The Luminaries (4 page)

The maid had left yesterday’s newspaper beneath the teapot—how thin it was, for a sixpenny broadsheet! Moody smiled as he took it up. He had a fondness for cheap news, and was amused to see that the town’s
Most Alluring Dancer
also advertised her services as the town’s
Most Discreet Accoucheuse
. A whole column of the paper was devoted to missing prospectors (
If this should reach the eyes of E
MERY
S
TAINES
, or any who know of his whereabouts
…) and an entire page to Barmaids Wanted. Moody read the document twice over, including the shipping notices, the advertisements for lodging and small fare, and several very dull campaign speeches, printed in full.
He found that he was disappointed: the
West Coast Times
read like a parish gazette. But what had he expected? That a goldfield would be an exotic phantasm, made of glitter and promise? That the diggers would be notorious and sly—every man a murderer, every man a thief?

Moody folded the paper slowly. His line of thinking had returned him to the
Godspeed
, and to the bloody casket in her hold, and his heart began to pound again. ‘That’s enough,’ he said aloud, and immediately felt foolish. He stood and tossed the folded paper aside. In any case, he thought, the daylight was fading, and he
disliked
reading in the dusk.

Quitting his room, he returned downstairs. He found the maid sequestered in the alcove beneath the stairs, scrubbing at a pair of riding boots with blacking, and inquired of her if there was a
parlour
in which he might spend the evening. His voyage had wrought considerable strain in him, and he was in sore need of a glass of brandy and a quiet place to rest his eyes.

The maid was more obliging now—her sixpences must be few and far between, Moody thought, which could be useful later, if he needed her. She explained that the parlour of the Crown had been reserved that night for a private party—‘The Catholic Friendlies,’ she clarified, grinning again—but she might conduct him instead, if he wished it, to the smoking room.

Moody returned to the present with a jolt, and saw that Thomas Balfour was still looking at him, with an expression of intrigued expectation upon his face.

‘I beg your pardon,’ Moody said, in confusion. ‘I believe I must have drifted off into my own thoughts—for a moment—’

‘What were you thinking of?’ said Balfour.

What had he been thinking of? Only the cravat, the silver hand, that name, gasped out of the darkness. The scene was like a small world, Moody thought, possessed of its own dimensions. Any amount of ordinary time could pass, when his mind was straying there. There was this large world of rolling time and shifting spaces, and that small, stilled world of horror and unease; they fit inside each other, a sphere within a sphere. How strange, that Balfour had
been watching him; that real time had been passing—revolving around him, all the while—

‘I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular,’ he said. ‘I have endured a difficult journey, that is all, and I am very tired.’

Behind him one of the billiard players made a shot: a doubled crack, a velvet plop, a ripple of appreciation from the other players. The clergyman shook out his paper noisily; another man coughed; another struck the dust from his shirtsleeve, and shifted in his chair.

‘I was asking about your quarrel,’ Balfour said.

‘The quarrel—’ Moody began, and then stopped. He suddenly felt too exhausted even to speak.

‘The dispute,’ prompted Balfour. ‘Between you and your father.’

‘I am sorry,’ Moody said. ‘The particulars are delicate.’

‘A matter of money! Do I hit upon it?’

‘Forgive me: you do not.’ Moody ran his hand over his face.

‘Not of money! Then—a matter of love! You are in love … but your father will not approve the girl of your choosing …’

‘No, sir,’ Moody said. ‘I am not in love.’

‘A great shame,’ Balfour said. ‘Well! I conclude: you are already married!’

‘I am unmarried.’

‘You are a young widower, perhaps!’

‘I have never been married, sir.’

Balfour burst out laughing and threw up both his hands, to signal that he considered Moody’s reticence cheerfully exasperating, and quite absurd.

While he was laughing Moody raised himself up on his wrists and swivelled to look over the high back of his armchair at the room behind him. He had the intention of drawing others into their
conversation
somehow, and perhaps thus diverting the other man from his purpose. But nobody looked up to meet his gaze; they seemed, Moody thought, to be actively avoiding him. This was odd. But his posture was awkward and he was being rude, and so he reluctantly resumed his former position and crossed his legs again.

