Under the Wide and Starry Sky

  Louis eyed the potential co-conspirator, a plain freckled girl eating a croissant at the next table. “She does not know what she is to intercept. She has come from Marseilles at the request of her lover,” he said, “a deserter from the Legion who has hired on as a spy for …”

  The games lasted as long as their own coffee and rolls, and then they were out on the streets, where the rhythm of life swept them along past flower stalls and boulangeries, past display windows full of glinting paperweights, gloves, Japanese silks and fans, past doorways where baking bread or perfume or chocolate sent fragrant fingers out to the sidewalk to fetch them in by the nose.

  Sometimes remembered buildings were gone. They wandered around the blackened stone remains of the Tuileries Palace that had been burned nearly to the ground during the suppression of the Paris Commune. “I was here when it was intact,” he said with wonder. “How changed Paris is in just fifteen years.” Elsewhere, he discovered that the mazes of crooked little streets he remembered from that early visit had been leveled by Baron Haussmann, the formidable mind behind the reshaping of the city. Now in their place were wide, arrow-straight boulevards lined with streetlights that imbued nighttime in Paris with a theatrical air. They walked along the lit streets as if they, and every other person on the pavement, were players in a grand, romantic drama.

  CHAPTER 20

  “I have good news,” Louis said when he visited her apartment a few days later. “You remember Henley, of course. He’s starting a publication called London. And he’s going to publish the story I read to you.”

  “‘The Suicide Club?’”

  “As soon as I polish it up. I think the length will be good for the magazine. I want to do a series of these shorter stories for him. Then, if luck holds, put them together as a collection for publication.”

  “That’s grand, Louis.”

  “I don’t know if publishing in London will mean much money, but it’s one more foray in the right direction. He’s going to need a lot of help. I was thinking you could do some work for him to get the thing off the ground—find writers, do some editing, perhaps. He could pay you a little something.”

  “Yes!” Fanny sat up wide-eyed on the sofa. “Say yes to him. I will absolutely help. It’s perfect timing, Louis. Sam can’t pay me next month. And I want to do it.”

  “Then I will pay.”

  “But you haven’t got any money for—”

  “We’ll find a way,” he said.

  Walking back to Will Low’s studio for the night, Louis tried to figure how much was left of the thousand pounds his father had given him upon graduation from law school. It had seemed like a solid amount when he got it. He hadn’t been a spendthrift, exactly, but he’d picked up the bill for a group dinner now and then, loaned friends money, and pitched in for this or that. The biggest chunk of it, he’d given to Colvin when someone stole a set of valuable prints in his keeping. Louis loaned him 250 pounds, lest Colvin be sued. Poor old Colvin probably would be paying that loan back for a good long time. Louis had given a fair amount to Bob and his sister as their money ran out. None of his generosity, he thought, was out of the ordinary. His friends had done the same for him when he was short of funds; it was how all of them lived.

  He could sleep and work at Will’s place and toss a few francs his way. At least he’d had the sense not to accept the invitation to stay in Bob’s flat. The place was crawling with bohemian friends and hangers-on. One fellow was sleeping in a closet. They were drunk by afternoon and up until dawn. Louis had pledged himself to work every morning until dinner, and he knew he could do it in this city.

  The next afternoon, when he walked over to the Montmartre apartment, he found Belle in the parlor entertaining Bob. One look at his cousin confirmed what Bob had already admitted: He was smitten. Louis burst out laughing at his stupefied cousin watching the American girl, whose excited, free-limbed storytelling had Bob gazing at her as if she were an exotic bird.

  “Luly!” Sammy shouted when he saw his friend. Louis and the boy bear-hugged.

  Fanny’s eyes met his in the round of chatter that followed. They went out into the hallway together.

  “I wish we had our own parlor, just for you and me,” he said.

  She pecked his cheek, then drew back and crossed her arms. “Did you know your eyes are red?”

  “I went back to Will’s last night and wrote until three or four in the morning.”

  “The canoe essays?”

  “Inland Voyage. That’s the name I came up with last night. I have two hundred pages so far. Added about fifteen last night.”

