The Luminaries

There were around fifteen letters in total, each addressed to Lauderback in a plain and unsophisticated hand. Moody took a moment to memorise the look of the knot, and the length of the strings of the bow. He then untied the ends, tossed the string to one side, and smoothed the folded letters over his knee. He could see from their postmarks that they were arranged in reverse chronological order, with the most recent letter first; he shuffled to the back of the pile, selected the very first letter that Lauderback had received, and began to read it. In the next moment his heart jumped into his throat.

Dunedin. March 1852

Sir you are my brother though you do not know me. Your father sired a bastard I am that bastard. I was raised CROSBIE WELLS taking the surname of my parish priest not knowing my father but knowing myself a whoreson. I passed my childhood in the Newington whorehouse THE JEWEL. I have lived a modest life such as I am able as a man of little means. I have not suffered. However I desired always to see my father just to know his shape & voice. Finally these prayers were answered with a letter from the man himself. He had always known of me he wrote. He expected he would soon be gone & confessed he would not identify me in his will for fear of tarnishing his name but he enclosed me £20 & blessings. He did not sign his name but I made inquiries about the servant who had brought the note & tracked his carriage though it was a rented one to GLEN HOUSE your father’s house & yours. I bought a coat I shaved I took a gig to your father’s house but sir I could not ring the bell. I returned home distraught & cowed & then I made a blunder seeing in the shipping news that ALASTAIR LAUDERBACK lawyer was departing for the colonies next tide. I believed it was my father I did not know he had a son I did not think that son might share his name. That ship departed but I was sharp upon the next. I landed at Dunedin & began to make inquiries as my fortunes would allow. I attended your public address the one conducted in the rain upon the wharf where the Harbour Master made you a present of a pocket watch & you seemed very well pleased. When I saw you I knew at once that I had erred & you were not my father but my brother. I was too anguished to confront you then & now you are in Lyttelton a place to which I cannot afford to sail. Sir I write with a request a prayer. I have spent my father’s £20 on this journey & other necessaries & I have not the means to return home. I have sold my coat but it fetched little more than half the price I paid for the broker did not believe it was a fine one. I have now but pennies to my name. You are a dignitary sir a man of politics philosophy & law I do not need to meet you but I beseech you for your charity believing you a good & Christian man & because I will remain always

Your brother

CROSBIE WELLS

There was a forwarding address beneath his name, a post-office box in Dunedin.

Moody put down the letter with a beating heart. So Lauderback and Crosbie Wells were brothers. That was a turn of events indeed! But Lauderback had not mentioned this connexion to the magistrate, when he admitted to having arrived at Crosbie Wells’s deathbed half an hour too late; nor had he confessed it to his friend, the shipping agent Thomas Balfour. What reason did he have to conceal his brother’s illegitimate parentage? Shame, perhaps? Or something else?

Moody took up the bundle and moved to the window, where there was more light. He unfolded the next letter and tilted it towards the glass.

Dunedin. September 1852

Sir six months have passed since I first wrote & I fear by your silence that I have offended you. I cannot recall my phrasing exactly but I do recall that in my last address I styled myself your brother & perhaps that caused you grief. I imagine that it pains you to know that your father was a less than perfect man. I imagine that you wish it otherwise. If the above is true then I beg forgiveness. Sir in these past months my fortunes have fallen further still. I assure you that as a whoreson I am not unaccustomed to the beggar’s life but to beg a man a second time is shame indeed. Nonetheless I write in desperation. You are a man of means the cost of a third-class ticket is all I ask & thenceforth you needn’t hear of me again. Here in Dunedin I save my pennies as I can. I have tried my hand at navvy work but find myself ill suited to the trade. I have been laid very low by ‘chill-blains’ & fever & other ills pertaining to the cold. I have not worked as steadily as I should have liked to do. My desire to meet our father Alastair Lauderback Senior has not diminished & I am conscious of the passing days for as I told you he confessed to me in writing that he was very close to death. I should like to speak to him but once before that sad event just so that we might lay eyes on one another & speak as men. Please sir I ask you on my knees to buy my passage home. You would not hear of me again I swear. I am nothing more than

Your grateful friend,

CROSBIE WELLS

Moody hardly paused before turning to the next; with his free hand, he fumbled for a chair, and sank into it, still reading.

Dunedin. January 1853

Sir how ought I read this silence that is the question on my mind. I believe you are in receipt of my correspondence but for some reason of principle you decline to answer or to extend a scrap of charity to your father’s bastard child. These letters did not take dictation. This is mine own hand sir & I can read as well & though I flatter myself I shall tell you that my parish priest Father Wells remarked more than once that I was an uncommonly bright boy. I state all this to make it clear I am no scoundrel though my station is a low one. Perhaps you wish for proof of my bastardy. Perhaps you think this an attempted swindle. I say on my honour it is not. Since I wrote to you last my needs and wishes are unchanged. I do not want to be in this country sir I never sought this life. For £20 I would return to England and never speak your name again.

Yours truly,

CROSBIE WELLS

Dunedin. May 1853

Sir I know from the provincial papers that you have taken up the post of Superintendent of the proud province of Canterbury. You took the post & offered up your honorarium for charity a noble gesture sir but one I observed with sadness. I wondered if you thought of me as you gave that £100 away. I have not the means to travel to Lyttelton where you are much less back home. I have never felt more alone than I do in this forsaken land surely you will understand this as a British man yourself. We have creeping damp and frost in-doors I wake most mornings with a rime of ice across my legs. I am not suited to the hard frontier & mourn my circumstances daily. Sir in this year past I have saved only £2 10s. 4d & I have now spent 4d upon these pages and postage. I beg of you to help

A man in need

CROSBIE WELLS

Dunedin. October 1853

Sir I write in great dejection. I am certain now that you will never write back to me & even I a whoreson am too proud to beg again. I am a sinner like our father the apple falling never far as the common saying goes. But in my youth I was taught that charity is a primary virtue & one to be practised most especially when that virtue is not due. You sir are not behaving as a Christian man. I do believe that if our respective circumstances were reversed I would not maintain the cruel silence that you keep with me. Rest assured I will not beg your charity again but I wish to make my dejection known to you. I have been following your career in the pages of the ‘Otago Witness’ & I know you are a man of no small means & much opinion. I have neither privilege but notwithstanding my abject position I am proud to call myself a Christian man & if you were in need sir I should turn my pockets out to help you as your brother. I do not expect that you will reply and perhaps I will die soon and you will never hear from me again. Even in the likelihood of that event I am proud to remain

Yours very sincerely

CROSBIE WELLS

Dunedin. January 1854

Sir I must apologise for the letter I wrote you last as it was written bitterly & with the purpose of insulting you. My mother warned me never to touch a pen when in a temper & now I see the wisdom in her words. My mother you have never known of course but she was quite a beauty in her time. SUE BUTCHER was her name in life God rest her soul though she also went by other names better suited to her line of work & liked to invent new ones at her pleasure. She was our father’s particular favourite a preference that was formed she said upon the handsome colour of her eyes. I do not resemble her except in pieces. She always said that I bore my father’s likeness though my father never returned to the whorehouse after I was born & as you know I never met him. I have been told that prostitution is a social ill composed of male licentiousness on the one hand & female depravity on the other & although I know this to be the opinion of wiser men than I nevertheless it does not make sense of how I remember my mother in my mind. She had ‘fine pipes’ & loved to sing all manner of hymns in the morning a practice that I also loved. I believe she was kind & hardworking & although she was known to be a flirt she was a very good one. How strange that we have separate mothers but share a father. I suppose it means that we are only half alike. But forgive these idle meditations & please accept my apologies & my assurance that I remain

Yours

CROSBIE WELLS

Dunedin. June 1854

Sir perhaps it is right you do not reply. You are acting only as a man of your high station can & you have a reputation to consider. I think I have become contented with your silence strange though that might sound. I have secured a modest wage & decent lodgings & I am ‘settling down’ as they term it here. I find Dunedin much changed in the summer months. The sun is bright on the hills & on the water & I can bear the briskness very well. How odd it is that I should find myself on the contrary face of the world. I believe that I am as far from England as any man could be. You will be surprised to learn that I am not to return home after all. I have resolved to make New Zealand the land in which I will be buried. Perhaps you wonder what spurred this change of heart & so I shall tell you. You see in New Zealand every man has left his former life behind & every man is equal in his way. Of course the flockmasters of Otago are barons here just as they were barons in the Scottish Highlands but for men like me there is a chance to rise. I find this very cheering. It is not uncommon for men to tip their hats to one another in the street regardless of their station. For you perhaps this is not a strange occurrence but for me it is a wondrous one. The frontier I think makes brothers of us all & in making this remark I shall remain

Yours very truly

CROSBIE WELLS

Dunedin. August 1854

Sir you will I hope forgive these letters I have no other correspondents & thoughts of you consume my days. I have been waxing philosophical myself in thinking what might have happened if you knew me sooner or if I knew you. I do not know your age so I do not know if you are the elder or if I am the elder. In my mind the difference signifies & because I am the bastard I imagine myself younger but of course that might not be the case. There were other children in the whorehouse several girls who grew up whoring & one boy who died of smallpox when I was very young but I was the eldest always & I should have liked a brother to admire. I have been thinking with much sadness upon the fact that I do not know whether you have sisters & brothers or if there are other bastards or if your father ever spoke of me to you. If I were in London I would be taking every chance to walk to Glen House & look in through the railings & spy my father whom you remember I have never seen. I have his letter still it says he knew of me & watched me and I wonder what he thought of me & what he might think about the life I lead here. But perhaps he is no longer living. You wish not to be my brother you have made that clear but perhaps you are as my priest with our correspondence as confession. I am heartened by this notion for I say with pride that I was properly confirmed. But I expect you are a Church of England man.

Yours,

CROSBIE WELLS

Dunedin. November 1854

Sir do you feel as if you know me or could pick me from a crowd? It struck me lately that I know your likeness though you do not know mine. We are not so dissimilar in our physique though I am slighter I think & my hair is darker than yours & folk would likely say that yours is the kinder face because my expression is too often sullen. I wonder if you walk about & think of me & if you search for fragments of my features in other people’s faces or their bodies when they pass you by. That is what I did every day while I was young & dreaming always of my father & trying to piece him from all the faces I had known. How comforting to think of all that unites us as brothers living at the end of the world. You are the subject of my repeating thoughts today.

Sincerely,

CROSBIE WELLS

The next letter in the sequence was much crisper, and the ink much brighter. Moody looked at the date, and noticed that nearly a decade had elapsed since Crosbie Wells’s last correspondence.

Dunedin. June 1862

Sir I will renew my correspondence to inform you very proudly that I write this as a married man. The courtship was a very short one though I believe the script followed conventional themes. In recent months I have been digging the gullies at Lawrence & though I have amassed a ‘competence’ I am yet to truly strike. Mrs. Wells as I must call her now is a fine specimen of the female sex & one I shall be very proud to carry on my arm. I suppose she is your sister now. I should like to know if you have a sister already or if Mrs. Wells is your very first. You shall not hear from me for some time after this for I must return to Dunstan in order to provide for my wife. What are your thoughts on the gold rush I wonder. Recently I heard a politician speak who called the gold a moral scourge. It is true that on the diggings I have seen much degradation but there was degradation prior to the strike as well. I fancy that it is the thought of men like me becoming rich that has most politicos afraid.

Cordially,

CROSBIE WELLS

Kawarau. November 1862

Sir I read in the papers that you are recently married for which I offer my heartiest congratulations. I have not seen a picture of your wife CAROLINE née GOUGH but she is reported to be a very fine match. I am happy when I think that we will both spend our Christmases as married men. I will journey back from Lawrence to spend the season with my wife who keeps her lodging in Dunedin & does not come to the diggings as she cannot bear the mud. I have never become used to Christmas in the summertime & feel the tradition as a whole is suited best to the colder months. Perhaps I blaspheme to talk of Christmas so but I esteem that there is much that does not retain its meaning here in New Zealand seeming instead like a faded relic from another time. I think of you receiving this letter & sitting down beside the fire perhaps or leaning close into the lamplight to make out the words. Permit me to invent these details it is a great pleasure always for me to think of you I assure you that I remain, from afar,

Yours very truly,

CROSBIE WELLS

Dunstan. April 1863

Sir I have passed this week in a melancholy humour wondering if Alistair Lauderback our father is yet deceased as I expect he is. London seems but a dream to me now. I recall the smoke & fog & cannot trust my own memory at all. As an experiment last week I sat down & tried to draw a map of Southwark in the dirt. I hardly could remember the shape of the Thames & no street names returned to me. Is it the same for you I wonder? I read in the ‘Otago Witness’ with some astonishment that you now style yourself a proud Cantabrian. I feel English through and through.

Yours,

CROSBIE WELLS

Kawarau. November 1863

Sir I like to think that you receive my words with pleasure but am content with the more probable event that you do not read them at all. In either case writing is a comfort to me and gives shape to my days. I read with interest that you have resigned the Superintendency. The word upon the diggings here is that Canterbury is soon to have her rush in gold following Otago’s fade & I rather wonder whether such a discovery would make you regret your decision to step down from that eminent position. The reward offered for a payable goldfield has excited more than one man upon the fields here at Kawarau. The land is steep & the sky very blinding here. I have been sun-burned so often that the shape of my collar has been branded into my neck & though this is painful I do not look forward to the winter months which in this high country will be bitter indeed. If gold is discovered in Canterbury will you run for the Super again? I do not mean that as an interrogative in the proper sense just as an expression of my curiosity in the course of your days. It is in this spirit that I sign myself

Sincerely,

CROSBIE WELLS

Kawarau. March 1864

Sir I write with most important and indeed astonishing news. I have been in Dunstan where I hit upon some extraordinary luck a claim veritably shining with the colour! I am now a wealthy man though I have not spent a penny of it having seen too many fellows spend their dust on hats & coats only to return those items to the pawnbroker’s when their fortunes change again. I will not tell you the amount for fear this message is intercepted but I will say that even by your handsome salary it is an enormous sum & I fancy that now I am the richer brother of us two at least in terms of ready money. What a lark that is. With this fortune I could return to London & set up a shop but I will continue to prospect as I believe my luck has not yet run dry. I have not yet declared the ore and have chosen to export it from the goldfields via a private escort which I am told is the safest route. Notwithstanding the alteration of my fortune I am, as ever,

Yours,

CROSBIE WELLS

West Canterbury. June 1865

Sir you will notice from my postmark that I am no longer a resident of the province of Otago but have ‘upped my sticks’ as the saying goes. You most likely have had little cause to venture west of the mountains so I shall tell you that West Canterbury is a world apart from the grasses of the South. The sunrise over the coastline is a scarlet marvel & the snowy peaks hold the colour of the sky. The bush is wet & tangled & the water very white. It is a lonely place though not quiet for the birdsong is constant & very pleasant for its constancy. As you may have guessed already I have put my former life behind me. I am estranged from my wife. I ought to tell you that I concealed much in my correspondence with you fearing that if you knew the bitter truth about my marriage you might think less of me. I shall not trouble you with the details of my escape to this place for it is a sorry tale & one that saddens me to recall. I am twice bitten three times shy which is a less admirable ratio than other men can boast but suffice to say that I have learned my lesson. Enough upon that subject instead I shall speak about the present & the future. I mean to dig for gold no longer though West Canterbury is flush with colour & men are making fortunes every day. No I will not prospect & have my fortune stolen once again. Instead I shall try my hand at the timber trade. I have made a fine acquaintance of a Maori man Terou Tow-Faray. This name in his native tongue means ‘The Hundred House of Years’. What poor names we British fellows have compared to these! I fancy it might be a line from a poem. Tow-Faray is a noble savage of the first degree & we are fast becoming friends. I confess it lifts my spirits to be in the companionship of men again.

Yours &c,

CROSBIE WELLS

West Canterbury. August 1865

Sir I read in the papers that Westland is to have a seat in Parliament & you are running for that seat. I am proud to say I am now a voting man sir for my cottage in the Arahura Valley is not leasehold it is my very own & as you know the ownership of land affords a man a vote. I will place my ballot in your favour & drink to your success. In the meantime I spend my days felling ‘totara’ with a thousand blows of my humble axe. You are a landed man sir you have Glen House in London and also I presume your electoral lodgings in handsome Akaroa. But I have never owned a scrap before. I have been with Mrs. Wells in name if not in deed for nigh on three years but all that time I was on the fields & without a fixed address while she remained in town. Although my present solitude suits me very well it is the stationary life to which I am unaccustomed. Perhaps we will meet or see each other while you are in Hokitika on your campaign. You must not fear that I will harm you or that I will betray the secret of our father’s wrong. I have told no man & only my estranged wife & her temperament is such that when she cannot profit from the knowledge she loses interest in the news. You must not fear me. You need only to send an X on paper to this return address if you make your mark in this way I will know that you do not wish to meet & I should keep away & stop writing & cease my wondering. I would do that gladly & anything else you ask of me because I am,

Yours very truly,

CROSBIE WELLS

West Canterbury. October 1865

Sir I have not received a letter X from you for which I thank you. Today I am heartened by your silence, though the very same has caused me grief before. I remain, as ever,

Yours,

CROSBIE WELLS

West Canterbury. December 1865

Sir I observe in the ‘West Coast Times’ that you mean to make the passage to Hokitika overland & therefore will pass through the Arahura Valley lest you make some deliberately circuitous route. I am a voting man and as such I would be honoured to welcome a politician at my home humble though the dwelling is. I shall describe it so that you might approach or direct your course away as you see fit. The house is roofed in iron & set back thirty yards from the banks of the Arahura on that river’s Southern side. There is a clearing of some thirty yards on either side of the cottage & the sawmill is some twenty yards further to the Southeast. The dwelling is a small one with a window & a chimney made of clay-fired brick. It is clad in the usual way. Perhaps even if you do not stop I shall see you riding by. I shall not expect it nor hope for it but I wish you a pleasant journey Westward and a triumphant campaign and I assure you that I remain,

With the deepest admiration,

CROSBIE WELLS

This was the final letter. It was dated a little over two months prior to the present day—and less than a month before Wells’s own death.

Moody threw down the page and sat a moment without moving. He did not habitually smoke alone, and so rarely kept tobacco about his person; right now, however, he wanted very much to be occupied by some compulsive and repeated motion, and briefly wondered whether he ought to ring the bell for a cigarette or a cigar. But he could not bear the thought of speaking to another person, even to deliver a command, and contented himself instead with the task of reshuffling the letters, and returning them to their original order, with the most recent letter placed on top.

It was clear from Crosbie Wells’s repeated allusions to Lauderback’s silence that the politician had never once responded to these letters from his bastard half-brother, his father’s whoreson child. Alistair Lauderback had kept his silence for thirteen years! Moody shook his head. Thirteen years! When Crosbie’s letters were so yearning, and so candid; when the bastard so plainly desired to meet his brother, and to look upon him, even once. Would it have so harmed Lauderback—the honourable Lauderback—to pen a few words in response? To send a banknote, and buy the poor man’s passage home? It was extraordinarily callous, never to reply! And yet (Moody conceded) Lauderback had kept Wells’s letters—he had kept them, and read them, and reread them, for the oldest were very worn, and had been folded, and refolded, many times. And he had journeyed to Crosbie Wells’s cottage in the Arahura Valley—arriving, in the last, just half an hour too late.

But then Moody remembered something else. Lauderback had taken Lydia Wells as his mistress! He had taken his brother’s wife as his mistress! ‘Unconscionable,’ Moody said aloud. He leaped up and began to pace. It was extraordinarily callous! It was inhuman! He made the calculations in his head. Crosbie Wells had been on the fields at Dunstan, and at Kawarau … and all the while the brother he so desired to meet was in Dunedin, making him a cuckold! Could Lauderback have been truly ignorant of this connexion? That was hardly likely, for Lydia Wells had taken her husband’s surname!

Moody stopped. No, he thought. Lauderback had told Balfour explicitly that he had not known that Lydia Wells was married throughout the course of their affair. In all of their dealings with one another, she had used her maiden name, Greenway. It was not until Francis Carver returned from gaol—calling himself Francis Wells—that Lauderback discovered that Lydia was married, and that her name was properly Lydia Wells, and that he, Lauderback, had been cuckolding her husband. Moody rifled back through the pile of letters until he found the one dated August of the previous year. Yes: Crosbie Wells had made it explicitly clear that he had shared the details of his illegitimate parentage with his wife. So Lydia Wells had known about Lauderback’s illegitimate brother from the very beginning of their love affair—and she had known, furthermore, that this was a matter about which Lauderback presumably cherished a very raw and private feeling, for he had never replied to Crosbie’s letters, even once. Perhaps, Moody thought, she had even sought out Lauderback with the express purpose of exploiting that connexion.

