The Last Bookaneer (26 page)

“Excellent idea,” said Davenport. “My aunt in Chicago believes every worthwhile tragedy must involve a member of our family.”

 • • • 

I
HAD TO LAUGH
inside when Davenport left with Stevenson to send their telegrams—not only to think of a confused woman in Chicago named Porter handed a message from a nephew she never heard of but also because as long as I could remember, Davenport hated telegrams on principle. If they did not contain bad news, he'd insist, they contained something offensively mundane. “If you are ever in trouble, Fergins,” he once commented with aristocratic irritation when I had to make a stop at a Paris hotel's telegraph office, “throw a rock through my window.”

Yet, the first thing I heard about Davenport's search for Kitten back in London in 1882 came in the form of a wired message:

Come as soon as possible. Hotel de Ville. Geneva.

Though it was unsigned, I had helped Davenport for more than ten years by that time; I would have known a message from him by the rhythm of its words. It had been almost a month since he had left me standing in his hotel room to watch out the window as he climbed into a hackney coach. I was surprised that his path would go through Geneva, as I had reason to believe Kitten had already been there when looking for the Mary Shelley story, and that great mission of hers had been over and done with before her return to London and subsequent disappearance.

Geneva had a part in the fascinating history of Shelley's novel. It was during a summer trip there with her husband, the poet Percival, when she dreamt her inspiration for
Frankenstein
. She was eighteen.

Unlike Davenport, who, I'd teased, was born with the ocean's temper, I have never felt myself a natural traveler, especially with long distances involved. But there was no hesitation on my part after I read the message. A series of steamers and trains brought me to the Continent and into Switzerland. I was driven right to the hotel named in the telegram, but did not find the bookaneer signed in under any of his usual aliases. I waited, knowing nothing of Geneva or where else to look; this made me appreciate Davenport's own challenge to find a woman who could have been anywhere on earth, a woman whose profession depended on her being able to go anywhere and become part of the scenery.

I fell asleep in a comfortable chair in the corner of the sitting room by a hearty fire. Then I heard Davenport's voice chastise me. At first I thought I dreamt it.

“Asleep. Asleep!”

I stirred, catching my breath and emitting a loud noise through my nose. He was standing over me in an ankle-length, loose-fitting coat.

“Sorry, Davenport.”

“Fast asleep, at a time like this.” The bookaneer swept off his beaver hat; he looked as though he had not been sleeping, his unshaven face swollen around his eyes and cheeks, his eyes red, his hair hanging in loose, disheveled knots. He had a series of scratches along his neck that suggested he had been in a scrape recently.

“I did not find what name you were under with the clerk,” I said, mounting a mild defense and changing the subject.

“I do not lodge here; I just come for some of my meals and my mail. I was here for a while when I arrived in Geneva but—never mind, we must go. I mustn't leave her alone too long.”

I waited until we were outside on the lawn to speak further. “Then you found her! Thank goodness,” I said with relief.

“Found whom?”

“Kitten.”

“No,” he said. He gave instructions to a waiting coach driver and the span of horses whisked us away from the hotel.

Cologny is a beautiful village high up among the lakes and mountains near Geneva, with charming cottages and hotels well placed for the most delightful views and the homes nestled in between. But instead of the surroundings I studied Davenport, trying to glean from his face whom we could be going to see and what any of this had to do with Kitten's disappearance. I could think of only one scenario that made sense: he had found a woman who knew what had happened to Kitten, and was keeping her locked away until she would agree to tell him what he needed to know, or maybe as ransom against another person who withheld information. I did not relish the notion of having any kind of prisoner and was eager to ask if this was it, but his gaze and brain were fixed on the mountains, and he sniffed and rubbed his eyes as though suffering through a cold.

