The Last Bookaneer Read online

  At the asylum, I found myself gratified by the surprised and thankful exclamations of the patients who accepted books from my cart; some broke down in tears to have a new book to read for the first time in years. Certainly, some of the inmates were coarse or lacked conversational skills, and two different men, plus one woman, confessed to having been Jack the Ripper. But I now better understood the peculiar cheerfulness I had seen from the attendant who had taken us around on our first visit. Passing through a place of misery even briefly will infect your soul, but doing something to help, even if it was a small token, gave a feeling of resignation and an unexpected contentment. One rainy afternoon, while doing my rounds through the institution, an attendant brought a message received for me at the front office. It did not surprise me that I had been located there, since the lunatic asylum had become something of a second home. I tipped the attendant as though we were standing in a gold-trimmed hotel instead of this den of misery.

  When I unfolded the paper, I had to catch my breath. It was a reply from one of Davenport’s informants I had contacted. Belial had been sighted sailing for the South Seas. One of the patients nearby began to weep. I put away my cart and started down a hall to the other side of the building to search for some privacy so I might concentrate and plan. I had to get word to Davenport, and quickly.

  Then I heard someone call out, startling me. The words came again—stop thief! It was more of a screech, actually. I looked up and saw a rainbow-colored parrot in flight. It was the bird who was yelling “stop thief,” again and again. There were innumerable other birds among verdant surroundings—canaries, macaws, goldfinches. I had wandered through a curtain into an aviary.

  Confusion swirled in my mind. Before exiting the building, I decided to peek in on the bookaneer, knowing it was time for his nap. Looking through the layers of dust on the small window that the attendants used to check on a patient, I could see his sunken cheeks and ghastly hairless head above the blankets. He seemed to be muttering something in his sleep. Quietly, I opened the door and crept in.

  I leaned forward, close enough to take in his putrid breath. “The beast,” he seemed to say. “The beast.”

  My hand hovered over his shoulder, tempted to shake him, but he sat bolt upright before I had the chance.

  Bill shouted at the top of his voice, a mad glint in his eye: “Beware the beast, Penrose Davenport, beware the beast! The beast! The beast!”

  The attendant rushed to control him but he kept shouting it until the agitated lunatics of the ward caught on to the cry and raised it to a fever pitch.

  The beast!

  The beast!

  The beast!

  The words rang out and shook the walls and floors from all sides; even some of the birds in the aviary joined the chant and screeched: “Beast!”

  As attendants arrived to subdue Bill, he began laughing and spitting wildly. Two men held him under his armpits while one gripped his legs. I watched the once potent bookaneer carried off like a hare to the cookhouse. I followed as far as I could, as though there was something I might do. Even after they had disappeared into another wing of the building, I still could not bring myself to exit the grounds. I pushed my cart for a second round of deliveries. After an hour or so wrestling with my fidgety thoughts, I saw two somber attendants go back into Bill’s room. I hurried after them with my book cart to disguise my purpose. They left the door open. They were stripping away the bedclothes and collecting the personal belongings in a box. There were now two pieces of news to turn Davenport’s plans upside down: First, Whiskey Bill was dead; second, Belial had a head start on the mission of a lifetime.

  IV

  It had not been a performance, and the ruse Davenport was so certain about never existed. Whiskey Bill had served a mission in a silver bowl on a silver platter. Do not mistake the conclusions I drew as criticism of Davenport’s intuition or his methods. On the contrary. To be brilliant is not a matter of being right more often than the next fellow; yes, that may be part of the pedestrian definition. It is in large part a matter of holding firm to convictions as long as possible, but not a moment longer. The brilliant man must trust he is right even when adrift alone with his convictions, and few people have the stomach for it. There are millions of average women and men who will refuse to take positions at the most important moments in their lives—moments that would have changed the course of their existences—for fear of being proven wrong. Fear is the impassable gulf between the ordinary and the remarkable. Between all of us and Pen Davenport.

