The Luminaries (46 page)

There was smoke issuing from Gascoigne’s chimney, and upon Mannering’s knock, the door opened promptly, and Gascoigne peered out. He was holding a freshly lit cigarette, and had exchanged his formal jacket for shirtsleeves and a woollen vest.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘I have it on good information that you’re holding on to some money,’ Dick Mannering said. ‘That money’s mine, and I’ve come to collect it.’

Aubert Gascoigne looked at him, then put his cigarette to his lips, inhaled, and blew a stream of smoke over Mannering’s
shoulder
, into the rain. ‘Who is the source of your good information?’ he said mildly.

‘Miss Anna Wetherell, by way of Mr. Edgar Clinch,’ Mannering said.

Gascoigne leaned against the doorframe. ‘And how did Miss Anna Wetherell, by way of Mr. Edgar Clinch, imagine that you would act, upon receiving this good information?’

‘Don’t play clever with me,’ Mannering said. ‘Don’t do it. I’ll only tell you once: I don’t like cleverness one bit. She says the money’s hidden under your bed.’

Gascoigne shrugged. ‘Well, if I am holding a fortune for Anna,’ he said, ‘I am doing it on promise, and see no reason why I should break that promise, and hand the money over to another man—just because he claims the money belongs to him. She certainly did not tell me to expect a visitor.’

‘It does belong to me.’

‘How so?’

‘It’s a debt,’ Mannering said. ‘She owes me.’

‘A debt is a private business,’ Gascoigne said.

‘A debt can be made public very easily. How would you like it if I spread the word that you were holding on to more than a hundred pounds in pure? Let me tell you. By midnight your door would be beaten down, by dawn the thief would be fifty miles away, and by this time to-morrow, you would be dead. Why, there’d be nothing easier—when you’ve no allegiances to speak of, and you live alone.’

Gascoigne’s expression darkened. ‘I am the custodian of that gold, and I will not hand it over without Miss Wetherell’s consent.’

Mannering smiled. ‘I’m going to take that as an admission of guilt.’

‘And I’m going to take
that
as proof of your logical inadequacy,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Good night. If Anna wants her money, she can come for it herself.’

He made to close the door, but Mannering stepped forward and put out his hand, halting him.

‘Strange, isn’t it?’ he said.

Gascoigne scowled. ‘What is strange?’

‘Strange how a common whore suddenly fronts up with gold enough to pay the sum total of her obligations—and then hides that sum total beneath the bed of a man who’s been in Hokitika barely long enough to learn her name.’

‘It is excessively strange.’

‘Perhaps I ought to introduce myself.’

‘I know who you are,’ Gascoigne said. ‘And I know what you do.’

Mannering unbuttoned his coat to reveal his pistols. ‘Do you know what these are? And do you know what they do?’

‘Yes,’ said Gascoigne coolly. ‘Those are percussion revolvers, and they can each fire six rounds in six seconds flat.’

‘Seven rounds, actually,’ said Mannering. ‘Second issue Smith & Wessons. Seven rounds each. But six seconds is right.’

Gascoigne took another draught of his cigarette.

Mannering placed his hands upon his holsters, smiling. ‘I must ask you to invite me into your home, Mr. Gascoigne.’

The Frenchman did not reply, but after a moment he crushed
the end of his cigarette on the doorframe, dropped it, stepped to the side, and gestured with exaggerated courtesy for Mannering to enter. Mannering glanced to the corners of the room, letting his gaze linger pointedly on Gascoigne’s bed. Once Gascoigne had closed the door behind him, he rounded on his host and said,

‘Who has your loyalty?’

‘I am not sure I understand the question,’ Gascoigne said. ‘You wish me to make a list of my friends?’

Mannering glared at him. ‘Here’s my question,’ he said. ‘Does Anna have your loyalty?’

‘Yes,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Up to a point, of course.’ He sat down in his striped wingback armchair, but made no gesture to offer his guest a seat.

Mannering locked his hands behind his back. ‘So if you knew that she was mixed up in something, you wouldn’t tell me.’

