The Luminaries

‘Who was that—Cochran?’

‘Harald Nilssen. Of Nilssen & Co.’

Mannering frowned. ‘Why not Cochran?’

Frost paused to draw on his cigar. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last.

‘What’s Clinch doing, dragging another body into the affair?’ said Mannering. ‘Surely he might have cleared the place himself. What’s he doing, dragging Harald Nilssen into the mix?’

‘I’m telling you: Clinch never dreamed there’d be anything of value in the cottage,’ Frost said. ‘He was flabbergasted when the fortune turned up.’

‘Flabbergasted, was he?’

‘Yes.’

‘That your word, or his?’

‘His.’

‘Flabbergasted,’ Mannering said again.

Frost continued. ‘Well, it worked out famously for Nilssen. He was set to take home ten percent of the value of the goods in the cottage. Lucky day for him. He walked home with four hundred pounds!’

Mannering still wore a sceptical expression. ‘Well, go on,’ he said. ‘Smelted. The gold had been smelted, you were saying.’

‘So I had a look at it,’ said Frost. ‘We always write a short description of the ore—whether it’s in flakes or whatnot—before it’s smelted down. The practice is no different when the gold’s been smelted already: we’re still obliged to make a record of what the stuff looked like when it came in. For reasons of—’ (Frost paused; he had been going to say ‘security’, but this did not exactly make sense) ‘—prudence,’ he finished, rather lamely. ‘Anyway, I examined the squares before Killarney put them in the crucible, and I saw that at the bottom of each square the smelter—whoever he was—had inscribed a word.’

He paused.

‘Well, what was it?’ said Mannering.

‘Aurora,’ said Frost.

‘Aurora.’

‘That’s right.’

All of a sudden Mannering was looking very alert. ‘But then these squares—all of them—were retorted again,’ he said. ‘Pressed into bullion, by your man at the bank.’

Frost nodded. ‘And then locked up in the vault, that very same day—once the commission merchant had taken his cut, and the estate taxes had been paid.’

‘So there’s no evidence of that name,’ Mannering said. ‘Do I have that right? That name is gone. That name has been smelted away.’

‘Gone, yes,’ said Frost. ‘But I made a note of it, of course; it was officially recorded. Written down in my book, as I told you.’

Mannering set down his glass. ‘All right, Charlie. How much to make that one page disappear—or your whole book, for that matter? How much for a little carelessness on your part? A touch of water, or a touch of fire?’

Frost was surprised. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘Just answer the question. Could you make that one page disappear?’

‘I could,’ Frost said, ‘but I wasn’t the only one to notice that inscription, you know. Killarney saw it. Mayhew did too. One of the buyers saw it; Jack Harmon, I think it was. He’s off in Greymouth now. Any one of them might have mentioned it to any number of others. It was quite remarkable, of course—that inscription. Not something a man would easily forget.’

‘D—n,’ said Mannering. He struck the desk with his fist. ‘D—n, d—n, d—n.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ Frost said again. ‘What’s this all about?’

‘What’s the matter with you, Charlie?’ Mannering burst out suddenly. ‘Why—it’s taken you two bloody weeks to front up to me about this! What have you been doing—sitting on your fingers? What?’

Frost drew back. ‘I came to see you today because I thought this information might help recover Mr. Staines,’ he said, with dignity. ‘Given that this money very plainly belongs to him, and not to Crosbie Wells!’

‘Rot. You might have done that two weeks ago. Or any day since.’

‘But I only made the connexion to Staines this morning! How was I to know about the Aurora? I don’t keep a tally of every man’s bankroll, and every man’s claim. I had no reason—’

‘You got a cut,’ Mannering interrupted. He levelled a finger at Frost. ‘You got a cut of that pile.’

Frost flushed. ‘That’s hardly pertinent.’

‘Did you or did you not get a cut of Crosbie Wells’s fortune?’

‘Well—unofficially—’

Mannering swore. ‘And you were just sitting tight, weren’t you?’ he said. He sat back, and with a disgusted flick of his wrist, threw the end of his cigar into the fire. ‘Until the widow showed up, and you got backed in a corner. And now you’re showing your cards—and making it look like charity! Well, I’ll be d—ned, Charlie. I’ll be God-d—ned.’

Frost had a wounded look. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s not the reason. I only put the pieces together this morning. Truly I did. Tom Balfour came by the bank with this cock-and-bull story about Francis Carver, and asked me to look up his shares profile, and I found out—’

‘What?’

‘—that Carver had taken out shares against Aurora, soon after Mr. Staines purchased it. I didn’t know about that before this morning.’

‘What’s that about Tom Balfour?’

‘And when Mr. Balfour left I looked up the Aurora’s records, and I noticed that Aurora’s profits started to fall away right around the time that Carver took out his shares, and that’s when I remembered about the name in the smelting, and put it all together. Truly.’

Mannering raised his voice. ‘What’s Tom Balfour wanting with Francis Carver?’

‘He’s wanting to bring him to the law,’ Frost said.

‘On what account?’

‘He said that Carver lifted a fortune from another man’s claim, or something to that tune. But he was cagey about it, and he began with a lie.’

‘Hm,’ said the magnate.

‘I brought the matter to you directly,’ Frost went on, still hoping for praise. ‘I left the bank early, to come to you directly. As soon as I put all the pieces together.’

‘All the pieces!’ Mannering exclaimed. ‘You haven’t got all the pieces, Charlie. You don’t know what half the pieces look like.’

Frost was offended. ‘What does that mean?’

But Mannering did not reply. ‘Johnny Quee,’ he said. ‘Johnny bloody Quee.’ He stood up so suddenly that the chair fell away behind him and struck the wall; the collie-dog leaped to her feet, overjoyed, and began to pant.

‘Who?’ said Charlie Frost, before he remembered: Quee was the name of the digger who worked the Aurora. His name had been written on the record at the bank.

‘My Chinese problem—and now yours too, I’m afraid,’ said Mannering, darkly. ‘Are you with me, Charlie, or against me?’

Frost looked down at his cigar. ‘With you, of course. I don’t see why you have to ask questions like that.’

Mannering went to the back of the room. He opened a cabinet to reveal two carbines, sundry pistols, and an enormous belt that sported two buckskin holsters and a leather fringe. He began buckling this rather absurd accessory about his ample waist. ‘You ought to be armed—or are you already?’

Frost coloured slightly. He leaned forward and crushed out his cigar—taking his time about it, stabbing the blunt end three times against the dish, and then again, grinding the ash to a fine black dust.

Mannering stamped his foot. ‘Hi there! Are you armed, or are you not?’

‘I am not,’ said Frost, dropping the cigar butt at last. ‘To be perfectly honest with you, Dick, I have never fired a gun.’

‘Nothing to it,’ said Mannering. ‘Easy as breathing.’ He returned to the cabinet, selecting two smart percussion revolvers from the rack.

Frost was watching him. ‘I should be a very poor second,’ he said presently, trying to keep his voice calm, ‘if I do not know the subject of your quarrel, and I do not have the means to end it.’

‘Never mind—never mind,’ said Mannering, inspecting his revolvers. ‘I was going to say I’ve got a Colt Army you could use, but now that I think of it … it takes a bloody age to load, and you don’t want to bother with shot and powder. Not in this rain. Not if you haven’t done it before. We’ll make do. We’ll make do.’

Frost looked at Mannering’s belt.

‘Outrageous, isn’t it?’ said Mannering, without smiling. He thrust the revolvers into his holsters, crossed the room to the coat-rack, and detached his greatcoat from its wooden hanger. ‘Don’t worry; see, when I put my coat on, and button it up, nobody will be any the wiser. I tell you, my blood is boiling, Charlie. That rotten chink! My blood is boiling.’

‘I have no idea why,’ said Frost.

‘He knows why,’ said Mannering.

‘Stop a moment,’ said Frost. ‘Just let me—just tell me this. What is it exactly that you’re planning?’

‘We’re going to give a Chinaman a scare,’ said the magnate, thrusting his arms into his coat.

‘What kind of a scare?’ said Frost—who had registered the plural pronoun with trepidation. ‘And on what score?’

‘This Chinaman works the Aurora,’ said Mannering. ‘This is his work, Charlie: the smelting you’re talking about.’

‘But what’s your grievance with him?’

‘Less of a grievance; more of a grudge.’

‘Oh!’ said Frost suddenly. ‘You don’t suppose that he killed Mr. Staines?’

Mannering made a noise of impatience that sounded almost like a groan. He removed Frost’s coat from the rack, and tossed it to him; the latter caught it, but made no move to put it on.

‘Let’s go,’ said Mannering. ‘Time’s wasting.’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ the other burst out, ‘you might do me the courtesy of a plain speech. I’ll need to have my story straight, if we’re going to go storming in to bloody Chinatown!’

(Frost regretted this phrasing as soon as he spoke—for he did not want to storm into Chinatown under any conditions—with his story straight or otherwise.)

‘There isn’t time,’ said Mannering. ‘I’ll tell you on the way. Put your coat on.’

‘No,’ said Charlie Frost—finding, to his surprise, that he could muster a delicate firmness, and hold his ground. ‘You’re not in a rush; you’re only excited. Tell me now.’

Mannering dithered, his hat in his hands. ‘This Chinese fellow worked for me,’ he said at last. ‘He dug the Aurora, before I sold it on to Staines.’

Frost blinked. ‘The Aurora was yours?’

‘And when Staines bought it,’ Mannering said, nodding, ‘the chink stayed on, and kept on digging. He’s on a contract, you see. Johnny Quee is his name.’

‘I didn’t know the Aurora had been yours.’

‘Half the land between here and the Grey has belonged to me at one stage or another,’ said Mannering, throwing out his chest a little. ‘But anyway. Before Staines came along, Quee and I had a bit of a quarrel. No: not exactly a quarrel. I have my way of doing things, that’s all, and the chinks have theirs. Here’s what happened. Every week I took the total of Quee’s yield—after it had been counted, of course—and I fed it back into the claim.’

‘You what?’

‘I fed it back into the claim.’

‘You were salting your own land!’ said Frost, with a shocked expression.

Charlie Frost was no great observer of human nature, and as a consequence, felt betrayed by others very frequently. The air of cryptic strategy with which he most often spoke was not manufactured, though he was entirely sensible of its effects; it came, rather, out of a fundamental blindness to all experience exterior to his own. Frost did not know how to listen to himself as if he were somebody else; he did not know how to see the world from another man’s eyes; he did not know how to contemplate another man’s nature, except to compare it, either enviously or pitiably, to his own. He was a private hedonist, perennially wrapped in the cocoon of his own senses, mindful, always, of the things he already possessed, and the things he had yet to gain; his subjectivity was comprehensive, and complete. He was never forthright, and never declared his private motivations in a public sphere, and for this he was usually perceived to be a highly objective thinker, possessed of an impartial, equable mind. But this was not the case. The shock that he now expressed was not a show of indignation, and nor was it even disapproving in any real way: he was simply baffled, having failed to perceive Mannering as anything other than a man of enviable income and pitiable health, whose cigars were always of the finest quality, and whose decanter never seemed to run dry.

Mannering shrugged. ‘I’m not the first man to want to make a profit, and I won’t be the last,’ he said.

‘For shame,’ said Frost.

But shame, for Mannering, was an emotion that attended only failure; he could not be made to feel compunction if he had not, in his own estimation, failed. He went on. ‘All right—so you’ve got an opinion about it. Here’s how it happened, though. The actual claim was useless. Little better than a tailing pile. After I bought it I buried maybe twenty pounds’ worth of pure ore in the gravel, scattering it all about, then directed Quee to begin his digging. Quee finds it all right. At the end of the week he goes to have it weighed at the camp station like all the other fellows. This is before the gold escort, you remember. Back when the bankers had their stations along the river, and the buyers worked alone. So when my claim comes up, and my gold is weighed, the bankers ask me if I want to bank it right there. I say no, not yet; I’ll take it back, pure. My story goes that I’m keeping it back for a private buyer who’s going to export it altogether, as a lump sum. Or some such tale; I don’t remember now. Well, after the stuff is weighed, and the value recorded, I gather it all back up again, wait for the cover of darkness, creep back to the claim, and shake it out a second time, over the gravel.’

‘I can’t believe you,’ said Frost.

‘Believe it or not, as you please,’ said Mannering. ‘Due credit to the Chinaman, of course: this happened maybe four or five times, and each week he came back with the exact same pile, more or less. He found it all, no matter how much I messed up the gravel, no matter how deep the grit settled, no matter the weather or what have you. Worked like a Trojan. That’s one thing I’ll say for the Chinese: when it comes to pure old-fashioned work, you can’t fault them.’

‘But you never told him what you were doing.’

Mannering was shocked. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Confess my sins? Of course I didn’t! Anyway. To all appearances, it looked like the Aurora was pulling twenty pounds a week. Nobody knew it was the same twenty pounds, over and over! She just looked like a good, steady claim.’

Mannering had begun his tale in a posture of some exasperation, but his natural affinity for storytelling could not long be held in check, and it was enjoyable to him, to recount a proof of his own ingenuity. He relaxed into his narrative, thumping the brim of his stovepipe hat against his leg.

‘But then Quee started to catch on,’ he said. ‘Must have been watching, or maybe he just figured me out. So what does he do? Cunning fox! He starts retorting the dust each week in a little crucible of his own. Then he brings it to the camp station already smelted, and done up in these one-pound blocks, about so big. There’s no throwing that back among the stones!

‘No matter, I thought. I had plenty of other claims for sale, and the other ones were pulling good dust. I could shuffle it around. So I started banking Quee’s squares as returns against the Dream of England claim, and every week, I’d salt the Aurora just as before, only I’d use Dream of England dust, not Aurora dust—do you see? Aurora had been pulling twenty pounds a week until then; she had to maintain that same yield, or it would look like her profits had started to fall away—and I wouldn’t get my profit, when I sold.

‘But then Quee got wise to that,’ Mannering went on, raising his voice in a final cadence, ‘and the bloody devil starts carving the name of the plot—Aurora—into his little squares. I can’t bank that against the Dream of England without raising a few eyebrows, can I? Would you believe it? The cheek of him!’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Frost, who was still feeling very much betrayed.

‘Well, there it is, anyway,’ said Mannering. ‘That’s the story. That’s when Emery arrived.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘Well—what happened?’

‘You know what happened. I sold him the Aurora.’

‘But the claim was a duffer, you said!’

‘Yes,’ said Mannering.

‘You sold him a duffer claim!’

‘Yes.’

‘But he’s your friend,’ said Charlie Frost, and even as he spoke the words he regretted them. How pathetic it sounded—to reprimand a man like Mannering about friendship! Mannering was in the august high noon of his life. He was prosperous, and well dressed, and he owned the largest and most handsome building on Revell-street. There were gold nuggets hanging from his watch chain. He ate meat at every meal. He had known a hundred women—maybe even a thousand—maybe more. What did he care about friends? Frost found that he was blushing.

Mannering studied the younger man for a moment, and then said, ‘Here’s the heart of it, Charlie. A four thousand-pound fortune—smelted, and every square of it stamped with the word Aurora—has turned up in a dead man’s house. We don’t know why, and we don’t know how, but we do know who, and that “who” is my old friend Quee in Kaniere. All right? This is why we have to go to Chinatown. So as to ask him a question or two.’

Frost felt that Mannering was still concealing something from him. ‘But the fortune itself,’ he said. ‘How do you account for it? If Aurora is a duffer, then where did all of that gold come from? And if Aurora’s not a duffer, then who’s cooking the books to make her appear as if she’s worth nothing at all?’

The magnate put his hat on. ‘All I know,’ he said, running his finger and thumb around the brim and back again, ‘is that I’ve got a score to settle. No man makes a fool of Dick Mannering more than once, and the way I see it, this johnny chink has had a jolly good try. Come along. Or are you turning yellow on me?’

No man likes to be called a coward—and least of all, a man who is feeling downright cowardly. In a cold voice Frost said, ‘I’m not yellow in the least.’

‘Good,’ said Mannering. ‘No hard feelings, then. Come along.’

Frost thrust his arms into his coat. ‘I only hope it doesn’t come to blows,’ he said.

‘We’ll see about that,’ said Mannering. ‘We’ll see about that. Come on, Holly—come on, girl! Giddyap! We’ve got business in the Hokitika gorge!’

As Frost and Mannering stepped out of the Prince of Wales Opera House, tugging down their hats against the rain, Thomas Balfour was turning into Weld-street, some three blocks to the south. Balfour had spent the last hour and a half at the Deutsches Gasthaus on Camp-street, where a pile of sauerkraut, sausage, and brown gravy, a seat before an open fire, and a period of uninterrupted contemplation had helped to refocus his mind upon Alistair Lauderback’s affairs. He quit the Gasthaus refreshed, and made immediately for the office of the West Coast Times.

The shutters were drawn inside the box window, and the front door closed. Balfour tried the handle: it was locked. Curious, he stamped around to the rear of the building, to the small apartment where Benjamin Löwenthal, the paper’s editor lived. He listened for a moment at the door, and, hearing nothing, cautiously turned the doorknob.

The door opened easily, and Balfour found himself face to face with Löwenthal himself, who was sitting at his table with his hands in his lap—quite as if he had been waiting for Balfour to startle him out of a trance. He stood up, in haste.

‘Tom,’ he said. ‘What is it? Is something wrong? Why didn’t you knock?’

The table at which he had been seated was properly a laboratory desk, the surface of which was pocked and worn, and mottled with spilled ink and chemicals; today, however, it had been swept clean of the detritus of Löwenthal’s trade, and covered with an embroidered cloth. In the centre was a little plate upon which a fat candle was burning.

‘Oh,’ Balfour said. ‘Sorry, Ben. Hello, there. Sorry. Sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb your—I mean, I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

‘But you are most welcome!’ said Löwenthal, perceiving that Balfour was not bearing ill tidings after all, but had simply dropped in for a chat. ‘Come in, out of the rain.’

‘Didn’t mean to break your—’

‘You haven’t broken anything. Come in, come in—close the door!’

‘It’s not business, exactly,’ Balfour said, by way of apology, knowing that Löwenthal’s holy day was a day of rest. ‘It’s not work, exactly. I just wanted to talk with you about something.’

‘It is never work, talking with you,’ Löwenthal replied generously, and then, for the fourth time, ‘But you must come in.’

At last Balfour stepped inside and closed the door. Löwenthal resumed his seat and folded his hands together. He said, ‘I have long thought that, for the Jew, the newspaper business is the perfect occupation. No edition on Sunday, you see—and so the timing of the Shabbat is perfect. I have pity for my Christian competitors. They must spend their Sunday setting type, and spreading ink, ready for Monday; they cannot rest. When you came up the path just now, that was the subject of my thinking. Yes, hang up your coat. Do sit down.’

‘I’m a Church of England man, myself,’ said Balfour—who, like many men of that religion, was made very uncomfortable by icons of faith. He eyed Löwenthal’s candle with some wariness, quite as if his host had laid out a hairshirt or a metal cilice.

‘What is on your mind, Tom?’

Benjamin Löwenthal was not at all displeased that his weekly observances had been interrupted, for his religion was of a very confident variety, and it was not in his nature to be self-doubting. He often broke his Shabbat vows in small ways, and did not chastise himself for it—for he was sensible of the difference between duty that is dreaded, and duty that comes from love; he believed in the acuity of his own perception, and felt that whenever he broke the rules, he broke them for reasons that were right. He was also (it must be admitted) rather restless, after two hours of unmitigated prayer—for Löwenthal was an energetic spirit, and could not be without external stimulation for long.

‘Listen,’ Balfour said now, placing his fingertips on the table between them. ‘I’ve just heard about Emery Staines.’

‘Ah!’ said Löwenthal, surprised. ‘Only just now? Your head has been buried in the sand, perhaps!’

‘I’ve been busy,’ said Balfour, eyeing the candle a second time—for ever since he was a boy he had not been able to sit before a candle without wanting to touch it, to sweep his index finger through the flame until it blackened, to mould the soft edges where the wax was warm, to dip his fingertip into the pool of molten heat and then withdraw it, swiftly, so that the tallow formed a yellow cap over the pad of his finger which blanched and constricted as it cooled.

‘Too busy for the news?’ said Löwenthal, teasing him.

‘I’ve got a fellow in town. A political fellow.’

‘Oh yes: the honourable Lauderback,’ said Löwenthal. He sat back in his chair. ‘Well, I hope that he is reading my paper, even if you are not! He has featured in the pages enough.’

