The Luminaries

‘No reason at all. He was just a name to me: all I knew about him was that he had vanished from the gorge, and that he had left a great many assets behind him.’

‘Did you not know that your husband Mr. Carver owned shares in Mr. Staines’s goldmine?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t talk investment with Francis.’

‘When did you first learn of the bonanza’s true origin?’

‘When the Reserve Bank published the notice in the paper in late March, asserting that the gold had in fact been found smelted, and was therefore traceable.’

Broham turned to the justice. ‘The Court will note that this announcement appeared in the West Coast Times on the twenty-third day of March this year.’

‘Duly noted, Mr. Broham.’

Broham turned back to Mrs. Carver. ‘You first arrived in Hokitika on Thursday the twenty-fifth of January, 1866, upon the steamer Waikato,’ he said. ‘Immediately upon landing, you made an appointment at the Courthouse to contest the sale of your late husband’s cottage and land. Is that correct?’

‘That is correct.’

‘How had you learned of Mr. Wells’s death?’

‘Mr. Carver had conveyed the news to me in person,’ said Mrs. Carver. ‘Naturally I made for Hokitika as swiftly as I was able. I would have liked to have attended the funeral; unfortunately I was too late.’

‘At the time you left Dunedin, did you know that the bulk of Mr. Wells’s estate comprised a fortune of unknown origin?’

‘No: it was not until I arrived in Hokitika that I read the account given in the West Coast Times.’

‘I understand that you sold your house and business in Dunedin prior to your departure, however.’

‘Yes, I did,’ said Mrs. Carver, ‘but it was not as radical a move as you might suppose. I am in the entertainment business, and the crowds at Dunedin are not what they once were. I had been considering a move to the West Coast for many months, and reading the West Coast Times with keen attention, with that future purpose in mind. When I read of Crosbie’s death, it seemed the perfect opportunity. I could start anew in a place where business was sure to be good—and I could also be close to his grave, which I very much desired. As I have said, we did not have a chance to resolve our differences before his death, and our separation had cut me very keenly.’

‘You and Mr. Wells were living apart at the time of his death, were you not?’

‘We were.’

‘How long had you been living apart?’

‘Some nine months, I believe.’

‘What was the reason for your estrangement?’

‘Mr. Wells had violated my trust,’ said Mrs. Carver.

She did not go on, so Broham, with a nervous glance at the justice, said, ‘Can you elaborate on that, please?’

Mrs. Carver tossed her head. ‘There was a young woman in my charge,’ she said, ‘whom Mr. Wells had used abominably. Crosbie and I had a dreadful row over her, and shortly after our disagreement, he quit Dunedin. I did not know where he went, and I did not hear from him. It was only when I read his obituary in the West Coast Times that I found out where he had gone.’

‘The young woman in question …’

‘Miss Anna Wetherell,’ said Mrs. Carver, crisply. ‘I had done her a charity, by taking her in, for which she was, as she asserted, very grateful. Mr. Wells tarnished that charity; Miss Wetherell abused it.’

‘Did the acquaintance between Miss Wetherell and Mr. Wells continue, after their joint relocation to Hokitika?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ said Mrs. Carver.

‘Thank you, Mrs. Carver. I have no further questions.’

‘Thank you, Mr. Broham,’ she said, serenely.

Moody was already pushing his chair back, waiting for the invitation from the justice to rise. ‘Mrs. Carver,’ he said promptly, when the invitation came. ‘In the month of March, 1864, your late husband Crosbie Wells made a strike in the Dunstan Valley, is that correct?’

Mrs. Carver was visibly surprised by this question, but she paused only briefly before saying, ‘Yes, that is correct.’

‘But Mr. Wells did not report this bonanza to the bank, is that also correct?’

‘Also correct,’ said Mrs. Carver.

‘Instead, he employed a private escort to transport the ore from Dunstan back to Dunedin—where you, his wife, received it.’

A flicker of alarm showed in Mrs. Carver’s expression. ‘Yes,’ she said, cautiously.

‘Can you describe how the ore was packed and then transported from the field?’

She hesitated, but Moody’s line of questioning had evidently caught her off guard, and she had not time enough to form an alibi.

‘It was packed into an office safe,’ she said at last. ‘The safe was loaded into a carriage, and the carriage was escorted back to Dunedin by a team of men—armed, of course. In Dunedin I collected the safe, paid the bearers, and wrote at once to Mr. Wells to let him know that the safe had arrived safely, at which point he sent on the key.’

‘Was the gold escort appointed by you, or by Mr. Wells?’

‘Mr. Wells made the appointment,’ said Mrs. Carver. ‘They were very good. They never gave us an ounce of trouble. It was a private business. Gracewood and Sons, or something to that effect.’

‘Gracewood and Spears,’ Moody corrected. ‘The enterprise has since relocated to Kaniere.’

‘Indeed,’ said Mrs. Carver.

‘What did you do with the bonanza, once it was delivered safely to you?’

‘The ore remained inside the safe. I installed the safe at our residence on Cumberland-street, and there it stayed.’

‘Why did you not take the metal to a bank?’

‘The price of gold was fluctuating daily, and the market for gold was very unpredictable,’ said Mrs. Carver. ‘We thought it best to wait until it was a good time to sell.’

‘By your degree of caution, I would hazard to guess the value of the bonanza was considerable.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Several thousand, we thought. We never had it valued.’

‘Following the strike, did Mr. Wells remain upon the field?’

‘Yes, he continued to prospect for another year: until the following spring. He was buoyed by his success, and felt that he might get lucky a second time; but he did not.’

‘Where is the bonanza now?’ Moody asked.

She hesistated again, and then said, ‘It was stolen.’

‘My condolences,’ said Moody. ‘You must have been devastated by the loss.’

‘We were,’ said Mrs. Carver.

‘You speak on behalf of yourself and Mr. Wells, presumably.’

‘Of course.’

Moody paused again, and then said, ‘I presume that the thief gained access, somehow, to the key.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Mrs. Carver, ‘or perhaps the lock was unreliable. The safe was of a modern design; and as we all know, modern technologies are never infallible. It’s also possible that a second key was cast, without our knowledge.’

‘Did you have any idea who might have stolen the bonanza?’

‘None at all.’

‘Would you agree that it is likely to have been someone in your close acquaintance?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Mrs. Carver, tossing her head. ‘Any member of the gold escort might have betrayed us. They knew for a fact that there was a fortune in pure colour at number 35 Cumberland-street; and they knew the location of the safe, besides. It might have been anyone.’

‘Did you open the safe regularly, to check upon the contents?’

‘Not regularly, no.’

‘When did you first discover that the fortune was missing?’

‘When Crosbie returned the following year.’

‘Can you describe what happened when you made this discovery?’

‘Mr. Wells came back from the fields, and we sat down to take stock of our finances together. He opened the safe, and saw that it was empty. You can be sure that he was absolutely furious—as was I.’

‘What month was this?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Mrs. Carver, suddenly flustered. ‘April, maybe. Or May.’

‘April or May—of 1865. Last year.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

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

He felt, as he sat down, that the atmosphere in the courtroom was quickening. Harrington and Fellowes had ceased their whispering, and the justice was no longer taking notes. Every pair of eyes in the room watched Mrs. Carver as she descended the steps from the witness box and sat down.

‘The Court calls Mr. Francis Carver.’

Carver was handsome in a dark green jacket and a pinned cravat. He gave his oath with his usual terse accent, and then turned, his expression sober, to face the barristers’ bench.

Broham looked up from his notes. ‘Mr. Carver,’ he said. ‘Please describe for the Court how you first came to be acquainted with Mr. Staines.’

‘I met him in Dunedin,’ said Carver, ‘around about this time last year. He was fresh off the boat from Sydney, and looking to set himself up as a prospector. I offered to be his sponsor, and he accepted.’

‘What did this sponsorship require of each of you?’

‘I’d loan him enough money to set him up on the diggings, and in return, he’d be obliged to give me half-shares in his first venture, with dividends in perpetuity.’

‘What was the exact monetary value of your sponsorship?’

‘I bought his swag and a store of provisions. I paid for his ticket over to the Coast. He was facing down a gambling debt in Dunedin; I paid that, too.’

‘Can you guess at a total value, please?’

‘I suppose I stood him eight pounds. Something in the neighbourhood of eight pounds. He got the short-term leg-up, and I got the long-term payoff. That was the idea.’

‘What was Mr. Staines’s first venture?’

‘He bought a two-acre plot of land within a mile of Kaniere,’ said Carver, ‘known as the Aurora. He wrote to me from Hokitika once he’d made his purchase, and forwarded on all the papers from the bank.’

‘How were the Aurora dividends paid out to you?’

‘By money order, care of the Reserve Bank.’

‘And in what frequency did these payments occur?’

‘Every quarter.’

‘What was the exact value of the dividend payment you received in October 1865?’

‘Eight pounds and change.’

‘And what was the exact value of the dividend payment you received in January 1866?’

‘Six pounds even.’

‘Over the last two quarters of last year, then, you received a total of approximately fourteen pounds in dividends.’

‘That is correct.’

‘In that case, Aurora’s total net profit must have been recorded as approximately twenty-eight pounds, over a six-month period.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did Mr. Staines make any mention to you of the bonanza discovered upon the Aurora by the Chinaman John Quee?’

‘No.’

‘Were you aware, at the time of falsification, that Mr. Staines had falsified the Aurora’s quarterly report?’

‘No.’

‘When did you first become aware that the bonanza discovered in the cottage of the late Mr. Wells had originated from the Aurora mine?’

‘The same time everyone else did,’ said Carver. ‘When the bank published their records in the paper, saying that the ore had been found smelted, not pure, and that the smelting bore a signature.’

Broham nodded, then, coughing slightly, changed the subject. ‘Mr. Staines has testified that he holds you in poor esteem, Mr. Carver.’

‘Maybe he does,’ said Carver, ‘but he never spoke a word to me about it.’

‘Did you, as Mr. Staines alleges, assault Miss Wetherell on the eleventh of October?’

‘I slapped her face,’ said Carver. ‘That’s all.’

From the gallery, Moody heard a low growl of disapproval.

‘What provoked you to slap her face?’ said Broham.

‘She was insolent,’ said Carver.

‘Can you elaborate on that?’

‘I asked her for a direction, and she had a laugh at my expense, so I slapped her. It was the first and only time I ever laid a hand on her.’

‘Can you describe the encounter as you remember it, please?’

‘I was in Hokitika on business,’ Carver said, ‘and I thought I’d ride to Kaniere to have a look at the Aurora: the quarterly report had just come in, and I could see that the claim wasn’t pulling good dust, so I went to find out why. I met Miss Wetherell on the side of the road. She was up to the eyes in opium, and talking nonsense. I couldn’t get anything out of her, so I remounted and rode on.’

‘Mr. Staines has testified that Miss Wetherell lost her child that very same day.’

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said Carver. ‘Last I saw her, she was still laughing, and stumbling about. Maybe she came to trouble after I left.’

‘Can you remember what you asked her, that afternoon?’

‘Yes. I wanted to find Wells,’ said Carver.

‘Why were you seeking news of Mr. Wells?’

‘I had a private matter to discuss with him,’ said Carver. ‘I hadn’t seen him since May, and I didn’t know where to find him, or who to ask. As Lydia said, he up and quit Dunedin in the night. Didn’t tell anyone where he was going.’

‘Did Miss Wetherell divulge Mr. Wells’s whereabouts to you at that time?’

‘No,’ said Carver. ‘She only laughed. That was why I slapped her.’

‘Do you believe that Miss Wetherell knew where Mr. Wells was living, and that she was concealing this information from you for a specific purpose?’

Carver thought about this, but then he shook his head. ‘Don’t know. Wouldn’t want to say.’

‘What was the nature of the business you wished to discuss with Mr. Wells?’

‘Insurance,’ said Carver.

‘In what respect?’

He shrugged, to indicate the answer was of no consequence. ‘The barque Godspeed was his ship,’ he said, ‘and I was her operating master. It wasn’t pressing business; I just wanted to talk some things over.’

‘Were you and Mr. Wells on good terms?’

‘Fair,’ said Carver. ‘I’d call them fair. It’s no secret that I was sweet on his wife, and quick to put my hand up when he passed, but I never came between them. I was decent to Wells, and Wells was decent to me.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Broham to the justice. ‘Thank you, Mr. Carver.’

‘Your witness, Mr. Moody.’

Moody stood up promptly. ‘Mr. Carver,’ he said. ‘When did you and Mrs. Carver first become acquainted?’

‘We have known each other almost twenty years,’ said Carver.

‘In other words, over the entire course of her marriage to the late Mr. Wells.’

‘Yes.’

‘I wonder if you might describe the circumstances of your engagement to Mrs. Carver.’

‘I’ve known Lydia since I was a young man,’ said Carver, ‘and we’d always thought we’d marry. But then I got ten years on Cockatoo, and during that time she fell in with Wells. By the time I got my leave ticket, they were married. I couldn’t fault her. Ten years is a long time to wait. I couldn’t fault him either. I know what calibre of woman she is. But I said to myself, if that marriage ever comes to an end, I’ll be next in line.’

‘You married shortly after Mr. Wells’s death, is that right?’

Carver stared at him. ‘There was nothing disrespectful about it,’ he said.

Moody inclined his head. ‘No, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I implied otherwise. Allow me to backtrack a little. When was it that you were released from prison?’

‘June of ’sixty-four,’ said Carver. ‘Nearly two years ago now.’

‘What did you do, upon your release from Cockatoo Island?’

‘I made for Dunedin,’ said Carver. ‘Found myself some work on a ship making the trans-Tasman run. That was Godspeed.’

‘Were you captaining this craft?’

‘Crew,’ said Carver. ‘But I made captain the following year.’

‘Mr. Wells was digging the field at Dunstan at this time, is that correct?’

Carver hesitated. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘And Mrs. Carver—then wife of Mr. Wells—was residing in Dunedin.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you see Mrs. Wells often, over this period?’

‘I had a drink at her place every now and again,’ said Carver. ‘She kept a tavern on Cumberland-street. But I was mostly at sea.’

‘In May of 1865, Crosbie Wells returned to Dunedin,’ said Moody. ‘I understand that he made a purchase at that time.’

Carver knew very well that he was being led into a trap, but he was powerless to stop it. ‘Yes,’ he said, curtly. ‘He bought Godspeed.’

‘Quite a purchase,’ said Moody, nodding, ‘not the least because it was made so abruptly. The fact that he chose to invest in a ship, of all things, is also curious. Had Mr. Wells any prior interest in seafaring, I wonder?’

‘Couldn’t tell you,’ said Carver. ‘But he must have done, if he made the purchase.’

Moody paused; then he said, ‘I understand that the deed of sale is currently in your possession.’

‘It is.’

‘How did it come to be in your possession, please?’

‘Mr. Wells entrusted it to me,’ said Carver.

‘When did he entrust this deed to you?’

‘At the time of sale,’ said Carver.

‘Which was …?’

‘In May,’ said Carver. ‘Last year.’

‘Immediately before Mr. Wells quit Dunedin, in other words, and relocated to the Arahura Valley.’

Carver could not deny it. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘What was Mr. Wells’s reason, in entrusting this deed of sale to you?’ said Moody.

‘So that I could act as his proxy,’ said Carver.

‘In case of injury, you mean,’ said Moody. ‘Or death.’

‘Yes,’ said Carver.

‘Ah,’ said Moody. ‘Now, let me see if I have this straight, Mr. Carver. As of the beginning of last year, Mr. Wells was the rightful possessor of several thousand pounds’ worth of ore, excavated from a claim in the Dunstan Valley. The ore was stashed in a safe at his residence in Dunedin, where his wife—an old and very fond acquaintance of yours—was living. In May, Mr. Wells returned home to Dunedin from the fields at Dunstan, and, without notifying his wife, cleared the safe. He immediately sank the entire bonanza into the purchase of the barque Godspeed, entrusted that ship and its operation to you, and promptly fled to Hokitika without informing any person of his destination or his design.

‘Of course,’ Moody added, ‘I am making an assumption, in presuming that it was Mr. Wells, and not another party, who removed the ore from the safe … but how else could he have purchased Godspeed? He possessed no shares or bonds of any kind—we are quite sure of that—and the transfer of ownership, printed in the Otago Witness upon the fourteenth of May that year, explicitly states that the ship was bought for gold.’

Carver was scowling. ‘You’re leaving out the whore,’ he said. ‘She was the reason he quit Dunedin. She was the reason he fell out with Lydia.’

‘Perhaps she was—but I will correct you in pointing out that Miss Wetherell was not, at that point in time, a member of the old profession,’ Moody said. ‘The promissory note penned by Mr. Richard Mannering, which I submitted to the court this morning, explicitly states that Miss Wetherell is to be outfitted with an appropriate gown, a muff pistol, perfumes, petticoats, and all other items “in which she is currently deficient”. It is dated June of last year.’

Carver said nothing.

‘You will forgive me,’ said Moody after a moment, ‘if I remark that Mr. Wells does not seem to have benefited very greatly from the sequence of events that unfolded in Dunedin last May. You, however, seem to have benefited a very great deal.’

Justice Kemp waited until Carver had seated himself beside his wife before calling the room sharply to order. ‘All right, Mr. Moody,’ he said, folding his hands, ‘I see that you have a clear direction here, and I will allow you to continue with your present argument, though I will make the remark that we seem to have wandered rather far from the course as set down in this morning’s bulletin. Now: you have submitted the names of two witnesses for the defence.’

Moody bowed. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘In the case of the defence witnesses, Mr. Moody will examine, and Mr. Broham will cross-examine,’ said the justice. He consulted the ledger, then looked up, over his spectacles, and said, ‘Mr. Thomas Balfour.’

Thomas Balfour was duly summoned from the cells.

‘Mr. Balfour,’ Moody said, when he had been sworn in. ‘You are in the shipping business, are you not?’

‘Have been for coming up twelve years, Mr. Moody.’

‘You have Mr. Lauderback’s private account, I understand.’

‘I do indeed,’ said Balfour, happily. ‘I’ve had Mr. Lauderback’s business since the winter of 1861.’

‘Can you please describe the most recent transaction between Mr. Lauderback and Balfour Shipping?’

‘I most certainly can,’ said Balfour. ‘When Mr. Lauderback first arrived in Hokitika in January, he came over the Alps, as you might remember. His trunk and assorted effects were sent by sea. He sent down a shipping crate from Lyttelton to Port Chalmers, and once the crate reached Port Chalmers I arranged for one of my vessels—the Virtue—to pick it up and bring it over to the Coast. Well, she got here all right—the Virtue—with the crate aboard. Arrived on the twelfth of January, two days before Mr. Lauderback himself. Next day, the crate was unloaded—stacked onto the quay with all the rest of the cargo—and I signed for it to be transferred into my warehouse, where Mr. Lauderback would pick it up, after he arrived. But that never happened: the crate was swiped. Never made it into the warehouse.’

‘Was the crate identified on the exterior as belonging to Mr. Lauderback?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Balfour. ‘You’ll have seen the crates stacked along the quay—they’d be indistinguishable, you know, were it not for the bills of lading. The bill tells you who owns the goods and who’s the shipper and what have you.’

‘What happened when you discovered the crate was missing?’

‘You can be sure I tore my hair out, looking for it: I hadn’t the faintest clue where it might have gone. Well, Godspeed was wrecked on the bar two weeks later, and when they cleared her cargo, what should turn up but the Lauderback crate! Seems it had been loaded onto Godspeed, when she last weighed anchor from the Hokitika port.’

‘In other words, very early on the morning of the fifteenth of January.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What happened when the Lauderback trunk was finally recovered?’

‘I did some sniffing around,’ said Balfour. ‘Asked some questions of the crew, and they told me how the mistake had come about. Well, here’s what happened. Someone had seen the bill of lading—“Mr. Lauderback, bearer”—and remembered that their skipper—that’s Carver—had been on the lookout for a crate so identified, the previous year. They saw this crate on the wharf, the night of the fourteenth, and they thought, here’s a chance to earn a bit of favour with the master.

