The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

  In the next moment everyone burst into life. Someone shouted to cover the fire. One of the diggers pulled the widow to safety, and two others cleared the sofa; the fire was doused with shawls and blankets; the lamp was knocked away; everyone was talking at once. Charlie Frost, wheeling round in the sudden darkness, saw that Anna Wetherell had not moved, and her expression had not changed. The sudden blaze of the fire did not seem to have alarmed her in the slightest.

  Someone lit the lamp.

  ‘Was that it? Was that what was supposed to happen?’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Clear a space, would you?’

  ‘Coo—to see us all lit up like that!’

  ‘Some kind of primitive—’

  ‘Make sure she’s breathing.’

  ‘Have to admit, I didn’t expect—’

  ‘Did it mean anything, do you think? What she said? Or was it—’

  ‘That wasn’t Emery Staines, sure as I’m—’

  ‘Another spirit? Working through—’

  ‘The way the lamp moved of its own accord like that!’

  ‘We ought to ask the johnnies. Hi! Was that Chinese?’

  ‘Does he understand?’

  ‘Was that Chinese, that she was speaking just now?’

  But Ah Quee did not appear to understand the question. One of the diggers leaned over and tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘What was that, eh?’ he said. ‘What was it that she said? Was it Chinese, what she was saying? Or some other tongue?’

  Ah Quee returned his gaze without understanding, and did not speak. It was Ah Sook who answered.

  ‘Lydia Wells speak Cantonese,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’ Nilssen said eagerly, swivelling about. ‘And what did she say?’

  Ah Sook studied him. ‘“One day I come back and kill you. You kill a man. He die—so you die. I come back and kill you, one day.”’

  Nilssen’s eyes went wide; his next question died on his lips. He turned to Anna—who was looking at Ah Sook, her expression faintly perplexed. Charlie Frost was frowning.

  ‘Where’s Staines in all of that?’ demanded one of the diggers.

  Ah Sook shook his head. ‘Not Staines,’ he said quietly. He got up from his cushion suddenly, and walked to the window, folding his arms.

  ‘Not Staines?’ said the digger. ‘Who then?’

  ‘Francis Carver,’ said Ah Sook.

  There was an explosion of outrage around the room.

  ‘Francis Carver? How’s that for a séance—when he isn’t even dead? Why—I could talk to Carver myself; I’d only have to knock upon his door!’

  ‘But he’s at the Palace,’ said another. ‘That’s fifty yards away from where we are.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘I mean you can’t deny that something strange—’

  ‘I could have talked to Carver myself,’ the digger repeated, stubbornly. ‘I don’t need a medium for that.’

  ‘What about the lamp, though? How do you account for the lamp?’

  ‘It jumped across the room!’

  ‘It levitated.’

  Ah Sook had stiffened. ‘Francis Carver,’ he said, directing his question to Harald Nilssen. ‘At the Palace Hotel?’

  Nilssen frowned—surely Ah Sook knew this already! ‘Yes, Carver’s staying at the Palace,’ he said. ‘On Revell-street. The building with the blue edging, you know. Next to the hardware store.’

  ‘How long?’ said Ah Sook.

  Nilssen looked even more confused. ‘He’s been here for three weeks,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘Since the night—I mean, since the Godspeed came to ground.’

  The other men were still arguing.

  ‘It’s not a séance unless it’s talking with the dead.’

  ‘No—when you talk to Carver, it’s you who ends up dead!’

  They laughed at this, and then the digger’s mate said, ‘Rum do, you’re thinking? Some kind of a hoax?’

  The stubborn digger looked inclined to agree, but he cast a glance over at Lydia Wells. The widow was still unconscious, and her face was very pale. Her mouth was partly open, showing the glint of a molar and a dry tongue, and her eyes were fluttering weakly beneath the lids. If she was shamming, the digger thought, then she was shamming extraordinarily well. But he had paid for a communion with Emery Staines. He had not paid to hear a string of Chinese syllables and then watch a woman fall into a faint. Why, how could he be sure that the words were even Chinese? She might have been speaking gibberish! The Chinese fellow might be in on the secret, and she might have paid him a fee, to corroborate the lie.

