The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

  ‘I just expected that you might,’ said Balfour.

  ‘I don’t know George Shepard from a stick of chalk,’ said Lauderback, stoutly.

  Aubert Gascoigne had completed his business at the Reserve Bank in the mid-afternoon; when the clock struck five, he was back at the Courthouse, compiling a record of that day’s petty sessions for the West Coast Times. He was surprised when the foyer door opened and Anna Wetherell walked in.

  She gave him only a cursory greeting, however, en route to shake Mr. Fellowes’ hand. They exchanged several words that Gascoigne could not hear, and then the lawyer gestured her into a private office, and closed the door.

  ‘What’s Anna doing with Fellowes?’ Gascoigne said to his colleague Burke.

  ‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ said Burke. ‘She came by earlier, while you were at the bank. Wanted to speak to a lawyer about something private.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t bloody news,’ said Burke. ‘Hello, there’s Gov. Shepard.’

  George Shepard was striding across the hall towards them.

  ‘Mr. Gascoigne, Mr. Burke,’ he said. ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘I’ve come to collect a warrant for a Chinaman’s arrest.’

  ‘It’s ready for you, sir.’

  Burke went to fetch the warrant. Shepard waited, with restrained impatience, his hands on his hips, his fingers tapping. Gascoigne was staring at Fellowes’ office door. Suddenly, from behind it, there came a muffled thump—rather like the sound of a body falling down stairs—and in the next moment Fellowes was shouting, ‘Give us a hand—give us a hand in here!’

  Gascoigne crossed the hall to the office and opened the door. Anna Wetherell was lying prone, her eyes closed, her mouth half-open; the lawyer Fellowes was kneeling beside her, shaking her arm.

  ‘Out for the count,’ said Fellowes. ‘She just collapsed! Pitched forward, right over the table!’ He turned to Gascoigne, pleading. ‘I didn’t do anything! I didn’t touch her!’

  The gaoler had come up behind them. ‘What’s going on?’

  Gascoigne knelt and leaned close to her. ‘She’s breathing,’ he said. ‘Let’s get her up.’ He lifted her into a sitting position, marvelling at how thin and wasted her limbs had become. Her head lolled back; he caught it in the crook of his elbow.

  ‘Did she hit her head?’

  ‘Nothing like that,’ said Fellowes, who was wearing a very frightened look. ‘She just fell sideways. Looks like she’s drunk. But she didn’t seem drunk, when she walked in. I swear I didn’t touch her.’

  ‘Maybe she fainted.’

  ‘Use your heads, both of you,’ said Shepard. ‘I can smell the laudanum from here.’

  Gascoigne could smell it too: thick and bitter. He slipped a finger into Anna’s mouth and worked her jaw open. ‘There’s no staining,’ he said. ‘If it were laudanum, her tongue would be brown, wouldn’t it? Her teeth would be stained.’

  ‘Take her to the gaol-house,’ Shepard said.

  Gascoigne frowned. ‘Perhaps the hospital—’

  ‘The gaol,’ Shepard said. ‘I’ve had enough of this whore and her theatrics. Take her to the Police Camp, and chain her to the rail. And sit her upright, so she can breathe.’

  Fellowes was shaking his head. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said. ‘One moment she was stone-cold sober, the next she came over all drowsy, and the next—’

  The foyer door opened again. ‘A Mr. Quee for Mr. Fellowes,’ came the call.

  Burke had come up behind them. ‘Excuse me, Mr. Shepard,’ he said. ‘Here’s your warrant for Mr. Sook’s arrest.’

  ‘Mr. Quee?’ said Gascoigne, turning. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘Take the whore away,’ the gaoler said.

  Sook Yongsheng, lying on the bare boards beneath George Shepard’s bed, was listening to the bells in the Wesleyan chapel ring out half past five when there came another rap at the cottage door. He turned his head to the side, and listened for Margaret Shepard’s footsteps. She padded down the hall, lifted the latch, and drew the bolt, and then the square of lightness on the calico wall widened again, and he felt the cool breath of the outside air. The light was bluer now, and less intense, and the shadow in the doorway was a muted grey.

  ‘Mrs. Shepard, I presume.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder if I might have a word with your husband. Is he available?’

