The Luminaries (27 page)

‘For shame,’ said Frost.

But shame, for Mannering, was an emotion that attended only failure; he could not be made to feel compunction if he had not, in his own estimation, failed. He went on. ‘All right—so you’ve got an opinion about it. Here’s how it happened, though. The actual claim was useless. Little better than a tailing pile. After I bought it I buried maybe twenty pounds’ worth of pure ore in the gravel, scattering it all about, then directed Quee to begin his digging. Quee finds it all right. At the end of the week he goes to have it weighed at the camp station like all the other fellows. This is before the gold escort, you remember. Back when the bankers had their stations along the river, and the buyers worked alone. So when my claim comes up, and my gold is weighed, the bankers ask me if I want to bank it right there. I say no, not yet; I’ll take it back, pure. My story goes that I’m keeping it back for a private buyer who’s going to export it altogether, as a lump sum. Or some such tale; I don’t remember now. Well, after the stuff is weighed, and the value recorded, I gather it all back up again, wait for the cover of darkness, creep back to the claim, and shake it out a second time, over the gravel.’

‘I can’t believe you,’ said Frost.

‘Believe it or not, as you please,’ said Mannering. ‘Due credit to the Chinaman, of course: this happened maybe four or five times, and each week he came back with the exact same pile, more or less. He found it all, no matter how much I messed up the gravel, no matter how deep the grit settled, no matter the weather or what
have you. Worked like a Trojan. That’s one thing I’ll say for the Chinese: when it comes to pure old-fashioned work, you can’t fault them.’

‘But you never told him what you were doing.’

Mannering was shocked. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Confess my sins? Of course I didn’t! Anyway. To all appearances, it looked like the Aurora was pulling twenty pounds a week. Nobody knew it was the same twenty pounds, over and over! She just looked like a good, steady claim.’

Mannering had begun his tale in a posture of some
exasperation,
but his natural affinity for storytelling could not long be held in check, and it was enjoyable to him, to recount a proof of his own ingenuity. He relaxed into his narrative, thumping the brim of his stovepipe hat against his leg.

‘But then Quee started to catch on,’ he said. ‘Must have been watching, or maybe he just figured me out. So what does he do? Cunning fox! He starts retorting the dust each week in a little
crucible
of his own. Then he brings it to the camp station already smelted, and done up in these one-pound blocks, about so big. There’s no throwing
that
back among the stones!

‘No matter, I thought. I had plenty of other claims for sale, and the other ones were pulling good dust. I could shuffle it around. So I started banking Quee’s squares as returns against the Dream of England claim, and every week, I’d salt the Aurora just as before, only I’d use Dream of England dust, not Aurora dust—do you see? Aurora had been pulling twenty pounds a week until then; she had to maintain that same yield, or it would look like her profits had started to fall away—and I wouldn’t get
my
profit, when I sold.

‘But then Quee got wise to
that,
’ Mannering went on, raising his voice in a final cadence, ‘and the bloody devil starts carving the name of the plot—
Aurora
—into his little squares. I can’t bank
that
against the Dream of England without raising a few eyebrows, can I? Would you believe it? The cheek of him!’

‘I
don’t
believe it,’ said Frost, who was still feeling very much betrayed.

‘Well, there it is, anyway,’ said Mannering. ‘That’s the story. That’s when Emery arrived.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘Well—what happened?’

‘You know what happened. I sold him the Aurora.’

‘But the claim was a duffer, you said!’

‘Yes,’ said Mannering.

‘You sold him a duffer claim!’

‘Yes.’

‘But he’s your friend,’ said Charlie Frost, and even as he spoke the words he regretted them. How pathetic it sounded—to
reprimand
a man like Mannering about
friendship
! Mannering was in the august high noon of his life. He was prosperous, and well dressed, and he owned the largest and most handsome building on
Revell-street.
There were gold nuggets hanging from his watch chain. He ate meat at every meal. He had known a hundred women—maybe even a thousand—maybe more. What did he care about
friends
? Frost found that he was blushing.

