The Luminaries (12 page)

‘What about the elections?’ Balfour said. ‘What about Caroline?’ (This was the name of Lauderback’s wife.)

‘I don’t need to risk all
that
,’ Lauderback said scornfully. ‘I can do it privately. Catch him on the contract. Blackmail him—as he did me. Give him a taste of his own medicine.’

Balfour stroked his beard, watching him. ‘Well, now.’

‘Carver will have destroyed his own copy of the bill of sale, most likely, if it’s proof of a lie … I suppose I’ll have to get my copy notarised, to be safe.’

‘Well, now,’ Balfour said again. ‘Perhaps we ought to steady up.’

But Lauderback had sat forward in excitement. ‘There’s no need—I can begin right away!’ he exclaimed. ‘I know exactly where the contract is. It’s packed in my trunk, in that shipping crate you’re taking care of for me.’

Balfour felt his guts clench. His face flooded red. He opened his mouth to reply—and then, in cowardice, closed it.

‘Has the
Virtue
been and gone already?’ Lauderback said. ‘You were expecting her last week, I think.’

There was a roaring in Balfour’s ears. He ought to have come clean about the disappearance as soon as the two men were left alone.
Stupid
, he shouted internally,
stupid!
But could he not simply tell Lauderback the truth? It had been no man’s fault that the shipping crate had disappeared—it had been an accident, a blunder of
paperwork
most likely—and it would show up, sooner or later, in some unlikely situation … a little battered externally perhaps, but none the worse for wear. Surely Lauderback would understand that! If he was calm and honest in making his confession—if he admitted fault—But then

Balfour’s heart gave a judder. There must be a
correlation
between the trunk in Lauderback’s story—the one packed with women’s dresses, that had made the trans-Tasman crossing every month for a year—and the trunk containing Lauderback’s effects, the fraudulent contract among them, that had so recently vanished from the Hokitika quay. There
must
be, when Balfour had never before mislaid a shipping crate, nor had one stolen, not in all
his years in the business! His heart began to pound. Francis Carver had blackmailed the politician once before; perhaps he had done so for a second time! Perhaps
Carver
had stolen the shipping crate! The man was familiar on the Hokitika docks, after all …

Lauderback was casting his eye over the table, looking for a cold morsel; he had not noticed the change in Balfour’s demeanour, as the latter turned over this new possibility in his mind. ‘Has she been through—the
Virtue
?’ he repeated, without impatience.

‘No,’ said Balfour.

The room seemed to constrict around the lie.

‘Not here yet?’ said Lauderback. He found a waxy onion on the plate Jock Smith had left behind and popped it into his mouth. ‘So I beat my own clipper ship—and on horseback! I wasn’t expecting that! Nothing went belly-up at sea, I hope?’

His good humour was quite restored; he was even giddy. Such a tonic for the spirit is the promise of revenge!

‘No,’ Balfour said again.

‘She’s still in transit, you said?’

Balfour paused a fraction of a second, then he said, ‘Ay—still in transit. That’s right.’

‘Coming West from Dunedin, is she? Or up and through the Strait?’

Balfour was sweating. He watched the movement of Lauderback’s jaw as the other man chewed. In the end he chose the more
protracted
route. ‘Up and through.’

‘Oh well,’ Lauderback said, swallowing. ‘These things can’t be helped, I suppose. Not in the shipping business. But you’ll let me know the moment it gets here—won’t you?’

‘Ay—of course. Yes. I will.’

‘I shall look forward to it,’ said Lauderback. He hesitated. ‘I say—Tom—there’s another thing. You must understand that what I’ve told you this morning—’

‘Strictest confidence,’ Balfour blurted out. ‘Won’t tell a soul.’

‘With my campaign at the point of—’

‘No need for that.’ Balfour shook his head. ‘No need to say it. Mum’s the word.’

‘Good man.’ Lauderback pushed his chair back and slapped his knees with both hands. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Poor Jock, and poor Augustus. I have been unutterably rude.’