‘So they open it up—just to be curious. Inside there’s a trunk and a pair of carpetbags and not much else. Doesn’t look terribly valuable, but they figure, you never know. They go off to find Captain Carver, but he’s nowhere to be found. Not in his rooms at the hotel, not at the bars, nowhere. They decide to leave it to the morning, and off they go to bed. Then Carver himself comes flying down the quay in a terrible bother, turns them all out of their hammocks, and says Godspeed weighs anchor at the first light of dawn—only a few hours’ hence. He won’t say why. Anyway, the fellows make a decision. They pop the lid back on the crate, haul it aboard nice and quick, and when Godspeed weighs anchor just before first light, the crate’s in the hold.’

‘Was Captain Carver notified of this addition to the cargo?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Balfour, smiling. ‘The fellows were pleased as Punch—they thought there would be a reward in it, you see. So they wait until Godspeed is under sail before they call him down. Carver takes one look at the bill of sale and sees they’ve botched the job. “Balfour Shipping?” he says. “It was Danforth Shipping, that was the one I lost. You’ve lifted the wrong bloody one—and now we’ve got stolen goods aboard.”’

‘Might we infer from this,’ Moody said, ‘that Captain Carver had lost a shipping crate, identified as belonging to Alistair Lauderback, with Danforth Shipping as its shipper, that contained something of great value to him?’

‘Certainly looks that way,’ said Balfour.

‘Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Balfour.’

‘My pleasure, Mr. Moody.’

Broham, who very plainly had no idea where Moody’s line of questioning was going, waived his right to cross-examine the witness for the defence, and the justice, making a note of this, called the second witness.

‘The Honourable Mr. Alistair Lauderback.’

Alistair Lauderback crossed the breadth of the courtroom in five strides.

‘Mr. Lauderback,’ said Moody, when he had given his oath. ‘You are the former owner of the barque Godspeed, is that correct?’

‘Yes,’ said Lauderback. ‘That is correct.’

‘According to the deed of sale, you sold the ship on the twelfth of May, 1865.’

‘I did.’

‘Is the man to whom you sold the ship in the courtroom today?’

‘He is,’ said Lauderback.

‘Can you identify him, please?’ said Moody.

Lauderback threw out his arm and levelled his index finger squarely in Carver’s face. ‘That man,’ he said, addressing Moody. ‘That’s the man, right there.’

‘Can there be a mistake?’ said Moody. ‘I observe that the deed of sale, submitted to the court by Mr. Carver himself, was signed by a “C. Francis Wells”.’

‘It’s an out-and-out forgery,’ said Lauderback, still pointing at Carver. ‘He told me his name was Crosbie Wells, and he signed the deed as Crosbie Wells, and I sold him the ship believing all the while that I’d sold it to a man named Crosbie Wells. It wasn’t until eight, nine months later that I realised I’d been played for a fool.’

Moody dared not make eye contact with Carver—who had stiffened, very slightly, at Lauderback’s falsehood. Moody saw, in the corner of his eye, that Mrs. Carver had reached out a white hand to restrain him: her fingers had closed around his wrist. ‘Can you describe what happened?’ he said.

‘He played the jilted husband,’ said Lauderback. ‘He knew I’d been out and about with Lydia—everyone in this room knows it too: I made my confession in the Times—and he saw a chance to turn a profit on it. He told me his name was Crosbie Wells and I’d been out and about with his wife. I never even dreamed he might be telling a barefaced lie. I thought, I’ve done this man wrong, and I’ve made a bad woman of his wife.’

The Carvers had not moved. Still without looking at them, Moody said, ‘What did he want from you?’

‘He wanted the ship,’ said Lauderback. ‘He wanted the ship, and he got the ship. But I was blackmailed. I sold it under duress—not willingly.’

‘Can you explain the nature of the blackmail?’

‘I’d been keeping Lydia in high fashion, over the course of our affair,’ Lauderback said. ‘Sending her old gowns over to Melbourne every month to get stitched up, and then they’d come back with the latest frills or flounces or what have you. There was a shipment that went back and forth across the Tasman in my name, and of course I used Godspeed as my carrier. Well, he’d intercepted it. Carver had. He’d opened up the trunk, lifted out the gowns, and packed a small fortune underneath them. The trunk was marked with my name, remember, and the arrangement with the dressmaker’s in Melbourne was mine. If that bonanza shipped offshore, I’d be sunk: on paper, I’d be foul of the law on theft, evasion of duty, everything. Once I saw the trap he’d laid, I knew there was nothing to be done. I had to give him the ship. So we shook hands as men, and I apologised again—and then, in keeping with his sham, he signed the contract “Wells”.’

‘Did you ever hear from Mr. Carver, alias Wells, after that encounter?’

‘Not a peep.’

‘Did you ever see the trunk again?’

‘Never.’

‘Incidentally,’ said Moody, ‘what was the name of the shipping company you used to transport Mrs. Carver’s gowns to and from the dressmaker’s in Melbourne?’

‘Danforth Shipping,’ said Lauderback. ‘Jem Danforth was the man I used.’

Moody paused, to allow the crowd in the gallery to comprehend the full implication of this, and then said, ‘When did you realise Mr. Carver’s true identity?’

‘In December,’ said Lauderback. ‘Mr. Wells—the real Mr. Wells, I should say—wrote to me just before he passed. Just a voter introducing himself to a political man, that’s all it was. But from his letter I knew at once that he didn’t know the first thing about me and Lydia—and that’s when I put it all together, and realised that I’d been had.’

‘Do you have Mr. Wells’s correspondence with you?’

‘Yes.’ Lauderback reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a folded piece of paper.

‘The Court will note that the document in Mr. Lauderback’s possession is postmarked the seventeenth of December, 1865,’ said Moody.

‘Duly noted, Mr. Moody.’

Moody turned back to Lauderback. ‘Would you read out the letter, please?’

‘Certainly.’ Lauderback held the up the paper, coughed, and then read:

West Canterbury. December 1865

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

With the deepest admiration,

CROSBIE WELLS

Moody thanked him. He turned to the justice. ‘The Court will note that the signature on Mr. Lauderback’s private correspondence exactly resembles the signature upon the deed of gift penned by Mr. Crosbie Wells upon the eleventh of October, 1865, in which a sum of two thousand pounds is to be given over to Miss Anna Wetherell by Mr. Emery Staines, with Crosbie Wells as witness; it also exactly resembles the signature upon Mr. Wells’s marriage certificate, submitted by Mrs. Lydia Carver, formerly Mrs. Wells, to the Magistrate’s Court two months ago. The Court will further note that these two signatures in no way resemble the signature upon the bill of sale for the barque Godspeed, submitted to the Court by Mr. Francis Carver. Suffice to prove that the signature upon this bill of sale is, indeed, a forgery.’

Broham was gaping at Moody, open-mouthed.

‘Just what do you mean by this, Mr. Moody?’ said the justice.

‘Simply that Mr. Carver obtained the barque Godspeed by methods of extortion, impersonation, and fraud,’ Moody said, ‘and used the same tactics in thieving a fortune of many thousands of pounds from Mr. Wells in May of last year—a theft he achieved, presumably, with Mrs. Carver’s help, given that she is now his wife.’

Broham, who was still struggling to place the events of the past five minutes in sequence in his mind, petitioned for a recess; but his request could hardly be heard above the commotion in the gallery. Justice Kemp, raising his voice to a shout, requested the immediate presence of both Mr. Broham and Mr. Moody in the Magistrate’s office; then he gave the instruction for all witnesses to be placed in custody, and adjourned the court.

THE HOUSE OF MANY WISHES

In which Lydia Wells is as good as her word; Anna Wetherell receives an unexpected visitor; and we learn the truth about Elizabeth Mackay.

The face that number 35, Cumberland-street presented to the thoroughfare was oddly blank: pale clapboard siding; a mullioned shop-window, papered over with butcher’s paper; a pair of curtained sash windows on the floor above. The establishments on either side—Number 37 was a bootmaker’s, and number 33, a shipping agency—had been built very close, masking any sense, from the street, of interior proportion. Walking past it, one might even have presumed the building to be unoccupied, for there were no signs or legends above the doorway, nothing on the porch, and no card in the plate above the knocker.

Mrs. Wells opened the front door with her own key. She led Anna down the silent passage to the rear of the house, where a narrow staircase led to the floor above. On the upstairs landing, which was as clean and blank as its counterpart below, she produced a second key from her reticule, unlocked a second door, and, smiling, gestured for Anna to step inside.

A more worldly soul than Anna might have formed an immediate conclusion from the scene that greeted her: the heavy lace curtains; the redundant upholstery; the heady scent of liquor and perfume; the beaded portiere, currently tied back against the doorframe to show the dimly lit bedchamber beyond. But Anna was not worldly, and if she was surprised to encounter a scene of such sweet-smelling, cushioned luxury at a boarding house for girls, she did not express it aloud. On the walk from the quay to Cumberland-street Mrs. Wells had exhibited a great range of refined tastes and particular opinions, and by the time they reached their destination Anna felt more than happy to defer to them—her own opinions seeming, all of a sudden, very pale and feeble by contrast.

‘You see that I take very good care of my girls,’ said her hostess. Anna replied that the room was exceedingly handsome, and at this encouragement Mrs. Wells proposed a turn of it, directing Anna’s attention, as they walked, to several ingenuities of decoration and placement, so that her compliments might be hitherto more specifically bestowed.

Anna’s chest had been delivered as promised, and was installed already at the foot of the bed—a signal that she took to mean the bed was intended to be hers. It had a handsome headboard, the wooden frame of which was all but obscured behind a great mound of white pillows, stacked in piles of three, and it was much broader and higher than the cot in which she habitually slept, at home. She wondered whether she would be required to share a bed with someone else: it seemed much too big for one person. Opposite the bed stood a high-sided copper bath, draped with towels, and beside it, a heavy bell-pull with a tasselled end. Mrs. Wells pulled this now, and from somewhere on the floor below there came a muted jingle. When the maid appeared, Mrs. Wells ordered hot water to be sent up from the kitchen, and a plate of luncheon to follow it. The maid hardly glanced at Anna, who was very grateful to be ignored, and relieved when the maid left to heat the water on the kitchen stove.

As soon as she was gone Lydia Wells turned to Anna, smiled again, and begged to take her leave.

‘I have appointments uptown which I must keep; but I shall be back in time for supper, and will expect us to take it together. You may ask Lucy for whatever you desire in the world. If she can find it, it will be found. Stay in the tub as long as you like, and use anything on the washstand that strikes your fancy. I insist that you make yourself entirely at home.’

Anna Wetherell did just that. She washed her hair with a lavender-scented lotion, and scrubbed every inch of her body with store-bought soap, and stayed in the water for the better part of an hour. After she had dressed again—turning her stockings inside-out to show their cleaner side—she spent a long time at the looking glass, fixing her hair. There were several bottles of perfume on the washstand: she sniffed all of them, returned to the first, and dabbed a little on her wrists and beneath her ears.

The maid had left a cold luncheon on the table below the window, the plate covered with a piece of cloth. Anna lifted the cloth aside, and saw a mound of ham, shaved very nicely, a thick slice of pease pudding, evidently fried, a yellow scone spread with butter and jam, and two pickled eggs. She sat, seized the knife and fork laid out for her, and fell upon it—relishing the flavours, after so many tasteless meals at sea.

Once the plate was clean, she sat wondering for some minutes whether she ought to ring the bell for the service to be cleared away: would it be more imperious to ring, or not to ring? Eventually she decided not to. She got up from the table and went to the window, where she drew the curtains, and, feeling very contented, stood awhile to watch the traffic in the street. The clock had struck three before she heard any sound from the floor below: sudden voices in the passage, and then footsteps mounting the stairs, and then a brisk two-knuckled knock at the door.

She had barely time to rise before the door was flung open, and in strode a tall, very dirty man, dressed in yellow moleskin trousers and a faded coat. When he saw Anna, he came up short.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Beg your pardon.’

‘Good afternoon,’ Anna said.

‘You one of Lydia’s girls?’

‘Yes.’

‘New girl?’

‘I arrived today.’

‘You and I both,’ said the man. He had sandy hair and a slightly grizzled look. ‘Good afternoon to you.’

‘Can I help you?’

He grinned at this. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for the mistress. Is she about?’

‘She has appointments uptown.’

‘What time will she be back?’

‘She said by suppertime,’ Anna said.

‘Well: have you any appointments, before then?’

‘No,’ Anna said.

‘Good,’ the man said. ‘Mind if I reserve the next dance?’

Anna did not know what to say to this. ‘I’m not sure if I ought to receive company when Mrs. Wells is out.’

‘Mrs. Wells,’ said the man, and laughed. ‘Sounds almost respectable, when you put it like that.’ He reached back and closed the door behind him. ‘Crosbie’s my name. What’s yours?’

‘Miss Anna Wetherell,’ said Anna, with increasing alarm.

He was already moving to the sideboard. ‘Care for a drop of something, Miss Anna Wetherell?’

‘No, thank you.’

He picked up a bottle and tilted it at her. ‘No because you don’t have a taste for liquor, or no because you’re being polite?’

‘I only just arrived.’

‘You’ve told me so once already, my girl, and anyway, that doesn’t answer the question I asked.’

‘I wouldn’t want to take advantage of Mrs. Wells’s hospitality,’ said Anna, with a slight emphasis of disapproval—as though to communicate that he ought not to, either.

Crosbie uncorked the bottle, sniffed, and recorked it. ‘Oh, there’s no such thing as hospitality,’ he said, returning the bottle to the tray, and selecting another. ‘You’ll be billed for everything you touch in this room, and quick as thieves. You mark my words.’

‘No,’ Anna said. ‘It’s all been paid for. And Mrs. Wells has been wonderfully hospitable. I’m staying at her personal request.’

He was amused by this. ‘Oh yes? Nearest and dearest, are you? Old friends?’

Anna frowned. ‘We met at the quay this afternoon.’

‘Just by accident, I suppose.’

‘Yes. There was a young woman—a Miss Mackay—who didn’t make the sailing. Her cousin’s cousin. When Miss Mackay didn’t show, Mrs. Wells invited me in place of her. The room and board is all paid in advance.’

‘Oho,’ said the man, pouring out a glassful of liquor.

‘Have you just returned from the fields?’ said Anna, stalling for time.

‘I have,’ said the man. ‘Up in the high country. Arrived back this morning.’ He drank, expelled a breath, and then said, ‘No. It’s not right if I don’t tell you. You’ve been euchred.’

‘I’ve been what?’

‘Euchred.’

‘I don’t know what that means, Mr. Crosbie.’

He smiled at her mistake, but did not correct her. ‘There’s always a Miss Mackay,’ he explained. ‘It’s a line she spins. So you believe her, and you follow her home, and before you know it, you’re beholden. Aren’t you, now? She’s given you a fine meal and a hot bath and nothing but the milk of kindness, and what have you given her? Oh’—he wagged his finger—‘but there will be something, Miss Anna Wetherell. There will be something that you can give.’ He seemed to perceive Anna’s anxiety, for he added, in a gentler tone, ‘Here’s something you ought to know. There’s no charity in a gold town. If it looks like charity, look again.’

‘Oh,’ said Anna.

He drained his glass and set it down. ‘Are you partial to a drink or not?’

‘Not today, thank you.’

He reached into his pocket, withdrew something, and then held up a closed fist. ‘Can you guess what I’m holding?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Go on. Have a guess.’

‘A coin?’

‘Better than a coin. Guess again.’

‘I can’t think,’ she said, in panic.

He opened his fist to reveal a nugget of gold around the size and shape of a chestnut, laughed again at her expression, and then tossed it to her. She caught it in the heels of her hands. ‘That’s enough in gold to buy every last bottle on this tray, with pounds left over,’ he said. ‘It’s yours, if you’ll keep me company until the mistress comes back. How about it? You’ll have a heads-up on those debts, when they start mounting.’

‘I’ve never touched a piece of gold,’ Anna said, turning it over. It was heavier than she had imagined it would be, and more elemental. It seemed to turn dull in her hands.

‘Come here,’ said Crosbie. He took the brandy bottle to the little sofa, sat down, and patted the space beside him. ‘Share a drink with a fellow, my girl. I’ve been walking for two weeks, and I’m thirsty as hell, and I want something nice to look at. Come here. I’ll tell you everything you need to know about Mrs. Lydia Wells.’

CRUX

In which two verdicts are delivered, and the justice fits the sentence to the crime.

Te Rau Tauwhare had not been invited to testify at either trial. He had watched the day’s proceedings from the rear of the courtroom, his expression sombre, his back against the wall. When Justice Kemp called for a final recess, giving the order for all the day’s witnesses to be remanded in custody, Tauwhare left the courthouse with the rest. Outside he saw the armoured carriage, waiting to transport the felons back to the gaol, and went to greet the duty sergeant, who was standing by.

‘Hello, Mr. Tauwhare,’ the sergeant said.

‘Hello.’

‘How’s your friend Staines doing, then? Kicking up his heels in there?’

‘Yes,’ said Tauwhare.

‘I popped my head in. Couldn’t hear much. Good show, is it?’

‘Very good,’ Tauwhare said.

‘Gov. Shepard got a rap on the knuckles this morning, didn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘I would have liked to have seen that,’ the sergeant said.

Just then the rear door of the courthouse opened and the bailiff appeared in the doorway. ‘Drake!’ he called.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the sergeant, standing tall.

‘Justice wants Francis Carver escorted to Seaview,’ the bailiff said. ‘Special orders. You’re to take him up the hill, and then come straight back again.’

Drake ran to open the doors of the carriage. ‘Only Carver?’

‘Only Carver,’ the bailiff said. ‘Mind you’re back in time for the verdict. Straight up to Seaview, and straight back again.’

‘Can do.’

‘Quick about it—he’s coming now.’

Francis Carver was brought out into the yard, and bundled into the carriage. His hands had been cuffed behind him. Inside the carriage, Drake produced a second set of cuffs from his belt, and used these to cuff Carver’s linked wrists to a clew that had been fixed to the wall behind the driver’s seat.

‘That’s not going anywhere,’ he said cheerfully, rattling the clew to prove his point. ‘There’s an inch of iron between you and the world, Mr. Carver. Hoo! What have you done, that they don’t trust you with all the rest? Last I checked, you were a bloody witness; next minute, you’re in irons!’

Carver said nothing.

‘One hour,’ the bailiff said, and returned inside.

Drake jumped out of the carriage and closed the doors. ‘Hi, Mr. Tauwhare,’ he said, as he set the latch. ‘Care for a dash up the hill and back? You’ll be down in time for the verdict.’

Tauwhare hesitated.

‘What do you say?’ the sergeant said. ‘Beautiful day for a ride—and we’ll pick up bit of speed, coming down.’

Still Tauwhare hesitated. He was staring at the latch upon the carriage door.

‘How about it?’

‘No,’ Tauwhare said at last.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Drake, shrugging. He clambered up onto the driver’s seat, picked up the reins, and urged the horses; the carriage rattled away.

‘Mr. Emery Staines. You plead guilty to having falsified the records of the Aurora goldmine in order to avoid share payments owing to Mr. Francis Carver, at a value of fifty percent net profit per annum, and to avoid a bonus payment owing to John Long Quee, at an undisclosed value. You plead guilty to having embezzled a great quantity of raw gold, found by John Long Quee upon the Aurora, which has since been valued at £4096. You admit that you thieved this gold from the Aurora and buried it in the Arahura Valley, with the purpose of concealment. You also plead guilty to dereliction, stating that you have been incapacitated for the past two months by excessive and prolonged consumption of opium.’

The justice laid his papers aside, and folded his hands together.

‘Your counsel, Mr. Staines,’ he said, ‘has done a very good job of painting Mr. Carver in a poor light this afternoon. Notwithstanding his performance, however, the fact remains that provocation to break the law is not licence to break the law: your poor opinion of Mr. Carver does not give you the right to determine what he does, or does not, deserve.

‘You did not witness the assault against Miss Wetherell first-hand, and nor, it seems, did anybody else; therefore you cannot know beyond a shadow of a doubt whether Mr. Carver truly was the author of that assault, or indeed, if an assault took place at all. Of course the loss of any child is a tragedy, and tragedy cannot be mitigated by circumstance; but in adjudicating your crime, Mr. Staines, we must put aside the tragic nature of the event, and consider it purely as a provocation—an indirect provocation, I should say—for your having committed the rather more cold-blooded crimes of embezzlement and fraud, in retaliation. Yes, you had provocation to dislike Mr. Carver, to resent Mr. Carver, even to despise him; but I feel that I state a very obvious point when I say that you might have brought your grievance to the attention of the Hokitika police, and saved us all a great deal of bother.

