Under the Wide and Starry Sky (7 page)

Fanny looked around the table when she sat down. Had more wine been drunk than she'd realized? Louis's friends seemed unperturbed by such a strange scene.

“What is
madderam
?” Fanny asked Bob.

“Old Shetland word. Means ‘madness.' Pure, joyous insanity.”

After dinner, the crowd convened outside under the arbor, where Chinese lanterns hung from the lattice. There was a hammock where Fanny settled when it was offered to her. In the canoe dumping games, her foot had been caught between two boats, and her ankle was throbbing. The others arranged themselves in chairs around her or sat cross-legged on the ground. One fellow shared a bottle of wine with his pet monkey. A pretty grisette, an expert at swallowing goldfish, circled the group with a new amusement. She dangled a grape on a string over their heads while each person tried to catch it in his teeth.

A voice said, “I don't want this day to end.” And another: “Let's tie the canoes together, climb in, and see where we wake up in the morning.”

They talked into the night about Monet, Degas, and Millet. Balzac's novels and Irish independence. Money. Love. Photography. Did pictures or words have more power? Fanny, like the others, spoke freely into the near darkness, the circle lit by only the moon and a few candles guttering in the warm breeze.

Someone asked Bob Stevenson if he still intended to commit suicide when his inheritance ran out. Just a few days earlier, Fanny had heard Bob's outrageous declaration. When his father died, he'd left his son a small sum of money. Bob had divided up his inheritance into ten parts and was busily spending the allotted fraction each year in creative, pleasurable ways. Fanny calculated that his merry march toward cessation had been in progress for about seven years.

“No man has the right to toss away his own life.” It was Louis's voice, tremulous with emotion. “Just as he has no right to dispose of his neighbor's. It's still a murder.”

“Your life doesn't belong to just you,” Fanny said.

“Obviously, I disagree with you,” Bob said. “I got thrown into life without my consent, and I have every right to decide when and how I will leave this earth. What's more, suicide is a fine subject for a story, Lou.” He drew on his cigarette thoughtfully and tipped his chair on its two back legs. “Let us imagine for a moment that there is a private organization, not advertised in any way but known by word of mouth among a certain group of men—a club … a suicide club. Once a month there is a card game run by the president of the club. The attendees pay a fee to get in, have their fill of champagne, and then sit down to a game of cards. They take turns drawing cards from the stack at the center of the table. The fellow who draws the ace of spades is the honoree that month. The winner, you might say, of his own demise.”

“Why does he need to join a club to commit suicide?” Belle asked.

“Because there is another important card player at the table,” Louis said, picking up the thread of the story. “That is the man who draws the ace of clubs. It falls to him to dispatch the first winner that very night.”

“Kill him, you mean?” Belle asked.

“Exactly,” Louis said.

“That's an interesting twist,” Fanny mused. “I think it is harder to be a murderer than simply a man who wants to end his own life.”

Louis and Bob played back and forth with the idea, embellishing here, rejecting there, until someone produced a guitar and quieted the talk.

Fanny looked up through a circular opening in the arbor at the black sky, awash in stars. She considered the idea of staying right where she was, of sleeping in the hammock so as to breathe in the fragrance of the trellis roses. Soon enough, couples were standing, saying good night. She noticed Belle and Frank O'Meara slip into the shadows. Fanny sat up in the hammock and climbed out. Louis leaped to his feet, took her arm, and helped her back to the building.

“Upon my soul,” he blurted, “you are the most magnificent woman I've ever met.” He was looking down at her, and in the dim lantern light of the inn, she saw tears in his eyes yet again. “I think I am falling in love with you,” he said.

Fanny felt her chest shrink with embarrassment. Happily, the stairs to her bedroom were only seconds away.

“Louis.” She patted his shoulder. “You are sweet. Now get some sleep.”

Fanny had found the invitation slipped under her door as she went down to breakfast. If there were a more enticing way to spend a sunny September morning, she could not think of it. In the past couple of days, since Louis returned to Edinburgh, the friendly intimacy Fanny enjoyed with Bob had revived. She contemplated the prospect that he might speak his feelings at last.

