
Stevenson pulled his eyes up to her grinning face. “Pray, leave me an ounce or two of my vital fluids, woman. You’ll drain me dry.”
“I shall,” laughed Fanny, re-belting her robe and shaking out her unbound hair. “In time, I shall have all of you there is to have.” She tapped him lovingly on the hand, then pulled out the chair opposite him and sat.
“I dreamed,” offered Stevenson. “It was quite a remarkable little drama that my brownies produced last night.”
“Your wee sleepy Ibsens? Was it something inspiring?” She leaned forward over the table, resting her chin on her fists. It was a distinctly girlish gesture, one that Stevenson never failed to respond to without a surge of complicated emotion—as she knew perfectly well.
“I’d thought it might be. And then I thought perhaps not.” He smiled enigmatically. “I’d be curious to know what you think.”
“Do tell.” Fanny leaned further forward, her eyes wide with interest.
He set down the coffee bowl and cleared his throat. “I was the son, you see, of a very rich and wicked man. Possessed of a huge estate and a most damnable temper. I’d lived abroad, and when I returned to England, I found him married again. To a very handsome young wife.”
“What happened to your mother? Wife number one?” He smiled. “The brownies didn’t attend to that.”
“I suppose they have no interest in the fate of older women.”
“It was a rather long and involved dream, Pig.”
She leaned back and folded her hands, the emblem of patience.
“For some reason, then, I went to meet with the old man in some desolate country by the sea—waves crashing, wind howling, and all that. And we somehow fell to quarreling and, when the old bastard stung me with some intolerable insult or other—I don’t remember what—I took my walking stick and struck him down.”
“Dead?”
“Dead!”
“Goodness! Had he corked your wine or something?”
Stevenson laughed. “He was assuredly the type, had we been drinking. In any case, his corpse is subsequently discovered and buried and I inherit the whole of his estate. Everything. And there I am, finally, living under the same roof with my father’s beautiful young widow. Widowed par moi.”
“Goodness, Louis. This is rather Greek.”
“It is. I suspect my brownies have been reading Sophocles.” He gave a shallow cough and again cleared his throat. “So she and I dine together, and share the long evenings quite amiably, until we become very good friends.”
“‘Good friends!’ Oh my, Louis. I’m not sure you should go on.”
“No?”
“I’m joking. I haven’t felt this excited for several hours.”
“Fanny, please. As I said, we live together quite happily until, one day, unaccountably, she suddenly takes to asking me the most searching questions. Where was I on the day of the murder? Have the police had any success with their investigations? Suddenly it seems perfectly clear to me that she suspects it was I that did the foul deed.”
“Perfectly clear. She seems quite smart, this beautiful young woman. Despite her youth.”
Stevenson sighed, but went on. “The following morning, I see her slip from the house in a veil. I follow her to the station and onto a train, you know, that carries us to the same seaside country where the thing happened, and I follow her out over the sandy hills to the very place where I had murdered the old coot.” He paused for a moment to take a breath, shifting to sit more upright. “And there she begins to grope among the rushes, with me watching her, lying there flat on my face in the sand. And suddenly she has something in her hand—something I can’t see at first. And then I realize with horror that she is holding part of my stick, the one that I had used to kill the old bastard. It now turns out, of course, that it had broken in half as I’d clubbed him and I had neglected to carry away both pieces.”
“Oh my,” sighed Fanny.
“Indeed.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I follow her home at a distance, and that night, she seems somehow even kinder to me than she had been before.”
“Kinder, you say?”
Stevenson nodded. “So very kind, in fact, that I was convinced that it was a ruse. That she now knew me for a murderer, and was frightened that I would somehow do her in as well. So I, of course, am driven increasingly mad with suspense and fear. I am sure that, the very next day, she will go to the police with her damning evidence and consign me to the gallows. But she doesn’t. So I am certain it will be the next day. But it isn’t. And so the burden grows more unbearable by the day, and I waste away like a man with a disease. Strange, isn’t it, how our real lives creep into our dreams?”
“You are not wasting away from a disease, Louis. You simply need caring for. That’s why Valentine and I are going to such lengths to fatten you up.”
Stevenson laughed, leaning forward to extend his slender forefinger in her direction. “Feel.”
She slapped his hand away. “Get back to your dream.”
“Mind you, I am quite sure there is no future for this little tale I am recounting. It is nothing destined for Blackwood’s, damn their souls.
Or London.”
“It’s gripping enough,” laughed Fanny. “At least for early-morning entertainment.”
“Damn!” blurted Stevenson, looking down at the candle. The sunlight was inches from the base of the candlestick, and well off to the left. He had missed the moment of truth.
“What?” Fanny looked truly alarmed.
“I’m sorry. It’s nothing. I’ve just lost track of the time.”
“Does it matter?”
“Not really.”
“So go on.” She settled herself and leaned towards him again with a keen expression.
