The Last Bookaneer

by Matthew Pearl

  He ignored me.

  “Belial is inside the house. If Tulagi had not died, perhaps he would not be here already, but he is.” My words sounded accusatory, though I had not intended that, but it hardly mattered. He had entered into a haze of distraction that could forfeit the mission.

  The bookaneer shot me a brief and meaningful glance. “I’m afraid this concerns you, Fergins.”

  He had been going through the letters and handed one back to me. I could not help but wonder if his dalliances with the native girl had put him in this mental fog. “Davenport, are you even listening to what I’m saying? Everything hangs in the balance.”

  I looked down at the letter and read: it was from Johnson, the man charged with watching over my bookstall. There had been a rut of bad times in London and worse luck, it said. All the bookstalls in London had been affected. He’d even had to dismiss the boys who helped guard the stalls, which in turn led to a rash of thefts by other boys (including one former guard). That had made everything even worse. There simply was no money left to pay expenses—he had closed the stall temporarily. Worse still, as it was a term of my lease not to leave the space idle for more than four days, a fact unknown to Johnson, it had been repossessed. My bookstall was gone. And I was thousands of miles away. I’m awful sorry, I am, Brother Bookseller, Johnson wrote in a postscript, as if he thought of regretting it only at the very end.

  “He should have tried expanding the inventory,” Davenport said. “I suppose it had to happen sometime. Doomed calling.”

  It was a doomed calling, and my life. I read the letter again and I wanted to deny it, to rip it up, burn it. I wanted to shout down Davenport’s unmovable fatalism. But I knew we were at a crossroads that required my attention. I carefully folded the letter up. There was nothing to do about the stall, and something had to be done here and now. I collected myself. We had come for a purpose and if it was to be fulfilled, this was the time.

  “Davenport, never mind about that, not right now. But Stevenson is finished. Belial is here, the storm has passed on to the next island. Davenport, please, attention!”

  The idea struck me right then. I dropped the letter I was still holding. This got his attention.

  “Fergins, what’s wrong?”

  I had to catch my breath before I could find the right words. “The mail, Davenport. It just got here.”

  “I suppose it is rather much to take in about your bookstall.”

  “Whiskey Bill.”

  Now I had his interest.

  “I’d rather listen to your piano playing than have to talk about that swindler.”

  “Bill imagined setting up a kind of Bookaneer Armageddon, yes? He convinced both you and Belial to come here, knowing you would try to rip each other’s hearts open. He wrote you to come to the asylum; he wrote Belial about Samoa. What if he wrote to Stevenson, too?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “In my study of the field, Davenport, every bookaneer lives with the inner belief that his talents are unique, and he can hardly suffer the mere existence of his fellow bookaneers because it threatens that belief. I see him in my mind’s eye with his wobbly hand over the chessboard I set up for him at the asylum. He had his own game in mind. This was a final ploy by Bill to ensure his rivals destroyed. He set a trap, turning the author against the final two bookaneers, to determine which would be the last.”

  “If he was trying to do that,” Davenport said, “the mail that just came in . . .” he did not finish the thought.

  I helped: “Could have a letter in it to Stevenson revealing everything.”

  “Go up to his library and go through the letters that John carried up.”

  I shook my head. “Not me.”

  “I cannot,” he replied. “I cannot move fast enough to avoid being caught. You know Bill’s handwriting. You could recognize it at a glance, couldn’t you?”

  “Yes, of course. But if I was discovered digging through the letters—”

  “You invent an excuse. What’s worse than him reading a letter from Bill, Fergins? Nothing is worse than that. If that were to happen, our entire mission evaporates, and nothing else matters.”

  “How could I manage it?”

  The plan was hatched. I was to contrive a reason to go to the library. Find the trunk of mail I had seen John Chinaman carry up. Search for any letters with handwriting that could belong to Whiskey Bill. Bring said mail to Davenport to examine and destroy. Somehow, avoid Belial and all servants along the way.

