“Penrose Davenport! I’m surprised, very surprised at your callousness.” I wagged a finger at him.
“You think me heartless,” he remarked, turning his whole body toward me for the answer. I just realized I haven’t fully described Davenport physically. This is a knotty task. Davenport appeared markedly different depending on the hour, the day, the lighting, the season, his mood. His abundant sand-colored hair was usually uncombed and styled only by the whim of the breeze, raindrops, or the degree of humidity, but the times he applied powder and oil to it suddenly his head took on a fixed and rather unnatural geometric slope. He always smelled of hair lotion, even though he used it so rarely. He was not much taller than I am, but he held himself straighter and with more poise so that a few inches would have been added to an onlooker’s estimation of his height. The man’s weight fluctuated, sometimes day to day, at least so it seemed; his cheeks and belly could seem quite bloated or alarmingly slender. Even his voice, so long divorced from the influence of any particular land as much as it was by favored cigars, floated in and out of vague accents. All of this constituted a kind of natural disguise, with the effect that men who had met him or seen him before would show no recognition in their next encounter. He was handsome in a rather cold way. There were no expressions fashioned on his face for the comfort of others. He grinned and smirked but rarely smiled. His oval eyes did as they pleased and held no gaze out of courtesy. If there was a fly on the wall, it was likely he was more interested in it than in looking at you while you poured out your heart. When he did direct himself to you fully, as he did at the moment he asked me if I thought him heartless, it had an almost dizzying effect.
“No, no,” I replied in a gentler voice. “Of course not. You are not heartless. Callous, dear fellow. Merely callous. What good would it do the man to falsely claim he is sick?”
“Arrange for a visit to the asylum, Fergins. You think Bill was once your friend. You are grateful to him. Your face shows you grieve, but do not waste your compassion. He was not your friend and, worse still, he is not dying.”
I took up the letter again. Davenport had noticed in a single glance, seeing the page upside down, what I had missed altogether in my exhilaration at the message. The paper was stamped with the mark of a lunatic asylum.
? ? ?
IT IS MY SINCERE HOPE you never see inside the asylum in Caterham. It is a massive colony of buildings located on an elevation. The rear structure was dimly lit, mostly by tallow candles, and the narrow stone corridors were lined with stacks of dirty aprons and barrels overfilled with animal bones. The place suffered from both too much and too little ventilation; doors were tied so they would not slam from the wind, and despite windows that were nailed shut, gusts of bone-chilling air came over and around us, mixing with the awful human odors.
Dried, shriveled wreaths and holly still on the walls had been meant to add cheer two or three Christmases ago by some well-meaning attendant. We could hear keening wails and shouts from the day room. Despair mingled with rage and confusion. As we were conducted through these passages, I found myself whistling a child’s lullaby to soothe myself.
“We divide the idiots from the lunatics the best we can manage,” explained the attendant guiding us, who seemed inexplicably cheerful, “but the boundary between the poor creatures is not always a clear one.”
At that moment, a pair of rats, each the size of a child’s boot, crossed at our feet. We soon came to another rat about the same size, this one dead.
“I ought to remove that before anyone eats it.”
“Eats a rat?” I asked.
“Stay,” the attendant requested. As I tried to determine whether he was addressing me or the rat, our guide lifted the dead creature by the tail with an almost tender motion. “Poor creature,” came his mournful whisper.
Our destination was a small stone chamber with a square window in the middle of the door. Whiskey Bill, the energetic masculine figure with a heavy red mustache, had transformed from the last time I saw him. He was another being altogether from the man who first surprised me on the street twenty-one years earlier. Entirely bald—in fact, other than his eyebrows, his face and head seemed hairless—his skin now sagged over his eyes and his pupils were cloudy. He wore the drab asylum-issued coat of thin gray material. At least there was his familiar smile showing off the big spaces between his teeth, but his coughing and retching disrupted his greeting. A Bible completed the impression of a deathbed.
Davenport waited until the attendant left us before he began the conversation. “You do not expect me to believe you have gone mad.” His tone was less hostile than his original reaction to the letter. Mistrust is in the bookaneer’s blood. If a bookaneer were to let his guard down even for a moment, a mission could be lost. In the history of the bookaneers, as far as I have understood it, no one bookaneer could ever really tolerate another, with one chief exception that I will speak of soon. That is why I never took Davenport’s suspicions of Whiskey Bill to reflect real animus against the man.
Bill craned his neck to confirm that the attendant had exited. Then he winked. “You are the fellow, Pen. I recently found myself as poor as Job’s turkey, and if the authorities here believe you insane they give you all your meals and a bed. Ain’t this a rather adequate place for an idiot asylum? They let me work in the gardens. The inhabitants of the female division are just on the other side of an awful low hedge. Some very fine specimens there, Pen!”
Davenport arched an eyebrow. “You speak of the insane women.”