The Luminaries (24 page)

Since then Carver had supplied him with a total of three pounds of opium. He would not supply Pritchard with more than one pound at a time, for the reason (as he very frankly explained) that he liked to keep a very tight hold on his own supply, in order to
prevent
Pritchard from selling the drug wholesale to other sellers, and making an intermediary profit that way. (In selling opium to Ah Sook, Pritchard was of course doing exactly this—but Carver remained unaware of this auxiliary arrangement, for he was seldom in Hokitika, and Pritchard had not troubled himself to
confess
it.) The resin came wrapped in paper, pressed into a tin box not unlike a caddy for storing tea.

Pritchard picked up a clout from the laboratory bench and began to clean the dirt from beneath his fingernails—noticing, as he did so, that they were getting rather long.

Would Carver really have dared to poison the drug before he sold it wholesale to a drug emporium? Pritchard might have
powdered
the resin and turned it into laudanum; he might have sold it piecemeal to any number of clients; he might have used the drug himself. It was true that Carver had an unpleasant history with Anna; he had harmed her badly once before. But even if he wished to kill her by overdose, there was no guarantee that a portion of the poisoned opium would end up in Anna’s hands. Pritchard rolled a ball of dirt between his fingers. No: it was absurd to think that any
man would devise a plot that comprised so many uncertainties. Carver might be a brute, but he was not a fool.

Having rejected that theory, the chemist now considered the second option: that the drug had been poisoned
after
Anna Wetherell was given a piece of it by Ah Sook to take at home. Perhaps someone had stolen into her rooms at the Gridiron, and poisoned it there. But again—why? Why bother to poison the opium at all? Why not kill the whore by more conventional means—by strangulation, or smothering, or battery?

Defeated, Pritchard turned his mind instead to the things he knew by instinct to be true. He
knew
that Anna Wetherell had not told the whole truth about the events of the 14th of January. He
knew
that someone had partaken of the drug recently from the pipe she had hidden in her room. He
knew
that she had ceased to take opium herself; by her eyes and her motions, he could not doubt that she was as dry as a bone. These certainties, in Pritchard’s eyes, could only point to one conclusion.

‘Hang it all,’ he whispered. ‘She’s lying—and on another man’s behalf.’

So the afternoon wore on.

In time Pritchard picked up his unfinished orders, and, for want of a more diverting occupation, began to work. He was not aware of the passing of the hours until a gentle knock at the laboratory door returned him to the present. He turned—noting, with a dim surprise, that the light had become very thin, and dusk was approaching—and saw Albert, Nilssen’s junior clerk, hovering in the doorway with his breath caught in his chest and an abashed look upon his face. He was carrying a note.

‘Oh—something from Nilssen,’ Pritchard said, coming forward. He had quite forgotten his conversation with Nilssen earlier that afternoon, and the request he had made of him—to find the
goldsmith
Quee, and to question him regarding the retorted gold that had been discovered on Crosbie Wells’s estate. He had forgotten about Crosbie Wells entirely—and his fortune, and his widow, and the vanished Mr. Staines. How silently the world revolved, when one was brooding, and alone.

Pritchard was fishing in his apron for a sixpence—but Albert, blushing furiously, stammered, ‘No, sir—’ and held up his palms, to show that the honour of having made the delivery was quite
sufficient
to sustain him.

In fact Albert was sure he had never had so exciting an
afternoon
in all his life. His employer, upon returning from Kaniere Chinatown some half hour previous, had been in such a state of agitation that he had almost torn the door from its hinges. He had penned the note that Albert was carrying now with all the passion of a symphonic composer in collusion with his muse. He had sealed it badly, dropped wax upon himself, cursed, and then thrust the folded, lumpy sheet at Albert, saying hoarsely, ‘Pritchard—to Pritchard—quick as you can.’ In the privacy of the chemist’s receiving room, just before he entered the laboratory, Albert had pinched the edges of the letter together to make the folded paper form a kind of tube, and by squinting down its length he had made out several words that seemed to him to smack of the gravest piracy. It thrilled him that his employer was up to no good.

