The Last Bookaneer

The issue of what Davenport was called provided endless fascination and distress to the magistrate. There was one official of the prison, a perplexed and angry man, who scowled and sighed at my every answer. Meanwhile, there was a representative from the German consulate, a commissioner or deputy commissioner of some sort, who observed it all with a cold indifference.

 

On the walls of my cell were carvings and chalk drawings, of ships and sea monsters, of dancing women and dead animals. There was one particularly elaborate and well-done drawing that drew my eye. It showed a very tall figure of a giant or a god, surrounded by smaller men. As I studied it the giant started to look like Davenport, then Belial, then Stevenson.

 

Davenport and I were held in adjacent cells and could communicate between the thin walls. The fact was, our doors were usually unlocked, leaving us free to move up and down the passage. The guards armed with rifles usually remained in the courtyard in front of the building, and other native guards, who appeared to have only knives, brought us food. Banner laughed and spit at us, screamed that we got what we deserved for not helping him. But he was lonely, and soon enough he just wanted to talk with us.

 

Belle came to visit us—I should say instead to visit Davenport. She was dressed in a picnic dress of white and crimson with braided trim around the collar and sleeves, and also wore an enthusiastic grin, which popped into a big smile, as she spoke to him. She seemed entirely taken with the fact that he had turned out to be a criminal.

 

“Whatever will you do, Mr. Porter—Davenport?” she asked.

 

He and I were on a bench in the central passage, and she sat on one opposite from us. “It appears I haven’t much choice in what I do, Miss Strong,” he said mechanically.

 

“Do you mean”—she lowered her voice to a whisper and almost giggled her question—“you will escape?”

 

Both of us were too amazed to respond.

 

“Louis will not tell us very much about what you did or tried to do,” she continued, too excited to wait for an answer to her earlier question. “I told him I was going to the village for supplies to make some new dresses. Do not worry. Neither Vao nor I will ever breathe a word of this visit or of your plans.”

 

“Vao?” Davenport echoed.

 

“Yes, the most prized of our house girls. She accompanied me here and listens to what I tell her to do, so don’t worry about her either. You know of her?”

 

“She was the dwarf’s charge,” I said, hoping to defuse the tension that came from Davenport’s sudden animation.

 

Belle rolled her eyes. “He was always the funniest little creature. Since Tulagi jumped into that ditch we have hardly known what to do with her. I caught her trying on one of my dresses yesterday. She was seen drinking alcohol from our cabinets by one of our houseboys, and some food that had gone missing she had apparently eaten in one sitting. If it were not for our feeling sympathy for her because of the dwarf’s death, she would have had to be dismissed. I am trying to keep her busy so it will not come to that.”

 

Davenport interrupted before she had finished. “Was it Vao’s idea to come here, or yours?”

 

Her head tilted in a gesture of suspicion at the question. “Who do you think makes the decisions, Mr. Davenport, me or the brown girls who serve Vailima?”

 

Davenport had lost patience for her. “Just please tell me where she is.”

 

“Waiting outside. You greet my visit with lassitude and apathy, yet your eyes dance at the mention of the little native girl. Do you fancy her?”

 

“You misunderstand,” Davenport said, though in fact the young woman had been astute. “I just need to speak to her—”

 

She was seething, her cheeks streaked red, reminding me of her mother during her first outburst toward me. “Perhaps you do belong in here, after all,” she said, and there ended the visit.

 

Davenport continued to be sullen and quiet after ruining any chance that Belle might help. Having known him for so many years, I was inclined to assume he was plotting—that he would hatch some victory from the darkest and lowest point of his adventures. I thought back to a time he sent for me while authorities in Dublin were questioning him and, once I arrived at the police station, rather a nervous wreck, the confidence in his eyes that it was an amusing and merely temporary problem (he was right). But when we were able to come together in the central passage of the Samoan prison and I looked closely—the rare moments his eyes met mine—I knew how different it was this time. I had never seen him like this. He was overcome.

 

I told him he should not have waited for me so long when I fell from the horse at Vailima. Perhaps he could have escaped Stevenson’s men.

 

“Could I?” His words were muffled, his mouth covered by the palm of his hand. He had not shaved since his injury and his coarse beard had been growing again, and with the latest crop of whiskers his whole face seemed to be cast in shadows. “Had I known, Fergins, that it would be an author who would vanquish me—why, I think I would have enjoyed the devilishness of it all. No, there would have been no escape this time, not with an army of islanders after me. Kitten was right.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“She once told me that when the last bookaneer appeared, he would leave grinning, and so our business would end.” He was speaking to me, but it was almost a trancelike state from which the words emerged. “She thought I would be her legacy. She thought it would be me.”

 

I was confused. “Who?”