The Luminaries

Cowell Devlin could not quite justify his impulse to conceal the deed of gift from the physician, Dr. Gillies. Perhaps, he thought, he had been impelled by the atmosphere of quiet in the dead man’s house. Perhaps he had meant the act of suppression as a gesture of respect. Perhaps his curiosity had been aroused by the name Anna Wetherell—the attempted suicide, found unconscious in the Christchurch-road—and he had concealed the paper out of an obscure wish to protect her. The chaplain mused over these various possibilities as he drank his tea. He did not speak to the physician, who was likewise silent. When they were done they washed their cups, covered the fire, closed the door, and clambered back upon the cart, to convey their sorry freight back to the Police Camp in Hokitika, where a post-mortem was to be conducted upon the dead man’s remains.

It was characteristic of Cowell Devlin that he would not attach a precise motivation to an action of questionable integrity, and that he chose, instead, to indulge a kind of dreamy confusion about his motivations as a whole. It was characteristic, too, that he saw no real obligation to confess this action—either then, or in the fortnight that followed, for it was not until the night of the 27th of January, two weeks later, that he showed this purloined deed of gift to anyone. Devlin believed himself to be a virtuous man, and his self-conception remained, in the face of all contradiction, impregnable. Whenever he behaved badly, or questionably, he simply jettisoned the memory, and turned his mind to something else. On the way back to Hokitika he held the deed flat against his chest with the palm of his hand. He spoke only to remark upon the power of the breakers, as the surf furled white against the shore beside them. The physician did not speak at all. After they returned to the Police Camp, and had carried Crosbie Wells’s body inside, Devlin did half-heartedly consider sharing the deed with Governor Shepard, but he was distracted by a new commotion, and the opportunity expired. Anna Wetherell, it turned out, was beginning to revive.

Her eyes fluttered behind their lids, and her tongue shifted in her mouth; she made a murmuring noise. Her fever appeared to have broken, for there was a spray of beaded perspiration on her brow and nose, and the orange silk of her dress had turned brownish at her collar and beneath her arms. Devlin dropped to his knees before her. He clasped her hands in his—they were soft, and chill to the touch—and called to Shepard’s wife for water.

When at last the girl woke, it was as if from a death. Her head reared back, and her eye rolled forward; she made a rasping noise. She seemed to register where she was, but the after-effects of opium had left her ravaged; evidently, she did not possess the energy even to express surprise. She drew her hands weakly away from Devlin’s grasp, and he retreated. He noticed that her hands moved at once to encircle her corset—as though her belly had been punctured, he thought, and she was trying to staunch the wound. He spoke, but she did not respond, and presently she closed her eyes again, and drifted back to sleep. An altercation broke out in another quarter of the gaol-house, and Devlin was called over to officiate; this duty, and others pertaining to his station, claimed his attention for the remainder of the afternoon.

At the end of the day the justice’s clerk arrived from the courthouse to collect bail from any miscreant who could raise the necessary sum. At the sound of this newcomer’s voice, Miss Wetherell lifted her dark head, made damp by fever, and beckoned. (The clerk was another new face in town, slim and very dapper; Gascoigne was his name.) The whore extracted several coins from between the sorry bones of her corset, and pressed them one by one into the clerk’s open palm. She was shivering a great deal, and wore a look of great humiliation. The bail was recorded as met, and Governor Shepard was then obligated to release her, which he did promptly. Devlin did not attend her hearing at the Magistrate’s Court the next day, for he had been charged with the task of digging a grave for the hermit, Crosbie Wells. He heard later that she had declined to plead, and had paid the fine that was levied against her without argument.

The day after the burial, a four-thousand-pound fortune was discovered in Crosbie Wells’s cottage—exactly twice the sum named in the partially burned deed of gift, which Devlin had since stowed between the pages of his Bible, between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New. Still Devlin did not confess; still he did not show the deed to anyone. He told himself that once Anna Wetherell was stronger—once the episode of her near-suicide was safely behind her—he would show the piece of paper to her; for the moment, however, he judged it prudent to keep the information to himself.

Now, in the dining room of the Palace Hotel, Devlin reached out and placed his hand over the battered cover of his Bible, which was unmarked except for a small Canterbury cross, stamped into the leather in gold. The movement was protective: although he did not yet know that the enclosed deed, pressed, apocryphal, between Malachi and Matthew, was to be of great importance to Thomas Balfour, as it would be to sundry other men, still he felt the need to keep it close to him. He knew that the deed—receipt of a gift that was never given, codicil to a will that was never made—was valuable somehow, and he was loath to part with it until he knew what its exact value truly was.

‘Grave-digging,’ said Balfour, taking his derby hat from its hook and running his fingers around the brim. ‘That’s something you’ll need to read up on.’

‘I do not know of any tracts on the subject,’ Devlin said.

‘For your new parish,’ said Balfour, ignoring him. ‘There’s a gallows going in.’ He put his hat on, pushed it back off his forehead with his thumb, and turned to leave. At the door he lingered. ‘I don’t know your name, Reverend,’ he said.

‘And I don’t know yours,’ Devlin returned. There was a silence—and then Balfour burst out laughing, tipped his hat to show his pleasure, and strode from the room.

Saturday in Hokitika was a day of bustle and appointment. The diggers flooded back to the township in droves, swelling the total population to some four thousand, and filling the dosshouses and hotels along Revell-street to riotous capacity. The clerks at the Magistrate’s Court were overrun with petty claims and mining rights, the brokers with pledges, the merchants with orders from the rich men, and petitions for extended credit from the poor. Gibson Quay was a hive of industry; it seemed that with every hour that passed, a new timber frame was hammered into place, a new door was hung, and a new store unfurled its banner to billow and crack in the Tasman wind. Every spoke on the great wheel of luck was visible on a Saturday—there were men rising, risen, just falling, fallen, and at rest—and that night every digger would either drink his sorrow, or his joy.

Today, however, the heavy rain had discouraged all but the most urgent traffic in the streets, and Hokitika did not throng with its usual crowd. The few bedraggled men Balfour passed were hunched under the awnings of hotels, cupping their hands to keep their cigarettes alight. Even the horses had an air of grim surrender. They stood muzzled by the wet cones of their nosebags, unmoving in the torn muck of the road, and as he strode by they showed not even a flicker in the half-lidded slack of their eyes.

As Balfour turned into Revell-street he met with such a lash of wind and rain that he was obliged to clamp his hat to his head with his hand. According to Saxby’s Weather Warnings, that dubious oracle published daily in the West Coast Times, the deluge would let up within a day or three—for Saxby was expansive in his predictions, and allowed himself a generous margin of error on either side of his guess. In truth the specifics of his column changed but rarely: downpour was as much a part of the Hokitika constitution as frost and sunburn had been in Otago, and red dust in the Victorian hills. Balfour quickened his pace, pulling his coat tighter around his body with his free hand.

There were a dozen-odd men upon the covered veranda of the Reserve Bank, pocketed in groups of three and four. The windows behind them were fogged pearl-grey. Balfour scanned the faces, squinting through the rain, but saw nobody he recognised. A ragged plume of smoke directed his gaze downward, to a figure sitting alone: a Maori man was squatting under the eave with his back against a piling. He was smoking a cigar.

His face was tattooed in a way that reminded Balfour of the wind patterns on a map. Two large swirls gave fullness to his cheeks, and spokes radiated upward from his brows to join his hairline. A pair of deep whorls on either side of his nostrils lent an almost prideful definition to his nose. His lips had been coloured blue. He was wearing serge trousers and an open-necked twill shirt, unbuttoned to the sternum; flat against the brown skin of his chest hung an enormous green pendant, shaped like an adze. He had almost finished his cigar, and as Balfour approached, he threw the butt into the thoroughfare, where it rolled down the camber of the road and then came to rest, still reeking, against the wet edge of the grass.

‘You’re that Maori fellow,’ said Balfour. ‘Crosbie Wells’s mate.’

The man moved his eyes to Balfour’s, but did not speak.

‘Give us your name again? Your name.’

‘Ko Te Rau Tauwhare toku ingoa.’

‘Crikey,’ Balfour said. ‘Give us just the name part.’ He held his palms close together, to signify a small amount. ‘Just the name.’

‘Te Rau Tauwhare.’

‘Can’t say that either,’ Balfour said. He shook his head. ‘Well—what do your friends call you, then—your white-man friends? What did Crosbie call you?’

‘Te Rau.’

‘Not much better, is it?’ Balfour said. ‘I’d be a fool to try, wouldn’t I? How about I call you Ted? That’s a good British name for you. Short for Theodore or Edward—you can choose. Edward’s a nice name.’

Tauwhare did not respond.

‘I’m Thomas,’ Balfour said, placing his hand on his heart. ‘And you’re Ted.’ He leaned over and patted Tauwhare on the crown of his head. The man flinched, and Balfour, in surprise, quickly snatched back his hand and took a step backwards. Feeling foolish, he stuck out his leg and shoved both hands into the pockets of his vest.

‘Tamati,’ said Tauwhare.

‘Come again?’

‘In my tongue, your name is Tamati.’

‘Oh,’ Balfour said, very relieved. He took his hands out of his pockets, clapped them together, and then folded his arms. ‘You’ve got a bit of English—good!’

‘I have a great many English words,’ said Tauwhare. ‘I am told I speak your language very well.’

‘Crosbie teach you a bit of English, Ted?’

‘I taught him,’ said Tauwhare. ‘I taught him korero Maori! You say Thomas—I say Tamati. You say Crosbie—I say korero mai!’

He grinned, showing teeth that were very white and very square. Evidently he had made a joke of some kind, and so Balfour smiled back.

‘Never had a head for languages,’ he said, pulling his coat tighter across his body. ‘If it’s not English, it’s Spanish—that’s what my old dad always said. Listen, though, Ted: I’m sorry about your mate. I’m sorry about Crosbie Wells.’

Tauwhare’s expression became sober at once. ‘Heimaumaharatanga,’ he said.

‘Yes, well,’ Balfour said, wishing that the other man would stop talking in his own tongue, ‘it was a d—n shame, is what it was. And now all this kerfuffle—all this bother, about the fortune and so forth—and his wife.’

He peered expectantly at Tauwhare, through the rain.

‘He pounamu kakano rua,’ said Te Rau Tauwhare. With his first two fingers he touched the pendant that hung around his neck. Perhaps it was a talisman of some kind, Balfour thought: they all had them, the Maori fellows. Tauwhare’s was almost the size of his hand, and polished to a shine; it was made of a dark green stone, clouded with bands of a lighter green, and was fitted to a braid that ran around Tauwhare’s neck, so that the narrow end of the adze sat high in the notch of his collarbone.

‘Say,’ Balfour said, opting for a shot in the dark, ‘Say, where were you when it happened, Ted? Where were you when Crosbie died?’

(Perhaps the Maori fellow could start him on his way; perhaps he knew something. It wouldn’t do to ask too many questions about the town, of course, for fear of attracting suspicion, but a Maori man was a much safer bet than most: his acquaintance was, most likely, very limited.)

Te Rau Tauwhare turned his dark eyes on Balfour, and considered him.

‘Do you understand the question?’ Balfour said.

‘I understand the question,’ Tauwhare said.

He understood that Balfour was asking about the death of Crosbie Wells, and yet had not been present at his funeral—that shameful excuse for a funeral, Tauwhare thought, with a flash of anger and disgust. He understood that Balfour had made only the most superficial show of sympathy, and had not even removed his hat. He understood that Balfour was looking to make a profit in some way, for he had a greedy look, in the way that men often did when they saw a chance to receive something and give nothing in return. Yes, Tauwhare thought: he understood the question.

Te Rau Tauwhare was not quite thirty years of age. He was handsomely muscular, and carried himself with assurance and the tightly wound energy of youth; though not openly prideful, he never showed that he was impressed or intimidated by any other man. He possessed a deeply private arrogance, a bedrock of self-certainty that needed neither proof nor explication—for although he had a warrior’s reputation, and an honourable standing within his tribe, his self-conception had not been shaped by his achievements. He simply knew that his beauty and his strength were without compare; he simply knew that he was better than most other men.

This estimation did make Tauwhare anxious, however: he felt that it pointed to a spiritual dearth. He knew that any self-reflexive certainty was the hallmark of shallowness, and that valuation was no index of true worth—and yet he could not shake his certainty about himself. This worried him. He worried that he was only an ornament, a shell without meat, a hollow clam; he worried that his own self-estimation was a vain one. He therefore apprenticed himself to the spiritual life. He quested after the wisdom of his ancestors, so as to teach himself to doubt himself. As a monk seeks to transcend the lesser functions of his body, so did Te Rau Tauwhare seek to transcend this lesser function of his will—but a man cannot master his will without the expression of it. Tauwhare could never strike a balance between surrendering to his impulses, and fighting them.

The iwi to which Tauwhare belonged was Poutini Ngai Tahu, a people who had once commanded the entire western coast of the South Island, from the steep-sided fjords in the south to the palms and stony beaches in the far north. Six years ago the Crown had purchased this extensive tract of land for a sum of three hundred pounds—reserving for Poutini Ngai Tahu only the Arahura River, sections of its banks, and a small parcel of land at Mawhera, the mouth of the river Grey. The negotiations had at the time struck Poutini Ngai Tahu as unfair; now, six years later, they knew the purchase to be patent theft. The thousands and thousands of diggers who had since flocked to the Coast in pursuit of gold had each purchased a prospector’s licence at a pound apiece, and land at a price of ten shillings per acre. That profit alone was considerable—but that was to say nothing of the value of the gold itself, hidden in the rivers and mingled in the sands, whose aggregate value was so colossal it had not yet been given a figure. Every time he thought about the wealth his people ought to have commanded, Tauwhare felt a swell of anger in his chest—an anger so bitter and tormented that it manifested as pain.

Thus it was to the Crown, and not to Poutini Ngai Tahu, that Crosbie Wells had paid his fifty pounds, when he purchased a hundred rolling acres at the eastern end of the Arahura Valley—an acreage that was thick with totara, a finely grained wood that answered well to a knife, and did not weather under salt or storm. Wells was pleased with his purchase. His two great loves were hard work and hard work’s reward—whisky, when he could get it, and gin when he could not. He built himself a one-roomed cottage overlooking the river, cleared a space for a garden, and began to build a timber mill.

Te Rau Tauwhare travelled up the Arahura Valley relatively frequently, for the reason that he was a hunter of pounamu, and the Arahura River was filled with that treasure: smooth, milky-grey stones that, when split, showed a glassy green interior, harder than steel. He was a competent carver, even, some said, an excellent one, but it was in sourcing the stone from the riverbed that he was truly and uniquely skilled. Pounamu was as dull and ordinary on the exterior as it was bright and iridescent within; Tauwhare, with his practised eye, did not need to scratch or split the stones at the riverbank, but carried them back to Mawhera untouched, so that they could be blessed and broken in the ceremonial way.

The acreage purchased by Crosbie Wells banked on to Poutini Ngai Tahu land—or, as we should properly say, banked onto the portion of land to which Poutini Ngai Tahu had been so recently confined. In any event, it was not long before Te Rau Tauwhare encountered Crosbie Wells—having been attracted by the sound of Wells’s axe, ringing through the valley as he split kindling for his fire. Their acquaintance began cordially, and became frequent; over time Tauwhare began to call in at Crosbie Wells’s cottage each time he was near. Wells, it turned out, was an enthusiastic pupil of Maori life and lore—and so Tauwhare’s visits became a tradition.

Te Rau Tauwhare loved any chance to enlighten other men upon those qualities that best defined him, and never more than when his audience flattered those aspects of his person about which he cherished a deeply private doubt: namely, his mauri, his spirit, his religion, and his depth. Crosbie Wells, over the coming months, questioned Tauwhare relentlessly about his beliefs, as a man, and as a Maori man, and as a Maori man of Ngai Tahu allegiance. He confessed that Tauwhare was the first non-European with whom he had ever spoken; his curiosity, so expressed, had all the qualities of thirst. Tauwhare, it must be said, did not learn a great deal about Crosbie Wells during this time; the latter seldom spoke about his own past, and it was not Tauwhare’s habit to ask a great many questions. He considered Crosbie Wells a kindred spirit, however, and often told him so—for, like all fundamentally confident persons, Tauwhare was very happy to compare himself to others, intending all such comparisons as compliments of the most heartfelt kind.

On the morning after Crosbie Wells’s death Tauwhare arrived at his cottage with a gift of food, as was their custom—he supplied the meat, and Wells the spirits, an arrangement that satisfied both men. In the clear space before Wells’s cottage he met a cart, departing. Holding the reins was the Hokitika physician, Dr. Gillies; beside him sat the gaol-house chaplain, Cowell Devlin. Tauwhare did not know either of these men, but when his gaze moved to the cart, he saw a familiar pair of boots, and, beneath a folded blanket, a familiar form. Tauwhare gave a cry, and dropped his gift upon the ground in shock; the chaplain, taking pity on him, suggested that he might accompany his friend’s body back to Hokitika, where it was to be prepared for burial, and thereafter, interred. There was no room for Tauwhare on the driver’s seat, but if he wished it, he could sit on the rear tongue of the cart, so long as he remembered to keep his feet out of the way.

The hoteliers and shopkeepers stood in the doorways along Revell-street as the cart rattled into Hokitika and turned down the main road. Some trotted forward for a better view, peering up at Te Rau Tauwhare—who stared back, blank-faced, limp. One of his hands was loosely gripping Wells’s ankle. The man’s body rolled and juddered with each lurch of the cart. When they reached the Police Camp Tauwhare did not move. He sat waiting, still holding Wells’s ankle, while the other men conferred.

The Hokitika cooper had agreed to knock together a pine coffin, ready for the funeral, and to fashion a rounded wooden headstone on which he would paint Crosbie Wells’s name and the two dates that bounded his life. (Nobody was sure of the actual year of his birth, but the year 1809 had been inked upon the flyleaf of his Bible: this was a plausible birth date, for it would place Crosbie Wells at fifty-seven years of age, and it was this date that the cooper would inscribe on the dead man’s wooden headstone.) Until these two orders were completed, however, and until the grave was dug, the gaol’s governor had directed Crosbie Wells to be laid out on the floor of his private study at the Police Camp, with a muslin bed sheet between his body and the ground.

When the body was arranged with his hands folded across his chest, the gaoler ushered everyone from the room and pulled the door closed, causing the hallway to shiver. The interior walls of the gaoler’s house were made of patterned calico that had been stretched tight and tacked to the building’s frame, and when the timber creaked in the wind, or was disturbed by a heavy footfall or the sudden slam of a door, the walls all quivered and rippled, like the surface of a pool—so that, watching them tremble, one could not help but call to mind that two-inch space between the doubled cloth, that dead space around the framing, full of dust, and patterned by the moving shadows of the bodies in the room beyond.

Someone has to stay with him, Tauwhare insisted. Wells could not be left alone, lying on the floor, without even a flame burning in the room, with no one to watch over him, touch him, pray over him, pray for him, or sing. Tauwhare tried to explain the principles of the tangi—but they weren’t principles, they were rites, too sacred for explanation, too sacred even to defend: they were simply the way things ought to be done, must be done. A spirit has not fully departed until the body is interred, he said. There are songs, and prayers … The gaoler reprimanded him, calling him a heathen. Tauwhare became angry. Somebody has to stay with him until the burial, he said. I will stay with him until the burial. Crosbie Wells was my friend and my brother. Crosbie Wells, the gaoler returned, was a white man, and unless a passing shadow has deceived me, certainly no brother of yours. The funeral will be on Tuesday morning; if you want to make yourself useful, you can lend a hand to the digging of his grave.

But Tauwhare stayed. He kept vigil on the porch, and then in the garden, and then in the alley between the gaoler’s cottage and the Camp—and from each station he was chased away. At last the gaoler emerged from the gaol-house with a long-handled pistol in his hand. He would shoot Tauwhare if he saw him within fifty yards of the Camp at any hour before the moment Crosbie Wells’s body was lowered into the ground, so help him God, he said. So Tauwhare backed up fifty paces, counting the steps, and sat down against the wooden façade of the Grey and Buller Bank. From this distance he watched over his old friend’s body, and spoke beloved words for him, on the final night before his spirit sailed away.

‘When Crosbie died,’ said Tauwhare, ‘I was in the Arahura.’

‘You were in the valley?’ said Balfour. ‘You were there when he died?’