  Her smile was coquettish. “Have I told you today that you are amazing?”

  “That’s all I want to hear. Ever.” He put the back of her hand to his cold cheek. “Who was your model at the studio today?”

  “A man dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte.”

  Louis tittered. “And your foot?” he asked.

  “Still achy,” she said. “The price of canoe wars. I probably shouldn’t have been out there in the first place. I can’t swim, you know.”

  “Fanny!”

  She shrugged. “I wasn’t going to miss the fun.”

  “I love you because you’re game,” he said, and he put his lips on her neck. “I love you because you have the heart of a man inside the body of a luscious—”

  “No,” she said. “Not here.”

  “Fanny … “

  “A woman’s reputation is a fragile thing. Even in Paris.” Her eyes darted toward the parlor. “Speaking of which, Bob has added a whole new wrinkle to my daughter’s life.”

  Louis reluctantly drew back. “Where does Frank O’Meara stand?”

  Fanny shook her head. “She’s in a complete dither about which one she loves better. She can hardly concentrate in art classes. Frankly, she’s driving me mad with her chatter about them.”

  “It’s so beautiful outside. Let’s round up everybody and go to the crèmerie to get a bite to eat,” he said.

  They walked out into the street, and Belle took Louis’s arm. Just ahead, Fanny linked arms with Bob, while Sammy scampered around making snowballs.

  “Do you love snow, Belle?” Louis asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “That’s good. Because we couldn’t be friends otherwise. “

  “You have strong opinions about the oddest things,” Belle said.

  “Some people look at snow and think about catching their death of a cold or how a person could get lost in it and meet his end. What could be better than to be wrapped up warm in a coat and to see the soft flakes coming down?” He nodded toward Fanny and Bob up ahead. “Come to think of it, I believe I love my friends better when snow is falling on them.”

  Belle, who had been ambivalent about Louis’s presence in their lives, allowed a grin. Her enormous eyes peered at him from beneath her fur-lined hood. “You have made my mother laugh again. I haven’t heard her sound so happy since Hervey was a baby.”

  CHAPTER 21

  “Mother,” Belle said when she came in the apartment door.

  It was afternoon, and Fanny was scrubbing Sammy’s school uniform shirt in a sudsy bowl. “What is it?”

  “I had lunch with Frank, and he said Louis is sick.”

  Fanny dropped the shirt and wiped her hands on her skirt.

  “It’s his eyes. Will Low told Frank that Louis is in bed and he can’t see a thing.”

  Fanny hurried into the bedroom to pull her boots on. “Go to my sewing box and get out a thimble. Fill it with boric acid crystals and wrap it in a clean napkin.”

  She’d noticed Louis’s eyes growing worse in the past day or two. Yesterday morning she had mixed a few grains of the white stuff in water and dripped it into his eyes, then sent him home to rest. When he hadn’t shown up at two o’clock, as he usually did, she assumed he was writing away. Fanny threw on her coat. “Watch Hervey!” she called over her shoulder to Belle.

  “I know who you mean,” Belle called back.

/>   Snow had brought the cabs and trams to a crawl. When Fanny got to Will Low’s studio, she saw the large white-haired head of an otherwise tiny doctor bending over Louis’s bed. The man was disheveled, and his spattered shirt cuffs gave proof that he was at the end of a long workday. In profile, his nose was a bony ridge upon which stiff bristles of hair stood up like porcupine quills.

  Louis was talking gaily in French to the old man. “What does he say?” Fanny asked Louis.

  “There’s my lady,” Louis said. “Hello, sweet one.” He stared blankly in her general direction.

  “Louis, what does he say?”

  “I got meself a roarin’ eye infection. Fever, too.”

  “What are we to do?”

  “Drink a pint a’ whiskey.”

  “Please, Louis … “

  “He says I need to have the bandages changed every fifteen minutes,” Louis said.

  Will Low’s jaw worked furiously as he watched.

  “Tell me what the doctor just said, can you Will?”

