The steps drew swiftly nearer, and swelled out suddenly louder as they turned the end of the street. The lawyer, looking forth from the entry, could soon see what manner of man he had to deal with.
—THE NARRATOR
BOURNEMOUTH, OCTOBER 1885
The man dashes along, his coattails flying, footfalls clattering between darkened façades that lean in, like huge stone spectators, over the twisting thoroughfare. Lamplight glints off the damp cobblestones as he sprints on, his breath coming in sharp gasps. It is a racecourse to break an ankle, but his pace never slackens as he whips his head from side to side, looking desperately for a gap in the endless ranks of buildings that line his flight from his pursuers. At last, all but breathless, he spies the dark doorway of a public house slightly ajar and he bursts through the opening into a low-ceilinged room. He finds himself utterly alone, the only presence and movement a fire that lies dying in the grate. As he approaches it, stealthily on his toes, its glow unaccountably mounts until it lights his face like a footlight on the stage. His complexion is swarthy, his features coarse, and as his breathing slows in the silent room, he wipes a bead of sweat from his low brow. Dropping to a seat at a table by the fire, he reaches into a pocket and, pulling out a folded packet of paper, lays it out before him and peels back the layers. At the very center of it sits a clot of white powder, still compressed by its wrapping. Grinning with satisfaction and relief, the man lowers his head and laps at the pile with his tongue, noisily, like a hound. He licks every crease and fold, then holds the paper up to the fire to be sure nothing remains. Evidently satisfied, he throws the paper onto the table and leans back in his chair. For a moment he is still. Then, with a sudden grunt, he thrusts his legs out straight before him, sending the table flying across the scarred floor. His arms straighten rigidly as well, and his head arches back, the cords in his neck straining as though they will snap. Side to side his head flails, in quickening rhythm, and his dark features swell like a child’s balloon. His cheeks surge out to swallow his nose, his brow bulging out above until his eyes all but disappear into the dark crease between the two mounting waves of flesh. A gurgle and then a scream break from his distended lips, and his hands fly to his face, pulling and clawing as though they belong to another creature altogether. Staggering to his feet, he stumbles towards the bar and towards the mirrored wall behind the serried bottles. Sweeping them aside, he reaches into his pocket for a box of lights and, striking one with difficulty in his shaking hands, he holds it up to his face. Even as he watches, the grisly swelling begins to subside and, as his skin settles back into patterns of human order, a new set of features emerges. A high and pale brow. Eyes wide-set and sensitive on a narrow, even delicate, face. A chevron of moustache where, before, there had been none. He holds the match more tightly, and leans closer to the mirror to be sure. Yes. Yes indeed. The powder has done its work. Standing back in the litter of smashed glass, he throws his head skyward and laughs, a deep howl that shakes his very bones, shakes him again, shakes his shoulder, pulls at him like someone wresting a drowning man from a cold river, calls to him with a voice of dread.
“Louis! Louis! For God’s sake, what is it? Louis!”
He raised his head from a sweat-drenched pillow, struggling to orient himself. Fanny shook his shoulder again and leaned closer, her breath hot in his ear. “You were screaming in your sleep, dearest. What was it? Are you all right?”
Stevenson rolled onto his back, then sat up in the darkened room. The house was utterly silent. “Damn it, Fanny? Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.”
“My God.” Fanny laughed with relief, sitting up beside him. “You were screaming bloody murder. What was I supposed to do? Just lie here and let the neighbors think…I don’t know what the neighbors would think.”
Stevenson rubbed his eyes, then wiped a drop of something from the tip of his nose. “Damn! I don’t know. Perhaps that I was reviewing our finances.”
“Louis!”
“Or,” he turned to her, “that my savage American wife was molesting me once again.”
“Molesting you?”
“Fulfilling her wifely duties, then.”
“Is it that awful?” laughed Fanny. “What I do for you?” She reached over beneath the counterpane and slid her hand down to his crotch.
“Well. Not exactly awful.” He could feel himself hardening to her touch.
“Oooh. I think I sense some interest down there.”
“Perhaps.” He adjusted his hips to make himself more accessible.
“You’re not about to scream again, are you?”
“I don’t think so, no.” He lay back in bed, banging his head on the headboard. “Ouch.”
“Does it hurt?” Stevenson chuckled. “Let momma kiss it.”
When it was done, Fanny curled up next to him. “There. That should help you get back to your dreaming.”
“Thank you.”
“Mind you, no more crying out.”