‘Your guilty plea does you credit. I also acknowledge that you have shown courtesy and humility in your responses this morning. All this suggests contrition, and deference to the proper execution of the law. Your charges, however, show a selfish disregard for contractual obligation, a capricious and decadent temperament, and a dereliction of duty, not only to your claims, but to your fellow men. Your poor opinion of Mr. Carver, however justified that opinion might be, has led you to take the law into your own hands on more than one occasion, and in more than one respect. In light of this I consider that it will do you a great deal of good to put away your grand philosophy for a time, and learn to walk in another man’s shoes.

‘Mr. Carver has been a shareholder of the Aurora for nine months. He has fulfilled his contractual obligation to you, and he has been ill rewarded. Emery Staines, I hereby sentence you to nine months’ servitude, with labour.’

Staines’s face betrayed nothing at all. ‘Yes, sir.’

The justice turned to Anna.

‘Miss Anna Wetherell,’ he said. ‘You have pleaded not guilty to all charges brought to bear against you, and in a civilised court we hold to the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty. I am sensible of the fact that aspersions cast by Mr. Moody upon Governor Shepard are aspersions only; however they have been duly recorded by this court, and may be productive in the future, pending investigations made upon Governor Shepard and others. In the meantime, I do not see that there is sufficient evidence to prove your guilt. You are acquitted of all charges. You shall be released from gaol, effective instant. I trust that from here you will continue on the righteous path to sobriety, chastity, and other virtues of a civilised kind; needless to say that I never wish to see you in this courtroom again, on any charge, least of all a charge of public intoxication and disorderly behaviour. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good.’ He turned to the barristers’ bench. ‘Now,’ he said heavily, but before he got any further, there came the sound of shouting in the street, and a terrible crash, and the high whinny of panicked horses—and then a terrible thump on the courthouse door, as though someone had thrown their bodily weight against it.

‘What’s going on?’ said the justice, frowning.

Moody had started up: he heard shouting from the porch, and a great clatter.

‘Open the door, someone. See what’s happening,’ the justice said.

The door was thrown open.

‘Sergeant Drake,’ exclaimed the justice. ‘What is it?’

The sergeant’s eyes were wild. ‘It’s Carver!’ he cried.

‘What about him?’

‘He’s dead!’

‘What?’

‘Some point between here and Seaview—someone must have opened the doors—and I never noticed. I was driving. I opened the doors to unload him—and there he was—and he’s dead!’

Moody whipped about, half expecting that Mrs. Carver might have fallen into a faint; but she had not. She was looking at Drake, white-faced. Quickly, Moody scanned the faces around her. All the witnesses had been remanded during the recess, including those who had testified in the morning: none of them had left the Courthouse. Shepard was there—and Lauderback—and Frost—and Löwenthal, and Clinch, and Mannering, and Quee, and Nilssen, and Pritchard, and Balfour, and Gascoigne, and Devlin. Who was missing?

‘He’s right outside!’ cried Drake, throwing out his arm. ‘His body—I came right back—I couldn’t—it wasn’t—’

The justice raised his voice above the commotion. ‘He took his own life?’

‘Hardly,’ cried Drake, his voice cracking into a sob. ‘Hardly!’

The crowd began crushing through the doors, past him.

‘Sergeant Drake,’ shouted the justice. ‘How in all heaven did Francis Carver die?’

Drake was now lost in the crowd. His voice floated up: ‘Somebody bashed his head in!’

The justice’s face had turned purple. ‘Who?’ he roared. ‘Who did it?’

‘I’m telling you I don’t know!’

There came a terrible shriek from the street, and then shouting; the courthouse emptied. Mrs. Carver, watching the last of the crowd fight its way through the doorway, brought her hands up to her mouth.

COMBUST

In which Mrs. Wells receives a false impression, and Francis Carver relays important news.

While Anna Wetherell entertained ‘Mr. Crosbie’ at the House of Many Wishes on Cumberland-street, Lydia Wells was doing some entertaining of her own. It was her habit, in the afternoons, to take her almanacs and star charts to the Hawthorn Hotel upon George-street, where she set up shop in a corner of the dining room, and offered to tell the fortunes of diggers and travellers newly arrived. Her sole customer, that afternoon, had been a golden-haired boy in a felt cap who, as it turned out, had also arrived on the steamer Fortunate Wind. He was a voluble subject, and seemed both delighted and fascinated by Mrs. Wells’s affinity for the arcane; his enthusiasm was flattering, and inclined her to be generous with her prognostications. By the time his natal chart was drawn, his past and present canvassed, and his future foretold, it was coming on four o’clock.

She looked up to see Francis Carver striding across the dining room towards her.

‘Edward,’ she said, to the golden-haired boy, ‘be a darling, would you, and ask the waiter to wrap up a pie with a hot-water crust? Tell him to put it on my account; I’ll take it home for my dinner.’

The boy obliged.

‘I’ve just had some good news,’ said Carver, when the boy was gone.

‘What is it?’

‘Lauderback’s on his way.’

‘Ah,’ said Lydia Wells.

‘He must have seen the shipping receipt from Danforth at long last. I hear from Billy Bruce that he’s bought his passage on the Active, sailing out of Akaroa. He arrives on the twelfth of May, and he sends an advance message that Godspeed is not to depart until then.’

‘Three weeks away.’

‘We’ve got him, Greenway. Like a fish in a trap, we’ve got him.’

‘Poor Mr. Lauderback,’ said Mrs. Wells, vaguely.

‘You might step over to the naval club this week and make an offer to the boys. A free night of craps, or double the jackpot, or a girl with every spin of the wheel. Something to tempt Raxworthy away from the ship that night, so that I can get a chance to get at Lauderback alone.’

‘I will go to the club in the morning,’ said Mrs. Wells. She began to tidy her books and charts away. ‘Poor Mr. Lauderback,’ she said again.

‘He made his own bed,’ said Carver, watching her.

‘Yes, he did; but you and I warmed the sheets for him.’

‘Don’t feel sorry for a coward,’ said Carver. ‘Least of all a coward with money to spare.’

‘I pity him.’

‘Why? Because of the bastard? I’d sooner feel sorry for the bastard. Lauderback’s had nothing but good luck from start to finish. He’s a made man.’

‘He is; and yet he is pitiable,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘He is so ashamed, Francis. Of Crosbie, of his father, of himself. I cannot help but feel pity for a man who is ashamed.’

‘No chance of Wells turning up unexpectedly, is there?’

‘You talk as if he and I were intimates,’ snapped Mrs. Wells. ‘I can’t answer for him; I certainly can’t control his every move.’

‘How long since he was last in town?’

‘Months.’

‘Does he write before he comes home?’

‘Good Lord,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘No, he doesn’t write.’

‘Is there any way you can make sure he keeps away? It wouldn’t do for him to come face to face with Lauderback—not at the eleventh hour.’

‘A drink will always tempt him—whatever the hour.’

Carver grinned. ‘Send him a mixed crate in the post? Set him up with a tally at the Diggers Arms?’

‘That, in fact, is a rather good idea.’ She saw the boy coming back from the kitchens with the pie wrapped in paper, and rose from the table. ‘I must be getting back now. I shall call on you tomorrow.’

‘I’ll be waiting,’ Carver said.

‘Thank you, Edward,’ said Mrs. Wells to the boy, taking the pie. ‘And goodbye. I could wish good fortune upon you, but that would be a waste of a wish, would it not?’

The boy laughed.

Carver was smiling too. ‘Did you tell his fortune, then?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘He is to become excessively rich.’

‘Is he, now? Like all the rest?’

‘Not like all the rest,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘Exceptionally rich. Goodbye, Francis.’

‘I’ll be seeing you,’ said Carver.

‘Goodbye, Mrs. Wells,’ said the boy.

She swept from the room, and the two men gazed after her. When she was gone Carver tilted his head at the boy. ‘Your name’s Edward?’

‘Actually—no, it isn’t,’ said the boy, looking a little shamefaced. ‘I made the choice to travel incognito, as you might say. My father always told me, when it comes to whores and fortune tellers, never give your real name.’

Carver nodded. ‘That’s sense.’

‘I don’t know about the whores part,’ the boy went on. ‘It grieves me to think of my father using them—I feel a kind of repugnance about it, out of loyalty to my mother, I suppose. But I like the telling fortunes part. It was rather a thrill, to use another man’s name. It made me feel invisible, somehow. Or doubled—as though I had split myself in two.’

Carver glanced at him, and then, after a moment, put out his hand. ‘Francis Carver’s my name.’

‘Emery Staines,’ said the boy.

MERCURY SETS

In which a stranger arrives upon the beach at Hokitika; the bonanza is apportioned; and Walter Moody quits the Crown Hotel at last.

Even in his best suit, with his hair combed and oiled, his boots blackened, and his handkerchief scented, Mr. Adrian Moody was a great deal less handsome than his younger son. His countenance bore the symptoms of a lifetime’s dependence upon hard drink—his eyes were pouched, his nose swollen, and his complexion permanently flushed—and when he moved, it was without grace or fluidity. He walked in a stiff-hipped, lumbering fashion; his gaze was restless and wary; his hands, stained yellow with tobacco smoke, were always stealing into his pockets, or picking in an anxious way at his lapels.

Upon clambering out of the skiff that had conveyed him from the steamer to the beach, Moody senior took a moment to stretch his back, shake out his aches and cramps, and pat his body down. He directed his luggage to a hotel on Camp-street, shook hands with the customs officer, who was standing by, thanked the oarsmen gruffly for their service, and finally set off down Revell-street with his hands locked behind his back. He walked the length of the street, up one side, and down the other, frowning into each window box he passed, scanning the faces in the street very closely, and smiling at no one. By now the crowd that had gathered outside the Courthouse had dispersed, and the armoured carriage containing Francis Carver’s body had returned to Seaview; the double doors were shut and locked. Moody senior barely glanced at the building as he passed.

At length he mounted the steps to the Hokitika Post Office, where, inside the building, he joined the queue to the postmaster’s window. As he waited, he retrieved a piece of paper from his wallet, and unfolded it, one-handed, against his breast.

‘I want this to find a Mr. Walter Moody,’ he said, when he reached the front of the queue.

‘Certainly,’ said the postmaster. ‘Know where he’s staying?’

As he spoke the bells in the Wesleyan chapel rang out five o’clock.

‘All I know is that he’s been in Hokitika these months past,’ said Moody senior.

‘In town? Or in the gorge?’

‘In town.’

‘At a hotel? Or is he tenting?’

‘I’d guess a hotel, but I couldn’t tell you. Walter Moody is the name.’

‘Mate of yours, is he?’

‘He’s my son.’

‘I’ll have a boy look into it, and charge you collect once we find him,’ said the postmaster, making a note of the name. ‘You’ll have to put a shilling down as surety, but if we find him to-morrow we’ll likely reimburse you sixpence.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘Would you prefer an envelope, or a seal?’

‘An envelope,’ said the other, ‘but hang a moment: I want to read it through one more time.’

‘Step aside, then, and come back when you’re ready. I’m shutting the window in half an hour.’

Adrian Moody did as he was bid. He smoothed the letter flat on the countertop, and then pushed it, with his finger, closer to the light.

Hokitika. 27.Apr.66

Walter—I beg you to read this letter to its very end, and to reserve your judgment upon me until you have done so. From my postmark you will

have perceived that I am in Hokitika, as you are. I am to take my lodging at the TEMPERANCE HOTEL on Camp-street, an address which will no doubt cause you some surprise. You have long known that I have the Epicurean temperament. Now I am also of a Stoical cast. I have sworn that I will never take another drop of liquor in this life, and since this oath was made it has not been broken. It is in the spirit of repentance that I set down a brief account of those true intentions that my enslavement to the drink has occluded, even perverted, in recent years.

I left the British Isles on account of debt, and debt alone. Frederick your brother had an acquaintance upon the field at Lawrence in Otago, and by his report the prospects there seemed very good; Frederick had determined to join him. You were in Rome, and meant to winter on the continent. I decided to make the journey in secret, in the hope that I would return as a rich man before the year was out. I confess this was a decision made with shameful provocation, for there were several men in London and also in Liverpool whom I desired very much to escape. Before I left I portioned a sum of £20 for my wife—the very last of my savings. Much later I learned that this provision never reached its destination: it was stolen, and by the very man who was to be its bearer (the blackguard PIERS HOWLAND, may he live in shame and die in squalor). By the time I discovered this I was in Otago, half a world away; furthermore, I could not make contact without risking pursuit, even conviction, on account of crimes unpunished and debts unpaid. I did nothing. I counted my wife as abandoned, prayed that God would forgive me, and continued with Frederick on the fields.

We made only pay dirt during our first year in Otago. I have heard it said that the men of the comfortable classes have the worst of luck upon the diggings, for they cannot bear privation as the lower orders can. This was certainly true in our case. We struggled mightily and despaired often. But we persevered, and seven months ago your brother struck upon a nugget the size of a snuffbox, caught between two boulders in the elbow of a stream. It was upon this nugget that we were able to begin to build our fortunes at long last.

You might ask why we did not send this nugget home with our apologies and blessings; that question would be a good one. Frederick your brother had long been in favour of writing to you. He had urged me to

make contact with my abandoned wife, and even to invite her to join us here, but I resisted. I resisted also his intimations that I should quit the devil drink and mend my ways. We had many arguments along this theme and finally parted on less than civil terms. I am sorry to say that I do not know where Frederick is now.

You have always been the scholar of the family, Walter. I am ashamed of a great many aspects of my life; but I have never been ashamed of you. In taking my oath of temperance I have confronted my true soul. I have seen myself truly as a man of weakness and of cowardice, easy prey to vice and sin of all description. But if I am proud of one thing it is that my sons are not like me in these degenerate respects. It is a painful joy for a father to say of his son: ‘That man is a better man than I’. I assure you I have felt this painful joy twice over.

I can do no more than to beg for your forgiveness, as I must also beg for Frederick’s, and to promise that our next reunion, should you grant me one, will be conducted ‘dry’. Good fortune, Walter. Know that I have confronted my true soul, and that I write this as a sober man. Know also that even the briefest reply would greatly cheer the heart of

Your father

ADRIAN MOODY

He read the letter twice over, then folded it into the envelope, and wrote his son’s name in large letters upon the front. His hand trembled as he capped his pen.

‘A Mr. Frost for Mr. Staines.’

‘Send him in,’ said Devlin.

Charlie Frost had a piece of paper in his hand. ‘Expenses,’ he said, looking apologetic.

‘Have a seat,’ said Devlin.

‘What’s the damage, Mr. Frost?’ said Staines. He was looking very tired.

‘Extensive, I’m afraid,’ said Frost, drawing up a chair. ‘Justice Kemp has ruled that Francis Carver’s dividend of two thousand and forty-eight pounds must be honoured. There’s a catch—the Garrity Group is to be repaid in full for the claim taken out against Godspeed—but the rest will go to Mrs. Carver, as Carver’s widow.’

‘How is she?’ Devlin said.

‘Sedated,’ said Frost. ‘Dr. Gillies and Mr. Pritchard are waiting on her, I believe; last I saw her, she was being escorted back to the Wayfarer’s Fortune.’ He turned back to Staines, flattening his paper on the desk. ‘May I itemise the expenses, briefly?’

‘Yes.’

‘As the party found guilty, you are responsible for all legal fees, including those incurred by Mr. Fellowes these months past, and including, also, Mr. Nilssen’s commission, since invested in the Seaview gaol-house—as you might remember, the Magistrate ruled that because it had been charitably donated, it would not be revoked. In total all of this amounts to a little over five hundred pounds.’

‘Halved, and halved again,’ said Staines.

‘Yes; I’m afraid you will find that a common theme with legal expenses. There’s more. You have also been sued for damages by a great many diggers, in both Kaniere and the Hokitika Gorge. I don’t have the exact sum for you yet; but I’m afraid it’s likely to be dozens of pounds, perhaps hundreds.’

‘Is that everything?’

‘In terms of official expenses, yes,’ said Frost. ‘There are several unofficial matters to discuss, however. Do we have time?’

‘Do we have time?’ said Staines to Devlin.

‘We have until the carriage gets here,’ said Devlin.

‘I will be quick,’ said Frost. ‘As you may be aware, the gold extracted from Anna’s orange gown is still stowed beneath Mr. Gascoigne’s bed. Anna owes a debt of some hundred and twenty pounds to Mr. Mannering, and she had thought to repay this amount with the pure colour extracted from the orange gown. I had the idea, however, that you might like to take on her debt to Mr. Mannering, and arrange for Mr. Mannering to be repaid out of your share of the bonanza, as an itemised expense. That way Anna will have something to live on, you see, during the months where you’re in gaol.’

‘Good,’ said Staines. ‘Yes—do that. Just as you say.’

Frost made a note of this. ‘The second matter,’ he said, ‘is the bonus owing to Mr. Quee. We must keep up the sham that the fortune originated on the Aurora, you see, and every man who comes upon a bonanza deserves a reward.’

‘Of course,’ said Staines. ‘A bonus.’

‘I am given to understand,’ Frost continued, ‘that Mr. Quee is desirous to return to China once his Company indenture expires; furthermore, he wishes to return with exactly seven hundred and sixty-eight shillings in his pocket. According to Mr. Mannering, he has long set his mind upon this precise figure. I believe it is of some personal or spiritual significance to him.’

Ordinarily this curiosity would have tickled Emery Staines extremely, but he did not smile. It was Devlin who exclaimed, ‘Seven hundred and sixty-eight shillings?’

‘Yes,’ said Frost.

‘What a fastidious thing,’ said Devlin. ‘What does it augur—do you know?’

‘I am afraid I do not,’ said Frost. ‘But if I might make a suggestion’—turning back to Staines—‘perhaps your bonus payment to Mr. Quee ought to be enough to realise this ambition.’

‘What does it come to, in pounds?’

‘Thirty-eight pounds, eight shillings,’ said Frost. ‘Roughly one percent of four thousand, and one percent is a reasonable rate for a goldfields bonus, especially given that Mr. Quee is Chinese. As a gesture of good faith, you also might wish to consider buying him out of his indenture, and facilitating his passage home.’

Staines shook his head. ‘I never thought of him, did I?’

‘Who?’ said Frost.

‘Mr. Quee,’ said Staines. ‘I simply never thought of him.’

‘Well, he did us all a very great favour this afternoon, in keeping our secret, and now we have a chance to do him one, in return. I have spoken to Mr. Mannering already. He is content to accept an early termination of Mr. Quee’s contract, and has costed it at my request. If you pay Mr. Quee a bonus of sixty-four pounds, then all expenses should be adequately covered.’

Staines brought his shoulder up to his cheek, and sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘All right.’

‘Now: the third financial matter.’ Frost coughed slightly. ‘When we first—ah—came upon the fortune, back in January, Mr. Clinch made me a present of thirty pounds, as a gift. I’m afraid I spent it, and I have not the means to repay even a penny of it. I wonder if I might impose upon your generosity, and list those thirty pounds as bank expenses.’ He said all this very fast, and then added, ‘As a loan, of course: I’d repay it by the time of your release.’

‘Here’s the carriage,’ Devlin said, rising.

‘That’s fine,’ said Staines to Frost. ‘Pay it out—just as you say. It doesn’t matter.’

Frost exhaled, full of relief. ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Staines.’ He watched as Devlin escorted Staines from the cell. When they reached the doorway he said, raising his voice a little, ‘First thing to-morrow, I’ll send you up an itemised receipt.’

The chapel bells were ringing out seven o’clock as Walter Moody folded the last of his fine clothes into his trunk, closed the lid, and secured the hasp. Rising, he checked the flies of his yellow moleskin trousers, tightened his belt, touched the red kerchief that was knotted about his neck, and finally, reached for his coat and hat—the former a plain woollen garment, cut almost to his knees, and the latter, a heavy soft-crowned thing with a wide waxed brim. He donned both, slung his swag onto his back, and left the room, removing the key from the lock as he did so.