‘Yes—poor Jock, poor Augustus, yes,’ said Balfour, motioning with his hand that Lauderback was free to leave—but Lauderback, humming now through his teeth, was already reaching for his coat.

Thomas Balfour’s heart was beating very fast. He was unused to the awful compression that comes after a lie, when it dawns upon the liar that the lie he has uttered is one to which he is now bound; that he must now keep lying, and compound smaller lies upon the first, and be shuttered in lonely contemplation of his own mistake. Balfour would wear his falsehood as a fetter, until the shipping crate was found. He needed to do it quickly—and without Lauderback’s knowledge, let alone his help.

‘Mr. Lauderback,’ he said, ‘I think you ought to go and play the politician for a while. Go shake some hands, you know. Throw the dice. Play some bowls. Spend a night at the theatre. Leave all this aside.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ll go down the wharf and ask a round of questions. What Carver’s up to, where he’s gone.’

A shadow of alarm passed over Lauderback’s face. ‘Thought you said he’d gone to Canton. Isn’t that what you said? Tea-trading?’

‘But we ought to make sure,’ Balfour said. ‘We ought to be ready.’ He was thinking about the missing shipping crate, and the new
possibility
that Francis Carver might have stolen it. (But what need had Carver of avenging himself
twice
upon Alistair Lauderback—when the first blackmail had come off without a hitch?)

‘Discreetly,’ said Lauderback. ‘Discreetly—when you ask your questions.’

‘Nothing to it,’ said Balfour. ‘The fellows know me down on Gibson Quay, and you remember I’ve done a fair patch of shipping with
Godspeed
. Anyway: better me than you.’

‘Yes—better,’ said Lauderback. ‘Yes. All right. You do that, then.’ He nodded.

In fact this was the very kind of delegation to which Alistair
Lauderback was accustomed, as a man of means. It was not strange to him that Balfour should devote his Saturday to
straightening
out another man’s affairs. He did not pause to wonder whether Balfour could be risking his own reputation, by
associating
himself with a story of cuckoldry, blackmail, murder, and revenge, and nor did he spare a thought for how Balfour might be recompensed. He felt only relief. An invisible order had been restored: the same kind of order that ensured his boiled egg was ready every morning, and the dishes cleared away. He plumped the knot of his necktie with his fingers, and rose from the table as a man refreshed.

Lightly Balfour said, ‘And you ought to steer clear of Lydia Wells, I think. Just because—’

‘Of course, of course, of course,’ said Lauderback. He picked up his gloves with his left hand, and reached to shake Balfour’s hand with his right. ‘We’ll get the bastard, won’t we?’

Suddenly Balfour realised that Lauderback knew exactly the nature of the twinkle by which Frank Carver had him tied. He could not have explained how he arrived at this sudden
realisation
—but all at once, he knew.

‘Yes,’ he said, shaking Lauderback’s hand very firmly. ‘We’ll get the bastard, by and bye.’

When a restless spirit is commissioned, under influence, to solve a riddle for another man, his energies are, at first, readily and
faithfully
applied. But Thomas Balfour’s energies tended to span a very short duration, if the project to which he was assigned was not a project of his own devising. His imagination gave way to
impatience
, and his optimism to an extravagant breed of neglect. He seized an idea only to discard it immediately, if only for the reason that it was no longer novel to him; he started in all directions at once. This was not at all the mark of a fickle temper, but rather, of a temper that is accustomed to enthusiasm of the most genuine and curious sort, and so will accept no form of counterfeit—but it was, nevertheless, something of an impediment to progress.

Balfour was ready to rise from the table and quit the Palace Hotel when suddenly it struck him that it would be a great shame to leave a pitcher of perfectly good wine half-filled. He poured the last of it into his glass and was raising it to his lips—and then he saw, over the rim of the glass, that the clergyman at the nearby table had put aside his tract and folded his hands. He was looking at Balfour intently.

