The Last Bookaneer (24 page)

“Please go on, Fanny.” Still worried I might place the mission in jeopardy, I glanced around furtively but there was no sign of Davenport. “Should we speak inside our cottage?”

I balanced the large melon on my hip and we began to walk side by side, but she guided me farther from the cottage. “No, let us stay outside. I cannot stay very long before I am missed. Besides, my warning is for you, and concerns Mr. Porter. I had one of our outside boys watching your cottage so I knew when I could speak to you alone. I am afraid for your safety.”

“How do you mean?”

“When you first arrived with Mr. Porter, I understood you gentlemen were passing through. You know how rare visitors are out here, and can imagine why I was so anxious to find out the latest news from Britain and Europe from you. But then there came a change in his eyes.”

“Tusitala's?” I asked.

Her own eyes flashed with urgency as she turned toward me. “Mr. Porter's. The island infected him. Just as it had my Louis long before you came.”

“Do you mean to suggest some kind of tropical illness?”

She grabbed my wrist. “I mean something far more dangerous than fever, than the hurricanes or even the most warlike of the savages—well, I do not like to call them that—it is the effect of being here for too long on certain white men. How do I explain it? It . . . casts a spell . . .” She shook her head and tried again. “Returns a man to his primal state. Louis thinks my peasant soul comes out when I work on the land, but it is men who become drunk with dominion over the earth and soon are ready to sell their trousers and douse themselves in coconut oil. Their imagination grows out of proportion to real life. It is why Louis likes to write here, because he feels free of all constraints. But it is also what scares me down in my bones. You see it in the foreign consuls who seek power here, in the missionaries, and now in my husband and your friend. Vailima is no longer just a home we built for our family; it is an ancestral home—and we are the ancestors. Don't you see it forming in his eyes? In Mr. Porter's?”

I adjusted the fruit, which became heavier as I thought about her frantic questions.

“That melon—I brought the seeds with me to Samoa, you know. Look at it again, Mr. Fergins,” she went on, her bushy eyebrows curling downward with impatience. I held it up and the lamplight went right through it, as though it were a round, fat telescope. My fingers touched the hollow, slimy middle of the melon.

“The rats have been eating through them. A rich and beautiful fruit from this infertile ground, but the core is eaten away by invisible forces.”

She began hurrying back toward the tree where she had tied her horse. I shifted my balance and caught up with her. “I can assure you, Fanny, we have no plans to stay indefinitely. Mr. Porter's work, the book he wishes to write, simply takes time.”

“I must go before I am missed. They say that after two months in Samoa, a white man will go mad. If you wish to save yourself, then see to it that you both leave this place quickly. You must promise me that.” In her gaze and her imploring voice, I saw the stern mother in her, and understood how both of her grown children had trouble leaving her side.

 • • • 

T
HE NEXT THREE DAYS
and nights Davenport barely said a word, and I must admit I did not try very hard to persuade him to break his silence. Of course, I told him of Fanny Stevenson's visit and my conversation with her, but he had so little to say in reply that this exchange deepened the chasm between us. The longer we avoided talking, the harder it was to try. What would you do about it, Mr. Clover?

—
About what, Mr. Fergins?

If your friend were responsible for such a . . . horrible . . . wretched . . . such a tragic death, how would you have proceeded?

—
I suppose I would have just the same thoughts as you. How could he still be a friend of mine after that? I would have marched right out the door and run away, very far away, as Mrs. Stevenson urged you to do.

I told you the story enters dark places. So you would have jettisoned him altogether?

—Yes, exactly. Why, I would have asked Cipaou to take me to the British consulate and make immediate arrangements to go home.

I see what you mean, Mr. Clover. But here is what you overlook. He is already a friend; that cannot change in the blink of an eye. A man takes a wife “for better or for worse,” and a friend comes with hardly less responsibility, sometimes more. Remember, I had agreed to assist in the success of this Samoan adventure, no matter what else happened. Sometimes, adversity requires increased commitment. Observing him in agony on the floor of our hut, I feared for what would happen to him.

