The Luminaries (45 page)

Harald Nilssen was used to commanding public attention, an authority he achieved through the use of wit, declamation, and comical self-styling. He became very quickly bored when he was required, for whatever reason, to inhabit the periphery of a crowded room. His vanity required constant stimulation, and
constant
proof that the ongoing creation of his selfhood was a project that he himself controlled. He was vexed, now, to think that he had been played as a fool, not because he believed himself
undeserving
of such treatment (Nilssen knew very well that he was an impressionable type, and often joked about this very fact) but because he could not perceive Shepard’s motivation in having treated him so.

He puffed at his pipe, conjuring in his mind the prospective
gaol-house
, the asylum, the scaffold of the gallows, built high above the drop. All of it would be built with his commission, and by his leave.
Hang Governor Shepard
, he thought suddenly. He had no real
obligation
to keep Shepard’s secret—why, he did not even know, exactly, what that secret really
was
! He would share Shepard’s request with the assembly that evening, and he would share his own suspicions about the man, to boot. He was not yet contractually bound to keep his silence. He had not yet signed his name to any document. What did that matter, anyway? A gaol-house was not a private property. It belonged to all of Hokitika. A gaol-house was built by the
government
—and on behalf of the adherents of the law.

Presently Nilssen heard the door in the outer office open and close. He leaped up. It was Albert, returning from Joseph Pritchard’s drug hall. His jacket was very wet, and when he stepped into Nilssen’s office, he carried with him the earthy smell of rain.

‘Did he burn the letter?’ Nilssen said anxiously. ‘Did you watch him burn it? What’s that you’ve got there?’

‘Pritchard’s reply,’ said Albert. He held up a folded piece of paper.

‘I said there wasn’t to be a reply! I said that!’

‘Yes,’ said Albert, ‘and I told him—but he penned one anyway.’

Nilssen eyed the document in Albert’s hand. ‘Did he burn my letter, at least?’

‘Yes,’ Albert said, but then he hesitated.

‘What? What?’

‘Well,’ Albert said, ‘when I said he had to burn it—he laughed.’

Nilssen narrowed his eyes. ‘Why did he laugh?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Albert. ‘But I thought I should tell you that he did. Maybe it doesn’t matter.’

The muscle beneath Nilssen’s eye began to pulse. ‘He laughed when he read the letter? When he read the words?’

‘No,’ said Albert. ‘He only laughed before. When I said he had to burn it.’

‘He found it amusing, did he?’

‘That you’d told him to burn it,’ said Albert, nodding. He was fingering the edges of the letter in his hand. He wanted very much to ask his employer what all of this to-do was on account of, but he did not know how to ask without risking a rebuke. Aloud he said, ‘Do you want to read the reply?’

Nilssen held out his hand. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘
You
didn’t read it, did you?’

‘No,’ Albert said, looking wounded. ‘It’s sealed.’

‘Oh, yes, so it is,’ said Nilssen. He took the note from Albert’s hand, turned it over, and broke apart the seal with his fingers. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he said, before he unfolded the paper. ‘You can go.’

‘Home?’ said Albert, in a voice of great regret.

‘Yes—home, you idiot,’ said Nilssen. ‘And you can leave the key on the desk before you do.’

But the boy lingered. ‘On the way back,’ he said, ‘when I passed the Prince of Wales, I saw there’s a new show opening tonight: a foreign spectacle. Mr. Mannering’s giving away tickets for free—on account of the opening—and I got one for you.’ He had spoken all of this very quickly; now he screwed up his face, and looked away.

Nilssen had not yet unfolded Pritchard’s letter. ‘What?’ he said.

‘
Sensations from the Orient
,’ the boy said. ‘It’s a gallery ticket—front and centre. The best. I asked for it special.’

‘You use it yourself,’ Nilssen said. ‘You go yourself. I don’t want a ticket to the theatre. Get along, now.’

The boy scuffed his shoe upon the boards. ‘I got myself one too,’ he said. ‘I thought—seeing as it’s Saturday—and the races have been postponed—’

Nilssen shook his head. ‘I can’t go to the theatre tonight,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ said Albert. ‘Why?’

‘I’m feeling poorly.’

‘Just for the first act,’ the boy said. ‘There’s supposed to be
champagne
. Champagne’s good if you’re feeling poorly.’

‘Take Henry Fuller with you.’

‘By the players’ door I saw a lady with a parasol.’

‘Take Henry.’

‘She was Japanese,’ said Albert, mournfully. ‘It didn’t look like greasepaint. It looked like she was really Japanese. Henry Fuller’s up the beach. Why won’t you come?’

‘I’m very ill.’

‘You don’t look ill. You’re smoking.’

‘I’m sure you can find someone to go along with you,’ Nilssen said, with mounting irritation. ‘Go down to the Star and wave that ticket around. How about that?’

Albert stared at the floorboards for a moment and worked his mouth. At length he sighed and said, ‘Well, I expect I’ll see you on Monday, Mr. Nilssen.’

‘Yes, I expect you will, Albert.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye. You’ll have to tell me all about the show. All right?’

‘Maybe we can go again,’ Albert said. ‘Only the ticket’s for tonight. But maybe we can go again.’

‘Yes,’ Nilssen said. ‘Next week, perhaps. After I recover.’

He waited until the disappointed subordinate had padded from the room, and closed the door quietly behind him. Then he unfolded Pritchard’s letter, and stepped towards the window, for a better light.