  “He says Lou could go blind if he does not care for his eyes. He shouldn’t have any light.” Will covered his wispy mustache with a paint-splattered hand. He looked around his studio, dismayed. “I could put sheets over the windows … “

  “Will, kindly ask the man precisely what we are to do and when. And ask him where I can get whatever medicine I need.’

  “Of course,” he said. His face, boyish beneath a sealskin toque, registered his profound relief that she had arrived.

  “I know how to do this, Will. Between the two of us, we should be able to get Louis into a cab and over to my flat.” Fanny patted Louis on the shoulder. “You’re coming home with me,” she said.

  “‘My young love said my mother won’t mind,’” Louis sang.

  Will Low blinked nervously. “I thought a little drink might take his mind off the burning.”

  Fanny glared at Low. “He’s pixilated. Get his trousers on him, will you?”

  Fanny set him up in her bed and pulled a chair next to it. During the night, light from the streetlamp fell on his body. She had never seen him asleep, and she couldn’t take her eyes off him. His face was as beautiful as Raphael’s. She had seen a painting once of the artist as a young man and his face was oval, with pensive dark eyes, like Louis’s. Here is a man so full of life and goodness and gifts, she thought. And utterly reckless with his health. He had ignored the burning in his eyes for a week, just kept on working.

  Ten days ago he had come with pages to read, and she’d felt almost immediately that a new door was opening for them. He began with his canoe essay and read sections of it aloud over a period of a week. But yesterday he had arrived with a piece about falling in love.

  Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural … She had pursed her lips to suppress the greedy pleasure she took in the words. The essay was written in generalities, but there was no doubt about it: It was an open love letter to her. Louis planned to send it off to Cornhill magazine.

  She ran her hand over his forehead. He was twenty-six and she was thirty-seven. She had spent a good part of her life being regarded as the young one. “Such a young bride, such a young mother, so young to be traveling alone,” people had always said to her. How odd to find herself the older one. She didn’t feel finished yet. She felt as young as he was. What did age matter, anyway? Not a scintilla. Except that it had allowed her to walk into love this time, eyes wide open—there was no falling about it.

  In the morning, when she stood up, she nearly dropped over from want of sleep. Belle was lounging in the parlor. On seeing her mother emerge from the bedroom, the girl clasped her hands and said, “I’m not judging you, Mama.”

  “There’s nothing to judge,” Fanny responded testily. She put her hands to her waist and stretched backward. “Ten grains of boric acid mixed with water.” She pointed toward a cup on the windowsill. “You watched me do it last night, right?” She yawned. “Oh, do I need to move these legs! If he wakes up, tell him I will be back soon to make breakfast.”

  Fanny made it down to the newsstand and was on her way to the bakery in the next block when her ankle buckled. It was the right foot, the foot that had ailed her since Grez. She gritted her teeth and hobbled back to her building, hoping against hope it was not a real sprain.

  Four flights. Up to an awful apartment. Sam had made certain they couldn’t get too comfortable in Paris. When she had returned from Grez, her Paris doctor had told her she was still fragile from Hervey’s loss. “You will need a housekeeper,” he’d said. “You’re much too weak to do that sort of work.” Ha! Housekeeper, indeed. She had dared not tell him they lived on the fourth floor and felt lucky to have it.

  When Fanny returned, Louis was sitting up. “They’re much worse today.” There was despair in his voice. “A man can write with bad lungs. But what does he do without eyes?”

  Fanny took his hand. “Louis, I think you should go home.” She waited for a response, but none came. “We’ll get Bob to take you to your parents’ house,” she said finally.

  “Bob isn’t in Paris, Mama,” Belle said. “He’s gone to Scotland for a week.”

  “Two weeks,” Louis corrected her. “He left yesterday.”

  Another silence.

  “There is a good doctor in London I have gone to,” Louis said. “I have close friends there who have taken care of me before. Colvin, my editor friend. And Fanny Sitwell. She would help us, I’m sure of it. Henley is there, too. He owes me a little fussing.”

