The Last Bookaneer (31 page)

 • • • 

I
FELT A TUG
on my shoulder the next night. Raising my head, the reality of our situation pushed out the sweet oblivion of sleep. I had been sleeping on the floor, without even a mat beneath me. Davenport gestured for me to come with him. To my surprise, I saw he had opened the door very slightly. Now he pushed it farther open. An even greater surprise, there was no apparent reaction to this, so he peered around the edge of the door, holding his breath as he did. Sao, who once again was our night guard, was slouched in his chair asleep and nobody else was in sight. Davenport gestured that I hurry; I shook my head and mouthed a protest. But he already had started his dangerous path, leaving me to either obey or be left alone.

Davenport dragged his uncooperative leg as quietly as he could and I remained so close behind I was almost touching him. We passed the guard's chair without a stir from the dog-tired Samoan. Davenport later told me he had been tempted to grab Sao's rifle, which rested loosely on the man's lap, but judged it too risky. We did not know the exact time of night, but it was late enough that the rest of the house would be asleep—except perhaps for Laefoele, the relief guard, wherever he was. Possibly on his way.

A loose floorboard emitted a sound under our feet. A soft creak, no louder than a sigh. I willed myself not to look back, as though the glance itself would alert Sao. But I could not help it, and as I turned my head, I knew what was about to happen. Sao looked first at the open door and then at us.

Forgetting, it seemed, that he had a lethal weapon at his fingertips with which to shoot us down, Sao lowered his head and charged Davenport. The bookaneer watched this unfold with his usual composure, and easily dodged the runner. Sao smashed right through the stair railing. He toppled over the side and held one of the broken posts, dangling from the edge of the top floor, below him a long drop to the lower level.

Davenport grabbed one of his hands and I clasped the other. We heaved.

“Hold on to us,” Davenport said, struggling with his weight. I lost my grip on the other hand, which was slick with sweat, then the hand Davenport gripped began to slip, but Davenport was able to grab on to Sao's long, thick hair and pull with better leverage. When Sao was safely back at the top, he remained on the floor, catching his breath and shaking off the scare.

“Thank to you, White Chiefs,” he said in English. “Thank to you, you save Sao—”

Davenport interrupted the speech by pummeling the back of Sao's head with the butt of the rifle, which the man had dropped. “Apologies,” Davenport muttered as he stepped around the unconscious lump on the floor to close the door to our former prison. He gestured again for me, but my jaw and mind were slack, frozen by the scene as my companion strained to pull Sao into the chair. Though I was urging him to hurry, I had an idea why he would slow our progress to get Sao into position. If the relief guard thought Sao was asleep, we could win a few extra minutes for our escape before the room was entered.

I helped Davenport down the back stairs of the house. He was extremely winded from the confrontation with Sao. It struck me with a fresh jolt of fear just how weak his injuries had left him, worsened by these last sedentary days at Vailima. We found a lit torch outside the ground floor and Davenport swept it up, staggering and groaning into the night.

It was steamy and windless, but the air on my face and mouth refreshed me. Davenport was visibly relieved to find no signs of pursuers from the house. He was emboldened. But as he took a few more steps onto the grounds, his head swiveled upward. I followed the line of his gaze.

There, on the second-story verandah, the long figure of a man was wrapped into the hammock. I knew that some nights the novelist found relief from his physical ailments by sleeping in the hammock. I could see in the dim blue mushroom-shaped lamps of the verandah that there was a conch shell beside the hammock, alongside the ever-present supply of extra tobacco. A cat was curled up by his feet.

The netted cradle rocked Stevenson and the cat back and forth. After trading whispers, neither Davenport nor I could say whether the man above us was asleep or awake. The long face was covered in shadows. Thunder from the retreating storms rolled through the mountain. Davenport started scrambling across the grounds toward the paddock and I did the same. Sao, Laefoele, Stevenson: the ways to be caught were multiplying at a rapid rate. When we were close enough to the paddock for our eyes to memorize the path beyond, Davenport extinguished our torch under his boot. The blinding darkness that swept around us immediately made the decision seem like a bad one. The hammock still rocked back and forth in a blue glow, now the only light we could see. Stevenson's head had turned slightly, facing us. For all the gold in the world I still could not say whether the novelist was awake, though the fact that he was not moving from his hammock in spite of our flight suggested he slept soundly. Then I noticed that Stevenson's long toes curled and then stretched, curled and stretched again, scratching the cat's back. Davenport perceived this at the same time I did, and launched into the best run he could manage. Stevenson had been watching us all along, toying with us.

