(We shall add, in conciliatory tones, that his sulking was of a very superficial sort: at a single kind word from Lauderback, his good humour would be restored.)
Balfour pushed his chair a little further away from the table, wishing in a childish way to make his boredom obvious to his host, and cast his gaze over the room.
The dining room was nearly empty, owing to the uncommon hour of their meal, and through the serving-hatch Balfour could see that the cook had taken off his apron and was sitting with both elbows on the table, playing at solitaire. Before the hearth sat a large-eared boy who was sucking on a stick of jerky. He had evidently been posted there to keep an eye upon the clothes-irons, which were warming in a rack above the coals, for every
half-minute
or so he wet his finger and held it close to the trestle to test the heat. At the table nearest theirs sat a clergyman—a freckled fellow, none too handsome, with a snub nose and a droop to his lower lip, like a simple child’s. He had taken his breakfast alone; he was now drinking coffee and reading a pamphlet—no doubt rehearsing the sermon he would deliver the following day, Balfour thought, for he nodded slowly as he read, as a man keeping tempo with a silent address.
The large-eared boy wet his finger again, and held it close; the clergyman turned a page; the cook squared a playing card with the edge of the chopping block. Balfour fiddled with his fork. Finally Lauderback paused in his diatribe to take a draught of wine, and Balfour seized his chance to interject.
‘Speaking of barques,’ he said (they had been speaking of
brigantines
), ‘I’ve seen your
Godspeed
over the bar a fair few times, this past year. She’s yours, isn’t she—
Godspeed
?’
But to his surprise, this remark was met with silence. Lauderback
only bowed his head, as if Balfour had put to him an issue of the gravest philosophical import, and he desired to meditate alone upon the question.
‘Hell of an outfit, she is,’ Balfour added. ‘Marvellous.’
The aides exchanged a glance.
‘Surely that brings home our point, Mr. L,’ said Augustus Smith finally, breaking the spell. ‘Even a barque handles better than a brigantine; she does it with half the crew and half the fuss. He can’t deny that.’
‘Yes,’ Lauderback said, rousing himself. He turned to Jock. ‘You can’t deny that.’
Jock was chewing; he grinned through his mouthful. ‘I will deny it. Give me half the weight in rigging over half the crew—there’s your fuss. I’d take speed over handling any day.’
‘How about a compromise?’ said Augustus. ‘Barquentine.’
Jock shook his head. ‘I’ll say it again: three masts is one too many.’
‘More speed than a barque, though.’ Augustus touched Lauderback’s elbow. ‘What about your
Flight of Fancy
? She was
fore-and
-aft rigged on the mainmast, was she not?’
Balfour had not intuited the aides’ objective—to divert the conversation away from the subject he had introduced—and he thought that perhaps the politician had not heard him correctly. He raised his voice and tried again. ‘Your
Godspeed
—as I say. She’s a regular, these parts. Hell of an outfit. I’ve seen her over the bar a fair few times. Seems to me she’s got both speed
and
handling. My word, she’s a marvellous craft.’
Alistair Lauderback sighed. He threw his head back and squinted up at the rafters, and a foolish smile trembled on his lips—the smile of a man who is unused to embarrassment, Balfour realised later. (He had never, before that morning, heard Lauderback confess a weakness of any kind.)
At last Lauderback said, still squinting upward, ‘That barque is no longer in my possession.’ His voice was strained, as though his smile had made it thinner.
‘That so!’ Balfour said, surprised. ‘Made a swap, did you—something bigger?’
‘No: I sold her, outright.’
‘For gold?’
Lauderback paused, and then said, ‘Yes.’
‘That so!’ Balfour said again. ‘Just like that—you sold her. Who’s buying?’
‘Her master.’
‘Hoo,’ said Balfour, exhaling cheerfully. ‘Can’t envy you there. We have heard some stories about that man around here.’
Lauderback did not reply. Still smiling, he studied the exposed beams of the ceiling, the cracks between the floorboards of the rooms above.
‘Yes,’ Balfour repeated, sitting back, and tucking his thumbs beneath his lapels. ‘We have heard some stories around here. Francis Carver! Not a man I’d care to cross, all right.’
Lauderback looked down in surprise. ‘Carver?’ he said,
frowning
. ‘You mean Wells.’
‘Master of the
Godspeed
?’
‘Yes—unless he sold it on.’
‘Burly fellow—dark brows, dark hair, broken nose?’
‘That’s right,’ said Lauderback. ‘Francis Wells.’