  But the digger had a cowardly temperament; he did not voice these opinions aloud. ‘Wouldn’t want to say,’ he said at last, but he still looked surly.

  ‘Well, we’ll ask her, when she comes around.’

  ‘Frank Carver speaks Chinese?’ one of the others said, in a voice of incredulity.

  ‘He goes back and forth from Canton, does he not?’

  ‘Born in Hong Kong.’

  ‘Yes, but to speak the language—as they do!’

  ‘Makes you think different of the man.’

  At this point the digger who had been discharged to the kitchen returned with a glass of water, and threw it across Lydia’s face. Gasping, she revived. The men crowded closer, asking in an anxious chorus after her health and safety, so that it was some moments before the widow had a chance to respond. Lydia Wells looked from face to face in some confusion; after a moment, she even managed a weak laugh. But her laughter was without its usual surety, and as she accepted a glass of Andalusian brandy from the man at her elbow her hand visibly trembled.

  She drank, and in the moments that followed, all manner of questions were put to her—what had she seen? What could she remember? Whom had she channelled? Had she made any contact with Emery Staines?

  Her answers were disappointing. She could remember nothing at all from the point she fell into her trance—which was unusual, she said, for usually she could recall her ‘visions’ very well indeed. The men prompted her, but without success; she simply could not remember anything at all. When it was revealed to her that she had spoken in a foreign tongue, quite fluently and for some time, she looked genuinely puzzled.

  ‘But I don’t know a word of Chinese,’ she said. ‘Are you sure? And the johnnies confirmed it? Real Chinese? You’re really sure?’

  This was confirmed, with much perplexity and excitement.

  ‘And what is all this mess?’ She gestured weakly at the scorched table and the remains of the fire.

  ‘The lamp just fell,’ said one of the diggers. ‘It just fell, of its own accord.’

  ‘It did more than fall: it levitated!’

  Lydia looked at the paraffin lamp a moment, and then seemed to rouse herself. ‘Well!’ She raised herself a little higher on the sofa. ‘So I channelled the ghost of a Chinaman!’

  ‘Interference wasn’t what I paid for,’ the stubborn digger said.

  ‘No,’ said Lydia Wells, soothingly, ‘no—of course it wasn’t. Of course we must refund the cost of all your tickets … but tell me: what were the very words I spoke?’

  ‘Something to do with a murder,’ said Frost, who was still watching her very closely. ‘Something to do with revenge.’

  ‘Indeed!’ said Mrs. Wells. She seemed impressed.

  ‘Ah Sook said it had something to do with Francis Carver,’ said Frost.

  Mrs. Wells went pale; she started forward. ‘What were the very words—the exact words?’

  The diggers looked around them, but perceived only Ah Quee, who returned their gaze stonily, and did not speak.

  ‘He doesn’t have English.’

  ‘Where’s the other one?’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  Ah Sook had extracted himself from the group some minutes before, padding from the room and into the foyer so quietly that nobody had noticed his departure. The revelation that Francis Carver had returned to Hokitika—that
he had been in Hokitika for three weeks—had caused a flood of private emotion in his breast, and he desired, all of a sudden, to be alone.

  He leaned against the rail of the porch and looked out, down the long arm of Revell-street, towards the quay. The long row of hanging lanterns formed a doubled seam of light that came together, in a haze of yellow, some two hundred yards to the south; their brightness was so intense that upon the camber of the street it might have been high noon, and the shadows of the alleys were made all the blacker, by contrast. A pair of drunks staggered past him, clutching one another around the waist. A whore passed in the other direction, her skirts gathered high above her knees. She looked at him curiously, and Ah Sook, after a moment of blankness, remembered that his face was still heavily painted, the corners of his eyes lengthened with kohl, his cheeks rounded with white. She called out to him, but he shook his head, and she walked on. From somewhere nearby there came a sudden roar of laughter and applause.

