Under the Wide and Starry Sky (5 page)

It was still cool when they arrived in Grez-sur-Loing. Nestled in the midst of vast farm fields, the village was a smattering of stone houses, a picturesque bridge, and a ruined twelfth-century tower with ferns growing in its cracked walls. In those first few weeks at the Hôtel Chevillon, they bundled in coats and wool scarves and arrayed themselves along the bank of the river—she and Belle with paintbrushes and Sammy with a fishing pole. Within speaking distance but silent and worlds away from one another, they gazed fixedly at the water.

The Loing River was just beyond a long garden behind the inn, a rambling stone building that was empty except for them. Madame Chevillon, a motherly sort, took it upon herself to fatten up the children, who cooperated with gratitude. Fanny expected her own plumpness—her loveliest feature, Rearden once told her—was gone for good. She was so reduced from her previous self that Sam had paid a seamstress to rework her old clothes and make an inexpensive dress.

The Chevillon was an eating place for a few men from around the area. They came in wearing muslin shirts soiled from the day's work. They washed their hands in the kitchen, then settled down to mutton, wine, and local gossip. With its crackling fireplace, rows of pickled vegetables huddled on the windowsill, and pots huffing on the stove, the small room reminded her of an Indiana farm kitchen. The smells and the hum of conversations she couldn't understand offered some succor to her.

Margaret Wright had told her the Hôtel Chevillon was the most bohemian of the bohemian gathering places near the Fontainebleau Forest. “Barbizon has become too fashionable. It's overrun by
poseurs
more interested in the
mise-en-scène
than in producing any actual art. The real painters go to Grez,” Margaret had assured her with authority, although she'd not yet been there herself. “And you needn't worry. They will leave you alone, I think.”

As the weather warmed, Madame Chevillon prepared for more guests. White sheets flapped on the clothesline; broth simmered on the stove. On a morning in late May, Fanny and Belle looked down from a window on the staircase landing to see a black-haired young fellow step out of the
diligence
that had brought him. Bob Stevenson, a twenty-nine-year-old Scot from Edinburgh, was the first of the regular summer crowd to arrive, and he looked every inch the
artiste
type Margaret had described. He wore trousers that ended at his knees, stockings with red and white horizontal stripes, and a smirk.

Seated next to him that evening in the dining room, Fanny found him boorish.

“There's an onslaught about to begin,” Bob Stevenson remarked, filling his glass with wine. “Once the others start to arrive, you'll discover this isn't the place to be if you are hoping for a little peace. Madame Chevillon said you had come for the quiet.”

“Oh,” Fanny said.

“Is that right?” the man persisted. “There are places not far from here that would serve you much better if you are here to rest … “

“I was
sent
here to rest,” she said, squinting at him across the table. Though he was just another young fool, he spoke English. “I had a son.” Her voice sounded dull and distant. “My children had a brother. He died …” She looked up at a corner of the ceiling, counting. “… six weeks ago.”

The young man turned crimson. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“Strange that they prescribe rest when you lose a child. There is no comfort in resting. One only thinks more.” She lit a cigarette. “Do you believe in heaven, Mr. Stevenson?”

The man was disarmed. “No,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

Fanny let out a bitter little laugh. “Well, I guess I've got a foot in the same camp nowadays. I'll tell you one thing,” she said, inhaling deep. “If there is a heaven? My boy has jewels in his crown.”

Belle stood up then. “Come along, Mama. You, too, Sammy. Let's walk down by the river.”

When they appeared at breakfast the next morning, Bob Stevenson rose from his seat and bowed slightly. “You and your daughter are painters, Mrs. Osbourne?”

“We are.”

“Might I interest you and Belle in a little outing? There is a certain place I like to sit to get the perspective of the main street. Your son can come along. We'll give him a brush.”

Fanny shrugged, nodded.

Later, when she understood that Bob Stevenson had come to the Hôtel Chevillon ahead of his friends in order to frighten off the intruding Americans, she comprehended the shame he must have felt when he learned of her loss. For Bob was a decent man, it turned out, from decent people.