‘I do not mean to disappoint you,’ he said, when Balfour’s
laughter
subsided.

‘Disappoint—no!’ Balfour cried. ‘No, no. You will have your secrets!’

‘You mistake me,’ Moody said. ‘My aim is not concealment. The subject is personally distressing to me, that is all.’

‘Oh,’ Balfour said, ‘but it is always so, Mr. Moody, when one is young—to be distressed by one’s own history, you know—wishing to keep it back—and never to share it—I mean, with other men.’

‘That is a wise observation.’

‘Wise! And nothing else?’

‘I do not understand you, Mr. Balfour.’

‘You are determined to thwart my curiosity!’

‘I confess I am a little startled by it.’

‘This is a gold town, sir!’ Balfour said. ‘One must be sure of his fellows—one must trust in his fellows—indeed!’

This was still more odd. For the first time—perhaps because of his growing frustration, which served to focus his attention more squarely upon the scene at hand—Moody felt his interest begin to stir. The strange silence of the room was hardly testament to the kind of fraternity where all was shared and made easy … and moreover, Balfour had offered very little with respect to his own character and reputation in the town, by which intelligence Moody might be made to feel more assured of
him
! His gaze slid sideways, to the fat man closest to the hearth, whose closed eyelids were
trembling
with the effort of pretended sleep, and then to the blond-haired man behind him, who was passing his billiard cue from one hand to the other, but seemed to have lost all interest in the game.

Something was afoot: of this he was suddenly certain. Balfour was performing a role, on behalf of the others: taking his measure, Moody thought. But for what purpose? There was a system behind this battery of questions, a design that was neatly obscured by the excess of Balfour’s manner, his prodigious sympathy and charm. The other men were listening, however casually they turned the pages of their papers, or pretended to doze. With this realisation the room seemed suddenly to clarify, as when a chance scatter of stars resolves into a constellation before the eye. Balfour no longer
seemed cheery and effusive, as Moody had first believed him to be; instead he seemed overwrought, strained; even desperate. Moody wondered now whether indulging the man might serve better
purpose
than denying him.

Walter Moody was much experienced in the art of confidences. He knew that by confessing, one earned the subtle right to become confessor to the other, in his turn. A secret deserves a secret, and a tale deserves a tale; the gentle expectation of a response in kind was a pressure he knew how to apply. He would learn more by appearing to confide in Balfour than by openly suspecting him, simply because if he placed his trust in the other man, freely and without reservation, then Balfour would be obliged to confer his own trust in exchange. There was no reason why he could not relate his family story—however vexing it might be to recall it—in order to purchase the other man’s trust. What had happened aboard the
Godspeed
, he had no intention of divulging, of course; but in this he did not need to dissimulate, for that was not the story that Thomas Balfour had requested to hear.

Having reflected upon this, Moody changed his tack.

‘I see that I must win your confidence yet,’ he said. ‘I have nothing to hide, sir. I will relate my tale.’

Balfour flung himself back into his armchair with great
satisfaction
. ‘You call it a tale!’ he said, beaming again. ‘Then I am surprised, Mr. Moody, that it concerns neither love nor money!’

‘Only their absence, I am afraid,’ Moody said.

‘Absence—yes,’ Balfour said, still smiling. He gestured for Moody to continue.

‘I must first acquaint you with the particulars of my family
history
,’ Moody said, and then lapsed into silence for a moment, his eyes narrowed, his mouth pursed.

The armchair in which he was sitting faced the hearth, and so nearly half of the men in the room were behind him, sitting or standing at their various sham pursuits. In the several seconds’ grace he had secured for himself by appearing to collect his thoughts, Moody let his gaze wander to his left and right, to make note of the listeners sitting closest to them, around the fire.

