The Last Bookaneer

by Matthew Pearl

  “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.

  III

  It 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 breakfas
t, 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.

  • • •

  IT 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.

  “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 exp
ect 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.”