The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

‘Poor you.’

  ‘Sympathy is worse.’

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

  ‘I don’t care.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Just while I mourn.’

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

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

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

  ‘I should imagine not!’

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

  He bristled. ‘What’s your meaning?’

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

  ‘Has he been a beast to you?’

  ‘No,’ Anna said. ‘Not really.’

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

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

  ‘When?’

  ‘When you took ill.’

  ‘I was in gaol.’

  ‘But after that.’

  ‘What good would that have done?’

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

  ‘You knew it was poisoned?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Anything at all?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You might be covering your tracks.’

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

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

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

  ‘What if you wanted to see him dead?’

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

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

  ‘What—you think that was me?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

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

  ‘He thinks you’re running a racket.’

  ‘Poisoning chinks?’ Pritchard snorted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘You’re not so very old,’ she said.

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

  ‘What laudanum business?’

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

  ‘Corked or uncorked?’

  ‘Corked. But only half full.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘What?’

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

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

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

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

  ‘You didn’t—you couldn’t have!’

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

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

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

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

  ‘I ate it. Same as ever.’

  ‘Come off it, Ann. Don’t be a liar.’

  ‘I’m not a liar.’

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

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

  ‘Even if it wasn’t—’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I can’t explain it!’

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

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

  ‘And every day since I made bail.’

  ‘Today?’

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

  ‘What time last night?’

  ‘Late. Midnight, maybe.’

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

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

  ‘I won’t. I won’t go.’

  ‘D—n you, Jo Pritchard!’

  ‘D—n you.’

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

  ‘What are you doing?’ Anna said.

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

  ‘Those are my things.’

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

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

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

  He ignored her, and picked up the pipe.

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

  ‘Happy?’ she said.

  ‘Watch your lip. Where’s the needle?’

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

  ‘You’re going to break it.’

  ‘Be doing you a favour, then.’

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

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

  ‘Beast,’ Anna said again.

  ‘I’m a beast, am I?’

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

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

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

  ‘Get back.’

  ‘Tell me where you’ve hidden it.’

  ‘Get back!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Who loaded this piece?’ he demanded.

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

  ‘Show me. Show me the spares.’

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