“Poetic license,” smiled Stevenson.
“Shhh, Sammy!” said Fanny. “Go on.”
Sam raised an eyebrow but he continued energetically.
I shall find him, never fear,
I shall find my grenadier;
But for all that’s gone and come,
I shall find my soldier dumb.
He has lived, a little thing,
In the grassy woods of spring;
Done, if he could tell me true,
Just as I should like to do.
He has seen the starry hours
And the springing of the flowers;
And the fairy things that pass
In the forests of the grass.
Not a word will he disclose,
Not a word of all he knows.
I must lay him on the shelf,
And make up the tale myself.
When Sam had finished, Fanny applauded, stood up, and applauded some more. Sam bowed, extending his hand theatrically towards Stevenson, who dipped his head in turn.
“It’s very good,” said Sam. “Except maybe for the razor bit. I guess you’ve earned your supper.”
“I am so relieved.”
“And he’s just like you’ve been, Lulu,” his stepson continued. “The little grenadier. For the longest time, he couldn’t speak a word.”
“Nor can he yet,” nodded the writer. “We have to speak for him.”
He was gazing at Sam with great pleasure when the thought of Ferrier swept darkly back over him. Very soon Walter’s lips, as well, would be sealed forever.
Stevenson lay in bed on his back, his left arm around Fanny, who nestled up against him with her head on his shoulder and her leg draped over his knee. He was perhaps a little warm, but it felt like a moment to relish, so he lay still. The moonlight promised to glide into their room at any moment. Already, its silver sheen etched the window frame sharply against the jet darkness of the interior wall. Crickets chittered thickly near and far, and the neighborhood nightingale added its liquid trill, now and again, to the whole inebriating chorale.
“Should I tell you how completely happy I have felt here?” he whispered. “With you?”
Fanny raised her head to look at him, her backlit features almost indistinguishable—save for her eyes, which were open wide with attentiveness. “Oh, Louis.” She craned up to kiss him, then settled back onto his shoulder.
“I feel almost guilty about it, given what is unfolding in Edinburgh.” He paused, half expecting a response, then added, “I do feel guilty.”
Fanny looked at him again. “We can control only what we can control. What is it that you say yourself about the duty of being happy? That, in being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world?”
Stevenson laughed. “How gratifying it is that someone is listening. Even if only to turn my own words back against me.”
“I am your most devoted reader,” cooed his wife, nestling in once again.
He tightened his arm around her. “How I longed as a younger man to be where I am right now—at least in terms of my matrimonial circumstances.”
Fanny tittered, adjusting herself on his shoulder. “‘Matrimonial circumstances.’ You make marriage sound like part of a lawsuit. Or a murder investigation.”
“You did marry a barrister,” chuckled Stevenson. “It’s too late to rue his lexicon.”
She knocked his leg with her knee, then rested it once again over his.
“I recall lying under the stars in the Cévennes all those years back on my great Gallic walkabout—my only companion little Celestine. Celestine the estrual donkey—”
“Louis!” Again her head rose.
“—and thinking how right it is for a man to have a woman. And, indeed, how wonderful it would be to repeat a journey such as that with you. To cook over an open fire. To share a bottle of the local plonk. And crawl into a marital sleeping sack under the wide and starry sky.”
“Mmmm!”
“With your pistols under our pillow. In case of highwaymen.”
“Or boy donkeys in rut.”
“Or boy donkeys in rut!”
For a moment they lay still.
“Would you mind, love? I’m a little warm.”
Fanny groaned softly and pulled back from him.
“Thank you. We could both of us be dumb soldiers. Tucked up in the same hole.”
“Ah, so that one was about you, too.”
The writer laughed. “Everyone says I’m a damned egoist.”
“And you’re sure you wouldn’t rather be alone out there? Like your little lead grenadier? What was it? ‘Doing as you would like to do’? Gratifying all your secret cravings?”
He tilted his head to kiss her forehead. “You are my secret craving. And I have never needed you more.”
