The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

  ‘Mary Magdalene was no clairvoyant,’ Moody said stiffly.

  ‘No,’ Gascoigne agreed, still grinning, ‘but she was the first to come upon the open tomb. She was the one to swear that the stone had been rolled away. It bears mention, that the news of the ascension first came as a woman’s oath—and that at first the oath was disbelieved.’

  ‘Well, tonight Anna Wetherell will make her oath upon another man’s tomb,’ Moody said. ‘And we will not be there to disbelieve it.’ He twitched his knife and fork still straighter, wishing that the waiter would come and clear his plate away.

  ‘We have the party beforehand to look forward to,’ said Gascoigne, but the cheer had gone from his voice. He too had been excessively disappointed by his exclusion from the widow’s impending communion with the dead. The exclusion rankled him rather more bitterly than it did Moody, for he felt, as the first friend Lydia Wells had made in Hokitika, that a place ought properly to have been reserved for him. But Lydia Wells had not once paid a call upon him, since the afternoon of the 27th of January, and nor had she once received him, even for tea.

  Moody had not yet met either woman formally. He had glimpsed them hanging drapes in the front windows of the former hotel, silhouetted darkly, like paper dolls against the glass. Perceiving them, he felt a rather strange thrill of longing—unusual for him, for it was not his habit to envy the relations that women conduct with other women, nor really, to think about them with any great interest at all. But as he walked past the shadowed frontage of the Wayfarer’s Fortune and saw their bodies shifting behind the contorting pane he wished very much that he could hear what they were saying. He wished to know what caused Anna to redden, and bite her lip, and move the heel of her hand to her cheekbone, as if to test it for heat; he wished to know what caused Lydia to smile, and dust her hands, and turn away—leaving Anna with her arms full of fabric, and her dress-front stuck all over with pins.

  ‘I think that you are right to doubt Anna’s part in all this—or at least, to wonder at it,’ Gascoigne went on. ‘I got the impression, when I first spoke to her about Staines, that she held the boy in rather high esteem; I even fancied that she might care for him. And now by all appearances she is seeking to profit from his death!’

  ‘We cannot be certain of the degree of Miss Wetherell’s complicity,’ Moody said. ‘It depends entirely upon her knowledge of the fortune hidden in the gowns—and therefore, of Mr. Lauderback’s blackmail.’

  ‘There has been no mention of the orange gown—from any quarter,’ said Gascoigne. ‘One would think Mrs. Wells might have been more active in its recovery, had Anna told her that it was stowed beneath my bed.’

  ‘Presumably Miss Wetherell believes the gold was paid out to Mr. Mannering, as she instructed.’

  ‘Yes—presumably,’ Gascoigne said, ‘but wouldn’t you suppose that in that case, Mrs. Wells would pay a call upon Mannering, to see about recovering it? There’s no want of love between them: she and Mannering are old friends from gambling days. No: I think it far more possible that Mrs. Wells remains entirely ignorant about the orange gown—and about all the others.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Moody.

  ‘Mannering won’t touch it,’ Gascoigne said, ‘for fear of what will happen down the line—and I’m certainly not going to take it to the bank. So there it stays. Under my bed.’

  ‘Have you had it valued?’

  ‘Yes, though unofficially: Mr. Frost came by to look it over. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of a hundred and twenty pounds, he thought.’

  ‘Well, I hope for Miss Wetherell’s sake that she has not confided in Mrs. Wells,’ Moody said. ‘I dread to think how Mrs. Wells might respond to such a revelation, behind closed doors. She would only blame Anna for the loss of the fortune—I am sure of it.’

  Suddenly Gascoigne put down his fork. ‘I’ve just had a thought,’ he said. ‘The money in the dresses became the money in the cottage. So if the widow’s appeal goes through, and she receives the fortune as her inheritance, she’ll get it all back—less the money in the orange gown, of course. She’ll end up where she started, after all.’

  ‘In my experience people are rarely contented to end up where they started,’ Moody said. ‘If my impression of Lydia Wells is accurate, I think that she will feel very bitter about Anna’s having been in possession of those dresses, no matter what Anna’s intentions might have been, and no matter what the outcome.’

