how the three girls ask often after her doings; the girls also beg him to find out where Miss Frere will be spending the next summer.
He was lured away from his letters by the ever-present temptation of the window in front of his writing desk. The poet always expected a revival of creative power with the onset of autumn. His fireless grate was heaped with autumnal leaves that imitated a flame. He noticed that the warm, bright day had waned more quickly than it seemed from inside the brown walls of his study. The window overlooked the open meadows, several acres of which Longfellow had recently purchased, stretching all the way to the gleaming waters of the Charles River. He found it amusing to think of the popular superstition that he made the purchase with a view to a rise in property value, while in fact all he wanted to secure was the view.
On the trees were no longer only leaves but brown fruits, on the bushes no longer blossoms but clusters of red berries. And the wind had a rough manliness in its voice - the tone not of a lover but of a husband.
Longfellow's day settled into just the right pace. Supper over, he dismissed the help and resolved to catch up on his newspaper reading. But after lighting the lamp in his study, he spent only a few minutes with the paper. The late edition of the Transcript carried Ednah Healey's startling announcement. The article contained details of the murder of Artemus Healey, which had until then been suppressed by the widow "on the counsel of the office of the Chief of Police and other official persons." Longfellow could read no further, though certain details from the article, he would realize in the next eventful hours, had burrowed into his mind uninvited; it was not the pain of the chief justice that ended Longfellow's tolerance for the story for now so much as that of the widow.
July 1861. The Longfellows should have been at Nahant. There was a cool sea breeze that caressed Nahant, but for reasons nobody remembered the Longfellows had not yet left the fervent sunshine and heat of Cambridge.
A tormenting scream burrowing into the study from the adjoining library. Two little girls shouting in terror. Fanny Longfellow had been sitting with little Edith, who was then eight, and Alice, eleven, sealing packages of the girls' freshly cut curls as mementos; little Annie Allegra slept soundly upstairs. Fanny had opened a window in the unlikely hope for a puff of air. The best conjecture in the days that followed - for nobody had seen precisely what happened, nobody could ever truly see something so brief and so arbitrary - was that a flake of hot sealing wax drifted onto her light summer dress. In a single moment, she was burning.
Longfellow had been at his standing desk in the study, throwing some black sand on a newly inked poem to blot it. Fanny ran in screaming from the adjoining room. Her dress was now all flames, hugging her body like tailored Oriental silk. Longfellow bundled her in a rug and laid her on the floor.
With the fire out, he carried the trembling body upstairs to the bedroom. Later that night, the doctors put her to rest with ether, in the morning, assuring Longfellow in a bold whisper that she could feel very little pain, she took some coffee and then drifted into a coma. The funeral service in the Craigie House library fell on their eighteenth wedding anniversary. Her head was the only part of her the fire had spared, and on her beautiful hair was laid a wreath of orange blossoms.
The poet was confined to his bed that day by his own burns, but he could hear the unrestrained weeping of his friends, women and men, down in the parlor, weeping for him, he knew, as well as for Fanny. He found, in his delusional but alert state of mind, that he could make out individuals by their crying. His facial burns would necessitate his growing a full and heavy beard - not only to conceal the scars, but also because he could no longer shave. The orange discoloring on the palms of his limp hands would last painfully long, reminding him of his failure, before whitening away.
Longfellow, recuperating in his bedchamber, raised his bandaged hands upward. For nearly a week, the children could hear delirious words float into the hall whenever they passed by.