The Luminaries

‘As you wish,’ Gascoigne said, shrugging. ‘You know without my telling you that proof of provocation is not evidence. A man cannot be convicted simply because it can be proved that he had good reason to commit the crime in question.’

Lauderback bristled. ‘Do you doubt my word?’

‘No indeed,’ said Gascoigne.

‘You just think my case is weak. You think I don’t have a leg to stand on.’

‘Yes. I think it would be very unwise to take this matter to court,’ said Gascoigne. ‘I am sorry to speak so bluntly. You have my compassion for your troubles, of course.’

But Gascoigne felt no compassion whatsoever for Alistair Lauderback. He tended to reserve that emotion for persons less privileged than himself, and although he could acknowledge that Lauderback’s current situation was pitiable, he considered the politician’s wealth and eminence to be ample consolation for whatever inconveniences the man might be encountering in the short term. In fact, enduring a spot of injustice might do Lauderback a bit of good! It might improve him as a politician, thought Gascoigne—who was, in his private adjudications at least, something of an autocrat.

‘I’ll wait for the Magistrate,’ said Lauderback. ‘He’ll see sense.’

Gascoigne tucked the envelope into his jacket, next to his cigarettes. ‘I understand that Carver is now attempting to draw down funds from your protection and indemnity scheme, in order to finance the debts that he incurred in disposing of the shipwreck.’

‘That is correct.’

‘And you wish to refuse him access to this money.’

‘Also correct.’

‘On what grounds?’

Lauderback turned very red. ‘On what grounds?’ he cried. ‘The man has stiffed me, Mr. Gascoigne! He was planning this from the outset! You’re a fool if you think I’ll take it lying down! Is that what you’re telling me? To take it lying down?’

‘Mr. Lauderback,’ Gascoigne said, ‘I do not presume to give you any kind of advice at all. What I am observing is that no laws appear to have been broken. In his letter to Mr. Garrity, Mr. Carver made it very plain that he is acting on Mr. Wells’s behalf—for Mr. Wells, as you know, is dead. To all appearances Carver is merely doing the charitable thing, in settling matters as the shipowner’s proxy, because the shipowner is not able to do the job himself. I do not see that you have any evidence to disprove this.’

‘But it’s not true!’ Lauderback exploded. ‘Crosbie Wells never bought that ship! Francis Carver signed that bloody contract in another man’s name! It’s a case of forgery, pure and simple!’

‘I’m afraid that will be very difficult to prove,’ said Gascoigne.

‘Why?’ said Lauderback.

‘Because, as I have already told you, there is no proof of Crosbie Wells’s true signature,’ said Gascoigne. ‘There were no papers of any kind in his cottage, and his birth certificate and his miner’s right are nowhere to be found.’

Lauderback opened his mouth to make a retort, and again seemed to change his mind.

‘Oh,’ said Gascoigne, suddenly. ‘I’ve just thought of something.’

‘What?’ said Lauderback.

‘His marriage certificate,’ said Gascoigne. ‘That would bear his signature, would it not?’

‘Ah,’ said Lauderback. ‘Yes.’

‘But no,’ said Gascoigne, changing his mind, ‘it wouldn’t be enough: to prove a forgery of a dead man’s hand, you would need more than one example of his signature.’

‘How many would you need?’ said Lauderback.

Gascoigne shrugged. ‘I am not familiar with the law,’ he said, ‘but I would imagine that you would need several examples of his true signature in order to prove the abberations in the false one.’

‘Several examples,’ Lauderback echoed.

‘Well,’ said Gascoigne, rising, ‘I hope for your sake that you find something, Mr. Lauderback; but in the meantime, I’m afraid that I am legally obliged to carry out Mr. Garrity’s instruction, and take these papers to the bank.’

Upon quitting the Wayfarer’s Fortune the chaplain had not escorted Anna Wetherell directly to the Courthouse. He took her instead into the Garrick’s Head Hotel, where he ordered one portion of fish pie—the perennial lunchtime special—and one glass of lemon cordial. He directed Anna to be seated, placed the plate of food in front of her, and bid her to eat, which she did obediently, and in silence. Once her plate was clean, he pushed the sugared drink across the table towards her, and said,

‘Where is Mr. Staines?’

Anna did not seem surprised by the question. She picked up the glass, sipped at it, winced at the sweetness, and then sat for a moment, watching him.

‘Inland,’ she said at last. ‘Somewhere inland. I don’t know exactly where.’

‘North or south of here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is he being held against his will?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You do know,’ said Devlin.

‘I don’t,’ Anna said. ‘I haven’t seen him since January, and I’ve no idea why he vanished like he did. I only know that he’s still alive, and he’s somewhere inland.’

‘Because you’ve been getting messages. Inside your head.’

‘Messages wasn’t the right way to describe it,’ Anna said. ‘That wasn’t right. It’s more like … a feeling. Like when you’re trying to remember a dream that you had, and you can remember the shape of it, the sense of it, but no details, nothing sure. And the more you try and remember, the more hazy it becomes.’

Devlin was frowning. ‘So you have a “feeling”.’

‘Yes,’ Anna said.

‘You have a feeling that Mr. Staines is somewhere inland, and that he is alive.’

‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘I can’t give you any details. I know it’s somewhere muddy. Or leafy. Somewhere near water, only it isn’t the beach. The water’s quick-moving. Over stones … You see: as soon as I try and put it into words, it trips away from me.’

‘This all sounds very vague, my dear.’

‘It’s not vague,’ Anna said. ‘I’m certain of it. Just as when you’re certain you did have a dream … you knew you dreamed … but you can’t remember any of the details.’

‘How long have you been having these “feelings”? These dreams?’

‘Only since I stopped whoring,’ Anna said. ‘Since my blackout.’

‘Since Staines disappeared, in other words.’

‘The fourteenth of January,’ said Anna. ‘That was the date.’

‘Is it always the same—the water, the mud? The same dream?’

‘No.’

She did not elaborate, and to prompt her Devlin said, ‘Well, what else?’

‘Oh,’ she said, embarrassed. ‘Just sensations, really. Snatches. Impressions.’

‘Impressions of what?’

She looked away from him. ‘Impressions of me,’ she said.

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand you.’

She turned her hand over. ‘What he thinks of me. Mr. Staines, I mean. What he dreams about, when he imagines me.’

‘You see yourself—but through his eyes.’

‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘Exactly.’

‘Ought I to infer that Mr. Staines holds you in high esteem?’

‘He loves me,’ she said, and then after a moment, she said it again. ‘He loves me.’

Devlin studied her critically. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Has he made an avowal of his love?’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘He doesn’t need to. I know it, just the same.’

‘Do you get these feelings frequently?’

‘Very frequently,’ she said. ‘He thinks of me all the time.’

Devlin nodded. The situation was at last becoming clear to him, and with this dawning clarity his heart was sinking in his chest. ‘Are you in love with Mr. Staines, Miss Wetherell?’

‘We spoke of it,’ she said. ‘The night he vanished. We were talking nonsense, and I said something silly about unrequited love, and he became very serious, and he stopped me, and he said that unrequited love was not possible; that it was not love. He said that love must be freely given, and freely taken, such that the lovers, in joining, make the equal halves of something whole.’

‘A passionate sentiment,’ Devlin said.

This seemed to please her. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘But he did not declare his love for you, after all that.’

‘He didn’t make any vows. I said that.’

‘And nor did you.’

‘I never got another chance,’ she said. ‘That was the night he disappeared.’

Cowell Devin sighed. Yes, he understood Anna Wetherell at long last, but it was not a happy understanding. Devlin had known many women of poor prospects and limited means, whose only transport out of the miserable cage of their unhappy circumstance was the flight of the fantastic. Such fantasies were invariably magical—angelic patronage, invitations into paradise—and Anna’s story, touching though it was, showed the same strain of the impossible. Why, it was painfully clear! The most eligible bachelor of Anna’s acquaintance possessed a love so deep and pure that all respective differences between them were rendered immaterial? He was not dead—he was only missing? He was sending her ‘messages’ that proved the depth of his love—and these were messages that only she could hear? It was a fantasy, Devlin thought. It was a fantasy of the girl’s own devising. The boy could only be dead.

‘You want Mr. Staines to love you very much, don’t you, Miss Wetherell?’

Anna seemed offended by his implication. ‘He does love me.’

‘That wasn’t my question.’

She squinted at him. ‘Everyone wants to be loved.’

‘That’s very true,’ Devlin said, sadly. ‘We all want to be loved—and need to be loved, I think. Without love, we cannot be ourselves.’

‘You’re of a mind with Mr. Staines.’

‘Am I?’

‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘That is precisely the sort of thing that he would say.’

‘Your Mr. Staines is quite the philosopher, Miss Wetherell.’

‘Why, Reverend,’ Anna said, smiling suddenly, ‘I believe you’ve just paid yourself a compliment.’

They did not speak for a moment. Anna sipped again at her sugared drink, and Devlin, brooding, looked out across the hotel dining room. After a moment Anna’s hand went to her bosom, where the forged deed of gift still lay against her skin.

Devlin looked sharply at her. ‘You have ample time to reconsider,’ he said.

‘I only want a legal opinion.’

‘You have my clerical opinion.’

‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘“Blessed are the meek”.’

She seemed to regret this impudence immediately; a violent blush spread across her face and neck, and she turned away. Suddenly Devlin wanted nothing more to do with her. He pushed his chair back from the table, and placed his hands on his knees.

‘I will accompany you to the Courthouse door and no further,’ he said. ‘What you do with the document in your possession is no longer my business. Know that I will not lie to protect you. I will certainly not lie in a court of law. If anyone asks, I shall not hesitate to tell them the truth, which is that you forged that signature with your own hand.’

‘All right,’ said Anna, rising. ‘Thank you very much for the pie. And the cordial. And thank you for all that you said to Mrs. Wells.’

Devlin rose also. ‘You oughtn’t to thank me for that,’ he said. ‘I let my temper get the better of me there, I’m afraid. I wasn’t at my best.’

‘You were marvellous,’ Anna said, and she stepped forward, and put her hands on his shoulders, and kissed him very nicely on the cheek.

By the time Anna Wetherell arrived at the Hokitika Courthouse, Aubert Gascoigne had already departed for the Reserve Bank, the envelope from John Hincher Garrity snug in the inside pocket of his jacket; Alistair Lauderback had likewise long since left the building. Anna was received by a red-faced solicitor named Fellowes, whom she did not know. He directed her into an alcove at the far side of the hall, where they sat down on either side of a plain deal table. Anna handed him the charred document without a word. The lawyer placed it on the table before him, squaring it with the edge of the desk, and then cupped his hands around his eyes to read it.

‘Where did you get this?’ Fellowes said at last, looking up.

‘It was given to me,’ Anna said. ‘Anonymously.’

‘When?’

‘This morning.’

‘Given how?’

‘Someone slipped it under the door,’ Anna lied. ‘While Mrs. Wells was down here at the Courthouse.’

‘Down here at the Courthouse, receiving the news that her appeal has been revoked at last,’ Fellowes said, with a sceptical emphasis. He turned back to the document. ‘Crosbie Wells … and Staines is the fellow whom nobody’s heard from … and Miss Wetherell is you. Strange. Any idea who dropped it off?’

‘No.’

‘Or why?’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘I suppose someone wanted to do me a good turn.’

‘Anyone in mind? Care to speculate?’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘I only want to know whether it’s good.’

‘It seems all right,’ said Fellowes, peering at it. ‘But it’s not exactly a cash cheque, is it? Not with things being as they are—eight weeks on, and Mr. Staines still missing.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well. Even if this deed is valid, our good friend Mr. Staines no longer has two thousand pounds to give away. All of his assets have been seized, on account of his absence. Effective last Friday. He’d be lucky to scrape together a few hundred from what he’s got left.’

‘But the deed is binding,’ Anna said. ‘Even so.’

The lawyer shook his head. ‘What I’m saying to you, my girl, is that our Mr. Staines can’t give you two thousand pounds—unless by some miracle he’s found alive, with a great deal of cash money on his person. His claims have been given over. Bought by other men.’

‘But the deed is binding,’ Anna said again. ‘It has to be.’

Mr. Fellowes smiled. ‘I’m afraid the law doesn’t quite work that way. Think on this. I could write you a cheque right now for a million pounds, but that doesn’t mean you’re a million pounds up, does it, if I’ve nothing in my pocket, and nobody to act as my surety? Money always has to come out of someone’s pocket, and if everyone’s pockets are empty … well, that’s that, no matter what anyone might claim.’

‘Mr. Staines has two thousand pounds,’ Anna said.

‘Yes—well, if he did, that would be a different story.’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘I’m telling you. Mr. Staines has two thousand pounds.’

‘How’s that?’

‘The gold in Crosbie Wells’s cottage belonged to him.’

Fellowes paused. He stared at her for several seconds, and then, in quite a different voice, he said, ‘Can that be proven?’

Anna repeated what Devlin had told her that morning: that the gold was found retorted, and bearing a signature that identified the origin of the gold.

‘Which mine?’

‘I can’t remember the name,’ Anna said.

‘What’s your source?’

She hesitated. ‘I’d rather not say.’

Fellowes was looking interested. ‘We could check the truth of it. The fortune was a component part of Wells’s estate, after all, so there should be a record somewhere at the bank. I wonder why it hasn’t come up before. Someone at the bank is keeping it back, perhaps.’

‘If it’s true,’ Anna said, ‘that means the fortune’s mine, does it not? Two thousand pounds of it belongs to me. By the authority of this piece of paper here.’

‘Miss Wetherell,’ Fellowes said, ‘this kind of money does not change hands so easily. I’m afraid it is never as simple as drawing down a cheque. But I will say that your coming here today is fortuitously timed. Mrs. Wells’s appeal has just been granted, and the share apportioned her is in the process of being released. I can place a hold on her claim very easily, while we figure out what to do with this paper of yours.’

‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘Will you do that?’

‘If you will consent to take me on as your solicitor, I will do all that I can to help,’ Fellowes said, sitting back. ‘My retainer is two pounds weekly, with expenses. I charge in advance, of course.’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t pay you in advance. I don’t have any money.’

‘Perhaps you might draw down a loan of some kind,’ Fellowes said delicately, shifting his gaze away. ‘I’m afraid that I am very strict on all matters of finance; I make no exceptions, and take nothing on promise. It’s nothing personal; it comes with the training, that’s all.’

‘I can’t pay you in advance,’ Anna said again, ‘but if you do this for me, I can pay you treble your retainer, when the money comes in.’

‘Treble?’ Fellowes smiled gently. ‘Legal processes often take a very long time, Miss Wetherell, and sometimes without results: there is no guarantee that the money would come in at all. Mrs. Wells’s appeal took two months to verify, and as you’ve shown very well, that business is not over yet!’

‘Treble, up to a ceiling of one hundred pounds,’ Anna said firmly, ‘but if you clear the funds for me within the fortnight, I’ll pay you two hundred, in cash money.’

Fellowes raised his eyebrows. ‘Dear me,’ he said. ‘This is very bold.’

‘It comes with the training,’ Anna said.

But here Anna Wetherell made a misstep. Mr. Fellowes’ eyes widened, and he shrank away. Why, she was a whore, he thought—and then it all came back to him. This was the very whore who had tried to end her life in the Kaniere-road, the very day of Staines’s disappearance, and Wells’s death! Fellowes was new to Hokitika: he did not know Anna Wetherell by sight, and had not immediately recognised her name. It was only at her brazen remark that he suddenly knew her.

Anna had mistaken his discomfiture for simple hesitation. ‘Do you consent to my terms, Mr. Fellowes?’

Fellowes looked her up and down. ‘I shall inquire at the Reserve Bank about this alleged retortion,’ he said. His voice was cold. ‘If the rumour you heard was a good one, then we will draw up a contract; if it was not, then I’m afraid I cannot help you.’

‘You are very kind,’ Anna said.

‘None of that,’ said Fellowes, roughly. ‘Where might I find you, say in three hours’ time?’

Anna hesitated. She could not return to the Wayfarer’s Fortune that afternoon. She had no money on her person, but perhaps she could ask an old acquaintance to stand her a drink at one of the saloons along Revell-street.

‘I’ll just come back,’ she said. ‘I’ll just come back and meet you here.’

‘As you wish,’ Fellowes said. ‘Let us err on the side of caution and say five o’clock.’

‘Five o’clock,’ Anna said. She held out her hand for the charred document, but Fellowes was already opening his wallet, to slip the piece of paper inside.

‘I think I’ll hold onto this,’ he said. ‘Just for the meantime.’

MOON IN ARIES, CRESCENT

In which Te Rau Tauwhare makes a startling discovery.

Te Rau Tauwhare was feeling very pleased as he leaped from stone to stone through the shallows of the Arahura River, making his way downriver towards the beach. He had spent the past month with a party of surveyors in the Deception Valley, and his purse was full; what’s more, that morning he had come upon a marvellous slab of kahurangi pounamu, the weight of which was causing his satchel to thump against his back with every step.

Back at Mawhera it would be time to dig the crop of kumara from the ground: Tauwhare knew it from the appearance of Whanui in the northern sky, the star low on the horizon, dawning well after midnight, and setting well before the dawn. His people called this month Pou-tu-te-rangi—the post that lifted up the sky—for at nights Te Ikaroa formed a milky arch that ran north to south across the black dome of the heavens. It hung between Whanui, in the north, and Autahi, in the south, and it passed through the red jewel of Rehua, directly overhead: for a moment, every night, the sky became a perfect compass, its needle a dusty stripe of stars. At the dawning of Whanui the crops would be unearthed from the ground; after this was Paenga-wha-wha, when the tubers would be piled upon the margins of the fields to be classified and counted, and then taken to the store pits and storehouses, to be stacked for the winter months ahead. After Paenga-wha-wha, the year came to an end—or, as the tohunga phrased, it, ‘to a death’.

He rounded a bend in the river, left the shallows, and mounted the bank. Crosbie Wells’s cottage was looking more forlorn with each passing day. The iron roof had rusted to a flaming orange, and the mortar had turned from white to vivid green; the small garden that Wells had planted had long since gone to seed. Tauwhare strode up the path, taking sorrowful note of these tokens of decay—and then halted suddenly.

There was somebody inside.

Slowly, Tauwhare came closer, peering through the open doorway into the gloom of the interior. The figure in question was curled on the floor, either dead or asleep. He was lying on his hip, with his knees angled close to his chest and his face turned away from the door. Tauwhare came closer still. He saw that the man was dressed in a jacket and trousers rather than digger’s moleskin, and as Tauwhare watched, the fabric over his rib moved very slightly, rising and falling with the motion of a breath. Asleep, then.

Tauwhare passed through the doorway, taking care that his shadow did not fall across the man’s body, and wake him. Moving softly, he edged around the wall behind him, to look down upon the sleeper’s face. The man was very young. His hair was darkly matted with dirt and grease; the skin of his face seemed almost white by contrast. His face would have been handsome had it not been so plainly ravaged by privation. The lids of his eyes were mottled purple, and there were deep shadows in the hollows beneath them. His breath was fretful and inconstant. Tauwhare cast his eye over the boy’s body. His dress had been worn almost to tatters, and apparently had not been changed in many weeks, for it was thick with mud and dust of all varieties. The coat had once been fine, however—that was plain—and the cravat, stiff with mud, was likewise of a fashionable cut.

‘Mr. Staines?’ Tauwhare whispered.

The boy’s eyes opened.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Hello, there.’

‘Mr. Staines?’

‘Yes, that’s me,’ the boy said, speaking in a voice that was high and very bright. He lifted his head. ‘Excuse me. Excuse me. Is this Maori land?’

‘No,’ said Tauwhare. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘It’s not Maori land?’

‘No.’

‘I need to be on Maori land,’ the boy said, struggling up into a sitting position. He was holding his left arm oddly across his chest.

‘Why?’ Tauwhare said.

‘I buried something,’ said Staines. ‘By a tree. But all the trees look the same to me and I’m afraid I’ve got myself into a bit of a muddle. Thank heavens you’ve come along—I’m ever so grateful.’

‘You disappeared,’ Tauwhare said.

‘Three days, perhaps,’ said the boy, sinking back again. ‘I think it was three days ago. I’ve been mixing up my days: I can’t seem to keep them in any sort of order. One forgets to mark the hours, when one’s alone. I say: will you have a look at this, please?’

He pulled down the neck of his shirt and Tauwhare saw that the soiled darkness on his cravat was in fact the sticky tar of old blood. There was a wound just above his collarbone, and even from his distance of several feet Tauwhare could see that it was a very grave one. It had begun to putrefy. The centre of the wound was black, and fingers of red speared away from it in rays. Tauwhare could see black speckles of powder-burn, dark against the white of his chest, and deduced that it could only be a gunshot wound. Evidently somebody had shot Emery Staines at very close range, some time ago.

‘You need medicine,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ said Staines. ‘Exactly right. Will you fetch it for me? I’d be most exceedingly obliged. But I’m afraid I don’t know your name.’

‘My name is Te Rau Tauwhare.’

‘You’re a Maori fellow!’ said Staines, blinking, as though seeing him for the first time. His eyes crossed, and then focused again. ‘Is this Maori land?’

Tauwhare pointed east. ‘Up there is Maori land,’ he said.

‘Up there?’ Staines looked where Tauwhare pointed. ‘Why are you down here, then, if your patch is up there?’

‘This is the house of my friend,’ said Tauwhare. ‘Crosbie Wells.’

‘Crosbie, Crosbie,’ said Staines, closing his eyes. ‘He was euchred, wasn’t he? Lord, how that man can drink. Hollow legs, both of them. Where is he, then? Gone fossicking?’

‘He’s dead,’ said Tauwhare.

‘I’m exceedingly sorry to hear that,’ Staines mumbled. ‘What a terrible blow. And you were his friend—his very good friend! And Anna … You’ll accept my condolences, I hope … But I’ve forgotten your name already.’

‘It’s Te Rau,’ said Tauwhare.

‘So it is,’ said Staines. ‘So it is.’ He paused a moment, wretched with exhaustion, and then said, ‘You wouldn’t mind taking me there, would you, old fellow? You wouldn’t mind it?’

‘Where?’

‘To the Maori land,’ said Staines, closing his eyes again. ‘You see, I’ve buried a great deal of gold on Maori land, and if you help me, I wouldn’t be averse to giving you a pinch of it. I’ll stand you whatever you like. Whatever you like. I remember the place exactly: there’s a tree. The gold’s underneath the tree.’ He opened his eyes again and gave Tauwhare a beseeching, blurry look.

Tauwhare tried again. ‘Where have you been, Mr. Staines?’

‘I’ve been looking for my bonanza,’ said Staines. ‘I know it’s on Maori land … but there’s nothing to mark Maori land, is there? No kind of fence to mark it. They always said a man could never get lost on the West Coast, because there’s always mountains on one side, and ocean on the other … but I seem to have got myself a little muddled, Te Rau. It’s Te Rau, isn’t it? Yes. Yes. I’ve been lost.’

Tauwhare came forward and knelt. Up close the man’s wound looked even worse. In the centre of the blackness was a thick crust, showing through it the glint of yellow. He reached out his hand and touched the skin of Staines’s cheek, feeling his temperature. ‘You are sick with fever,’ he said. ‘This wound is very bad.’

‘Never saw it coming,’ said Staines, staring at him. ‘Fresh off the boat, I was, and green with it. Nothing shows like greenness, on a man. Never saw it coming. Heavens, you are a sight for sore eyes! I’m terribly sorry about this muddle. I’m terribly sorry about your mate Crosbie. I really am. What kind of medicine did you say you had about you?’

‘I shall bring it to you,’ said Tauwhare. ‘You wait here.’ He did not feel hopeful. The boy was not speaking sense, and he was much too sick to walk to Hokitika on his own; he would need to be carried there on a litter or a cart, and Tauwhare had seen enough of the Hokitika hospital to know that men went there to die, not to be cured. The place was canvas-roofed, and walled only with the simplest clapboard; the bitter Tasman wind blew through the cracks in the planking, giving rise to a new cacophony of coughing and wheezing with each gust. It stank of filth and disease. There was no fresh water, and no clean linen, and only one ward. The patients were forced to sleep in close quarters with one another, and sometimes even to share a bed.

‘Half-shares,’ the boy was saying. ‘Seemed fair enough to me. Half for you, half for me. What about it, he says. Going mates.’

Tauwhare was calculating the distance in his mind. He could make for Hokitika at a pace, alert Dr. Gillies, hire a cart or a trap of some kind, and be back, at the very earliest, within three hours … but would three hours be soon enough? Would the boy survive? Tauwhare’s sister had died of fever, and in her final days she had been very like the way that Staines was now—bright-eyed, both sharp and limp at once, full of nonsense and tumbling words. If he left, he risked the boy’s death. But what could he do, if he stayed? Suddenly decisive, he bowed his head to say a karakia for the boy’s recovery.

‘Tutakina i te iwi,’ he said, ‘tutakina i te toto. Tutakina i te iko. Tutakina i te uaua. Tutakina kia u. Tutakina kia mau. Tenei te rangi ka tutaki. Tenei te rangi ka ruruku. Tenei te papa ka wheuka. E rangi e, awhitia. E papa e, awhitia. Nau ka awhi, ka awhi.’

He raised his head.

‘Was that a poem?’ said Staines, staring. ‘What does it mean?’

‘I asked for your wound to heal,’ Tauwhare said. ‘Now I shall bring medicine.’ He took off his satchel, pulled out his flask, and pressed it into the boy’s hands.

‘Is it the smoke?’ the boy said, shivering slightly. ‘I’ve never touched the stuff, myself, but how it claws at one … like a thorn in every one of your fingers, and a string around your heart … and one feels it always. Nagging. Nagging. You’d stand me a mouthful of smoke. I believe you would. You’re a decent fellow.’

Tauwhare shucked his woollen coat, and draped it across the boy’s legs.

‘Just until I find this tree on Maori land,’ the boy went on. ‘You can have as many ounces as you please. Only it’s the good stuff I’m after. Are you going to the druggist? Pritchard’s got my account. Pritchard’s all right. Ask him. I’ve never touched a pipe before.’

‘This is water,’ said Tauwhare, pointing at the flask. ‘Drink it.’

‘How extraordinarily kind,’ said the boy, closing his eyes again.

‘You stay here,’ Tauwhare said firmly. He stood. ‘I go to Hokitika and tell others where you are. I shall come back very soon.’

‘Just a bit of the good stuff,’ said Staines, as Tauwhare left the cottage. His eyes were still closed. ‘And after you come back we’ll go and have a nose around for all that gold. Or we’ll start with the smoke—yes. Do it properly. What an unrequited love it is, this thirst! But is it love, when it is unrequited? Good Lord. Medicine, he says. And him a Maori fellow!’

MARS IN AQUARIUS

In which Sook Yongsheng pays a call upon a very old acquaintance, and Francis Carver dispenses some advice.

Sook Yongsheng, after making his five-pound purchase at Brunton, Solomon & Barnes that morning, had immediately gone into hiding. The shopkeeper who loaded the pistol had been very plainly suspicious of his intentions, though he had accepted Ah Sook’s paper note without complaint: he had followed Ah Sook to the door of his establishment, to see him off, and Ah Sook twice looked over his shoulder to see him standing, arms folded, scowling after him. A Chinaman purchasing a revolver with cash money, laying down that cash money all at once, refusing to pay more than five pounds even for the item, and requesting that the piece be loaded in the store? This was not the kind of suspicion that one kept to oneself. Ah Sook knew very well that by the time he reached the corner of Weld- and Tancred-streets the rumour mill would have begun to turn, and swiftly. He needed to find a place to hide until sundown, whereupon he would venture, under the cover of darkness, to the rearmost bedroom on the ground floor of the Crown Hotel.

There was no one in Hokitika Ah Sook trusted enough to ask for aid. Certainly not Anna: not any more. Nor Mannering. Nor Pritchard. He was not on speaking terms with any of the other men from the council at the Crown, except Ah Quee, who, of course, would be in Kaniere, digging the ground. For a moment he considered taking a room at one of the more disreputable hotels on the eastern side of town, perhaps even paying for the week in advance, to disguise his motivation … but even there he could not guarantee anonymity; he could not guarantee that the proprietors would not talk. His presence in Hokitika on a Monday morning was conspicuous enough, even without wagging tongues. Better not to trust in the discretion of other men, he thought. He resolved instead to take his pistol into the alley that ran in parallel between Revell-street and Tancred-street. The alley formed a rutted thoroughfare between the rear allotments of the Revell-street warehouses and hotels, which faced west, and the rear allotments of the Tancred-street cabins, which faced east. There was ample opportunity for camouflage, and the alley was central enough to allow points of entry and exit from all sides. Best of all, the space was frequented only intermittently, by the tradesmen and penny-postmen who serviced the hotels.

In the allotment behind a wine and spirit merchant’s Ah Sook found a place to hide. A piece of corrugated iron had been propped against an outhouse, creating a kind of lean-to, open at both ends. It was shielded from the alley by a large flax bush, and from the rear of the merchant warehouse by the outhouse pump. Ah Sook crawled into the triangular space, and sat down, cross-legged. He was still sitting in this way three hours later, when Mr. Everard came running down Revell-street, shouting the news to the bellmen that George Shepard had taken out a warrant for a Chinaman’s arrest.

At Mr. Everard’s words a thrill ran through Ah Sook’s body. Now he could be certain that Francis Carver had been forewarned. But Ah Sook had an advantage Carver did not—could not—suspect: thanks to Walter Moody’s confidence, he knew exactly where to find Carver, and when. Warrant or no warrant, George Shepard had not arrested him yet! Ah Sook listened until the cry up and down Revell-street had faded, and then, smiling slightly, he closed his eyes.

‘What are you doing down there?’

Ah Sook started. Standing over him, his hand on the outhouse door, was a dirty youth of perhaps five-and-twenty, wearing a sack coat and a collarless shirt.

‘You’re not allowed to squat here, you know,’ the youth said, frowning. ‘This is private land. It belongs to Mr. Chesney. You can’t just hole up where you please.’

Another voice, from the warehouse: ‘Who’s that you’re talking to, Ed?’

‘There’s a chink—just sitting here. Beside the outhouse.’

‘A what?’

‘A Chinaman.’

‘He’s using the outhouse?’

‘No,’ called the youth. ‘He’s just sitting beside it.’

‘Well, tell him to get a move on.’

‘Get on with you,’ said the youth, giving Ah Sook a gentle nudge with the toe of his boot. ‘Get on with you. You can’t stay here.’

The voice from the warehouse called again. ‘What did you say he was doing there, Ed?’

‘Nothing,’ the youth called back. ‘Just sitting. He’s got a pistol.’

‘A what?’

‘He’s got a pistol, I said.’

‘What’s he doing with it?’

‘Nothing. He’s not making any trouble, as far as I can see.’

A pause. Then, ‘Is he gone?’

‘Get on with you,’ Ed said again to Ah Sook, motioning. ‘Go on.’

Roused to motion at last, Ah Sook slipped out from beneath the corrugated iron, and hurried away—feeling the puzzled eyes of the youth on his back, as he did so. He ducked behind a laundry line, and into the oaty-smelling stables at the rear of the Hotel Imperial, keeping his head down and his pistol clasped tight to his chest. Above the whickering and stamping of the horses he could hear that the two men were still calling back and forth, discussing him. He knew that before long he would be pursued; he needed to hide himself, and quickly, before someone sounded the alarm. Ah Sook ran to the end of the stalls and peered over the half-door. He looked along the row of allotments, at the lean-to kitchens beyond them, the baize doors for the tradesmen, the privies, the pits for waste. Where would he be safest? His gaze came to rest upon the small cluster of buildings that formed the Police Camp, and among them, the wooden cottage in which George Shepard lived. His heart gave a sudden lurch. Well, why not? he thought, suddenly bold. It is the last place in Hokitika that anyone would think to find me.

He crossed the small track between the stables and the Police Camp fence, walked up to George Shepard’s kitchen door, and rapped smartly upon it. While he was waiting for a response he looked furtively about him, but the alley was quite empty, and there was nobody in the yards on either side of where he stood. Unless someone was watching from inside one of the hotels—which was very possible, the cockled glass shielding all view of the interior—then nobody could see him, standing in the shadow of George Shepard’s lean-to, pistol in hand.

‘Who is it?’ came a woman’s voice, through the door. ‘Who is it?’

‘For Margaret,’ said Sook Yongsheng, leaning his mouth close to the wood.

‘Who?’

‘For Margaret Shepard.’

‘But who is it? Who’s calling?’

It seemed to him that her mouth was very close to the wood also; perhaps she was leaning close, on the other side.

‘Sook Yongsheng,’ he said. And then, into the ensuing silence, ‘Please.’

The door opened, and there she was.

‘Margaret,’ said Ah Sook, full of feeling. He bowed.

Only when he rose from the bow did he allow himself to appraise her. Like Lydia Wells, she too seemed virtually unaltered since the scene of their last encounter, at the courthouse in Sydney, when she stepped forward with the testimony—the false testimony!—that had saved his life. Her hair now showed a strip of silver down the central part, and it had turned brittle, such that the few wisps that had escaped her hairnet formed a haze about her head. Apart from this small token of her advancing age, her features seemed more or less the same: the same frightened, watery eyes; the same buck teeth; the same broken nose, broad across the bridge; the same blurred lips; the same look of fearful shock and apprehension. How well the memory is stirred by the sight of a familiar face! All in a rush Ah Sook could see her sitting down in the witness chair, folding her gloved hands neatly in her lap, blinking at the prosecutor, coughing twice into a scrap of lawn, tucking it into the cuff of her dress, folding her hands again. Telling a lie to save his life.

She was staring at him. Then she hissed, ‘What on earth—’ and gave a laugh that was almost a hiccup. ‘Mr. Sook—what—what on earth? There is a warrant out for your arrest—did you know that? George has taken out a warrant!’

‘May I come in?’ said Ah Sook. He was holding the pistol against his hip, with his body half-turned to shield it: she had not seen it yet.

A gust of wind blew through the open door as he spoke, causing the interior walls of the cottage to shudder and thrum. The wind moved visibly over the stretched calico.

‘Quickly,’ she said. ‘Quickly, now.’

She hustled him into the cottage, and shut the door.

‘Why have you come?’ she whispered.

‘You are very kind woman, Margaret.’

Her face crumpled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’

Ah Sook nodded. ‘You are very kind.’

‘It’s a terrible position you’re putting me in,’ she whispered. ‘What’s to say I won’t send word to George? I ought to! There’s a warrant out—and I had no idea, Mr. Sook. I had no idea you were even here, before this morning. Why have you come?’

Ah Sook, moving slowly, brought out the pistol from behind his back.

She brought her hand up to her mouth.

‘You will hide me,’ he said.

‘I can’t,’ said Mrs. Shepard, still with her hand over her mouth. She stared at the revolver. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking, Mr. Sook.’

‘You will hide me, until dark,’ Ah Sook said. ‘Please.’

She worked her mouth a little, as though gnawing on her palm, and then snatched her hand away, and said, ‘Where will you go when it gets dark?’

‘Take Carver’s life,’ said Ah Sook.

‘Carver—’

She groaned and moved on quick feet away from him, flapping her hand, as though motioning him to put the gun away, out of sight.

Ah Sook did not move. ‘Please, Margaret.’

‘I never dreamed I’d see you again,’ she said. ‘I never dreamed—’

She was interrupted. There came a smart rap on the door: the front door, this time, on the far side of the cottage.

Margaret Shepard’s breath caught in her throat; for an instant, Ah Sook feared that she was going to vomit. Then she flew at him, pushing his chest with both hands. ‘Go,’ she whispered, frantic. ‘Into the bedroom. Get under the bed. Get out of sight. Go. Go. Go.’

She pushed him into the bedroom that she shared with the gaoler. It was very tidily kept, with two chests of drawers, an ironframed bed, and a single embroidered tract, stapled to the framing above the headboard. Ah Sook did not have time to look around him. He fell to his knees and slithered under the bed, still with the pistol in his hand. The door closed; the room darkened. Ah Sook heard steps in the passage, and then the sound of the latch being lifted. He turned to the side. Through the calico wall beside him a square of lightness widened, and a patch of blackness stepped forward into it, clouding the centre. Ah Sook felt the sudden chill of the wind.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Shepard. I’m looking for your husband. Is he at home?’

Ah Sook stiffened. He knew that voice.

Margaret Shepard must have shaken her head, for Francis Carver said, ‘Care to tell me where he might be found?’

‘Up at the construction site, sir.’ She spoke barely above a whisper.

‘Up at Seaview, is he?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Ah Sook cradled the Kerr Patent in both hands. There would be nothing easier than to slither out from beneath the bed, and stand, and press the muzzle to the wall. The cartridge would rip through the calico walls like nothing. But how could he be sure not to injure Mrs. Shepard? He looked at the patch of darkness, trying to see where Carver’s shadow ended, and Mrs. Shepard’s began.

‘The alert’s gone up,’ Carver was saying. ‘Shepard’s just put in for a warrant. Our old friend Sook’s in town. Armed and on the loose.’

The gaoler’s wife said nothing. In the bedroom, Ah Sook began to ease himself out from under the bed.

‘It’s me he’s after,’ Carver said.

No answer: perhaps she only nodded.

‘Well, your husband’s done me a good turn, in sounding the warning,’ Carver went on. ‘You let him know that I appreciate it.’

‘I will.’

Carver seemed to linger. ‘Rumour has it that he’s been in Hokitika since late last year,’ he said. ‘Our mutual friend. You must have seen him.’

‘No,’ she whispered.

‘You never saw him? Or you never knew?’

‘I never knew,’ she said. ‘Not until—not until this morning.’

In the bedroom, still with the pistol trained on the calico shadow, Ah Sook got to his knees, and then to his feet. He began to move towards the wall. If he angled the pistol sideways—if he shot obliquely, rather than head-on—

‘Well, George did,’ Carver was saying. ‘He’s known for a while now. Been keeping a watch upon the man. He didn’t tell you?’

‘No,’ whispered Mrs. George.

Another pause.

‘I suppose that figures,’ Carver said.

Ah Sook had reached the timber frame of the bedroom doorway. He was perhaps six feet away from the square of lightness that was the front door; the doubled sheet of calico was all that stood between him and Francis Carver. Was Carver armed? There was no way to tell, short of opening the door and confronting him face to face—but if he did so he would lose precious seconds, and he would lose the advantage of surprise. And yet he still did not dare shoot, for fear of hurting Mrs. Shepard. He peered at the shapes on the fabric, trying to see where the woman was standing. Did the door open to the left, or to the right?

The blackness of the calico shadow seemed to thicken slightly.

‘You’ve spent your lifetime paying for it,’ Carver said. ‘Haven’t you?’

Silence.

‘And it’s never enough.’

Silence.

‘He doesn’t want your penance,’ Carver said. ‘Mark my words, Mrs. Shepard. Your penance is not what he wants. He wants something that he can take for his very own. George Shepard wants revenge.’

Mrs. Shepard spoke at last. ‘George abhors the notion of revenge,’ she said. ‘He calls it brutish. He says revenge is an act of jealousy, not of justice.’

‘He’s right,’ Carver said. ‘But everyone’s jealous of something.’

The patch of blackness in the doorway faded and dissolved, and Ah Sook heard Carver’s footsteps retreating. The cottage door closed, and there came a rattling sound as Mrs. Shepard drew the bolt and chain. Then lighter footsteps, approaching, and the bedroom door opened. Mrs. Shepard looked at Ah Sook, startled, and then at the pistol in his hand.

‘You fool,’ she said. ‘In broad daylight! And with the sergeant five paces away!’

Ah Sook said nothing. Again Mrs. George seemed to hiccup. Her voice rose to a pitch that was partly a whisper, partly a shriek. ‘Are you in your right mind? What do you think would happen to me—to me—if you took that man’s life on my doorstep? How could—do you think—with the duty sergeant five paces away—without a—and George—! What on earth!’

Ah Sook felt ashamed. ‘Sorry,’ he said, letting his hands fall.

‘I’d be hanged,’ said Margaret Shepard. ‘I’d be hanged. George would see to it.’

‘No harm done,’ said Ah Sook.

The woman’s hysteria melted into bitterness at once. ‘No harm done,’ she said.

‘Very sorry, Margaret.’

And he did feel sorry. Perhaps he had lost his chance. Perhaps now she would turn him out into the street, or ring for her husband, or summon the sergeant … and he would be captured, and Carver would walk free.

She stepped forward and eased the revolver from his hand. She held it only a moment before setting it to the side, carefully, upon the whatnot, making sure the muzzle was turned away. Then she hovered a moment, not looking at him. She breathed several times, deeply. He waited. ‘You’ll stay here till after dark,’ she said at last, and quietly. Still she did not look at him. ‘You’ll stay under the bed until it’s dark, and it’s safe to leave.’

‘Margaret,’ said Ah Sook.

‘What?’ she whispered, shrinking away, darting a quick look at the lamp fixture, then at the headboard of the bed. ‘What?’

‘Thank you,’ said Ah Sook.

She peered at him, and then quickly dropped her gaze to his chest and stomach. ‘You stand out a mile in that tunic,’ she mumbled. ‘You’re a Chinaman through and through. Wait here.’