After that first day of painting, Belle stayed behind with Sammy, who preferred to fish. For about ten days, only Fanny and Bob went out to paint. They sat together for hours on the main street of Grez, discussing art and life and passersby while painting the quaint stone buildings. Bob's canvas was the better one, but he complimented her work. For short stretches of time, Fanny's gnawing sorrow eased.

In his gentle way, she realized later, Bob brought her along in small steps to the point where she could talk to people again. There was no obvious show of gallantry, no sign of pity on his part. They had merely conversed like normal people do. But it felt as if he had flung a rope bridge across the chasm that had formed between her and the rest of the world since Hervey's death.

When his friends began arriving in June, Fanny didn't retreat to her room. She felt a measure of her old self returning. She was able to greet each one warmly. And they, in turn, made her family part of their peculiar circle.

Bourron-Marlotte was a short train ride from Paris, but Louis Stevenson nearly missed the stop. His damp cheek had stuck to the window in his sleep, and it was only the abrupt separation of skin from glass when the train halted that shocked him awake. He grabbed his knapsack and leaped onto the station platform, still groggy. It was dinner hour, and the plangent sound of pots rattling in a house nearby made his belly growl. If he were to catch the end of supper at the Hôtel Chevillon, he'd have to step lively, but Grez-sur-Loing was only four and a half kilometers away, a snap for a walking man. His legs—unfurled after three weeks in a canoe—rejoiced in the freedom.

Louis climbed down an embankment next to the tracks and found the path through the woods toward Grez. He remembered the trail from a year ago. He and his cousin Bob had followed it to a pub in Bourron, then staggered back to the Chevillon, singing “Flow gently, sweet Afton” and baying at the moon. It had been a perfect summer idyll, an escape from Edinburgh and parents, a wild splash into
la vie bohème.

Now, as the darkening violet sky drew down upon the last horizon's strip of gold, he picked his way over fallen trees and brush until he spotted an open field next to the main road into Grez. It was August, and he had already missed two months of raucous pleasure with the friends who'd arrived earlier. He shouted, “I'm coming!,” laughed at the hoarse caw of his voice in the evening silence, then broke into a run. In a few minutes, the hotel came into sight, its yellow windows and doors beaming like campfires in the gloaming. Louis went around to the side of the building and entered the back garden through the carriage doors so he wouldn't be noticed. As he crept across the stone terrace, he could see familiar faces at the dining room table, as well as an equal number he didn't know. Madame Chevillon's niece Ernestine languidly cleared plates. There was Henley with his great, unruly red beard and his hogshead of a chest, shaking with laughter. Charles Baxter, Louis's old university comrade, who'd clearly had a snoutful, was smiling at a robust young woman with olive skin and wavy hair—Spanish or Italian, perhaps. And Bob, so handsome with his newly drooping mustache, was listening to an interesting-looking woman at the end of the table.

Louis moved a step closer. The woman appeared to be a sister of the other, for her straight nose and dark hair were similar and her skin the same pale caramel shade. She was sitting sideways, with her feet propped on a slat of Bob's chair, and between draws on her cigarette, she leaned near to his ear to speak. Bob's usual sardonic expression was nowhere in evidence.

Louis watched for several minutes before stepping toward one of the open French doors. He stopped and turned to the garden. In the dim moonlight, he made his way to a small fountain, where he splashed water on his face and neck and raked wet fingers through his hair. Then he knelt, opened his knapsack, and recovered from its bottom a rolled-up black velvet jacket. Shaking the coat, he pulled it on and smoothed it as best he could. From a pocket in its lining, he produced an embroidered felt smoking cap and placed it on his head. Once more Louis's hand went into the bag, this time coming up with a red sash that he tied around his waist. As a last touch, he tucked his white linen pants into his high boots.

