The Luminaries (42 page)

Tauwhare, who had received this sermon doubtfully, only nodded. ‘These are wise words,’ he added, feeling pity for his
interlocutor
.

In general Tauwhare’s conception of prayer was restricted to the most ritualised and oratorical sort. The ordered obeisance of the
whaikorero
produced in him, as did all rituals of speech and
ceremony
, a feeling of centrality and calm, the likes of which he could not manufacture alone, and nor did he wish to. The sensation was quite distinct from the love he felt for his family, which he
experienced
as a private leaping in his breast, and distinct, too, from the pride he felt in himself, which he felt as a pressurised excitement, an elated certainty that no man would ever match him, and no man would ever dare to try. It ran deeper than the natural
goodness
that he felt, watching his mother shuck mussels and pile the slippery meat into a wide-mouthed flax basket on the shore, and knowing, as he watched her, that his love was good, and wholly pure; it ran deeper than the virtuous exhaustion he felt after a day stacking the
rua kumara
, or hauling timber, or plaiting
harakeke
until the ends of his fingers were pricked and raw. Te Rau Tauwhare was a man for whom the act of love was the true religion, and the altar of this religion was one in place of which no idols could be made.

‘Shall we go to the grave together?’ Devlin said.

The wooden headstone that marked Crosbie Wells’s grave had surrendered already to the coastal climate. Two weeks following the hermit’s death, the wooden plaque was already swollen, the face already spotted with a rime of black mould. The indentation of the cooper’s engraving had softened, and the thin accent of paint had faded from white to a murky yellow-grey, giving the impression, not altogether dispelled by the stated year of his death, that the man had been deceased for a very long time. The plot was yet unseeded by lichen or grass, and, despite the rain, had a barren look—not of earth recently turned, but of earth that had settled, and would not be turned again.

The favoured epitaphs here were chiefly beatitudes from Matthew, or oft-quoted verses from the Psalms. Injunctions to sleep and be at peace did not reassure, however, as they might have done in some hedged and cobbled parish, ten thousand miles away. It was in the company of the lost and the drowned that Crosbie Wells lay at his eternal rest, for there were yet only a handful of headstones in the plot at Seaview, and most of them were memorials erected in honour of vessels that had been wrecked, or lost at sea: the
Glasgow
, the
City of Dunedin
, the
New Zealand
—as though entire cities, entire nations, had been bound for the Coast, only to run aground, or sink, or disappear. On the hermit’s right was a memorial to the brigantine
Oak
, the first ship to founder at the mouth of the Hokitika River, a fact engraved with forbidding premonition upon the greenish stone; on Wells’s left was a wooden headstone barely larger than a plaque, which bore no name at all, only a verse, unattributed:
M
Y
T
IMES
A
RE
I
N
Y
OUR
H
AND
. None too far from the cemetery was the site of George Shepard’s future gaol-house, the foundations of which had been paced and
measured
out already, the dimensions marked in white lead paint upon the soil.

It was the first time that Tauwhare had ventured to Seaview since Wells’s interment, a ceremony that had taken place before a small and perfunctory audience, and despite very heavy rain. In these aspects, and in the general speed with which the conventional blessings were dispatched, Wells’s funeral had seemed to embody every kind of inconvenience, and every kind of dreariness. Needless to say Te Rau Tauwhare had not been invited to
contribute
to the proceedings; in fact George Shepard had specifically enjoined him, with an ominous wag of his large-knuckled finger, to keep silent during all but the chaplain’s ‘Amen’—a chorus to which Tauwhare did not, in the event, add his voice, for Devlin’s
benediction
was quite swallowed in the downpour. He was permitted to assist in lowering Wells’s coffin down into the mud of the hole, however, and in depositing thirty, forty, fifty shovelfuls of wet earth after it. He should have liked to do this alone, for the party made short work of filling the hole, and it seemed to Tauwhare that
everything was over far too soon. The men, pulling their collars up about their ears, buttoned their coats, took up their earth-spattered tools, and trooped single-file back down the muddy switchback to the warmth and light of Hokitika proper, where they shucked their greatcoats, and wiped their faces dry, and changed their sodden boots for indoor shoes.