In ten minutes she was back with a jacket and trousers over her arm, and a soft-crowned hat in her hand. ‘Try these on,’ she said, ‘I’ll sew the trousers up for size, and you can borrow a jacket from the gaol-house. You’ll leave this place looking like an Englishman, Mr. Sook, or you won’t leave it at all.’

NGA POTIKI A REHUA / THE CHILDREN OF ANTARES

In which Mr. Staines takes his medicine, and Miss Wetherell takes a fall.

Te Rau Tauwhare reached Pritchard’s Drug Hall by half past three; by the stroke of four, he and Pritchard were sitting in a rented trap, driving a pair of horses northward as fast as the trap would allow. Pritchard was half-standing, bare-headed, reckless, whipping the horses into a froth. There was a bulge in his jacket pocket: a glass jar of laudanum, sloshing thickly, so that the rusty liquid left an oily wash of colour on the inside of the glass, that thinned, and then thickened, each time the wheels of the trap went over a stone. Tauwhare was gripping the seatback with both hands, doing his best not to be sick.

‘And it was me he said he wanted,’ Pritchard said to himself, exhilarated. ‘Not the doctor—me!’

Charlie Frost, queried by the lawyer Fellowes, told the truth. Yes, the fortune found on Crosbie Wells’s estate had been found already retorted. The smelting was the work of the Chinese goldsmith, Quee Long, who until that morning had been the sole digger employed to work Mr. Staines’s goldmine, the Aurora. Mr. Fellowes wrote this down in his pocketbook, and thanked the young banker very courteously for his help. Then he produced the charred deed of gift that Anna Wetherell had given him, and handed it wordlessly across the desk.

Frost, glancing at it, was astonished. ‘It’s been signed,’ he said.

‘Come again?’ said Fellowes.

‘Emery Staines has signed this document some time in the past two months,’ said Frost firmly. ‘Unless that signature is a fake, of course … but I know the man’s hand: that’s his mark. The last time I saw this piece of paper there was a space next to this man’s name. No signature.’

‘Then he’s alive?’ said the lawyer.

Benjamin Löwenthal, turning into Collingwood-street, was surprised to find that Pritchard’s Drug Hall was shut and locked, with a card in the window saying the establishment was closed. He walked around to the rear of the building, where he found Pritchard’s assistant, a boy named Giles, reading a paper on the back stoop.

‘Where’s Mr. Pritchard?’ he said.

‘Out,’ said the boy. ‘What is it that you’re wanting?’

‘Liver pills.’

‘Repeat prescription?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can sort you. Come on in the back way.’

The boy put aside his paper, and Löwenthal followed him inside, through Pritchard’s laboratory into the shop.

‘It’s not like Jo, to leave his office on a Monday afternoon,’ Löwenthal said, while the boy set about making up his order.

‘He went off with a native fellow.’

‘Tauwhare?’

‘Don’t know his name,’ the boy said. ‘He came by all in a bother. Not two hours ago. Gave his message to Mr. Pritchard, and then Mr. Pritchard packed me off to rent a trap for the both of them, and then they tore off to the Arahura like a pair of night riders.’

‘Indeed.’ Löwenthal was curious. ‘You didn’t find out why?’

‘No,’ the boy said. ‘But Mr. Pritchard took along a whole jar of laudanum, and a pocketful of powder, besides. The native man said, “He needs medicine”—I heard him say it. But he didn’t say whom. And Mr. Pritchard kept saying something I didn’t understand at all.’

‘What was that?’ said Löwenthal.

‘“The whore’s bullet”,’ said the boy.

‘Why—Anna Wetherell!’

Clinch’s tone was less astonishment than shock.

‘Hello, Edgar.’

‘But what are you doing here? Of course you are most welcome! But what are you doing?’ He came out from behind the desk.

‘I need a place to be,’ she said. ‘Until five o’clock. May I trespass upon your hospitality for a few hours?’

‘Trespass—there’s no trespassing!’ Clinch cried, coming forward to take her hands in his. ‘Why—yes—of course, of course! You must come into my office! Shall we take tea? With biscuits? How good it is to see you. How very lovely! Where is your mistress? And where are you going, at five o’clock?’

‘I’ve an appointment at the Courthouse,’ said Anna Wetherell, politely disengaging her hands, and stepping back from him.

Clinch’s smile vanished at once. ‘Have you been summoned?’ he said anxiously. ‘Are you to be tried?’

‘It’s nothing like that. I’ve engaged a solicitor, that’s all. Of my own volition.’

‘A solicitor!’

‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘I’m going to contest the widow’s claim.’

Clinch was astonished. ‘Well!’ he said, smiling again, to cover his bewilderment. ‘Well! You must tell me all about it, Anna—and we must take tea together. I’m so very happy you’ve come.’

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said Anna. ‘I feared you might resent me.’

‘I could never resent you!’ Clinch cried. ‘I could never—but why?’ In the next moment he understood. ‘You’re going to contest the widow’s claim—on that fortune.’

She nodded. ‘There’s a document that names me as an inheritor.’

‘Is there?’ said Clinch, wincing. ‘Signed, and everything?’

‘Found in his stove. In Crosbie Wells’s stove. Someone tried to burn it.’

‘But is it signed?’

‘Two thousand pounds,’ said Anna. ‘Oh—you have always been such a father to me, Edgar—I don’t mind telling you. He meant it as a present! Two thousand pounds, as a present, all at once. He loves me. He’s loved me all along!’

‘Who?’ said Edgar Clinch sourly, but he already knew.

As Löwenthal was returning to the newspaper offices on Weld-street he heard someone call his name. He turned, and saw Dick Mannering striding towards him, a paper folded beneath his arm.

‘I have a juicy piece of news for you, Ben,’ Mannering said. ‘Though you may have heard it already. Would you like to hear a juicy piece of news?’

Löwenthal frowned, distracted. ‘What is it?’

‘Rumour has it that Gov. Shepard’s taken out a warrant for Mr. Sook’s arrest. Apparently Mr. Sook turned up in Hokitika this morning, and laid down cash money for a military weapon! How about that?’

‘Does he mean to use it?’

‘Why would one buy a gun,’ said Mannering cheerfully, ‘except to use it? I dare say that we can expect a shoot-out in the thoroughfare. A shoot-out—in the American style!’

‘I have some news also,’ said Löwenthal, as they turned into Revell-street, and began walking south. ‘Another rumour—and no less juicy than yours.’

‘About our Mr. Sook?’

‘About our Mr. Staines,’ said Löwenthal.

Quee Long was slicing vegetables for soup at his hut in Chinatown when he heard hoof beats approaching, and then someone shouting hello. He went to the doorway, and pulled back the hessian curtain with one hand.

‘You there,’ said the man on the threshold, who had just dismounted. ‘You’ve been summoned by the law. I’m to take you to the Hokitika Courthouse.’

Quee Long put up his hands. ‘Not Ah Sook,’ he said. ‘Ah Quee.’

‘I bloody well know who you are,’ the man said, ‘and it’s you I want. Come along: quick as you’re able. There’s a buggy waiting. Come.’

‘Ah Quee,’ said Ah Quee again.

‘I know who you are. It’s to do with a fortune you dug up on the Aurora.’

‘The Arahura?’ said Ah Quee, mishearing him.

‘That’s right,’ the man said. ‘Now get a move on. You’ve been summoned by a Mr. John Fellowes, on behalf of the Magistrate’s Court.’

After leaving the Reserve Bank Mr. Fellowes paid a call upon Harald Nilssen, at Nilssen & Co. He found the commission merchant in his office, drawing up a balance sheet on George Shepard’s behalf. The work was dreary, and Nilssen was pleased to be roused from it—pleased, that is, until the lawyer handed him the charred contract bearing the signatures of Emery Staines and Crosbie Wells. Nilssen’s face drained of colour at once.

‘Have you ever seen this document before?’ said Fellowes.

But Nilssen was a man who learned from his mistakes.

‘Before I answer you,’ he said cautiously, ‘I’d like to know who sent you, and what’s your purpose with me.’

The lawyer nodded. ‘That’s fair,’ he said. ‘The girl Wetherell received this document this morning from an anonymous source. Slid under the front door while her mistress was out. It’s a tidy sum of money, and by all appearances it’s bound for her pocket, as you can see. But it stinks of a set-up. We don’t know who sent it—or why.’

Nilssen had already betrayed Cowell Devlin once; he would not do so a second time. ‘I see,’ he said, keeping his face impassive. ‘So you are working for Miss Wetherell.’

‘I’m not associated with any whores,’ Fellowes said sharply. ‘I’m just doing a bit of research, that’s all. Getting the lay of the land.’

‘Of course,’ Nilssen murmured. ‘Forgive me.’

‘You were the man who cleared Crosbie Wells’s estate,’ Fellowes went on. ‘All I want to know is whether this piece of paper was among his possessions, when you were called in to clear the place.’

‘No, it was not,’ said Nilssen, truthfully. ‘And we cleared that cottage top to bottom: you have my word on that.’

‘All right,’ Fellowes said. ‘Thanks.’

He stood, and Nilssen rose also. As they did so the bells in the Wesleyan chapel rang out the hour: it was a quarter before five.

‘Very fine donation you made, by the way,’ said Fellowes, as he made to leave. ‘Your support of the new gaol-house on Seaview. Very fine.’

‘Thank you,’ said Nilssen, speaking tartly.

‘It’s a rare thing in this day and age, to meet a truly charitable man,’ said the lawyer. ‘I commend you for it.’

‘Mr. Staines?’

The boy’s eyes fluttered open, blurred, focused, and came to rest on Joseph Pritchard, who was crouching over him.

‘Why, it’s Pritchard,’ he said. ‘The druggist.’

Pritchard reached out a gentle hand and pulled back the collar of Staines’s shirt, to expose the blackened wound beneath. The boy did not protest. His eyes searched Pritchard’s face as the chemist examined the wound.

‘Did you manage to scrape up a piece of it?’ he whispered.

Pritchard’s face was sombre. ‘A piece of what?’

‘A piece of the resin,’ the boy said. ‘You said you’d stand me a piece of it.’

‘I brought something to take the edge away,’ Pritchard said shortly. ‘You’ve found a thirst for the smoke, have you? That’s a nasty wound you’ve got there.’

‘A thirst,’ the boy said. ‘I said it was like a thorn. I never heard the shot, you know. I was in the coffin at the time.’

‘How long have you been here? When was the last time you ate?’

‘Three days,’ the boy said. ‘Was it three days? It’s very good of you. Excessively kind. I suppose it was midnight. I fancied a walk.’

‘He’s not talking sense,’ Pritchard said.

‘No,’ said Tauwhare. ‘Will he die?’

‘He doesn’t look too thin,’ Pritchard said, feeling Staines’s cheek and forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Someone’s been feeding him, at least … or he’s managed to scavenge, wherever he’s been. Christ! Eight weeks. Something more than prayers is holding this one together.’

Staines’s gaze drifted over Pritchard’s shoulder to Tauwhare, standing behind him. ‘The Maoris are the very best of guides,’ he said, smiling. ‘You’ll do beautifully.’

‘Listen,’ Pritchard said to Staines, pulling his collar over the wound again. ‘We’ve got to get you onto the trap. We’re going to take you back to Hokitika, so that Dr. Gillies can take that bullet out of your shoulder. Once you’re on the trap I’ll give you something to take the edge away. All right?’

The boy’s head had fallen forward. ‘Hokitika,’ he mumbled. ‘Anna Magdalena.’

‘Anna’s in Hokitika, waiting for you,’ said Pritchard. ‘Come on, now. The sooner the better. We’ll have you in town before dark.’

‘He wrote her an aria,’ said the boy. ‘As a token. I never made a vow.’

Pritchard lifted Staines’s good arm, draped it over his shoulder, and stood. Tauwhare grabbed the boy around the waist, and together the two men carried him out of the cottage and hauled him onto the trap. The boy was still mumbling. His skin was slick with sweat, and very hot. They arranged him on the seat of the trap in such a way that Pritchard and Tauwhare could sit on either side of him, and prevent him from falling forward, and Tauwhare tucked his woollen coat about the boy’s legs. At last Pritchard produced the jar of laudanum from his pocket, and uncorked it.

‘It’s very bitter, I’m afraid, but it’ll take the edge off,’ he said, cupping the back of Staines’s neck with one hand, and holding the bottle to his mouth. ‘There it is,’ he said. ‘There it is. Goes down easy, doesn’t it? One more swallow. There it is. One more. Now settle back, Mr. Staines, and close your eyes. You’ll be asleep in no time.’

Alistair Lauderback, upon quitting the Hokitika Courthouse, had gone immediately to the office of the shipping agent, Thomas Balfour. He flung his copy of Godspeed’s bill of sale onto Balfour’s desk, seated himself without invitation, and cried, ‘He’s still at it, Tom! Francis Carver is still at it! He’ll bleed me till the bloody day I die!’

It took Balfour a very long time to make sense of this theatrical statement, to understand in full the protection and indemnity scheme under which Godspeed had been insured, and to venture his own opinion, finally, that perhaps Lauderback ought to admit defeat, in this round at least. Francis Carver, it seemed, had bested him. The ambiguous signature was a piece of cleverness that Lauderback could not easily contest, and as for the matter of Godspeed’s insurance policy, Carver was legally entitled to draw down those funds, and Mr. Garrity had already seen fit to approve the transaction. But the politician was loath to accept such sensible advice, and persisted in sighing, clutching his hair, and cursing Francis Carver. By five o’clock Balfour’s patience was long since spent.

‘I’m not the man to talk to,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t know a scrap about the ins and outs of the law. You shouldn’t be talking to me.’

‘Who then?’

‘Go and talk to the Commissioner.’

‘He’s out of town.’

‘What about the Magistrate?’

‘On the eve of the elections! Are you mad?’

‘Shepard, then. Show this to George Shepard and see what he thinks.’

‘Mr. Shepard and I are not on good terms,’ Lauderback said.

‘Well, all right,’ Balfour said, exasperated, ‘but Shepard’s not on good terms with Carver, don’t forget! He might be able to give you a leg-up on that account.’

‘What’s Shepard’s beef with Carver?’ Lauderback asked.

Balfour frowned at him. ‘Carver did his time under Shepard,’ he said. ‘As a convict. Shepard was a penitentiary sergeant on Cockatoo Island at Port Jackson, and Carver did his time there.’

‘Oh,’ said Lauderback.

‘Didn’t you know that?’

‘No,’ said Lauderback. ‘Why should I?’

‘I just expected that you might,’ said Balfour.

‘I don’t know George Shepard from a stick of chalk,’ said Lauderback, stoutly.

Aubert Gascoigne had completed his business at the Reserve Bank in the mid-afternoon; when the clock struck five, he was back at the Courthouse, compiling a record of that day’s petty sessions for the West Coast Times. He was surprised when the foyer door opened and Anna Wetherell walked in.

She gave him only a cursory greeting, however, en route to shake Mr. Fellowes’ hand. They exchanged several words that Gascoigne could not hear, and then the lawyer gestured her into a private office, and closed the door.

‘What’s Anna doing with Fellowes?’ Gascoigne said to his colleague Burke.

‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ said Burke. ‘She came by earlier, while you were at the bank. Wanted to speak to a lawyer about something private.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because it wasn’t bloody news,’ said Burke. ‘Hello, there’s Gov. Shepard.’

George Shepard was striding across the hall towards them.

‘Mr. Gascoigne, Mr. Burke,’ he said. ‘Good afternoon.’

‘Good afternoon.’

‘I’ve come to collect a warrant for a Chinaman’s arrest.’

‘It’s ready for you, sir.’

Burke went to fetch the warrant. Shepard waited, with restrained impatience, his hands on his hips, his fingers tapping. Gascoigne was staring at Fellowes’ office door. Suddenly, from behind it, there came a muffled thump—rather like the sound of a body falling down stairs—and in the next moment Fellowes was shouting, ‘Give us a hand—give us a hand in here!’

Gascoigne crossed the hall to the office and opened the door. Anna Wetherell was lying prone, her eyes closed, her mouth half-open; the lawyer Fellowes was kneeling beside her, shaking her arm.

‘Out for the count,’ said Fellowes. ‘She just collapsed! Pitched forward, right over the table!’ He turned to Gascoigne, pleading. ‘I didn’t do anything! I didn’t touch her!’

The gaoler had come up behind them. ‘What’s going on?’

Gascoigne knelt and leaned close to her. ‘She’s breathing,’ he said. ‘Let’s get her up.’ He lifted her into a sitting position, marvelling at how thin and wasted her limbs had become. Her head lolled back; he caught it in the crook of his elbow.

‘Did she hit her head?’

‘Nothing like that,’ said Fellowes, who was wearing a very frightened look. ‘She just fell sideways. Looks like she’s drunk. But she didn’t seem drunk, when she walked in. I swear I didn’t touch her.’

‘Maybe she fainted.’

‘Use your heads, both of you,’ said Shepard. ‘I can smell the laudanum from here.’

Gascoigne could smell it too: thick and bitter. He slipped a finger into Anna’s mouth and worked her jaw open. ‘There’s no staining,’ he said. ‘If it were laudanum, her tongue would be brown, wouldn’t it? Her teeth would be stained.’

‘Take her to the gaol-house,’ Shepard said.

Gascoigne frowned. ‘Perhaps the hospital—’

‘The gaol,’ Shepard said. ‘I’ve had enough of this whore and her theatrics. Take her to the Police Camp, and chain her to the rail. And sit her upright, so she can breathe.’

Fellowes was shaking his head. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said. ‘One moment she was stone-cold sober, the next she came over all drowsy, and the next—’

The foyer door opened again. ‘A Mr. Quee for Mr. Fellowes,’ came the call.

Burke had come up behind them. ‘Excuse me, Mr. Shepard,’ he said. ‘Here’s your warrant for Mr. Sook’s arrest.’

‘Mr. Quee?’ said Gascoigne, turning. ‘What’s he doing here?’

‘Take the whore away,’ the gaoler said.

Sook Yongsheng, lying on the bare boards beneath George Shepard’s bed, was listening to the bells in the Wesleyan chapel ring out half past five when there came another rap at the cottage door. He turned his head to the side, and listened for Margaret Shepard’s footsteps. She padded down the hall, lifted the latch, and drew the bolt, and then the square of lightness on the calico wall widened again, and he felt the cool breath of the outside air. The light was bluer now, and less intense, and the shadow in the doorway was a muted grey.

‘Mrs. Shepard, I presume.’

‘Yes.’

‘I wonder if I might have a word with your husband. Is he available?’

‘No,’ said Margaret Shepard, for the second time that day. ‘He’s gone down to the Courthouse on business.’

‘What a shame. Might I wait for him?’

‘You’d do better to make an appointment,’ she said.

‘I take it that he is not likely to return.’

‘He often spends his nights at Seaview,’ she said. ‘And sometimes he plays billiards in town.’

‘I see.’

Sook Yongsheng did not know Alistair Lauderback’s voice, but he could tell from the tone and volume that the man speaking was someone of some authority.

‘Forgive me for disturbing you,’ Lauderback went on. ‘Perhaps you might do me the favour of telling your husband that I came by.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You do know who I am, don’t you?’

‘You’re Mr. Lauderback,’ she whispered.

‘Very good. Tell him that I should like to discuss a mutual acquaintance. Francis Carver is the man’s name.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

That man will be dead before the morning, thought Sook Yongsheng.

The door closed again; the bedroom darkened.

Cowell Devlin made room for Anna Wetherell in the corner of the Police Camp gaol-house, thinking, as he did so, that she made for a much more wretched picture than she had two months prior, following her attempt upon her own life. She was not feverish, as she had been then, and she did not mumble in her sleep, or lash about—but she seemed all the sorrier, for sleeping so peacefully, clad in her black mourning gown. She was so thin. Devlin manacled her with great regret, and as loosely as he was able. He asked Mrs. Shepard to bring a blanket to place beneath her head. This instruction was silently obeyed.

‘What’s the meaning of it?’ he said to Gascoigne, as he folded the blanket over his knee. ‘I saw Anna only this morning. I escorted her to the Courthouse myself! Did she go straight to Pritchard’s, and buy a phial of the stuff?’

‘Pritchard’s is closed,’ Gascoigne said. ‘It’s been closed all afternoon.’

Devlin slipped his palm beneath Anna’s head, and slid the folded blanket beneath. ‘Well then, where did she get her hands on a phial of laudanum, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Perhaps she’d had it all along.’

‘No,’ said Devlin. ‘When she left the Wayfarer’s Fortune this morning she wasn’t carrying a reticule or wallet of any kind. She didn’t even have any money on her person, as far as I’m aware. Someone must have given it to her. But why?’