  ‘No,’ said Margaret Shepard, for the second time that day. ‘He’s gone down to the Courthouse on business.’

  ‘What a shame. Might I wait for him?’

  ‘You’d do better to make an appointment,’ she said.

  ‘I take it that he is not likely to return.’

  ‘He often spends his nights at Seaview,’ she said. ‘And sometimes he plays billiards in town.’

  ‘I see.’

  Sook Yongsheng did not know Alistair Lauderback’s voice, but he could tell from the tone and volume that the man speaking was someone of some authority.

  ‘Forgive me for disturbing you,’ Lauderback went on. ‘Perhaps you might do me the favour of telling your husband that I came by.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You do know who I am, don’t you?’

  ‘You’re Mr. Lauderback,’ she whispered.

  ‘Very good. Tell him that I should like to discuss a mutual acquaintance. Francis Carver is the man’s name.’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’

  That man will be dead before the morning, thought Sook Yongsheng.

  The door closed again; the bedroom darkened.

  Cowell Devlin made room for Anna Wetherell in the corner of the Police Camp gaol-house, thinking, as he did so, that she made for a much more wretched picture than she had two months prior, following her attempt upon her own life. She was not feverish, as she had been then, and she did not mumble in her sleep, or lash about—but she seemed all the sorrier, for sleeping so peacefully, clad in her black mourning gown. She was so thin. Devlin manacled her with great regret, and as loosely as he was able. He asked Mrs. Shepard to bring a blanket to place beneath her head. This instruction was silently obeyed.

  ‘What’s the meaning of it?’ he said to Gascoigne, as he folded the blanket over his knee. ‘I saw Anna only this morning. I escorted her to the Courthouse myself! Did she go straight to Pritchard’s, and buy a phial of the stuff?’

  ‘Pritchard’s is closed,’ Gascoigne said. ‘It’s been closed all afternoon.’

  Devlin slipped his palm beneath Anna’s head, and slid the folded blanket beneath. ‘Well then, where did she get her hands on a phial of laudanum, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Perhaps she’d had it all along.’

  ‘No,’ said Devlin. ‘When she left the Wayfarer’s Fortune this morning she wasn’t carrying a reticule or wallet of any kind. She didn’t even have any money on her person, as far as I’m aware. Someone must have given it to her. But why?’

  Gascoigne wanted very much to know why Cowell Devlin had gone to the Wayfarer’s Fortune that morning, and what had happened there; as he was thinking of a polite way to ask, however, there came the rattle and clop of a trap approaching, and then Pritchard’s voice:

  ‘Hello in there! It’s Jo Pritchard, with Emery Staines!’

  Devlin’s face was almost comical in its astonishment. Gascoigne had already rushed outside by the time he got to his feet; the chaplain hurried after him, and saw, in the courtyard, Joseph Pritchard, climbing down from the driver’s seat of a trap, and leading the horses to be tethered at the gaol-house post. On the seat of the trap Te Rau Tauwhare was sitting with both arms around a white-faced, sunken-eyed boy. Devlin stared at the boy. This was Emery Staines—this limp, inconsequential thing? The boy was much younger than he had envisaged. Why, he was but one-and-twenty—perhaps even younger. He was barely older than a child.

  ‘Tauwhare found him hiding out in Crosbie’s cottage,’ Pritchard said shortly
. ‘He’s very sick, as you can see. Give us a hand getting him down.’

  ‘You’re not taking him to gaol!’ Devlin said.

  ‘Of course not,’ Pritchard said. ‘He’s going to the hospital. He needs to see Dr. Gillies at once.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Gascoigne.

  ‘What?’ said Pritchard.

  ‘He won’t last an hour if you take him there,’ Gascoigne said.

  ‘Well, we can’t exactly take him back to his own rooms,’ said Pritchard.

  ‘Get him a hotel, then. Get him a room somewhere. Anywhere’s better than the hospital.’

  ‘Give us a hand,’ Pritchard said again. ‘And someone send for Dr. Gillies, while we’re at it. He’ll have the last word.’

  They helped Emery Staines down from the trap.

  ‘Mr. Staines,’ said Pritchard. ‘Do you know where you are?’

  ‘Anna Magdalena,’ he mumbled. ‘Where’s Anna?’