Tauwhare came silently upon the grave of his friend, Devlin
following
, his hands folded, his expression peaceful. Tauwhare halted some five or six feet from the wooden headstone, and looked upon the plot as though upon a deathbed from a chamber doorway—as though fearing to step, bodily, into the room.

Tauwhare had never seen Crosbie Wells beyond the Arahura Valley. He had certainly never seen him here, upon this forsaken terrace, ravaged by the sky. Had the man not said countless times that it was in the solitary Arahura that he wished to end his days? It was senseless that he should have been laid to rest here, among men who were not his brethren, upon soil he had not worked, and did not love—while his dear old cottage stood empty and
abandoned
, some dozen miles away! It was
that
soil that ought to have claimed him. It was
that
earth that ought to have turned his death to fertile life. It was in the Arahura, Tauwhare thought, that he ought to have been buried, in the end. At the edge of the clearing, perhaps … or by the plot of his tiny garden … or on the
north-facing
side of the cottage, in a patch of sun.

Te Rau Tauwhare came closer—into the phantom chamber, to the foot of the phantom bed. A wave of guilt overcame him. Ought he to confess to the chaplain after all—that he, Tauwhare, had led Crosbie to his death? Yes: he would make his confession; and Devlin would pray for him, as though for a Christian man. Tauwhare squatted down upon his haunches, placed a careful palm over the wet earth that covered Crosbie’s heart, and held it there.

‘Weeping may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning,’ Devlin said.

‘
Whatu
ngarongaro he tangata, toitu he whenua
.’

‘May the Lord keep him; may the Lord keep us, as we pray for him.’

Tauwhare’s palm had made an indentation in the soil; seeing this, he lifted his hand a little, and with his fingertips, smoothed the print away.

At the
West Coast Times
office on Weld-street, Benjamin Löwenthal’s Shabbat was just coming to an end. Charlie Frost found him sitting at his kitchen table, finishing his supper.

Löwenthal was rather less pleased to see Frost than he had been to see Thomas Balfour earlier that afternoon, for he guessed, rightly, that Frost was come to speak about the estate of Crosbie Wells—a subject of which he had long since tired. He welcomed Frost into his kitchen courteously, however, and invited the young banker to take a seat.

Frost, for his part, did not apologise for interrupting Löwenthal’s devotions, for he was not worldly, and he did not know them to be devotions. He sat down at the ink-stained table, thinking it very strange that Löwenthal had cooked himself such an elaborate supper, only to partake of it alone. The candle he took for an eccentricity; he glanced at it only once.

‘It’s about the estate,’ he said.

Löwenthal sighed. ‘Bad news, then,’ he said. ‘I might have guessed it.’

Frost gave a brief summary of what had transpired in Chinatown that afternoon, describing Mannering’s former grievances with Ah Quee in some detail.

‘Where’s the bad news?’ Löwenthal said, when he was done.

‘I’m afraid your name came up,’ said Frost, speaking delicately.

‘In what context?’

‘It was suggested’—even more delicately—‘that perhaps this fellow Lauderback used you as a pawn, on the night of the fourteenth. In coming straight to you, I mean, on the night of the hermit’s death, and telling you all about it. Maybe—just possibly—he came to you by some sort of design.’

‘That’s absurd,’ Löwenthal said. ‘How was Lauderback to know that I’d go straight to Edgar Clinch? I certainly never mentioned
Edgar’s name to him … and he said nothing out of the ordinary to me.’

Frost spread his hands. ‘Well, we’re making a list of suspects, that’s all, and Mr. Lauderback is on that list.’

‘Who else is on your list?’

‘A man named Francis Carver.’

‘Ah,’ said Löwenthal. ‘Who else?’

‘The widow Wells, of course.’

‘Of course. Who else?’

