Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan Page A

no high drama,” Louis said. “But I have enough material to do some essays for magazines. If all goes well, I will wrap them up into a book. I think it could sell.”
    â€œI’m
sure
it could,” she said. Her eyes blinked rapidly, as they always had when she was stirred up about something. “You’re the finest writer I have ever known.”
    â€œHow many others have you known?”
    Louis watched her think about it. “None,” she said. “Still … “
    They both laughed. Cummy hadn’t any idea what he wrote now. Though she had always crowed about his boyish scribblings, she was truly proud of the religious history on the Covenanters he had written when he was sixteen. She privately took some credit for it, having indoctrinated Louis in the brutal martyrdoms of the Presbyterian heroes who fought against the Episcopal monarchy. It was the first thing Louis had published, even though his own father had paid for the printing. To Cummy,
The Pentland Rising
ranked among the important books of the ages.
    She was a believer in him the way only mothers and nurses could be. Once, about a year before, his mother had chided him for not responding to one of Cummy’s letters. “Alison Cunningham had more than one marriage proposal she turned down so she could stay at her post.” He knew he was “her post,” but it hadn’t occurred to him that Cummy had ever lost anything except sleep for him.
    Their fondness for each other had been forged during the feverish nights of his unrelenting, croupy coughs. Cummy had comforted him tenderly through it all. Now that he was grown, they remained close friends. Never mind that she was a ferocious Calvinist and he a nonbeliever. He forgave her the bloody tales that haunted his childhood, and she forgave his recent lapse in faith as a temporary complication. “Even John the Baptist suffered doubts,” she told him. “You were always a pious boy. God hasn’t forgotten that. Just don’t keep Him waiting too long.”
    Louis could not look at Cummy without thinking of drafts, cures, blood, and terror.
    She had been a fierce opponent of drafts. She could detect the faintest incursion of cold air and could instantly rig a blanket as a hanging to seal off his room. Whole winters he had passed inside that hothouse, too sick to get outside. It was bronchitis; it was pneumonia; it was incipient tuberculosis—the diagnoses changed over time. What was agreed upon by everyone was that he had inherited a bad set of lungs from his mother, and drafts, above all, were to be defended against.
    Cummy would stand at the window, whatever the season, cheerfully pointing out anything that moved to the sickly child bundled in a blanket. By day, they studied the Edinburgh sky, umber-colored from factory grit, and scanned the trees in Queen Street Gardens, trying to locate the one blackbird sending up a song. Or he would lie facedown on the floor and paint pictures. At night, awake and hacking, he listened as Cummy spoke of the hideously persecuted, half-naked and freezing Covenanters who were run through with swords by King Charles’s soldiers on Rullion Green in the Pentland Hills. She told of their corpses being axed to pieces and the heads and hands sent to different parts of Scotland, and she told him of “the boot,” an iron torture device placed over the leg that was used on some of the battle’s survivors. When pressed by the boy, she explained that the torturer squeezed an iron wedge between the martyr’s leg and the iron cage, then hammered it until the leg was pulp. For months, when he closed his eyes, Louis saw free-floating, mutilated limbs. He prayed for sleep, and when it didn’t come, he prayed for morning. His little rag of a body would finally fall unconscious just as other children were heading to school.
    He wondered now if his parents had any idea of what was going on during