‘I was setting a trap for kereru,’ said Tauwhare. ‘Do you know kereru?’

‘Some kind of bird, is it?’

‘Yes—very tasty. Good for stewing.’

‘All right.’

Balfour’s derby hat had begun to drip. He took it off and banged it against his leg. Already his suit had darkened from grey to a sodden charcoal. His shirt had become translucent, showing through it the pink of his skin.

‘I set the trap before nightfall, to catch the birds in the morning,’ Tauwhare said. ‘From the ridge you can see Crosbie’s house—from above. That night four men went in.’

‘Four?’ said Balfour, replacing his hat. ‘You don’t mean three—one man on a black stallion, very tall; two other men with him, shorter, both on bay mares? That’s Alistair Lauderback—and Jock, and Augustus. The men who found his body, you know—who alerted the police.’

‘I saw three men on horseback, yes,’ said Tauwhare, nodding slowly. ‘But before they arrived, I saw one man on foot.’

‘One man alone—well! You’re all right, aren’t you, Ted?’ said Balfour, suddenly very excited. ‘Yes—by golly, you’re all right!’

‘I was not alarmed,’ Tauwhare continued, ‘because I did not know that Crosbie Wells died that night. I did not know he was dead until the morning.’

‘One man—entering the cottage, alone!’ said Balfour. He began to pace. ‘And before Lauderback! Before Lauderback arrives!’

‘Do you wish to know his name?’

Balfour wheeled on his foot. ‘You know who it was?’ He was almost shouting. ‘Yes, good Lord! Tell me!’

‘We will trade,’ said Tauwhare immediately. ‘I will set my price; you will counter. One pound.’

‘Trade?’ said Balfour.

‘One pound,’ said Tauwhare.

‘Hang tight,’ said Balfour. ‘You saw a man go into Wells’s cottage on the day of his death—the very day of his death, two weeks ago? You really saw somebody do that? And you know—without a shadow of a doubt—who that man was?’

‘I know the name,’ said Tauwhare. ‘I know the man. No cheating.’

‘No cheating,’ agreed Balfour. ‘But before I pay—I want to make sure that you do really know him, you see. I want to make sure you’re not taking me for a ride. Big man, was it? Very dark hair?’

Tauwhare folded his arms. ‘Fair play,’ he said. ‘No cheating.’

‘Of course it’s fair play,’ said Balfour. ‘Of course it is.’

‘We will trade. I have set my price at one pound. Now you counter.’

‘Heavy—was he heavy? Thick-set? I’m just making sure, you see. I’m making sure you’re on the level. Then I’ll start trading. You might be cheating me.’

‘One pound,’ said Tauwhare stubbornly.

‘It was Francis Carver, wasn’t it, Ted? Isn’t that right? It was Francis Carver—the sea captain? Captain Carver?’

Balfour was guessing—but it was a good guess. A wounded look passed over Tauwhare’s face, and he exhaled audibly.

‘I said no cheating,’ he said, in a tone of reproof.

‘I wasn’t cheating, Ted,’ said Balfour. ‘I just knew it already, you see. I’d only forgotten. Of course Carver made a trip up to Crosbie Wells’s cottage that day. That was him, wasn’t it—Captain Carver, the man you saw? You can tell me—it’s not a secret, because I already know.’

He searched the man’s face, making sure.

Tauwhare’s jaw was rigidly set. Under his breath he muttered, ‘Ki te tuohu koe, me maunga teitei.’

‘Well, Ted, you’ve done me a d—ned good turn here, and I won’t forget it,’ said Balfour. By now he was thoroughly saturated. ‘And you know—if I ever need something done, I’ll come to you, won’t I? And you’ll get your coin some other way.’

Tauwhare lifted his chin. ‘You need Maori,’ he said. He did not phrase it as a question. ‘You need Maori, you come to me. I do not do odd jobs. But you need language, and I will teach you many things.’

He did not mention that his skill was as a carver. He had never sold pounamu. He would not sell pounamu. For one could not put a price upon a treasure, just as one could not purchase mana, and one could not make a bargain with a god. Gold was not a treasure—this Tauwhare knew. Gold was like all capital in that it had no memory: its drift was always onward, away from the past.

‘All right—but you’ll shake, won’t you?’ Balfour seized Tauwhare’s dry hand in his wet one, and shook it vigorously. ‘There’s a good man, Ted—there’s a good man.’

But Tauwhare was still looking severely displeased, and he withdrew his hand from Balfour’s grip as soon as he was able. Balfour felt a twinge of regret. It would not do to make an enemy of the fellow—not with so much of this business yet unsolved, he thought. There was a chance that Tauwhare’s testimony might have to be called upon at a later time; there was a chance that he knew something about the relations, whatever they were, between Crosbie Wells and Francis Carver—or between those two men and Lauderback, come to think of it. Yes: it would be useful, to keep the man appeased. Balfour reached into his pocket. Surely he had something small, some token. They were fond of tokens. His fingers found a shilling and a sixpence. He pulled the sixpence out.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘You can have this, if you tell me some Maori. Just like you taught Crosbie Wells. Eh, Ted? Then we’ll have done business, just as you wanted to. All right? Then we’ll be friends. Then you won’t be able to complain.’

He pressed the silver piece into the other man’s palm. Tauwhare looked at it.

‘Now, tell me,’ said Balfour, rubbing his hands together. ‘What does … what does Hokitika mean? Hokitika. Just the one word, that’s all I’m after. And I’d call that a tidy price, by the bye—a sixpence, for a single word! I’d call that a song!’

Te Rau Tauwhare sighed. Hokitika. He knew the sense of it, but could not translate. This happened so often between the languages, English and Maori: the words of one tongue never found their exact equivalent in the other, just as there was no white man’s herb that one might perfectly exchange for puha, and no white man’s bread that exactly called to mind rewena pararoa: however close the flavour, there was always something approximated, something imagined, or something lost. Crosbie Wells had understood this. Te Rau Tauwhare taught him korero Maori without using any English at all: they used their fingers to point, and their faces to mimic, and when Te Rau said things that Crosbie Wells did not understand, he let the sounds wash over him, like prayers, until their meanings clarified, and he could see inside the word.

‘Hokitika,’ said Balfour. He wiped the rain from his face. ‘Come on, mate.’

At last Tauwhare lifted his finger and described a circle in the air. When his fingertip returned to the place from which he had begun, he jabbed his finger, sharply, to mark the place of return. But one cannot mark a place upon a circle, he thought: to mark a place upon a circle is to break it, so that it is not a circle any longer.

‘Understand it like this,’ he said, regretting that he had to speak the words in English, and approximate the noun. ‘Around. And then back again, beginning.’

The Reserve Bank was always very crowded on a Saturday at noon. Diggers stood about with their hands full of gold; the Libra-scales rattled up and down as the ore was measured and recorded; the junior bankers ran back and forth from the archives, checking claim papers, marking tax payments, and receiving fees. Along the wall that faced the street were four barred cubicles where the bankers sat; above them hung a gilt-framed chalkboard, upon which was written that week’s yield in ore, with subtotals for each district, and a grand total for the Hokitika region as a whole. Whenever a sum of raw gold was banked or bought, the chalked numbers were erased and then totalled anew—typically to a murmur of appreciation from the men in the room, and occasionally, if the total was a remarkable one, to a round of applause.

When Balfour entered the bank the attention of the crowd was focused not upon this chalkboard but upon the long table opposite, where the gold buyers, identifiable by the bright copper satchels that they wore upon their belts, inspected the raw ore for purchase. The buyer’s work was slow. He weighed each nugget in his hand, scratched and tested the metal for impurities, and examined it through a jeweller’s loupe. If the ore had been sifted, he filtered it through sieves of matting to check the flakes had not been cut with grit or gravel, and sometimes shook glistering handfuls over plates of mercury, to ensure that the metals bonded as they should. Once he declared the stuff pure and fit to be valued, the digger in question shuffled forward, and was asked to state his name. The Libra-scales were then calibrated until the arm hung parallel with the desk—and then the buyer poured the digger’s pile of gold into the left-hand tray. To the right-hand tray the buyer added cylinder weights, one by one, until finally the scales lurched, and the tray bearing the man’s fortune shuddered, and swung free.

That morning there was only one buyer present: a slick-haired magnate, wearing a pale green hunting jacket and a yellow tie—a gaudy combination, and one that might have served to mark him rather too obviously as a moneyed man, had he been doing business alone and unprotected. But the Hokitika gold escort was on hand. This small army, a uniformed infantry of ten men, presided over every sale and purchase of the colour. Later they would oversee the bullion’s transfer into an armoured van, and ensure that it was safely conveyed offshore. They stood behind the buyer, and flanked the desk at which he sat—each man armed with a .577 Snider-Enfield rifle, a massive, gleaming piece of the most modern design. It took a cartridge as long as a man’s index finger, and could blow a fellow’s head to bloody dust. Balfour had admired the Snider-Enfield when the model was first shipped in, but seeing ten armed men in this enclosed space gave him an anxious premonition. The room was so crowded he doubted any one guard could find the room to raise his weapon to his shoulder, let alone discharge a round.

He shouldered his way through the diggers to the bankers’ cubicles. Most of the men in the room were present as spectators only, and so parted to admit him; it was in very little time at all, therefore, that Balfour found himself at a barred cubicle, facing a young man in a striped vest and a neatly pinned cravat.

‘Good morning.’

‘I’m wanting to know if a man named Francis Carver has ever taken out a miner’s right in New Zealand,’ Balfour said. He removed his hat and slicked back his wet hair, an action without a perceptible benefit, for the palm of his hand was very wet also.

‘Francis Carver—Captain Carver?’

‘That’s the man,’ said Balfour.

‘I am obliged to ask who you are, and why you are requesting this information.’

The banker spoke without affect, and in a mild tone of voice.

‘The man owns a ship, and I’m in the shipping trade,’ Balfour said smoothly, replacing his hat. ‘Tom Balfour’s my name. I’m looking to set up a side venture of a kind—tea-trading, back and forth from Canton. Just canvassing the idea at this point. I want to find out a bit more about Carver before I make any offers of business. Where his money’s spread. Whether he’s ever been bankrupted. That kind of thing.’

‘Surely you could just ask Mr. Carver yourself,’ replied the banker, speaking in the same inoffensive tone, so that the remark did not come off as rude, but, merely, as pleasantly offhand. He might have been passing a broken wagon in the street, and observing, quite affably, that there was a very simple way to mend the axle.

Balfour explained that Carver was at sea, and could not be contacted.

The banker seemed unsatisfied with this explanation. He considered Balfour, and put his finger against his lower lip. Evidently, however, he could not conjure a further objection that might give him reason to decline to pursue Balfour’s request. He nodded, pulled his ledger towards him, and wrote a note in a thin, precise script. He then blotted his page (a little unnecessarily, Balfour thought, for the ledger remained open) and dried the nib of his pen with a square of soft leather. ‘Wait here, please,’ he said. He disappeared through a low doorway, beyond which lay an antechamber of some kind, and soon returned carrying a large folder, bound in leather and marked on its spine with the letter C.

Balfour drummed his fingers as the banker untied the clasp upon the folder and opened it. He scrutinised the young man through the bars of the grille.

What a contrast this young man posed to the Maori in the street! They were rough contemporaries in age, but where Tauwhare had been muscled, tense, and proud, this fellow was languid, even catlike: he moved with a kind of casual luxury, as though he saw no need to spend his strength on swiftness, and nor did he see any reason to conserve it. He was lean in body. His hair was brown in hue, long, and curly at the tips; he wore it tied in a ribbon at the nape of his neck, in the fashion of a whaler. His face was broad and his eyes spaced widely; his lips were full, his teeth very crooked, and his nose rather large. These features conspired to form an expression that was both honest and nonchalant—and nonchalance is a form of elegance, when it demands much, and declines to reveal its source. Balfour considered him a very elegant young man.

‘Here,’ the banker said at last, pointing. ‘You see—Carswell, here, and then Cassidy. Your man’s not here.’

‘So Francis Carver doesn’t own a miner’s right.’

‘Not in Canterbury, no.’ He shut the folder with a soft thud.

‘What about an Otago certificate?’

‘I’m afraid you will have to go to Dunedin for that.’

This was a dead end. In Lauderback’s story the gold in the crate had hailed (allegedly, of course) from Dunstan, which was an Otago field.

‘You don’t keep records of Otago men?’ Balfour asked, disappointed.

‘No.’

‘What if he came in on Otago papers? Would there be a record at the customhouse—from when he first arrived?’

‘Not at the customhouse,’ said the banker, ‘but if he made any dust, he’d have to have it counted and weighed before he left. He’s not allowed to transfer it to another province, or out of the country, without declaring it first. So he’d come here. We’d ask to take a look at the miner’s right. Then we’d make a record in this book that he was working under Otago papers, but on a Hokitika claim. There’s nothing in this book; therefore, as I said just now, we can safely assume he hasn’t prospected anywhere hereabouts. As for whether he’s prospected in Otago, I’ve no idea.’

The banker spoke with the controlled alarm of a bureaucrat who is requested to explain some mundane feature of the bureaucracy of which he is a functioning part: controlled, because an official is always comforted by proof of his own expertise, and alarmed, because the necessity for explanation seemed, in some obscure way, to undermine the system which had afforded him that expertise in the first place.

‘All right,’ said Balfour. ‘Now, there’s one more thing. I need to know whether Carver has owned shares in any mining company, or if he took out shares on a private claim.’

A flicker of doubt disturbed the banker’s mild expression. For the briefest moment, he said nothing, and again it seemed as if he were trying to think of a reason to decline Balfour’s request, to declare it unorthodox, or to press to know the reason why. He looked at Balfour with a gaze that was no less piercing for its mildness—and Balfour, who was always made uncomfortable by scrutiny, scowled very darkly. But, as before, the banker applied himself to the task demanded of his office. He wrote another note upon his ledger, blotted it, and then politely excused himself to pursue this new request.

When he returned with the shares records, however, he looked openly uneasy.

‘Francis Carver has speculated in this area,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t call it a portfolio: it’s only one claim. Looks like a private agreement. Carver takes home a return to the tune of fifty percent of the mine’s net profit every quarter.’

‘Fifty percent!’ Balfour said. ‘And only one claim—that’s confidence for you! When did he buy?’

‘Our records show the date as July 1865.’

‘That far back!’ Balfour said. (Six months ago! But that was after the sale of the Godspeed—was it not?) ‘Which claim is it? Who’s owning?’

‘The mine is called the Aurora,’ said the banker, enunciating very carefully. ‘It is owned and operated by—’

‘Emery Staines,’ Balfour finished for him, nodding his head. ‘Yes, I know the place—up Kaniere way. Why, that’s capital news. Staines is a great friend of mine. I’ll go and talk to the man myself. Thank you very much, Mr.—?’

‘Frost.’

‘Thank you very much, Mr. Frost. You’ve been extraordinarily helpful.’

But the banker was looking at Balfour with a strange expression on his face.

‘Mr. Balfour,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you haven’t heard.’

‘Something about Staines?’

‘Yes.’

Balfour stiffened. ‘He’s dead?’

‘No,’ said Frost. ‘He vanished.’

‘What? When?’

‘Two weeks ago.’

Balfour’s eyes went wide.

‘I am sorry to be the one to break the news—if you are his great friend.’

Balfour did not notice the barb of emphasis in the banker’s remark. ‘Vanished—two weeks back!’ he said. ‘And no one’s talking? Why haven’t I heard about it?’

‘I assure you that many men have been talking,’ said Frost. ‘A notice has been published in the Missing Persons column every day this week.’

‘I never read the personals,’ said Balfour.

(But of course: he had been with Lauderback, this fortnight past, facilitating introductions up and down the Coast; he had not been frequenting the Corinthian, as he habitually did in the evenings, to share a mug of beer with the other camp followers while they exchanged the local news.)

‘Perhaps he found a strike,’ he said now. ‘That could be it. Perhaps Staines found a paying seam, up in the bush somewhere, and he’s keeping it quiet—until he’s staked the ground.’

‘Perhaps,’ the banker said courteously, and would not say more.

Balfour chewed his lip. ‘Vanished!’ he said. ‘I can’t understand it!’

‘I rather wonder whether this news will be of import to your partner,’ said Frost, smoothing the open page of his ledger with his palm.

‘Who’s my partner?’ Balfour said, with some alarm—thinking that the banker was referring to Alistair Lauderback, whose name he had been careful not to use.

‘Why—Mr. Carver,’ Frost said, blinking. ‘Your prospective partner in business—as you have just informed me, sir. Mr. Carver has a joint investment with Mr. Staines. So if Mr. Staines is dead …’

He trailed off with a shrug.

Balfour narrowed his eyes. The banker seemed to be implying, however vaguely, that Carver was in some way responsible for Emery Staines’s disappearance … an implication for which he surely did not have any proof. His attitude was very clear, and yet he had not really expressed an opinion of any kind, upon which he might be faulted. The tone of his voice implied that he did not like Carver, even though his words expressed sympathy for the man’s possible loss. Balfour, feeling the cowardice of this equivocation, almost became angry—but then he remembered that he was shamming. He was not going into business with Carver, and need not take his part in an argument against him.

But then young Frost smothered a smile, and Balfour saw, with a sudden rush of indignation, that, in fact, the younger man was mocking him. Frost had not believed his false story for a moment! He knew that Balfour was not going into business with Carver; he knew that this falsehood had been fabricated to mask some other purpose—and then he added the insult of diminishment to the injury of exposure, by finding Balfour amusing! It rankled Balfour to be second-guessed, but it rankled him still more to be ridiculed, especially by a man whose days were spent in a three-foot-square cubicle, signing cheques in another man’s name. (This last was Lauderback’s phrase, half-remembered from earlier that morning; it came to Balfour’s mind as his own.) Suddenly angry, he leaned forward and curled his hands around the bars of the grille.

‘All right,’ he said quietly. ‘You listen. I’m no more going into business with Carver than you are. I think the man’s a thug and a crook and all the rest of it. I’m up against him, d—n it. I’ve got to get a twinkle on him: something I can use.’

‘What is a twinkle?’ the banker asked.

‘It’s stupid—never mind it,’ Balfour snapped. ‘The point is that I’m looking to round him up. Give him over to the law. I think he skimmed a fair fortune out of some other fellow’s claim. Thousands. But it’s only a hunch, and I need hard evidence. I need a place to start. All right? That investment story I gave you just now was a bunch of guff. Cock and bull.’ He glared at the banker through the bars of the grille. ‘What?’ he said after a moment. ‘What, then?’

‘Nothing at all,’ said Frost. He squared the papers on his desk, and gave a cryptic, tight-lipped smile. ‘Your business is your own. I wish you only luck, Mr. Balfour.’

The news about Emery Staines had rattled Balfour severely. Shipping crates and blackmail was one thing, he thought, but a person disappearing was quite another. That was a sombre business. Emery Staines was a good digger, and much too young to die.

Outside the courthouse Balfour stood and breathed heavily for a moment. The small crowd outside the bank had dispersed to their luncheon, and the Maori man was gone. The rain had thinned to a persistent drizzle. Balfour cast his eye up and down the street, somewhat at a loss for where next to go. He felt excessively dejected. Vanished, he thought. But one did not simply vanish! The boy could only have been murdered. There was no other explanation for it—if he had not been seen for two weeks.

Emery Staines was easily the richest man south of the black sands. He owned more than a dozen claims, several of which had shafts that descended to depths of thirty feet, at least. Balfour, who admired Staines exceedingly, would have guessed his age at three-or four-and-twenty—not so young as to be unworthy of his luck, and not so old as to suggest that he might have acquired it by some less than honest means. In fact such a suggestion had never crossed Balfour’s mind. Staines had been gifted with a thoroughly good-natured beauty, the kind that is earnest and hopeful without ever declaring itself to be so; in temper he was affable, optimistic, and delightfully quick. Even to think him dead was hateful. To think him murdered was worse.

Just then the Wesleyan chapel bell struck half past twelve, releasing a flurry of birds: they burst out of the makeshift belfry and scattered, dark against the sky. Balfour turned his face to the sound, feeling as he did so a sudden ache in his temple. His senses were turning from dull to sharp—the effect of the spirits he had consumed that morning—and the responsibilities of his situation had begun to weigh heavy upon him. He no longer felt inclined to ask questions on Lauderback’s behalf.