‘Yes—featured,’ said Balfour. ‘But listen, Ben: I wanted to ask you a question. I stopped in at the bank this morning, and I heard someone’s been putting up notices in the paper. On Mr. Staines’s behalf—begging his return. Am I allowed to ask who placed them?’

‘Certainly,’ Löwenthal said. ‘A notice is a public affair—and in any case, she left a box number at the bottom of the advertisement, as you might have seen; you only have to go to the post office, and look at the boxes, and you will see her name.’

‘“She”?’

‘Yes, you’ll be surprised by this,’ said Löwenthal. ‘It was one of our ladies of the night! Will you guess which one?’

‘Lizzie? Irish Lizzie?’

‘Anna Wetherell.’

‘Anna?’ said Balfour.

‘Yes!’ said Löwenthal, now smiling broadly—for he had an insider’s sensibility, and enjoyed himself the most when he was permitted to occupy that role. ‘You wouldn’t have guessed that, would you? She came to me not two days after Mr. Staines first disappeared. I tried to persuade her to wait until more time had passed—it seemed wasteful to advertise for a man’s return when he was only two days’ gone. He might have merely walked into the gorge, I said, or ridden up the beach to the Grey. He might be back to-morrow! So I told her. But she was adamant. She told me he had not departed; he had vanished. She was very clear on that. She used those very words.’

‘Vanished,’ echoed Balfour.

‘The poor girl had been tried at the Courts that very morning,’ Löwenthal said. ‘What rotten luck she has had, this year past. She’s a dear girl, Tom—very dear.’

Balfour frowned: he did not like to be told that Anna Wetherell was a dear girl. ‘Can’t imagine it,’ he said aloud, and shook his head. ‘Can’t imagine it—the two of them. They’re as chalk and cheese.’

‘Chalk and cheese,’ echoed Löwenthal. He took pleasure in foreign idioms. ‘Who is the chalk? Staines, I suppose—because of his quarrying!’

Balfour did not seem to have heard him. ‘Did Anna give you any indication as to why she was asking after Staines? I mean—why—’

‘She was attempting to make contact with him, of course,’ Löwenthal said. ‘But that is not your question, I think.’

‘I just meant—’ But Balfour did not go on.

Löwenthal was smiling. ‘It is hardly a wonder, Tom! If that fellow showed her the smallest ounce of affection—well.’

‘What?’

The editor made a clucking noise. ‘Well, you must admit it: next to Mr. Staines, you and I are very grey indeed.’

Balfour scowled. What was a bit of greyness? Grey hair dignified a man. ‘Here’s another question,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘What do you know about a man named Francis Carver?’

Löwenthal raised his eyebrows. ‘Not a great deal,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard stories, of course. One is always hearing stories about men of his type.’

‘Yes,’ said Balfour.

‘What do I know about Carver?’ Löwenthal mused, turning the question over in his mind. ‘Well, I know that he’s got roots in Hong Kong. His father was a financier of some kind—something to do with merchant trading. But he and his father must have parted ways, because he is not associated with a parent firm any longer. He is a lone agent, is he not? A trader. Perhaps he and his father parted ways after he was convicted.’

‘But what do you make of him?’ Balfour pressed.

‘I suppose that my impression of him is not an altogether good one. He is a rich man’s son first and a convict second, but it might just as well be the other way about: I believe he shows the worst of both worlds. He’s a thug, but he’s conniving. Or, to put it another way, his life is lavish, but it’s base.’

(This character summation was a quintessential one for Benjamin Löwenthal, who, in his thinking, tended always to position himself as the elucidating third party between opposing forces. In his evaluations of other men, Löwenthal first identified an essential disparity in their person, and then explained how the poles of this disparity could only be synthesised in theory, and by Löwenthal himself. He was fated to see the inherent duality in all things—even in his own appraisal of the duality of all things—and was obliged, as a consequence, to adopt a strict personal code of categorical imperatives, as a protective measure against what he perceived to be a world of discrepancy and flux. This personal code was phlegmatic, reflexive, and highly principled; it was the only fixed seat from which he could regard these never-ending dualities, and he depended upon it wholly. He tended to be relaxed in his daily schedule, humorous in his religion, and flexible in his business—but upon his imperatives, he could not be mistaken, and he would not yield.)

‘Carver got me in a touch of hot water recently,’ he went on. ‘Around a fortnight ago, he left his mooring off-schedule—and in the middle of the night. Well, it was a Sunday, and so the shipping news had been published already, in Saturday’s edition. But because Godspeed wasn’t scheduled to leave that day, and because she left well after sundown, somehow her departure wasn’t recorded in the customhouse log. Well, nobody told me anything about it, and so her departure was never recorded in the paper either. Quite as if the ship never left her mooring! The Harbourmaster was very upset about it.’

‘Last Sunday?’ said Balfour. ‘That’s the day Lauderback arrived.’

‘I suppose it was. The fourteenth.’

‘But Carver was in the Arahura Valley that very same night!’

Löwenthal looked up sharply. ‘Who told you that?’

‘A Maori fellow. Tay something, his name is. Youngish chap; wears a big green pendant. I spoke with him in the street this morning.’

‘What is his authority?’

Balfour explained that Te Rau Tauwhare and Crosbie Wells had been great friends, and that Tauwhare had observed Francis Carver entering the cottage on the day of the hermit’s death. As to whether Carver had been present in the cottage before or after Wells’s death, Balfour did not know, but Tauwhare had assured him that Carver’s arrival had occurred before Lauderback’s—and Lauderback, by his own testimony, had arrived at the cottage not long after the event of the hermit’s death, for when he entered the man’s kettle had been boiling on the range, and had not yet run dry. It stood to reason, therefore, that Francis Carver had been present in the cottage before Crosbie Wells passed away, and perhaps (Balfour realised with a chill) had even witnessed his death.

Löwenthal stroked his moustache. ‘This is very interesting news,’ he said. ‘Godspeed sailed late that evening, well after sundown. So Carver must have come straight back to Hokitika from the Arahura Valley, made his way directly for the ship, and weighed anchor, all before the dawn. That is a very hasty departure, I think.’

‘Rum to my eye,’ said Balfour. He was thinking about his vanished shipping crate.

‘And when one considers that Staines disappeared around the very same time—’

‘And Anna,’ said Balfour, cutting across him. ‘That was the night of her collapse—because Lauderback found her, you remember, in the road.’

‘Ah,’ said Löwenthal. ‘Another coincidence.’

‘You might say only a weak mind puts faith in coincidence,’ said Balfour, ‘but I say—I say—a string of coincidences cannot be a coincidence. A string of them!’

‘No indeed,’ said Löwenthal, distantly.

Presently Balfour said, ‘But young Staines. That’s a perfect shame, that is. There’s no use being soft about it, Ben—he’s been murdered, surely. A man doesn’t vanish. A poor man, maybe. But not a man of means.’

‘Mm,’ said Löwenthal—who was not thinking about Staines. ‘I wonder what Carver was doing with Wells in the Arahura. And what he was running away from, for that matter. Or running towards.’ The editor thought a moment more, and then exclaimed, ‘I say: Lauderback’s not mixed up with Carver, is he?’

Balfour expelled a long breath. ‘Well, that’s the real question,’ he said, with a show of great reluctance. ‘But I’d be breaking Lauderback’s confidence if I told you. I’d be breaking my word.’ He looked again at the wick of the candle, hoping that his friend would prompt him to continue.

Unhappily for Balfour, however, Löwenthal’s moral code did not accept the kind of violation that Balfour was proposing he indulge. After studying Balfour dispassionately for a moment, he sat back in his chair, and changed the subject. ‘Do you know,’ he said, speaking in a brisker tone, ‘you are not the first man to come by my office and ask me about that notice in the paper—the one about Emery Staines.’

Balfour looked up, both disappointed and surprised. ‘Why—who else?’

‘A man came by in the middle of the week. Wednesday. Or perhaps it was Tuesday. Irish. A clergyman by profession—but not a Catholic; he was a Methodist, I think. He’s to be the chaplain of the new gaol.’

‘Free Methodist,’ Balfour said. ‘I met him this morning. Strange looking. Very unfortunate teeth. What was his interest on account of?’

‘But I can’t remember his name,’ Löwenthal murmured, tapping his lip.

‘Why was he interested in Staines?’ Balfour asked again—for he did not know the chaplain’s name, and could not offer it.

Löwenthal folded his hands together again, on the tabletop. ‘Well, it was rather odd,’ he said. ‘Apparently he went along with the coroner to Crosbie Wells’s cottage, to collect the man’s remains.’

‘Yes—and then buried him,’ said Balfour, nodding. ‘Dug the grave.’

‘Devlin,’ said Löwenthal, striking the table. ‘That’s his name: Devlin. But I haven’t got the first name. Give me another moment.’

‘But anyway,’ said Balfour. ‘As I was asking. What’s he got to do with Staines?’

‘I don’t exactly know,’ Löwenthal admitted. ‘From our brief conversation I gathered that he needed to speak to Mr. Staines very urgently—either about the death of Crosbie Wells, or about something related to the death of Crosbie Wells. But I can’t tell you any more than that. I didn’t ask.’

‘It’s a shame you didn’t,’ said Balfour. ‘That’s a loose end, that is.’

‘Why, Tom,’ said Löwenthal, with a sudden smile, ‘you are sounding like a detective!’

Balfour flushed. ‘I’m not really,’ he said. ‘I’m only trying to figure something out.’

‘Figure something out—for your friend Lauderback, who has sworn you to silence!’

Balfour remembered that the clergyman had also overheard Lauderback’s story, that same morning, and this thought prompted a stirring of alarm: there was a real loose end, he thought. Really, Lauderback ought to have been more cautious, in speaking of such private matters in a public place! ‘Well,’ he said, bristling, ‘isn’t it odd? This chap—Devlin—’

‘Cowell Devlin,’ said Löwenthal. ‘That’s his name: I knew it would come to me. Cowell Devlin. Yes: unfortunate teeth.’

‘Whoever he is, I’ve never seen him before,’ Balfour said. ‘Why’s he so concerned about Emery Staines—out of nowhere? Doesn’t it strike you as odd?’

‘Oh, very odd,’ Löwenthal said, still smiling. ‘Very odd. But you’re getting hot under your collar, Tom.’

Balfour had indeed become very flushed. ‘It’s Lauderback,’ he began, but Löwenthal shook his head.

‘No, no: I won’t make you break your confidence,’ he said. ‘I was only teasing you. Let’s change the subject. I won’t ask.’

But Thomas Balfour was wishing very much that Löwenthal would ask. He was very ready to betray Alistair Lauderback’s confidence, and he had rather hoped that by pretending that he could not possibly divulge the politician’s secret, he could tempt Löwenthal to beg him to do exactly that. But evidently Löwenthal did not play this kind of game. (Perhaps he did not wish to, or perhaps he did not know that he might.) Balfour felt stifled. He wished that, at the outset, he had sat down and told the tale of Lauderback’s blackmail and proposed revenge, frankly and in full. Now he would have to leave without really having learned anything—for he could hardly offer to narrate the story now, after the editor had assured him he did not need to know it!

We will interject to observe that this was a regrettable censorship; for if Balfour had recounted Lauderback’s tale in full, the events of the 27th of January might have played out rather differently for him—and for a number of other men. Prompted by certain particulars of Lauderback’s story, Löwenthal would have remembered an event that he had not had reason to remember for many months: a memory that would have been of great assistance to Balfour’s investigations of Carver, helping to explain, in part at least, that man’s mysterious assumption of the surname Wells.

As it happened, however, Balfour did not narrate Lauderback’s tale, and Löwenthal’s memory was not jogged, and presently Balfour, rising from the spattered table, had no choice but to thank his friend and bid him goodbye—feeling, as Löwenthal also did, that their conversation had been something of a disappointment, having served only to raise his hopes, and then frustrate them. Löwenthal returned to the quiet contemplation of his faith, and Balfour to the slush of Revell-street, where the bells were ringing half past three; the day rolled on.

But onward also rolls the outer sphere—the boundless present, which contains the bounded past. This story is being narrated, with much allusion and repeated emphasis, to Walter Moody—and Benjamin Löwenthal, who is also present in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel, is hearing parts of the tale for the very first time. Suddenly he is put in mind of an event that occurred some eight months prior. When Thomas Balfour pauses to drink, as he is doing now, Löwenthal steps forward, around the billiard table, and raises his hand to indicate that he wishes to interject. Balfour invites him to do so, and Löwenthal begins to narrate the memory that has so recently returned to him, speaking with the hushed gravity of one conveying very important news.

Here is his account.

One morning in the month of June, 1865, a dark-haired man with a scar on his cheek entered Löwenthal’s small office on Weld-street and asked for a notice to be placed in the West Coast Times. Löwenthal agreed, took out his pen, and asked the man what he wished to advertise. The man replied that he had lost a shipping crate that contained items of great personal value. He would pay a sum of twenty pounds if the crate were to be returned to him—or fifty, if the crate were to be returned to him unopened. He did not say what was inside the crate, beyond the fact that its personal value was considerable; he spoke gruffly, and used very plain words. When Löwenthal asked his name, he did not answer. Instead he pulled a birth certificate from his pocket and laid it on the desk. Löwenthal copied down the name—Mr. Crosbie Francis Wells—and inquired, finally, where the man would like responders to be directed, if indeed his lost shipping crate was found. The man named an address on Gibson Quay. Löwenthal recorded this, filled out a receipt, collected his fee, and then bid the man good morning.

One might well ask (and indeed, Moody did ask) how Löwenthal could be so certain of the precise details of this event, given that the memory had only just returned to him, nearly eight months later, and he had not had any opportunity to verify its particulars. How could Löwenthal be sure, firstly, that the man who placed this advertisement did indeed have a scar upon his cheek; secondly, that this event had taken place in June of the previous year, and thirdly, that the name upon the birth certificate was, without a shadow of a doubt, Crosbie Francis Wells?

Löwenthal’s reply was courteous, but rather lengthy. He explained to Moody that the West Coast Times had been founded in May of 1865, roughly one month after Löwenthal’s first landing in New Zealand. At first printing, the newspaper’s print run was a mere twenty copies, one each for Hokitika’s eighteen hotels, one for the newly appointed magistrate, and one for Löwenthal himself. (Within a month, and following the purchase of a steam-powered press, Löwenthal’s print run had expanded to two hundred; now, in January 1866, he was printing nearly a thousand copies of every edition, and he had hired a staff of two.) In order to advertise to his subscribers that the Times had been Hokitika’s very first daily gazette, Löwenthal set the first edition of the paper behind glass and hung it in his front office. He therefore remembered the exact date of the newspaper’s establishment (the 29th day of May, 1865), for he saw this framed edition every morning. The man in question, Löwenthal explained, had certainly arrived at some point in June, for Löwenthal’s steam-powered press had been delivered on the first day of July, and he distinctly remembered processing the scarred man’s advertisement on his old hand-powered machine.

How was it that his memory was so distinct upon this point? Well, upon setting the type, Löwenthal had discovered that two inches square (the standard size for a column advertisement, and the size for which the scarred man had paid) was not enough to contain the message: the advertisement was one word too long to fit in the column space available. Unless Löwenthal shuffled around his repeat notices and changed the format of the paper altogether, he would be forced to create what typographers call a ‘widow’: that is, the final word of the advertisement (which was ‘Wells’) would be marooned at the top of the third column, producing an undesirable and even confusing effect in the reader’s mind. By the time Löwenthal discovered this, the scarred man had long since left his office, and Löwenthal was disinclined to venture out into the streets to find him. Instead he looked for a word to remove, finally deciding to excise the man’s middle name, Francis. This omission would prevent the creation of a ‘widow’, and the format of his column would not be spoiled.

The West Coast Times was published early the following morning, and well before noon, the scarred man returned. He insisted—though he did not give a reason—that it was of the utmost importance that his middle name was included. He resented very much that Löwenthal had altered his advertisement without his knowledge, and expressed his displeasure with the same plainspoken gruffness with which he had first entreated the editor’s assistance. Löwenthal, apologising profusely, printed the notice again—and five times after that, for the man had paid for a week’s worth of advertising, and Löwenthal thought it prudent, under the circumstances, to offer him a seventh printing for free.

Therefore, as Löwenthal explained to Moody, he was certain both of the date of the event, and of the man’s full name, Crosbie Francis Wells. The event stood out in his mind: it is always his first mistake that an entrepreneur remembers, looking back upon the origins of his enterprise, and the displeasure of a patron is not easily forgotten, when one takes one’s business to heart.

This only left the question of the man’s description—for how could Löwenthal be sure that the man in question did in fact possess a scar upon his cheek, as the ex-convict known as Francis Carver certainly did, and as the hermit known as Crosbie Wells certainly did not? Upon this final point, Löwenthal conceded that he could not be sure. Perhaps in remembering the event he had overlaid a different memory of a scar-faced man. But he wished to add that his powers of recollection were typically strong, and he could picture this man very vividly in his mind; he remembered that the man had been holding a top hat, and that he had pressed it between his palms as he spoke, as if he meant to compress the thing to a single sheet of felt. This detail, surely, could not be false! Löwenthal declared that he would be willing to wager a decent sum of money that the man he remembered had indeed possessed a scar, shaped like a sickle, upon his cheek—and that he had possessed, also, a birth certificate that bore the name Crosbie Francis Wells. Löwenthal did concede, however, that he had never known the hermit, Crosbie Wells, in life, and had no way to imagine his features, because no image or sketch of the dead man had survived him.

This new information, as one can well imagine, gave rise to a veritable cacophony of interjection and supposition in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel, and the narrative did not resume for some time. But we shall leave them in the present, and bear onward, in the past.

The ferry service that ran between Kaniere and the mouth of the Hokitika River had not been interrupted by the inclement weather, though their custom had slowed; the ferrymen, with no one to escort and no chores outstanding, were sitting about in the open warehouse adjacent to the quay, smoking cigarettes and playing at whist. They looked none too happy to abandon their game and venture out into the rain, and named a fare that reflected this displeasure. Mannering agreed to the sum at once, however, and the ferrymen were obliged to put away their cards, stub out their cigarettes, and set about carrying the boat down the ramp to the water.

Kaniere was only some four miles upriver, a distance that would be covered in no time at all on the return journey, when the oarsmen no longer had to pull against the current; the journey inland, however, could easily take up to an hour, depending on the river’s motion, the wind, and the pull of the tide. Diggers travelling back and forth between Kaniere and Hokitika usually covered that distance by coach, or on foot, but the coach had been and gone already, and the weather disinclined them to walk.

Mannering paid the fare, and presently he and Frost were sitting in the stern of a painted dinghy (in fact it was a lifeboat, salvaged from a wreck) with the collie-dog Holly between them. The stroke-side oarsmen pushed off from the bank with the blades of their oars, and pulled strongly; soon the craft was on her way upstream.

Sitting with their backs against the stern, Frost and Mannering found themselves face-to-face with the oarsmen, rather like a pair of outsized, well-dressed coxswains; the distance between them closed each time the oarsmen leaned forward to take another stroke. The two men therefore did not speak about the business they were about to perform, for to do so would have been to invite the oarsmen into their confidence. Instead Mannering kept up a steady flow of chatter about the weather, the Americas, soil, glass, breakfast, sluice mining, native timbers, the Baltic naval theatre, and life upon the fields. Frost, who was prone to seasickness, did not move at all, except to reach up periodically and wipe away the drips that formed beneath the brim of his hat. He responded to Mannering’s chatter only with clenched noises of agreement.

In truth Frost was feeling very frightened—and progressively more frightened, as each stroke carried the craft closer and closer to the gorge. What in all heaven had come over him—in saying that he was not yellow, when he was as yellow as a man could be? He could easily have pretended that he was expected back at the bank! Now he was lurching around in three inches of brown water, shivering, unarmed, and unprepared—the ill-chosen second in another man’s duel—and for what? What was his quarrel with the Chinaman Quee? What was his grudge? He had never laid eyes upon the man in all his life! Frost reached up to wipe the brim of his hat.

The Hokitika River threaded its way over gravel flats, the stones of which were uniformly round and worn. The banks of the river were fringed darkly with scrub, the foliage made still darker by the rain; the hills beyond them crawled with shifting cloud. One had the sense, peering up at them, that distance was measured in stages: the tall kahikatea, rising out of the scrub, were silhouetted green in the foreground, blue in the middle distance, and grey on the crest of the hills, where they merged with the colour of the mist. The Alps were shrouded, but on a fine day (as Mannering remarked) they would have been quite visible, as a sharp ridge of white against the sky.

