The plan was hatched. I was to contrive a reason to go to the library. Find the trunk of mail I had seen John Chinaman carry up. Search for any letters with handwriting that could belong to Whiskey Bill. Bring said mail to Davenport to examine and destroy. Somehow, avoid Belial and all servants along the way.
Keeping these instructions in my head, I started for the second floor of the house. A climb up a flight of stairs had never before seemed to take so long, as if each tread tilted up and away from me, the walls shaking and trembling like a runaway train, my mind dark as a tunnel. I headed for the library, eyes down at my feet except to look for anyone who might be watching my path. My heart thumped; my excursion became more momentous and life altering with each step I took. “This, my dear Fergins, this alone, could save my mission from disaster,” Davenport had said to me before we separated, encircling a hand around my wrist like my oldest friend or a policeman making an arrest.
A few seconds later, as measured out by the big clock by the stairwell, I was inside the Stevensons’ library. There was the trunk I had seen the Chinese servant carrying. It was resting on the floor in one corner of the room. I had my moment. Here, now, I was to become a . . . the word bookaneer retreated from me. It would take much more than this. I thought about the advice Davenport had given me. I walked to the nearest shelves as though to reach for a book, then I dropped to my knees in a quick motion. Opening the lid with one hand, I readied my other hand to dig through the mail.
It was empty. The room swallowed me whole.
“It is so, so lovely.”
The voice came from Fanny Stevenson, sitting in a deep armchair facing away from me. She wore a brown gown with yellow flowers stitched into it, and her toes rested on the windowsill. The mistress of the house was so compact she had been completely concealed by the back of the chair.
“Fanny,” I said, trying to determine how much I needed to explain.
She continued looking out the window. I realized she wasn’t watching me at all. I had disturbed her reverie.
“It is all so, so lovely,” she said, then with a birdlike motion she finally glanced at me. “Mr. Fergins, I have made a mistake.”
“Fanny?”
“Oh, a terrible mistake,” she said with a warm smile. “I should never have told you to leave this place. It is the loveliest spot in the world sometimes. The South Pacific can have everything you ever dreamed of, or everything you ever feared coming to pass. We mean to live our lives in Samoa and leave our bones here. Do you know, I was out walking yesterday? The air was soft and warm from the storms, and filled with the most delicious fragrance. These perfumes of the tropical forests are wonderful. When I am pulling weeds, it often happens that a puff of the sweetest scents blows back at me and all is well again. It does not seem possible that we have not been here longer than we actually have. Everything looks so settled, as though we have been here for many, many years.”
She threw open the window. No action imaginable could have been any more absurd. The awful winds howled and rushed in and nearly knocked her over, pushing pencils, papers, and books off the table behind her. Lloyd rushed in and steadied his mother while I forced the window closed.
“It’s all so lovely, so, so lovely,” she was repeating through tears but still with a smile.
“Mother, let us take you to bed to rest. Yes, that’s it, come with me,” Lloyd said, waiting until she had recovered herself and was walking on her own toward the door. “I’m very sorry,” he said, turning to me with the dutiful face characteristic of a grown man whose mother was becoming a burden. “Sometimes she will rant against this place; other times she will seem ready to throw herself into Mount Vaea to stay forever. When she is caught between the two feelings is when she goes to pieces. It is very hard for her, because when Louis makes up his mind there is nothing to do, and all she wants to do is keep him happy. It has become her . . . calling, so to speak.”
“We all must have one,” I replied.
I could hear Davenport’s shouts from downstairs and I tried to ignore them. It meant I was taking too long. He was trying to draw as many of the servants to him—and away from me—as possible by acting as though he had reinjured himself.
When mother and son were both gone, I looked everywhere I could think for any sign of the mail, under the pretense of cleaning the mess blown around by the storm. I rushed to the glass doors that led to Stevenson’s sanctum. My legs were moving faster than my brain, but I was imagining a scenario of what must have happened. John had brought the mail to Stevenson’s desk, then removed the empty trunk to the library, for it would not fit inside the narrow sanctum without being a hazard for the novelist to trip over.
The doors to the sanctum were closed. I knocked lightly, then made a few bolder taps. Nobody called to come in or go away, so I held my breath and stepped inside. There were stacks of mail on the bed and the floor. My eyes took these in before landing on Stevenson, almost invisible, tucked under multiple blankets, propped against pillows. He looked up from a letter he was reading, but his wide-set eyes, as ever, seemed to absorb everything at once, while mine scrambled for crumbs.
Me: “Tusitala.”
Him: “Mr. Fergins, I have here a most interesting letter from abroad. You might as well join me.”
XIII
By the time I had returned to Davenport, I could hardly keep from talking over my own sentences, there was so much I needed to say—I suppose the same is true as I recount the story to you now. I told him how the letter had been written on the other side of a page ripped from a book, which, as it turned out, was a page from a Bible. Whiskey Bill’s Bible.
“As best I can remember, Davenport,” I said, “the letter began like this.” I recited: