The Last Bookaneer (6 page)

“We divide the idiots from the lunatics the best we can manage,” explained the attendant guiding us, who seemed inexplicably cheerful, “but the boundary between the poor creatures is not always a clear one.”

At that moment, a pair of rats, each the size of a child's boot, crossed at our feet. We soon came to another rat about the same size, this one dead.

“I ought to remove that before anyone eats it.”

“Eats a rat?” I asked.

“Stay,” the attendant requested. As I tried to determine whether he was addressing me or the rat, our guide lifted the dead creature by the tail with an almost tender motion. “Poor creature,” came his mournful whisper.

Our destination was a small stone chamber with a square window in the middle of the door. Whiskey Bill, the energetic masculine figure with a heavy red mustache, had transformed from the last time I saw him. He was another being altogether from the man who first surprised me on the street twenty-one years earlier. Entirely bald—in fact, other than his eyebrows, his face and head seemed hairless—his skin now sagged over his eyes and his pupils were cloudy. He wore the drab asylum-issued coat of thin gray material. At least there was his familiar smile showing off the big spaces between his teeth, but his coughing and retching disrupted his greeting. A Bible completed the impression of a deathbed.

Davenport waited until the attendant left us before he began the conversation. “You do not expect me to believe you have gone mad.” His tone was less hostile than his original reaction to the letter. Mistrust is in the bookaneer's blood. If a bookaneer were to let his guard down even for a moment, a mission could be lost. In the history of the bookaneers, as far as I have understood it, no one bookaneer could ever really tolerate another, with one chief exception that I will speak of soon. That is why I never took Davenport's suspicions of Whiskey Bill to reflect real animus against the man.

Bill craned his neck to confirm that the attendant had exited. Then he winked. “You are the fellow, Pen. I recently found myself as poor as Job's turkey, and if the authorities here believe you insane they give you all your meals and a bed. Ain't this a rather adequate place for an idiot asylum? They let me work in the gardens. The inhabitants of the female division are just on the other side of an awful low hedge. Some very fine specimens there, Pen!”

Davenport arched an eyebrow. “You speak of the insane women.”

“Perhaps some are like me, and merely in financial embarrassment and looking for help. Who knows but perhaps I shall marry one of them. Never marrying has been a regret. Do you know in London one person in every nine hundred is thought to be insane?”

“Knowing that figure should disqualify you from being one of them. You are always enthusiastic at the wrong time, Bill.”

“Pen,” Bill continued, moving his body up and down. “Press down on the mattress. This bed is not half-uncomfortable. Did they tell you this ward has its own aviary? There is only one condition. Every day and a half or so I must do something rather outré so that the doctors do not declare me cured before I am ready. I see the old bookseller found you,” Bill said, turning toward me with a tight nod. “He was meant to serve a role as a go-between only.”

“I could wait outside,” I offered.

“I always said a bookseller is one-quarter philosopher, one-quarter philanthropist, and . . .” He made a silent calculation. “. . . two-quarters pure rogue. You are a disloyal sort,” he said to me—still in a sadly weak warble compared with the voice as I remembered it, despite his rising emotion. “Disloyal as a Jacobite!”

“You should thank Fergins for convincing me to see you,” Davenport said. “Nor is he treacherous or disloyal for ceasing your arrangement; he merely valued his skills enough to work for the best of our line. I've made a wager with Fergins. If you really are dying, I shall owe him a pair of gloves.”

“Yes,” I chimed in. Davenport had a tendency to invent small moments that had not happened even when they did not serve a purpose. I had learned to accept them as real. “Calf leather, I hope, if I win, Davenport. But I pray you are not too unwell, Bill,” I added.

“Now I would thank you to explain what we are doing here,” Davenport said, stepping over my sympathy. “We wasted time enough on the train here. What is this nonsense about my life depending on speaking with you? The only reason I allowed Fergins to drag me out here is that I am curious to see what trick you are planning.”

