The Luminaries (50 page)

‘Now that I mention it,’ he went on, ‘we might do very well to have one of our own men on hand, while the cargo’s being cleared. On account of Tom’s shipping crate, I mean—and whatever it was that Mr. Moody thought he saw, below. You can be our eyes and ears, Mr. Tauwhare. You have the perfect excuse, if you’re short on cash, and in need of honest work. Nobody will ask you how or why.’

But Tauwhare shook his head. He had pledged, privately, never to transact with Francis Carver again, under any circumstances. ‘I do not do odd jobs,’ he said, placing six pennies on the countertop.

‘Go on down to the
Godspeed
,’ Löwenthal insisted. ‘Nobody’s going to ask you any questions. You have the perfect excuse.’

But Tauwhare did not like to take advice from other men,
however
well intentioned. ‘I will wait for surveying work,’ he said.

‘You might be waiting a good long time.’

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

Löwenthal was becoming annoyed. ‘You aren’t seeing sense,’ he said. ‘Here’s a chance for you to do us all a good turn, and
yourself
besides. You won’t be able to attend the widow’s party without a ticket, and you won’t be able to buy a ticket if you’ve got an empty purse. Go on down to Gibson Quay, and put in a day’s work, and do us all a favour.’

‘I do not want to attend the party.’

Löwenthal was incredulous. ‘Why on earth not?’

‘You said it would be foolish. A piece of theatre.’

A moment of quiet passed between them. Then Löwenthal said, ‘Did you know they’ve brought in a barrister? A Mr. John Fellowes, from the Greymouth Police. He’s been assigned to straighten out the Crosbie Wells affair.’

Tauwhare shrugged.

‘He’s doing his research as we speak,’ Löwenthal continued, ‘in order to find out if this business warrants an inquiry. He’s making a report for a Supreme Court judge. Supreme Court means murder, Mr. Tauwhare. A murder trial.’

‘I have had no part in murder,’ said Tauwhare.

‘Perhaps not—but we both know that you’re as mixed up in this business as the rest of us. Come! Mr. Moody saw something in the hold of the
Godspeed
, and you have a perfect chance to find out what he saw.’

But Tauwhare did not care what Mr. Moody saw, or did not see. ‘I will wait for honest work,’ he said again.

‘You might show a little loyalty.’

Tauwhare flared at this. ‘I have not broken my oath,’ he said.

Löwenthal reached across the workbench, put his hand over the pile of pennies, and swept them into his apron pocket. ‘I don’t mean to the Crown lot,’ he said. ‘I mean to your old friend Wells. This is his widow we’re talking about, after all. His widow, and his inheritance, and his memory. You’ll do as you please, of course. But if I were you, I’d make it my business to attend the party tonight.’ ‘Why?’ Tauwhare spat out the word contemptuously.

‘Why?’ said Löwenthal, picking up his composing stick again.

‘Why show loyalty to your good friend Wells? Only that I would have thought you owed it to the man, after selling him out to Francis Carver.’

Alistair Lauderback had not been in Hokitika since Wednesday morning, chiefly for the reason that the wreck of the
Godspeed
was wholly visible from his suite of rooms on the upper floor of the Palace Hotel, and the sight of it caused him no end of bitterness. When he was offered the chance to give an address at the Greymouth Town Hall, and to cut a ribbon on a shaft mine near Kumara, he accepted both invitations heartily, and at once. At the moment we join him—the moment Tauwhare took his leave of Löwenthal—Lauderback was making his way across the Kumara wetlands at a great pace, with a Sharps sporting rifle propped against his shoulder, and a satchel full of shot in his hand. Beside him was his friend Thomas Balfour, similarly armed, and similarly flushed with virtuous exertion. The two had spent the morning shooting at game, and they were now returning to their horses, which were tethered at the edge of the valley, visible from this
distance
as a small patch of white and a small patch of black against the sky.