  Keeping these instructions in my head, I started for the second floor of the house. A climb up a flight of stairs had never before seemed to take so long, as if each tread tilted up and away from me, the walls shaking and trembling like a runaway train, my mind dark as a tunnel. I headed for the library, eyes down at my feet except to look for anyone who might be watching my path. My heart thumped; my excursion became more momentous and life altering with each step I took. “This, my dear Fergins, this alone, could save my mission from disaster,” Davenport had said to me before we separated, encircling a hand around my wrist like my oldest friend or a policeman making an arrest.

  A few seconds later, as measured out by the big clock by the stairwell, I was inside the Stevensons’ library. There was the trunk I had seen the Chinese servant carrying. It was resting on the floor in one corner of the room. I had my moment. Here, now, I was to become a . . . the word bookaneer retreated from me. It would take much more than this. I thought about the advice Davenport had given me. I walked to the nearest shelves as though to reach for a book, then I dropped to my knees in a quick motion. Opening the lid with one hand, I readied my other hand to dig through the mail.

  It was empty. The room swallowed me whole.

  “It is so, so lovely.”

  The voice came from Fanny Stevenson, sitting in a deep armchair facing away from me. She wore a brown gown with yellow flowers stitched into it, and her toes rested on the windowsill. The mistress of the house was so compact she had been completely concealed by the back of the chair.

  “Fanny,” I said, trying to determine how much I needed to explain.

  She continued looking out the window. I realized she wasn’t watching me at all. I had disturbed her reverie.

  “It is all so, so lovely,” she said, then with a birdlike motion she finally glanced at me. “Mr. Fergins, I have made a mistake.”

  “Fanny?”

  “Oh, a terrible mistake,” she said with a warm smile. “I should never have told you to leave this place. It is the loveliest spot in the world sometimes. The South Pacific can have everything you ever dreamed of, or everything you ever feared coming to pass. We mean to live our lives in Samoa and leave our bones here. Do you know, I was out walking yesterday? The air was soft and warm from the storms, and filled with the most delicious fragrance. These perfumes of the tropical forests are wonderful. When I am pulling weeds, it often happens that a puff of the sweetest scents blows back at me and all is well again. It does not seem possible that we have not been here longer than we actually have. Everything looks so settled, as though we have been here for many, many years.”

  She threw open the window. No action imaginable could have been any more absurd. The awful winds howled and rushed in and nearly knocked her over, pushing pencils, papers, and books off the table behind her. Lloyd rushed in and steadied his mother while I forced the window closed.

  “It’s all so lovely, so, so lovely,” she was repeating through tears but still with a smile.

  “Mother, let us take you to bed to rest. Yes, that’s it, come with me,” Lloyd said, waiting until she had recovered herself and was walking on her own toward the door. “I’m very sorry,” he said, turning to me with the dutiful face characteristic of a grown man whose mother was becoming a burden. “Sometimes she will rant against this place; other times she will seem ready to throw herself into Mount Vaea
to stay forever. When she is caught between the two feelings is when she goes to pieces. It is very hard for her, because when Louis makes up his mind there is nothing to do, and all she wants to do is keep him happy. It has become her . . . calling, so to speak.”

  “We all must have one,” I replied.

  I could hear Davenport’s shouts from downstairs and I tried to ignore them. It meant I was taking too long. He was trying to draw as many of the servants to him—and away from me—as possible by acting as though he had reinjured himself.

  When mother and son were both gone, I looked everywhere I could think for any sign of the mail, under the pretense of cleaning the mess blown around by the storm. I rushed to the glass doors that led to Stevenson’s sanctum. My legs were moving faster than my brain, but I was imagining a scenario of what must have happened. John had brought the mail to Stevenson’s desk, then removed the empty trunk to the library, for it would not fit inside the narrow sanctum without being a hazard for the novelist to trip over.