‘Well, it would depend on the situation, of course,’ Gascoigne said. ‘What kind of “something” are you talking about?’

‘Are you lying on her behalf?’

‘I agreed to conceal a pile of money on her behalf,’ Gascoigne said. ‘I hid it underneath my bed. But you already know all about that. So I suppose the answer is no.’

‘Why does she have your loyalty? Up to a point?’

Gascoigne’s wrists were limp upon the armrests; he had arranged himself casually, like a king in a throne. He explained that he had cared for Anna when she was released from gaol two weeks prior, and had thereafter courted her friendship. He pitied her, for he believed that someone was using her for ill, but he could not say that he enjoyed any special intimacy with her, and had never paid to enjoy her company. The black dress, he added, had belonged to his late wife. He had given it to the whore as a gesture of charity, for her whoring gown had been ruined during her sojourn in gaol. He had not expected that she would enter a period of mourning, upon acquiring the dress, and in truth had been rather disappointed by this eventuation, for he thought her a very fine specimen of her sex, and would have very much liked to have taken his pleasure in the conventional way.

‘Your story doesn’t account for that gold underneath your bed,’ Mannering said.

Gascoigne shrugged. He felt too tired, and too angry, to lie. ‘The morning after Crosbie Wells died,’ he said, ‘Anna woke up in gaol with a great quantity of gold stashed about her person. The metal had been sewn around her corset. She had no idea how she had come to be in possession of such a sum, and was, naturally, quite frightened. She requested my help. I thought it best to hide it, for we did not know who had hidden the gold on her body, or for what purpose. We have not yet had it valued, but I would hazard its total worth at well over a hundred pounds—and in all likelihood, a great deal more. That, Mr. Mannering, is the whole truth—at least as far as
I
am concerned.’

Mannering was quiet. This explanation did not make any sense to him at all.

‘I must say,’ Gascoigne added, ‘you do me a great disservice by assuming my guilt before you have queried me on the subject of my innocence. I resent very much that you have trespassed upon my time and my privacy in such a belligerent way.’

‘You can leave off with that kind of talk,’ Mannering said. ‘Belligerent! Have I pointed a firearm in your face? Have I
threatened
you with violence?’

‘You have not—and yet I would be happier if you were to take off your belt.’

‘Take it off?’ Mannering looked contemptuous. ‘And lay it down in the middle of the table, I suppose—with each of us an equal
distance
away—until you make a move for it, and I’m too slow! I won’t fall for it: I’ve seen
that
trick before.’

‘Then I will make another request,’ Gascoigne said. ‘I request that your presence in my house is of as short a duration as possible. If you have further questions, you ought to make them now—but I have told you everything I know about that gold.’

‘Listen,’ Mannering said firmly. (He was rather bewildered that he had so swiftly lost the upper hand.) ‘I didn’t mean for us to start on the wrong foot.’

‘Certainly you meant it,’ said Gascoigne. ‘Perhaps now you regret it, but you meant it.’

Mannering swore. ‘I don’t regret anything!’ he cried. ‘I don’t regret anything at all!’

‘That accounts for your serenity.’

‘Let me tell you something,’ Mannering said—but he was
prevented
from saying anything further: just at that moment came a smart rap upon the door.

Gascoigne stood immediately. Mannering, who looked suddenly alarmed, stepped back several paces and withdrew one of his pistols from its holster. He held it against his thigh, to conceal it from view, and nodded for Gascoigne to lift the latch.

On the threshold, standing with his stick set at a rather rakish angle from his body and his hat tipped back from his brow, was Harald Nilssen. He bowed, and was just about to make his
introduction
to Gascoigne when he perceived, over the latter’s shoulder, Dick Mannering, standing awkwardly, with one arm held stiff at his side. Nilssen burst out laughing.

‘
Well
,’ he said. ‘Seems I’m two steps behind you, Dick. Everywhere I go today—there you are, and you got there first! Hello, Mr. Gascoigne. My name’s Harald Nilssen. I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance. I do hope I’m not interrupting anything.’

Gascoigne bowed courteously, though his expression remained cold. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Do come in.’