Why—the woman was nothing better than a profiteer! To have used both brothers—to have ruined them both! For another thing was now clear: the fortune by which Lauderback had been blackmailed had not originated from Carver’s own claim at all. The sum total had been stolen from Crosbie Wells; he had been the one to make a strike on the fields at Dunstan, as his correspondence had attested! So Lydia Wells had betrayed Wells’s secret to Francis Carver, with whose help she had then devised a plan to steal Wells’s fortune and blackmail Lauderback, leaving the pair of them rich, and the proud possessors of the barque Godspeed, into the bargain. Lauderback was plainly ashamed of his illegitimate relation, as Mrs. Wells, as his mistress, must have known first-hand; clearly, she had devised a scheme to use that shame as leverage.

Suddenly Moody’s heart gave a lurch. This was the twinkle—the private information by which Francis Carver had blackmailed Lauderback, and guaranteed his silence on the sale of the Godspeed. For Carver had called himself Francis Wells, leading Lauderback to believe that he and Crosbie were brothers: fellow whoresons, brought up in the same whorehouse … born, perhaps, to the same mother! Crosbie Wells’s surname had been given to him by assignation, and it was not implausible that Crosbie Wells might have had other siblings on his mother’s side, if his mother was a prostitute. What a way to play on Lauderback’s sympathies, and force his hand!

Crosbie Lauderback, Moody thought suddenly, feeling a rush of empathy for the man. He thought of Wells dead in his cottage in the Arahura, one hand curled around the base of an empty bottle, his cheek against the table, his eyes closed. How coldly the wheels of fortune turned. How steely Lauderback’s heart must have been, to maintain his silence, in the face of these impassioned appeals! And how pitiful, that Crosbie Wells had watched his brother’s ascension, over the course of a decade, through the ranks of the Provincial Council into the very House of Parliament itself—while the bastard struggled in the damp and frost, alone.

And yet Moody could not repudiate Lauderback altogether. The politician had visited his brother, in the end…. though with what intention, Moody did not know. Perhaps the politician meant to make up for thirteen years of silence. Perhaps he had intended to apologise to his half-brother, or merely, to look upon him, and speak his name, and shake his hand.

There were tears in Moody’s eyes. He swore, though without conviction, drew the back of his hand roughly across his face—feeling a bitter kinship with the hermit, a man whom he had never seen, and would never know. For there was a terrible resemblance between Crosbie Wells’s situation and his own. Crosbie Wells had been abandoned by his father, as had Moody. Crosbie Wells had been betrayed by his brother, as had Moody. Crosbie Wells had relocated to the southern face of the world in pursuit of his brother, as had Moody—and there he had been spurned, and ruined, only to live out his days alone.

Moody squared the edges of the letters in his hands. He ought to have rung the bell for the maid an hour ago, and demanded the trunk be removed from his room; he would invite suspicion if he delayed any further. He wondered what he should do. There was not enough time to make copies of the entire correspondence. Ought he to return the letters to the lining of the trunk? Ought he to steal them? Surrender them to a relevant authority here in Hokitika? They were certainly pertinent to the case at hand, and in the event that a Supreme Court judge was summoned, they would be very valuable indeed.

He crossed the room and sat down upon the edge of his bed, thinking. He could send the letters to Löwenthal, with instructions that they were all to be published, in sequence and in full, in the West Coast Times. He could send them to George Shepard, the gaol warden, begging the latter’s advice. He could show them to his friend Gascoigne, in confidence. He could summon the twelve men of the Crown, and solicit their opinion. He could send them to the goldfields Commissioner—or better yet, to the Magistrate. But to what end? What would come of it? Who would profit from the news? He tapped his fingertips together, and sighed.

At length Moody gathered up the letter-bundle, tied the bow exactly as it had been tied, and replaced the bundle in the lining of the trunk. He fitted the bar back into the hasp, wiped the lid of the trunk, and stood back to make sure everything looked exactly as he had found it. Then he put his hat and coat back on—as though he had only just returned home from Maxwell’s dining hall—and rang the bell. The maid stamped upstairs in due course, and in a tone of deep exasperation he told her that the wrong trunk had been delivered to his rooms. He had taken the liberty of opening the trunk, and of reading the name inscribed on the interior: it belonged to Mr. Alistair Lauderback, a man whom he had never met, who was certainly not lodging at the Crown Hotel, and whose name bore no resemblance at all to his own. Presumably his own trunk had been sent to Mr. Lauderback’s hotel—wherever that was. He intended to spend the afternoon at the billiard hall on Stafford-street, and expected that the mistake would be corrected during the hours of his absence, for it was of the utmost importance that he was reunited with his possessions at the earliest convenience: he planned to attend the widow’s ‘drinks and speculation’ at the Wayfarer’s Fortune that evening, and he wished to do so in appropriate attire. He added, before taking his leave, that he was most severely displeased.

A MONTH WITHOUT A MOON

In which the Wayfarer’s Fortune opens to the public at long last.

The hanging sign outside the Wayfarer’s Fortune had been repainted so that the jaunty silhouette with his Dick Whittington bundle was now walking beneath a starry sky. If the stars formed a constellation above the painted figure’s head, Mannering did not recognise it. He glanced up at the sign only briefly as he mounted the steps to the veranda, noting, as he did so, that the knocker had been polished, the windows washed, the doormat replaced, and a fresh card fitted into the plate beside the door:

MRS. LYDIA WELLS

,

MEDIUM, SPIRITIST

SECRETS UNCOVERED FORTUNES TOLD

At his knock he heard female voices, and then quick footsteps on the stairs, ascending. He waited, hoping that it would be Anna who received him.

There was a rattling sound as the chain was unhooked. Mannering touched the knot of his necktie with his fingers, and stood a little straighter, looking at his faint reflection in the glass.

The door opened.

‘Dick Mannering!’

Mannering was disappointed, but he did not show it. ‘Mrs. Wells,’ he exclaimed. ‘A very good evening to you.’

‘I certainly hope it will be; but it is not the evening yet.’ She smiled. ‘I would expect you of all people to know that it is dreadfully unfashionable to arrive early to a party. What would my mother call it? A barbarism.’

‘Am I early?’ Mannering said, reaching for his pocket watch in a pretence of surprise. He knew very well that he was early: he had desired to arrive before the others, so as to get a chance to speak with Anna alone. ‘Oh yes—look at that,’ he added, squinting at the watch. He shrugged and tucked it back into the pocket of his vest. ‘I must have forgotten to wind it this morning. Well, I’m here now—and so are you. Dressed for the occasion. Very handsome. Very handsome indeed.’

She was wearing widow’s weeds, though her costume had been ‘enhanced’, as she might have phrased it, in various small ways, and these enhancements belied its sombre tone. The black bodice had been embroidered with vines and roses, stitched in a glossy thread, so that the designs winked and flashed upon her breast; she wore another black rose upon a band of black that was fitted, as a cuff, around the plump whiteness of her forearm, and a third black rose in her hair, pinned into the hollow behind her ear.

She was still smiling. ‘What am I to do now?’ she said. ‘You have put me in a dreadful position, Mr. Mannering. I cannot invite you in. To do so would only encourage you to arrive early on other occasions; before long, you would be inconveniencing men and women of society all over town. But I cannot turn you out into the street either—for then you and I will both be barbarians. You for your impudence, and me for my inhospitality.’

‘Seems there’s a third option,’ said Mannering. ‘Let me stand on the porch all night, while you mull it over—and by the time you make up your mind, I’ll be right on time.’

‘There’s another barbarism,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘Your temper.’

‘You’ve never seen my temper, Mrs. Wells.’

‘Have I not?’

‘Never. With you, I’m a civilised man.’

‘With whom are you uncivilised, one wonders.’

‘It’s not a matter of with whom,’ said Mannering. ‘It’s a matter of how far.’

There was a brief pause.

‘How grand that must have felt,’ said Mrs. Wells presently.

‘When?’

‘Just then,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘What you just said. It must have felt grand.’

‘There’s a certain style about you, Mrs. Wells. I’d forgotten it.’

‘Is there?’

‘Yes—a certain style.’ Mannering reached into his pocket. ‘Here’s the tariff. Daylight robbery, by the way. You can’t charge three shillings in Hokitika for an evening’s entertainment—not if you’re calling up Helen of Troy. The fellows won’t stand for it. Though I oughtn’t to be giving you advice. As of this evening, you and I are direct competitors. Don’t think that I don’t know it: it’ll be the Prince of Wales or the Wayfarer’s Fortune, when the boys turn out their pockets of a Saturday night. I’m a man who takes notice of my competition—and I’m here tonight to take notice of you.’

‘A woman likes to be noticed,’ said Mrs. Wells. She accepted the coins, and then pulled the door wide. ‘Anyway,’ she added, as Mannering stepped into the hall, ‘you’re a rotten liar. If you’d forgotten to wind your watch, you wouldn’t have been early, you’d have been late.’

She shut the door behind him, and set the chain.

‘You’re in black,’ Mannering observed.

‘Naturally,’ she returned. ‘I am recently widowed, and therefore in mourning.’

‘Here’s a fact,’ Mannering said. ‘The colour black is invisible to spirits. I’ll make a bet that you didn’t know that—did you, now! It’s why we wear black at funerals: if we dressed in colour we’d attract the attention of the dead. Wearing black, they can’t make us out.’

‘What a charming piece of trivia,’ said Mrs. Wells.

‘Do you know what it means, though? It means that Mr. Staines won’t be able to see you. Not in that gown. You’ll be quite invisible to him.’

She laughed. ‘Dear me. Well, there’s nothing to be done, I suppose. Not at this late stage. I shall have to call the whole evening off.’

‘And Anna,’ said Mannering. ‘What colour will she be wearing, tonight?’

‘Black, as a matter of fact,’ said Mrs. Wells, ‘for she is in mourning also.’

‘You’re scuppered,’ said Mannering. ‘The whole enterprise. And all on account of your gowns. How’s that for a stick in a wheel? Thwarted—by your own gowns!’

Mrs. Wells was no longer smiling. ‘You are irreverent,’ she said, ‘to make sport of the tokens of bereavement.’

‘You and I both, Mrs. Wells.’

They looked at each other for a moment, each searching the other’s expression.

‘I have the greatest respect for swindlers,’ said Mannering presently. ‘I ought to—seeing as I count myself among them! But fortune telling—that’s a poor swindle, Mrs. Wells. I’m sorry to say it plain, but there it is.’

Her expression was still cautious; lightly she said, ‘How so?’

‘It’s nothing better than a falsehood,’ said Mannering, stoutly. ‘Tell me the name of the next man to bet against me. Buy me into my next game of brag. Give me the winner of next week’s races. You wouldn’t do it, would you? No, you wouldn’t—because you can’t.’

‘I see that you like to doubt, Mr. Mannering.’

‘I’m an old hand at this game, that’s why.’

‘Yes,’ said the widow, still gazing at him. ‘You relish doubting.’

‘Give me the winner of next week’s races, and I’ll never doubt again.’

‘I cannot.’

Mannering spread his hands. ‘There you have it.’

‘I cannot; because in asking me for such a thing, you are not asking me to tell your fortune. You are asking me to give you an incontrovertible proof of my own ability. That is what I cannot do. I am a fortune-teller, not a logician.’

‘Poor fortune-teller, though, if you can’t see ahead to next Sunday.’

‘One of the first lessons one learns, in this discipline, is that nothing about the future is incontrovertible,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘The reason is very simple: a person’s fortune always changes in the telling of it.’

‘You’re feathering your own nest, with that argument.’

She lifted her chin slightly. ‘If you were a jockey in next week’s horse race, and you came to me and asked to know if your fortune was likely good—well, that would be a different story. If I pronounced that your fortune was very gloomy, you would likely ride poorly, because you would be dejected; if I made a favourable forecast, you would likely ride with confidence, and thus do well.’

‘All right—I’m not a jockey,’ said Mannering, ‘but I am a punter with five pounds riding on a mare called Irish—that’s the truth—and I’m asking you to tell my fortune, good or bad. What’s my forecast?’

She smiled. ‘I doubt your fortunes would be very much altered by the loss or gain of five pounds, Mr. Mannering; and in any case, you are still seeking proof. Come through into the parlour.’

The interior of the Wayfarer’s Fortune hardly recalled the grimy establishment at which Mrs. Wells had received Aubert Gascoigne three weeks prior. The widow had ordered drapes, a new suite of furniture, and a dozen rolls of paper in a striking rose-and-thorn design; she had set a number of exotic prints behind glass, painted the stairwell, washed the windows, and papered both front rooms. She had found a lectern, upon which to place her almanac, and several shawled lamps, which she had placed in various situations around the former hotel’s front rooms in order to create a more mystical atmosphere. Mannering opened his mouth to comment upon the transformation—and came up short.

‘Why—it’s Mr. Sook,’ he said, in astonishment. ‘And Mr. Quee!’

The two Chinese men stared back at him. They were sitting cross-legged on either side of the hearth, their faces painted very thickly with grease.

‘Do you know these men?’ said Lydia Wells.

Mannering remembered himself. ‘Only to look at them,’ he said. ‘I do a fair patch of business with the Chinamen, you know—and these boys are familiar faces in Kaniere. How do you do, fellows?’

‘Good evening,’ said Ah Sook. Ah Quee said nothing. Their expressions were all but indistinguishable beneath the greasepaint, which exaggerated their features, lengthening the corners of their eyes, emphasising the roundness of their cheeks.

Mannering turned to Mrs. Wells. ‘What—they have a part in the séance, do they? In your employ?’

‘This one came by this afternoon,’ Mrs. Wells explained, pointing at Ah Sook, ‘and I had the idea that his presence might add a certain flavour to the séance this evening. He agreed to return, and in the event, he did me one better: he brought his friend along. You must agree that two is a good deal better than one. I like an axis of symmetry in a room.’

‘Where is Anna?’ said Mannering.

‘Oh—upstairs,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘In fact it was you, Mr. Mannering, who gave me the idea. Your Sensations from the Orient. Nothing sells tickets like an Oriental touch! I saw it twice—once from the gallery, and once from the stalls.’

Mannering was frowning. ‘When is she coming down?’

‘Not until the séance,’ said Mrs. Wells.

He started. ‘What—not for the party? She won’t be here for the party?’

Mrs. Wells turned away to arrange the glasses on the sideboard. ‘No.’

‘Why ever not?’ said Mannering. ‘You know there are a dozen men champing at the bit to get a word in with her. They’re shelling out a week’s wages just to get in the door—and it’s all on account of Anna. You’d be mad to keep her upstairs.’

‘She must prepare herself for the séance. I cannot have her equilibrium disturbed.’

‘Poppycock,’ said Mannering.

‘Pardon me?’ said Mrs. Wells, turning.

‘I said that’s poppycock. You’re keeping her back—for a reason.’

‘What do you imply?’

‘I lost my best girl in Anna Wetherell,’ said Mannering. ‘I’ve kept my distance for three weeks, out of respect for God knows what, and now I want a chance to speak with her. There’s no such thing as equilibrium disturbed and we both know it.’

‘I feel I must remind you that this is a field in which you lack expertise.’

‘Expertise!’ said Mannering, contemptuously. ‘Three weeks ago Anna didn’t know equilibrium from her own elbow. This is poppycock, Mrs. Wells. Call her down.’

Mrs. Wells drew back. ‘I must also remind you, Mr. Mannering, that you are a guest in my home.’

‘This isn’t a home; it’s a place of business. I’ve paid you three shillings on the surety that Anna would be here.’

‘In fact no such surety was given.’

‘Hear this!’ said Mannering—who was becoming very angry. ‘I’ll give you another piece of advice, Mrs. Wells, and I’ll give it to you free: in show business, you give an audience exactly what they’ve paid for, and if you don’t, you’ll suffer the consequences of their unrest. It said in the paper that Anna would be here.’

‘It said in the paper that she would be present at the séance, as my assistant.’

‘What have you got on her?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Why did she agree to it? To stay upstairs—alone, and in the dark?’

Mrs. Wells ignored this question. ‘Miss Wetherell,’ she said, ‘has been learning to play out the patterns of the Tarot, an art at which she has proven to be something of an adept. Once I am satisfied that she has achieved mastery, she will advertise her services in the West Coast Times, and at that time you will be very welcome, as will all the citizens of Hokitika, to make an appointment with her.’

‘And I’ll be paying through the nose for the privilege, will I?’

‘But of course,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘I wonder that you expected otherwise.’

Ah Sook was looking at Mrs. Wells, Ah Quee, at Mannering.

‘This is an outrage,’ Mannering said.

‘Perhaps you no longer wish to attend the party,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘If that is the case, you need only say so; I shall repay your tariff in full.’

‘What’s the point of it? Keeping her upstairs.’

The widow laughed. ‘Come, Mr. Mannering! We are in the same business, as you have already pointed out; I don’t need to spell it out for you.’

‘No. Spell it out,’ said Mannering. ‘Go on. Spell it out.’

Mrs. Wells did not, however; she gazed at him a moment, and then said, ‘Why did you come to the party tonight?’

‘To speak with Anna. And to get a measure of my competition. You.’

‘The first of your ambitions will not be realised, as I have now made clear, and you surely must have achieved the second by now. This being the case, I do not see that there is any reason for you to remain.’

‘I’m staying,’ Mannering said.

‘Why?’

‘To keep an eye on you, that’s why.’

‘I see.’ Mrs. Wells gazed at him. ‘I think that there is another reason why you decided to attend the party tonight—a reason that you have not hitherto shared with me.’

‘Oh? And what might that be?’ said Mannering.

‘I’m afraid I can only guess,’ said Mrs. Wells.

‘Well, go on—make your prediction. That’s your game, isn’t it? Tell my fortune.’

She put her head to the side, appraising him. Then she said, suddenly decisive, ‘No; this time I believe I shall keep my prediction to myself.’

Mannering faltered, and after a moment Mrs. Wells gave her tinkling laugh, and drew herself upright, clasping her hands together over her bosom. Begging Mannering’s leave to depart, she explained that she had hired two barmaids from the Star and Garter to wait on her guests that evening, and the girls had not yet been briefed: they were waiting in the kitchen, very patiently, and she would not suffer them to wait a moment longer. She invited Mannering to pour himself a drink from the decanters set out upon the sideboard, and to make himself very much at home—and with that, she swept from the room, leaving Mannering staring after her, red-faced.

Once the door had closed behind her, he rounded on Ah Sook. ‘What have you got to say for yourself, then?’

‘To see Emery Staines,’ said Ah Sook.

‘You’ve got some questions for him, I suppose.’

‘Yes.’

‘Dead or alive,’ said Mannering. ‘It’s one or the other, isn’t it, Mr. Sook? It’s one or the other, at this stage.’

He stamped to the sideboard and poured himself a very stiff drink.

Mrs. Wells had hired a two-man orchestra, comprising a fiddle and a flute, from the Catholic Friendly Society on Collingwood-street. The musicians arrived a little before seven, their instruments rolled in velvet, and Mrs. Wells directed them to the end of the hallway where two chairs had been set up facing the door. The only songs they knew were jigs and hornpipes, but Mrs. Wells had lit upon the idea that they might play their repertoire at a quarter time, or as slowly as their breath and co-ordination would permit, in order to be more in keeping with the tenor of the evening. Played slowly, the jigs turned sinister, and the hornpipes became sad; even Mannering, whose bad temper had not been assuaged by two fingers of brandy and the cheerful ministration of the Star and Garter barmaids, had to admit that the effect was very striking. When the first guests knocked upon the door, ‘Sixpenny Money’ was sounding at an aching drawl—putting one in mind not of dancing and celebration, but of funerals, sickness, and very bad news.

By eight o’clock the former hotel had reached capacity, and the air was thick with smoke.

‘Have you ever watched a magician at a market? Have you ever seen a cup-and-ball man at work? Well, it’s all in the art of diversion, Mr. Frost. They have ways of making you look away, by means of a joke or a noise or something unexpected, and while your head is turned, that’s when the cups get swapped, or filled, or emptied, or what have you. I don’t need to tell you that no diversion’s as good as a woman, and tonight, you’ll be contending with two.’