Around eleven, Bob was waiting downstairs for her, wearing a battered plaited-straw hat. They set off into the forest, where streaks of sunlight shot through oak and pine branches, splashing the ferns with a quivering glow.

“I have a question for you,” Fanny said finally. “I hope it is not too personal.”

“Ask it.”

“Are you serious about all that suicide talk?”

Bob took off his hat, scratched his head glumly. “My money's going to be gone soon enough.”

“Perhaps it's time to start earning some of your own.”

“Perhaps.”

“No one will hold you to that talk. You have too many people who love you.”

“Louis wouldn't allow it, anyway,” Bob said. “Say, how do you like Louis?”

“He's charming. Nearly as clever as you,” Fanny said. “But my word, one minute he's weeping, and the next, he's so hysterical he can't stop laughing. I don't know whether to give him a handkerchief or look out the window. Does he have some condition?”

Bob's laughter pealed through the clearing where they stood. “A variety of them,” he said. “Being a Lighthouse Stevenson is one.”

“What is that?”

“He's an artist in a family of proper engineers—my father was one of them. They're quite famous for the lighthouses they build, by the way. But his main condition is being giddy with life.” Bob laughed. “He's suffered, you see, with his lungs—been near to death a few times. But that's made Louis who he is; a bit of a bedlamite, you might say. Hungry for living life and oblivious to caution sometimes. Never, never has he let his illnesses cripple his spirit. He's always got a zany story or joke saved up for me. And the laughing? Well, haven't you ever laughed so hard that you lost control, as he did last night? When you were simply gasping for air and thought you would never stop?”

“Possibly as a child. Not lately.”

“I'm sorry, Fanny. You haven't had much reason to laugh.”

“Frankly, I found your cousin a little frightening.”

“Oh, he's perfectly all right. The thing is, once you've laughed that hard you will want to do it again. It feels so grand. Lou and I spent a good part of our youth laughing our heads off. He would look at me, and I was doomed.”

They were walking along a path overhung by branches of a great-trunked beech tree.

“Do you suppose Monet came to this spot to paint?” Fanny said.

“When he was about nine … “

“Monet?”

“Louis. And I was twelve, we would set up lead soldiers and wage huge battles in his bedroom. Not just maneuvers; we would give the wee men grudges, bad habits, valor—whole histories, not only military ranks. I could play at his bedside as happily as if I were outdoors.” Bob laughed to himself. “A huge imagination he has; that's why he's never bored. “

“I can see you love him, Bob.”

“He's got his foibles, don't get me wrong. He may have abandoned the church, but he's a moralist of the first water. I remember one time we came upon a man on the road who was beating his dog. Louis was horrified and told him to stop. The man growled at him and said, ‘I'll do what I want. It's my dog.' Louis, mind you, was a mere boy, but he said indignantly, ‘He's not your dog. He's God's dog.' That pretty well sums up Louis's attitude about unfairness. Can't bear it. He's going to be famous someday, mark my words. If he can keep his health.”

“He appears to be perfectly fine.”

“I think the canoeing, being out in the country air, is good for him.” Bob caught her eye as they continued on. “He's awfully fond of you, Fanny.”

“I do not need another child.”

“Fanny,” Bob said gently, “I am a lazy, vulgar cad. I haven't any ideas about what I can really do. I don't think I will ever be a first-rate painter. I may be older than Lou, but he is far more mature.”

They walked on for a few minutes. Up ahead, Fanny could see the path that led back to the garden. Disgusted, she stopped and turned to him. “Were you assigned this task, Bob, or have you undertaken it on your own?”

Bob's eyes passed over her face. “You are a beautiful woman, an accomplished woman. A man would be blind not to see that.” He paused. “I would not make the case for anyone except Louis. He has a soul like that of no one else I know. And I am not what you imagine, Fanny.”

In the garden, Bob put his hand at the small of her back and walked quietly with her to the dining room, where the midday dinner was in progress. Fanny saw at once the knowing glances darting among the people gathered there. She knew what they were thinking: that something deeply intimate had happened on the forest walk. Her whole head was burning. She tipped up her chin and looked neither left nor right.
Let them think they have caught us in a tryst.

