The Last Bookaneer (5 page)

Neither Belial, Kitten, nor Davenport were among the bookaneers who had employed my services. It was rather peevish of me to be discouraged by this. I confess that. I had been admitted into the world of the bookaneers by chance, and now all I wished, more than any earthly object, was to observe the absolute best. What is that Arab proverb old Mr. Stemmes would sometimes repeat? Beware the camel's nose—for its whole body will soon follow. You have the gist. I had never been greedy, but in this instance I could not restrain myself. Though Belial might as well have been the invisible man, and Kitten was too intimidating to approach, I decided that the next time I happened to see Pen Davenport I would come right out and tell him my desire.

I must have been invigorated by the breeze one brisk spring evening, because I thought I'd try some places where he might be, and found my way to the district of Covent Garden. When I entered the dark Italianate rooms of the Garrick Club, the clocks inside were chiming midnight while the noise and bustle of men was fresh and unflagging. Here was a place that made the thought of ever sleeping seem foolish. I hoped that listening to the after-theater conversations I might overhear some gossip related to the bookaneers, and more specifically a hint of a recent sighting of Davenport around London, though for all I knew he was on a remote mission and far from English soil.

I was flattered when the unassuming usher bowed and told me to follow him. “We have a place waiting for you.”

How highly my new associations with the bookaneers had elevated my social status. Here in New York, culture is only occasionally more powerful than money, but in London, wealth will never be even a close second.

The Garrick was crammed with expensive collections of books and a range of paintings, modern and old, some of which the museums would consider too strange or obscene to display. Just as the wall space was split between art and literature, so was the roll of members and guests who frequented the place, these authors and artists also joined by many of the great actors of the theater. There were so many performers in wigs and false mustaches and heavy powders, you assumed everyone was in disguise even if they were not, and you felt that same feeling as in the best theaters of the day. Magical beings and not ordinary humans must reign here. There was one band of happy mummies and ghouls, raising glasses for a toast to a successful show. As I was conducted through a long passage off the main dining room, I prepared to ask the usher if there had been any interesting visitors that evening, when we stopped at the entrance of the smoking room.

The usher stepped to the side and I saw him. Pen Davenport was at a table in the center, the air around him a swirl of bitter tobacco scents—from musk to mustard. I glanced back over my shoulder. The usher had vanished into the dining room.

“I understand you have been looking for me.”

My jaw actually dropped.

Drowsy, thoughtful eyes the color of emeralds glanced up from beneath long lashes. His voice was quiet enough that I had to lean an ear toward him. Above him was a painting of David Garrick, the legendary actor whose name inspired the club's, dressed as Macbeth and contemplating a dagger; to the left of the speaker, an elegant statuette of Thackeray.

I clapped my mouth closed. “Pardon?”

“Then you haven't been searching for me?”

I was so amazed I could hardly reply. Before the Garrick I had paused at a few taverns and clubs of literary bent where, my previous notes reminded me, I had seen Davenport in the past, but I had not given any indication of my purpose.

I found my tongue. “I looked for you this evening, yes, but have not uttered your name to another living soul.”

“You did not have to. In the past four hours you visited the Beefsteak, the Green Room, the Canary House, the Hogarth, and now the Garrick, and did little else but whistle to yourself and hide behind your spectacles. I know who you are. You have performed trifling assignments for some middling bookaneers, and outside of that fact I would wager your life is rather plain. White-rim spectacles are only worn by a man who keeps clean. So if you are doing something unusual, it is surely connected to
our
profession, not yours. If two of the five places had been different, if you went to the Crown or Stone Tavern on your tour of London club life, even if only one of the five had been a favorite haunt of some other bookaneer, of Molasses's or that redheaded lout Whiskey Bill's, for instance, then it would have been less obvious you searched for me.”

“But how did you know where I've been? Were you . . .” I swallowed my next word.

“I have not had you followed,” he said, guessing my question. “I'm afraid, bookseller, you will never be important enough to follow.” It is difficult to accurately describe how Davenport could speak with sincerity but without much inflection; only he could manage pronouncing “you will never be important” not as an insult, but as an impersonal observation.