When Davenport emerged from the paddock climbing on a horse, his aches seemed to recede; the creature's strength became his own. He reached down to me.

“What are you waiting for, Fergins?”

“Not Jack.”

“What?”

“We can't take Jack! He's Tusitala's favorite! It will kill him.”

“It is the best animal on this rotting terrain, and our best chance; now take my hand!”

The hammock was empty and the next noise was the sound of a conch being blown. The slightest differences in the shell's notes could call the family to dinner or announce that the island was at war, but neither of us had mastered the sounds enough to guess their meanings. Then we heard shouts in Samoan, including one deep, angry voice I recognized as Sao's, amid the din of general chaos we had just unleashed.

I never before noticed how tall Jack was. I was struggling to climb up behind Davenport, and slipped down into a cloud of dust.

“Go without me,” I urged.

He was determined to wait, but I had hit the ground hard. When we heard hoof-falls I yelled again for him to go, and Davenport finally set himself on the animal and galloped away. A few moments later, I heard Jack snorting and whinnying, the sounds moving back toward me. The clouds covering the moon had begun to fall away. There were silhouettes of Samoans everywhere I looked. Axes, rifles, and knives were at the ready.

 • • • 

W
E SPENT THE REST
of the night in the same room from which we had originally escaped, this time with two guards at all times who were, I assume, exhorted by Stevenson to stay more vigilant, or at least awake. We made no further attempts to flee. The next morning we were escorted by John Chinaman and two young Samoans into Stevenson's sanctum, where the master of the house was sitting up in the bed, not so different from the position I now take telling you the story. The bed was covered in mosquito netting. His flageolet was disassembled into many pieces, spread out on the quilt in front of him.

“I have just discovered what is wrong with me, my white gentlemen,” Stevenson said, looking at his reflection in a small mirror. He contorted his face a couple of times, then turned to the profile. “I look like a Pole.”

Davenport and I glanced at each other, unsure if the novelist waited for a response.

Stevenson put down the mirror and waved his hand over the segments of his musical instrument. “Seventeen separate members, you see, my white gentlemen, and most of these have to be fitted on their individual springs as fine as needles. Sometimes two at once, with the springs showing different ways.” His rage seemed to have dissipated, at least outwardly.

I looked again at Davenport, whose eyebrow was now raised and taut as he was nodding in agreement.

“Tell us just one thing, if you would,” the bookaneer said. “About the other stream.”

Stevenson squinted.

“We only found four,” Davenport explained. “
Vai
means water and
lima
means five. We looked everywhere we could. Where is the fifth stream and where does it lead?”

The novelist shrugged. “There are only four. ‘Vailima' sounded better than the Samoan word for ‘four streams.'”

Davenport smiled his gratitude for the explanation, then tried to build on the exchange with a confidential tone. “Perhaps we can still work out an arrangement, Tusitala.”

“Do you know what the traditional punishment for deception in Samoa is, Mr. Porter?” Stevenson said, now looking right at him. “Apologies, I mean Davenport. It is this: You are cast off alone in a canoe in the middle of the ocean. If you are lucky, you die at sea rather than make land on one of the cannibal islands.”

“Is that your intention for us?” I asked, swallowing hard.

“I forced Mr. Fergins to accompany me,” Davenport said. “He deserves no punishment.”

Stevenson opened his mouth, then closed it before he started again. “Do you know what angers me most? The truth should have occurred to me. After all, where would one meet a man as agreeable as you, but in fiction? A man who would volunteer to hold my cigarette after only knowing me a few weeks.” He twisted two pieces of the flageolet together. “I have been disappointed in so many friendships I supposed I tricked myself into having high hopes. Has any author ever fought back against you bookaneers?”

“Some.”

“Have any succeeded? Have you literary Robin Hoods and Rob Roys ever been vanquished by a mere scribbler?”

“That remains to be seen,” answered Davenport.

“You made a grave mistake this time, taking on one of your ‘missions' of greed against what may be the only author on earth who has his own little militia”—another piece of the musical instrument was fitted and twisted in—“armed up to my teeth. When I deal with literary pirates, I do it with gloves off. You know, I suspect there is more that drives your conquests, Mr. Davenport. Love for a woman, perhaps, hindered or lost long ago. Is that so?”

Davenport's eyes popped.