What she knew by the time they had reached the inn was something else entirely. In a fashion that only a man of Bob's genteel breeding could have managed, she had been passed like a slab of cheese on a plate from one diner to the next.

When Louis arrived at the iron gate in front of 17 Heriot Row, fear gripped him.
What an absurd sensation for a man of twenty-six.
Yet here he stood like a child of eight, dreading going into the place as if it were a setting from a Poe story. It was, in fact, a perfectly pleasant row house in the New Town, built of beveled sandstone blocks, distinguished from its neighbors only by an arching fanlight above the door. Otherwise, his father's house locked arms with its fellows in a show of seamless solidity. These were homes occupied by judges and lawyers and other stewards of Edinburgh, and their basements were quarters for the servants, not dungeons. Lately, though, when Louis came back to the house where he had grown up, he felt a prisoner's panic upon crossing the threshold. He had endured miserable inquisitions in recent times—usually at the dining table and at his father's hands. Now it was his wretched lot to be coming home with his hat in hand, for he was nearly out of money.

He closed the big front door gently, stepped quietly through a second set of glass doors, and walked into the empty dining room, where coals glowed in the grate. He stirred the fire with a poker, hoping for a few moments of solitude before his mother appeared and commenced one of her pleasant interviews, a mixture of good-humored small talk and family gossip, followed by delicate, abstract forays into his personal life (“How does a handsome young man like you keep the girls at arm's length?”) and his cheerful, edited confidences. The real interrogation would begin later, when his father returned home from work, and all niceties would fall away. Louis sank into the big chair by the fire and closed his eyes. Within a minute or two, he heard the distinctive shuffle of the butler's shoes.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Stevenson,” the man said.

“John,” Louis said, “how are you?”

“Very well, sir. Your parents are not at home just now. They went out to Swanston. But Miss Cunningham is here. I'll get her.”

Soon a different but familiar step clicked on the staircase. Louis jumped up and went into

the foyer. Against the oval skylight on the third floor, he saw the sprightly figure of his childhood nurse—a tiny gray-haired woman in a neat brown dress, flying down the winding stone steps, her arms open.

“Master Lou?” she called out. “Is it really you?”

“Cummy!” he shouted. “I had no idea you would be here.” He lifted her in an embrace before she got to the bottom step.

“Your mother asked me to drop by in case you arrived while they were in Swanston. They went out yesterday and will be back by supper tonight. They weren't sure what time you were coming. I was just up in your room, fluffin' the pillows.”

“Alison Cunningham, I am past the need of fluffing.”

“Every man likes a little pampering once in a while. Look at you,”she said, smoothing his lapels. “Did you add more height in the past two months?”

“I stopped growing some years ago, my friend.”

“I must be getting shorter, then. I have an old lady's bones. Sit down with me, Lou, and tell me all about your trip. Are you hungry? I asked Mildred to have tea ready in case you got here in time. I haven't seen you since you had a wig and robe on, the day you were called to the bar.”

Louis winced. “Ah, Cummy, did you have to remind me of that? I have blissfully blotted it out of my mind for six weeks. Well, mostly.”

They settled at the dining room table where they had spent so many hours of his boyhood, coloring and printing out his earliest stories. Soon platters were coming up the dumbwaiter from Mildred in the kitchen below, and Nora, a sweet-tempered servant who'd been with them forever was trundling trays of food to the sideboard. Cucumber and egg sandwiches, smoked salmon, and toasted cheese on bread—”Orkney cheddar, Master Lou, yer fauvrit,” Nora confided. She sliced the fruitcake and spread clotted cream over a piece for him. “Juist as ye like it.”

“Thank you, Nora. You spoil me.” They all spoiled him, he knew. It gave them something to do in this quiet household.

“I've had my tea. But you know how much I like to watch you eat,” Cummy said. “How was the canoing on the Scheldt?”

“It was an ordinary-sized adventure, no high drama,” Louis said. “But I have enough material to do some essays for magazines. If all goes well, I will wrap them up into a book. I think it could sell.”