“No, of course I couldn't. I didn't mean—”

“I maintain multiple sets of eyes across the city wherever there are literary characters. The clubs, the drinking dens, the coffeehouses, the circulating libraries, the printers' shops and their warehouses. I am informed of visitors' routines, and breaks in those routines. Unlike some of my more grandiose challengers who fancy they are too distinguished to be viewed by fellow men, I make myself just visible enough to know when someone wishes to find me. Now, if you please.” He flicked his hand for me to take a seat.

Shaking off my nerves, I lowered myself into the chair opposite, almost slipping down the big leather cushion onto the floor. There was a sample of the club's famous gin punch waiting for me on the table. I could not stop myself from staring at the man.

“When they dreamed of turning iron and metal into gold, they called it alchemy. The much more far-fetched dream of turning bound sheafs of plain paper into fortunes, they call publishing,” he mused with an arch expression on his face. Though I was nearly a decade his senior, at twenty-six years old he commanded a conversation in a way I never had. “Usually when a man seeks my company,” the bookaneer continued, “I expect him to do some of the talking.”

“Of course, Mr. Davenport.” He held out a cigar to me. “No, thank you; tobacco rather irritates my—”

“Hold it, at least. I will not be seen in the smoking room of the Garrick with a nonsmoker.”

I complied. “That's sensible.”

“It is a doomed calling, you know.”

“What?”

“Bookselling. Your problem is the educational system. It's become too good. Aristocrats enjoy spending as much money as possible on books. The greater portion of the population that learns to read, the more they will revolt against having to pay to do so. Now, your business.”

I explained how recently I had been given the unexpected chance to be of some service to some in his field, and that I thought, perhaps, that if he should ever need assistance similar to that which I had performed from time to time for his fellow bookaneers—not that he would, being so accomplished—but in the odd event, the unexpected and unlikely occasion, the rare spot that he did find that he did, I thought to leave him my card.

“Oh. You are finished?”

“Well, I—Sorry.”

“Do you know how many of the great bookaneers have passed through this room over the years?”

“No.”

“They were individuals who rose, usually without the name of a college or a family, to hold as much sway as rich publishers and esteemed authors, more so in some cases, in determining the public's access to books. If they did wrong sometimes, well, so have the publishers—so have books themselves, which have started wars and have ended them, have saved lives and vanquished them without mercy. I understand you are a sort of encyclopedia when it comes to knowledge about our trade. I wonder if you noticed how I rate among the bookaneers—”

“Oh, the very top of the pile, I'd say! Pen Davenport? A master. Right up alongside Belial.”

Later, I would understand that Davenport was not to be read all at once, like a broadside, but unfolded gradually, as the pages of a long, multivolume set of books. I had made two mistakes in a single breath. I had interrupted his monologue, without intending to, and I had said Belial.

His deep annoyance showed itself only by the downward slope of his brow and the pursing of his fine mouth. He punished me with three long beats of silence before his face relaxed. “Belial,” he began in a grumbling voice. “Belial would eat your heart if given the chance. Tell me this, bookseller. Imagine Belial sitting beside me right now, and he offered you a place helping him, and I offered the same. You must accept one or the other, for we two are men of opposite principles.”

“How do you mean?”

“I am a man who respects the supremacy of books; he is one who seeks to gain supremacy from them. Which man would you accept?”

“Why, I suppose whoever needed my help more.”

I took his elaborately crumpled chin and his hunched shoulders to mean I had insulted him. “If you noticed how I rate among the bookaneers, if you possessed that modicum of knowledge, you would know that the reason I am first-rate is that I need no help. Certainly not the help of a man who believes I would do anything in the style as a ruffian such as
Whiskey Bill
.”

“My apologies.” I gave my spectacles a good polish and then took another quick glance around the room. “I am sorry I do not know what bookaneers have been in this place through history, Mr. Davenport. But I can tell you that Edgar Boehm said he made that statuette behind you in only two sittings with William Thackeray in 1860, but in fact he completed it only after the novelist's death. One of those four seemingly identical—seemingly, I say—early editions of Shakespeare on that oval table in the far corner is a forgery, and I would venture to guess a misprint on the title page of the third novel from the left on the shelf to the right of you has led the librarian of this club to believe it is a much older volume than it is.”

