The Last Bookaneer (40 page)

“You must see the pathos of it, Mr. Clover. He was the greatest bookaneer of our day. I rather hate to think of him so . . . bewildered.”

“It was you,” I repeated, fighting back a flash of anger. “
You
were the last bookaneer. Not Davenport or Belial, but you. You took it away from them.”

He laughed. “Who am I?”

“You're as disloyal as you dare. Whiskey Bill was right about you. Why did you do it? Belial might have deserved to be tricked, but why betray your closest friend? Why did you decide to arrange for Belial to bring the pages to New York instead of letting Davenport succeed? If what you say now is true, you did not even stand to profit from any of this.”

He straightened his spectacles and looked away. “I should think the why of this would be the most obvious part,” he said, mumbling his words with a tone of disappointment.

“So it is, Mr. Fergins.” I was ready to meet his challenge. “Davenport brought you to Samoa without your consent, and in the process you lost your bookstall, the one place, as you've said, that was really your home. He never respected you and that showed in how he treated you. What he did to Charlie was the same thing he had done to you, only the poison killed this time—you could not forgive him for that, and for contributing to Tulagi's despair and self-murder by corrupting Vao out of—well, some kind of perverse bitterness that Kitten had been taken away from him by Belial.”

Anger flashed in his eyes as I cataloged Davenport's actions, but that passed, quickly replaced by surprise. “Say again? I did this for Davenport! For his own good!”

“What?”

He furrowed his brow and then began to pace up and down the chamber. “Yes, naturally, Mr. Clover. Think of it. Once Davenport's foot and leg were badly injured in the storm, I knew Belial would defeat him. It was a matter of hours once Stevenson finished the book. What could a hobbled and stubborn bookaneer do against an able-bodied one? The only way to avoid this, to preserve the legacy of this final mission, was to use Belial to our advantage—to allow him to take the manuscript but then upend him. However, I knew Davenport as a man too vain to allow Belial's triumph, especially after his discovery that Belial had been responsible for seducing Kitten into her final, fatal mission. When I realized this, I vowed to remove the mission from him altogether, from both of them. In the process, I would also do right by Stevenson, who had been kind to us. I saved Davenport's most important mission the only way I could, by tricking him out of it. I saved his legacy, and that of all bookaneers!”

“Do you think Davenport sees it that way? What does Frankenstein think of his monster?”

Mr. Fergins lowered himself back onto the mat on the floor, folding his chin into his hands and sighing wistfully.

This seemed to perplex him, so I tried a different line of questioning: “Where is he? Where did Davenport go from here?”

“He was held in Tale-Pui-Pui for about a month before being released. Soon after leaving the prison he found passage back to London. I saw him frequently in that period after I left New York and went back to England. He even stayed in my rooms for a while. ‘You, my dear Fergins, are my greatest friend in the whole world, or at least in London,' he'd say with rare affection and his usual obliviously insulting tone. He never did suspect that I had been the one to deceive him, and though I do not know if he would have sympathized with my reasons, I'm not certain he would have cared by that point. There was nothing behind his eyes anymore, and now he lies beneath the earth.

“When a great author dies, it is cried out by the newspapers and the newsboys who sell them. But when a bookaneer left us, what memorial did he ever have? Davenport was unmoored, perhaps not so different from how Belial himself became after turning poet. Davenport drank and drank. Unlike Belial, Davenport had never been able to keep a penny in his pocket, especially after Kitten's death. He owed a large sum of money to an infamous printer in Paris, and when he did not profit from the Samoan affair he could not pay his debt. He eventually had to work for the man in France, delivering messages and packages. When he could be found, I ought to say. I heard from one French binder that Davenport disappeared for seven days straight once on a binge. One day he was asleep in the woods, and when he woke, not knowing where he was, he tried to cross a frozen lake, but he fell in and drowned. Ovid once wrote that suppressed grief suffocates and multiplies its strength.” He was silent for a long time. “I warned you not to involve yourself in the story I would tell you, that it would lead to dark passages. Mr. Clover, why dwell on any of it now?” His expression cleared itself of concern and I saw the face of eager, open friendliness I remembered, though I could hardly enjoy it.