Gascoigne wanted very much to know why Cowell Devlin had gone to the Wayfarer’s Fortune that morning, and what had happened there; as he was thinking of a polite way to ask, however, there came the rattle and clop of a trap approaching, and then Pritchard’s voice:

‘Hello in there! It’s Jo Pritchard, with Emery Staines!’

Devlin’s face was almost comical in its astonishment. Gascoigne had already rushed outside by the time he got to his feet; the chaplain hurried after him, and saw, in the courtyard, Joseph Pritchard, climbing down from the driver’s seat of a trap, and leading the horses to be tethered at the gaol-house post. On the seat of the trap Te Rau Tauwhare was sitting with both arms around a white-faced, sunken-eyed boy. Devlin stared at the boy. This was Emery Staines—this limp, inconsequential thing? The boy was much younger than he had envisaged. Why, he was but one-and-twenty—perhaps even younger. He was barely older than a child.

‘Tauwhare found him hiding out in Crosbie’s cottage,’ Pritchard said shortly. ‘He’s very sick, as you can see. Give us a hand getting him down.’

‘You’re not taking him to gaol!’ Devlin said.

‘Of course not,’ Pritchard said. ‘He’s going to the hospital. He needs to see Dr. Gillies at once.’

‘Don’t,’ said Gascoigne.

‘What?’ said Pritchard.

‘He won’t last an hour if you take him there,’ Gascoigne said.

‘Well, we can’t exactly take him back to his own rooms,’ said Pritchard.

‘Get him a hotel, then. Get him a room somewhere. Anywhere’s better than the hospital.’

‘Give us a hand,’ Pritchard said again. ‘And someone send for Dr. Gillies, while we’re at it. He’ll have the last word.’

They helped Emery Staines down from the trap.

‘Mr. Staines,’ said Pritchard. ‘Do you know where you are?’

‘Anna Magdalena,’ he mumbled. ‘Where’s Anna?’

‘Anna’s right here,’ said Cowell Devlin. ‘She’s right inside.’

His eyes opened. ‘I want to see her.’

‘He’s not talking sense,’ said Pritchard. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’

‘I want to see Anna,’ said the boy, suddenly lucid. ‘Where is she? I want to see her.’

‘He seems coherent to me,’ said Gascoigne.

‘Bring him inside,’ said Devlin. ‘Just until the doctor gets here. Come on: it’s what he wants. Bring him into the gaol.’

THE GREATER MALEFIC

In which Sook Yongsheng overhears the beginning of a conversation.

Ah Sook crouched in the allotment behind the Crown Hotel, his back against the timber of the building, his knees bent, the Kerr Patent revolver cradled loosely in both his hands. He looked like an altogether different man from the one who had purchased the pistol that morning. Margaret Shepard had cut off his pigtail, shadowed his chin and throat with blacking, and thickened his eyebrows with the same; she had found a threadbare jacket for him, and a shirt of gaol-issue twill, and a red kerchief to tie about his neck. With the brim of his hat turned down, and the collar of his jacket turned up, he did not look Chinese in the slightest. Walking the three-hundred-yard distance from the Police Camp to the Crown, he had not attracted the least bit of attention from anyone at all; now, crouched in the allotment, he was all but invisible in the darkness.

Inside the hotel two people were talking: a man and a woman. Their voices came down to him quite clearly through the gap between the window shutter and the frame.

‘Looks like it’ll come off,’ the man was saying. ‘Protected and indemnified.’

‘You still sound uneasy,’ said the woman.

‘Yes.’

‘What are you doubting? The money’s in your hand, almost!’

‘You know I don’t trust a fellow without connexions. I couldn’t dig up anything on this Gascoigne at all. He arrived in Hokitika some time before Christmas. Landed himself a job at the Courthouse without any fuss. Lives alone. No friends to speak of. You say he’s nothing but a dandy. I say: how do I know that Lauderback hasn’t set him up?’

‘He does have one connexion. He brought a friend along to the opening of the Wayfarer’s Fortune, I recall. An aristocratic type.’

‘What does he go by? The friend.’

‘Walter Moody was his name.’

‘He can’t be Adrian Moody’s son?’

‘That was my first thought, too. He did speak with a Scottish lilt.’

‘Well, there you have it: they must be related.’

There was the clink of glasses.

‘I saw him just before I left Dunedin,’ the man went on. ‘Adrian, I mean. Tight as all get-up.’

‘And out for blood, no doubt,’ said the woman.

‘I don’t like a man beyond his own control.’

‘No,’ the woman agreed, ‘and Moody is of the worst variety—the kind of man who loves to be offended, so that he can vent his temper—for he knows not how to vent it, otherwise. He’s a decent man when he’s sober.’

‘But anyway,’ the man said, ‘if this chap Gascoigne is in thick with one of the Moody family, he ought to do us fine. His advice ought to be fine.’

‘The family resemblance is excessively slight. The mother’s features must have been strong.’

The man laughed. ‘You’re never short of an opinion, Greenway. An opinion is one thing you’ve always got on hand.’

There was another pause, and then the woman said, ‘He came over on Godspeed, in fact.’

‘Moody?’

‘Yes.’

‘No. He can’t have.’

‘Francis! Don’t contradict me. He told me himself, that evening.’

‘No,’ the man said. ‘There was no one with the name of Moody. There were only eight of them, and I looked the paper over. I would have remembered that name.’

‘Perhaps you overlooked it,’ said the woman. ‘You know I hate to be contradicted. Let’s not disagree.’

‘How would I overlook the name Moody? Why, that’s like overlooking Hanover, or—or Plantagenet.’

The woman laughed. ‘I would hardly compare Adrian Moody to a royal line!’

Ah Sook heard the squeak of a chair, and the shifting of weight over floorboards. ‘I only mean I’d have recognised it. Would you pass over the name Carver?’

The woman made a noise in her throat. ‘He most definitely said that he’d come over on Godspeed,’ she said. ‘I remember it vividly. We exchanged some words on the subject.’

‘Something’s not right,’ the man said.

‘Well, have you got the passenger list? Surely you’ve a copy of the Times—from when the ship came in. Why don’t you check it?’

‘Yes. You’re right. Hang a bit; I’ll go and look in the smoking room. They keep a stack of old broadsheets on the secretary.’

The door opened and closed.

The lamp in the next room came on, illuminating one corner of the allotment in a glow of muted yellow. Carver was in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel—and away from Lydia Wells at last. Ah Sook raised himself up slightly. He saw through the window that Carver had his back to the door, and was shuffling through the papers on the secretary. As far as he could see, there was nobody else in the room. In the bedroom, Lydia Wells began to hum a little ditty to herself.

Ah Sook got to his feet. Holding the Kerr Patent against his thigh, and moving as softly as he was able in his digger’s boots, he crept around the back of the house to the tradesman’s door. He turned into the alley—and froze.

‘Drop your arms.’

Standing on the far side of the alley, his face in shadow, a long-handled pistol in his hand, was the gaol’s governor, George Shepard. Ah Sook did not move. His eyes went to Shepard’s pistol, and then back to Shepard’s face.

‘Drop it,’ Shepard said. ‘I will shoot you. Drop the piece now.’

Still Ah Sook said nothing; still he did not move.

‘You will kneel down and place your revolver on the ground,’ Shepard said. ‘You will do that now, or you will die. Kneel.’

Ah Sook sank to his knees, but he did not release the Kerr Patent. His finger tightened on the hammer.

‘I will shoot you dead before you have time to cock and aim,’ Shepard said. ‘Make no mistake about it. Drop your arms.’

‘Margaret,’ said Ah Sook.

‘Yes,’ Shepard said. ‘She sent me a message.’

Ah Sook shook his head: he could not believe it.

‘She is my wife,’ Shepard said curtly. ‘And she was my brother’s wife before me. You remember my brother, I trust. You ought to.’

‘No.’ Again Ah Sook’s finger tightened on the hammer.

‘You do not remember him? Or you do not believe that you ought to remember?’

‘No,’ said Ah Sook, stubbornly.

‘Let me jog your memory,’ Shepard said. ‘He died at the White Horse Saloon at Darling Harbour, shot through the temple at close range. Do you remember him now? Jeremy Shepard was his name.’

‘I remember.’

‘Good,’ said Shepard. ‘So do I.’

‘I did not murder him.’

‘Still singing the same old tune, I see.’

‘Margaret,’ said Sook Yongsheng again, still kneeling.

‘Francis!’

‘Hush a moment. Hush.’

‘… What are you listening for?’

‘Hush.’

‘I can’t hear anything.’

‘Nor can I. That’s good.’

‘It was so close.’

‘Poor lamb. Did it alarm you?’

‘Only a bit. I thought—’

‘Never mind. Most likely it was just an accident. Someone cleaning their piece.’

‘I couldn’t help but imagine that horrible Chinaman.’

‘Nothing’s going to come of him. He’ll head straight to the Palace, and he’ll be rounded up before the morning.’

‘You’ve been so afraid of him, Francis.’

‘Come here.’

‘All right. All right. I’ve recovered now. Let’s see what you’ve found.’

‘Here.’ There was a rustling noise. ‘Look. McKitchen, Morely, Parrish. See? Eight in total—and no mention of a Walter Moody anywhere.’

There was a short period of quiet as she looked the paper over, and checked the date. Presently he said, ‘Strange thing to tell a lie about. Especially when his partner shows up out of nowhere, a few weeks later, and starts yammering to me about insurance. I’m just a chap who tells another chap about loopholes, he said.’

‘One of these names must be a false one. If your passengers truly numbered eight, and Walter Moody was truly among them.’

‘Eight—and all accounted for. They took the lighter in to shore that afternoon—six hours, maybe seven hours, before we rolled.’

‘Then he must have taken a false name.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Well, perhaps he was lying, then. About having come over on Godspeed.’

‘Why would he do that?’

Evidently Lydia Wells could not produce a response to this either, for after a moment she said, ‘What are you thinking, Francis?’

‘I’m thinking to write my old friend Adrian a letter.’

‘Yes, do,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘And I shall make some inquiries of my own.’

‘The insurance money did come through. Gascoigne was as good as his word.’

Presently she said, ‘Let’s to bed.’

‘You’ve had a trying day.’

‘A very trying day.’

‘It’ll all come out right, in the end.’

‘She’ll get what she deserves,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘I should also like to get what I deserve, Francis.’

‘It’s dreary for you, waiting.’

‘Frightfully.’

‘Mm.’

‘Are you not tired of it also?’

‘Well … I cannot show you off in the street as I would like.’

‘How would you show me off?’

Carver did not reply to this; after a short silence he said, low, ‘You’ll be Mrs. Carver soon.’

‘I have set my sights upon it,’ said Lydia Wells, and then nobody spoke for a long time.

EQUINOX

In which the lovers sleep through much commotion.

George Shepard directed Sook Yongsheng’s body to be brought into his private study at the Police Camp and laid out on the floor. The blacking on the man’s chin and throat seemed all the more gruesome in death; Mrs. George, as the body was brought in, breathed very deeply, as though steadying herself internally against a wind. Cowell Devlin, arriving from the Police Camp gaol-house, looked down at the body in shock. The hatter perfectly recalled the hermit, Crosbie Wells, who had been laid out in this very way, two months prior—on the very same sheet of muslin, in fact, his lips slightly parted, one eye showing a glint of white where the lids had not been properly closed. It was a moment before Devlin realised who the dead man really was.

‘The shot was mine,’ said Shepard, calmly. ‘He was drawing his pistol on Carver. Meaning to shoot him in the back, through the window. I caught him just in time.’

Devlin found his voice at last. ‘You couldn’t have—disarmed him?’

‘No,’ said Shepard. ‘Not in the moment. It was his life or Carver’s.’

Margaret Shepard let out a sob.

‘But I don’t understand,’ Devlin said, glancing at her, and then back at Shepard. ‘What was he doing, drawing a pistol on Carver?’

‘Perhaps you might clear up the chaplain’s confusion, Margaret,’ said George Shepard, addressing his wife, who sobbed a second time. ‘Reverend, I’ll be wanting you to dig another grave.’

‘Surely his body ought to be sent home to his people,’ Devlin said, frowning.

‘This one has no people,’ said Shepard.

‘How do you know that?’ said Devlin.

‘Again,’ said Shepard, ‘perhaps you ought to ask my wife.’

‘Mrs. Shepard?’ said Devlin, uncertainly.

Margaret Shepard gasped and covered her face with her hands.

Shepard turned to her. ‘Compose yourself,’ he said. ‘Don’t be a child.’

The woman took her hands from her face at once. ‘Forgive me, Reverend,’ she whispered, without looking at him. Her face was very white.

‘That’s quite all right,’ said Devlin, frowning. ‘You’re in shock, that’s all. Perhaps you ought to lie down.’

‘George,’ she whispered.

‘I consider that you did the ethical thing today,’ the gaoler said, staring at her. ‘I commend you for it.’

At this Mrs. Shepard’s face crumpled. She clapped her hands over her mouth, and ran from the room.

‘My apologies,’ said the gaoler to Devlin, when she was gone. ‘My wife has a volatile temperament, as you can see.’

‘I do not fault her,’ Devlin said. The relations between Shepard and his wife troubled him extremely, but he knew better than to give voice to his fears. ‘It is very natural to feel overcome in the presence of the dead. All the more so, if one has a personal history with the deceased.’

Shepard was staring down at Sook Yongsheng’s body. ‘Devlin,’ he said after a moment, looking up, ‘will you share a drink with me?’

Devlin was surprised: the gaoler had never made such an invitation before. ‘I would be honoured,’ he said, still speaking carefully. ‘But perhaps we might go into the parlour … or out onto the porch, where we will not disturb Mrs. Shepard’s rest.’

‘Yes.’ Shepard went to his liquor cabinet. ‘Do you have a taste for brandy, or for whisky? I have both.’

‘Well,’ Devlin said, surprised again, ‘it’s been an awfully long time since I had a drop of whisky. Some whisky would be very nice.’

‘Kirkliston is what I have,’ said Shepard, plucking out the bottle, and holding it up. ‘It’s tolerable stuff.’ He stacked two glasses, swept them up into his great hand, and gestured for Devlin to open the door.

The Police Camp courtyard was deserted, and chilly in the dark. All the buildings opposite were shuttered, their inhabitants abed; the wind had dropped at sundown, and it was almost perfectly quiet, the silence like the surface of a pond. The only sound came from the moths bumping against the glass globe that hung in a bracket beside the cottage door. There came a fizz of light each time a moth spiralled down into the flame, and then a dusty, acrid smell, as its body burned.

Shepard set out the glasses on the banister rail, and poured them both a measure.

‘Margaret was my brother’s wife,’ he said, handing one of the glasses to Devlin, and draining the other. ‘My older brother. Jeremy. I married her after Jeremy died.’

‘Thank you,’ Devlin murmured, accepting the glass, and holding the liquor to his nose. The gaoler had been too modest: the whisky was more than tolerable. In Hokitika a bottle of Kirkliston cost eighteen shillings, and double that whenever spirits were scarce.

‘The White Horse Saloon,’ the gaoler was saying. ‘That was the name of the place. A dockside tavern at Darling Harbour. He was shot through the temple.’

Devlin sipped at his whisky. The taste was smoky and slightly musty; it put him in mind of cured meats, and new books, and barnyards, and cloves.

‘So I married his wife,’ Shepard went on, pouring himself another measure. ‘It was the moral thing to do. I am not like my brother, Reverend, neither in temperament nor in taste. He was a dissolute. I do not mean to commend myself by contrast, but the difference between us was very often remarked. It had been remarked since our childhoods. I knew virtually nothing of his marriage to Margaret. She was a barmaid. She was not a beauty, as you know. But I married her. I did the dutiful thing. I married her, and provided for her, in her loss, and together we waited for the trial.’

Devlin nodded mutely, staring at his whisky, turning the small glass around in his hand. He was thinking of Sook Yongsheng, lying cold on the floor inside—his chin and throat smeared with bootblack; his eyebrows thickened, like a clown.

‘Poor, brutish Jeremy,’ Shepard said. ‘I never admired him, and to my knowledge, he never admired me. He was a terrible brawler. I expected that one of his brawls would turn fatal, sooner or later; they happened often enough. When I first learned that he had been murdered, I wasn’t terribly surprised.’

He drained his glass again, and refilled it. Devlin waited for him to go on.

‘It was a Johnny Chinaman who did it. Jeremy had kicked him about in the street, shamed him most likely. The chink came back to seek redress. Found my brother sleeping off a bottle in a rented room above the tavern. Picked up Margaret’s pistol from beside his bed, put the muzzle to his temple, and that was that. Then he tried to run, of course, but he was stupid about it. He didn’t get further than the edge of the quay. He was tripped up by a sergeant, and thrown in gaol that very night. The trial was scheduled for six weeks later.’

Again Shepard drained his glass. Devlin was surprised; he had never seen the gaoler drink before, except at mealtimes, or as medicine. Perhaps the death of Ah Sook had unsettled him.

‘The trial ought to have been straightforward,’ the gaoler went on, pouring himself a fourth measure. His face had become rather flushed. ‘First, of course, the suspect was a chink. Second, he had ample provocation to wish my brother harm. Third, he had not a word of English to defend himself. There was no doubt in anybody’s minds that the chink was guilty. They’d all heard the shot go off. They’d all seen him running. But then comes Margaret Shepard into the witness box. My new wife, don’t forget. We’ve been married less than a month. She sits down, and this is what she says. My husband wasn’t murdered by that Chinaman, she says. My husband was killed by his own hand, and I know it, because I witnessed his suicide myself.’

Devlin wondered whether Margaret Shepard was listening, from inside.

‘There wasn’t a word of truth to it,’ the gaoler said. ‘Complete fabrication. She lied. Under oath. She defiled her late husband’s memory—my brother’s memory—by calling him a suicide … and all to protect that worthless chink from the punishment that he deserved. He would have swung without a doubt. He should have swung. It was his crime, and it went unpunished.’

‘How can you be sure that your wife wasn’t telling the truth?’ said Devlin.

‘How can I be sure?’ Shepard reached for the bottle again. ‘My brother was not a suicidal type,’ he said. ‘That’s how. You’ll have another?’

‘Please,’ Devlin said, holding out his glass. It was rare that he tasted whisky.

‘I can see that you’re doubtful, Reverend,’ said Shepard, as he poured, ‘but there’s just no other way to say it. Jeremy was not a suicidal type. No more than I am.’

‘But what reason could Mrs. Shepard have had—to lie, under oath?’

‘She was fond of him,’ said Shepard, shortly.

‘This Chinaman,’ said Devlin.

‘Yes,’ said Shepard. ‘The late Mr. Sook. They had a history together. You can be sure I didn’t see that coming. By the time I found out, however, she was already my wife.’

Devlin sipped again at his whisky. They were silent for a long while, looking out at the shadowed forms of the buildings opposite.

Presently Devlin said, ‘You haven’t mentioned Francis Carver.’

‘Oh—Carver,’ said Shepard, swirling his glass. ‘Yes.’

‘What is his association with Mr. Sook?’ said Devlin, to prompt him.

‘They had a history,’ said Shepard. ‘Some bad blood. A trading dispute.’

This much Devlin knew already. ‘Yes?’

‘I’ve been keeping a watch on Sook since Darling Harbour. I got word this morning that he had bought a pistol from the outfitters on Camp-street, and I applied for a warrant for his arrest at once.’

‘You would arrest a man simply for purchasing a pistol?’

‘Yes, if I knew what he meant to do with it. Sook had sworn to take Carver’s life. He’d sworn to it. I knew that when he finally caught up with Carver, it would be murder or nothing. As soon as I heard about the pistol I called the alarm. Staked out the Palace Hotel. Sent word ahead to Carver, letting him know. Gave the message to the bellmen, to cry along the road. I was one step behind him—until the very last.’

‘And in the last?’ said Devlin, after a moment.

Shepard fixed him with a cold look. ‘I told you what happened.’

‘It was his life or Carver’s,’ Devlin said.

‘I acted inside the law,’ Shepard said.

‘I’m sure you did,’ Devlin said.

‘I had a warrant for his arrest.’

‘I do not doubt it.’

‘Revenge,’ said Shepard firmly, ‘is an act of jealousy, not of justice. It is a selfish perversion of the law.’

‘Revenge is certainly selfish,’ Devlin agreed, ‘but I doubt it has very much to do with the law.’

He finished his whisky, and Shepard, after a long moment, did the same.

‘I’m very sorry about your brother, Mr. Shepard,’ Devlin said, placing his glass on the banister.

‘Yes, well,’ said Shepard, as he corked the whisky bottle, ‘that was years ago. What’s done is done.’