‘I
had
come to talk with you about Anna Wetherell,’ Nilssen said cheerfully, wiping his boots, ‘but I see I’ve been pipped at the post!’

Gascoigne closed the door and said, ‘What about Anna?’

At the same time, Mannering said, ‘Steady up, Mr. Nilssen.’

Nilssen answered Gascoigne. ‘Well, it concerns something rather peculiar,’ he said. ‘So perhaps it’s not for all ears. But listen: I don’t want to interrupt you. I can easily come back when you’re not
otherwise
engaged.’

‘No, please,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Mr. Mannering was just leaving; he just told me so himself.’

It vexed Mannering to be excluded in this way. ‘What’s it all about?’ he said to Nilssen.

Nilssen made a short bow. ‘It is a very delicate situation; I do apologise.’

‘Hang
delicate
,’ Mannering said. ‘You needn’t conceal anything from
me
, for God’s sake: we’re in this together! Is this about the widow? Or about the gold?’

Nilssen was uncomprehending. ‘The Wells fortune?’ He turned to Gascoigne. ‘Are you mixed up in
that
, then?’

Gascoigne was looking very amused all of a sudden. ‘It seems I am being interrogated from all quarters at once,’ he said. ‘Are you also wearing pistols, Mr Nilssen? You really ought to confess them, if you are.’

‘I’m not wearing pistols,’ Nilssen said. He glanced at Mannering, and saw the revolver in his hand. ‘What’s that for? What are you doing?’

But Mannering did not answer: he was caught, momentarily, between all that he wished to conceal from Nilssen, and all that he wished to conceal from Gascoigne. He hesitated, wishing that he had not already mentioned the widow and the gold.

‘Mr. Mannering was just showing me his second-issue Smith and Wesson,’ Gascoigne said conversationally. ‘That cylinder takes seven cartridges, apparently.’

‘Oh,’ Nilssen said—but he looked suspicious. ‘What for?’

Again Mannering’s explanation stalled in his throat. He did not wish Nilssen to know about the gold hidden beneath Gascoigne’s bed … but he did not wish Gascoigne to know about the Crosbie Wells debacle, and Ah Quee, and Ah Sook, and opium, and all that was to be discussed at the Crown Hotel that very evening.

‘It’s a delicate situation,’ Gascoigne said, putting in for the older man. He leaned towards Nilssen. ‘All I can tell you is that Mr. Mannering here has a source of very good information in Miss Anna Wetherell, and the information comes by way of Mr. Edgar Clinch.’

‘That’s enough out of you,’ said Mannering, finding his tongue at last. ‘Nilssen. What’s your news about Anna? What’s your
business
?’

But Nilssen misunderstood Mannering’s intention, in pressing him to speak upon this subject in front of Gascoigne. He
remembered
that Pritchard’s letter had mentioned pistols, and Anna, and
indirectly, Edgar Clinch—for Pritchard had said a strange event had taken place in Anna’s rooms at the Gridiron Hotel that very afternoon.
Of course!
Nilssen thought suddenly. Their ‘delicate
situations
’ must be one and the same.

‘Look here,’ he said, holding up his hand. ‘I believe we’re talking about the same thing after all. If Mr. Gascoigne’s in on the secret, then we may as well wait until everyone’s assembled at the council, and share our stories then. Save telling everything twice. Shall I see you both at the Crown?’

Mannering exhaled.

‘I am afraid,’ Gascoigne said presently, ‘that I am not in on the secret, and I have not been invited to a council at the Crown.’

There was a silence. Gascoigne looked at Nilssen, and then at Mannering. Mannering looked at Gascoigne, and then at Nilssen. Nilssen was looking at Mannering. He had a very apologetic expression upon his face.

‘Now you’ve done it,’ the magnate said. He uttered an oath, put away his pistol, and then levelled his finger at Gascoigne. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for it—though I’m d—ned if your
presence
is welcome, and I’ll be d—ned if I don’t keep you in my sights until the evening’s over, and beyond. Put your coat on. You’re coming along.’