‘Very well, then—thanks,’ Pritchard said, taking the letter. ‘Did he say a reply was needed?’

The boy said, ‘There’s not to be a reply, sir. But he said to stay and watch you burn it, after you’d read it through.’

Pritchard gave a snort of laughter. This was so like Nilssen: first he sulked, and then he complained of the messiness of it all, and then he dallied, and then he tried to remove all the burden of responsibility from himself—but as soon as he became a
participant,
as soon as he felt crucial, and impressive, then everything became a pantomime, a cloak-and-dagger show; he gloried in it.

Pritchard walked away a few paces (the boy looked
disappointed
), tore the seal with his fingers, and flattened the paper upon his laboratory desk. The letter read:

Thomas Balfour’s inquiry at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand that morning had piqued the banker’s curiosity on several fronts, and as soon as the former had left the building, Mr. Frost
immediately
resolved to do some inquiring of his own. He was still holding in his hand the shares profile of the Aurora goldmine, owned and operated by the vanished prospector, Emery Staines.
Aurora,
Frost thought, tapping the document with his lean finger.
Aurora.
He knew that he had seen that name recently—but where? After a moment he laid the document aside, clambered down from his stool, and padded to the cabinet opposite his cubicle, where a row of leather spines were marked with the words ‘Returns by Quarter’. He selected the third and fourth quarters of the previous year, and returned to his desk to examine the goldmine’s records.

Charlie Frost was a man of scant reputation, for such a thing is only ever claimed, and Frost was a quiet soul, modest in his dress, mild in his features, and disinclined, whatever the provocation, to disturb the peace. When he spoke, it was slowly and with care. He rarely laughed openly, and although his posture was languid and easy, he always seemed alert, as if perpetually mindful of some rule of etiquette that other men no longer observed. He did not like to declare his preferences or to hold forth in speech; in fact he was
reluctant, when in conversation, to assert an agenda of any kind. This was not at all to say that Frost lacked agenda, or that his
preferences
were few; in fact, the many rituals of his private life were regulated in the extreme, and his ambitions were tremendously particular. Rather, Frost had learned the value of appearing to be unassuming. He knew the latent power of obscurity (powerful, because it aroused curiosity in others) and he was capable of great strategy in wielding it—but he took extreme care to keep this talent hidden. The impression that strangers invariably formed, upon first meeting him, was that he was a man of reaction rather than of action, who was managed in business, seduced in love, and
steadfastly
docile in all his pleasures.

Frost was but four-and-twenty years of age, and New
Zealand-born.
His father had been a high-level official in the now defunct New Zealand Company, who, upon disembarking at the mouth of the Hutt River and finding a wealth of flat land to be divided and sold, had promptly sent home for a wife. Frost was not proud of the fact of his birth, for it was a rare citizenship for a white man to hold, and he felt that it was shaming. He told no stories about his childhood, spent in the marshy flat of the Hutt Valley, reading and re-reading his father’s thumbed copy of
Paradise Lost,
the only book besides the Bible that the family possessed. (By the age of eight, Frost could recite every speech of God’s, the Son’s, and Adam’s—but never Satan’s, whom he found pugnacious, and never Eve’s, whom he thought feeble, and a bore.) It was not an unhappy
childhood,
but Frost was unhappy when he recalled it. When he spoke about England, it was as though he missed that place very dearly, and could not wait to return.

With the dissolution of the New Zealand Company, Mr. Frost senior was all but bankrupted, and cast into disrepute. He turned to his only son for aid. Charlie Frost secured scribal work in Wellington, and soon was offered a place at a bank in the Lambton quarter, a position that earned him enough to keep his parents in health and relative comfort. When gold was discovered in Otago, Frost transferred to a bank at Lawrence, promising to send the larger portion of his wages home, each month, by private mail—a
promise he had never broken. He had not once returned home to the Hutt Valley, however, and did not plan to. Charlie Frost tended to conceive of all his relationships in terms of profit and return, and he did not spare a thought for others once he considered that his duty had been served. Now, in Hokitika (for he had followed the rush from Lawrence to the Coast), he did not think at all about his parents, except when he was writing to them each month. This was a difficult task, for his father’s letters were abrupt and mortified, and his mother’s, full of a dismayed silence—sentiments that grieved Charlie Frost, but only briefly. After his replies had been written and dispatched, he shredded their letters into spills for lighting his cigars, cutting the pages lengthwise so as to occlude their import absolutely; the spills he burned, with great indifference.