“No trick! We have been flying at each other's throats for so many years, Pen, but Lord knows I've always been honest about hating you. You'll admit that. You are the fellow. You are the fellow.”

“You have said.”

“Be patient with an old man.”

“An old devil.”

Bill's eyes widened and brightened. “Maybe so, Pen! I need to tell you some things, so take a seat and listen. Please. If you want the bookseller, let the old goat stay. He was always harmless as a butterfly.”

Davenport rolled up his sleeves as if he were about to operate, and carried a stool close to the head of the bed. I took another stool by the foot of the bed.

“Thank you. Pen, I have seen firsthand what a scoundrel you become when someone questions your way of thinking, but you always were a gentleman at heart. There is a new mission, one of phenomenal importance and, potentially, profit.”

“Is this about your Poe obsession? It is the way of the commonplace bookaneer to go in for a Holy Grail.”

“No!” Bill cried, coughing with exasperation as he tried to expel his words. “It's not that. Something . . . bigger—Stevenson.”

Stevenson. As in Robert Louis. One of the most popular living writers in the world. The author known for
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
Treasure Island,
and
Kidnapped,
whose work was demanded by readers around the world. We looked at each other. I knew Davenport's mind was moving at great speed, though he did not look interested.

“One of the more capricious but gifted writers ever to set pen to paper. He is sailing the Pacific by private means to improve his health,” Davenport said. “They say he will return to Scotland when he feels restored, but nobody knows how long it will be.”

“He is never to return,” Bill said with somber finality.

“Are you implying Stevenson died while at sea?” Davenport asked.

“What do you know about the island of Upolu?” Bill asked.

“I concentrate on the literary world. I do not know much about distant lands of illiterates. Fergins likes to know a little about everything.”

“Upolu is one of the three primary Samoan islands,” I said, “formed by a volcano and still in its shadow. Samoa is also known as the Navigator Islands, because of the abilities of its natives to command the sea without any of our modern equipment. Upolu is its capital of government and commerce.”

“I ask again. Is Stevenson dead?”

“No—not dead yet, Pen.”

“Then has he been taken by savages?”

“Worse! He remains by his own will. From what I have learned, he alighted at the island of Upolu and decided never to leave. Stevenson, or the shade of Stevenson, lives in seclusion there, an exile from all civilized people and things. Do you realize what it all means? How close we are?”

“Close to what?” Davenport asked, and he made the slightest gesture to me, at which I removed a pencil and my notebook.

“Glory, dear Pen! These writers take the essence of every person around them, turn them into books and stories without permission or even a simple thank-you, and want all the credit and glory for themselves. We are the only ones who can stand in the way, who can take that glory right from their pockets. God as my witness, I've taken some for myself these long years. The intelligence I have been able to collect informs me Stevenson is finishing the most important book of his life. But he is a bag of bones now, unlikely to survive much longer, and if his illnesses do not claim him first, the island will. The place is a hell on earth, with roasting temperatures and consumed with deadly quarrels among the pagan tribes. Between the spears of the natives and the intervention of heavily armed foreign governments, plus the mischief of tropical disease, no white man is safe. The novel, this masterpiece, will perish out there—but if one were able to bring it back to civilization . . . I know when you want something you go at things like one o'clock, no matter how lackadaisical you seem to others. You are the one to do it, Pen!”

“Have at it yourself when you decide to leave this palace.”

“You see I am no longer in any condition to do anything of the sort. I have spent my fortune and my health hunting for Poe's lost novel, alas, which is never to see the light of day. If you can retrieve Stevenson's book, my dear Pen, you will yield a terrific fortune. You can bring the publishers and their damned monopolies to their knees begging you for it.”

“Even if any of what you say is true, you must know I would not give you the satisfaction of following a lead brought by you, Whiskey Bill.”

Bill looked him up and down. “I used to know you as having a grander sense of destiny, of our profession. A man who sought to transcend mere errands parceled out by the gluttonous publishers. A man not quite so . . . calculating in everything.”

