The Luminaries (96 page)
In which Te Rau Tauwhare declines to mention Francis Carver’s name to Crosbie Wells, much less to describe the circumstances of their brief interaction one month prior, an omission that owes in equal parts to a deeply private nature and to a certain cunning when it comes to financial profit; the next time he sees Francis Carver, Tauwhare thinks, he will make an easy shilling, perhaps more.
Crosbie Wells had bought four panes of glass for a quartered window, but he had yet to cut the hole, and set the sill; for the moment, the panes were propped against the wall, reflecting, faintly, the flickering lamplight, and the square grating of the stove.
‘I knew a man who lost an arm in the floods at Dunstan,’ Wells was saying. He was lying on his bolster, a bottle of spirits on his chest; Tauwhare sat opposite, nursing a bottle of his own. ‘Got caught in a rapid, you see, and his arm got trapped, and they couldn’t save it. He had a plain name. Smith or Stone or something like that. Anyway—the point is—he talked of it afterwards, the incident, and his real sorrow, he said, was that the arm he’d lost had been tattooed. A full-rigged ship was the picture—a present to
himself
, after coming round the Horn—and it bothered him extremely that he’d lost it. For some reason it stayed with me—that story. Losing a tattoo. I asked him if he mightn’t just tattoo the other arm, but he was strange about it. I’ll never do that, he said. I’ll never do it.’
‘It is painful,’ said Tauwhare. ‘
Ta moko
.’
Wells looked over at him. ‘Is it sometimes a shock,’ he said, ‘to see yourself? After you haven’t been near a looking glass in a while, I mean. Do you forget?’
‘No,’ Tauwhare said. ‘Never.’ His face was shadowed; the
lamplight
accented the lines around his mouth, giving his expression a hawkish, solemn look.
‘I think I would.’
‘We have a saying,’ Tauwhare said. ‘
Taia a moko hei hoa matenga mou
.’
‘I cut a man’s face with a knife,’ Wells said, still staring at him. ‘Gave him a scar. Right here. Eye to mouth. It bled like anything. Did yours bleed like anything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you ever killed a man, Tauwhare?’
‘No.’
‘No,’ said Wells, turning back to his bottle. ‘Nor have I.’
PART EIGHT
In which Quee Long brings a complaint before the law, and George Shepard, whose personal hatred of Sook Yongsheng has grown, over time, to include all Chinese men, declines to honour it, an injustice for which he does not, either then, or afterwards, feel any compunction.
‘I do not understand what you are saying.’
Ah Quee sighed. He pointed a third time to his certificate of indenture, which lay between them on Shepard’s desk. In the box marked ‘present site of employment’ was written the word
Aurora
.
‘Duffer,’ he explained. ‘Aurora is duffer claim.’
‘The Aurora is a duffer claim, and you work the Aurora, yes. That much I understand.’
‘Mannering,’ said Ah Quee. ‘Mannering make duffer
not
duffer.’
‘Mannering make duffer not duffer,’ Shepard repeated.
‘Very good,’ said Ah Quee, nodding. ‘Very bad man.’
‘Which is he—very good or very bad?’
Ah Quee frowned; then he said, ‘Very bad man.’
‘How does he make the duffer not a duffer? How?
How
?’
Ah Quee took his purse and held it up. Moving very deliberately, so that the action would not be lost on Shepard, he extracted a silver penny, which he then transferred to his left pocket. He waited a moment, and then he took the penny from his pocket, and returned it to his purse, as before.
Shepard sighed. ‘Mr. Quee,’ he said. ‘I see that the term of your
indenture will not expire for some years; the term of my patience, however, reached its expiration some minutes ago. I have neither the resources nor the inclination to launch an investigation into Mr. Mannering’s finances on the strength of a half-articulated tip. I
suggest
you return to the Aurora, and count yourself lucky that you have any kind of work at all.’
In which Alistair Lauderback, having now officially announced his intention to run for the Westland seat in the Fourth New Zealand Parliament, an ambition that, in addition to furthering his already illustrious political career, will take him over the Alps to Westland proper in the coming months, thus granting the interview his bastard brother has so long desired, now turns his mind to practical matters, or, more accurately, entreats an old associate to turn his mind to practical matters on his, Lauderback’s, behalf.
Akaroa. 22 Aug.
My dear Tom—
I expect you know already of my ambition to run for the Westland seat; but if this news comes as a surprise to you, I have enclosed an article from the
Lyttelton Times
that explains the announcement, and my reasons for it, in more detail than I have time for here. You can be sure that I am eager to see the fine sights of West Canterbury with my own eyes. I plan to arrive in Hokitika by 15 January, an estimate dependent upon weather, as I will make the journey overland, rather than by sea, in order to follow and inspect the future Christchurch-road. I prefer to travel light, as you know; I have arranged for a trunk of personal effects to be transferred from Lyttelton in the last days of December. Might the
Virtue
collect the trunk in Dunedin prior to her departure on the 10th of January, and convey it to the Coast? As a West Canterbury foreigner I shall defer to your expertise on questions of Hokitika lodging, dining,
coach hire, club membership &c. I trust fully in your good taste and capability, and remain,
Yours, &c.,
A. LAUDERBACK
In which Mannering, driving Anna Wetherell to Kaniere, perceives in her a new quality, a hardness, a kind of distance; an observation that moves him, internally, to pity, though when he speaks, some three miles after this observation is first made, it is not to console her, the intervening miles having wrought in him a hardness of his own.