There was a silence in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel—a silence that, for a moment, seemed to still the breath of every man, and still the smoke that rose in coils from the pipes, the cigarettes, the cheroots, and the cigars.

It was past midnight. The darkness had rounded the corners of the room, and the cones of light cast by the spirit lamps now seemed robust and warming, where before they had been faint and chill. Strains of Saturday night filtered in from the street—an accordion, distant shouting, an infrequent whoop, hoof beats. It had stopped raining, though the cloud had not yet cleared, and the gibbous moon showed only as a squarish patch of light in the
lowering
sky.

‘That’s it,’ said Thomas Balfour. ‘That’s it. That’s where we’d got to.’

Moody blinked and looked around him. Balfour’s narrative,
disjunctive
and chaotic as it was, had indeed accounted for the presence of every man in the room. There by the window was the Maori carver, Te Rau Tauwhare, who had been Crosbie’s loyal friend in life, though he had unwittingly betrayed him at the last. There in the farthest corner was Charlie Frost, the banker who had engineered the sale of Wells’s house and land, and opposite him, the
newspaperman Benjamin Löwenthal, who had heard about the death within mere hours of its occurrence. Edgar Clinch, purchaser of Wells’s estate, was sitting on the sofa beside the billiard table, smoothing his moustache with his finger and thumb. There by the fire was Dick Mannering, whoremonger, theatre owner, and close associate of Emery Staines; there behind him was Ah Quee, his enemy. There with a cue in his hand was the commission merchant, Harald Nilssen, who had discovered in Crosbie Wells’s cottage not only an enormous fortune, but a corked phial of laudanum, half empty, which had been purchased at Joseph Pritchard’s drug hall. The latter, of course, was sitting nearest Moody; on his other side was Thomas Balfour, lackey to the politician Lauderback, whose shipping crate had lately disappeared. There in the wingback
armchair
next to Balfour was Aubert Gascoigne, who had paid Anna Wetherell’s bail, and had uncovered another, smaller fortune hoarded in her orange whoring gown. Behind him was Ah Sook, peddler of opium, keeper of the den at Kaniere, and former
associate
of Francis Carver, who had discovered, that very afternoon, that Crosbie Wells had once been rich. And there, finally, leaning against the billiard table with his arms folded across his chest, was the chaplain Cowell Devlin, who had committed the hermit’s body to its final resting place upon the terrace at Seaview.

It was, in Moody’s estimation, a confoundedly peripheral
gathering
. The twelve men were united only by their association to the events of the 14th of January, upon which night Anna Wetherell had nearly died, Crosbie Wells
had
died, Emery Staines had
vanished
, Francis Carver had sailed away, and Alistair Lauderback had arrived in town. It struck Moody that none of
these
people were present. The gaol warden, Governor Shepard, was likewise absent, as was the crafty widow, Lydia Wells.

Another thought struck Moody: the night of the 14th of January was the very evening that he himself had first set foot upon New Zealand soil. Disembarking the packet steamer that had conveyed him from Liverpool to Dunedin, he had cast his gaze skyward, and had felt for the first time the strangeness of where he was. The skies were inverted, the patterns unfamiliar, the Pole Star beneath his
feet, quite swallowed. At first he searched for it, stupidly, wanting to measure his present latitude from the incline of his rigid arm, as he had done as a boy, on the other side of the earth. He found Orion—upended, his quiver beneath him, his sword hanging upward from his belt; Canis Major—hanging like a dead dog from a butcher’s hook. There was something very sad about it, Moody thought. It was as if the ancient patterns had no meaning here. At length he found the Southern Crux, and tried to recall the rule for locating the pole, for there was no equivalent star to mark it, here in the black of the antipodes, where everything was upended and unformed. Did one use the crossbar of the thing? Or the spar? He could not remember. There was some kind of formula: the length of a knuckle, some equation. A matter of inches. It had bothered him extremely that there was no star to mark the pole.

