The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

  The real Crosbie Wells (or perhaps, Moody thought, another Crosbie Wells) lived alone in the Arahura Valley, some miles north of Hokitika. Wells was not a notorious personage, and his acquaintance was small; before his death he was little known in Hokitika, and those who did know him did not suspect him to be a person of any wealth or consequence. It was Ah Sook, investigating the circumstances of his death nine months later, who discovered that Wells had made a strike on the fields at Dunstan several years before, pulling in a fortune of thousands of pounds. Evidently Wells had desired, for some reason, to keep this information a secret.

  Francis Carver placed his advertisement in the Times in early June (the precise month having been confirmed by Benjamin Löwenthal). While in Hokitika he offered Te Rau Tauwhare a private reward for any news of a man named Crosbie Wells. Tauwhare did not know a man of that name or description, however, and the shipping crate was not found; Carver returned to Dunedin empty-handed.

  Anna Wetherell had also arrived in Hokitika upon the Godspeed, clad in a purple working gown rented from her new employer, Dick Mannering. When she learned, some weeks after her arrival, that a trunk containing women’s dresses had been salvaged from a wreck, she purchased all five.

  It was not unreasonable to presume that Anna was ignorant of the fortune these gowns contained, and ignorant, also, of their origin. She had never spoken of the hidden gold to any man, and she had never attempted in any visible way to remove it. Moody considered this. Was total ignorance really possible? As an opium eater, perhaps she had not noticed the added weight about her person as a sober woman might; then again, she was, as Gascoigne had attested, a former acquaintance of Lydia Wells’s, and perhaps she had recognised the garments as Lydia’s. Well, Moody thought, whatever the case, Anna had been wearing that entire fortune—a portion at a time, of course—ever since then, save for a month-long period in September and October, when the advanced stage of her pregnancy had compelled her to wear, instead, a frock designed for lying-in.

  When Anna’s landlord, Edgar Clinch, discovered the fortune hidden in the gowns, he concluded that the whoremonger Dick Mannering must be using Anna to smuggle raw ore off the goldfields, as a way of evading duty at the bank. The thought of this collusion grieved Clinch extremely, but he had no reason to press the matter with either party, and did not do so.

  Clinch was not the only man to chance upon the hidden fortune in Anna’s gowns, however, and he was not the only man to misapprehend its likely meaning. The digger Quee Long had also uncovered the secrets hidden in Anna’s seams—around much the same time, in fact—and had leaped to the very same conclusion as Clinch. Ah Quee knew first-hand that Mannering was more than capable of fraud, for he had been cheated by the magnate once before. Ah Quee decided to beat Mannering at his own game. He began siphoning the gold out of Anna’s dresses, retorting the dust into squares, and stamping these squares with the name of the goldmine Aurora—so as to ensure that the profit would be banked against his own claim, which by this time had been purchased by a young prospector named Emery Staines.

  The project of removing the gold from Anna’s dress took several months. Whenever Anna visited Ah Quee’s hut in Kaniere Chinatown, she was all but senseless with opium; Ah Quee was therefore able to remove the gold with his thread and needle without her knowledge, while she slept. Anna did not wear her orange whoring dress when she travelled to Chinatown. For this reason, the orange dress had remained filled with gold, long after Ah Quee had stripped the other four of their fortune.

  Nobody knew how, or why, Ah Quee’s retorted fortune had been stolen from the vault at the camp station. The most probable thief, given the information currently available, was the vanished prospector, Staines—who, significantly, lacked a motivation. The young man was colossally rich, and, by popular opinion at least, colossally fortunate. Why should he desire to steal from his own indentured worker? And why should he choose to stash the gold in another man’s cottage, so far from his own claims? Well, whatever the young man’s reasons, Moody thought, at least one thing was certain: Staines had never banked Ah Quee’s earnings against the Aurora as he was legally obliged to do. This was very perplexing, for the retorted gold, if banked, would have transformed the Aurora goldmine from a duffer into a homeward-bounder overnight.