“Of course, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”
He felt a slight blow to his shoulder, and then her arm crept across his chest as she nuzzled closer. Darkness welled back.
Fanny awoke to find herself alone.
“Louis?” she called. She sat up and looked about the room. “Louis?” There was no reply.
She rose, donning her robe and slippers before she hurried downstairs. She found him in the dining room, bent over a sheaf of papers with pen in hand, a cup of tea off to the side. “Here you are.”
He peered up at her distractedly.
“I woke to an empty bed,” announced Fanny.
“What? Oh! I’m sorry, Pig.”
“You couldn’t sleep?”
“Oh, I did,” he replied with a smile. He laid down the pen and pushed the papers away. “I did. Your ministrations were marvelously soporific.”
“I’m not sure how I should take that.”
“Well, I hope. But I’m afraid I was too excited to linger this morning, as adorable as you looked just lying there. Softly snoring.”
“Louis!”
“I was far too aroused.”
“Still?”
Stevenson waved his hand. “The dream you so rudely interrupted?”
“Like the man from Porlock?”
“In the interrupting, perhaps. Hardly in what followed.”
Fanny grinned and rearranged her robe.
“I’ve been jotting things down. Playing the sedulous ape to my brownies.” He gestured towards the papers and pen. “I think they have provided me with my missing link.”
“Your missing link?”
“The body for the story I’ve been after, you know…it seems like forever. About that sense of one man being two that I am always dithering on about.”
“You mean we’ll finally be able to put all that to rest?”
“I should get it all down today. I must.”
“Weren’t you saying you couldn’t wait to get back to David Balfour?”
“Did I?”
“Haven’t you left him and his companion starving out there on the moor somewhere?”
Stevenson snorted. “Let them eat rabbits.” He reached for a cigarette.
Fanny frowned.
“It fuels the muses,” he explained.
“Then at least give me one.”
He pushed the box over to her, then struck a match and lit for both of them.
“Do you think you could meet Sam’s train?” he asked, exhaling with obvious relish.
“He’ll be expecting you to be there, too.”
“I know he will. I’m simply too energized by what my little midnight artisans have tossed my way. I must play about with them before they flit away.”
Fanny sighed. “What do you have, then? Tell me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She glanced at him impatiently. “This could get tiresome, you know? All this newfound ma’aming.”
Stevenson eyed her from beneath an arched brow. “Yes, dearest.”
He detailed excitedly the flight through the darkened streets, the powder, and the transformation—judiciously omitting the curious but intriguing portrait in the public house mirror of the dreamer himself. “There was that,” he said, “and before that there was a very vivid scene of the man in the mirror, the transformed man, but this time he was sitting at a window high up on a wall. A particularly filthy wall. It was inside a narrow courtyard of some sort, and the evening sky was fading higher up above. And as he sits there, disconsolately, two acquaintances walk into the musty court—perhaps I myself was one of them, I don’t recall—and they see him sitting there. And as they speak with him, just pleasantries you know, this look of fright creeps over the poor soul’s face. And, even as he reaches out to lower the sash, a dreadful change sweeps over his features and this poor old gent turns into…well, a horror.”
“Fascinating.” Fanny tapped the ash of her cigarette into his saucer. “And may I ask…?”
“Of course.”
“Was this horror he turned into anything like your runner in the streets?”
Stevenson laughed. “You are acute, Pig!”
“Goodness! I’m getting a bit of a chill.”
“And I as well,” cried Stevenson. “The wretched man just…reverts under the cool eyes of friends. There’s no stopping the transformation!”
“No,” responded Fanny. “I can’t wait to see how you flesh it all out.”
“Nor can I, to be honest. Thus my appeal to you.”
Fanny reached across the table to clutch his hand. “I’ll be happy to fetch Sammy, then. And you can devote your whole day to cavorting with your brownies.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Fanny reached for his teacup, pretending to toss it at her husband. She failed to notice it was still half-full, and a good measure of tea spilled out onto her robe and the tablecloth below. “Fuck and piss!” she exclaimed, reaching up to cover her mouth in embarrassment.
“‘Oh, is that you, Millie?’” sang Stevenson, cupping his hand dramatically behind his ear. “‘Yes, indeed. That was Mrs. Stevenson calling out for you.’”
Home for a brief vacation and filled with tales of arrogant sixth-formers, Latin grammar, and wretched food, Sam had taken up rugby football and had both a swollen nose and a blackened eye to prove it.
