Under the Wide and Starry Sky (35 page)

In the weeks that followed, no native people came across the
tapu
line to visit them. They named their clutch of huts Equator Town and watched as life went on around them, just beyond the line. Sometimes they saw the king walk past and out into the water with one of his retainers, where they climbed into a fishing boat—for the king liked to fish—untied the boat's rope from the anchor—which happened to be a sewing machine—and headed out to sea. When they came back, Fanny would likely be presented with a large fish, which meant the king would be joining them for dinner. She planted salad greens that flourished and, in time, delighted Tembinoka.

In the mornings, Louis wrote. In the afternoons he and Lloyd collaborated on a novel set in the Pacific. After, they fantasized about having their own copra trading boat. In the evenings, Louis walked on the beach under the stars, playing his flageolet.

Fanny couldn't forget her husband's dire predictions for the future of this little silver crescent of sand sitting out in the vast blue ocean. She had grown fond of Tembinoka. She heard in his conversation the pride of a man who had built up a society that was modern, compared to the world he had inherited from his predecessors.

The
Equator
was overdue by nearly two weeks, and Fanny expected it would come any moment. They were all ready to go, their provisions were running short, and they were sorely tired of eating wild chicken. She wanted to give the king a gift before they left. Though the man seemed to have one of everything, he lacked a flag for his kingdom. One morning she quickly sketched out a design. She envisioned a banner with three stripes—yellow, green, and red—with a black shark at its center, and below it, the words
I bite triply.

“It's a reference to the shark's three rows of teeth,” she explained to Louis.

That night a copra trading ship called the
Tiernan
was in harbor. The king threw a big party with fireworks and dancing but, strangely, did not invite them. Fanny and Louis were inside their hut when they heard a gunshot near the palace.

“Do you think someone has shot the king?”

“The thought hadn't occurred to me, but now that you say it …” Louis got up, loaded their pistols, and put them near at hand.

In their hut in Equator Town, they lay awake listening.

Someone shot at a dog, the king explained when he came by the hut the next morning. Fanny was glad to see Tembinoka alive, though he was, uncharacteristically, a little drunk. She showed him her design for the Apemama flag, and he beamed his approval. He didn't stay long. Louis was not there, and the king seemed like a small, tired child when he said, “I want to go home.”

Louis arrived next, with urgent news.”The captain of the
Tiernan
says we can take passage with him to Samoa. No one knows what has happened to the
Equator.
”

“All right.”

“We'll have to pack quickly. They depart tomorrow.”

The next day, Fanny cast her gaze at their belongings, strewn around the hut, which she couldn't bring herself to pack. “Captain Reid is expecting us to be here,” she said, but her shoulders sank and she admitted what was on her mind: “I have this dreadful feeling … I don't want to go.”

“The lady has a dreadful feeling.” Louis sighed. But he did not pursue his teasing and canceled their passage.

When the
Equator
arrived the following week and the Stevensons climbed aboard, Tembinoka wept on the dock.

“Did you get the news about the
Tiernan
?” Reid asked them over a dinner of octopus and clams on the boat that evening.

Fanny caught her breath.

“Becalmed, they were, just bobbing around with no wind, so everyone went to sleep, I suppose, when up sprang a squall that made the boat turn turtle. It was just a day or two out of Apemama.”

“I can't believe it,” Louis said. “We just saw them off.”

“Sixteen dead,” Reid said gravely.

They fell quiet. Fanny remembered the faces of the men they had befriended and wondered who among them had died.

In the coming days, when storms chased the
Equator
from Apemama to Samoa, Fanny settled her blankets in a narrow galley-way so she wouldn't be thrown from her bed. Waves came over the prow and poured down below, leaving her in a shallow lake. She was terrified, but she would never admit that to Louis. Instead, she lay fully dressed, with an umbrella over her head, thinking about the lost men on the
Tiernan,
who went from dreams to death in the flutter of an eye.

1889

When Fanny first clapped eyes on their future homestead in the South Seas, she was standing on the side of a mountain, two and a half miles above the town of Apia, on the island of Upolu in Samoa. The sighting of the property lacked the thrill she'd felt upon first seeing the house in Bournemouth, or the chalet in Hyeres, or even the little cottage in Oakland where she had raised her children. She wasn't even looking for a place in Samoa. They had merely gotten off the
Equator
for a couple of weeks while Louis researched the history of the place for his newspaper letters. His best source was a local trader, one Mr. Harry J. Moors, who promptly offered his home as the place they should stay during their visit. He happened to be the local land agent as well.

“Moors wants to show us some land this afternoon,” Louis said after breakfast.

“He's enterprising, I'll give him that. We've been here all of three days,” Fanny replied. They were taking an afternoon stroll through Apia, looking it over. On its main street, where drinking shops alternated with churches and houses, sin and salvation appeared to be tied in the contest for Apia's souls. Pouring out of tavern doorways came the deafening whine of hurdy-gurdies. Within, they spied tawdry-looking women drinking with sailors.