“Listen to me, bookseller. I am going to ask you something, and if you can answer, I may give you a chance.”

Hope returned to me, and hearing the beating of my heart in my ears reminded me how much I craved what he held out. I prepared myself, took a deep breath, nodded.

“Understand, Mr. Fergins, that when a man does work for me, he works for no one else.”

“What is the question?”

“It is a simple and easy one—too easy. Whiskey Bill transferred a number of books over the past year and a half through your bookstall into other hands. What were in those books?”

I felt my racing heart skip. “I cannot answer.”

“You do not remember or—” He broke off. He studied me through a series of slow blinks, then nodded. “No. You are loyal to the man.”

I smiled and shook my head no. “I cannot answer, Mr. Davenport, simply because I do not know. You see, I never opened them.” I placed the unlit cigar down in front of him and began to gather myself to leave.

“Wait a minute.”

I paused at the threshold of the smoking room. I wasn't even certain he was still addressing me. When I turned around, he was concentrating on his cigar for a while before he put it out and spoke again.

“Congratulations. You gave the one right answer, bookseller.”

“Did I?”

His hands were folded in his lap, the fingertips on one hand tapping the tips of his other hand as he considered me and waited for me to say something sensible.

I almost broke down laughing.
Pen Davenport
had congratulated me, and Thackeray and Macbeth were witnesses.

I
t is no exaggeration to say the publishing trade nearly ran aground a few years after I began to assist Pen Davenport. Several times, as a matter of fact. The greatest change for the community—and the terrible threat to the continued livelihood of the bookaneers—was the attempt to enact an international agreement on copyright. This movement, wide awake after a dormancy, tipped the trade into a state of uncertainty that disrupted every level of the profession, from the papermakers and compilers to the millionaire publishers. Meanwhile, printers and binders perfected methods to make books more cheaply and quicker than ever imagined. Book prices fell into disarray. Bookselling was no longer a trade for a rational man, as I discovered while keeping the dire accounts of my bookstall. You might wonder, as I continue my story, whether I was wise to put my bookselling business at further risk through my unorthodox associations. There were times when the added income from Davenport's assignments were all that stood between the operating or shuttering of my much loved bookstall.

I have mentioned that it was the lack of copyright protection for foreign works on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that gave birth to the modern bookaneers. To shine the bright light of the law over the publishing field would all but obliterate their profession. Indeed, there came a time when the United States—a nation where it seems even lawmakers detest laws—finally agreed in principle to an international treaty. Authors celebrated the news and visited Congress to shake hands, but the gloom was palpable for those who were accustomed to keeping order in the hidden corners of the trade.

About a decade into my association with Davenport, some older bookaneers passed away or retired. The formidable queen bee of the group, the deceptively named Kitten, was gone, though her indelible mark never went away, especially from the methods and emotions of Davenport. Many of the lesser bookaneers moved on to simpler work, and the parasitic barnacles scrambled for whatever scraps remained. But here was something strange: it was the first-rate bookaneers, those who had been most nimble in their techniques and had shown the greatest abilities and foresight in their line of work, who blinded themselves to the inevitable downfall of the profession. The very best of the remaining bookaneers, it seemed, were set to sink with the ship because they could not fathom dry land.

The literary taverns around London sat gloomy and idle, often half-empty, filled with faint echoes of golden times. Fewer and fewer assignments reached me from Davenport. With my business troubles mounting, I was forced to sell some of the rarest editions in my personal collection. Visiting Paris for this purpose, I found its book community mired in a similar malaise, and witnessed or heard about the same affliction in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, as well as Berlin, Barcelona, Vienna, Zurich, Rome, and all the centers of publishing.