Frost thumbed through the returns folder until he found the
section
that pertained to Kaniere and the Hokitika gorge. The records were listed alphabetically, with the Aurora as the second, beneath a claim that had been named, rather optimistically for the West Coast, the All Seasons. Frost leaned in close to the page to read the figures, and in the next moment, he gave a murmur of surprise.

In the month following its initial purchase, the Aurora claim had performed splendidly, pulling in almost a hundred pounds; come August, however, the claim’s profits had dropped off radically, until—Frost raised his eyebrows—virtually coming to a halt. The sum total of the Aurora’s profits over the last quarter was only twelve pounds. One pound weekly! That was very odd, for a mine of Aurora’s depth and promise. One pound weekly—why, that would be barely enough to cover the overheads, Frost thought. He bent closer over the book. The record showed that the Aurora was worked by one man only. The name was a Chinese one, so the labour would be cheap … but even so, Frost thought, the digger would still have to be paid a daily wage.

Charlie Frost was frowning. According to the shares profile, Emery Staines had first taken over the Aurora goldmine in the late autumn of the previous year. It appeared that, some weeks after this purchase, Staines had sold fifty-percent shares to the notorious
Francis Carver; however, immediately following
that
transaction—as this record showed—the claim had run suddenly dry. Either Aurora had become, all of a sudden, a duffer claim—worth
virtually
nothing—or someone was doing a very good job of making it seem that way. Frost shut the folder and stood for a moment,
thinking
. His gaze wandered over the crowd: the diggers in their slouch hats, the investors, the escort in their braided epaulettes. Suddenly he remembered where he had seen that name before.

He put up a card in his cubicle to indicate that the window was closed.

‘You off for the day?’ a colleague asked.

‘I suppose I could be,’ said Frost, blinking. ‘I hadn’t thought that I might; I had intended to return after my lunch hour.’

‘We’ll be closed by two, and there’s no more buying today, once this lot is done,’ the other banker said. He stretched his back, and slapped his belly with both hands. ‘May as well see you Monday, Charlie.’

‘Well!’ Frost murmured, gazing into the crown of his hat, as though suddenly perplexed to see it in his hand. ‘That’s very kind of you. Thank you very much.’

Dick Mannering was alone in his office when Frost knocked upon the door. At his knock, Mannering’s collie-dog burst from beneath the desk in an explosion of joyful energy; she leaped upon Frost, her tail thumping the floor, her red mouth open.

‘Charlie Frost!
You’re
a man I didn’t expect to see,’ Mannering exclaimed, pushing his chair back from the desk. ‘Come in, come in—and close the door. I have the feeling that whatever it is you’re about to tell me, it’s not for everyone to hear.’

‘Down, girl,’ said Frost to the dog, gripping her muzzle, looking into her eyes, mussing her ears—and, satisfied, she dropped back onto all fours, and trotted back to her master, where she turned, sank down, put her nose upon her paws, and watched Frost from beneath her brows, sorrowfully.

He closed the door as he was bid. ‘How are you, Dick?’

‘How am I?’ Mannering spread his hands. ‘I’m curious, Charlie. Do you know that? I’m a very curious man, these days. About a whole raft of things. You know Staines hasn’t shown up—not
anywhere
. We even tried Holly in the gorge, though she’s not much of a bloodhound. Gave her a handkerchief to sniff at, and off she went—but then back again, with nothing. Yes, I’m a very curious man. I do hope you’ve brought a bit of news—or a bit of scandal, if news cannot be had. My word—what a fortnight it’s been! Take off your coat—yes—oh, don’t worry about the rain. It’s only water—and heaven knows we ought to be used to the stuff by now.’