Frost glanced at Pritchard, uncomfortably, and then away: he was a little afraid of the chemist, and he did not like the way that Pritchard was looming over him—standing so close that when he spoke Frost could feel the heat of his breath. ‘How do you propose I am not diverted?’ he said.

‘You keep both eyes open,’ Pritchard said. ‘Nilssen watches Anna. You watch the widow. Between the two of you, you’ve got them covered, you see? You watch Lydia Wells no matter what. If she invites you to close your eyes or look elsewhere—they often do that, you know—well, don’t.’

Frost felt a twinge of irritation at this. He wondered what right Joseph Pritchard had, to allocate duties of surveillance at a séance to which he did not hold an invitation. And why was he assigned to the widow, when Nilssen got Anna? He did not voice these complaints aloud, however, for a barmaid was approaching with a decanter on a tray. Both men filled their glasses, thanked her, and watched her move away through the crowd.

As soon as she had left Pritchard resumed, with the same intensity. ‘Staines has got to be somewhere,’ he insisted. ‘A man doesn’t just vanish without a trace. What do we know for sure? Let us catalogue it. We know that Anna was the very last to see him alive. We know that she was lying about that opium—saying she’d eaten that ounce herself, when I saw for myself that that was a plain-faced lie. And we know that now she’s fixing to call him up from the dead.’

It occurred to Frost suddenly that Pritchard’s jacket fit him very ill, and that his necktie had not been pressed, and that his shirt was all but threadbare. Why, and his razor must be very blunt, Frost thought, to produce so uneven and patchy a shave. This criticism, internally voiced, gave him a sudden confidence. He said,

‘You don’t trust Anna very much, do you, Mr. Pritchard?’

Pritchard seemed taken aback by the assumption. ‘There is ample reason not to trust her,’ he said coldly. ‘As I have just chronicled for you.’

‘But personally,’ Frost said. ‘As a woman. I gather that your impression of her integrity is very low.’

‘You talk of a whore’s integrity!’ Pritchard burst out, but he did not go on.

After a moment Frost added, ‘I wonder what you think of her. That’s all.’

Pritchard stared at Frost with a vacant expression. ‘No,’ he said, at last. ‘I don’t trust Anna. I don’t trust her a straw. I don’t even love her. But I wish I did. Isn’t that a curious thing? I wish I did.’

Frost was uncomfortable. ‘Hardly worth three shillings, is it?’ he said, referring to the party. ‘I must say I expected more.’

Pritchard seemed embarrassed also. ‘Just remember,’ he said, ‘during the séance, keep both eyes on Mrs. Wells.’

They turned away from one another, pretending to scan the faces of the crowd, and for a moment the two men shared the very same expression: the distant, slightly disappointed aspect of one who is comparing the scene around him, unfavourably, to other scenes, both real and imagined, that have happened, and are happening, elsewhere.

‘Mr. Balfour. May I speak with you a moment alone?’

Balfour glanced up: it was Harald Nilssen, looking characteristically dapper in a vest of imperial blue. He saw on Nilssen’s face the hardened expression of a man who is resolved to ask a difficult question, and his heart became heavy in his chest. ‘Of course—naturally, naturally,’ he said. ‘You can speak to me—of course you can speak to me! Naturally!’

What fools men became, he thought, when they knew they were about to be shamed. He followed Nilssen through the crowd.

When they were out of earshot of the parlour, Nilssen stopped abruptly. ‘I’ll get right to it,’ he said, turning on his heel.

‘Yes,’ said Balfour. ‘Get right to it. That’s always best. How do you like the party?’

From the sitting room came a roar of laughter, and a woman’s indignant squeal.

‘I like it very well,’ said Nilssen.

‘No sign of Anna, though.’

‘No.’

‘And three shillings,’ said Balfour. ‘That’s a price! We’ll be drinking our money’s worth—won’t we?’ He looked into his glass.

‘I’ll get right to it,’ Nilssen said again.

‘Yes,’ said Balfour. ‘Do.’

‘Somehow,’ Nilssen began, ‘Mr. Lauderback knows about my commission. He’s publishing a letter in the paper about it, to-morrow. Lambasting Shepard’s character and so forth. I haven’t seen it yet.’

‘Oh dear,’ Balfour said. ‘Oh dear—yes, I see. I see.’ He nodded vigorously, though not at Nilssen. They were standing almost side-by-side. Nilssen was directing his speech at a framed print upon the wall, and Balfour, at the wainscot.

‘Governor Shepard penned a reply,’ Nilssen went on, still addressing the print, ‘which is to appear directly underneath Lauderback’s, in to-morrow’s paper. I’ve seen the reply: Shepard sent me a copy this afternoon.’

He gave a brief account of Shepard’s response—causing Balfour’s anxiety to dissolve, in a moment, into pure astonishment.

‘Well,’ he said, looking squarely at Nilssen for the first time, ‘I’m blowed. That’s a shark in shallow water, all right. Fancy Gov. Shepard coming up with something like that. Saying it’s all your instigation—the investment—as a donation! I’m blowed! He’s got you in a corner, hasn’t he? What a confident devil that man is! What a snake!’

‘Did you tell Mr. Lauderback about my commission?’ Nilssen said.

‘No!’ said Balfour.

‘You didn’t even mention it—off-hand?’

‘No!’ said Balfour. ‘Not a bit!’

‘All right,’ Nilssen said heavily. ‘Thanks. I’m sorry to have troubled you. I suppose it has to be one of the others.’

Balfour started. ‘One of the others? You mean—one of the fellows from the Crown?’

‘Yes,’ Nilssen said. ‘Somebody must have broken his oath. I certainly didn’t tell Mr. Lauderback anything—and I’m certain that nobody else knows about the investment, beyond the twelve who swore.’

Balfour was looking panicked. ‘What about your boy?’ he said.

Nilssen shook his head. ‘He doesn’t know.’

‘Someone at the bank, maybe.’

‘No: it was a private agreement—and Shepard has the only copy of the deed.’ Nilssen sighed. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for having sprung it on you—for having asked, you know—and doubted you. But I knew you were Lauderback’s man—and, well, I had to make sure.’

‘Naturally you did…! Of course!’

Nilssen nodded gloomily. He looked through the drawing-room doorway to the crowd beyond—to Pritchard, who stood a clear head taller than any other man in the room—to Devlin, who stood in conversation with Clinch—to Löwenthal, who was talking to Frost—to Mannering, who was refilling his glass from the decanter on the sideboard, and laughing very freely at another man’s joke.

‘Hang tight,’ said Balfour suddenly. ‘You said that Shepard’s letter mentioned Lauderback and Lydia Wells.’

‘Yes,’ said Nilssen, uncomfortably. ‘He’s made their affair all but public knowledge—saying that Lauderback must come clean about her. That’s the—’

Balfour interrupted him. ‘But how in all heaven does Shepard know about the affair in the first place? I hardly think that Lauderback would have—’

‘I told him,’ Nilssen burst out. ‘I broke my oath. Oh, Mr. Balfour—he had me in a corner—and he knew I was hiding something—and I buckled. I couldn’t think fast enough. You’ve every right to be furious with me. You’ve every right. I don’t mind.’

‘Not at all,’ said Balfour—to whom this confession had come as a strange relief.

‘Now Lauderback will know you didn’t keep his confidence,’ Nilssen went on, miserably, ‘and by to-morrow morning all of Westland will know that he took a mistress in Mrs. Wells, and perhaps he’ll lose the seat in Parliament, and it’s all my fault. I’m ever so sorry—truly, I am.’

‘What else did you tell him?’ Balfour said. ‘About Anna—and the blackmail—and the gowns?’

‘No!’ said Nilssen, looking shocked. ‘And nothing about Carver, either. All I said was that Mrs. Wells had been Lauderback’s mistress. That was all. But now Governor Shepard’s gone and said as much—in the paper.’

‘Well, that’s quite all right,’ said Balfour, clapping Nilssen on the shoulder. ‘That’s quite all right! Governor Shepard might have found that out from anywhere. If Lauderback asks, I’ll tell him that I’ve never spoken two words to Shepard in all my life, and that will be the truth.’

‘I’m dreadfully sorry,’ said Nilssen.

‘Not a bit,’ said Balfour, patting him. ‘Not a bit of it.’

‘Well, you’re very kind to say so,’ said Nilssen.

‘Happy to help,’ said Balfour.

‘I still don’t know who sold me out to Lauderback in the first place,’ Nilssen said, after a moment. ‘I’ll have to keep asking, I suppose.’

He sighed, and turned again to scan the faces of the crowd.

‘I say, Mr. Nilssen,’ Balfour said, ‘I’ve thought of something. Apropos of … of … well, of nothing at all really. Here. Next time I have some commission work—next time something comes across my desk, you know—I might not go to Mr. Cochran after all. You know he’s had my business for a long time—but, well, I wonder if it might be time for a change. I’ll wager we’ll all come out of this business looking for a man to lean on. Looking for a man to trust. As I say—you’ll have it—my business—in the future.’

He did not look at Nilssen; he began to fish in his jacket pocket for a cigar.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Nilssen. He watched Balfour for a moment longer, and then, nodding slowly, turned away. Balfour found a cigar, unwrapped it, bit off its end, and placed it between his teeth; then he struck his match, angled it so the flame caught, and held the flame to the square end of the cigar. He puffed at it three times, blowing out his cheeks; then he shook out the match, plucked the cigar from his mouth, and turned it around, to make sure that the tobacco was burning.

‘Mr. Clinch.’

‘Yes,’ said Clinch. ‘What is it?’

‘I have a question,’ Tauwhare said.

‘Well then—ask.’

‘Why did you buy the cottage of Crosbie Wells?’

The hotelier groaned. ‘Not that,’ he said. ‘Let’s not talk about that. Not tonight.’

‘Why?’

‘Just leave it,’ Clinch snapped. ‘I’m out of humour. I’m not discussing Crosbie bloody Wells.’

He was watching the widow as she moved from guest to guest. Her crinoline was so wide that she parted the crowd wherever she walked, leaving an aisle of space behind her.

‘She has a cruel face,’ Tauwhare observed.

‘Yes,’ Clinch said, ‘I think so, too.’

‘Not a friend of Maori.’

‘No, I expect not. Nor of the Chinese—as we can very well see. Nor of any man in this room, I don’t doubt.’ Clinch drained his glass. ‘I’m out of humour, Mr. Tauwhare,’ he said again. ‘When I am out of humour, do you know what I like to do? I like to drink.’

‘That’s good,’ Tauwhare said.

Clinch reached for the decanter. ‘You’ll have another?’

‘Yes.’

He refilled both their glasses. ‘Anyway,’ he said, as he returned the decanter to the sideboard, ‘the appeal will go through, and the sale will be revoked, and I’ll get my deposit back, and that will be that. The cottage won’t belong to me any longer: it will belong to Mrs. Wells.’

‘Why did you buy?’ Tauwhare persisted.

Clinch exhaled heavily. ‘It wasn’t even my idea,’ he said. ‘It was Charlie Frost’s idea. Buy up some land, he said: that way nobody will ask any questions.’

Tauwhare said nothing, waiting for Clinch to go on; presently he did.

‘Here’s the argument,’ he said. ‘You don’t need a miner’s right if the land’s your very own, do you? And if you find a piece of gold on your own land, it’s yours, isn’t it? That was the idea—his idea, I mean: it wasn’t mine. I couldn’t take the gowns to the bank—not without a miner’s right. They’d ask where it came from, and then I’d be stuck. But if I had a piece of land for my very own, then nobody asks anything at all. I never knew about Johnny Quee, you see. I thought the gold had been in the dresses all along—still pure. So I saved up for a deposit. Charlie, he said to wait for either a deceased estate or a subdivision: either the one or the other, he said, for the sake of staying clean. So when the Wells tract came up for sale, I bought it first thing, thinking that—well, I don’t know. It was stupid. Settling there, with—I don’t know. Of course, Anna comes home from gaol in a different dress, the very next day—and then, after she quits the place, I find out the other dresses have been stripped. It was the leaden makeweights that I was feeling. The whole plan’s gone to custard. I’ve got a piece of land I don’t want, and no money to call my own, and Anna—well. You know about her.’

Tauwhare was frowning. ‘The Arahura is a very sacred place,’ he began.

‘Yes, well,’ said Clinch, waving a hand to silence him, ‘the law’s the law. If you want to buy the cottage back again, you’re more than welcome; but it’s not me you should be talking to. It’s her.’

They gazed across the room at Mrs. Wells.

‘The problem with beautiful women,’ Clinch said presently, ‘is that they always know it, and the knowing turns them proud. I like a woman who doesn’t know her own beauty.’

‘A stupid woman,’ Tauwhare said.

‘Not stupid,’ Clinch said. ‘Modest. Unassuming.’

‘I do not know those words.’

Clinch waved a hand. ‘Doesn’t say too much. Doesn’t speak about herself. Knows when to keep quiet, and knows when to speak.’

‘Cunning?’ said Tauwhare.

‘Not cunning.’ Clinch shook his head. ‘Not cunning, and not stupid either. Just—careful, and quiet. And innocent.’

‘Who is this woman?’ said Tauwhare slyly.

‘No: this isn’t a real woman,’ said Clinch. He scowled. ‘Never mind.’

‘Hi—Edgar. Do you have a moment?’

Löwenthal had come up behind them.

‘By all means,’ said Clinch. ‘Excuse me, Mr. Tauwhare.’

Löwenthal blinked, seeing Tauwhare for the first time. ‘You must have gone down to the wreck,’ he said. ‘Find anything?’

Tauwhare did not like to be addressed with condescension, as though he belonged to a servile class; nor could he forgive Löwenthal for having shamed him earlier that day.

‘No,’ he replied, scornfully. ‘Nothing.’

‘Pity,’ said Löwenthal, already turning away.

‘What’s on your mind, Ben?’ said Clinch, when they were alone.

‘It’s an indelicate question, I’m afraid,’ said Löwenthal. ‘About the child of Anna’s—the baby that never came to term.’

‘All right,’ said Clinch, cautiously.

‘You recall the night I found her—after the dust-up with Carver.’

‘Of course.’

‘That was the night she confessed that Carver was the child’s father.’

‘Yes—I remember.’

‘I would like to know whether you knew that fact already, or whether, like me, you heard that confession for the first time that evening,’ Löwenthal said. ‘You will please forgive my indelicacy—and the impertinence of the subject in question.’

Clinch was silent for a long time. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘That was the first time she spoke of it. She kept mum on the subject until that night.’

‘But did you have an inkling?’ Löwenthal pressed. ‘Some idea? Were you of the opinion, perhaps, that Carver might have been the—ah—the sire?’

Clinch looked uncomfortable. ‘It was some fellow from Dunedin days,’ he said. ‘That’s all I knew. It wasn’t a Hokitika chap: the months didn’t match up.’

‘And Carver knew Anna in Dunedin.’

‘She came over on Godspeed,’ Clinch said shortly. ‘Beyond that, I couldn’t tell you. What’s this in aid of?’

Löwenthal explained what had happened in the office of the West Coast Times that afternoon. ‘Anna might not have been telling the truth, you see. She might have been spinning us a line. Of course we never had reason to doubt her word—until now.’

Clinch scowled. ‘But who else could it be—if not Carver?’

Löwenthal pursed his lips. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Any number of men, I suppose. Perhaps it’s no one we know.’

‘This is just Carver’s word against Anna’s,’ Clinch said hotly. ‘You aren’t taking Carver’s part—on the strength of a single declaration? Any man can deny a thing, you know; it doesn’t cost a man a penny, to deny a thing!’

‘I’m not taking either part—yet,’ Löwenthal said. ‘But I do think that the timing of Anna’s confession could be significant. Perhaps.’

Frowning, Clinch reached up to stroke the side of his face. As he did so Löwenthal caught the spice of his cologne and realised that Clinch must have paid for a scented shave at the barbershop, rather than the penny lather that was the standing order of most Hokitika men—a guess that was further confirmed when Clinch moved his hand, and Löwenthal saw a reddish spray of irritation upon the man’s soft cheeks. Discreetly, Löwenthal looked the hotelier up and down. Clinch’s jacket had been brushed, and his collar starched; the shirt he was wearing seemed very white, and the toes of his boots were freshly blackened. Oh, Löwenthal thought, with pity: he made himself handsome, for Anna.

‘So she only named the father after the child was dead,’ Clinch said at last, and in a very harsh voice. ‘That’s a whore’s honour—that’s all that is.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Löwenthal said, more kindly. ‘Let’s drop the subject.’

‘Mr. Walter Moody—Mrs. Lydia Wells,’ said Gascoigne. ‘Mr. Moody is come to Hokitika from Scotland, Mrs. Wells, to make his fortune in the gorge; Mrs. Wells, as you will know, Mr. Moody, is the mistress of this establishment, and a great enthusiast of realms.’

Lydia made a very pretty curtsey, and Moody a short but respectful bow. Moody then paid the necessary compliments to his hostess, thanking her very nicely for the evening’s entertainment, and praising her renovations of the old hotel. Despite his best efforts, the compliments came out very flat: when he looked at her, he thought only of Lauderback, and Crosbie Wells.

When he had finished speaking she said, ‘Do you have an interest in the occult, Mr. Moody?’—a question which Moody could not answer honestly without risking offence.

He paused only a moment, however, before replying, ‘There are many things that are yet arcane to me, Mrs. Wells, and I hope that I am a curious man; if I am interested in those truths that are yet unknown, it is only so that they might, in time, be made known—or, to put it more plainly, so that in time, I might come to know them.’

‘You are wonderfully free with one verb, I notice,’ the widow returned. ‘What does it mean for you, Mr. Moody, to know something? I fancy you put rather a lot of stock in knowing—judging from the way you speak.’

Moody smiled. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘I suppose that to know a thing is to see it from all sides.’

‘To see it from all sides,’ the widow repeated.

‘But I confess you catch me off guard; I have not spent any time working on the definition, and should not like to hear it quoted back to me—at least not until I have spent some time thinking about how I might defend it.’

‘No,’ the widow agreed, ‘your definition leaves much to be desired. There are so many exceptions to the rule! How could one possibly see a spirit from all sides, for example? The notion is incredible.’

Moody gave another short bow. ‘You are quite right to name that as an exception, Mrs. Wells. But I am afraid I do not believe a spirit can be known at all—by anyone—and I certainly do not believe a spirit can be seen. I do not mean to impugn your talents in the slightest—but there it is: I do not believe in spirits, categorically.’

‘And yet you applied for a ticket to the séance this evening,’ the widow pointed out.

‘My curiosity was piqued.’

‘By the particular spirit in question, perhaps?’

‘Mr. Staines?’ Moody shrugged. ‘I have never met the man. I arrived in Hokitika some fortnight after he disappeared. But since then I have heard his name many times, of course.’

‘Mr. Gascoigne says that you have come to Hokitika to make your fortune.’

‘Yes: so I hope.’

‘And how will you make it?’

‘By dint of hard work and good planning, I expect.’

‘Of course, there are many rich men who work little, and plan nothing at all.’

‘Those men are lucky,’ Moody said.

‘Do you not wish to be lucky also?’

‘I wish to be able to call myself deserving of my lot,’ Moody said carefully. ‘Luck is by nature undeserved.’

‘What an honourable answer,’ said Lydia Wells.

‘And a truthful one, I hope,’ said Moody.

‘Aha,’ said the widow. ‘We are back to “truth” again.’

Gascoigne had been watching Lydia Wells. ‘You see how her mind is working,’ he said to Moody. ‘She will swoop down in a moment, and savage your argument. Prepare yourself.’

‘I hardly know how to prepare to be savaged,’ Moody said.

Gascoigne was right. The widow lifted her chin and said, ‘Are you a man of religion, Mr. Moody?’

‘I am a man of philosophy,’ he rejoined. ‘Those aspects of religion that can be called philosophy, interest me extremely; those that cannot, do not.’

‘I see,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘I am afraid that in my case it is quite the reverse: it is only those philosophies that can be called religions that hold any interest for me.’

Gascoigne laughed outright at this. ‘Very good,’ he said, wagging his finger. ‘That is very good.’

Moody was amused, despite himself, by the widow’s acuity, but he was determined not to let her take the upper hand. ‘It seems that we have little in common, Mrs. Wells,’ he said. ‘I hope that this lack of common ground will not be an impediment to friendship.’

‘We disagree upon the validity of spirits: we have established that much,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘But let me put the contrary question to you. What about a soul—a living soul? Do you believe that you can “know” a person who is living, if you cannot “know” a person who is dead?’