‘Hell of a day,’ Lauderback exclaimed, as much to himself as to Balfour. ‘It’s a glorious hell of a day! Why, it almost makes one
forgive
the rain, does it not—when the sun comes out like this, at the end of it all.’

Balfour laughed. ‘Forgiven, maybe,’ he said, ‘but not forgotten. Not by me.’

‘It’s a grand country,’ said Lauderback. ‘Look at those colours! Those are New Zealand colours, rinsed by New Zealand rain.’

‘And we are New Zealand patriots,’ said Balfour. ‘The view’s all ours, Mr. Lauderback. There for the taking.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Lauderback. ‘Nature’s patriots!’

‘No need for a flag,’ said Balfour.

‘How lucky we are,’ said Lauderback. ‘Think how few men have laid eyes upon this view. Think how few men have walked this soil.’

‘More than we expect, I don’t doubt,’ said Balfour, ‘if the birds have learned to scatter at the sight of us.’

‘You give them too much credit, Tom,’ said Lauderback. ‘Birds are very stupid.’

‘I shall remember that, next time you come home with a brace of duck and a long account of how you snared them.’

‘You do that: but I shall make you hear the story all the same.’

For Thomas Balfour this good-humoured exchange was very
welcome
. Over the past three weeks Lauderback had been excessively bad company, and Balfour had long since tired of his capricious moods, which alternated brittle, vicious, and sour. Lauderback tended to revert to childish modes of behaviour whenever his hopes were dashed, and the wreck of the
Godspeed
had wrought an
unbecoming
change in him. He had become very jealous of the company of crowds, needing always to be surrounded and attended; he would not spend any length of time alone, and protested if he was required to do so. His public manner was unchanged—he was exuberant and convincing when speaking from a pulpit—but his private manner had become altogether peevish. He flew into a temper at the
slightest
provocation, and was openly scornful of his two devoted aides, who chalked these vicissitudes of humour up to the taxing nature of political life, and did not protest them. That Sunday they had been granted a reprieve from Lauderback’s company, owing to a shortage of rifles, and, equally, to Lauderback’s disinclination to share; instead they would spend the period of their master’s absence at the Kumara chapel, contemplating, at Lauderback’s instruction, their sins.

Alistair Lauderback was an intensely superstitious man, and he felt that he could date the sudden change in his fortune to the night of his arrival in Hokitika, when he came upon the body of the hermit, Crosbie Wells. When he dwelled upon all the misfortunes he had suffered since that day—the wreck of the
Godspeed
in
particular
—he felt soured towards all of Westland, as though the whole forsaken district had been complicit in the project of
embarrassing
his successes, and frustrating his desires. The ruin of the
Godspeed
was proof, in his mind, that the very place was cursed against him. (This belief was not as irrational as might be
supposed
, for the shifty movement of the Hokitika bar owed, in the large part, to the silt and gravel that was carried down the Hokitika River from the claims upstream, and now clotted the river mouth, invisibly, in ever-changing patterns that answered only to the tide: in essence, the
Godspeed
had met her end upon the tailings of a thousand claims, and for that, every man in Hokitika could be said to be partially to blame for the wreck.)

Some days after
Godspeed
’s ruin Thomas Balfour had confessed to Lauderback that, in fact, the shipping crate containing Lauderback’s documents and personal effects had disappeared from Gibson Quay, due to a mistake of lading for which no one man seemed to be accountable. Lauderback received this
information
dispiritedly, but without real interest. Now that the
Godspeed
was ruined, he had no reason to blackmail Francis Carver, the
purpose
of which had only been to win his beloved ship back again: the barque’s bill of sale, stowed in his trunk among his personal possessions, was no longer of any use to him as leverage.