Like a child caught thieving, Balfour put down the glass.

‘Reverend,’ he said. (It was, on reflection, rather early in the day to be drunk.)

‘Good morning,’ returned the reverend man, and from his accent Balfour knew at once that he was Irish; he relaxed, and allowed himself to be rude. He picked up his glass again, and drank deeply.

The clergyman said, ‘Your friend is a lucky man, I think.’

What an unfortunate face he had—caught in a perennial
boyhood
, with that bunched mouth, that pouting bottom lip, those teeth like nubbins. One envisaged him in shorts and gaiters, munching on a slab of bread-and-dripping, carrying a parcel of books that had been buckled together with an old belt of his father’s, slapping it against his leg as he ate. But he was thirty,
perhaps
forty in age.

Balfour narrowed his eyes. ‘Don’t recall we were speaking for your benefit.’

The man inclined his head, as if conceding a point. ‘No, indeed,’ he said. ‘And to the benefit of no other man either, I should hope.’

‘Meaning what, precisely?’

‘Merely that no man ought to profit from overhearing bad news. Least of all a member of the clergy.’

‘Bad news, you call it? Thought you just said he was lucky.’

‘Lucky to have you,’ the clergyman said, and Balfour blushed.

‘You know,’ he said angrily, ‘it doesn’t count as a confession, just because it sounds like a secret, and you heard it on the sly.’

‘You are quite right to make that distinction,’ the clergyman said, still in pleasant tones. ‘But I did not overhear you by design.’

‘As to your design—as to what’s intentioned and what’s not. Who’s to know it?’

‘You were talking very loud.’

‘Who’s to know your design, I meant?’

‘With respect to my intentions, I’m afraid you’ll have to trust in my word—or in my cassock, if my word is not enough.’

‘Trust what in your word and your cassock? Trust what enough?’

‘Trust that I did not mean to eavesdrop,’ said the clergyman patiently. ‘Trust that I can keep a secret, when I’m asked.’

‘Well,’ Balfour said, ‘you’ve been asked. I’m asking. And you ought to leave off mentioning luck and bad news. That’s your
opinion
—that’s not what you heard.’

‘You’re right. I do apologise.’

‘Unsolicited, you know. And not appreciated.’

‘I do apologise. I shall be silent.’

Balfour waved his finger. ‘But you should leave off because I’ve asked you—not because of the confessing rule. Because it wasn’t a confession.’

‘No indeed: we agree on that.’ He added, in a different voice, ‘In any case, confession is a Catholic practice.’

‘But you’re Catholic.’ All of a sudden Balfour was feeling very drunk.

‘Free Methodist,’ the reverend man corrected, without offence; but he added, as a gentle reprimand, ‘You can’t tell a great deal about a man from his accent, you know.’

‘It’s Irish,’ said Balfour, stupidly.

‘My father hails from the county Tyrone. Before I came here, I was in Dunedin; before that, I was in New York.’

‘New York—now there’s a place!’

The reverend shook his head. ‘Everywhere is a place,’ he said.

Balfour faltered. After this admonishment, he felt that he could not pursue the subject of New York—but he could not think of anything else to speak about, beyond the subject he had already forbidden the reverend man to pursue. He sat a moment, scowling; then he said, ‘You’re stopping here?’

‘At this hotel?’

‘Ay.’

‘No: in fact my tent is flooded, and I’m taking my breakfast out of the rain,’ the clergyman said. He spread his hand to indicate the detritus of the meal before him, long since cold. ‘You see I have taken rather a long time of it, to make the shelter last.’

‘You don’t have a church to go to?’

This was a rather rude question, and one to which Balfour already knew the answer, for there were only three churches in Hokitika at that time. But he was feeling somehow thwarted by the
man, in a way that he could not quite identify, and he wished to regain the upper hand—not by shaming him, exactly; but by
cutting
him down to size.