Moody considered this, smiling. After a moment, the widow went on:

‘Do you feel that you could ever truly “know” your friend Mr. Gascoigne, for example? Can you see him from all sides?’

Gascoigne looked very peeved for having been used as a rhetorical example, and said so aloud; the widow shushed him, and put the question to Moody a second time.

Moody looked at Gascoigne. In fact he had anatomised Gascoigne’s character to a very fine degree of detail, over the three weeks of their acquaintance. He felt that he understood the scope and limits of the man’s intelligence, the quality of his sentiment, and the tenor of his many expressions and habits. He felt, as a whole, that he could summarise the man’s character very accurately. But he knew that Lydia Wells was intending to trap him, and in the end he chose to reply very blandly indeed, repeating that he had only arrived in Hokitika but three weeks ago, and could not hope to form an accurate assessment of Gascoigne’s soul in such a time. That project, he added, would require more than three weeks of observation.

‘Mr. Moody was Mr. Carver’s passenger,’ Gascoigne put in. ‘He arrived on the Godspeed the very night she came to ground.’

Moody felt a stirring of unease at this disclosure. He had used a false name while booking his passage upon Godspeed, and he did not like to advertise the fact that he had arrived in Hokitika upon that craft, given the nature of what he had witnessed—or imagined that he had witnessed—in the hours before the ship had foundered. He looked at the widow, seeking, in her face, some flicker of doubt or recognition that might show that she had known about the bloody phantom in Godspeed’s hold.

But Lydia Wells was smiling. ‘Did he?’ she said, looking Moody up and down. ‘Then I’m afraid Mr. Moody is a very common specimen of a man indeed.’

‘How so?’ Moody said stiffly.

The widow laughed. ‘You are a lucky man who is scornful of the notion of luck,’ she said. ‘I am afraid, Mr. Moody, that I have met a great many men like you.’

Before Moody could think of a reply to this, she picked up a small silver bell, rang it sharply, and announced, in a voice that was no less penetrating for its husky half-whisper, that all those without tickets were to make their departures at once, for the séance was about to begin.

VENUS IN AQUARIUS

In which Sook Yongsheng forgets his shilling; Lydia Wells becomes hysterical; and we receive an answer from the realm of the dead.

What a different gathering this was to the clandestine council that had assembled in the Crown Hotel three weeks ago! The Crown had played host to a party of twelve, which, following Moody’s arrival, became a party of thirteen; here, in the front room of the Wayfarer’s Fortune, they were a party of eleven seeking to summon a twelfth.

Charlie Frost, under Joseph Pritchard’s instruction, kept his eyes fixed upon Lydia Wells as the widow led the seven ticket holders into the parlour where Ah Sook and Ah Quee, shining with greasepaint, sat cross-legged on either side of the hearth. The drapes had been drawn over the parlour windows, and all but one of the paraffin lamps had been doused, giving the room a pinkish glow. Above this last lamp a tin dish of attar had been placed on a metal stand, and the liquid, gently heated by the warmth of the flame, filled the room with the pleasant scent of roses.

Mrs. Wells invited the men to take their seats, which, in the interval while the other guests departed the Wayfarer’s Fortune and dispersed into the night, had been arranged in a circle in the middle of the room. There was much embarrassment and nervousness in the room as the seven guests were seated. One man kept emitting a high-pitched giggle; others grinned and elbowed their mates in the ribs. Mrs. Wells paid these disturbances no notice. She was busy arranging five candles in a star pattern upon a plate, and lighting them, one by one. When the candles were lit, and the paper spill extinguished, Lydia Wells seated herself at last, and remarked, in a voice that was suddenly hushed and conspiratorial, that Anna Wetherell, these hours past, had been preparing her mind for the impending communion with the dead. She was not to be spoken to, when she made her entrance in the parlour, for even the smallest disturbance could disrupt her state of mind, which in turn would disrupt the widow’s own transmissions. Did the present company consent to ignore her?

The present company consented.

Did the present company consent to assist the widow’s transmissions further, by maintaining a state of mental receptivity for the duration of the event? Would every man agree to keep his mind cool and open, his limbs relaxed, his breathing deep and rhythmic, and his attention focused absolutely, like that of a monk at prayer?

This was assured.

‘I cannot tell you what will happen in this room tonight,’ the widow went on, still speaking in a voice of conspiracy. ‘Perhaps the furniture will move about. Perhaps we will feel breezes—the breath of the underworld, some might call it—as the spirits around us are disturbed. Perhaps the dead will speak through the mouths of the living. Or perhaps they will reveal themselves by the presentation of a token.’

‘What do you mean, a token?’ one of the diggers said.

Lydia Wells turned her calm gaze upon the speaker. ‘Sometimes,’ she said quietly, ‘and for reasons unknown to us, the dead are unable to speak. When this happens, they choose to communicate in other ways. I was party to a séance in Sydney where this occurred.’

‘What happened?’

Mrs. Wells became glazed. ‘A woman had been killed in her own home,’ she said, ‘under circumstances that were a touch mysterious—and some months following her death, a select group of spiritists convened at her house, to contact her.’

‘How was she killed?’

‘The family dog went savage,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘Quite out of character, the beast attacked her—and ripped out her throat.’

‘Hideous.’

‘Ghastly.’

‘The circumstances of her death were suspicious,’ the widow continued, ‘not the least because the dog was shot before its true nature could be established by the law. But the case was closed, and the woman’s husband, wild with grief, quit the house and sailed away. Some months later, a servant who had been employed in the house brought the matter to a medium’s attention. We arranged for a séance to be held in the very room in which this woman had been killed.

‘A gentleman in our group—not the medium, but another spiritist of high renown—happened to be wearing a pocket watch that evening. The watch was tucked inside his vest pocket, with the chain pinned to his breast. He had wound it, he assured us afterwards, before he arrived at the house, and the piece kept very good time. Well, that night—during the séance—there came a queer little whirring noise from his vest. We all heard it, though we did not know what it was. He retrieved the piece, and found to his astonishment that the dial now read three minutes past one. He insisted that he had wound the watch at six o’clock, and it was not yet nine. There was no way that the hands could have moved so far on their own accord, and he could hardly have turned the knob by accident! He tried the knob—and found that it had stuck. It was broken. In fact the piece never worked again.’

‘But what did it mean?’ someone said. ‘Three minutes past one?’

The widow’s voice became low. ‘We could only assume,’ she said, ‘that the spirit of the dead woman was trying to tell us something, very urgently. The time of her death, perhaps? Or was she delivering a warning? A death that was yet to come?’

Charlie Frost found that he was breathing shallowly.

‘What happened next?’ Nilssen whispered.

‘We decided to stay in the drawing room until three minutes past one in the morning,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘Perhaps, we thought, the spirit was inviting us to stay until that time—at which point something was to happen. We waited until the hour struck one; we waited in silence for one minute—two minutes—three—and then, exactly at that moment, there was a terrible crash: a painting tumbled from its hook upon the wall. We all turned, and saw, behind it, a hole in the plaster. The painting had been put up, you see, to mask the hole.

‘Well, the women in the group were screaming; there was noise all about; you can imagine the commotion. Someone found a knife, and cut out the piece of plaster—and lo and behold, lodged into the plaster, there was a ball of shot.’

Frost and Nilssen exchanged a quick glance. The widow’s story had reminded them both of the bullet that had vanished from Anna Wetherell’s bedchamber, in the upper room of the Gridiron Hotel.

‘Was the case ever solved?’ somebody said.

‘Oh, yes,’ the widow said. ‘I shan’t go into the details—there are too many—but you can look it all up in the papers if you’re curious. You see, the woman was never savaged by a dog at all. She had been murdered by her own husband—and he’d shot the dog, and slashed her throat himself, to cover it up.’

There were murmurs of distress around the room.

‘Yes,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘Tragic, the whole story. Elizabeth something, the woman’s name was. I forget the last name. Well, the good news was that when the case reopened, they had two clues on their side: first, that she had been killed by a ball from a Colt Army handgun … and second, that the precise time of her death was three minutes past one.’

The widow was quiet for a moment, and then she laughed. ‘But you aren’t here tonight to hear me tell tales!’ She rose from her chair. Several of the assembled men made to rise also, out of politeness, but the widow put up her hand, stalling them. ‘I regret to say that the sceptics of the world are very many,’ she said, ‘and for every good-hearted man, there are ten more who are not good at all. There may be men among you who will attempt to deny whatever happens tonight, or who will attempt to discredit me. I invite you all to look around you, now, and to reassure yourselves that this room contains no tricks or deceits or follies of any kind. I know as well as you that there are many pretenders in the art of fortune telling, but you may rest assured that I am not one of them.’ She spread her arms and said, ‘You can see that I am concealing nothing on my person. Don’t worry—you are free to look.’

There was tittering at this, and much shuffling as the men looked around them, examining the ceiling, the chairs, the paraffin lamp on the table, the candles, the rug upon the floor. Charlie Frost kept his eyes on Lydia Wells. She did not look tense. She twirled around, revealing that she was hiding nothing in her skirts, and then seated herself very easily, smiling at the room at large. She picked at a loose thread upon her sleeve and waited until the men were still.

‘Excellent,’ she said, when the collective attention had focused upon her once again. ‘Now that we are all happy, and ready, I shall cut the lights, and await Anna’s arrival.’

She leaned forward and doused the paraffin lamp, plunging them all into the gloom of candlelight. After several seconds of quiet, there came three knocks at the parlour door behind them, and Lydia Wells, still fussing over the lamp, called, ‘Come!’

The door opened, and the seven men turned. Frost, forgetting Pritchard’s instruction for a moment, looked too.

Anna was standing in the doorway with an expression of ghostly vacancy upon her face. She was still wearing the mourning dress she had been gifted by Aubert Gascoigne, but if the dress had been ill fitting once, it looked wretched on her now. The gown hung from her shoulders as though from a rail. The waist, though plainly cinched, was loose, and the tatted collar masked an almost concave breast. Her face was very pale, her expression sombre. She did not look at the faces of the assembled crowd. With her eyes fixed upon the middle distance, she came forward, slowly, and sank into the vacant armchair facing Lydia Wells.

Why, thought Frost, as she sat down, she is starving! He glanced at Nilssen, meaning to catch the other man’s eye, but Nilssen was frowning at Anna, an expression of grave perplexity upon his face. Too late, Frost remembered his own assignation, and turned back to the widow—who, in the brief moment while every man’s head was turned towards the door, had done something. Yes: she had done something, certainly, for she was smoothing down her dress in a self-conscious, satisfied way, and her expression had suddenly become brisk. What had she done? What had she altered? In the dim light he could not tell. Frost cursed himself for having looked away. This was just the kind of subterfuge that Pritchard had predicted. He vowed that he would not look away a second time.

The corners of the room had now vanished entirely into black. The only light came from the flickering glow of the candles in the centre of the group, and around it the eleven faces had a greying, ghostly look. Without taking his eyes from the widow’s face, Frost noted that in fact the circle of chairs was not perfectly circular: it was more nearly an ellipsis, placed with its longest axis pointing to the door, and Lydia seated at its farthest end. By placing the seats in this configuration, she had been able to ensure that every man’s head would turn towards the door—and away from her—when Anna arrived. Well, Frost thought, the Chinese men, at least, must have seen the sleight of hand that she had performed in that quick instant when Anna appeared in the doorway. He made a second mental note: to question them once the séance was over.

The group now joined hands, at the widow’s instruction; and then, in the fluttering light of the candles, Lydia Wells heaved a great sigh, smiled, and closed her eyes.

The widow’s visitation took a very long time coming. The group sat in perfect silence for nigh on twenty minutes, each man holding himself very still, breathing rhythmically, and waiting for a sign. Charlie Frost kept his eyes on Mrs. Wells. At length she set up a humming sound, low at the back of her throat. The humming thickened, acquired pitch; soon one could make out words, some nonsensical, some recognisable only by their shapes, their syllables. These too thickened into phrases, entreaties, commands: finally Mrs. Wells, arching her back, made her request of the world of the dead: to give up the shade of Emery Staines.

Later, Frost would describe the scene that followed as, variously, a ‘fit’, a ‘seizure’, and a ‘prolonged convulsion’. He knew that none of these explanations was quite right, for none conveyed, accurately, either the elaborate theatrics of Lydia Wells’s performance, or Frost’s acute embarrassment, in witnessing them. Mrs. Wells called out Staines’s name, again and again, intoning the words with a lover’s dying fall—and when no answer came, she became agitated. She suffered paroxysms. She repeated syllables, like a babbling child. Her head lolled against her chest, reared back, lolled again. Presently her convulsions began approaching a kind of climax. Her breathing became faster and faster—and then suddenly quelled. Her eyes snapped open.

Charlie Frost felt a cold jolt of unease: Lydia Wells was staring directly at him, and the expression on her face was unlike any he had seen her wear before: it was rigid, bloodless, fierce. But then the flames from the candles ducked and leaped and he saw that Lydia Wells was not looking at him, but past him, over his shoulder, to where Ah Sook sat in the corner in his Oriental pose. Frost did not blink; he did not look away. Then Lydia Wells gave a strange sound. Her eyes rolled back in her head. The muscles in her throat began to pulse. Her mouth moved strangely, as though she were chewing on the air. And then in a voice that did not belong to her she said:

‘Ngor yeu nei wai mut haak ngor dei gaa zuk ge ming sing tung wai waai ngor ge sing yu fu zaak. Mou leon nei hai bin, dang ngor co yun gaam cut lai, ngor yat ding wui wan dou nei. Ngor yeu wan nei bou sou—’

And she gave a great shudder, and pitched sideways, onto the floor. In the very same moment (Frost would discuss this inexplicable event with Nilssen for weeks to come) the paraffin lamp on the table lurched violently to the side, coming down upon the plate of candles that had been set out next to it. This was a mistake that ought to have been very easily righted, for the glass globe of the lamp did not shatter, and the paraffin did not spill—but there was a colossal whoosh of flame, and the circle of men was suddenly illuminated: the entire surface of the table was burning.

In the next moment everyone burst into life. Someone shouted to cover the fire. One of the diggers pulled the widow to safety, and two others cleared the sofa; the fire was doused with shawls and blankets; the lamp was knocked away; everyone was talking at once. Charlie Frost, wheeling round in the sudden darkness, saw that Anna Wetherell had not moved, and her expression had not changed. The sudden blaze of the fire did not seem to have alarmed her in the slightest.

Someone lit the lamp.

‘Was that it? Was that what was supposed to happen?’

‘What did she say?’

‘Clear a space, would you?’

‘Coo—to see us all lit up like that!’

‘Some kind of primitive—’

‘Make sure she’s breathing.’

‘Have to admit, I didn’t expect—’

‘Did it mean anything, do you think? What she said? Or was it—’

‘That wasn’t Emery Staines, sure as I’m—’

‘Another spirit? Working through—’

‘The way the lamp moved of its own accord like that!’

‘We ought to ask the johnnies. Hi! Was that Chinese?’

‘Does he understand?’

‘Was that Chinese, that she was speaking just now?’

But Ah Quee did not appear to understand the question. One of the diggers leaned over and tapped him on the shoulder.

‘What was that, eh?’ he said. ‘What was it that she said? Was it Chinese, what she was saying? Or some other tongue?’

Ah Quee returned his gaze without understanding, and did not speak. It was Ah Sook who answered.

‘Lydia Wells speak Cantonese,’ he said.

‘Yes?’ Nilssen said eagerly, swivelling about. ‘And what did she say?’

Ah Sook studied him. ‘“One day I come back and kill you. You kill a man. He die—so you die. I come back and kill you, one day.”’

Nilssen’s eyes went wide; his next question died on his lips. He turned to Anna—who was looking at Ah Sook, her expression faintly perplexed. Charlie Frost was frowning.

‘Where’s Staines in all of that?’ demanded one of the diggers.

Ah Sook shook his head. ‘Not Staines,’ he said quietly. He got up from his cushion suddenly, and walked to the window, folding his arms.

‘Not Staines?’ said the digger. ‘Who then?’

‘Francis Carver,’ said Ah Sook.

There was an explosion of outrage around the room.

‘Francis Carver? How’s that for a séance—when he isn’t even dead? Why—I could talk to Carver myself; I’d only have to knock upon his door!’

‘But he’s at the Palace,’ said another. ‘That’s fifty yards away from where we are.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘I mean you can’t deny that something strange—’

‘I could have talked to Carver myself,’ the digger repeated, stubbornly. ‘I don’t need a medium for that.’

‘What about the lamp, though? How do you account for the lamp?’

‘It jumped across the room!’

‘It levitated.’

Ah Sook had stiffened. ‘Francis Carver,’ he said, directing his question to Harald Nilssen. ‘At the Palace Hotel?’

Nilssen frowned—surely Ah Sook knew this already! ‘Yes, Carver’s staying at the Palace,’ he said. ‘On Revell-street. The building with the blue edging, you know. Next to the hardware store.’

‘How long?’ said Ah Sook.

Nilssen looked even more confused. ‘He’s been here for three weeks,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘Since the night—I mean, since the Godspeed came to ground.’

The other men were still arguing.

‘It’s not a séance unless it’s talking with the dead.’

‘No—when you talk to Carver, it’s you who ends up dead!’

They laughed at this, and then the digger’s mate said, ‘Rum do, you’re thinking? Some kind of a hoax?’

The stubborn digger looked inclined to agree, but he cast a glance over at Lydia Wells. The widow was still unconscious, and her face was very pale. Her mouth was partly open, showing the glint of a molar and a dry tongue, and her eyes were fluttering weakly beneath the lids. If she was shamming, the digger thought, then she was shamming extraordinarily well. But he had paid for a communion with Emery Staines. He had not paid to hear a string of Chinese syllables and then watch a woman fall into a faint. Why, how could he be sure that the words were even Chinese? She might have been speaking gibberish! The Chinese fellow might be in on the secret, and she might have paid him a fee, to corroborate the lie.

But the digger had a cowardly temperament; he did not voice these opinions aloud. ‘Wouldn’t want to say,’ he said at last, but he still looked surly.

‘Well, we’ll ask her, when she comes around.’

‘Frank Carver speaks Chinese?’ one of the others said, in a voice of incredulity.

‘He goes back and forth from Canton, does he not?’

‘Born in Hong Kong.’

‘Yes, but to speak the language—as they do!’

‘Makes you think different of the man.’

At this point the digger who had been discharged to the kitchen returned with a glass of water, and threw it across Lydia’s face. Gasping, she revived. The men crowded closer, asking in an anxious chorus after her health and safety, so that it was some moments before the widow had a chance to respond. Lydia Wells looked from face to face in some confusion; after a moment, she even managed a weak laugh. But her laughter was without its usual surety, and as she accepted a glass of Andalusian brandy from the man at her elbow her hand visibly trembled.

She drank, and in the moments that followed, all manner of questions were put to her—what had she seen? What could she remember? Whom had she channelled? Had she made any contact with Emery Staines?

Her answers were disappointing. She could remember nothing at all from the point she fell into her trance—which was unusual, she said, for usually she could recall her ‘visions’ very well indeed. The men prompted her, but without success; she simply could not remember anything at all. When it was revealed to her that she had spoken in a foreign tongue, quite fluently and for some time, she looked genuinely puzzled.

‘But I don’t know a word of Chinese,’ she said. ‘Are you sure? And the johnnies confirmed it? Real Chinese? You’re really sure?’

This was confirmed, with much perplexity and excitement.

‘And what is all this mess?’ She gestured weakly at the scorched table and the remains of the fire.

‘The lamp just fell,’ said one of the diggers. ‘It just fell, of its own accord.’

‘It did more than fall: it levitated!’

Lydia looked at the paraffin lamp a moment, and then seemed to rouse herself. ‘Well!’ She raised herself a little higher on the sofa. ‘So I channelled the ghost of a Chinaman!’

‘Interference wasn’t what I paid for,’ the stubborn digger said.

‘No,’ said Lydia Wells, soothingly, ‘no—of course it wasn’t. Of course we must refund the cost of all your tickets … but tell me: what were the very words I spoke?’

‘Something to do with a murder,’ said Frost, who was still watching her very closely. ‘Something to do with revenge.’

‘Indeed!’ said Mrs. Wells. She seemed impressed.

‘Ah Sook said it had something to do with Francis Carver,’ said Frost.

Mrs. Wells went pale; she started forward. ‘What were the very words—the exact words?’

