Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 77

“Are you ready?” Belle’s curly head was poking around Louis’s office door.
“The amenuensis arrives,” Louis greeted her, leaning back in his chair.  “Yes, come in. And look at you—stockings and shoes!”

Since his scrivener’s cramp worsened a few months ago, Louis had asked Belle to take his dictation. Today she was outfitted in a neat linen dress, as if reporting to work in a shop.
“Where shall we begin?” she said, her pencil poised for action.

“Another letter to The Times.”

Belle retrieved a piece of Vailima letterhead and returned to her seat. “Sir, colon,” Louis began. “Will you allow me to bring to the notice of your readers the
Sedition, parenthesis, Samoa, end parenthesis, Regulation, comma,  1892, comma, for the Western  Paci?c,  comma,  and  comma,  in  particular  comma,  the  de?nition  in  section  3 question mark …”

Belle’s pen ?ew as he dictated for another ?ve minutes. “I am, sir, your obedient servant, Lord Prickle Trumble.” The Amenuensis smiled indulgently at his pale joke.  “You will be happy to know that is all the lawyering and protesting I shall be doing today.”
“Good.”

“Tomorrow, when you hear the enclosure that goes with this letter, you will despise me, I am quite certain. It is very long.”

“Where are we off to next?”

“Scotland. The Pentland Hills. Brutal father, hanging judge. Romantic son banished to countryside to languish over—”

“—the Kirsties.”

“Indeed.”

Louis had risen early, his mind full of ideas for Weir of Hermiston. He’d taken notes for a steady hour. Now the words came easily as he dictated, and Belle never paused in  her writing except to ask him to slow down.

He could not have guessed two years ago that they would be able to cooperate on such a project. Belle had bitterly resented him for such a long time. After her marriage to Joe Strong, her estrangement from Fanny had only deepened her contempt for Louis. When Louis saw her in San Francisco as he and Fanny prepared to depart on the Casco, Belle had

been damned cold toward him. And when the Casco delivered them to Honolulu, Belle had put on a proud show as an independent woman with an artistic social circle of her own, a royal social circle. Louis could see how shaky her circumstances really were. Her little family was barely surviving. Joe’s addictions were devouring what money he made as a painter. It was for Belle’s sake that Louis and Fanny had agreed to take Joe with them on the Equator.
Later, when Louis went to meet his mother in Sydney, he invited Belle to a meeting with him alone. There had been  so much  bad blood between  them, he wasn’t certain  if she would be open to his suggestion. But he forged ahead and invited her family to come and live at Vailima.

“I never managed to have children of my own. You and Lloyd are my only family. I want you with us. And your mother needs you.”

A ?ood of emotions and memories erupted then, and she explained how she had come to understand why her mother had left her father. “I don’t know about Joe, whether he can get better,” she’d said at the time. “But I cannot come to Samoa without him. He’s Austin’s father.” Louis promptly agreed to her request.

Belle still talked about that meeting in Sydney.  “‘A child at Vailima!’ That’s what you shouted,” she liked to tell Louis. “I’d never seen you so tickled. After that, I don’t think you cared a fig whether I came along with Austin or not.”

She had matured enormously since the days of her vitriolic letters demanding money. She’d apologized for them. “I was behaving like a spoiled brat,” she admitted that day in Sydney. They had been friends ever since. They all missed Austin. Belle was glad to have some purpose now that he was gone. She showed up every day, chatty as a magpie but a great help nonetheless. In the wake of her failed marriage, Louis had tried to make her feel she had a safe place with them at Vailima.

They  worked for  an  hour  before  Belle  got  up  to  go.  “Louis,  I  really  appreciate  your kindness to me.”

Louis embraced her. “A grit joy it is working wi ye, Belle,” he said, glancing toward the clock. “Lunchtime, isn’t it?”

In turning toward the clock, he glimpsed a  ?gure standing on the verandah. Fanny’s face, crazily vexed, stared in at them through the window.

“Fanny!” Louis called out. “Come in. We were just—”

She disappeared from view and in half a second was inside Louis’s study.

“Youuuu!” Fanny screamed. “Both of you!” He saw a blur of blue dress, of Fanny’s arms swinging, waving, and then coming down upon the desk. Her hands went for a stack of manuscript pages, and in a heartbeat she was hurling them around the room. The papers were still flying when she pitched his inkpot, splattering black streaks across the wall.
Trans?xed, Louis watched glass shards ?y in a shower onto the ?oor.  “What the hell, Fanny?” he cried out. He reached out to stop her, but she ?ew past him, pushing Belle out of the way as she charged through the door.