The Luminaries (23 page)

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.

‘It’s there?’ Pritchard said.

‘Hardly made a scratch,’ Gascoigne said, testing the depth of the hole with the end of his finger. ‘Those muff pistols, they’re not worth much.’

‘But where—’ Pritchard was at a loss. His tongue felt thick in his mouth.

‘What happened to the first?’ said Gascoigne, echoing him. They all stared at the second cartridge, the visible cartridge, misshapen in his hand. Then Gascoigne looked at Anna, and Anna at Gascoigne—and it seemed to Pritchard that a look of understanding passed between them.

What a wretched thing it was, to behold one’s whore
exchanging
glances with another man! Pritchard wanted to despise her, but he could not: he felt dulled, even bewildered. There was a ringing in his ears.

Anna turned to him. ‘Will you go downstairs?’ she said. ‘Tell Edgar I was playing with the gun, or cleaning it, and it went off by accident.’

‘He isn’t at the desk,’ Pritchard said.

‘Tell the valet, then. Just make it known. I don’t want anybody coming up; I don’t want any fuss. Please do it.’

‘All right. I will,’ Pritchard said. ‘And then—’

‘And then you should go.’ Anna was firm.

‘I want what I came for.’ He spoke quietly, glancing sideways at Gascoigne—but the other man’s eyes were discreetly lowered.

‘I can’t help you, Joseph. I don’t have what you want. Please go.’

He looked into her eyes again. They were green, with a thick rind of darkness around the edge of the iris, and flecks of pebbled grey clustered around the pupil in rays. It had been months since he had seen the colour in her eyes, since he had seen her pupil as a point, a grain, and not as a blurred disc of blackness, dulled with sleep. She was sober—of this he had no doubt at all. So she was a liar, and maybe even a thief; so she was deceiving him. And her appointment, the man Gascoigne. There was another secret. Another lie. Going with a lady, to look at hats—!

But Pritchard found that he could not renew his anger. He felt ashamed. He felt as though it had been
he
who had intruded, as though it had been
he
who had disturbed an intimate scene in the whore’s own chambers, between Anna and Gascoigne. The shame Pritchard felt was of a very crude and childish sort: it came upon him as a rush of bitter feeling, swelling in his throat.

At last he turned on his heel and made to leave. In the doorway he reached back for the handle, to pull the door shut behind him—but he did it slowly, and watched them through the narrowing crack.

Gascoigne began moving just before the door was quite closed. He spun towards Anna and opened his arms for an embrace, and Anna fell into him, her pale cheek rising to fit into the curve of his neck. Gascoigne wrapped his arms strongly about her waist, and Anna’s body went limp; he lifted her, so that her toes trailed on the floor; she was clasped against him; he lowered his head and pressed his cheek against her hair. His jaw was clenched; his eyes were open; he breathed fiercely through his nose. Pritchard, with his eye at the door, was overcome with loneliness. He felt that he had never loved, and that no soul had ever loved him. He shut the door as softly as he could, and padded down the stairs.

‘May I interject to ask a question?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Can you show me exactly how Miss Wetherell was holding the pistol?’

‘Certainly. Like this—with the heel of her hand right here. I was standing at an angle to her, about where Mr. Mannering is sitting now, in relation to me, and her body was half-turned, like this.’

‘And if the gun had fired as expected, what kind of injury would Miss Wetherell likely have sustained?’

‘If she was lucky, a flesh wound in the shoulder. If she was unlucky—well, perhaps a little lower. Her heart, maybe. The left side … The truly curious thing, of course, is even if the cartridge
was
a blank, she still should have been impacted by the empty casing, or burnt by the powder, or seared at the very least. We couldn’t make heads or tails of it.’

‘Thank you. I’m sorry to interrupt.’

‘Is there something you can share with us, Mr. Moody?’

‘Presently I will—when I have heard the rest of the story.’

‘I must say, sir—you’re looking awfully queer.’

‘I’m quite well. Please continue.’

It was still early in the afternoon when Pritchard returned to his drug hall on Collingwood-street, but he felt that it ought to be much later—that night ought to be falling, to make sense of the exhaustion that he felt. He entered by way of the shop, and spent a foolish moment straightening the razor-strops with the corners of the shelves, and tidying the bottles so that they stood shoulder-to-
shoulder
against the lip of the display cabinet—but suddenly he could not bear himself. He set a card in the shop window informing callers to return on Monday, locked the door, and retired to his laboratory.

There were several orders set out upon his desk, to be made up, but he gazed down at the forms almost without seeing them. He took off his jacket and hung it on the hook beside the range. He tied his apron about his waist by habit. Then he stood and gazed at nothing.

