Afterward
The clerk at the inn in Alès stared at Louis with an ambiguous expression of amusement and disgust. The Scotsman, his long hair unkempt and stringy, his drooping mustache not as pronounced amongst his stubble, his clothes rather filthy from infrequent changes and even fewer washes, strode purposefully through the door and across the lobby. Several guests stopped to watch; one woman made a sound such as one would after having laid one’s hand against something unpleasant.
“Bonjour,” Louis said, seemingly unaware of the scene he was making by simply being there. The truth was that he knew, but did not care. “I have a reservation. Stevenson; I made the arrangements some weeks ago.”
The clerk looked at him and then doubtfully checked their log, raising his eyebrows in surprise when, behold, halfway down the page, the name Stevenson.
“Very well, monsieur,” the clerk said, and was about to continue with a more pleasant, professional greeting than he had heretofore given, but Louis interrupted.
“My post?” he inquired.
“Pardon?”
“My post? Où est mon courrier? My mail?”
“Ah!” the clerk exclaimed, and then turned, and after a quick search, plucked a packet of letters from a cubby and handed them to the guest.
“Merci,” Louis said absently and walked swiftly to an empty table in the corner of the lobby, by a large window that looked out onto a bustling, sunny city street.
* * *
Louis took a train northward to Lyons and then to Paris. There, he resisted—just barely—traveling south, past Fontainebleau and onto Grez-sur-Loing, the rural artist’s commune where he and Fanny had met. Eventually, he headed further north, and boarded a vessel, ultimately ending in London with his friend Henley, where he would stay on until Christmas.
Now, he reclined at a desk in a comfortable drawing room, brow beaded with sweat, those nightmare apparitions just barely dissipated. The fire crackled deliciously in the hearth, spitting embers against the screen. Fanny’s letter was tucked folded between his middle and ring finger, the envelope between the next two digits, the hand of which lay upon his leg.
The post at Alès consisted of three letters—one from his mother, one from his friend and editor, Sidney Colvin, and a third, from Fanny. In it, there was no acknowledgement of Louis’s plans of a rugged, potentially dangerous journey through the highlands of southern France. There was nothing to indicate that she had even received his last letter—the one in which he told her of his plans and, again, begged her for an answer. All that told him that she’d read it at all was the fact that she’d gotten the Alès address to send her own note. For it was hardly a letter at all, but a note, in which she told him about her son Lloyd, and the troubles with her adult daughter, Belle. She threw in a little gossip about her sister’s prospects for marriage, the idea of which only raised the painful specter of her own still-apparently-intact nuptials. There was no mention of an application for divorce, no mention of her feelings, or his feelings, or any hint whatsoever of their future together. If, indeed, they had a future together.
Louis had walked almost a hundred-and-twenty miles, up mountains and down ravines, across bridges, and through towns. He happened upon monsters he’d have never believed existed and he helped destroy another that never should have existed at all. He fired his weapon twice, and he fell in love with a donkey who had shown more concern for him than this note expressed. He was no better off than when he’d started off from Monastier. He was no closer to an answer to his dilemma.
When not assaulted by the terrible visions of his perilous journey, the dreams that haunted him from the moment he received the post in Alès were memories of real life: the way she swiftly rolled her cigarettes; the way she played his nurse when he’d grown too ill to care for himself at Grez—where he’d raved feverishly when he wasn’t dreaming; the smallness of her hands and feet; the exotic hue of her skin and the wild dark of her eyes and hair. It was the look she gave—a look that nailed you to the wall—that he could not bear to part with. Not another woman he’d ever met—none, he believed, that walked the earth—possessed the sheer audacity to dare fix a man with that stare. None, but Fanny. His Fanny.
Henley knocked upon the door lightly and entered, the thump of his wooden crutch just barely muted by the Turkish carpet.
“Hannah instructed me to warn you of dinner’s approach,” he said.
Louis’s moustache rose over a tired smile and he nodded.
“News?” Henley inquired and set a glass of sherry on the desk.
“C’est la vie,” Louis sighed and shook his head, capitulating to the universal, ugly, but somewhat liberating truth.
Henley nodded, tapped Louis’s shoulder twice, and limped from the room. Louis listened to his friend’s loping steps grow quieter and soon disappear deeper into the house. He picked up the glass of sherry.
“Such is life, the way that it is,” he said softly to the glass and took a sip.
He then flattened a sheet across the surface of the writing desk—the first proper desk he’d used in weeks—uncapped the inkpot, and began to write his letter.
Mon cher petit homme . . .[1]
The End
[1] “My dear little man.” This is one version of how RLS actually addressed Fanny Osbourne.
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