Moody gazed into the fire, the coals of which had long since gone to ash. Thomas Balfour had not told his tale at all chronologically, and his narrative had been further convoluted by countless interruptions, clarifications, and echoes—all chasing one another, as endless circles, going round. What a convoluted picture it was—and how difficult to see, in its entirety! Moody turned his mind to all that he had heard that evening. He tried to place the recounted events into the order in which they had actually occurred.

Roughly nine months prior to the present day, the former convict Francis Carver had successfully cheated Alistair Lauderback out of his ship, the
Godspeed
. At some point thereafter, and by an unknown complication, he had then lost the shipping crate by which he had forced the politician’s hand. Inside this shipping crate was a trunk containing approximately four thousand pounds in pure gold, a fortune that had been meticulously sewn into the lining of five dresses. The seamstress was a woman named Lydia Wells, who was, at that time, posing as Francis Carver’s wife.

Four thousand pounds was a great deal of money, and Carver, naturally, wished to recover it, once he discovered that the thing had been lost. He sailed to Hokitika, presumably guessing that the crate had been delivered there by mistake, and placed an
advertisement
in the
West Coast Times
, offering a large reward for the
crate’s safe return. He placed this advertisement under the name of Crosbie Francis Wells—producing a birth certificate to confirm this identity—though he was known, both beforehand and
thereafter
, by the name of Francis Carver. It was yet unknown why Carver’s blackmail of Lauderback had required him (or inspired him) to assume an alias. It was also unknown why Crosbie Wells’s birth certificate, if indeed genuine, had been in Carver’s possession at that time.

The real Crosbie Wells (or perhaps, Moody thought,
another
Crosbie Wells) lived alone in the Arahura Valley, some miles north of Hokitika. Wells was not a notorious personage, and his
acquaintance
was small; before his death he was little known in Hokitika, and those who did know him did not suspect him to be a person of any wealth or consequence. It was Ah Sook, investigating the
circumstances
of his death nine months later, who discovered that Wells had made a strike on the fields at Dunstan several years before, pulling in a fortune of thousands of pounds. Evidently Wells had desired, for some reason, to keep this information a secret.

Francis Carver placed his advertisement in the
Times
in early June (the precise month having been confirmed by Benjamin Löwenthal). While in Hokitika he offered Te Rau Tauwhare a private reward for any news of a man named Crosbie Wells. Tauwhare did not know a man of that name or description, however, and the shipping crate was not found; Carver returned to Dunedin empty-handed.

Anna Wetherell had also arrived in Hokitika upon the
Godspeed
, clad in a purple working gown rented from her new employer, Dick Mannering. When she learned, some weeks after her arrival, that a trunk containing women’s dresses had been salvaged from a wreck, she purchased all five.

It was not unreasonable to presume that Anna was ignorant of the fortune these gowns contained, and ignorant, also, of their origin. She had never spoken of the hidden gold to any man, and she had never attempted in any visible way to remove it. Moody considered this. Was total ignorance really possible? As an opium eater, perhaps she had not noticed the added weight about her
person as a sober woman might; then again, she was, as Gascoigne had attested, a former acquaintance of Lydia Wells’s, and perhaps she had recognised the garments as Lydia’s. Well, Moody thought, whatever the case, Anna had been wearing that entire fortune—a portion at a time, of course—ever since then, save for a
month-long
period in September and October, when the advanced stage of her pregnancy had compelled her to wear, instead, a frock designed for lying-in.

When Anna’s landlord, Edgar Clinch, discovered the fortune hidden in the gowns, he concluded that the whoremonger Dick Mannering must be using Anna to smuggle raw ore off the
goldfields
, as a way of evading duty at the bank. The thought of this collusion grieved Clinch extremely, but he had no reason to press the matter with either party, and did not do so.

Clinch was not the only man to chance upon the hidden fortune in Anna’s gowns, however, and he was not the only man to
misapprehend
its likely meaning. The digger Quee Long had also uncovered the secrets hidden in Anna’s seams—around much the same time, in fact—and had leaped to the very same conclusion as Clinch. Ah Quee knew first-hand that Mannering was more than capable of fraud, for he had been cheated by the magnate once before. Ah Quee decided to beat Mannering at his own game. He began siphoning the gold out of Anna’s dresses, retorting the dust into squares, and stamping these squares with the name of the goldmine Aurora—so as to ensure that the profit would be banked against his own claim, which by this time had been purchased by a young prospector named Emery Staines.