That brings us to approximately a year ago, in the fall of 1890. One quiet morning back at my stall, I was contemplating the dispiriting numbers of my ledgers. In the grip of such hard times I could not afford a single loss to my stock. Any bookstall owner will tell you that being in business outdoors means books disappear. It might be the wealthiest gentleman in the neighborhood who, peeping into a book of history, remembers an appointment and, without thinking, walks away with the unpaid-for volume. There were others, mostly urchins of the street, who would try to grab a book to sell somewhere else for small change. I kept one of those great, big theological tomes at a table in front of my chair, which I could drop onto an offender. I also employed a young boy of my own to stand guard and watch for books that “grow legs.” Lastly, I kept the books on my shelves spread out just enough that I could see out every side of the stall from where I sat.

My little guard had gone on an errand for me when I spied through one of these slits a boy of ten or eleven strutting by, walking his fingers along the spines of the books. He slowed his step. I knew what was about to happen. I leapt up armed with my
Jones's Theology
but he had already begun running off at the speed of a thunderbolt. By the time I started to give chase, I was too breathless from the exertion even to yell “thief,” and the little Oliver Twist was far gone into the crowds.

To my surprise, I did not find anything missing. I counted my inventory once more. There was, as it turned out, one book more than there should have been. I recognized the size, shape, the clasp, the grain of the plain brown leather, and most of all the name of a nonexistent book, in this case
Concerning the Three Impostors,
by Emperor Frederick II. It had to be—it
was
one of Whiskey Bill's, so long absent from my sight. I looked around, as though the bookaneer might be standing there tipping his dandyish high hat to me as he had done from the stairwell at the Crown, which by this point had long ago closed its doors. Exhilarated by the chance to do what I never dared, I carefully opened the metal latch, threw aside the leather strap, and with great ceremony turned to the title page, then turned to the next page, then the next, the next, then skipped ten, twenty, forty-five pages ahead, thirty pages back. The pages were blank.

Running my hand through the book again, I noticed the back cover was thicker than the front. I had come across some examples of binding from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in which church relics were kept in a sort of cupboard inside the leather. It could be a crucifix or perhaps a tooth. Old Stemmes told me he once found a human toe, though I presume he was inebriated and had dropped a piece of sausage there. Now, the book I held in my hands at the moment was not from another century, but I suspected it might share the same design, and I carefully peeled back the compartment, where there was a sealed letter.

Closing my stall an hour and a half early, I hurried to the far side of the square and hailed a cab to Dover Street. It was a long drive between two parts of the city; unlike New York, which ends abruptly when it pleases, London stretches out obnoxiously in every direction. I entered a tall and narrow building awkwardly combining the grammar of French and Greek architecture into a monstrosity of pillars, arches, gables, and friezes; this was one of the new “private” hotels where an inhabitant was not bothered by being forced to pass through any of the public rooms. There was also no elevator, and climbing the four steep flights took the wind out of me for the second time that day. After four pulls of the bell Davenport appeared, weary from interrupted sleep. It was three o'clock in the afternoon.

“You have brought breakfast, I assume, Fergins,” he said in a croak, turning his back and leading me in. “The other day when I went down to the dining room, there were two American girls—at separate ends of the room—with their elbows on the tables. I found it amusing, but I could hardly enjoy my food listening to all the English ladies grind their teeth over it.”

His rooms were in the usual disarray, piles of newspapers, magazines, and only a few books scattered here and there. Shelves were mostly empty. Davenport almost never kept a book, unless he was especially amused or repulsed by it. There were some etchings and landscapes on the wall, but most had been turned around so that the plain brown backs of the frames faced out; these the bookaneer felt were gaudy or in some other ways lacking in style. He would usually change hotels every time he returned from a mission away, or every four or five weeks if he remained in London, but he had stayed put here for two months despite complaining about it. I stopped to lean against the wall of his sitting room, trying to smile through my panting. “I might, I just might have a lead—well, I have something I trust you'll find intriguing, anyway.” I put my hand to my coat. “But first, my dear Davenport, how are you? You are not unwell, I hope?”

“Wait a minute.”

He washed and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. The forty-four-year-old face still appeared boyish from a distance but a closer inspection revealed weathered skin, creased faintly like well-worn cotton.

He hated pleasantries, but my question was real. I had been worried about the bookaneer, about the states of lethargy and dark moods of solitude I would find him in.

“Unwell and as well as ever. Have you come all that way to ask me that?”

“No. It's Whiskey Bill.”