“Fergins.”

I began to collect our coats and hats. Then I noticed Davenport had tilted his head back and was looking at the ceiling. Knowing what he was thinking, I spoke softly to him: “Samoa. Warlike tribes, dangerous climate. Too risky, treasure or not, my dear Davenport.”

Whiskey Bill scowled at me, then stretched his hand out to the other bookaneer, though he could not reach him. “This will be the final gift to posterity, to the world at large, from our work. I
am
dying,” Bill said in a quieter voice filled with pain. “You are the only one who can do this. My ambitions must vanish—but I need not vanish from history. When the yarn is told, I will be spoken of as the man to have passed the mission along to you, and that will be something. I will have played a part. That will be—it will have to be enough. Your permanence in the legends of the bookaneers—your
life
as it exists beyond these earthly skins—depends upon this chance, Pen Davenport. I know you long for such a laurel. I know that like me, you do not yet feel our calling completed.”

“You know nothing about me.” There was an unusual tremor in his voice.

“To the devil with laurels, then. With the copyright treaty about to go into effect on the first of July, Pen, how many missions are still left for you? The end comes. Why, it would be the most lucrative pursuit since the discovery of Shelley's lost novelette. Do you know how much money you would walk away with if you managed to do this?”

I had already started calculating this in my notebook—factoring in Stevenson's last three contracts, the scarcity of major successes over the last twelve to eighteen months, and the unique value to the public of an author's last work. “Twenty thousand pounds, at least,” I said. When I met Davenport's glare, I felt my cheeks flush with color and I looked down at my hands.

Bill, heartened by my mistake, straightened himself on his pillows. “Talk of a true ‘treasure island.'” His bearing now grew funereal. “In making myself your enemy, Pen, I believe I have served almost in a role similar to a friend—goading and encouraging you to do more.”

“There are no friends in our line of work,” Davenport said.

“No,” Bill said, his eyes darting over my face before continuing. “Then perhaps you would say I have served as something of a mentor to you.”

“I've had only one.”

“You have been afraid of the bigger missions since she's been gone. You loved her. We
all
loved her, you know, in our own ways.”

Davenport rose to his feet and drew back as though to slap the man's face. I was about to try to catch him when he extended his hand down toward the bed. They shook.

“I have nothing more to say,” said Davenport. “I trust I will meet you in the field again one day, Whiskey Bill. Godspeed.”

“That day, I will finally best you.”

 • • • 

I
MUST HAVE APOLOGIZED
a dozen times for having persuaded Davenport to take that trip to the asylum—I could hardly remember if it really had been a matter of my convincing him, but that was how he saw it and so it was fact. A few days passed. He had some business back at the Garrick Club and I received a message to go there. I found him in the same smoking room where we first met. He was sitting next to a well-known German printer, who excused himself to the card room.

“Your notebook, Fergins,” he said.

He snatched it out of my hands. Turning the pages furiously, he found the notes I took at Caterham. He held it out to a spot where there was a little more light than smoke.

“I do apologize for talking you into that awful place. You were right, I shouldn't have bothered you. I should have torn up Bill's letter when I received it—and burned it in the fire, too.”

“Try not to speak for a minute.” He hummed to himself. “Did you think there was any truth to what Whiskey Bill tried to sell us?”

“That nonsense about Samoa, you mean?” The fact was, I would have preferred Davenport drop the whole matter. I did not like the glimmer I had noticed in his eye at the talk of Samoa. But I had to be honest. “Something in his voice—well, I could not help but think that at least some of it rang true.”

Davenport showed my comment the respect of a slow nod. “It was a ruse, a trap to send me on a wild goose chase far from here. The very fact that you believe it shows how well planned it was. The question remains this: Why would he want to do that? I want you to make inquiries into Stevenson so we can prove Bill's deceit. Meanwhile, I need fresh reports on Ruskin, Swinburne, Hardy, Tennyson, any author of esteem living or passing through London this season. Do you understand?”