The Luminaries (49 page)

Three weeks have passed since Walter Moody first set foot upon the sand, since the council at the Crown convened in stealth, and since the barque
Godspeed
was added to the wrecks upon the bar. When the twelve men greet each other now, it is with a special
understanding
—as when a mason meets a member of his guild, in daylight, and shares a glance that is eloquent and grave. Dick Mannering has nodded to Cowell Devlin in the Kaniere
thoroughfare
; Harald Nilssen has twice raised his hat to Thomas Balfour; Charlie Frost has exchanged the morning’s greetings with Joseph Pritchard while in line for breakfast at the sixpenny saloon. A secret always has a strengthening effect upon a newborn
friendship
, as does the shared impression that an external figure is to blame: the men of the Crown have become united less by their shared beliefs, we observe, than by their shared misgivings—which are, in the main, externally directed. In their analyses, variously made, of Alistair Lauderback, George Shepard, Lydia Wells, Francis Carver, Anna Wetherell, and Emery Staines, the Crown men have become more and more suggestive, despite the fact that nothing has been proven, no body has been tried, and no new information has come to light. Their beliefs have become more
fanciful
, their hypotheses less practical, their counsel less germane.
Unconfirmed suspicion tends, over time, to become wilful,
fallacious
, and prey to the vicissitudes of mood—it acquires all the qualities of common superstition—and the men of the Crown Hotel, whose nexus of allegiance is stitched, after all, in the bright thread of time and motion, have, like all men, no immunity to influence.

For the planets have changed places against the wheeling canvas of the stars. The Sun has advanced one-twelfth along the tilted wheel of her ecliptic path, and with that motion comes a new world order, a new perspective on the whole. With the Sun in Capricorn we were reserved, exacting, and lofty in our distance. When we looked upon Man, we sought to fix him: we mourned his failures and measured his gifts. We could not imagine what he might have been, had he been tempted to betray his very nature—or had he betrayed himself without temptation, better still. But there is no truth except truth in relation, and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clockwork
orchestration
that alters every minute, never repeating, never still. We are no longer sheltered in a cloistered reminiscence of the past. We now look outward, through the phantasm of our own convictions: we see the world as we wish to perfect it, and we imagine dwelling there.

At the newspaper office on Weld-street, Te Rau Tauwhare found the door propped open with a hatstand, and the sound of whistling issuing from within. He entered without knocking, and passed through the shop to the workroom at the rear, where the paper’s editor, Benjamin Löwenthal, was sitting at his workbench, setting the type for Monday’s edition of the
West Coast Times
.

In his left hand Löwenthal held a steel composing stick, roughly the size of a schoolboy’s rule; with his right, he selected and deftly fitted tiny blocks of type, their nicks facing outward, onto the square edge of the stick—a task that required him to read not only right-to-left, but also back-to-front, for the galley text was both
mirrored
and reversed. Once the line was set, he would slide it into the forme, a flat steel tray a little larger than a newspaper broadsheet; beneath each line he slotted thin straps of lead, to create a space between the lines, and occasionally, a raised brass rule, to produce a solid underscore. When he had slid the last line of text into the forme, he fitted wooden quoins around the edge of the tray,
tapping
them with a mallet to ensure that every block was snug; then he planed the surface of the galley with a piece of two-by-four to ensure each block of type sat at a uniform height. Finally, he dipped his hand-roller in a tray of ink, and coated the entire galley
in a thin film of glossy black—working swiftly, so the ink did not have time to dry—and laid a trembling sheet of newsprint over it. Löwenthal always printed his first proof by hand, so as to check it for errors before committing the galley to the press—though he made few errors of an accidental or careless sort, being, by nature, something of a stickler for perfection.

He greeted Tauwhare very warmly. ‘I’m sure I haven’t seen you since the night
Godspeed
came to ground, Mr. Tauwhare,’ he said. ‘Can that be true?’

‘Yes,’ Tauwhare said, indifferently. ‘I have been in the north.’ He cast his eye over the other man’s workbench: cases of type, pots of ink and lye, brushes, tweezers, mallets, assorted blocks of lead and brass, a bowl of spotted apples, a paring knife.

‘Just arrived back, have you?’

‘This morning.’

‘Well then, I am sure I can guess why you’ve returned.’

Tauwhare frowned. ‘How can you guess?’

‘Why—for the widow’s
séance
! Do I not hit upon it?’

Tauwhare said nothing for a moment, still frowning. Then he said, with a tone of suspicion, ‘What is a
séance
?’

Löwenthal chuckled. He put down his composing stick, crossed the room, and took up Saturday’s paper from where it lay folded on the side of the washstand. ‘Here,’ he said. He unfolded it to the second page, tapped an advertisement with his ink-stained finger, and passed the paper to Tauwhare. ‘You ought to come along. Not to the
séance
itself—you need a special ticket for that—but to the party beforehand.’

The advertisement ran over two columns. It had been printed in a bold eighteen-point type that Löwenthal typically reserved for mastheads and historic headlines only, and it was bordered thickly in black. The Wayfarer’s Fortune, owned and operated by Mrs. Lydia Wells, late of the city of Dunedin, widow to Crosbie, was to open to the public for the first time that very evening. In honour of this occasion Mrs. Wells, a celebrated medium, would condescend to host Hokitika’s inaugural
séance
. This
séance
would be restricted to an elite audience, with tickets allocated according to the
principle
‘first to come, first to be served’; the occasion would be
prefaced
, however, by an evening of ‘drinks and speculation’, open to the discerning public—who was encouraged, collectively, to come with an open mind.

