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

on the sofa. At night, she and Miss Kate took turns staying awake beside him. His sores had begun to bleed and had to be dressed constantly. His frail little body had to be shifted to take the pressure off new sores.
    When Belle and Sammy returned home from their classes, they kept vigil by Hervey’s side. One day Belle brought a newspaper and sketchily translated an article about a wealthy California woman who had taken over a whole floor at the fancy Hôtel Splendide. A picture showed a woman in a white dress and feathered hat, surrounded by her entourage.
    Fanny studied the faces in the paper. “I know this woman,” she said. “I knew her when she didn’t have a nickel. In Austin, Nevada.”
    Belle perked up. “Truly?”
    â€œTell about the camp!” shouted Sammy, who never seemed to tire of the old stories.
    â€œIt was winter,” Fanny began. “Belle and I hadn’t been in camp with your father all that long. We heard there was going to be a party in the next settlement, a few miles away. I had brought a trunk full of dresses with me, only to find that they were far too fine to wear in Austin, Nevada. The camp was just a gulley of falling-down shacks, and the few women living there had to wash their things in the brown river water. No plumbing. No furniture. Nothing but a makeshift bed and a couple of pots in your father’s cabin when I got there. But I did get to wear one of those nice dresses the night we went to that party. Somebody had made a sled out of a packing box with some runners on it. There wasn’t a mirror to be found in the whole gulley. When the other women came to get me, one of the girls held up a lantern and a metal pie pan so I could see to fix my hair.” Fanny touched her finger to the newspaper. “This woman in the article—she was the one who held up the tin pan.”
    â€œOh.” Belle sighed, struck by the fairy-tale ending. “And now she’s rich.”
    â€œAt least somebody got rich,” Fanny mused. “I bundled you up in a blanket that night, and we piled onto the sled with the other ladies and sang all the way to the next camp.”
    â€œDid I dance?” Belle asked.
    â€œLike a dervish. I’ll never forget you swirling around that room. You were too little to need a partner. Oh, and I remember that was the night I met that preacher, Reverend Warwick. He had two gold front teeth. I said to him, ‘I didn’t know there was a minister in these parts,’ and he said, ‘You musta heard of me by my nickname. It’s Smilin’ Jesus.”
    Sammy knew that part of the story already, but he laughed heartily, as they all did. How desperately they needed to laugh.
    Fanny remembered the night in Nevada as if it had just happened. At that party, she had danced until dawn, with a different partner for every tune. Some of the women, she learned, were from the whorehouse in the next camp. Later, Fanny wondered if Sam’s philandering had already begun by the time she and Belle arrived in Austin.
    â€œWill you call on her at the Splendide?” Belle asked.
    Fanny knew that her daughter was wondering if she might work herself into the rich woman’s good graces. “No, I won’t,” she replied. She studied the photo of the woman she had known. How strange to think they had been together in that hardscrabble mining town, each of them part of a couple bent on striking it rich. How could she have dreamed then that she would someday end up in Paris, camped nearby and yet a world apart, in a suite of cheap rooms with her three children and without her husband?
    She realized then how much she really did miss Sam and how afraid she was for Hervey.

CHAPTER 7
    By mid-March, Fanny was frantic; Hervey’s condition had deteriorated badly. Three different times she hired a carriage to go out into the countryside to find a farm where she could get fresh oxblood to replenish the iron