The craft bore on. They were passed by one canoe, travelling swiftly downriver, conveying a bearded surveyor and a pair of Maori guides—who lifted their hats, cheerfully enough, and Mannering did likewise. (Frost could not risk the motion.) After that, there was nothing; only the riverbanks, jolting by; the rain lashing at the water. The gulls that had followed them from the river mouth lost interest and fell back. Twenty minutes or so passed, and the craft turned a corner—and then, as a lamp suddenly illuminates a crowded room, there was noise and motion all around them.

The canvas settlement of Kaniere was stationed as a midpoint between Hokitika and the inland claims. The land around the settlement was fairly flat, rutted by a veritable lattice of gullies and streams, all of them bearing stones and gravel down from the Alps, towards the sea; the sound of moving water was ever-present here, as a distant roar, a click, a rush, a patter. As one early surveyor had put it, on the Coast, wherever there was water, there was gold—and there was water all about, water dripping from the ferns, water beading on the branches, water making fat the mosses that hung from the trees, water filling one’s footsteps, welling up.

To Frost’s eyes, the camp at Kaniere made for a very dismal picture. The diggers’ tents, terraced in crooked rows, bowed low under the weight of endless rain; several had collapsed altogether. Ropes ran back and forth between them, heavy with flags and wet laundry. Several of the tents had been bricked with a makeshift siding made of schist and clay, and were faring better; one enterprising party had thought to hang a second sheet in the trees above them, as an auxiliary fly. Nailed to the tree-trunks were painted signs advertising every kind of entertainment and drink. (A man needed no more than a canvas fly and a bottle to open a grog-shanty on the diggings, though he would suffer a fine, and even a gaoling, were he to be sprung by the law; most of the liquor sold in this way had been fermented in the camp. Charlie Frost had once tried the Kaniere rotgut, only to spit out his mouthful in disgust. The liquor was oily, acidic in taste, and thick with strings of matter; it had smelled, he thought, very like a photographic emulsion.)

Frost marvelled that the rain had not driven the diggers indoors; their spirits, in fact, seemed quite undampened. They were clustered at the riverside, some of them panning, knee-deep in the water, others rattling their sluice boxes, still others cleaning their pots, bathing, soaping their laundry, plaiting rope, and darning on the shore. They all wore the digger’s habitual costume of moleskin, serge, and twill. Some of them sported sashes about their waists, dyed the brightest scarlet, in the piratical fashion of the time, and most wore slouch hats with the brims turned down. They shouted back and forth to one another as they worked, seeming to take no notice of the rain. Behind this shouting, one could hear the conventional hubbub of industry—the ringing chop of an axe, laughter, whistling. Blue smoke hung in the air and dispersed over the river in lazy gusts. The sound of an accordion drifted up from deep in the trees, and from somewhere further off came a roar of applause.

‘Quiet, isn’t it?’ said Mannering. ‘Even for a Saturday.’

Frost did not think that it was quiet.

‘Hardly a man out,’ said Mannering.

Frost could see dozens of men—perhaps hundreds.

The panorama before them was Charlie Frost’s very first impression of Kaniere—and indeed, his first impression of Hokitika’s environs at large, for in the seven months since he had crossed the Hokitika bar, he had never once ventured inland, nor once along the beachfront further than the high terrace of Seaview. Although he frequently bemoaned the smallness of his circumstances, he knew, in his innermost heart, that his spirit was not well suited to adventure; now, as he watched a man haul a branch onto a puny fire at the river’s edge, and deposit the thing bodily onto the dark bed of ashes, causing a whuff of smoke to engulf him, blackly, so that he began to cough in the terrible, lung-wracking way of a man not long for this world, Frost felt thoroughly justified in his conservatism. Kaniere, he told himself internally, was a wretched, God-forsaken place.

The ferry pulled into the shallows, and the lifeboat’s keel ground on the stones. The forward oarsmen jumped out and dragged the boat clear of the water, so that Mannering and Frost could clamber out of the craft without wetting their boots—an unnecessary courtesy, for their boots were very wet already. The collie-dog leaped over the gunwale and flopped, belly-first, into the water.

‘My word,’ said Mannering, as he heaved himself onto the stones, and stretched his back. ‘I ought to have changed my trousers. Not a day for fine dress—eh, Charlie? Makes a fool out of a dandy. My word!’

He had perceived that Frost was out of sorts, and was trying to be cheerful. For although he felt that it would do Frost a great deal of good to bear witness to a bit of rough and tumble (Frost’s composure had a priggish quality that aggravated Mannering extremely) he wished to remain, all the same, in the boy’s good opinion. Mannering was competitive by nature, and among the many hypothetical trophies for which he competed daily was one engraved with the names of every one of his associates. Were he ever to be forced to choose between another man’s betterment and another man’s compliance, he would choose the latter, no matter the cost. He would not go soft upon Frost, who was soft enough already, and he would ensure that the boy knew his place, but he was not too proud to extend a hand of kindness—not least because kindness was so patently desired.

But Frost did not respond. He was appalled to see an A-frame calico tent, barely big enough to fit three men lying side by side, sporting the hand-painted sign ‘Hotel’; he was appalled still further to see a digger unbutton his trousers and relieve himself, in full view of his fellows, onto the stones at the riverside. He recoiled—and then, to his alarm, heard laughter. A pair of diggers, sitting beneath a timber-framed awning not ten yards from the ferry landing, had been observing the lifeboat’s approach. They evidently found Frost’s horror very amusing; one of them tipped his hat, and the other gave a mock salute.

‘Come for a gander?’

‘Naw, Bob—he’s come to do his laundry in the river. Only problem, he forgot to get his clothes dirty first!’

The men laughed again—and Frost, red-faced, turned away. It was true that his life had been circumscribed by the twin compasses of duty and habit; it was true that he had not travelled, and would not speculate; it was true that his coat had been brushed that morning, and his vest was clean. He was not ashamed of these things. But Frost had spent his childhood in a place without other children, and he did not understand teasing. If another man made fun at his expense, he did not know how to respond. His face became hot, and his throat became tight, and he could only smile, unnaturally.

The oarsmen had lifted the lifeboat clear of the water. They agreed to transport the pair back to Hokitika in two hours’ time (two hours, Frost thought, with a sinking heart), and then drew lots to determine which man would remain with the boat. The unlucky man sat down, disappointed; the rest, rattling their coins, disappeared into the trees.

The two men opposite were still laughing.

‘Ask him for a pinch of snuff,’ the first digger was saying to his mate.

‘Ask him how often he writes home—to Mayfair.’

‘Ask him if he knows how to roll up his sleeves past his elbow.’

‘Ask him about his father’s income. He’ll be pleased about that.’

It was desperately unfair, Frost thought—when he had never even been to Mayfair—when his father was a poor man—when he was the New Zealander! (But the appellation sounded foolish; one did not say ‘Englander’.) His own income was paltry when one considered the enormous portion of his wages that he diverted into his father’s pocket every month. As for the suit he was currently wearing—he had bought it with his own wage; he had brushed the coat himself, that morning! And he very frequently rolled his sleeves above his elbows. His cuffs were buttoned, as were the diggers’ own; he had purchased his shirt at the Hokitika outfitters, just as they had. Frost wanted to say all of this—but instead he knelt down and held out his hands, palm upward, for the collie-dog to lick.

‘Can we move?’ he said in an undertone to Mannering.

‘In a moment.’

Having replaced his purse in his inner pocket, Mannering was now fussing over the buttons of his great coat—for he could not decide whether to leave all but the bottom button undone, which would give him the best ease of access to his pistols, or all but the topmost button undone, which would do best to conceal his pistols from sight.

Frost shot another nervous look around him—avoiding the gaze of the diggers beneath the awning. The track from the ferry landing forked away through the trees—one spoke bearing eastward, towards Lake Kaniere, and the other southeast, towards the Hokitika Gorge. Beyond the south bank of the river lay a rich patchwork of claims and mines that included, among others, the goldmine Aurora. Frost did not know any of this; in fact he could hardly have pointed north, had he been asked. He looked about for a sign that might direct them to Chinatown, but there was none. He could see no Chinese faces in the crowd.

‘That way,’ Mannering said, as if hearing his thoughts; he nodded his head to the east. ‘Upriver. None too far.’

Frost had caught the dog between his knees; he now began kneading her wet fur, more for his own reassurance than for the dog’s pleasure. ‘Ought we to agree on—on a plan of some kind?’ he ventured, squinting upward at the other man.

‘No need,’ said Mannering, buckling his belt a little higher.

‘No need for a plan?’

‘Quee doesn’t have a pistol. I’ve got two. That’s the only plan I need.’

Frost was not entirely soothed by this. He freed Holly—she bounded away from him immediately—and stood up. ‘You’re not going to shoot an unarmed man?’

Mannering had decided upon the top button. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s best.’ He smoothed his coat over his body.

‘Did you not hear me?’

‘I heard you,’ said Mannering. ‘Stop fretting, Charlie. You’ll only draw attention to yourself.’

‘You might answer me, if you want to ease my fretting,’ Frost said, in a voice that was rather shrill.

‘Listen,’ Mannering said, turning to face him at last. ‘I’ve paid Chinamen to work my claims for the past five years, and if there’s one thing I can tell you, it’s this. They go after that smoke like a hatter for a whore, and no exceptions. By this time on a Saturday, every yellow man this side of the Alps will be laid out limp with the dragon in his eye. You could walk in to Chinatown and round up every one of them with one arm tied behind your back. All right? There’ll be no need for violence. There’ll be no need for any guns. They’re only for show. It’s all stacked to our advantage, Charlie. When a man’s full of opium it’s like he’s made of water. Remember that. He’s useless. He’s a child.’

SUN IN CAPRICORN

In which Gascoigne recalls his first encounter with the whore; several seams are unpicked with a knife; exhaustion takes its toll; and Anna Wetherell makes a request.

Perceiving Anna and Gascoigne through the chink in the doorway, Joseph Pritchard had seen only what he himself most craved—love, and honest sympathy. Pritchard was lonely, and like most lonely souls, he saw happy couples everywhere. In that moment—as Anna’s body folded against Gascoigne’s chest, and he wrapped his arms around her, and lifted her, and placed his cheek against her hair—Pritchard, his hand cupped limp around the cold knob of the door, would not have been consoled to know that Aubert Gascoigne and Anna Wetherell were merely, and very simply, friends. Loneliness cannot be reassured by proportion. Even friendship would have seemed to Pritchard a feast behind a pane of glass; even the smallest charity would have wet his lip, and left him wanting.

Pritchard’s assumptions about Gascoigne had been formed on very limited acquaintance—on one conversation only, as a matter of fact. Judging from his haughty manner and the impeccable standard of his dress, Pritchard had supposed that Gascoigne occupied a position of some influence at the Magistrate’s Court, but in truth the clerk’s responsibilities there were very few. His chief duty lay in the collection of bail each day from the gaol-house at the Police Camp. Besides this task, his hours were spent recording fees, policing receipts for miner’s rights, fielding complaints, and on occasion, running errands on the Commissioner’s behalf. It was a lowly position, but Gascoigne was new in town; he was content to be employed, and confident that he would not take home a lackey’s wage for long.

Gascoigne had been in Hokitika for less than a month when he first encountered Anna Wetherell lying shackled on George Shepard’s gaol-house floor. She was sitting with her back against the wall, and her hands in her lap. Her eyes were open, and shone with fever; her hair had come loose from its clasp and stuck damply to her cheek. Gascoigne knelt before her, and on impulse extended his hand. She gripped it and pulled him closer still, out of sight of the gaoler, who was sitting by the door with a rifle on his knees. She whispered, ‘I can make my bail—I can raise it—but you have to trust me. And you can’t tell him how.’

‘Who?’ Gascoigne’s voice, too, had dropped to a whisper.

She nodded towards Governor Shepard, without taking her eyes from his. Her grip tightened, and she guided his hand to her breast. He was startled; he almost snatched his hand away—but then he felt what she was guiding him to feel. Something was packed around her ribcage, beneath the cloth. It felt, Gascoigne thought, like chainmail—but he had never touched a piece of chainmail.

‘Gold,’ she whispered. ‘It’s gold. Up and down the corset-bones, and in the lining, and all the way about.’ Her dark eyes were searching his face, pleading with him. ‘Gold,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how it got there. It was there when I woke up—sewn in.’

Gascoigne frowned, trying to understand. ‘You wish to pay your bail with gold?’

‘I can’t get it out,’ she whispered. ‘Not here. Not without a knife. It’s been sewn in.’

Their faces were almost touching; he could smell the sweet aftertaste of opium, like a plummy shadow on her breath. He murmured, ‘Is it yours?’

A desperate look flashed across her face. ‘What’s the difference? It’s money, isn’t it?’

Shepard’s voice rang out from the corner. ‘Does the whore detain you, Mr. Gascoigne?’

‘Not at all,’ Gascoigne said. She released him and he straightened, taking a step away from her. He pulled his purse from his pocket as a way of feigning nonchalance, feigning purpose. He weighed the pouch in his hand.

‘You may remind Miss Wetherell that we do not take bail on promise,’ Shepard said. ‘Either she produces the money here and now, or she stays here until someone raises it for her.’

Gascoigne studied Anna. He had no reason to heed the woman’s request, or to believe that the hard plating he had felt around her corset was, as she claimed, gold. He knew that he ought to report her to the gaoler immediately, on the grounds that she had attempted to distract him from his duty. He ought to break apart her corset with the hunting knife he carried in his boot—for if she was carrying pure gold about her person, it surely did not belong to her. She was a whore. She had been detained for public intoxication. Her dress was filthy. She stank of opium, and there were purple shadows underneath her eyes.

But Gascoigne surveyed her with compassion. His code was one of innate chivalry; he had a deep sympathy for people in desperate circumstances, and the wide-eyed anguish of her appeal had stirred both his compassion and his curiosity. Gascoigne believed that justice ought to be a synonym for mercy, not an alternative. He also believed that merciful action answered to instinct before it answered to any law. In a sudden rush of pity—for that emotion always came upon him as a flood—he was moved to meet the girl’s request, and to protect her.

‘Miss Wetherell,’ he said (he had not known her name before the gaoler used it), ‘your bail is set at one pound one shilling.’ He was holding his purse in his left hand, and his ledger in his right; now he made as if to transfer the ledger to the other hand, and, using the latter object as a shield, extracted two coins from his purse and tucked them against his palm. Then he transferred both purse and ledger to his right hand and held out his left, palm upward, with his thumb crossed across the palm. ‘Can you raise that sum from the money you have shown me in your corset?’ He spoke loudly and clearly, as if addressing a halfwit or a child.

For a moment she didn’t understand. Then she nodded, reached her fingers down between the bones of her corset, and drew out nothing. She pressed her pinched fingers into Gascoigne’s hand; Gascoigne lifted his thumb, nodded, as if satisfied with the coins that had appeared there, and recorded the bail on the ledger. He dropped the coins audibly into his purse, and then moved on to the next prisoner.

This act of kindness, so unorthodox in George Shepard’s gaol-house, was not a terribly unusual one for Gascoigne. It was his pleasure to strike up friendships within the servile classes, with children, with beggars, with animals, with plain women and forgotten men. His courtesies were always extended to those who did not expect courtesy: when he encountered a man whose station was beneath him, he was never rude. To the higher classes, however, he held himself apart. He was not ungracious, but his manner was jaded and wistful, even unimpressed—a practice that, though not a strategy in any real sense, tended to win him a great deal of respect, and earn him a place among the inheritors of land and fortune, quite as if he had set out to end up there.

In this way Aubert Gascoigne, born out of wedlock to an English governess, raised in the attics of Parisian row-houses, clothed always in cast-offs, forever banished to the coal scuttle, by turns admonished and ignored, had risen, over time, to become a personage of limited but respectable means. He had escaped his past—and yet he could be called neither an ambitious man, nor an unduly lucky one.

In his person Gascoigne showed a curious amalgam of classes, high and low. He had cultivated his mind with the same grave discipline with which he now maintained his toilette—which is to say, according to a method that was sophisticated, but somewhat out of date. He held the kind of passion for books and learning that only comes when one has pursued an education on one’s very own—but it was a passion that, because its origins were both private and virtuous, tended towards piety and scorn. His temperament was deeply nostalgic, not for his own past, but for past ages; he was cynical of the present, fearful of the future, and profoundly regretful of the world’s decay. As a whole, he put one in mind of a well-preserved old gentleman (in fact he was only thirty-four) in a period of comfortable, but perceptible, decline—a decline of which he was well aware, and which either amused him or turned him melancholy, depending on his moods.

For Gascoigne was extraordinarily moody. The wave of compassion that had compelled him to lie on Anna’s behalf dissipated almost as soon as the whore was freed: it darkened to despair, a despair that his help might, after all, have been a vain one—misplaced, wrong, and worst of all, self-serving. Selfishness was Gascoigne’s deepest fear. He loathed all signs of it in himself, quite as a competitive man loathes all traces of weakness that might keep him from his selfish goal. This was a feature of his personality of which he was extraordinarily proud, however, and about which he loved to moralise; whenever the irrationality of all this became too evident to ignore, he would fall into a very selfish bout of irritation.

Anna had followed him out of the gaol-house; in the street he suggested, almost brusquely, that she come to his quarters, so as to explain herself in private. Meekly she acquiesced, and they walked on together, through the rain. Gascoigne no longer pitied her. His compassion, quick to flare, had given way to worry and self-doubt—for she was a failed suicide, after all; and, as the gaoler had warned him as he signed the form for Anna’s release, probably insane.

Now, two weeks later, in the Gridiron Hotel—with his arms about her, his hand splayed firmly in the hollow of her back, her forearms pressed against his chest, her breath dampening his collarbone—Gascoigne’s thoughts again turned to the possibility that perhaps she had tried, a second time, to end her life. But where was the bullet that ought to have lodged in her breastbone? Had she known that the gun would misfire in such a peculiar way, when she pointed the muzzle at her own throat, and pulled the hammer down? How could she have known it?

‘All men want their whores to be unhappy’—Anna herself had said that, the night she was released from gaol, after she followed him home to his quarters, and they took apart her gown at his kitchen table, with the rain beating down, and the paraffin lamp making soft the corners of the room. ‘All men want their whores to be unhappy’—and how had he responded? Something curt, most likely, something terse. And now she had shot herself, or tried to. Gascoigne held her for a long time after Pritchard closed the door, gripping her tight, inhaling the salty smell of her hair. The smell was a comfort: he had been many years at sea.

And he had been married. Agathe Gascoigne—Agathe Prideaux, as he had known her first. Elfin, quick-witted, teasing, and consumptive—a fact he had known when he made his proposal, but which had somehow seemed immaterial, surmountable; more a proof of her delicacy than a promise of ill tidings to come. But her lungs would not heal. They had travelled south, in pursuit of the climate cure, and she had died on the open ocean, somewhere off the Indian coast—horrible, that he did not know exactly where. Horrible, how her body had bent when it had struck the surface of the water—that slapping sound. She had made him promise not to order a coffin, nor to have one approximated, should she die before they reached their port of call. If it happened, she said, it would happen in the mariners’ way: sewn into a hammock with a double-backed seam. And because the hammock was hers, that bloom of scarlet, darkened now to brown—he’d knelt and kissed it, macabre though that was. After that, Gascoigne kept sailing. He stopped only when his money ran dry.

Anna was heavier than Agathe had been—more angular, more substantial; but then (he thought), perhaps the living always seem substantial to those whose thoughts are with the dead. He moved his hand across her back. With his fingers he traced the shape of her corset, the double seam of eyelets, laced with string.

After leaving the gaol-house they had detoured past the Magistrate’s Court, so that Gascoigne could leave his bail purse in the deposit box there, and file the bail notices, ready for the morning. Anna watched him perform these tasks patiently and without curiosity: she seemed to accept that Gascoigne had done her a great favour, and she was content to obey him, and keep silent, in return. Out of habit she did not walk beside him in the street, but followed him at a distance of several yards—so that Gascoigne could claim not to know her, if they encountered an arm of the law.

When they reached Gascoigne’s cottage (for he had a whole cottage to himself, though a small one; a one-roomed clapboard cabin, some hundred yards from the beach), Gascoigne directed Anna to wait beneath the awning of the porch while he split a log for kindling in the yard. He made short work of the log, feeling a little self-conscious with Anna’s dark eyes fixed upon him as he chopped. Before the heartwood could dampen in the rain, he gathered the splintered fragments in his arms and dashed back to the doorway, where Anna stood aside to let him pass.