Thomas Balfour had returned, in the late afternoon, to the Palace Hotel, with the intention of finding Cowell Devlin—the chaplain who had overheard his conversation with Lauderback that
morning
. He wished to apologise for his earlier rudeness, but also (and rather more urgently) to ask the chaplain about his connexion to the vanished prospector, Emery Staines. He was sure that Devlin’s inquiry at the office of the
West Coast Times
was connected,
somehow
, to the Crosbie Wells affair.

Devlin was not at the Palace Hotel, however; the kitchen staff informed Balfour that he had left the dining room several hours before. He was not in his tent upon the beachfront, nor at the Police Camp gaol-house, nor in any of the churches; he was not in any of the stores or billiard-halls, and he was not on the quay. Balfour wandered about Hokitika for several hours, dejected, and was about to give up and go home when he spied Devlin at last. The chaplain was walking down Revell-street, his hat and coat quite saturated; walking next to him was another man, a good deal taller and larger than he. Balfour crossed the street. He was already raising his arm to flag the other down when he recognised Devlin’s companion: it was the Maori man with whom he had also spoken, earlier that day, and to whom he had also been rather unforgivably rude.

‘Hi there,’ he called. ‘Reverend Devlin. Would you believe it! The very man I was looking to find! Hello, Ted: I’m glad to see you again, too.’

Tauwhare did not offer a greeting; Devlin, however, smiled. ‘I see that you have found out my surname,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I still do not know yours.’

Balfour thrust out his hand. ‘Tom Balfour,’ he said, beaming, and they shook hands. ‘Yes: I went to see Ben Löwenthal, over at the
Times
, and we had some words about you. Matter of fact I’ve been trying to track you down these past few hours. To ask you something.’

‘Then our meeting is doubly fortuitous,’ said Devlin.

‘It’s a question about Emery Staines,’ Balfour said, interrupting him. ‘I hear you’ve been asking after him, you see. Wanting to know who placed that notice in the paper, advertising his return. Ben told me that you’d been by. I’m wanting to know why you’re asking after him—Staines, I mean—and what’s your connexion to the man.’

Cowell Devlin hesitated. The truth, of course, was that Emery Staines was one of the three names written upon the deed of gift that he had taken from the ash-drawer of Crosbie Wells’s range, the day after the hermit’s death. He had not showed that deed to anyone, however, and he had resolved not to do so, until he knew a little more about the people it concerned. Ought he to lie to Balfour? He did not like to utter falsehoods, but perhaps he could tell a partial truth. He bit his lip.

Balfour had perceived the chaplain’s hesitation, and had mistaken it for reproof. He put up his hands. ‘Hark at me,’ he exclaimed, ‘asking questions in the street—and in the weather—when we’re getting wetter all the time! Look here. How about we share a meal together? Something hot. There’s no sense in talking out of doors—not when there are warm hotels on either side of us, and good cheer to be had.’

Devlin glanced at Tauwhare, who, despite his dislike of Balfour, had brightened considerably at the prospect of a meal.

Balfour coughed, and then thumped his chest with his fist, wincing. ‘I wasn’t myself this morning—out of sorts; I wasn’t myself. I’m sorry for it—and I mean to make it up—to both of you. I’ll stand us all a plate of something, and we’ll have a drink together—as friends. Come: let a man say he’s sorry, when he asks.’

The threesome was soon established at a corner table at Maxwell’s. Balfour, who was always very happy to play the role of
the munificent host, ordered three bowls of clear soup, a round of bread, a fat black pudding, a hard cheese, sardines in oil, hot
buttered
carrots, a pot of stewed oysters, and a demijohn of stout. He had the prescience to delay any talk of Crosbie Wells or Emery Staines until both his guests were sated with food and drink, and talked instead of whaling, a subject of which all three men had a most romantic conception, and much to share. When Benjamin Löwenthal found them some three-quarters of an hour later, they were a very merry party.

‘Ben!’ cried Balfour, when he saw Löwenthal approaching. ‘But what about your Sabbath?’

He had become, for the second time that day, rather drunk.

‘Ends at starlight,’ Löwenthal said shortly. To Tauwhare he said, ‘I believe that we have not yet been introduced. I am Benjamin Löwenthal; I publish the
West Coast Times
.’

‘Te Rau Tauwhare,’ the Maori man replied, and shook his hand very firmly.

‘He also goes by Ted,’ said Balfour. ‘Very good friend of Crosbie Wells.’

‘Were you?’ said Löwenthal to Tauwhare.

‘His finest friend,’ said Devlin.

‘Better than brothers,’ said Balfour.

‘Well, in that case,’ said Löwenthal, ‘my business concerns all three of you.’

Benjamin Löwenthal had no authority to widen the invitation to the Crown Hotel council to include Devlin and Tauwhare. But as we have observed already, Löwenthal could be very forbidding when his ethical code was affronted, and Charlie Frost had affronted him, that afternoon, by suggesting that the Crown
assembly
ought to be restricted to an exclusive few. Löwenthal felt the need to rectify what he perceived to have been Frost’s moral error, and he extended the invitation to Tauwhare and Devlin now as an obscure act of reproach.

‘Capital,’ Balfour said. ‘Pull up a chair.’

Löwenthal sat down, placed the palms of his hands together, and, in a low voice, explained the purpose of the meeting that
evening—to which Balfour acquiesced immediately, Tauwhare gravely, and Cowell Devlin after a long, judicious pause. The
chaplain
was thinking about the deed of gift that he had taken from the hermit’s stove, currently stored in his Bible, between the Old Testament and the New. He resolved to bring his Bible with him to the council that evening, and to produce the deed, if the occasion moved him, and the timing was right.