Mary Menzies’s words had fixed him—they were his prophecy, his curse. ‘You have never been at peace with good’—he
remembered
them; he wrote them down; and by doing so he made sure her words came true. He became the man whom she rejected
because
she rejected him,
because
she left. And now he was
thirty-eight,
and he had never been in love, and other men had mistresses, and other men had wives. With his long finger Pritchard touched the shaft of a prescription bottle on the desk before him. She was nineteen. She was Mary Menzies in his mind.

A phrase of his father’s returned to him: you give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life. (‘Remember that, Joseph,’—with one hand on Pritchard’s shoulder, and the other clasping a
newborn
puppy against his chest; the next day, Pritchard dubbed the young thing Cromwell, and his father nodded once.) Recalling the words, Pritchard thought:
is that what I have done, to my own self, to my own fate? Am I the dog in my father’s maxim, badly named?
But it was not a question.

He sat down and placed his hands, palm downward, on the
laboratory
bench. His thoughts drifted back to Anna. By her own account, she had not intended to commit suicide at all—a claim that Pritchard believed was an honest one. Anna’s life was
miserable
, but she had her pleasures, and she was not a violent type. Pritchard felt that he knew her. He could not imagine that she would try to take her life. And yet—what had she said? It does occur to one, now and again.
Yes
, Pritchard thought heavily.
Now and again, it does.

Anna was a seasoned opium eater. She took the drug nearly every day, and was well accustomed to its effects upon her body and her mind. Pritchard had never known her to lose consciousness so completely that she could not be revived for over twelve hours. He doubted that such a circumstance could have come about by
accident
. Well, if she truly had
not
intended to end her life—as she attested—then that left only two options: either she had been drugged by somebody else, used for some nefarious purpose, and then abandoned in the Christchurch-road, or (Pritchard gave a slow nod) she was bluffing. Yes. She had lied about the resin; she
could easily be lying about the overdose, too. But for what purpose? Whom was she protecting? And to what end?

The Hokitika physician had confirmed that Anna had indeed partaken of a great deal of opium on the night of the 14th of January: his testament to this effect had been published in the
West
Coast Times
on the day after Anna’s trial. Could Anna have
managed
to fool the physician, or to persuade him somehow to give a false diagnosis? Pritchard considered this. She had been in the
gaol-house
for over twelve hours, over which time she would have been prodded and poked by all manner of men, and witnessed by dozens of others, besides. She could hardly have fooled them all. True unconsciousness cannot be faked, Pritchard thought. Even a whore was not as good an actress as that.

All right: perhaps the drug had been poisoned after all. Pritchard turned his hands over, and studied the whorls on the pads of his
fingers
, each hand the mirror image of the other. When he pressed his fingertips together, they made a perfect doubled reflection, as when a man touches his forehead to a glass. He leaned forward to look at the whorls. He himself had certainly not altered the drug in any way, and he did not really suspect the Chinese man, Sook, of having done so either. Sook was fond of Anna. No, it was
impossible
that Sook might have sought to cause Anna harm. Well, that meant the drug must have been poisoned either
before
Pritchard bought it wholesale, or
after
Anna purchased her smaller portion from Ah Sook, to imbibe at home.

Pritchard’s source for opiates of all kinds was a man named Francis Carver. He considered Carver now. The man was a former convict, and had a poor reputation as a consequence; to Pritchard, however, he had always been courteous and fair, and Pritchard had no reason to think that Carver might wish him—or his business—any kind of active harm. As to whether Carver bore ill-will towards the Chinese, Pritchard had no idea—but he did not sell direct to the Chinese. He sold to Pritchard, and Pritchard alone.

Pritchard had first met Carver at a gambling house on
Revell-street,
some seven months ago. Pritchard was a keen gambler, and had been refreshing himself between games of craps, tallying his
losses in his mind, when a scar-faced man sat down beside him. Pritchard inquired, as a pleasantry, whether the man was fond of cards, and what had brought him to Hokitika; soon they fell to
talking
. When in due course Pritchard named his own profession, Carver’s expression sharpened. Putting down his drink, he explained that he had a long-standing connexion with a former East Indiaman who controlled an opium poppy plantation in Bengal. If Pritchard was in need of opium, Carver could
guarantee
a product of unrivalled quality and limitless supply. At that time Pritchard had no stock of opium at all, save for some weak tinctures of laudanum he had purchased from a quack; without hesitation, therefore, he thanked Carver, shook his hand, and agreed to return the following morning to draw up the terms of their trade.