“So much for a violent death,” I said with a pang of unexpected sorrow.
Mr. Osbourne did not hear my quiet aside or ignored it. “You will find which path to take up when you are closer, now that we have marked it. I can tell you the inscription on the grave, but most want to read it for themselves when they reach the summit. You are a pilgrim, are you not, Mr. Clover?”
He shuffled to a chair and sank into it as I tried to think how to answer. “An American reader, traveling here to see Louis’s grave?” he tried again, a touch of annoyance in his voice. “Oh, we have all kinds—acclaimed literati, political gentlemen of high standing, single women, Negroes, men who know not a word of English—nothing surprises me anymore. So many always said they meant to visit while he lived here, yet it’s once he was in the ground that the visitors finally come for Louis. He would not have liked to hear me call him that, you know. They called him by a savage name here and”—he chuckled—“he took to it after a while.”
“Tusitala.” This prompted a second look from the writer’s stepson, and I moved the conversation hastily along. “Where is the rest of your family, Mr. Osbourne, if I may ask?”
His sister, Belle, had left the island almost immediately after Stevenson’s death, and his mother departed from Samoa a few weeks later. Fanny returned to America, which, Mr. Osbourne said, she acknowledged as her true home. Stevenson had given a purse of gold to Ah Fu, the real name of John Chinaman, in case he ever wanted to return to his family in China, which he did only after the novelist’s death. All but a few of the remaining servants removed to their own villages or joined the various warring factions. Mr. Osbourne stayed on to finish clearing out the estate. As I looked around, the scenes Mr. Fergins described to me four and a half years earlier came to life—the quiet infiltration by Davenport and Belial that had gone so wrong.
“What will become of Vailima?”
“Indeed, Mr. Clover,” Mr. Osbourne said, then gave what Mr. Fergins had called a philosophical shrug. “My sister and mother prayed so hard to leave this island, prayed that Louis, a man who never changed his mind, would decide to go back to England or Scotland. This was rather a grand place once, and I even find myself a little reluctant to close it up and go. What a world this was! Louis may not have always been happy here, but I am sure of one thing: he was happier here than he would have been in any place in the world. Maybe one would not think a stepson could judge best.”
“Do you recall a visitor to your house called Penrose Davenport?” I asked. “Or Thomas, the missionary?”
He seemed irritated that I had let his lofty comment float away in favor of my eager change of topic. I tried to make up for it by adding something personal. “I, also, have a stepfather, actually. I was ten when my mother married, and soon after I was told the white minister at the same church where my mother worked was my father. Maybe I had secretly known before; it’s hard to really remember. I had two fathers after that, I suppose, but could not really call either one father.”
He sat up straighter, closing his eyes and nodding before blowing another cloud from his cigarette and taking a long drink from a glass of beer that must have been near the boiling point, as it had been in the room before my arrival. “Who was it you’re talking about? Davenport?”
“An American. It was some five years ago he would have arrived here. You might remember him by the name he originally gave: Porter.”
“No, friend, no. This is Samoa. You cannot expect me to remember such things after so many have passed through here. Why, what white man in the South Seas doesn’t go by a false name at one time or another? I wouldn’t bet a single shilling your name is Clover.”
“It certainly is.”
“Even ‘Tusitala’ was a disguise of sorts for Louis,” he went on, then sighed when he saw I still waited for him to give real consideration to the question. “There are four steamers a month that make port at Apia when it’s not the rainy season, and back then there was an endless parade of strangers and visitors trying to stake claims to the island. And the missions, trying to collect as many souls as possible. Well, there were the Methodists, the Wesleyans, the Marists. Perhaps I do recall something of the missionary you mention. There have been so many who came through here, I probably could not remember half the names. They all liked Louis, and he usually liked them. Missionaries enjoy knowing men who have no religion. Fancy that! Thomas left rather hurriedly, if we are thinking of the same man. I tried to stay uninvolved in most of my stepfather’s business and political dealings; it seemed to have a way of making me his partner, and I always wanted to feel I was his son. I spent my time overseeing the outside boys. As for Davenport . . . Porter, did you say he was called at first?”