Mannering studied the younger man for a moment, and then said, ‘Here’s the heart of it, Charlie. A four thousand-pound
fortune
—smelted, and every square of it stamped with the word
Aurora
—has turned up in a dead man’s house. We don’t know why, and we don’t know how, but we do know who, and that “who” is my old friend Quee in Kaniere. All right? This is why we have to go to Chinatown. So as to ask him a question or two.’

Frost felt that Mannering was still concealing something from him. ‘But the fortune itself,’ he said. ‘How do you account for it? If Aurora
is
a duffer, then where did all of that gold come from? And if Aurora’s
not
a duffer, then who’s cooking the books to make her appear as if she’s worth nothing at all?’

The magnate put his hat on. ‘All I know,’ he said, running his finger and thumb around the brim and back again, ‘is that I’ve got a score to settle. No man makes a fool of Dick Mannering more than once, and the way I see it, this johnny chink has had a jolly good try. Come along. Or are you turning yellow on me?’

No man likes to be called a coward—and least of all, a man who is feeling downright cowardly. In a cold voice Frost said, ‘I’m not yellow in the least.’

‘Good,’ said Mannering. ‘No hard feelings, then. Come along.’

Frost thrust his arms into his coat. ‘I only hope it doesn’t come to blows,’ he said.

‘We’ll see about that,’ said Mannering. ‘We’ll see about that. Come on, Holly—come on, girl! Giddyap! We’ve got business in the Hokitika gorge!’

As Frost and Mannering stepped out of the Prince of Wales Opera House, tugging down their hats against the rain, Thomas Balfour was turning into Weld-street, some three blocks to the south. Balfour had spent the last hour and a half at the Deutsches Gasthaus on Camp-street, where a pile of sauerkraut, sausage, and brown gravy, a seat before an open fire, and a period of uninterrupted contemplation had helped to refocus his mind upon Alistair Lauderback’s affairs. He quit the Gasthaus refreshed, and made immediately for the office of the
West Coast Times.

The shutters were drawn inside the box window, and the front door closed. Balfour tried the handle: it was locked. Curious, he stamped around to the rear of the building, to the small apartment where Benjamin Löwenthal, the paper’s editor lived. He listened for a moment at the door, and, hearing nothing, cautiously turned the doorknob.

The door opened easily, and Balfour found himself face to face with Löwenthal himself, who was sitting at his table with his hands in his lap—quite as if he had been waiting for Balfour to startle him out of a trance. He stood up, in haste.

‘Tom,’ he said. ‘What is it? Is something wrong? Why didn’t you knock?’

The table at which he had been seated was properly a laboratory desk, the surface of which was pocked and worn, and mottled with spilled ink and chemicals; today, however, it had been swept clean of the detritus of Löwenthal’s trade, and covered with an
embroidered 
cloth. In the centre was a little plate upon which a fat candle was burning.

‘Oh,’ Balfour said. ‘Sorry, Ben. Hello, there. Sorry. Sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb your—I mean, I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

‘But you are most welcome!’ said Löwenthal, perceiving that Balfour was not bearing ill tidings after all, but had simply dropped in for a chat. ‘Come in, out of the rain.’

‘Didn’t mean to break your—’

‘You haven’t broken anything. Come in, come in—close the door!’

‘It’s not
business,
exactly,’ Balfour said, by way of apology,
knowing
that Löwenthal’s holy day was a day of rest. ‘It’s not
work,
exactly. I just wanted to talk with you about something.’

‘It is never work, talking with you,’ Löwenthal replied generously, and then, for the fourth time, ‘But you must come in.’

At last Balfour stepped inside and closed the door. Löwenthal resumed his seat and folded his hands together. He said, ‘I have long thought that, for the Jew, the newspaper business is the perfect occupation. No edition on Sunday, you see—and so the timing of the Shabbat is perfect. I have pity for my Christian competitors. They must spend their Sunday setting type, and spreading ink, ready for Monday; they cannot rest. When you came up the path just now, that was the subject of my thinking. Yes, hang up your coat. Do sit down.’

