“An anonymous collector. Shelley, that’s what they’re after, Fergins.”
His personal concern for Kitten, which reached a near-hysterical pitch at the Hogarth that night, put away the canard that he could ever separate her professional life from his own. This is what you would not hear him say: “Without any good reason in particular, I have a feeling of dread about this.” He never admitted a superstitious emotion. But I knew enough of Pen Davenport that it was exactly how his words sounded in my ears.
As for the object of her mission, it was indeed a bookaneer’s version of a Holy Grail. It was something talked about for a long time but never proven to actually exist. The collector was pursuing Mary Shelley’s lost short story, sometimes referred to as a novelette, of Frankenstein she finished in the summer of 1816 before writing the novel itself, which would then be completed the following year. Short stories, notebooks, outlines, scribbles, even crude stick-figure drawings made in connection with an important work could command great prices—sometimes higher than pages of a finished manuscript—because these raw materials entered directly into the author’s thoughts. A half-page list of potential titles Charles Dickens had scrawled out for his unfinished work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, for instance, has been bought and sold in public—and purloined and copied and bartered in secret—more times than any other item related to that book.
Though an author such as Mrs. Shelley lived so much more recently than, say, Shakespeare or Dante, that does not diminish the value of materials related to her work. In fact, Frankenstein was such an unexpected and unprecedented success that the original documents were at best sloppily preserved and collected at the time, making their later recovery more difficult and their value dearer. Frankenstein’s creature, as a literary creation, stood alone in its originality, one of the reasons for that novel’s incredibly enduring popularity. To find Mary Shelley’s story that originated it would rate with the top two or three discoveries by any bookaneer, certainly in modern times, maybe in history.
The novelette was presumed destroyed by bibliographers until some pages of the late Mrs. Shelley’s diary rediscovered in the late 1860s in the drawer of a discarded desk suggested it could be extant. The collector who’d hired Kitten had come into possession of a fresh clue where to search. Armed with this information, Kitten left England less than a week after I heard about it from Davenport. Bookaneers did not tell their own tales, but from what I understood her expedition was less eventful than Davenport had expected. She was gone only two and a half months, all told, and by all accounts met with great success. She found Shelley’s novelette. And when the intermediaries for the collector received the novelette from her, as promised they passed the enormous payment on to the victorious bookaneer. All of this transpired without complications. I remember seeing Kitten at a distance during the period after her return to London; perhaps it was my imagination, but she seemed buoyant.
That was the beginning of the end.
I had to leave for some travels to conduct some business at Davenport’s behest, and when I returned to London he was in as wretched a state as I had seen in the ten years I’d known the man.
He didn’t stop moving as I tried to talk with him, and I could not follow his broken line of discussion. “Mark this, Fergins . . . someone has lured her into a scrape. . . . Someone has done it!”
He went up and down his rooms, pacing, I thought, until I realized he was plucking up clothes, maps, and scraps of writing paper. I recognized these scraps: they had been accumulated over many years, and written on them were the locations of trusted men and women in every quarter of the world.
“Calm yourself, Davenport, please. If we can just talk about this calmly, I am certain . . . If you could just stand still and explain . . .”
“Calmly! She’s missing. Kitten—she’s gone missing!”
“On a confidential mission,” I suggested.
“I’m not a fool, Fergins. I know when she is on a mission. She has been lured into something, I promise you. She was so distracted by her mission for the Shelley papers that she must not have noticed some trouble was brewing against her.” There was a whistle that rose up from below the window. Davenport glanced down to the street, then took my hand and gave it a hard, affectionate squeeze, as unexpected as a slap in the face. “I’ve pinned some instructions for you on the wall next to the fireplace, Fergins. Mind my affairs for a while. You are the only man I trust in London. I do not have time to answer any of your questions but one: I am going to find Kitten and bring her home.”
“But go where? Davenport, you cannot simply walk out the door without so much as a . . .”
I listened to his footsteps on the stairs as long as they could be heard. Just like that, he was gone, and the circumstances of Kitten’s disappearance still a mystery to me.
X
The morning we unceremoniously left our cottage with nothing more than half a biscuit and coffee in my stomach, I was exhausted, having spent more than an hour gathering fruit before going to sleep and then lying awake wondering about the nightmares that ravaged Davenport. I was so hungry and groggy, I nearly nodded off as I followed in the hoof steps of Cipaou’s and Davenport’s horses. I had to tie my spectacles behind my head to keep them from being blown off. I tried a few times to ask Davenport where we were going, having to wait until the narrow paths widened enough to fit next to his horse, and even then I had to shout over the gusts.
“I told you,” he said, shouting back (having to raise his voice made him angry), “that I am tired. We are going to Apia, and I want no discussion.”