During his absence his trunk was to be kept at Clark’s Warehouse on Gibson Quay, to which place his private mail, if he received any, would also be directed. To finance this relocation, he left three silver shillings at the Crown front desk, along with his key. He slipped a fourth shilling into the hand of the Crown maid, folding her small yellow hand in both his own, and thanked her very warmly for the three months’ service and hospitality she had provided him. Quitting the Crown, he turned down the narrow path that led to the beachfront and at once began walking north, his swag clanking on his back, his tent roll bumping the backs of his legs with each step.

He was no more than two miles out of Hokitika when he perceived that he was walking some ten paces ahead of another man, similarly clad in the digger’s habitual costume; Moody glanced back, and they acknowledged one another with a nod.

‘Hi there,’ said the other. ‘You walking north?’

‘I am.’

‘Heading for the beaches, are you? Charleston way?’

‘So I hope. Do we share a destination?’

‘Seems we do,’ the other said. ‘Mind if I fall into step?’

‘Not at all,’ said Moody. ‘I shall be glad of the company. Walter Moody is my name. Walter.’

‘Paddy Ryan,’ said the other. ‘You got a Scottish tongue on you, Walter Moody.’

‘I cannot deny it,’ said Moody.

‘Never had any trouble with a Scot.’

‘And I have never quarrelled with an Irishman.’

‘That makes one of you,’ said Paddy Ryan, with a grin. ‘But it’s the truth: I never had any trouble with a Scot.’

‘I’m very glad of it.’

They walked on in silence for a time.

‘I guess we’re both a long way away from home,’ said Paddy Ryan presently.

‘I’m a long way from where I was born,’ said Moody, squinting across the breakers to the open sea.

‘Well,’ said Paddy Ryan, ‘if home can’t be where you come from, then home is what you make of where you go.’

‘That is a good motto,’ Moody said.

Paddy Ryan nodded, seeming pleased. ‘Are you fixing to stay in this country, then, Walter? After you’ve dug yourself a patch, and made yourself a pile?’

‘I expect my luck will decide that question for me.’

‘Would you call it lucky to stay, or lucky to go?’

‘I’d call it lucky to choose,’ said Moody—surprising himself, for that was not the answer he would have given, three months prior.

Paddy Ryan looked at him sidelong. ‘How about we share our stories? Make the road a little shorter that way.’

‘Our stories? Do you mean our histories?’

‘Ay—or the stories you’ve heard, or whatever you like.’

‘All right,’ said Moody, a little stiffly. ‘Do you want to go first, or shall I?’

‘You go first,’ said Paddy Ryan. ‘Give us a tale, and spin it out, so we forget about our feet, and we don’t notice that we’re walking.’

Moody was silent for a time, wondering how to begin. ‘I am trying to decide between the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,’ he said presently. ‘I am afraid my history is such that I can’t manage both at once.’

‘Hi—no need for the truth at all,’ said Paddy Ryan. ‘Who said anything about the truth? You’re a free man in this country, Walter Moody. You tell me any old rubbish you like, and if you string it out until we reach the junction at Kumara, then I shall count it as a very fine tale.’

SUN & MOON IN CONJUNCTION (NEW MOON)

In which Mrs. Wells makes two very interesting discoveries.

When Lydia Wells returned to the House of Many Wishes a little after seven o’clock, she was informed by the maid that Anna Wetherell had received a caller in her absence: Mr. Crosbie Wells, who had returned unexpectedly after many months of absence in the Otago highlands. Mr. Wells had an appointment of some kind upon George-street that evening, the maid reported, but he had left with the assurance that he would return the next morning, in the hope of securing an interview with his wife.

Mrs. Wells received this news thoughtfully. ‘How long did you say he stayed, Lucy?’

‘Two hours, ma’am.’

‘From when until when?’

‘Three until five.’

‘And Miss Wetherell …?’

‘I haven’t disturbed her,’ said Lucy. ‘She hasn’t rung the bell since he left, and I didn’t trouble them when he was here.’

‘Good girl,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘Now, if Crosbie does come back tomorrow, and if, for whatever reason, I am not here, you show him to Miss Wetherell’s room as before.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And you’d better put in an order at the wine and spirit merchant first thing to-morrow. A mixed crate should do us fine.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Here’s a pie for our supper. See that it’s heated through, and then send it up. We’ll eat at eight, I think.’

‘Very good, ma’am.’

Lydia Wells arranged her almanacs and star charts in her arms, peered critically into the glass hanging in the hall, and then ascended the stairs to Anna’s room, where she knocked briskly, and opened the door without waiting for an answer.

‘Is it not better—to be fed, and dry, and clean?’ she said, in lieu of a greeting.

Anna had been sitting in the window box. She leaped up when Mrs. Wells strode into the room, blushing deeply, and said, ‘Very much better, ma’am. You are much too kind.’

‘There is no such thing as too much kindness,’ declared Mrs. Wells, depositing her books upon the table next to the settee. She glanced quickly at the sideboard, making a mental tally of the bottles, and then turned back to Anna, and smiled. ‘What fun we shall have this evening! I am going to draw your chart.’

Anna nodded. Her face was still very red.

‘I draw a chart each time I make a new acquaintance,’ Mrs. Wells went on. ‘We shall have a glorious good time, finding out what is in store for you. And I have brought home a pie for our supper: the best that can be had in all Dunedin. Isn’t that fine?’

‘Very fine,’ said Anna, dropping her gaze to the floor.

Mrs. Wells seemed not to notice her discomfort. ‘Now,’ she said, sitting down at the settee, and drawing the largest book towards her. ‘What is the date of your birthday, my dear?’

Anna told her.

Mrs. Wells drew back; she placed her hand over her heart. ‘No!’ she said.

‘What?’

‘How terribly odd!’

‘What’s odd?’ said Anna, looking frightened.

‘You have the same birthday as a young man I just …’ Lydia Wells trailed off, and then said, suddenly, ‘How old are you, Miss Wetherell?’

‘One-and-twenty.’

‘One-and-twenty! And you were born in Sydney?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Right in town?’

‘Yes.’

Lydia Wells’s expression was marvellous. ‘You don’t happen to know the precise hour of your birth, do you?’

‘I believe I was born at night,’ said Anna, blushing again. ‘That’s the way my mother tells it. But I don’t know the precise hour.’

‘It is astonishing,’ cried Mrs. Wells. ‘I am astonished! The exact same birthday! Perhaps even beneath the very same sky!’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Anna.

In a hushed tone of conspiracy, Lydia Wells explained. She spent her afternoons at a hotel upon George-street, where she gave astral predictions for a small fee. Her customers, for the most part, were young men about to make their fortunes on the goldfield. That afternoon—while Anna was enjoying her bath—she had given a reading to just such a man. The querent (so she described him) was also one-and-twenty, and had also been born in Sydney, upon the very same day as Anna!

Anna could not make sense of Mrs. Wells’s exhilaration. ‘What does it mean?’ she said.

‘What does it mean?’ Lydia Wells’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘It means that you may share a destiny, Miss Wetherell, with another soul!’

‘Oh,’ Anna said.

‘You may have an astral soul-mate, whose path through life perfectly mirrors your own!’

Anna was not as impressed by this as Mrs. Wells might have hoped. ‘Oh,’ she said again.

‘The phenomenon is very rare,’ said Mrs. Wells.

‘But I had a cousin with the same birthday as me,’ Anna said, ‘and we can’t have shared a destiny, because he died.’

‘It is not enough to share a day,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘You must be born at the exact same minute—and at the exact same latitude and longitude: that is, under the exact same sky. Only then will your charts be identical. Even twins, you see, are born some minutes apart, and in the interim the skies have shifted a little, and the patterns have changed.’

‘I don’t know the exact minute I was born,’ Anna said, frowning.

‘Nor did he,’ said Mrs. Wells, ‘but I shall lay my money upon the fact that your charts are identical—for we know already that the two of you have something in common.’

‘What?’

‘Me,’ said Mrs. Wells, triumphantly. ‘On the twenty-seventh of April, 1865, you both arrived in Dunedin, and you both had your natal charts drawn by Mrs. Crosbie Wells!’

Anna brought her hand up to her throat. ‘What?’ she whispered. ‘Mrs.—what?’

Lydia Wells continued with the same enthusiasm. ‘And there are other correspondences! He was travelling alone, as you were, and he arrived this morning, as you did. Perhaps he made a friend by some accident of circumstances—quite as you did, when you met me!’

Anna was looking as though she might be sick.

‘Edward is his name. Edward Sullivan. Oh, how I wish I had brought him back with me—how I wish I had known! Are you not aching to make his acquaintance?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ she whispered.

‘What an extraordinary thing,’ said Lydia Wells, gazing at her. ‘It is most extraordinary. I wonder what would happen, were you ever to meet.’

SILVER

In which Crosbie Wells makes a request; Lydia Wells is imprudent; and Anna Wetherell plays witness to a rather ugly scene.

The mortification that Anna Wetherell had suffered, upon discovering that the man whom she had entertained upon the afternoon of her arrival in Dunedin had been, in fact, the master of the house, only intensified over the weeks that followed. Crosbie Wells was now installed in the rear bedroom of number 35, Cumberland-street, and as a consequence they saw each other every day.

Anna Wetherell was painfully and perpetually conscious of the impression she created, and as a consequence of this abiding self-consciousness, her self-regard was critical to the point of fantasy. She had the inconsolable sense that there was something visible about her own character that she herself could not see, and this anxiety could not be appeased by persuasion, proof, or compliment. She was certain, when in conversation, that the unvoiced conclusions formed by those around her were both censorious and wholly apt, and because the shame she felt at this imagined censure was very real, she sought all the harder to court the good opinion of those whom she met—feeling, as she did so, that even in this project her intentions were all too visible.

Believing herself uniformly criticised, Anna would have been very surprised to learn that the impressions others formed of her were not uniform in the slightest. The artless simplicity with which she most often spoke indicated to some that she possessed an alarming store of private opinions, the frank expression of which was even more alarmingly unfeminine; to others, her speech was entirely without artifice, and refreshing for that reason. Likewise her tendency to squint upon the world was suggestive to some of fearfulness, and to others, of calculation. To Crosbie Wells, she was merely, and very simply, sweet: he found her frequent embarrassments very amusing, and had told her so more than once.

‘You’d do well in a camp, my girl,’ he said. ‘A breath of fresh air, is what you are. Unspoiled. Nothing worse than a woman with a ready answer. Nothing worse than a woman who’s forgotten how to blush.’

Lydia Wells—a woman with a great many ready answers, and who very rarely blushed—had been only infrequently seen at number 35, Cumberland-street since her husband’s unexpected return. She left the house in the late morning, and often did not return until the dusk, when the gambling parlour opened for the night. Wells, in her absence, kept mostly to the first-floor boudoir, where the decanters on the sideboard were refilled daily. Drink softened him. Anna found that she liked him best in the late afternoons, when three or four glasses of whisky had turned him pensive, but not yet sad.

Wells, it transpired, had no desire to return to the fields at Dunstan. Anna learned that he had made a strike of significant value the previous year, and he now desired to put that fortune to some use: he was considering various investments, both in Dunedin and beyond, and he spent a great deal of time poring over the local papers, comparing prices for gold, and tracking the rise and fall of various stocks. ‘Would you fancy me better as a flockmaster, or as a timber man, Miss Wetherell?’ he said, and then laughed very freely at her rising blush.

Whether Mrs. Wells comprehended Anna’s embarrassment, or the reason for it, Anna did not know. The older woman was no less warm, and her speech no less conspiratorial, than at the scene of their first meeting; but it seemed to Anna that her manner had acquired a glaze of distance—as though she were steeling herself, privately, for an impending breach in their relations. With her husband, she was similarly removed. Whenever Wells spoke she simply gazed at him, unsmiling, and then turned the conversation to an unrelated theme. Anna was devastated by these subtle tokens of displeasure, and as a consequence she strove to secure her mistress’s good opinion all the more. By now she knew very well that she had been, as Crosbie Wells had phrased it, ‘euchred’, but any energy that she might have expended in confronting her mistress on the matter of the fictitious Elizabeth Mackay (who was never again mentioned) had been directed, instead, into a disgusted self-admonishment, and a belief, privately held, that she alone could make restitution for what she and Crosbie Wells had done.

The operations of the House of Many Wishes had been revealed to Anna gently, and in degrees. The morning after her arrival in Dunedin, Mrs. Wells had showed her the downstairs parlour, and Anna had loved it at once: the velvet booths, the green glass bottles behind the bar, the card tables, the gambling wheel, the small confessional with the saloon-style doors where Mrs. Wells occasionally told fortunes for a fee. In the daylight the room seemed somehow preserved: the motes of dust, trapped in the shafts of light that fell through the high windows, had a patient, potent feel. Anna was quite awed. At her mistress’s invitation, she stepped onto the podium, and spun the gambling wheel—watching the rubber needle clack, clack, clack, towards the jackpot, only to fall, with a final clack, past it.

Mrs. Wells did not invite her to attend the evening parties immediately. From her bedroom window Anna watched the men arrive, stepping down from carriages, removing their gloves, striding up the walk to rap upon the door; soon afterwards, cigar smoke began to seep through the floorboards into her room, lending a spicy, acrid tint to the air, and turning the lamplight grey. By nine the hum of conversation had thickened to a hubbub, punctuated by snatches of laughter and applause. Anna could hear only what came up through the floor, though every time someone opened the door to the downstairs passage the noise intensified, and she could make out individual voices. Her curiosity was roused to the point of disconsolation, and after several days she inquired of Mrs. Wells, very tentatively and with much apology, whether she might be permitted to tend bar. She now did so every night, though Mrs. Wells had imposed two regulations: none of the patrons was to address her directly, and she was not permitted to dance.

‘She’s raising your value,’ Wells explained. ‘The longer they have to wait, the more you’ll fetch, when it comes time to go to market.’

‘Oh, Crosbie,’ snapped Mrs. Wells. ‘Nobody’s going to market. Don’t be absurd.’

‘Farming,’ said Wells. ‘There’s an enterprise. I could be a farmer—and you could be my farmer wife.’ To Anna he said, ‘It’s quite all right. My old ma was a whore, God rest her.’

‘He’s only trying to frighten you,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘Don’t listen to him.’

‘I’m not frightened,’ said Anna.

‘She’s not frightened,’ said Wells.

‘There’s nothing to be frightened about,’ said Mrs. Wells.

In fact Anna thought the dancing girls quite marvellous. They were incurious about her, calling her either ‘Sydney’ or ‘Port Jackson’ if they addressed her at all, but she did not possess pride enough to be offended; in any case, their air of weary indifference was a sophistication to which she privately aspired. They brought up the drinks orders from the gentlemen playing cards, and waited as Anna set out the glasses and poured. ‘A dash and a splash,’ they said, for whisky-and-water, and ‘a hard dash’, for whisky poured neat. When the drinks were poured, they slid the tray onto their hip, or hoisted it high above their heads, and sashayed back through the crowd, leaving behind them the powdery-sickly scent of greasepaint and perfume.

On the 12th of May the inhabitants of number 35, Cumberland-street rose early. The House of Many Wishes was to host a party that evening in honour of naval officers and ‘gentlemen with marine connexions’, and there was much to be done in preparation for this grand event. Mrs. Wells had hired a fiddler, and put in an order at the store for lemons, spruce liquor, rum, and several hundred yards of rope, which she planned to cut into lengths and plait, so as to adorn each table with a knotted wreath as a centrepiece.

‘I shall make the first wreath, as a template,’ she said to Anna, ‘and you can do the rest this afternoon: I will guide you through the steps, and show you how to tuck the ends away.’

‘Waste of a good Manila line,’ said Wells.

Mrs. Wells continued as if he had not spoken. ‘The wreaths look quite arresting, I think; one can never over-decorate at a themed event. If there is any rope left over, we can it pin up behind the bar.’

They were eating breakfast together—an infrequent occasion, for it was rare that Wells rose before noon, and Mrs. Wells had usually quit the place by the time Anna woke. Mrs. Wells seemed nervous; perhaps she was fearful for the success of the party.

‘They will look marvellous,’ Anna said.

‘What’s next?’ said Wells, who was out of humour. ‘A party for diggers—with a riffle-box on each table, and a tailrace from the bar? “In honour of the common man”, you could say. “A party for the unremarkable man. Gentlemen with no connexions whatsoever.” There’s a theme.’

‘Have you had enough toast, Anna?’ said Mrs. Wells.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Anna.

‘One of tonight’s guests is a decorated man,’ Mrs. Wells went on, changing the subject. ‘How about that? I think it will be the first time that I have played hostess to a naval hero. We shall have to ask him all about it—shan’t we, Anna?’

‘Yes,’ said Anna.

‘Captain Raxworthy is his name. He has a Victoria Cross; I do hope he wears it. Pass the butter, please.’

Wells passed the butter. After a moment he said, ‘Have you today’s Witness?’

‘Yes, I read it already; there was nothing of consequence to report,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘Friday papers are always light on the news.’

‘Where is it?’ said Wells. ‘The paper.’

‘Oh—I burned it,’ said Mrs. Wells.

Wells stared at her. ‘It’s still morning,’ he said.

‘I am quite aware that it is still the morning, Crosbie!’ she said, giving a little laugh. ‘I used it to light the fire in my bedroom, that’s all.’

‘It’s nine o’clock,’ Wells complained. ‘You don’t burn today’s paper at nine o’clock. Not when I haven’t even seen it yet. I’ll have to go out and buy another.’

‘Save your sixpence,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘It was nothing but gossip. Nothing to report—I’ve told you.’ She glanced at the carriage clock—the second time she had done so in as many minutes, Anna observed.

‘I like a bit of gossip,’ said Wells. ‘Anyway, you know that I’m looking at making an investment. How am I supposed to keep up with the stocks, without the paper?’

‘Yes, well, it’s done now, and it won’t hurt you to wait until tomorrow. Have you had enough toast, Anna?’

Anna frowned slightly: Mrs. Wells had asked her this already. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Good,’ said Mrs. Wells. She was tapping her foot. ‘What fun we shall have, tonight! I love to look forward to a party. And naval men are so high-spirited. And terribly good storytellers. Their stories are never dull.’

Wells was sulking. ‘You know I spend my mornings with the paper. I do it every day.’

‘You can catch up on the Leader,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘Or last week’s Lyttelton Times; it’s on my writing desk.’

‘Why didn’t you burn that, then?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, Crosbie!’ snapped Mrs. Wells. ‘I’m sure it won’t do you any harm to occupy yourself in some other way. Read a settler’s pamphlet. I have a store of them on the bureau downstairs.’

Wells drained his coffee and set his cup down with a clatter. ‘I need the key to the safe,’ he announced.

It seemed to Anna that Mrs. Wells stiffened slightly. She did not look at her husband, but concentrated on buttering her toast; after a moment, she said, ‘Why is that?’

‘What do you mean, why? I want to look at my dust.’

‘We had agreed to wait until a more prudent time to sell,’ said Mrs. Wells.

‘I’m not selling anything. I just want to take stock of my affairs, that’s all. Go through my papers.’

‘I’d hardly call them “papers”,’ said Mrs. Wells, laughing slightly.

‘What else?’

‘Oh—you make it sound so grand, that’s all.’

‘My miner’s right. That’s a paper.’

‘What need could you possibly have for your miner’s right?’

He was scowling. ‘What is this—a royal inquisition?’

‘Of course not.’

‘It’s what they are,’ said Wells. ‘Papers. And there’s a letter in there I’d like to read over.’

‘Oh, come,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘You must have read that thing a thousand times, Crosbie. Even I know its every phrasing by heart! “Dear Boy—you do not know me—”’

Wells brought his fist down on the table, causing all of the crockery to jump. ‘Shut your mouth,’ he said.

‘Crosbie!’ said Mrs. Wells, in shock.

‘There’s sport and then there’s sporting,’ said Wells. ‘You just crossed over.’

For a moment, it seemed as though Mrs. Wells were about to make a retort, but she thought better of it. She dabbed her mouth with a napkin, regaining composure. ‘Forgive me,’ she said.

‘Forgiveness doesn’t cut it. I want the key.’

She tried to laugh again. ‘Really, Crosbie; today is not the day. Not with the naval party this evening—and so much to organise. Let us put it off until to-morrow. We can sit down together, you and me—’

‘I’m not putting it off until to-morrow,’ said Wells. ‘Give me the key.’

She rose from the table. ‘I’m afraid you’ve heard my final word on the matter,’ she said. ‘Excuse me.’