He shrugged. “He retired, or whatever you might call stopping something nobody else cares if you do.”

I removed the volume of blank pages from my coat and explained how it had come to be at my stall, and how I found the letter hidden in the leather cupboard inside the back cover. My narrative did not get a rise out of him and he waved the letter away when I held it out. “Don't you even want to see it, my dear Davenport?”

“Read it to me.”

“The letter is marked P. D. on the front. I suppose you agree it must be meant for you, and that we are quite justified in unsealing it.”

He was just as uninterested in the ethics of the matter.

I opened the letter, making certain to show that I had not previously tampered with it. I gave an involuntary laugh.

“What do you howl about, Fergins?”

“It
is
for you.” I tried not to be melodramatic in my reading, but the anticipation and the strong wording probably lent a theatrical edge to my voice.

Friday, 17th October 1890. My dear Pen. I write to you with days remaining to me before I die. You must see me, sooner, not later. Your life depends on what I have to tell you.

I gasped. “It is signed ‘Whiskey Bill.'”

But when I looked up from the extraordinary letter I found Davenport fully absorbed in watching the oblong circles of his cigar smoke dissipate into the stale air of his room. I was about to say something to try to break his trancelike state when he responded.

“If he says he is dying, that settles the question. Whiskey Bill is not dying, and if he were, he would not tell anyone about it until it was too late to enjoy.”

“Penrose Davenport! I'm surprised, very surprised at your callousness.” I wagged a finger at him.

“You think me heartless,” he remarked, turning his whole body toward me for the answer. I just realized I haven't fully described Davenport physically. This is a knotty task. Davenport appeared markedly different depending on the hour, the day, the lighting, the season, his mood. His abundant sand-colored hair was usually uncombed and styled only by the whim of the breeze, raindrops, or the degree of humidity, but the times he applied powder and oil to it suddenly his head took on a fixed and rather unnatural geometric slope. He always smelled of hair lotion, even though he used it so rarely. He was not much taller than I am, but he held himself straighter and with more poise so that a few inches would have been added to an onlooker's estimation of his height. The man's weight fluctuated, sometimes day to day, at least so it seemed; his cheeks and belly could seem quite bloated or alarmingly slender. Even his voice, so long divorced from the influence of any particular land as much as it was by favored cigars, floated in and out of vague accents. All of this constituted a kind of natural disguise, with the effect that men who had met him or seen him before would show no recognition in their next encounter. He was handsome in a rather cold way. There were no expressions fashioned on his face for the comfort of others. He grinned and smirked but rarely smiled. His oval eyes did as they pleased and held no gaze out of courtesy. If there was a fly on the wall, it was likely he was more interested in it than in looking at you while you poured out your heart. When he did direct himself to you fully, as he did at the moment he asked me if I thought him heartless, it had an almost dizzying effect.

“No, no,” I replied in a gentler voice. “Of course not. You are not heartless. Callous, dear fellow. Merely callous. What good would it do the man to falsely claim he is sick?”

“Arrange for a visit to the asylum, Fergins. You think Bill was once your friend. You are grateful to him. Your face shows you grieve, but do not waste your compassion. He was not your friend and, worse still, he is
not
dying.”

I took up the letter again. Davenport had noticed in a single glance, seeing the page upside down, what I had missed altogether in my exhilaration at the message. The paper was stamped with the mark of a lunatic asylum.

 • • • 

I
T IS MY SINCERE
HOPE
you never see inside the asylum in Caterham. It is a massive colony of buildings located on an elevation. The rear structure was dimly lit, mostly by tallow candles, and the narrow stone corridors were lined with stacks of dirty aprons and barrels overfilled with animal bones. The place suffered from both too much and too little ventilation; doors were tied so they would not slam from the wind, and despite windows that were nailed shut, gusts of bone-chilling air came over and around us, mixing with the awful human odors.

Dried, shriveled wreaths and holly still on the walls had been meant to add cheer two or three Christmases ago by some well-meaning attendant. We could hear keening wails and shouts from the day room. Despair mingled with rage and confusion. As we were conducted through these passages, I found myself whistling a child's lullaby to soothe myself.