I can recall other times over the years when I worried about his mental well-being a good deal. In the period after he lost Kitten, Davenport was adrift. He drank too much, he accepted missions that he would have never ordinarily considered from men who once upon a time would have made him turn up his nose. I remember one occasion in particular: he asked me to find out the location of a rather disreputable book reviewer, a man who dressed like a cheap poet and chewed tobacco like an American. A publisher had hired Davenport to pay this fellow a visit. It was Davenport's assignment to remind the reviewer that he had been paid to puff—to write a positive review, in layman's terms—a new book, after a rumor had been overheard that he was, in fact, composing a rather scathing one. This was the sort of mission usually only taken by one of the lowest class of bookaneers, the so-called barnacles. Davenport was so mastered by drink that I had to escort him to the address in a suburb of London or he wouldn't have found it. I heard a tumult inside and ran into the house. When the critic scoffed at Davenport's demand, the bookaneer struck him in the head, but it turned out the reviewer was also an Oxford pugilist. I had to pull the fellow off the bookaneer and peel my companion, bloodied, from the imitation Turkish rug.

I grew quite concerned about the health of the Samoan mission. We had not been back to Vailima since Charlie was buried and had no intelligence about what was happening there. And each day, as the death of Charlie began to seem more part of the past than of the present, the object of my sorrow began to shift from the lost servant to the despair of my companion. I carefully formulated a statement of reassurance that ran something like this: “It was not your intention, Davenport, to do the young native harm, and you mustn't blame yourself for doing what you had to do in the name of a mission.” I hoped this might help him surrender those burdens he had brought upon himself, and allow him to move forward with what could still be accomplished. When I finally prepared to say this, it was no use; he spoke over me.

“Fergins, I am quite tired of so many delays,” he said, a glimmer in his eye that had not been present since before the funeral. He was looking with intensity at the upper beams holding up our iron roof. He reached up and idly brushed his hand against it. He might have been studying the vaulted ceilings of an ancient cathedral. “Tired. Collect some fruit and prepare our trunks. We are finished with this place.”

“Davenport? You want me to go out and collect fruit in the dark?”

He stepped onto the wooden plank that formed the threshold of our hut, outlined by the darkness, pushing his face against the onslaught of wind. “You can manage. I have already sent for Cipaou to deliver a farewell card to Stevenson. We're leaving first thing in the morning, as soon as Cipaou comes.” He ducked his head as he moved inside and said no more.

That night, I lay awake thinking of what might happen next, when Davenport began to thrash . . . groan . . . cry out . . . even (so it sounded) weep. I did not have the heart when morning came to ask him what it was he had seen in his dreams. Later, while mired in disaster, he revealed to me that he had dreamt of Kitten in her final hours.

Whether by virtue of illness, death, incarceration, or the twilight of the profession itself, every bookaneer had a last mission, but it was rare that the mission brought about the end. Such was the unusual destiny of Kitten, a woman who believed destiny was a comfort for the weak minded. I remember hearing the first rumblings about her fateful endeavor during the summer of 1882. It was late at night and I was dog tired when Davenport finally entered the drawing room at the Hogarth Club, with its big chairs and long rugs. I was waiting to hand over a biographical listing he needed for an important negotiation in order to prove a contested item was not a forgery. But he hardly looked in my direction and had no interest in the document that was the product of hours in the damp closets of libraries and antiquarians' attics. He tilted back the strong drink I'd ordered him and snapped his fingers for the waiter to bring another before he slammed the empty glass to the table. In a few minutes he had produced more noise, without saying a word, than I had heard in the room during the previous two hours.

Davenport's moods were always unpredictable, but I knew something had gone wrong when he voluntarily started to talk about Kitten. He said that Kitten had been hired to go abroad and search out a series of manuscript pages that had been believed lost for more than sixty years. The facts seemed rather unremarkable in themselves and did not justify his agitation.

