Fanny watched the bowl of mashed potatoes go around the table. It was a wilting July evening in Bournemouth, and a new flock of guests was at her dinner table. Before Henley and his wife, Anna, arrived along with Bob Stevenson and Katharine de Mattos, Fanny had stood in the steaming kitchen beside Valentine, overseeing the miserable meal preparation. The girl was prone to mistakes when she was out of sorts. She spewed incomprehensible French curses into a boiling pot while Fanny sliced tomatoes and wondered aloud what had possessed her to choose lamb and potatoes for a hellishly hot evening.
“I sent it everywhere,” Henley was saying as he scooped a fat spoonful of potatoes onto his plate. “The magazine market at the moment appears to be glutted.”
“William is being polite,” Katharine said with self-deprecating good humor. She was cool-looking in a fashionable linen dress, except for the beads of sweat across her upper lip. “Let’s be honest among friends. Mr. Henley has had little success with my story because it is my story.”
“When I read your manuscript, I kept thinking that it was too realistic,” Fanny said. “Do you remember my idea of the sprite? Why don’t you try it that way, instead of portraying the mysterious woman on the train as an escapee from a mental ward?”
Katharine’s knife paused midcut. “No, I don’t think so. It’s not the sort of story I write.”
“Then let me try my hand at it,” Fanny said. “We can collaborate on it.”
Katharine glanced at Henley, then down at her lap. “I’m not like the rest of you,” she muttered. “I don’t believe I would be very good at collaborating.”
“Are you going to work on it some more?”
“I hadn’t planned to.”
“Well, then, why don’t I give it a go?” Fanny said. “The spirit-world angle would change the whole gist of it.”
Katharine bit her lip, considering. “All right. I suppose if you want to try …” Her eyes went to Henley’s again.
Fanny knew what they all were thinking: that she wasn’t any more fit to get the story published than Louis’s cousin. What a pleasure it would be if she could prove them wrong.
“I DON’T KNOW why you want to bother with that,” Louis said when they were in bed. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not your story now.” Louis yawned.
“But she consented,” Fanny said.
“With her lips, yes.”
“It will be different, more of a fable when I’m done. Much better. Anyway, I suggested the nixie idea to her before she wrote her version. Haven’t we all thrown ideas around, shared them? As I recall, ‘The Suicide Club’ was Bob’s idea.”
Louis was silent. When his breath came regularly, Fanny rose from bed and tiptoed to the desk where Katharine’s manuscript lay. It was so clear what was wrong with the thing. No one wanted to read such a dreary, depressing story. Fanny thought she would keep the young man on the train as a character who is going out into the country. She would load him down with gear and high hopes for a quiet day of fishing in a stream. At first he would be annoyed by the waiflike creature he meets on the train; but she would not be insane. She would be a water sprite trying to find her way back to the river out of which she’d been fished. As the two leave the train, headed for the river, the young man could become smitten by her simple wisdom and free spirit. But the untamed creature he is growing to love—after a lovely playful interlude—will disappear into the water, as if in a dream.
Henley would hate that sort of mystical little tie-up, but Fanny loved the twist. It wouldn’t take that much work to make the piece into a story someone would publish. She would call it “The Nixie.”