‘Miss Wetherell,’ said Frost, ‘and Mr. Staines.’

Löwenthal’s face was inscrutable. ‘A broad taxonomy,’ he said. ‘Continue.’

Frost explained that a small group of men were meeting at the Crown Hotel after nightfall, in order to pool their information, and discuss the matter at length. The group was to include every man who had been present in Quee Long’s hut that afternoon, Edgar Clinch, the purchaser of Wells’s estate, and Joseph Pritchard, whose laudanum had been found in the hermit’s cottage following the event of Wells’s death. Harald Nilssen had vouched for Pritchard’s character; he, Frost, had vouched for Clinch.

‘You vouched for Clinch?’ said Löwenthal.

Frost confirmed this, and added that he would be happy to vouch for Löwenthal, too, if Löwenthal was desirous to attend.

Löwenthal pushed his chair back from the table. ‘I will attend,’ he said, standing, and moving to fetch a box of matches from the shelf beside the door. ‘But there’s someone else I think ought to be present also.’

Frost looked alarmed. ‘Who is that?’

Löwenthal selected a match, and struck it against the doorjamb. ‘Thomas Balfour,’ he said, tilting the match, and watching the small flame climb along the shaft. ‘I believe that his information may be of considerable value to the project of our discussion—if he is
willing
to share it, of course.’ He lowered the match, carefully, into the sconce above the table.

‘Thomas Balfour,’ Frost repeated.

‘Thomas Balfour, the shipping agent,’ Löwenthal said. He
turned the dial to widen the aperture: there was a hiss, and the globe flared orange-red. ‘He came to you this morning, did he not? I think he mentioned that he had seen you at the bank.’

Frost was frowning. ‘Yes, he did,’ he said. ‘But he asked some mighty strange questions, and I wasn’t altogether sure of his
purpose
, to tell you the truth.’

‘That’s just it,’ Löwenthal said, shaking out the match. ‘There’s another dimension to this whole business, and Tom knows about it. He told me this afternoon that Alistair Lauderback is sitting on a secret—something big. He might be unwilling to break Lauderback’s confidence, of course (he kept his peace with me) but if I put the matter to him in the context of this assembly … well, he can be the master of his own choice. He can make up his own mind. Perhaps, once
everyone
else has shared his own piece, he might be moved to speak.’

‘To speak,’ Frost repeated. ‘All right. But can he be trusted—to listen?’

Löwenthal paused, pinching the charred match between his finger and his thumb. ‘Please correct me if I am mistaken,’ he said coldly, ‘but I understood from your invitation that this is to be an assembly of innocent men—not of schemers, or conspirators, or felons of any kind.’

‘That’s right,’ said Frost. ‘But even so—’

‘And yet you ask whether Tom can be trusted to listen,’ Löwenthal went on. ‘Surely
you
are not in possession of any information that might indict you? Surely you know nothing that you would not want to share aloud, and freely, with a company of innocents united by a common cause?’

‘Of course not,’ said Frost, blushing. ‘But we still need to be
cautious
—’

‘Cautious?’ Löwenthal said. He dropped the match into the woodpile, and rubbed his fingertips together. ‘I am beginning to doubt your better interests, Mr. Frost. I am beginning to wonder whether this is not a kind of conspiracy after all.’

They looked at each other for a long moment, but Frost’s will was not equal to Löwenthal’s; he ducked his head, his cheeks
flaming
, and nodded once.

‘You should invite Mr. Balfour—certainly,’ he said. ‘Certainly you should.’

Löwenthal clucked his tongue. His manner could be very
schoolmasterly
when his code of ethics was aggrieved: his reprimands were always stern, and always effective. He gazed at the younger man now with a very sorrowful expression, causing Frost to blush still more furiously, like a schoolboy who has been caught doing
violence
to a book.

Wishing to redeem himself, Frost said, somewhat wildly, ‘And yet there
are
things about the sale of the cottage that are not yet public knowledge—that Mr. Clinch would not like to be made public, I mean.’