  ‘But we’re fairly certain that Anna did not even know about the gold she was carrying—at least, not until very recently.’

  ‘Mr. Gascoigne,’ Moody said, holding up his hand, ‘despite my youth, I possess a certain store of wisdom about the fairer sex, and I can tell you categorically that women do not like it when other women wear their clothes without their asking.’

  Gascoigne laughed. Cheered by this joke, he applied himself to finishing his luncheon with a renewed energy, and a good humour.

  The truth of Moody’s observation notwithstanding, it must be owned that his store of wisdom, as he had termed it, could be called empirical only in that it had been formed upon the close observation of his late mother, his stepmother, and his two maternal aunts: to put it plainly, Moody had never taken a lover, and did not know a great deal about women, save for how to address them properly, and how to dote upon them as a nephew and as a son. It was not despite the natural partialities of youth that the compass of Moody’s worldly experience was scarcely larger than a keyhole, through which he had perceived, metaphorically speaking, only glimpses of the shadowed chamber of adulthood that lay beyond. In fact he had met with ample opportunity to widen this aperture, and indeed, to unlock the door altogether, and pass through it, into that most private and solitary of rooms … but he had declined these opportunities with quite the same discomfort and stiff propriety with which he fielded Gascoigne’s rhetorical teases now.

  When he was one-and-twenty a late night of carousing in London had led him, by the usual methods and channels, to a lamp lit courtyard not far from Smithfield Market. This courtyard, by the authority of Moody’s college chums, was frequented by the most fashionable of whores—so identifiable for their red Garibaldi jackets, brass-buttoned, that were the height of Parisian fashion at the time, and alarming to English ladies for that reason. Although the military style of their jackets gave the women a deliberate and brazen look, they pretended at shyness, turning away so they might look at the men over the rounded curve of their shoulders, and feint, and titter, and point their toes. Moody, watching them, felt suddenly sad. He could not help but think of his father—for how many times, over the years of Moody’s youth, had he come across the man in some dark corner of the house, to perceive, upon his father’s lap, a perfect stranger? She would be gasping unnaturally, or squealing like a pig, or speaking in a high-pitched voice that was not her own, and she would leave behind her, always, that same greasy musk: the smell of the theatre. Moody’s college chums were pooling their sovereigns and cutting straws to draw for the first pick; silently, he withdrew from the courtyard, hailed a hansom, and retired to bed. It was a point of pride for him, thereafter, that he would not do as his father had done; that he would not fall prey to his father’s vices; that he would be the better man. And yet how easy it might have been—to contribute his sovereign, and select his straw, and choose one of the red-shirted ladies to follow into the cobbled alcove on the dark side of the church! His college chums supposed him to have set his sights upon a clerical vocation. They were surprised, some years later, when Moody enrolled at Inner Temple, and began to study for the Bar.

  It was therefore with a very well-concealed ignorance that Moody played interlocutor to Gascoigne, and Clinch, and Mannering, and Pritchard, and all the others, when they spoke of Anna Wetherell, and the esteem in which they held her, as a whore. Moody’s well-timed murmurs of ‘naturally’ and ‘of course’ and ‘exactly so’, combined with a general rigidity of posture whenever Anna’s name was mentioned, implied to these men merely that M
oody was made uncomfortable by the more candid truths of human nature, and that he preferred, like most men of exalted social rank, to keep his earthly business to himself. We observe that one of the great attributes of discretion is that it can mask ignorance of all the most common and lowly varieties, and Walter Moody was nothing if not excessively discreet. The truth was that he had never spoken two words together to a woman of Anna Wetherell’s profession or experience, and would hardly know how to address her—or upon what subject—should the chance arise.

  ‘And of course,’ he said now, ‘we ought to be cheered by the fact that Miss Wetherell’s trunk did not follow her to the Wayfarer’s Fortune.’

  ‘Did it not?’ said Gascoigne, in surprise.