“I'm
sure
it could,” she said. Her eyes blinked rapidly, as they always had when she was stirred up about something. “You're the finest writer I have ever known.”

“How many others have you known?”

Louis watched her think about it. “None,” she said. “Still … “

They both laughed. Cummy hadn't any idea what he wrote now. Though she had always crowed about his boyish scribblings, she was truly proud of the religious history on the Covenanters he had written when he was sixteen. She privately took some credit for it, having indoctrinated Louis in the brutal martyrdoms of the Presbyterian heroes who fought against the Episcopal monarchy. It was the first thing Louis had published, even though his own father had paid for the printing. To Cummy,
The Pentland Rising
ranked among the important books of the ages.

She was a believer in him the way only mothers and nurses could be. Once, about a year before, his mother had chided him for not responding to one of Cummy's letters. “Alison Cunningham had more than one marriage proposal she turned down so she could stay at her post.” He knew he was “her post,” but it hadn't occurred to him that Cummy had ever lost anything except sleep for him.

Their fondness for each other had been forged during the feverish nights of his unrelenting, croupy coughs. Cummy had comforted him tenderly through it all. Now that he was grown, they remained close friends. Never mind that she was a ferocious Calvinist and he a nonbeliever. He forgave her the bloody tales that haunted his childhood, and she forgave his recent lapse in faith as a temporary complication. “Even John the Baptist suffered doubts,” she told him. “You were always a pious boy. God hasn't forgotten that. Just don't keep Him waiting too long.”

Louis could not look at Cummy without thinking of drafts, cures, blood, and terror.

She had been a fierce opponent of drafts. She could detect the faintest incursion of cold air and could instantly rig a blanket as a hanging to seal off his room. Whole winters he had passed inside that hothouse, too sick to get outside. It was bronchitis; it was pneumonia; it was incipient tuberculosis—the diagnoses changed over time. What was agreed upon by everyone was that he had inherited a bad set of lungs from his mother, and drafts, above all, were to be defended against.

Cummy would stand at the window, whatever the season, cheerfully pointing out anything that moved to the sickly child bundled in a blanket. By day, they studied the Edinburgh sky, umber-colored from factory grit, and scanned the trees in Queen Street Gardens, trying to locate the one blackbird sending up a song. Or he would lie facedown on the floor and paint pictures. At night, awake and hacking, he listened as Cummy spoke of the hideously persecuted, half-naked and freezing Covenanters who were run through with swords by King Charles's soldiers on Rullion Green in the Pentland Hills. She told of their corpses being axed to pieces and the heads and hands sent to different parts of Scotland, and she told him of “the boot,” an iron torture device placed over the leg that was used on some of the battle's survivors. When pressed by the boy, she explained that the torturer squeezed an iron wedge between the martyr's leg and the iron cage, then hammered it until the leg was pulp. For months, when he closed his eyes, Louis saw free-floating, mutilated limbs. He prayed for sleep, and when it didn't come, he prayed for morning. His little rag of a body would finally fall unconscious just as other children were heading to school.

He wondered now if his parents had any idea of what was going on during those wide-eyed nights. Margaret and Thomas Stevenson were observant Presbyterians but happy enough to be lumped together on Sunday with all the other Church of Scotland burghers on their street, unlike Cummy, who belonged to the more evangelical Free Church. Could his parents possibly know their fair-haired darling had knelt next to his nurse and prayed for their souls' redemption because they played whist? Could they have imagined the menu of horrors Louis had been provided on a nightly basis while they slept? The images were as vivid now as they were then, the blistered skin of the unrepentant roasting on a million spits. Did his parents guess that the night terrors that plagued him—his vision of the devil riding furiously past their house on horseback—had roots in the nurse's tales of damnation? Cummy's heaven was a pale thing compared to her vivid images of a roaring, devouring hell.

All of Cummy's stories had been administered to him as she sat on the counterpane of his bed and dosed him with castor oil, cough syrup, the dreaded antimony wine that tasted of metal and sometimes made him vomit, and the strong black coffee she brewed to calm him in the night. All the good of the woman was mixed together with the dark and bitter.