He wrapped his coat around his body, turned on his heel, and began walking towards the Hokitika spit—a place that was, for him, a habitual refuge. It was his pleasure to stand on the sand in foul weather, clutch his coat across his body, and look out past the clustered masts of the ships at anchor, swaying en masse, impelled variously by the river’s rushing current, the surf, and the wind—the howling Tasman wind, that stripped the bark from the trees at the beachfront, and bent the scrub to crippled forms. Balfour enjoyed the fierce indifference of a storm. He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone.

As he slithered down the muddy bank to the quay, the wind suddenly dropped. Smiling, Balfour peered into the mist. The rain had stolen all chance of a reflection from the wide mouth of the river, and the water was as grey and opaque as a pewter plate. The bucking masts had slowed their motion when the wind died away; Balfour watched them, calmed by their weighty roll, back and forth, back and forth. He waited until they were almost still before moving on.

The quay curved around the mouth of the river to meet the spit, a narrow finger of sand that was battered on one side by the white surf of the open ocean, and lapped on the other by the confused wash of the river, its waters mingled now with salt, and stripped of gold. Here, on the calm side of the spit, a short wharf projected from the quay. Balfour stepped down onto it, landing with a flat sole, and the structure shuddered beneath his weight. Two stevedores, quite as sodden as he was, were sitting on the wharf some twenty feet away; they started at the jolt, and turned.

‘All right, chaps,’ said Balfour.

‘All right, Tom.’

One was carrying a brass-capped boathook; he had been using it to swipe at the gulls, which were diving for their supper on the rocks below, and now he resumed this idle purpose. The other was keeping score.

Balfour strolled up behind them, and for a time nobody spoke. They watched the moored vessels pitch back and forth, and squinted out, through the rain.

‘You know what the trouble is?’ Balfour said presently. ‘Down here, any man can make himself over. Make himself new. What’s an alias, anyway? What’s in a name? Pick it up as you pick up a nugget. Call this one Wells—this one Carver—’

One of the stevedores glanced around. ‘You got a quarrel with Francis Carver?’

‘No, no.’ Balfour shook his head.

‘Quarrel with a man called Wells?’

Balfour sighed. ‘No—there hasn’t been a quarrel,’ he said. ‘I’m wanting to find out a thing or two, that’s all. But quiet—on the sly.’

The gull returned; the stevedore swiped again, and missed.

‘Foul-hooked through his wing, nearly,’ said the second man. ‘That’s five.’

Balfour saw that they had dropped a square of biscuit on the gravel below.

The stevedore who had spoken first nodded his head at Balfour and said, ‘Are you wanting to chase up Carver, or chase up the other one?’

‘Neither,’ Balfour said. ‘Never mind. Never mind. I’ve got no quarrel with Francis Carver—you remember that.’

‘I’ll remember,’ said the stevedore, and then, ‘I say, though: if you’re wanting dirt—and on the sly—you ought to ask the gaoler.’

Balfour was watching the gull circle closer. ‘The gaoler? Shepard? Why?’

‘Why? Because Carver did time under Shepard,’ said the stevedore. ‘On Cockatoo Island, for all of ten years. Carver dug the dry dock there—convict labour—with Shepard looking on. If you’re wanting dirt on Carver, I’d make a bet that Gov. Shepard is the man to dig it up.’

‘At Cockatoo?’ Balfour said with interest. ‘I didn’t know Shepard was a sergeant at Cockatoo.’

‘He was. And then the very year after Carver gets his leave, Shepard gets a transfer to New Zealand—and follows him! How’s that for bad luck?’

‘The worst,’ agreed his fellow.

‘How do you know this?’ Balfour said.

The stevedore was addressing his mate. ‘That’s a face I’d never want to see again—my gaoler, day in and day out, for ten years—and then, as soon as I’m free—’

‘How do you know this?’ Balfour persisted.

‘I apprenticed on the dockyards there,’ the stevedore said. ‘Hey, now—that’s a corker!’

For he had struck the gull across the back with his stick.

‘You don’t happen to know what Carver was booked for—do you, lad?’

‘Trafficking,’ the stevedore said immediately.

‘Trafficking what?’

‘Opium.’

‘What—into China? Or out?’

‘Couldn’t tell you.’

‘Who booked him, though? Not the Crown.’

The stevedore thought about this, and then shrugged. ‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘I thought it was something to do with opium. But maybe that was just something I heard.’

Presently Balfour bid them both goodbye, and moved on along the spit. As soon as he was well alone, he planted his feet apart, thrust his hands into his pockets, and looked out over the white roar of the ocean—past the screw jacks and greased rollers, past the wooden lighthouse at the spit’s far end, past the dark hulks of the ships that had foundered on the bar.

‘See, now!’ he muttered to himself. ‘That’s something—that’s something, all right! Carver must be the man’s real name! He can’t be using an alias—not in Hokitika, under the gaoler’s own nose—when he served time beneath the man, in a penitentiary!’ Balfour slicked his moustache with his finger and thumb. ‘Here’s the rub, though. What in heaven’s name provoked him to make the claim—with proof in writing, to boot—that his name was Francis Wells?’

SATURN IN LIBRA

In which Joseph Pritchard outlines his theory of conspiracy; George Shepard makes a calculated offer; and Harald Nilssen agrees, in a tone of remonstration, to pay a call upon Ah Quee.

It was at this point that Balfour’s role as narrator was usurped—a transferral that was marked, on the shipping agent’s part, by the lighting of a new cigar, the filling of a fresh glass, and an enthusiastic ‘Now, correct me if I’m wrong, boys!’

This exhortation was apparently directed at two persons: Joseph Pritchard, the dark-haired man on Moody’s left, whose stifled intensity of silence was matched, as Moody soon discovered, by the stifled intensity of his unhurried speech, and another man whose physical presence we have not yet had cause to remark. This second man had been playing at billiards when Moody first made his entrance; Balfour now introduced him, with an admiring thrust of his cigar, as Harald Nilssen, born in Oslo, late of Bath, undefeated master of the three-card brag, and a d—ned fine shot—to which Nilssen added, springing forward to augment his own commendation, that he carried a muzzle-loading Enfield musket, the British Empire’s finest, and the only firearm he had ever deigned to touch. These two men were more than willing to take Balfour’s exhortation at face value—Nilssen for reasons of vanity, for he could not bear to be the leading role in a sensational tale, and not the leading actor, too; and Pritchard for reasons of precision.

We shall therefore leave Thomas Balfour standing on the wharf with his hands in his pockets, squinting into the rain. We shall turn our gaze some two hundred yards to the north, and alight at the Auction Yards on Gibson Quay—where, behind the rostrum, an unpainted door leading to a private office bears the legend Nilssen & Co., Commission Merchants.

In deference to the harmony of the turning spheres of time we shall resume our tale exactly at the moment Balfour left off—in Hokitika, on Saturday, the 27th of January, at five minutes before one in the afternoon.

At midday on a Saturday Harald Nilssen could usually be found in his office, sitting before a stack of contracts, wills, and bills of lading, patting his breast every ten minutes or so to check again the silver pocket watch that would release him to his luncheon—which he took with medical regularity each day at the Nonpareil. Nilssen recommended this routine to any who would listen, believing very stoutly in the curative properties of dark gravy, pastry, and ale; he did much recommendation, in fact, and often made an example of his own customs for the profit of other, less visionary men. He derived an especial pleasure from argument, so long as it was of the preposterous, hypothetical variety, and so loved to fashion absurd theories of abstraction from the small but dedicated circle of his own tastes. This attitude was affectionately reinforced by his friends, who thought him vivacious and amusing, and scorned by his detractors, who thought him affected and self-absorbed—but these latter voices were subdued in Nilssen’s ears, and he spent no effort to better make them out.

Harald Nilssen was famous in Hokitika for the high style of his dress. That afternoon he was wearing a knee-length frock coat with silk-faced lapels of a charcoal hue, a dark red vest, a grey bow tie, and cashmere striped morning trousers. His silk hat, which was hanging on a hatstand behind his desk, was of the same charcoal hue as his coat; beneath it was propped a silver-tipped stick with a curved handle. To complete this costume (for so he perceived of his daily dress: as a costume that could be completed, to effect) he smoked a pipe, a fat calabash with a bitten-down stem—though his affection for the instrument had less to do with the pleasures of the habit than for the opportunity for emphasis it provided. He often held it in his teeth unlit, and spoke out of the corner of his mouth like a comic player delivering an aside—a comparison which suited him, for if Nilssen was vain of the impressions he created, it was because he knew that he created them very well. Today, however, the mahogany bowl was warm, and he was pulling on the stem with considerable agitation. The hour of his luncheon was past, but he was not thinking of his stomach, and nor of the ruddy-cheeked barmaid at the Nonpareil, who called him Harry and always saved the choicest edges of the piecrust for his plate. He was frowning down at a yellow bill upon his desktop, and he was not alone.

At length he pulled his pipe from his teeth and lifted his eyes to meet the gaze of the man sitting opposite him. He said, in a low voice, ‘I’ve done no wrong. I’ve done nothing below the law.’

He spoke with only a very slight Norwegian accent: thirty years in Bath had made him all but British in his inflexions.

‘It’s who stands to profit,’ said Joseph Pritchard. ‘That’s what a justice will be looking for. Seems you made a very tidy profit by this man’s death.’

‘By the legal sale of his estate! Which I took on after he was already in the ground!’

‘In the ground—but warm, I think.’

‘Crosbie Wells drank himself to death,’ said Nilssen. ‘There was no cause for an inquest, nothing untoward. He was a drunk and a hermit, and when I received these papers I believed his estate would be small. I had no idea about the ’bounder.’

‘You’re saying this was just a lucky piece of business.’

‘I’m saying I’ve done nothing below the law.’

‘But someone has,’ Pritchard said. ‘Someone is behind this. Who knew about the ’bounder? Who waited till Crosbie Wells was six feet deep, then sold off his land so quiet and so quick, without ever going to auction—who put the papers in? And who planted my laudanum under his cot?’

‘You say planted—’

‘It was planted,’ Pritchard said. ‘I’ll take my oath on that. I never sold that man a dram. I know my faces, Harald. I never sold a single dram to Crosbie Wells.’

‘Well then, there you are! You can prove that! Show your records, and receipts—’

‘We have to look beyond our own part in this design!’ Pritchard said. When he spoke vehemently he did not raise his voice, but lowered it. ‘We’re associated. Trace it back far enough, and you’ll find an author. It’s all of a piece.’

‘Do you suggest this was planned—in advance?’

Pritchard shrugged. ‘Looks like murder to me,’ he said.

‘Conspiracy to murder,’ Nilssen corrected him.

‘What’s the difference?’

‘The difference is in the charge. It would be conspiracy to murder—we’d be convicted for the intention, not for the act itself. Crosbie wasn’t killed by another man’s hand, you know.’

‘So we’ve been told,’ Pritchard said. ‘Do you trust the coroner, Mr. Nilssen? Or will you take a spade in your own hands, and bring the hermit’s body up?’

‘Don’t be ghastly.’

‘I’ll tell you this: you’d find more than one corpse in the hole.’

‘Don’t, I said!’

‘Emery Staines,’ Pritchard said, relentlessly. ‘What the devil happened to him, if he wasn’t killed? You think he turned to vapour?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Wells died, Staines vanished. All in a matter of hours. Wells is buried two days later … and what better place to hide a body, than in another man’s grave?’

Joseph Pritchard always sought the hidden motive, the underlying truth; conspiracy enthralled him. He formed convictions as other men formed dependencies—a belief for him was as a thirst—and he fed his own convictions with all the erotic fervour of the willingly confirmed. This rapture extended to his self-regard. Whenever the subterranean waters of his mind were disturbed, he plunged inward, and struggled downward—kicking strongly, purposefully, as if he wished to touch the mineral depths of his own dark fantasies; as if he wished to drown.

Nilssen said, ‘That’s useless speculation.’

‘Buried together,’ said Pritchard. He sat back. ‘I’d bet my life.’

‘What does it matter what you guess—what you wager?’ Nilssen burst out. ‘You didn’t kill him. You didn’t murder anybody. It’s on another man’s head.’

‘But somebody certainly wants to make it seem as if I did. And somebody’s certainly made you look like a d—ned fool, for chasing a herring that turned out to be red!’

‘You’re talking appearances.’

‘Juries care about appearances.’

‘Come,’ said Nilssen, somewhat weakly. ‘You can’t really think that a jury—’

‘—Will be necessary? Don’t be an ass. Emery Staines is Hokitika royalty. Strange as that sounds. Folk who couldn’t pick the Commissioner from a line-up of drunks know Staines’s name. There’s no doubt there’ll be an inquest. If he fell down the stairs and broke his neck with a dozen men to witness, there would be an inquest. All it’s going to take is one shred of evidence to connect him to the Crosbie Wells affair—his body, probably, whenever they find it—and bang, you’re implicated. You’re a co-conspirator. You’re on trial. And then what are you going to say to defend yourself?’

‘That I’m not—that we didn’t—conspire—’

But uselessness overcame him, and he did not go on.

Pritchard did not interrupt the silence. He stared intently at his host and waited. At length Nilssen resumed, struggling to keep his voice calm and practical:

‘We mustn’t keep anything back. We must go to the justice ourselves—’

‘And risk the charge?’ Pritchard’s voice became lower still. ‘We don’t know half the players, man! If Staines was murdered—look, even if you don’t believe the rest of what I’m saying, you must admit that it’s a d—ned coincidence he disappeared when he did. If he was murdered—and let’s say he was—well, somebody in town has got to know about it.’

Nilssen tried to be haughty. ‘I for one am not going to stand about and wait with a noose around my neck—’

‘I am not proposing that we stand about and wait.’

The commission merchant sagged a little. ‘What then?’

Pritchard grinned. ‘You say there’s a noose—well, all right. Follow the rope.’

‘Back to the banker, you mean?’

‘Charlie Frost? Maybe.’

Nilssen looked sceptical. ‘Charlie’s no double-crosser. He was as surprised as anyone when the ’bounder turned up.’

‘Surprised, that’s easy to fake. And what about the fellow who purchased the land? Clinch—of the Gridiron Hotel. He must have been tipped off somehow.’

Nilssen shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘Perhaps you ought to try.’

‘Anyway,’ Nilssen said, frowning, ‘Clinch doesn’t stand to gain a penny, now that the widow’s made her claim. She’s the one you should be worried about.’

But Pritchard did not have an opinion about the widow. ‘Clinch doesn’t stand to gain a penny—from Crosbie Wells, maybe,’ he said. ‘But think on this. Staines leases the Gridiron to Clinch, doesn’t he?’

‘What are you driving at?’

‘Only that a fellow’s never sorry when his creditor is dead.’

Nilssen turned red. ‘Clinch wouldn’t take another man’s life. None of them would. Charlie Frost? Come off it, Jo! The man’s a mouse.’

‘You can’t tell from looking at a man what he’s capable of doing. And you certainly can’t tell what he’s done.’

‘This kind of speculation—’ Nilssen began, but he did not know what form his protestation was to take, and he again fell silent.

Nilssen did not know the vanished prospector, Emery Staines, at all well—though if asked, he would have declared the opposite, for Nilssen tended to profess intimacy whenever it flattered him to do so, and Staines was very much the kind of man with whom Nilssen would have liked to forge an intimate acquaintance. Nilssen loved to be dazzled, and never was he more dazzled than by the selfhood of a man he very much admired. Emery Staines, being possessed of both youth and conviction, was naturally an enviable type. Calling him to mind now, Nilssen had to agree with Pritchard that it was exceedingly unlikely that Staines had departed Hokitika in secret, of his own volition, in the middle of the night. His claims required constant maintenance and supervision, and there were more than fifty men in his employment—why, his absence would be costing more than pennies, Nilssen thought, and the debt would be mounting every day. No: Pritchard was right. Staines had either been kidnapped, or—far more likely—he had been killed, and his body had been very effectively concealed.

The current information held that Emery Staines had last been seen around sundown on the 14th of January, walking south down Revell-street in the direction of his house. What happened after that, nobody knew. His barber came calling at eight the next morning, and found his door unlocked; he reported that the bed was rumpled, as if recently slept in, but the fire was cold. All valuables were present and untouched.

Emery Staines had no enemies, as far as Nilssen was aware. His disposition was bright and very open, and he had the rare gift of managing to act both generously and humbly at once. He was very rich, but there were many rich men in Hokitika, and most of them were a good deal more unpleasant than he. It was unusual that he was young, of course, and that might be a cause for envy in an older, more disappointed man—but envy was rather a weak motive for murder, Nilssen thought, if indeed the young man had been killed.

‘What would drive any man to quarrel with Staines?’ Nilssen said aloud. ‘That boy radiates luck—the Midas touch, he has.’

‘Luck is not a virtue.’

‘Killed for his money, then—?’

‘Let’s put Staines aside for the moment.’ Pritchard leaned forward. ‘You took home a fair cut of Crosbie Wells’s fortune.’

‘Yes—I told you, ten per cent,’ Nilssen said, turning back to the yellow bill of sale on the desk before him. ‘Commission on the sale of his effects, you know; but now that the will’s been disputed, the payment’s void. I shall have to pay it all back again. The property ought not to have been sold.’

He touched the edge of the bill with his finger. He had signed the document, and its copy, at this very desk two weeks prior—and how his heart had sunk as he had penned his name. In Hokitika the sale of effects on a deceased estate was never a profitable venture, but his business was not prospering, and he was desperate. How shameful it was (he had thought), to have travelled half the girth of the globe only to see his fortunes fall so far—only to scrabble for scraps beneath the tables of richer, luckier men. The name on the bill—Crosbie Wells—had meant nothing to him. From what he knew Wells was just a loner, a wretched twist of a man who drank himself into a stupor every night and dreamed of nothing. Nilssen signed his name in bitterness, in exhaustion. He was going to have to rent a horse, sacrifice a day of work, ride out—where?—to the forsaken Arahura, and pick over this dead man’s effects as a vagrant trawls through a gutter, looking for food.

And then, wedged into the flour canister, the powder box, the meat safe, the bellows, the cracked basin of an old commode—and all of it glistering, heavy, and soft. His commission had come in at just over four hundred pounds; for the first time in his life, he was flush. He might have packed up and sailed to Sydney; he might have returned home; he might have begun anew; he might have married. But he had no time to enjoy it. The day his commission was finally cleared was the very day of Mrs. Wells’s arrival; within hours, the sale of the estate had been appealed, the inheritance disputed, and the fortune seized by the bank. If the appeal was granted—as it certainly would be—Nilssen would be obliged to pay his commission back again, in full. Four hundred pounds! It was more money than he earned in a year. He ran his finger down the edge of the bill, and felt a lonely stab of outrage. He wished, as he had wished many times in the last week, that he could be given someone to blame.

But Pritchard was shaking his head: he wasn’t interested in the dead man’s will, nor in the legal implications of its contest. ‘Never mind all that, for the moment,’ he said. ‘Think back to the cottage. You saw the pile with your own eyes?’

‘I was the one to discover it.’ Nilssen spoke with a touch of pride. He relaxed a little at the memory. ‘Oh—if you’d seen it—I might have turned it into leaf and covered a whole billiard table, legs and all. Heavy as anything. And how it shone.’

Pritchard didn’t smile. ‘You said that it wasn’t dust and it wasn’t nugget. Do I have that right?’

Nilssen sighed. ‘Yes, that’s right: it had all been pressed into squares.’

‘Retorted,’ Pritchard said, nodding, ‘—which takes equipment, and skill. So who was the smith? Not Wells himself.’

Nilssen paused. This was a point that had not crossed his mind. The way that Pritchard was setting forth his argument—confidently, arrogantly—was unpleasant to him, but he had to concede that the chemist had made several connexions already that he himself had missed. He sucked on his pipe.

Nilssen had no great knowledge of the workings of a goldfield. He had only attempted to prospect for the colour once, and found it miserable work—lugging pails of water to and from the river to sluice the stones, slapping at the sandflies that crept up his jacket until he was mad enough to dance. Afterwards his back ached and his fingers stung and his feet stayed spongy and swollen for days. The pinch of grit he had taken home, knotted into the corner of his kerchief, was taxed and taxed and then weighed to the smallest fraction of an ounce—yielding, at last, five dirty shillings, an impossible disappointment, barely enough to cover the rental of his horse to and from the gorge. Nilssen did not try his luck again. He was by natural faculty and self-styling a Renaissance man, accustomed to showing immediate promise in whatever field to which he applied himself; if he did not master a trick on his first attempt, he gave up the trade. (He was not without humour about this practice: he often recounted his abortive episode in the Hokitika gorge, exaggerating the discomforts he had sustained in light-hearted deprecation of his own constitutional delicacy—but this was an interpretation that was reserved for him alone, and he became embarrassed if another man took on this same perspective, so to speak, or agreed with him.)