  Ah Sook sucked his lips between his teeth. So Francis Carver had returned to Hokitika once again. He surely was not aware that his old associate was living in a hut at Kaniere, less than five miles away! Carver was not a man to bear a risk if he could remove the threat of that risk altogether. In that case, Ah Sook thought, perhaps he, Ah Sook, had the advantage. He sucked again at his teeth, and then, after a moment, shook his head: no. Lydia Wells had recognised him that morning. She would surely have relayed the news to Carver at once.

  Inside, the conversation had returned to the subject of the paraffin lamp—a trick that Ah Sook had already dismissed out of hand. Lydia Wells had merely slipped a loop of thread over the knob of the lamp, at the moment she doused it. The thread was the same colour as her dress, and the other end of it was affixed to the inside of her wrist. One sharp twitch of her right hand, and the lamp would fall over the candles. The small table upon which the candles were burning had been coated with paraffin oil, which had the virtues of being both odourless and colourless, such that, to an outsider, the table might have seemed merely clean; at first contact with a naked flame, however, the surface of the table was sure to ignite. It was all a charade, a sham. Mrs. Wells had not made any kind of communion with the realm of the dead, and the words that she had spoken were not the words of a dead man. Ah Sook knew this because the words were his own.

  The whore had lingered in the thoroughfare; she now called out to the men on the veranda opposite, and lifted the flounces of her skirt a little higher. The men called back in response, and one leaped up to caper. Ah Sook watched them with a distant expression. He marvelled at the strange power of feminine hysteria—that Lydia Wells might have remembered his very words, perfectly, over all these years. She did not speak Cantonese. However could she have recalled his speech, and his intonation, so exactly? That was uncanny, Ah Sook thought. For he might have taken her, by her ‘visitation’, for a true native of Canton.

  In the street the men were pooling their shillings, while the streetwalker stood by. There came a whistle-blast from near the quays, and then a shout of warning from the duty sergeant, and then running footsteps, approaching. Ah Sook watched the men scatter and formed his resolution in his mind.

  He would return to Kaniere that very evening, clear all his belongings from his cottage, and make for the hills. There he would apply himself wholly to the task of turning the ground. He would save every flake of dust he came upon, and live as simply as he was able, until he had amassed a total of five ounces. He would not take opium until he held five ounces in his hand; he would not drink; he would not gamble; he would eat only the cheapest and plainest of foods. But the very moment that he reached this target he would return to Hokitika. He would change the metal at the Grey and Buller Bank. He would walk across the thoroughfare to Tiegreen’s Hardware and Supply. He would lay his paper note upon the countertop. He would purchase a store of shot, a tin of black powder, and a gun. Then he would walk to the Palace Hotel, climb the stairs, open Carver’s door, and take his life. And after that? Ah Sook exhaled again. After that, nothing. After that his life would come full circle, and he could rest, at last.

  MERCURY IN AQUARIUS

  In which Moody passes on some vital information, and Sook Yongsheng presents him with a gift.

  On the morning of the 20th of March Walter Moody rose before the dawn, rang for hot water, and washed standing at the window, looking over the rooftops as the navy pre-dawn sky faded to grey, then pale blue, then the splendid yellow of a fresh yolk—by which time he was dressed, and descending the stairs, and calling for his toast to be buttered, and his eggs boiled hard. En route to the dining room he lingered in the hallway, leaning his ear towards the door of a locked chamber at the foot of the stairs. After listening a moment he perceived a grainy, rhythmic sound, and continued on, satisfied that the room’s inhabitant was still very sound asleep.

  The Crown dining room was empty save for the intermittent presence of the cook, who stifled a yawn as he brought Moody’s pot of tea, and another as he delivered the morning edition of the West Coast Times, the pages slightly damp from the chill of the night. Moody scanned the paper as he ate. The front page was composed chiefly of repeat notices. The banks offered competing terms of interest, each promising the very best price for gold. The hoteliers boasted the various distinctions of their hotels. The grocers and warehousemen listed a full inventory of their wares, and the shipping news reported which passengers had lately departed, and which passengers had lately arrived. The second page of the paper was taken over by a long and rather spiteful review of the latest show at the Prince of Wales (‘so poor in quality as to defy—because it is beneath—criticism’), and several gossipy correspondences from goldfield speculators in the north. Moody turned to the social notices as he finished his second egg, and his eyes came to rest upon a pair of names he recognised. A modest ceremony had been planned. No date had yet been determined. There would be no honeymoon. Cards and other expressions of congratulation could be addressed care of the prospective groom, who took his nightly lodging at the Palace Hotel.