They shared a late luncheon together, after which Stevenson excused himself and retreated to the bedroom, where he had been writing the entire morning. Fanny had been surprised to find him sequestered there when she returned from the railway station, propped as he was against a huge bank of pillows in a cloud of tobacco smoke, oblivious to Sam’s racket as he barreled into the house and up the stairs with his luggage. When she had questioned his location, he mumbled something about the best place to recapture the dream being the same place he had had it.
So it went, remarkably, for three full days, two of them marked by as nasty a tempest as Bournemouth had experienced in decades. Never had Fanny seen Stevenson so consumed by a project. He left strict instructions with the maids not to be disturbed, and the few times when Fanny, in daylight hours, deigned to come into the room, she found him hunched intently over his manuscript, heedless of the torrents of rain lashing at the windowpanes three feet from his head. Only twice could she prevail upon him to come down to the dining room—for lunch the second day and a late breakfast the third. Once, when Valentine knocked at the door with a light supper on a tray, he sent her away with a snarl.
After a full day of this, Sam, as unaccustomed as Fanny to seeing his stepfather so totally consumed by his writing, swung between filial concern and clear disappointment at being ignored, such that Fanny felt she had to say something. “It’s for Sam that I am doing this,” Stevenson shot back at her. “Sam and the rest of you.” Each of the nights, Fanny fell asleep amidst the flicker of candlelight and the scratching of the nib, and two of the mornings she awoke to the same sound.
“Did you sleep at all, Louis?”
“Enough.”
On the third morning, Fanny woke to the gentle whistling of her husband’s breath. She raised her head from the pillow and looked over to see him lying on his back, his mouth slightly open and one arm tossed back over his head. The counterpane lay halfway down his chest and, since the room was chilly, she pulled the cover gently up to his unshaven chin. She sat up slowly so as not to disturb him and, looking at the table to his side, noted a pile of paper stacked neatly beneath the extinguished candle. Next to it lay Stevenson’s pen and an uncapped bottle of ink.
She slipped her legs out from under the covers and, dropping her feet to the floor, slid them into her slippers. She cringed at the creaking bedstead as she rose from the mattress, but Stevenson whistled on as she donned her robe and tiptoed around the bed to stand there next to him.
The tempest had abated. Outside the window, the nearly naked branches of an oak tree scarcely moved against the brightening sky. Somewhere in the middle distance, a rook or two cawed away. She screwed the cap onto the inkbottle and gazed down at her sleeping spouse, wishing he would close his mouth. How many marriages would ever be solemnized, she wondered, if everyone who intended to marry were required to see a future spouse lying asleep before the banns could be proclaimed? How often might Louis have wondered the same thing while he peered at her dozing? She clenched her jaw tightly and looked down at the stack of papers. There was a look of finality about it. Should she slip the manuscript out from under the candle stand and begin reading it at once? She decided against it, adjusted the covers once more around him, and slipped quietly out of the room.
Valentine must have heard her descending the stairs, and she came into the drawing room to find her mistress standing in front of the fire, warming her hands.
“Are you wanting breakfast now, madame?”
“I don’t think so, Valentine. I believe I’ll wait for Sam.”
The maid nodded. “And Monsieur Stevenson? Will we be seeing him today, do you think?”
Fanny stared at the young woman, vaguely galled by the secure smile on her lips. She was tempted to reply that it was hardly any business of hers. “I don’t know, Valentine. We’ll just have to see, won’t we? I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“The master is finished with his writing, then?”
“I don’t know. I expect he might be. But you know him almost as well as I do,” she added, regretting it as soon as she said it.
“Not at all,” Valentine replied. “But I do know he is not always content with what he writes.”
Her smile seemed completely open and sincere. In place of her doubts, Fanny felt a sudden and unlooked-for kinship with this woman, as far removed as she herself was from her native home and all things familiar.
“So,” said Valentine. “I will be in the kitchen. Tell me, or send Millie, when the young master has come down. Or monsieur himself.”
She turned and left the room without a curtsy—leaving Fanny to wonder what, if anything, that might mean.
Sam tramped down the stairs shortly past nine, calling out loudly for his mother.
“Shhhh,” hissed Fanny, rushing out into the hall to quiet him. “Your father is asleep.”
“Oooh, sorry,” said the lad, hunching his shoulders. “You’re still in your robe?”
“I didn’t want to wake Louis by dressing.” She looked askance at his jacket and tie. “And look at you! I keep telling you you don’t need to dress for breakfast here.”
Sam looked down at himself and laughed. “I promise to be more slovenly tomorrow. So has Louis finished writing whatever it is he’s been writing? Or are we going to spend yet another day in collective banishment?”