“You’re working again,” chirped Sam. He stood in the doorway of Stevenson’s study, arms akimbo. “I guess you’re feeling better.”
“I am,” answered Stevenson. “Writing and feeling more like my old self.”
“You’re not old, Lulu. Not nearly as old as Mama.” The boy grinned like an imp.
“Shhh! Your mother has the ears of an owl.”
“Do you have a poem for me today?”
Stevenson laughed. “I thought I had fulfilled that contract.”
“Technically, I suppose. But I do miss them.”
“So do I.”
Sam walked over to the desk and looked at the notebook his step-father had been writing in. “Otto, still?”
Stevenson sighed.
“Why don’t you write about something interesting? Like the deacon.”
For almost as long as Stevenson had known him, Sam had been entranced by the story of Deacon Brodie, the infamous Edinburgh cabinet maker—by day, deacon of the carpenters’ guild and city councilor; by night, burglar and profligate gambler. Brodie had been hired to install locks in the houses of Edinburgh’s wealthiest citizens, and then pressed the keys into wax to make duplicates for his midnight larcenies. Most gripping to the lad, it seemed, was the legendary claim that, when Brodie and his accomplice were hanged from a gibbet that the deacon himself had designed, Brodie had devised a steel collar to protect his neck, and then bribed the hangman to remove his supposed corpse posthaste from the gallows and whisk him off to France and another life. Stevenson had always punctiliously withheld the fact that, beyond his partiality for the risks of burglary and games of chance, Brodie was thoroughly given to carnal pleasures. He had fathered five illegitimate children on two mistresses, each of them unknown to the other.
Stevenson chuckled.
“Why are you laughing?”
“My friend Henley has been begging me for years to write a play about Brodie. He claims it would make us rich.”
“Well it could, couldn’t it?”
“I don’t think your mother would approve,” replied Stevenson. “In fact, I’m certain she wouldn’t.”
“You may be right,” agreed the boy. “But even after you’ve finished Otto?”
“Or Otto has finished me?”
Sam giggled.
“No,” Stevenson said wistfully. “Someday, perhaps. When I’ve earned a little latitude through more commendable efforts.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re at it again,” said Sam. “So is Mother.”
“I expect she is. Can you tell her I shall be out soon? I’ve promised her a glass of burgundy before the sun is down.”
“Sure,” said Sam, smiling as he turned and left the room.
Deacon Brodie, thought Sevenson to himself as he took up his pen once again. Many were the glasses that the LJR Society had raised to Brodie’s checkered memory—the bulk of them proposed by poor Walter himself. It was curious, though, that Sam had suggested he write something about the Edinburgh guildsman with the two lives. As far as Stevenson knew, the boy could have known nothing about his previous attempt in that vein, the piece at which Blackwood’s had turned up their noses.
On the
day, Fanny offered to come out with him, but he said that, above all else, he needed to be alone. The post had arrived at about two in the afternoon, and when he saw the envelope bearing Coggie’s writing, he knew the news it must contain. At first he had just stood there with the thing in his hand, his heart racing. It was only when the straight edge of the paper and the regular beauty of her script began to waver with his building tears that he ripped the missive open and forced himself through the contents.
The very end had been blessedly easy. There had been a week when the swelling of Walter’s liver and spleen had been very painful, and he had required large doses of laudanum to manage. One morning, upon waking, he had refused the usual draught until his family could be summoned. It was, Coggie said, as though he knew the end was upon him. He made his farewells, apologizing for having caused his loved ones such endless trouble, and then he drank his laudanum and slept. He never regained consciousness, lapsing into a coma and dying the next day but one. The doctor explained that the fluids in his abdomen, fluids resulting from the total failure of his liver and the subsequent packing-in of his kidneys as well, had put such pressure on his heart and lungs that he had died of cardiac arrest. In Walter’s comatose state, the doctor assured them, the end would have been painless.