  Moody was frowning as he folded the paper, wiped his mouth, and rose from the table—but it was not the engagement, nor the fact of its announcement, that preoccupied his thinking as he returned upstairs to fetch his hat and coat. It was the matter of the forwarding address.

  For Moody knew very well that Francis Carver no longer lodged at the Palace Hotel. His rooms at the Palace stood as before, with his frockcoat hanging in the armoire, his trunk set out at the foot of the bed, and his bedclothes mussed and strewn about. He still broke his fast in the Palace dining room every morning, and drank whisky in the Palace parlour every night. He still paid his weekly board to the Palace proprietor—who, as far as Moody had been able to ascertain, remained quite unaware that his most notorious guest was paying two pounds weekly for an unoccupied room. The fact of Carver’s nightly relocation was not commonly known, and were it not for the accident of their conjunction, Moody might have also remained ignorant of the fact that Carver had slept every night since the night of the widow’s séance at the Crown, in a small room next to the kitchen that afforded an unobstructed view up the rutted length of the Kaniere-road.

  By seven-thirty Moody was striding eastward along Gibson Quay, dressed in a grey slouch hat, yellow moleskin trousers, leather knee-boots, and a dark woollen coat over a shirt of grey serge. He now donned this costume six days out of seven, much to the amusement of Gascoigne, who had asked him more than once why he had chosen to leave off the piratical red sash, which might have finished off the ensemble very nicely.

  Moody had staked a claim close enough to Hokitika to permit his continued board at the Crown Hotel. This arrangement cut into his weekly earnings rather severely, but he preferred it to sleeping in a tent beneath the open sky, something he had attempted only once, to his great discomfort. It took him an hour and twenty minutes to walk to his claim from Hokitika; before the clock struck nine every morning, therefore, he was at his cradle at the creekside, ha
uling pails of water, whistling, and shovelling sand.

  Moody was not, truth be told, a terribly skilful prospector: he was hoping for nuggets rather than panning for dust. Too often the ore-bearing gravel slipped through the netting at the bottom of the cradle, only to be washed away; sometimes he emptied his cradle twice over without finding any flakes at all. He was making what the diggers called ‘pay dirt’, meaning that the sum total of his weekly income was more or less equal to the sum total of his weekly expenditure, but it was a holding pattern he could not sustain. He knew that he ought to heed popular advice, and go mates with another man, or with a party. The chance of striking rich was doubled in a partnership, and the chances multiplied still further in a party of five, or seven, or nine. But his pride would not permit it. He persevered alone, visualising, every hour, the nugget with which he would buy his future life. His dreams at night began to glister, and he began to see flashes of light in the most unlikely places, such that he had to look again, and blink, or close his eyes.

  Stepping across the small creek that formed the northern boundary of his claim, Moody was surprised to see the pale silhouette of a tent through the scrub, and beside it, the remains of a fire. He came up short. The Hokitika diggers typically spent their weekends in town, not returning to the field until mid-morning on Monday at the very earliest. Why had this digger not joined his fellows? And what was he doing on another man’s patch of land?

  ‘Hello there,’ Moody called, meaning to rouse the tent’s inhabitant. ‘Hello.’

  At once there came a grunt, and a flurry of motion inside the tent. ‘Sorry,’ someone said. ‘Very sorry—very sorry—’

  A Chinese face appeared at the opening, blurred with sleep.

  ‘No trouble,’ he said. ‘Very sorry.’

  ‘Mr. Sook?’ said Moody.

  Ah Sook squinted up at him.