  Davenport was no fool. He embraced reality when it came for him, and then blamed others. “This is what should have happened,” was a phrase frequently spoken by him. You would not have heard from him even an admission as mild as: “Well, now you see, Fergins, I suppose Whiskey Bill was not sending us on a wild goose chase while pretending to be dying, after all. He really was dying and the mission was genuine. To think, there was an aviary in that asylum, just as he told us!”

  “This is what should have happened, my dear Fergins,” he said a week after Bill’s death from heart congestion. “That damned asylum should have transferred Bill to a proper hospital. We could all see he was losing a bit of his mind, very well, but the poor fellow’s body was falling apart and those white-coated fools were blind enough not to see it. Now”—he waved his hands in the air in the way of a professor who has forgotten his line of thought—“it is too late.”

  “Wholeheartedly agreed, Davenport,” was how I would usually respond to these vague nods to his errors.

  There was nothing to gain by dwelling on another bookaneer’s sad demise. There was plenty of work ahead. I had to follow our informant’s initial lead about Belial’s South Seas trip by tracking down the probable dates and vessel of that man’s passage out of England (Davenport was at least three weeks behind his rival, as far as I could determine). I was able to confirm sightings of the shadowy bookaneer consistent with preparations for such a voyage, but Belial’s exact day and means of departure remained murky and unprovable—as frustratingly invisible as the legendary bookaneer himself. Meanwhile, I gathered together every known detail of Stevenson’s singular life to add to my existing knowledge of the man.

  Sickly as a child, Stevenson surprised his very pessimistic and industrious family by surviving long enough to study engineering, following the family profession on his father’s side, before growing tired of it and switching to law, which did not last much longer. Literature beckoned—“literature beckoned,” of course, that is the predictable turn to everyone but a budding author. Leaving Edinburgh and soon Scotland altogether to seek a climate salutary to his fragile health and to be closer to Bohemian and artistic friends, in Paris he fell in with an American woman, more than ten years his senior, called Fanny Osbourne. She was already married and had two children, a boy and a girl, and would soon enough be divorced and married again, this time to Stevenson.

  By then he was writing at a furious pace about his colorful travels, and soon his giant imagination pressed him into writing novels. Of course, many writers who have written articles, poems, essays, or criticism sooner or later decide to try their hands at a novel, and fail at it, not realizing how much life must be contained in the form. But Stevenson was different. Remarkable novels flowed from his pen. Novels that nobody expected and novels that built worlds. Novels made him a fortune. Stevenson’s writing was unique and easily identifiable, and yet it was difficult for a reader to imagine the storyteller himself. Here is another way to put it: the reader wants to rescue E. A. Poe; he wants to be a friend to Longfellow; wants Dickens to be his friend, Sir Walter Scott to be his wealthy uncle; but would be satisfied simply to lay eyes on R. L. Stevenson. He excited as much curiosity about himself as any novelist had in half a century, one of the secrets to the immense interest in his books, no matter their subjects. His rather picturesque and wild life only added to this. The gangly writer and his unusual family spent time
in San Francisco, New York, and back in Scotland and England before setting sail for the South Seas.

  Poor health spurred Stevenson’s most recent odyssey, and along the way something made him decide not to go back.

  I arranged for Davenport’s passage on the first ship launching for the South Seas, which happened to be a British man-of-war; the bookaneer had been touched by blind good fortune, for the frigate would be the only ship to sail out of Liverpool for the South Seas with room for passengers for another four months. Three months to the day after the death of Whiskey Bill, the day this mission was born, Davenport stepped aboard the warship and wondered aloud whether he ought to have brought a hat with a wider brim to keep the sun out of his eyes; I kept my umbrella above him for shade.

  I had prepared whatever useful materials I could find on Samoa for the bookaneer: maps, cyclopedia extracts, pamphlets, travelogues. The travel books were written by gentlemen adventurers with forgettable initials before creaky surnames, and they might as well have all been written by the same fellow, so plain and uninformative were their contents. The dozen or so rather obscure books written as detailed studies of the island nation were out-of-date and often inaccurate. No matter. As far as I could tell, Davenport barely glanced over the materials I provided for him. This surprised and concerned me, for he usually prepared thoroughly. As he studied the clouds, I gave a careful glance to each sailor who walked by, on their way between fixing ropes and ladders and sails, as though each boy in his blue tunic and white trousers could harbor a design against Davenport.