He walked quickly to the house, pausing to consider each of the two doors. Rejecting both, he chose the open window. With the grace of a high jumper, he threw one long leg and then the other over the windowsill and hurtled himself into the dining room.

Noise exploded in his ears—whoops, cackles, clapping, the sound of chairs scraping the floor as one friend after another entered the fray of bear hugs and backslaps.

When the chaos subsided, Bob stepped forward and spoke to those still seated. “Ladies and gentlemen—those of you who don't know our newly arrived guest—may I present to you my cousin Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis to his friends. And to the lads in this room who know him best, the Great Exhilarator!”

“Hurrah!” they shouted. “Exhilarate us, Lou!”

Someone passed a glass to Louis. “To guid-fallowship,” he said, lifting his voice along with the wine, “to guid health, and the wale o' guid fortune to yer bonny sels!”

He threw back his head and let go a giddy laugh when the wine hit his tongue. Pure gladness coated his mouth, slid down through his chest, lit up his arms and legs. My God, how joyful a picture the dining room made. It looked as warm as a Flemish painting, all golden and peopled by dear friends and ragged, lovely strangers. They smoked pipes and cigarettes, a company of exiles with paint-speckled forearms that united them into a band and declared their intentions.

Will Low, the sweet-tempered American painter Louis had met the previous summer, gestured to the end of the table where he was chatting with a young boy, the only child in the room.

“What took you so long?” The boy looked up at him through pale lashes. “Everybody's been waiting.”

Louis crouched down near his chair. “And what might your name be?”

“Sam,” he said. “Sammy. But these people call me Pettifish.” His shoulders went up in a question. “I don't know why.”

Louis laughed. “Is it short for
petite
fish? I'll wager it is. You know, my father had a name like that for me—called me Smout. It's a Scottish word for a small fry.”

“Why do grown-ups always name us after fish?”

“Ah, that
is
a good question. I haven't the faintest idea. But I'll tell you how I ended it. Charged him a penny every time he said the wretched word. You might consider that.”

“Sam's here with his sister, Belle,” Will explained, nodding toward the pretty, dark-haired girl next to Baxter. “And at the end of the table,” he continued, “that lovely lady … “

“… is my mother,” the boy said.

Louis stood up to have a better view. “You don't say. I thought they were sisters.”

The child rolled his eyes. “Everyone says that.”

So these are the Americans
. Could they possibly know the displeasure they had caused his circle of friends, sight unseen? When Bob got word from Madame Chevillon that an American woman and her children had taken up residence at the inn for the summer, he had fumed with indignation. The only reason the fellows were assembling at Grez in the first place was because they had been driven out of their last summer haunt by a swarm of lady painters. The bourgeois art students from the school in Barbizon had filled the inns and cafés and turned up behind every other tree with an easel and paintbrush.

News of the American woman and her brats had landed like a lead weight on their collective fantasies. So much for a summer of
la vie bohème
on the banks of the Loing. Bob was so irritated by Madame Chevillon's announcement that he'd come to Grez before the others, intent upon behaving badly enough to chase away the intruders. He was the right man for the job; he had a slicing wit when he chose to unsheath it.

While Louis was out paddling the
Arethusa
from Antwerp to Paris, Bob had sent him two letters in care of Will Low's studio in Paris. Louis collected both right before he came to Grez. In the first letter, Bob's rage was palpable. By the second letter, though, his indignant tone had disappeared.
They're all right,
he'd written.

“Come with me.” Bob had Louis's arm now and led him directly to the lady interloper.

“Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne,” she said when she stood. The crown of dark brown curls at the top of her head came up first (how tiny she was, nearly a foot shorter than he), and then the smooth honey-colored face tilted. He examined the curving upper lip—like an archer's bow—and the deep brown eyes. “I feel as if I know you,” she said, grasping both of his hands. Everything about her was exotic, from her lively gold-ringed fingers to her tiny blue kidskin slippers peeking from beneath a black skirt. She might have been a Sephardic shepherdess, to judge from her features, but the voice was different. American, to be sure. It had a touch of grassy prairie in it, riverboats, he didn't know what all. Maybe Tennessee walking horses.