‘Well, I don’t mean to contradict you flat,’ Balfour said, blinking, ‘but that man’s name is Carver. Perhaps you’re confusing him with the old fellow who—’
‘No,’ Lauderback said.
‘The hermit—’
‘No.’
‘Who died—the man you came across, two weeks ago,’ Balfour said, persisting. ‘The dead man. His name was Wells, you know. Crosbie Wells.’
‘
No
,’ Lauderback said, for the third time. He raised his voice slightly. ‘I am not mistaking the name. Wells was the name on the papers, when I signed the barque across. It was always Wells.’
They looked at each other.
‘Can’t understand it,’ Balfour said at last. ‘Only I do hope you didn’t get stiffed. Strange coincidence, isn’t it—Frank Wells, Crosbie Wells.’
Lauderback hesitated. ‘Not quite a coincidence,’ he said
carefully
. ‘They were brothers, I thought.’
Balfour gave a shout of laughter. ‘Crosbie Wells and Frank Carver, brothers? Can’t imagine anything more unlikely. Only by marriage, surely!’
Lauderback’s foolish smile returned. He began stabbing with his finger at a crumb.
‘But who told you that?’ Balfour added, when the other did not speak.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lauderback.
‘Carver mentioned something—when he signed the papers?’
‘Maybe that was it.’
‘Well! If you say so … but to look at them, I’d never have believed it,’ Balfour said. ‘One so tall and striking, the other such a wastrel—such a runt—!’
Lauderback quivered; his hand made a compulsive movement on the table, as if to reach and grasp. ‘Crosbie Wells was a wastrel?’
Balfour waved his hand. ‘You saw him dead.’
‘But only dead—never living,’ said Lauderback. ‘Strange thing: you can’t tell what a fellow really looks like, you know, without
animation
. Without his soul.’
‘Oh,’ Balfour said. He contemplated that idea.
‘A dead man looks created,’ Lauderback continued. ‘As a
sculpture
looks created. It makes you marvel at the work of the design; makes you think of the designer. The skin is smooth. Fine. Like wax, like marble—but not like either: it doesn’t hold the light, as a wax figure does, and it doesn’t reflect it, like stone. Has a matte finish, as a painter would say. No shine.’ Suddenly Lauderback seemed very embarrassed. He rounded off by demanding, rather rudely, ‘Have
you
ever seen a man fresh dead?’
Balfour tried to make light of it (‘Dangerous question to ask—on a goldfield—’) but the politician was waiting for an answer, and at length he had to concede that he had not.
‘Shouldn’t have said “seen”,’ Lauderback added, to himself. ‘Should have said “bore witness”.’
Augustus Smith said, ‘Jock put his hand on the fellow’s neck—didn’t you, Jock?’
‘Ay,’ said Jock.
‘When we first came in,’ said Augustus.
‘Meant to rouse him,’ said Jock. ‘Didn’t know that he had already passed. He might have been sleeping. But here’s the thing: his collar was damp. With sweat, you see—it hadn’t yet dried on him. We figured he couldn’t have been more than half an hour dead.’
He would have said more, but Lauderback made a sharp
movement
with his chin, to silence him.
‘Can’t figure it out,’ Balfour said. ‘Signed his name Wells!’
‘We must be thinking of different men,’ said Lauderback.
‘Carver has a scar on his cheek, right here. White in colour. Shaped like—like a sickle.’
Lauderback pursed his lips, then shook his head. ‘I don’t recall a scar.’
‘But he was dark-haired? Thick-set? Brutish, you might say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can’t figure it out,’ Balfour said again. ‘Why would a man change his name? And
brothers
! Frank Carver—and Crosbie Wells!’
Lauderback’s mouth was working beneath his moustache, as if he was chewing on his lip. In quite a different voice he said, ‘You knew him?’
‘Crosbie Wells? Not a bit,’ said Balfour. He settled back in his chair, pleased to be asked a direct question. ‘He was building a sawmill, way out in the Arahura—well, you saw the cottage; you’ve been there. He’d done his shipping through me—equipment and so forth—so I knew him to look at him. Rest his soul. Had a Maori fellow for a mate. They were in on the mill together.’
‘Did he strike you—as a kind of a man?’
‘As what kind of a man?’
‘Any kind.’ Lauderback’s hand twitched again. Flushing, he amended his question: ‘I mean to say: how did he strike you?’
‘No complaints,’ Balfour said. ‘Kept his business to his business, you know. From his talk I’d call him London-born.’ He paused, and
then leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘Course, they’re saying all sorts about him, now that he’s gone.’