Stevenson left La Solitude with no notion of where he was headed, except that he was drawn to the sea. He reeled through the busy town, subliminally registering the scores of milling citizens and the frenetic activity of midday trade but feeling utterly, irrevocably cut off from it all. It was as though he were, once again, stuffed inside the diving suit he had donned all those years ago in Wick Harbour, and were trudging along the sea-bottom through silent schools of fish. It was only when he had left the town completely and made his way up and over the pine-covered hill of Costebelle that he found a spot that felt attuned to his mood. He settled in a tiny clearing with a view of the snaking Giens peninsula, threw himself onto the carpet of soft, auburn needles, and wept.
How long he gave way to the all-consuming grief, he had no way of knowing, for he had ultimately fallen asleep. By the time he awoke, the sun had sunk low in the western sky and its rays slanted in baroque majesty through the trunks of the graceful trees. Beyond the far tip of the peninsula, some sort of passenger ship crept slowly across his line of vision, leaving a blur of smoke above its creamy wake. Stevenson imagined finely dressed passengers gathering in a comfortable lounge for a late afternoon tea or aperitif, serenaded by a string quartet playing light airs from Strauss. He smiled briefly at the fancy that a nineteenth-century Charon might well pilot a boat such as this, and might have welcomed Walter personally to the convivial bevy of passengers as they steamed across the Styx to the underworld. Then he felt guilty for smiling, rose to his feet, and made his way back to the town.
He must have wandered every street and square of Hyères, winding in and out, boxing the compass once, twice, and then boxing it again. Bits and pieces of what he saw and heard, he took in: a raven-haired girl of six, perhaps, sitting on a window sill facing inwards and laughing with an intoxicating, bubbly beauty at something that someone was saying or doing; a man beating a dog that cringed, tail between its legs, but evidently too frightened to run for fear of augmented reprisal; two young men, no doubt intoxicated, weaving through the cathedral square with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders, singing out of tune with one another—singing, perhaps, two entirely different melodies. A pretty young woman passed in front of them with a market bag in her hand. She shook her head in a mixture of amusement and disdain. She became Coggie, of course, and the two dithering youths became…
He bought a bottle of some indeterminate red at a dusty and foul-smelling shop near the railway station and, fortified by its cloying sugars, continued his aimless odyssey. Twice, when darkness had fallen, he was accosted by prostitutes, one of them baring a thigh to him under a flickering streetlamp. Once a beggar asked him for a coin, and he reached into his pocket for a handful, dropping them onto the cobblestones with a callousness he quickly regretted. He passed Le Désire, the restaurant of his humiliating undoing, concealing his face so as not to be recognized, although there was no sign of either the diners or the waiter of that troubling evening. He settled for a half-hour at a similar establishment in the same section of the town, but, after picking at an indifferent plate of trout, he purchased another bottle of red and rambled on.
It was well past eleven when he found his way back to the Rue de la Pierre Glissante. As he opened the ground-floor entrance, he was surprised to see Valentine sitting at the kitchen table, leaning over a book. She rose as he entered, straightening her apron and quickly adjusting her cap.
“Monsieur is home,” she said in a soft voice.
“Yes.”
“I am so sad about your friend. Madame has told me.”
“Thank you, Valentine.”
She seemed almost to lose her balance, shuffling back quickly before she steadied herself. In the candlelight, he could see color rising to her cheeks. “I am sorry. How clumsy.”
“No,” said Stevenson, stepping instinctively towards her. Unaccountably, he felt a flush in his own cheeks. He dropped his hands to his side and gazed at her.
“We were worried for you. Madame was worried for you. And little Sam.” Again, she adjusted her apron.
“I am sorry to have given you concern. It was thoughtless of me.”
“It is not often that one loses a best friend. May God send you a good rest this night.”
“Thank you, Valentine.”
“Madame is waiting upstairs.” She lowered her eyes and reached over to close her book.
Dear Baxter.