  The doors to the sanctum were closed. I knocked lightly, then made a few bolder taps. Nobody called to come in or go away, so I held my breath and stepped inside. There were stacks of mail on the bed and the floor. My eyes took these in before landing on Stevenson, almost invisible, tucked under multiple blankets, propped against pillows. He looked up from a letter he was reading, but his wide-set eyes, as ever, seemed to absorb everything at once, while mine scrambled for crumbs.

  Me: “Tusitala.”

  Him: “Mr. Fergins, I have here a most interesting letter from abroad. You might as well join me.”

  XIII

  By the time I had returned to Davenport, I could hardly keep from talking over my own sentences, there was so much I needed to say—I suppose the same is true as I recount the story to you now. I told him how the letter had been written on the other side of a page ripped from a book, which, as it turned out, was a page from a Bible. Whiskey Bill’s Bible.

  “As best I can remember, Davenport,” I said, “the letter began like this.” I recited:

  My dear Mr. Stephenson (I interrupted myself here to explain to Davenport that any letter spelling Stevenson with “ph” was usually torn up without reading any further, but for some reason the novelist made an exception), justly celebrated author, sir,

  I write to warn you of two visitors to expect to Samoa, or who have already arrived by the time you receive this letter depending on the speed of the mails to no man’s land. I speak of one man called Belial and another named Penrose (Pen, to friends, like me) Davenport. They will both enter your life, separately, in ways that might seem natural but are in actuality highly calculated. Belial will likely come to you first, is a man standing six feet one or two inches in height, and seeming taller than a man with greater height, teeth like diamonds in the sun, his hair like a clump of pretty seaweed, and his voice like the thunder and trumpets that might greet the day of judgment. Davenport? Well, he is the one somewhere near you intent on being intent, always tormenting himself about one trivial thing or another as if he were Christ himself, and who has a face as serious as a dead German, as Heine says. Make no mistake. He is as scheming, in his way, as the other one. I’ll wait a moment while you wonder who they are, for of course they come with false names and purposes.

  Davenport might’ve brought his inseparable caddie, his shadow, if you will, though a rounder and shorter and balder shadow. A whistling, book-lugging fool. Second thought, I’d wager he was wise enough to leave disloyal old Fergins the bookseller behind this time, like a train needing to move faster would unhook its rusty caboose.

  Finished? Know everyone we’re talking about? Excellent. These two snakes come from the line of men and women known as Bookaneers—a brave and necessary and dying breed, alas—and they come to you to steal your latest masterpiece for the sake of profit and glory. The high seas of literature swarm with plunderers. Certainly, if I could have I would have been there, too, and I would have been so honored, sir, so much so I cannot tell you. Not since Lord Byron nearly became King of Greece, had he not had the misfortune of dying instead, has a literary man exiled himself so grandly as you. If I had come, I would have presented myself as a doctor with the newest cures from Europe, to try to tempt you in your state as an invalid, but those fools might not have thought of that. Feed them to the cannibals, if you permit suggestions.

  Your servant,

  William Perkins Richmond

  P.S. In your position as an esteemed author, if you should ever be made privy to the whereabouts of a novel called Life of an Artist at Home and Abroad, supposedly once printed anonymously in a French newspaper, written by Edgar Poe but wrongly attributed to Eugene Sue before being lost forever and forgotten, please order a copy to be left on my grave, and from the spirit-world I should be thankful.

  “We have to get out of here!” I cried after finishing. “Stevenson knows all. He knows who you really are. We have to leave now!”

  “Belial.” Davenport cringed while grabbing his leg. “Where is Belial?”

  I shook my head. “Stevenson called John Chinaman into his sanctum after reading the letter to me and ordered him to immediately protect the manuscript and hunt for Belial. That is when I slipped out of the room.”

  For the second time since our arrival in Samoa, the first being the death of Charlie, I saw what I would describe as absolute fear reflected in the deep green of Davenport’s eyes. “What does he plan to do, Fergins?”