The clergyman only smiled, showing his tiny teeth. ‘Not yet,’ he said.

‘Never heard of a Free Methodist. I suppose it’s one of the new ones.’

‘A new practice, a new polity,’ said the man. He smiled again. ‘But an old doctrine, of course.’

Balfour thought him rather smug.

‘I suppose you’ve come on a mission,’ he said. ‘To turn the
heathens
.’

‘I notice that you make a great many suppositions,’ said the
clergyman
. ‘You have not yet asked a question without presuming to answer it as well.’

But Thomas Balfour did not take kindly to this kind of observation: he would not be instructed on the formation of his thought. He pushed his chair back from the table, indicating that he intended to take his leave.

‘To answer you,’ the clergyman went on, as Balfour reached for his coat, ‘I am to be the chaplain of the new gaol-house at Seaview. But until it is built’—he picked up his pamphlet, and slapped it in an explanatory fashion against the palm of his other hand—‘I’m a student of theology, that’s all.’

‘Theology!’ said Balfour. He pushed his arms into the sleeves of his coat. ‘You ought to be reading stiffer stuff than that, you know. Hell of a parish you’re walking into.’

‘God’s people, even so.’

Balfour nodded vaguely and made to leave. Suddenly a new thought struck him.

‘If you called it bad news,’ he said. ‘I’m going to wager that you were listening for a good long while.’

‘Yes,’ said the chaplain humbly. ‘I was. It was a name that caught my attention.’

‘Carver?’

‘No: Wells. Crosbie Wells.’

Balfour narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s Crosbie Wells to you?’

The chaplain hesitated. The truthful answer was that he did not know Crosbie Wells at all—and yet in the fortnight since that man’s death, he had done little else but think of him, and ponder the
circumstances
of his death. He conceded after a pause that he had had the solemn honour of digging Wells’s grave, and performing the last rites over his coffin, as it was lowered into the ground—an explanation that did not satisfy Thomas Balfour. The shipping agent was still regarding his new acquaintance with an expression of patent mistrust; his eyes narrowed still further when the
chaplain
(who ordinarily bore up very well under doubtful scrutiny) suddenly winced, and dropped his gaze.

The chaplain’s name—as Walter Moody would discover some nine hours later—was Cowell Devlin. He had arrived in Hokitika upon the clipper ship
Virtue
, which was leased and operated by Balfour Shipping, and which had conveyed, along with sundry
passengers
, timber, iron, fasteners, many tins of paint, assorted dry goods, several crates of livestock, and a great quantity of calico, the now-vanished shipping crate containing Alistair Lauderback’s trunk, and inside that, the copy of the contract under which the barque
Godspeed
had been sold. The
Virtue
had reached Hokitika two days before Alistair Lauderback himself; the Reverend Cowell Devlin had first arrived in Hokitika, therefore, two days before the death of Crosbie Wells.

Immediately upon landing, he had reported to the Police Camp, where the gaol’s governor, George Shepard, wasted little time in putting him to work. Devlin’s official duties would not begin until the completion of the new Hokitika gaol-house, high on the terrace of Seaview; in the meantime, however, Devlin might make himself useful around the Police Camp, and help with the daily
management
of the temporary gaol, which was, at that time, the residence of two women and nineteen men. Devlin was to teach each one of them to fear their Maker, and to instil in their wayward hearts a proper respect for the iron cladding of the law—or so the gaoler phrased it. (Devlin would soon discover that he and Shepard
differed
very radically in their pedagogic sensibilities.) Having taken
a brief tour of the Police Camp and praised the style of its
management
, Devlin inquired whether he might take his lodging in the gaol-house each night, so as to sleep among the felons, and share their bread. The gaoler received this proposition with distaste. He did not exactly reject Devlin’s inquiry, but he paused, licked his lip with a pale, dry tongue, and then suggested that Devlin might do better to take up residence in one of Hokitika’s many hotels. Shepard went on to warn the chaplain that his Irish accent might invite demonstrations of partisanship from Englishmen, and the expectation of a Catholic sensibility from his fellow Irish; he advised him, finally, to be discerning when choosing his company, and still more discerning when choosing his words—and with this pronouncement, he welcomed Devlin to Hokitika, and promptly bid him good morning.