  It was hard to fathom what was in the bookaneer’s mind as I helped carry his belongings and two large casks of freshwater aboard. His face maintained its inscrutability. I ought to note that the bookaneer had grown a beard; the tangled, shapeless thing did nothing to age his youthful face, instead making him appear like one of the young actors who would come to the Garrick with false whiskers glued over their pretty cheeks. Then again, he always managed to appear rather slovenly before an important mission, for which he would later snap into fine form. I wish I could convey something of his inner thoughts, but I could not glean anything definite from him. I’ll do my imitation of Homer, who will stop to describe his heroes suiting up in armor in order to suggest, however indirectly, their states of mind. On the day he began the most fateful mission in the history of the bookaneers, this was the modern armor of our far-famed Pen Davenport: a narrow shoe-tie neckcloth tucked snugly into a crimson velvet waistcoat, where his thumbs were hooked on opposite loops; his dark checked overcoat of the inverness style, with a cape hanging elbow length. In place of a brazen helmet such as the sort the blind bard of Chios dwelled upon, our journeyer had an old-fashioned smoking cap that covered the tops of his ears.

  Wishing him Godspeed, I began to exit when he asked me two questions.

  “Do you think, Fergins, that Belial has already completed the mission? That I will be doing nothing more than wasting my strength sailing across the world?”

  “I have had every scout and spy I trust listening for news, and I believe we would have heard of it. Remember, two ships in the past four months have wrecked on their way to the South Seas. It’s just as likely Belial never made it there, or was waylaid.”

  He nodded, reassured by my optimism, if not by the report of nautical trends, but I wanted to be comprehensive. He invited me for a quick farewell drink.

  I fixed two glasses of champagne. He was slouching to one side at the small table that constituted the only other furniture in the berth beside the bureau. I sat diagonally across, on the edge of the bed.

  “What is it you fear so much about my trip, my dear Fergins?” Davenport asked, swirling the golden liquid in his glass before losing his interest and putting it down.

  “Did I say I do?”

  “Then you do not?”

  I shook the glass side to side until more bubbles rose toward me. I had promised myself not to admit my trepidation, but I never was one who could duck a direct question, certainly not one from Davenport. “There is something about this endeavor that fills me with dread, I confess it. Something . . .”

  “I have had my share of difficult missions.”

  “Of course you’re right. And on the other hand . . .”

  “No other hands today, Fergins. To the point.”

  I said what I had been burning to say all along. “The great Robert Louis Stevenson, ailing and helpless, isolated on a remote island with no law and order, writing what is likely to be his final novel: a bull’s-eye, a bookaneer’s ultimate prize.”

  “You think it all too perfect.”

  “Too perfect not to contain peril.”

  “But of course you think so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fergins, you are a Londoner! That is why you think like that. Which is very different than to say you are an Englishman, by the way,” he mused. “The Englishman is too superstitious to question good fortune, the Londoner too intellectual to accept it.”

  “And the American?”

  “The American,” he said, smiling at the accusatory tone of my response. “The American expects the good fortune.” He studied his slightly overgrown and sharp fingernails, then smoothed his beard with one of them. “Do you know what Kitten would have done?”

  My voice dried up at the usually forbidden topic.

  “If she’d learned of this mission,” he continued, his emerald eyes clouded. “Do you know what she would have done? She would have recited to me all the reasons I should not go and I would have been convinced with all my heart to stay away from the blasted thing. Then when she returned with Stevenson’s manuscript grasped to her bosom like a newborn babe, she would have raised a little eyebrow, so that it tugged her face ever so slightly, and said, ‘Davenport, you failed the test.’” He raised his glass. “To Kitten.”