“So, as I recall, she’s left the house for some reason or other and I ransack her room and, at last, I find the damning evidence. It’s hidden away in a drawer among her jewels. My broken stick, engraved with my initials! So there I stand, holding this thing in the hollow of my hand. And I marvel at her unaccountable behavior—that she should seek the thing, and keep it, and yet not use it. And then the door opens. And behold, herself!” He paused and stared hard at his auditor.
“Yes?”
“I don’t want to bore you.”
“I don’t want to wring your neck, you perfect goose. Now go on.”
“All right. So we stand eye to eye, with the evidence there between us. I look for her either to denounce me or to run screaming from the room. But she looks at me with a face brimming with some sort of vital communication, and she is about to speak when I raise a hand and cut her off. But before I leave the room, which in my search I had turned positively upside down, I lay my death warrant back in the drawer where I had found it. And at that, strangely, her face lights up.”
“Hmmm.”
“Precisely. And the next thing I know, she is
explaining the disorder of her things to her maid, coming up with one ingenious lie after another. Why this should be, I have absolutely no notion, and that uncertainty combines with all the others until I absolutely reach the end of my rope. We were breakfasting together in one corner of a great, parqueted, sparely furnished room of many windows. Very Renoir. Curious those details should stick.”
“Yes. And insignificant, I’d think. Go on.”
“Perhaps. But throughout, she has tortured me with these probing looks and the hint of questions unasked. And no sooner are the servants gone, and we two are alone together, than I leap to my feet. And she too springs up, with a ghostly pale face, and she stands there as I rage and rave: ‘Why do you torment me so? You know everything. Why do you not denounce me? Why on earth do you torture me?’”
He paused and Fanny gazed at him in the silence, transfixed.
“And when I have done,” Stevenson continued, “she falls down on her knees. And with her hands outstretched to me, just like this, she cries, ‘Do you not understand? I love you!’”
“Oh my!” sighed Fanny. She shivered visibly and tightened her robe around her.
“Indeed,” replied Stevenson. “And I awoke, as I said, with a sort of pang of wonder and mercantile delight.” He raised his eyebrows and nodded with the thought. “But the mercantile delight was not of long endurance. Owing to there being certain unmarketable elements in the thing.”
Fanny erupted in laughter. “You might say. Patricide, I think it’s called. Added to unquenchable lust for your stepmother. I can just imagine the impression it would make at Heriot Row. Or at Cassell’s, for that matter.”
Stevenson chuckled. “So…I gather you would have me wait patiently for further inspiration?”
“I would. If you insist on turning to a new subject.”
“As I thought.”
For a moment they sat in silence, the redstart chirping busily away. The wind had picked up, and it soughed through the trees just outside the window.
“It was certainly an artful little reverie, though,” said the writer. “I must confess that I had no idea whatever as to the motive of the woman. Throughout. Right up until the instant of her dramatic declaration. My artful little Land of Nodders kept me completely in the dark.”
“Remarkable.”
“It is remarkable. And what’s more remarkable is that I’m sure there is more life in this un-publishable little vignette than in the whole of… you-know-what.”
“Enough!” declared Fanny, with an impatient toss of her mane. “God, Louis! Enough of that.”
Stevenson rose and walked over to the window, where he leaned against the wall, looking out. He crossed his arms tightly over his meager chest. “So you really won’t allow me to walk away from this stillborn monstrosity.”
“I will not have you writing stories about killing fathers and bedding mothers, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“Not at all. But weren’t you somewhat titillated—even just a trifle—by my little fable of forbidden love?” He raised his eyebrows suggestively.
Fanny laughed again. “A naughty yarn between husband and wife is one thing. The next oeuvre of a noteworthy author is another.”
“A respectable author, you mean.”
“Of course.”
“You’d unman me, then?”
“Louis! Really!”
“Would you unman me?”
Fanny paused for a moment, then replied in a slow and deliberate cadence. “As an author and celebrity, I would have you virtuously tame. Although a wild man in my boudoir.”
“That smacks of hypocrisy.”
“It smacks of good sense. Now what, pray tell, are you planning for the day?”
“May I offer you another glass?” asked Stevenson, holding up a bottle in the candlelight. He and Fanny sat again at the dining table that evening, the window still open as the air cooled. The deafening whir of midday cicadas had long since given way to the chirp of crickets, but the volume of their chorus bore further witness to the explosive fecundity of the Provençal clime. England and Scotland knew nothing like it.
“I don’t think so,” replied his wife, pushing her glass to the side. She held her fist up to her mouth as though to check some mild digestive ruction. “I’ve seen enough of the grape for now.”
Stevenson had not written a single word the whole day, unless one counted the labels they had pasted onto the scores of bottles they had filled from their barrel of Grenache. The enterprise had taken them close to six hours, sitting in the warm sun in front of the house while natives passed by, wondering at the strange industry of these foreigners.