‘I’m a Church of England man, myself,’ said Balfour—who, like many men of that religion, was made very uncomfortable by icons of faith. He eyed Löwenthal’s candle with some wariness, quite as if his host had laid out a hairshirt or a metal cilice.

‘What is on your mind, Tom?’

Benjamin Löwenthal was not at all displeased that his weekly observances had been interrupted, for his religion was of a very confident variety, and it was not in his nature to be self-doubting. He often broke his Shabbat vows in small ways, and did not
chastise
himself for it—for he was sensible of the difference between duty that is dreaded, and duty that comes from love; he believed in the acuity of his own perception, and felt that whenever he broke
the rules, he broke them for reasons that were right. He was also (it must be admitted) rather restless, after two hours of unmitigated prayer—for Löwenthal was an energetic spirit, and could not be without external stimulation for long.

‘Listen,’ Balfour said now, placing his fingertips on the table between them. ‘I’ve just heard about Emery Staines.’

‘Ah!’ said Löwenthal, surprised. ‘Only just now? Your head has been buried in the sand, perhaps!’

‘I’ve been busy,’ said Balfour, eyeing the candle a second time—for ever since he was a boy he had not been able to sit before a candle without wanting to touch it, to sweep his index finger through the flame until it blackened, to mould the soft edges where the wax was warm, to dip his fingertip into the pool of molten heat and then withdraw it, swiftly, so that the tallow formed a yellow cap over the pad of his finger which blanched and constricted as it cooled.

‘Too busy for the news?’ said Löwenthal, teasing him.

‘I’ve got a fellow in town. A political fellow.’

‘Oh yes: the honourable Lauderback,’ said Löwenthal. He sat back in his chair. ‘Well, I hope that
he
is reading my paper, even if you are not! He has featured in the pages enough.’

‘Yes—featured,’ said Balfour. ‘But listen, Ben: I wanted to ask you a question. I stopped in at the bank this morning, and I heard someone’s been putting up notices in the paper. On Mr. Staines’s behalf—begging his return. Am I allowed to ask who placed them?’

‘Certainly,’ Löwenthal said. ‘A notice is a public affair—and in any case, she left a box number at the bottom of the advertisement, as you might have seen; you only have to go to the post office, and look at the boxes, and you will see her name.’

‘“She”?’

‘Yes, you’ll be surprised by this,’ said Löwenthal. ‘It was one of our ladies of the night! Will you guess which one?’

‘Lizzie? Irish Lizzie?’

‘Anna Wetherell.’

‘Anna?’ said Balfour.

‘Yes!’ said Löwenthal, now smiling broadly—for he had an
insider’s sensibility, and enjoyed himself the most when he was
permitted
to occupy that role. ‘You wouldn’t have guessed
that
, would you? She came to me not two days after Mr. Staines first disappeared. I tried to persuade her to wait until more time had passed—it seemed wasteful to advertise for a man’s return when he was only two days’ gone. He might have merely walked into the gorge, I said, or ridden up the beach to the Grey. He might be back to-morrow! So I told her. But she was adamant. She told me he had not departed; he had vanished. She was very clear on that. She used those very words.’

‘Vanished,’ echoed Balfour.

‘The poor girl had been tried at the Courts that very morning,’ Löwenthal said. ‘What rotten luck she has had, this year past. She’s a dear girl, Tom—very dear.’

Balfour frowned: he did not like to be told that Anna Wetherell was a dear girl. ‘Can’t imagine it,’ he said aloud, and shook his head. ‘Can’t imagine it—the two of them. They’re as chalk and cheese.’

‘Chalk and cheese,’ echoed Löwenthal. He took pleasure in
foreign
idioms. ‘Who is the chalk? Staines, I suppose—because of his quarrying!’

Balfour did not seem to have heard him. ‘Did Anna give you any indication as to
why
she was asking after Staines? I mean—why—’

‘She was attempting to make contact with him, of course,’ Löwenthal said. ‘But that is not your question, I think.’