The theory that Joseph Pritchard had put to him was logical enough, up to a point. Somebody—more than one person, perhaps—must have known about the fortune hidden on Crosbie Wells’s estate. The fortune was too large, and the sale of his property too furtive and too swift, to deny that probability altogether. Furthermore, the phial of laudanum that had been discovered in close proximity to the man’s dead body suggested that somebody—perhaps the same somebody—had been present in the cottage either just prior to or just after the hermit’s death, presumably with some intention of harm. The phial was Pritchard’s, purchased from his emporium and bearing a label signed in his hand: its bearer must therefore have been a Hokitika man, travelling northward, not a stranger, travelling south. This ruled out the dignitaries who had first discovered Crosbie’s body, and had brought the news of his death to the town.

Privately Nilssen did believe that Pritchard was right to hold the purchaser of the estate, Edgar Clinch, in suspicion—and the banker, Frost, as well. He did not suspect them of having a part in Emery Staines’s murder, as Pritchard evidently did, but it seemed to him that Clinch must have acted on a tip of some kind, to buy Crosbie Wells’s cottage and land so hastily—and whatever that tip might have been, Charlie Frost must know about it. Nilssen could also accept that his own involvement, however innocently undertaken, must look decidedly fishy to an impartial outsider: he had been the one to discover the fortune, after all; he had recorded the glass phial of laudanum in his ledger along with everything else (he had been compiling a list of effects to be sold); and he stood to gain four hundred pounds out of the transaction.

Beyond these admissions, however (which, after all, were only admissions of doubt and probable impression), Nilssen was uncertain. Pritchard had reasoned that the disappearance of Emery Staines could not be coincidental, which was supposition; he had argued that the man had been murdered, which was guesswork; he had suggested that his body had been buried in Wells’s own grave, which was presumption; and he had proposed that the legal debacle over Wells’s estate had been planned in advance as a kind of eclipse, a decoy—this last, Nilssen thought, was downright fantasy. Pritchard could not account for the phial of laudanum; he could not produce a motivation, or a plausible suspect … and yet the commission merchant could not discount the man’s convictions altogether, however much he disliked the manner in which they were expressed.

Nilssen did not share the chemist’s rapt intoxication with the plumbing of the deep: the quest for truth did not possess him as it did his guest. Pritchard became very strange when speaking of his passions, the elixirs that he brewed and tasted under the low ceiling of his laboratory, the resins and powders that he bought and sold in clouded jars. There was something cold and hard about the man, Nilssen thought—diverting his own ill feeling, as he often did, into a principle of aesthetic distaste.

At last, and with the air of vexation that always passed over him whenever another man’s argument showed a deficiency in his own, Nilssen took his pipe from his mouth and said, ‘Well—perhaps Wells had a contact down at the Reserve. Killarney—or a Company man—’

‘No.’ Pritchard struck the desk with splayed fingers; he had been waiting for Nilssen to guess wrongly, and he had his counter-argument prepared. ‘This is a Chinaman’s work. I’d bet any money. The joss at Kawarau was always full of fellows without a permit—they shared the miner’s rights between them. No man can tell two of them apart, you see, and one name’s as good as another, when it comes from a foreign tongue. It’s all outside jobs in Chinatown. If this was a Company affair it would look—’

‘Cleaner?’ Nilssen sounded hopeful.

‘The opposite. When a fellow has to cover his prints—when he has to use the tradesman’s entrance, instead of coming in through the foyer as he’s known to do—that’s when he has to start making provisions, sacrifices. Do you see? A man on the inside has to contend with the pawns—with all the pieces of the system. But a man on the outside can deal with the Devil direct.’

It was expressions of this kind that Nilssen particularly disliked. He dropped his gaze again to the bill of sale.

‘Chinatown Forge,’ Pritchard said. ‘You mark my guess. One fellow does all the furnace work. His name is Quee.’

‘You’ll speak to him?’ said Nilssen, looking up.

‘Actually,’ said the chemist, ‘I was hoping that you would. I’m in a spot of bother with the Orientals at the moment.’

‘Dare I ask why?’

‘Oh—bad business is all. Trade secrets. Opium,’ Pritchard said. He turned his hand over and then let it fall into his lap.

Nilssen frowned. ‘You ship your opium from China?’

‘Good Lord, no,’ Pritchard said. ‘From Bengal.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘It’s more of a personal dispute. On account of the whore who nearly died.’

‘Anna,’ Nilssen said. ‘Anna Wetherell.’

Pritchard scowled: he had not wanted to use her name. He turned his head away and watched the raindrops swell and gather under the lip of the sash window.

In the brief pause before he resumed speaking, Nilssen was startled by the thought that perhaps the chemist loved her: Anna Wetherell, the whore. He tested the possibility in his mind, enjoying it. The girl was uncommonly striking—she moved with a weary, murderous languor, like a disaffected swan—but she was rather more volatile in her tempers than Nilssen liked in a girl, and her beauty (in fact Nilssen would not call her beautiful; he reserved that word for virgins and angelic forms) was too knowing for his taste. She was also an opium eater, a habit that showed in her features as a constant blur, and in her manner as a fathomless exhaustion—this compulsion was unbecoming enough, and now she was a would-be suicide, besides. Yes, Nilssen thought: she was just the kind of girl for whom Pritchard would fall. They would meet in darkness; their encounters would be feverish and doomed.

Here the commission merchant missed his mark. Nilssen’s guesses were always of the self-confirming sort: he tended to favour whichever proofs best pleased his sense of principle, and equally, to hold fast to whichever principles best lent themselves to proof. He talked often of virtue, and so gave the impression of a most encouraging and optimistic temper, but his faith in virtue was indentured to a less adaptable master than optimism. The benefit of the doubt, to take the common phrase, was a haphazard gift, and Nilssen was too proud of his intellect to surrender the power of hypothesis. In his mind a protective glaze had been applied to the crystal forms of high abstraction: he loved to regard them, and to wonder at their shine, but he had never thought to take them down from their carved and oaken mantel, so to speak, and feel them, supple in his hands. He had concluded that Pritchard was in love simply because it was pleasant to deliberate the point, examine the specimen, and then return to the beliefs he had possessed all along: that Pritchard was a queer fish; that Anna was a lost cause; and that one ought never undertake to love a whore.

‘Yes, well,’ Pritchard was saying, ‘they’re furious about it, you know. The yellow chap who operates the den at Kaniere—Ah Sook is his name—he went to Tom Balfour, after the whore took ill—very upset, you understand. He told Tom he wanted to look over my shipping records, check the last case that had come in on my account.’

‘Why not just come to you direct?’ Nilssen asked.

Pritchard shrugged. ‘Thought I was up to something, I suppose,’ he said.

‘He thought you poisoned her—on purpose?’

‘Yes.’ Pritchard looked away again.

‘Well, and what did Tom say?’ Nilssen said, to prompt him.

‘He showed Ah Sook my records. Proved I’m clean.’

‘Your record’s clean?’

‘Yes,’ Pritchard said shortly.

Nilssen saw that he had caused his guest offence, and felt an ugly flash of pleasure. He was beginning to resent the implication that they would be equally implicated as conspirators, if (or when) the possible murder of Emery Staines came to light: it seemed to him that Pritchard was considerably more embroiled in this mess than he was. Nilssen had nothing to do with opium, and wanted nothing to do with it. The drug was a poison, a scourge, and it made a fool of men.

‘Listen,’ Pritchard said, placing his finger on the desktop, ‘you need to get this Quee chap to talk with you. I’d do it myself if I could—I’ve tried the den, but Sook won’t have a bar of me. Quee’s all right. He’s decent. Ask him about the pile—whether it’s his gold, and if it is, why it turned up on Wells’s estate. You can go this afternoon.’

It rankled Nilssen to be ordered about in this way. ‘I don’t see why you can’t talk to Quee yourself, if your beef is with the other fellow.’

‘I’m under the hammer. Call it laying low.’

Nilssen called it something rather different in his mind. Aloud he said, ‘What on earth would induce a johnny chink to speak to me?’—taking refuge, finally, in petulance. He pushed the yellow bill away from him.

‘At least you’re neutral,’ Pritchard said. ‘You’ve given none of them cause to judge you one way or another—have you?’

‘The celestials?’ Nilssen sucked on his pipe; the leaf was almost ash. ‘No.’

‘You say it with an Ah in front—Ah Quee. It’s their way of saying Mister.’ Pritchard paused a moment, regarding the other man, and then he added, ‘Think of it this way. If we are being framed, then perhaps he is, too.’

As he was speaking, there came a knock at the door: it was the clerk, bearing the message that George Shepard was in the outer office and waiting to be received.

‘George Shepard—the gaoler?’ Nilssen said, with some trepidation, and a swift glance at Pritchard. ‘Did he say why?’

‘Matter of profit, he said, mutual gains,’ the clerk replied. ‘Shall I fetch him in?’

‘I’ll take my leave,’ Pritchard said, standing immediately. ‘So you’ll find him—the fellow Quee? Say you will.’

‘All the way to Kaniere?’ Nilssen said, remembering his luncheon, and the barmaid at the Nonpareil.

‘It’s only an hour’s walk,’ Pritchard said. ‘But make sure you get the right fellow: the one you’re after is a shortish chap, very thin, clean-shaven; you’ll know his cottage by the chimney that issues from the forge. I’ll wait your message,’—and he was gone.

Nilssen’s office seemed much too small to accommodate the massive, rigid bow that George Shepard made upon his entrance. The commission merchant felt himself shrink back a little in his chair, and to compensate for this he leaped up, thrust out his hand, and cried,

‘Mr. Shepard—yes, yes, please. I haven’t yet had the pleasure of receiving your business, sir—but I do hope that I can be of service—in the nearest future—if I may. Do sit down.’

‘I know you, of course,’ Shepard replied, taking the chair that was offered him. Seeing that Nilssen’s pipe was lit, he reached in his pocket for his own. Nilssen passed his tobacco pouch and lucifers across the desk, and there was a short pause as Shepard filled and tamped his bowl and struck a match. His pipe was shallow, made of briar, with a smart collar of amber set between the bit and the stem. He puffed several times until he was satisfied the leaf was lit, and then sat back in his chair with a calculated glance first to his left and then to his right, as if he wished to square himself with the planes of the room.

‘By reputation,’ he added, being the kind of man who always finished an utterance once he had set his thought in motion. He breathed out a mouthful. ‘That fellow just leaving,’ he said. ‘His name again?’

‘Jo Pritchard is his name, sir—Joseph. Runs the drug hall on Collingwood-street.’

‘Of course.’

Shepard paused, forming his business in his mind. The pale light of the day, falling slantwise across Nilssen’s desk, froze the eddies of pipe-smoke that hung about his head—fixing each coiling thread upon the air, as mineral quartz preserves a twisting vein of gold, and proffers it. Nilssen waited. He was thinking: if I am convicted, then this man will be my gaoler.

George Shepard’s appointment as governor of the Hokitika Gaol had been met with little opposition from the men who lived and dug within the bounds of his jurisdiction. Shepard was a cold, formidable character, slow moving in a way that seemed constantly to emphasise the breadth of his shoulders and the weight of his arms; when he walked, it was with long, deliberate strides, and when he spoke (which was seldom) he intoned in a rich and august bass. His manner was humourless and not at all likeable, but severity counted as a virtue for a man of his profession, and it was to his credit, the voters agreed, that no charge of bias or prejudice had ever been laid at his door.

If Shepard was the subject of idle rumour, it was of the conjectural sort, and nearly always concerned his private relations with his wife. Their marriage was to all appearances conducted in absolute silence, with a grim determination on his part, and a fearful inhibition on hers. The woman referred to her own self as Mrs. George, and this only in a whisper; she wore the bewildered, panicked aspect of a tortured animal, who sees a cage where there is none, and cowers at every sudden thing. Mrs. George rarely ventured beyond the gaol-house door except, on rare occasions of civic display, to trip red-faced down Revell-street in Governor Shepard’s wake. They had been at Hokitika four months before anyone discovered that she did in fact possess a Christian name—Margaret—though to speak it in her presence was an assault so dreadful that her only recourse was to flee.

‘I come to you on business, Mr. Nilssen,’ Shepard began. He held the bowl of his pipe in his fist against his breast as he spoke. ‘Our present gaol-house is little better than a corral—a holding pen. There is scant light, and insufficient air. To ventilate, we prop open the door upon a chain, and I sit beyond the doorway with my rifle on my knees. It is untenable. We haven’t the resources to cope with—more experienced criminals. More sophisticated crimes. A murder, say.’

‘No—yes, yes,’ Nilssen said. ‘Of course.’

There was a pause, and then Shepard continued. ‘If you will forgive my pessimism,’ he said, ‘I believe that Hokitika is about to meet a darker time. This town is at a threshold. Digger law is still the creed of the hills, and here—why, we are but a backwater of Canterbury still, but soon we will be the jewel in her crown. Westland will split, and Hokitika will prosper; but as she rises, she will have to reconcile herself.’

‘Reconcile—?’

‘The savage and the civil,’ Shepard said.

‘You allude to the natives—the Maori tribes?’

Nilssen spoke with a touch of eagerness; he cherished a romantic passion for what he called ‘the tribal life’. When the Maori canoes came strong and flashing through the Buller Gorge—he had seen them from a distance—he was quelled in awe. The warriors seemed terrible to him, their women unknowable, their customs fearsome and primitive. His transfixion was closer to dread than to reverence, but it was a dread to which he sought to return. In fact Nilssen had been first spurred to make his voyage to New Zealand by a chance encounter with an able seaman at a roadside inn near Southampton, who was boasting (rather improbably, as it turned out) of his own encounters with the primitive peoples of the South Seas. The sailor was a Dutchman, and wore his jacket cut short above his hips. He had traded iron nails for cocoa-nuts; he had permitted island women to place their hands upon the white skin of his chest; he had once made a present of a knot to an island boy. (‘What kind of knot?’ Nilssen begged, coming forward; it was a Turk’s Head; Nilssen did not know it, and the seaman sketched the looping floral shape upon the air.)

But Shepard shook his head at Nilssen’s interjection. ‘I do not use “savage” in the native sense,’ he said. ‘I allude to the land itself. Prospecting is an ugly business: it makes a man start thinking like a thief. And here the conditions are foul enough to make the diggers still more desperate.’

‘But the diggings can be made civil.’

‘Perhaps—after the rivers are spent. After the prospectors give way to dams and dredges and company mines—when the forests are felled—perhaps then.’

‘You do not have faith in the power of the law?’ Nilssen said, frowning. ‘Westland is soon to have a seat in Parliament, you know.’

‘I see that I am not making myself clear,’ Shepard said. ‘Will you allow me to begin again?’

‘By all means.’

The gaoler began immediately, without altering his posture or his tone. ‘When two codes of justice are available at once,’ he said, ‘a man will always use the one to inveigh against the other. Consider a man who thinks it just and right to bring a complaint to the Magistrate’s Court against his own whore—expecting both the exercise of the law, and his exemption from it. He is refused, and perhaps he is even charged for consorting with the girl; now he blames the law and the girl both. The law cannot answer for his digger’s sense of what is due, and so he takes the law upon himself, and throttles her. In former days he would have solved his quarrel with his fists, at once—that was digger’s law. Perhaps the whore would perish, or survive, but either way his action was his own. But now—now he feels his very right to demand justice has been threatened, and that is what he acts upon. He is doubly angry, and his rage is doubly spent. I am seeing examples of this kind every day.’

Shepard sat back, and replaced his pipe in his mouth. His manner was composed, but his pale eyes were fixed very intently upon his host.

Nilssen never refused an opportunity to provoke a hypothetical. ‘Yes, but—to follow your argument,’ he said, ‘surely you are not suggesting a preference for digger’s law?’

‘Digger’s law is philistine and base,’ Governor Shepard said calmly. ‘We are not savages; we are civilised men. I do not consider the law to be deficient; I mean to point out, merely, what happens when the savage meets the civil. Four months ago the men and women in my gaol-house were drunks and petty thieves. Now I see drunks and petty thieves who feel indignant, and entitled, and speak righteously, as if they have been unjustly tried. And they are angry.’

‘But—again—to conclude,’ Nilssen said. ‘After the whore is throttled, after the digger’s rage is spent. Surely the civil law then returns to condemn this man? Surely he’s punished justly—in the end?’

‘Not if his fellows rally round him, to preserve his digger’s rights,’ Shepard replied. ‘No man holds to any code as strong as he does when his code’s affronted, Mr. Nilssen, and there’s nothing more brutal than a gang of angry men. I’ve been a gaoler sixteen years.’

Nilssen sat back in his chair. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I take your point; it’s this twilight that’s the danger, between the old world and the new.’

‘We must do away with the old,’ Shepard said. ‘I will not suffer whores, and I will not suffer those who frequent them.’

Shepard’s autobiography (a document which, if ever penned, would be rigid, admonishing, and frugal) did not possess that necessary chapter wherein the young hero sows his oats and strays; since his marriage, his imagination had conjured nothing beyond the squarish figure of Mrs. George, whose measures were so familiar, and so regular, that he might have set his pocket watch by the rhythm of her days. He had always been irreproachable in his conduct, and as a consequence, his capacity for empathy was small. Anna Wetherell’s profession did not fascinate him in the least, and he had no boyhood memories of tenderness or embarrassment to soften him towards the subtleties of her trade; when he looked at her, he saw only a catalogue of indiscretions, a volatile intelligence, and a severe want of promise. That a whore might attempt to take her own life did not strike him as a remarkable thing, nor a very sad one; in this particular case, he might even call a termination merciful. Miss Wetherell lived by the will of the dragon, after all, a drug that played steward to an imbecile king, and she would guard that throne with jealous eyes forever.

It is fair to say that, of the seven virtues, Governor Shepard inclined towards the cardinal four. He was well apprised of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness, but only as a creed to be studied, and obeyed. We do not mean to diminish his religion by remarking that forgiveness is a thing that one must first be obliged to ask for in order to know how to give, and Governor Shepard had never in his life met any imperative to ask. He had prayed for Miss Wetherell’s soul, as he did for all the men and women in his keeping, but his prayers were expressions of duty rather than of hope. He believed the soul to inhabit the body, and consequently, that the body’s desecration was an assault upon the soul: a common whore, when judged by this substantive theology, fared ill indeed, and Anna Wetherell was malnourished, mistreated, and as wretched a picture as any he had seen. He did not wish her damned, but he believed, privately, that her salvation was impossible.

Miss Wetherell’s spiritual fate, and the method by which she had sought to determine it forever, did not interest him; her corporeal merits did not interest him either. In this Shepard was set apart from the majority of men in Hokitika, who (as Gascoigne was to remark to Moody some seven hours later) had been talking of little else for a fortnight. When they exhausted the former subject, they fell back upon the latter, an arrangement that kept them in conversation for a great while.

Nilssen’s pipe had gone out. He rapped the bowl against his desktop to empty the ash and then began to refill it. ‘I believe Alistair Lauderback means to make a change,’ he said, unlacing the strings of his tobacco pouch with his free hand. ‘If he is elected, of course.’

Shepard did not answer at once. ‘You’ve been following the campaigns?’

Nilssen, busy with his pouch, did not notice the other man’s hesitation. When the gaoler had first entered Nilssen had been fearful of himself, even guarded, but he rarely dwelled long in a state of embarrassment. Shepard’s theory of law had roused his intelligence, and gratified it, and he again felt master of his faculties. The absorbing rituals that attended the filling of his pipe—the worn thinness of the leather strings, the dry spice of the tobacco—had restored a kind of order to his senses. He replied, without looking up, ‘Yes indeed. Reading the speeches every day, and with keen attention. Lauderback is here now—in Hokitika—is he not?’

‘He is,’ Shepard said.

‘He will take the seat, I think,’ said Nilssen, rubbing a pinch of tobacco between his fingers. ‘The Lyttelton Times is backing his play.’

‘You value him?’

‘Tunnels and railways,’ Nilssen said, ‘that’s his game, isn’t it? Progress, civilisation, all of that. Strikes me that your thinking squares quite nicely with Lauderback’s campaign.’ He struck a match.