‘Excuse me—I’m afraid you haven’t heard mine,’ said Wells. He pushed his chair back from the table and rose also. ‘Where is it—on your necklace?’

She edged around the table away from him. ‘In actual fact, it is in a safe box at the bank,’ she said. ‘I don’t keep a copy at home. If you wait just a—’

‘Rot,’ said Wells. ‘It’s on your necklace.’

She took another step away from him, seeming, for the first time, alarmed. ‘Please, Crosbie; don’t cause a scene.’

He advanced upon her. ‘Give it.’

She tried to smile, but her mouth trembled. ‘Crosbie,’ she said again, ‘be reasonable. We have—’

‘Give it to me.’

‘You are causing a scene.’

‘I’ll cause a bigger scene than this. Give it up.’

She tried to make for the door, but he was too fast: his hands shot out, and grabbed her. She twisted her body away—and for a moment they struggled—and then Wells, scrabbling with one hand at her bodice, found what he was looking for: a thin silver chain, from which a fat silver key was dangling. He wrenched it out, gathering the key in his fist, and tried to snap the chain. It tore at her neck, and would not break: she cried out. He tried again, more sharply. She was beating his chest with her fists. Grunting, he fought to restrain her, still with the chain wrapped around his fist. He tore at her neck again. ‘Crosbie,’ she gasped, ‘Crosbie.’ At last it broke, and the key was in his hand; she gave a sob. At once he turned, panting slightly, and went to the safe. He fitted the key into the lock, rattling the handle several times before the mechanism clicked, and then the heavy door swung open.

The safe was empty.

‘Where’s my money?’ said Crosbie Wells.

Mrs. Wells swayed, her hands cupped around her neck. Her eyes were filled with tears. ‘If you calm down just a moment,’ she said, ‘I can explain.’

‘Who needs calming?’ said Wells. ‘I asked a simple question, that’s all. Where’s my bonanza?’

‘Now, Crosbie, listen,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘I can get it back—the bonanza. I only put it away for a while. Somewhere safe. I can get it back for you, but not until to-morrow. All right? Tonight there are a great many distinguished gentlemen coming to the house, and I haven’t the time to—to go to—to where I’ve hidden it. There’s just too much to do.’

‘Where are my papers?’ said Wells. ‘My miner’s right. My birth certificate. The letter from my father.’

‘They’re with the bonanza.’

‘Are they, now. And where is that?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Why not, Mrs. Wells?’

‘It’s complicated,’ she said.

‘I would imagine it is.’

‘I can get them back for you.’

‘Can you?’

‘To-morrow. After the party.’

‘Why not today? Why not this morning?’

‘You can stop hectoring me,’ she said, flaring up. ‘I simply can’t manage it today. You’ll have to wait until to-morrow.’

‘You’re asking for time,’ said Wells. ‘I wonder why.’

‘Crosbie, the party,’ she said.

Wells looked at her for a long moment. Then he crossed the room and pulled sharply upon the bell-rope. The maid Lucy appeared within moments.

‘Lucy,’ said Wells, ‘go on down to George-street and pick me up a copy of today’s Otago Witness. Mrs. Wells appears to have burned our copy, by mistake.’

GOLD

In which Francis Carver receives a message, and Staines is left alone.

The fit of whimsical good humour that had prompted Emery Staines, on the afternoon of his arrival in Dunedin, to commission a natal chart from Mrs. Lydia Wells, medium, spiritist, had been only intensified by the forecast itself, which, being uniformly providential, had put him in such high spirits that he felt inclined to celebrate. He had awoken the next morning with a terrible headache and a guilty sensation of indebtedness; upon applying to the hotelier he discovered, to his alarm, that he was in debt to the house to the tune of eight pounds, having put up a fortnight’s stipend on a game of brag, only to lose every penny of it, and five pounds more. The circumstances under which he had become so grossly indebted were somewhat hazy in his memory, and he begged the hotelier for a cup of coffee on credit so that he might sit awhile and consider how best to proceed. This request was granted, and he was still sitting at the bar some three quarters of an hour later when Francis Carver appeared, sponsorship papers in hand.

Carver made his offer in plain speech and without preamble. He would provide enough capital to furnish Staines with a miner’s right, a swag, and a ticket to the nearest payable goldfield; he added, casually, that he would also be happy to pay any debts that Staines might have incurred in Dunedin since his arrival the previous day. In return, Staines would agree to sign over half-shares of his first claim, with dividends in perpetuity, and this income would be routed back to Carver’s account in Dunedin by private mail.

Emery Staines knew at once that he had been played for a fool. He remembered enough of the early hours of the previous evening to know that Carver had been excessively solicitous of him, ensuring that his bets were always matched, his company was always lively, and his glass was always filled. He also had the shadowy sense that the gambling debt had been imposed upon him in some way, for his weakness for cards was of a very ordinary, cheerful sort, and he had never before thrown away such a large sum of money in a single evening. But he was amused that he had been swindled so soon after his adventure began, and his amusement led him to feel a kind of affection for Carver, as one feels affection for a crafty opponent in chess. He decided to chalk the whole business up to experience, and accepted Carver’s terms of sponsorship with characteristic good humour; but he resolved, privately, to be more vigilant in the future. To have been bested once was diverting, but he swore that he would not be bested a second time.

Staines was not a terribly good judge of character. He loved to be enchanted, and so was very often drawn to persons whose manner was suggestive of tragedy, romance, or myth. If he suspected that there was a strain of something very dastardly in Carver, he conceived of that quality only in the most fanciful, piratical sense; had he pursued this impression, he would have found only that it delighted him. Carver was more than twenty years Staines’s senior, and was as brawny and dark as Staines was slight and fair. He held himself in the manner of one ready to inflict damage at any moment, spoke gruffly, and very rarely smiled. Staines thought him wonderful.

Once the contract had been signed, Carver’s manner became gruffer still. Otago, he said, was past its prime as a goldfield. Staines would do much better to make for the new-built town of Hokitika in the West, where, as rumour had it, a man could make his fortune in a single day. The Hokitika landing was notoriously treacherous, however, and two steamers had been wrecked already upon the bar: for this reason Carver insisted that Staines make the passage to the West Coast under sail rather than under steam. If Staines would consent to accompany him firstly to the customhouse, secondly to the outfitter’s on Princes-street, and thirdly to the Reserve Bank, their arrangement could be finalised by noon. Staines did consent, and within three hours he was in possession of a miner’s right, a swag, and a ticket to Hokitika upon the schooner Blanche, which was not due to depart Port Chalmers until the morning of the 13th of May.

Over the two weeks that followed Staines and Carver saw a great deal of one another. Carver had a month of shore leave while the barque upon which he worked was refitted and recaulked; he took his lodging, as Staines also did, at the Hawthorn Hotel on George-street. They very often breakfasted together, and occasionally Staines accompanied Carver in his chores and appointments around the city, chattering all the while. Carver did not discourage this, and although he communicated little beyond a repressed and constant anxiety, Staines flattered himself that his company was a gratifying and much-needed diversion.

Emery Staines knew very well that he created a singular impression in the minds of all those whom he met. This knowledge had become, over time, an expectation, as a consequence of which, his singularity had become even more pronounced. His manner showed a curious mixture of longing and enthusiasm, which is to say that his enthusiasms were always of a wistful sort, and his longings, always enthusiastic. He was delighted by things of an improbable or impractical nature, which he sought out with the open-hearted gladness of a child at play. When he spoke, he did so originally, and with an idealistic agony that was enough to make all but the most rigid of his critics smile; when he was silent, one had the sense, watching him, that his imagination was nevertheless usefully occupied, for he often sighed, or nodded, as though in agreement with an interlocutor whom no one else could see.

His disposition to be sunny was, it seemed, unshakeable; however this attitude had not been formed in consultation with any moral code. In general his beliefs were intuitively rather than scrupulously held, and he was not selective in choosing his society—feeling, in his intuitive way, that it was the duty of every thinking man to expose himself to a great range of characters, situations, and points of view. He had read extensively, and although he favoured the Romantics above all others, and never tired of discussing the properties of the sublime, he was by no means a strict disciple of that school, or indeed, of any school at all. A solitary, unsupervised childhood, spent for the most part in his father’s library, had prepared Emery Staines for a great many possible lives without ever preferring one. He might just as soon be found in morning dress debating Cicero and Seneca as in boots and woollen trousers, ascending a mountain in search of a view, and in both cases he was bound to be enjoying himself a great deal.

On his twenty-first birthday, he was asked where he wished to go in the world, to which he immediately responded ‘Otago’—knowing that the rushes in Victoria had abated, and having long been enamoured of the idea of the prospector’s life, which he conceived of in terms quixotic and alchemical. He saw the metal shining, unseen, undiscovered, upon some lonely beach of some uncharted land; he saw the moon rising full and yellow over the open sea; he saw himself riding on horseback through the shallows of a creek, and sleeping on the bare earth, and running water through a wooden cradle, and twining digger’s dough around a stick to bake above the embers of a fire. What a fine thing it would be, he thought, to be able to say that one’s fortune was older than all the ages of men and history; to say that one had chanced upon it, had plucked it from the earth with one’s own bare hands.

His request was granted: passage was duly bought upon the steamer Fortunate Wind, bound for Port Chalmers. On the day of his departure his father advised him to keep his wits about him, to practise kindness, and to come home once he had seen enough of the world to know his place in it. Foreign travel, he said, was the very best of educations, and it was a gentleman’s duty to see and understand the world. Once they had shaken hands, he presented young Staines with an envelope of paper money, advised him not to spend it all at once, and bid him good morning, quite as if the boy were simply stepping out for a stroll, and would be back in time for dinner.

‘What does he do for a living?’ said Carver.

‘He’s a magistrate,’ said Staines.

‘A good one?’

The boy sighed, throwing his head back a little. ‘Oh … yes, I suppose he is good. How do I paint a picture of my father? He is a reading man, and he is well regarded in his profession, but he has a queer sense of things. For example: he tells me my inheritance comprises only his fiddle and his shaving razor—saying that if a man is to make his way in the world, all he needs is a good shave and the means to make some music. I believe he’s written it into his will like that, and portioned everything else to my mother. He’s a little peculiar.’

‘Hm,’ said Carver.

They were breakfasting together at the Hawthorn Hotel for the very last time. The next morning, the schooner Blanche was scheduled to depart for Hokitika, with the barque Godspeed, newly caulked and fitted, bound for Melbourne some hours later.

‘Do you know,’ Staines added, as he tapped his egg, ‘that is the first time since my landing in Dunedin that somebody has asked me what my father does for a living; but I have been asked where I shall make my fortune no less than a dozen times, and I have been offered all kinds of sponsorship, and I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked what I mean to do with my pile, once I have amassed a competence! What a curious phrase that is—a “competence”. It seems to sell the notion awfully short.’

‘Yes,’ said Carver, his eyes on the Otago Witness.

‘Are you expecting someone?’ said Staines.

‘What?’ said Carver, without looking up.

‘Only that you’ve been reading the shipping news for the past ten minutes,’ said Staines, ‘and you’ve hardly touched your breakfast.’

‘I’m not waiting for anyone,’ said Carver. He turned a page of the paper and began to read the goldfields correspondence.

They lapsed into silence for a time. Carver kept his eyes upon the paper; Staines finished his egg. Just as Staines was about to rise from the table and excuse himself, the front door opened, and a penny postman walked in. ‘Mr. Francis Carver,’ he called.

‘That’s me,’ said Carver, raising his hand.

He tore open the envelope and scanned the paper briefly. Staines could see, through the thinness of the paper, that the letter was composed of only one line of script.

‘I do hope it’s not bad news,’ he said.

Carver did not move for a long moment; then he crushed the paper in his hand and tossed it sideways into the fire. He reached into his pocket for a penny, and once the postman had scurried away, he turned to Staines and said, ‘What would you say to a gold sovereign?’

‘I don’t believe I’ve ever addressed one before,’ said Staines.

Carver stared at him.

‘Do you need help?’ Staines said.

‘Yes. Come with me.’

Staines followed his sponsor up the stairs. He waited while Carver unlocked the door to his private quarters, and then stepped into the room after him. He had never set foot in Carver’s room before. It was much larger than his own, but similarly furnished. It still held the musty, bodily smell of sleep: Carver’s bedclothes were twisted in the centre of the mattress. In the centre of the room was an iron-strapped chest. Pasted to the lid was a yellow bill of lading:

BEARER ALISTAIR LAUDERBACK

SHIPPER DANFORTH SHIPPING

CARRIER GODSPEED

‘I need you to watch over this,’ said Carver.

‘What’s inside it?’

‘Don’t you mind what’s inside it. I just need you to watch over it, until I come back. Two hours, maybe. Three hours. I’ve got some business up town. There’d be a sovereign in it for you.’

Staines raised his eyebrows. ‘A whole sovereign—to watch a chest for three hours? Whatever for?’

‘You’d be doing me a favour,’ said Carver. ‘I don’t forget a favour.’

‘It must be terribly valuable,’ said Staines.

‘To me it is,’ said Carver. ‘Do you want the job?’

‘Well—all right,’ said Staines, smiling. ‘As a favour. I’d be glad.’

‘You’d best have a pistol,’ said Carver, going to the bureau.

Staines was so astonished he laughed. ‘A pistol?’ he said.

Carver found a single-loading revolver, snapped open the breech, and peered into it. Then he nodded, snapped it back together, and passed it to Staines.

‘Should I expect to use this?’ said Staines, turning it over.

‘No,’ said Carver. ‘Just wave it about, if anyone walks in.’

‘Wave it about?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who’s going to walk in?’

‘Nobody,’ said Carver. ‘Nobody’s going to walk in.’

‘What’s in the trunk?’ Staines said again. ‘I really think I ought to know. I can keep a secret.’

Carver shook his head. ‘The less you know, the better.’

‘It’s not a matter of knowing less; it’s a matter of knowing nothing at all! Am I some kind of an accomplice? Is this some kind of a heist? Truly, Mr. Carver, I can keep a secret.’

‘There’s another thing,’ said Carver. ‘Just for today, my name isn’t Carver. It’s Wells. Francis Wells. If anyone comes asking, I’m Francis Wells. Never mind why.’

‘Good Lord,’ said the boy.

‘What?’

‘Only that you’re being dreadfully mysterious.’

Carver rounded on him suddenly. ‘If you run off, it’ll be a breach of our contract. I’ll have grounds to seek recompense in whatever way I see fit.’

‘I won’t run off,’ said the boy.

‘You keep your eye on that trunk until I get back, and you’ll walk away with a pound coin. What’s my name?’

‘Mr. Wells,’ said the boy.

‘Mind you remember it. I’ll be three hours.’

Once Carver had gone, Staines set the pistol on the bureau, the muzzle faced away, and knelt to look at the trunk. The hasp had been padlocked. He lifted the padlock to examine the profile of the keyhole—observing, to his satisfaction, that the lock was of a very simple design. Smiling suddenly, he took out his clasp knife, unfolded the blade, and fitted the point of his knife into the keyhole. He jimmied it for nearly a minute before the mechanism clicked.

COPPER

In which Wells’s suspicion deepens; Anna becomes alarmed; and a package arrives at the House of Many Wishes, addressed to Mrs. Wells.

Crosbie Wells read the Otago Witness from top to bottom, and in perfect silence. When he was done, he shook out the paper, folded it crisply along the seam, and rose from his chair. Mrs. Wells was sitting opposite him. Her expression was cold. He advanced upon her, tossed the paper into her lap—she flinched slightly—and then placed his hands on his hips, surveying her.

‘Arrivals caught my eye,’ he said.

She said nothing.

‘One name in particular. Active is the name of the steamer. Arriving at the top of the tide. When’s that? Sundown.’

Still she said nothing.

‘Seems odd you didn’t tell me,’ said Wells. ‘I’ve only been waiting—what—twelve years? Twelve years, and no reply. All these years I’ve been in the highlands, digging for gold. Now the man himself arrives in town, and you knew about it, and you made no mention. No: it’s worse than keeping quiet. You set out to deceive me. You burned the paper in the bloody stove. That’s a black deceit, Mrs. Wells. That’s a cold deceit.’

She kept composure. ‘You are quite right,’ she said. ‘I should never have deceived you.’

‘Why did you burn it?’

‘I didn’t want the news to spoil the party,’ she said. ‘If you’d discovered he was arriving tonight, you might have gone down to the quay—and he might have spurned you—and you might have become upset.’

‘But that is just what has me confounded, Mrs. Wells.’

‘What?’ she said.

‘The party.’

‘It’s only a party.’

‘Is it?’

‘Crosbie,’ she said, ‘don’t be foolish. If you go looking for a conspiracy, you will find a conspiracy. It’s a party, and that’s all.’

‘“Gentlemen with marine connexions”,’ said Wells. ‘Naval types. What do you care about naval types?’

‘I care that they are men of considerable rank and influence, because I care about my business, and the party will do my business good. Everybody loves a theme. It lends a flavour to an evening.’

‘Does Mr. Alistair Lauderback get an invite, I wonder?’

‘Of course not,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘Why should I invite him? I’ve never set eyes upon the man in my life. And anyway—as I told you—it was precisely because I didn’t want you to get upset that I burned this morning’s paper. You’re very right: I shouldn’t have, and I’m very sorry to have deceived you. But the party, I assure you, is only a party.’

‘What about the bonanza?’ said Wells. ‘And my papers? How do they fit in?’

‘I’m afraid they don’t,’ said Mrs. Wells.

‘I have half a mind to take a stroll down to Port Chalmers,’ said Wells. ‘Around sundown. Nice night for it. Bit chilly, perhaps.’

‘By all means do so,’ said Mrs. Wells.

‘I’d miss the party, of course.’

‘That would be a shame.’

‘Would it?’

She sighed. ‘Crosbie,’ she said, ‘you are being very silly.’

He leaned closer. ‘Where’s my money, Mrs. Wells?’

‘It is in a vault at the Reserve.’

‘Liar. Where is it?’

‘It is in a vault at the Reserve.’

‘Where is it?’

‘It is in a vault at the Reserve.’

‘Liar.’

‘Insulting me,’ said Mrs. Wells, ‘will not—’

He slapped her, hard, across the face. ‘You’re a dirty liar,’ he said, ‘a rotten thief, and I’ll call you worse before I’m through with you.’

A perfect silence followed. Mrs. Wells did not reach up to touch her cheek where he had slapped her. She stayed perfectly still—and Wells, suddenly vexed, turned away from her, and crossed the room to where the decanters and bottles were set out upon their silver tray. He poured himself a measure, drank it off, and then poured another. Anna kept her eyes on her rope wreath, which was becoming misshapen under her trembling fingers. She did not dare to look at Mrs. Wells.

Just then there came a swift knock at the front door, and then a voice, calling through the slot: ‘Package for Mrs. Lydia Wells.’

Mrs. Wells made to rise, but Crosbie Wells shouted, ‘No.’ He had become very flushed. ‘You’ll stay right there.’ He pointed to Anna with the hand that held his glass. ‘You,’ he said. ‘Go and see.’

She did. It was a bottle, pint-sized, wrapped in brown paper, and stamped with the matrix of the chemist on George-street.

‘What is it?’ called Wells, from the floor above.

‘It’s a package from the chemist’s,’ Anna called back.

There was a pause, and then Mrs. Wells said, speaking clearly, ‘Oh: I know what it is. It’s hair tonic. I placed the order last week.’

Anna returned upstairs, the package in her hand.

‘Hair tonic,’ said Wells.

‘Really, Crosbie,’ said Mrs. Wells, ‘you are becoming paranoiac.’ To Anna she said, ‘You can put it in my room. On the nightstand, please.’

Wells was still glaring at his wife. ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘Not until you tell me the truth. You’re staying right here—where I can keep an eye on you.’

‘In that case I look forward to a very dull afternoon,’ said Mrs. Wells.

Crosbie Wells responded angrily to this, and they continued bickering. Anna, glad to have a reason to exit, took the paper-wrapped bottle across the hallway and into the hushed darkness of Mrs. Wells’s bedroom. She went to set the bottle down upon the nightstand when something caught her eye: a bottle of hair tonic, half the size of the bottle she was holding in her hand, and not at all alike in its dimensions. Frowning, she looked at the package in her hand—and then, on a sudden impulse, slid her finger underneath the wrapping, and sloughed the paper away. The bottle was unmarked; it had been corked, and the cork had been sealed with candle wax. She held it up to the light. It contained a thick, treacly liquid, the colour of rust.