The project of removing the gold from Anna’s dress took several months. Whenever Anna visited Ah Quee’s hut in Kaniere Chinatown, she was all but senseless with opium; Ah Quee was therefore able to remove the gold with his thread and needle
without
her knowledge, while she slept. Anna did not wear her orange whoring dress when she travelled to Chinatown. For this reason, the orange dress had remained filled with gold, long after Ah Quee had stripped the other four of their fortune.

Nobody knew how, or why, Ah Quee’s retorted fortune had been
stolen from the vault at the camp station. The most probable thief, given the information currently available, was the vanished
prospector
, Staines—who, significantly, lacked a motivation. The young man was colossally rich, and, by popular opinion at least, colossally fortunate. Why should he desire to steal from his own indentured worker? And why should he choose to stash the gold in another man’s cottage, so far from his own claims? Well, whatever the young man’s reasons, Moody thought, at least one thing was certain: Staines had never banked Ah Quee’s earnings against the Aurora as he was legally obliged to do. This was very perplexing, for the retorted gold, if banked, would have transformed the Aurora
goldmine
from a duffer into a homeward-bounder overnight.

Emery Staines was also very strangely implicated by the deed of gift that Cowell Devlin had discovered in Crosbie Wells’s stove—which, though it did not bear his signature, bore his name. This deed seemed to imply that Emery Staines and Crosbie Wells had been associates of some kind, and that the hoarded fortune had been intended, for some reason, as a gift from Emery Staines to Anna Wetherell. But this was even more confounding, for whichever way one looked at it, the gold was not Staines’s to give away!

Anna had been carrying a child—Carver’s child—since before she arrived in Hokitika, and in the springtime she began at last to show. Her condition was never to fully ripen into birth, however: in mid-October, Carver returned to Hokitika, confronted Anna, and beat her severely. The unborn child did not survive this encounter. Anna’s later intimation, when she described the scene to Edgar Clinch, was that Carver had killed the child in cold blood.

Moody paused in his chronology to dwell upon this unhappy event. Although the child’s death had been referenced in passing several times that evening, it did not seem as though any man
present
was entirely clear about how this fatal altercation had come about. It was for reasons of natural delicacy that Moody had not pressed the men for further information, but he wondered now how Anna’s relations with Carver fitted in to the scheme of the story at large. He wondered whether the child’s death had truly been intended, and, if so, what might have motivated Francis
Carver to commit such a heinous act. None of the twelve men currently present could answer this question with any kind of objective certainty, of course; they could only describe what they had been told to be true.

(How opaque, the minds of absent men and women! And how elusive, motivation! For Francis Carver might have killed his child in cold repudiation, as an act of loathing, as a brutal prophylactic, or quite by accident: short of asking the man directly, there was no way to tell. Even Anna Wetherell, who had named Carver as the murderer, might have had any number of reasons to lie.)

Having reflected upon this, Moody continued.

Te Rau Tauwhare, encountering Carver by chance on the morning of the 14th of January, had remembered the offer that the man had made him the previous year. For a price of two shillings, Tauwhare offered to tell Carver where Crosbie Wells was living. The men shook hands, Tauwhare gave directions, and Carver made for the Arahura Valley that very same day—a night that was to be Wells’s last. Perhaps Carver had witnessed the hermit’s death, or perhaps he had left moments before its occurrence, but in either case, he had arrived at the cottage with a phial of laudanum, traces of which were later discovered in Crosbie Wells’s stomach during his post-mortem. Following their encounter, Carver returned to Hokitika, manned the
Godspeed
, and weighed anchor, leaving well before the dawn. From Hokitika Carver had travelled not to Canton (as Balfour had speculated he might) but to Dunedin, a fact that Moody himself could corroborate, for it was at Port Chalmers that Moody had boarded the very same craft, twelve days later.