Louis grinned. “May I ask where you are from?”

“Originally? Why, I grew up in Indiana.” The dark eyes, full of sex, danced first toward Bob and then Louis. “Your cousin tells me you're from Edinburgh. He also says you're … What's the expression?
All right
,” she said.

Louis was momentarily at a loss for words. Those were the words Bob had used to describe
her
in his last letter. Had Bob told her how they had all dreaded her? Louis felt strangely out of step for a moment, as if understandings had been reached in his absence.

“I'll get some food for you,” Bob said, and disappeared.

“Have you been to America?” Fanny asked Louis.

“No, I regret to say I haven't. But when I was in Cumberland some years ago, I met a Highland spae wife who predicted I would go—”

“A spae wife?”

“Oh, a mad old crone who claimed she had second sight.”

“Be careful what you say,” Fanny said. “I have a touch of it myself.”

Louis laughed. “She was nothing like you, but I liked her predictions. She said I would visit America and I was to be very happy and I would spend much time on the sea.”

“You don't say.” Fanny Osbourne turned her attention to a pear-shaped mesh bag suspended from a link of the silver chatelaine around her waist. She unhooked it and pulled out a small sack of tobacco. “Cigarette?” She peeled six papers from a booklet and put them on the table.

“Absolutely. I'm not accustomed to a lady rolling her own.”

Louis watched her boyish fingers shake a line of tobacco onto a paper. She rolled the cigarette evenly with both thumbs, then lifted it to her mouth, where her cat-quick tongue sealed the edge. Six times a stuffed rolling paper went to her lips; each repetition was more expert than the last. “That should do us,” she said, reattaching the little purse to her belt.

He noticed several objects hanging from other fine chains on her waist, including a folding knife and a pouch full of drawing pencils.

“You are the very spectacle of self-sufficiency,” Louis said.

When Fanny raised her eyes to his, he caught his breath. She focused her gaze on him as if sighting a pistol. “Are you mocking me?” she asked.

“No, no, not at all! I'm admiring you. Have you always rolled your own cigarettes?”

“Ever since I started smoking. A miner in Nevada taught me.”

“In Nevada?”

“I lived for a while in a silver mining camp.”

“My goodness! How … bracing.”

She drew on her cigarette. “That's a delicate expression, Mr. Stevenson.” Her eyes remained unwaveringly on his.

“I meant you seem so ladylike, and to be such an adventuress—”

“Oh, it's not that unusual to find women in mining camps. But I wasn't in the same line of business some of the others pursued, if that's what you're wondering.”

Louis shook his head. “I am wondering why you take whatever I say and misconstrue it, madam. You have known me five minutes, not nearly long enough to despise me. It usually takes at least ten.”

She laughed then and small, perfect white teeth flashed across her face. “I'm only teasing you, Louis.”
Lou
-us, she pronounced his name, soft and slow, as if stroking it. “I liked you the minute you jumped in.”

Bob returned with a plate of food for him and a bottle of whisky. “To Louis the Canoeist,” he said, tapping his glass to his cousin's. “Give us the plums, Lou.”

There had been an abundance of plums to pick from along the banks of the Scheldt and the canals of Belgium and then, at the end, the upper Oise. Louis had traveled for twenty days in the
Arethusa
with his shy, athletic friend Walter Simpson, who manned another sailing canoe, the
Cigarette.
Their voyage had provoked furious notetaking on Louis's part—from observations on the free life of the barge captain to his own near-kidnapping by the mad young oarsmen of the Belgian Royal Nautical Sportsmen's Club, whose enthusiasm for boating was almost frightening. For the sake of a warm clubhouse dinner and a bed for the night, he and Simpson pretended to know the great English rowers whose names the Belgians reverently recited. As they were escorted to their sleeping quarters by one of the club members, Louis and Simpson, under pressure, agreed to give a morning demonstration of the proper English stroke. At dawn, they fled rather than be found out as rank amateurs.