“What are they still doing here?” It was Fanny, who had just walked in. Her lips trembled after she spoke.

“Never mind, Barkis, I am taking care of it.”

“Taking care! You told me these men came to steal from you. This is no house; it's an asylum, where our family has come, one by one, to lose their minds, and everyone else looks in on us to make certain it happens!” She was in tears. Lloyd trailed a few steps behind her. “No, don't take me away! These men must be judged! You”—she pointed right at me—“you were supposed to help convince Louis to take us all back home! Now we are all doomed!”

Lloyd could not manage to pacify his mother at all. But Stevenson extended his hand through the netting and reached hers.

“Teacher, tender comrade, wife,

A fellow farer true through life,

Heart whole and soul free,

The August father gave to me.”

Her hysteria settled down to a low sob as he recited and she squeezed his hand. Lloyd managed to lead her away into another room, leaving us to resume our quiet confrontation.

Davenport, as though he were in the position to make demands, said, “Let us be done with the games. What will you do? What will happen now?”

Stevenson turned his head away without answering. Then he said, almost reassuringly, “Whenever I think of you, I will damn you until the air is blue, and when you think of me, you will damn me until the air is blue, and everything will be all right in the world. Tell me, what happens to ‘bookaneers' when they must finally leave the little bubble of literary life?”

“I suppose they usually disappear from sight.”

“Then you shall be no different. Men, you are now retired from your business. I suppose I know nothing, except that men are fools and hypocrites, and I know less of them than I was fond enough to fancy.” At a signal from Stevenson, John led us out of the room and through the house as Stevenson began to play a slow, tortured tune in a minor key.

Davenport spoke in Chinese (he later translated the conversation for me). “I will pay you generously to help us.”

“You can speak my tongue,” John answered back in Chinese in utter surprise.

“My profession has brought me many places,” Davenport continued smoothly in the other man's tongue. “I know you wish to go away from here, to go home. Back to your own people. Where you will not be demeaned any longer as ‘John Chinaman.' Help us to find Father Thomas and get off the island safely, and I could help you. I will send you money and find your passage.”

John grabbed Davenport by the throat. They had to be separated by native servants. We were then pulled and pushed until we were outside, where we were both thrust into the same empty stall of the paddock inside which Charlie had died in the midst of hallucination and mental anguish. Davenport looked as though he had been dropped into hell, kneeling to examine the ropes and leather straps that had held Charlie down. After a few hours, we heard a commotion outside, and I pressed my face against a slot between two boards.

“What, Fergins?”

I tried to think how best I could tell him what I saw: an entire regiment of Samoan soldiers gathering outside, with a litter that had an iron cage on top, tied to two horses.

O
le Fale Puipei
.” That was the inscription over the entrance to the Apian jail, built on the edge of the island's most miserable swamp. Perhaps I will find a satisfactory translation of this motto one day. Maybe it was some antiquated form of the language that did not match the words as I learned them. “In the Talons of Hope.” Understand, Mr. Clover, that might not be what it means, but that is what it
should
mean.

We had been there one time before, to visit the man who had tried to steal from Stevenson and whom I had first suspected was Belial. Now that we were the prisoners with that same wretched Banner in a chamber near those we were put in, it seemed the whole place might have been erected for those whom Robert Louis Stevenson perceived to have wronged him at one point or another.

There is a little room in the back of the jail used for interviews. We were taken there separately for interrogations by the authorities. They were not so interested in the bookaneer's mission and purpose, for after all there were no books on this island except those brought by whites, and certainly the whole notion of stealing one was rather fanciful in the realm of crimes on the island. Instead, it was the issue of presenting ourselves with false identities that appalled their sensibilities. It was the terrible crime, as Stevenson had warned us, they called deception, something bookaneers practiced before eating breakfast.

“What is your friend's name? Davenport? He called himself Porter, no? You said his name was Porter? But you knew his name? You knew he was Davenport, and called him Porter?”

The issue of what Davenport was called provided endless fascination and distress to the magistrate. There was one official of the prison, a perplexed and angry man, who scowled and sighed at my every answer. Meanwhile, there was a representative from the German consulate, a commissioner or deputy commissioner of some sort, who observed it all with a cold indifference.

On the walls of my cell were carvings and chalk drawings, of ships and sea monsters, of dancing women and dead animals. There was one particularly elaborate and well-done drawing that drew my eye. It showed a very tall figure of a giant or a god, surrounded by smaller men. As I studied it the giant started to look like Davenport, then Belial, then Stevenson.

