I had prepared whatever useful materials I could find on Samoa for the bookaneer: maps, cyclopedia extracts, pamphlets, travelogues. The travel books were written by gentlemen adventurers with forgettable initials before creaky surnames, and they might as well have all been written by the same fellow, so plain and uninformative were their contents. The dozen or so rather obscure books written as detailed studies of the island nation were out-of-date and often inaccurate. No matter. As far as I could tell, Davenport barely glanced over the materials I provided for him. This surprised and concerned me, for he usually prepared thoroughly. As he studied the clouds, I gave a careful glance to each sailor who walked by, on their way between fixing ropes and ladders and sails, as though each boy in his blue tunic and white trousers could harbor a design against Davenport.
It was hard to fathom what was in the bookaneer’s mind as I helped carry his belongings and two large casks of freshwater aboard. His face maintained its inscrutability. I ought to note that the bookaneer had grown a beard; the tangled, shapeless thing did nothing to age his youthful face, instead making him appear like one of the young actors who would come to the Garrick with false whiskers glued over their pretty cheeks. Then again, he always managed to appear rather slovenly before an important mission, for which he would later snap into fine form. I wish I could convey something of his inner thoughts, but I could not glean anything definite from him. I’ll do my imitation of Homer, who will stop to describe his heroes suiting up in armor in order to suggest, however indirectly, their states of mind. On the day he began the most fateful mission in the history of the bookaneers, this was the modern armor of our far-famed Pen Davenport: a narrow shoe-tie neckcloth tucked snugly into a crimson velvet waistcoat, where his thumbs were hooked on opposite loops; his dark checked overcoat of the inverness style, with a cape hanging elbow length. In place of a brazen helmet such as the sort the blind bard of Chios dwelled upon, our journeyer had an old-fashioned smoking cap that covered the tops of his ears.
Wishing him Godspeed, I began to exit when he asked me two questions.
“Do you think, Fergins, that Belial has already completed the mission? That I will be doing nothing more than wasting my strength sailing across the world?”
“I have had every scout and spy I trust listening for news, and I believe we would have heard of it. Remember, two ships in the past four months have wrecked on their way to the South Seas. It’s just as likely Belial never made it there, or was waylaid.”
He nodded, reassured by my optimism, if not by the report of nautical trends, but I wanted to be comprehensive. He invited me for a quick farewell drink.
I fixed two glasses of champagne. He was slouching to one side at the small table that constituted the only other furniture in the berth beside the bureau. I sat diagonally across, on the edge of the bed.
“What is it you fear so much about my trip, my dear Fergins?” Davenport asked, swirling the golden liquid in his glass before losing his interest and putting it down.
“Did I say I do?”
“Then you do not?”
I shook the glass side to side until more bubbles rose toward me. I had promised myself not to admit my trepidation, but I never was one who could duck a direct question, certainly not one from Davenport. “There is something about this endeavor that fills me with dread, I confess it. Something . . .”
“I have had my share of difficult missions.”
“Of course you’re right. And on the other hand . . .”
“No other hands today, Fergins. To the point.”
I said what I had been burning to say all along. “The great Robert Louis Stevenson, ailing and helpless, isolated on a remote island with no law and order, writing what is likely to be his final novel: a bull’s-eye, a bookaneer’s ultimate prize.”
“You think it all too perfect.”
“Too perfect not to contain peril.”
“But of course you think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“Fergins, you are a Londoner! That is why you think like that. Which is very different than to say you are an Englishman, by the way,” he mused. “The Englishman is too superstitious to question good fortune, the Londoner too intellectual to accept it.”
“And the American?”
“The American,” he said, smiling at the accusatory tone of my response. “The American expects the good fortune.” He studied his slightly overgrown and sharp fingernails, then smoothed his beard with one of them. “Do you know what Kitten would have done?”
My voice dried up at the usually forbidden topic.
“If she’d learned of this mission,” he continued, his emerald eyes clouded. “Do you know what she would have done? She would have recited to me all the reasons I should not go and I would have been convinced with all my heart to stay away from the blasted thing. Then when she returned with Stevenson’s manuscript grasped to her bosom like a newborn babe, she would have raised a little eyebrow, so that it tugged her face ever so slightly, and said, ‘Davenport, you failed the test.’” He raised his glass. “To Kitten.”
Curious as it might sound, over the course of several years between the day my assistance to Davenport began and the time Kitten disappeared, I cannot remember speaking to the fascinating woman more than a half-dozen times. I had encountered her. I would be walking with Davenport late at night as he gave me instructions for an assignment, for instance, and we would part ways at the lighted window of a tavern or hotel, where I could see her inside, bathing indifferently in attention while waiting for him. Or there she would appear at the corner ahead of us, rising up and down on her toes, a coat wrapped around her and a colorful scarf hugging her head so that she was nothing more than a face, and Davenport would bid me an abrupt good-bye as he hurried to her side.