‘Laudanum,’ she whispered.

WU XING

In which Emery Staines does Carver’s bidding, and Ah Sook is effectively deceived.

Staines held the gown up to the light, wondering. There were five in total—one of orange silk, and the rest of muslin—but apart from them the chest was quite empty. What was the meaning of it? Perhaps they held some sentimental value for Carver … but if so, then why had he outfitted Staines with a pistol, in watching over them? Perhaps they were stolen goods, though they did not look at all valuable … or perhaps, Staines thought, Carver was going mad. This thought cheered him; he chuckled aloud, and then, shaking his head, returned the gowns to the chest.

There came a sharp knock upon the door.

‘Who is it?’ said Staines.

There was no answer; but after a moment the caller knocked again.

‘Who’s there?’ said Staines again.

The caller knocked a third time, more urgently. Staines felt his heartbeat quicken. He went to the bureau and picked up the pistol. Holding it flat against his thigh, he walked to the door, unlatched it, and opened it a crack.

‘Yes?’ he said.

In the hallway stood a Chinese man of perhaps thirty years, dressed in a tunic and a woollen cape.

‘Francis Carver,’ he said.

Staines remembered Carver’s instruction. ‘I’m afraid there’s nobody of that name here,’ he said. ‘You don’t mean Mr. Wells—Francis Wells?’

The Chinese man shook his head. ‘Carver,’ he said. He produced a piece of paper from his breast, and held it out. Curious, Staines took it. It was a letter from the Cockatoo Island Penitentiary, thanking Mr. Yongsheng for his inquiry, and informing him that upon his release from gaol Mr. Francis Carver had sailed for Dunedin, New Zealand, upon the steamer Sparta. At the bottom of the letter—and in a much darker shade of ink—somebody else had written Hawthorn Hotel. Staines stared at the note for a long time. He had not known that Carver was a former convict; the news was striking to him, but he found, upon further reflection, that it was not wholly unexpected. At last, and with great reluctance, he shook his head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, passing the piece of paper back to the Chinese man, and smiling apologetically. ‘There’s nobody named Francis Carver here.’

IRON

In which Crosbie Wells puts two and two together.

An interminable afternoon passed at number 35, Cumberland-street. Together Anna and Mrs. Wells had constructed fifteen plaited wreaths, which they installed in the parlour downstairs, watched over by Wells, who drank steadily and did not speak. Behind the rostrum they had fashioned a ‘mainsail’ made from an oar and a white bedsheet, which they reefed with lengths of twine; behind the bar they had hung a string of admiralty flags. Once the wreaths had been arranged, they set out lemons and spruce liquor, trimmed candles, polished glasses, refilled the spirit lamps, and dusted—stretching each task out as long as possible, and taking every excuse to make small trips upstairs and to the kitchen, so as to avoid the dreadful silence of embittered company.

They were interrupted, a little after four, by a brisk knock at the front door.

‘Who can that be?’ said Mrs. Wells, frowning. ‘The girls aren’t due until seven. I never receive callers at this time of day.’

‘I’ll answer it,’ said Wells.

On the threshold was a Chinese man in a tunic and a woollen cape.

‘What have we got here?’ said Wells. ‘You’re not a naval man.’

‘Good afternoon,’ said the other. ‘I look for Francis Carver.’

‘What?’ said Crosbie Wells.

‘I look for Francis Carver.’

‘Carver, you said?’

‘Yes.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘He live here,’ said the Chinese man.

‘Afraid he doesn’t, mate. This place belongs to a Mrs. Lydia Wells. I’m her lucky husband. Crosbie’s my name.’

‘Not Carver?’

‘I don’t know anyone by the name of Carver,’ said Wells.

‘Francis Carver,’ the man supplied.

‘Can’t help you, I’m afraid.’

The Chinese man frowned. He reached into his pocket and withdrew the same letter that he had presented to Emery Staines, some two hours prior. He handed it to Wells. The words Hawthorn Hotel had been scratched out; beneath them, in a different hand, someone had written House of Many Wishes, Cumb’d-st.

‘Someone gave you this address?’ said Wells.

‘Yes,’ said the Chinese man.

‘Who?’ said Wells.

‘Harbourmaster,’ said the Chinese man.

‘I’m afraid the Harbourmaster’s put you wrong, mate,’ said Wells, passing the letter back to him. ‘There’s no one of that name at this address. What’s it you’re wanting him for?’

‘To bring to justice,’ said the Chinese man.

‘Justice,’ said Wells, grinning. ‘All right. Well, I hope he deserves it. Good luck.’

He closed the door—and then suddenly stopped, his hand upon the frame. Suddenly he turned, and, taking the steps two at a time, returned upstairs to the boudoir, where the Otago Witness was folded upon the bureau. He snatched it up. After scanning the columns for several minutes he saw, listed among the projected departures for the following day:

Jetty Four

: Godspeed,

dest. Port Phillip. Crew comprising J. RAXWORTHY (captain), P. LOGAN (mate), H. PETERSEN (second mate), J. DRAFFIN (steward), M. DEWEY (cook), W. COLLINS (boatswain), E. COLE, M. JERISON, C. SOLBERG, F. CARVER (seamen).

‘Who was that at the door?’

Anna had come up behind him. She was holding a brass candleholder in each hand. ‘Was it Lucy, back from the store? Mrs. Wells is wanting her.’

‘It was a Chinaman,’ said Wells.

‘What did he want?’

‘He was looking for someone.’

‘Who?’

Wells studied her. ‘Do you know anyone who ever did time at Cockatoo Island?’

‘No.’

‘Nor do I.’

‘That’s hard labour,’ said Anna. ‘Cockatoo is hard labour.’

‘Not for the faint-hearted, I should think.’

‘Who was he looking for?’

Wells hesitated, but then he said, ‘Ever heard of a Francis Carver?’

‘No.’

‘Ever seen an ex-con?’

‘How would I know one?’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t,’ said Wells.

There was a pause; presently she said, ‘Should I tell Mrs. Wells?’

‘No,’ said Wells. ‘Stop a moment.’

‘I was only supposed to come up for these,’ said Anna, holding up the candleholders. ‘I really ought to be getting back.’

Wells rolled the Otago Witness into a tube. ‘She’s a heartless woman, Anna. Not a bone of true feeling in Mrs. Lydia Wells: it’s profit or bust. She’s taken my money, and she’ll take yours, and we’ll be ruined—both of us. We’ll be ruined.’

‘Yes,’ Anna said, miserably. ‘I know.’

He brandished the rolled paper. ‘Do you know what this says? Man named Carver listed as a crewman on a private charter. Leaving on to-morrow’s tide. A gentleman with a marine connexion, in other words.’

‘I suppose that means he’ll be at the party,’ Anna said.

‘And another thing: the master of the craft. Raxworthy.’

‘Mrs. Wells mentioned him at breakfast,’ Anna said.

‘Indeed she did,’ said Wells, striking the paper upon his leg. ‘Everything’s beginning to add up. Only I can’t quite see it yet. The picture.’

‘What’s adding up?’

‘All day,’ he explained, ‘I’ve been wondering one thing: what could she possibly want with my papers? My miner’s right. My birth certificate. I’ve no doubt she lifted them, as she lifted the bonanza too; but she wouldn’t bother with anything unless it could be put to some use, and what use for an old man’s papers could she possibly have? None at all, I thought. In that case, she must have dispatched them somehow. Passed them on. But to whom? What kind of a man might have need for another man’s papers? That’s when it struck me. A man running from his past, I thought. A man with a tarnished name, who wants to start over with a better one. A man looking to put some chapter of his life behind him.’

Anna waited, frowning.

‘Here’s a d—n certainty,’ said Wells, holding up the rolled paper like a sceptre. ‘I don’t know how, and I don’t know why or what for, but I’ll tell you here and now, little Anna, that tonight I’ll be making the acquaintance of a Mr. Francis Carver.’

TIN

In which Carver takes an alias, and Lauderback signs his name.

‘Wells,’ said Lauderback, coming up short.

‘Good evening,’ said Francis Carver. He was sitting in a chair facing the gangway. There was a pistol in his hand.

‘What is this?’ said Lauderback.

‘Do come in.’

‘What is this?’ he said again.

‘A conversation,’ said Carver.

‘But what’s it about?’

‘I recommend that you step into the cabin, Mr. Lauderback.’

‘Why?’

Carver said nothing, but the muzzle of the pistol twitched a little.

‘I haven’t laid my eyes on her since last we spoke,’ Lauderback said. ‘Upon my honour. When you told me to step away, Mr. Wells, I stepped away. I’ve been in Akaroa these nine months past. I only just arrived back in town tonight—just now, in fact; this very moment. I’ve kept away—just as you asked of me.’

‘Says you,’ said Carver.

‘Yes, says me! Do you doubt my word?’

‘No.’

‘Then what do you mean—says me?’

‘Only that on paper it says different.’

Lauderback faltered. ‘I have not the slightest idea what paper you’re talking about,’ he said after a moment, ‘I shall hazard to guess, however, that you are alluding in some way to the Danforth receipt.’

‘I am,’ said Carver.

With a swift look over his shoulder, Lauderback stepped into the cabin and pulled the hatch closed behind him. ‘All right,’ he said, when he was inside. ‘Something’s cooking. Or cooked.’

‘Yes,’ said Carver.

‘Is this about Crosbie?’ said Lauderback. ‘Is this something to do with Crosbie?’

‘You know,’ said Carver, ‘I worry about old Crosbie.’

He did not go on. After a moment Lauderback said, in a fearful voice, ‘Do you?’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Carver. ‘One of these days, that poor man is going to drink himself to death.’

Lauderback had begun to sweat. ‘Where’s Raxworthy?’ he said.

‘Getting drunk on Cumberland-street, I believe.’

‘What about Danforth?’

‘The same,’ said Carver.

‘They’re in your pocket, are they?’

‘No,’ said Carver. ‘You are.’

TAR

In which Carver comes to finish the deed; Crosbie Wells makes a counter-attack; and the laudanum takes effect.

When Francis Carver rapped upon the door of number 35 Cumberland-street some two hours later, the naval party was in full swing: he could hear rhythmic clapping and the stamp of feet, and raucous laughter. He knocked again, more sharply. The maid Lucy appeared after his fourth knock; once she saw that it was Carver, she invited him inside, and flew down the passage to summon Mrs. Wells.

‘Oh, Francis,’ she said, when she saw him. ‘Thank heavens.’

‘It came off,’ said Carver. He patted his breast, where the deed of sale lay folded in his inside pocket. ‘Everything signed, effective instant. I’ve got a boy keeping an eye on him—Lauderback—until the morning. But I doubt he’ll do any talking.’

‘You didn’t hurt him, did you?’

‘No: he’s feeling very sorry for himself, that’s all. What’s been happening here?’

She dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘after that awful brawl this morning—and a wretched day—we’ve had the most incredible luck. Crosbie’s taken up with my new girl. Perhaps he thought to spite me, by taking her to bed … but I couldn’t have thought of anything I wanted more, than to have the two of them out of the way for the evening. The moment they were alone, I sent up Lucy with a fresh decanter.’

‘Laced?’

‘Of course.’

‘How strong?’

‘I used half the bottle.’

‘Anything come of it?’

‘I haven’t heard a peep,’ she said. ‘Not a sound.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll go up. I’ll need fifteen minutes.’

‘He’s very angry. He knows about the gold—as I told you—and he found out about Lauderback arriving. You must be careful.’

‘I won’t need to be careful if he’s sauced.’

‘You won’t shoot him—will you, Francis?’

‘Don’t worry your head about it.’

‘I want to know.’

‘I’ll tap him on the head,’ said Carver, ‘that’s all.’

‘Not here!’

‘No—not here. I’ll take him someplace else.’

‘The girl’s still up there, you know. She might have gone down with him. I don’t know.’

‘I’ll deal with her. I’ll tell her to leave before anything happens. Don’t you worry.’

‘What should I do?’

‘Get on back to the party. Pour Raxworthy another drink.’

Carver put his ear to the door; hearing nothing, he eased the door handle, very quietly. It opened without a sound. The room was dark, but in the chamber beyond, a small lamp was burning. There was someone in the bed: the bedclothes were mounded, and he could see a splash of dark hair on the pillow. Keeping his hand on his hip, he moved slowly forward, into the room.

He heard the whistle of something heavy slicing through air, and almost turned—but before he could do so, he was clubbed on the back of the head, and he stumbled to his knees. He whirled about, his hand closing around the grip of his pistol—but Crosbie Wells swung the poker again, cracking him across the knuckles, and again, across the jaw. Carver recoiled in pain. He brought his hands up, instinctively, to protect his face. A fourth strike made contact with his elbow, and a fifth cracked him just above his temple. He collapsed sideways, suddenly weak, upon the floor.

Wells darted forward and tried to yank the pistol from the man’s belt with his free hand. Carver grabbed his arm, and they tussled a moment, until Wells cracked him another time across the side of the head with the poker. He lost his grip, and fell back. At last Wells gained purchase on the pistol, and wrenched it free; once it was in his hand he cocked it, levelled it in Carver’s face, and stood a moment, panting. Carver grunted, bringing his arms up to his face. He was dazed: the lights in the room had begun to pulse.

‘Who are you?’

Carver peered at him. There was blood in his mouth.

Wells was holding the pistol in his left hand, and the poker in his right. He raised the poker a little, threatening to strike again. ‘Are you Francis Carver? You speak or I’ll shoot you dead. Is your name Carver?’

‘Used to be,’ said Carver.

‘What is it now?’

Carver grinned at him, showing bloody teeth. ‘Crosbie Wells,’ he said.

Wells came closer. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he said.

‘Go ahead,’ said Carver, and closed his eyes.

Wells raised the poker again. ‘Where’s my bonanza?’

‘Gone.’

‘Where is it, I said?’

‘Shipped offshore.’

‘Who shipped it? You?’

Carver opened his eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You did.’

Wells brought the poker down. It glanced off the other man’s temple—and Carver fainted away. Wells waited a moment, to see if he was shamming, but the faint was plainly real: he was showing the whites of his eyes, and one of his hands was twitching.

Wells laid the poker down, out of Carver’s reach. He transferred the pistol to his right hand. Tentatively, he pushed the muzzle of the pistol into Carver’s cheek, and nudged him. The man’s head rolled back.

‘Is he dead?’ said Anna, from the doorway. Her face was white.

‘No. He’s breathing.’

With his left hand Wells took his bowie knife from his boot, and unsheathed the blade.

‘Will you kill him?’ Anna whispered.

‘No.’

‘What will you do?’

Wells did not answer. Using his pistol to keep Carver’s head steady, he inserted the point of his knife just below the outer corner of Carver’s left eye. Blood welled up instantly, running thickly down his cheek. With a sudden flick of his wrist, Wells twisted the blade, slicing from his eye down to his jaw. He leaped back—but Carver did not wake; he only gurgled. His cheek was now awash with blood; it was running off the line of his jaw and soaking into his collar.

‘C for Carver,’ said Wells quietly, staring at him. ‘You’re a man to remember now, Francis Carver. You’re the man with the scar.’

He looked up and caught Anna’s eye. Her hands were over her mouth; she looked horrified. He jerked his chin at the decanter on the sideboard. ‘Have a drink,’ he said. ‘You’ll be asleep in a minute. Only you’d better do it fast.’

Anna glanced at the decanter. The laudanum had darkened the whisky very slightly, giving the liquid a coppery glow. ‘How much?’ she said.

‘As much as you can stomach,’ said Wells. ‘And then lie down on your side—not your back. You’ll drown on your own self, otherwise.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘No time at all,’ said Crosbie Wells. He wiped his knife on the carpet, sheathed it, and then stood, ready to leave.

‘Wait.’ Anna ran into the bedroom. A moment later she returned with the gold nugget that he had first given her, the afternoon of their first encounter. ‘Here,’ she said, pressing it into his hands. ‘Take it. You can use it to get away.’

MAKEWEIGHTS

In which Crosbie Wells asks for help; a customs agent becomes angry; and a bill of lading is recalled.

‘Psst—Bill!’

The official looked up from his newspaper. ‘Who’s that?’

‘It’s Wells. Crosbie Wells.’

‘Come out where I can see you.’

‘Here.’ He emerged into the light, palms up.

‘What are you doing—creeping about in the dark?’

Wells took another step forward. Still with his palms up, he said, ‘I need a favour.’

‘Oh?’

‘I need to get on a ship first light.’

The official’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where you bound?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Wells. ‘Anywhere. I just need to go quiet.’

‘What’s in it for me?’

Wells opened his left fist: there, against his palm, was the nugget that Anna had returned to him. The official looked at it, making a mental estimation of its worth, and then said, ‘What about the law?’

‘I’m on side with the law,’ said Wells.

‘Who’s on your heels, then?’

‘Man named Carver,’ said Wells.

‘What’s he got on you?’

‘My papers,’ said Wells. ‘And a fortune. He lifted a fortune from my safe.’

‘When did you ever make a fortune?’

‘At Dunstan,’ said Wells. ‘Maybe a year ago. Fifteen months.’

‘You kept bloody quiet about it.’

‘Course I did. I never told a soul but Lydia.’

The man laughed. ‘That was your first mistake, then.’

‘No,’ said Wells, ‘my last.’

They looked at each other. Presently Bill said, ‘Might not be worth it. For me.’

‘I go aboard tonight, hide away, sail first thing. You keep this nugget, and I keep my life. That’s all. You don’t need to get me on board—just tell me which ship is leaving, and turn a blind eye as I walk past.’

The official wavered. He put aside his paper and leaned forward to check the schedule pinned above his desk. ‘There’s a schooner bound for Hokitika leaving at first light,’ he said after a moment. ‘The Blanche.’

‘You tell me where she’s anchored,’ said Wells. ‘Give me a window. That’s all I’m asking, Bill.’

The official pursed his lips, considering it. He turned back to the schedule, as though the best course of action might somehow present itself to him in writing. Then his gaze sharpened, and he said, ‘Hang on—Wells!’

‘What?’

‘This inventory says it was authorised by you.’

Frowning, Wells stepped forward. ‘Let me see.’

But Bill pulled the log towards him, away from Wells’s reach. ‘There’s a crate going to Melbourne,’ he said, scanning the entry. ‘It’s been loaded on Godspeed—and you signed for it.’ He looked up, suddenly angry. ‘What’s all this about?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Wells. ‘Can I see it?’

‘You’re spinning me a line,’ said Bill.

‘I’m not,’ said Wells. ‘I never signed that bloody thing.’

‘Your money’s in that crate,’ said Bill. ‘You’re sending your colour offshore, while you hop over to Hokitika to cover your tracks, and when it’s all safe and sound, you’ll sally across the Tasman and make yourself over, tax-free.’

‘No,’ said Wells. ‘That wasn’t me.’

The official flapped his hand, disgustedly. ‘Go on. Keep your bloody nugget. I don’t want a part in any scheme.’

Wells said nothing for a moment. He stared at the dark shapes of the ships at anchor, the broken needles of light upon the water, the hanging lanterns, squeaking in the wind. Then he said, speaking carefully, ‘That wasn’t me who signed.’

Bill scowled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t start. You won’t take me for a fool.’

‘My certificates,’ said Wells. ‘My miner’s right—my papers—everything. It was all in the safe at Cumberland-street. I swear to you. This man Carver. He’s an ex-convict. Served time at Cockatoo. He took it all. I have nothing but the shirt on my back, Bill. Francis Carver is using my name.’

Bill shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That crate’s not going offshore. I’m pulling the inventory, first thing in the morning.’

‘Pull it now,’ said Wells. ‘I’ll take the crate with me—to Hokitika. Nothing’s going offshore that way, is it? Everything’s legal that way.’

The official looked down at the inventory, and then back at Wells. ‘I don’t want a part in any racket.’

‘You’ll have done nothing wrong,’ said Wells. ‘Nothing at all. It’s only evasion of duty if you send it offshore. I’ll even sign for it. I’ll sign anything you like.’

Bill did not say anything for a long moment, and Wells knew that he was considering it. ‘I can’t get it on the Blanche,’ he said at last. ‘She’s sailing first light, and Parrish has signed off on the cargo already. There isn’t time.’