‘Some things are never done,’ said the chaplain. ‘We do not forget those whom we have loved. We cannot forget them.’

Shepard glanced at him. ‘You speak as though from experience.’

Devlin did not answer at once. After a pause he said, ‘If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person’s point of view.’

The gaoler only grunted at this. He watched as Devlin descended the steps into the shadows of the courtyard. At the horse-post the chaplain turned and said, ‘I’ll be at Seaview first thing in the morning, to begin digging the grave.’

Shepard had not moved. ‘Good night, Cowell.’

‘Good night, Mr. Shepard.’

The gaoler watched until Devlin had rounded the side of the gaol-house, and then he pinched the empty glasses between his finger and his thumb, picked up the bottle, and went inside.

The gaol-house door stood partway open, and the duty sergeant was sitting just inside the entrance, his rifle laid across his knees. He asked with his eyebrows whether the chaplain meant to step inside.

‘They’re all abed, I’m afraid,’ he said, his voice low.

‘That’s all right,’ said Devlin, also speaking quietly. ‘I’ll only be a moment.’

The bullet had been removed from Staines’s shoulder, and his wound had been stitched. His filthy clothes had been cut from his body, and the dirt washed from his face and hair; he had been dressed in moleskin trousers and a loose twill shirt, donated by Tiegreen’s Hardware on promise of payment the following day. Throughout all these ministrations the boy had drifted in and out of consciousness, mumbling Anna’s name; when he became aware, however, that the physician meant to install him at the Criterion Hotel opposite the Police Camp, his eyes snapped open at once. He would not leave Anna. He would not go anywhere that Anna did not go. He put up such a fuss to this effect that at length the physician agreed to placate him. A bed was made up for him at the gaol-house, next to where Anna lay, and it was decided that Staines would be manacled like the others, in the interests of preventing disharmony. The boy consented to the manacle without protest, lay down, and reached out a hand to touch Anna’s cheek. After a time his eyes closed, and he slept.

Since then he had not woken. He and Anna lay facing each other, Staines lying on his left hip, and Anna, on her right, both of them with their knees drawn up to their chests, Staines with one hand tucked beneath his bandaged shoulder, Anna with one hand tucked beneath her cheek. She must have turned towards him, some time in the night: her left arm was flung outward, her fingers reaching, her palm turned down.

Devlin came closer. He felt overcome—though by what kind of sentiment, he did not exactly know. George Shepard’s whisky had warmed his chest and stomach—there was a blurry tightness in his skull, a blurry heat behind his eyes—but the gaoler’s story had made him feel wretched, even chilled. Perhaps he was about to weep. It would feel good to weep. What a day it had been. His heart was heavy, his limbs exhausted. He looked down at Anna and Emery, their mirrored bodies, facing in. They were breathing in tandem.

So they are lovers, he thought, looking down at them. So they are lovers, after all. He knew it from the way that they were sleeping.

FIRST POINT OF ARIES

In which a steamer arrives in Port Chalmers from Sydney, and two passengers are roused before the rest.

Anna Wetherell’s first glimpse of New Zealand was of the rocky heads of the Otago peninsula: mottled cliffs that dropped sharply into the white foam of the water, and above them, a rumpled cloak of grasses, raked by the wind. It was just past dawn. A pale fog was rising from the ocean, obscuring the far end of the harbour, where the hills became blue, and then purple, as the inlet narrowed, and closed to a point. The sun was still low in the East, throwing a slick of yellow light over the water, and lending an orange tint to the rocks on the Western shore. The city of Dunedin was not yet visible, tucked as it was behind the elbow of the harbour, and there were no dwellings or livestock on this stretch of coastline; Anna’s first impression was of a lonely throat of water, a clear sky, and a rugged land untouched by human life or industry.

The first sighting had occurred in the grey hours that preceded the dawn, and so Anna had not witnessed the smudge on the horizon growing and thickening to form the contour of the peninsula, as the steamer came nearer and nearer to the coast. She had been woken, some hours later, by a strange cacophony of unfamiliar birdcalls, from which she deduced, rightly, that they must be nearing land at last. She eased herself from her berth, taking care not to wake the other women, and fixed her hair and stockings in the dark. By the time she came up the iron ladder to the deck, wrapping her shawl about her shoulders, the Fortunate Wind was rounding the outer heads of the harbour, and the peninsula was all around her—the relief sudden and impossible, after long weeks at sea.

‘Magnificent, aren’t they?’

Anna turned. A fair-haired boy in a felt cap was leaning against the portside rail. He gestured to the cliffs, and Anna saw the birds whose rancorous call had roused her from her slumber: they hung in a cloud about the cliff-face, wheeling, turning, and catching the light. She came forward to the rail. They looked to her like very large gulls, their wings black on the tops, and white beneath, their heads perfectly white, their beaks stout and pale. As she watched, one made a low pass in front of the boat, its wingtip skimming the surface of the water.

‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘Are they petrels—or gannets, maybe?’

‘They’re albatrosses!’ The boy was beaming. ‘They’re real albatrosses! Just wait till this fellow comes back. He will, in a moment; he’s been circling the ship for some time. Good Lord, what a feeling that must be—to fly! Can you imagine it?’

Anna smiled. She watched as the albatross glided away from them, turned, and began climbing on the wind.

‘They’re terrifically good luck, albatrosses,’ the boy was saying. ‘And they’re the most incredible fliers. One hears stories of them following ships for months and months, and through all manner of weather—halfway around the world, sometimes. Lord only knows where these ones have been—and what they’ve witnessed, for that matter.’

When it turned on its side it became almost invisible. A needle of white, pale against the sky.

‘So few birds are truly mythical,’ the boy went on, still watching the albatross. ‘I mean, there are ravens, I suppose, and perhaps you might say that doves have a special meaning too … but no more than owls do, or eagles. An albatross is different. It has such a weight to it. Such symbolism. It’s angelic, almost; even saying the name, one feels a kind of thrill. I’m so glad to have seen one. I feel almost touched. And how wonderful, that they guard the mouth of the harbour like they do! How’s that for an omen—for a gold town! I heard them calling—that was what roused me—and I came topside because I couldn’t place the sound. I thought it was pigs at first.’

Anna looked at him sidelong. Was the boy making an overture of friendship? He was speaking as if they were close familiars, though in fact they had not exchanged more than perfunctory greetings on the journey from Sydney—Anna having kept largely to the women’s quarters, and the boy, to the men’s. She did not know his name. She had seen him from a distance, of course, but he had not made any particular impression upon her, good or bad. She saw now that he was something of an eccentric.

‘Their calling roused me too,’ she said, and then, ‘I suppose I ought to go and wake the others. It’s too perfect a sight to be missed.’

‘Don’t,’ the boy said. ‘Oh, don’t. Would you mind? I couldn’t bear to have a crowd of people jostling about. Not at this hour. Somebody’s bound to say “Instead of the cross, the albatross”, or “he stoppeth one of three”, and then the rest of the journey would be quite lost to argument—everyone trying to piece together the poem, I mean, and quarrelling over which pieces go where, with each man trumping the next, and showing off his memory. Let’s just enjoy it for ourselves. Dawn is such a private hour, don’t you think? Such a solitary hour. One always hears that said of midnight, but I think of midnight as remarkably companionable—everyone together, sleeping in the dark.’

‘I am afraid I am interrupting your solitude,’ Anna said.

‘No, no,’ the boy said. ‘Oh, no. Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.’ He grinned at her, quickly, and Anna smiled back. ‘Especially the company of one other soul,’ he added, turning back to the sea. ‘It’s dreadful to feel alone and really be alone. But I love to enjoy the feeling when I’m not. Hark at him—the beauty! He’ll circle back in a moment.’

‘Birds always make me think of ships,’ Anna said.

He turned to her, eyes wide. ‘Do they?’ he said.

Anna blushed under his direct attention. The boy’s eyes were a deep brown. His brows were thick, and his lips very full. He was wearing a felt cap with a flat brim; beneath it, his hair was a dark gold, rather unruly where it curled around his temples and over his ears. Clearly it had been cropped close some months ago, and he had not returned to the barber since.

‘It’s just a fancy,’ she said, becoming shy.

‘But you must follow through,’ said the boy. ‘You must! Go on.’

‘Heavy ships are so graceful in the water,’ Anna said at last, looking away. ‘Compared to lighter crafts, I mean. If a boat is too light—if it bobs about on the waves—there’s no grace to its motion. I believe that it’s the same with birds. Large birds are not buffeted about by the wind. They always look so regal on the air. This fellow. Seeing him fly is like seeing a heavy ship cut through a wave.’

They watched as the albatross circled back to make his pass again. Anna stole a look at the boy’s shoes. They were brown leather, tightly laced, neither too shiny nor too worn—giving her no clues about his origin. In all likelihood he was coming to make his fortune on the Otago goldfields, like every other man on board.

‘You’re quite right,’ the boy cried. ‘Yes, indeed! It’s not at all like watching a sparrow, is it? He’s weighted—exactly like a ship, exactly so!’

‘I should like to see him in a storm,’ said Anna.

‘What a peculiar wish,’ said the boy, delighted. ‘But yes, now that you say it, I believe I feel the same way. I should like to see him in a storm as well.’

They lapsed into silence. Anna waited for the boy to offer his name, but he did not speak again, and presently their solitude was interrupted by the arrival of others on deck. The boy doffed his hat, and Anna dropped a curtsey; in the next moment, he was gone. Anna turned back to the ocean. The colony was behind them now, and the grunts and squeals of the albatrosses had dwindled to nothing—swallowed by the deep thrum of the steamer, and the great roaring hush of the sea.

MERCURY IN PISCES; SATURN CONJUNCT MOON

In which Cowell Devlin makes a request; Walter Moody shows his mettle; and George Shepard is unpleasantly surprised.

Since the night of the autumnal equinox both Anna Wetherell and Emery Staines had remained incarcerated in the Police Camp gaol. Anna’s bail had been set at eight pounds, an outrageous sum, and one she could not possibly hope to pay without external help. This time, of course, she had no fortune sewn into her clothing to use as surety, and no employer who might consent to pay the debt on her behalf. Emery Staines might have stood her the money, had he not been remanded in custody on a charge of his own: he had been arrested, on the morning following his reappearance, on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and dereliction. His bail had been set at one pound one shilling—the standard rate—but he had opted not to pay it, preferring, instead, to remain with Anna, and to await his summons to the Magistrate’s Court.

Following their reunion, Anna’s health began to improve almost at once. Her wrists and forearms thickened, her face lost its pinched, starved quality, and the colour returned to her cheeks. This improvement was noted with satisfaction by the physician, Dr. Gillies, who in the weeks after the equinox had visited the Police Camp gaol-house nearly every day. He had spoken to Anna very sternly about the dangers of opium, expressing his fervent hope that her most recent collapse had cautioned her never to touch a pipe again: she had been lucky twice now, but she could not expect to be lucky a third time. ‘Luck,’ he said, ‘has a way of running short, my dear.’ He prescribed to her a decreasing dosage of laudanum, as a means of weaning her, by degrees, from her addiction.

To Emery Staines, Dr. Gillies prescribed the very same: five drams of laudanum daily, reducible by one dram a fortnight, until his shoulder had completely healed. The wound was looking much better for having been sewn and dressed, and although the joint was very stiff, and he could not yet raise his arm above his head, his health was likewise very rapidly improving. When Cowell Devlin brought the jar of laudanum into the Police Camp gaol-house each night, he watched eagerly as the chaplain poured the rust-coloured liquid into two tin cups. Staines could not account for his sudden and inconsolable thirst for the drug; Anna, however, did not seem to relish the daily dosage at all, and even wrinkled her nose at the smell. Devlin mixed the laudanum with sugar, and sometimes with sweet sherry, to allay the tincture’s bitter taste—and then, under the physician’s strict instruction, he stood over the two felons as they drank their twin measures down. It rarely took long for the opiate to take effect: within minutes they sighed, became drowsy, and passed into the underwater moonscape of a strange, scarlet-tinted sleep.

They slept, over the coming weeks, through a great many changes in Hokitika. On the first day of April, Alistair Lauderback was elected as the inaugural M.P. for the newly formed electoral district of Westland, achieving the majority by a triumphant margin of three hundred votes. In his speech of acceptance he praised Hokitika, calling the town ‘New Zealand’s nugget’; he went on to express his great sorrow at the prospect of quitting the place so soon, and assured the voting public that he would take the best interests of the common digger with him to the new capital city the following month, where he would serve his term in Parliament as a faithful Westland man. After Lauderback’s speech the Magistrate shook his hand very warmly, and the Commissioner led three rounds of Huzzah.

On the 12th of April, the walls of George Shepard’s gaol-house and asylum went up at last. The felons, Anna and Emery included, had been transferred from the temporary quarters at the Police Camp to the new building upon the terrace of Seaview, where Mrs. George was already installed as matron. Since Ah Sook’s death she had been kept very busy hemming blankets, sewing uniforms, cooking, tabulating stores, and making up weekly rations of tobacco and salt; she was seen, if possible, even less frequently than before. She spent her evenings in the Seaview graveyard, and her nights in the residence alone.

On the 16th, Francis Carver and Lydia Wells were finally married, before a crowd that, as the society pages of the West Coast Times had it, ‘befit, in dress, number, and demeanour, the marriage of a widowed bride’. The day after the wedding, the groom received a large cash payment from the Garrity Group, with which his creditors were paid in full, the last of the copper plating was pried from Godspeed’s hull, and the bones of the ship were given up, at long last, for salvage. He had ended his board at the Palace Hotel, and was now installed at the Wayfarer’s Fortune with his wife.

Over this time a great many men had tramped up the switchback trail to the terrace at Seaview, in order to beg an interview with Emery Staines. Cowell Devlin, on the gaoler’s strict instruction, turned each man away—assuring them that yes, Staines was alive, and that yes, he was recuperating from a very grave illness, and that yes, he would be released from custody in due course, pending the verdict of the Magistrate’s Court. The only exception the chaplain made was for Te Rau Tauwhare, to whom Staines had become, over the course of the past month, extraordinarily attached. Tauwhare rarely stayed long at the gaol-house, but his visits had such an advantageous effect upon Staines’s mood and health that Devlin soon began to look forward to them also.

Staines, Devlin discovered, was a sweet-natured, credulous lad, ready with a smile, and full of naïve affection for the foibles of the world around him. He spoke little of the long weeks of his absence, repeating only that he had been very unwell, and he was very glad to have returned. When Devlin asked, cautiously, whether he remembered encountering Walter Moody aboard Godspeed, he only frowned and shook his head. His memory of that period was very incomplete, made up, as far as Devlin could tell, of dream-like impressions, sensations, and snatches of light. He could not remember boarding a ship, and nor could he remember a shipwreck—though he seemed to recall being washed up on the beach, coughing seawater, both arms wrapped around a cask of salt beef. He remembered approaching Crosbie Wells’s cottage; he remembered passing a party of diggers, sitting around a fire; he remembered leaves and running water; he remembered the rotten hull of an abandoned canoe, and a steep-sided gorge, and the red eye of a weka; he remembered nightly dreams about the patterns of the Tarot, and gold-lined corsets, and a fortune in a flour sack, hidden beneath a bed.

‘It’s all a dreadful blur,’ he said. ‘I must have walked out into the night and got lost in the bush somehow … and after that I couldn’t find my way back again. What a good job it was, that old Te Rau found me when he did!’

‘And yet it would have been much better if he had found you sooner,’ Devlin said, still speaking cautiously. ‘If you had returned but three days earlier, your claims would not have been seized. You have lost all your assets, Mr. Staines.’

Staines seemed very unconcerned by this. ‘There’s always more gold to be had,’ he said. ‘Money’s only money, and it does one good to be out of pocket every once in a while. In any case, I’ve a nest egg up in the Arahura Valley, stashed away. Thousands and thousands of pounds. As soon as I’ve recovered, I’ll go and dig it up.’

This, naturally, took a great while to straighten out.

On the third week of April the petty sessions schedule was published in the West Coast Times.

The charges levelled against Mr. Emery Staines are as follows: firstly, the falsification of the January 1866 quarterly report; secondly, the theft of ore lawfully submitted by Mr. John Long Quee against the goldmine Aurora, since discovered in the possession of the late Mr. Crosbie Wells, of the Arahura Valley; thirdly, dereliction of duty to claims, mines, and other responsibilities, the period of absence being in excess of 8 weeks. Hearing scheduled for Thursday 27th April at the Resident Magistrate’s Court, 1P.M., before his Hon. Mr. Justice Kemp.

Devlin, reading this over his Saturday morning coffee, made for the Crown at once.

‘Yes, I saw it,’ said Moody, who was breakfasting on kippers and toast.

‘You must understand the significance of the charges.’

‘Of course. I shall hope for a quick hearing—as will many others, I expect.’ Moody poured his guest a cup of coffee, sat back, and waited politely for Devlin to announce the reason for his visit.

The chaplain placed his hand upon the tabletop, palm upward. ‘You have legal training, Mr. Moody,’ he said, ‘and from what I know of your character you have a fair mind; that is to say, you are not partial, one way or another. You know the facts of this case as a lawyer ought—from all sides, I mean.’

Moody frowned. ‘Yes indeed,’ he said, ‘which means that I know very well that the gold in Mr. Wells’s cottage never came from the Aurora in the first place. It does not belong to Mr. Staines, whichever way one looks at it. You can’t be asking me to stand up in court, Reverend.’

‘That is precisely what I am asking,’ said Devlin. ‘There is a shortage of solicitors in Hokitika, and yours is a better mind than most.’

Moody was incredulous. ‘This is a civil court,’ he said. ‘Do you imagine me performing some sort of grand exposure of the whole story—dragging every last one of you into it—not to mention Lauderback, and Shepard, and Carver, and Lydia Wells?’

‘Lydia Carver, you ought to say now.’

‘Forgive me. Lydia Carver,’ said Moody. ‘Reverend, I do not see how I could be of any use at all, at a court of petty sessions. Nor do I see who would benefit, from a merciless exposure of the whole business—the fortune in the dresses, the blackmail, Lauderback’s personal history, everything.’

He was thinking about the bastard, Crosbie Wells.

‘I am not advocating for a merciless exposure,’ the chaplain said. ‘I am asking you to consider acting as Miss Wetherell’s counsel.’

Moody was surprised. ‘I thought Miss Wetherell had engaged a solicitor already.’

‘I’m afraid that Mr. Fellowes has turned out to be rather less congenial than his name suggests,’ Devlin said. ‘He declined to take Anna on as a client, following the laudanum debacle in the Courthouse last month.’

‘Citing what reason?’

‘He fears being fined for corruption, apparently. She had offered to pay his retainer out of the very same fortune that she was trying to claim, which was rather unwise, all things considered.’

Moody was frowning. ‘Is there not a duty solicitor at hand?’

‘Yes—a Mr. Harrington—but he is very deep in the Magistrate’s pocket, by all accounts. He will not do, if we are going to save Anna from a Supreme Court trial.’

‘A Supreme Court trial? You must be joking,’ said Moody. ‘This will all be resolved at the petty sessions—and in very short time, I am sure. I do not mean to patronise your intelligence, Reverend, but there is a great deal of difference between civil and criminal law.’

Devlin gave him a strange look. ‘Did you read the courthouse schedule in the paper this morning?’

‘Yes indeed.’

‘From start to finish?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Perhaps you ought to look it over once again.’

Frowning, Moody shook open his paper to the third page, flattened it, and cast his eye down the schedule a second time. And there, at the bottom of the column:

The charges levelled against Miss Anna Wetherell are as follows: firstly, forgery; secondly, public intoxication resulting in disorderly behaviour; thirdly, grievous assault. Hearing scheduled for Thursday 27th April at the Resident Magistrate’s Court, 9A.M., before his Hon. Mr. Justice Kemp.

Moody was astonished. ‘Grievous assault?’

‘Dr. Gillies confirmed that the bullet in Staines’s shoulder issued from a lady’s pistol,’ Devlin said. ‘I’m afraid that he let this piece of information slip while in the company of the Gridiron valet, who was reminded of the shots fired in Anna’s room, back in January, and fronted up with that story. They sent a man over to the Gridiron at once, and Mr. Clinch was obliged to hand over Anna’s pistol as evidence. The match between gun and cartridge has since been confirmed.’

‘But Mr. Staines cannot have been the one to bring this charge against her,’ Moody said.

‘No,’ Devlin agreed.

‘Then who’s behind it?’

Devlin coughed. ‘Unfortunately Mr. Fellowes is still in possession of that wretched deed of gift—the one in which Staines gives over two thousand pounds to Anna, with Crosbie Wells as witness. He has since shared it with Governor Shepard, who, as you will remember, first saw it when it was yet unsigned. Shepard asked me for the truth … and I had to admit that Staines’s signature had in fact been forged—and by Anna herself.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘They’ve got her in a corner,’ Devlin said. ‘If she pleads guilty to the assault, they will claim that it was an attempted murder: they can use the deed of gift to prove that she had decent provocation to wish him dead, you see.’