Poor Ferrier. It bust me horrid. He was, after Bob and you, the oldest of my friends. This has been a strange awakening. Last night, with the window open on the lovely, still night, I could have sworn he was in the room with me. I heard his rich laughter as, even now, I see his coral waistcoat studs that he wore the first time he dined in my house. I see his attitude, leaning back a little, already with something of a portly air. How I admired him! And now in the West Kirk!
I am trying to write out this haunting bodily sense of absence, besides which what else should I write of? Looking back, I think of him as one who was good, though sometimes clouded. He was the only gentleman of all my friends, certainly the only modest man among the lot. He never gave himself away; he kept back his secret. Dear, dear, what a wreck! And yet how pleasant in the retrospect!
When I come to think of it, I do not know what I said to his sister when I learned the news, and I fear to try again. Could you send her this? It would let her know how entirely, in the mind of (I suppose) his oldest friend, the good, true Ferrier obliterates the memory of the other, who was only his “lunatic brother.” This came upon me, overall, with terrible suddenness. I was surprised, in the end, by this death; and it is fifteen years since I first saw the handsome face in the Spec. I expected to have died first.
Love to you, your wife, and her sisters. Ever yours, dear boy.
R.L.S.
8
“I have had what is far more to the purpose,” returned the doctor solemnly: “I have had a lesson—O God, Utterson, what a lesson I have had!”
—DR. HENRY JEKYLL
EDINBURGH, APRIL 1884
“We do believe we’ve turned up a comfortable house in Bournemouth. A wee bit dear, I would say. But thoroughly respectable.” Stevenson grinned at his father. “Even Fanny seems to have taken a fancy to this one.”
“She’s given up her mad notion, then? Of returning to America? California?” Thomas Stevenson reached slowly to his right. Lifting the decanter from his desk, he held it up towards his son with an inquiring glance.
“Thank you, Father.” Stevenson rose from his seat and padded across the oriental carpet to where the older man sat, bespectacled and draped in a crimson lap robe. “Just half.” He held out his glass, cringing slightly when the flanged top of the decanter struck hard against t
he rim. He lowered it a jot to make it easier for his father to pour.
“Will that do?”
“Perfect.” Stevenson raised his glass perfunctorily, then returned to his seat while his father poured himself another measure. Stevenson eyed his glass to make sure it had not been chipped. “I believe I’ve persuaded her that Sam will have a better education here than there. I am afraid, though, that she continues to find the English stuffy and overbearing. Especially my London literary friends. Perhaps to a man.”
“Well,” laughed Thomas Stevenson. “Fanny is a perceptive lassie. Not fond of the Sassenachs. Why don’t you come north?”
Stevenson smiled and shook his head. “Our dear Dr. Mennell. I fear he claims the Edinburgh winds would finish me unco hasty. He deems the Hampshire coast a sufficiently risky proposition.”
“You could always go back to France,” huffed the old man, with what appeared to be a touch of resentment. “For all your mother and I see of you. Any of you.”
“No, Father. We really do wish to be closer to you and Mother. Besides, we’ve brought the best of France here with us.”
“This Valentine of yours?”
“Valentine.”
“I must meet this wondrous woman. But tell me about the house.”
“Well,” said Stevenson, setting down his glass, “it has a name. ‘Seaview.’ And it is perhaps a mile’s walk from the coast. A comely yellow brick villa on an acre or so of land. Scores of pine trees for the lungs. Disused stable and coach house—”
“A coach house!” his father exclaimed. “Then we shall have to get you a coach!”
Stevenson smiled. “A pigeon house—”
“And pigeons!” The old man chuckled. “How big?”
“Big enough for the three of us, when Sam’s not at school. And Valentine. Perhaps some other help. And guests, of course. If any can be enticed to visit.”
“How much?”
“Seventeen hundred, I’m afraid.” He looked at his father guiltily.
“Fanny likes it?”
The writer nodded. “There is a wonderful spot for a garden. She claims she could grow tomatoes.”
“Done!”
Seeking Hyde Page 14
