Under the Wide and Starry Sky (47 page)

Talolo brought down the black dress trousers Louis had made in Sydney, and a white linen shirt. He helped Lloyd and Belle dress him. Lafaele took his hands and laced his fingers together. Belle fetched the British flag that had flown over the
Casco
and laid it across his chest.

Throughout the night, their closest friends came, feeling their way up the road under a sliver of moon. Reverend Clarke knelt with Maggie to pray. The chiefs brought their precious heirloom
tapas
to place over and around him, so that Louis might lie in state like a Samoan high chief. Someone hung a garland of flowers over the headboard. In the flickering candlelight, they kissed his hands. An old chief whispered, “The stones and the earth weep, Tusitala.”

One man asked Fanny if the Catholics among them might say their prayers for the dead, and soon
“requiescat in pace”
echoed against the shiny redwood walls.

“He should be buried by tomorrow afternoon,” Funk said to Fanny. “This heat …”

She was stunned and tried to understand what he was saying. “He wants to be buried on Mount Vaea,” she replied.

“It's near impossible to get up there,” Lloyd said.

Talolo stood nearby, as if guarding Louis. “It will be done,” he said.

At dawn, Fanny woke to the sound of axes cracking into tree trunks and bush knives swooshing through thick viney undergrowth in the distance. She saw she was dressed in her clothes from the day before. For a few seconds, she had no memory of it, and then a bolt of agony ripped through her. She put a pillow over her head and sobbed.

In time, Belle came into the room. She wiped Fanny's face with a cool washcloth and helped her change clothes. “One of the chiefs has made a casket,” she said. “Lloyd says about forty natives are out there making a path to the top.”

“What shoes,” Fanny muttered.

“You can't climb up there, Mama. Nor can Aunt Maggie. Please, please don't try. Louis would never want you to.”

“Reverend Clarke?”

“He says he is going.”

“He will say the church prayers.” Fanny went to her bookcase and took out a volume. She opened it and marked the page she wanted. “Are you climbing up?”

“Yes.”

“Take this with you. Read aloud these three lines.”

Belle read the verse Louis had begun on the emigrant train when he came to America, seeking to marry Fanny.

“All right, Mama, I'll read it.”

By afternoon, sixty Samoans and nineteen whites appeared at the house. Several strong chiefs lifted the flag-draped casket and carried it along the Road of the Loving Heart. Fanny walked behind the casket until the road met the steep new trail. Standing near the bathing pool, Fanny watched the strong Samoan chiefs, young and old, heave the box up the track. Teams of men positioned themselves along the trail. One party of sweating and exhausted pallbearers got the coffin to a waiting party of men who took it on the next leg up the mountain. At the front of the procession, a high chief carrying a staff called out the terrible news:
“Tusitala is dead!”
Over and over, his outcries were followed by wails.

Fanny saw Belle go up the path slowly, aided by two Samoan men and followed by Austin, who climbed like a monkey through the bush, gripping thick roots to pull himself up through the mud. When the crowd of mourners disappeared, Fanny turned back and walked to the house. The heaviness in her heart was so great, she thought she might fall over. Her hand went to her chest, and in that gesture, she felt the lump inside her dress. She stopped and pulled the container of ergotin from the little pocket. For most of the eighteen years she had known Louis, she'd carried a vial.
What a useless talisman in the end.

In the cavernous great room, she found Maggie sitting alone, heaving with grief. Fanny sat down beside her and took her hand. They did not speak. The room grew dim, and then dimmer, as the evening sounds began.

1904

Fanny stood on her balcony, gazing toward the bay. The afternoon fog was rolling in and up the hill. Soon the green trees below would be wrapped in its gauze, and the whole house—banisters, door handles, glass—would be dewy moist.

She went inside to the study, where spears and
tapa
cloths hung on the walls, and opened the desk drawer. Her hand found what she was seeking. She took out the slim volume of
The Weir of Hermiston,
and for the thousandth time, she read the dedication page.

T
O
M
Y
W
IFE

The first time she'd seen the verse, it was pinned to her bed curtain in Vailima during the period she'd come to think of as their second courtship. Louis had pulled her out of the darkness with love poems.