‘And if she pleads not guilty?’

‘They’ll still get her on the charge of fraud; and if she denies that, then they’ll get her on a charge of lunacy, which, as we all know, Shepard has long been keeping up his sleeve. I am afraid that he and Fellowes are very much united against her.’

‘Mr. Staines will testify in her defence, of course.’

Devlin winced. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I fear that he does not really understand the gravity of the situation at hand. He has a sweet temper, but in his opinions he tends towards foolishness. When I raised the issue of Miss Wetherell’s lunacy, for example, he was perfectly delighted by the idea. He said he wouldn’t have her any other way.’

‘What is your opinion? Is the girl of sound mind?’

‘Sanity is hardly a matter of opinion,’ said Devlin, archly.

‘On the contrary, I’m afraid,’ said Moody. ‘Sanity depends for its proof upon the testimony of witnesses. Have you asked the physician to make a report?’

‘I was hoping that you might be the one to do that,’ Devlin said.

‘Hm,’ Moody said, turning back to the paper. ‘If I am to provide counsel to Miss Wetherell, I’ll need to speak to Mr. Staines as well.’

‘That is easily arranged; they are inseparable.’

‘In private—and at length.’

‘You shall have everything you need.’

Moody tapped his fingers. After a moment he said, ‘We shall have to ensure, first and foremost, that both sides of the story agree.’

The morning of the 27th of April dawned clear and bright in Hokitika. Walter Moody, rising with the dawn, took a very long time over his toilette. He shaved, combed and oiled his hair, and applied scent beneath his ears. The Crown maid had set his boots outside his door, freshly blackened; upon the whatnot she had laid out a burgundy vest, a grey cravat, and a standing collar with flared points. She had brushed and pressed his frock coat, and hung it up in the window so that it would not crease overnight. Moody took great care in dressing; so much so that the chapel bells were ringing out eight o’clock before he descended the stairs to breakfast, tapping the pockets of his vest to ensure his fob was correctly pinned. Half an hour later, he was striding north along Revell-street, his top hat set squarely on his brow, and his leather valise in his hand.

It seemed to Moody, as he approached the Courthouse, that all of Hokitika had turned out for the morning sessions: the queue to get into the building stretched halfway down the street, and the crowd on the portico had a breathless, eager look. He joined the shuffling queue, and in time he was shepherded into the building by a pair of grim-faced duty sergeants, who instructed him, roughly, to keep his hands to himself, not to speak unless spoken to, and to remove his hat when the justice was called. Moody shouldered his way through the gallery, holding his briefcase close to his chest, and then stepped over the rope to take his place on the barristers’ bench beside the prosecution lawyers.

As defence counsel, Moody had received the list of witnesses called by the plaintiff three days before the trial. The names had been listed in the order in which they would be called: Rev. Cowell Devlin; Gov. George Shepard; Mr. Joseph Pritchard; and Mr. Aubert Gascoigne—a sequence that had furnished Moody with a fair idea of the angle that the plaintiff’s laywer was likely to take, in the case against Anna. The witness list for the afternoon session was much longer: in the case of the District of Westland vs. Mr. Emery Staines, the plaintiff had called for the testimonies of Mr. Richard Mannering; Mr. John Long Quee; Mr. Benjamin Löwenthal; Mr. Edgar Clinch; Mr. Harald Nilssen; Mr. Charles Frost; Mrs. Lydia Carver; and Capt. Francis Carver. Moody, upon receiving these advance documents, had sat down at once to refine his two-part strategy—for he knew very well that the impression created in the morning would do much to shape the verdict delivered in the afternoon.

At last the clock struck nine, and those seated were requested to rise. The crowd fell silent for the arrival of the honourable Justice Kemp, who mounted the steps to the dais, seated himself heavily, waved a hand for the members of the court to be seated also, and dispatched the necessary formalities without ado. He was a florid, thick-fingered man, clean-shaven, with a thatch of wiry hair, cut oddly, so that it ballooned over his ears, and lay very flat upon the crown of his head.

‘Mr. Walter Moody for the defendant,’ he said, reading the names off the ledger in front of him, ‘and Mr. Lawrence Broham for the plaintiff, assisted by Mr. Roger Harrington and Mr. John Fellowes of the Magistrate’s Court.

‘Mr. Moody, Mr. Broham’—looking up over his spectacles to fix his gaze upon the barristers’ bench—‘I will say two things before we begin. The first is this. I am very sensible of the fact that the crowd in this courtroom did not convene today out of love for the law; but we are here to satisfy justice, not prurience, no matter who is on that stand, and no matter what the charge. I will thank you both to restrict your interrogations of Miss Wetherell, and of all her associates, to appropriate themes. In describing Miss Wetherell’s former employment, you may choose from the terms “streetwalker”, “lady of the night”, or “member of the old profession”. Do I make myself clear upon this point?’

The lawyers murmured their assent.

‘Good,’ said Justice Kemp. ‘The second item I wish to mention is one I have already discussed with each of you in private; I repeat myself for the benefit of the public. The six charges that we will hear today—forgery, inebriation, and assault, in the case of Miss Wetherell this morning, and fraud, theft, and dereliction, in the case of Mr. Staines this afternoon—are, in a great many ways, interdependent, as I am sure every reading man in Westland is already aware. Given this interrelation, I think it prudent to delay the sentencing of Miss Wetherell until the case of Mr. Staines has been heard, so as to ensure that each trial is considered in the light, as it were, of the other. All clear? Good.’ He nodded to the bailiff. ‘Call the defendant.’

There was much whispering as Anna was brought forth from the cells. Moody, turning to observe her approach, was satisfied by the impression his client created. Her thinness had lost its starved, wasted quality, and now seemed merely feminine: an index of delicacy rather than of malnourishment. She was still wearing the black dress that had belonged to Aubert Gascoigne’s late wife, and her hair had been fixed very plainly, gathered in a simple knot at the nape of her neck. The bailiff guided her into the makeshift witness box, and she stepped forward to place her hand upon the courthouse Bible. She gave her oath quietly and without emotion, and then turned to the justice, her expression blank, her hands loosely folded.

‘Miss Anna Wetherell,’ he said. ‘You appear before this court to answer for three charges. Firstly, the forgery of a signature upon a deed of gift. How do you plead?’

‘Not guilty, sir.’

‘Secondly, public intoxication causing disorderly behaviour upon the afternoon of the twentieth of March this year. How do you plead?’

‘Not guilty, sir.’

‘And thirdly, the grievous assault of Mr. Emery Staines. How do you plead?’

‘Not guilty, sir.’

The justice made a note of these pleas, and then said, ‘You are no doubt aware, Miss Wetherell, that this court is not authorised to hear a criminal case.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The third of your indictments may be judged to warrant a trial by a higher court. If that circumstance should come to pass, you will be remanded in custody until a Supreme Court judge and jury can be convened. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir. I understand.’

‘Good. Sit.’

She sat.

‘Mr. Broham,’ said Justice Kemp, ‘the Court will now hear your statement.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Broham was a slender man with a ginger moustache and sharp, watery eyes. He rose, squaring the edges of his papers with the edge of the desk.

‘Mr. Justice Kemp, fellow members of the Court, ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. ‘That the smoke of the poppy is a drug primitive in its temptations, devastating in its effects, and reprehensible in its associations, both social and historical, ought among all decent citizens to be a commonplace. Today we shall examine a sorry case in point: a young woman whose weakness for the drug has besmirched not only Hokitika’s public countenance, but the countenance of our newly anointed District of Westland at large …’

Broham’s statement was lengthy. He reminded the members of the Court that Anna had made an attempt upon her life once before, drawing a connexion between that failed attempt and her collapse on the afternoon of the 20th of March—‘both of which,’ he added, with a cynical accent, ‘did well to draw the attention of the public eye’. He devoted a great deal of time to her forgery of Staines’s signature upon the deed of gift, casting doubt upon the validity of the document as written, and emphasising the degree to which Anna stood to gain, by falsifying it. Turning to the charge of assault, he spoke in general terms about the dangerous and unpredictable character of the opium addict, and then described Staines’s gunshot wound in such frank detail that a woman in the gallery had to be escorted from the building. In closing, he invited all present to consider how much opium two thousand pounds would buy; and then he asked, rhetorically, whether the public would suffer such a quantity to be placed in the hands of such a damaged and ill-connected person as Miss Anna Wetherell, former lady of the night.

‘Mr. Moody,’ the justice said, when Broham sat down. ‘A statement for the defence.’

Moody rose promptly. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said to the justice. ‘I shall be brief.’ His hands were shaking: he splayed them firmly on the desktop before him, to steady himself, and then in a voice that sounded much more confident than he felt, he said,

‘I will begin by reminding Mr. Broham that Miss Wetherell has in fact thrown off her dependency, an achievement for which she has earned my most sincere admiration and respect. Certainly, as Mr. Broham has taken such pleasure in describing to you all, Miss Wetherell’s disposition is of the kind that leaves her prey to the myriad temptations of addiction. I myself have never touched the smoke of the poppy, as Mr. Broham has also assured you he has not, and I hazard to guess that one reason for our mutual abstinence is fear: fear of the drug’s probable power over us; fear of its addictive quality; fear of what we might see, or do, were we to succumb to its effects. I make this remark to emphasise the fact that Miss Wetherell’s weakness in this regard is not unique to her, and I say again that she has my commendation for having committed herself so wholeheartedly to the project of her own reform.

‘But—whatever Mr. Broham might have you believe—we are not here to adjudicate Miss Wetherell’s temperament, nor to deliver a verdict upon her character. We are here to adjudicate how justice might best be served with respect to three accusations: one of forgery, one of disorderly conduct, and one of assault. I do not disagree with Mr. Broham’s contention that forgery is a serious crime, and nor do I find fault with his assertion that grievous assault is the close cousin of homicide; however, and as my case will shortly demonstrate, Miss Wetherell is innocent of all three crimes. She has not committed forgery; she has attempted in no way to assault Mr. Emery Staines; and her collapse on the afternoon of the twentieth of March could hardly be called disorderly, any more than the lady who was escorted from this very courtroom ten minutes ago could be accused of the same. I have not the slightest doubt that the testimony of witnesses will demonstrate my client’s innocence, and that they will do so in very short order. In anticipation of this happy outcome, Mr. Justice, esteemed members of the court, ladies and gentlemen, I do not hesitate to place the matter in the good hands of the law.’

Moody sat, his heart thumping. He looked up at the justice, hoping for some token of affirmation, but Justice Kemp was bent over his ledger, taking notes. Broham was looking down the bench at Moody, a very nasty expression on his face. Fellowes, sitting next to him, leaned over to whisper something in his ear, and after a moment he smiled, and whispered something back.

‘Thank you, Mr. Moody,’ the justice said at last, underlining what he had written with a flourish, and putting down his pen. ‘The defendant will now rise. Mr. Broham, you have the floor.’

Broham stood, and thanked the justice a second time.

‘Miss Wetherell,’ he said, turning to her. ‘Until the night of the fourteenth of January, how did you make your living?’

‘Mr. Broham!’ snapped the justice at once. ‘What did I just say? Miss Wetherell is a member of the old profession. Let that suffice.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Broham. He began again. ‘Miss Wetherell. On the night of the fourteenth of January you made a decision regarding your former employment, is that correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was it?’

‘I quit.’

‘What do you mean when you say that you “quit”?’

‘I quit whoring.’

The justice sighed. ‘Continue,’ he said, with a tone of resignation.

‘Did you take up alternative employment at once?’ Broham said, moving on.

‘Not at once,’ Anna said. ‘But when Mrs. Wells arrived in town she took me in at the Wayfarer’s Fortune. I started learning the Tarot, and astral charts, with the idea that I might assist her in telling fortunes. I thought I might earn a living as her assistant.’

‘At the time that you quit your former employment, did you have this future purpose in mind?’

‘No,’ said Anna. ‘I didn’t know that Mrs. Wells was coming before she arrived.’

‘In the period before Mrs. Wells arrived in Hokitika, how then did you expect that you would support yourself?’

‘I didn’t have a plan,’ Anna said.

‘No plan at all?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You did not have a nest egg, perhaps? Or another form of surety?’

‘No, sir.’

‘In that case, you made a radical step,’ said Broham, pleasantly.

‘Mr. Broham!’ snapped the justice.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Make your point.’

‘Certainly. This deed of gift’—Broham produced it—‘names you, Miss Wetherell, as the lucky inheritor of two thousand pounds. It is dated October eleventh of last year. The donor, Mr. Emery Staines, disappeared without a trace upon the fourteenth of January—the very same day that you, as the fortunate recipient of this extraordinary sum, decided to quit walking the streets and mend your ways, a decision made without provocation, and without a plan for the future. Now—’

‘I object,’ said Moody, rising. ‘Mr. Broham has not established that Miss Wetherell had no provocation to change her circumstances of employment.’

The justice allowed this, and Broham, looking peeved, was obliged to put the question to Anna: ‘Did you have provocation, Miss Wetherell, in making the decision to cease prostituting yourself?’

‘Yes,’ said Anna. She looked at Moody again. He nodded slightly, encouraging her to speak. She drew a breath, and said, ‘I fell in love. With Mr. Staines. The night of the fourteenth of January was the first night we spent together, and—well, I didn’t want to keep whoring after that.’

Broham was frowning. ‘That was the very same night you were arrested for attempted suicide, was it not?’

‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘I thought he didn’t love me—that he couldn’t love me—and I couldn’t bear it—and I did a terrible thing.’

‘Do you then admit you made an attempt upon your own life, that night?’

‘I meant to go under,’ said Anna, ‘but I never set out to do myself real harm.’

‘When you were tried for the crime of attempted suicide—in this very courtroom—you refused to enter a plea. Why have you changed your tune in this regard?’

This was a question that Moody and Anna had not rehearsed, and for a moment he felt anxious that she would falter; but she responded calmly, and with the truth. ‘At that time Mr. Staines was still missing,’ she said. ‘I thought he might have gone upriver, or into the gorge, in which case he’d be reading the Hokitika papers for news. I didn’t want to say anything that he might read, and think less of me.’

Broham coughed into the back of his knuckles, dryly. ‘Please describe what happened on the evening of the fourteenth of January,’ he said, ‘in sequence, and in your own words.’

She nodded. ‘I met Mr. Staines at the Dust and Nugget around seven. We had a drink together, and then he escorted me back to his residence on Revell-street. At about ten o’clock I went back to the Gridiron and lit my pipe. I was feeling strange, as I’ve said, and I took a little more than usual. I suppose I must have left the Gridiron while I was still under, because the next thing I remember is waking up in gaol.’

‘What do you mean when you say that you were feeling strange?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘just that I was melancholy—and very happy—and disconsolate, all mixed up. I can’t describe it exactly.’

‘At some point that same night, Mr. Staines disappeared,’ Broham said. ‘Do you know where he went?’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘Last I saw him was at his residence on Revell-street. He was asleep. He must have disappeared sometime after I left him.’

‘Sometime after ten o’clock, in other words.’

‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘I waited for him to come back—and he didn’t—and the days kept passing, with no sign of him. When Mrs. Wells offered me board at the Wayfarer, I thought it best to take it. Just for the meantime. Everyone was saying that he was surely dead.’

‘Did you see Mr. Staines at any point between the fourteenth of January and the twentieth of March?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Did you have any correspondence with him?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Where do you think he went, during that period?’

Anna opened her mouth to reply, and Moody, rising quickly, said, ‘I object: the defendant cannot be forced to speculate.’

Again the justice allowed the objection, and Broham was invited to continue.

‘When Mr. Staines was recovered, on the afternoon of the twentieth of March, there was a bullet in his shoulder,’ he said. ‘At the time of your rendezvous on the fourteenth of January, was Mr. Staines injured?’

‘No,’ said Anna.

‘Did he become injured, that evening?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Anna. ‘Last I saw him, he was fine. He was sleeping.’

Broham picked up a muff pistol from the barristers’ desk. ‘Do you recognise this firearm, Miss Wetherell?’

‘Yes,’ said Anna, squinting at it. ‘That’s mine.’

‘Do you carry this weapon on your person?’

‘I used to, when I was working. I kept it in the front of my dress.’

‘Were you carrying it on the night of the fourteenth of January?’

‘No: I left it at the Gridiron. Under my pillow.’

‘But you were working on the night of the fourteenth of January, were you not?’

‘I was with Mr. Staines,’ Anna said.

‘That was not my question,’ Broham said. ‘Were you working on the night of the fourteenth of January?’

‘Yes,’ Anna said.

‘And yet—as you allege—you left your pistol at home.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I didn’t think I’d need it,’ Anna said.

‘But this was an aberration: ordinarily it would have been on your person.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can anyone vouch for the pistol’s whereabouts that evening?’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘Unless someone looked under my pillow.’

‘The cartridge found in Mr. Staines’s shoulder issued from a pistol of this type,’ Broham said. ‘Did you shoot him?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know who did?’

‘No, sir.’

Broham coughed into his knuckles again. ‘Were you aware, upon the night of the fourteenth of January, of Mr. Staines’s net worth as a prospector?’

‘I knew he was rich,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows that.’

‘Did you discuss the fortune discovered in the cottage of Mr. Crosbie Wells with Mr. Staines, either on that night, or on any other night?’

‘No. We never spoke about money.’

‘Never?’ said Broham, raising an eyebrow.

‘Mr. Broham,’ said the justice, tiredly.

Broham inclined his head. ‘When did you first learn about Mr. Staines’s intentions, as described upon this deed of gift?’

‘On the morning of the twentieth of March,’ said Anna. She relaxed a little: this was a line she had memorised. ‘The gaol-house chaplain brought that paper to the Wayfarer’s Fortune to show me, and I took it straight to the Courthouse to find out what it might mean. I sat down with Mr. Fellowes, and he confirmed that the deed of gift was a legal document, and binding. He said that there might be something in it—that I might have a claim upon the fortune, I mean. Then he agreed to take the deed to the bank on my behalf.’

‘What happened after that?’

‘He said to meet back here at the Courthouse at five o’clock. So I came back at five, and we sat down as before. But then I fainted.’

‘What induced the faint?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Were you under the effects of any drug or spirit at that time?’

‘No,’ said Anna. ‘I was stone-cold sober.’

‘Can anyone vouch for your sobriety that day?’

‘The Reverend Devlin was with me in the morning,’ Anna said, ‘and I’d spent that afternoon with Mr. Clinch, at the Gridiron.’

‘In his report to the Magistrate, Governor Shepard described a strong smell of laudanum in the air at the time of your faint,’ Broham said.

‘Maybe he made a mistake,’ Anna said.

‘You have a dependency upon opiates, do you not?’

‘I haven’t smoked a pipe since before I moved in with Mrs. Wells,’ said Anna stoutly. ‘I gave it up when I went into mourning: the day I was released from gaol.’

‘Allow me to clarify: you attest that you have not touched opium, in any form, since your overdose upon the fourteenth of January?’

‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘That’s right.’

‘And Mrs. Carver can vouch for this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you tell the Court what happened on the afternoon of the twenth-seventh of January in the hours before Mrs. Carver’s arrival at the Gridiron Hotel?’

‘I was in my room, talking to Mr. Pritchard,’ Anna recited. ‘My pistol was in the front of my dress, like it always is. Mr. Gascoigne came into the room very suddenly, and I was startled, so I took out the pistol, and it misfired. None of us could figure out what went wrong. Mr. Gascoigne thought the piece might be broken, so he had me reload it, and then he fired it a second time into my pillow, to make sure that it was working correctly. Then he gave the piece back to me, and I put it back in my drawer, and that was the last I touched it.’

‘In other words, two shots were fired that afternoon.’

‘Yes.’

‘The second bullet lodged in your pillow,’ the lawyer said. ‘What happened to the first?’

‘It vanished,’ Anna said.

‘It vanished?’ said Broham, raising his eyebrows.

‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘It didn’t lodge anywhere.’

‘Was the window open, by any chance?’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘It was raining. I don’t know where the cartridge went. None of us could figure it out.’

‘It just—vanished,’ said Broham.

‘That’s right,’ said Anna.

Broham had no further questions. He sat down, smirking slightly, and the justice invited Moody to cross-examine.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Moody. ‘Miss Wetherell, all three of today’s charges have been brought against you by Mr. George Shepard, governor of the Hokitika Gaol. Do you have a personal acquaintance with the man?’

This was a conversation they had practised many times; Anna answered without hesitation. ‘None at all.’