  ‘No. The lead-lined dresses remain at the Gridiron, along with her pipe, and her opium lamp, and other miscellaneous items; she never sent for them.’

  ‘And Mr. Clinch has not raised the issue?’

  ‘No,’ said Moody. ‘It is cheering, I think: whatever role Miss Wetherell played in Mr. Staines’s disappearance, and whatever role she is to play in the ridiculous séance this evening, we can at least be fairly certain that she has not confided in Mrs. Wells absolutely. I take heart in that.’

  He looked about for the waiter, for Gascoigne had finished eating, and he wished to settle his account as soon as possible, so that he might return to the Crown, and unpack his trunk at long last.

  ‘You are anxious to depart,’ Gascoigne observed, wiping his mouth with his table napkin.

  ‘Forgive my rudeness,’ Moody said. ‘I am not tired of your company—but I am rather anxious to be reunited with my possessions. I have not changed my jacket in some weeks, and I do not yet know the degree to which my trunk survived the storm. It is possible that all my clothes and documents were ruined.’

  ‘What are we waiting for? Let us go, at once,’ said Gascoigne, for whom this explanation was not only entirely reasonable, but also something of a relief. Gascoigne feared very much that his own society was tiring, and he was made very anxious whenever a man he respected showed boredom in his company. He insisted upon settling the cheque himself, shooing away Moody in the manner of an indulgent governess; once this was done, the two friends stepped out into the noisy rush of Revell-street, where a party of diggers was swarming cheerfully past. Behind them came a shout from a surveyor on horseback, reining in, and above them, the solitary bell in the Wesleyan chapel, which was striking the hour, once, twice. Raising their voices above this noise—the creaking wheels of a gig, the snap of canvas, laughter, hammering, the shrill voice of a woman calling to a man—the two friends bid one another good afternoon, and shook hands very warmly as they parted ways.

  THE LESSER MALEFIC

  In which certain key facts are disputed; Francis Carver is discourteous; and Löwenthal is provoked to speak his mind.

  It was Löwenthal’s practice, when a letter of inflammatory accusation was delivered to the West Coast Times, to contact all parties concerned before the paper went to press. He judged it right to give fair warning to any man about to be lambasted, for the court of public opinion in Hokitika was a court of severe adjudication, and a reputation could be ruined overnight; to every man so threatened, he extended the invitation to pen a reply.

  Alistair Lauderback’s long-winded and rather haphazard address on the subject of Governor Shepard’s professional dereliction was no exception to this rule, and upon reading it through, Löwenthal sat down at once to make a copy of the document. The copy he would set into type; the original he would take to the Police Camp, to show to the gaoler himself—for Shepard would certainly wish to defend himself upon several counts, and it was still early enough in the day that his reply could be included, as a response to Lauderback’s, in the Monday edition of the Times.

  Löwenthal was frowning as he set out his writing implements. He knew that the information about Shepard’s private investment could only have been leaked by one of the twelve men of the Crown, which meant that someone—sadly—had broken his vow of silence. As far as Löwenthal knew, the only man who had any kind of acquaintance with Alistair Lauderback was his friend, Thomas Balfour. It was with a heavy heart that the newspaperman pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, unscrewed the cap on his inkwell, and dipped his nib. Tom, he thought, with admonition, Tom. He shook his head, and sighed.

  Löwenthal was copying out Lauderback’s final paragraph when he was roused by the sound of the bell. Immediately he stood, laid his pen upon his blotter, and walked through to the shop, his face already relaxing into a smile of welcome—which froze, ever so slightly, when he saw who was standing in the doorway.

  The incomer wore a long grey coat with velvet-faced lapels and turned velvet cuffs; the coat was made of a tight weave of some shiny, sealskin-like variety that turned an oily colour when he moved. His cravat was piled high at his throat, and the lapels of his shawl-collared waistcoat were turned up at the sides, lending an added bulk to his shoulders, and an added thickness to his neck. There was a heavy quality to his features, as though they had been hewn from some kind of mineral: something elemental and coarsely grained that would not polish, and that weighed a great deal. His mouth was wide, and his nose flattened; his brow protruded squarely. Upon his left cheek was a thin scar, silvery in colour, which curved from the outer corner of his eye down to his jaw.

