It had not been a performance, and the ruse Davenport was so certain about never existed. Whiskey Bill had served a mission in a silver bowl on a silver platter. Do not mistake the conclusions I drew as criticism of Davenport’s intuition or his methods. On the contrary. To be brilliant is not a matter of being right more often than the next fellow; yes, that may be part of the pedestrian definition. It is in large part a matter of holding firm to convictions as long as possible, but not a moment longer. The brilliant man must trust he is right even when adrift alone with his convictions, and few people have the stomach for it. There are millions of average women and men who will refuse to take positions at the most important moments in their lives—moments that would have changed the course of their existences—for fear of being proven wrong. Fear is the impassable gulf between the ordinary and the remarkable. Between all of us and Pen Davenport.
Davenport was no fool. He embraced reality when it came for him, and then blamed others. “This is what should have happened,” was a phrase frequently spoken by him. You would not have heard from him even an admission as mild as: “Well, now you see, Fergins, I suppose Whiskey Bill was not sending us on a wild goose chase while pretending to be dying, after all. He really was dying and the mission was genuine. To think, there was an aviary in that asylum, just as he told us!”
“This is what should have happened, my dear Fergins,” he said a week after Bill’s death from heart congestion. “That damned asylum should have transferred Bill to a proper hospital. We could all see he was losing a bit of his mind, very well, but the poor fellow’s body was falling apart and those white-coated fools were blind enough not to see it. Now”—he waved his hands in the air in the way of a professor who has forgotten his line of thought—“it is too late.”
“Wholeheartedly agreed, Davenport,” was how I would usually respond to these vague nods to his errors.
There was nothing to gain by dwelling on another bookaneer’s sad demise. There was plenty of work ahead. I had to follow our informant’s initial lead about Belial’s South Seas trip by tracking down the probable dates and vessel of that man’s passage out of England (Davenport was at least three weeks behind his rival, as far as I could determine). I was able to confirm sightings of the shadowy bookaneer consistent with preparations for such a voyage, but Belial’s exact day and means of departure remained murky and unprovable—as frustratingly invisible as the legendary bookaneer himself. Meanwhile, I gathered together every known detail of Stevenson’s singular life to add to my existing knowledge of the man.
Sickly as a child, Stevenson surprised his very pessimistic and industrious family by surviving long enough to study engineering, following the family profession on his father’s side, before growing tired of it and switching to law, which did not last much longer. Literature beckoned—“literature beckoned,” of course, that is the predictable turn to everyone but a budding author. Leaving Edinburgh and soon Scotland altogether to seek a climate salutary to his fragile health and to be closer to Bohemian and artistic friends, in Paris he fell in with an American woman, more than ten years his senior, called Fanny Osbourne. She was already married and had two children, a boy and a girl, and would soon enough be divorced and married again, this time to Stevenson.
By then he was writing at a furious pace about his colorful travels, and soon his giant imagination pressed him into writing novels. Of course, many writers who have written articles, poems, essays, or criticism sooner or later decide to try their hands at a novel, and fail at it, not realizing how much life must be contained in the form. But Stevenson was different. Remarkable novels flowed from his pen. Novels that nobody expected and novels that built worlds. Novels made him a fortune. Stevenson’s writing was unique and easily identifiable, and yet it was difficult for a reader to imagine the storyteller himself. Here is another way to put it: the reader wants to rescue E. A. Poe; he wants to be a friend to Longfellow; wants Dickens to be his friend, Sir Walter Scott to be his wealthy uncle; but would be satisfied simply to lay eyes on R. L. Stevenson. He excited as much curiosity about himself as any novelist had in half a century, one of the secrets to the immense interest in his books, no matter their subjects. His rather picturesque and wild life only added to this. The gangly writer and his unusual family spent time in San Francisco, New York, and back in Scotland and England before setting sail for the South Seas.
Poor health spurred Stevenson’s most recent odyssey, and along the way something made him decide not to go back.
I arranged for Davenport’s passage on the first ship launching for the South Seas, which happened to be a British man-of-war; the bookaneer had been touched by blind good fortune, for the frigate would be the only ship to sail out of Liverpool for the South Seas with room for passengers for another four months. Three months to the day after the death of Whiskey Bill, the day this mission was born, Davenport stepped aboard the warship and wondered aloud whether he ought to have brought a hat with a wider brim to keep the sun out of his eyes; I kept my umbrella above him for shade.