No doubt Belial had been right when he told Davenport that giving Kitten such an enormous success as the Shelley novelette hollowed her ambitions. But I believed there had been something more, and that Belial, as Belial did, flattered himself to think he knew the whole story. There are some who would never want to look at a book again associated with such a bleak past as her mother’s abuse of her, but to Kitten her mother’s copy of Shelley’s novel had become a talisman. It was impossible to ask her now, but it seemed to me that perhaps she sought some peace from that mission. Mary Shelley had once said that writing Frankenstein made her cross from childhood into life; I think Kitten believed that finding the long-lost Shelley document, the supposed key to the creation of Frankenstein, would have finally given her dominion over the bedlam of her childhood. This is just my speculation. I cannot really say what was in Kitten’s mind, other than to repeat the scattered, incomplete comments she made in her final weeks. Do our professional accomplishments ever really act as salve to personal grief?
I’d tried speaking to Davenport about Kitten’s copy of Frankenstein after I discovered its provenance, and I asked him again in the corridor of the Samoan prison. I had no more success trying to engage him about it than I’d had years before. But he did tell me about his nightmares, about his visions of Kitten dying, about the fact that he thought success in the Samoan mission might finally banish these visitations from his dreams.
That night, a prison guard came and woke me from a deep sleep. He began leading me away. He did not respond to any English, and in my stupor I could not manage sufficient Samoan to question him.
“They are releasing you,” said Banner, who had come into the passage to see what was happening.
“Davenport, do you hear that?” I called. “We are freed.”
The bookaneer rushed to the doorway of his chamber. The guard gestured at him to return to his place.
“Not him,” Banner continued, punctuating his declaration with his usual snort. “The brown fellow says because you used your true name, you will not face charges of deceit. Your grumpy friend must stay in this dismal hole with the rest of us.”
I dug my heels into the clay floor. “I won’t go either.”
“You some kind of martyr?” Banner asked, his hollow eyes widening.
“You must go,” the bookaneer said with a stoic air.
“What about you? The mission?”
“You complete the mission.”
“What do you mean?” He might have been speaking Samoan himself.
Davenport grabbed my shoulders. “Fergins, listen. I do not know when we’ll next meet, so remember my instructions exactly. Leave the jail with the guard. If there has not yet been a ship to sail from here, you can still find him.”
“Belial? How could I—”
“Find him, do what you must to take the manuscript from him.”
“How on earth could I—”
“Quiet! For once in your life be quiet!” he shouted, his eyes red and wet. He dried them with the back of his sleeve. His hands, gripping my shoulders again, shook me and drifted toward each other so if he squeezed, he would have strangled me. “Do whatever you must, for God’s sake, Fergins! Surprise will be your best stratagem, since he will not expect you. This is my last chance to see Belial defeated.”
“But you will not see it if you are in here.”
The guard physically dragging me away, I shouted in protest against him and against the bookaneer’s plan but all to no avail. The sinking feeling that had begun to form in the pit of my stomach settled in as I lost my view of Davenport. I laugh now, but not because I find the memories humorous, Mr. Clover. I only laugh at my slightly younger self because I could not know how entirely alone I was about to become.
? ? ?
I WAS SO STARTLED by my release from incarceration and separation from my only companion on the island, I did not pay attention to the odd timing of it all. I was being taken away in the middle of the night. I had been placed facing backward on a waiting horse, sitting behind one of the guards already in the saddle. The time of night was not the only queer thing. I was taken not toward the beach, where I would have expected to be handed off to the British consulate, but somewhere else, far from the prison, with no explanation or response to my many questions. At several points, it seemed we were going straight up inclines and the sides of cliffs. I tried to whistle away the anxiety. The angry official who had attended my interrogation was riding ahead of our party, and when we stopped in the dark interior of the island jungle, he was the one to come to me.
To my surprise, he spoke English well. He had not been perplexed at my words, as I had thought, during my interrogation. He had been perplexed by the fact that the line of questioning resolved itself against Davenport and not me.
“If it were my decision, you would stay in prison until you rot away, as your friend will,” he said to me now. “But our orders are to release you.”
“I thank you for it,” I said in my most docile voice. I looked around in the dim light of torches, confused at what was happening to me.
He snickered at my note of appreciation. “A white man can rot in the heart of our island as well as any prison.”
“No,” I said, my chest pounding away, “you don’t understand. . . .”
They had brought me all this way to discard me. I was pulled down from the saddle. The men turned their horses around in unison and then galloped off into the night.
? ? ?
IT SURPRISES ME as much as anything else does when thinking about surviving in the wilderness of Samoa, how long I was convinced I was being followed. Who would have bothered to pursue me? The prison guards who discarded me under the cover of darkness? Native assassins hired by Belial? If they really had been after me, I don’t doubt they would have taken me quickly and easily were it not for a fresh deluge of rain, which covered my tracks. Any pursuit beyond that had to be in my mind alone, and in the vast silence and loneliness my mind was spinning.