I was on my way to find Davenport when I was stopped on the stairs by John Chinaman. He greeted me with his usual glare of belligerence and handed me several letters.
At first I could not understand how there could be letters with my name on them, then remembered that Davenport had left word with the post office in London that I could be reached in Samoa, and separately told various associates of his that he could be reached through me. I tucked them under my vest for later and continued on, eyeing Belial, who was conducting a prayer circle in memory of Tulagi. The natives sat in a semicircle around him with heads bowed, and he held his hands high like a tableau of Christ with his disciples. John, meanwhile, gathered up an entire trunkful of letters that I guessed were for Stevenson.
“Davenport!” I called when I found him in the great hall practicing putting weight on his bad leg. “Haven’t you heard?”
“What is that?” he asked, looking at the bulge in my vest.
“Oh, letters. Just arrived on a merchant ship of some kind. John Chinaman was carrying a whole trunk of them to Stevenson.”
“Let’s see.”
“Here.” I switched to a whisper. “Davenport, forget those, he’s finished! Did you hear what I said?”
He ignored me.
“Belial is inside the house. If Tulagi had not died, perhaps he would not be here already, but he is.” My words sounded accusatory, though I had not intended that, but it hardly mattered. He had entered into a haze of distraction that could forfeit the mission.
The bookaneer shot me a brief and meaningful glance. “I’m afraid this concerns you, Fergins.”
He had been going through the letters and handed one back to me. I could not help but wonder if his dalliances with the native girl had put him in this mental fog. “Davenport, are you even listening to what I’m saying? Everything hangs in the balance.”
I looked down at the letter and read: it was from Johnson, the man charged with watching over my bookstall. There had been a rut of bad times in London and worse luck, it said. All the bookstalls in London had been affected. He’d even had to dismiss the boys who helped guard the stalls, which in turn led to a rash of thefts by other boys (including one former guard). That had made everything even worse. There simply was no money left to pay expenses—he had closed the stall temporarily. Worse still, as it was a term of my lease not to leave the space idle for more than four days, a fact unknown to Johnson, it had been repossessed. My bookstall was gone. And I was thousands of miles away. I’m awful sorry, I am, Brother Bookseller, Johnson wrote in a postscript, as if he thought of regretting it only at the very end.
“He should have tried expanding the inventory,” Davenport said. “I suppose it had to happen sometime. Doomed calling.”
It was a doomed calling, and my life. I read the letter again and I wanted to deny it, to rip it up, burn it. I wanted to shout down Davenport’s unmovable fatalism. But I knew we were at a crossroads that required my attention. I carefully folded the letter up. There was nothing to do about the stall, and something had to be done here and now. I collected myself. We had come for a purpose and if it was to be fulfilled, this was the time.
“Davenport, never mind about that, not right now. But Stevenson is finished. Belial is here, the storm has passed on to the next island. Davenport, please, attention!”
The idea struck me right then. I dropped the letter I was still holding. This got his attention.
“Fergins, what’s wrong?”
I had to catch my breath before I could find the right words. “The mail, Davenport. It just got here.”
“I suppose it is rather much to take in about your bookstall.”
“Whiskey Bill.”
Now I had his interest.
“I’d rather listen to your piano playing than have to talk about that swindler.”
“Bill imagined setting up a kind of Bookaneer Armageddon, yes? He convinced both you and Belial to come here, knowing you would try to rip each other’s hearts open. He wrote you to come to the asylum; he wrote Belial about Samoa. What if he wrote to Stevenson, too?”
“Why would he do that?”
“In my study of the field, Davenport, every bookaneer lives with the inner belief that his talents are unique, and he can hardly suffer the mere existence of his fellow bookaneers because it threatens that belief. I see him in my mind’s eye with his wobbly hand over the chessboard I set up for him at the asylum. He had his own game in mind. This was a final ploy by Bill to ensure his rivals destroyed. He set a trap, turning the author against the final two bookaneers, to determine which would be the last.”
“If he was trying to do that,” Davenport said, “the mail that just came in . . .” he did not finish the thought.
I helped: “Could have a letter in it to Stevenson revealing everything.”
“Go up to his library and go through the letters that John carried up.”
I shook my head. “Not me.”
“I cannot,” he replied. “I cannot move fast enough to avoid being caught. You know Bill’s handwriting. You could recognize it at a glance, couldn’t you?”
“Yes, of course. But if I was discovered digging through the letters—”
“You invent an excuse. What’s worse than him reading a letter from Bill, Fergins? Nothing is worse than that. If that were to happen, our entire mission evaporates, and nothing else matters.”
“How could I manage it?”