‘It’s no palace,’ he said foolishly—though, by Hokitika standards, it was.

Anna made no comment as she passed under the lintel and into the dim fug of the cottage. Gascoigne dropped the kindling on the hearth and reached back to close the door. He lit the paraffin lamp, set it on the table, and knelt to build a fire—intensely aware, as he did so, of Anna’s silent appraisal of the room. It was sparsely furnished. His one fine piece of furniture was a wingback armchair, upholstered in a thick fabric of pink and yellow stripes: this had been a present to himself, upon first taking possession of the place, and it stood pride of place in the centre of the room. Gascoigne wondered what assumptions she was forming, what picture was emerging from this scant constellation of his life. The narrow mattress, over which his blanket was folded thrice. The miniature of Agathe, hanging from a nail above the bedhead. The row of seashells along the window sill. The tin kettle on the range; his Bible, the pages mostly uncut except for Psalms and the epistles; the tartan biscuit tin, inside of which he kept his letters from his mother, his papers, and his pens. Beside his bed, the box of broken candles, the wax pieces held together by the string of their wicks.

‘You keep a clean house,’ was all she said.

‘I live alone.’ Gascoigne pointed with a stick to the trunk at the base of his bed. ‘Open that.’

She loosed the clasps, and heaved open the top. He directed her to a swatch of dark linen, which she lifted up, and Agathe’s dress slithered out over her knees—the black one, with the tatted collar, that he had so despised.

(‘People will think me an ascetic,’ she had said cheerfully, ‘but black is a sober colour; one ought to have a sober dress.’

It was to hide the bloodstains, the fine spray that peppered her cuffs; he knew it, but did not say so. He agreed, aloud, that one ought to have a sober dress.)

‘Put it on,’ Gascoigne said, watching as Anna smoothed the fabric over her knee. Agathe had been shorter; the hem would have to be let down. Even then, the whore would show three inches of her ankle, and maybe even the last hoop of her crinoline. It would be awful—but beggars could not be choosers, Gascoigne thought, and Anna was a beggar tonight. He turned back to the fire and shovelled ash.

It was the only dress of Agathe’s that Gascoigne still possessed. The others, packed in their camphor-smelling cedar case, had been lost when the steamer ran aground—the berths first looted, then flooded, when the steamer fell at last upon her side, and the surf closed in. For Gascoigne the loss was a blessing. He had Agathe’s miniature: that was all he wished to keep. He would pay her memory due respect, but he was a young man, and still hot-blooded, and he meant to begin again.

By the time Anna had changed, the fire was lit. Gascoigne glanced sideways at the dress. It looked just as ill upon her as it had upon his late wife. Anna saw him looking.

‘Now I will be able to mourn,’ she said. ‘I never had a black dress before.’

Gascoigne did not ask her whom she was mourning, or how recent the death. He filled the kettle, and put it on the range.

Aubert Gascoigne preferred to initiate conversation, rather than fall in with another person’s theme and tempo; he was content to be silent in company until he felt moved to speak. Anna Wetherell, with her whore’s intuition, seemed to recognise this aspect of Gascoigne’s character. She did not press him to converse, and she did not watch or shadow him as he went about the ordinary business of the evening: lighting candles, refilling his cigarette case, exchanging his muddy boots for indoor shoes. She gathered up the gold-lined dress and conveyed it across the room to spread on Gascoigne’s table. It was heavy. The gold had added perhaps five pounds to the weight of the fabric, Anna guessed: she tried to calculate the value. The Crown would buy pure colour at a rate of around three sovereigns per ounce—and there were sixteen ounces in a pound of weight—and this was five pounds of weight, at least. How much did that total? She tried to imagine a column of sums in her mind, but the figures swam.

While Gascoigne banked the fire for the evening, and spooned tea leaves into a strainer, ready to steep, Anna examined her dress. Whoever had hidden the gold there evidently had experience with a needle and thread—either a woman or a sailor, she thought. They had sewn with care. The gold had been fitted up and down the bones of the corset, sewn into the flounces, and parcelled evenly around the hem—an extra weight she had not noticed earlier, for she often carried lead pellets around the bottom of her crinoline, to prevent the garment from blowing upward in the wind.

Gascoigne had come up behind her. He took out his bowie knife, to cut the corset free—but he began too like a butcher, and Anna made a noise of distress.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘You don’t know how—please let me.’

He hesitated, and then passed her the knife, and stood back to watch. She worked slowly, wanting to preserve the form and shape of the dress: first she took out the hem, then worked her way upward, along each flounce, snicking the threads with the point of the knife, and shaking the gold out of the seams. When she reached the corset, she made a little slice beneath each stay, and then reached up with her fingers to loose the gold from where it had been stuffed, in panels, between the bones. It was these lumpy parcels that had so reminded Gascoigne of chainmail, in the gaol-house.

The gold, shaken out of the folds, shone gloriously. Anna collected it in the centre of the table. She was careful not to let the dust scatter in the draught. Each time she added another handful of dust, or another nugget, she cupped her hands over the pile, as if to warm herself upon the shine. Gascoigne watched her. He was frowning.

At last she was done, and the dress was emptied.

‘Here,’ she said, taking up a nugget roughly the size of the last joint of Gascoigne’s thumb. She pushed it across the table towards him. ‘One pound one shilling: I haven’t forgotten.’

‘I will not touch this gold,’ said Gascoigne.

‘Plus payment for the mourning dress,’ Anna said, flushing. ‘I don’t need charity.’

‘You might,’ said Gascoigne. He sat down on the edge of the bed and reached into his breast pocket for his cigarettes. He flipped open the silver case, plucked out a cigarette, and lit it with care; only after it was lit, and he had taken several lungfuls, did he turn to her, and say,

‘Who do you work for, Miss Wetherell?’

‘You mean—who runs the girls? Mannering.’

‘I do not know him.’

‘You would if you saw him. He’s very fat. He owns the Prince of Wales.’

‘I have seen a fat man.’ Gascoigne sucked on his cigarette. ‘Is he a fair employer?’

‘He has a temper,’ Anna said, ‘but his terms are mostly fair.’

‘Does he give you opium?’

‘No.’

‘Does he know you take it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who sells you the stuff?’

‘Ah Sook,’ said Anna.

‘Who is that?’

‘He’s just a chink. A hatter. He keeps the den at Kaniere.’

‘A Chinese man who makes hats?’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘I was using local talk. A hatter is a man who digs alone.’

Gascoigne paused in his line of questioning to smoke.

‘This hatter,’ he said next. ‘He keeps an opium den—at Kaniere.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you go to him.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘Alone.’ He spoke the word accusingly.

‘Most often,’ Anna said, squinting at him. ‘Sometimes I buy a little extra, to take at home.’

‘Where does he get it from? China, I suppose.’

She shook her head. ‘Jo Pritchard sells it to him. He’s the chemist. Has a drug hall on Collingwood-street.’

Gascoigne nodded. ‘I know Mr. Pritchard,’ he said. ‘Well then, I am curious: why should you bother with Chinamen, if you could buy the stuff from Mr. Pritchard direct?’

Anna lifted her chin a little—or perhaps she merely shivered; Gascoigne could not tell. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘You don’t know,’ said Gascoigne.

‘No.’

‘Kaniere is a long way to walk for a mouthful of smoke, I think.’

‘I suppose.’

‘And Mr. Pritchard’s emporium is—what—not ten minutes’ walk from the Gridiron. Still less if one walked at a pace.’

She shrugged.

‘Why do you go to Kaniere Chinatown, Miss Wetherell?’

Gascoigne spoke acidly; he felt that he knew the probable answer to the question, and wanted her to say the words aloud.

Her face was stony. ‘Maybe I like it there.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Maybe you like it there.’

(For goodness’ sake! What had come over him? What did he care if the whore plied her trade with Chinamen or not? What did he care if she made the trip to Kaniere alone, or with an escort? She was a whore! He had met her for the first time that very evening! Gascoigne felt a rush of bewilderment, and then immediately, a stab of anger. He took refuge in his cigarette.)

‘Mannering,’ he said, when he had exhaled. ‘The fat man. Could you leave him?’

‘Once I clear my debt.’

‘How much do you owe?’

‘A hundred pounds,’ said Anna. ‘Maybe a little over.’

The empty dress lay between them, like a flayed corpse. Gascoigne looked at the pile, at its glimmer; Anna, following his line of sight, looked too.

‘You will be tried at the courts, of course,’ Gascoigne said, gazing at the gold.

‘I was only tight in public,’ said Anna. ‘They’ll fine me, that’s all.’

‘You will be tried,’ Gascoigne said. ‘For attempted suicide. The gaoler has confirmed it.’

She stared at him. ‘Attempted suicide?’

‘Did you not try and take your life?’

‘No!’ She leaped up. ‘Who’s saying that?’

‘The duty sergeant who picked you up last night,’ said Gascoigne.

‘That’s absurd.’

‘I’m afraid it has been recorded,’ said Gascoigne. ‘You will have to plead, one way or another.’

Anna said nothing for a moment. Then she burst out, ‘Every man wants his whore to be unhappy—every man!’

Gascoigne blew out a narrow jet of smoke. ‘Most whores are unhappy,’ he said. ‘Forgive me: I only state a simple truth.’

‘How could they charge me for attempted suicide, without first asking me whether I—? How could they? Where’s the—’

‘—Proof?’

Gascoigne studied her with pity. Anna’s recent brush with death showed plainly in her face and body. Her complexion was waxy, her hair limp and heavy with grease. She was snatching compulsively at the sleeves of her dress with her fingers; as the clerk appraised her, she gave a shiver that racked her body like a wave.

‘The gaoler fears that you are insane,’ he said.

‘I have never spoken one word to Gov. Shepard in all my months in Hokitika,’ said Anna. ‘We are perfect strangers.’

‘He mentioned that you had recently lost a child.’

‘Lost!’ said Anna, in a voice full of disgust. ‘Lost! That’s a sanitary word.’

‘You would use a different one?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your child was taken from you?’

A hard look came across Anna’s face. ‘Kicked from my womb,’ she said. ‘And by—by the child’s own father! But I suppose Gov. Shepard didn’t tell you that.’

Gascoigne was silent. He had not yet finished his cigarette, but he dropped it, crushed the ember with the heel of his shoe, and lit another. Anna sat down again. She placed her hands upon the fabric of her dress, laid out upon the table. She began to stroke it. Gascoigne looked at the rafters, and Anna at the gold.

It was very unlike her to burst out in such a way. Anna’s nature was watchful and receptive rather than declamatory, and she rarely spoke about herself. Her profession demanded modesty of the strictest sort, paradoxical though that sounded. She was obliged to behave sweetly, and with sympathy, even when sympathy was not owing, and sweetness was not deserved. The men with whom she plied her trade were rarely curious about her. If they spoke at all, they spoke about other women—the sweethearts they had lost, the wives they had abandoned, their mothers, their sisters, their daughters, their wards. They sought these women when they looked at Anna, but only partly, for they also sought themselves: she was a reflected darkness, just as she was a borrowed light. Her wretchedness was, she knew, extremely reassuring.

Anna reached out a finger to stroke one of the golden nuggets in the pile. She knew that she ought to thank Gascoigne in the conventional way, for paying her bail: he had taken a risk, in telling a falsehood to the gaoler, keeping her secret, and inviting her back to his home. She sensed that Gascoigne was expecting something. He was fidgeting strangely. His questions were abrupt and even rude—a sure sign that he was distracted by the hope of a reward—and when she spoke he glared at her, quickly, and then glanced away, as if her answers annoyed him very much. Anna picked up the nugget and rolled it around in her palm. Its surface was bubbled, even knot-holed, as if the metal had been partly melted in a forge.

‘It appears to me,’ Gascoigne said presently, ‘that someone was waiting for you to smoke that pipe last night. They waited until you were unconscious, and then sewed this gold into your dress.’

She frowned—not at Gascoigne, but at the lump in her hand. ‘Why?’

‘I have no idea,’ the Frenchman said. ‘Who were you with last night, Miss Wetherell? And just how much was he willing to pay?’

‘Listen, though,’ Anna said, ignoring the question. ‘You’re saying that someone took this dress off me, sewed in all this dust so carefully, and then laced me back up—filled with gold—only to leave me in the middle of the road?’

‘It does sound improbable,’ Gascoigne agreed. He changed his tack. ‘Well then: answer me this. How long have you had that garment?’

‘Since the spring,’ Anna said. ‘I bought it salvage, from a vendor on Tancred-street.’

‘How many others do you own?’

‘Five—no; four,’ said Anna. ‘But the others aren’t for whoring. This is my whoring gown—on account of its colour, you see. I had a separate frock for lying-in—but that was ruined, when—when the baby died.’

There was a moment of quiet between them.

‘Was it sewed in all at once?’ Gascoigne said presently. ‘Or over a period? I suppose there’s no way to tell.’

Anna did not respond. After a moment Gascoigne glanced up, and met her gaze.

‘Who were you with last night, Miss Wetherell?’ he asked again—and this time Anna could not ignore the question.

‘I was with a man named Staines,’ she said quietly.

‘I do not know this man,’ Gascoigne said. ‘He was with you at the opium den?’

‘No!’ Anna said, sounding shocked. ‘I wasn’t at the den. I was at his house. In his—bed. I left in the night to take a pipe. That’s the last thing I remember.’

‘You left his house?’

‘Yes—and came back to the Gridiron, where I have my lodging,’ Anna said. ‘It was a strange night, and I was feeling odd. I wanted a pipe. I remember lighting it. The next thing I remember, I was in gaol, and there was daylight.’

She gave a shiver, and suddenly clutched her arms across her body. She spoke, Gascoigne thought, with an exhilarated fatigue, the kind that comes after the first blush of love, when the self has lost its mooring, and, half-drowning, succumbs to a fearful tide. But addiction was not love; it could not be love. Gascoigne could not romanticise the purple shadows underneath her eyes, her wasted limbs, the dreamy disorientation with which she spoke; but even so, he thought, it was uncanny that the opium’s ruin could mirror love’s raptures with such fidelity.

‘I see,’ he said aloud. ‘So you left the man sleeping?’

‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘He was asleep when I left—yes.’

‘And you were wearing this dress.’ He pointed at the orange tatters between them.

‘It’s my work dress,’ Anna said. ‘It’s the one I always wear.’

‘Always?’

‘When I’m working,’ Anna said.

Gascoigne did not reply, but narrowed his eyes very slightly, and pressed his lips together, to signify there was a question in his mind that he could not ask with decency. Anna sighed. She decided that she would not express her gratitude in the conventional way; she would repay the sum of her bail in coin, and in the morning.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘It’s just as I told you. We fell asleep, I woke up, I wanted a pipe, I left his house, I went home, I lit my pipe, and that’s the last thing I remember.’

‘Did you notice anything strange about your own rooms when you returned? Anything that might show that someone had been there, for example?’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘The door was locked, same as always. I opened it with my key, I walked in, I closed the door, I sat down, I lit my pipe, and that’s the last thing I remember.’

It wearied her to recapitulate—and she would become still wearier in the days to come, once it transpired that Emery Staines had disappeared in the night, and had not been seen since, by anyone. Upon this point Anna Wetherell would be examined, and cross-examined, and scorned, and disbelieved; she would repeat her story until it ceased to be familiar, and she began to doubt herself.

Gascoigne did not know Staines, having arrived in Hokitika himself only very recently, but watching Anna now, he felt suddenly intensely curious about the man.

‘Could Mr. Staines have wished you harm?’ he said.

‘No!’ she said at once.

‘Do you trust him?’

‘Yes,’ Anna said quietly. ‘As much as—’

But she did not complete the comparison.

‘He is a lover?’ Gascoigne said, after a pause.

Anna blushed. ‘He is the richest man in Hokitika,’ she said. ‘If you have not heard of him yet, you will presently. Emery Staines. He owns most things around town.’

Again Gascoigne’s gaze drifted to the gleaming pile of gold on the table—but pointedly this time: to the richest man in Hokitika, this would seem, surely, like a very small pile. ‘He is a lover?’ he repeated. ‘Or a client?’

Anna paused. ‘A client,’ she said at last, and in a smaller voice. Gascoigne inclined his head respectfully, as if Anna had just informed him that the man had passed away. She rushed on: ‘He’s a prospector. That’s how he made his wealth. But he hails from New South Wales, as I do. In fact we were on the same ship across the Tasman, when we first arrived: the Fortunate Wind.’

‘I see,’ said Gascoigne. ‘Well, then. If he is rich, perhaps this gold is his.’

‘No,’ Anna said, alarmed. ‘He wouldn’t.’

‘He wouldn’t what? Wouldn’t lie to you?’

‘Wouldn’t—’

‘Wouldn’t use you as a beast of burden, to traffic this gold without your knowing?’

‘Traffic it where?’ said Anna. ‘I’m not leaving. I’m not going anywhere.’

Gascoigne paused to drag upon his cigarette. Then he said, ‘You left his bed in the night—did you not?’

‘I meant to return,’ Anna said. ‘And sleep it off.’

‘You left without his knowledge, I think.’

‘But I meant to return.’

‘And despite the fact—perhaps—that he had contracted you to remain until the morning.’

‘I’m telling you,’ Anna said, ‘I only meant to be gone a little while.’

‘But then you lost consciousness,’ Gascoigne said.

‘Perhaps I fainted.’

‘You don’t believe that.’

Anna chewed her lip. ‘Oh, it doesn’t make sense!’ she exclaimed after a moment. ‘The gold doesn’t make sense; the opium doesn’t make sense. Why would I end up there? Out cold, quite alone, and halfway to Arahura!’

‘Surely much of what happens when you are under the effects of opium does not make sense.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, all right.’

‘But I would be happy to defer to you on that point,’ Gascoigne said, ‘having never touched the drug myself.’

The kettle began to whistle. Gascoigne stuck his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, wrapped his hand in a scrap of serge, and lifted it down from the range. As he poured the water over the tea leaves he said, ‘What about your chink? He touched the opium, did he not?’

Anna rubbed her face—as a tired infant rubs its face: clumsily. ‘I didn’t see Ah Sook last night,’ she said. ‘I told you, I took a pipe at home.’

‘A pipe filled with his opium!’ Gascoigne set the kettle on a rack above the range.

‘Yes—I suppose,’ Anna said. ‘But you might just as well call it Joseph Pritchard’s.’

Gascoigne sat down again. ‘Mr. Staines must be wondering what has happened to you, seeing as you left his bed so abruptly in the night, and did not return. Though I notice he did not come to make your bail today—neither he nor your employer.’

He spoke loudly, meaning to rouse Anna out of her fatigue; when he set out the saucers, he set Anna’s down with a clatter, and pushed it across the table so it scraped.

‘That’s my business,’ Anna said. ‘I shall go and make my apologies, as soon as—’

‘As soon as we are decided what to do with this pile,’ Gascoigne finished for her. ‘Yes: you ought to do that.’

Gascoigne’s mood had changed again: suddenly, he was extremely vexed. No clear explanation had yet presented itself to him as to why Anna’s dress had been filled with gold, or how she had ended up unconscious, or indeed whether these two events were connected in any way. He was vexed that he could not understand it—and so, to appease his own ill humour, he became scornful, an attitude that afforded him at least the semblance of control.

‘How much is this worth?’ said Anna now, moving to touch the pile again. ‘As an estimate, I mean. I don’t have an eye for such things.’

Gascoigne crushed the stub of his cigarette on his saucer. ‘I think the question you ought to be asking, my dear,’ he said, ‘is not how much; it is who, and why. Whose gold is that? Whose claim did it come from? And where was it bound?’

They agreed, that first night, to hide the pile away. They agreed that if anyone asked Anna why she had exchanged her habitual gown for this new, more sombre one, she would reply, quite honestly, that she had wished to enter a belated period of mourning for the death of her unborn child, and she had procured the garment from a trunk that had washed up on the Hokitika spit. All of this was true. If anyone asked to see the old gown, or inquired as to where it was stored, then Anna was to inform Gascoigne immediately—for that person no doubt had knowledge of the gold that had been hidden in her flounces, and would therefore know about the gold’s origin—and perhaps also its intended destination, wherever that was.

With this strategy having been decided, Gascoigne then emptied his tartan biscuit tin, and together they swept the gold into it, wrapped the tin in a blanket, and placed the entire bundle in a flour sack that Gascoigne tied with string. He requested, until they had further intelligence, that the sack be stowed at his quarters, beneath his bed. At first Anna was doubtful, but he persuaded her that the pile would be safest with him: he never entertained visitors, his cabin was locked during the day, and nobody had the slightest reason to think that he was harbouring a pile—after all, he was new in town, and had neither enemies nor friends.