Lauderback had recently taken to playing dice in the evenings, for gambling was a weakness to which he periodically fell prey whenever he felt shamed, or out of luck. He demanded,
naturally
, that Jock and Augustus Smith take up this vice also, for he could not endure to sit at the table alone. They dutifully
complied
, though their bets were always very cautious, and they bowed out early. Lauderback placed his bets with the grim
determination
of a man for whom winning would mean inordinately much, and he was as chary of his tokens as he was of his whisky,
which he drank very slowly, to make the evening last until the dawn.

‘You weren’t going to ride back this afternoon, were you?’ he said to Balfour now, with an emphasis that suggested regret.

‘I was,’ Balfour said. ‘That is—I am. I mean to be in Hokitika by tea-time.’

‘Put it off a day,’ Lauderback entreated. ‘Come along to the Guernsey tonight for craps. No sense to ride back on your own. I have to stay on to cut a ribbon in the morning—but I’ll be back in Hokitika by to-morrow noontime. Noontime on the inside.’

But Balfour shook his head. ‘Can’t do it. I’ve a shipment coming first thing to-morrow morning. Monday sharp.’

‘Surely you don’t need to be present—for a
shipment
!’

‘Oh—but I need the time to tally up my finances,’ Balfour said with a grin. ‘I’m twelve pounds redder than I was on Wednesday—and that’s twelve pounds into
your
pocket, you know. One pound for every face of the dice.’

(Balfour concealed the real reason for his haste, which was that he wished to attend the widow’s ‘drinks and speculation’ in the front room of the Wayfarer’s Fortune that evening. He had not spoken of Mrs. Wells to Lauderback since the politician made his confession in the dining room of the Palace Hotel, having judged it prudent to let Lauderback introduce the subject himself, and on his own terms. Lauderback, however, had also avoided any
mention
of her, though Balfour felt that his silence was of a taut and even desperate quality, as though at any moment he might burst out, and cry her name.)

‘That takes me back to my schooling days,’ Lauderback said. ‘We got one lash for every pip of the dice—if they caught us. Twenty-one pips on a single die. There’s a trivial fact I’ve never
forgotten
.’

‘I won’t stay until I’m down twenty-one pounds, if that’s your angle.’

‘You ought to stay,’ Lauderback persisted. ‘Just one more night. You ought to.’

‘Look at that marvellous fern,’ said Balfour—and indeed it was
marvellous: furled perfectly, like the scroll of a violin. Balfour touched it with the muzzle of his gun.

The recent alteration in Lauderback’s humour had had a very injurious effect upon his friendship with Thomas Balfour. Balfour was certain that Lauderback had not told him the whole truth about his former dealings with Francis Carver and Crosbie Wells, and this exclusion left him very disinclined to pander to him. When Lauderback expressed his dissatisfaction on the subject of Westland, and sandbars, and cold-cut dinners, and disposable collars, and
imitation
, and German mustard, and the Premier, and bones in fish, and ostentation, and ill-made boots, and the rain, Balfour responded with less energy and admiration than he might have done but one month prior. Lauderback, to put it plainly, had lost his advantage, and both men knew this to be so. The politician was loath to admit that their friendship had cooled, however; he persisted in speaking to Balfour exactly as he always had done—that is, in a tone that was occasionally supercilious, always declamatory, and very rarely humble—and Balfour, who could be very supercilious himself if only he put his mind to the task, persisted in resenting him.

Presently they retrieved their horses, saddled up, and set off for Kumara at a slow trot. After they had been riding for a short while, Lauderback took up the thread again.

‘We had talked of stopping off at Seaview together—on the return journey,’ he said. ‘To take a look at the foundations for the gaol-house.’

‘Yes,’ said Balfour. ‘You’ll have to tell me all about it.’

‘I suppose I’ll have to go alone.’

‘Alone—with Jock and Augustus! Alone in a party of three!’

Lauderback shifted on his saddle, seeming very disgruntled. Presently he said, ‘What’s the gaoler’s name again—Sheffield?’

Balfour glanced at him sharply. ‘Shepard. George Shepard.’