The diggers looked around them, but perceived only Ah Quee, who returned their gaze stonily, and did not speak.

‘He doesn’t have English.’

‘Where’s the other one?’

‘Where did he go?’

Ah Sook had extracted himself from the group some minutes before, padding from the room and into the foyer so quietly that nobody had noticed his departure. The revelation that Francis Carver had returned to Hokitika—that he had been in Hokitika for three weeks—had caused a flood of private emotion in his breast, and he desired, all of a sudden, to be alone.

He leaned against the rail of the porch and looked out, down the long arm of Revell-street, towards the quay. The long row of hanging lanterns formed a doubled seam of light that came together, in a haze of yellow, some two hundred yards to the south; their brightness was so intense that upon the camber of the street it might have been high noon, and the shadows of the alleys were made all the blacker, by contrast. A pair of drunks staggered past him, clutching one another around the waist. A whore passed in the other direction, her skirts gathered high above her knees. She looked at him curiously, and Ah Sook, after a moment of blankness, remembered that his face was still heavily painted, the corners of his eyes lengthened with kohl, his cheeks rounded with white. She called out to him, but he shook his head, and she walked on. From somewhere nearby there came a sudden roar of laughter and applause.

Ah Sook sucked his lips between his teeth. So Francis Carver had returned to Hokitika once again. He surely was not aware that his old associate was living in a hut at Kaniere, less than five miles away! Carver was not a man to bear a risk if he could remove the threat of that risk altogether. In that case, Ah Sook thought, perhaps he, Ah Sook, had the advantage. He sucked again at his teeth, and then, after a moment, shook his head: no. Lydia Wells had recognised him that morning. She would surely have relayed the news to Carver at once.

Inside, the conversation had returned to the subject of the paraffin lamp—a trick that Ah Sook had already dismissed out of hand. Lydia Wells had merely slipped a loop of thread over the knob of the lamp, at the moment she doused it. The thread was the same colour as her dress, and the other end of it was affixed to the inside of her wrist. One sharp twitch of her right hand, and the lamp would fall over the candles. The small table upon which the candles were burning had been coated with paraffin oil, which had the virtues of being both odourless and colourless, such that, to an outsider, the table might have seemed merely clean; at first contact with a naked flame, however, the surface of the table was sure to ignite. It was all a charade, a sham. Mrs. Wells had not made any kind of communion with the realm of the dead, and the words that she had spoken were not the words of a dead man. Ah Sook knew this because the words were his own.

The whore had lingered in the thoroughfare; she now called out to the men on the veranda opposite, and lifted the flounces of her skirt a little higher. The men called back in response, and one leaped up to caper. Ah Sook watched them with a distant expression. He marvelled at the strange power of feminine hysteria—that Lydia Wells might have remembered his very words, perfectly, over all these years. She did not speak Cantonese. However could she have recalled his speech, and his intonation, so exactly? That was uncanny, Ah Sook thought. For he might have taken her, by her ‘visitation’, for a true native of Canton.

In the street the men were pooling their shillings, while the streetwalker stood by. There came a whistle-blast from near the quays, and then a shout of warning from the duty sergeant, and then running footsteps, approaching. Ah Sook watched the men scatter and formed his resolution in his mind.

He would return to Kaniere that very evening, clear all his belongings from his cottage, and make for the hills. There he would apply himself wholly to the task of turning the ground. He would save every flake of dust he came upon, and live as simply as he was able, until he had amassed a total of five ounces. He would not take opium until he held five ounces in his hand; he would not drink; he would not gamble; he would eat only the cheapest and plainest of foods. But the very moment that he reached this target he would return to Hokitika. He would change the metal at the Grey and Buller Bank. He would walk across the thoroughfare to Tiegreen’s Hardware and Supply. He would lay his paper note upon the countertop. He would purchase a store of shot, a tin of black powder, and a gun. Then he would walk to the Palace Hotel, climb the stairs, open Carver’s door, and take his life. And after that? Ah Sook exhaled again. After that, nothing. After that his life would come full circle, and he could rest, at last.

MERCURY IN AQUARIUS

In which Moody passes on some vital information, and Sook Yongsheng presents him with a gift.

On the morning of the 20th of March Walter Moody rose before the dawn, rang for hot water, and washed standing at the window, looking over the rooftops as the navy pre-dawn sky faded to grey, then pale blue, then the splendid yellow of a fresh yolk—by which time he was dressed, and descending the stairs, and calling for his toast to be buttered, and his eggs boiled hard. En route to the dining room he lingered in the hallway, leaning his ear towards the door of a locked chamber at the foot of the stairs. After listening a moment he perceived a grainy, rhythmic sound, and continued on, satisfied that the room’s inhabitant was still very sound asleep.

The Crown dining room was empty save for the intermittent presence of the cook, who stifled a yawn as he brought Moody’s pot of tea, and another as he delivered the morning edition of the West Coast Times, the pages slightly damp from the chill of the night. Moody scanned the paper as he ate. The front page was composed chiefly of repeat notices. The banks offered competing terms of interest, each promising the very best price for gold. The hoteliers boasted the various distinctions of their hotels. The grocers and warehousemen listed a full inventory of their wares, and the shipping news reported which passengers had lately departed, and which passengers had lately arrived. The second page of the paper was taken over by a long and rather spiteful review of the latest show at the Prince of Wales (‘so poor in quality as to defy—because it is beneath—criticism’), and several gossipy correspondences from goldfield speculators in the north. Moody turned to the social notices as he finished his second egg, and his eyes came to rest upon a pair of names he recognised. A modest ceremony had been planned. No date had yet been determined. There would be no honeymoon. Cards and other expressions of congratulation could be addressed care of the prospective groom, who took his nightly lodging at the Palace Hotel.

Moody was frowning as he folded the paper, wiped his mouth, and rose from the table—but it was not the engagement, nor the fact of its announcement, that preoccupied his thinking as he returned upstairs to fetch his hat and coat. It was the matter of the forwarding address.

For Moody knew very well that Francis Carver no longer lodged at the Palace Hotel. His rooms at the Palace stood as before, with his frockcoat hanging in the armoire, his trunk set out at the foot of the bed, and his bedclothes mussed and strewn about. He still broke his fast in the Palace dining room every morning, and drank whisky in the Palace parlour every night. He still paid his weekly board to the Palace proprietor—who, as far as Moody had been able to ascertain, remained quite unaware that his most notorious guest was paying two pounds weekly for an unoccupied room. The fact of Carver’s nightly relocation was not commonly known, and were it not for the accident of their conjunction, Moody might have also remained ignorant of the fact that Carver had slept every night since the night of the widow’s séance at the Crown, in a small room next to the kitchen that afforded an unobstructed view up the rutted length of the Kaniere-road.

By seven-thirty Moody was striding eastward along Gibson Quay, dressed in a grey slouch hat, yellow moleskin trousers, leather knee-boots, and a dark woollen coat over a shirt of grey serge. He now donned this costume six days out of seven, much to the amusement of Gascoigne, who had asked him more than once why he had chosen to leave off the piratical red sash, which might have finished off the ensemble very nicely.

Moody had staked a claim close enough to Hokitika to permit his continued board at the Crown Hotel. This arrangement cut into his weekly earnings rather severely, but he preferred it to sleeping in a tent beneath the open sky, something he had attempted only once, to his great discomfort. It took him an hour and twenty minutes to walk to his claim from Hokitika; before the clock struck nine every morning, therefore, he was at his cradle at the creekside, hauling pails of water, whistling, and shovelling sand.

Moody was not, truth be told, a terribly skilful prospector: he was hoping for nuggets rather than panning for dust. Too often the ore-bearing gravel slipped through the netting at the bottom of the cradle, only to be washed away; sometimes he emptied his cradle twice over without finding any flakes at all. He was making what the diggers called ‘pay dirt’, meaning that the sum total of his weekly income was more or less equal to the sum total of his weekly expenditure, but it was a holding pattern he could not sustain. He knew that he ought to heed popular advice, and go mates with another man, or with a party. The chance of striking rich was doubled in a partnership, and the chances multiplied still further in a party of five, or seven, or nine. But his pride would not permit it. He persevered alone, visualising, every hour, the nugget with which he would buy his future life. His dreams at night began to glister, and he began to see flashes of light in the most unlikely places, such that he had to look again, and blink, or close his eyes.

Stepping across the small creek that formed the northern boundary of his claim, Moody was surprised to see the pale silhouette of a tent through the scrub, and beside it, the remains of a fire. He came up short. The Hokitika diggers typically spent their weekends in town, not returning to the field until mid-morning on Monday at the very earliest. Why had this digger not joined his fellows? And what was he doing on another man’s patch of land?

‘Hello there,’ Moody called, meaning to rouse the tent’s inhabitant. ‘Hello.’

At once there came a grunt, and a flurry of motion inside the tent. ‘Sorry,’ someone said. ‘Very sorry—very sorry—’

A Chinese face appeared at the opening, blurred with sleep.

‘No trouble,’ he said. ‘Very sorry.’

‘Mr. Sook?’ said Moody.

Ah Sook squinted up at him.

‘I’m Walter Moody,’ Moody said, placing his hand over his heart. ‘Do you—ah—do you remember me?’

‘Yes, yes.’ Ah Sook knuckled his eyes with his fist.

‘I’m so glad,’ said Moody. ‘This is my claim, you see: from this creek here to those yellow pegs on the southern side.’

‘Very sorry,’ Ah Sook said. ‘No harm done.’

‘No: of course,’ Moody said. ‘In any case, Ah Sook, I’m pleased to see you. Your absence from Kaniere has been noted by a great many people. Myself included. I am very pleased to see you—very pleased, not angry at all. We feared that something had happened to you.’

‘No trouble,’ the hatter said. ‘Tent only. No trouble.’ He disappeared from sight.

‘I can see you’re not causing trouble,’ Moody said. ‘It’s all right, Mr. Sook: I’m not worried about you making camp! I’m not worried about that at all.’

Ah Sook clambered out of the tent, pulling his tunic down as he did so. ‘I will go,’ he said. ‘Five minutes.’ He held up five fingers.

‘It’s all right,’ Moody said. ‘You can sleep here if you like; it’s of no consequence to me.’

‘Last night only,’ said Ah Sook.

‘Yes; but if you want to tent here tonight also, I don’t mind a bit,’ said Moody. His manner was alternating between bluff cheer and clumsy condescension, as it might if he were speaking to someone else’s child.

‘Not tonight,’ said Ah Sook. He began to strike his tent. Hauling the canvas fly, still wet with dew, from the rope over which it had been draped, he revealed the flattened square of earth where he had spent the night: the woollen blanket, twisted, and pressed flat with the tangled imprint of his body; a pot, filled with sand; his leather purse; a panning dish; a string bag containing tea and flour and several wrinkled potatoes; a standard-issue swag. Moody, casting his eye over this meagre inventory, was oddly touched.

‘I say,’ he said, ‘but where have you been, Mr. Sook, this month past? It’s been a full month since the séance—and no one’s heard a word from you!’

‘Digging,’ said Ah Sook, flattening the canvas fly across his chest.

‘You vanished so soon after the séance,’ Moody continued, ‘we rather thought you’d gone the same way as poor old Mr. Staines! No one could make heads or tails of it, you disappearing like that.’

Ah Sook had been folding the fly into quarters; now he paused. ‘Mr. Staines come back?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ Moody said. ‘He’s still missing.’

‘And Francis Carver?’

‘Carver’s still in Hokitika.’

Ah Sook nodded. ‘At the Palace Hotel.’

‘Well, in actual fact, no,’ said Moody, pleased to be given an opportunity to conspire. ‘He’s begun sleeping at the Crown Hotel. In secret. Nobody knows he’s staying there: he’s kept up the pretence that he’s staying at the Palace, and he still pays rent to the Palace proprietor—and keeps his rooms, just as before. But he sleeps every night at the Crown. He arrives well after nightfall, and leaves very early. I only know because I rent the room above.’

Ah Sook had fixed him with a penetrating look. ‘Where?’

‘Carver’s room? Or mine?’

‘Carver.’

‘He sleeps in the room next to the kitchen, on the ground floor,’ said Moody. ‘It faces east. Very near the smoking room—where you and I first met.’

‘A humble room,’ said Ah Sook.

‘Very humble,’ Moody agreed, ‘but he’s got a vantage down the length of the Kaniere-road. He’s keeping watch, you see. He’s watching out for you.’

Walter Moody knew virtually nothing about Ah Sook’s history with Francis Carver, for Ah Sook had not had the opportunity, at the Crown Hotel, to narrate the tale in any detail, and had not been seen since, save for his appearance at the Wayfarer’s Fortune one month ago. Moody wished very much to know the full particulars, but despite his best efforts of surveillance and inquiry—he had become an adept at turning idle conversation, discreetly, to provocative themes—his understanding had not developed beyond what he had learned in the smoking room of the Crown, which was that the history concerned opium, murder, and a declaration of revenge. Ah Quee was the only man to whom Ah Sook had narrated the tale in full, and he did not, alas, possess language enough to share it with any English-speaking man.

‘Every night, at the Crown Hotel?’ said Ah Sook. ‘Tonight?’

‘Yes, he’ll be there tonight,’ said Moody. ‘Though not until well after dark, as I’ve told you.’

‘Not the Palace.’

‘No, not the Palace,’ said Moody. ‘He changed hotels.’

‘Yes,’ said Ah Sook gravely. ‘I understand.’ He went to loose the knot of his guy-rope from the fork of a tree.

‘Who was he?’ said Moody. ‘The murdered man.’

‘My father,’ said Ah Sook.

‘Your father,’ said Moody. After a moment, he said, ‘How was he killed? I mean—forgive me, but—what happened?’

‘A long time ago,’ said Ah Sook. ‘Before the war.’

‘The opium wars,’ said Moody, prompting him.

‘Yes,’ said Ah Sook, but he did not go on. He began to reel in the guy-rope, using his forearm as a spool.

‘What happened?’ said Moody.

‘Profit,’ said Ah Sook, giving his explanation flatly.

‘Profit of what kind?’

Clearly Ah Sook thought this was a very stupid question; perceiving this, Moody rushed on to ask another. ‘I mean—was your father—was he in the opium business, as you are?’

Ah Sook said nothing. He withdrew his forearm from the loop of rope, twisted it into a figure-eight, and secured it onto his swag. Once it was affixed, he sat back on his haunches, regarded Moody coolly for a moment, and then leaned over and spat, very deliberately, into the dirt.

Moody drew back. ‘Forgive me,’ he murmured. ‘I ought not to pry.’

Walter Moody had told nobody at all that Crosbie Wells was the bastard brother of the politician Lauderback. He had decided, in the hours following this discovery, that the intelligence was not his to share. His reasons for this concealment were deeply felt, but vaguely articulated. A man should not be made to answer for his family. It was wrong to expose a man’s private correspondence without his consent. He did not want to perform this exposure himself. But these reasons, even when taken together, did not quite comprise the whole truth, which was that Moody had compared himself to both men many times over the past month, and felt a profound kinship with each of them, though in very different ways: with the bastard, for his desperation; with the politician, for his pride. This double comparison had become the habitual project of his meditations every day, as he stood in the chill water and ran clods of earth and metal through his hands.

Ah Sook stuffed the last of his possessions into his swag, and then sat down upon it to lace his boots.

Moody could not bear it any longer. He burst out, ‘You know you will be hanged. If you take Carver’s life, you will be hanged. They’ll take your life, Mr. Sook, if you take his, no matter what your provocation.’

‘Yes,’ said Ah Sook. ‘I understand.’

‘It will not be a fair trial—not for you.’

‘No,’ Ah Sook agreed. The prospect did not appear to distress him. He knelt by the fire, picked up a twig, and stirred the damp earth that he had placed over the embers the night before. Below the earth the coals were still warm, dark as matted blood.

‘What are you going to do?’ said Moody, watching him. ‘Shoot him down?’

‘Yes,’ said Ah Sook.

‘When?’ said Moody.

‘Tonight,’ said Ah Sook. ‘At the Crown Hotel.’ He appeared to be digging for something beneath the coals. Presently his stick struck something hard. Using the end as a lever, he flipped the object out onto the grass: it was a little tin tea caddy, black with soot. The box was evidently still hot: he wrapped his sleeve around his hand before he picked it up.

‘Show us your arms,’ said Moody.

Ah Sook looked up.

‘Go on and show us your arms,’ said Moody, suddenly flushed. ‘There are pistols and there are pistols, Mr. Sook: you have to know your powder, as my own father used to say.’

It was rare he quoted his father in company, Adrian Moody’s habitual phrases being, in general, unsuitable to civil conversation, and Walter Moody being, in general, disinclined to reference him.

‘I buy a pistol,’ said Ah Sook.

‘Good,’ said Moody. ‘Where is it?’

‘Not yet,’ said Ah Sook.

‘You haven’t bought it yet?’

‘Today,’ said Ah Sook. He opened the caddy, and poured a handful of golden flakes into his palm. Moody realised that he must have buried the box in the earth beneath his fire, in case he was robbed during the night.

‘What kind of pistol are you going to buy?’

‘From Tiegreen’s.’ With his free hand he reached for his purse.

‘What manufacturer, I meant. What kind.’

‘Tiegreen’s,’ said Ah Sook again. He opened the mouth of the purse one-handed, to transfer the gold into it.

‘That’s the name of the store,’ Moody said. ‘What kind of pistol are you going to buy? Are you a weapons man?’

‘To shoot Francis Carver,’ said Ah Sook.

‘Tiegreen’s won’t do for you,’ Moody said, shaking his head. ‘You might go there to buy a fowling piece … or a rifle of some kind … but they won’t furnish you with a pistol. A military weapon is what you want. Not every ball of shot will kill a man, you see, and the last thing you want is to do the job by halves. Heavens, Mr. Sook! A pistol is not just a piece of hardware—just as a horse is not merely a … mode of transport,’ he said, rounding off this comparison rather lamely.

Ah Sook did not reply. He had chosen Tiegreen’s Hardware and Supply for two reasons: firstly, because the store was located beside the Palace Hotel, and secondly, because the shopkeeper was sympathetic to Chinese men. The first consideration no longer mattered, of course, but the second consideration was an important one: Ah Sook had planned to ask Mr. Tiegreen to load the piece for him, in the store, so that the deed could be carried out the very same day. He had never fired a pistol. He knew the basic principles behind the design, however, and he guessed it was not a skill that required a great deal of practice.

‘Go to the outfitters on Camp-street,’ Moody said. ‘Right beside the Deutsches Gasthaus. The building that shows the peak of the roof behind the sham. The sign isn’t painted yet, but the proprietors are Brunton, Solomon & Barnes, and the door should be open. When you get there, ask for a Kerr Patent. Don’t let them sell you anything else: it’s a British military piece, very sound, and it will do the job. The cost for a Kerr Patent is five pounds even. Any more than five pounds, and they’re robbing you.’

‘Five pounds?’ Ah Sook looked down at the gold in his purse. He had had no idea that a pistol could be got for such a reasonable sum! He had been quoted a figure twice that much. ‘Kerr Patent,’ he repeated, to remember it. ‘Camp-street. Thank you, Mr. Moody.’

‘What are you going to do,’ Moody said, ‘when the deed is done? When Carver’s dead? Will you turn yourself in? Will you try to make a run for it?’ All of a sudden he felt absurdly excited.

But Ah Sook only shook his head. He closed the mouth of his purse and then wrapped the purse tightly in a square of cloth. At last he rose, swinging his swag onto his back as he did so, and tucking the bundled object very carefully into his pocket.

‘This claim,’ he said, gesturing. ‘Pay dirt only. Very small gold.’

Moody waved his hand. ‘Yes. I know.’

‘No ’bounders here,’ said Ah Sook.

‘No homeward-bounders,’ said Moody, nodding. ‘You needn’t spell it out, Mr. Sook: I know the truth of it.’

Ah Sook peered at him. ‘Go north,’ he said. ‘Black sands. Very lucky in the north. No nuggets here. Too close to town.’

‘Charleston,’ said Moody. ‘Yes. There’s fortunes to be made, in Charleston.’

Ah Sook nodded. ‘Black sands,’ he said. He stepped forward, and Moody saw that he was holding the soot-blackened tea caddy in both hands. He proffered it, and Moody, surprised, extended his own hands to receive it. Ah Sook did not release the gift at once: he bowed low over it, and Moody, copying him, bowed also.