The following fortnight seemed to pass in a blur. Anna returned to Staines’s house to find that he had vanished completely; days later, she learned about the death of Crosbie Wells, and discovered that that event had also taken place during the hours of her unconsciousness. Soon after that she heard that an enormous fortune, the origins of which had yet to be determined, had been discovered hidden on Crosbie Wells’s estate, which had since been purchased by the hotelier, Edgar Clinch—acting proprietor of the Gridiron Hotel, which was owned by Emery Staines, and the current residence of Anna herself.

Gascoigne had not spoken with Anna directly about any of these events, for she refused to be drawn on the subject of Emery Staines, and had nothing at all to say about Crosbie Wells, save that she had never known him. Gascoigne sensed that she was grieving Staines’s disappearance, but he could not gauge whether she believed him to be alive or dead. In deference to her feelings Gascoigne dropped the subject altogether; when they spoke, they spoke of other things. From her high window on the upper floor of the Gridiron Hotel Anna watched the diggers struggle up and down Revell-street, through the rain. She kept to her room, and wore Agathe Gascoigne’s black dress every day. No man inquired about Anna’s change of costume; no man made any kind of intimation to suggest that he knew about the gold that had been hidden in her corset, now safely stowed under Gascoigne’s bed. The responsible party was reluctant, for whatever reason, to come forward and show his hand.

On the day after Crosbie Wells’s burial, Anna was tried for attempted suicide at the petty court, as Gascoigne had predicted she would be. She refused to plead, and in the end was fined a sum of five pounds for her attempted felony—and then scolded roundly, for having wasted the Magistrate’s time.

All this was running through Gascoigne’s mind as he stood in the Gridiron Hotel with Anna Wetherell clasped against his chest, tracing the eyelets of her corset, up her back. He had held Agathe in this way—exactly in this way, exactly so, with one hand splayed beneath her shoulder blade, the other cupping the ball of her shoulder, Agathe with her forearms against his chest, always—having raised her arms to shield herself at the moment of enclosure. How strange that he recalled her, now. One could know a thousand women, Gascoigne thought; one could take a different girl every night for years and years—but sooner or later, the new lovers would do little more than call to mind the old, and one would be forced to wander, lost, in that reflective maze of endless comparison, forever disappointed, forever turning back.

Anna was still trembling from the shock of the misfire. Gascoigne waited until her breathing was steady—some three or four minutes after Pritchard’s tread retreated down the stairs—and then at last, when he felt her body regain some of its strength, he murmured, ‘What on earth got into you?’

But Anna only shook her head, burrowing against him.

‘Was it a blank? A false cartridge?’

She shook her head again.

‘Perhaps you and the chemist—perhaps you devised something together.’

That roused her; she pushed away from him with the heels of her hands, and said, in a voice full of disgust, ‘With Pritchard?’

It pleased Gascoigne to see her brighten, even in anger. ‘Well, then: what was he wanting you for?’ he said.

Anna almost told him the truth—but felt a sudden shame. Gascoigne had been so kind to her, this past fortnight, and she could not bear to tell him where the opium had gone. Just yesterday he had expressed happiness that she had ended her enslavement to the pipe: he had marvelled at her strength, and praised the clearness of her eyes, and admired her. She had not had the heart to disabuse him then, and she did not now.

‘Old Jo Pritchard,’ she said, looking away. ‘He was lonely, that was all.’

Gascoigne pulled out his cigarette case, and found that he was trembling too. ‘Have you any brandy left?’ he said. ‘I would like to sit a moment, if you don’t mind. I need to gather myself.’

He laid the spent pistol carefully on the whatnot beside Anna’s bed.

‘Things keep happening to you,’ he said. ‘Things you can’t explain. Things nobody seems to be able to explain. I’m not sure …’

But he trailed off. Anna went to the armoire to fetch the brandy, and Gascoigne sat down upon the bed to light his cigarette—and just for a moment they were fixed in a tableau, the kind rendered on a plate, and sold at a fair as an historical impression: he with his wrists on his knees, his head bowed, his cigarette dangling from his knuckles—she with her hand on her hip, her weight upon one leg, pouring him a measure. But they were not lovers, and it was not their room.

Gascoigne took another deep draught of his cigarette, and closed his eyes.

Meaning to cheer him, Anna said, ‘I am very much looking forward to my surprise, Mr. Gascoigne.’

For she had not lied to Joseph Pritchard, when she informed him she had an appointment—going with a lady, to look at hats. Gascoigne had arranged a private consultation with a lady of fashion; apparently he had paid for the consultation himself, though he had insisted that the details of the arrangement, and the identity of the lady, remain a surprise. Anna had never been asked to wait for a surprise before, and the prospect had filled her with both elation and dread; she had thanked the Frenchman very prettily, however, for his consideration.

When Gascoigne did not respond, Anna tried to press him further. ‘Is your woman downstairs, waiting?’

Gascoigne emerged from his reverie at last. He sighed. ‘No: I am to fetch you and bring you to her. She’s in the private parlour at the Wayfarer—but she can wait ten minutes; she has waited ten minutes already.’ He passed a hand over his face. ‘Your hats can wait.’

‘What are you not sure of?’

‘What?’

‘You just said, “I’m not sure”, but you didn’t finish your sentence.’

They had adopted an easy tone with one another, this past fortnight, as so often happens after a shared ordeal—though Anna still called him Mr. Gascoigne, and never Aubert. Gascoigne had not pressed her to use the more informal designation, for he rather liked shows of propriety, and it flattered him to hear his family name pronounced.

‘I’m not sure what to make of it,’ Gascoigne said at last. He took the glass from her, but did not drink: all of a sudden, he felt extraordinarily sad.

Aubert Gascoigne felt the pressure of anxiety rather more acutely than other men. When he was made anxious, as he had been by the inexplicable misfire of Anna’s pistol, he tended to give himself over to bursts of powerful emotion—shock, despair, anger, sorrow: emotions which he seized upon because they channelled his anxiety outward, and in a sense regulated the pressure that he felt within. He had earned a reputation for being strong and level-headed at a time of crisis—as he had been, that afternoon—but he tended to unravel after the crisis had been weathered or forestalled. He was still trembling, an agitated motion that had only started when he released the whore from their embrace.

‘There’s something I need to speak with you about,’ Anna said now.

Gascoigne rolled his brandy around his glass. ‘Yes.’

Anna returned to the armoire and poured herself a measure also. ‘I’m late on my rent. I owe three months. Edgar gave me notice this morning.’

Abruptly she stopped speaking, turned, and peered at him. Gascoigne had been taking a draught of his cigarette; he paused at the end of the intake, his chest expanded, and made a gesture with his hands to ask how much.

‘It’s ten shillings a week, with meals, and a bath every Sunday,’ Anna said. (Gascoigne exhaled.) ‘Over three months—that’s—I don’t know … six pounds.’

‘Three months,’ Gascoigne echoed.

‘I was set back by that fine,’ said Anna. ‘Five pounds, to the Magistrate. That was a month of wages for me. It cleaned me out.’ She waited.

‘Surely the whoremonger pays your rent,’ Gascoigne said.

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘He doesn’t. I report direct to Edgar.’

‘Your landlord.’

‘Yes: Edgar Clinch.’

‘Clinch?’ Gascoigne looked up. ‘That’s the man who purchased Crosbie Wells’s estate.’

‘His cottage,’ said Anna.

‘But he’s just come in on an enormous fortune! What does he care about six pounds?’

Anna shrugged. ‘He just said to raise it. At once.’

‘Perhaps he fears what will happen at the courthouse,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Perhaps he fears he will have to give it all back again, once the appeal is granted.’

‘He didn’t say why,’ Anna said. (She had not yet heard about the sudden arrival, on Thursday afternoon, of the widow Wells, and so did not know that the sale of Crosbie Wells’s estate was in danger of being revoked.) ‘But he’s not calling my bluff about it; he said he wasn’t.’

‘You can’t—appease him somehow?’ Gascoigne said.

‘You can leave off the “somehow”,’ Anna said haughtily. ‘I’m in mourning. My child is dead and I’m in mourning. I won’t do that any more.’

‘You could find another line of work.’

‘There isn’t one. The only thing I can do is needlework, and there’s no call for it here. There aren’t enough women.’

‘There’s mending,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Socks and buttons. Frayed collars. There’s always mending, in a camp.’

‘Mending doesn’t pay,’ said Anna.

She peered at him again—expectantly, Gascoigne thought, and this interpretation gave rise to a flash of anger. He took refuge in another draught. It was not his responsibility that she had no money. She had not walked the streets once in the two weeks since her night in gaol, and whoring was her income: it stood to reason that she was out of pocket. As for this mourning business! Nobody had forced her into it. She was hardly impaired by grief—the child was three months dead, for heaven’s sake. The frock was no real impediment either. She would make a shilling just as easily in Agathe’s black dress as in her habitual orange one—for she had loyal custom in the Hokitika township, and whores were all too few along the Coast. Anyway, Gascoigne thought, what did it matter? One could not tell colours in the dark.

This burst of irritation was not for want of mercy. Gascoigne had known poverty, and since his youth he had been many times in debt. He would have helped Anna, and gladly, had she chosen to request his assistance in a different way. But like most extremely sensitive people, Gascoigne could not bear sensitivity in others: he required honesty and directness when he was asked a question—and he required it all the more desperately when he was vexed. He recognised that the whore was employing a strategy in order to get something. This strategy angered him because he could see it was a strategy—and also, because he knew exactly what Anna was about to ask for. He expelled a jet of smoke.

‘Edgar’s always been very kind to me,’ Anna continued, when it became evident that Gascoigne was not going to speak. ‘But lately he’s been in a temper. I don’t know what it is. I’ve tried pleading with him, but there’s nothing doing.’ She paused. ‘If I could only—’

‘No.’

‘Only the smallest bit—that’s all I’d need,’ said Anna. ‘Just one of the nuggets. I could tell him I found it in the creek, or on the road somewhere. Or I could tell him I’d been paid in pure—the diggers do that, sometimes. I could say it was from one of the foreign boys. I’m a good liar.’

Gascoigne shook his head. ‘You cannot touch that gold.’

‘But for how long?’ Anna said. ‘For how long?’ ‘Until you find out who sewed it into your corset!’ Gascoigne snapped. ‘And not a moment before!’

‘But what am I to do about my rent, in the meantime?’

Gascoigne looked hard at her. ‘Anna Wetherell,’ he said, ‘you are not my ward.’

This silenced her, though her eyes flashed in displeasure. She cast about for something to do, some mundane task with which to occupy herself. At last she knelt down to pick up her scattered trinkets, strewn by Pritchard on the floor—scooping them towards her angrily, and throwing them with some violence back into the empty dresser drawer.

‘You are right: I am not your ward,’ she said presently. ‘But I will counter that the pile is not your gold—to be kept, and restricted, as you please!’

‘Nor does that gold belong to you, Miss Wetherell.’

‘It was in my dress,’ she said. ‘It was on my person. I bore the risk.’

‘You would risk far more, in spending it.’

‘So what do I do?’ Anna cried. ‘Once a whore, always a whore? That’s the only option left me, I suppose!’

They glared at each other. I would give you a gold sovereign, Gascoigne was thinking, if you plied your trade with me. Aloud he said, ‘How long do you have?’

Anna wound a scrap of ribbon into a vicious ball before answering. ‘He didn’t say. He said I had to raise the money or get out.’

‘Would you like me to talk to him?’ Gascoigne said—baiting her, because he knew this was not what she wanted at all.

‘And say what?’ Anna returned, throwing the balled ribbon into the drawer. ‘Beg him to spare me for another week—another month—another quarter? What’s the difference? I shall have to pay him sooner or later.’

‘That,’ said Gascoigne in an icy tone, ‘is what characterises a debt, I’m afraid.’

‘I wish that I had known you to be a creditor of this kind, two weeks ago,’ Anna said now, and in a waspish tone. ‘I should never have accepted your help, otherwise.’

‘Perhaps your memory is faulty,’ Gascoigne said. ‘I will remind you that I gave help only because you asked for it.’

‘This? This mouldy dress? This is “help”? I’d rather give you back the dress—and keep the gold!’

‘I got you out of the gaol-house, Anna Wetherell, at great personal risk to myself—and that dress belonged to my late wife, in case you did not know it,’ Gascoigne said. He dropped his cigarette onto the floor and ground it to nothing with his heel. Anna was opening her mouth to make a retort, and so he said, loudly: ‘I’m afraid you are not in a fit state for my surprise.’

‘I am perfectly fit, thank you.’

‘A surprise,’ Gascoigne said, raising his voice still further, ‘that I organised for you for reasons of the purest charity and goodwill—’

‘Mr. Gascoigne—’

‘—for I felt that it might do you good, to get out and enjoy yourself a little,’ Gascoigne concluded. His face was very white. ‘I will inform my lady that your spirits are low, and that you won’t be seen.’

‘My spirits aren’t low,’ Anna said.

‘I think that they are,’ said Gascoigne. He drained his glass, and then set it on the nightstand next to Anna’s pillow, the centre of which was still pierced by a single blackened hole. ‘I will leave you now. I am sorry that your gun did not fire in the way that you intended, and I am sorry that your lifestyle exceeds your means to pay for it. Thank you for the brandy.’

MEDIUM COELI / IMUM COELI

In which Gascoigne raises the issue of Anna’s debt, and Edgar Clinch does not confide in him.

As Gascoigne was crossing the foyer of the Gridiron Hotel, the door was wrenched open, and the hotelier, Mr. Edgar Clinch, entered at a pace. Gascoigne slowed in his step so that the two men would not have to pass too close to one another—an action that Clinch mistook for a different kind of hesitation. He stopped abruptly in the middle of the doorway, blocking Gascoigne’s exit. Behind him, the door thudded shut.

‘Can I help you?’ he said.

‘Thank you, no,’ Gascoigne said politely—and hovered a moment, waiting for Clinch to move from the doorway so that he might leave without having to brush shoulders with the other man.

But the valet had been alerted by the slam of the door. ‘Oi—you!’ he called out to Gascoigne, coming forward from his cubicle beneath the stairs. ‘What was the story behind those pistol shots? Jo Pritchard came downstairs like death incarnate. Like he’d seen a ghost.’

‘It was a mistake,’ said Gascoigne curtly. ‘Just a mistake.’

‘Pistol shots?’ said Edgar Clinch—who had not moved from the doorway.

Clinch was a tall man, forty-three years of age, with sandy-coloured hair and a harmless, pleasant look. He wore an imperial moustache, greased at the tips, a handsome accessory that had not silvered at the same rate as his hair—which was likewise greased, parted in the middle, and cut to the level of his earlobes. He had apple-shaped cheeks, a reddish nose, and a blunted profile. His eyes were set so deep in his face that they seemed to shut altogether when he smiled, which he did often, as the crowfoot lines around his eyes could testify. At present, however, he was frowning.

‘I was down here at the desk,’ said the valet. ‘This man, he was there—he saw it. He’d run up, on account of the shouting—the gun went off just after he walked in. After that there was another shot—a second. I’m about to go up, to investigate, but then Jo Pritchard comes down, and tells me not to worry. Tells me the whore was cleaning the piece, and it went off by accident—but that explanation only accounts for the first.’

Edgar Clinch slid his gaze back to Gascoigne.

‘The second shot was mine,’ Gascoigne said, speaking with ill-concealed annoyance; he did not like to be detained against his will. ‘I fired the piece experimentally, once I could see that the first shot had fouled.’

‘What was the shouting on account of?’ asked the hotelier.

‘That situation is now resolved.’

‘Jo Pritchard—laying into her?’

‘Sounded like that from here,’ said the valet.

Gascoigne shot the valet a poisonous look, and then turned back to Clinch. ‘There was no violence done to the whore,’ he said. ‘She is perfectly sound, and the situation is now resolved, as I have already told you.’

Clinch narrowed his eyes. ‘Strange how many guns go off while being cleaned,’ he said. ‘Strange how many whores get it into their heads to clean their guns, when there’s gentlemen about. Strange how many times that’s happened, in my hotel.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t offer an opinion on that subject,’ Gascoigne said.

‘I think you can,’ said Edgar Clinch. He planted his feet a little wider apart, and folded his arms across his chest.

Gascoigne sighed. He was in no mood for bullish displays of proprietorship.

‘What happened?’ Clinch said. ‘Did something happen to Anna?’

‘I suggest you ask her yourself,’ Gascoigne said, ‘and save us both some time. You can do that very easily, you know: she’s right upstairs.’

‘I don’t appreciate being made a fool in my own hotel.’

‘I wasn’t aware that I was making you a fool.’

Clinch’s moustache twitched dangerously. ‘What’s your quarrel?’

‘I’m not sure that I have one,’ said Gascoigne. ‘What’s yours?’

‘Pritchard.’ He spat out the name.

‘You needn’t bring that to me,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Pritchard’s not my man.’ He felt trapped. It was useless pretending to reason with a man whose mind was already fixed, and Edgar Clinch, by the looks of things, was spoiling for a fight.

‘That’s a true fact,’ put in the valet, coming to Gascoigne’s rescue. He had also observed that his employer was out of sorts. The hotelier’s face was very red, and his trouser leg was twitching, as though he were bouncing his weight up and down upon his heel—a sure sign that he was angry. The valet explained, in soothing tones, that Gascoigne had only interrupted the argument between Pritchard and Anna; he had not been present for its origin.

Clinch did not cut a terribly intimidating figure, even when poised in fighting stance, as he currently was: he seemed fretful rather than fearsome. His anger, though palpable, seemed to render him somehow powerless. He was occupied by his emotion; he was its servant, not its liege. Watching him, Gascoigne was put more in mind of a child preparing for a tantrum than a fighter preparing for a brawl—though of course the former was no less dangerous, when the provocation was the same. Clinch was still blocking the door. It was clear that he would not be rational—but perhaps, Gascoigne thought, he could be calmed.

‘What has Pritchard done to you, Mr. Clinch?’ he said—thinking that if he gave the man a chance to speak, his anger might run its course, and he might calm himself that way.

Clinch’s reply was strangled and inarticulate. ‘To Anna!’ he cried. ‘Feeds her the very drug that’s killing her—sells it!’

This was hardly explanation enough: there must be more. To coax him, Gascoigne said, lightly, ‘Yes—but when a man’s a drunk, do you blame the publican?’

Clinch ignored this piece of rhetoric. ‘Joseph Pritchard,’ he said. ‘He’d feed it to her if he could, like a babe at suck; he’d do that. You agree with me, Mr. Gascoigne.’

‘Ah—you know me!’ said Gascoigne, in a tone of relief, and then, ‘I do?’

‘Your sermon in yesterday’s Times. A d—n fine sentiment, by the bye; a d—n fine piece,’ said Clinch. (Paying a compliment appeared to soothe him—but then his features darkened again.) ‘He might have done well to read it. Do you know where he gets it from? That filthy muck? The resin? Do you know? Francis Carver, that’s who!’

Gascoigne shrugged; the name meant nothing to him.

‘Francis bloody Carver, who kicked her—kicked her, beat her—and it was his baby! His baby in her belly! Killed his own spawn!’

Clinch was almost shouting—and Gascoigne was suddenly very interested. ‘What’s that you’re saying?’ he said, stepping forward. Anna had confided to him that her unborn baby had been killed by its own father—and now it appeared that this same man was connected to the opium by which she herself had nearly perished!

But Clinch had rounded on his valet. ‘You,’ he said. ‘If Pritchard comes by again, and I’m not here, it’s you I’m counting on to turn him back. Do you hear me?’

He was very upset.

‘Who is Francis Carver?’ said Gascoigne.

Clinch hawked and spat on the floor. ‘Piece of filth,’ he said. ‘Piece of murderous filth. Jo Pritchard—he’s just a reprobate. Carver—he’s the devil himself; he’s the one.’

‘They are friends?’

‘Not friends,’ said Clinch. ‘Not friends.’ He jabbed his finger at the valet. ‘Did you hear me? If Jo Pritchard sets foot on that staircase—the bottom stair—you’re out on your own!’

Evidently the hotelier no longer regarded Gascoigne as a threat—for he moved from the doorway, snatching his hat from his head; Gascoigne was now free to exit, as he pleased. He did not move, however; instead he waited for the hotelier to elaborate, which, after slicking his hair back with the palm of his hand, and hanging his hat upon the hatstand, he did.