‘Send it on after, then. I’ll sign a transfer right now. I’m begging you.’

‘No need to beg,’ said Bill, frowning.

Wells came forward and placed the nugget on the desk. For a moment the thing seemed to shiver, like the needle of a compass.

Bill looked at the nugget for a long moment. Then he looked up, and said, ‘No. You keep your nugget, Crosbie Wells. I don’t want a part in any scheme.’

FIXED EARTH

In which Emery Staines takes his metal to the bank; Crosbie Wells proposes a deceit; and Staines begins to doubt his first impression, much too late.

Emery Staines was yet to make a strike in Hokitika. He had not yet found a patch of ground he liked well enough to stake, or indeed, a company he liked well enough to join. He had amassed a small ‘competence’ in dust, but the pile had been collected variously, from beaches both north and south of the river, and from small gullies on the far side of the Hokitika Gorge: it was an inconstant yield, of which the greater portion by far had already disappeared. Staines tended towards profligacy whenever the time and money spent were his very own: he far preferred to sleep and dine in the society of others than to do so alone in his tent beneath the stars, the romance of which did not endure, he discovered, past the first experience. He had not been prepared for the bitterness of the West Canterbury winter, and was very frequently driven indoors by the rain; with poor weather as his excuse, he drank wine and ate salt beef and played at cards every evening, venturing out the next morning to fill his handkerchief anew. Had it not been for his agreement with Francis Carver, he might have continued in this haphazard way indefinitely, which is to say, following a two-part pattern of excess and recovery; but he had not forgotten the conditions of his sponsorship, under which he would shortly be obliged to ‘throw down an anchor’, as the diggers termed it, and invest.

On the morning of the 18th of June Staines woke early. He had spent the night at a flophouse in Kaniere, a long, low clapboard shanty with a lean-to kitchen and hammocks strung in tiers. There was a damp chill in the air; as he dressed, his breath showed white. Outside, he paid a halfpenny for a plate of porridge, ladled from a steaming vat, and ate standing, gazing eastward to where the ridge of the high Alps formed a crisp silhouette against the winter sky. When the plate was clean he returned it to the hatch, tipped his hat to his fellows, and set off for Hokitika, where he intended to make an appointment with a gold buyer preparatory to purchasing a claim.

As he came around the river to the spit he perceived a ship make its stately approach into the neck of the harbour; it glided into the roadstead and seemed to hover, broadside to the river, in the deep water on the far side of the bar. Staines admired the craft as he walked around the long curve of the quay. It was a handsome three-masted affair, none too large, with a figurehead carved in the shape of an eagle, its beak wide and screaming, its wings outspread. There was a woman at the portside rail: from this distance Staines could not make out her face, much less her expression, but he supposed that she was lost in a reverie, for she stood very still, both hands gripping the rail, her skirts whipping about her legs, the strings of her bonnet slapping at her breast. He wondered what preoccupied her—whether she was absorbed in a memory, a scene recalled, or in a forecast, something that she wished for, something that she feared.

At the Reserve Bank he produced his kid pouch of dust, and, at the banker’s request, surrendered its contents to be examined and weighed. The valuation took some time, but the eventual price offered was a good one, and Staines left the building with a paper note made out for twenty pounds folded in his vest pocket, against his heart.

‘Stop you there, lad.’

Staines turned. On the steps of the bank, just rising, was a sandy-haired man, perhaps fifty in age. His skin was very weathered, and his nose very red. He sported a patchy week-old beard, the stubble of which was quite white.

‘Can I help you?’ said Staines.

‘You can answer me a couple of questions,’ said the man. ‘Here’s the first. Are you a Company man?’

‘I’m not a Company man.’

‘All right. Here’s the second. Honesty or loyalty?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Honesty or loyalty,’ said the man. ‘Which do you value higher?’

‘Is this a trick?’

‘A genuine inquiry. If you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Well,’ said Staines, frowning slightly, ‘that’s very difficult to say—which to value higher. Honesty or loyalty. From a certain point of view one might say that honesty is a kind of loyalty—a loyalty to the truth … though one would hardly call loyalty a kind of honesty! I suppose that when it came down to it—if I had to choose between being dishonest but loyal, or being disloyal but honest—I’d rather stand by my men, or by my country, or by my family, than by the truth. So I suppose I’d say loyalty … in myself. But in others … in the case of others, I feel quite differently. I’d much prefer an honest friend to a friend who was merely loyal to me; and I’d much rather be loyal to an honest friend than to a sycophant. Let’s say that my answer is conditional: in myself, I value loyalty; in others, honesty.’

‘That’s good,’ said the man. ‘That’s very good.’

‘Is it?’ said Staines, smiling now. ‘Have I passed some kind of a test?’

‘Almost,’ said the man. ‘I’m after a favour. In good faith—and on your terms. Look here—’

He reached into his pocket and withdrew a nugget, around the size of a short cigar. He held it up, so that it caught the light. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’

‘Very nice,’ said Staines, but he was no longer smiling.

The man continued. ‘Picked this up in the Clutha Valley. Otago way. Been carrying it about for a month—two months—but I’m wanting to turn it into land, you see—got my eye on a patch of land—and the land agent won’t touch anything but paper money. Here’s the problem. I’ve been robbed. Got no proof of my own identity. My papers, my miner’s right. Everything’s gone. So I can’t bank this nugget on my own accord.’

‘Ah,’ said Staines.

‘What I’m after is a favour. You take this nugget into the bank. Say it’s your own—that you found it, on Crown land. Change it into paper money for me. It wouldn’t take you half an hour, all up. You can name your price.’

‘I see,’ said Staines, uncertainly. He hovered a moment. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you might simply explain your situation to the fellows inside. You might tell them that you’ve been robbed—as you’ve just told me.’

‘I can’t do that,’ said the man.

‘There are always records,’ said Staines. ‘Even if you don’t have your papers, they’ll have other ways of tracking who you are. The shipping news and so forth.’

The man shook his head. ‘I was on an Otago certificate,’ he said, ‘and I never came through the customhouse when I arrived. There’s no record of me here.’

‘Oh,’ said Staines—who was beginning to feel very uncomfortable.

The man stepped forward. ‘I’m telling you a straight story, lad. The nugget’s mine. Picked it up in the Clutha Valley. I’ll sketch the place for you. I’ll draw you a bloody map. My story’s straight.’

Staines looked again at the nugget. ‘Can anyone vouch for you?’ he said.

‘I haven’t gone waving this about,’ the man snapped, shaking his fist. ‘Where would be the sense in that? I’ve been robbed already; I won’t be robbed again. There’s only one soul on earth who’s touched this piece besides me. Young woman by the name of Anna Wetherell. She’d vouch for the truth of what I’m telling you; but she’s in Dunedin, isn’t she, and I can’t stand about waiting for the post.’

The name Anna Wetherell meant nothing to Staines, and he registered it only dimly as he considered the best way to withdraw. The man’s story was not at all convincing (it seemed obvious to Staines that the nugget had been stolen, and that the thief, fearing capture, was now attempting to cover his tracks by employing an innocent third man to turn the evidence to untraceable cash) and his countenance did not reassure. He had the weary, bloodshot look of a man long since ruined by drink; even at a distance of several paces, Staines could smell yesterday’s liquor on his clothes and on his breath. Stalling for time, he said, ‘Land agent, did you say?’

The man nodded. ‘There’s an acreage I’m keen on. Arahura way. Timber, that’s the business. I’m through with chasing gold. I had a fortune, and now it’s gone, and that’s the end of the game as far as I’m concerned. Timber—that’s honest work.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Crosbie Wells,’ said the man.

Staines paused. ‘Wells?’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ said the man. Suddenly he scowled. ‘What’s it to you?’

Staines was remembering the strange injunction that Francis Carver had given him at the Hawthorn Hotel in George-street, one month prior: ‘Just for today,’ he had said, ‘my name’s Wells. Francis Wells.’

‘Crosbie Wells,’ Staines repeated now.

‘That’s it,’ said Wells, still scowling. ‘No middle name, no nickname, no alias, nothing but plain old Crosbie Wells, ever since the day I was born. Can’t prove it, of course. Can’t prove a d—ned thing, without my papers.’

Staines hesitated again. After a moment he put out his hand and said, ‘Emery Staines.’

Wells transferred the nugget to his other hand, and they shook. ‘Care to name your price, Mr. Staines? I’d be very much obliged to you.’

‘Listen,’ said Staines suddenly. ‘You don’t happen to know—I mean, forgive me, but—you don’t happen to know a man named Francis Carver?’

For he still did not know the full story of what had happened on the day before he left Dunedin—where Carver had gone that afternoon; why he had chosen to assume an alias; why he had afforded such importance to a small chest containing nothing but five unremarkable gowns.

Wells had stiffened. He said, in a voice that was newly hard, ‘Why?’

‘I’m very sorry,’ said Staines. ‘Perhaps it’s of no consequence. I only ask because—well, about a month ago, a man named Carver took on your surname—just for an afternoon—and never told me why or what for.’

Wells’s hands had balled into fists. ‘What’s Carver to you?’

‘I don’t know him well,’ said Staines, taking a step back. ‘He stood me some money, that’s all.’

‘What kind of money? How much?’

‘Eight pounds,’ said Staines.

‘What?’

‘Eight,’ said Staines, and then, again, ‘Eight pounds.’

Wells advanced on him. ‘Friend, is he?’

‘Not in the least,’ said Staines, stepping back again. ‘I found out later that he was a con—that he’d served ten years, with labour—but it was too late by then; I’d signed.’

‘Signed what?’

‘A sponsorship agreement,’ said Staines.

‘And he signed in my name.’

‘No,’ said Staines, putting up his hands, ‘he only used it—your name, I mean—but I don’t know what for. Look, I’m ever so sorry to distress you—’

‘He was the one,’ said Crosbie Wells. ‘He was the one who took my papers. Cheated me out of a pile in pure. Turned my own wife against me. He took my name, and my money, and he tried to take my life—only the job didn’t come off, did it? I got out. I’m still here. Working for a pittance, and living hand to mouth, and keeping my head down, and looking over my shoulder every moment till I’m fairly driven mad. This’—he brandished the nugget—‘is all I’ve got left.’

‘Why do you not bring the law against him?’ said Staines. ‘All that sounds like evidence enough.’

Wells did not reply at once. Then he said, ‘Where is he?’

‘I believe he’s in Dunedin still.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘As much as I can be,’ said Staines. ‘I’ve his address; I’m to write to him as soon as I make my first venture.’

‘You’re his partner.’ Wells spat out the word.

‘No: I’m obliged to him, that’s all. He stood me eight pounds, and I’m to make him an investment, in return.’

‘You’re his partner. You’re his man.’

‘Look,’ said Staines, alarmed again, ‘whatever Mr. Carver’s done to you, Mr. Wells—and whatever his reasons—I don’t know anything about it. Truly. Why—if I’d known anything, I’d never have mentioned his name to you just now, would I? I’d have kept my mouth shut.’

Wells said nothing. They stared at one another, each searching the other’s expression. Then Staines said, ‘I’ll do it. I’ll take your nugget to the bank.’

MARS IN CANCER

In which Carver begins his search for Crosbie Wells; Edgar Clinch offers his services; and Anna Wetherell hardens her resolve.

Godspeed crossed the Hokitika bar at the highest point of the tide. It took Captain Carver the better part of an hour to negotiate the traffic in the river mouth, for several crafts were departing, and he was obliged to wait for a signal from Gibson Quay before he could approach the wharf; Anna Wetherell, standing alone on deck, had ample time to take a measure of the view. Hokitika was smaller than she had envisaged, and much more exposed. Compared with the city of Dunedin, which was tucked away down the long arm of the Otago Harbour, and enclosed on all sides by hills, Hokitika’s proximity to the ocean seemed almost fearsome. To Anna the buildings had a grim, forsaken look, made somehow wretched by the strings of red and yellow bunting that crossed back and forth between the rooflines and the awnings of the waterfront hotels.

A sudden clanging directed her attention to the quay, where a ginger-haired man with a moustache was standing on the wharf, swinging a brass hand-bell, and shouting into the wind. He was plainly advertising something, but his litany of recommendations was quite inaudible beneath the peal of the bell, the mouth of which was big enough to admit a round of bread, and the clapper, as thick and heavy as a bar of bullion. It produced a dolorous, inexorable sound, muffled by the distance, and by the wind.

The journey from Dunedin had marked Godspeed’s inaugural voyage under the command of Francis Carver, who had been so incapacitated by the multiple injuries that he had incurred on the night of the 12th of May that he had failed to make Godspeed’s scheduled departure for Melbourne the following afternoon; he had missed, as a consequence, any opportunity to inform Captain Raxworthy that the ship’s ownership had changed. Raxworthy was punctual by nature, and would not suffer the barque’s departure to be delayed on account of a tardy crewman: he had sailed on schedule, his own severe headache notwithstanding, and after Godspeed left her anchor at Port Chalmers Carver could do nothing but wait for her return. He passed the next four weeks in convalescence, watched over by an anxious Mrs. Wells, who could not look upon his facial disfigurement without despair. The wound had been stitched, and the stitches since removed: it now formed an ugly pinkish weal, as thick as a length of sisal, and puckered at both ends. He touched the scar very often with his fingertips, and had taken to covering it with his hand when he spoke.

When Godspeed returned from Port Phillip on the 14th of June, Carver met with James Raxworthy to inform him that his tenure as captain had come to an end. The barque had been sold from under him, and by order of the ship’s new owner, a Mr. Wells, Carver himself had been promoted to the captaincy, an honour that gave him the licence to disband Raxworthy’s crew, and assemble his own. The meeting between Carver and his former captain was long, and not at all cordial; relations became further strained when Carver discovered that a certain item had been struck from Godspeed’s inventory one month ago. He appealed to Raxworthy, who only shrugged: as far as he could see, there had been no breach of regulation or protocol in the trunk’s having been recalled. Carver’s fury turned to anguish. He applied to the customhouse, and to all the shipping firms along the quay, and to all the doss-houses in the sailors’ district. His inquiries turned up nothing. Poring over the shipping news of the Otago Witness later that evening, he discovered that, besides Godspeed, there had been only one departure from Port Chalmers on the 13th of May: the schooner Blanche, bound for Hokitika.

‘It’s hardly even a clue,’ he said to Mrs. Wells, ‘but I can’t stand to do nothing. If I do nothing I’ll go mad. I’ve still got his birth certificate, after all—and the miner’s right. I’ll say my name is Crosbie Wells, and I’ll say I’ve lost a shipping crate. I’ll offer a reward for its return.’

‘But what about Crosbie himself?’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘There’s a chance—’

‘If I see him,’ said Carver, ‘I’ll kill him.’

‘Francis—’

‘I’ll kill him.’

‘He will be expecting you to pursue him. He won’t be caught off guard—not a second time.’

‘Neither will I.’

The day before Godspeed’s departure, Anna Wetherell was summoned to the downstairs parlour, where she found Mrs. Wells waiting for her.

‘Now that Mr. Carver has recovered his health,’ said Mrs. Wells, ‘I can turn my mind to less pressing matters, such as the matter of your future. You cannot remain in my household even a moment longer, Miss Wetherell, and you know the reason why.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Anna whispered.

‘I might have turned a blind eye to your betrayal,’ Mrs. Wells went on, ‘and suffered in silence, as is a woman’s lot; the violence brought upon Mr. Carver, however, I cannot ignore. Your alliance with my husband has passed beyond the realm of wickedness, and into the realm of evil. Mr. Carver has been permanently disfigured. Indeed he was lucky to have kept his life, given the severity of the injuries he sustained. He will bear that scar forever.’

‘I was asleep,’ said Anna. ‘I didn’t see any of it.’

‘Where is Mr. Wells?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you telling me the truth, Miss Wetherell?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I swear.’

Mrs. Wells drew herself up. ‘Mr. Carver sails to the West Coast tomorrow, as you know,’ she said, changing the subject, ‘and as it happens I have an acquaintance in a Hokitika man. Dick Mannering is his name. He will set you up in Hokitika as he sees fit: you will become a camp follower, as was your original ambition, and you and I will not cross paths again. I have taken the liberty of costing all of your expenses over the last two months, and passing the debt to him. I can see you are surprised. Perhaps you believe that liquor grows on trees. Do you believe that liquor grows on trees?’

‘No, ma’am,’ she whispered.

‘Then it will not come as a surprise to you that your habit of drinking alone has cost me more than pennies, this month past.’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Evidently you are not as stupid as you are wicked,’ said Mrs. Wells, ‘though given the scope and degree of your wickedness, this hardly signifies as an intellectual achievement. Mr. Mannering, I ought to inform you, is unmarried, so you are in no danger of bringing shame upon his household as you have done upon mine.’

Anna choked; she could not speak. When Mrs. Wells dismissed her she flew to the boudoir, went to her bureau, pulled the stopper from the decanter of laudanum-laced whisky and drank straight from the neck, in two desperate, wretched slugs. Then she threw herself upon her bed, and sobbed until the opiate took effect.

Anna knew very well what awaited her in Hokitika, but her guilt and self-reproach were such that she had steeled herself against all impending fates, as a body against a wind. She might have protested any or all of Mrs. Wells’s arrangements; she might have fled in the night; she might have formed a plan of her own. But she was no longer in any doubt about the fact of her condition, and she knew that it would not be long before she began to show. She needed to quit Mrs. Wells’s household as soon as possible, before the other woman guessed her secret, and she would do so by whatever method available to her.

A gull made a long, low pass down Gibson Quay; once it reached the spit it turned and began climbing on the updraft, circling back to make the pass again. Anna pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. By now Godspeed had received clearance to drop anchor. A line had been thrown ashore, and the sails were being furled and reefed at Carver’s instruction; slowly, the barque rolled towards the wharf. A small crowd of stevedores had gathered to assist, and Anna, blinking suddenly, saw that several of them were pointing at her and talking behind their hands. When they saw that she was looking, they doffed their hats, and bowed, and laughed, hoisting up their trousers by the buckles of their belts. Anna flushed. Suddenly wretched, she crossed the deck to the starboard rail, gripped it with both hands, and, breathing deeply, looked out over the high shelf of the spit, to where the breakers threw up a fine mist of white, blurring the line of the horizon. She remained there until Carver, calling her name with a curt accent, bid her to descend to the quay; a Mr. Edgar Clinch, acting proprietor of the Gridiron Hotel, had made her an offer of lodging, which Carver had accepted on her behalf.

TE-RA-O-TAINUI

In which Crosbie Wells makes for the Arahura Valley, and the steamer

Titania

is wrecked upon the bar.

Wells’s nugget, banked by Staines, fetched over a hundred pounds in cash money. While the buyer completed his evaluation, and the banker made his notes, Staines was interrogated from a great many quarters about the nugget’s origin. He gave vague replies to these inquiries, waving his hand in an easterly direction, and mentioning general landmarks such as ‘a gully’ and ‘a hill’, but his attempts to downplay the yield were unsuccessful. When the nugget’s value was chalked onto the board above the buyer’s desk, the banker led a round of applause, and the diggers chanted his name.

‘If you like, we could have it copied, before it’s smelted down,’ said the banker, Frost, as Staines made to depart. ‘You could paint the copy gold, and keep it—or you could send it home to a sweetheart, as a token. It’s a handsome piece.’

‘I don’t need a replica,’ said Staines. ‘Thanks anyway.’

‘You might want to remember it,’ said Frost. ‘Your luckiest day.’

‘I hope my luckiest day is yet to come,’ said Staines—prompting another round of applause, and more admiration, and propositions to ‘go mates’ from at least half a dozen men. By the time he had extracted himself from the crowd and returned outside, he felt more than a little annoyed.

‘I have been declared the luckiest man in Hokitika,’ he said, as he handed Crosbie Wells his envelope. ‘I have been advised to keep hold of my luck, and to share my luck around, and to confess the secret of my luck, and I don’t know what else. I fancy that the story you told me was not at all true, Mr. Wells; you simply knew what would happen to a man foolish enough to walk into the Reserve Bank with a nugget of that size at this hour of the day.’

Wells was grinning. ‘The luckiest man in Hokitika,’ he said. ‘Quite an expectation. I trust you’ll bear up.’

‘I will do my best,’ said the boy.