Again Lauderback did not respond. He was being very strange, Balfour thought; the man was tongue-tied, even red-faced. It was as if he wanted Balfour both to answer some very specific question and to cease talking altogether. The two aides seemed to have lost interest—Jock was pushing a piece of liver around his plate, and Augustus’s head was turned away; he was watching the rain beat at the window.
Out of the corner of his eye, Balfour considered them. The two men were as satellites to Lauderback. They slept on bolsters in his room, accompanied him everywhere, and seemed at all times to speak and act in plural, as if they shared a single identity between them, as well as a name. Until that morning Balfour had thought them pleasant chaps, convivial and quick-witted; he had thought their devotion to Lauderback a fine thing, though their constant presence had occasionally worn his nerves rather thin. But now? He looked from one to the other, and realised that he wasn’t sure.
Lauderback had hardly spoken a word to Balfour about the final chapter of his journey over the Alps, two weeks prior. Most of what Balfour knew about the night of his arrival had come from the
West
Coast Times
, which had published an abridged version of the account Lauderback had given, in writing, to the law. Lauderback was not suspected of having played any part in the deaths, one attempted, the other actual: the coroner’s report removed any doubt that Crosbie Wells had died of purely natural causes, and the physician was able to prove that the opium by which Anna Wetherell had nearly perished was her own. But Balfour wondered, now, whether the paper’s account had been the truth.
He watched Jock Smith push his piece of liver back and forth. It was very strange that Lauderback seemed, all of a sudden, so intensely curious about the living character of Crosbie Wells; it was even stranger to think that Crosbie Wells, who had been mild, and common, and lacking in any kind of influence, should enjoy a familial connexion—or
any
kind of connexion!—to the notorious Francis Carver. Balfour could not believe it. And then there was the
matter of the whore in the road. Was that event just a coincidence, or did it connect somehow to Crosbie Wells’s untimely passing? Why had Lauderback been so reluctant to speak of either encounter—reluctant, that is, until now?
He said, partly to rekindle the conversation, and partly to keep his imagination from drifting to make unfounded accusations of his friend, ‘So you sold the barque to Carver—only you thought his name was Wells—and he told you, by the bye, that he had a brother Crosbie, squirrelled away.’
‘I can’t remember now,’ Lauderback said. ‘It was nearly a year ago. Long gone.’
‘But then you come across the same man’s brother—fresh dead—a year later!’ Balfour said. ‘On the other side of the Alps, no less … in a place you’ve never set foot before! There’s queer odds on that, wouldn’t you say?’
Lauderback said, rather loftily, ‘Only a weak mind puts faith in coincidence’—for it was his habit, when under pressure, to assume a condescending air.
Balfour ignored this maxim. ‘Alias Carver?’ he mused. ‘Or alias Wells?’ But he was watching the politician as he spoke.
‘Shall I fill us another pitcher, Mr. L?’ said Augustus Smith.
Lauderback rapped the table. ‘Yes: fill us another. Good.’
‘
Godspeed
weighed anchor around two weeks back,’ said Balfour. ‘She goes back and forth from Canton, does she not—tea-trading? So I expect we won’t be seeing Carver around these parts for a while.’
‘Let’s drop the subject,’ Lauderback said. ‘I made a mistake with the names. I must have made a mistake with the names. It doesn’t signify.’
‘Hang tight,’ said Balfour. A new thought had struck him.
‘What?’ said Lauderback.
‘It
might
signify. Given that the sale of his estate has been appealed. It might signify to the widow, if Crosbie Wells had a brother tucked away.’
Lauderback was smiling again, tremulously. ‘The widow?’
‘Ay,’ Balfour said darkly, and was about to go on, but Lauderback
said, all in a rush, ‘There was no sign of a wife at the cottage—no sign at all. To all appearances he—the fellow—lived alone.’
‘Indeed,’ Balfour said. Again he was about to elaborate, but Lauderback interrupted:
‘You said that it might signify—news about a brother. But a man’s money always goes to his wife, unless his will says otherwise. That’s the law! I don’t see how a brother could signify. I don’t see it.’
He bent his head towards his guest.
‘There
is
no will,’ Balfour said. ‘That’s the problem. Crosbie Wells never made one. No one knew if he had any family at all. They didn’t even know where to send a letter, when he passed—they only had his name, you see, not a home address, not even a birth certificate, nothing. So his land and cottage are returned to the Crown … and the Crown has the right to sell it on, of course, so it goes on the market and it sells the very next day. Nothing stays long on the market around here, I can tell you. But
then
, with the ink still drying on
that
sale, a wife turns up! No one knew a scrap about a wife before that day—only she’s got the marriage papers—and she signs herself Lydia Wells.’