Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan Page A

is a certain place I like to sit to get the perspective of the main street. Your son can come along. We’ll give him a brush.”
    Fanny shrugged, nodded.
    Later, when she understood that Bob Stevenson had come to the Hôtel Chevillon ahead of his friends in order to frighten off the intruding Americans, she comprehended the shame he must have felt when he learned of her loss. For Bob was a decent man, it turned out, from decent people.
    After that first day of painting, Belle stayed behind with Sammy, who preferred to fish. For about ten days, only Fanny and Bob went out to paint. They sat together for hours on the main street of Grez, discussing art and life and passersby while painting the quaint stone buildings. Bob’s canvas was the better one, but he complimented her work. For short stretches of time, Fanny’s gnawing sorrow eased.
    In his gentle way, she realized later, Bob brought her along in small steps to the point where she could talk to people again. There was no obvious show of gallantry, no sign of pity on his part. They had merely conversed like normal people do. But it felt as if he had flung a rope bridge across the chasm that had formed between her and the rest of the world since Hervey’s death.
    When his friends began arriving in June, Fanny didn’t retreat to her room. She felt a measure of her old self returning. She was able to greet each one warmly. And they, in turn, made her family part of their peculiar circle.

CHAPTER 10
    Bourron-Marlotte was a short train ride from Paris, but Louis Stevenson nearly missed the stop. His damp cheek had stuck to the window in his sleep, and it was only the abrupt separation of skin from glass when the train halted that shocked him awake. He grabbed his knapsack and leaped onto the station platform, still groggy. It was dinner hour, and the plangent sound of pots rattling in a house nearby made his belly growl. If he were to catch the end of supper at the Hôtel Chevillon, he’d have to step lively, but Grez-sur-Loing was only four and a half kilometers away, a snap for a walking man. His legs—unfurled after three weeks in a canoe—rejoiced in the freedom.
    Louis climbed down an embankment next to the tracks and found the path through the woods toward Grez. He remembered the trail from a year ago. He and his cousin Bob had followed it to a pub in Bourron, then staggered back to the Chevillon, singing “Flow gently, sweet Afton” and baying at the moon. It had been a perfect summer idyll, an escape from Edinburgh and parents, a wild splash into
la vie bohème.
    Now, as the darkening violet sky drew down upon the last horizon’s strip of gold, he picked his way over fallen trees and brush until he spotted an open field next to the main road into Grez. It was August, and he had already missed two months of raucous pleasure with the friends who’d arrived earlier. He shouted, “I’m coming!,” laughed at the hoarse caw of his voice in the evening silence, then broke into a run. In a few minutes, the hotel came into sight, its yellow windows and doors beaming like campfires in the gloaming. Louis went around to the side of the building and entered the back garden through the carriage doors so he wouldn’t be noticed. As he crept across the stone terrace, he could see familiar faces at the dining room table, as well as an equal number he didn’t know. Madame Chevillon’s niece Ernestine languidly cleared plates. There was Henley with his great, unruly red beard and his hogshead of a chest, shaking with laughter. Charles Baxter, Louis’s old university comrade, who’d clearly had a snoutful, was smiling at a robust young woman with olive skin and wavy hair—Spanish or Italian, perhaps. And Bob, so handsome with his newly drooping mustache, was listening to an interesting-looking woman at the end of the table.
    Louis moved a step closer. The woman appeared to be a sister of the