  ‘Anna’s right here,’ said Cowell Devlin. ‘She’s right inside.’

  His eyes opened. ‘I want to see her.’

  ‘He’s not talking sense,’ said Pritchard. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’

  ‘I want to see Anna,’ said the boy, suddenly lucid. ‘Where is she? I want to see her.’

  ‘He seems coherent to me,’ said Gascoigne.

  ‘Bring him inside,’ said Devlin. ‘Just until the doctor gets here. Come on: it’s what he wants. Bring him into the gaol.’

  THE GREATER MALEFIC

  In which Sook Yongsheng overhears the beginning of a conversation.

  Ah Sook crouched in the allotment behind the Crown Hotel, his back against the timber of the building, his knees bent, the Kerr Patent revolver cradled loosely in both his hands. He looked like an altogether different man from the one who had purchased the pistol that morning. Margaret Shepard had cut off his pigtail, shadowed his chin and throat with blacking, and thickened his eyebrows with the same; she had found a threadbare jacket for him, and a shirt of gaol-issue twill, and a red kerchief to tie about his neck. With the brim of his hat turned down, and the collar of his jacket turned up, he did not look Chinese in the slightest. Walking the three-hundred-yard distance from the Police Camp to the Crown, he had not attracted the least bit of attention from anyone at all; now, crouched in the allotment, he was all but invisible in the darkness.

  Inside the hotel two people were talking: a man and a woman. Their voices came down to him quite clearly through the gap between the window shutter and the frame.

  ‘Looks like it’ll come off,’ the man was saying. ‘Protected and indemnified.’

  ‘You still sound uneasy,’ said the woman.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you doubting? The money’s in your hand, almost!’

  ‘You know I don’t trust a fellow without connexions. I couldn’t dig up anything on this Gascoigne at all. He arrived in Hokitika some time before Christmas. Landed himself a job at the Courthouse without any fuss. Lives alone. No friends to speak of. You say he’s nothing but a dandy. I say: how do I know that Lauderback hasn’t set him up?’

  ‘He does have one connexion. He brought a friend along to the opening of the Wayfarer’s Fortune, I recall. An aristocratic type.’

  ‘What does he go by? The friend.’

  ‘Walter Moody was his name.’

  ‘He can’t be Adrian Moody’s son?’

  ‘That was my first thought, too. He did speak with a Scottish lilt.’

  ‘Well, there you have it: they must be related.’

  There was the clink of glasses.

  ‘I saw him just before I left Dunedin,’ the man went on. ‘Adrian, I mean. Tight as all get-up.’

  ‘And out for blood, no doubt,’ said the woman.

  ‘I don’t like a man beyond his own control.’

  ‘No,’ the woman agreed, ‘and Moody is of the worst variety—the kind of man who loves to be offended, so that he can vent his temper—for he knows not how to vent it, otherwise. He’s a decent man when he’s sober.’

  ‘But anyway,’ the man said, ‘if this chap Gascoigne is in thick with one of the Moody family, he ought to do us fine. His advice ought to be fine.’

  ‘The family resemblance is excessively slight. The mother’s features must have been strong.’

  The man laughed. ‘You’re never short of an opinion, Greenway. An opinion is one thing you’ve always got on hand.’

  There was another pause, and then the woman said, ‘He came over on Godspeed, in fact.’

  ‘Moody?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No. He can’t have.’

  ‘Francis! Don’t contradict me. He told me himself, that evening.’

  ‘No,’ the man said. ‘There was no one with the name of Moody. There were only eight of them, and I looked the paper over. I would have remembered that name.’

  ‘Perhaps you overlooked it,’ said the woman. ‘You know I hate to be contradicted. Let’s not disagree.’

  ‘How would I overlook the name Moody? Why, that’s like overlooking Hanover, or—or Plantagenet.’

  The woman laughed. ‘I would hardly compare Adrian Moody to a royal line!’

  Ah Sook heard the squeak of a chair, and the shifting of weight over floorboards. ‘I only mean I’d have recognised it. Would you pass over the name Carver?’

  The woman made a noise in her throat. ‘He most definitely said that he’d come over on Godspeed,’ she said. ‘I remember it vividly. We exchanged some words on the subject.’