“I know,” sighed Fanny. “But the signs are promising. I found papers stacked neatly by his bedside. I didn’t dare touch them, of course. We’ll just have to see. Breakfast?”
“Hell, yes! I’m bloody well starving.”
Fanny cringed theatrically. “I’m glad to see your fellow scholars are having such a positive effect on your language. Or is it the masters?”
“Oh, Mother. I am learning so much,” exclaimed Sam as they passed into the dining room. “I can conjugate the verb ‘bugger’ in Latin.”
“Samuel Lloyd Osbourne,” cried Fanny, turning and shaking him by the shoulders. “That’s awful.”
“I’m joking, Mother. All we’ve been doing is amo, amas, amat. Cogito, cogitas, cogitat.”
“Well, I’m relieved to hear that. Just don’t let your father hear you talking that way.”
“Six thousand miles away? I doubt he will.”
“You know what I mean.”
Sam and Fanny were just finishing their breakfast when they heard a creak on the stairs. Moments later, Stevenson stepped into the doorway in his striped pajamas and hastily donned robe. He raised a packet of papers in his hand, beaming.
“Good morning, beloved family.”
“Good morning, Lou,” replied Sam. “I can call you Lou, can’t I?”
Stevenson felt a curious stab of emotion. “I suppose we have outgrown ‘Lulu,’ haven’t we?”
“Well…”
“You may call me anything you like. Lou. Lulu. Velvet Coat. Writer of Genius.”
Fanny motioned briskly to her husband, fumbling at her waist.
Stevenson looked down and, throwing the papers onto the sideboard, belted his robe. “Thank you, dearest.”
“Writer of genius,” repeated Sam. “Are we talking about something recent?”
“My goodness!” exclaimed Stevenson, picking up the manuscript and walking over to the table. “Am I to assume from your phrasing that nothing I have penned in the past decade is worth a goat’s bleat?”
Sam laughed and shook his head. “Lou! Lulu! Really! Have you finished, then?”
“I have!” He threw the lot of paper onto the table, halfway between his wife and stepson. “At least a solid draft.”
“And?” asked Fanny.
“And…” He reached up to stroke his moustache. “I do believe it may be the best thing I’ve written. Ever!”
“It came like a tidal wave. I could barely stop writing.” He held up his right hand like a withered claw, then shook it energetically.
“So we noticed,” grinned Sam. “What’s it about?”
Stevenson looked at Fanny. She tipped her head briefly from side to side, weighing the situation, then nodded.
“A rather bad man, I would say. Who makes a show of being good.”
“Oh, like Brodie,” observed Sam. “Not another cabinet maker, though?”
Stevenson chuckled. “No, not another cabinet maker. A doctor.”
Sam reached over and laid his hand on the papers. “Can I read it?”
“I’m not sure it’s quite ready for such an important eye. Perhaps your mother will oblige me by being the first to subject herself to my immodest scribblings.”
“So they’re immodest, are they?” asked Fanny.
“I shall leave that for you to judge.”
“Very well, then. Perhaps I can find a few moments for a quick look-through. You’re sure it will be worth my while?” Her grin was especially impish.
“If you would indulge me, dear heart, I would be ever so grateful.” Stevenson held the manuscript out to her. “Remember, it’s the fruit of only three days’ labor.” He smiled cautiously as she snatched it from his hand.
After Sam’s time away at school, Stevenson was prepared for his stepson to have outgrown forever their war games of yore, especially given his new preference in names. Nonetheless, once the lad had run upstairs to brush his teeth and tromped down again to the drawing room, it was Sam himself who proposed the idea.
“I don’t suppose you have any old soldiers lying around, do you?” the boy asked as he idly picked up the latest copy of Punch.
“Of course I do. I must tell you, though, that their pensions are costing me a fortune.”
Sam laughed and closed the paper. “Do you suppose you could dig them out? Perhaps we could fight a battle or two…for old times’ sake?”
The expression hit Stevenson, for the second time that morning, with unlooked-for poignancy. Could Sam the growing boy already be mourning a vanishing age of innocence and play? Or was Sam the young man revealing a maturing solicitousness for him, Stevenson, for whom games of war had so long been the surest means of rapport between them? He thought back to his own most recent visit to Heriot Row, when he had found his father standing alone in the old day nursery, a toy boat in his hand. Thomas Stevenson claimed he had felt a draft flowing down into the hall below; he was just checking, he’d protested, to be sure all the windows were latched.