‘Francis Carver’s a trafficker,’ he said. ‘Godspeed—that’s his ship; you might have seen her at anchor. A barque—three-masted.’

‘What’s his connexion to Pritchard?’

‘Opium, of course!’ said Edgar Clinch, with impatience. He evidently did not take well to being questioned; he frowned anew at Gascoigne, and it seemed that a new wave of suspicion came over him. ‘What were you doing in Anna’s room?’

Gascoigne said, in a tone of polite surprise, ‘I was not aware that Anna Wetherell is in your employ, Mr. Clinch.’

‘She’s in my care,’ said Clinch. He slicked back his hair a second time. ‘She lodges here—it’s part of the arrangement—and I have a right to know her business, if it happens on my province, and there are pistols involved. You can go: you’ve got ten minutes’—this last to the valet, who scuttled off to the dining room, to take his lunch.

Gascoigne took hold of his lapels. ‘I suppose you think she’s lucky, living here, with you to watch over her,’ he said.

‘You’re wrong,’ said Clinch. ‘I don’t think that.’

Gascoigne paused, surprised. Then he said, delicately, ‘Do you care for many girls like her?’

‘Only three right now,’ Clinch said. ‘Dick—he’s got an eye for them. Only the class acts—and he doesn’t drop his standard; he holds to it. You want a shilling whore, you go down to Clap Alley, and see what you catch. There’s no spending your loose change with him. It’s pounds or nothing. Dick, he put you on to Anna?’

This must be Dick Mannering, Anna Wetherell’s employer. Gascoigne made a vague murmur instead of answering. He did not care to narrate the story of how he and Anna had come to meet.

‘Well, you ought to go to him, if you want a poke at one of the others,’ Clinch went on. ‘Kate, the plump one; Sal, with the curly hair; Lizzie, with the freckles. It’s no use asking me. I don’t do all of that—the bookings and whatnot. They just sleep here.’ He saw that his choice of verb had provoked some disbelief in the other, and so he added, ‘Sleep is what I mean, you know: I wasn’t mincing. I can’t have night-callers. I’d lose my licence. You want the whole night, you take it on your own head—in your own room.’

‘This is a fine establishment,’ said Gascoigne politely, with a sweep of his hand.

‘It isn’t mine,’ said Clinch, with a scornful look. ‘I’m renting. Up and down the street—from Weld to Stafford, it’s all rented. This place belongs to a fellow named Staines.’

Gascoigne was surprised. ‘Emery Staines?’

‘Odd,’ Clinch said. ‘Odd to be renting from a man who’s half my age. But that’s the modern way: all of us upended, each man for his own.’

It seemed to Gascoigne that there was a forced quality to the way that Clinch spoke: his phrases seemed borrowed, and he uttered them unnaturally. He was guarded in his tone, even anxious, and seemed to be protecting himself against Gascoigne’s poor opinion, impossible project though that was. He does not trust me, Gascoigne thought, and then, well, I do not trust him, either.

‘What will happen to this place if Mr. Staines doesn’t return, I wonder?’ he said aloud.

‘I’ll stay on,’ said Clinch. ‘I’ll buy it, maybe.’ He fumbled a moment with a drawer beneath the desk, and then said, ‘Listen: you’ll think me a bore for asking again—but what were you doing in Anna’s room?’

He looked almost pleading.

‘We exchanged some words about money,’ Gascoigne said. ‘She is out of pocket. But I believe you know that already.’

‘Out of pocket!’ Clinch scoffed. ‘There’s a word! She has pockets enough, believe me.’

Was this a cryptic reference to the gold that had been sewn into Anna’s dress? Or simply a crass allusion to the girl’s profession? Gascoigne felt suddenly alert. ‘Why should I believe you—above Anna?’ he said. ‘By her account, she hasn’t a penny to her name—and yet you think it right, to demand six pounds of her, paid up at once!’

Clinch’s eyes widened. So Anna had confided in Gascoigne about the rent she owed. So she had complained about him—and bitterly, judging by the Frenchman’s hostile tone. The thought was hurtful. Clinch did not like the thought of Anna speaking about him to other men. Quietly he said, ‘That isn’t your business.’

‘On the contrary,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Anna brought the matter to my attention. She begged me.’

‘Why?’ said Clinch. ‘Why, though?’

‘I imagine because she trusts me,’ Gascoigne said, with a touch of cruelty.

‘I meant, what’s the use in begging you?’

‘So that I might help her,’ Gascoigne said.

‘But why you, though?’ Clinch said again.

‘What do you mean, why me?’

Clinch was almost shouting. ‘What’s Anna doing asking you?’

Gascoigne’s eyes flashed. ‘I suppose you are asking me to define the precise state of relations between us.’

‘I don’t need to ask that,’ said Clinch, with a hoarse laugh. ‘I know the answer to that!’

Gascoigne felt a swell of fury. ‘You are impertinent, Mr. Clinch,’ he said.

‘Impertinent!’ said Clinch. ‘Who’s impertinent? The whore’s in mourning—that’s all—and you can’t deny it!’

‘The fact that she is in mourning is the very reason why she cannot repay her present debts. And yet you persist in abusing her.’

‘Abusing—!’

‘I got the impression,’ Gascoigne said coldly, ‘that Anna is very much afraid of you’—which was not at all true.

‘She isn’t afraid of me,’ said the hotelier, looking shocked.

‘What do you care about six pounds? What do you care if Anna pays up to-morrow or next year? You’ve just landed yourself a homeward-bounder. You’ve got thousands of pounds in the bank! And here you are splitting hairs over a whore’s rental, like a Limehouse profiteer!’

Clinch bristled. ‘A debt’s a debt.’

‘Rot,’ said Gascoigne. ‘A grudge is a grudge, more like.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I don’t yet know,’ said Gascoigne. ‘But I’m beginning to think, for Anna’s sake, that I ought to try and find out.’

Clinch turned red again. ‘You ought not to talk to me like that,’ he said. ‘You oughtn’t—in my own hotel!’

‘You talk as if you were her keeper! Where were you this afternoon, when she was in danger?’ said Gascoigne—who was beginning to feel a little reckless. ‘And where were you when she turned up near-dead in the middle of the Christchurch-road?’

But this time Clinch did not cower beneath the accusation, as he had done before. Instead he seemed to harden. He looked back at Gascoigne with his jaw newly set. ‘I won’t be schooled about Anna,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what she is to me. I won’t be schooled.’

The two men stared at each other, as two fighting dogs across a pit—and then each expressed his recognition of the other, and conceded, tacitly, that he had met his match. For Gascoigne and Clinch were not so very dissimilar in temperament, and even in their differences, showed a harmony of sorts—with Gascoigne as the upper octave, the clearer, brighter sound, and Clinch as the bass-note, thrumming.

Edgar Clinch had something of a circular nature. He was both solicitous and self-doubting—attributes that, because they opposed one another, tended to engender in him a state of constant, anxious flux. He provided for those whom he loved only to demand their fullest approbation for his care—a demand which, in turn, shamed him, for he was sensitive to the nuances of his own actions, and doubtful of their worth; consequently, he retracted the demand, doubled his provision, and began again, only to find that his need for approbation had doubled also. In this way he remained perpetually in motion, as a woman is perpetually in motion, harnessed to the rhythms of the moon.

His relationship with Anna Wetherell had begun in just this way. When Anna had first arrived from Dunedin, Clinch had been all but overcome: she was the rarest and most troubled creature he had ever known, and he swore that he would not rest until she was beloved. He secured his best room for her, and pampered her in all the ways that he was able, but he became very hurt when she did not notice the efforts he had made—and when she did not notice his hurt, he became angry. His anger was both unsustainable and unsustaining; it did not nourish him, as men are sometimes nourished by their own rage. Instead the emotion only diminished him, leaving him all the emptier—and, therefore, all the more ready to love.

When Anna first arrived in Hokitika she was with child, though her belly had not yet begun to wax, and her figure did not yet betray the secret of her condition. Clinch met her upon Gibson Quay, to which place she had been conveyed by lighter, the barque Godspeed having dropped its anchor some hundred yards or so offshore. The day was clear and bright with cold. The mouth of the river shone brilliantly; there was birdsong in the air. Even now Clinch felt that he could recollect every detail. He could see the wide halo of her bonnet, and the ends of her ribbons, flapping in the wind; he could see her ankle-boots, her buttoned gloves, her reticule. He could see the purple shimmer of her gown—which had been hired, as he later discovered, from the impresario Dick Mannering, to whom Anna would pay a daily rental until she could afford to make a purchase of her own. The garish colour did not suit her: it turned her complexion sallow, and drained the life from her eyes. Edgar Clinch thought her radiant. Beaming, he enclosed her thin hand in both of his own, and shook it vigorously. He welcomed her to Hokitika, offered her his elbow, and proposed a stroll, which she accepted. After directing the porters to have her trunk delivered to the Gridiron Hotel, Clinch threw out his chest and walked Anna Wetherell down Revell-street like a consort escorting a queen.

At that time Edgar Clinch had been in Hokitika less than a month. He did not yet know Dick Mannering, though he had heard the latter’s name; he had met Anna’s boat that afternoon quite without prearrangement with either the magnate or the whore. (Mannering had been detained in Dunedin, and would not arrive in Hokitika until the following week; in any case, he preferred to travel by steamship than by sail.) On fine days Clinch often stood upon the spit and greeted the diggers as they disembarked onto the sand. He shook their hands, smiled, and invited each man to take his lodgings at the Gridiron Hotel—remarking, casually, that he could offer a handsomely discounted price, but only to those men who accepted it within the next half-hour.

During the short walk from Gibson Quay Clinch became very aware of the delicate pressure of Anna’s hand upon his elbow; by the time they reached the Gridiron’s front door, he found that he all but depended on it. He begged to treat the young woman to luncheon in the dining room; she accepted, prompting in his breast a paroxysm of redemptive feeling, as a result of which he offered her his very best, and very largest, room.

Anna paid for her lodging with a promissory note from Dick Mannering, which Clinch, in his sudden flood of generosity, accepted without question. By the time it dawned upon him that she must be a member of the old profession, his affections had been securely, and irrevocably, bestowed. When Mannering arrived in Hokitika one week later, he introduced himself to Clinch as Anna’s employer, and thereafter negotiated an agreement under which the whore would receive, in exchange for a weekly fee, the benefits of protection, discreet surveillance, two meals a day, and a weekly bath. This last item was an expensive luxury, and one that would be rescinded (as Mannering confidentially explained) once the girl was well established in the town. Over the first few weeks of her employment, however, it was necessary to pander to her sense of opulence, and to satisfy her tastes.

Clinch was more than happy to fill the copper bathtub every Sunday, laborious though that duty was. He loved to glimpse Anna upon the landing, wet-haired and freshly clean; he loved to pass her in the dining room on Sunday evenings, and catch the milky scent of soap upon her skin. He loved to pour the spent bathwater, clouded with dirt, into the gutter at the edge of the road, and hope, as the white water seeped away, that Anna was looking down upon him from her window on the floor above.

Clinch’s efforts in love were always of a mothering sort, for it is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive, and it was a mother that Edgar Clinch most craved—his own having died in his infancy, and since then been resurrected as a goddess of shining virtue in his mind, a goddess whose face was as a blurred shape, seen through a window on a night of fog. There was an ill-fated aspect to all of his love’s labours, however, for they required of their object a delicacy of intuition that he himself did not possess. Edgar Clinch was a hopeless romantic, but in all the ordinary senses, he was an unsuccessful one: despite his daily ministrations, Anna Wetherell remained entirely ignorant of the fact that the hotelier loved her with the passion of a lonely and desperate heart. She was courteous to him, and kept her rooms in decent order, but she never solicited his company, and she restricted their conversation to the most trivial of themes. Needless to say, her indifference only warmed the coals of the man’s infatuation—and banked them higher, so that they burned longer, and with a redder light. When Mannering suggested, after a month, that the extravagance of Anna’s weekly bath ought to be discontinued, Clinch only ceased to itemise this service on Anna’s monthly bill. Every Sunday he set out the copper tub, and laid out the linens, and drew the water as before.

It seemed, in those first few months, that nothing at all could dampen Clinch’s adoration for Anna. He was not repelled by the fact of her profession, though it did distress him to know that she was so frequently in danger of harm. When he learned that she was an opium eater, and took the drug nearly every day, he was likewise only grieved and fearful, rather than repulsed. (He reasoned that the drug was very fashionable, and that he himself took laudanum whenever he could not sleep; why, what was the difference, between opium that had been turned into a tincture, and opium that had been burned into a smoke?) The sorrier aspects of Anna’s life, far from driving Clinch away, only caused him sadness, and as a consequence he longed for her happiness all the more.

When it became apparent that Anna was expecting another man’s child, however, Clinch’s sadness acquired an edge of alarm. He began to wonder whether he ought now to make his feelings known to her. Perhaps he should make an offer of marriage. Perhaps, when the babe was born, he might adopt the little thing as his own, and care for it; perhaps they could become a family, of a kind.

Clinch was pondering this very question one midwinter afternoon when he heard a thud upon the hotel’s veranda, and a muted cry. He opened the sash window (he had been lighting the fires in the upstairs rooms) and peered down to see that Anna had stumbled on the short flight of stairs that led to the front door. As he watched, she lifted her arm, slowly, and began to cast about for the rail.

Clinch descended the stairs, crossed the foyer, and opened the door to admit her—in which time Anna had hauled herself upright and crossed the veranda. When Clinch stepped out, Anna, who had been upon the point of reaching for the latch herself, fell against him, and, to stop herself from falling, she reached up and wrapped her heavy arms around his neck. She turned her face into his collar, so that her nose and mouth were pressed against the skin of his throat; she seemed to sag against him. Clinch gave a murmur of surprise—and then he was very still. He felt that if he spoke, or moved too quickly, the moment might be shattered, and the whore might flee. He looked out, over her shoulder. It was a pale, bright Sunday afternoon, and the street was quiet. No one could see them. No one was watching. Clinch cupped Anna’s waist between his palms, and breathed, and breathed again—and then, in one swift movement, he folded Anna against him, lifted her up, and crushed his mouth against her cheek. He stayed there for a long moment, his lips against her jaw. Then he hoisted her higher, retreated back into the foyer, shut the door with the edge of his foot, turned the key in the lock, and carried her upstairs.

Anna’s bath had been set out in the room opposite the landing, and iron pots of water were waiting, covered, on the ledge beside the fire. Clinch, still with Anna in his arms, lowered himself down upon the sofa next to the bath. His heart was beating very fast. He drew back, to look at her. Her eyes were closed; her limbs were loose and syrupy.

Many months had passed since Anna had returned the rented purple dress to Dick Mannering, having purchased, in place of it, several dresses that were better suited to her frame. Today, however, she was not wearing the bustled orange gown with which she habitually advertised her trade—for the whores in Hokitika wore bright colours when they were working, and muted tones when they were not. She was dressed, instead, in a cream-coloured muslin frock, the bust of which was cut in the style of a riding jacket, and buttoned to her throat. Around her shoulders she wore a blue three-cornered shawl. From these clues, and from the fact that she was all but insensible from the effects of opium, Edgar Clinch deduced that she had just been in Chinatown: when she travelled to that place, she travelled incognito, in her dull-coloured clothes.

With shaking fingers Clinch eased the shawl from Anna’s shoulders and let it fall upon the floor. He then untied the bow at the back of her dress and loosed the strings of her corset, moving slowly and in stages. His fingers found her covered buttons, one by one, and unhooked the loops that secured them. She was compliant in his arms, and when he moved to ease the dress off her shoulders, she lifted her arms like a very small child. Next he detached her crinoline, and lifted her out of the uppermost hoop, so that the frame fell away, hitting the floor in a rattle of buckles and wood. He eased her down upon the sofa again—she was now undressed to her slip—and folded her shawl over her body. Then he stood, and began to fill the bath. She lay with her cheek against the back of her hand, her breast rising and falling with the fitful breath of sleep. When the water was ready Clinch returned to her, murmuring phrases of reassurance; he drew her slip over her head, gathered her naked body up, knelt, and lowered her into the tub.

Anna made a cooing noise when her body touched the water, but she did not open her eyes. Clinch arranged her so that the copper lip of the tub sat snug against the nape of her neck, ensuring that she could not slither down, and drown herself. He smoothed her hair from her cheek, and ran his thumb around her jaw. He had wet his sleeves up to the shoulders, in lowering her into the water; now he stood back, and held his dripping sleeves apart from his body, and looked down at her. He felt very lonely and very contented at once.

After a moment the hotelier knelt and picked up the muslin dress from the ground, meaning to shake it straight, and fold it over the back of the sofa. The dress was heavier than he would have imagined—why, it was only muslin and thread, now that the crinoline had been detached, and the bloomers and petticoats discarded! Why was the thing so very burdensome? He pinched the fabric, and as he did so, felt something strange beneath his hands. He turned the dress over—what was that, some kind of weight, spaced along the seam? It felt like a row of stones. He eased his finger beneath a thread and felt it snap, then wormed his finger and thumb into the tunnel of the hem. Perhaps it had been stuffed with something. He withdrew, to his astonishment, a pinch of pure gold.

Anna was still sleeping, her cheek against the lip of the bath. Clinch, his heartbeat racing, felt along the seams of the gown, and up the flounces to the bust. There were ounces and ounces—perhaps pounds—concealed within the fabric. And all of it pure! What had Anna been doing in Chinatown, to return half-addled with opium, her dress stitched up with ore? She must be trafficking the stuff somewhere—smuggling it, by the looks of things. Taking it into Chinatown? That did not make sense. She must be taking it out. In exchange for opium, perhaps! Clinch’s mind was moving very fast. He recalled now that concealing gold in the lining of one’s clothing was a common method of evading duty at the customhouse, though it was a risky business, for if one were caught, one faced heavy fines, and even time in gaol. But Anna herself was not a digger—she was a woman, for heaven’s sake!—and the gold could not be hers. Someone must have trusted Anna enough to hide this gold in her clothing. And Anna must have trusted that man enough to bear the risk on his behalf.

Then it came to him: Mannering. Dick Mannering owned nearly every Chinaman in Kaniere; they all worked his claims, in exchange for a salary of a kind. Mannering was also Anna’s employer. Why, of course! Mannering was known to be a dirty dealer—what whoremonger was not? And had he not declared, over and over, that Anna Wetherell was the very best of whores?

Clinch turned back to Anna, and was startled to see that her eyes were open, and she was staring at him.

‘How’s the water?’ he said stupidly, shaking out the fold of the dress so that the pinch of gold in his fingers was concealed.

She hummed her pleasure—but she shifted her knee for the sake of modesty, and crossed her arms across her breasts. Her distended belly was a perfect sphere, buoyed high in the cloudy water like an apple in a pail.

‘Did you walk back—all the way from Kaniere?’ Clinch asked. Surely she had not just walked four miles—not when she could hardly hold her head up! Not when she could hardly stand!

She hummed again, breaking the tone in two pieces, to indicate a negative.

‘How then?’ Clinch said.

‘Dick was passing through,’ she mumbled. The words were like treacle in her mouth.

Clinch stepped closer. ‘Dick Mannering—passing through Chinatown?’

‘Mm.’ She closed her eyes again.

‘Gave you a lift, did he?’

But Anna did not answer. She had passed back into sleep. Her head lolled back against the lip of the tub, and her crossed arms fell away from her bosom, struck the surface of the water, sank, and rose again.

Clinch was still holding the pinch of gold in his fingers. Carefully he laid the dress over the back of the chair and then dropped the pinch of gold into his pocket, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together to release the flakes, as if he were salting a stew.

‘I’ll leave you to your bath,’ he said, and withdrew from the room.

But instead of returning downstairs he walked swiftly across the hallway, to Anna’s quarters, and fitted his master key easily into her lock. He entered her room and strode across to the armoire, where she kept her clothes. Anna had five dresses, all of them purchased salvage, from a cargo steamer that had been wrecked upon the bar. Clinch turned to the whoring dress first. With swiftly tapping fingers he moved along every seam, and felt inside the bustle. Like the muslin, this too was veritably stuffed with gold! He turned to the next—and the next—and the next; each dress was the same. Why, Clinch thought, doing some calculation in his head, between these five dresses, Anna Wetherell was hoarding a veritable fortune.

He sat down upon her bed.