Her eyes fell on the letter Henry James had sent to her after Louis's death. She knew the first and last parts by heart.
We have been sitting in darkness for nearly a fortnight, but what is our darkness to the extinction of your magnificent light? He lighted up one whole side of the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one's imagination. We are smaller fry and meaner people without him.

Henry James had understood her better than any of Louis's other friends, better than Colvin or Baxter. She could still see the look on poor Charles Baxter's face when he found her desolate at Vailima. By the time he arrived, Maggie had returned to Scotland, Lloyd was away, and their beloved family had been dispersed, except for the three Samoans they could afford to pay. It was just Fanny and Belle he found there. Baxter had presented her with the first two volumes of
The Edinburgh Edition
and watched her sob when she held the books in her own hands. The poor man had looked frightened, as if she might be going off her head.

But she had not gone mad. To her surprise, she kept on functioning.

The surly forest ate at the edges of her careful fields and slowly took them back. She applied herself to placing a monument at the top of Mount Vaea where he lay. One side of the stone bore a plaque with Louis's “Home is the sailor” poem. On the other, an Old Testament quotation from Naomi's speech to Ruth:
Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.

Fanny had not seen the grave; she would never make it up Mount Vaea until the day others would carry her bones there. Knowing her resting place would be next to his made it easier to let him go.

Sometimes during those long, fragrant evenings of his last year, they had sat on the verandah and fantasized about where they would go if they ever left Samoa. He would talk of Scotland, she of San Francisco. “The top of Russian Hill,” she told him.

Ten years gone. Would his heart have broken to know she'd given up Vailima, and for so little? She and Belle had stayed on for a couple of years, trying to keep it going, until Fanny couldn't bear it anymore. What was Vailima without Louis? After moving to San Francisco, she lived day to day with a singleminded determination: to get a proper biography of her husband published before she died. It had taken time, but it was done, and not by her own hand, as Louis had instructed if she so chose. Nobody could tell his story better than she, but Fanny couldn't bring herself to do it. She'd known there would be plenty of work for her to do without writing the whole thing herself. There would be judgments to make as she pulled together the thousands of pieces that made up his life. She would gather those pieces and make sure they were correct.

In the end, it was a beloved cousin of Louis's who wrote the
Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.
But Fanny had helped shape it.

“For a man who spent a good part of his life expecting death to appear around the next corner, he was astoundingly cheerful,” she told the cousin, who stayed at Vailima as he prepared the book.

“It was one of his finest qualities,” the young man said.

“When we lived in Davos, I hated the cold weather.
Hated
it. We would drink coffee in the morning and look out the window at twin mountain peaks in the distance. He asked me one sunny day, ‘What do you see?' I shivered and said, ‘A lot of ice and two frozen peaks. What do you see?'

“‘I see the blue space between them,' he told me. ‘I see a cup full of sky.'”

Fanny's eyes had spilled over when she told that memory. “It's sad is that I didn't fully understand at the time what a gift his cheerfulness was. He gave that to me every day I knew him. It's one of the things I miss most.”

Sometimes she wondered if Louis would approve of the house she had built. One night, he told her in a dream that it was just fine. But with the cable car rattling below, clanging its bell, with the electric streetlight outside the windows, she knew he could not have abided it here himself.

Fanny got up and went down the stairs toward the first floor. The light outside had dimmed, though it still lit the stained-glass window depicting the
Hispaniola
from
Treasure Island.

It amused Fanny to have a grand home with such a window. Sometimes she would walk to the Portsmouth Square area where Louis had rented a room while waiting for her divorce to come through. During that time, he had eaten on seventy cents a day. It pained her to think of it. How she wished he might be here to enjoy the fruits of his work.

She had made a life in San Francisco. Lloyd's family lived in an adjoining wing of the house. Dora Williams had a place nearby. Fanny's maid, Mary, was a constant presence. Recently, she'd taken on a wonderful young man, the son of an old friend, as her companion. She was not alone.