  Curious as it might sound, over the course of several years between the day my assistance to Davenport began and the time Kitten disappeared, I cannot remember speaking to the fascinating woman more than a half-dozen times. I had encountered her. I would be walking with Davenport late at night as he gave me instructions for an assignment, for instance, and we would part ways at the lighted window of a tavern or hotel, where I could see her inside, bathing indifferently in attention while waiting for him. Or there she would appear at the corner ahead of us, rising up and down on her toes, a coat wrapped around her and a colorful scarf hugging her head so that she was nothing more than a face, and Davenport would bid me an abrupt good-bye as he hurried to her side.

  Yes, I did see her during that period. I was confident that I knew what she was to Davenport and presumed to understand what he was to her, but I could not claim to know her. This is important to understand, Mr. Clover: nobody spent more time with Davenport than the two of us, but to each other we remained almost strangers until—until it was too late. As for Davenport, he only ever talked about what he wanted to talk about and usually he did not want to talk about her. Most of what I knew about Kitten came from my long study of the field. It was believed she was born in France but as a young woman traveled widely, chasing opportunity. Rumors persist about what she did during those years. She was a grave robber in Egypt, an opium trader in Hong Kong, a bravo (or assassin) in Berlin, depending on who tells you.

  The next thing heard about her was during an extended time in America in the war that broke your country to pieces. Her role as a spy for both sides is recorded in two history books, one titled Spies of the Rebellion and another privately printed called Natural Traitors, which devotes half a chapter to a woman known then as Jane Grimm. During wartime, when American book publishing was as splintered as the rest of the country, this thirty-year-old Frenchwoman had occasion to smuggle the proof sheets of valuable books from the Southern states to Northern publishers, and vice versa, marking the beginning of a long career that would bring her great profit by utilizing her diverse set o
f skills as thief, smuggler, and trickster.

  She had been known by a variety of names at different times and places, and like many who spend life operating in the shadows, she could have been forgiven for forgetting the one she was born with. Her name among the bookaneers was a bit of an affectionate jest among those who knew, despite her size, how really ferocious she was, like a kitten with a spool of thread.

  Those two words of Davenport’s in his toast—to Kitten—ended any debate. I met the side of his glass with mine and prayed I would see my companion again.

  • • •

  A TOLLING BELL from the deck alerted visitors to return to land.

  I put my glass back on the bureau of Davenport’s stateroom. “I should leave you to it.”

  “This mission is delicate, Fergins. Unusually so. If my subject were to somehow learn of the purpose of my presence, or be given any reason for extra caution, the mission could be compromised rapidly—and more precariously—than perhaps any other I’ve had. I will be on a primitive island, with infrequent chances to leave and little means of communication with the outside world.”

  “You know, Davenport, that I am entirely discreet about our dealings.”

  “The very reason I am reluctant to convey any doubt. I suppose I mean to urge you to reinforce even your usual discretion and make a fortress of your knowledge.”

  “Without question,” I said solemnly, then thought I ought to add something more formal. “I vow to you before God I shall never say a word of it.”

  “You always understood me, Fergins.” This was Davenport’s way of saying many things ordinary men would have uttered in plainer words: Thank you, or Stay in good health, or I will miss your company, my friend.

  After exiting the berth and taking the long passage to the stairs, a new worry struck and slowed me down. He had sounded hesitant and seemed to be swatting at his own doubts. He had spoken as if we might not meet again. This is what I realized only at that moment: Davenport, for once, shared my dread and sense of danger. As the bell tolled on, I knew I had but a few minutes. I had to convince him to come off the ship with me, to forget this whole affair. Then I noticed something strange. A large fly, following in front of me wherever I turned. Then another black spot swirled right before my eyes, rising and dropping, becoming bigger, splitting into two. Black spots filled my vision; dryness plugged my throat. My knees trembled and buckled and I dropped down, gasping. I knew my earlier instincts were right, the trepidation, the fear that there were enemies hiding among us on this frigate. I tried to stand again and call out to Davenport to save himself but my legs were jelly.