‘And yet in addition to bringing the charges against you today, Governor Shepard has made numerous allegations about your sanity, has he not?’

‘Yes: he says that I am insane.’

‘Have you and Governor Shepard ever spoken at length?’

‘No.’

‘Have you ever transacted business of any kind together?’

‘No.’

‘To your knowledge, does Governor Shepard have reason to bear ill-will towards you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I haven’t done anything to him.’

‘I understand you share a mutual acquaintance, however,’ Moody said. ‘Is that correct?’

‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘Ah Sook. A Chinaman. He ran the dragon den at Kaniere, and he was my very dear friend. He was shot dead on the twentieth of March—by Governor Shepard.’

Broham leaped up to object. ‘Governor Shepard had a warrant for that man’s arrest,’ he said, ‘and on that occasion he was acting in his capacity as a member of the police. Mr. Moody is casting aspersions.’

‘I am aware of the warrant, Mr. Broham,’ said Moody. ‘I raise the issue because I believe the mutual acquaintance is a pertinent point of connexion between plaintiff and defendant.’

‘Continue, Mr. Moody,’ said the justice. He was frowning.

Broham sat down.

‘What was Governor Shepard’s connexion to Mr. Sook?’ Moody asked Anna.

‘Ah Sook was accused of murdering Governor Shepard’s brother,’ Anna said, speaking clearly. ‘In Sydney. Fifteen years ago.’

All of a sudden the courtroom was very still.

‘What was the outcome of the trial?’ Moody said.

‘Ah Sook was acquitted at the last minute,’ said Anna. ‘He walked free.’

‘Did Mr. Sook ever speak of this matter to you?’ said Moody.

‘His English was not very good,’ said Anna, ‘but he often used the words “revenge”, and “murder”. Sometimes he talked in his sleep. I didn’t understand it at the time.’

‘On these occasions to which you refer,’ Moody said, ‘how did Mr. Sook appear to you?’

‘Vexed,’ Anna said. ‘Perhaps frightened. I didn’t think anything of it until afterwards. I didn’t know about Governor Shepard’s brother till after Ah Sook was killed.’

Moody turned to the justice, holding up a piece of paper. ‘The defence refers the Court to the transcript of the trial, recorded in the Sydney Herald on the ninth of July, 1854. The original can be found at the Antipodean Archives on Wharf-street, where it is currently being held; in the meantime, I submit a witnessed copy to the Court.’

He passed the copy along the bench to be handed up to the justice, and then turned back to Anna. ‘Was Governor Shepard aware of the fact that you and Mr. Sook were very dear friends?’

‘It wasn’t exactly a secret,’ said Anna. ‘I was at the den most days, and it’s the only den in Kaniere. I’d say that almost everyone knew.’

‘Your visits earned you a nickname, did they not?’

‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘Everyone called me “Chinaman’s Ann”.’

‘Thank you, Miss Wetherell,’ Moody said. ‘That will be all.’ He bowed to the justice, who was scanning the transcript from the Sydney Herald, and sat down.

Broham, to whom this insinuation had come as a very unexpected surprise, petitioned to re-examine Anna on the subject that had just been raised by the defence. Justice Kemp, however, declined his request.

‘We are here this morning to consider three charges,’ he said, placing the account of Ah Sook’s acquittal carefully to the side, and folding his hands, ‘one of forgery, one of drunk and disorderly behaviour, and one of assault. I have made note of the fact that Miss Wetherell’s association with Mr. Sook was of a personal significance to the plaintiff; but I do not judge that these new developments warrant a re-examination. After all, we are not here to consider the plaintiff’s motivations, but Miss Wetherell’s.’

Broham looked very put out; Moody, catching Anna’s eye, gave her a very small smile, which she returned in kind. This was a victory.

The first witness to be called was Joseph Pritchard, who, interrograted by Broham, echoed Anna’s account of what had happened on the 27th of January in the Gridiron Hotel: the first bullet had vanished upon the event of the misfire, and the second had been fired into Anna’s pillow by Aubert Gascoigne, as an experiment.

‘Mr. Pritchard,’ said Moody, when he was invited to cross-examine. ‘What was your purpose in seeking an audience with Miss Wetherell on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of January?’

‘I figured that there was another story behind her attempted suicide,’ said Pritchard. ‘I thought that perhaps her store of opium might have been poisoned, or cut with something else, and I wanted to examine it.’

‘Did you examine Miss Wetherell’s supply, as you intended?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you discover?’

‘I could tell by looking at her pipe that someone had used it very recently,’ Pritchard said. ‘But whoever that was, it wasn’t her. She was as sober as a nun that afternoon. I could see it in her eyes: she hadn’t touched the drug in days. Maybe even since her overdose.’

‘What about the opium itself? Did you examine her supply?’

‘I couldn’t find it,’ Pritchard said. ‘I turned over her whole drawer, looking for it—but the lump was gone.’

Moody raised his eyebrows. ‘The lump was gone?’

‘Yes,’ said Pritchard.

‘Thank you, Mr. Pritchard,’ said Moody. ‘That will be all.’

Harrington was bent over his ledger, writing furiously. Now he ripped out the page upon which he had been scribbling, and thrust it down the bench for the other men to read. Broham, Moody saw, was no longer smirking.

‘Call the next witness,’ said the justice, who was writing also.

The next witness was Aubert Gascoigne, whose testimony confirmed that the misfire had occurred, the bullet had vanished, and that the second shot had been fired, without incident, into the headboard of Anna’s bed. Questioned by Broham, he admitted that he had not suspected that Emery Staines might have been present in the Gridiron Hotel on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of January; questioned by Moody, he agreed that the notion was very possible. He returned to his place below the dais, and once he was seated again, the justice called the gaol-house chaplain, Cowell Devlin.

‘Reverend Devlin,’ said Broham, once the clergyman had been sworn in. He held up the deed of gift. ‘How did this document first come to be in your possession?’

‘I found it in Crosbie Wells’s cottage, the morning after his death,’ Devlin said. ‘Mr. Lauderback had brought news of Mr. Wells’s death to Hokitika, and I had been charged by Governor Shepard to go to the cottage and assist in the collection of the man’s remains.’

‘Where exactly did you find this document?’

‘I found it in the ash drawer at the bottom of the stove,’ said Devlin. ‘The place had an unhappy atmosphere, and the day was very wet; I decided to light a fire. I opened the drawer, and saw that document lying in the grate.’

‘What did you do next?’

‘I confiscated it,’ said Devlin.

‘Why?’

‘The document concerned a great deal of money,’ the chaplain said calmly, ‘and I judged it prudent not to make the information public until Miss Wetherell’s health had improved: she had been brought into the Police Camp late the previous night on a suspected charge of felo de se, and it was very plain that she was not in a fit state for surprises.’

‘Was that the only reason for your confiscation?’

‘No,’ Devlin said. ‘As I later explained to Governor Shepard, the document did not seem worth sharing with the police: it was, at that time, invalid.’

‘Why was it invalid?’

‘Mr. Staines had not signed his name to authorise the bequest,’ said Devlin.

‘And yet the document that I am holding does bear Mr. Staines’s signature,’ said Broham. ‘Please explain to the Court how this document came to be signed.’

‘I am afraid I can’t,’ Devlin said. ‘I did not witness the signing first-hand.’

Broham faltered. ‘When did you first become aware that the deed had been signed?’

‘On the morning of the twentieth of March, when I took the deed to Miss Wetherell at the Wayfarer’s Fortune. We had been discussing other matters, and it was during our conversation that I first noticed the document had acquired a signature.’

‘Did you see Miss Wetherell sign this deed of gift?’

‘No, I did not.’

Broham was plainly flummoxed by this; to regain composure, he said, ‘What were you discussing?’

‘The nature of our discussion that morning was confidential to my status as a clergyman,’ Devlin said. ‘I cannot be asked to repeat it, or to testify against her.’

Broham was astonished. Devlin, however, was in the right, and after a great deal of protestation and argument, Broham surrendered his witness to Moody, looking very upset. Moody took a moment to arrange his papers before he began.

‘Reverend Devlin,’ he said. ‘Did you show this deed of gift to Governor Shepard immediately after you discovered it?’

‘No, I did not,’ said Devlin.

‘How then did Governor Shepard become aware of its existence?’

‘Quite by accident,’ replied Devlin. ‘I was keeping the document in my Bible to keep it flat, and Governor Shepard chanced upon it while browsing. This occurred perhaps a month after Mr. Wells’s death.’

Moody nodded. ‘Was Mr. Shepard alone when this accidental discovery occurred?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He advised me to share the deed with Miss Wetherell, and I did so.’

‘Immediately?’

‘No: I waited some weeks. I wanted to speak with her alone, without Mrs. Carver’s knowledge, and there were few opportunities to do so, given that the two women were living together, and very rarely spent any length of time apart.’

‘Why did you want your conversation with Miss Wetherell to happen without Mrs. Carver’s knowledge?’

‘At the time I believed Mrs. Carver to be the rightful inheritor of the fortune discovered in Mr. Wells’s cottage,’ Devlin said. ‘I did not want to drive a wedge between her and Miss Wetherell, on account of a document that, for all I knew, might have been somebody’s idea of a joke. On the morning of the twentieth of March, as you may remember, Mrs. Carver was summoned to the courthourse. I read of the summons in the morning paper, and made for the Wayfarer’s Fortune at once.’

Moody nodded. ‘Had the deed remained in your Bible, in the meantime?’

‘Yes,’ said Devlin.

‘Were there any subsequent occasions, following Governor Shepard’s initial discovery of the deed of gift, where Governor Shepard was alone with your Bible?’

‘A great many,’ said Devlin. ‘I take it with me to the Police Camp every morning, and I often leave it in the gaol-house office while completing other tasks.’

Moody paused a moment, to let this implication settle. Then he said, changing the subject, ‘How long have you known Miss Wetherell, Reverend?’

‘I had not met her personally before the afternoon of the twentieth of March, when I called on her at the Wayfarer’s Fortune. Since that day, however, she has been in my custody at the Police Camp gaol-house, and I have seen her every day.’

‘Have you had opportunity, over this period, to observe her and converse with her?’

‘Ample opportunity.’

‘Can you describe the general impression you have formed of her character?’

‘My impression is favourable,’ said Devlin. ‘Of course she has been exploited, and of course her past is chequered, but it takes a great deal of courage to reform one’s character, and I am gratified by the efforts she has made. She has thrown off her dependency, for a start; and she is determined never to sell her body again. For those things, I commend her.’

‘What is your opinion of her mental state?’

‘Oh, she is perfectly sane,’ said Devlin, blinking. ‘I have no doubt about that.’

‘Thank you, Reverend,’ Moody said, and then, to the justice, ‘Thank you, sir.’

Next came the expert testimonies from Dr. Gillies; a Dr. Sanders, called down from Kumara to deliver a second medical opinion upon Anna’s mental state; and a Mr. Walsham, police inspector from the Greymouth Police.

The plaintiff, George Shepard, was the last to be called.

As Moody had expected, Shepard dwelled long upon Anna Wetherell’s poor character, citing her opium dependency, her unsavoury profession, and her former suicide attempt as proof of her ignominy. He detailed the ways in which her behaviour had wasted police resources and offended the standards of moral decency, and recommended strongly that she be committed to the newly built asylum at Seaview. But Moody had planned his defence well: following the revelation about Ah Sook, and Devlin’s testimony, Shepard’s admonitions came off as rancorous, even petty. Moody congratulated himself, silently, for raising the issue of Anna’s lunacy before the plaintiff had a chance.

When at last Broham sat down, the justice peered down at the barristers’ bench, and said, ‘Your witness, Mr. Moody.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Moody. He turned to the gaoler. ‘Governor Shepard. To your eye, is the signature of Emery Staines upon this deed of gift a demonstrable forgery?’

Shepard lifted his chin. ‘I’d call it a near enough replica.’

‘Pardon me, sir—why “near enough”?’

Shepard looked annoyed. ‘It is a good replica,’ he amended.

‘Might one call it an exact replica of Mr. Staines’s signature?’

‘That’s for the experts to say,’ said Shepard, shrugging. ‘I am not an expert in specialised fraud.’

‘Governor Shepard,’ said Moody. ‘Have you been able to detect any difference whatsoever between this signature and other documents signed by Mr. Staines, of which the Reserve Bank has an extensive and verifiable supply?’

‘No, I have not,’ said Shepard.

‘Upon what evidence do you base your claim that the signature is, in fact, a forgery?’

‘I had seen the deed in question in February, and at that point, it was unsigned,’ said Shepard. ‘Miss Wetherell brought the same document into the courthouse on the afternoon of the twentieth of March, and it was signed. There are only two explanations. Either she forged the signature herself, which I believe to be the case, or she was in collusion with Mr. Staines during his period of absence—and in that case, she has perjured in a court of law.’

‘In fact there is a third explanation,’ Moody said. ‘If indeed that signature is a forgery, as you so vehemently attest it is, then somebody other than Anna might have signed it. Somebody who knew that document was in the chaplain’s possession, and who desired very much—for whatever reason—to see Miss Wetherell indicted.’

Shepard’s expression was cold. ‘I resent your implication, Mr. Moody.’

Moody reached into his wallet and produced a small slip of paper. ‘I have here,’ he said, ‘a promissory note dated June of last year, submitted by Mr. Richard Mannering, which bears Miss Wetherell’s own mark. Do you notice anything about Miss Wetherell’s signature, Governor?’

Shepard examined the note. ‘She signed with an X,’ he said at last.

‘Precisely: she signed with an X,’ Moody said. ‘If Miss Wetherell can’t even sign her own name, Governor Shepard, what on earth makes you think that she can produce a perfect replica of someone else’s?’

All eyes were on Shepard. He was still looking at the promissory note.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Moody to the justice. ‘I have no further questions.’

‘All right, Mr. Moody,’ said the justice, in a voice that might have conveyed either amusement or disapproval. ‘You may step down.’

VENUS IS A MORNING STAR

In which a temptation presents itself, under a guise.

Once the Fortunate Wind reached her mooring at Port Chalmers, and the gangways were lowered to the docks, Anna was obliged to join the women’s queue, in order to be inspected by the medical officials. From the quarantine shelter she went on to the customhouse, to have her entry papers stamped and approved. After these interviews were completed, she was directed to the depot, to see about picking up her trunk (it was a very small one, barely larger than a hatbox; she could almost hold it beneath one arm) and there she met with a further delay, her trunk having been loaded onto another lady’s carriage by mistake. By the time this error was corrected, and her luggage recovered, it was well past noon. Emerging from the depot at last, Anna looked about hopefully for the golden-haired boy who had so delighted her upon the deck that morning, but she saw nobody she recognised: her fellow passengers had long since dispersed into the crush of the city. She set her trunk down on the quay, and took a moment to straighten her gloves.

‘Excuse me, miss,’ came a voice, approaching, and Anna turned: the speaker was a copper-haired woman, plump and smooth-complexioned; she was very finely dressed in a gown of green brocade. ‘Excuse me,’ she said again, ‘but are you by any chance newly arrived in town?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Anna. ‘I arrived just now—this morning.’

‘On which vessel, please?’

‘The Fortunate Wind, ma’am.’

‘Yes,’ said the woman, ‘yes: well, in that case perhaps you can help me. I’m waiting for a young woman named Elizabeth Mackay. She’s around your age, plain, slim, dressed like a governess, travelling alone …’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t seen her,’ said Anna.

‘She will be nineteen this August,’ the woman went on. ‘She’s my cousin’s cousin; I’ve never met her before, but by all accounts she is very well kept, and moderately pretty. Elizabeth Mackay is her name. You haven’t seen her?’

‘I’m very sorry, ma’am.’

‘What was the name of your ship—the Fortunate Wind?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Where did you board?’

‘Port Jackson.’

‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘That was it. The Fortunate Wind, coming from Sydney.’

‘I’m sorry to say that there were no young ladies aboard the Fortunate Wind, ma’am,’ said Anna, squinting a little. ‘There was a Mrs. Paterson, travelling with her husband, and a Mrs. Mader, and a Mrs. Yewers, and a Mrs. Cooke—but they’re all on the wiser side of forty, I would say. There was no one who might have passed for nineteen.’

‘Oh dear,’ said the woman, biting her lip. ‘Dear, dear, dear.’

‘Is there a problem, ma’am?’

‘Oh,’ the woman said, reaching out to press Anna’s hand, ‘what a lamb you are, to ask. You see, I run a boarding house for girls here in Dunedin. I received a letter from Miss Mackay some weeks ago, introducing herself, paying her board in advance, and promising that she would be arriving today! Here.’ The woman produced a crumpled letter. ‘You can see: she makes no mistake about the date.’

Anna did not take the letter. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’m sure there’s no mistake.’

‘Oh, I do apologise,’ said the woman. ‘You can’t read.’

Anna blushed. ‘Not very well.’

‘Never mind, never mind,’ the woman said, tucking the letter back into her sleeve. ‘Oh, but I am excessively distressed about my poor Miss Mackay. I am terribly distressed! What could be the meaning of it—when she promised to be arriving on this day—on this sailing—and yet—as you attest—she never boarded at all! You’re quite sure about it? You’re quite sure there were no young women aboard?’

‘I’m sure there’s a simple explanation,’ Anna said. ‘Perhaps she took ill at the last minute. Or perhaps she sent a letter with apologies, and it was misdirected.’

‘You are so good to comfort me,’ said the woman, pressing her hand again. ‘And you are right: I ought to be sensible, and not permit myself these flights of fancy. I’ll only get worried, if I think of her coming to any kind of harm.’

‘I’m sure that it will all come out right,’ Anna said.

‘Sweet child,’ said the woman, patting her. ‘I am so glad to make the acquaintance of such a sweet, pretty girl. Mrs. Wells is my name: Mrs. Lydia Wells.’

‘Miss Anna Wetherell,’ said Anna, dropping a curtsey.

‘But hark at me, worrying about one girl travelling alone, when I am talking to another,’ said Mrs. Wells, smiling now. ‘How is it that you have come to be travelling without a chaperone, Miss Wetherell? You are affianced to a digger here, perhaps!’

‘I’m not affianced,’ said Anna.

‘Perhaps you are answering a summons of some kind! Your father—or some other relative—who is here already, and has sent for you—’

Anna shook her head. ‘I’ve just come to start over.’

‘Well, you have chosen the perfect place in which to do just that,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘Everyone starts anew in this country; there is simply no other way to do it! Are you quite alone?’

‘Quite alone.’

‘That is very brave of you, Miss Wetherell—it is excessively brave! I am cheered to know that you were not wanting for female company on your crossing, but now I should like to know at once whether you have secured lodging, here in Dunedin. There are a great many disreputable hotels in this city. Someone as pretty as you has a great need of good advice from a good quarter.’

‘I thank you for your kind concern,’ Anna said. ‘I meant to stop in at Mrs. Penniston’s; that is where I am bound this afternoon.’

The other woman looked aghast. ‘Mrs. Penniston’s!’

‘The place was recommended to me,’ said Anna, frowning. ‘Can you not also recommend it?’

‘Alas—I cannot,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘If you had mentioned any lodging house in the city but Mrs. Penniston’s! She is a very low woman, Miss Wetherell. A very low woman. You must keep your distance from the likes of her.’

‘Oh,’ said Anna, taken aback.

‘Tell me again why you have come to Dunedin,’ said Mrs. Wells, speaking warmly now.

‘I came because of the rushes,’ Anna said. ‘Everyone says there’s more gold in a camp than there is in the ground. I thought I’d be a camp follower.’

‘Do you mean to find employment—as a barmaid, perhaps?’

‘I can tend bar,’ Anna said. ‘I’ve done hotel work. I’ve a steady hand, and I’m honest.’

‘Have you a reference?’

‘A good one, ma’am. From the Empire Hotel in Union-street, in Sydney.’

‘Excellent,’ said Mrs. Wells. She looked Anna up and down, smiling.

‘If you cannot endorse Mrs. Penniston’s,’ Anna began, but Mrs. Wells interrupted her.

‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘I have the perfect solution—to solve both our dilemmas—yours and mine! It has just come to me! My Miss Mackay has paid for a week’s lodging, and she is not here to occupy the room she paid for in advance. You must take it. You must come and be my Miss Mackay, until we find you some employment, and set you on your feet.’

‘That is very kind, Mrs. Wells,’ said Anna, stepping back, ‘but I couldn’t possibly accept such a handsome … I couldn’t impose upon your charity.’

‘Oh, hush your protestations,’ said Mrs. Wells, taking Anna’s elbow. ‘When we are the very best of friends, Miss Wetherell, we shall look back upon this day and call it serendipity—that we chanced upon one another in this way. I am a great believer in serendipity! And a great many other things. But what am I doing, chattering away? You must be famished—and aching for a hot bath. Come along. I shall take wonderful care of you, and once you are rested, I shall find you some work.’