“She will receive market value for the pages? Then why—”

“From what she tells me, in fact, the offer made to her is generous, quite generous.”

“In that case, what—”

Again he interrupted. “Never search for any kind of Holy Grail, Fergins. It is the sort of thing done by your onetime friend Whiskey Bill, who has been unable to forget the legends of Poe's lost novel, which is exactly why Bill is no more useful than a squeezed orange or a spent bullet.”

“Well, if Kitten, who is as experienced as any bookaneer, judges it conducive—”

“She taught me that. Yes. Avoid the Holy Grail, the heroic journeys, the pursuit of a legend—that is not the life of the bookaneer, who must keep his eyes on the ground while other book people live by dreaming. A mission such as this could drag on and become a drain that ruins a bookaneer's fortunes.”

I spoke quicker and completed a question. “Who has hired her for it, and what is it, exactly?”

“An anonymous collector. Shelley, that's what they're after, Fergins.”

His personal concern for Kitten, which reached a near-hysterical pitch at the Hogarth that night, put away the canard that he could ever separate her professional life from his own. This is what you would not hear him say: “Without any good reason in particular, I have a feeling of dread about this.” He never admitted a superstitious emotion. But I knew enough of Pen Davenport that it was exactly how his words sounded in my ears.

As for the object of her mission, it was indeed a bookaneer's version of a Holy Grail. It was something talked about for a long time but never proven to actually exist. The collector was pursuing Mary Shelley's lost short story, sometimes referred to as a novelette, of
Frankenstein
she finished in the summer of 1816 before writing the novel itself, which would then be completed the following year. Short stories, notebooks, outlines, scribbles, even crude stick-figure drawings made in connection with an important work could command great prices—sometimes higher than pages of a finished manuscript—because these raw materials entered directly into the author's thoughts. A half-page list of potential titles Charles Dickens had scrawled out for his unfinished work,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, for instance, has been bought and sold in public—and purloined and copied and bartered in secret—more times than any other item related to that book.

Though an author such as Mrs. Shelley lived so much more recently than, say, Shakespeare or Dante, that does not diminish the value of materials related to her work. In fact,
Frankenstein
was such an unexpected and unprecedented success that the original documents were at best sloppily preserved and collected at the time, making their later recovery more difficult and their value dearer. Frankenstein's creature, as a literary creation, stood alone in its originality, one of the reasons for that novel's incredibly enduring popularity. To find Mary Shelley's story that originated it would rate with the top two or three discoveries by any bookaneer, certainly in modern times, maybe in history.

The novelette was presumed destroyed by bibliographers until some pages of the late Mrs. Shelley's diary rediscovered in the late 1860s in the drawer of a discarded desk suggested it could be extant. The collector who'd hired Kitten had come into possession of a fresh clue where to search. Armed with this information, Kitten left England less than a week after I heard about it from Davenport. Bookaneers did not tell their own tales, but from what I understood her expedition was less eventful than Davenport had expected. She was gone only two and a half months, all told, and by all accounts met with great success. She found Shelley's novelette. And when the intermediaries for the collector received the novelette from her, as promised they passed the enormous payment on to the victorious bookaneer. All of this transpired without complications. I remember seeing Kitten at a distance during the period after her return to London; perhaps it was my imagination, but she seemed buoyant.

That was the beginning of the end.

I had to leave for some travels to conduct some business at Davenport's behest, and when I returned to London he was in as wretched a state as I had seen in the ten years I'd known the man.

He didn't stop moving as I tried to talk with him, and I could not follow his broken line of discussion. “Mark this, Fergins . . . someone has lured her into a scrape. . . . Someone has done it!”

He went up and down his rooms, pacing, I thought, until I realized he was plucking up clothes, maps, and scraps of writing paper. I recognized these scraps: they had been accumulated over many years, and written on them were the locations of trusted men and women in every quarter of the world.