We rode for almost an hour. After taking smaller, winding roads along one of the lakes, we were released from the coach at a path that disappeared into an overgrown garden. This led us to a cottage that had also been hidden from view. The house was of a charming design typical of the old style, but had been left in an apparent state of disrepair. It seemed the height of odd timing to me that Davenport in his haste would pause to light one of his beloved cigars before we entered, but I was mistaken. Shutters and musty curtains were drawn closed inside, and Davenport was lighting our way with a match.

At the door to the last room, he stood on a chair and unfastened a series of latches. Inside, there was a single dim lamp burning; I could make out a bed, dresser, and table with a pitcher and a basin of water.

“Light stings her eyes,” Davenport said in a whisper, “so I keep it low.”

Only then did I notice the small figure of a woman crouched in the corner of the room, shivering. Davenport picked up a blanket from the floor and draped it over her. Then the light caught her doughy face as he tried to lift her up and she revolted against his touch. She scratched and shrieked, kicked and screamed. I jumped in to help restrain her. Her pupils were contracted, her hair long and wild, her pulse racing.

She finally stopped struggling after fifteen minutes, and as Davenport settled her under the bedclothes, I stumbled out of the room into the dark hall. I was having trouble getting my breath back in those stale quarters. Outside, dark clouds were drifting overhead, and the slight sunlight that broke through rescued my senses. I found myself at the bottom of a hill, facing a larger house situated beyond this one. It struck me: I had seen all of this before.

I wheeled around when the door opened.

“She sleeps again,” announced Davenport, whose feet crunched the gravel behind me. His shoulders slumped, his head was down, his expression abashed.

“You told me back at the hotel that you hadn't found Kitten!” I was trembling with confusion and fear. I was shouting.

He did not look up at me. “You saw her, Fergins. No. I did not find Kitten. I found a . . . a body deprived of a soul, a being abandoned by its maker. That is not the woman I have loved for eighteen years.”

That was the only time he ever said it to me.

“That house up there on the hill—I have seen it in illustrations. That's Villa Diodati, isn't it?”

Davenport slowly nodded his head. Villa Diodati had once been the summer cottage of Lord Byron. He named it after the family who had lived there long before him, patrons of the great John Milton. The often-heretical Byron savored the connection with the Christian poet and loved to invite friends to visit. It was there, so close to the cottage where we were standing, that young Mary Shelley first began to invent the story of a medical student who experiments with animating a corpse, a trifle to entertain Byron and his friends; she became so preoccupied with the idea, she saw it in her nightmares. That meant the cottage we had just exited had to be the Maison Chappuis, rented by the Shelleys that summer more than sixty-five years before. I asked him if it was so and he swallowed hard.

“Kitten was a sight to behold after she came back to London with the Shelley story. Had you noticed?” he asked me with wide-eyed curiosity. “She was flush with the success. Watching her . . . well, she was stepping on clouds. It was every bookaneer's dream, to do what she had, to improve the knowledge of literature and be showered in money for it.”

His words caught in his throat. He dropped his head again, and I realized his haggard appearance did not come from sickness or a lack of sleep alone. His red and puffy eyes and cheeks, his runny nose—he had been crying.

“She had been through Germany and here in Geneva before she completed her mission.” He went on with his explanation. “After she returned to London, I didn't really spend time with her. She would refuse to reply to my notes, would usually not be at home when I called on her. Her problems sleeping multiplied until she was no longer sleeping at all. Other missions came her way, some that she said she would accept, but then it was as though she would forget all about them. I came to believe, Fergins, that she must have seen something in the Shelley papers—something that suggested more to be found, something even bigger and better than what she had sold to the anonymous collector. After she disappeared, her trail led me back to Geneva, and I knew she had to be here to track this other Shelley discovery.”

“What was it?” He raised an eyebrow to my question, and I could see he was curious to hear my own guess, so I tried my best. “Something else about
Frankenstein
. Another discarded draft. A different beginning or ending. Or, no, nothing of Mary's at all. A piece of writing of Percy Shelley's that could have been mixed in unnoticed with some Mary Shelley material—why, could it be? The final section of his ‘Triumph of Life' that he was writing before he drowned?”