“How is it you came to be on this storm-blasted little island, of all places on earth?”

“Now, that's a sensible topic. When I was first on Upolu with Davenport, I had overheard that the King of Tonga was seeking to devise and print a constitution that could be shown to interlopers in order to prove Tonga was free and self-ruled, and prevent the foreign powers that had fragmented so many nations in the South Seas. When I was back in London without my bookstall and without even the occupation of helping Davenport, I did not know what to do, but I knew what I would not do. I would not be left with nothing. I would not feel myself wither and fade away. I began to corresponded with the King of Tonga and made my arrangement with him. I would help write and print his constitution, in return for his financing my own ambitions here.”

He was about to continue, but the tall native returned and whispered something in the bookseller's ear. Mr. Fergins nodded. He turned back to me, saying, “Rest, Mr. Clover. You have had a tiring expedition here. I must tend to some business, and then will return.”

I wanted to ask exactly what ambitions and what business he had on this island, but he and the other man were already resuming their conversation in the soft language of this region, and exited. I followed at a distance, as quietly as possible. I heard them leave the building and so found an open window where I could look for them. They were standing outside with a dark-skinned man, dressed in ragged clothes, balanced on a wooden crutch to compensate for a missing leg. He had a simple haversack with him. Mr. Fergins raised his right arm in the fashion of an oath taker and the crippled man did the same. I could hear the bookseller say: “I am the keeper . . .” but he spoke the rest of his statement in a whisper, or maybe it was the strong southeast winds that prevented me from hearing what else he said. The other man seemed to repeat the saying.

I returned to the parlor and laid my head down on a white mat to wait.

My skin and hair stuck to the woven surface of the mat. It was dark outside the windows, but the darkness was starting to lift. A palm leaf of food was on a shelf in the corner of the room. A pig lay on its side and snored rhythmically. Realizing I had slept the night, I jumped to my feet. Outside, I found an older native man cooking over a stone fire pit. I explained to him that it was urgent I return to the shore and see if the guides I had hired were still there. He did not seem to understand a word, but took his leave to fetch someone at an unhurried pace. A few minutes later, Mr. Fergins appeared, once again in a formless suit that looked like a sack, decorated with a string of shells around his neck, and a crown of leaves.

“Do not worry at all, my dear friend,” he said, interrupting me as I stated my concerns. “I took care of everything. When we found that you had fallen into such a deep sleep, I had one of my boys release your vessel and explain that I would arrange for your transportation whenever you needed to go. I hope you feel better rested?”

I said I did.

“Good fellow. It is such a rare pleasure to have a visitor here. Please”—he gestured—“have your breakfast and I will show you what I've been doing.”

“Is that . . . ?” I began, staring at the selection before me as a native unwrapped a palm leaf from it.

“Turtle. Baked in its shell,” said my host proudly. “Some gannet's eggs and some nuts.”

Being around him was like being around a young boy. After breakfast, we went to a quiet lagoon, where he plunged in for a morning bath with a giant splash. I tried again to ask about what business he was conducting on the island, but his reply was that such things could wait. After bathing, we gathered crabs into a basket for an afternoon meal, and continued on our way. He was almost galloping.

The island was of such a narrow and curving shape, and had so many glittering rock and coral formations around it, we were always near some shoreline. But the breakers did not create the usual rhythmic, back-and-forth flow of the ocean. Instead, the noise of the waves was constant, like the engines of the trains where I used to dwell.

Unlike the terrain in Samoa, there were no mountains here. It was mostly low and flat, with some small hills throughout. When we gained enough ground to have a new view of one of the inlets, Mr. Fergins pointed out a surprising sight: a warship, rusty but upright and armed, basking in the light.

“My understanding was that there are no foreign powers here,” I said. “I thought that is what you made their constitution to prevent.”

“The frigate belongs to no foreign nation.”

“Then who?”

“Me!” he exclaimed.