Valentine and Fanny had managed the bottles. Fanny had taken them from the wooden boxes they’d come in and placed them on the worktable next to Stevenson, who’d inserted a small funnel into each and held the assemblage under the wooden tap, working the sticky valve with his other hand. At the start, it had been challenging to calculate the level of fill, leaving room for the cork and the requisite finger’s width below. Soon, though, he fell into a comfortable, mindless rhythm, absurdly gratifying after his recent attempts to write. Once the bottles were filled, Valentine had passed them along to Sam, who insisted on manning the corking machine. The boy kept careful count of the first forty or fifty corks that he levered down into the necks. Eventually, though, he lost track, humming odd bits of song in what seemed to be total contentment. The only real breaks in the exhausting procedure, save for the occasional call of nature and a mid-day meal of cheese and crusty bread, involved times when the cork-pot needed refilling with warm water, and one other, when Stevenson caught his sleeve on the tap and yanked it hard enough in the bunghole that the liquid spurted out explosively, soaking his white cotton trousers. While Valentine scurried away for a mallet to pound the thing back into place, Fanny and Sam fell all over themselves laughing—which had inspired Stevenson to leap up and perform a few dripping pirouettes. La valse erotique du vin, he’d waggishly dubbed it, threatening to take the performance to Paris.
“So Symonds wrote you?” asked Fanny that evening, waving at a big moth that flitted perilously near the candle flame.
“He did.”
“And what did he have to say? Is he well?”
“He seems to be. He says that Davos continues to agree with him. And that he is close to being done with his Renaissance book.”
“I don’t know why it takes you men so long to finish things,” quipped Fanny. “Women manage to make babies in only nine months’ time.”
“So I have heard. I only hope that your career in that regard is now complete.”
Fanny cast him a disapproving glance.
“Oh, and he is hoping to visit,” Stevenson added.
“Visit here?”
“Where else?”
“He’s coming to steal you away from me,” laughed Fanny. “After everything I’ve done to nurse you back to health.”
“Symonds is a married man, Pig. He has four daughters.”
“And that means something more definitive here than in America? Wasn’t he always reading Walt Whitman? I distinctly remember him going on and on about Walt Whitman. Ad nauseam. And I have to say, you seemed to encourage him.” She eyed her husband with an overwrought air of suspicion.
Stevenson laughed and poured himself another half-glass. Half-glasses always felt more innocuous, two halves seeming much more abstemious than one whole. “If you must know, Leaves of Grass tumbled the world upside down for me,” he declaimed, affecting the tone and posture of an orator addressing an audience of hundreds. “I am perfectly happy to admit it. It blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion. But it is only a book for those who have the gift of reading.”
Fanny bridled visibly. “And by that you mean…?”
Stevenson laughed again. “I am toying with you, Pig. But Whitman is your man if you want to see life afresh. If you want a world in which women are afforded the same rights as men—to carry firearm
s, roll their own cigarettes, and curse in public.”
“Perhaps I’ll give him another chance.”
“As for Symonds,” Stevenson continued, “he is the best of talkers. He sings the praises of the earth and the arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music.” He held his glass high in front of him, sweeping it grandly from side to side. “In a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar.”
“Just listen to yourself! Are you describing Symonds, or writing a poem about the man?”
“I’m sure it is the wine speaking,” replied Stevenson. “It loosens the tongue.” He grinned mischievously. “And the tail!”
“You never speak about me that way. ‘Serenading with a light guitar.’”
“How do you know how I speak about you when you’re not there? For all that you know, I routinely surpass Dante on the storied Beatrice.”
“Well then, prove it.”
“How?”
“Talk about me that way when I am around you.”
“Impossible!” declared Stevenson, setting his empty glass so close to the edge of the table that it almost tumbled off. He flinched sheepishly.
“Impossible?”
“When I am in your presence, love, your ethereal radiance positively stills my tongue with rapt bedazzlement.”
“Why are your eyes closed? Are you falling asleep, Louis?”
“Not at all. I am merely shielding myself from your beauty.”
7
All the time…we were keeping the women off him as best we could, for they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces.
—MR. RICHARD ENFIELD, COUSIN TO UTTERSON
Fanny had spent much of the afternoon outdoors, first at the market with Valentine shopping for the evening’s meal, then in the garden attending to some much-needed weeding and pruning. The day was unseasonably warm, and for the last half-hour she had been sustained by the thought of a cool bath followed by a glass of wine with Louis on the balcony overlooking the street.
She climbed up to the sitting room with a vase of freshly-cut lavender, something to grace the dining table in what she thought would be a rather Claude Monet fashion. Her eyes were still adjusted to the bright sunlight, and at first it was difficult to tell that the long room was empty. Pulling off her broad-brimmed hat, she tossed it onto the table and set the vase down beside it.
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