The town was full of whites—some four hundred, Moors had told them—mostly British, with about ninety Germans and fewer than twenty Americans. “The whites you'll see are missionaries, expatriate farmers, traders, sailors, and beachcombers who washed up in Upolu and never left,” Moors said. Fanny noticed the whites had mixed enough with natives that there were plenty of “half-castes” on the streets of Apia. Moors himself had a native wife.

“Would you seriously consider living here?” she asked Louis.

He shrugged. “I wouldn't want to live in town. But you heard the doctor. If I am to remain well, I'll have to stay in this area for the bulk of my time. And you need a place to land, Fanny. I just don't know if Samoa is the right spot. We might be better off near Sydney. Bigger port, more culture.”

“It can't hurt to look at it, I suppose,” she said.

Standing on the hill in the tropical sun that afternoon, with Mount Vaea climbing up in the distance, Fanny's eyes scanned some three hundred acres of tangled forest and undergrowth, a mess of impenetrable branches and liana vines.

“Upolu and Savii are the biggest of the islands in Samoa, but we get the most contact with the outside world here in Upolu.” Mr. Moors swept a hand across the treed landscape. “Look at it! Five rivers, all of 'em full of freshwater prawns; a high waterfall and a smaller one that has a bathing pool below it. It's nigh-hand to paradise.” He kicked the toe of his boot into the soil. “You can grow anything here, the year round. Oh, there's the occasional cyclone, but that's about it. You might consider a plantation of a couple of crops; people do that to help pay for the cost of the land. Locals will keep it going while you're away.” The trader took off his straw hat, wiped his forehead with a sleeve. “Folks call this place Vailima, which is Samoan for ‘five rivers.'” He pointed to a spot on the hillside. “Right there would be the best place for a house,” he said. “That's where I'd put 'er. You'll know exactly when a mail ship comes in.”

Sweating profusely, Fanny stared in wonder at Louis, who seemed excited by the land and infused with new energy now that the temperature was well into the nineties. “You are the only person I know who perks up in a heat wave,” she said.

“How many mail deliveries?” Louis asked Moors.

“Four a month. You can't beat that.”

As they dressed for dinner at Moors's house that evening, Fanny said, “Did you notice how filthy the beach in Apia was? What kind of town would allow animal carcasses and offal to remain there? I don't know what to think of this place.” Nor did she know what to make of Mr. Moors, a brawny Michigander whose heart appeared to retain a nook of sentimentality and whose fingers were in a lot of Samoan pies. He was mainly a trader, with a post in Apia and a string of trading posts on other islands. But he was also the person who would sell them the land on Upolu, arrange to have it cleared, build the cottage for them, and act as their banker, since he had considerable money to loan until their funds could get to the island. He was a big financial force in town. She suspected his enthusiasm for having them as neighbors had something to do with Louis's fame but more to do with his money.

What the people of Apia thought of
them
on first sight was apparent in the face of a missionary who happened to be at the harbor when the
Equator
pulled into port. She and Louis and Lloyd disembarked from the boat barefoot. Fanny wore a
holoku,
bracelets, big gold hoop earrings she had acquired in Tahiti, a straw hat on her head, and her guitar slung over her back. Lloyd wore hoop earrings, blue glasses against the sun, and carried a battered fiddle. Louis, she supposed, was strange-looking simply for the slender figure he cut, but with his somewhat seedy cotton trousers and shirt, and the flageolet in his hand, and a twenty-five-cent white cotton yachting cap on his head, he might have been a beachcomber. All of them were smoking.

The missionary man, Reverend Clarke, had looked puzzled and then hopeful when he saw them tromping along the coral-and-sand main street of Apia. He approached Louis and asked, “Are you folks minstrels?”

“After a fashion, sir,” Louis replied cheerily. “Have you work for us?”

A few days running, they rode horses over the hills above Apia. Louis was vigorous in the Samoan climate, staying in the saddle for five hours and then, over long dinners and drinks, talking with the trader and his wife, Nimo, about the politics of the place, on which Moors was an expert.

Impulsively, they decided to buy the property. They authorized Moors to embark on building a cottage where they would live while a larger house was constructed. Fanny calculated that they could sail on to Sydney, get a steamer and return to England, see old friends—what friends were left—collect their possessions, and be back to Samoa in eight months, by September 1890, when the cottage would be done and the house under way.

Reverend Clarke, a decent, gentle man, appeared excited by the idea that they would be neighbors but clearly felt compelled to tell them the truth about the land. “The locals say your property only has four rivers,” he said regretfully, as if the information might spoil the deal.

“Close enough,” Fanny said.

Later she would wonder:
What made me think I could make this wild place a home?
Then she would remember what she saw the day they bought the land: an orchid growing on a tree limb. It was an exquisite thing, glowing white and tinged with rose and green, perfect in form, flourishing in health, a spot of beauty secretly tucked into ordinary brown bark. That was what she would make Vailima—an unexpected jewel in the Samoan forest.

1890

Cold germs found Louis easily enough in Sydney. Soon he was coughing, and then, for the first time since he fell ill in Tahiti, he was hemorrhaging.

They had ended their cruise on the
Equator
dreaming of a return to Europe, if only for a visit. Now even that diminished plan was crushed.

