Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan

Author:Nancy Horan [Horan, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: urn|ean|9780345516534
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine
Published: 2014-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

It wasn’t long before Fanny got word from Louis that he had fallen ill in Nice, on his way home. His friends thought it was merely a cold, left him at a hotel, and returned to London. Now he was hemorrhaging. She immediately caught a train to Nice, all the while cursing the hides of Henley and Baxter. Were they even bigger fools than she thought them to be? What would it take to make them realize how fragile Louis was?

When she reached his bedside, she found him sleeping; his cheeks were sunken purple shadows, his fingertips white as paper. The French physician attending him told her to go into the hallway.

“Mr. Stevenson has pneumonia, which has aggravated his poor lungs into hemorrhaging,” he said, after closing the door to Louis’s room. “You should notify a male friend or member of the family that he may be needed, in case your husband dies.”

Fanny was stunned. She searched his face and found only dull resignation. “I need to contact his mother to get here right away,” she muttered.

“Where is she?”

“Edinburgh.”

The doctor shook his head. “She won’t arrive in time.”

Fanny sat beside Louis’s bed throughout the night, watching in frozen panic as he struggled to breathe. By morning, though, her husband was performing his Lazarus impersonation once again.

“Would you kindly get me a newspaper, Fan?” he asked when he opened his eyes. “I feel as if I don’t know a thing about what’s going on in the world.”

With the help of the hotel manager, Fanny arranged for a visit from a different doctor, who gave Louis a good once-over and announced, “You could live until you are seventy, sir, but you must curtail the traveling. You are a writer, yes?”

“Yes,” Louis replied. “A very seedy one, at the moment.”

“We are going to have to bind your right arm so that you are not tempted to use it. In this way, you will be able to lie very still. No talking, either. That is how it must be until your hemorrhaging stops.”

Fanny was unsure how she would succeed in transporting Louis sixty-five miles back to Hyères. In a panic, she contacted Louis’s old canoeing friend Walter Simpson; when he declined, she suspected what he thought: that she was a Cassandra and this was a false alarm. She called upon Bob next, even though she had enlisted him far too many times in the past. He was married now, like Walter and the others, but Bob said yes, he would come. They managed to get Louis home slowly, with intervals of rest along the train route. Fanny was relieved and moved when Henley arranged for his trusted English doctor to come to Hyeres to treat Louis. Along with Baxter and Bob, he guaranteed to pay the doctor’s fees.

As she nursed Louis in the weeks that followed, she acted as his amenuensis as well. He was forbidden to pace, let alone get out of bed, though that did not stop him from dramatizing the dialogue as he dictated pieces of a romance he was calling Prince Otto.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.