Nearest the hearth sat the fat man who was feigning sleep. He was by far the most ostentatiously dressed in the room: a massive watch chain, thick as his own fat finger, was slung across his chest, between the pocket of his velvet vest and the breast of his cambric shirt, and affixed to the chain at intervals were knuckle-sized lumps of gold. The man next to him, on Balfour’s other side, was partly obscured by the wing of his armchair, so that all Moody could see of him was the glint of his forehead and the shiny tip of his nose. His coat was made of herringbone, a thick woollen weave that was much too hot for his proximity to the fire, and his perspiration betrayed the posture of apparent ease with which he had arranged himself in the chair. He had no cigar; he was turning a silver
cigarette
case over and over in his hands. On Moody’s left was another wingback armchair, pulled so close to his own that he could hear the nasal whistle of his neighbour’s breath. This man was
dark-haired
, slim in build, and so tall that he appeared folded in two, sitting with his knees together and the soles of his shoes planted flat upon the floor. He was reading a newspaper, and in general, he was doing a much better job of pretended indifference than the others, but even so his eyes were somewhat glassy, as if they were not quite focused upon the type, and he had not turned a page in some time.

‘I am the younger son of two,’ Moody began at last. ‘My brother, Frederick, is five years my senior. Our mother died near the end of my school years—I returned home only for a short time, to bury her—and shortly thereafter my father married again. His second wife was unknown to me then. She was—she is—a quiet, delicate woman, one who frighted easily, and was often ill. In her delicacy she is very unlike my father, who is coarse in his manner and much inclined to drink.

‘The match was poor; I believe both parties regretted the
marriage
as a mistake, and I am sorry to report my father treated his new wife very badly. Three years ago he disappeared, leaving her, in Edinburgh, without provision to live. She might have become a pauper, or worse, such was the sudden destitution in which she found herself. She appealed to me—by letter, I mean; I was abroad—and I returned home at once. I became her protector, in
a modest sense. I made arrangements on her behalf, which she accepted, though somewhat bitterly, for the shape of her fortunes was much changed.’ Moody gave an awkward dry cough. ‘I secured for her a small living—employment, you understand. I then travelled to London, with the purpose of finding my father. There I exhausted all possible methods of locating him, and spent a great deal of money in the process. Finally I began to see about turning my education into an income of a kind, for I knew that I could no longer rely on my inheritance as surety, and my credit in the city had become very poor.

‘My elder brother knew nothing of our stepmother’s
abandonment
: he had left to seek his fortune on the Otago goldfields, some few weeks before my father disappeared. He was inclined to fits of whimsy of this kind—an adventurous spirit, I suppose you might call him, though we were never close with one another after childhood, and I confess I do not know him well. Months passed, and even years; he did not return, and nor did he send any news at all. My letters to him went unanswered. Indeed I still do not know if they ever reached his hands. At length I too booked my passage on a ship bound for New Zealand, my intention being to inform my brother of the changes in our family’s position, and—if he was alive, of course—perhaps to join him on the diggings for a time. My own fortune was gone, the interest on my perpetuity was long since exhausted, and I was in a great deal of debt. While in London I had studied at the Inner Temple. I suppose I might have stayed on, and waited to be called to the Bar … but I have no real love for the law. I could not stomach it. I sailed for New Zealand instead.

‘When I landed at Dunedin, not two weeks ago, I learned that Otago’s gold had been all but eclipsed by new findings here on the Coast. I hesitated, not knowing where to venture first, and was rewarded for my hesitation in the most unexpected way: I met my father.’

Balfour made a murmur, but did not interrupt. He was staring into the fire, his mouth pursed judiciously around his cigar and his hand loose around the base of his glass. The eleven others were
equally still. The billiard game must have been abandoned, for Moody could no longer hear the click of the balls behind him. There was a sprung quality to the silence, as if the listeners were waiting for him to reveal something very particular … or fearing that he might.

‘Our reunion was not a happy one,’ Moody continued. He was speaking loudly, above the drumming of the rain; loudly enough for every man in the room to hear him, but not so loudly as to make it seem as if he was aware of their attention. ‘He was drunk, and extremely angry that I had discovered him. I learned that he had become extraordinarily rich, and that he was married again, to a woman who doubtless was innocent of his history, or indeed of the fact that he was legally bound to another wife. I was, I am sorry to admit, unsurprised. My relations with my father have never been warm, and this was not the first time I had caught him in questionable circumstances … though never in a situation of this criminal magnitude, I should hasten to say.