‘Well, I’m very much obliged to you,’ said Wells, thumbing through the paper notes quickly, and then tucking the envelope into his vest. ‘The Arahura Valley is where I mean to buy. Some ten miles to the north. The river crosses the beach—you can’t miss it. You’re welcome any time, and for any reason.’

‘I’ll remember,’ said Staines.

Wells paused. ‘You still don’t quite believe my story, do you, Mr. Staines?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t, Mr. Wells.’

‘Maybe you’ll spill the beans to your man Carver.’

‘Carver’s not my man.’

‘But maybe you’ll drop my name. Casual mention. Just to see.’

‘I won’t.’

‘It would be as good as murder, Mr. Staines. He’s got a score to settle. He wants me dead.’

‘I can keep a secret,’ said Staines. ‘I won’t tell anyone.’

‘I believe it,’ said Wells. He put out his hand. ‘Good luck.’

‘Yes—good luck.’

‘Perhaps I’ll be seeing you.’

‘Perhaps you will.’

Staines remained on the steps of the Reserve Bank for a long time after Crosbie Wells stepped down into the street. He watched the other man thread through the crowd towards the land agent’s office, where he mounted the steps, removed his hat, and stepped inside without a backwards glance. Fifteen minutes passed. Staines rested his elbows on the rail, and kept watching.

‘Shipwreck—shipwreck—shipwreck on the bar!’

Staines watched the bellman approach. ‘What’s the name of the craft?’ he called.

‘The Titania,’ said the bellman. ‘A steamer. Run aground.’

Staines had never heard of the Titania. ‘Where was she coming from?’

‘Dunedin, by way of Auckland,’ the bellman replied. When Staines nodded, dismissing him, he continued on: ‘Shipwreck—shipwreck—shipwreck on the bar!’

At long last, the door of the land agency office opened, and two men walked out: Crosbie Wells, and a second man, presumably a land agent, who was putting his arms into his coat. They stood talking on the porch for several minutes; presently a small two-horse cab came clopping around the side of the building, and stopped to let Wells and the land agent climb aboard. Once they were seated, and the doors closed, the driver spoke to the horses, and the small vehicle clattered off to the north.

ACCIDENTAL DIGNITY

In which two chance acquaintances are reunited, and Edgar Clinch is less than pleased.

Mr. Edgar Clinch proved a guide both solicitous and thorough. During the short walk from Gibson Quay he maintained a constant and richly detailed commentary upon everything they passed: every shopfront, every warehouse, every vendor, every horse, every trap, every pasted bill. Anna’s responses were few, and barely uttered; as they approached the Reserve Bank, however, she interrupted his chatter with a sudden exclamation of surprise.

‘What is it?’ said Clinch, alarmed.

Leaning against the porch railing was the golden-haired boy from the Fortunate Wind—who was gazing at her with an expression likewise incredulous.

‘It’s you!’ he cried.

‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘Yes.’

‘The albatrosses!’

‘I remember.’

They regarded one another shyly.

‘How good to see you again,’ Anna said after a moment.

‘It is perfectly serendipitous,’ said the boy, descending the steps to the street. ‘Fancy that—us meeting a second time! Of course I have wished for it, very much—but they were vain wishes; the kind one makes in twilight states, you know, idly. I remember just what you said, as we rounded the heads of the harbour—in the dawn light. “I should like to see him in a storm”, you said. I have thought of it many times, since; it was the most delightfully original of speeches.’

Anna blushed at this: not only had she never heard herself described as an original before, she had certainly never supposed that her utterances qualified as ‘speeches’. ‘It was only a fancy,’ she said.

Clinch was waiting to be introduced; he cleared his throat.

‘Have you been in Hokitika long?’ said the boy.

‘I arrived this morning. Just now, in fact—we dropped anchor not an hour ago.’

‘So recently!’ The boy seemed even more astonished, as though her recent arrival meant that their chance reunion was even more remarkable to him.

‘And you?’ Anna said. ‘Have you been here long?’

‘I’ve been here over a month,’ said the boy. He beamed suddenly. ‘How good it is to see you—how very wonderful. It has been a great age since I have seen a familiar face.’

‘Are you a—a member of the camp?’ said Anna, blushing again.

‘Yes; here to make my fortune, or at least, to chance upon it: I confess I do not quite understand the difference. Oh!’ He snatched off his hat. ‘How outrageously rude of me. I haven’t introduced myself. Staines is my name. Emery Staines.’

Clinch used this opportunity to interject. ‘And how do you like Hokitika, Mr. Staines?’

‘I like it very well indeed,’ replied the boy. ‘It’s a perfect hive of contradictions! There is a newspaper, and no coffee house in which to read it; there is a druggist for prescriptions, but one can never find a doctor, and the hospital barely deserves its name. The store is always running out of either boots or socks, but never both at once, and all the hotels along Revell-street only serve breakfast, though they do so at all hours of the day!’

Anna was smiling. She opened her mouth to reply, but Clinch cut across her.

‘Gridiron does a hot dinner,’ he said. ‘We’ve a threepenny plate and a sixpenny plate—and the sixpenny comes with beer.’

‘Which one is the Gridiron?’ said Staines.

‘Revell-street,’ said Clinch, as if this destination were address enough.

Staines turned back to Anna. ‘What has brought you to the Coast?’ he said. ‘Have you come at somebody’s request? Are you to make your living here? Will you stay?’

Anna did not want to use Mannering’s name. ‘I mean to stay,’ she said cautiously. ‘I am to take my lodging at the Gridiron Hotel—at the kind request of Mr. Clinch.’

‘That’s me,’ said Clinch, putting out his hand. ‘Clinch. Edgar is my Christian name.’

‘I am delighted to meet you,’ said Staines, shaking his hand briefly; then, turning back to Anna, he said, ‘I still don’t know your name … but perhaps I won’t ask for it, just yet. Shall you keep it a secret—so that I have to make inquiries, and find you out?’

‘Her name is Anna Wetherell,’ said Clinch.

‘Oh,’ said the boy. His expression had suddenly given way to astonishment; he was looking at Anna very curiously, as though her name bore a significance that he could not, for some reason, articulate aloud.

‘We’d best be getting on,’ said Clinch.

He leaped aside. ‘Oh—yes, of course. You’d best be getting on. A very good morning to you both.’

‘It was very nice to see you again,’ said Anna.

‘May I call upon you?’ said Staines. ‘Once you’re settled?’

Anna was surprised, and thanked him; she might have said more, but Clinch was already leading her away, seizing her hand where it was tucked beneath his elbow and drawing it, firmly, closer to his chest.

ARIES, RULED BY MARS

In which Francis Carver asks Te Rau Tauwhare for information; but Tauwhare, having not yet made the acquaintance of a Mr. Crosbie Wells, cannot help him.

The Maori man carried a greenstone club upon his hip, thrust through his belt in the way that one might wear a crop or a pistol. The club had been carved into the shape of a paddle, and polished to a shine: the stone was a rippled olive green, shot through with bursts of yellow, as if tiny garlands of kowhai had been melted and then pressed into glass.

Carver, having delivered his message, was about to bid the other man goodbye when the stone caught the light, and seemed suddenly to brighten; curious, he pointed at it, saying, ‘What’s that—a paddle?’

‘Patu pounamu,’ said Tauwhare.

‘Let me see,’ said Carver, holding out his hand. ‘Let me hold it.’

Tauwhare took the club off his belt, but he did not hand it to the other man. He stood very still, staring at Carver, the club loose in his hand, and then suddenly, he leaped forward, and mimed jabbing Carver in the throat, and then in the chest; finally he raised the club up high above his shoulder, and brought it down, very slowly, stopping just before the weapon made contact with Carver’s temple. ‘Harder than steel,’ he said.

‘Is it?’ said Carver. He had not flinched. ‘Harder than steel?’

Tauwhare shrugged. He stepped back and thrust the club back into his belt; he appraised Carver for a long moment, his chin lifted, his jaw set, and then he smiled coldly, and turned away.

SUN IN GEMINI

In which Benjamin Löwenthal perceives an error, and Staines acts upon a whim.

‘Bother,’ said Löwenthal. He was scowling at his forme—reading the text both right-to-left and backwards, for the type was both mirrored and reversed. ‘I’ve got a widow.’

‘A what?’ said Staines, who had just entered the shop.

‘It’s called a widow. A typographical term. I have one too many words to fit into the column; when there’s a word hanging over, that’s a widow. Bother, bother, bother. I was in such a rush, this morning—I let a man pay for a two-inch advertisement without tallying his letters, and his notice won’t fit into a two-inch square. Ah! I must put it aside, and come back with fresh eyes later: that is the only thing to do, when one is in a muddle. What can I do for you, Mr. Staines?’ Löwenthal pushed the forme aside and, smiling, reached for a rag to wipe the ink from his fingers.

Staines explained that he had banked his competence that morning in exchange for cash. ‘I was meaning to invest in a claim,’ he explained, ‘but I don’t want to do that—not just yet. I’m still—well, I’m still of two minds about a number of things. I would like to know what’s on offer in the camp instead. Hotels, dining halls, warehouses, shops … anything that’s for sale.’

‘Certainly,’ said Löwenthal. He moved to the cabinet, opened the topmost drawer, and began to thumb through the files; presently he extracted a piece of paper, and handed it to Staines. ‘Here.’

Staines scanned the document. When he reached the bottom of the list, his expression slackened very slightly; in surprise, he looked up.

‘The Gridiron,’ he said.

Löwenthal spread his hands. ‘It is as good a venture as any,’ he said, ‘Mr. Maxwell is the current owner; Mr. Clinch, the acting proprietor. Both are good men.’

‘I’ll take it,’ said Staines.

‘Oh?’ said Löwenthal. ‘Should I inform Mr. Maxwell that you would like to look it over?’

‘I don’t want to look it over,’ said Staines. ‘I want to buy it outright—and at once.’

SCORPIO, RULED BY MARS

In which Francis Carver makes an acquaintance at the Imperial Hotel.

Carver held little hope that the notice he had placed in the West Coast Times that morning would bear fruit. He doubted that anyone would be so foolish as to surrender a wanted trunk unopened, still less when a fifty-pound reward was offered for that trunk’s return. The very best that he could hope for was that the trunk would be opened, the contents rifled, and the dresses presumed to be of sentimental value only, in which case the finder—if he or she had read the Times, and was aware of the reward offered—might surrender them; but that contingency, itself unlikely, depended upon the still more unlikely contingency that the trunk had been sent to West Canterbury, of all possible destinations in the world! No: the fact that it had been removed from Godspeed’s hold on the night of the 12th of May could mean only one thing: someone must have been aware of the colossal fortune the trunk contained. It would hardly have been recalled at the last minute, only to be shipped at hazard, elsewhere. If it had been Crosbie Wells who had recalled the trunk at the last moment—by far the most likely guess—then he would surely have quit the country as soon as he was able, using the gold to bribe the customhouse officials, or perhaps, paying another man for his papers or his name. The fortune was gone for good. Carver cursed aloud, and, to accent his frustration, slammed the base of his glass against the bar.

‘Amen,’ said the man nearest him.

Carver turned to glare at him, but the man was beckoning the bartender.

‘Pour that man another drink,’ he said. ‘We’ll both have another. On my tab.’

The bartender uncorked the brandy bottle and refilled Carver’s glass.

‘Pritchard’s my name,’ said the man, watching as the bartender poured.

Carver glanced at him. ‘Carver,’ he said.

‘Took you for a sailor,’ Pritchard said. ‘Salt on your jacket.’

‘Captain,’ said Carver.

‘Captain,’ said Pritchard. ‘Well, good on you. I never had a stomach for the sea. I might have gone back home, otherwise; only I’m put off by the thought of the journey. I’d rather die here than suffer that again. Arse end of the world, isn’t it?’

Carver grunted, and they both drank.

‘Captain, though,’ said Pritchard presently. ‘That’s good.’

‘And you?’ said Carver.

‘Chemist.’

Carver was surprised. ‘Chemist?’

‘Only one in town,’ said Pritchard. ‘A true original, that’s what I am.’

They sat in silence for a time. When their glasses were empty Pritchard signalled again to the bartender, who refilled them both as before. Suddenly Carver rounded on him, and said, ‘What have you got in the way of opium? Have you a ready supply?’

‘Afraid I can’t help,’ Pritchard said, shaking his head. ‘Nothing but tincture, that’s all I’ve got, and it’s poor. Weaker than whisky, twice the headache. You won’t find anything south of the Grey. Not if you’ve a real thirst for it. Go north.’

‘I’m not buying,’ Carver said.

CANCER & THE MOON

In which Edgar Clinch attempts to exercise his authority, having deduced that Anna’s recent decline in health owes much to a new dependency both facilitated and encouraged by her employer, Mannering; and Anna Wetherell, whose obstinacy of feeling is more than a match for Clinch’s own, does not indulge him.

‘I don’t have anything against the Chinese,’ said Clinch. ‘I just don’t like the look of it, that’s all.’

‘What does it matter what it looks like?’

‘I don’t like the feel of it. That’s what I meant. The situation.’

Anna smoothed down the skirt of her dress—muslin, with a cream skirt and a crocheted bust, one of five that she had purchased from the salvage vendors following the wreck of the Titania some weeks ago. Two of the gowns had been speckled with black mould, the kind that any amount of washing would not remove. They were all very heavy, and the corsets, very fortified, tokens by which she presumed them to be relics of an older, more rigid age. The salvage man, as he wrapped the purchases in paper, had informed her that, very strangely, the Titania had been conveying no female passengers at all on the day she came to ground; stranger still, nobody had come forward to claim this particular trunk after the cargo had been recovered from the wreck. None of the shipping firms seemed to know the first thing about it. The bill of lading had been rendered illegible by salt water, and the log did not list the item by name. It was certainly a mystery, the salvage man concluded. He hoped that she would not come to any embarrassment or difficulty, in wearing them.

Clinch pressed on. ‘How are you to keep your wits about you, when you’re under? How are you to defend yourself, if—if—well, if you encounter something—untoward?’

Anna sighed. ‘It isn’t your concern.’

‘It’s my concern when I can see plain as day that he’s got your advantage, and he’s using you for ill.’

‘He will always have my advantage, Mr. Clinch.’

Clinch was becoming upset. ‘Where did it come from—your thirst? Answer me that! You just picked up a pipe, did you, and that was all it took? Why did you do it, if you weren’t compelled by Mr. Mannering himself? He knows the way he wants you: without any room to move, that’s how. Do you think I haven’t seen it before, this method? The other girls won’t touch the stuff. He knows that. But he tried it on you. He set you up. He took you there.’

‘Edgar—’

‘What?’ said Clinch. ‘What?’

‘Please leave me be,’ said Anna. ‘I can’t bear it.’

THE LEO SUN

In which Emery Staines enjoys a long luncheon with the magnate Mannering, who, over the past month, has made a concerted effort to court his friendship, behaving mayorally, as he prefers to do, as though all goldfields triumphs are his to adjudicate, and his to commend.

‘You’re a man who wears his success, Mr. Staines,’ said Mannering. ‘That’s a uniform I like.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said Staines, ‘my luck has been rather awfully exaggerated.’

‘That’s modesty talking. It was a hell of a find, you know, that nugget. I saw the banker’s report. What did it fetch—a hundred pounds?’

‘More or less,’ said Staines, uncomfortably.

‘And you picked it up in the gorge, you said!’

‘Near the gorge,’ Staines corrected. ‘I can’t remember exactly where.’

‘Well, it was a piece of good luck, wherever it came from,’ said Mannering. ‘Will you finish up these mussels, or shall we move on to cheese?’

‘Let’s move on.’

‘A hundred pounds!’ said Mannering, as he signalled to the waiter to come and take their plates away. ‘That’s a d—n sight more than the price of the Gridiron Hotel, whatever you paid for the freehold. What did you pay?’

Staines winced. ‘For the Gridiron?’

‘Twenty pounds, was it?’

He could hardly dissemble. ‘Twenty-five,’ he said.

Mannering slapped the table. ‘There you have it. You’re sitting on a pile of ready money, and you haven’t spent a single penny in four weeks. Why? What’s your story?’

Staines did not answer immediately. ‘I have always considered,’ he said at last, ‘that there is a great deal of difference between keeping one’s own secret, and keeping a secret for another soul; so much so that I wish we had two words, that is, a word for a secret of one’s own making, and a word for a secret that one did not make, and perhaps did not wish for, but has chosen to keep, all the same. I feel the same about love; that there is a world of difference between the love that one gives—or wants to give—and the love that one desires, or receives.’

They sat in silence for a moment. Then Mannering said, gruffly, ‘What you’re telling me is that this isn’t the whole picture.’

‘Luck is never the whole picture,’ said Staines.

AQUARIUS & SATURN

In which Sook Yongsheng, having recently taken up residence in Kaniere Chinatown, journeys into Hokitika to outfit himself with various items of hardware, where he is observed by the gaoler George Shepard, known to him as the brother of the man he had been accused of having murdered, and also, as the husband of that man’s true murderer, Margaret.

Margaret Shepard stood in the doorway of the hardware store, waiting for her husband to complete his purchases and pay; Sook Yongsheng, though not eight feet distant from her, was shielded from her view by the dry goods cabinet. Shepard, coming around the side of the cabinet, saw him first. He stopped at once, and his expression hardened; in a voice that was quite ordinary, however, he said,

‘Margaret.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she whispered.

‘Go back to the camp,’ said Shepard, without taking his eyes from Sook Yongsheng. ‘At once.’

She did not ask why; mutely she turned and fled. When the door had slammed shut behind her, Shepard’s right hand moved, very slowly, to rest upon his holster. In his left hand he was holding a paper sack containing a roll of paper, two hinges, a ball of twine, and a box of bugle-headed nails. Sook Yongsheng was kneeling by the paraffin cans, making some kind of calculation on his fingers; he had placed his parcels beside him on the floor.

Shepard was aware, dimly, that the atmosphere in the store had become very still. From somewhere behind him someone said, ‘Is there a problem, sir?’

Shepard did not answer at once. Then he said, ‘I will take these.’ He held up the paper sack, and waited; after a moment he heard whispering, and then tentative footsteps approaching, and then the sack was lifted from his hand. Nearly a minute passed. Sook Yongsheng continued counting; he did not look up. Then the same voice said, almost in a whisper, ‘That will be a shilling sixpence, sir.’

‘Charge it to the gaol-house,’ Shepard said.

JUPITER’S LONG REIGN

In which Alistair Lauderback, believing his half-brother Crosbie Wells to be the half-brother, on his mother’s side, of the blackguard Francis Carver, and believing, consequently, that Crosbie Wells had been in some way complicit in the blackmail under which he, Lauderback, surrendered his beloved barque

Godspeed

, is perplexed to receive a letter with a Hokitika postmark, the contents of which make clear that his apprehension has been quite false, a revelation that prompts him, after a great deal of solemn contemplation, to write a letter of his own.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the renewed correspondence of Mr. Crosbie Wells comprised the sole reason for Alistair Lauderback’s decision to run for the Westland seat in Parliament; the letter did serve, however, to tip the scales in the district’s favour. Lauderback read the letter through six times, then, sighing, tossed it onto his desk, and lit his pipe.

West Canterbury. June 1865

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

Yours &c,

CROSBIE WELLS

INHERENT DIGNITY

In which Emery Staines pays a call upon Anna Wetherell at the Gridiron Hotel, where he begs her, after some preamble, to narrate her version of Crosbie Wells’s escape; and Anna, made curious by the urgency and frankness of his appeal, sees no reason not to recount the tale in full.

Emery Staines did not recognise the dress that Anna was wearing as one of the five that he had been charged to safeguard, pistol in hand, at the Hawthorn Hotel on the afternoon of the 12th of May. It did strike him, when he first appraised her, that the garment fit her rather oddly—it had clearly been tailored for a woman much more buxom than she—but he put the thought aside just as quickly. They greeted one another warmly, but with mutual uncertainty, and after an awkward pause Anna invited him into the parlour, where they sat down on the straight-backed chairs that faced the hearth.

‘Miss Wetherell,’ said Staines at once, ‘there’s something I would like to ask you—something terribly impertinent—and you must knock me back at once if—if you don’t want to give an answer—if you do not want to indulge me, I should say—for whatever reason at all.’

‘Oh,’ said Anna—and then she drew a breath, as if to steel herself, and turned her face away.