“Nothing would please me more. Let me just go fetch a pair of armies. Who shall it be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Napoleon and the Russians? Borodino?”
“Very well. And I suppose you’ll want to be the French,” sighed Stevenson in mock resignation. On his way to the stairs, he stole a glance into the dining room. Fanny sat at the table, her chin propped on a fist as she pored intently over his work. Hearing him pass, she looked up and smiled. She seemed, from the relative size of the piles, to be a fair way into it. As he turned again to climb to his room, Stevenson registered, for reasons that were hard to ascertain, more concern than he was used to feeling over the customary spousal review.
They had fought the battle of Borodino more than once before, and it unfolded with reasonable speed. Stevenson’s roundly beaten Cossacks were already retreating from the field when Fanny stepped quietly into the room.
“Borodino,” he explained in response to her puzzled look. “Sam is Napoleon. I am Kutuzov. I am in full retreat.”
“Oh my!”
“And look at Sam, if you would. You can tell how much he wants to break the rules.”
“I do not,” laughed the youth.
“Yes, you do. Do you see those troops over there?” he asked Fanny, pointing to a clutch of lead horsemen massed around Sam’s left knee. “That’s the Imperial Guard.”
“I see. They do look imperious.”
“And if Sam—Napoleon—if Napoleon were to send them after me right now”—he looked up at her with an air of helplessness—“it would result in a terrible, crushing defeat. Cataclysmic.”
“Oh my! But he can’t?”
“Well, he could. But that’s not the way it happened.”
“Napoleon wouldn’t risk them,” explained Sam. “So I won’t risk them either.”
“So the battle’s over?” asked Fanny.
“Nothing to do but bury the dead,” replied her son.
“And dash home for some vodka,” added Stevenson. “A great deal of vodka, I should think.”
They shared a happy laugh.
“So,” said Stevenson, climbing up from the floor and walking over to lean on the mantle, “have you finished as well, love?” He pointed to the papers in Fanny’s hand. “Am I now to be crushed on this front as well?”
“Not at all.” Fanny stepped carefully over the battlefield and seated herself in James’s chair. She laid the papers in her lap and patted them gently, an uncharacteristically prim smile on her face.
“What do you think?” asked Stevenson. Again he felt a curious surge of anxiety.
“I can certainly see why it consumed you totally. For days.”
“And by that you mean…?”
“I mean it is remarkable, Louis. It is remarkable.”
“You like it?”
“I do.”
Stevenson’s knees nearly buckled with relief. A part of him bridled, as always, at depending on Fanny for approval, but at least this insistent little fable seemed to pass muster. “What do you like about it, then?”
“Well, the plot is ingenious. Brilliant, even. Your resolution took me completely unawares.”
“Goodness,” said Sam. “Now you really have to let me read it.”
Stevenson smiled at him. “We shall see.”
“It is so, so suspenseful, Louis. And the language all through is perfect. Powerful. There were times when I felt I was right there in the streets of London—caught up in all of the city’s tumult, swept along by the rush of the crowd. Even choking on the fog.” She made a little gesture towards her mouth. “I declare, when I finished the last page, I felt as though I might have to jump in the bath to wash away all the filth.”
“It sounds just delightful,” quipped Sam. “Maybe Pear’s Soap will decide to publish it, Lulu. To further their sales, you know.”
“Then I shall have truly arrived,” chuckled Stevenson. “What a consummation, to have penned the first shilling shocker destined to improve its readers’ hygiene.” He looked at Fanny, who laughed more guardedly than he might have expected.
“It is a shilling shocker,” she remarked.
“I know it is,” replied Stevenson. “A perfect book-end for ‘The Body Snatcher.’ Or worse. But I expect it will help us buy our Christmas goose.”
For a moment, Fanny sat there silently. “You know, Louis,” she said at last, “it could be a masterpiece.”
“You are too kind.” Stevenson reached up to adjust the watercolor over the mantle. “Unless by ‘could be’ you mean that it’s not.” He turned and looked at her uncertainly. “Quite. Yet.”
Fanny slid forward in her chair and restraightened the papers in her lap. “You said you thought it might be the best thing you’d ever written.”
Stevenson wagged his head equivocally.
“Well, I really think it could be.”
“But?”
Fanny glanced at her men. Both were staring at her expectantly.
“Out with it!” exclaimed Stevenson. “You’re not helping me with insinuations.”
She sighed and drew her shoulders back. “You’ve made a story of it. And a fine story, Louis. It’s extremely exciting.”
Stevenson nodded.