‘Juk neih houwahn,’ said Ah Sook, but he provided no translation, and Moody did not ask for one. He straightened, tin box in hand, and watched the hatter walk away.

SUN IN PISCES

In which Anna Wetherell is twice surprised; Cowell Devlin grows suspicious; and the deed of gift acquires a new significance.

What was glimpsed in Aquarius—what was envisioned, believed in, prophesied, predicted, doubted, and forewarned—is made, in Pisces, manifest. Those solitary visions that, but a month ago, belonged only to the dreamer, will now acquire the form and substance of the real. We were of our own making, and we shall be our own end.

And after Pisces? Out of the womb, the bloody birth. We do not follow: we cannot cross from last to first. Aries will not admit a collective point of view, and Taurus will not relinquish the subjective. Gemini’s code is an exclusive one. Cancer seeks a source, Leo, a purpose, and Virgo, a design; but these are projects undertaken singly. Only in the zodiac’s second act will we begin to show ourselves: in Libra, as a notion, in Scorpio, as a quality, and in Sagittarius, as a voice. In Capricorn we will gain memory, and in Aquarius, vision; it is only in Pisces, the last and oldest of the zodiacal signs, that we acquire a kind of selfhood, something whole. But the doubled fish of Pisces, that mirrored womb of self and self-awareness, is an ourobouros of mind—both the will of fate, and the fated will—and the house of self-undoing is a prison built by prisoners, airless, doorless, and mortared from within.

These alterations come upon us irrevocably, as the hands of the clock-face come upon the hour.

Lydia Wells had not hosted a séance a second time. She was well apprised of the charlatan’s motto that one must never repeat the very same trick to the very same crowd—but when she was accused, because of this, of being a charlatan herself, she only laughed. She had admitted, in an open letter in the West Coast Times, that her attempt to communicate with the shade of Mr. Staines had been unsuccessful. This failure, as she reported, was unprecedented in her professional experience, an anomaly that suggested to her that the afterlife had been unable, rather than unwilling, to produce him. From this, she wrote, one could only conclude that Mr. Staines was not dead after all, and she signed off expressing her confident anticipation of the young man’s eventual return.

This statement confounded the men of the Crown considerably; it had the effect, however (common to all of the widow’s strategies), of enhancing the value of her enterprise, and following its publication the Wayfarer’s Fortune began to do a very good trade. The establishment was open every evening between the hours of seven and ten, offering cut-price brandy and conversation of the speculative sort. Fortune telling happened in the afternoons, by private appointment only, and Anna Wetherell, in continuance with former policy, was not seen.

Anna only left the Wayfarer’s Fortune to take her daily exercise, in which she was accompanied, invariably, by Mrs. Wells, who was not insensible of the myriad benefits of daily perambulation, and who often said that there was nothing she liked better than a stroll. Together, arm in arm, the two women walked the length of Revell-street every morning, setting out to the north, and returning down the opposite side. They examined the contents of each window box as they passed, purchased milk and sugar, when milk and sugar could be got, and greeted the Hokitika regulars very blandly and impassively indeed.

That morning they had taken their daily walk earlier than usual, for Lydia Wells had an appointment at the Hokitika Courthouse at nine. She had been summoned to appear before the Magistrate about a legal matter pertaining to the estate of her late husband, Crosbie Wells, and the wording of the summons had intimated that the news was likely good: at ten minutes before nine, the front door of the Wayfarer’s Fortune opened, and Lydia Wells, her copper hair shining splendidly against a gown of midnight blue, stepped out into the sunshine.

Cowell Devlin watched Mrs. Wells exit the hotel and descend the steps to the street, drawing her shawl tightly around her shoulders, and smiling at the men who paused in their daily business to stare at her. He waited until she had disappeared into the throng of the crowd, and then waited five minutes more, to be safe. Then he crossed the street to the Wayfarer’s Fortune, mounted the steps to the veranda, and, after glancing back at the blank façade of the Courthouse, knocked upon the door. He was holding his battered Bible against his chest.

The door opened almost at once.

‘Miss Wetherell,’ Devlin said, removing his hat with his free hand. ‘Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cowell Devlin; I am the resident chaplain of the Hokitika Gaol. I have in my possession a document that I expect will be of great interest to you, and I hope to gain a private audience with you, in order to discuss it.’

‘I remember you,’ said Anna. ‘You were there when I woke up in gaol after my blackout.’

‘Yes,’ Devlin said.

‘You prayed for me.’

‘And I have prayed for you many times since.’

She looked surprised. ‘Have you?’

‘Fervently,’ the chaplain replied.

‘What did you say you wanted?’

Devlin repeated his intentions.

‘What do you mean, a document?’

‘I would prefer not to produce it here. May I come in?’

She hesitated. ‘Mrs. Wells is out.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Devlin said. ‘In fact I saw her entering the Courthouse just now, and hastened here with the precise hope that I might speak with you alone. I confess I have been waiting for just such an opportunity for some time. May I come in?’

‘I’m not supposed to receive guests when she’s not here.’

‘I have but one item of business to speak with you about,’ Devlin said calmly, ‘and I am a member of the clergy, and this is a respectable hour. Would your mistress deny you so little?’

Anna’s mistress would certainly her deny so little, and a great deal more—it being against the widow’s policy ever to admit exceptions to the regulations she imposed at whim. But in a moment Anna decided to be reckless.

‘Come through into the kitchen,’ she said, ‘and I’ll make us a pot of tea.’

‘You are most kind.’

Devlin followed her down the corridor to the kitchen at the rear of the house, where he waited, still standing, for Anna to fill the kettle and place it on the stove. She had certainly become extraordinarily thin. Her cheeks were hollow, and her skin had a waxy sheen; her wasted carriage bespoke malnourishment, and when she moved, it was with a trembling exhaustion, as though she had not eaten a decent meal in weeks. Devlin glanced quickly around the kitchen. On the washboard the plates from breakfast had been stacked to dry, and he counted two of everything, including two ceramic egg cups, printed with a raised blackberry design. Unless Lydia Wells had had a guest to dine early that morning—which was doubtful—then Anna must have eaten breakfast, at least. There was a half-round of bread on the breadboard, wrapped in a linen cloth, and the butter dish had not yet been put away.

‘Will you have a biscuit with your tea?’

‘You are most kind,’ Devlin said again, and then, embarrassed at having repeated the platitude, he rushed on: ‘I was gratified, Miss Wetherell, to learn that you had conquered your dependence upon the Chinese drug.’

‘Mrs. Wells won’t permit it in the house,’ Anna said, swiping a strand of hair from her face. She fetched the biscuit tin from the pantry shelf.

‘She is right to be strict,’ Devlin said, ‘but it is you who deserves congratulation. You must have shown great fortitude, in throwing off your dependency. I have known grown men who have not managed such a feat.’

Whenever Devlin was nervous, his speech became very formal and correct.

‘I just stopped,’ Anna said.

‘Yes,’ Devlin said, nodding, ‘an abrupt cessation is the only way, of course. But you must have battled every kind of temptation, in the days and weeks afterward.’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘I just didn’t need it any more.’

‘You are too modest.’

‘I’m not mincing,’ Anna said. ‘I kept going, for a while—until the lump ran out. I ate all of it. But I just couldn’t feel it any more.’

Devlin appraised her with a calculating look. ‘Have you found that your health has much improved, since your cessation?’

‘I expect it has,’ Anna said, fanning the biscuits in an arc over the plate. ‘I’m well enough.’

‘I am sorry to contradict you, Miss Wetherell, but you do not seem at all well.’

‘You mean I’m too thin.’

‘You are very thin, my dear.’

‘I’m cold,’ said Anna. ‘I’m always cold these days.’

‘I expect that is on account of your being very thin.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I expect so too.’

‘I have observed,’ Devlin said after a moment, ‘in persons of low morale—particularly those who have contemplated suicide—that the loss of appetite is a common symptom.’

‘I have an appetite,’ she said. ‘I eat. I just can’t seem to keep the weight on.’

‘Do you eat every day?’

‘Three meals,’ she said, ‘two of them hot. I manage the cooking for both of us.’

‘Mrs. Wells must be very grateful,’ Devlin said, speaking in a tone that made it clear he did not entirely believe her.

‘Yes,’ she said, vaguely. She turned away to fetch cups and saucers from the rack above the washboard.

‘Will you continue in your present circumstances after Mrs. Wells is married?’ Devlin inquired.

‘I expect so.’

‘I imagine that Mr. Carver will take up residence here.’

‘Yes, I believe he means to.’

‘Their engagement was announced in the West Coast Times this morning. It was a very modest announcement; even, one might have said, subdued. But a wedding is always a happy event.’

‘I love a wedding,’ Anna said.

‘Yes,’ said Devlin. ‘A happy event—no matter what the circumstances.’

It had been suggested, following the scandal precipitated by George Shepard’s letter to the editor of the West Coast Times one month ago, that only remarriage could ameliorate the damage the widow’s reputation had sustained. Mrs. Wells’s claim upon Crosbie Wells’s inheritance had been considerably weakened by the revelation that she had made him a cuckold in the years before his death, and her position had been weakened still further by the fact that Alistair Lauderback had made a full and very frank confession. In a public reply to George Shepard, Lauderback admitted that he had concealed the fact of the affair from the voting public, to whom he offered his sincere apologies. He wrote that he had never been more ashamed of himself, and that he accepted full responsibility for all consequences, and that until the day he died he would regret that he had arrived at Mr. Wells’s cottage half an hour too late to beg the man’s forgiveness. The confession had its desired effect; indeed, by the outpouring of sympathy and admiration that followed it, some even supposed Lauderback’s reputation to have been improved.

Anna had finished arranging the saucers. ‘Let us go into the parlour,’ she said. ‘I’ll hear the kettle when it boils.’

She left the tray, and padded back down the corridor to the parlour, which was set up for the widow’s afternoon appointments, with the two largest armchairs drawn very close to one another, and the curtains closed. Devlin waited for Anna to sit before he did so himself, and then he opened his Bible and withdrew the charred deed of gift from between its pages. He handed it to her without a word.

On this 11th day of October 1865 a sum of two thousand pounds is to be given to MISS ANNA WETHERELL, formerly of New South Wales, by MR. EMERY STAINES, formerly of New South Wales, as witnessed by MR. CROSBIE WELLS, presiding.

Anna took up the deed with a rather glazed look: she was all but illiterate, and did not expect to make sense of the words in a single glance. She knew her alphabet, and could sound out a line of print if she worked very slowly and in a very good light; it was a laborious task, however, and she made many errors. But in the next moment she snatched it up, and, with an exclamation of surprise, held it close to her eyes.

‘I can read this,’ she said, speaking almost in a whisper.

Devlin did not know that Anna had never learned to read, and this pronouncement was not remarkable to him. ‘I found this document in the bottom of Crosbie Wells’s stove the day after his death,’ he said. ‘As you can see, it is an extraordinary sum of money—still more because the sum is intended as a bequest—and I confess I do not know quite what to make of it. I must warn you at the outset that, in terms of legality, the document is not good. Mr. Staines did not sign his name, which, in turn, makes Mr. Wells’s signature invalid. The witness cannot sign before the principal.’

Anna said nothing. She was still looking at the paper.

‘Have you ever seen this document before?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Did you know of its existence?’

‘No!’

Devlin was alarmed: she had almost shouted the word. ‘What is it?’ he said.

‘I just—’ Her hand went to her throat. ‘May I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘Have you ever—I mean, in your experience—’ She stopped herself, bit her lip, and began again. ‘Do you know why I can read this?’

His eyes were searching hers. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

‘I never learned to read,’ Anna explained, ‘not properly. I mean—I can sound out a line of letters—and I know labels and signs; but that’s more like remembering than reading, because I see them every day. I could never read a paper. Not front to back. It would take me hours and hours. But this—I can read it. Without any effort, I mean. Quick as thinking.’

‘Read it out loud.’

She did, fluently.

Devlin was frowning. ‘Are you quite sure that you have never seen this document before?’

‘Quite sure,’ Anna said.

‘Did you know already that Mr. Staines intended to give you two thousand pounds?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘What about Mr. Wells? Did you ever speak with Mr. Wells about it?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m telling you: it’s the first I’ve seen of it.’

‘Perhaps,’ Devlin said, ‘if you had been told about it—but you had forgotten …’

‘I wouldn’t forget a dirty great fortune,’ said Anna.

Devlin paused, watching her. Then he said, ‘One hears stories of children with Continental nannies, waking up one day, and speaking fluent Dutch, or French, or German, or whatever it is—’

‘I never had a nanny.’

‘—but I have never heard of a person suddenly acquiring the ability to read,’ he finished. ‘That is most peculiar.’

There was a sceptical accent in his voice.

‘I never had a nanny,’ Anna said again.

Devlin sat forward. ‘Miss Wetherell,’ he said, ‘your name is associated with a great many unsolved crimes, including a possible murder, and I am sure that I do not need to impress upon you the gravity of a Supreme Court trial. Let us talk frankly—and in confidence.’ He pointed at the deed in Anna’s hand. ‘This bequest was written three months before Mr. Staines disappeared. It represents exactly half of the Wells inheritance. Mr. Wells died the very day that Mr. Staines vanished, and on the morning after his death I found this paper in the stove. The events are clearly related, and a lawyer will be able to join the dots, even if I cannot. If you are in a difficult position, I may be able to help you; but I cannot help you if you do not trust me. I am asking you to take me into your confidence, and tell me what you know.’

Anna was frowning. ‘This paper doesn’t have anything to do with the Wells inheritance,’ she said. ‘This is about Emery’s money, not Crosbie’s.’

‘You are right; but it is doubtful that the gold discovered in Mr. Wells’s cottage ever belonged to Mr. Wells,’ Devlin said. ‘You see, the ore was not discovered pure: it had been smelted by a goldsmith, and pressed into a kind of bullion. The smelting bears a signature, and by this signature the bank has been able to trace the gold back to a goldmine belonging to Mr. Staines. The Aurora.’

‘The what?’ said Anna.

‘The Aurora,’ Devlin said. ‘That’s the name of the goldmine.’

‘Oh,’ she said. She was clearly confused; feeling pity for her, Devlin explained it all again, more slowly. This time she understood. ‘So the fortune was Emery’s, all along?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Devlin, cautiously.

‘And he meant to give exactly half of it to me!’

‘This document certainly seems to imply that Mr. Staines meant to give you two thousand pounds—and that Mr. Wells, as of the night of the eleventh of October, knew about this intention, and possibly even endorsed it. But as I have already told you, the document is not valid: Mr. Staines never signed.’

‘What if he did sign it?’

‘Until Mr. Staines is found,’ Devlin said, ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done.’ He watched her for a moment, and then said, ‘It has taken me a very long time to bring this document to your attention, Miss Wetherell, and for that I ask your forgiveness. The reason is simply that I have been waiting for a chance to speak with you alone; as you know, those chances have been very hard to come by.’

‘Who knows about this?’ she said suddenly. ‘Besides you and me.’

Devlin hesitated. ‘Governor Shepard,’ he said, deciding to tell the truth, but not the whole truth. ‘I spoke with him about the matter perhaps a month ago.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He imagined that it must have been a joke of some kind.’

‘A joke?’ She looked crestfallen. ‘What kind of a joke?’

Devlin reached forward to take her hand, crushing her fingers slightly in his sympathy. ‘Don’t be disappointed, my dear. It is the poor in spirit who are blessed, and every one of us awaits a much greater inheritance than any that can be gifted in gold.’

There came a shrill piping from the kitchen, and a hiss as the hot water spouted onto the cast-iron plate.

‘There’s our kettle,’ said Devlin, smiling at her.

‘Reverend,’ Anna said, withdrawing her hand from his grip, ‘would you mind very much if I asked you to pour out the tea? I’m feeling a little strange, and I would like some time alone.’

‘Certainly,’ said Cowell Devlin with courtesy, and he left the room.

As soon as he was gone Anna rose and crossed the parlour in two quick steps, the charred deed of gift still in her hand. Her heart was beating fast. She stood unmoving for a moment, gathering confidence, and then, in one fluid motion, she went to the widow’s writing desk, laid the deed of gift upon the table, uncorked a pot of ink, picked up Mrs. Wells’s pen, wet the nib in the inkwell, leaned forward, and wrote:

Emery Staines

Anna had never seen Emery Staines’s signature before, but she knew without a doubt that she had replicated the form of it exactly. The letters of Staines’s last name followed a careless diminution, and the letters of his first were cheerfully illegible; the signature was confidently sloppy, and underlined with a casual relish, as if to say that the shape had been formed so many times before as not to be disproved by any minor variation. There was a doubled curlicue preceding the E—a personal touch—and the S had a slightly flattened quality.

‘What have you done?’

Devlin was standing in the doorway with the tea tray in his hands and an expression of fearsome admonition on his face. He set the tray upon the sideboard with a clatter and advanced upon her, holding out his hand. Mutely, Anna passed the document to him, and he snatched it up. For a moment, his outrage was such that he could not speak; then he controlled himself, and said, very quietly,

‘This is an act of fraud.’

‘Maybe,’ said Anna.

‘What?’ Devlin shouted, suddenly furious. He rounded on her. ‘What did you say?’

He had expected her to cower, but she did not. ‘That’s his signature,’ she said. ‘The deed is good.’

‘That is not his signature,’ Devlin said.

‘It is,’ said Anna.

‘That is a forgery,’ Devlin snapped. ‘You have just committed forgery.’

‘Maybe I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Anna.

‘Your insolence is unbecoming,’ Devlin said. ‘Will you add the crime of perjury to the crime of fraud?’

‘Maybe I don’t know anything about fraud.’

‘The truth will bear out,’ said Devlin. ‘There are analysts, Miss Wetherell, who can tell a forgery at sight.’

‘Not this one,’ Anna said.

‘Do not delude yourself,’ Devlin said. ‘Shame on you.’

But Anna was feeling quite without delusion, and quite without shame; she was feeling, in fact, sharper than she had felt in many months. Now that Emery Staines’s signature was upon the deed of gift, it was no longer invalid. By the authority of this document, two thousand pounds must be given, as a present, to Miss Anna Wetherell, by Mr. Emery Staines; the deed had been signed, and witnessed, and the signature of the donor was a good one. Who could fault her word, when one of the signatories had vanished, and the other was dead?

‘Can I look at it again?’ she said, and Devlin, red-faced with anger, handed the deed back to her. Once it was in her hand, Anna darted away, loosed the bodice of Agathe Gascoigne’s dress, and slipped the paper between the buttons, so that it lay against her skin. Placing her hands over her bodice, she stood a moment, panting, her eyes searching Devlin’s—who had not moved. There was ten feet of space between them.

‘For shame,’ Devlin said quietly. ‘Explain yourself.’

‘I want a second opinion, that’s all.’

‘You have just falsified that deed, Miss Wetherell.’

‘That can’t be proved.’

‘By my oath, it can.’

‘What’s to stop me swearing an oath against you?’

‘That would be a falsehood,’ Devlin said. ‘And it would be a very grave falsehood, if you swore to it in court, which you would certainly be forced to do. Don’t be foolish.’

‘I’ll get a second opinion,’ she said again. ‘I’ll go to the Courthouse and ask.’

‘Miss Wetherell,’ Devlin said. ‘Calm yourself. Think. It would be the word of a minister against the word of a whore.’

‘I’m not whoring any more.’

‘A former whore,’ said Devlin. ‘Forgive me.’

He took a step towards her, and Anna retreated. Her hand was still pressed flat over her breast.

‘If you come one step closer,’ she said, ‘I’ll scream, and I’ll rip my bodice open, and say you did it. They’ll hear me from the street. They’ll rush in.’

Devlin had never before been threatened in this way. ‘I will come no closer,’ he said, with dignity. ‘I will retreat, in fact, and at once.’ He returned to the chair he had formerly occupied, and sat down. ‘I do not wish to brawl with you,’ he said, speaking quietly now. ‘I do wish to ask you several questions, however.’

‘Go on,’ said Anna, still breathing hard. ‘Ask.’

Devlin decided upon a direct approach. ‘Did you know that the gowns you purchased salvage last winter had once belonged to Lydia Wells?’

Anna gaped at him.

‘Kindly answer the question,’ Devlin said. ‘I am referring to the five gowns which Mrs. Wells used to blackmail Mr. Alistair Lauderback, with Francis Carver’s help.’

‘What?’ she said.