Despite this encouragement Frost was careful to hang up his coat so that it did not touch Mannering’s, and to ensure that it would not drip upon Mannering’s overshoes, which were laid out beneath the coat-rack, each fitted with a shoe tree, and shined a handsome black. Then he plucked off his hat, somewhat gingerly.

‘It’s a pig of a day,’ he said.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ said Mannering. ‘You’ll have a brandy?’

‘I will, if you will,’ said Frost, this being his policy in all
expressions
of appetite and thirst. He sat down, placing the palms of his hands upon his knees, and looked about him.

Mannering’s office was located above the foyer of the Prince of Wales Opera House, and boasted a handsome view out over the theatre’s striped awning to Revell-street, and beyond it to the open ocean, visible between the fronts of the facing houses as a band of bluish-grey, occasionally of green, and today, through the rain, as a whitish yellow—the water having taken on the colour of the sky.

The room had been designed as a testament to the wealth of its owner; for Mannering, in addition to managing the opera house, received income as a whoremonger, a card sharp, a shareholder, and a goldfields magnate. In all these professions he possessed a wonderful knack for profit, most especially the kind that can be made off the back of the trespasses of other men: this the room’s furnishings made abundantly clear. The walls of his office were papered, and the cabinets oiled; there was a thick Turkish rug upon the floor; a ceramic bust, fashioned in the Roman style, served as a scowling bookend; under the window a specimen box displayed
three black butterflies, each the size of a child’s outspread hand. Behind Mannering’s desk hung a sublime watercolour landscape, framed in gold: it showed a high cliff, slanting beams of sunlight, silhouetted foliage of a purplish hue, and, in the hazy distance, the pale wash of a rainbow, curving out of a cloud. Charlie Frost thought it a very fine piece of art, and one that commended Mannering’s taste most favourably. He was always pleased when he thought up a reason to pay a call upon the older man, so that he might sit in this very chair, and gaze up at it, and imagine that he was somewhere very grand and far away.

‘Yes: what a fortnight it’s been,’ Mannering was saying. ‘And now my best whore has gone off and declared herself in mourning! Bloody pain in the neck, I’m telling you. Beginning to think she might be cracked. That’s a blow. When it’s your best whore. That’s a blow. You know she was there with Emery, the night he
disappeared.
’

‘Miss Wetherell—and Mr. Staines?’ Frost had curled his hands around the scrolled arms of his chair, and was tracing the groove of the carving with the tips of his fingers.

Beauty, for Charlie Frost, was more or less synonymous with refinement. The ideal woman, in his mind, was one devoted to the project of her own enhancement, who was accomplished in the female arts of embroidery, piano-playing, pressing leaves, and the like; who sang sweetly, read quietly, and demurred to all opinion; who was a charming and priceless collectible; who loved, above all things, to be loved. Anna Wetherell had none of these qualities, but to admit that Anna did not at all resemble the fantastic shape of Frost’s phantasmic ideal is not at all to say that the banker did not care for her, or that he did not take his satisfaction like the rest. Imagining Anna and Staines together now, he felt a twinge of discomfort—almost of distaste.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mannering, plucking the crystal plug from the neck of the decanter, and swirling the liquid about. ‘He bought her for the whole night, and b—er the constable, or whoever might come knocking! At his own house, too! No slag hotels for him! He was most particular: it had to be her, he said, not Kate, not Lizzie;
it had to be Anna. And then the next morning she’s half dead and he’s nowhere to be found. It’s done my head in, Charlie. Of course
she’s
no help.
She
says she can’t remember a d—n thing before the moment she woke up in gaol—and by the stupid look on her face I’m inclined to believe her. She’s my best whore, Charlie—but devil take that drug of hers; devil take it for his own. You’ll have a cigar?’

Frost accepted a cigar from the box, and Mannering bent to hold a paper spill to the coals—but the spill was too short, and flared too quickly, and Mannering burned his fingers. He dropped the paper into the grate with an oath. He was obliged to fashion another spill out of a twist of blotting paper, and it was several moments before both their cigars were lit.