But Cowell Devlin did not have funds enough to support several months’ lodging in a hotel, and it was not his habit, furthermore, to indulge another man’s pessimism about partisan displays. He did not take Shepard’s advice, and he did not heed his warning. He purchased a standard-issue miner’s tent, strung it up some fifty yards from the Hokitika beachfront, and weighted the calico
pockets
with stones. Then he made his way back to Revell-street, bought a mug of small beer at the most crowded hotel he could find, and began to introduce himself, to Englishmen and Irishmen alike.

Cowell Devlin was, to all intents and purposes, a self-made man—but because this epithet is rarely used to describe members of the holy orders, we ought to clarify its usage here. The cleric spent the present moment in a state of constant visualisation,
conjuring
in his mind the untroubled future self he had determined that he would one day become. His theology, too, followed this
pattern
: he was a hopeful believer, and to his many disciples he spoke of a utopian future, a world without want. When he spoke, he freely interchanged the language of auspice with the language of dreams: there was no conflict, in Cowell Devlin’s mind, between reality as he wished to perceive it, and reality as it was otherwise perceived. Such an inclination might, in the context of another man’s temperament, be called ambition, but Devlin’s self-image
was impregnable, even mythic, and he had long ago determined that he was not an ambitious man. As might be expected, he was given to bouts of very purposeful ignorance, and tended to pass over the harsher truths of human nature in favour of those that could be romanticised by whimsy and imagination. With respect to these latter articles, Devlin was an adept. He was an excellent
storyteller
, and therefore, an effective clergyman. His faith, like his self-image, was complete, equable, and almost clairvoyant in its expression—attributes that, as Balfour had already observed,
occasionally
made him seem rather smug.

At eleven o’clock on the night of the 14th of January—the night that Alistair Lauderback arrived in Hokitika—Cowell Devlin was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Hokitika gaol-house,
speaking
with the inmates about Paul. Sometime around sundown it had begun to rain, and the chaplain had decided to stay late, in the hope that the downpour was only a temporary one—for he was new to Hokitika, and did not yet understand the dogged persistence of the weather on the Coast. The governor was at work in his
private
study, and his wife abed. The prisoners were mostly awake. They had listened to Devlin’s sermon at first politely and then with real interest; they were now, at the chaplain’s encouragement,
offering
testimonies and philosophies of their own.

Devlin was wondering whether he ought to retire for the night and venture out into the rain when there came a shout from the courtyard, and a thump against the door. This roused the gaoler, who emerged from his study with a linen cap upon his head and a rifle in his hand, a combination that ought to have been amusing, but was not. Devlin rose also, and followed Shepard to the door. They peered into the rain—and saw, just past the circle of light that was thrown by the gaoler’s lantern, the duty sergeant Ellis Drake. He had a woman in his arms.

Shepard opened the door wider and invited the sergeant to step inside. Drake was a greasy, nasal fellow of limited intelligence;
hearing
his name, one was put in mind not of the naval hero but of the common duck, a species he closely resembled. He conveyed his
captive
into the gaol-house by the vulgar method of the fireman’s hold,
and deposited her with little ceremony upon the floor. He then reported, nasally, that the whore had either committed a crime against society or a crime against God; she had been found in a
posture
of such abject insentience that a distinction between gross intoxication and wilful harm could not be made, but he hoped (
tipping
his hat) that some hours in the gaol-house might serve to clarify the matter. He nudged her senseless body with the tip of his boot, as if to reiterate his point, and added that the instrument of her crime was likely opium. The whore was enslaved to the drug, and had often been seen in public while under its effects.