Read Online Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan - Free Book Online

possibly know the displeasure they had caused his circle of friends, sight unseen? When Bob got word from Madame Chevillon that an American woman and her children had taken up residence at the inn for the summer, he had fumed with indignation. The only reason the fellows were assembling at Grez in the first place was because they had been driven out of their last summer haunt by a swarm of lady painters. The bourgeois art students from the school in Barbizon had filled the inns and cafés and turned up behind every other tree with an easel and paintbrush.
    News of the American woman and her brats had landed like a lead weight on their collective fantasies. So much for a summer of
la vie bohème
on the banks of the Loing. Bob was so irritated by Madame Chevillon’s announcement that he’d come to Grez before the others, intent upon behaving badly enough to chase away the intruders. He was the right man for the job; he had a slicing wit when he chose to unsheath it.
    While Louis was out paddling the
Arethusa
from Antwerp to Paris, Bob had sent him two letters in care of Will Low’s studio in Paris. Louis collected both right before he came to Grez. In the first letter, Bob’s rage was palpable. By the second letter, though, his indignant tone had disappeared.
They’re all right,
he’d written.
    â€œCome with me.” Bob had Louis’s arm now and led him directly to the lady interloper.
    â€œFanny Van de Grift Osbourne,” she said when she stood. The crown of dark brown curls at the top of her head came up first (how tiny she was, nearly a foot shorter than he), and then the smooth honey-colored face tilted. He examined the curving upper lip—like an archer’s bow—and the deep brown eyes. “I feel as if I know you,” she said, grasping both of his hands. Everything about her was exotic, from her lively gold-ringed fingers to her tiny blue kidskin slippers peeking from beneath a black skirt. She might have been a Sephardic shepherdess, to judge from her features, but the voice was different. American, to be sure. It had a touch of grassy prairie in it, riverboats, he didn’t know what all. Maybe Tennessee walking horses.
    Louis grinned. “May I ask where you are from?”
    â€œOriginally? Why, I grew up in Indiana.” The dark eyes, full of sex, danced first toward Bob and then Louis. “Your cousin tells me you’re from Edinburgh. He also says you’re … What’s the expression?
All right
,” she said.
    Louis was momentarily at a loss for words. Those were the words Bob had used to describe
her
in his last letter. Had Bob told her how they had all dreaded her? Louis felt strangely out of step for a moment, as if understandings had been reached in his absence.
    â€œI’ll get some food for you,” Bob said, and disappeared.
    â€œHave you been to America?” Fanny asked Louis.
    â€œNo, I regret to say I haven’t. But when I was in Cumberland some years ago, I met a Highland spae wife who predicted I would go—”
    â€œA spae wife?”
    â€œOh, a mad old crone who claimed she had second sight.”
    â€œBe careful what you say,” Fanny said. “I have a touch of it myself.”
    Louis laughed. “She was nothing like you, but I liked her predictions. She said I would visit America and I was to be very happy and I would spend much time on the sea.”
    â€œYou don’t say.” Fanny Osbourne turned her attention to a pear-shaped mesh bag suspended from a link of the silver chatelaine around her waist. She unhooked it and pulled out a small sack of tobacco. “Cigarette?” She peeled six papers from a booklet and put them on the table.
    â€œAbsolutely. I’m not accustomed to a lady rolling her own.”
    Louis watched her boyish fingers shake a line of tobacco onto a paper. She rolled the cigarette evenly with both thumbs, then lifted it to her mouth, where her