Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 15

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 ?re 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 con?dences. 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 ?re 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 ?oor, he saw the sprightly ?gure of his childhood  nurse—a  tiny  gray-haired  woman  in  a  neat  brown  dress,  ?ying  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 con?ded. 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 ?rst 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 su?ered 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 ?erce opponent of drafts. She could detect the faintest incursion of cold
air and could instantly rig a blanket as a hanging to seal o? 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 ?oor 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 di?erent 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-?oating, 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 wideeyed  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 co?ee 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 ?rst 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 ?gures 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 ?nally 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 insu?erable 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 pro?ted 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 ?nd 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.”

, Thomas Stevenson already occupied the head seat at the table.
“Louis.” His father spoke his name matter-of-factly, as if he were identifying an object. When Louis and his mother were settled, his father lifted his knife and set to work on the lamb chop before him.

“Hello,  Father,”  Louis  said  pointedly,  when  it  became  clear  that  there  would  be  no cordiality. “And how was your trip?”

When Thomas Stevenson spoke, he had the look of a weary academic ?nishing a long

lecture. Thomas kept his head bent and tilted slightly to one side while he glared up from heavy eyelids. His eyebrows winged at an angle, forcing deep horizontal lines to etch his forehead. One always had the sense that he was using every shred of patience he possessed to make his point to a thickheaded audience.

“You’ve had your holiday. It’s time you take on clients.” He pushed mashed potatoes around his plate. “Monday morning, get yourself over to the Parliament House and—”
Louis took a deep breath. “I’ve decided to try to make a go with the writing. I began a book of essays when I was in France, and I thought we might talk about—”
The  head  of  the  father  tipped  farther  forward,  as  if  he  were  confused. “Let  me understand this. You abandoned engineering because you were bored. But you agreed to study the law if I paid for your legal studies. I did so, believing that your writing would be secondary to the law. Now you are saying you won’t practice?”

“It was a compromise. It was never a true calling to me.” “It was an agreement,” he thundered. “Have you forgotten that?”

“I told you when I was fourteen that I wanted to write, and you wouldn’t hear of it. You looked at me and saw another lighthouse builder. And when engineering school didn’t work out, you looked at me and saw a lawyer. I entered the bar for your sake. The truth is, I have no desire to walk the boards of the Parliament House for the rest of my days.” Louis tried to modulate his tone. “I have so many ideas to express. What I want is to become a good writer—a great writer, if it may be. A writer of in?uence. I don’t feel that way about being  an  advocate.”  Louis  waited  for  the  usual  rejoinder:  How  do  you  intend  to  feed yourself?

“Your personal commitments are as fickle as your faith?”

Straight to the  old wounds. Louis measured his words.  “We have been  through  this all before, Father. It isn’t the ideals of Christianity with which I disagree, it’s the intolerance of a religion that won’t permit questions. How can you live with that? If you believe, then believe. But don’t tell me I can’t use the reason I was born with. You are the one who taught me about science, to explore and question.”

His father stood up slowly. “I have made all my life to suit you,” he said, his voice an agonized rumble. “I have worked for you and gone out of my way for you, and the end of it is that I ?nd you in opposition to the Lord Jesus Christ. I would ten times sooner see you lying in your grave than that you should be shaking the faith of other young men and

bringing ruin on other houses as you have brought already upon this.”
“So that is what I will do as a writer? Shake the faith of other young men?” Louis’s eyes ?lled with tears.  “Have you ever once done something for the joy of it? Or is it all just degradation and damnation with you?”

Thomas Stevenson looked stricken. It was an unfair remark, and Louis knew it. His father had nursed him through the nights when he was sickest. He had laughed and played with him as if he were a child himself. But this matter of religion had wedged them apart. You are a good man, Louis thought, but you are cowed by some strange Calvinist devil.
Louis observed his father’s hunched shoulders, his face red with distress. He had long worn  a  neat  beard  like  a  stirrup  around  his  ruddy  face,  without  a  mustache.  In  the lamplight, the bitterness in his heart showed on his naked, downturned mouth.
“I thought to have had someone to help me when I was old,” he said. His father left the dining  room, the food on  his plate gone cold. In  the past, it was
usually Louis who stormed o?, running to his room or racing outside. Thomas Stevenson lumbered to his study and shut the door. Louis had heard it slam in the past after their exchanges. Now he sensed defeat in the dull click of the latch.

Maggie Stevenson eyed her son, her pretty features tortured. She had not spoken up for Louis; these days she rarely did. It did not surprise him. His parents had long enjoyed their own society, and even as the adored only child, he often felt left out. Her silence simply con?rmed what he’d known for some time. My mother is my father’s wife. And the children of lovers are orphans.

“Excuse me,” Louis said. He stood up, fetched his jacket in the vestibule, and headed into the night.