“I must tell you, sir, that I haven’t changed my mind. Indeed, I have not even brought the manuscript I suppose you’re still after.”
The man recovered after a moment of disappointment and took the young laborer on a tour of the offices. He brought him to a vault. There was not money inside but stereotype plates and woodcuts from which their books were made. He meant to persuade the naive lad by demonstrating the importance of the trade of publishing, one can suppose, by placing the objects in his hands. The young and morally upright man did not waver. However, after a long day being regaled by the publisher at Paris’s finest coffee shops and wine taverns, the visitor finally relented, agreeing to a small fortune in exchange for retrieving and handing over the manuscript. The publisher happily parted with the sum. He could barely contain himself. After all, whatever he was paying this simple country boy was far less than he would have had to pay Mrs. Barnard herself, who had been a very hardheaded woman.
A few weeks after purchasing the manuscript from the laborer, he received a letter from England. It purported to be written by Mrs. Barnard, assuring him that she was very much alive, that the rumors of her death in the papers were so foolish she had not even responded to them, and that she had heard about his plans to publish a new book by her while she was visiting London. She had written no book called A Tomb, she protested, and in fact everything she had ever written had been published and she did not seek to enlarge the list.
The publisher trembled at the thought of losing the money he had given to the laborer and the far greater sums spent preparing the publication. Childishly, he hid the letter and then incinerated it in the boiler. He did his best to forget it. Until one day a woman appeared in their offices. She was short with thick black curly hair and a glowing white complexion, smelling of oranges and mint, with a small mouth.
“Good afternoon. I am Elizabeth Barnard, and I understand you are publishing a book under my name that I did not write.”
The publisher was speechless, no doubt burning up at the thought of the lad who had somehow tricked him. Him, of all people.
“Mrs. Barnard. Thank goodness you are among the living!”
She waited, her expressive brow wrinkling.
“We must have been duped,” he went on.
“By whom?”
“I do not know. A confidence man! A Jeremy Diddler!”
She replied after a thoughtful pause. “Did you not receive my letter in time to stop publication of the hideous thing being called a book?”
“No, I suppose . . . No. A letter? I never received it,” he stammered and sputtered, turning red as a beet.
She took both his hands in her own and turned his palms upward, stroking each with her thumb. “An odd thing—it is an odd thing. I have a messenger who swears he delivered it into these hands.”
It is said by some he actually got on his knees and begged her mercy, but it hardly matters if that detail is true or fanciful. Rather than endure a lawsuit, he paid her an exorbitant sum and agreed to publish an announcement that A Tomb was a forgery.
This French publisher, who died a few years later, his demise perhaps hastened by the cruelty of this episode, was said to be a very big, strong-limbed gentleman. The lady bringing him to his knees was barely five feet tall. Even I have not been able to confirm whether Davenport and Kitten, who of course presented herself as Mrs. Barnard (who really was under the ground, in an out-of-the-way burial yard outside Bath), had coordinated their efforts, or Davenport had made his move forging the document and Kitten made hers on top of it. In any case, the tale of their mutual success became one of the most renowned in the annals of the bookaneers, and, by many accounts, was the true beginning of their love affair.
? ? ?
THERE WAS an interesting development with our uninteresting and despicable fellow passenger, Hines. Once Davenport had humiliated him during our confrontation in the ship’s library, he was as docile as a lamb toward the bookaneer. I had been as kind as could be to the man—kinder with every barb and insult thrown my way—yet he still only scorned me, while Davenport had wrung his neck, figuratively speaking, and in doing so rendered him tame. More important, he continued to be a useful source of information about Samoa, however unpleasant his delivery.
“You bachelors might look to pick a girl in Samoa to bring home and marry,” he said crassly to us, “if you wouldn’t mind your darling wife showing her bosom to every man she meets.”
“Pardon me?” replied Davenport.
The merchant’s face shook with laughter. “A joke, good fellow. I like to have some fun with new visitors. Those brown women on the islands never cover themselves up above the waist, you know. But they’re still embarrassed if you happen to see one of them without the little clothes they wear!”
“How do you know that?” Davenport could not resist asking, stopping Hines’s laughter cold.
“All I’m saying”—he screwed his face into a serious one—“is that they’re happy to have a white man to marry, so they don’t end up carrying their husband’s bloody, brown head home from a battlefield. Many whites marry the prettiest natives or half-castes they see when they’re in the South Seas. It’s all well and good to bring them back with you—just don’t bring a white woman to the islands. It is all too primitive; being in a place like that kills a civilized woman.”
Another time, while playing euchre with the first officer and another passenger in the smoking parlor, the merchant chimed in, “It is important always to remember one thing about savages: they are far more frightened of us than we ought to be of them. Savvy? It will feel as though you are dealing with people who are deaf and dumb, or just beasts, but they can be persuaded to understand our ways. You probably heard the story of the gunboat Adler.”