‘Misery won’t do. Misery is bad for business, whatever the business. A man won’t bet on it, and a man won’t bet against it—and it has to be one or the other, you see, in our line of work. Do you see?’
‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘I see.’
He was driving her to Chinatown, where Ah Sook was waiting with his resin and his pipe.
‘I’ve never had a girl murdered, and I’ve never had a girl beat,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘So you can trust me,’ he said.
In which Staines confides in Mannering to the extent that he admits regret in having entered into a sponsorship agreement with Mr. Francis Carver, explaining that the initial opinion that he, Staines, formed of Carver’s character and history was and is grievously in error, his opinion now being that Carver is a villain of the first degree, and one not at all deserving of good fortune; to which Mannering, chuckling slightly, proposes a somewhat thrilling, because dastardly, solution.
‘There’s only one true crime upon a goldfield,’ said Mannering to Staines as they stamped through the undergrowth towards the southern edge of the Aurora claim. ‘Don’t you bother your head about murder, or theft, or treason. No: it’s fraud that’s the crime of crimes. Making sport of a digger’s hopes, you see, and a digger’s hopes are all he has. Digger fraud has two varieties. Salting a claim is the first. Crying a duffer is the second.’
‘Which is considered to be the more grievous?’
‘Depends on what you call grievous,’ said Mannering, swiping away a vine. ‘Salt a claim and get caught, you might get murdered in your bed; cry a duffer and get caught, you’re liable to get lynched. Cold-blooded, hot-blooded. That’s your choice.’
Staines smiled. ‘Am I to do business with a cold-blooded man?’
‘You can decide for yourself,’ said Mannering, throwing out his arm. ‘Here it is: the Aurora.’
‘Ah,’ said Staines, stopping also. They were both panting slightly from the walk. ‘Well—very good.’
They surveyed the land together. Staines perceived a Chinese man, squatting some thirty yards distant, his panning dish loose in his hands.
‘What’s the opposite of a homeward-bounder?’ said Mannering presently. ‘A never-going-homer? A stick-it-to-Mr.-Carver?’
‘Who’s that?’ said Staines.
‘That’s Quee,’ said Mannering. ‘He’ll stay on.’
Staines dropped his voice. ‘Does he know?’
Mannering laughed. ‘“Does he know?” What have I just told you? I’m not keen on getting murdered in my bed, thank you.’
‘He must think this a terribly poor enterprise.’
‘I haven’t the first idea what that man thinks,’ said Mannering, scornfully.
In which Ah Quee, placing his hands upon the armoured curve of Anna’s bodice, makes a curious discovery, the full significance of which he will not appreciate until eight days later, when the complete rotation of Anna’s four muslin gowns has given him a mental estimation of the extent of the riches they contain, excluding, of course, the dust contained within the gown of orange silk, which Anna never wears to Kaniere.
Anna lay perfectly still, her eyes closed, as Ah Quee ran his hands over her gown. He tapped every part of her corset with his fingers; he traced each flounce; he picked up the weighted hem and poured the fabric through his hands. His methodical touch seemed to anchor her in time and space; she felt that it was imperative that he touched every part of the garment before he touched her, and this certainty filled her with a lucid, powerful calm. When he slid his arm beneath her shoulders to roll her over, she complied without a sound, bringing her limp hands up to her mouth, like a baby, and turning her face towards his chest.
PART NINE
In which Ah Quee fills his firebox with charcoal, meaning to smelt the last of the dust excavated from Anna’s gown, and to inscribe the smelted bars with the name of the goldmine to which he is indentured, the Aurora; and Anna, as she sleeps, mutters syllables of distress, and moves her hand to her cheek, as if intending to staunch a wound.
When Anna woke, it was morning. Ah Quee had moved her to the corner of his hut. He had placed a folded blanket beneath her cheek, and had covered her with a woollen cape, his own. She knew upon waking that she had been talking in her sleep, for she felt flushed and disturbed, and much too hot; her hair was damp. Ah Quee had not yet noticed that she had woken. She lay still and watched him as he fussed over his breakfast, and examined his
fingernails
, and nodded, and hummed, and bent to rake the coals.
In which Emery Staines, to whom Crosbie Wells has since narrated the full story of his betrayal at the hands of Francis Carver, each having won the other’s trust and loyalty, decides in a moment to falsify the quarterly report, removing all evidence of the bonanza from the goldfield records, and quite forgetting as he does so the determined worker Quee, who, according to protocol, and notwithstanding the circumstances of his indenture, is nevertheless deserving of a bonus.
Emery Staines, arriving at the camp station, was surprised to see that the Aurora’s box was flagged, meaning that a yield had been submitted. He requested the gold escort to unlock the box. Inside there was a neat lattice of smelted gold bars. Staines took one of the bars in his hand. ‘If I asked you to turn your back a moment,’ he said presently, ‘while I transferred the contents of this box
elsewhere
, what would be your price?’
The escort thought a moment, running his fingers up and down the barrel of his rifle. ‘I’d do it for twenty pounds,’ he said. ‘Sterling. Not pure.’
‘I’ll give you fifty,’ said Staines.