Yet Cummy was as dear to him as his mother was. She had never allowed a novel or play into his room, but she had read to him with drama and gusto the things she loved: long passages of Scripture and the Shorter Catechism; a poem called “The Cameronian's Dream” whose singsong first lines he could recite even now: “In a dream of the night I was wafted away / To the muirland of mist, where the martyrs lay … “

Sometimes she had broken her own rules by reading aloud to him from
Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper.
It was a family periodical full of articles about art and science and, best of all, delicious made-up stories. Cummy bypassed her scruples by choosing to view the tales as true. She had seen firsthand the magic such stories exerted on him.

“I'm not going to practice law,” Louis said, blotting his mouth with a napkin.

Cummy waited a while before she responded. “Have you told your father?”

“I will tonight.”

She patted his hand, then drew in a big breath. “Well, now,” she said, exhaling the words thoughtfully.

“And I have met a woman.”

“Oh!” Cummy struggled to conceal her surprise. “You don't say.”

“She's an American and she has children. Divorced.” Louis watched her

eyebrows quiver slightly at the announcement. “I'd appreciate if you didn't mention it.”

“Of course, Master Lou, I won't say a word.” She glanced at her watch as if she had an appointment, then hurried to the foyer to get her coat. When she came back to hug him, her eyes were wide and blinking. “I shall be saying a prayer for you about suppertime.”

When she was gone, Louis went upstairs to change clothes. In his bedroom he noticed what a lot of junk there was, things from his early years that embarrassed him to look at now. His mother had made the room a museum of his childhood. He had never bothered to pitch anything himself; and he commenced doing so. Picking up the little cardboard figures from a play theater he'd loved as a boy, he considered throwing them into the wastebin, then rejected the idea. His eyes fell on a stack of papers next. He knew the pile intimately but spent the next couple of hours reading through the pages anyway, walking down that avenue of history one more time.

It was no accident that he'd become a writer, he thought when he glanced up from the pages. In his bookcase, he spotted
The Arabian Entertainments,
a book he had borrowed repeatedly from his grandfather's library before he finally owned it. Next to it stood a row of romances that had been his friends:
Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels,
The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote,
Rob Roy,
and a half-dozen other historical novels by Scott that had swept him away at thirteen. Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass
was crammed in among the romances, though it should have occupied a shelf of its own, so completely did it turn his seventeen-year-old world upside down with its unblushing sexual imagery and manly thinking. By then he knew he wanted to be Robert Louis Stevenson, author. Had known for some time, actually, as he'd carried around a notebook in his back pocket for the purpose of describing things since he was a boy. When it came to writing, he'd been obsessively practicing for years. He had set himself the task to imitate the best writers, including Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Montaigne, and Hawthorne. He was convinced the exercise would help him penetrate the mystery of what made good writing great. You went to the masters to study their technique, whether you were a painter or a woodcarver or a writer. You learned the basics. And when you were schooled in the craft, truly practiced, when you had exposed yourself to the best, you might be ready to utter your own thoughts. He laughed to remember how he had driven everyone mad during his Charles Lamb period, when he blathered on like an insufferable prig, imitating how he thought the great essayist would have spoken, and interjecting “If I may so speak” into any pause in a conversation. How did his family put up with it? Yet it wasn't for naught; he'd profited considerably from aping the masters.

Now he stacked his old pages in a neat pile and left them on the desk. Perhaps someday, someone would be heartened to find his early attempts. It was vanity to think that way, he knew. And he cringed at the memory of asking Bob to save his letters without saying why; they both understood what Louis was hoping for. It was a measure of Bob's friendship that he had not peed his drawers at the pride of the remark. Yet there it was—fat ambition.

He was eyeing the cardboard theater figures again when a knock came at his door.

“Darling!” His mother swept in and wrapped her arms around him, beaming in the way she used to before all the arguments took over. He was struck by how little her oval face had changed since he was a small child. She kept herself girlish and slender for his father. Not all women her age did that. “Come to supper, Lou. We want to hear all about your trip.”