Occasionally, she was stopped on the street by someone who wanted to talk about Louis and his work. She knew she was something of a public figure, easily recognized in her loose velvet gowns and lace veils, her arms ringed with bracelets, her neck circled with jewelry, her feet adorned with red dancing slippers. They would look at her and think of the South Seas, perhaps, or
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
or Long John Silver. Well, there were worse things than being known as the eccentric wife of a great man.

If her heart felt empty at times, the rooms of the house on Russian Hill did not. All around her were reminders: the plaster cast of Rodin's entwined lovers; photographs of Louis on the
Casco,
his hair whipping in the wind; Henry James's mirror;
kava
bowls, chunks of coral, a salmon-colored moth the size of a starling, pinned behind glass. And everywhere were Louis's books. His
words.
The conversation continued.

When the city made her tired, she traveled down the peninsula to her ranch. There, on clear nights, she camped in a tent surrounded by the soft brown-shouldered foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. She lay with her head out the flap and gazed at the stars—the same ones that coursed over Silverado. Over Hyères, Vailima, Grez. The same stars that glittered above sails and spars at sea.

Fanny Stevenson devoted the remainder of her life to promoting her husband's literary legacy. She developed a close relationship with her secretary and constant companion, Ned Field, who was forty years her junior. Ignoring gossip, they lived and traveled together. Fanny built a house near Santa Barbara, California, where she died in 1914 at the age of 73.

At the time of her death, Fanny Stevenson had just completed work for the publication of her book, The Cruise of the
Janet Nicoll,
based upon her diary written during that voyage. Today the book provides valuable insight into the lives of South Seas islanders and non-natives living there during the end of the nineteenth century.

Belle Strong, Fanny's daughter, married Ned Field in 1914, six months after her mother's death. Together, the Fields took Fanny Stevenson's ashes to Samoa, where they buried them on Mount Vaea, next to Robert Louis Stevenson's remains. Etched into a bronze plaque on the tomb Fanny shares with her husband is her Samoan name, Aolele, as well as the tribute he wrote to her:

Under the Wide and Starry Sky is a work of fiction inspired by actual events in the lives of Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne Stevenson. Robert Louis Stevenson was a prolific letter writer whose witty, candid, soul-searching correspondence documents his life before Fanny, and with her in a relationship that ranged over and eighteen-year period and vast stretches of the globe. Fanny was a colorful letter writer herself, as well as a diary keeper. Their written words, along with those of their families and friends, provided the main sources for this book. In attempting to recall to life these extraordinary characters, I have occasionally put into their mouths their own written or spoken words. That said, the letters and diary entries in the book are invented, with some exceptions, which are enumerated in the attached Note. Woven into the novel are poems and paragraphs of prose from letters and works written by Robert Louis Stevenson and others; these excerpts are mentioned in the Notes, as well.

I am drawn to writing about real people because history offers up astonishing characters, not to mention plot twists and details that sometimes defy the imagination. Working within a framework defined by real events inspires, rather than constrains me. I have stayed as true as possible to the known facts of the subjects' lives while using fictional storytelling—dramatizing documented incidents while inventing others, and compressing time and some minor characters—to capture the world Fanny and Louis inhabited. As a novelist, I am interested in exploring the relationship of the main subjects, investigating the gaps in the record (delicate matters were not often discussed in letters), drawing conclusions about the
whys
behind their decisions, and experiencing the emotional journey and insights that come from traveling with them.

During his lifetime, Robert Louis Stevenson was beloved and respected for his
Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, A Child's Garden of Verses,
and other works. After his death in 1894, his literary reputation suffered when twentieth century public taste for realism cast him as an outmoded writer in the strict Romantic tradition. Yet many modern writers, including Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges, have written of their admiration for Stevenson's work. In recent years, literary scholars have reexamined his essays, short stories, novels, and nonfiction writings and have made the case that Robert Louis Stevenson was a gifted artist who was far more sophisticated, and more modern, than previously understood.

Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer of historical novels himself, once wrote: “There is not a life in all the records of the past but, properly studied, might lend a hint and a help to some contemporary,” Stevenson could not have expressed better why Fanny's life, and his own, are worthy stories for telling.