“You will die if you go back to Britain,” a Sydney doctor told Louis. “You cannot return for
any
length of time. It's as simple as that.”

The news staggered Fanny. She watched Louis struggle bravely to put a good face on it. “There are only a few people in England and one or two in America whom I will truly,
truly
miss.” After a day or two, though, he could not conceal his despair. “I heard a church bell this morning,” he told her, “and I was back in Swanston, in my grandfather's country church.” His eyes looked off beyond her, as if he were seeing, just behind her, the old parishioners he once knew. “It was so vivid! I wanted to be there.” He shook his head with sober resignation. “I am going to die in exile. When I return to Scotland, it will be to a grated cell in the Calton Burial Ground.”

As his fever rose, Fanny saw what had to be done. She went down to the docks, looking for a boat that might take them out to sea while they waited for the cottage to be finished. A maritime strike was under way, and boats were not leaving Sydney. Only one, a copra trading ship called the
Janet Nicoll,
had a nonunion crew and intended to sail despite the strike. When Fanny inquired about taking passage, she drew a flat no from the shipping company owner, Mr. Henderson, who communicated to her through a representative.

“I didn't get a chance to explain myself properly,” Fanny told Louis when she returned from the harbor.

“Oh, I think the owner got your message clear enough. He doesn't want us, my dear. The man has his hands full just getting his ship out of port.”

“I'm going back tomorrow,” she said, “and I'm going to get us on that boat. You can stake your wig on it.”

The following afternoon, Fanny waited outside Henderson's office for an interview. When he opened his door, he wore a scowl. “Madam,” he said, “this is a working boat with fifty men. There is no place to put a woman.”

“I sailed as the only woman on the
Equator,
sir,” Fanny said. “I have lived the same way the men live. You would not have to make any special accommodations for me. And I can afford the fare, whatever that might be.”

The man shot her a baleful look that asked,
Why my ship?

“My husband is extremely ill. We have found that he regains his health when he is at sea. Yours is the only ship that will be leaving this harbor, and the sooner my husband gets sea air in his lungs, the better.”

The owner nearly guffawed. “All the more reason why I cannot take you on, madam. The last thing I am equipped to handle is a sick man.” With that, his head withdrew, and he shut the door.

Progress,
she thought. The man spoke with a Scottish accent. Was there a living Scot who did not feel pride in the accomplishments of a countryman, particularly one as beloved as Louis?

The next day, she stopped at a bookstore before going again to the Henderson and McFarlane shipping company. When she went in search of Henderson, his assistant informed her he would not see her.

“Tell him I won't bother him after today.”

Some thirty minutes later, Henderson's harried face peered around the half-opened door. Fanny reached into her satchel and held out to him copies of
Treasure Island
and
Jekyll and Hyde
. The man looked blankly at them.

“Do you know these books?”

“Mmm,” he grunted.

“My husband, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote them. You are Scottish, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know that Mr. Stevenson is a national treasure to your people. To have my husband perish here because he could not get out to sea would be an incredible loss to his countrymen. You could have a hand in saving his life.”

The man chewed his tobacco furiously.

“I will not hold you responsible if he dies at sea,” she said, her voice quavering. “This is his only chance. Do you understand?”

“Wait here,” he said, taking the books she pressed into his hands.

She paced outside his door. When he returned, he planted himself in the doorway with his arms crossed. “This ship sails with sealed orders. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“It means you will not be told where we intend to sail. I shall be on the ship, and I can assure you, you will have no say in where we go. We will be out for four months, and during that time, you will receive not a particle of special attention. If you get off the boat at one of our stops and are not on board when we depart, we will not look for you. We will leave you. Do you understand?”

“I do.” She turned to go but stopped in her tracks. “I forgot to mention. There are three of us, not two. My son is traveling with us.” She hurried out the door and didn't look back.

Fanny raced around Sydney buying gifts. She remembered the women she had met already, both native women and the wives of missionaries and traders. She hadn't encountered one yet who wasn't starving to have a pretty new garment or decoration. She ended up buying printed fabrics and a box full of artificial flowers to make wreaths. In a dry goods store, she came across a notebook labeled
Lett's Australasian Diary and Almanac, 1890.
She needed a proper journal. She bought the
Lett's
and wrote her name on the cover. Below it, she wrote in block letters,
The Cruise of the
Janet Nicoll.

On this voyage, she intended to keep good notes. Memory was a fickle thing, and Louis counted on the details she pulled out of her journals. But it was more than that. Already they had been at sea for nearly two years. This would be the third and last ship voyage before they settled into the house in Samoa. It was a piece of her life she did not want to lose.

The following morning, she wrapped Louis in blankets and walked behind as four strong sailors carried him aboard on a gurney. It might have been a funeral procession, with Fanny carrying armfuls of artificial flowers. At one point, a drunk young white man with a rose in his lapel rushed up in an attempt to assist the sailors, but lost his footing and pitched backward off the gangplank into the water, where he flailed around until someone rescued him.

Fanny opened the porthole in their cabin so Louis could gulp the sea air as the ship departed. An exile he might be, but at least he was alive.