“The daughter of a chief,” Davenport repeated the words to himself.
Vao was still holding on to him, with no apparent intention of letting go. The dwarf interrupted this tableau, which must have seemed as dangerous to him as it did to me, pulling her away and out the door. Just then, Stevenson caught up to us. He was winded from running and the exertion had brought on a coughing fit.
“What is it? What had happened?”
“Nothing important, Tusitala,” Davenport answered without hesitation or a hint of deception. “Just a broken wineglass.”
Stevenson examined the scene with a deliberate look. “Well,” he said, “I suppose the storm has set all our teeth on edge. That reminds me, my white gentlemen. I must ride out to the consulate to send some responses about this deportation business before the rains land. There was a yacht that sank in the Pacific a few weeks ago, and you may want to write out a message to wire your relations or they are liable to read about it in the papers and think you were on it.”
“Excellent idea,” said Davenport. “My aunt in Chicago believes every worthwhile tragedy must involve a member of our family.”
? ? ?
I HAD TO LAUGH inside when Davenport left with Stevenson to send their telegrams—not only to think of a confused woman in Chicago named Porter handed a message from a nephew she never heard of but also because as long as I could remember, Davenport hated telegrams on principle. If they did not contain bad news, he’d insist, they contained something offensively mundane. “If you are ever in trouble, Fergins,” he once commented with aristocratic irritation when I had to make a stop at a Paris hotel’s telegraph office, “throw a rock through my window.”
Yet, the first thing I heard about Davenport’s search for Kitten back in London in 1882 came in the form of a wired message:
Come as soon as possible. Hotel de Ville. Geneva.
Though it was unsigned, I had helped Davenport for more than ten years by that time; I would have known a message from him by the rhythm of its words. It had been almost a month since he had left me standing in his hotel room to watch out the window as he climbed into a hackney coach. I was surprised that his path would go through Geneva, as I had reason to believe Kitten had already been there when looking for the Mary Shelley story, and that great mission of hers had been over and done with before her return to London and subsequent disappearance.
Geneva had a part in the fascinating history of Shelley’s novel. It was during a summer trip there with her husband, the poet Percival, when she dreamt her inspiration for Frankenstein. She was eighteen.
Unlike Davenport, who, I’d teased, was born with the ocean’s temper, I have never felt myself a natural traveler, especially with long distances involved. But there was no hesitation on my part after I read the message. A series of steamers and trains brought me to the Continent and into Switzerland. I was driven right to the hotel named in the telegram, but did not find the bookaneer signed in under any of his usual aliases. I waited, knowing nothing of Geneva or where else to look; this made me appreciate Davenport’s own challenge to find a woman who could have been anywhere on earth, a woman whose profession depended on her being able to go anywhere and become part of the scenery.
I fell asleep in a comfortable chair in the corner of the sitting room by a hearty fire. Then I heard Davenport’s voice chastise me. At first I thought I dreamt it.
“Asleep. Asleep!”
I stirred, catching my breath and emitting a loud noise through my nose. He was standing over me in an ankle-length, loose-fitting coat.
“Sorry, Davenport.”
“Fast asleep, at a time like this.” The bookaneer swept off his beaver hat; he looked as though he had not been sleeping, his unshaven face swollen around his eyes and cheeks, his eyes red, his hair hanging in loose, disheveled knots. He had a series of scratches along his neck that suggested he had been in a scrape recently.
“I did not find what name you were under with the clerk,” I said, mounting a mild defense and changing the subject.
“I do not lodge here; I just come for some of my meals and my mail. I was here for a while when I arrived in Geneva but—never mind, we must go. I mustn’t leave her alone too long.”
I waited until we were outside on the lawn to speak further. “Then you found her! Thank goodness,” I said with relief.
“Found whom?”
“Kitten.”
“No,” he said. He gave instructions to a waiting coach driver and the span of horses whisked us away from the hotel.
Cologny is a beautiful village high up among the lakes and mountains near Geneva, with charming cottages and hotels well placed for the most delightful views and the homes nestled in between. But instead of the surroundings I studied Davenport, trying to glean from his face whom we could be going to see and what any of this had to do with Kitten’s disappearance. I could think of only one scenario that made sense: he had found a woman who knew what had happened to Kitten, and was keeping her locked away until she would agree to tell him what he needed to know, or maybe as ransom against another person who withheld information. I did not relish the notion of having any kind of prisoner and was eager to ask if this was it, but his gaze and brain were fixed on the mountains, and he sniffed and rubbed his eyes as though suffering through a cold.