Anna never wore the orange dress in Chinatown—Clinch knew that with certainty—and yet that gown was packed with gold, just like the others. So this was not just an agreement with the Orientals, as he had first believed! This was an operation that went beyond the bounds of Chinatown. Beyond the bounds of Hokitika, perhaps. Someone, Clinch thought, was preparing a heist of the first degree.

He considered the alternatives. Could Mannering be using Anna as a mule, to traffic ore out of the gorge without her knowledge? Why, Clinch thought, that task would be easy enough: one only needed to feed her a pipe of opium, and wait for her to drift into sleep, and thereafter the gold could be sewn into her dress, one pinch at a time. Perhaps … but no: it was absurd to think that Mannering would court such a colossal risk without the security of the whore’s own discretion. She was bearing hundreds of pounds on her person, for heaven’s sake—perhaps thousands. She must know about it. Mannering was not a fool when it came to money. He would never place a fortune in the custody of a common whore without insurance. Anna must have provided him with some kind of security—some debt, Clinch thought, some obligation. But what could she possibly have to give, that might serve as a surety on a fortune in pure?

Suddenly furious, Clinch punched the quilt with the heels of his hands. Mannering! The presumption of him—to engineer a deception of this kind, when Anna was living under Clinch’s roof, and supping at Clinch’s table! What if the duty sergeants had come calling—what if they had searched her room? Who would bear the responsibility then? Why, Clinch thought, he ought to have been given a cut of the profit, at the very least—he ought to have been told! And the Chinamen were in on the secret, no doubt. That was galling. Perhaps all of Hokitika knew. Clinch uttered an oath. Dick Mannering, he thought sourly, could be d—ned in hell.

He heard splashing in the room next door—Anna must have roused herself—and wondered, quickly, whether he ought to confiscate the dresses from the wardrobe. He could hold them as ransom against Mannering, perhaps. He could wait until Anna had regained her senses, and question her about the matter. He could force a confession—an apology. But his courage failed him. Edgar Clinch was always stymied by ill feeling; his grievances, though acutely felt, rarely developed beyond their unvoiced expression in his mind. With a heavy heart, he left Anna’s room, returned downstairs, and unlocked the foyer door.

‘Please accept my sincere apologies,’ said Gascoigne.

Clinch blinked. ‘What for?’

‘For insinuating that you had anything other than Miss Wetherell’s very best interests at heart.’

‘Oh,’ said Clinch. ‘Yes. Well, thanks.’

‘Goodbye,’ said Gascoigne.

Clinch received this farewell with disappointment. He had rather hoped that Gascoigne would stay a moment longer—at least until his valet returned from lunch—and talk the issue over. It always pained him to leave a conversation on a less than civil note, and in fact he did want to discuss the issue of Anna’s debt with Gascoigne, however hostile he had been at its first mention. He had not meant to lose his temper with Anna the previous afternoon. But she had lied to him—saying she had not a shilling to call her own, when there were hundreds, even thousands, sewn into the dresses in her wardrobe! The dresses were still there; he checked them periodically, to make sure that the ore had not been removed. Why should he foot the bill for her daily expenses, when she had access to such extraordinary wealth? Why should he be the one to soothe her troubles, when she was conspiring against him, and even telling falsehoods to his face? Months of silence had made him very bitter, and his bitterness had ripened, in an instant, into spite.

He stepped forward, and even put out his hand, meaning to delay Gascoigne’s departure. He wanted to beg him not to leave; he wanted, suddenly, desperately, not to be alone. But what reason could he give, to persuade Gascoigne to stay? Stalling for time, he said, ‘Where are you off to?’

The question rankled Gascoigne. How dreary frontier living could be! Every man was asked to share his private business; it was not like Paris, or London, where one felt the luxury of strangeness on every corner; where one could really be alone.

‘I have an appointment,’ he said curtly.

‘Who’s your appointment? What’s it all about?’

Gascoigne sighed. It was so dull to be asked. Clinch was looking almost sulky—as if Gascoigne’s departure was vexing to him! Why, they had only met ten minutes before.

‘I’m going with a lady,’ he said, ‘to look at hats.’

TRUE NODE IN VIRGO

In which Quee Long is interrupted thrice; Charlie Frost holds his ground; and Sook Yongsheng names a suspect, to everyone’s surprise.

At the very moment that Gascoigne took his leave of Edgar Clinch, slamming the Gridiron’s front door rather discourteously behind him, Dick Mannering and Charlie Frost were disembarking from the ferry onto the stones at the riverbank at Kaniere. The commission merchant Harald Nilssen was also rapidly approaching that place on foot; he had just passed the wooden marker announcing he was one half-mile distant from the settlement, an encouragement that had induced him to increase his pace considerably, though he continued to swipe the wet grasses at the roadside with his stick. The object of all three men was, of course, to reach Kaniere Chinatown, and there demand an interview with the Chinese goldsmith Quee Long—who had just been startled, as presently he would be again, by the arrival of a very unexpected guest.

‘Chinatown’ was something of a misleading name for the small clutch of tents and stone cabins some few hundred yards upriver from the Kaniere claims, for although every man hailed from Canton, and most from Kwangchow, together they could hardly be said to comprise a township: ‘Chinatown’ was home, at that time, to only fifteen Chinese men. Of this small cluster, Quee Long’s dwelling was notable for its handsome chimney, made of fired clay. The brick oven from which this chimney issued had been constructed as a miniature forge, fitted with a cast-iron chamber beneath a raised clay shelf, and positioned in the centre of the dwelling’s only room; it was upon this clay shelf that Quee Long slept at night, warmed by the bricks that still held the heat of that day’s fire. When he was smelting his weekly yield in ore, he filled the firebox with charcoal, for although that fuel was costly, it burned hotter than coke; today, however, his crucible and bellows had been set aside, and the firebox was stacked with a lattice of slow-burning wood.

Quee Long was a barrel-chested man of capable proportions and a practical strength. His eyes were rounded in their inner corners, but came to a point at his cheeks; the shape of his face was almost square. When he smiled, he revealed a very incomplete set of teeth: he had lost two incisors, as well as his foremost molars in his lower jaw. The gaps in his smile tended to put one in mind of a child whose milk teeth were falling away—a comparison that Quee Long might well have made himself, for he had a critical eye, a quick wit, and a flair for caustic deprecation, most especially when that deprecation was self-imposed. He painted a very feeble picture whenever he spoke about himself, a practice that was humorously meant, but that belied, nevertheless, an excessively vulnerable self-conception. For Quee Long measured all his actions by a private standard of perfection, and laboured in service of this standard: as a consequence he was never really satisfied with any of his efforts, or with their results, and tended, in general, towards defeatism. These nuances of his character were lost upon the subjects of the British Crown, with whom Quee Long shared but eighty or a hundred words, but to his compatriots, he was renowned for his cynical humour, his melancholy spirit, and his dogged perseverance in the service of untouchable ideals.

He had travelled to New Zealand under contract. In exchange for the cost of his return passage from Kwangchow, Quee Long agreed to surrender the majority percentage of his earnings on the goldfield to a corporate purse. Quee Long was made very poor by the conditions of his indenture, which were neither flexible nor charitable; but he remained a diligent worker nonetheless. His dream—an unlikely one, alas—was to return to Kwangchow with seven hundred and sixty-eight shillings in his pocket: upon this, he had decided, he would live out his days. (This particular sum had been chosen both for auspicious reasons—for, when spoken in Cantonese, it sounded like the phrase ‘perennial fortune’; and also for reasons of partiality—for Quee Long worked best when he could envision the fulfilment of a goal.)

Quee Long’s father, Quee Zuang, had worked in Kwangchow as a city watchman. He had spent his working life marching up and down the city wall, supervising the opening and closing of doors, and ensuring that the porters’ rotation was executed correctly. It was an important occupation, if a routine one, and as a boy Quee Long had been not unduly proud of his father’s station. In the trade wars of recent years, however, the relative prestige of Quee Zuang’s position had paled. When Kwangchow was stormed in 1841, the city looked to its fortifications—only to despair. British soldiers swarmed the forts in numbers that far exceeded the forces of the Qing, and the Chinese defences were overrun. The British took the city, and Quee Zuang, along with hundreds of his fellows, was captured—to be released on the condition that Kwangchow agreed to open her port to trade.

The natural shame that Quee Long felt for his city’s repeated surrender (for Kwangchow would be captured by British soldiers no less than four times in the coming score of years) was amplified a hundredfold by the shame he felt on his father’s behalf. Quee Zuang was all but broken by the ignominy he suffered. The old man died soon after the conclusion of the second war; by the time of his death, he had faced down the barrel of a British rifle three times.

Quee Long did not like to imagine what his father might think, were he to look upon him now. Quee Zuang had given his honour and his life in defending China from Britain’s unreasonable demands—and now, not eight years after his death, Quee Long was here, in New Zealand, profiting from the very circumstance that his father—and his country—had attempted, vainly, to forestall. He was sleeping on foreign soil, digging for gold (for gold, not silver), and conceding the bigger portion of his daily earnings to a British-owned firm, the governing ranks of which he would never be entitled to join. His discomfort, when he tallied up these betrayals, was characterised less by filial shame than by a pervasive kind of disenfranchisement. Looking back upon the long crisis of his own life (for so he perceived it, as if his selfhood was balanced, always, upon the point of choice—but what choice, he did not know, for this ambivalence was without a real beginning, and without a perceptible end) Quee Long felt only disassociated: from his own work, from his father’s wishes, from the circumstances under which his country, and his family, had been shamed. He felt that he did not know how to feel.

But there was one point upon which Quee Long remained loyal to his father’s shade. He would not take opium, and would not suffer it to be taken in his presence, or by the ones he loved. The drug, for Quee Long, was a symbol, signifying the unforgivable depths of Western barbarism towards his civilisation, and the contempt with which the Chinese life was held, in the face of the lifeless Western goals of profit and greed. Opium was China’s warning. It was the shadow-side of Western expansion—its dark complement, as a yin to a yang. Quee Long often said that a man with no memory was a man with no foresight—to which he added, humorously, that he had quoted this maxim many times before, and he was determined to keep quoting it, without alteration. Any Chinese man who took a pipe in his hands was, in Quee Long’s estimation, both a traitor and a fool. Whenever he passed the opium den at Kaniere, he turned his head, and spat upon the ground.

It will come as some surprise, then, when we identify the man with whom Quee Long was currently talking as none other than Sook Yongsheng—the man who operated the opium den at Kaniere, and who had sold Anna Wetherell the lump of opium by which she had so nearly perished, two weeks prior to the present day. (Quee Long’s forbidding code did not extend to Anna Wetherell, who often visited him after she had taken her pipe at the Kaniere den, when her body had become limp and supple with the drug, and she could not speak above a moan. But Quee Long never saw the instruments of her addiction, though he profited greatly from its effects; had she ever produced the drug in his presence, he would have knocked it from her hand. So he told himself, at least. Beneath this vague assertion ran another, more inarticulate belief: that a cosmic justice, in the case of Anna’s pitiful addiction, had somehow been served.)

Sook Yongsheng and Quee Long were not friends. When the former had knocked upon Quee Long’s door earlier that afternoon, begging his compatriot’s help and hospitality, the latter had received him with no small sense of trepidation. The two men, as far as Quee Long knew, shared only three things in common: a birthplace, a language, and a fondness for a Western whore. Quee Long guessed that it was concerning this third article of connexion that Sook Yongsheng desired to speak, for Anna Wetherell had been a topic of much speculation and opinion in recent days; he was further surprised, therefore, when his guest announced that his information pertained to two men: one named Francis Carver, the other, Crosbie Wells.

Sook Yongsheng was perhaps ten years younger then Quee Long. His eyebrows were very faint, and sloped in such a way as to express gentle surprise. His eyes were large, his nose broad, and his lips finely formed in a Cupid’s bow. Though he spoke with much animation, he tended to keep his face very still when he was listening, and because of this habit he was often perceived to be wise. He too was clean-shaven, and also wore a pigtail—though in fact Sook Yongsheng harboured strong anti-Manchu sentiments, and cared little for the empire of the Qing; his hairstyle was not a token of affiliation, but one of habit, carried over from the days of his youth. He was wearing, again like his host, a grey cotton shift and simple trousers, over which he had belted a black woollen coat.

Quee Long had never heard of either Francis Carver or Crosbie Wells, but he nodded gravely, stood aside, and welcomed the other man into his home, insisting that Sook Yongsheng seat himself in pride of place nearest the fire. He set out the choicest selection of food that he could offer, filled a pot of water for tea, and apologised for the poverty of his offerings. The opium dealer waited in silence until his host had completed these tasks. He then bowed deeply, praised Ah Quee’s excellent generosity, and tasted each one of the dishes that had been set before him, commending every one. With these formalities discharged, Sook Yongsheng began to explain the real purpose of his visit—speaking, as he always did, in a style that was vital, poetically exaggerated, and accented by proverbs, the meaning of which was always beautiful, but not always particularly clear.

He began speaking, for example, by observing that upon a big tree there are always dead branches; that the best soldiers are never warlike; and that even good firewood can ruin a stove—sentiments which, because they came in very quick succession, and lacked any kind of stabilising context, rather bewildered Quee Long. The latter, impelled to exercise his wit, retaliated with the rather acidic observation that a steelyard always goes with the weights—implying, with the aid of yet another proverb, that his guest had not begun speaking with consistency.

We shall therefore intervene, and render Sook Yongsheng’s story in a way that is accurate to the events he wished to disclose, rather than to the style of his narration.

Ah Sook rarely ventured into Hokitika proper. He kept, in the main, to his hut in Kaniere, which was fitted like a salon, with sofa-beds against every wall, and cushions strewn about, and fabrics pinned up to conserve and subdue the heavy smoke that coiled up from the pipes, the chafing dishes, the spirit lamps, the stove. The opium den had an air of stout impregnability about it, an impression compounded by the warm fug of its close atmosphere, and this was a comfort upon which Ah Sook had come to depend. Over the course of the past fortnight, however, he had made the journey to the river mouth no less than five times.

Upon the morning of the 14th of January (some twelve hours prior to Anna Wetherell’s near-death), Ah Sook had received word from Joseph Pritchard that a long-awaited shipment of opium had just been delivered to his drug emporium, and was available for purchase. Ah Sook’s own supplies of the drug were very low. He donned his hat, and made for Hokitika at once.

At Pritchard’s emporium he purchased a half-pound block of resin and paid for it in pure. In the street, with the paper-wrapped block stowed safely in the bottom of his satchel, he felt a rush of summery possibility, the likes of which a Hokitika morning rarely produced in him. The sun was shining, and the Tasman wind lent a briny sharpness to the air. The crowds in the street seemed very gay, and as he stepped across the gutter, a passing digger tipped his hat, and smiled at him. Emboldened by this incidental gesture, Ah Sook resolved to delay his return to Kaniere. He would spend an hour or so browsing the salvage crates on Tancred-street, as a special present to himself. After that, he thought, he might even purchase a joint of meat from the butcher’s, and take it home to make a soup.

But on the corner of Tancred-street he came up short: his festive mood dissolved at once. Standing at the far end of the street was a man whom Ah Sook had not seen in over a decade, and whom Ah Sook had believed, prior to that moment, he would never see again.

His old acquaintance was very much changed since their last encounter. His proud face was much disfigured, and a decade in gaol had lent a muscled bulk to his chest and arms. His posture was familiar, however: he was standing with his shoulders slightly rounded, and the backs of his hands against his hips, as in the days of old. (How strange, Ah Sook thought later, that one’s gestures remain the same, even as the body changes, weathers, and gives itself over to age—as though the gestures were the real vessel, the vase to the body’s flower. For it was Francis Carver through and through, to stand with his hips cocked slightly forward, and his shoulders hunched—a posture that would have been slovenly in another man. But Carver’s presence, grave, dark, and imposing, was such that he could afford to neglect those rules of carriage that other men were obliged, by virtue of their very mediocrity, to observe.) Carver half-turned to cast his gaze down the street, and Ah Sook leaped sideways, out of view. He leaned against the rough pine of the grocery store wall and waited there a moment until the beating of his heart had slowed.

The full account of Sook Yongsheng’s history with Francis Carver was not yet known to Quee Long, but Ah Sook did not recount the full particulars of the story at this time. He explained to his host only that Francis Carver was a murderer, and that he, Sook Yongsheng, had sworn to take Carver’s life as an act of vengeance. He gave this information almost carelessly, as though it were altogether commonplace to swear vengeance upon one’s foes; in truth, however, the source of this carelessness was pain, for he did not like to dwell upon the unhappy details of his private past. Ah Quee, sensing that this was not the time to interrupt, only nodded—but he stored the pertinent facts away, resolving to remember them.

Ah Sook continued his tale.

He remained for several seconds with his forehead pressed against the rough cladding of the grocery store wall. When his breathing was steady, he edged back to the corner of the building to look at Carver again—for to look at last upon the face that one has conjured in one’s most vengeful dreams is a pleasure of the most rare and passionate sort, and Ah Sook had conjured Carver’s image in his sleep for nigh on fifteen years. His hatred of the man needed no renewal, but he felt, upon perceiving Carver now, a surge of sudden fury, unfamiliar, uncontrolled: he had never hated the man more than he did at that instant. If he had a pistol he would have shot him at once, and in the back.

Carver was speaking to a young Maori man, though from their respective postures Ah Sook guessed they were not familiar: they were standing slightly apart from one another, as affiliates rather than as friends. He could not quite hear their conversation, but from its rapidly staccato nature he guessed that they were bartering; the Maori man was gesticulating very firmly, and kept shaking his head. At length it seemed that a fixed price had been agreed, and Carver, taking out his purse, counted several coins into the Maori man’s open hand. He had evidently purchased information of some kind, for now the Maori man began to speak at length, and with exaggerated motions. Carver repeated back the information, to fix it in his mind. The Maori man nodded his assent, and spoke a little more. Presently they shook hands and parted ways, the Maori man eastward, towards the mountains, and Carver westward, towards the mouth of the river, and the quays.

Ah Sook considered pursuing Carver at a safe distance, but decided against it: he did not wish to force a reunion with the man until he was prepared for such an event. At present he was unarmed, and he guessed that Carver had at least a knife about his person, and possibly also a firearm of some kind: it would be folly to accost him when at a disadvantage. Instead Ah Sook set off in pursuit of the Maori man—who was on his way back to the Arahura Valley to build a bird trap, having purchased from the Hokitika Dry Goods several yards of strong fishing line, and a small loaf of hardtack to crumble into bait.

Ah Sook caught up with him in the next block, and caught his sleeve. He begged to know the import of the man’s conversation with Carver, and produced a coin to show that he would pay for the information if necessary. Te Rau Tauwhare looked at him inscrutably for a moment, and then shrugged, took the coin, and gave his explanation.

Many months prior to the present day, Tauwhare said, Francis Carver had offered him a monetary reward for any news of a man named Crosbie Wells. Soon after this offer was made, Carver returned to Dunedin, and Tauwhare to Greymouth; the two men did not cross paths again. But as chance would have it, Tauwhare did then meet the very man for whom Carver was searching, and Crosbie Wells had since become his very good friend. Mr. Wells, Tauwhare added, lived in the Arahura Valley; he was a former prospector, and had given his life over, more recently, to the project of building a mill.

(Tauwhare spoke slowly, and with much gesticulation; he was evidently well used to communicating with his hands and his expressions, and paused after every clause to make sure that he was accurately understood. Ah Sook found that he could understand his meaning very clearly, though English was neither man’s native tongue. He whispered the names to himself: Arahura Valley, Te Rau Tauwhare, Crosbie Wells.)

Tauwhare explained that he had not seen Carver again until that very morning—the morning of the 14th of January. He had spied Carver upon the Hokitika waterfront less than half an hour before, and, remembering the offer the captain had made many months ago, he saw an opportunity to make an easy profit. He approached Carver and announced that he could offer news of Crosbie Wells at a price, if Carver’s offer was still valid—which, evidently, it was. They agreed upon the fee (two shillings) and once the coins were in his hand, Tauwhare told the other man where Crosbie Wells was living.

Ah Sook, in what he had understood of Tauwhare’s narrative, had discovered nothing that was of immediate use to him; however, he thanked the man very courteously for his information, and bid him goodbye. He then returned to Kaniere—where he found Anna Wetherell sitting in a patch of sunshine beyond his front door, waiting for him. Feeling suddenly tender towards her (any reminder of the troubles of his past life tended to furnish Ah Sook with a wealth of redemptive feeling about his present) he made her a present of a fresh half-ounce, cut from the new block of resin that he had purchased from Pritchard that morning. She wrapped the gift in a square of cheesecloth, and stuck it into the band of her hat. Ah Sook then lit his lamp, and they lay down together, waking only when the air began to cool with the coming of the dusk, whereupon Anna took her leave of him, and Ah Sook turned his mind to supper.