Shepard made to reply, then hesitated. ‘I don’t make a habit of speaking my politics in another man’s office unless I’m invited to do so, Mr. Nilssen.’

‘Oh—please,’ said Nilssen politely, shaking out the match.

‘But with your leave,’ nodding his great pale head, ‘I will say this. I too think that Lauderback will take the seat—Parliament and the Super both. He has a great force of personality on his side, and of course his connexion to the Bar and to the Provincial Council speak highly of his character and skill.’

‘And this is a re-election for him, of course,’ interrupted Nilssen, who very often made a habit of speaking politics in other men’s offices, and forgot for a moment that he had granted the other man licence to speak his own mind. ‘He’s familiar.’

‘He is familiar—to his own circle,’ Shepard said. ‘His loyalty is to Canterbury, and his tunnels and railways—to take your phrase—are the Lyttelton tunnel and the projected railway between Christchurch and Dunedin. As Superintendent he will reapportion whatever funds are not already tied into this tunnel and this railway—as he must, of course, to make good the promises of his campaign.’

‘You may be right about the Super,’ Nilssen said, ‘but as an M.P.? He will represent Westland—’

‘Lauderback is a Westland man in electorate only,’ Shepard said. ‘I do not fault him on it—he has my vote, Mr. Nilssen—but he does not know the digger’s life.’

Nilssen looked as if he meant to interrupt again, so Shepard pressed on, raising his voice a little. ‘I arrive now at the business that compelled this interview. I have the Commissioner’s endorsement to begin work upon a new gaol-house, away from the Police Camp, on the terrace north of town. You recall it was a company of convicts who first cleared the Hokitika-road? I intend to do the same thing here: I shall use my own convict labour to build the prison at Seaview.’

This notion appealed to Nilssen’s sense of retribution, and he smiled.

‘However, as you have already remarked,’ Shepard continued, ‘Alistair Lauderback’s focus is on transport: in his address to the Council he has argued in favour of using convict labour to build and maintain the Christchurch road. The route over the Alps is still treacherous—unfit for a horseman, much less for a coach.’

‘The Superintendent has the final word on the matter?’ Nilssen asked. ‘Are your convicts not yours to employ?’

‘Alas,’ Shepard said. ‘They are only mine to keep.’

The clerk entered, bearing coffee on a wooden tray. He was in a state of considerable excitement, for it was not often that Nilssen had visitors, and never visitors of such enigmatic repute as Pritchard (who was famous for his opium) and Shepard (who was famous for his wife). The clerk had arranged the coffee pot and saucers on the tray with particular attention, and he carried it high with his elbows cocked and his back held very straight. Nilssen nodded approvingly: it was not their custom for the clerk to wait on his employer, but Nilssen was pleased at the effect it must be creating in the mind of his guest. The clerk set the tray upon the sideboard and began to pour. He was hoping that the men would resume their conversation while he was still in the room, and so tried to pour slowly, feeling a pang of regret at the floating grains of chicory that he had added to the coffee grounds for reasons of economy, and now, with their ugly film of grit, seemed to admonish his pretensions.

Behind him Shepard said, ‘By the bye, Mr. Nilssen: what do you know about Emery Staines?’

There was a pause. ‘I know that he is missing,’ Nilssen responded.

‘Missing, yes,’ said Shepard. ‘He hasn’t been seen for almost a fortnight. Very strange.’

‘I do not know him well,’ Nilssen said.

‘Don’t you?’ said Shepard.

‘He is an acquaintance—but not a friend.’

‘Ah.’

Nilssen seemed about to cough; then he burst out, ‘Are you quite finished, Albert?’

The clerk set down the coffee pot.

‘Shall I leave the tray, sir?’

‘Yes, yes—then go, for God’s sake,’ Nilssen said. He lurched for the cup as it was handed him, causing a small tide of coffee to slop into the saucer, and set it down before him with a clatter. The clerk brought a second cup to Shepard, who made no move to touch it, and pointed to the desk before him without a word.

‘I shall say it plain,’ Shepard said, when the disappointed clerk had shut the door behind him. ‘I mean to begin work on the gaol-house at once, before the elections, so that when Lauderback takes office the work is already well underway. I am aware that this may seem to others as if I seek to actively thwart the success of his campaign. I come to you to solicit both your business and your discretion.’

‘What do you need?’ Nilssen said cautiously.

‘Materials to build, and perhaps ten or twenty able bodies to begin digging the foundation,’ Shepard said, reaching into his breast for the plans. ‘I can offer you commission at your standard rate. The site has been purchased already, and approved. Here is the architect’s design.’

‘This is the original? Or a copy?’ Nilssen took the papers from Shepard’s massive hand and unfolded them.

‘The original. There is no copy,’ Shepard said. ‘I keep these documents on my person always, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Nilssen agreed, reaching for his spectacles.

‘The reason I have come to you,’ Shepard continued, ‘and not to Cochran, or Morrison, or another competitor whose business—forgive me—is faring rather better than yours at present, owes only in part to your reputation as an efficient man.’

Nilssen looked up.

‘Permit me to speak frankly,’ Shepard said. ‘The matter is indelicate, I know; I will try and be as delicate as I can. It has come to my attention that you took home a commission to the value of many hundreds of pounds, upon closing the estate of Mr. Crosbie Wells.’

Nilssen started, but Shepard held up his hand to silence him.

‘Do not implicate yourself by speaking before you have heard what I have to say,’ he said. ‘I will tell you exactly what I know. The man’s body came through the Police Camp before his burial; given that he had no family or friends to speak of, we conducted the wake at the Camp itself. I had the solemn honour of viewing his body, and of being present while the physician checked his vital organs for signs of harm. Dr. Gillies concluded the cause of death was drink; I, with my slender knowledge of the subject, could only agree with his ruling. Dr. Gillies was careful in his examination of the contents of the dead man’s stomach and intestines, however, which contained not only food and spirits, but traces of laudanum—though not enough, I should add, to warrant undue suspicion. I do not believe that Crosbie Wells was poisoned, except by drink.

‘Now: even before the wake was over, Wells’s land and mill were sold. The land, as you know, was reclaimed by the bank, and was then purchased almost immediately by a Mr. Edgar Clinch; while the transaction was perfectly legal, it is nevertheless curious how swiftly the property changed hands. I understand that you were then called upon to clear the cottage and sell on the dead man’s effects, for a fee that would be set against their total value; you accepted this employment, and promptly discovered a great deal of hoarded gold (where was it hidden, in the flour canister?) to the aggregate value of four thousand pounds. A “homeward bounder”, to use the local phrase. Now, Mr. Nilssen, you ought have then been able to walk away with your percentage, which was by now a very handsome cut; the whole enterprise was thwarted, however, when Mr. Wells’s widow landed on the beach, and declared herself. She was one week too late to attend his burial, but not at all too late to contest the sale of his estate, and any transactions that had taken place as a consequence of that sale.

‘As I have said, I do not believe that Crosbie Wells was poisoned,’ Shepard said. ‘But I also do not believe that the hoarded gold belonged to him, much less to his widow. The apparition of the widow Wells is a curiosity in a tale already rather too curious for my taste.’ He paused. ‘Have I said anything so far that you know or guess to be untrue? You can decline to answer that if you wish.’

‘You mean to blackmail me?’ Nilssen managed.

‘Not at all,’ Shepard said. ‘But you must agree this smacks of plotting.’

‘Yes. I do.’

‘I am not a detective,’ Shepard said, ‘and profess no inclination towards that field. I care very little about how much you know. But I must have my new gaol-house, and I see an opportunity for both of us to gain.’

‘Speak it, sir.’

‘The widow Wells has made her appeal, to contest the sale of her late husband’s effects,’ Shepard said. ‘The appeal will take months to action, of course, as legal matters do, and in the meantime the money will be held in escrow by the bank. In the end, I expect that the sale will be revoked, and if no greater plot is exposed, the widow will claim the ’bounder as her own. Incidentally, I have enjoyed several conversations with Crosbie Wells these past few months, and he certainly never spoke of being married—not to me, nor to any other man I’ve spoken to.’

Nilssen had a vision of a cat tapping a small rodent back and forth with the flat of its paw, its claws in sheath. He was not guilty—he had done no wrong—and yet he felt guilty; he felt implicated, as though he had performed a terrible misdeed while sleeping, and had woken to find his bolster smeared with blood. He felt certain that any moment now the gaoler would expose him—but for what crime, he did not yet know. What was the word Pritchard had used? Associated. Yes—he felt that acutely.

When he was a small boy Nilssen had stolen a precious button from his cousin’s treasure chest. It was a cuff button from a military jacket, brass in colour, and engraved with the lithe body of a fox, running forward with its jaws parted and its ears cocked back. The button was domed, and greyer on one side than on the other, as if the wearer had tended to caress its edge with his finger, and over time had worn the shine away. Cousin Magnus had rickets and a bandy-legged gait: he would die soon, so he did not have to share his toys. But Nilssen’s longing for the button became so great that one night when Magnus was sleeping he crept in, unlatched the chest, and stole it; he walked about the darkened nursery for a while, fingering the thing, testing its weight, running his finger over the body of the fox, feeling the brass take on the warmth of his hand—until something overcame him, not remorse exactly, but a dawning fatigue, an emptiness, and he returned the button to the place where he had found it. Cousin Magnus never knew. Nobody knew. But for months and years and even decades afterwards, long after Cousin Magnus was dead, that theft was as a splinter in his heart. He saw the moonlit nursery every time he spoke his cousin’s name; he blushed at nothing; he sometimes pinched himself, or uttered an oath, at the memory. For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

‘I estimate that it will be at least April before the sale is successfully repealed,’ Shepard was saying, with the same perfect gravity. ‘In the meantime—immediately, in fact—I propose that you invest the entire sum of your commission into the building of my gaol-house.’

Nilssen raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘But the money is not mine,’ he said, for the second time that afternoon. ‘It has already been revoked de jure, if not de facto. Once the widow’s appeal has been granted, and the sale of the estate declared void, I shall have to pay my commission back in full.’

‘The Council can sponsor your loan, with interest,’ Shepard said. ‘The gaol is publicly funded, after all; by the time your commission is recalled, I will be able to draw down funds from the Reserve, and repay you. We shall have a contract drawn up; you may name your terms. Your investment will be secure.’

‘If you have public funding,’ Nilssen said, ‘then why propose this to me at all? What need do you have of these four hundred pounds?’

‘Yours is ready money, and will be privately invested,’ Shepard said. ‘My Council funding has been approved, but not paid out; if I wait for the sum to be apportioned, and deposited into the gaol’s account, I will be waiting for thirty bankers to push my contract across thirty desks, and back again. It will be March, or April, and the elections will be past.’

‘And Lauderback will have his convicts,’ Nilssen said.

‘Yes, and he will have siphoned off a great deal more of the district’s budget, besides.’

‘Very well,’ Nilssen said. ‘Let us suppose that I agree to this, and you get your gaol-house. You said that both of us would stand to gain.’

‘Well, yes,’ Shepard said, blinking. ‘You will have employment, Mr. Nilssen. You will get your standard commission on the labour, and the iron, and the timber, and the nails, and every small thing. Legal profit—that is how you stand to gain.’

Nilssen could not fault this (certainly, it had been many weeks since he had contracted work that promised this degree of yield), but Shepard’s method of proposition was making him very uncomfortable. The gaoler had used the word murder, and called that crime ‘sophisticated’; he had waited until Albert was present as a witness to ask about Emery Staines; and when he narrated the story of the Wells affair, he had made a great show of preventing Nilssen’s interruption, lest the commission merchant implicate himself by speaking too much or too soon—thereby assuming that he could implicate himself in some way. Shepard was treating his host as a guilty man.

Nilssen said, ‘And what if I refuse your offer—what then?’

Shepard pulled his lips back in a rare smile, the effect of which was rather gruesome. ‘You are determined to see this offer as a blackmail,’ he said. ‘I cannot imagine why that might be so.’

Nilssen could not hold the gaoler’s gaze for long. ‘I will grant you the loan, and offer my services on commission,’ he said at last. His voice was low. He pulled the architect’s plans towards him. ‘Please be so good as to wait a moment,’ he added, ‘while I make a record of the materials you require.’

Shepard inclined his head, and at last picked up the cup of coffee that was cooling on the desktop before him. He took up the saucer with great care; in his great hand the china seemed impossibly fragile, as if he might close his fist and with a single motion crush the vessel to a dust. He drained the cup and returned it to the exact position it had formerly occupied upon Nilssen’s desk. He then replaced his pipe in his mouth, folded his hands, and waited. The irregular scratch of Nilssen’s pen was the only sound between them.

‘I shall draw you down a cheque on Monday morning,’ Nilssen said at last, as he penned the final sum. ‘We can advertise for tender in Monday’s paper—I’ll send a note to Löwenthal direct. I shall recommend that the labourers meet here, in the Auction Yards, at ten sharp, to be signed—that will give the men a chance to read the paper and spread the word. By Monday noon, weather permitting, we can begin work on the land.’

Shepard’s eyes had narrowed. ‘You said Löwenthal? Ben Löwenthal—the Jew?’

‘Yes,’ Nilssen said, blinking. ‘We can’t advertise without the paper. You could do it by flyer and gazette if you wanted—but everybody reads the Times.’

‘I hope that we are understood that the investment of your commission is strictly a private matter.’

‘We are understood, sir.’ There was a pause. ‘On my oath,’ Nilssen added, and then immediately regretted the phrase.

‘Perhaps we ought to insert a clause into our contract to that tune,’ Shepard said lightly. ‘For peace of mind.’

‘You can trust my discretion,’ Nilssen said, blushing again.

‘I truly hope I can,’ said Shepard. He stood, and extended his hand.

Nilssen rose also, and they shook hands.

‘Mr. Shepard,’ Nilssen said suddenly, as Shepard made to depart. ‘The way you were speaking before—about the savage and the civil, the old world and the new.’

Shepard regarded him impassively. ‘Yes.’

‘I’m curious to hear how that line of thinking applies to all of this—the estate, the ’bounder, the widow Wells.’

Shepard took a long time to answer. ‘A homeward bounder is a chance for total reinvention, Mr. Nilssen,’ he said at last. ‘Find a nugget, and a man can buy his own life. That kind of promise isn’t offered in the civil world.’

Nilssen sat alone in his office for a long time after Shepard left, turning the gaoler’s proposition over and over in his mind. A feeling of doubt was seeding in his breast. He felt that he had missed a connexion somewhere—as if he had come across a knotted handkerchief, balled in the watch-pocket of an old vest, and could not for the life of him recall what the knot was supposed to prompt him to remember—what errand, what responsibility; where he’d been, even, when he tied the corners, and tucked the thing away against his heart. He drummed his fingers; he toyed with his lapel. The rain beat against the window. The grey shadows in the room changed places, as the sun sank behind the cloud.

Suddenly he got up, went to the door, and opened it a fraction. ‘Albert!’ he called, through the chink.

‘Yes, sir,’ Albert called back, from the outer office.

‘Crosbie Wells—the man who died.’

‘Sir.’

‘Who found his body? Remind me.’

‘A company of men, sir,’ Albert replied.

‘You recall the story?’

‘It was in the papers—I can find it for you, if you like.’

‘Just tell me what you remember.’

‘The party stopped in to refresh themselves, and found Mr. Wells fresh dead—that’s my understanding. Sitting at his kitchen table, the papers had it.’

‘Give us the name?’—But he already knew. He rested his head against the doorframe, and felt sick.

‘That fellow in contest for the Westland seat,’ said Albert. ‘The Canterbury man. You met him last week at the Star. Alistair Lauderback’s his name.’

Some ten minutes later Nilssen appeared in the doorway of the outer office, snapping out his top hat with such a tremendous crack that the clerk leaped out of his chair. He was holding his stick in a rather brutish fashion, gripping it halfway down its shaft, as if he meant to wield it as a cudgel. His face was very pale.

‘Shall I direct any callers to the Nonpareil?’ Albert called after him, as the commission merchant made for the door.

‘No—leave me be. Tell them to wait. Tell them to come back Monday,’ Nilssen snapped, without turning. He quitted the gatehouse and strode off down the quay, but when he reached his accustomed pie-house on the corner he did not stop. He drew his coat tighter across his body and turned inland, towards Kaniere, and the goldfields.

MIDNIGHT DAWNS IN SCORPIO

In which the chemist goes in search of opium; we meet Anna Wetherell at last; Pritchard becomes impatient; and two shots are fired.

Joseph Pritchard, upon quitting Nilssen’s offices, had not returned immediately to his laboratory on Collingwood-street. He had made his way instead to the Gridiron, one of the sixty or seventy hotels that lined Revell-street along its most crowded and lively stretch. This establishment (which, with its canary trim and false shutters, showed a gay frontage even in the rain) was the habitual residence of Miss Anna Wetherell, and although it was not the latter’s custom to entertain callers at this hour of the day, it was not Pritchard’s custom to conduct his business according to any schedule but his own. He stamped up the steps and hauled open the door without so much as a nod to the diggers on the veranda, who were sitting in a row with their boots upon the rail, alternately whittling, cleaning their nails, and spitting tobacco into the mud. They looked at him with some amusement as he passed darkly into the foyer, remarking, once the door had thudded shut behind him, that there was a man very much determined to get to the bottom of something.

Pritchard had not encountered Anna in many weeks. He had heard about her attempted suicide only third-hand, via Dick Mannering, who in turn had relayed the intelligence of Ah Sook, the Chinese man who managed the opium den at Kaniere. Anna frequently plied her trade at Kaniere Chinatown, and for that reason was known colloquially as Chinaman’s Ann—a designation that harmed her popularity in some circles, and greatly accented it in others. Pritchard belonged to neither camp—he held little interest in the private lives of other men—so he was neither titillated nor repulsed to learn that the whore was a particular favourite of Ah Sook’s, and that her near-death, as Mannering reported to Pritchard later, had driven the man almost to hysteria. (Mannering did not speak Cantonese, but he knew a handful of written characters, including metal, want, and die—enough to conduct a pictographic colloquy with the aid of his pocketbook, an object that was by now so heavily marked and foxed with use that he was able to perform very sophisticated rhetorical allusions simply by leafing back through the pages and pointing with his fingers to an old quarrel, an old settlement, an old sale.)

It irritated Pritchard that Anna had not contacted him herself. He was a chemist, after all, and, south of the Grey River at least, the sole supplier of opium to the West Coast dens: concerning a matter of overdose, he was an expert. She ought to have called on him, to solicit his advice. Pritchard did not believe that Anna had tried to end her life: he could not believe it. He was sure that she had been forced to take the drug against her will; either that, or the stuff had been altered with the intention of causing her harm. He had tried to recall the remainder of the lump from the Chinese den, in order to examine it for traces of poison, but Ah Sook was much too furious to indulge this request, having articulated (again via Mannering) his vehement resolve never to conduct business with the chemist again. Pritchard was indifferent to the threat—he had plenty of custom in Hokitika, and the sale of opium made up only a very small percentage of his revenue—but his professional curiosity about the event had not yet been satisfied. He needed, now, to question the girl himself.

The hotel’s proprietor was not present when Pritchard entered the foyer of the Gridiron Hotel, and the space had an empty, rattling feel. Once Pritchard’s eyes became accustomed to the gloom he saw Clinch’s valet, who was leaning against the desk reading an old copy of the Leader, simultaneously mouthing the words and tracing them with his fingertip as he followed each line of print. There was a greasy patch on the countertop where the motion of his finger had polished the wood to a shine. He looked up and gave the chemist a nod as he passed. Pritchard flicked a shilling at him, which the other caught neatly and slapped onto the back of his hand—‘Came up tails,’ the boy called out, as Pritchard began to ascend the stairs, and Pritchard gave a snort of laughter. He could be brutal, when his spirits were aggrieved, and he was feeling brutal now. The hallway was quiet, but he put his ear against Anna Wetherell’s door and listened for a moment before he knocked.

Harald Nilssen had guessed rightly that Pritchard’s relations with Anna Wetherell were rather more tormented than his own, but he was mistaken to conclude that the chemist was in love with her. In fact Pritchard’s taste in women was thoroughly orthodox, even juvenile. He would sooner be inclined to fall for a dairymaid than for a whore—however dull the maid, and however striking the whore. He valued purity and simplicity, plain dress, a soft voice, a tractable will, and a small ambition—which is to say, contrast. His ideal woman would perfectly contrast him: she would be knowable where he was unknowable, composed where he was not. She would be a kind of anchor from above and without; she would be a shaft of light, a comfort, a benediction. Anna Wetherell, with all her excess and intoxication, was too like him. He did not hate her for that, exactly—but he pitied her.