Davenport and I were held in adjacent cells and could communicate between the thin walls. The fact was, our doors were usually unlocked, leaving us free to move up and down the passage. The guards armed with rifles usually remained in the courtyard in front of the building, and other native guards, who appeared to have only knives, brought us food. Banner laughed and spit at us, screamed that we got what we deserved for not helping him. But he was lonely, and soon enough he just wanted to talk with us.

Belle came to visit us—I should say instead to visit Davenport. She was dressed in a picnic dress of white and crimson with braided trim around the collar and sleeves, and also wore an enthusiastic grin, which popped into a big smile, as she spoke to him. She seemed entirely taken with the fact that he had turned out to be a criminal.

“Whatever will you do, Mr. Porter—Davenport?” she asked.

He and I were on a bench in the central passage, and she sat on one opposite from us. “It appears I haven't much choice in what I do, Miss Strong,” he said mechanically.

“Do you mean”—she lowered her voice to a whisper and almost giggled her question—“you will escape?”

Both of us were too amazed to respond.

“Louis will not tell us very much about what you did or tried to do,” she continued, too excited to wait for an answer to her earlier question. “I told him I was going to the village for supplies to make some new dresses. Do not worry. Neither Vao nor I will ever breathe a word of this visit or of your plans.”

“Vao?” Davenport echoed.

“Yes, the most prized of our house girls. She accompanied me here and listens to what I tell her to do, so don't worry about her either. You know of her?”

“She was the dwarf's charge,” I said, hoping to defuse the tension that came from Davenport's sudden animation.

Belle rolled her eyes. “He was always the funniest little creature. Since Tulagi jumped into that ditch we have hardly known what to do with her. I caught her trying on one of my dresses yesterday. She was seen drinking alcohol from our cabinets by one of our houseboys, and some food that had gone missing she had apparently eaten in one sitting. If it were not for our feeling sympathy for her because of the dwarf's death, she would have had to be dismissed. I am trying to keep her busy so it will not come to that.”

Davenport interrupted before she had finished. “Was it Vao's idea to come here, or yours?”

Her head tilted in a gesture of suspicion at the question. “Who do you think makes the decisions, Mr. Davenport, me or the brown girls who serve Vailima?”

Davenport had lost patience for her. “Just please tell me where she is.”

“Waiting outside. You greet my visit with lassitude and apathy, yet your eyes dance at the mention of the little native girl. Do you fancy her?”

“You misunderstand,” Davenport said, though in fact the young woman had been astute. “I just need to speak to her—”

She was seething, her cheeks streaked red, reminding me of her mother during her first outburst toward me. “Perhaps you do belong in here, after all,” she said, and there ended the visit.

Davenport continued to be sullen and quiet after ruining any chance that Belle might help. Having known him for so many years, I was inclined to assume he was plotting—that he would hatch some victory from the darkest and lowest point of his adventures. I thought back to a time he sent for me while authorities in Dublin were questioning him and, once I arrived at the police station, rather a nervous wreck, the confidence in his eyes that it was an amusing and merely temporary problem (he was right). But when we were able to come together in the central passage of the Samoan prison and I looked closely—the rare moments his eyes met mine—I knew how different it was this time. I had never seen him like this. He was overcome.

I told him he should not have waited for me so long when I fell from the horse at Vailima. Perhaps he could have escaped Stevenson's men.

“Could I?” His words were muffled, his mouth covered by the palm of his hand. He had not shaved since his injury and his coarse beard had been growing again, and with the latest crop of whiskers his whole face seemed to be cast in shadows. “Had I known, Fergins, that it would be an author who would vanquish me—why, I think I would have enjoyed the devilishness of it all. No, there would have been no escape this time, not with an army of islanders after me. Kitten was right.”

“What do you mean?”

“She once told me that when the last bookaneer appeared, he would leave grinning, and so our business would end.” He was speaking to me, but it was almost a trancelike state from which the words emerged. “She thought I would be her legacy. She thought it would be me.”

I was confused. “Who?”

“The last bookaneer. She said I could be the best because I was heartless. She meant it as praise, Fergins. That unlike all the authors whose books we chased, I had learned to separate the sentiment from the ambition. I tried, I always tried to be what she thought I was. . . .” Then he hung his head.
Overcome.