‘Shepard, yes. I wonder if he’s angling for a shot at Magistrate. He’s done very well on the Commissioner’s budget—to get everything moving so smartly. He’s done very well indeed.’

‘I suppose he has. Hark at
that
one!’ Balfour pointed with the end of his crop at another fern frond, more orange than the first, and
furrier. ‘What a pleasant shape it is,’ he added. ‘The motion of it—eh? As though it’s stilled in motion. There’s a thought!’

But Lauderback was not to be distracted by the pleasant shape of ferns. ‘He’s right in the Commissioner’s pocket, of course,’ he said, still referring to George Shepard. ‘And I gather he’s the Magistrate’s old friend.’

‘Perhaps they’ll keep it in the family then.’

‘Smacks of ambition. Don’t you think? The gaol-house, I mean. His devotion to the project. His devotion to the whole affair. He’s done very well about it.’

Lauderback, as an ambitious man, was very much the kind to be suspicious of ambition in others. Balfour, however, only snorted.

‘What?’ said Lauderback.

‘Nothing,’ said Balfour. (But it was not nothing! He detested it when a man received moral credit—however distantly—for
something
undeserved.)

‘What?’ said Lauderback again. ‘You made a noise.’

‘Well, tally it all up,’ Balfour said. ‘Timber for the gallows. Iron for the fencing. Stone for the foundation. Twenty navvies on a daily wage.’

‘What?’

‘Commissioner’s budget my hat!’ Balfour cried. ‘That money must be coming in from another quarter—from another source! Tally it up in your head!’

Lauderback looked across at him. ‘A private investment? Is that what you mean?’

Balfour shrugged. He knew full well that George Shepard had funded the construction of the gaol-house with Harald Nilssen’s commission on Crosbie Wells’s estate—but he had vowed to keep the secret, at the council of the Crown Hotel, and he did not like to break his promises.

‘Private investment, you said?’ Lauderback persisted.

‘Listen,’ said Balfour. ‘I don’t want to break any oaths. I don’t want to tread on any toes. But I will say this: if you stop in at Seaview, you ought to sniff around a bit. That’s all I’m saying. Sniff around, and you might come up with something.’

‘Is that why you’re heading home early?’ Lauderback demanded. ‘To avoid Shepard? Is this something between the two of you?’

‘No!’ Balfour said. ‘No, no. I was tipped off, that’s all.’

‘Tipped off? By whom?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘Come on, Tom! Don’t go proud on me. What did you mean by that?’

Balfour thought for a moment, squinting over the valley floor towards the rumpled slopes in the East. His horse was slightly shorter than Lauderback’s black mare, and because he was a shorter man than Lauderback, his shoulders were a clear foot below the other man’s—even when he squared them, which he did now. ‘It’s just common sense, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Twenty navvies on the foundation at once? All the materials paid up in cash? That’s not the way that Council funding gets paid out. You know that yourself! Shepard must be dealing ready money.’

‘Which one is it?’ said Lauderback. ‘Common sense—or a
tip-off
?’

‘Common sense!’

‘So you weren’t tipped off.’

‘Yes, I was,’ Balfour said hotly. ‘But I might just as well have
figured
it out. That’s what I’m saying: I might just as well have figured it out on my own.’

‘So what was the point in it?’

‘In what?’

‘Tipping you off!’

Balfour was scowling. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’ he said. ‘You’re not making any sense.’

But Lauderback was making perfect sense, and Balfour knew it. ‘What doesn’t make sense, Tom,’ he said, ‘is that
you’re
the one tipped off about a gaol-house! What does Balfour Shipping care about public funding, and how it’s spent? What do
you
care about a private investment—unless it’s wrapped up in something else?’

Balfour shook his head. ‘You’ve got me wrong,’ he said.

‘Something to do with one of the felons maybe,’ Lauderback said. ‘A private investment—in exchange for—’

‘No, no,’ Balfour said. ‘Nothing like that.’

‘What then?’