  Emery Staines was also very strangely implicated by the deed of gift that Cowell Devlin had discovered in Crosbie Wells’s stove—which, though it did not bear his signature, bore his name. This deed seemed to imply that Emery Staines and Crosbie Wells had been associates of some kind, and that the hoarded fortune had been intended, for some reason, as a gift from Emery Staines to Anna Wetherell. But this was even more confounding, for whichever way one looked at it, the gold was not Staines’s to give away!

  Anna had been carrying a child—Carver’s child—since before she arrived in Hokitika, and in the springtime she began at last to show. Her condition was never to fully ripen into birth, however: in mid-October, Carver returned to Hokitika, confronted Anna, and beat her severely. The unborn child did not survive this encounter. Anna’s later intimation, when she described the scene to Edgar Clinch, was that Carver had killed the child in cold blood.

  Moody paused in his chronology to dwell upon this unhappy event. Although the child’s death had been referenced in passing several times that evening, it did not seem as though any man present was entirely clear about how this fatal altercation had come about. It was for reasons of natural delicacy that Moody had not pressed the men for further information, but he wondered now how Anna’s relations with Carver fitted in to the scheme of the story at large. He wondered whether the child’s death had truly been intended, and, if so, what might have motivated Francis Carver to commit such a heinous act. None of the twelve men currently present could answer this question with any kind of objective certainty, of course; they could only describe what they had been told to be true.

  (How opaque, the minds of absent men and women! And how elusive, motivation! For Francis Carver might have killed his child in cold repudiation, as an act of loathing, as a brutal prophylactic, or quite by accident: short of asking the man directly, there was no way to tell. Even Anna Wetherell, who had named Carver as the murderer, might have had any number of reasons to lie.)

  Having reflected upon this, Moody continued.

  Te Rau Tauwhare, encountering Carver by chance on the morning of the 14th of January, had remembered the offer that the man had made him the previous year. For a price of two shillings, Tauwhare offered to tell Carver where Crosbie Wells was living. The men shook hands, Tauwhare gave directions, and Carver made for the Arahura Valley that very same day—a night that was to be Wells’s last. Perhaps Carver had witnessed the hermit’s death, or perhaps he had left moments before its occurrence, but in either case, he had arrived at the cottage with a phial of laudanum, traces of which were later discovered in Crosbie Wells’s stomach during his post-mortem. Following their encounter, Carver returned to Hokitika, manned the Godspeed, and weighed anchor, leaving well before the dawn. From Hokitika Carver had travelled not to Canton (as Balfour had speculated he might) but to Dunedin, a fact that Moody himself could corroborate, for it was at Port Chalmers that Moody had boarded the very same craft, twelve days later.

  Alistair Lauderback, arriving at Wells’s cottage soon after Carver departed it, found the hermit dead at his kitchen table, his head resting on his arms. He journeyed on to Hokitika, where he was interviewed by the editor Benjamin Löwenthal, who was intending to run a political special in Monday’s edition of the Times. Löwenthal, hearing from Lauderback that Crosbie Wells was dead, deduced that Wells’s property would presently be put up for sale. The next morning he informed the hotelier Edgar Clinch of this probable eventuation, knowing that Clinch was looking to make an investment in land. Clinch immediately took his deposit to the bank, where the banker Charlie Frost facilitated his purchase of the dead man’s estate.

  Clinch then commissioned Harald Nilssen to clear the dead ma
n’s cottage and dispose of his effects. Nilssen did so—and discovered, to his astonishment, a perfect fortune, hidden in every conceivable hiding place around the dwelling’s single room. The ore, once it had been purified by the bank, was valued at a little over four thousand pounds. Nilssen was paid his ten percent commission, leaving a little over thirty-six hundred; out of this had been paid sundry death taxes, fees, and incidentals, which included a present of thirty pounds to the banker, Charlie Frost. The remainder—still a certifiable fortune—was currently being held in escrow at the Reserve Bank. Clinch was not likely to see a single penny of the sum, however: Lydia Wells, arriving mysteriously from Dunedin some days after the hermit’s funeral, had since appealed to revoke Clinch’s purchase, on the grounds that his property and effects legally belonged to her.