“I do not know. Any of those are possibilities. I couldn't find out the details, and as you can tell she has not been in any condition to tell me very much. Here is what I could gather about what happened here: While Kitten was searching for whatever it is she sought, she must have sustained some kind of injury—probably from crawling around one of these damned abandoned houses littering these mountains. I have come to believe she was prescribed a mixture of opiates by a local doctor. Soon, she must have been drowning herself in it. I found her not in her right mind, wandering in and out of this cottage, which I have been told was allowed to deteriorate more than ten years ago, though was once fine enough, as you remembered, for Percy Shelley to rent for himself and Mary to be close to Byron. I have been able to keep her inside here, where she seems calmest, and have brought some doctors around, but we must get her well enough to return to London as soon as possible to receive proper care. I do not want her reputation damaged. We must keep this between us. I need your help to do that, Fergins.”

“You can count on it.”

Over the next two weeks, I became a nurse to Kitten, relieving Davenport at regular intervals. I had heard of Kitten's past troubles with opium, but had understood that she had left the compulsion behind long ago when she achieved success as a bookaneer, a combination of not being able to afford any distraction and not needing it. This period of watching over her in Maison Chappuis was the most concentrated time I spent with the profession's most celebrated woman. For the first time in my eyes, she looked her fifty-two years. Not only had she visibly aged, but unhealthily; she was delicate and gaunt. She was shrinking out of existence.

I'd pass a warm towel along her brow and caress her hollow cheeks.

“She saw him here.”

I asked her what she meant.

Her voice was small, a croak. “Shelley. She saw the creature, that glorious thing, when she looked upon these very mountains, across that peaceful lake, she saw it waiting, when others saw nothing but the scenery. She was Mary Godwin then. But called herself Mrs. Shelley to everyone she met. She knew.”

Despite her general stupor and her gnawing hunger for opium, I was impressed by how well Kitten could tell a story, even if it was not wholly coherent. She talked of other missions, as well, though most often of the
Frankenstein
novelette she had been so proud of procuring. There was sometimes an air of confusion. She would speak of looking upon the mountains and scenery as though her eyes were on them, even though she was confined to a dark chamber. She could not answer questions about what she was looking for that brought her back to Geneva.

Another time, she said: “He cannot understand.”

Her eyelids were fluttering and she was shivering badly. I thought she might be imagining scenes from Mary Shelley's time in Cologny again, surrounded by Byron and Percy Shelley and other men whose reputations in literature were secure when hers was in its infancy.

“Who? Who does not?”

“He does not understand that I need to do this, and he never did.” Then her eerie ice blue eyes opened and she exhaled.

“I read it all to her,” she said after I frowned and nodded; then she was asleep.

I heard her repeat this phrase, “I read it for her,” or “I read it all to her,” or something to that effect, numerous times.

Sometimes I began to ask too many questions, and I'd give pause when she'd move her hand—bony, more so every day, and ice cold—to mine.

I had never seen someone cry herself to sleep, but that is what our poor opium eater did more than once.

Another moment I remember as happening a day or so later. I was trying to brush the tangles from her hair, which had become wiry but brittle. I tried to be as gentle as possible, but if too gentle the tangles would worsen. Then she said: “Belial.” The word was carried on a gasp. I asked her to repeat, to explain what she wanted to say about him, but this time there was nothing more.

Davenport sent me out to gather the belongings Kitten had left at scattered hotels and boardinghouses around Geneva where she had lodged. Most of what I found was inconsequential. There was one item—a well-worn edition of
Frankenstein
—that caught my bibliographical interest. It was French, and from the early 1820s; if my memory served, it was the third French translation of the novel ever published. I hoped it might lead us to find out why she had returned to Geneva, what she was searching for, but that was not to be. I showed it to Kitten and she embraced it tightly, but never said anything about it.