It was so rare for him to speak of Kitten that whenever he did, I hardly ever responded. After her death, I had held on to that French edition of
Frankenstein
I mentioned earlier, the one she had left behind at a hotel near Geneva during her opium haze. Even if Davenport would seldom discuss her, my time with Kitten on Lake Geneva left me wanting to try to understand her better. Though she had not been able to tell me anything about it, a secondhand book reveals much to the keeper of a bookstall. From the types of cracks in the spine and the edges of pages, I can tell at a glance a book that has been well read from a book that has been abused. I believe it was the litterateur Charles Lamb who told Coleridge that books are not just the words on the page, but the blots and the dog-eared corners, the buttery thumbprints and pipe ash we leave on them. I knew a bookseller who by habit marked his page with his wire-rimmed spectacles, dozens of his spectacles being found for years after his death in libraries across London. Books are written over with names, dates, romantic and business propositions, gift dedications; the pages could be pressed onto flowers, keys, notes. A book can unfold moments or generations, if you know how to see it. Most people, of course, do not. How odd it must be to go through life believing that a book is a book.

In the case of this particular edition of Shelley's novel, it was one of the first translations to be printed after the young Englishwoman's story became such a sensation. In France, unlike in many other countries, people will go without food in order to own a book they enjoy. The French publishers were fragmented by regions in the early 1820s. The whole world was smaller then, and there was no better example of it than in books. Booksellers and publishers in the olden days were one and the same. You would meet an author in person, print and bind his book, and sell it to your friends and neighbors. Though the bookseller who printed it was no longer in existence, I easily identified the area of France where it most likely had been first sold. I could also determine almost immediately it'd had at least two different owners, judging from the different ways pages had been held and marked, and some writing on two different places on the flyleaf—the first line of writing was crossed out too thoroughly to read; another appeared to be the name Loui.

I thought about that book as Davenport finished speaking about Kitten's wishes for his career.

“If you could have overtaken Belial this time, what would you have said to him?” I asked, in part to relieve him of the topic of Kitten.

He smirked to himself, I suppose thinking of an answer, but had no intention of telling it to me. We stood there in silence.

Without a conversation, the flow of my memories continued: Whenever I was traveling near France after Kitten's death, I brought her book with me as well as a list of all the aliases I had heard associated with Kitten, gradually narrowing them down through defunct directories to determine her birth name. Because it seemed to have had two owners with no familial resemblance in handwriting, I suspected this
Frankenstein
had been a secondhand purchase before landing in Kitten's hands.

When I was satisfied I had identified her surname and its proper branch, I was able to discover several people who remembered Kitten's family, which had moved away long ago. One old lady had a vivid memory of Kitten's mother, whose name, Louisa, matched the one on the flyleaf. She did not recognize the edition of the book but did remember her fondness for
Frankenstein
, describing it as an obsession. “It was her favorite story—she said it was the only book other than the Bible that she read beginning to end, and her Bible she would throw at her children's heads or use to beat them. She was a mean woman, had three or four sons and the one girl, who had to steal to feed herself. But that book, she loved. Why, that witch even begged her daughter to read the book to her when she was ill—imagine, a dying woman coughing blood onto her pillow, asking a fifteen-year-old girl to read such a disgusting story out loud. I'd spit on her if I saw her living again. A detestable picture!” She spit right on the book.

I was very moved by the image of Kitten as a young woman whose mother only appreciated her through this book. One of my earliest memories is of my own mother singing to me. Nothing sophisticated, Irish peasant songs she had heard from her grandmother. Over the years, I found the words to these songs printed in various obscure books, and when my mother had long forgotten the songs herself, I would sing them to her, and I believe that brought her some happiness, or at least the memory of happiness.

No doubt Belial had been right when he told Davenport that giving Kitten such an enormous success as the Shelley novelette hollowed her ambitions. But I believed there had been something more, and that Belial, as Belial did, flattered himself to think he knew the whole story. There are some who would never want to look at a book again associated with such a bleak past as her mother's abuse of her, but to Kitten her mother's copy of Shelley's novel had become a talisman. It was impossible to ask her now, but it seemed to me that perhaps she sought some peace from that mission. Mary Shelley had once said that writing
Frankenstein
made her cross from childhood into life; I think Kitten believed that finding the long-lost Shelley document, the supposed key to the creation of
Frankenstein
, would have finally given her dominion over the bedlam of her childhood. This is just my speculation. I cannot really say what was in Kitten's mind, other than to repeat the scattered, incomplete comments she made in her final weeks. Do our professional accomplishments ever really act as salve to personal grief?