The longer we stayed, the less I could conceive of moving the poor creature to try to get her back to London, but Davenport remained insistent. When she would be screaming and begging for her opium, throwing plates and lamps, scratching off patches of our skin, he would curse himself. “If I had been there to prevent her from falling, she would never be in this state. If only I had been here to warn the doctor against plying her with opium.” He had convinced himself more than ever that she must have suffered an accident—through the floor of an old attic or stair tread, he believed—and that was what had put her on the opium track. Bringing her back to London became a way of redeeming this failing. But the self-recriminations would have no relief. The Swiss doctor attending her confirmed that her body had reached an impossible position that nobody could reverse: it could neither go on with opium nor go on without it. All we could do was wait for the inevitable. She died in that cottage one early morning, a few minutes after three a.m., the fourteenth day of May, 1882.
At first, Davenport showed no change or release in emotion. After her body was taken away, his knees began to buckle and he convulsed with sobs. I caught him before he could fall, and he sobbed into my shoulder for a half hour as I tried in vain to comfort him. Then he pushed me away, embarrassed by his grief. The push was so forceful I fell backward into the wall.
We never found any evidence of what she was searching for that would have brought her back to Geneva, and no further Shelley papers of any significance have been uncovered in those cottages or elsewhere since. When I helped Davenport clean out her rooms back in London after our return, we discovered a half dozen vials of opium.
“Davenport, it means you do not have to blame yourself. She had begun using opium before her final journey. Her fate had nothing to do with you not being in Cologny to prevent her from an injury.” I thought this would be a great relief, and was dumbfounded that he didn’t care.
Davenport glanced down at the black crepe around his arm, then back at me. “Fancy that,” he said. Later that day, while smoking a cigar in the dark, he asked: “Which should haunt me less, Fergins, believing I could have saved her or knowing I could not?”
? ? ?
THE NIGHT AFTER we walked in on Belial’s assault of Vao and Tulagi, I scrubbed and scrubbed but could not get the bloodstains out of the fabric of my umbrella. I did not want Stevenson to notice it and ask questions, so I kept it tucked away among my belongings.
As we expected, residing at Vailima gave us the time and luxury Davenport had been longing for to explore more thoroughly. He assigned me the completion of our inventory of Stevenson’s library—it was part of his standard analysis of a subject, though in this case I think there was an added element of plain curiosity on the bookaneer’s part. Even for a man who had encountered most of the celebrated literati on both sides of the Atlantic, it was difficult not to be intensely interested in everything to do with Stevenson the man. The novelist was so entirely singular that learning more about him became a way of trying to prove to yourself he was of the same species.
A man’s library opens up his character to the world. There were some penny dreadfuls that were on a shelf hidden behind the door. Then there were shelves of travel books, with a vast selection of volumes chronicling Pacific Ocean adventure, which confirmed the wisdom of Davenport’s disguise as a travel writer; near that was an impressive collection of modern poetry. There was a French history that I noticed had a passage Stevenson marked, which translated as “I know my tongue has caused me a lot of trouble, but also sometimes lots of pleasure.” There was a small set of classical texts, some in translation and others in their original languages, several with the pages uncut. I note that without meaning to criticize. The biggest secret kept by the literary world I occupy is that the best way for a book to become successful is to be unread. There is a book that is prestigious to own, to show to friends, and it is printed and purchased, printed and collected, until people forget to read it, but no matter—it must be in every family library to make it a complete one, and nobody knows enough to ever argue against it.
Two walls of shelves were filled with Bibles—more than 150 varieties by my count. We had not seen any evidence that Stevenson was a particularly religious man; if anything he seemed indifferent or hostile toward his mother’s Christian pronouncements. He welcomed the missionaries for the purpose of social company and guiding the natives, not for improving his own spiritual nature. “The religious man has the need for only one Holy Book even as he wants only one God,” Davenport said to me as I began to catalog the books, “but the literary man can never have enough of them.”
After studying and admiring several rare editions among the collection, I noticed one Bible published more recently. I examined it at length. Why it caught my eye, I could not explain at first. There was a lurking sense of familiarity. It was the same edition that Whiskey Bill had had at his bedside—his deathbed, as it turned out. In my hours sitting beside him at the asylum, I had seen at a glance that Bill’s was well read, the pages thumbed and marked at intervals and the spine strained.
Stevenson’s copy of the same edition, in contrast, was fresh and stiff. It was a rather macabre and whimsical project that I’d had, as I thumbed through the pages and wondered in vain what last words Bill had read before his death. I rather liked the idea—admittedly a romantic one—that Bill, that every bookaneer who ever walked the earth, should be reading from a book when death sets him free.
I was ready to put away the Bible and commit my attention to the rest of my inventory when my eye struck on a verse of Revelation, or rather the footnote by Mr. Randolph Hawkins, the editor of this edition, to a particular verse about the “beast out of the abyss.” Hawkins’s scholarly exegesis suggested the beast due to emerge at the end of the world is Belial, one of the angels who fell with Lucifer and, according to Milton, one who could not be subdued even by Lucifer himself.
The words with their new significance echoed in my mind and the room seemed to shake with them: Beware the beast, Penrose Davenport, beware the beast. . . .
The beast.
The beast was Belial all along.
XI