  Of course, the gold found in Crosbie’s cottage did not represent the sum total of the fortune at play. Ah Quee had only stripped four out of Anna’s five gowns. The final portion, sewn into the folds of Anna’s orange whoring dress, had been discovered by Anna Wetherell herself but two weeks ago, when she woke up in gaol following the crisis of her overdose. She had assumed, reasonably enough, that the gold had only just been planted on her person—for she had no memory of what had happened to her in the twelve hours prior to her arrest, and was in a state of considerable confusion. She entreated Gascoigne’s help, and together they excavated the metal from the orange gown and hid it in a flour sack under Gascoigne’s bed.

  When Anna then returned to the Gridiron Hotel, wearing the black dress that had belonged to Gascoigne’s late wife, Edgar Clinch’s old suspicions were renewed. He felt sure—rightly this time—that Anna’s change of dress had something to do with the hidden gold, and he noted with bitterness that her orange whoring gown had now disappeared. He resented very much that she claimed to be unable to pay her debts to him, when he knew full well that she was flush with colour; letting his resentment get the better of him, he spoke to her cruelly, and gave her notice to leave.

  But Clinch’s threat did not have the consequence he was expecting. Anna Wetherell had since paid her debt to him in full, but not with the gold in her gowns, and not with her legal earnings either. The debt had been paid out that very afternoon by way of a six-pound loan from Crosbie’s widow, Lydia Wells; her debt to Mannering, which by the magnate’s reckoning was well over a hundred pounds, would be more than covered by the gold she and Gascoigne had excavated from the orange gown. Anna had since quit the Gridiron for good. She had been invited, henceforth, to take her lodging with Lydia Wells at the Wayfarer’s Fortune, where she would no longer call herself a whore.

  Did Lydia Wells know that Carver’s missing shipping crate had ended up in Hokitika, and that the dresses had been purchased by Anna, and that the fortune at Crosbie Wells’s cottage was one and the same as the fortune with which Carver had blackmailed the politician Lauderback, some ten months ago? Such a question depended entirely upon Anna. How much did Anna know about her own involvement in this very circular affair? And how much, for that matter, was she willing to reveal to Lydia Wells? It was very possible that Anna did not know the dresses had once been Lydia’s. In this case, Mrs. Wells would remain ignorant of this fact also, for Anna was still wearing the black dress that had once belonged to Gascoigne’s late wife, and she had vowed to remain in mourning for some time. Of course, Moody thought, Anna would only need to have opened the wardrobe in her room for the widow to have recognised the dresses … but given that the gowns were currently lined with leaden makeweights, placed there as a decoy by the goldsmith Quee, Mrs. Wells might not have realised, at first glance or first touch, that the original fortune had been replaced by a worthless replica. Clinch had been fooled to this effect already. Moody wondered whether it was upon this false surety that the widow had paid Anna’s debt that afternoon.

  If Anna did know that the five dresses had once belonged to Lydia Wells, however, then she surely must have known about their concealed fortune all along, and therefore, about Lauderback’s blackmail, and the forced sale of the Godspeed, ten months prior. In light of this, Moody thought, the circumstance under which Anna’s baby had been killed suddenly seemed very pertinent to the mysteries at hand, for Anna’s relation to Francis Carver, like her relation to Lydia Wells, was a matter about which no man present knew anything at all.

  Moody ran his finger absent-mindedly around the rim of his glass. There had to be a better explanation for all of this than merely the correlative accident of circumstance. What had Balfour said, hours ago? ‘A string of coincidences is not a coincidence’? And what was a coincidence, Moody thought, but a stilled moment in a sequence that had yet to be explained?

  ‘That’s our part in it, at least,’ Balfour added, in a tone of some apology. ‘It’s not much of an answer, Mr. Moody—but it accounts for what got us here tonight; the cause, as I said, of our assembly.’

  ‘A little more than he bargained for, perhaps,’ said Dick Mannering.

  ‘It’s always that—when it’s the truth,’ replied Balfour.