In general Pritchard was close-mouthed on the subject of the fairer sex. He did not enjoy speaking about women with other men, a practice which, in his estimation, was always clownish and braying. He kept his silence, and as a consequence his fellows believed him very well accomplished, and women, when they regarded him, believed him enigmatic and profound. He was not unhandsome, and his trade was a good one: he might have been considered a very eligible bachelor, had he worked a little less, and ventured into society a little more. But Pritchard loathed large groups of mixed company, where every man is required to act as a kind of envoy for his sex, and presents his own advantages playfully, under the scrutiny of the room. Large crowds made him stifled and irritable. He preferred close company, and kept few friends—to whom he was fiercely loyal, as he was loyal to Anna, in his own way. The intimacy that he felt when he was with her owed chiefly to the fact that a man is never obliged to discuss his whores with other men: a whore is a private matter, a meal to be eaten alone. It was this aloneness that he sought in Anna. She was a solitude for him; and when he was with her, he kept her at a distance.

Pritchard had truly loved only once in his life—but it had been sixteen years since Mary Menzies became Mary Firkin, and moved to Georgia to pursue a life of cotton and red earth and (so Pritchard had imagined) an expansive slowness, made of wealth and cloudless skies. Whether she had perished—whether Mr. Firkin, too, was living still—whether she had children, born or lost—whether she had aged well, or aged badly—he did not know. She was Mary Menzies in his mind. When he had last seen her she had been twenty-five, dressed simply in sprigged muslin with her hair gathered in ringlets at her temples, her wrists and fingers unadorned; they were sitting in the window box, saying goodbye.

‘Joseph,’ she had said (he inscribed it in his pocketbook later, to remember it for all of time), ‘Joseph, I don’t believe you have ever been at peace with good. It is well you never made love to me. You will remember me fondly now. It would not have been so, otherwise.’

He heard quick steps on the other side of the door.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ was Anna’s only greeting. She was disappointed: she must have been expecting someone else. Pritchard stepped inside without speaking, and closed the door behind him. Anna moved into the quartered patch of light beneath the window.

She was dressed in mourning, but by the old-fashioned style of the gown (the bell-shaped skirt, the pointed waist) and the faded hue of the cloth, Pritchard guessed it had not been tailored for her new: it must have been a gift, or, more likely, something salvaged. He saw that the hem had been let out: two inches of darker black showed as a stripe against the floor. It was a strange thing to behold a whore in mourning—rather like seeing a dandified cleric, or a child with a moustache; it gave one a sense of confusion, Pritchard thought.

It struck him that he had rarely seen Anna except by lamplight, or by the moon. Her complexion was translucent, even blue, and tended to a deep purple beneath her eyes—as if she had been painted in watercolour, on a paper that was not stiff enough to hold the moisture, so the colours ran. Her countenance was, as Pritchard’s mother might have said, made up of angles. Her brow was very straight and her chin was pointed. Her nose was narrow, even geometric: a sculptor might render it in four strokes, with one slice on either side, one down the bridge, and one tuck beneath. She was thin-lipped, and though her eyes were naturally large, she tended to peer upon the world suspiciously, and so rarely employed them to seductive effect. Her cheeks were hollow, and her jawbone was visible, as the rim of a drum is visible, tight beneath the stretched membrane of the skin.

The previous year she had been with child, a state that had warmed the wax of her cheeks, and made plump the wretched bones of her arms—and Prichard had liked her: the round belly, the swollen breasts, hidden beneath yards of lawn and tulle, fabrics which softened her, made her buoyant. But sometime after the spring equinox, when the evenings were becoming longer, and the days brighter, and the sun hung low and scarlet over the Tasman Sea for hours before slipping, finally, into the red wash of the sea, the baby perished. Its body had since been wrapped in calico and buried in a shallow grave upon the terrace at Seaview. Pritchard had not spoken to Anna about the baby’s death. He did not frequent her rooms with any kind of regularity, and he did not ask her questions when he was there. But he had wept, privately, when he heard the news. There were so few children in Hokitika—perhaps three or four. One looked forward to seeing them as to hearing a familiar accent of speech, or a beloved ship on the horizon, that put one in mind of home.

He waited for her to speak first.

‘You can’t stay,’ she said. ‘I’ve an appointment.’

‘I won’t keep you. I wanted to ask after your health.’

‘Oh,’ she burst out, ‘I am sick of the question—sick of it!’

He was surprised by the violence of her answer. ‘I haven’t visited you in a while.’

‘No.’

‘But I saw you in the thoroughfare—just after the New Year.’

‘It’s a small town.’

He moved closer. ‘You smell like the sea.’

‘I don’t. I haven’t been sea-bathing in weeks.’

‘Something stormy, then. As when a body comes in from the snow, and carries in the cold.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘What am I doing?’

‘By speaking in that way—poetical.’

‘Poetical?’

(Pritchard had the bad habit, when conversing with women, of answering a question with another question. Mary Menzies had complained of it once, long ago.)

‘Sentimental. Fanciful. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’ Anna plucked at her cuff. ‘I have recovered my health,’ she added. ‘And you can save your next question for yourself. I didn’t mean any kind of unnatural harm. I meant to take a pipe same as always, and then I fell asleep, and then the next thing I remember, I was in gaol.’

Pritchard placed his hat upon the armoire. ‘And since then, you’ve been hounded.’

‘To death.’

‘Poor you.’

‘Sympathy is worse.’

‘Well, then,’ Pritchard said, ‘I shan’t give you any. I’ll be cruel to you instead.’

‘I don’t care.’

It seemed to him that she spoke with pity and blankness, which angered him; he considered showing it, but then he reminded himself that he was on an errand. ‘Who’s the client?’ he said instead, to taunt her.

She had gone to the window, and half-turned in surprise. ‘What?’

‘You said you’ve an appointment. Who is it?’

‘There’s no client. I’m going with a lady to look at hats.’

He snorted. ‘I’ve heard of a whore’s honour, you know. You don’t have to lie.’

She studied him from what seemed like a great distance—as if he were only a mark on the horizon for her, a distant speck, receding. And then she said, slowly, as if speaking to a child, ‘Of course—you didn’t know. I’m done with whoring for a time.’

He raised his eyebrows, and then, to cover his surprise, laughed at her. ‘Honest woman, are you now? Hats and window boxes, is it? Gloves in the street?’

‘Just while I mourn.’

He felt that this answer—stated simply and quietly—made him look foolish for having laughed, and a knot of frustration began to gather in his chest.

‘What’s Dick got to say about that?’ he said, referring to Anna’s employer, Mr. Mannering.

Anna turned away. ‘He’s not happy,’ she said.

‘I should imagine not!’

‘I don’t want to talk about that with you, Jo.’

He bristled. ‘What’s your meaning?’

‘I don’t have a meaning. Not a special one. I’m just tired of thinking about him.’

‘Has he been a beast to you?’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘Not really.’

Pritchard knew about whores. The mincing types who pretended shock and spoke in high-pitched voices full of air; the buxom, helpful types who wore draped-elbow sleeves in any season, and called one ‘lad’; the drunkards, greedy and whining, with chipped red knuckles and watery eyes—and then there was the category to which Anna belonged, the unknowable types, by turns limpid and flashing, whose carriage bespoke an exquisite misery, a wretchedness so perfect and so absolute that it manifested as dignity, as calm. Anna Wetherell was more than a dark horse; she was darkness itself, the cloak of it. She was a silent oracle, Pritchard thought, knowing not wisdom, but wickedness—for whatever vicious things one might have done, or said, or witnessed, she was sure to have witnessed worse.

‘Why didn’t you come to me?’ he said at last, wanting to accuse her of something.

‘When?’

‘When you took ill.’

‘I was in gaol.’

‘But after that.’

‘What good would that have done?’

‘It might have saved you a good deal of trouble,’ he said curtly. ‘I could have proven that opium was poisoned, if you’d let me testify.’

‘You knew it was poisoned?’

‘I’m guessing. How else, Ann? Unless—’

Anna moved away from him again, to the bedhead this time, and wrapped her fingers around the iron knob. As she moved he smelled her again—the sea. The intensity of the sensation startled him. He had to check the urge to step towards her, to follow her, and breathe her in. He smelled salt, and iron, and the heavy, metallic taste of foul weather … low cloud, he thought, and rain. And not just the sea: a ship. That tarred ropy smell, the dusty damp of bleached teak, oiled sailcloth, candle wax. His mouth began to water.

‘Poisoned,’ Anna said, peering at him. ‘By whom?’

(Perhaps it was a sensory memory—merely a chance echo, the kind that suddenly flooded one’s body, and then vanished just as swiftly. He put it from his mind.)

‘The possibility must have occurred to you,’ he said, frowning.

‘I suppose. I don’t remember anything.’

‘Anything at all?’

‘Only sitting down with the pipe. Heating the pin. After that, nothing.’

‘I believed you weren’t a suicide—that you didn’t mean harm. I believed that.’

‘Oh well,’ Anna said, ‘but it does occur to one, now and again.’

‘Of course—now and again,’ Pritchard said, too quickly. He felt bested, and took a half step backward.

‘I don’t know a thing about poison,’ she said.

‘If I could examine the rest of the lump I could tell you whether or not the stuff had been cut with something else,’ Pritchard said. ‘That’s why I came. I want to know if I can buy some of it back from you to take a look at. Ah Sook won’t give me the time of day.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘You want to examine it—or swap it out?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You might be covering your tracks.’

Pritchard flushed with indignation. ‘What tracks?’ She said nothing, so he said again, ‘What tracks?’

‘Ah Sook thinks you poisoned it,’ Anna said at last, peering at him.

‘Does he? Bloody roundabout way of doing it, if I wanted to see you dead.’

‘What if you wanted to see him dead?’

‘And lose his business?’ Pritchard’s voice became low. ‘Look here: I don’t claim a brotherly feeling or anything of that sort, but I’ve got no quarrel with Oriental folk. Do you hear? I’ve got no reason to wish any one of them harm. None at all.’

‘His claim tent was slashed again. Last month. All his medicines got spoiled.’

‘What—you think that was me?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Then what’s the story?’ Pritchard said. ‘Give it up, Ann. What?’

‘He thinks you’re running a racket.’

‘Poisoning chinks?’ Pritchard snorted.

‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘And it’s not as stupid as all that, you know.’

‘Is that right! Come around to his perspective, have you?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ she said. ‘It’s not me who thinks—’

‘You think me a cross old man,’ Pritchard said. ‘I know it. I am a cross old man, Anna. But I’m not a murderer.’

The whore’s conviction disappeared as swiftly as it had come to animate her. She shrank back again, stepping sideways towards the window, and her hand moved to the tatted lace of her collar. She began to pluck at it. Prichard felt soothed. He recognised the gesture: not as her own, but as a motion that belonged to a girl, any girl.

‘Well, anyway,’ he said, trying to make amends. ‘Anyway.’

‘You’re not so very old,’ she said.

He wanted to touch her. ‘And then this laudanum business—the Crosbie Wells debacle,’ he said. ‘My mind’s been full of that.’

‘What laudanum business?’

‘Phial of laudanum, found underneath the hermit’s bed. It’s mine.’

‘Corked or uncorked?’

‘Corked. But only half full.’

She looked interested. ‘Yours—does that mean belonging to you personal, or just bought from your place?’

‘Bought,’ said Pritchard. ‘And not by Crosbie. I never sold that man a dram.’

Anna placed her hand against her cheek, thinking. ‘That’s strange.’

‘Old Crosbie Wells,’ said Pritchard, trying to be jolly. ‘Nobody ever paid the man a scrap of thought when he was living—and now this.’

‘Crosbie—’ Anna began, but then all at once, she was crying.

Pritchard made no move to advance towards her, to open his arms, to offer comfort. He watched her fish in her sleeve for a handkerchief and waited, his hands locked behind his back. She was not crying for Crosbie Wells. She hadn’t even known the man. She was crying for herself.

Of course, Pritchard thought, it must have been unpleasant, to have been tried for attempted suicide at the petty courts, and hounded by all manner of men, and discussed in the Times as a curiosity, and spoken about over breakfasts, and between rounds at billiards, as if one’s soul were a common property, a cause. He watched as she blew her nose, fumbling with her thin fingers to tuck the handkerchief away. This was not exhaustion merely: this was a grief of a different kind. She seemed not so much harassed as halved.

‘Never mind,’ Anna said at last, when she had regained control. ‘Never mind me.’

‘If I could just take a look at a piece of it,’ Pritchard said.

‘What?’

‘The resin. I’ll buy it back from you. I’m not going to swap it out—you can give me just a piece, you know; you don’t have to give up the whole lump.’

She shook her head, and in the sharpness of the movement Pritchard caught what was different about her. He strode forward, covering the space between them in three quick strides, and grabbed her sleeve.

‘Where is it?’ he said. ‘Where’s the tar?’

She pulled free of him. ‘I ate it,’ she said. ‘I ate the last of it last night, if you must know.’

‘You didn’t—you couldn’t have!’

Pritchard followed her, and turned her by the shoulders so she faced him. He placed the pad of his thumb on her chin and tilted her head back, to better see her eyes.

‘You’re lying,’ he said. ‘You’re dry.’

‘I ate it,’ Anna repeated. She shook herself free.

‘Did you give it back to Sook? Did he take it back?’

‘I ate it. Same as ever.’

‘Come off it, Ann. Don’t be a liar.’

‘I’m not a liar.’

‘You ate a lump of poisoned tar and your eyes are clear as dawn?’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Who’s to say it was poisoned?’

‘Even if it wasn’t—’

‘You know that it was poisoned? You’re sure?’

‘I don’t know a d—ned thing about this d—ned business, and I don’t like your tone,’ Pritchard snapped. ‘I just want a piece of it back so I can look at it, for heaven’s sake!’

She was roused again. ‘And who poisoned it, Jo? Who tried to kill me? What’s your guess?’

Pritchard waved his arm. ‘Ah Sook, maybe.’

‘Accuse the man who’s accusing you?’ She laughed. ‘That’s a guilty man’s game!’

‘I’m trying to help you!’ Pritchard said furiously. ‘I’m trying to help!’

‘There’s nothing to help!’ Anna cried. ‘No one to help! For the last time: there was no suicide, Joseph, and no—bloody—poison!’

‘Then explain to me why you ended up half-dead in the middle of the Christchurch-road!’

‘I can’t explain it!’

For the first time that day Pritchard saw real emotion on her face: fear, fury.

‘You took a pipe that night—same as usual?’

‘And every day since I made bail.’

‘Today?’

‘No. I ate the last of it last night. I told you.’

‘What time last night?’

‘Late. Midnight, maybe.’

Pritchard wanted to spit. ‘Don’t call me a fool. I’ve seen you when you’re under, and I’ve seen you coming up. Right now you’re sober as a nun.’

Her face crumpled. ‘If you don’t believe me, go away.’

‘I won’t. I won’t go.’

‘D—n you, Jo Pritchard!’

‘D—n you.’

She burst into tears again. Pritchard turned away. Where would she keep it? He strode to the armoire, opened it, and began rifling through the contents. Her empty dresses, hanging from the rail. Her petticoats. Her bloomers, most of them tattered and stained. Handkerchiefs, shawls, stays, stockings; her button boots. There was nothing. He moved to the dresser, where a spirit lamp sat upon a cracked china plate—this would be her opium lamp—and beside it, a wadded pair of gloves, a comb, a pincushion, an opened package of soap, sundry jars of cream and powder. These items he picked up and then replaced, roughly; he meant to turn the whole room over.

‘What are you doing?’ Anna said.

‘You’re hiding it—only you won’t tell me why!’

‘Those are my things.’

He laughed. ‘Keepsakes, are they? Precious mementos? Antiques?’

He wrenched the drawer from her dresser, and upended it over the floor. A cascade of trinkets rattled out. Coins, wooden spools of thread, ribbons, covered buttons, a pair of dressmaker’s shears. Three rolling champagne corks. A man’s shaving brush—she must have stolen that from somewhere. Matches, stays. The ticket from her passage to New Zealand. Wads of cloth. A silver-backed looking glass. Pritchard raked the pile. There was Anna’s pipe—and there ought to be a little box to match it, or perhaps a little pouch, inside of which her resin would be folded in a square of waxed paper, like toffee purchased from a store. He cursed.

‘You’re a beast,’ Anna said. ‘You’re detestable.’

He ignored her, and picked up the pipe.

It was of Chinese making, fashioned from bamboo, and about as long as Pritchard’s forearm. The bowl of the pipe sat some three inches away from its end; it protruded like a doorknob, and was fixed to the wood by means of a metal saddle. Pritchard weighed the thing in his hands, holding it as a flautist holds a flute. He sniffed it. There was a dark residue around the rim of the bowl—so someone had partaken of the pipe, and recently.

‘Happy?’ she said.

‘Watch your lip. Where’s the needle?’

‘There.’ She pointed at a square of cloth among the sorry detritus on the floor, through which was pushed a long hatpin, stained black at the tip. Pritchard sniffed this also. He then inserted the hatpin into the aperture of the bowl and rolled the tip about.

‘You’re going to break it.’

‘Be doing you a favour, then.’

(Pritchard deplored Anna’s craving for the drug—but why? He himself had taken opium many times. He had taken it in Kaniere, in fact, with Ah Sook, in the tiny hut that Sook had hung with Oriental fabrics, to still the air so that his precious lamps would not flicker in a draught.)

At last Pritchard tossed the pipe aside—but carelessly, so that the bowl struck the floorboards, and rang out.

‘Beast,’ Anna said again.

‘I’m a beast, am I?’

He lunged for her, not really intending to hurt her, but merely to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, until she told him the truth. But he was clumsy, and she wrenched away, and for the third time that afternoon, Pritchard’s nostrils were filled with the rich, briny smell of the ocean—and, impossibly, the metallic taste of cold—as if a wind had slapped him in the face, as if a sail had snapped above him, as if a storm was in the air. He faltered.

‘Get back,’ she said. She was holding her hands before her face, her fingers half-curled into fists. ‘I mean it, Joseph. I won’t be called a liar. Get back and get out.’

‘I’ll call you a liar if you d—ned well lie.’

‘Get back.’

‘Tell me where you’ve hidden it.’

‘Get back!’

‘Not until you tell me where it is!’ he shouted. ‘Tell me, you useless bloody whore!’

He lunged for her again, in desperation; he saw her eyes flash, and in the next moment she had reached into her breast and withdrawn a muff pistol, the single-loading kind. It was a slip of a piece, hardly longer than Pritchard’s finger, but from a distance of two paces it could shatter his chest. Instinctively he put up his hands. The piece was facing backward, with the muzzle pointing up towards her chin, and Anna had to spin the piece to fit it into her hand—but she was frantic, and in that moment three things happened at once. Pritchard stepped backwards, and stumbled on the edge of the rattan rug; behind him, the door burst open, and someone gave a cry; and Anna half-turned at the noise, started forwards, and shot herself in the breast.

The report from the small gun was hollow, even unremarkable—like the cracking of a topsail far above a deck. It seemed an echo of itself, as if the real shot had fired somewhere much further away, and this noise was just a copy. Stupidly Pritchard wheeled about, turning his back on Anna, to confront the figure at the door. His mind felt full of fog; he registered, in some distant way, that the man who had just entered was Aubert Gascoigne, the new clerk at the Magistrate’s Court. Pritchard did not know Gascoigne at all well. Some three weeks ago the clerk had come to his laboratory, seeking to fill a prescription for a bowel complaint—absurdly, Pritchard thought of that now. He wondered whether his tincture had helped the other man as he had promised it would.

For the briefest second, nobody moved … or perhaps no time passed at all. Then Gascoigne roared an oath, started forward, and fell upon the body of the whore. He wrenched her head back and the pistol clattered to the side—but the white of her neck was unscarred—there was no blood—and she was breathing. Her hands flew to her throat.

‘You fool—you fool!’ Gascoigne shouted. There was a sob in his voice. He grabbed her tatted collar with both hands and ripped it open. ‘Blank cartridge, was it? Wax pellet, was it? Thought you’d give us all another scare? What the devil do you think you’re playing at?’

