Had Davenport been there and demanded to know my plan, I would have been able to lay it out in a very logical fashion. First step, I would have said, was to confirm the Subject’s presence; then locate his stateroom; then identify to a reliable degree what times he was dining with the officers (where else would Belial dine?), before infiltrating and searching his chambers. Not as laden with natural impulse as Davenport might have orchestrated, but it was efficient and sensible, which was my life in a nutshell. But none of it mattered.
As my cot rocked me through the fourth night of fitful sleep and terrifying movements, I was jolted awake by the sound of music. It was beautiful humming—an aria from an opera that had been staged in London a few months before our departure. I had attended one of the first performances. I could not begin to imagine how one of my poor Chinese steerage mates had learned this tune, or why he would be rehearsing it in this floating dungeon. Thoughts and memories crashed together in the manner of a confused dream. I felt around for my spectacles, hanging on a nail protruding from the boards on the wall. Then I groped in the dark for a lantern and turned the gas up. It gradually illuminated the craggy, remarkable face of Belial, grinning expressively. He was sitting at the edge of one of the other passengers’ cots, with the prone man pinned underneath peering up at the formidable stranger. From one of the other hammocks emerged a string of curses in Chinese.
“How did you know that I was here?” I asked, a question I had been imagining I would hear from Belial’s lips before the voyage was finished.
His humming stopped and he bestowed upon me a munificent nod. “With our dear friend Davenport so unjustly detained, I supposed the only move he had left would be to charge the king with his pawn.”
“I am a pawn, you mean. And you are the king.”
“You understand me. I supposed you sufficiently intelligent to find the first large ship to sail after the storms fully cleared, and correctly presume I would be sailing on it, and if so that you would attempt to conceal yourself from me, and of course to sail in steerage would be the best way to do so, if an affront to your good English sensibilities. I might have waited for you to show yourself. But to be honest, I tire of all the games just as Davenport did. Tell me, bookseller, how do you sleep in here, swinging like a man hanged?” He passed a sad glance around the crowded berth, and a disgusted look at the confused man on whose arm he was still sitting. “Look what Davenport has done to you.”
“What do you mean, what he has done to me?”
“Surely you are sufficiently intelligent to see . . . Well, no matter. He has lost his final gambit. It must be a sweet relief for you, in a way.”
“Relief?”
“You do not have to struggle to help fulfill his potential for him any longer. That is too much a burden for any man, even—no, especially—Pen Davenport himself.” Then, with increasing pity and a strangely uncaring solicitude, he whispered, “Look at yourself.”
I needed no mirror to know what he beheld. I was unshaven, my hair unwashed and greasy, my once-pristine and polished spectacles stretched, blackened, and scratched. I was almost touched by the note of sympathy in his words. I welled with emotion and could not convince my tongue to work.
“You are lost, dear man,” he concluded, in his Pope Thomas voice, which, after all, was just a natural part of him. I had known him only in his missionary role, but it now occurred to me it had reflected the bookaneer’s natural disposition.
Belial invited me to take breakfast with him on the upper deck. Liberated from the tough salt pork and vinegary bread of the lower mess chest, I gratefully ate the finer servings of fruit and meat, and it seemed to give Belial pleasure to watch, chin at rest on his knuckles. After the meal, we walked the length of the ship. I took in the raw, fresh air with the eagerness of a starved man.
“Did you really believe in your heart you would come here and filch Stevenson’s manuscript from me?” he asked. He seemed genuinely curious but also completely unthreatened.
“I suppose.”
He gave a heavy, rolling laugh while he patted my arm with the affection a victorious politician might grant his opponent. “Is there anything less natural than taking a stroll on a ship? It is as if the earth were flat, and in every direction you will eventually drop into nowhere. I despise it. We never should have been at each other’s throats, Mr. Fergins. Davenport got in the way of what could have been a friendship between us. You have been one of the greatest appreciators of our profession. Where did you rate me as a bookaneer?”
It was the second time in my life I had heard a variation of that question. “Quite at the top. Indeed, with Davenport’s failure in Samoa, I suppose you will be seen as rather untouched in your position.”
“Thank you! It is an honor to hear so from your lips, and Christina will be tickled pink to hear of your praise. Think of this, you have been witness to the last and greatest of the bookaneers. You will have that story to tell in the future to those with brains enough to listen. What will you do when you go home?”
“How do you mean?”
“My informants wrote me that your bookstall in London is shuttered.”
“Perhaps I will not go home,” I said with a windy sigh, acknowledging the fate of my life’s work. “Not yet, anyway. I cannot bear to go back to Hoxton Square—well, I can stay with my brother and his wife in Slough, where we were raised; there is plenty of space and my nieces humor my reading habits. Or I can do something temporary when we make port in New York, perhaps, until I feel ready to go back. Perhaps a traveling book cart.”