  Moody looked from face to face. No one man could really be called ‘guilty’, just as no one man could really be called ‘innocent’. They were—associated? Involved? Entangled? Moody frowned. He felt that he did not possess the right word to describe their interrelation. Pritchard had used the word ‘conspiracy’ … but the term was hardly applicable, when each man’s involvement was so incidental, and each man’s relation to the events in question so palpably different. No: the real agents, and the real conspirators, were surely those men and women who were not present—who each had a secret that he or she was trying to hide!

  Moody considered the absentees.

  Francis Carver, as had been asserted many times that evening, was certainly ‘behind’ something. By Lauderback’s account at least, Carver was an inveterate schemer with a taste for blackmail; what’s more, he had visited Crosbie Wells on the day of his death, and perhaps had even watched him die. This reputation ought not to be forgotten, but it ought not to be given undue credence either, Moody thought: Carver could not be ‘behind’ everything at once, and he certainly could not have engineered a plot of such elaborate proportion as to simultaneously indict twelve men.

  Then there was Lydia Wells, the alleged wife of both Wells and Carver, the erstwhile mistress of Alistair Lauderback, and now (as she had recently confided to Gascoigne) the clandestine fiancée of an unnamed man. Like Carver, Mrs. Wells had shown herself to be capable of the most ruthless blackmail, and the most elaborate lies. She had also acted in partnership with Carver once before. The validity of her claim upon Crosbie Wells’s fortune would be determined by the law in due course… though even if her claim was valid, Moody thought, the method of her claiming it was at best discourteous, and at worst, downright heartless. He felt that he distrusted Lydia Wells rather more than he distrusted Francis Carver—though of course this was unreasonable, for he had never met her, nor laid eyes upon her; he knew her only by report, and by a most disjointed and multifarious report at that.

  Moody turned now to the other couple, Anna Wetherell and Emery Staines—who had been together on the night of the 14th of January, hours before Anna lapsed into unconsciousness, and Emery disappeared. What had really happened on that night, and what role had they played, whether witting or unwitting, in the Crosbie Wells affair? On the surface of things, it rather seemed as though Emery Staines had all the luck, and Anna, none of it—and yet Anna had survived her brush with death, and Staines, presumably, had not. It struck Moody that every man present, in his own way, was terribly envious of Staines, and terribly jealous of Anna. Staines’s luck as a prospector was shared by no one, and Anna, as a camp whore, was a common property, shared by them all.

  He was left with the politician and the gaoler. Moody considered them together. Alistair Lauderback, like his antagonist George Shepard, was a delegator, a man who was protected from the fullest consequences of his actions for the reason that his whims were most often perform
ed and carried out by other men. There were other parallels too. Lauderback was soon to stand for the seat of Westland; Shepard was soon to begin building his gaol-house and asylum on the terrace at Seaview. Lauderback had a personal history with Lydia Wells, his former mistress at the gambling house, just as Shepard had a personal history with Francis Carver, his former prisoner at the Sydney gaol.

  In his mind Moody had arranged these external figures into three pairs: the widow and the trafficker; the politician and the gaoler; the prospector and the whore. This realisation pleased him—for Moody’s mind was an orderly one, and he was reassured by patterns of any kind. Almost whimsically he wondered what role he himself played, in this strange tangle of association, yet to be solved. He wondered if he, too, had an opposite. Crosbie Wells, perhaps? Was his counterpart a dead man? Moody recalled, all of a sudden, the apparition upon the barque Godspeed, and he gave an involuntary shiver.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ said Harald Nilssen, and Moody became aware that the men in the room had been waiting for him to speak for some time. They were gazing at him with more or less the same expression of hopeful expectation—the emotion betrayed, restrained, or displayed, according to the temper of the man. So I am to be the unraveller, Moody thought. The detective: that is the role I am to play.

  ‘Don’t rush him,’ Harald Nilssen added, addressing the room at large—though it had been he who had encouraged Moody to break his silence. ‘Let him speak on his own time.’

  But Moody found he could not speak. He looked from face to face, at a loss for what to say.

  After another moment, Pritchard leaned in and placed a long finger on the arm of Moody’s chair. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘You said you had found something in the cargo of the Godspeed, Mr. Moody—something that made you doubt her errand was an honest one. What was it?’

  ‘The shipping crate, maybe?’ said Balfour.