The Last Bookaneer

by Matthew Pearl

  “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.

  XIV

  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 bookst
all. 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?

  I’d tried speaking to Davenport about Kitten’s copy of Frankenstein after I discovered its provenance, and I asked him again in the corridor of the Samoan prison. I had no more success trying to engage him about it than I’d had years before. But he did tell me about his nightmares, about his visions of Kitten dying, about the fact that he thought success in the Samoan mission might finally banish these visitations from his dreams.

  That night, a prison guard came and woke me from a deep sleep. He began leading me away. He did not respond to any English, and in my stupor I could not manage sufficient Samoan to question him.

  “They are releasing you,” said Banner, who had come into the passage to see what was happening.

  “Davenport, do you hear that?” I called. “We are freed.”

  The bookaneer rushed to the doorway of his chamber. The guard gestured at him to return to his place.

  “Not him,” Banner continued, punctuating his declaration with his usual snort. “The brown fellow says because you used your true name, you will not face charges of deceit. Your grumpy friend must stay in this dismal hole with the rest of us.”

  I dug my heels into the clay floor. “I won’t go either.”

  “You some kind of martyr?” Banner asked, his hollow eyes widening.

  “You must go,” the bookaneer said with a stoic air.

  “What about you? The mission?”

  “You complete the mission.”

  “What do you mean?” He might have been speaking Samoan himself.

  Davenport grabbed my shoulders. “Fergins, listen. I do not know when we’ll next meet, so remember my instructions exactly. Leave the jail with the guard. If there has not yet been a ship to sail from here, you can still find him.”

  “Belial? How could I—”

  “Find him, do what you must to take the manuscript from him.”

  “How on earth could I—”

  “Quiet! For once in your life be quiet!” he shouted, his eyes red and wet. He dried them with the back of his sleeve. His hands, gripping my shoulders again, shook me and drifted toward each other so if he squeezed, he would have strangled me. “Do whatever you must, for God’s sake, Fergins! Surprise will be your best stratagem, since he will not expect you. This is my last chance to see Belial defeated.”

  “But you will not see it if you are in here.”

  The guard physically dragging me away, I shouted in protest against him and against the bookaneer’s plan but all to no avail. The sinking feeling that had begun to form in the pit of my stomach settled in as I lost my view of Davenport. I laugh now, but not because I find the memories humorous, Mr. Clover. I only laugh at my slightly younger self because I could not know how entirely alone I was about to become.

  • • •

  I WAS SO STARTLED by my release from incarceration and separation from my only companion on the island, I did not pay attention to the odd timing of it all. I was being taken away in the middle of t
he night. I had been placed facing backward on a waiting horse, sitting behind one of the guards already in the saddle. The time of night was not the only queer thing. I was taken not toward the beach, where I would have expected to be handed off to the British consulate, but somewhere else, far from the prison, with no explanation or response to my many questions. At several points, it seemed we were going straight up inclines and the sides of cliffs. I tried to whistle away the anxiety. The angry official who had attended my interrogation was riding ahead of our party, and when we stopped in the dark interior of the island jungle, he was the one to come to me.

  To my surprise, he spoke English well. He had not been perplexed at my words, as I had thought, during my interrogation. He had been perplexed by the fact that the line of questioning resolved itself against Davenport and not me.

  “If it were my decision, you would stay in prison until you rot away, as your friend will,” he said to me now. “But our orders are to release you.”

  “I thank you for it,” I said in my most docile voice. I looked around in the dim light of torches, confused at what was happening to me.

  He snickered at my note of appreciation. “A white man can rot in the heart of our island as well as any prison.”

  “No,” I said, my chest pounding away, “you don’t understand. . . .”

  They had brought me all this way to discard me. I was pulled down from the saddle. The men turned their horses around in unison and then galloped off into the night.

  • • •

  IT SURPRISES ME as much as anything else does when thinking about surviving in the wilderness of Samoa, how long I was convinced I was being followed. Who would have bothered to pursue me? The prison guards who discarded me under the cover of darkness? Native assassins hired by Belial? If they really had been after me, I don’t doubt they would have taken me quickly and easily were it not for a fresh deluge of rain, which covered my tracks. Any pursuit beyond that had to be in my mind alone, and in the vast silence and loneliness my mind was spinning.