  Löwenthal’s hesitation was only momentary. In the next instant he was bustling forward, wiping his hands on his apron, and smiling very broadly; when his hands were clean, he extended both his palms to his guest, and said, ‘Mr. Wells! How good to see you again. Welcome back to Hokitika.’

  Francis Carver narrowed his eyes, but did not take the bait. ‘I want to place an advertisement,’ he said. He did not step into the bounds of the other man’s reach; he remained by the door, keeping eight feet of distance between them.

  ‘Certainly, certainly,’ said Löwenthal. ‘And may I say: I am both honoured and gratified that you have sought my paper’s services a second time. I should have been very sorry to lose any man’s custom through an error of my own.’

  Again Carver said nothing. He had not removed his hat, and made no move to do so.

  But the newspaperman was not intimidated by Carver’s insolence. Smiling very brightly, he said, ‘But let us not talk of former days, Mr. Wells; let us talk of today! You must tell me what I can do for you.’

  A flash of irritation darkened Carver’s face at last. ‘Carver,’ he corrected. ‘My name’s not Wells.’

  Satisfied, Löwenthal folded his hands. The first two fingers of his right hand were stained very darkly with ink, which created a curiously striped effect when he laced his fingers together—as though his two hands belonged to two different creatures, one black, the other fawn.

  ‘Perhaps my memory is faulty,’ he said, ‘but I feel I do recall you very vividly. You were here nearly a year ago, were you not? You had a birth certificate. You placed an advertisement about a missing shipping crate—for which you were offering some kind of a reward. There was some confusion regarding your name, I remember. I made a mistake in the printing—omitting your middle name—and you returned the following morning, to identify the error. I believe your birth certificate was made out as Crosbie Francis Wells. But please—have I mistaken you for another man?’

  Again Carver did not reply.

  ‘I have always been told,’ Löwenthal added after a moment, ‘that I have a remarkably good memory.’

  He was taking a risk, in speaking impertinently … but perhaps Carver would be drawn. Löwenthal’s expression remained pleasantly impassive. He waited for the other man to speak.

  Löwenthal knew that Carver was lodging at the Palace Hotel, from which place he conducted the unhappy business of arranging for the wreck of the Godspeed to be hauled ashore. This was a project that would surely have been undertaken slyly, and with much restriction, had Carver been taking pains to conceal a murdered man aboard the foundered ship. But by all reports—including that of
the shipping agent, Thomas Balfour—Carver had been most forthcoming in his business. He had submitted a cargo inventory to the Harbourmaster; he had met with delegates from each of Hokitika’s shipping firms, in order to settle their accounts; and he had several times rowed out to the wreck himself, in the company of shipwrights, salvage vendors, and the like.

  ‘My name’s not Wells,’ Carver said at last. ‘That was on behalf of someone else. It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ Löwenthal said smoothly. ‘So Mr. Crosbie Wells had lost a shipping crate—and you were helping him retrieve it.’

  A pause, then, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well then, I do hope you were successful in that project! I trust the crate was eventually returned to him?’

  Carver jerked his head in annoyance. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I told you.’

  ‘But I would be remiss,’ Löwenthal said, ‘if I did not offer my condolences to you, Mr. Carver.’

  Carver studied him.

  ‘I was very saddened to learn of Mr. Wells’s death,’ Löwenthal continued. ‘I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but by all accounts he was a decent citizen. Oh—I do hope I’m not the man to break the news to you—that your acquaintance is deceased.’

  ‘No,’ Carver said again.

  ‘I am glad of that. How did you know one another?’

  The flash of irritation returned. ‘Old friends.’

  ‘From Dunedin, perhaps? Or further back?’

  Carver did not look inclined to answer this, so Löwenthal went on, ‘Well, I expect it must be a great comfort to you, to know that he died peacefully.’

  Carver’s mouth twisted. After a moment he burst out, ‘What’s peaceful?’