“But it should be an allegory, don’t you see? And I’m afraid…”
“What? You’re afraid of what?”
“I’m afraid you’ve totally missed the point.”
Stevenson took his elbow off the mantle, crossing his arms and standing squarely on both feet. He inhaled deeply and evenly. “An allegory. Explain what you mean.”
“Your man is bad all through,” Fanny declared. She spoke softly, as though she knew she was venturing onto perilous ground. “The transformation is only to escape detection and blame.”
“Yes?” With his neck raked forward, Stevenson looked vaguely like a brooding crane.
“So it really is only Brodie with a twist. In prose.”
“It isn’t at all like Brodie,” Stevenson shot back. “Brodie was a petty thief, not a…”
“Voluptuary?”
Stevenson paused briefly and then nodded. “And, what is more, Brodie was always in complete control of himself. This man…” There was a spell of total silence. When Stevenson spoke again, his voice was as soft as his wife’s, but there was clearly something mounting underneath. “What, then, do you propose that I do?”
For a moment Fanny was still. “It’s the tale of a criminal, Louis. A clever criminal. But it could become the tale of anyone. Everyone. An allegory of all humanity, don’t you see?” She waited for a response, but nothing came from him. Sam sat perfectly still on the floor, looking back and forth between the two of them. “You could make him a good man, Louis. You should. A normal man, struggling with his appetites. Urges of the flesh. You remember we talked about all that with James.”
She looked up at Stevenson, who was breathing ever more deeply, his arms folded tightly across his chest.
“You wanted to write something about Walter Ferrier? Or someone like him? Something good and strong that might make a difference? That’s what this ought to be, love. Really. That would be your masterpiece. Instead of, like Sammy said, another Deacon Brodie.”
“Another Brodie,” Stevenson repeated flatly after a long and awkward silence. “Another…fucking…Brodie.”
Fanny turned towards Sam. His eyes were wide in surprise. When she looked back at her husband, it was as though he were holding his breath before a plunge into deep water. At length, his lips began moving, shaping what seemed to be words, although he didn’t utter a sound. Slowly he turned to the mantle and, with an eerie languor, reached for one of the crystal glasses that rested there. He hefted it briefly, looking around the room, and then jerked the tumbler up to his chest with both hands. Fanny watched, transfixed, as his forearms began to tremble.
“Louis!” she exclaimed. “What on earth are you doing?”
There was a sharp snap and her husband’s hands flew apart, the remains of the tumbler falling to the hearth. He looked down as blood oozed then rushed from his left palm.
“Oh my God,” cried Sam, leaping to his feet. He ran into the dining room and fetched a napkin, which he brought back and pressed into his stepfather’s open hand.
“No, there’s glass,” said Stevenson. With his other hand, he pulled a long sliver from his flesh and turned to place it on the mantle. Looking vacantly at the boy, he wrapped the napkin tightly around the ugly wound and walked across the room to where his wife sat frozen in dismay. He held out his uninjured hand, palm up. She stared at him, uncomprehending. He extended his hand again, and she realized what he wanted. She doubled the manuscript over on itself and handed it to him, looking down as he walked quietly out of the room. A single drop of his blood trembled like mercury on the pale blue bombazine of her skirt and then, as she watched, it sank dully into the fabric.
The afternoon was almost gone when Valentine stepped into the drawing room.
Fanny and Sam had taken luncheon alone and then retreated to the fire, where they sat for hours, neither of them speaking of what they had earlier witnessed in the room. Fanny knitted, jumping up every now and again to straighten something on the wall or move a piece of furniture ever so slightly. Sam worked his way through the old numbers of Punch that Stevenson kept stacked in the bottom of the Dutch cupboard. Occasionally he chuckled quietly to himself, and when Fanny asked him what he found amusing, he explained or came over to her chair to show her a clever drawing. One of them, curiously a propos both of Sam’s Pear’s Soap remark and Stevenson’s unbroken three-day sequestration, was entitled “A Good Advertisement.” It showed an ill-groomed, unshaved, and obviously odiferous man stooped over his desk. “I used your soap two years ago,” read the motto; “since then I have used no other.” The only real cheer in the room, though, came from the fireplace and the ironwork cage in which the two family canaries trilled in ignorant bliss.
“Monsieur Stevenson would like to see you,” Valentine announced.
“Me?” asked Fanny, looking up from her knitting.
The maid nodded.
“Thank you.” Fanny set her wool and needles aside and gazed over at Sam. The boy shrugged and went back to his reading.