I tried to assess whether this was one of his little jokes. “You are serious, Mr. Fergins.”

“Indeed. This was the German ship wrecked at Apia years ago in a hurricane. Since the Germans did not want to spend money to repair it, I convinced the King of Tonga to negotiate for us to tow it in and work on it. We still have some final repairs to make, but we are getting closer.”

“What will you do with a warship?”

“Well,” he said, seeming to think hard, “nothing
personally
. But one never knows what you will need to protect your own property. Come, we'll walk through the village.”

We passed a massive stone formation, with twenty- or thirty-foot slabs covered in moss and creepers placed perpendicularly on top of pillars of similar sizes. What they meant, and how they were placed that way, explained my host, the modern generation of natives could not say. I followed as we climbed up a steep path, through a dusty hamlet of small huts and one larger, a wooden church painted white. I was still overflowing with questions from the day before.

“Can you tell me what happened to Vao?” I asked.

“Only what I've heard. That she eventually married a great warrior of a nearby village and dedicated herself to the local wars against the king and his German allies who had ordered her village burned.”

“I had the impression that you had fallen in love with her when she helped you after your release from the jail.”

He paused for a moment, shaking his soft, silky beard of the last few drops of water while he looked me over. “Me? Do not be ridiculous! I have told you my life before this was about books; my heart and head were stacked with them from floor to ceiling. There was no room for love. Vao was a dear girl but never the same after her misbegotten liaison with Davenport. After her quest for vengeance against Belial, I think the darker matters consumed her, and that beautiful young girl, the girl who had loved Tulagi so desperately, was gone forever.”

It seemed to me he had misjudged the native girl entirely, that she had not been corrupted out of some state of purity, but had long been enveloped in grief for her father, waiting for her first opportunity to break free to fight the injustices, and might have felt an understanding from Davenport from his own grief over not saving Kitten. It made me wonder what else he might have understood incorrectly, and what I might have learned if I could have heard the same story from the lips of Vao herself, or from Davenport or even Belial.

He continued, ready to move on. “Here is what I am very excited for you to see.”

As we came out of the bush into the beating sun, I heard a strange murmur, as though a thousand butterflies and flowers around us whispered a secret into the air at the same moment. There beyond a field stood a massive house, four times the size of the building where I had spent the night, with giant windows and long verandahs running on the upper and lower levels. It was like another Vailima. Such an unexpected place to encounter on this tiny, forsaken island.

Two natives escorted us inside. I was so distracted I only vaguely noticed that the helpful pair of men were extreme opposites: one tiny, the other nearly a giant. The first man was hardly the size of one of the other's legs. The house—if that is what it was—was built on an elevation and commanded remarkable views of the ocean breaking against the borders of the islands nearby. The interior of the palace, painted yellow and white, was filled with long tables with a peculiar variety of men and women sitting and reading books—dwarves, hunchbacks, old men and women with elephantiasis in a limb or severe trembling in a hand, one-eyed men, a young lady with a cleft palate, persons with limbs too long or too short. They were all natives, but the tints of their skin suggested they were assembled from a range of island populations rather than a single race. Those who were not seated were making their way from one part of the place to another. Occasionally one of these occupants would pass by us, whispering to themselves. I recognized some lines being spoken from books I had read—
The Odyssey
,
Gulliver's Travels
, a passage from an adventure tale by Dumas, even something from Stevenson himself. Each speaker bowed their heads at Mr. Fergins, keeping their eyes averted. The cacophony of whispers drifted through the house and, added to the heat and the jolt of recent revelations, left me dizzy.

“What on earth is going on in this place, Mr. Fergins? Have you made yourself some kind of despot?”

“Poor Tulagi. He was the hero in all this, Mr. Clover—a guardian angel of all that is worth protection. These dwarves—along with hunchbacks and the others you see who have come together here—are considered useless in society on these islands because they cannot partake in battle and other ordinary obligations, but I have recruited them all for a great endeavor. They work hard to prove they are capable since others no longer believe they are, or never believed it.”