Anna’s hand was moving over her breast, her fingers touching and tapping in confusion. Her eyes were wide.

Pritchard said, ‘A blank?’ He leaned down and picked up the pistol.

The barrel was hot, and the smell of gunpowder was in the air. But he could see no spent casing, and no hole anywhere. The wall behind Anna was plastered and smooth, just as it had been a second ago. The two men looked about—at the walls, at the floor, at Anna. The whore looked down at her breast. Pritchard held the pistol out, letting it dangle foolishly from his index finger, and Gascoigne took it up. Deftly he snapped open the barrel and peered into the breech. Then he turned on Anna.

‘Who loaded this piece?’ he demanded.

‘I did it myself,’ Anna said, bewildered. ‘I can show you the spares.’

‘Show me. Show me the spares.’

She clambered up, and went to the whatnot beside the bed; after a moment she returned with a tin box in which seven cartridges were rolling on a scrap of brown paper. Gascoigne touched them with his finger. Then he passed the pistol to the whore. ‘Do it just as you did. The very same.’ Anna nodded dumbly. She pivoted the barrel sideways and fitted a cartridge into the breech. She then snapped the barrel back correctly, cocked the piece, and handed the loaded pistol back to him. She looked terrified, Pritchard thought—dumbfounded, mechanical. Gascoigne took the pistol from her, stepped back several paces, levelled the piece, and fired at the headboard of her bed. The report sounded just as it had before—this time Pritchard heard a murmur of alarm from the floor below, and rapid footsteps—and they all looked to the spot where he had fired. A perfect hole, darkened slightly at its edges by the heat, pierced the centre of her pillow; a puff of feathered dust had risen up from the stuffing, and as they watched, floated down in a film of gauze. Gascoigne moved forward, and tossed the pillow aside. With his fingers he felt around the headboard of the bed, just as Anna had felt around her neck for injury, and after a moment he gave a grunt of satisfaction.

‘It’s there?’ Pritchard said.

‘Hardly made a scratch,’ Gascoigne said, testing the depth of the hole with the end of his finger. ‘Those muff pistols, they’re not worth much.’

‘But where—’ Pritchard was at a loss. His tongue felt thick in his mouth.

‘What happened to the first?’ said Gascoigne, echoing him. They all stared at the second cartridge, the visible cartridge, misshapen in his hand. Then Gascoigne looked at Anna, and Anna at Gascoigne—and it seemed to Pritchard that a look of understanding passed between them.

What a wretched thing it was, to behold one’s whore exchanging glances with another man! Pritchard wanted to despise her, but he could not: he felt dulled, even bewildered. There was a ringing in his ears.

Anna turned to him. ‘Will you go downstairs?’ she said. ‘Tell Edgar I was playing with the gun, or cleaning it, and it went off by accident.’

‘He isn’t at the desk,’ Pritchard said.

‘Tell the valet, then. Just make it known. I don’t want anybody coming up; I don’t want any fuss. Please do it.’

‘All right. I will,’ Pritchard said. ‘And then—’

‘And then you should go.’ Anna was firm.

‘I want what I came for.’ He spoke quietly, glancing sideways at Gascoigne—but the other man’s eyes were discreetly lowered.

‘I can’t help you, Joseph. I don’t have what you want. Please go.’

He looked into her eyes again. They were green, with a thick rind of darkness around the edge of the iris, and flecks of pebbled grey clustered around the pupil in rays. It had been months since he had seen the colour in her eyes, since he had seen her pupil as a point, a grain, and not as a blurred disc of blackness, dulled with sleep. She was sober—of this he had no doubt at all. So she was a liar, and maybe even a thief; so she was deceiving him. And her appointment, the man Gascoigne. There was another secret. Another lie. Going with a lady, to look at hats—!

But Pritchard found that he could not renew his anger. He felt ashamed. He felt as though it had been he who had intruded, as though it had been he who had disturbed an intimate scene in the whore’s own chambers, between Anna and Gascoigne. The shame Pritchard felt was of a very crude and childish sort: it came upon him as a rush of bitter feeling, swelling in his throat.

At last he turned on his heel and made to leave. In the doorway he reached back for the handle, to pull the door shut behind him—but he did it slowly, and watched them through the narrowing crack.

Gascoigne began moving just before the door was quite closed. He spun towards Anna and opened his arms for an embrace, and Anna fell into him, her pale cheek rising to fit into the curve of his neck. Gascoigne wrapped his arms strongly about her waist, and Anna’s body went limp; he lifted her, so that her toes trailed on the floor; she was clasped against him; he lowered his head and pressed his cheek against her hair. His jaw was clenched; his eyes were open; he breathed fiercely through his nose. Pritchard, with his eye at the door, was overcome with loneliness. He felt that he had never loved, and that no soul had ever loved him. He shut the door as softly as he could, and padded down the stairs.

‘May I interject to ask a question?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Can you show me exactly how Miss Wetherell was holding the pistol?’

‘Certainly. Like this—with the heel of her hand right here. I was standing at an angle to her, about where Mr. Mannering is sitting now, in relation to me, and her body was half-turned, like this.’

‘And if the gun had fired as expected, what kind of injury would Miss Wetherell likely have sustained?’

‘If she was lucky, a flesh wound in the shoulder. If she was unlucky—well, perhaps a little lower. Her heart, maybe. The left side … The truly curious thing, of course, is even if the cartridge was a blank, she still should have been impacted by the empty casing, or burnt by the powder, or seared at the very least. We couldn’t make heads or tails of it.’

‘Thank you. I’m sorry to interrupt.’

‘Is there something you can share with us, Mr. Moody?’

‘Presently I will—when I have heard the rest of the story.’

‘I must say, sir—you’re looking awfully queer.’

‘I’m quite well. Please continue.’

It was still early in the afternoon when Pritchard returned to his drug hall on Collingwood-street, but he felt that it ought to be much later—that night ought to be falling, to make sense of the exhaustion that he felt. He entered by way of the shop, and spent a foolish moment straightening the razor-strops with the corners of the shelves, and tidying the bottles so that they stood shoulder-to-shoulder against the lip of the display cabinet—but suddenly he could not bear himself. He set a card in the shop window informing callers to return on Monday, locked the door, and retired to his laboratory.

There were several orders set out upon his desk, to be made up, but he gazed down at the forms almost without seeing them. He took off his jacket and hung it on the hook beside the range. He tied his apron about his waist by habit. Then he stood and gazed at nothing.

Mary Menzies’s words had fixed him—they were his prophecy, his curse. ‘You have never been at peace with good’—he remembered them; he wrote them down; and by doing so he made sure her words came true. He became the man whom she rejected because she rejected him, because she left. And now he was thirty-eight, and he had never been in love, and other men had mistresses, and other men had wives. With his long finger Pritchard touched the shaft of a prescription bottle on the desk before him. She was nineteen. She was Mary Menzies in his mind.

A phrase of his father’s returned to him: you give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life. (‘Remember that, Joseph,’—with one hand on Pritchard’s shoulder, and the other clasping a newborn puppy against his chest; the next day, Pritchard dubbed the young thing Cromwell, and his father nodded once.) Recalling the words, Pritchard thought: is that what I have done, to my own self, to my own fate? Am I the dog in my father’s maxim, badly named? But it was not a question.

He sat down and placed his hands, palm downward, on the laboratory bench. His thoughts drifted back to Anna. By her own account, she had not intended to commit suicide at all—a claim that Pritchard believed was an honest one. Anna’s life was miserable, but she had her pleasures, and she was not a violent type. Pritchard felt that he knew her. He could not imagine that she would try to take her life. And yet—what had she said? It does occur to one, now and again. Yes, Pritchard thought heavily. Now and again, it does.

Anna was a seasoned opium eater. She took the drug nearly every day, and was well accustomed to its effects upon her body and her mind. Pritchard had never known her to lose consciousness so completely that she could not be revived for over twelve hours. He doubted that such a circumstance could have come about by accident. Well, if she truly had not intended to end her life—as she attested—then that left only two options: either she had been drugged by somebody else, used for some nefarious purpose, and then abandoned in the Christchurch-road, or (Pritchard gave a slow nod) she was bluffing. Yes. She had lied about the resin; she could easily be lying about the overdose, too. But for what purpose? Whom was she protecting? And to what end?

The Hokitika physician had confirmed that Anna had indeed partaken of a great deal of opium on the night of the 14th of January: his testament to this effect had been published in the West Coast Times on the day after Anna’s trial. Could Anna have managed to fool the physician, or to persuade him somehow to give a false diagnosis? Pritchard considered this. She had been in the gaol-house for over twelve hours, over which time she would have been prodded and poked by all manner of men, and witnessed by dozens of others, besides. She could hardly have fooled them all. True unconsciousness cannot be faked, Pritchard thought. Even a whore was not as good an actress as that.

All right: perhaps the drug had been poisoned after all. Pritchard turned his hands over, and studied the whorls on the pads of his fingers, each hand the mirror image of the other. When he pressed his fingertips together, they made a perfect doubled reflection, as when a man touches his forehead to a glass. He leaned forward to look at the whorls. He himself had certainly not altered the drug in any way, and he did not really suspect the Chinese man, Sook, of having done so either. Sook was fond of Anna. No, it was impossible that Sook might have sought to cause Anna harm. Well, that meant the drug must have been poisoned either before Pritchard bought it wholesale, or after Anna purchased her smaller portion from Ah Sook, to imbibe at home.

Pritchard’s source for opiates of all kinds was a man named Francis Carver. He considered Carver now. The man was a former convict, and had a poor reputation as a consequence; to Pritchard, however, he had always been courteous and fair, and Pritchard had no reason to think that Carver might wish him—or his business—any kind of active harm. As to whether Carver bore ill-will towards the Chinese, Pritchard had no idea—but he did not sell direct to the Chinese. He sold to Pritchard, and Pritchard alone.

Pritchard had first met Carver at a gambling house on Revell-street, some seven months ago. Pritchard was a keen gambler, and had been refreshing himself between games of craps, tallying his losses in his mind, when a scar-faced man sat down beside him. Pritchard inquired, as a pleasantry, whether the man was fond of cards, and what had brought him to Hokitika; soon they fell to talking. When in due course Pritchard named his own profession, Carver’s expression sharpened. Putting down his drink, he explained that he had a long-standing connexion with a former East Indiaman who controlled an opium poppy plantation in Bengal. If Pritchard was in need of opium, Carver could guarantee a product of unrivalled quality and limitless supply. At that time Pritchard had no stock of opium at all, save for some weak tinctures of laudanum he had purchased from a quack; without hesitation, therefore, he thanked Carver, shook his hand, and agreed to return the following morning to draw up the terms of their trade.

Since then Carver had supplied him with a total of three pounds of opium. He would not supply Pritchard with more than one pound at a time, for the reason (as he very frankly explained) that he liked to keep a very tight hold on his own supply, in order to prevent Pritchard from selling the drug wholesale to other sellers, and making an intermediary profit that way. (In selling opium to Ah Sook, Pritchard was of course doing exactly this—but Carver remained unaware of this auxiliary arrangement, for he was seldom in Hokitika, and Pritchard had not troubled himself to confess it.) The resin came wrapped in paper, pressed into a tin box not unlike a caddy for storing tea.

Pritchard picked up a clout from the laboratory bench and began to clean the dirt from beneath his fingernails—noticing, as he did so, that they were getting rather long.

Would Carver really have dared to poison the drug before he sold it wholesale to a drug emporium? Pritchard might have powdered the resin and turned it into laudanum; he might have sold it piecemeal to any number of clients; he might have used the drug himself. It was true that Carver had an unpleasant history with Anna; he had harmed her badly once before. But even if he wished to kill her by overdose, there was no guarantee that a portion of the poisoned opium would end up in Anna’s hands. Pritchard rolled a ball of dirt between his fingers. No: it was absurd to think that any man would devise a plot that comprised so many uncertainties. Carver might be a brute, but he was not a fool.

Having rejected that theory, the chemist now considered the second option: that the drug had been poisoned after Anna Wetherell was given a piece of it by Ah Sook to take at home. Perhaps someone had stolen into her rooms at the Gridiron, and poisoned it there. But again—why? Why bother to poison the opium at all? Why not kill the whore by more conventional means—by strangulation, or smothering, or battery?

Defeated, Pritchard turned his mind instead to the things he knew by instinct to be true. He knew that Anna Wetherell had not told the whole truth about the events of the 14th of January. He knew that someone had partaken of the drug recently from the pipe she had hidden in her room. He knew that she had ceased to take opium herself; by her eyes and her motions, he could not doubt that she was as dry as a bone. These certainties, in Pritchard’s eyes, could only point to one conclusion.

‘Hang it all,’ he whispered. ‘She’s lying—and on another man’s behalf.’

So the afternoon wore on.

In time Pritchard picked up his unfinished orders, and, for want of a more diverting occupation, began to work. He was not aware of the passing of the hours until a gentle knock at the laboratory door returned him to the present. He turned—noting, with a dim surprise, that the light had become very thin, and dusk was approaching—and saw Albert, Nilssen’s junior clerk, hovering in the doorway with his breath caught in his chest and an abashed look upon his face. He was carrying a note.

‘Oh—something from Nilssen,’ Pritchard said, coming forward. He had quite forgotten his conversation with Nilssen earlier that afternoon, and the request he had made of him—to find the goldsmith Quee, and to question him regarding the retorted gold that had been discovered on Crosbie Wells’s estate. He had forgotten about Crosbie Wells entirely—and his fortune, and his widow, and the vanished Mr. Staines. How silently the world revolved, when one was brooding, and alone.

Pritchard was fishing in his apron for a sixpence—but Albert, blushing furiously, stammered, ‘No, sir—’ and held up his palms, to show that the honour of having made the delivery was quite sufficient to sustain him.

In fact Albert was sure he had never had so exciting an afternoon in all his life. His employer, upon returning from Kaniere Chinatown some half hour previous, had been in such a state of agitation that he had almost torn the door from its hinges. He had penned the note that Albert was carrying now with all the passion of a symphonic composer in collusion with his muse. He had sealed it badly, dropped wax upon himself, cursed, and then thrust the folded, lumpy sheet at Albert, saying hoarsely, ‘Pritchard—to Pritchard—quick as you can.’ In the privacy of the chemist’s receiving room, just before he entered the laboratory, Albert had pinched the edges of the letter together to make the folded paper form a kind of tube, and by squinting down its length he had made out several words that seemed to him to smack of the gravest piracy. It thrilled him that his employer was up to no good.

‘Very well, then—thanks,’ Pritchard said, taking the letter. ‘Did he say a reply was needed?’

The boy said, ‘There’s not to be a reply, sir. But he said to stay and watch you burn it, after you’d read it through.’

Pritchard gave a snort of laughter. This was so like Nilssen: first he sulked, and then he complained of the messiness of it all, and then he dallied, and then he tried to remove all the burden of responsibility from himself—but as soon as he became a participant, as soon as he felt crucial, and impressive, then everything became a pantomime, a cloak-and-dagger show; he gloried in it.

Pritchard walked away a few paces (the boy looked disappointed), tore the seal with his fingers, and flattened the paper upon his laboratory desk. The letter read:

Jo—

Called on Quee, as per your request. You were right about the gold—his work—though he swears he has no notion how the stuff ended up with Wells. The whore’s mixed up in it all—perhaps you knew that already—though we can’t quite get to the bottom of it—the author, to use your phrase. Seems every man is implicated as we are—peripherally. Too much to set down here. I proposed a council. Orientals too. We meet in the back room of the CROWN, at SUNSET. Will ensure our council not disturbed. Tell no one—not even if you trust them & they are connected & may one day stand beside us as Accused. Be so good as to destroy this—

H. N.

MOON IN TAURUS, WAXING

In which Charlie Frost forms a hunch; Dick Mannering buckles on his holsters; and we venture upriver to the Kaniere claims.

Thomas Balfour’s inquiry at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand that morning had piqued the banker’s curiosity on several fronts, and as soon as the former had left the building, Mr. Frost immediately resolved to do some inquiring of his own. He was still holding in his hand the shares profile of the Aurora goldmine, owned and operated by the vanished prospector, Emery Staines. Aurora, Frost thought, tapping the document with his lean finger. Aurora. He knew that he had seen that name recently—but where? After a moment he laid the document aside, clambered down from his stool, and padded to the cabinet opposite his cubicle, where a row of leather spines were marked with the words ‘Returns by Quarter’. He selected the third and fourth quarters of the previous year, and returned to his desk to examine the goldmine’s records.

Charlie Frost was a man of scant reputation, for such a thing is only ever claimed, and Frost was a quiet soul, modest in his dress, mild in his features, and disinclined, whatever the provocation, to disturb the peace. When he spoke, it was slowly and with care. He rarely laughed openly, and although his posture was languid and easy, he always seemed alert, as if perpetually mindful of some rule of etiquette that other men no longer observed. He did not like to declare his preferences or to hold forth in speech; in fact he was reluctant, when in conversation, to assert an agenda of any kind. This was not at all to say that Frost lacked agenda, or that his preferences were few; in fact, the many rituals of his private life were regulated in the extreme, and his ambitions were tremendously particular. Rather, Frost had learned the value of appearing to be unassuming. He knew the latent power of obscurity (powerful, because it aroused curiosity in others) and he was capable of great strategy in wielding it—but he took extreme care to keep this talent hidden. The impression that strangers invariably formed, upon first meeting him, was that he was a man of reaction rather than of action, who was managed in business, seduced in love, and steadfastly docile in all his pleasures.

Frost was but four-and-twenty years of age, and New Zealand-born. His father had been a high-level official in the now defunct New Zealand Company, who, upon disembarking at the mouth of the Hutt River and finding a wealth of flat land to be divided and sold, had promptly sent home for a wife. Frost was not proud of the fact of his birth, for it was a rare citizenship for a white man to hold, and he felt that it was shaming. He told no stories about his childhood, spent in the marshy flat of the Hutt Valley, reading and re-reading his father’s thumbed copy of Paradise Lost, the only book besides the Bible that the family possessed. (By the age of eight, Frost could recite every speech of God’s, the Son’s, and Adam’s—but never Satan’s, whom he found pugnacious, and never Eve’s, whom he thought feeble, and a bore.) It was not an unhappy childhood, but Frost was unhappy when he recalled it. When he spoke about England, it was as though he missed that place very dearly, and could not wait to return.

With the dissolution of the New Zealand Company, Mr. Frost senior was all but bankrupted, and cast into disrepute. He turned to his only son for aid. Charlie Frost secured scribal work in Wellington, and soon was offered a place at a bank in the Lambton quarter, a position that earned him enough to keep his parents in health and relative comfort. When gold was discovered in Otago, Frost transferred to a bank at Lawrence, promising to send the larger portion of his wages home, each month, by private mail—a promise he had never broken. He had not once returned home to the Hutt Valley, however, and did not plan to. Charlie Frost tended to conceive of all his relationships in terms of profit and return, and he did not spare a thought for others once he considered that his duty had been served. Now, in Hokitika (for he had followed the rush from Lawrence to the Coast), he did not think at all about his parents, except when he was writing to them each month. This was a difficult task, for his father’s letters were abrupt and mortified, and his mother’s, full of a dismayed silence—sentiments that grieved Charlie Frost, but only briefly. After his replies had been written and dispatched, he shredded their letters into spills for lighting his cigars, cutting the pages lengthwise so as to occlude their import absolutely; the spills he burned, with great indifference.

Frost thumbed through the returns folder until he found the section that pertained to Kaniere and the Hokitika gorge. The records were listed alphabetically, with the Aurora as the second, beneath a claim that had been named, rather optimistically for the West Coast, the All Seasons. Frost leaned in close to the page to read the figures, and in the next moment, he gave a murmur of surprise.

In the month following its initial purchase, the Aurora claim had performed splendidly, pulling in almost a hundred pounds; come August, however, the claim’s profits had dropped off radically, until—Frost raised his eyebrows—virtually coming to a halt. The sum total of the Aurora’s profits over the last quarter was only twelve pounds. One pound weekly! That was very odd, for a mine of Aurora’s depth and promise. One pound weekly—why, that would be barely enough to cover the overheads, Frost thought. He bent closer over the book. The record showed that the Aurora was worked by one man only. The name was a Chinese one, so the labour would be cheap … but even so, Frost thought, the digger would still have to be paid a daily wage.