Fanny rose and made her way to the stairs. She stole with real trepidation to the bedroom door, peering in to see Stevenson sitting once again in the bed, his head thrown back on the bank of pillows. He had unbuttoned his shirt, and his long neck and concave chest looked grotesquely wasted and pale. He heard her approach and turned to her with a look of strained resignation.
“There,” he said, pointing a long finger towards the fire. “There it lies.”
“My God, Louis,” shouted Fanny as she rushed over to the grate. Trembling on the glowing coals sat layer upon layer of feathery ash. Only at the very center did any paper remain, a round the size of a communion wafer bearing a tracery of familiar script. Fanny turned to her husband, her mouth agape. No words came.
“You were right,” he said softly, his voice hoarse and broken.
“My God, Louis. Is that the whole thing?”
He nodded silently.
“Why? What on earth were you thinking? Why?”
“I would have been tempted.”
“Tempted how? To use it after all?”
“This was the only way. To start over.”
There was a rustle at the door, and the two looked over to see Sam standing there, leaning against the doorjamb with an expression of grave concern. “I heard you call out, Mother. Is everything all right?”
Fanny choked back a curious urge to laugh. “Everything is fine, dear. Lulu is just saying he’s sorry for frightening us.”
Sam looked at his stepfather, who stared straight ahead.
“Everything is under control here,” said Fanny. “We’re fine. Why don’t you run along downstairs?”
Sam looked doubtful, but he took his hands off the doorjamb and made to leave. “If you need me, let me know.”
Once her son had left, Fanny walked over to the bed and began to sit. Stevenson moved slightly to the side to make way for her.
“Oh, Louis. I’m so sorry. Look what you’ve done to yourself.”
“I was so angry.”
Fanny reached out to touch his arm.
“I think I was about to hurl that glass, Pig. God help me, but I was.” He paused for a moment. “But I knew that you were absolutely right. It was nothing more than the deacon again, back from the dead. And, naturally, that enraged me even more!”
Fanny sighed and nodded.
“I suppose I took my anger out upon myself.” He held up his bandaged hand. “And on that!” Again he pointed at the fire.
“Oh, Louis!”
Stevenson turned to her with a guarded smile. He held up an open notebook that had been resting on the counterpane to his left. “Look.”
Fanny could see two short passages on the recto sheet, separated by a tracery of doodles.
“What is it?”
“I have started over.”
“Oh my!”
“May I?”
“Of course,” replied Fanny, feeling something between giddy relief and genuine excitement.
“The solicitor was a man of a rugged countenance, never lighted by a smile,” he read. “Cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. I’m afraid I don’t have his name yet, but the fellow will be our eyes and ears. What do you think?”
“Well, it’s hard to tell.” She giggled nervously. “There’s not much of it, is there?”
“There will be more. It will be better.”
“Louis!”
“It will. I shall end up thanking you.”
She looked at him uncertainly.
“Of course I have not quite reached that point. Not just yet. But I will, I expect.” Incredibly, there was a grin on his haggard face.
She reached out and touched his cheek with the backs of her fingers.
“So,” he said, holding up the notebook. “Lean, long, dusty, dreary.” He stared at her with those vulnerable eyes, the cornered hare’s. “Am I, too, in any way lovable? Still?”
Fanny shook her head and laughed outright. “You are not lovable. You are impossible.”
“Impossibly lovable?”
“Let’s just stick with impossible,” she said through a widening smile.
“Fanny.”
“Yes?”
“This is important.”
“What is it, Louis?”
“About this.” He shook the notebook. “I have a notion how to develop the allegory, as you so bravely envisioned it. And you were right about Ferrier, as well. I feel poor Walter can breathe real life into this. Not that it should be about him in any literal way, you know…but as the tale of a good man plagued by a damnable addiction.” In the incalculably dark moments that had come on the heels of the manuscript’s going into the fire, Stevenson’s departed friend had indeed found his way back into the writer’s creative mind. Watching grimly from the bed as the flames subsided, Stevenson had recalled with arresting vividness that confessional moment when Ferrier had resorted to another set of pronouns to describe his addictive self—his depraved “other” self, if his testimony were to be trusted. Stevenson could almost instantaneously imagine a scene in which, in the renewed fiction’s own confessional interlude, his protagonist would similarly distance himself from a concealed and now condemned side of his nature, seeking in that way to escape all responsibility for his deeds: It was he, the man might insist. He, I say. I cannot say I!
Stevenson gazed intently at his wife. “Walter is my dumb grenadier. I must speak for him. You do remember that poem?”