‘The gowns,’ Devlin went on, ‘which each contained a small fortune in pure ore, stitched into the lining, around the bodice, and around the hem. One of these dresses was made of orange silk; the other four were muslin, and coloured cream, grey, pale blue, and striped pink. These four are currently stowed in a box beneath the stairs at the Gridiron Hotel; the orange gown is in the possession of Mr. Aubert Gascoigne, at his private residence.’

He had her full attention now. ‘How do you know this?’ she whispered.

‘I have made it my business to find out a good deal about you,’ said Devlin. ‘Now answer the question.’

Her face was pale. ‘Only the orange gown had gold,’ she said. ‘The other four had makeweights—made of lead.’

‘Did you know that they had once belonged to Lydia Wells?’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘Not for sure.’

‘But you suspected it.’

‘I—I’d heard something,’ she said. ‘Months ago.’

‘When did you first discover what the gowns contained?’

‘The night after Emery disappeared.’

‘After you were gaoled for attempted suicide.’

‘Yes.’

‘And Mr. Gascoigne paid your bail, on promise, and together you took apart the orange gown at his cottage on Revell-street, and hid the tatters under his bed, thereafter.’

‘How—?’ she whispered. She looked terrified.

Devlin did not pause. ‘Presumably, after you returned to the Gridiron that evening, your first move was to go back to your wardrobe and check the four remaining gowns.’

‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘But I didn’t cut them open. I only felt along the seams. I didn’t know that it was lead that I was feeling: I thought it was more colour.’

‘In that case,’ Devlin said, ‘you must have believed that you were suddenly extraordinarily rich.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you did not open the hems of those dresses, in order to use that gold to repay your debt to Edgar Clinch.’

‘Later, I did,’ said Anna. ‘The following week. That’s when I found the makeweights.’

‘But even then,’ Devlin said, ‘you did not tell Mr. Gascoigne what you surmised. Instead, you pretended helplessness and ignorance, claimed to have no money, and begged him for aid!’

‘How do you know all this?’ Anna said.

‘I will ask the questions, thank you,’ Devlin said. ‘What were you intending to do with that gold?’

‘I wanted to keep it back,’ Anna said. ‘As a nest egg. And I didn’t have anywhere to hide the metal. I thought I might ask Emery about it. There was no one else I trusted. But by then he was gone.’

‘What about Lydia Wells?’ Devlin said. ‘What about Lydia Wells, who came to the Gridiron that same afternoon—who paid your debt to Mr. Clinch—and who has shown you every kind of hospitality ever since?’

‘No.’ Anna’s voice had become very small.

‘You never told her about those gowns?’

‘No.’

‘Because you suspected they had once belonged to her.’

‘I’d heard something,’ Anna said. ‘I never knew—not for certain—but I knew that there was something—and she was desirous to get them back.’

Devlin folded his arms. Anna was plainly fearful of how much he knew about her situation, and how he had come to know it. This pained him, but he reflected that, given the circumstances, it was better to keep her frightened, than to risk her becoming bold. It would not do, to have her flapping that forged signature about.

‘Where is Mr. Staines?’ he said next.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think you do.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘I shall remind you that you have committed serious fraud by forging a signature in a dead man’s hand.’

‘He’s not dead.’

Devlin nodded; he had been hoping for a definite answer. ‘How do you know that?’

Anna did not reply, so Devlin said again, more sharply, ‘How do you know that, Miss Wetherell?’

‘I’ve been getting messages,’ Anna said at last.

‘From Mr. Staines?’

‘Yes.’

‘What kind of messages?’

‘They’re private.’

‘How does he communicate them?’

‘Not with words,’ said Anna.

‘How then?’

‘I just feel him.’

‘You feel him?’

‘Inside my head.’

Devlin exhaled.

‘I suppose you doubt my word now,’ Anna said.

‘I most certainly do,’ Devlin said. ‘It goes rather hand in hand with your being a fraudster, I’m afraid.’

Anna thumped a hand over the paper hidden in her breast. ‘You held onto this for a mighty long time,’ she said.

Devlin glared at her. He opened his mouth to make a retort, but before he could find the words, he heard brisk steps upon the porch, and the rattle of the door handle, and the sudden noise of the street as the front door swung inwards, and someone walked in. Anna looked at Devlin with frightened eyes. The widow had returned from the Courthouse, and she was calling Anna’s name.

SATURN IN VIRGO

In which George Shepard does not appoint a deputy; Quee Long is mistaken for another man; and Dick Mannering draws the line.

George Shepard had spent the morning of the 20th of March supervising various deliveries of materials and hardware to the site of the future gaol-house at Seaview—which, two months into the project of its construction, was looking more and more imposing every day. The walls had gone up, the chimneys had been bricked, and inside the main residence the fortified doors had all been fitted and hung in their steel frames. There were still many details to be ironed out, of course—the lamps had yet to be delivered; the gaol-house kitchen still lacked a stove; there was still no glass in the gaoler’s cottage windows; the pit beneath the gallows had not yet been dug—but all in all everything had moved splendidly quickly, thanks to Harald Nilssen’s four-hundred pound ‘donation’, and additional funding, finally paid out, from the Westland Public Works Committee, the Hokitika Council, and the Municipal Board. Shepard had predicted that the felons could be moved from the Police Camp before the end of April, and several of them already spent their nights upon the Seaview premises, watched over by Shepard, who preferred, now that the prison was so near completion, to sleep there also, and to take his suppers cold.

When the bell in the Wesleyan chapel rang out noon Shepard was in the future asylum, digging an alternate pit for the latrine. As the sound of the bell drifted up from the town below the foreman called for the felons to break. Shepard put down his spade, wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve, and clambered bodily out of the hole—perceiving as he did so that a young ginger-haired man was standing on the far side of the iron gate, peering through the bars, and evidently waiting for an interview.

‘Mr. Everard,’ Shepard said, striding forward.

‘Gov. Shepard.’

‘What brings you up to Seaview this morning? Not idle curiosity, I think.’

‘I’d hoped to beg an audience with you, sir.’

‘I trust you haven’t been waiting long.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Do you wish to come in? I can call for the gate to be unlocked.’ Shepard was still perspiring from his recent exertion: he mopped his forehead a second time with his sleeve.

‘It’s all right,’ the man said. ‘I’ve only got a message.’

‘Deliver it,’ said Shepard. He placed his hands on his hips.

‘I’ve come on behalf of Mr. Barnes. Of Brunton, Solomon and Barnes.’

‘I do not know any of those men.’

‘They’re outfitters. They’ve a new warehouse,’ said Everard. ‘On Camp-street. Only the sign hasn’t been painted yet. Sir,’ he added hastily.

‘Continue,’ Shepard said, still with his hands on his hips.

‘A couple months back you made it known that you’d be very grateful for a watch to be placed on a certain Chinaman.’

Shepard’s expression sharpened at once. ‘You remember rightly.’

‘I’m here to report to you that a Chinaman bought a pistol this morning,’ the young man said.

‘From Mr. Barnes’s establishment, I presume.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Where is this Chinaman now?’

‘I couldn’t tell you that,’ said Everard. ‘I saw Barnes just now, and he said he’d sold a Kerr Patent to a Chinaman this morning, and I came straight to you. I don’t know if the Chinaman in question is your man or not … but I thought it would do well to advise you, either way.’

Shepard offered neither thanks nor congratulation for this. ‘How long ago did the sale occur?’

‘Two hours ago at least. Perhaps more. Barnes said that the fellow must have acted on a tip: he wouldn’t lay down any more than five pounds for the Kerr. Five pounds even, he kept saying, like he’d been tipped. He knew not to be overcharged.’

‘How did he pay for it?’

‘With a paper note.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes,’ said Everard. ‘He loaded the piece in the store.’

‘Who loaded it?’

‘Barnes. On the Chinaman’s behalf.’

Shepard nodded. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Now. Listen closely. You go back to Hokitika, Mr. Everard, and you tell every man you see that George Shepard is on the lookout for a Chinaman called Sook. Let it be known that if anybody sees Johnny Sook in town today, no matter what for and no matter where, I’m to be sent for, at once.’

‘Shall you offer a reward for the man’s capture?’

‘Don’t say anything about a reward, but don’t deny it either, if anyone asks.’

The young man drew himself up. ‘Am I to be your deputy?’

Shepard did not answer at once. ‘If you come upon Johnny Sook,’ he said at last, ‘and you find a way to apprehend him without a great deal of fuss, then I shall turn a blind eye to whatever your method of capture might have been. That’s as much as I will say.’

‘I understand you, sir.’

‘There’s another thing you can do for me,’ said Shepard. ‘Do you know a man named Francis Carver by sight?’

‘The man with the scar on his face.’

‘Yes,’ said Shepard. ‘I want you to take him a message for me. You’ll find him at the Palace Hotel.’

‘What’s it to be, sir?’

‘Tell him exactly what you just told me,’ said Shepard. ‘And then tell him to buckle on his holsters.’

Everard sagged a little. ‘Is he your deputy, then?’

‘I don’t have a deputy,’ Shepard said. ‘Go on now. We’ll speak later.’

‘All right.’

Shepard raised his arms and placed his hands on the bars of the gate; he watched the youth’s retreating form. Then he called, ‘Mr. Everard!’

The young man stopped and turned. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you want to be a lawman?’

He brightened. ‘One day, I hope, sir.’

‘The best lawmen can enforce the law without a badge,’ Shepard said, gazing at him coolly through the bars of the gate. ‘Remember that.’

Emery Staines had now been absent for over eight weeks, an interval judged by the Magistrate to be sufficient to nullify ownership of all gold-bearing ground. By the Magistrate’s ruling, all mines and claims owned by Mr. Staines had been returned to the Crown, a repossession that had taken effect on Friday of the previous week. The Aurora, naturally, was one of the many claims surrendered, and as a consequence of this surrender, Quee Long had been released, at long last, from his fruitless obligation to that barren patch of ground. He made for Hokitika first thing Monday, in order to inquire where he was to be indentured next, and to whom.

Ah Quee disliked going to the Company offices very much, for he was never treated courteously while he was there, and he was always made to wait. He bore the officials’ jeers with equanimity, however, and pretended not to notice as their junior clerks flicked him with pellets made of spit and paper, and held their noses whenever they passed the chair in which he sat. At length he was invited forward to explain his purpose to the bureaucrat at the front desk. After another long delay, the purpose of which was not explained to him, he was allocated another claim in Kaniere, given a receipt of the transfer, and sent on his way—by which time the ginger-haired Mr. Everard had reached Hokitika proper, and was dispensing George Shepard’s message left and right.

As Ah Quee exited the Company offices on Weld-street, clutching the paper proof of his indenture in his hand, he heard somebody shout. He looked up, confused, and saw to his alarm that he was being rushed at from both sides. He cried out, and flung up his arm. In the next moment he was on the ground.

‘Where’s the pistol, Johnny Sook?’

‘Where’s the pistol?’

‘Check in his waistband.’

There were hands on his body, patting and punching. Somebody aimed a kick at his ribs and he gasped.

‘Stashed it, most likely.’

‘What’s that you’ve got? Coolie papers?’

His indenture was wrenched from his hand, scanned briefly, and tossed aside.

‘Now what?’

‘Now what have you got to say for yourself, Johnny Sook?’

‘Ah Quee,’ said Ah Quee, managing to speak at last.

‘Got a tongue in his head, does he?’

‘You’ll speak in English if you speak at all.’

Another kick in the ribs. Ah Quee gave a grunt of pain and doubled up.

‘He’s not the right one,’ said one of his attackers.

‘What’s the difference?’ responded the other. ‘He’s still a Chinaman. He still stinks.’

‘He doesn’t have a pistol,’ the first man pointed out.

‘He’ll give us Sook. They’re all in thick.’

Ah Quee was kicked again, in the buttocks this time; the toe of the man’s boot caught his tailbone and shot a jolt of pain up his spine to his jaw.

‘You know Johnny Sook?’

‘You know Johnny Sook?’

‘You seen him?’

‘We want to talk to Johnny Sook.’

Ah Quee grunted. He attempted to raise himself up onto his hands, and fell back.

‘He’s not going to spill,’ observed the first man.

‘Here. Move away a bit—’

The second man danced away on light feet and then ran at Ah Quee like a kicker hoping to make a conversion. Ah Quee felt him coming at the last moment, and rolled fast towards him, to cushion the blow. The pain in his ribs was excruciating. He could only breathe with the topmost part of his lung. The men were laughing now. Their voices had receded into a throbbing haze of sound.

Then a voice thundered out over the street:

‘You’ve got the wrong man, my friends.’

The attackers turned. Standing in the open doorway of the Weld-street coffee house, his arms folded across his chest, was the magnate Dick Mannering. His bulk quite filled the doorway: he made for an imposing presence, despite the fact that he was unarmed, and at the sight of him the two men shrank away from Quee Long at once.

‘We’re under instructions to apprehend a Chinaman with the name of Johnny Sook,’ said the first man, sticking his hands into his pockets, like a boy.

‘That man’s name is Johnny Quee,’ said Mannering.

‘We didn’t know that, did we?’ said the second man, his hands stealing into his pockets also.

‘Instructions from the gaoler,’ said the first man.

‘The chink called Johnny Sook is on the loose,’ said the second.

‘He’s got a pistol.’

‘Armed and dangerous.’

‘Well, you’ve got the wrong man,’ said Mannering, descending the stairs to the street. ‘You know that because I’m telling you, and I’m telling you for the last time. This man’s name is Johnny Quee.’

Mannering seemed rather more menacing for the fact that he was advancing upon them, and at his approach the men finally balked.

‘Didn’t mean any trouble,’ the first man muttered. ‘Had to make

‘Yellow-lover,’ muttered the other, but quietly, so that Mannering didn’t hear.

Mannering waited until they had departed, and then looked down at Ah Quee, who rolled onto his side, checked his ribs for breakage, and clambered laboriously to his feet, picking up his trampled certificate of indenture as he did so, and brushing it clean of dust. His throat was very tight.

‘Thank you,’ he said, when he could breathe at last.

Mannering seemed annoyed by this expression of gratitude. He frowned, looking Ah Quee up and down, and said, ‘What’s this about Johnny Sook and a pistol?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Ah Quee.

‘Where is he?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Have you seen him? Anywhere at all?’

Ah Quee had not seen Ah Sook since the night of the widow’s séance, one month prior: late that night he had returned from the Wayfarer’s Fortune to find Ah Sook packing his few belongings and vanishing, with a grim efficiency, into the rustle of the night. ‘No,’ he said.

Mannering sighed. ‘I suppose you’ve been reassigned, now that Aurora’s gone back to the bank,’ he said after a moment. ‘Let’s have a look at your paper, then. Let’s see where they’ve placed you. Hand it over.’

He held out his hand for the certificate. The document was brief, and had been written without consultation with Ah Quee: it provided his ‘apparent age’ instead of his actual age; the origin of the ship he had arrived on, rather than his actual birthplace in Canton; and a brief list of his attributes as a worker. It was heralded with the numeral five, indicating that the length of his indenture was five years, and had been stamped with the Company seal. Mannering cast his eye down the document. In the box marked ‘present site of employment’ the word Aurora had been recently scratched out, and replaced with the words Dream of England.

‘Can’t get a bit of luck, can you?’ Mannering said. ‘That claim belongs to me! One of mine. Belongs to me.’ He tapped himself on the chest. ‘You’re working for me again, Johnny Quee. Just like the good old days. Back when you were running rings around me with your bloody crucible, and bleeding Anna Magdalena for dust.’

‘You,’ said Ah Quee, massaging his ribs.

‘Together again,’ said Mannering grimly. ‘Dream of England, my eye. English Nightmare, more like.’

‘Unlucky,’ said Ah Quee.

‘Unlucky for you or unlucky for me?’

Ah Quee did not reply to this, having not understood the question, and all of a sudden Mannering laughed and shook his head. ‘It’s the nature of indenture, I’m afraid, that you sign away your luck. Every chance to get lucky, you sign away. It’s the nature of any contract. A contract’s got to be fulfilled, you see: it’s got to come around on itself, sooner or later. A lucky man, I’ve always said, is a man who was lucky once, and after that, he learned a thing or two about investment. Luck only happens once and it’s always an accident when it does. It’s contracts that come back around. It’s investments and obligations; it’s paperwork; it’s business. I’ll tell you another thing I like to say. If a man wants any shot at making his fortune then he’ll never sign his name to any piece of paper that he didn’t write himself. I’ve done that, Johnny Quee. I’ve never signed my name to any contract that I didn’t write myself.’

‘Very good,’ said Ah Quee.

Mannering glared at him. ‘I don’t suppose you’d be so stupid as to try and run something funny past me again. That’s twice now that you’ve tried to bet against me: once on the Aurora, and once on Anna. I’m a man who knows how to count.’

‘Very good,’ said Ah Quee again.

Mannering passed the indenture back to him. ‘Well, you’ll be pleased to turn your back upon Aurora, I don’t doubt—and you needn’t worry about Dream of England. She’s as sound as a drum.’

‘Not a duffer?’ said Ah Quee, slyly.

‘Not this one,’ said Mannering. ‘I’ll give you my word on that. You’ll do all right on Dream of England. She’s been raked for nuggets, of course, but there’s plenty of dust in the tailings. Perfect for a man like you. Someone with two eyes in his head. You won’t make a fortune on her, Johnny Quee, but who among you ever does?’

Ah Quee nodded.

‘Get yourself back to Kaniere,’ said Mannering at last, and returned inside.

VENUS IN PISCES

In which the chaplain loses his temper, and the widow loses a fight.

‘But who is this?’ said Lydia Wells. ‘A man of God?’

She stood in the doorway, half-smiling, plucking at each of her fingertips in turn, to ease off her gloves; Anna and Devlin looked back at her in mute horror, as though apprehended in some gross act of fornication—though Anna was by the window, her palm still pressed flat against her breast, and Devlin was seated at the sofa, from which he now leaped up, blushing horribly.

‘Goodness me,’ said Lydia Wells, easing one milky hand out of her glove, and tucking it under her elbow to begin plucking off the other. ‘What a pair of sheep.’

‘Good morning, Mrs. Wells,’ said Devlin, finding his tongue at last. ‘My name is Cowell Devlin. I am the chaplain of the prospective gaol-house at Seaview.’

‘A charming introduction,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘What are you doing in my parlour?’

‘We were having a—theological discussion,’ said Devlin. ‘Over tea.’

‘You appear to have forgotten the tea.’

‘It’s still steeping,’ said Anna.

‘So it is,’ said Lydia Wells, without glancing at the tray. ‘Well, in that case, my arrival has been fortuitously timed! Anna, run and fetch another cup. I’ll join you. I have a great fondness for theological debate.’

With a desperate look at Devlin, Anna nodded, ducked her head, and slipped out of the room.

‘Mrs. Wells,’ whispered Devlin quickly, as Anna’s footsteps receded down the hallway, ‘may I ask you a very odd question, while we are alone?’

Lydia Wells smiled at him. ‘I make my living answering odd questions,’ she said, ‘and you of all people should know that we are hardly alone.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Devlin, feeling uncomfortable. ‘But here’s the question. Does Miss Wetherell know how to read?’

Lydia Wells raised her eyebrows. ‘That is a very odd question,’ she replied, ‘though not because of its answer. I wonder what prompted the asking.’

Anna returned with a cup and saucer, and set it beside the others on the tray.

‘What is the answer?’ Devlin said quietly.

‘You play mother, Anna,’ said Lydia Wells, her voice ringing out. ‘Reverend: be seated, please. There you are. How nice, to have a clergyman to tea! It makes one feel quite civilised. I will have a biscuit, I think, and sugar too.’

Devlin sat.

‘The answer, to the best of my knowledge, is no,’ the widow said, sitting down herself also. ‘And now I have an odd question of my own. Is it a different class of falsehood, when a minister of God tells a lie?’

He balked. ‘I do not see the pertinence of your question.’

‘But Reverend, you are not playing fair,’ the widow said. ‘I answered your question without begging to know the reason why; will you not now do the same for me?’

‘What was his question?’ said Anna, looking around—but she was ignored.

‘Is it a different class of falsehood, I ask,’ the widow went on, ‘when the liar is a minister of God?’

Devlin sighed. ‘It would be a different class of falsehood,’ he said, ‘only if the minister was using the authority of his office for ill. So long as the falsehood did not pertain to his office, there would be no difference. We are equal in the eyes of God.’

‘Ah,’ said the widow. ‘Thank you. Now. You said just now that you were talking of theology, Reverend. Would you care to count me in to the debate?’