  ‘Something’s not right,’ the man said.

  ‘Well, have you got the passenger list? Surely you’ve a copy of the Times—from when the ship came in. Why don’t you check it?’

  ‘Yes. You’re right. Hang a bit; I’ll go and look in the smoking room. They keep a stack of old broadsheets on the secretary.’

  The door opened and closed.

  The lamp in the next room came on, illuminating one corner of the allotment in a glow of muted yellow. Carver was in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel—and away from Lydia Wells at last. Ah Sook raised himself up slightly. He saw through the window that Carver had his back to the door, and was shuffling through the papers on the secretary. As far as he could see, there was nobody else in the room. In the bedroom, Lydia Wells began to hum a little ditty to herself.

  Ah Sook got to his feet. Holding the Kerr Patent against his thigh, and moving as softly as he was able in his digger’s boots, he crept around the back of the house to the tradesman’s door. He turned into the alley—and froze.

  ‘Drop your arms.’

  Standing on the far side of the alley, his face in shadow, a long-handled pistol in his hand, was the gaol’s governor, George Shepard. Ah Sook did not move. His eyes went to Shepard’s pistol, and then back to Shepard’s face.

  ‘Drop it,’ Shepard said. ‘I will shoot you. Drop the piece now.’

  Still Ah Sook said nothing; still he did not move.

  ‘You will kneel down and place your revolver on the ground,’ Shepard said. ‘You will do that now, or you will die. Kneel.’

  Ah Sook sank to his knees, but he did not release the Kerr Patent. His finger tightened on the hammer.

  ‘I will shoot you dead before you have time to cock and aim,’ Shepard said. ‘Make no mistake about it. Drop your arms.’

  ‘Margaret,’ said Ah Sook.

  ‘Yes,’ Shepard said. ‘She sent me a message.’

  Ah Sook shook his head: he could not believe it.

  ‘She is my wife,’ Shepard said curtly. ‘And she was my brother’s wife before me. You remember my brother, I trust. You ought to.’

  ‘No.’ Again Ah Sook’s finger tightened on the hammer.

  ‘You do not remember him? Or you do not believe that you ought to remember?’

  ‘No,’ said Ah Sook, stubbornly.

  ‘Let me jog your memory,’ Shepard said. ‘He died at the White Horse Saloon at Darling Harbour, shot through the temple at close range. Do you remember h
im now? Jeremy Shepard was his name.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Good,’ said Shepard. ‘So do I.’

  ‘I did not murder him.’

  ‘Still singing the same old tune, I see.’

  ‘Margaret,’ said Sook Yongsheng again, still kneeling.

  ‘Francis!’

  ‘Hush a moment. Hush.’

  ‘… What are you listening for?’

  ‘Hush.’

  ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘Nor can I. That’s good.’

  ‘It was so close.’

  ‘Poor lamb. Did it alarm you?’

  ‘Only a bit. I thought—’

  ‘Never mind. Most likely it was just an accident. Someone cleaning their piece.’

  ‘I couldn’t help but imagine that horrible Chinaman.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to come of him. He’ll head straight to the Palace, and he’ll be rounded up before the morning.’

  ‘You’ve been so afraid of him, Francis.’

  ‘Come here.’

  ‘All right. All right. I’ve recovered now. Let’s see what you’ve found.’

  ‘Here.’ There was a rustling noise. ‘Look. McKitchen, Morely, Parrish. See? Eight in total—and no mention of a Walter Moody anywhere.’

  There was a short period of quiet as she looked the paper over, and checked the date. Presently he said, ‘Strange thing to tell a lie about. Especially when his partner shows up out of nowhere, a few weeks later, and starts yammering to me about insurance. I’m just a chap who tells another chap about loopholes, he said.’

  ‘One of these names must be a false one. If your passengers truly numbered eight, and Walter Moody was truly among them.’

  ‘Eight—and all accounted for. They took the lighter in to shore that afternoon—six hours, maybe seven hours, before we rolled.’

  ‘Then he must have taken a false name.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Well, perhaps he was lying, then. About having come over on Godspeed.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  Evidently Lydia Wells could not produce a response to this either, for after a moment she said, ‘What are you thinking, Francis?’