‘I don’t mean to beg,’ Anna said. ‘I’m not going begging.’

‘You haven’t begged for anything at all,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘What a sweet child you are. Here—porter!’

A snub-nosed boy ran forward.

‘Have Miss Wetherell’s trunk delivered to number 35, Cumberland-street,’ said Mrs. Wells.

The snub-nosed boy grinned at this; he turned to Anna, looked her up and down, and then pulled his forelock with exaggerated courtesy. Lydia Wells did not comment upon this piece of impudence, but she fixed the porter with a very severe look as she handed him a sixpence from her purse. Then she put her arm around Anna’s shoulders, and, smiling, led her away.

EXALTED IN ARIES

In which the defendant waxes philosophical; Mr. Moody gains the upper hand; Lauderback gives a recitation; and the Carvers are caught in a lie.

The afternoon sessions began promptly at one o’clock.

‘Mr. Staines,’ said the justice, after the boy had been sworn in. ‘You have been indicted for three charges: firstly, the falsification of the January 1866 quarterly report. How do you plead?’

‘Guilty, sir.’

‘Secondly, the embezzlement of ore lawfully submitted by your employee Mr. John Long Quee against the goldmine Aurora, since discovered in the dwelling belonging to the late Mr. Crosbie Wells, of the Arahura Valley. How do you plead?’

‘Guilty, sir.’

‘And lastly, dereliction of duty to claims and mines requiring daily upkeep, the period of your absence being in excess of eight weeks. How do you plead?’

‘Guilty, sir.’

‘Guilty all round,’ said the justice, sitting back. ‘All right. You can be seated for the moment, Mr. Staines. We have Mr. Moody for the defendant, again, and Mr. Broham for the plaintiff, assisted by Mr. Fellowes and Mr. Harrington of the Magistrate’s Court. Mr. Broham: your statement please.’

As before, Broham’s statement was one designed to discredit the defendant, and as before, it was excessively long-winded. He itemised all the trouble that had been caused by Staines’s absence, casting Wells’s widow, in particular, as a tragic figure whose hopes had been falsely raised by the promise of a windfall inheritance that she had mistakenly (but reasonably) supposed to be a part of her late husband’s estate. He spoke of the inherent corruption of wealth, and referred to both fraud and embezzlement as ‘those clear-sighted, cold-blooded crimes’. Moody’s statement, when he gave it, asserted simply that Staines was very aware of the trouble he had caused by his extended absence, and very willing to pay for all damages or debts incurred as a result.

‘Mr. Broham,’ said Justice Kemp, when he was done. ‘Your witness.’

Broham rose. ‘Mr. Staines.’ He held up a piece of paper in the manner of one brandishing a warrant for arrest, and said, ‘I have here a document submitted by Nilssen & Co., Commission Merchants, which inventories the estate of the late Mr. Crosbie Wells. The estate, as recorded by Mr. Nilssen, includes a great deal of pure ore, since valued by the bank at four thousand and ninety-six pounds exactly. What can you tell me about this bonanza?’

Staines answered without hesitation. ‘The ore was found upon the claim known as the Aurora,’ he said, ‘which, until recently, belonged to me. It was excavated by my employee Mr. Quee in the middle months of last year. Mr. Quee retorted the metal into squares, as was his personal custom, and then submitted these squares to me as legal earnings. When I received the bonanza, I did not bank it against the Aurora as I was legally obliged to do. Instead I bagged it up, took it to the Arahura Valley, and buried it.’

He spoke calmly, and without conceit.

‘Why the Arahura, specifically?’ said Broham.

‘Because you can’t prospect on Maori land, and most of the Arahura belongs to the Maoris,’ said Staines. ‘I thought it would be safest there—at least for a while; until I came back and dug it up again.’

‘What did you intend to do with the bonanza?’

‘I planned to cut it down the middle,’ said Staines, ‘and keep half of it for myself. The other half I meant to give to Miss Wetherell, as a gift.’

‘Why should you wish to do such a thing?’

He looked puzzled. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand the question, sir.’

‘What did you mean to achieve, Mr. Staines, by presenting Miss Wetherell with this sum of money?’

‘Nothing at all,’ said the boy.

‘You meant to achieve nothing at all?’

‘Yes, exactly,’ said Staines, brightening a little. ‘It wouldn’t be a gift otherwise, would it?’

‘That fortune,’ said Broham, raising his voice above the scattered laughter, ‘was later discovered in the cottage belonging to the late Crosbie Wells. How did this relocation come about?’

‘I don’t know for sure. I expect that he dug it up and took it for himself.’

‘If that was indeed the case, why do you suppose that Mr. Wells did not take it to the bank?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said Staines.

‘I’m afraid it isn’t,’ said Broham.

‘Because the ore was smelted, of course,’ said Staines. ‘And each one of those blocks bore the word “Aurora”—engraved into the very metal, by my Mr. Quee! He could hardly pretend he’d lifted it from the ground.’

‘Why did you not bank the bonanza against the Aurora, as you were legally obliged?’

‘Fifty percent shares on the Aurora belong to Mr. Francis Carver,’ said Staines. ‘I have a poor opinion of the man, and I did not want to see him profit.’

Broham frowned. ‘You removed the bonanza from the Aurora because you did not want to pay the fifty percent dividends legally owing to Mr. Carver. However, you intended to give fifty percent of this same bonanza to Miss Anna Wetherell. Is that right?’

‘Exactly right.’

‘You will forgive me if I consider your intentions somewhat illogical, Mr. Staines.’

‘What’s illogical about it?’ said the boy. ‘I wanted Anna to have Carver’s share.’

‘For what reason?’

‘Because she deserved to have it, and he deserved to lose it,’ said Emery Staines.

More laughter, more widespread this time. Moody was becoming anxious: he had warned Staines against speaking too fancifully, or too pertly.

When it was quiet again the justice said, ‘I do not believe that it is your prerogative, Mr. Staines, to adjudicate what a person does or does not deserve. You will kindly restrict yourself, in the future, to factual statements only.’

Staines sobered at once. ‘I understand, sir,’ he said.

The justice nodded. ‘Continue, Mr. Broham.’

Abruptly, Broham changed the subject. ‘You were absent from Hokitika for over two months,’ he said. ‘What caused your absence?’

‘I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been under the effects of opium, sir,’ said Staines. ‘I was astonished to discover, upon my return, that over two months had passed.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘I believe I have spent much of the time in the opium den at Kaniere Chinatown,’ said Staines, ‘but I couldn’t tell you for sure.’

Broham paused. ‘The opium den,’ he repeated.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Staines. ‘The proprietor was a fellow named Sook. Ah Sook.’

Broham did not want to dwell on the subject of Ah Sook. ‘You were discovered,’ he said, ‘on the twentieth of March, in the cottage that once belonged to Crosbie Wells. What were you doing there?’

‘I believe I was looking for my bonanza,’ said Staines. ‘Only I got a little muddled—I was unwell—and I couldn’t remember where I’d buried it.’

‘When did you first develop a dependency upon opium, Mr. Staines?’

‘I first touched the drug on the night of the fourteenth of January.’

‘In other words, the very night that Crosbie Wells died.’

‘So they tell me.’

‘A bit of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?’

Moody objected to this. ‘Mr. Wells died of natural causes,’ he said. ‘I cannot see how any coincidence with a natural event can be a significant one.’

‘In fact,’ said Broham, ‘the post-mortem revealed a small quantity of laudanum in Mr. Wells’s stomach.’

‘A small quantity,’ Moody repeated.

‘Continue with your interrogation, Mr. Broham,’ said the justice. ‘Sit down, Mr. Moody.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Broham to the justice. He turned back to Staines. ‘Can you think of a reason, Mr. Staines, why Mr. Wells might have taken any quantity of laudanum together with a great quantity of whisky?’

‘Perhaps he was in pain.’

‘Pain of what kind?’

‘I am speculating,’ said Staines. ‘I’m afraid I can only speculate: I did not know the man’s personal habits intimately, and I was not with him that evening. I mean only that laudanum is often taken as a pain relief—or as an aid to sleep.’

‘Not on top of a bottle of whisky, it’s not.’

‘I certainly would not attempt such a combination myself. But I cannot answer for Mr. Wells.’

‘Do you take laudanum, Mr. Staines?’

‘Only when prescribed; not as a habit.’

‘Do you have a prescription currently?’

‘Currently I do,’ said Staines, ‘but it is a very recent prescription.’

‘How recent, please?’

‘It was first administered to me on the twentieth of March,’ said Staines, ‘as a pain relief, and as a method of weaning me from my addiction.’

‘Prior to the twentieth of March, have you ever purchased or otherwise obtained a phial of laudanum from Pritchard’s drug emporium on Collingwood-street?’

‘No.’

‘A phial of laudanum was discovered in Crosbie Wells’s cottage some days after his death,’ said Broham. ‘Do you know how it got there?’

‘No.’

‘Was Mr. Wells, to your knowledge, dependent upon opiates?’

‘He was a drunk,’ said Staines. ‘That’s all I know.’

Broham studied him. ‘Please tell the Court how you spent the night of the fourteenth of January, in sequence, and in your own words.’

‘I met with Anna Wetherell at the Dust and Nugget around seven,’ said Staines. ‘We had a drink together, and after that we went back to my apartment on Revell-street. I fell asleep, and when I woke—around ten-thirty, I suppose—she had gone. I couldn’t think why she might have left so suddenly, and I went out to find her. I went to the Gridiron. There was nobody at the front desk, and nobody on the landing, and the door of her room upstairs was unlocked. I entered, and saw her laid out on the floor, with her pipe and the resin and the lamp arranged around her. Well, I couldn’t rouse her, and while I was waiting for her to come to, I knelt down to take a look at the apparatus. I’d never touched opium before, but I’d always longed to try it. There’s such a mystique about it, you know, and the smoke is so lovely and thick. Her pipe was still warm, and the lamp was still burning, and everything seemed—serendipitous, somehow. I thought I might just taste it. She looked so marvellously happy; she was even smiling.’

‘What happened next?’ said Broham, when Staines did not go on.

‘I went under, of course,’ said Staines. ‘It was heavenly.’

Broham looked annoyed. ‘And after that?’

‘Well, I had a pretty decent go at her pipe, and then I lay down on her bed, and slept for a bit—or dreamed; it wasn’t sleep exactly. When I came up again, the lamp was cold, and the bowl of the pipe was empty, and Anna was gone. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t even spare her a thought. All I wanted was another taste. It was such a thirst, you see: from the first sip, I was enchanted. I knew I couldn’t rest until I tried the drug again.’

‘All this from your very first taste,’ said Broham, sceptically.

‘Yes,’ said Staines.

‘What did you do?’

‘I made for the den in Chinatown at once. It was early—just past dawn. I saw no one on the road at all.’

‘How long did you remain in Kaniere Chinatown?’

‘I think a fortnight—but it’s hard to recall exactly; each day blurred into the next. Ah Sook was ever so kind to me. He took me in, fed me, made sure I never ate too much. He kept tally of my debts on a little chalkboard.’

‘Did you see anyone else, over this period?’

‘No,’ said Staines, ‘but really, I can’t remember much at all.’

‘What is the next thing you remember?’

‘I woke up one day and Ah Sook was not there. I became very upset. He had taken his opium with him—he always did, when he left the den—and I turned the place over, looking for it, becoming more and more desperate. And then I remembered Miss Wetherell’s supply.

‘I set off for Hokitika at once—in a frenzy. It was raining very heavily that morning, and there were not many people about, and I made it to Hokitika without seeing anyone I knew. I entered the Gridiron by the rear door, and ascended the servants’ staircase at the back. I waited until Anna went down to luncheon, and then I slipped into her room, and found the resin, and all her apparatus, in her drawer. But then I got trapped—someone struck up a conversation in the hallway, just outside the door—and I couldn’t leave. And then Anna came back from lunch, and I heard her coming, and I panicked again, so I hid behind the drapes.’

‘The drapes?’

‘Yes,’ said Staines. ‘That’s where I was hiding, when I took the bullet from Anna’s gun.’

Broham’s face was growing red. ‘How long did you remain hidden behind the drapes?’

‘Hours,’ said Staines. ‘If I were to guess, I’d say from about twelve until about three. But that is an estimation.’

‘Did Miss Wetherell know that you were in her room on that day?’

‘No.’

‘What about Mr. Gascoigne—or Mr. Pritchard?’

‘No,’ said Staines again. ‘I kept very quiet, and stood very still. I’m certain that none of them knew that I was there.’

Fellowes was whispering intently in Harrington’s ear.

‘What happened when you were shot?’ said Broham.

‘I kept quiet,’ said Staines again.

‘You kept quiet?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr. Staines,’ said Broham, in a voice that pretended to scold him. ‘Do you mean to tell this courtroom that you were shot, quite without warning and at a very close range, and you did not cry out, or move, or make any noise at all that might have alerted any one of the three witnesses to your presence?’

‘Yes,’ said Staines.

‘How on earth did you not cry out?’

‘I didn’t want to give up the resin,’ said Staines.

Broham studied him; in the ensuing pause, Harrington passed him a piece of paper, which Broham scanned briefly, then looked up, and said, ‘Do you think it possible, Mr. Staines, that Miss Wetherell might have known that you were present, upon the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of January, and that she might have fired her pistol deliberately in the direction of the drapes with the express purpose of causing you harm?’

‘No,’ said Staines. ‘I do not think it possible.’

The courtroom had become very still.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I trust her,’ said Staines.

‘I am asking if you think it possible,’ said Broham, ‘not if you think it probable.’

‘I understand the question. My answer is unchanged.’

‘What induced you to place your trust in Miss Wetherell?’

‘Trust cannot be induced,’ he burst out. ‘It can only be given—and given freely! How am I possibly to answer that?’

‘I will simplify my question,’ the lawyer said. ‘Why do you trust Miss Wetherell?’

‘I trust her because I love her,’ said Staines.

‘And how did you come to love her?’

‘By trusting her, of course!’

‘You make a circular defence.’

‘Yes,’ the boy cried, ‘because I must! True feeling is always circular—either circular, or paradoxical—simply because its cause and its expression are two halves of the very same thing! Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love. Any man who disagrees with me has never been in love—not truly.’

A perfect silence followed this remark. From the far corner of the courtroom there came a low whistle, and, in response to it, smothered laughter.

Broham was plainly irritated. ‘You will forgive me for remarking, Mr. Staines, that it is rather unusual to steal opiates from the person one professes to love.’

‘I know it’s very bad,’ Staines said. ‘I’m very ashamed of what I did.’

‘Can anyone confirm your movements over the past two months?’

‘Ah Sook can vouch for me.’

‘Mr. Sook is deceased. Anyone else?’

Staines thought for a moment, and then shook his head. ‘I can’t think of anybody else.’

‘I have no further questions,’ said Broham, curtly. ‘Thank you, Mr. Justice.’

‘Your witness, Mr. Moody,’ said the justice.

Moody thanked him also. He spent a moment putting his notes in order, and waiting for the whispering in the room to subside, before he said, ‘You have testified that your opinion of Mr. Carver is a poor one, Mr. Staines. What caused this poor opinion?’

‘He assaulted Anna,’ said Staines. ‘He beat her—in cold blood—and she was carrying a child. The child was killed.’

The courtroom was quiet at once.

‘When did this assault take place?’ said Moody.

‘On the afternoon of the eleventh of October, last year.’

‘The eleventh of October,’ Moody echoed. ‘Did you bear witness to this assault?’

‘No, I did not.’

‘How did you learn of its occurrence?’

‘From Mr. Löwenthal, later that afternoon. He was the one who found her in the road—all battered and bloody. He can vouch for her condition when he found her.’

‘What was your business with Mr. Löwenthal that afternoon?’

‘An unrelated matter,’ said Staines. ‘I called on him because I wanted to put a notice in the paper.’

‘Regarding—?’

‘The purchase of a crate of Long Toms.’

‘When you heard the news that Miss Wetherell had been assaulted,’ said Moody, ‘were you surprised?’

‘No,’ said Staines. ‘I already knew Carver was a beast—and already I regretted our association ten times over. He’d offered to be my sponsor when I first arrived in Dunedin—that was how I met him, you see, when I was just off the boat, that very day. I didn’t suspect anything foul. I was very green. We shook hands in good faith, and that was that, but it wasn’t long before I started hearing things about him—and about Mrs. Carver too: they work as a team, of course. When I heard what they did to Mr. Wells, I was horrified. I’ve gone into business with a perfect swindler, I thought.’

The boy was getting ahead of himself. Moody coughed, to remind him of the narrative sequence upon which they had agreed, and said, ‘Let’s go back to the night of the eleventh of October. What did you do, when Mr. Löwenthal advised you that Miss Wetherell had been assaulted?’

‘I made for the Arahura Valley directly, to give the news to Mr. Wells.’

‘Why did you consider the information to be of importance to Mr. Wells?’

‘Because he was the father of the child Miss Wetherell was carrying,’ said Staines, ‘and I thought he might want to know that his child had been killed.’

By now the courtroom was so quiet that Moody could hear the distant bustle of the street. ‘How did Mr. Wells respond upon receipt of the news that his unborn child was dead?’

‘He was very quiet,’ said Staines. ‘He didn’t say much at all. We had a drink together, and sat awhile. I stayed late.’

‘Did you discuss any other matters with Mr. Wells that evening?’

‘I told him about the fortune I had buried near his cottage. I said that if Anna survived the night—she had been very badly beaten—then I would give her Carver’s share.’

‘Was your intention put down in writing on that night?’

‘Wells drew up a document,’ said Staines, ‘but I didn’t sign.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t exactly remember why not,’ said Staines. ‘I had been drinking, and by then it was very late. Perhaps the conversation turned to other themes—or perhaps I meant to, and I forgot about it. Anyway, I slept awhile, and then returned to Hokitika in the early morning to check on Miss Wetherell’s progress to recovery. I never saw Mr. Wells again.’

‘Did you tell Mr. Wells where the ore was buried?’

‘Yes,’ said Staines. ‘I described the site in general terms.’

Next the Magistrate’s Court heard the testimonies of Mannering, Quee, Löwenthal, Clinch, Nilssen, and Frost—all of whom described the discovery and deployment of the fortune discovered in Crosbie Wells’s cottage quite as if the retorted gold had indeed been discovered upon the Aurora. Mannering testified to the conditions under which the Aurora had been sold, and Quee to the fact of the ore’s retortion. Löwenthal detailed his interview with Alistair Lauderback on the night of the 14th of January, during which he learned about the death of Crosbie Wells. Clinch testified that he had purchased the estate the following morning. Nilssen described how the gold had been hidden in Crosbie Wells’s cottage, and Frost confirmed its value. They made no mention whatsoever of Anna’s gowns, nor of the foundered barque, Godspeed, nor of any of the concerns and revelations that had precipitated their secret council in the Crown Hotel three months ago. Their examinations passed without incident, and in very little time, it seemed, the justice was calling Mrs. Lydia Carver to the stand.

She was dressed in her gown of striped charcoal, and over it, a smart black riding jacket with puffed leg-o’-mutton sleeves. Her copper hair, wonderfully bright, was piled high upon her head, the chignon held in place with a black band of velvet. As she swept by the barristers’ bench, Moody caught the scent of camphor, lemons, and aniseed—an emphatic scent, and one that recalled him, in a moment, to the party at the Wayfarer’s Fortune, prior to the séance.

Mrs. Carver mounted the steps to the witness box almost briskly; but when she saw Emery Staines, seated on the stand behind the rail, she appeared momentarily to falter. Her hesitation was very brief: in the next moment she collected herself. She turned her back on Staines, smiled at the bailiff, and raised her milky hand to be sworn in.

‘Mrs. Carver,’ said Broham, after the bailiff had stepped back from the stand. ‘Are you acquainted with the defendant, Mr. Emery Staines?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve never had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a Mr. Emery Staines,’ said Mrs. Carver.

Moody, glancing at the boy, was surprised to see that he was blushing.

‘I understand that on the night of the eighteenth of February you staged a séance in order to make contact with him, however,’ Broham said.

‘That is correct.’

‘Why did you choose Mr. Staines, of all people, as the object of your séance?’

‘The truth is rather mercenary, I’m afraid,’ said Mrs. Carver, smiling slightly. ‘At that time his disappearance was the talk of the town, and I thought that his name might help to draw a crowd. That was all.’

‘Did you know, when you advertised this séance, that the fortune discovered in your late husband’s cottage had originated upon the goldmine Aurora?’

‘No, I did not,’ said Mrs. Carver.

‘Did you have any reason to connect Mr. Staines with your late husband?’