Devlin flushed. He opened his mouth—and faltered: he did not have an alibi prepared.

Anna came to his rescue. ‘When I woke up in gaol,’ she said, ‘the Reverend Devlin was there. He prayed for me, and he has been praying ever since.’

‘Then you have been talking about prayer?’ the widow said, still addressing Devlin.

The chaplain recovered his composure. ‘Among other things,’ he said. ‘We have also been discussing acts of great providence, and unexpected gifts.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘And do you make it your habit, Reverend, to drop in on young women when their guardians are otherwise engaged, in order to discuss, without a chaperone, matters of theology?’

Devlin was offended by the accusation. ‘You are hardly Miss Wetherell’s guardian,’ he said. ‘She lived alone for months until you arrived in Hokitika; what sudden need has she of a guardian?’

‘A very great one, I should judge,’ said Lydia Wells, ‘given the degree to which she has been formerly exploited in this town.’

‘I wonder at your adverb, Mrs. Wells! You mean to say that she is exploited no longer?’

Lydia Wells seemed to stiffen. ‘Perhaps you do not think it a gladness,’ she said coldly, ‘that this young woman is no longer prostituting her body every night, and risking every kind of violence, and concussing herself daily with a contemptible drug. Perhaps you wish that she had her former life back again.’

‘Don’t perhaps me,’ Devlin said, flaring up. ‘That’s cheap rhetoric. It’s nothing better than bullying, and I won’t stand for a bully; I won’t.’

‘I am astonished by your accusation,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘In what way am I a bully?’

‘The girl has no freedoms, for heaven’s sake! She was brought here against her will, and you keep her on the shortest leash imaginable!’

‘Anna,’ said Lydia Wells, still addressing Devlin. ‘Did you come to the Wayfarer’s Fortune against your will?’

‘No, ma’am,’ Anna said.

‘Why did you come and take up lodgings here?’

‘Because you made me an offer, and I accepted it.’

‘What was my offer?’

‘You offered to pay my debt to Mr. Clinch up front, and you said that I could come and live with you as your companion, so long as I helped you on the business end.’

‘Did I keep my end of the bargain?’

‘Yes,’ Anna said, miserably.

‘Thank you,’ the widow said. She had not taken her eyes from Devlin’s, and nor had she touched her cup of tea. ‘As for the length of the girl’s leash, I find it very wonderful that you should protest a life of virtue and austerity, in favour of—what did you call them—“freedoms”? Freedoms to do what, exactly? Freedom to fraternise with those very men who once defiled and abused her? Freedom to smoke herself senseless in a Chinaman’s saloon?’

Devlin could not resist countering this. ‘But why did you make your offer, Mrs. Wells? Why did you offer to repay Miss Wetherell’s debts?’

‘Out of concern for the girl, naturally.’

‘Moonshine,’ said Devlin.

‘Pardon me,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘I have ample concern for Anna’s welfare.’

‘Look at her! The poor girl’s half the size she was a month ago; you can’t deny that. She’s starving. You’re starving her.’

‘Anna,’ said Lydia Wells, spitting out the girl’s name. ‘Do I starve you?’

‘No,’ said Anna.

‘Are you, in your own opinion, starving?’

‘No,’ Anna said again.

‘You can spare me the pantomime,’ said Devlin, who was becoming angry. ‘You don’t care two straws for that girl. You’ve no more concern for her than you do for anyone—and from what I have heard about you, that’s a paltry kind of concern indeed.’

‘Another terrible accusation,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘And from the chaplain of a prison, no less! I suppose I ought to try to clear my name. Anna, tell the good Reverend what you did while you were in Dunedin.’

There was a pause. Devlin glanced at Anna, his confidence faltering.

‘Tell him what you did,’ said Lydia Wells again.

‘I played the serpent in your household,’ said Anna.

‘Meaning what, precisely? Tell him exactly what it was you did.’

‘I lay down with your husband.’

‘Yes,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘You seduced my husband, Mr. Wells. Now tell the good Reverend this. What did I do, in retaliation?’

‘You sent me away,’ Anna said. ‘To Hokitika.’

‘In what condition?’

‘With child.’

‘With whose child, please?’

‘With your husband’s child,’ Anna whispered. ‘Crosbie’s child.’

Devlin was astonished.

‘So I sent you away,’ the widow said, nodding. ‘Do I still maintain that my reaction was the right one?’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘You have repented. You have begged for my forgiveness. More than once.’

‘Are you quite sure?’ said Mrs. Wells, feigning astonishment. ‘According to our good Reverend here, I have no concern at all for the welfare of others, and presumably still less for those who have played temptress beneath my roof! Are you quite sure that I am even capable of begging your forgiveness?’

‘Enough,’ said Devlin. He raised his hands. ‘Enough.’

‘It’s true,’ Anna said. ‘It’s true that she has asked for my forgiveness.’

‘Enough.’

‘Now that you have insulted my integrity in virtually every way imaginable,’ said the widow, picking up her teacup at last, ‘would you mind telling me, without falsehood this time, what you are doing in my parlour?’

‘I was delivering a private message to Miss Wetherell,’ Devlin said.

The widow turned to Anna. ‘What was it?’

‘You don’t have to tell her,’ Devlin said quickly. ‘Not if you don’t want to. You don’t have to say a single word to her.’

‘Anna,’ said Lydia Wells, dangerously. ‘What was the message?’

‘The Reverend showed me a document,’ Anna said, ‘by the authority of which, half of that fortune in Crosbie’s cottage belongs to me.’

‘Indeed,’ said Lydia Wells—and although she spoke coolly Devlin thought he saw a flash of panic in her eye. ‘To whom does the other half belong?’

‘Mr. Emery Staines,’ said Anna.

‘Where is this document?’

‘I hid it,’ said Anna.

‘Well, go and fetch it out,’ Lydia snapped.

‘Don’t,’ Devlin said quickly.

‘I won’t,’ said Anna. She made no move to touch her bodice.

‘You might at least do me the courtesy of telling me the whole truth,’ Lydia said. ‘Both of you.’

‘I’m afraid we can’t do that,’ Devlin said, speaking before Anna could have a chance. ‘This information, you see, pertains to a crime that has not yet been fully investigated. It concerns, among other things, the blackmail of a certain Mr. Alistair Lauderback.’

‘Pardon me?’ said Lydia Wells.

‘What?’ said Anna.

‘I’m afraid I can’t disclose anything further,’ Devlin said—observing, to his great satisfaction, that the widow had become very pale. ‘Anna, if you wish to go to the Courthouse directly, I will escort you there myself.’

‘You will?’ Anna said, peering at him.

‘Yes,’ Devlin said.

‘What on earth do you think you’ll be doing at the Courthouse?’ said Lydia Wells.

‘Seeking legal counsel,’ said Anna. ‘As is my civil right.’

Mrs. Wells fixed Anna with an impenetrable look. ‘I consider this a very poor way to repay my kindness,’ she said at last, and in a quiet voice.

Anna went to Devlin’s side, and took his arm. ‘Mrs. Wells,’ she said, ‘it is not your kindness that I mean to repay.’

JUPITER IN CAPRICORN

In which Aubert Gascoigne is very much amused; Cowell Devlin abdicates responsibility; and Anna Wetherell makes a mistake.

The Hokitika Courthouse, home of the Resident Magistrate’s Court, was a scene of robust but much-approximated ceremony. The courtroom had been cordoned with ropes, rather like a shearing yard. District officials sat behind a row of desks that protected them from the milling crowd; when the court was in session, these desks would form a kind of barricade between the figures of the court and the public, who was required to stand. The magistrate’s seat, currently vacant, was only a captain’s chair on a raised dais, though the chair had been draped with sheepskins to give it a more dignified aspect. Beside it stood an outsize Union Jack, hung on a stand that was rather too short for the size of the flag. The flag might have pooled on the dusty ground, had an enterprising soul not thought to place an empty wine cask beneath the bottom of the stand—a detail that served to diminish, rather than enhance, the flag’s effect.

It had been a busy morning in the petty courts. Mrs. Wells’s appeal to revoke the sale of Crosbie Wells’s estate had been approved at last, which meant that the Wells fortune, formerly held in escrow at the Reserve Bank, had been surrendered to the Magistrate’s purse. Harald Nilssen’s four-hundred-pound commission had not likewise been revoked, for two reasons: firstly, because the sum constituted his legal payment for a service adequately rendered; and secondly, because the commission had since been donated, in its entirety, to assist in the erection of the new gaol-house at Seaview. It was unseemly, the Magistrate declared, to revoke a gift of charity, especially when the gift was such a handsome and selfless one; he commended Nilssen, in absentia, for his benevolence.

There were sundry other legal expenses to be itemised, most of which reflected the many hours the Magistrate’s office had spent on the project of trying to find the late Mr. Wells’s birth certificate. These expenses would come out of Mrs. Wells’s inheritance also—which, less the estate taxes and fees, and after these many corrections had been made, now totalled a little over £3500. This sum was to be made payable to Mrs. Wells as soon as the fortune had been cleared by the Reserve Bank, in whatever form of currency the widow desired. Did Mrs. Wells have anything to say? No, she did not—but she gave Aubert Gascoigne a very broad smile as she swept away from the Courthouse, and he saw that her eyes were shining.

‘Oi—Gascoigne!’

Gascoigne had been staring into the middle distance. He blinked. ‘Yes?’

His colleague Burke was in the doorway, a fat paper envelope in his hand. ‘Jimmy Shaw tells me you’ve a flair for maritime insurance.’

‘That’s right,’ said Gascoigne.

‘Do you mind taking on another job? Something’s just come in.’

Gascoigne frowned at the envelope. ‘What kind of a “something”?’

‘Letter from a John Hincher Garrity,’ said the other, holding it up. ‘Regarding one of the wrecks on the bar. Godspeed is the name of the craft.’

Gascoigne held out his hand. ‘I’ll take a look at it.’

‘Good man.’

The envelope had been postmarked in Wellington, and slit already. Gascoigne opened it and withdrew its contents. The first document enclosed was a short letter from John Hincher Garrity, M.P. for the electoral district of Heathcote in Canterbury. The politician authorised a representative of the Hokitika Courthouse to act as his agent in drawing down funds from the Garrity Group’s private account at the Bank of New Zealand. He trusted that the enclosed documents would explain the matter sufficiently, and thanked the representative in advance for his efforts. Gascoigne put this letter aside and turned to the next document. It was also a letter, forwarded by Garrity; it had been addressed to the Garrity Group.

Hokitika, 25 Feb. 66

Sirs—

I write to inform you of the regrettable wreck of the barque

Godspeed,

of which I was until very recently the operating master, upon the treacherous Hokitika Bar. The shipowner, Mr. Crosbie F. Wells, is recently deceased, and I am settling matters as his proxy. I understand that in purchasing

Godspeed

Mr. Crosbie F. Wells inherited all extant policies from former owner A. Lauderback, member of the Garrity Group, and therefore, that

Godspeed

is protected and indemnified by said authority. I seek now to draw down all funds designated by Mr. Lauderback for this purpose in order to facilitate the removal of the wreck. I enclose the full record of all expenses, deeds of sale, receipts, quotes, inventories, &c., and remain,

Yours,

Francis W. R. Carver

Gascoigne frowned. What did Carver mean by this? Crosbie Wells had certainly not purchased Godspeed; Carver had purchased the craft himself, using the alias Wells. Gascoigne shuffled through the remaining pages, which had evidently been forwarded by Carver to Mr. Garrity as evidence of the validity of his claim. He passed over the harbourmaster’s assessment of the wreck, a balance sheet of all the debts incurred, and sundry receipts and testimonials, until he found, at the bottom of the pile, a copy—presumably Carver’s personal copy—of Godspeed’s bill of sale. Gascoigne took up this last item and looked at the signature closely. It had been signed by a Francis Wells! What was Carver playing at? Looking at the signature a moment longer, however, Gascoigne perceived that the large loop on the side of the F could easily have been a C … why, yes! There was even a dot of ink, fortuitously placed, between the C and the F. The longer Gascoigne looked at it, the more the ambiguity became clear to him: Carver must have signed the false name with this future purpose in mind. Gascoigne shook his head, and then, after a moment, laughed aloud.

‘What’s tickled you?’ said Burke, looking up.

‘Oh,’ said Gascoigne, ‘nothing of consequence.’

‘You just laughed,’ said Burke. ‘What’s the joke?’

‘There is no joke,’ said Gascoigne. ‘I was expressing my appreciation, that’s all.’

‘Appreciation? What for?’

‘A job well done,’ said Gascoigne. He returned the letters to the envelope and stood, intending to take John Hincher Garrity’s letter of authorisation to the bank at once—but just as he did so the foyer door opened, and Alistair Lauderback walked in, shadowed at his heels by Jock and Augustus Smith.

‘Ah,’ said Lauderback, perceiving the letter in Gascoigne’s hand. ‘I’m just in time, then. Yes: I had a message from Garrity myself this morning. There’s been a mix-up, and I’m here to set it straight.’

‘Mr. Lauderback, I presume,’ said Gascoigne dryly.

‘I want a private interview with the Magistrate,’ Lauderback said. ‘It’s urgent.’

‘The Magistrate is taking his luncheon at present.’

‘Where does he take it?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ said Gascoigne. ‘The afternoon sessions begin at two o’clock; you are welcome to wait until then. Excuse me, gentlemen.’

‘Hold up,’ said Lauderback, as Gascoigne bowed, and made to exit. ‘Where do you think you’re going with that letter?’

‘To the bank,’ said Gascoigne—who could not bear officious rudeness of the kind that Lauderback had just displayed. ‘I have been deputised by Mr. Garrity to facilitate a transaction on his behalf. I beg you to excuse me.’

Again he made to leave.

‘Hold up a moment,’ said Lauderback. ‘Just hold up a moment! It’s on account of this very business that I want an audience here; you’re not to go off to the bank, before I’ve said my piece!’

Gascoigne stared at him coolly. Lauderback seemed to realise that he had begun on the wrong foot, and said, ‘Hear me out, would you? What’s your name?’

‘Gascoigne.’

‘Gascoigne, is it? Yes, I had you for a Frenchman.’

Lauderback held out his hand, and Gascoigne shook it.

‘I’ll speak to you, then,’ Lauderback said. ‘If I can’t get the Magistrate.’

‘I imagine you would prefer to do so in private,’ said Gascoigne, still without warmth.

‘Yes, good.’ Lauderback turned to his aides. ‘You wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll be ten minutes.’

Gascoigne led him into the Magistrate’s office, and closed the door behind him. They sat down on the Windsor chairs that faced the Magistrate’s desk.

‘All right, Mr. Gascoigne,’ said Lauderback at once, sitting forward, ‘here’s the long and short of it. This whole business is a set-up. I never sold Godspeed to a man named Crosbie Wells. I sold it to a man who told me that his name was Francis Wells. But the name was an alias. I didn’t know it at the time. This man. Francis Carver. It was him. He took the alias—Francis Wells—and I sold the ship to him, under that name. You see he kept his Christian name. Only the surname changed. The point is this: he signed the deed with a false name, and that’s against the law!’

‘Let me see if I understand you correctly,’ Gascoigne said, pretending to be bemused. ‘Francis Carver claims that a man named Crosbie Wells purchased Godspeed … and you claim that this is a lie.’

‘It is a lie!’ said Lauderback. ‘It’s an out-and-out fabrication! I sold the ship to a man named Francis Wells.’

‘Who doesn’t exist.’

‘It was an alias,’ said Lauderback. ‘His real name is Carver. But he told me that his name was Wells.’

‘Francis Wells,’ Gascoigne pointed out, ‘and Crosbie Wells’s middle name was Francis, and Crosbie Wells does exist—at least, he did. So perhaps you were mistaken about the purchaser’s identity. The difference between Francis Wells and C. Francis Wells is not very great, I observe.’

‘What’s this about a C?’ said Lauderback.

‘I have examined the forwarded copy of the deed of sale,’ Gascoigne said. ‘It was signed by a C. Francis Wells.’

‘It most certainly was not!’

‘I’m afraid it was,’ said Gascoigne.

‘Then it’s been doctored,’ said Lauderback. ‘It’s been doctored after the fact.’

Gascoigne opened the envelope in his hand, and extracted the bill of sale. ‘On first inspection, I believed that it read merely “Francis Wells”. It was only on leaning closer that I saw the other letter, cursively linked to the F.’

Lauderback looked at it, frowned, and looked closer—and then a deep blush spread across his cheeks and neck. ‘Cursive or no cursive,’ he said, ‘C or no C, that deed of sale was signed by the blackguard Francis Carver. I saw him sign it with my own two eyes!’

‘Was the transaction witnessed?’

Lauderback said nothing.

‘If the transaction was not witnessed, then it will be your word against his, Mr. Lauderback.’

‘It’ll be the truth against a lie!’

Gascoigne declined to answer this. He returned the contract to the envelope, and smoothed it flat over his knee.

‘It’s a set-up,’ Lauderback said. ‘I’ll take him to court. I’ll have him flayed.’

‘On what charge?’

‘False pretences, of course,’ Lauderback said. ‘Impersonation. Fraud.’

‘I’m afraid that the evidence will bear out against you.’

‘Oh—you’re afraid of that, are you?’

‘The law has no grounds to doubt this signature,’ Gascoigne said, smoothing the envelope a second time, ‘because no other documentation survives Mr. Crosbie Wells, official or otherwise, that might serve as proof of his hand.’

Lauderback opened his mouth; he seemed about to say something, but then he shut it again, shaking his head. ‘It was a set-up,’ he said. ‘It was a set-up all along!’

‘Why do you think Mr. Carver saw the need to take an alias with you?’

The politician’s answer was surprising. ‘I’ve done some digging on Carver,’ he said. ‘His father was a prominent figure in one of the British merchant trading firms—Dent & Co. You might have heard of him. William Rochfort Carver. No? Well, anyway. Some time in the early fifties he gives his son a clipper ship—the Palmerston—and the son starts trading Chinese wares back and forth from Canton, under the banner of Dent & Co. Carver’s still a young man. He’s being coddled, really, becoming master of a ship so young. Well, here’s what I found out. In the spring of 1854 the Palmerston gets searched when it’s leaving the Sydney harbour—just a routine job—and Carver’s found to be foul of the law on several counts. Evading duty, and failing to declare, and a pile of other misdemeanours. Each small enough that a judge might turn a blind eye, but the charges come in all at once; when they’re stacked up like that, the law has to come down. He’s given ten years at Cockatoo, and that’s ten years of penal servitude, no less. A real dishonour. The father’s furious. Revokes the ship, disinherits the son, and as a final touch, makes sure to tarnish his name at every dock and shipyard in the South Pacific. By the time Francis Carver gets out of gaol, he has about as good a character as Captain Kidd—in seafaring circles at least. No shipowner’s going to lease a ship to him, and no crew’s going to take him on.’

‘And so he assumed an alias.’

‘Exactly,’ said Lauderback, sitting back.

‘I am curious to know why he only assumed an alias with you,’ Gascoigne said lightly. ‘He does not seem to have assumed the name Wells in any other context, save for when he purchased this ship. He introduced himself to me, for example, as Mr. Francis Carver.’

Lauderback glared at him. ‘You read the papers,’ he said. ‘Don’t make me spell it out to you. I’ve made my apology in public: I won’t do it again.’

Gascoigne inclined his head. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Carver assumed the alias Francis Wells in order to exploit your former entanglement with Mrs. Wells.’

‘That’s it,’ said Lauderback. ‘He said that he was Crosbie’s brother. Told me he was settling a score on Crosbie’s behalf—on account of my having made a bad woman of his wife. It was an intimidation tactic, and it worked.’

‘I see,’ said Gascoigne, wondering why Lauderback had not explained this so sensibly to Thomas Balfour two months ago.

‘Look,’ said Lauderback, ‘I’m playing straight with you, Mr. Gascoigne, and I’m telling you that the law is on my side. Carver’s break with his father is commonly known. He had a thousand provocations to assume an alias. Why, I could call in the father’s testimony, if need be. How would Carver like that?’

‘Not very well, I should imagine.’

‘No,’ cried Lauderback. ‘Not very well at all!’

Gascoigne was annoyed by this. ‘Well, I wish you luck, Mr. Lauderback, in bringing Mr. Carver to justice,’ he said.

‘Spare the bromide,’ Lauderback snapped. ‘Talk to me plain.’