There was so much Louis had saved up to tell Bob, but how could he say it now, in front of this new woman? He wanted to say,
If you want to find out who you really are, then go travel. To move is the thing.
He wanted to say,
Something important has begun.
Every chance encounter, every change of landscape in the journey, offered itself up to his pen. He could see a way now to go out and have adventures, to pour all that he witnessed through his soul and onto paper, a way he could make a living doing what he loved, in spite of his father's plans for him. At the end of the journey, after he had maneuvered the
Arethusa
to a dock in Pontoise, it was raining. He hated wet weather. Yet he had put his face up to the drizzle and thanked it for falling on him.

Louis looked at Bob and Fanny's expectant faces. “French rain is different from the stuff that falls in Auld Reekie.”

Bob laughed, but Fanny said, “It takes leaving, doesn't it, to see things through fresh eyes.”

“It
does,
” Louis said. He saw she had two or three wavy silver strands, like sprung coils, at each temple. “I felt free, truly free. Just to be out in the open air …”

“Do you know that Whitman poem ‘Song of the Open Road'?” Fanny asked. “‘I think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open air … ‘“

“… I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like,'” Louis responded, picking up the verse, “… and whoever beholds me shall like me.'”

He saw the faintest smile flicker across her somber mouth as she took his measure.

“So, you're a travel essayist now, are you?” Bob injected into the quiet moment that followed. He sucked hard on his pipe and released a cloud above their heads. The sardonic grin he had developed at Cambridge was in full display. “Your father will be thrilled to hear that.” He turned to Fanny. “Our friend here just completed his legal studies.”

“I am not suited to be an advocate,” Louis said, suddenly cross.

“You're not much of a vagabond, either,” Bob observed. “Look at you with a knapsack. No self-respecting gypsy carries a freshly pressed shirt.”

“When we were younger, perhaps sixteen,” Louis explained to Fanny, “we would go adventuring for a couple of days without anything but a toothbrush. Not even a comb. Considered it bad form to be encumbered.”

“We couldn't stand ourselves after a while,” Bob added, “so we'd have to go buy shirts and underwear and visit a barber rather often, just to get the hair combed. It got expensive.”

“Our fathers were underwriting our adventures in those days,” Louis said.

“Let's be honest, they still are.” Bob swilled back a whisky.

“So you were close as little boys,” Fanny said.

“Like brothers,” Bob said.

“But I want to know about
you,
Fanny Osbourne. How did you decide to come to Grez?”

She flicked her wrist, and the vivacious face went slack. “There's plenty of time for that. How long are you staying?”

“I have to go back to Edinburgh in a few days.”

“We can talk tomorrow,” she said. “I must put my boy to bed. He's looking weary down there.” Louis watched her collect the limp child from his seat and depart the room.

“She's quite something, isn't she?” Bob said when she was gone. “The locals call her
la belle Americaine
.”

“Indeed. What is she doing in Grez?”

“Ordered here by a doctor.”

“Lungs?”

“No, it's not that. She came over to the continent to study painting, along with her daughter and sons. While they were in Paris, the youngest boy died of consumption—the kind Henley had.”

“Ah,” Louis said. “What a pity.”

“She broke down, and they sent her here to rest.”

“Where is the husband?”

“Back in California.”

“And …?”

“Rather raw, from what I can gather. Fanny doesn't say much about him. I get the feeling it went cold a long time ago.”

“Did you tell her we all dreaded her presence here?”

“I did just recently. She found it quite funny.”

So they are confidants,
Louis thought,
probably lovers
.
And once again, here am I, floating around in Bob's wake.

He poured himself a glass of whisky, drank it down, and then threw back a second. “A guid dram, laddie,” Louis growled playfully. But his heart stung. He waited for the burning to pass before pulling himself up to go talk to the others.