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

cat-quick tongue sealed the edge. Six times a stuffed rolling paper went to her lips; each repetition was more expert than the last. “That should do us,” she said, reattaching the little purse to her belt.
    He noticed several objects hanging from other fine chains on her waist, including a folding knife and a pouch full of drawing pencils.
    â€œYou are the very spectacle of self-sufficiency,” Louis said.
    When Fanny raised her eyes to his, he caught his breath. She focused her gaze on him as if sighting a pistol. “Are you mocking me?” she asked.
    â€œNo, no, not at all! I’m admiring you. Have you always rolled your own cigarettes?”
    â€œEver since I started smoking. A miner in Nevada taught me.”
    â€œIn Nevada?”
    â€œI lived for a while in a silver mining camp.”
    â€œMy goodness! How … bracing.”
    She drew on her cigarette. “That’s a delicate expression, Mr. Stevenson.” Her eyes remained unwaveringly on his.
    â€œI meant you seem so ladylike, and to be such an adventuress—”
    â€œOh, it’s not that unusual to find women in mining camps. But I wasn’t in the same line of business some of the others pursued, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
    Louis shook his head. “I am wondering why you take whatever I say and misconstrue it, madam. You have known me five minutes, not nearly long enough to despise me. It usually takes at least ten.”
    She laughed then and small, perfect white teeth flashed across her face. “I’m only teasing you, Louis.”
Lou
-us, she pronounced his name, soft and slow, as if stroking it. “I liked you the minute you jumped in.”
    Bob returned with a plate of food for him and a bottle of whisky. “To Louis the Canoeist,” he said, tapping his glass to his cousin’s. “Give us the plums, Lou.”
    There had been an abundance of plums to pick from along the banks of the Scheldt and the canals of Belgium and then, at the end, the upper Oise. Louis had traveled for twenty days in the
Arethusa
with his shy, athletic friend Walter Simpson, who manned another sailing canoe, the
Cigarette.
Their voyage had provoked furious notetaking on Louis’s part—from observations on the free life of the barge captain to his own near-kidnapping by the mad young oarsmen of the Belgian Royal Nautical Sportsmen’s Club, whose enthusiasm for boating was almost frightening. For the sake of a warm clubhouse dinner and a bed for the night, he and Simpson pretended to know the great English rowers whose names the Belgians reverently recited. As they were escorted to their sleeping quarters by one of the club members, Louis and Simpson, under pressure, agreed to give a morning demonstration of the proper English stroke. At dawn, they fled rather than be found out as rank amateurs.
    There was so much Louis had saved up to tell Bob, but how could he say it now, in front of this new woman? He wanted to say,
If you want to find out who you really are, then go travel. To move is the thing.
He wanted to say,
Something important has begun.
Every chance encounter, every change of landscape in the journey, offered itself up to his pen. He could see a way now to go out and have adventures, to pour all that he witnessed through his soul and onto paper, a way he could make a living doing what he loved, in spite of his father’s plans for him. At the end of the journey, after he had maneuvered the
Arethusa
to a dock in Pontoise, it was raining. He hated wet weather. Yet he had put his face up to the drizzle and thanked it for falling on him.
    Louis looked at Bob and Fanny’s expectant faces. “French rain is different from the stuff that falls in Auld Reekie.”
    Bob laughed, but Fanny said, “It takes leaving, doesn’t it, to see things through fresh eyes.”
    â€œIt
does,
” Louis said. He saw she had two or three wavy silver strands,