  CHAPTER 22

  It was the curtains Fanny couldn’t help staring at. Sitting on a chaise in front of the drawing room window, she pretended to look out on Brunswick Row, but her gaze went only as far as the lush brown velvet that framed the view. The curtains were pure simplicity; Fanny could have sewn them herself. But the fabric made her want to bury her face in it. The velvet would feel soft as a baby’s thigh, she was certain; it was that fine. Subtly layered refinement—that was the atmosphere Fanny Sitwell had achieved with the pieces in her drawing room, from the leather chairs worn to a mellow shine to the pale blue damask wallpaper. That summed up the lady of the house, too.

  “How is the pain today, Fanny?” Mrs. Sitwell asked. She moved over to the divan, where she adjusted the pillows under Fanny’s foot cast.

  “Gone,” Fanny said. “Thankfully gone. I would have had the operation a month ago if I’d known I would feel so relieved.”

  “Dr. Hedgebrook is a miracle worker.”

  “That he is,” Sidney Colvin concurred. He sat by the fireplace in a chair that was clearly designated as his, since no one else ever approached it. He was a pinched, sober fellow, an intellectual type who buried himself in journals and books when it was just the three of them, tossing a remark now and then into the conversation. It was when Louis showed up that the fellow blossomed. He was a real Cambridge professor of some sort. Everything about him was neatly trimmed, from the hairline below his bald pate to his close-cut beard to the tailoring of his coat.

  “He may come across as a cold fish,” Louis had warned her, “but he is the soul of decency. They both are. Oh, they’re proper types. You must never smoke in front of them, for example. But they have been extraordinarily kind to me.”

  Fanny and Louis had shown up in London like a pair of injured birds; he nearly blind and she limping and queasy with worry. Louis’s old friends had gone into action, arranging visits from the finest doctor in town. They brought in food to their hotel room during the fortnight Louis was laid up, with Fanny at his bedside. It was during one of the doctor’s visits to the hotel that the venerable physician had spied Fanny’s limp, examined her foot, and pronounced her an ideal candidate for surgery.

  Now she was the patient. Returning from the hospital, Fanny had come to recuperate in the home of Mrs. Sitwell. The pair insisted she stay there and showered her with concern. They set her up on the sofa by the window, where she served as a splash
of color in the subdued decor. They had thrown a tiger skin over the upholstery before settling her there, tied a yellow silk scarf around her head, swathed her in bright shawls, then sat down and gaped at her across the tea table as if she were Pocahantas.

  “Mrs. Sitwell,” she said now, glancing at the piano “might I persuade you to play?”

  “If you can bear my little errors,” the woman said. “I have been working on a Mozart Sonata.”

  “If there are errors, I won’t know it. I would love to hear it.”

  “I second that,” Colvin piped up.

  “Do you play, Fanny?” Mrs. Sitwell asked.

  “I don’t have a musical bone in my body.”

  The woman laughed. “Louis doesn’t have much of one, either. No sense of pitch whatsoever. But he does adore music, doesn’t he? He puts his heart into that little flageolet of his.”

  “Oh,” Fanny said. She realized she did not know he played anything.

  Fanny Sitwell had an appeal of the pre-Raphaelite sort, with sculpted cheekbones, straight brown hair parted down the middle and knotted at the back of her neck, and limpid blue eyes framed by brows fixed in pretty concern. Apparently, she had retired her bustle, for there was none to arrange when she sat down on the piano bench. Instead, she wore cream-colored tea gowns in her home. She was all patrician loveliness: her carriage, taste, flawless manners. In fact, she used the word “lovely” all the time, whether speaking of the sky or a friend or a rib roast.

  Thank God for the piano. There were three more days to be gotten through on the sofa in this overheated flat before Fanny and Louis could return to Paris. These people had been ever so kind, petting her and waiting on her every desire, but she was no good as an invalid. Never had been. And the whole situation was strange, staying in the home of a woman whom Louis seemed to have desired rather heatedly at one point. “I worshipped her,” he’d told Fanny in explaining their close friendship. “But it was merely a boy’s crush; I was so young.” “So young,” as Fanny calculated it, was only three years ago. It hadn’t been such a long a time since Louis was coming to this house, pouring out his soul to his nurturing angel, and resting his head in his Madonna’s lap.