“Of course I remember it.” “Let me read you the other bit. From what I imagine will be a kind of denouement from the man himself: I was born to a large fortune, endowed besides with a lively mind, by nature inclined to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellow men, and thus with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as makes the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures.”
Fanny shook her head and tittered.
“What? What is it?”
“That’s not Ferrier. Or not just Ferrier.”
“I’m just remembering our little exchange after your patricidal dream. The one you had in Hyères. About respectability driving you to hypocrisy.”
Stevenson smiled through a moderate blush. “One writes what one knows. But, Fanny…”
His wife nodded.
“If there is anything else I need to know, please…” There was perhaps the hint of a tear in his eye.
“Tell you now?”
“Tell me now.”
She wiped at his cheek. “Well…goodness. This suddenly feels awfully momentous. It makes me so nervous.”
“My God,” sighed Stevenson over-loudly. “You have broadsides in reserve? I thought perhaps another swipe or two from your cutlass, but there are broadsides?”
Fanny shook her head and laughed softly. “No, Louis. Just two things, I suppose.”
The writer pulled his head back and squinted at her.
She plunged ahead. “There was too much sex.”
Stevenson’s eyes opened wide, then he slowly nodded. “I thought you might say that. You can’t shake yourself loose of Mrs. Grundy, can you?”
Fanny shook her head. “Why should I? Louis, you simply cannot write about a gentleman using prostitutes.”
“But gentlemen do.”
“Of course they do. But this story will never see the light of day as is. As was,” she corrected herself, with a wistful glance at the fire. “And you must get rid of that bit about your ‘disgraceful pleasures.’ Jekyll’s ‘disgraceful pleasures.’ What were they, ‘indulged from an early age?’”
“Why?” asked Stevenson. “That seems innocuous enough to me. Ambiguous enough.”
“Oh, please,” objected Fanny.
“All right. What did you make of them, then?”
“What else? Self-abuse.”
Stevenson chuckled. “Self-abuse?”
“Of course. What else could it be?”
“I don’t know. Anything. A childish taste for sweets. Dressing like a woman?”
Fanny slapped him on the arm. “I mean it.”
Stevenson studied her closely then sighed. “Done, love. No masturbating from an early age. And?”
“And?”
“You said there were two things.”
“Yes. And the powders.”
“What about the powders?”
She looked at him uncertainly. “They are too fanciful. Don’t you think? Really!”
“They were part of the dream,” Stevenson replied, with more than a touch of impatience. “Right at the core of it. They are where the whole idea came from.”
“Couldn’t you make them something else, though? Something closer to what a man might really use to endow a night self.”
“Such as what?”
“I don’t know,” answered Fanny. “Opium. Strong spirits.”
“This needn’t be Ferrier’s actual life, you know, Pig. In fact, it shouldn’t be. He has a family.”
“Still.”
Stevenson sighed. “Then what about the physical change?”
“I don’t know, Louis. There could be a disguise.”
“It’s not a story about what a man wears,” responded Stevenson with some animation. “Or about make-up. It’s about what a man is. And you’ll recall,” he added, “I tried a disguise in ‘The Travelling Companion.’ It was tripe!”
“You could do it here, too,” Fanny persisted. “Honestly. This is just so very much better than ‘The Travelling Companion.’ Besides, you never had any takers for that.”
“Thank you for reminding me.”
“I feel quite strongly about this,” Fanny went on. “Perhaps you should talk with James.”
Stevenson laughed. “I know what James would say. Precisely what he would say.” He looked up at the ceiling and grinned. “My man should begin by taking insufficient sugar in his tea—and then move on to taking far too much lemon—which would leave him, to begin with, a sour companion—and ultimately a murderous blight on the gentlemen’s club.”
“I can see I’ll be making no more headway here.”
“Don’t you think you’ve already made enough headway?”
She studied him closely, very much aware of the fire that still burned off to the side. “I’m sorry, Louis.”
“Let us just see where we end up. The brownies and we. I have made mistakes in the past by not trusting them sufficiently.”
“And by trusting me too much?”
“Never,” replied the writer. “You are my unfailing bulwark against artistic disaster. Not to mention self-abuse.”
His eyes dropped reflexively to Fanny’s side of the mattress. It was distressing to stretch truths with his wife, even in the smallest ways. Already, though, the two extant seeds of the tale were germinating at pace in his fecund imagination. Perhaps he could be forgiven if he were to ask Fanny to step away, just for a bit, so he could get on with it.