The goldsmith Ah Quee, to whom this was being narrated at a great pace, found that his impression of his guest was rapidly changing. Ah Quee had never cherished a very great regard for Ah Sook, who was clothed always in the conjured shadows of his reeking smoke, who shunned the company of other men, who squandered his meagre profits at the gambling house, where he rolled his dice in silence, and spat with little grace upon the floor. Perceiving Ah Sook now, however, Ah Quee felt that he had been mistaken, to repudiate the hatter’s character so completely. The man who sat before him now seemed—what? Virtuous? Principled? The words were not quite right. His speech was ardent, and there was a sweetness to this ardour, almost a naïvety. Ah Quee realised, to his surprise, that he did not at all dislike him. He was flattered that Ah Sook had sought his company—and his confidence—that afternoon, and this pleasure disposed him to be sympathetic; what was more, he had not yet guessed the purpose of the other man’s visit, and therefore was very much enthralled in his tale. He had forgotten, for the moment, his disapproval of the other man’s trade, and the sickly smell of the smoke, which he had brought with him, on his clothing, in his hair.

Ah Sook had paused to eat a mouthful of curd. He praised the dish a second time, and then resumed his tale.

On the night of the 14th of January, directly following Francis Carver’s rendezvous with Crosbie Wells, Godspeed weighed anchor—a fact about which Ah Sook would remain ignorant for some days. He remained in Kaniere, where he was occupied with planning the logistics of his impending crime. He had a keen sense of ceremony, and he desired very much that Carver’s death should happen in the proper way; however, he did not possess a pistol, and to his knowledge nor did any one of his compatriots. He would have to purchase one, discreetly, and learn to use it on his own. He had just spent the sum total of his dust upon the opium he had purchased from Pritchard’s emporium, and he had no more money at his disposal. Ought he to ask one of his fellows for a loan? He was pondering this problem when there came another unexpected tiding from Hokitika: Anna Wetherell had tried, and failed, to end her life.

Ah Sook was very distressed by this intelligence—though he found, upon reflection, that he did not believe it to be true. He decided instead that Pritchard’s latest shipment of opium must have been poisoned. Anna’s constitution was well accustomed to the drug, and a fraction of an ounce was hardly enough to cause her to lose consciousness for many hours, such that she could not be revived. Ah Sook returned to Hokitika the following morning and requested an immediate interview with Pritchard’s shipping agent, Thomas Balfour.

It so happened that this morning (the 16th of January) was the very morning that Balfour discovered that the shipping crate containing Alistair Lauderback’s personal effects had disappeared from the Hokitika waterfront; as a consequence of this, the shipping agent was curt, and very much distracted. Yes, Balfour Shipping had Pritchard’s contract; Balfour had little to do with the cargo itself, however. Perhaps Ah Sook might do better to contact Pritchard’s supplier, who was a rather brutish-seeming man, thick-set, with a scarred cheek and a gruff nature. His name was Francis Carver. Was Ah Sook at all acquainted with this man?

Ah Sook controlled his shock as best he could. He asked how long Carver and Pritchard had been partners in business. Balfour replied that he did not know, but since Carver had been an infrequent face in Hokitika since the spring of the previous year, he imagined that the two men had conducted their relationship for at least that long. It was strange, Balfour went on, that Ah Sook had never encountered Carver, if they were known to one another! (For such was very obvious, from the expression on Ah Sook’s face.) But perhaps not that strange, seeing as Carver so seldom ventured inland, and Ah Sook so seldom ventured into town. Was Carver known to him from his years in Canton? Yes? Well, in that case, it was certainly a shame that they had missed each other! Yes, missed each other: Mr. Carver had recently set sail. Two days ago, in fact. What a pity! For the man had most likely sailed for Canton, in which case he was not likely to return to Hokitika for some time.

Ah Sook had reached this point in his narrative when the kettle began to boil. Ah Quee lifted it down from the range and poured the water over their tea, to steep. Ah Sook paused, watching the tea leaves float to the bottom of his bowl and gather there. After a long moment, he resumed.

Taking Balfour’s supposition—that Carver had left Hokitika for Canton, and would not return for some months—as the truth, Ah Sook again returned to Kaniere to ponder his next move. He knew from the Maori man, Tauwhare, that Francis Carver had been seeking news of a man named Crosbie Wells just prior to his departure. Perhaps he could contact this Crosbie Wells himself, and question him. He remembered, from his brief conversation with Tauwhare, that Wells lived in the Arahura Valley, some few miles upriver from the coast. He journeyed there, and discovered, to his even greater disappointment, that the cottage was empty: the hermit was dead.

In the week that followed, Ah Sook followed the story of the Wells fortune very closely—believing, not unreasonably, that the hermit’s death was in some way related to Carver’s departure. This project had consumed him for nigh on eight days—until that very morning, in fact, the 27th of January, when he had made two discoveries that had surprised him very much indeed.

Ah Sook was just about to announce the reason for his visit when a pistol-crack rent the air—he started in shock—and there came shouting from the clearing beyond Ah Quee’s door.

‘Come out of there, you rotten chink! You come out of there and stand up like a man!’

Ah Sook’s eyes found Ah Quee’s. Who? he asked silently, and Ah Quee pinched his mouth to indicate distaste: Mannering. But his eyes were fearful.

In the next moment the hessian curtain was wrenched aside, and Mannering filled the doorway. He had his pistol in his hand. ‘Sitting around the forge, are you—scheming, are you? Both of you in it together? I’d have thought better of you, Johnny Sook! To dirty yourself in muck such as this! Yellow peril—by God!’

He strode into the cabin—rather less threateningly than he would have liked, for the stud was very low, and he was obliged to stoop—and caught Ah Quee around his body with one strong arm. He placed the muzzle of his Smith & Wesson against the man’s temple, and at once Ah Quee became very still.

‘All right,’ Mannering said. ‘I’m listening. What’s your business with Crosbie Wells?’

For a moment Ah Quee did not move at all. Then he shook his head—minutely, for he was conscious of the muzzle’s pressure against his skull. He did not know a man named Crosbie Wells, beyond what Ah Sook had just narrated to him, which was simply that the man had been a hermit, had lived in the Arahura Valley, and had recently died. Behind Mannering a white-faced Charlie Frost slipped into the room—and then, moments later, the collie-dog Holly bounded in behind him. Her coat was very wet. She trotted the perimeter of the small room, panting gloriously, and uttered several hoarse barks that nobody bothered to hush.

‘Well then,’ Mannering said, when Ah Quee did not respond, ‘I’ll ask it the other way around, shall I? Tell me this, Johnny Quee. What was Crosbie Wells doing with four thousand pounds of Aurora gold?’

Ah Quee made a noise of confusion. Aurora gold? he thought. There was no Aurora gold! Aurora was a duffer claim. Mannering, of all people, knew that!

‘Stuffed into the flour canister,’ Mannering snarled. ‘Wedged into the bellows. Inside the teapot. In the meat safe. Do you understand me? Four thousand pounds’ worth of pure!’

Ah Quee was frowning: his understanding of English was very limited, but he knew ‘gold’, and he knew ‘Aurora’, and he knew ‘thousand’, and it was very plain to him that Mannering wished to recover something that was lost. He must be referring to the gold from Anna’s dresses, Ah Quee thought—the gold that he had come upon, one afternoon, lifting a flounce of her skirt and finding it heavy, mineral, weighted with stones; the gold that he had siphoned, week by week, taking out the threads, a seam at a time, while she lay sleeping atop the brick bed of this very range, the waxing half-sphere of her pregnancy rising and falling with every breath, murmuring only when the snick of his needle touched her skin. He had smelted that metal, over the weeks and months following his discovery, and he had stamped each square with the name of the claim to which he was indentured—the Aurora—before taking it to the camp station at Kaniere …

‘Four thousand pounds!’ Mannering shouted. (Holly began to bark.) ‘The Aurora is a bloody duffer—she’s a bloody tailing pile! I know that! Staines knows that! Aurora’s dry and always has been. You tell me the truth. Did you strike it rich on the Aurora? Did you find a seam? Did you find a seam and retort the gold and hide it at Crosbie Wells’s cottage? Tell me, d—n you! Quiet, Holly! Quiet!’

It was the Aurora mine to which Ah Quee was exclusively indentured; his contract would not allow him to make a profit, except from ore lifted from that plot of land. After smelting the gold from Anna’s dresses, and inscribing each smelted block with the word Aurora, he had delivered the ore to the camp station to be banked and weighed. When the Aurora’s quarterly return was published in the first week of January, however, Ah Quee had discovered, to his shock, that the gold had not been banked against the claim at all. Somebody had stolen it from the camp station vault.

Mannering shoved the gun harder into Ah Quee’s temple, and again instructed him to speak, uttering several profanities too vulgar to set down here.

Ah Quee wet his lips. He did not have enough English to articulate a full confession; he cast about for the few English words he knew. ‘Unlucky,’ he said at last. ‘Very unlucky.’

‘D—ned right you’re unlucky,’ Mannering shouted. ‘And you’re about to become unluckier still.’ He struck Ah Quee’s cheek with the butt of his revolver, and then shoved the muzzle into his temple again, pushing the man’s head painfully to the side. ‘You had better start thinking about your luck, Johnny Quee. You had better start thinking about how to turn your luck around. I will shoot you. I will put a hole in your head, with two men to witness. I will.’

But Charlie Frost had become very agitated, and it was he who spoke. ‘You stop that,’ he said.

‘Hush up, Charlie.’

‘I won’t hush up,’ Frost said. ‘You put down that gun.’

‘Not for Africa.’

‘You’re confusing him!’

‘Rot.’

‘You are!’

‘I’m speaking the only language he can understand.’

‘You’ve got your pocketbook!’

This was very true. After a moment, as if in concession, Mannering took the revolver away from Ah Quee’s temple. But he did not return the weapon to its holster. He paused a moment, weighing the piece in his hand, and then he raised it again, and levelled it—not at Ah Quee, but at Ah Sook, who, of the two men, had the better English. With the muzzle pointed directly at Ah Sook’s face, Mannering said, ‘I want to know whether the Aurora turned up a bonanza, and I want the truth. Ask him.’

Ah Sook relayed Mannering’s question to Ah Quee in Cantonese, who responded at length. The goldsmith recounted the full history of the Aurora goldmine, salted by Mannering, since purchased by Staines; he explained the reason why he had first chosen to retort his weekly earnings, and later, to inscribe the blocks with the name of the mine to which he was indentured; he assured Ah Sook that the Aurora, to the best of his knowledge, was worth nothing at all—having barely turned up pay dirt for six months. Mannering shifted from foot to foot, scowling. All the while Holly was circling the room, her mouth in a grin, her wide tail thumping. Charlie Frost put his hand down for her to lick.

‘No nugget,’ Ah Sook translated, when Ah Quee was done. ‘No bonanza. Ah Quee say Aurora is duffer claim.’

‘Then he’s a God-d—ned liar,’ Mannering said.

‘Dick!’ said Frost. ‘You said yourself that the Aurora’s a duffer!’

‘Of course it is!’ shouted Mannering. ‘So where in hell did all that gold come from—all of it smelted by this filthy heathen—and in this very room? Is he in league with Crosbie Wells? Ask him!’

He shook his pistol at Ah Sook, who said, after confirming the answer with Ah Quee, ‘He not know Crosbie Wells.’

Ah Sook could easily have shared his own intelligence with Mannering—the intelligence that had brought him to Ah Quee’s hut that very afternoon, seeking the other man’s advice—but he did not approve of Mannering’s interrogative technique, and he felt that the magnate did not deserve a helpful answer.

‘What about Staines, then?’ said Mannering to Ah Sook. His fury was acquiring a desperate edge. ‘What about Emery Staines? Aha: you know that name, don’t you, Johnny Quee—of course you do! Go on: where is he?’

This question was relayed from Ah Sook to Ah Quee, as before.

‘He not know,’ said Ah Sook again, when Ah Quee was done.

Mannering exploded with annoyance. ‘He not know? He not know? He not know a lot of things, Johnny Sook, wouldn’t you say?’

‘He won’t answer if you ask him like that!’ Frost cried.

‘You hush, Charlie.’

‘I won’t hush!’

‘This isn’t your business, d—n it. You’re getting in the way.’

‘It’ll be my business if any blood gets spilled,’ Frost said. ‘Put down your gun.’

But Mannering only thrust it once again at Ah Sook. ‘Well?’ he snarled. ‘And you can wipe that stupid look off your face, or I’ll wipe it off for you. I’m asking you, now—not him, not Johnny Quee. I’m asking you, Sook. What do you know about Staines?’

Ah Quee’s eyes were moving back and forth between them.

‘Mr. Staines very nice man,’ said Ah Sook pleasantly.

‘Nice man, is he? Care to say where the nice man might have disappeared to?’

‘He leave,’ said Ah Sook.

‘Did he, now?’ Mannering said. ‘Just upped his sticks, did he? Left all his claims behind? Walked out on everyone he knows?’

‘Yes,’ said Ah Sook. ‘It was in the paper.’

‘Tell me why,’ said Mannering. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘I not know,’ said Ah Sook.

‘You are playing a very stupid hand—both of you,’ said Mannering. ‘I’ll ask you one last time, and I’ll spell it out slowly, so you understand. A very large fortune has recently come into play. Hidden in a dead man’s house. All of it—every last flake of it—had been smelted and stamped with the word Aurora. That’s the signature of my old friend Quee here and if he denies it he can rot in hell. Now, what I want to know is this. Did that gold really come from the Aurora, or did it not? You ask him that. Yes or no.’

Ah Sook put this question to Ah Quee, who decided, given the gravity of the circumstances, to respond with the truth. Yes, he had found a bonanza, and no, it had not come from the Aurora, though when he smelted the gold he had stamped it with the goldmine’s name, in order to ensure that the profits, at least in part, would return to him. He explained that, strange as it sounded, he had found the gold on Anna Wetherell’s person, sewn into the seams of her gown. He had first discovered it nearly six months ago, and had deduced, after some thought, that Anna must be trafficking the metal on behalf of someone else. He knew that Anna Wetherell was Mannering’s girl; he also knew that Mannering had falsified his own financial records before. It was reasonable to conclude, therefore, that Mannering was using Anna Wetherell as a method of transporting gold out of the gorge, in order to evade duty at the bank.

‘What’s he saying?’ said Mannering. ‘What’s his answer?’

‘He’s telling a frightfully long story,’ said Frost.

He was—and it was Ah Sook’s turn to be enthralled. Anna Wetherell had been concealing a bonanza? Anna, whom Mannering would not permit to carry even a purse upon her person, for fear of thieves? He could not believe it!

Ah Quee continued.

He could not forget his earlier grievance with Dick Mannering, for it was explicitly by Mannering’s hand that he was now forced to remain indentured to a duffer claim. Here was a chance both to get his revenge, and earn his freedom. Ah Quee began inviting Anna Wetherell back to his hut each week, always when she was addled with opium, for upon leaving Ah Sook’s hut she was always very sleepy and stupid; most often she fell asleep within moments after her arrival, lulled by the heat of Ah Quee’s stove. This suited Ah Quee. Once Anna was arranged comfortably upon the brick bed of his stove, he took her dress apart with a needle and thread. He replaced the tiny nuggets around her hem with leaden makeweights, so that she would not notice the sudden lightness of the fabric when she woke; if she stirred in her sleep, he held a cup of strong liquor to her lips, and encouraged her to drink it down.

Ah Quee tried to describe how the gold had been hidden in the flounces of Anna’s gowns, but with Mannering’s arm still around his body, he could not supplement his description with gestures, and therefore turned to metaphor in order to describe how the metal had been sewn into her corset and around her bustle—‘like a suit of armour,’ he said, and Ah Sook, who was always pleased by poetic expressions, smiled. Anna had four dresses in all, Ah Quee said, each containing, in his estimation, roughly a thousand pounds’ worth of pure ore. Ah Quee worked until each dress was empty, smelting every last flake of the dust into his signature blocks, and inscribing each one with the name of the claim to which he was bound—quite as though he had come upon it honestly, and legally, in the gravel pit of the Aurora. For a time, he added, he was very happy: once his surety had been repaid, he could return to Kwangchow at last, and as a wealthy man.

‘Well?’ Mannering said to Ah Sook, stamping his foot with impatience. ‘What’s the story? What’s he saying?’

But Ah Sook had forgotten his role as translator. He was gazing at Ah Quee in wonderment. The story was incredible to him! Thousands of pounds … Anna had been concealing thousands of pounds about her person, for months! That was a fortune large enough to retire a dozen men, if not more, in luxury. Anna might have purchased the entire beachfront with that kind of sum … and even then, she would have money to spare! But where was that fortune now?

In the next moment Ah Sook understood.

‘Sei qin,’ he breathed. So the fortune that Ah Quee had lifted from Anna’s dresses had ended up, by some caprice or misdirection, in the possession of the hermit, Crosbie Wells. But what was this misdirection in aid of—and who was to blame?

‘Speak English!’ Mannering shouted. ‘Speak English, d—n you!’

Suddenly very excited, Ah Sook asked Ah Quee how the fortune might have come to end up hidden in Wells’s cottage. Ah Quee replied, bitterly, that he did not know. He had never heard the name Crosbie Wells before that afternoon. As far as he knew, the last person to touch the retorted fortune was the Aurora’s current owner, Emery Staines—and Staines, of course, was nowhere to be found. Ah Quee explained that it was Staines who took the Aurora’s returns from the camp station to the Reserve Bank at the end of every month—a duty that had plainly not been carried out.

‘All I’m hearing is noise and nonsense,’ said Mannering. ‘If you don’t tell me what it’s all about, Johnny Sook—I’m telling you—’

‘They’ve finished talking,’ said Frost. ‘Just wait.’

Ah Sook was frowning. Did Emery Staines really steal from his own vault, only to stash the smelted fortune in a hermit’s cottage, twelve miles away? Where was the method in that? Why would Staines steal his own fortune, only to gift it to another man?

‘I’ll give you the count of five,’ Mannering said. His face was purple. ‘Five!’

Ah Sook looked at Mannering at last, and sighed.

‘Four!’

‘I tell you,’ Ah Sook said, holding up his palms. But what a lot there was to tell … and how few words he possessed, to contain the explanation! He thought for a moment, trying to remember the English word for ‘armour’, in order to preserve the poetic metaphor that Ah Quee had used. At last he cleared his throat, and said,

‘Bonanza not from Aurora. Anna wear secret armoury, made of gold. Quee Long find secret gold armoury that Anna wear. Quee Long try to bank armoury gold as Aurora gold. Then Staines thief from Quee Long.’

Dick Mannering, naturally enough, misunderstood this.

‘So the bonanza wasn’t from anywhere in the Aurora,’ he repeated. ‘Emery made a strike somewhere—but he kept it secret—until Quee here discovered it. Then Quee tried to bank Emery’s gold against the Aurora, so Mr. Staines took it back.’

That was confounding! Ah Sook began talking rapidly to Ah Quee in Cantonese—which Mannering, evidently, interpreted as a sign of assent. ‘Where is Mr. Staines now?’ he demanded. ‘Stop with your other questions. Ask him that. Where is Mr. Staines now?’

Obediently Ah Sook broke off, and relayed the question. This time Ah Quee responded in a tone of patent distress. He said that he had not spoken with Emery Staines since December, but he was very desirous to see him again, for it had not been until the Aurora’s quarterly return was published in early January that he had realised that he had been cheated. The fortune he had found in Anna’s dresses had not been banked against the Aurora as he had intended it to be, and Ah Quee was certain that Mr. Staines was responsible for this error. By the time he figured this out, however, Mr. Staines had disappeared. As to where he might have disappeared to, Ah Quee had no idea.

Ah Sook turned back to Mannering, and said, for the second time, ‘He not know.’

‘Did you hear that, Dick?’ said Charlie Frost, from the corner. ‘He doesn’t know.’

Mannering ignored him. He kept his revolver levelled at Ah Sook’s face, and said, ‘You tell him that unless he plays fair with me, I’m going to kill you.’ He twitched the gun, to emphasise his point. ‘You tell him that: either Johnny Quee talks, or Johnny Sook dies. Tell him that. Tell him now.’