Charlie Frost was frowning. According to the shares profile, Emery Staines had first taken over the Aurora goldmine in the late autumn of the previous year. It appeared that, some weeks after this purchase, Staines had sold fifty-percent shares to the notorious Francis Carver; however, immediately following that transaction—as this record showed—the claim had run suddenly dry. Either Aurora had become, all of a sudden, a duffer claim—worth virtually nothing—or someone was doing a very good job of making it seem that way. Frost shut the folder and stood for a moment, thinking. His gaze wandered over the crowd: the diggers in their slouch hats, the investors, the escort in their braided epaulettes. Suddenly he remembered where he had seen that name before.

He put up a card in his cubicle to indicate that the window was closed.

‘You off for the day?’ a colleague asked.

‘I suppose I could be,’ said Frost, blinking. ‘I hadn’t thought that I might; I had intended to return after my lunch hour.’

‘We’ll be closed by two, and there’s no more buying today, once this lot is done,’ the other banker said. He stretched his back, and slapped his belly with both hands. ‘May as well see you Monday, Charlie.’

‘Well!’ Frost murmured, gazing into the crown of his hat, as though suddenly perplexed to see it in his hand. ‘That’s very kind of you. Thank you very much.’

Dick Mannering was alone in his office when Frost knocked upon the door. At his knock, Mannering’s collie-dog burst from beneath the desk in an explosion of joyful energy; she leaped upon Frost, her tail thumping the floor, her red mouth open.

‘Charlie Frost! You’re a man I didn’t expect to see,’ Mannering exclaimed, pushing his chair back from the desk. ‘Come in, come in—and close the door. I have the feeling that whatever it is you’re about to tell me, it’s not for everyone to hear.’

‘Down, girl,’ said Frost to the dog, gripping her muzzle, looking into her eyes, mussing her ears—and, satisfied, she dropped back onto all fours, and trotted back to her master, where she turned, sank down, put her nose upon her paws, and watched Frost from beneath her brows, sorrowfully.

He closed the door as he was bid. ‘How are you, Dick?’

‘How am I?’ Mannering spread his hands. ‘I’m curious, Charlie. Do you know that? I’m a very curious man, these days. About a whole raft of things. You know Staines hasn’t shown up—not anywhere. We even tried Holly in the gorge, though she’s not much of a bloodhound. Gave her a handkerchief to sniff at, and off she went—but then back again, with nothing. Yes, I’m a very curious man. I do hope you’ve brought a bit of news—or a bit of scandal, if news cannot be had. My word—what a fortnight it’s been! Take off your coat—yes—oh, don’t worry about the rain. It’s only water—and heaven knows we ought to be used to the stuff by now.’

Despite this encouragement Frost was careful to hang up his coat so that it did not touch Mannering’s, and to ensure that it would not drip upon Mannering’s overshoes, which were laid out beneath the coat-rack, each fitted with a shoe tree, and shined a handsome black. Then he plucked off his hat, somewhat gingerly.

‘It’s a pig of a day,’ he said.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ said Mannering. ‘You’ll have a brandy?’

‘I will, if you will,’ said Frost, this being his policy in all expressions of appetite and thirst. He sat down, placing the palms of his hands upon his knees, and looked about him.

Mannering’s office was located above the foyer of the Prince of Wales Opera House, and boasted a handsome view out over the theatre’s striped awning to Revell-street, and beyond it to the open ocean, visible between the fronts of the facing houses as a band of bluish-grey, occasionally of green, and today, through the rain, as a whitish yellow—the water having taken on the colour of the sky.

The room had been designed as a testament to the wealth of its owner; for Mannering, in addition to managing the opera house, received income as a whoremonger, a card sharp, a shareholder, and a goldfields magnate. In all these professions he possessed a wonderful knack for profit, most especially the kind that can be made off the back of the trespasses of other men: this the room’s furnishings made abundantly clear. The walls of his office were papered, and the cabinets oiled; there was a thick Turkish rug upon the floor; a ceramic bust, fashioned in the Roman style, served as a scowling bookend; under the window a specimen box displayed three black butterflies, each the size of a child’s outspread hand. Behind Mannering’s desk hung a sublime watercolour landscape, framed in gold: it showed a high cliff, slanting beams of sunlight, silhouetted foliage of a purplish hue, and, in the hazy distance, the pale wash of a rainbow, curving out of a cloud. Charlie Frost thought it a very fine piece of art, and one that commended Mannering’s taste most favourably. He was always pleased when he thought up a reason to pay a call upon the older man, so that he might sit in this very chair, and gaze up at it, and imagine that he was somewhere very grand and far away.

‘Yes: what a fortnight it’s been,’ Mannering was saying. ‘And now my best whore has gone off and declared herself in mourning! Bloody pain in the neck, I’m telling you. Beginning to think she might be cracked. That’s a blow. When it’s your best whore. That’s a blow. You know she was there with Emery, the night he disappeared.’

‘Miss Wetherell—and Mr. Staines?’ Frost had curled his hands around the scrolled arms of his chair, and was tracing the groove of the carving with the tips of his fingers.

Beauty, for Charlie Frost, was more or less synonymous with refinement. The ideal woman, in his mind, was one devoted to the project of her own enhancement, who was accomplished in the female arts of embroidery, piano-playing, pressing leaves, and the like; who sang sweetly, read quietly, and demurred to all opinion; who was a charming and priceless collectible; who loved, above all things, to be loved. Anna Wetherell had none of these qualities, but to admit that Anna did not at all resemble the fantastic shape of Frost’s phantasmic ideal is not at all to say that the banker did not care for her, or that he did not take his satisfaction like the rest. Imagining Anna and Staines together now, he felt a twinge of discomfort—almost of distaste.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mannering, plucking the crystal plug from the neck of the decanter, and swirling the liquid about. ‘He bought her for the whole night, and b—er the constable, or whoever might come knocking! At his own house, too! No slag hotels for him! He was most particular: it had to be her, he said, not Kate, not Lizzie; it had to be Anna. And then the next morning she’s half dead and he’s nowhere to be found. It’s done my head in, Charlie. Of course she’s no help. She says she can’t remember a d—n thing before the moment she woke up in gaol—and by the stupid look on her face I’m inclined to believe her. She’s my best whore, Charlie—but devil take that drug of hers; devil take it for his own. You’ll have a cigar?’

Frost accepted a cigar from the box, and Mannering bent to hold a paper spill to the coals—but the spill was too short, and flared too quickly, and Mannering burned his fingers. He dropped the paper into the grate with an oath. He was obliged to fashion another spill out of a twist of blotting paper, and it was several moments before both their cigars were lit.

‘But that’s not to say a word of the troubles you’ve been going through,’ Mannering added, as he sat down.

Frost looked pained. ‘My troubles—as you call them—are under control,’ he said.

‘I should say they are not,’ said Mannering. ‘What with the widow arriving Thursday—and now the whole town’s talking! I’ll tell you what it looks like from where I’m standing. It looks an awful lot like you knew that gold was planted in the hermit’s cottage, and once he died, you made d—ned sure the sale went through just as fast as could be.’

‘That’s not the truth of it,’ said the banker.

‘It looks like you’re in it together, Charlie,’ Mannering went on. ‘You and Clinch: you look like partners, to the hilt. They’ll bring in a judge, you know. They’ll send someone from the High Court. This kind of thing doesn’t just blow over. We’ll all be drawn into it—where we were on the night of the fourteenth of January, all of that. We’d better get our stories straight before that happens. I’m not accusing you. I’m describing it from where I stand.’

There was often a touch of the sovereign address about Mannering’s speech, for his self-perception was an unshakeable one, authoritarian and absolute. He could not view the world but from the perspective of commanding it, and he loved to declaim. In this he was the radical opposite of his guest—a difference that, in Mannering’s case, caused him some irritation, for although he preferred deferential company, he was made peevish by those whom he considered unworthy of his attention. He was very generous to Charlie Frost, always sharing liquor and cigars with the young man, and gifting him gallery tickets to all the latest entertainment, but occasionally he found Frost’s quiet reserve grating. Mannering tended to cast his followers into roles, labelling them as one labels a man by his profession, terming him ‘the doctor’ or ‘the corporal’; his labels, internally made and never voiced aloud, described other men purely by way of their relation to him—which was how he saw everyone whom he encountered: as reflections of, or detractions from, his own authentic self.

Mannering, as has been already observed, was a very fat man. In his twenties he had been stout, and in his thirties, quite pot-bellied; by the time he reached his forties, his torso had acquired an almost spherical proportion, and he was obliged, to his private dismay, to request assistance in both mounting and dismounting his horse. Rather than admit that his girth had become an impediment to daily activity, Mannering blamed gout, a condition with which he had never been afflicted, but one that he felt had a soundly aristocratic ring. He very much liked to be mistaken for an aristocrat, an assumption that happened very often, for he had mutton-chop whiskers and a fair complexion, and he favoured expensive dress. That day his necktie was fastened with a gold stickpin, and his vest (the buttons of which were rather palpably strained) sported notched lapels.

‘We’re not in anything together,’ said Frost. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’

Mannering shook his head. ‘I can see you’re in a bind, Charlie—I can see it! You and Clinch both. If it comes to trial—it may come to trial, you know—then you’ll have to explain why the sale of the cottage was put through so quickly. That will be the crucial point—the point on which you’ll have to agree. I’m not suggesting perjury. I’m just saying your stories will have to square. What are you after—help? Do you need an alibi?’

‘An alibi?’ said Frost. ‘Whatever for?’

‘Come,’ said Mannering, with a paternal wag of his finger. ‘Don’t tell me you weren’t up to something. Just look at how fast the sale went through!’

Frost sipped at his brandy. ‘We ought not to discuss it in such a casual manner. Not when there are other men involved.’

(This was another of his policies: always to appear reluctant to divulge.)

‘Hang other men,’ Mannering exclaimed. ‘Hang “ought” and “ought not”! What’s the story? Give it up!’

‘I’ll tell you; but there was nothing criminal about it,’ Frost said—not without enjoyment, for he rather liked declaring that he was not at all to blame. ‘The transaction was perfectly legal, and perfectly sound.’

‘How do you explain it, then?’

‘Explain what?’

‘How it all happened!’

‘It’s perfectly explicable,’ Frost said calmly. ‘When Crosbie Wells died, Ben Löwenthal heard about it nearly straight away, because he went over to interview that political chap the very instant he got into town—so as to run a special in the paper the next morning. And the political chap—Lauderback’s his name; Alistair Lauderback—well, he had just come from Wells’s cottage; he was the one to find the fellow dead. Naturally he told Löwenthal all about it.’

‘Crafty Jew,’ said Mannering, with some relish. ‘Always in the right place at the right time, aren’t they?’

‘I suppose,’ Frost replied—for he did not wish to register an opinion one way or another. ‘But as I was saying: Löwenthal found out about Wells’s death before anybody. Before the coroner even arrived at the cottage.’

‘But he didn’t think to buy it up,’ said Mannering. ‘The land.’

‘No; but he knew that Clinch was on the lookout to make an investment, and so he did him a good turn, and let him in on the news—that the Wells estate would soon be up for sale, I mean. Clinch came to me the next morning with his deposit, ready to buy. And that’s all there is to it.’

‘Oh no it isn’t,’ said Mannering.

‘I assure you it is,’ said Frost.

‘I can read between the lines, Charlie,’ said Mannering. ‘“Did him a good turn”? From the goodness of his charitable heart, eh? Not him—not Löwenthal! That’s a tip-off, and it’s a tip-off about a great bloody pile. They’re in on it together—Löwenthal and Clinch. I’ll bet my hat.’

‘If they are,’ said Frost, shrugging, ‘I’m sure that I don’t know about it. All that I’m telling you is that the sale of the cottage was perfectly legal.’

‘Legal, the banker tells me! But you still haven’t answered my question. Why did it have to happen so bloody quickly?’

Frost was unruffled. ‘Simply because there was no paperwork in the way. Crosbie Wells had nothing: no debt, no insurance, nothing to resolve. No papers.’

‘No papers?’

‘Not in his cottage. Not a birth certificate, not a ticket, not a licence. Nothing.’

Mannering rolled his cigar in his fingers. ‘No papers,’ he said again. ‘What do you make of that?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps he lost them.’

‘How do you lose your papers, though?’

‘I don’t know,’ Frost said again. He did not like to be pressed to share his views.

‘Perhaps someone burned them. Got rid of them.’

Frost frowned slightly. ‘Who?’

‘That political fellow,’ said Mannering. ‘Lauderback. He was the first upon the scene. Maybe he’s mixed up in this business somehow. Maybe he told Löwenthal about the fortune hidden in the cottage. Maybe he saw the fortune—and told Löwenthal about it—and then Löwenthal told Clinch! But that’s foolish,’ he added, rebutting his own hypothesis. ‘There’s nothing in that for him, is there? And nothing for the Jew. Unless everyone’s getting a cut, somewhere along the line …’

‘Nobody got a cut,’ said Frost. ‘The fortune’s being held in escrow at the bank. Nobody can touch it. At least not until the business with the widow gets straightened out.’

‘Oh yes—the widow,’ said Mannering, with relish. ‘There’s a turn of events for you! What do you make of her? She’s an acquaintance of mine, you know—an acquaintance. Greenway, that’s her maiden name. I never knew her as Mrs. Wells—the mistress Greenway, she was to me. How do you like her, Charlie?’

Frost shrugged. ‘She’s got paperwork on her side,’ he said. ‘If the marriage certificate turns out to be legal then the sale will be revoked, and the fortune will be hers. That’s in the hands of the bureaucrats now.’

‘But how do you like her, I said?’

Frost looked annoyed. ‘She cuts a fine figure,’ he said. ‘I think her very handsome.’ He stuck his cigar in the side of his mouth, and bit down upon it, lending to his expression the shadow of a wince.

‘She’s handsome all right,’ said Mannering happily. ‘Oh, she’s handsome all right! Plays a man like a pianoforte, and what a repertoire—indeed! I suppose that’s what happened to poor old Crosbie Wells: he got played, like all the rest of them.’

‘I cannot make sense of their union at all,’ Frost admitted. ‘What could an old man like Crosbie Wells have to offer—well, even a plain woman, let alone a handsome one? I cannot make sense of her attraction; though of course I can well imagine his.’

‘You are forgetting his fortune,’ Mannering said, wagging his finger. ‘The strongest aphrodisiac of all! Surely she married old Crosbie for his money. And then he hoarded it up, and she had nothing to do but wait for him to die. What else could explain it? When she popped up so soon after his death—like she’d been planning it, you know. Oh, Lydia Wells is a canny soul! She keeps her eyes on the pennies and her fingers on the pounds. She wouldn’t sign her name except to profit.’

Frost did not respond at once, for Mannering’s response had cued him to remember the reason for his visit, and he wished to collect his thoughts before he announced his business; after a moment, however, Mannering gave a bark of laughter, and thumped his fist upon the desk.

‘There it is!’ he exclaimed, with much delight. ‘I knew it! I knew you were in a fix one way or another—and I knew I’d smoke you out! What is it, then? What’s your crime? What’s the rub? You’ve given it away, Charlie; it’s written all over you. It’s something to do with that fortune, isn’t it? Something about Crosbie Wells.’

Frost sipped his brandy. He had committed no crime, exactly—and yet there was a rub, and it did have to do with the fortune, and it did concern Crosbie Wells. His gaze slid over Mannering’s shoulder to the window, and he paused a moment, in contemplation of the view, deciding how best to phrase the matter.

After the fortune discovered in Wells’s cottage had been valued by the bank, Edgar Clinch had made Frost a very fine present, to acknowledge his role in facilitating the sale: a banknote made out to the sum of thirty pounds. The receipt of this banknote had a sudden and intoxicating effect upon Charlie Frost, whose income was devoted, in the main, to the upkeep of parents he never saw, and did not love. In a frenzy of excitement, unprecedented in his worldly experience, Frost determined to spend the entire sum of money, and at once. He would not inform his parents of the windfall, and he would spend every last penny on himself. He changed the note into thirty shining sovereigns, and with these he purchased a silk vest, a case of whisky, a set of leather-bound histories, a ruby lapel-pin, a box of fine imported candies, and a set of monogrammed handkerchiefs, his initials picked out against a rose.

Lydia Wells had arrived in Hokitika some days after this prodigal fit. Immediately upon her arrival she visited the Reserve Bank, announcing her intentions to revoke the sale of her late husband’s cottage and effects. If this revocation proved successful, Frost would be obliged, he knew, to recover those thirty pounds in turn. He could not sell the vest back again, except as worn goods; the books and the lapel-pin he could pawn, but only at a fraction of their worth; he had opened the case of whisky; the candies were gone; and what fool would want to buy a handkerchief embroidered with another man’s name? All in all he would be lucky to recover even half of the amount that he had spent. He would be forced to go to one of Hokitika’s many usurers, and beg for credit; he would bear his debt for months, perhaps even for years; and worst of all, he would even have to confess the whole affair to his parents. The prospect made him sick.

But he had not come to Mannering to confess his humiliations. ‘I am not in a fix,’ he replied curtly, turning his gaze back to his host, ‘but it is my guess that someone else very well might be. You see: I do not believe that fortune belonged to Crosbie Wells at all. I believe that it was stolen.’ He leaned over to tap the ash of his cigar, and saw that the end had gone out.

‘Well—from whom?’ Mannering demanded.

‘That is precisely what I wish to speak with you about,’ the young banker said. There were lucifers in his vest pocket; he transferred his cigar to his right hand, to retrieve them. ‘I had a notion just now, this afternoon, and I wanted to run it by you. It’s about Emery Staines.’

‘Oh—no doubt he’s wrapped up in it all,’ Mannering said, throwing himself back into his chair. (Frost set about lighting his cigar a second time.) ‘Disappearing that very same day! No doubt he’s connected. I don’t hold out much hope for our friend Emery, I’m telling you that. We have a saying on the fields: it’s unlucky to be lucky for long. Have you heard that one? Well, Emery Staines was the luckiest man I’m ever likely to know. He went from rags to riches, that boy, and all without a helping hand from any quarter. I’m wagering that he was murdered, Charlie. Murdered in the river—or on the beach—and his body washed away. No man likes to see a boy make his fortune. Not before he’s thirty. And especially not when that fortune’s clean. I’m wagering whoever killed him was twenty years his senior, on the inside. At least twenty years. How about that for a bet?’

‘Forgive me,’ Frost said, and shook his head very slightly.

‘Oh yes,’ Mannering said, disappointed. ‘You don’t place your money, do you? You’re one of those sensible types. Never toss a coin except to lay it in your purse.’

Frost did not reply to this, having been put in mind, uncomfortably, of the thirty pounds he had recently squandered in such a profligate way; after a moment Mannering cried, ‘But don’t leave me waiting!’—feeling embarrassed, for his last remark had come out rather more as an insult than he had intended it to seem. ‘Give it up! What’s your notion?’

Charlie Frost explained what he had discovered that morning: that Frank Carver owned a half-share in the Aurora goldmine, and that he and Emery Staines were, to all intents and purposes, partners.

‘Yes—I suppose I knew something about that,’ Mannering said, vaguely. ‘That’s a long story, though, and Staines’s own business. Why do you mention it?’

‘Because the Aurora claim is connected to the Crosbie Wells debacle.’

Mannering frowned. ‘How so?’

‘I’ll tell you.’

‘Do.’

Frost puffed on his cigar a moment. ‘The Wells fortune came through the bank,’ he said at last. ‘Came through me.’

‘Yes?’

Dick Mannering could not bear to let another man hold the stage for long, and tended to interrupt frequently, most often to encourage his interlocutor to reach his own conclusion as quickly and concisely as he could.

Frost, however, was not to be hurried. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘here’s the curious thing. The gold had already been smelted, and not by a Company man. It had been done privately, by the looks of things.’

‘Smelted—already!’ said Mannering. ‘I didn’t hear about that.’

‘No; you wouldn’t have,’ said Frost. ‘Every piece of gold that comes over our counter has to be retorted, even if the process has been done before. It’s to prevent any makeweights from slipping through, and to ensure a uniform quality. So Killarney did it all over again. He smelted Wells’s colour before it was valued, and by the time anybody saw it, it had been poured into bars and stamped with the Reserve seal. Nobody outside the bank could have known that it had been retorted once before—save for the man who hid it in the first place, of course. Oh, and the commission merchant, who found it in the cottage, and brought it to the bank.’