  “I couldn’t say. Stevenson fell into one of his uncanny fits—you know how he does. He was speaking so quickly in Samoan, I could hardly understand any of it. Are you well enough to move, Davenport?”

  I tried to help him but he remained on the bed. I knew he understood he had no choice and minutes, maybe seconds, to act. Yet he could not help groping for some other way out than flight. He knew, as I knew, that the moment he rose from that bed and snuck out of the room, this mission was lost. That his career, in essence, was over. That he could never match Kitten’s achievement nor—in some profound way—reverse its consequences to her.

  “Davenport. Now is the time. All is up; he knows everything. We haven’t another moment to spare. We must get away from Vailima and to the American consulate to beg for protection.”

  He nodded. The nod itself seemed to cause him as much pain as his mangled leg. After he accepted my hand, I pulled him to his feet.

  His leg was leaden, dragging behind him. We progressed slowly to the door. I opened it and Stevenson was waiting on the other side, holding a cigarette out in one hand, inspecting us, first him and then me. His wide-set eyes had a kind of mesmerizing effect.

  The novelist put the cigarette back to his mouth. “Look at me, I almost forgot to smoke just then.”

  “I suppose there is nothing I can say to satisfy you, Tusitala,” Davenport spoke quietly, the respectful tone of a truehearted soldier captured in war. “Whiskey Bill seems to have made certain of that.”

  “I see your co-adventurer has already relayed news of the letter. There is something you can do. It will not help you much, but I still recommend complying. You can satisfy my curiosities. Did you ever steal from me before, in this storied so-called vocation of yours, Mr. Davenport?”

  Davenport took a few unsteady steps back into the room. “It’s not so simple as that.”

  “Grown men, hunting books like pheasants in the wild. Lord in heaven! Now, did you steal from me before you came here or not?”

  “Not really.”

  “Indirectly, then?” Stevenson’s question really did seem to contain more curiosity than anger, as if speaking about someone other than himself.

  “You will remember a map you drew to be printed in Treasure Island.”

  “I ought to; it took a great amount of my time and strength. My publisher lost it, after all that, and engaged an illustrator to do the far inferior one printed in the book.”

  “The
publisher did not lose it,” Davenport said.

  “You—”

  “No, I was not involved in taking it, but it passed through my hands sometime later, and I commend you on the quality. There was another mission I was involved in. I need not tell you, of all people, the prelude,” Davenport continued. “The autumn of ’88 your Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was whispered about in the streets of London. Those who blamed it—and the stage version of your novel then underway—for unleashing the murders in Whitechapel feared an army of Rippers would emerge in London. All from the influence of your slim book. I believe you were in San Francisco with Mrs. Stevenson at the time, so it was said.”

  Stevenson gave a guttural agreement.

  “There were publishers seeking to capitalize on the frenzy, who ordered shipments of pirated editions of your novel to sell. I was engaged to protect the shipment from another bookaneer hired by a consortium of committees trying to keep them away from the public.”

  Another grunt.

  “Do you think it possible, Tusitala?” I ventured into the exchange. “For a book about a changeable man actually to change a man into something he is not?”

  “What is your opinion, Mr. Davenport?” Stevenson asked, still fixated on the bookaneer.

  “I once believed books could start wars or end them,” he began, phrases from a speech I had heard him make about his profession more than once. This time his voice broke off.

  “I suppose you believe books made you into the criminal being you are today.”

  “The laws of your land and mine left creative works made outside its borders unprotected. That was not our doing. There was chaos and confusion. We were needed because we were able to do what nobody else could—not authors, not publishers, not lawmakers—to control the chaos. So the literary world relied on us and resented us for it, named us bookaneers, began to shout that we were criminals, to write poems and books against so-called pirates, until the laws finally started to change and now we are about to be left to wither and die in order to purify the rest of you. Did a book make me into this? No, Tusitala, I made many books into what they’ve become.”