This last injunction was perhaps easier said than done, for as the paper had it, the purpose of the
séance
was to locate, via the extraordinarily sensitive instrument of Mrs. Wells herself, certain tremors of spirit, the investigation of which would open a
channel
between this realm and the next, and thereby establish some kind of a rapport with the dead. Within the broad category of the dead, Mrs. Wells had been both excessively particular and
excessively
confident in making her selection: she planned to summon the shade of Mr. Emery Staines, who had not yet returned to Hokitika, and whose body, after five weeks of absence, had not yet been found.

The widow had not made clear what she planned to ask the shade of Mr. Staines, but it was universally assumed that, if
nothing
else, she would surely request to know the manner of his death. Any medium worth her salt will tell you that a spirit who has been murdered is far more loquacious than a spirit who has left this world in peace—and Lydia Wells, we need hardly remark, was worth every grain of hers.

‘What is a
séance
?’ said Tauwhare again.

‘It is a piece of utter foolishness,’ said Löwenthal cheerfully. ‘Lydia Wells has announced to all of Hokitika that she is going to
commune
with the spirit of Emery Staines, and more than half of Hokitika has taken her at her word. The
séance
itself is just a
performance
. She will go into a trance—as though she’s having a fit, or a seizure—and then she’ll say a few words in a man’s voice, or make the curtains move in some unexpected fashion, or pay a boy a penny to climb up the chimney and call down the pipe. It’s a piece of cheap theatre. Of course every man will go home believing he’s made contact with a ghost. Where did you say you’ve been?’

‘Mawhera,’ said Tauwhare. ‘Greymouth.’ He was still frowning at the paper.

‘No word of Mr. Staines up there, I suppose.’

‘No.’

‘Nor here. We’re rather losing hope, I’m sorry to say. But perhaps we’ll get a clue of some kind this evening. The real cause for suspicion, you see, is Mrs. Wells’s certainty that Mr. Staines really is dead. If she knows that much, then what else does she know, and how does she know it? Oh: tongues have been wagging, Mr. Tauwhare, this fortnight past. I wouldn’t miss this party for the world. How I wish that I’d got my hands on a ticket.’

For the widow had chosen to limit her
séance
to only seven souls—seven being a number of magical allusion, possessed of a darkly mysterious ring—and Löwenthal, arriving at the Wayfarer’s Fortune some fifteen minutes before nine in the morning, discovered, to his immense regret, that these seven places had already been filled. (Of the Crown men, only Charlie Frost and Harald Nilssen had been successful in securing a ticket.) Löwenthal, along with scores of other disappointed men, would have to content himself with attending the preliminary ‘drinks and speculation’, and leaving before the
séance
was officially conducted. He attempted to buy a ticket at double price from one of the lucky seven, but to no avail. Frost and Nilssen both refused his offer outright, though Nilssen promised to describe the event in a high degree of detail, after the fact, and Frost
suggested
that Löwenthal might like to assist him in developing a strategy of reconnaissance, beforehand.

‘It’ll be three shillings on the door,’ Löwenthal supplied, in case Tauwhare could not read, and was disguising his lack of ability.

‘Three shillings?’ Tauwhare said, glancing up. That was an extraordinary sum, for one evening’s entertainment. ‘What for?’

Löwenthal shrugged. ‘She knows that she can charge what she likes, and she’s going to do just that. It might pay for your brandy if you drink quick enough: she’s doing bottomless cups, you see, not drink-for-drink. But you’re right—it’s a robbery. Of course every second man is champing at the bit to get a word with Anna. She’s the real attraction—the real draw! You know she’s barely been seen beyond the Wayfarer’s front door in three weeks. Goodness only knows what’s been happening inside.’

‘I wish to place a notice in your paper,’ Tauwhare said. He tossed
the paper down onto the desk, somewhat rudely, so that it skidded over Löwenthal’s forme.

‘Certainly,’ said Löwenthal, with disapproval. He reached for his pencil. ‘Do you have an advertisement prepared?’

‘“Maori guide, very experienced, fluent in English, locally knowledgeable, offers services to surveyors, diggers, explorers and the like. Success and safety guaranteed.”’

‘Surveyors, diggers, explorers,’ repeated Löwenthal, as he wrote. ‘Success and safety. Yes, very good. And then I’ll put your name, shall I?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll need an address as well. Are you stopping off in town?’

Tauwhare hesitated. He had planned to return to the Arahura Valley that night, and spend the night in Crosbie Wells’s deserted cottage; he did not wish to disclose this fact to Löwenthal, however, given Löwenthal’s close acquaintance with Edgar Clinch, the man to whom the dwelling now legally belonged.

Edgar Clinch had been the frequent object of Tauwhare’s
meditations
ever since the assembly at the Crown Hotel three weeks ago, for despite all the transactions between Maori and Pakeha that had occurred over the past decade, Te Rau Tauwhare still looked upon the Arahura Valley as his own, and he was made very angry whenever any tract of Te Tai Poutini land was bought for profit rather than for use. As far as Tauwhare knew, Clinch had not spent any length of time in the Arahura prior to the sale; since the
purchase
, he had not even troubled himself to walk the perimeter of the acreage that now belonged to him by law. What had been the point of the purchase? Did Clinch mean to settle there? Did he mean to till the soil? Fell the native timbers? Dam the river? Drop a shaft, perhaps, and mine for gold? Certainly he had not done a thing to Crosbie’s cottage beyond stripping it of all that he could sell—and even that he had done by proxy. It was a hollow dividend that required no skill, no love, and no hours of patient industry: such a dividend could only be wasted, for it was borne from waste, and to waste it would return. Tauwhare could not respect a man who treated land as though it was just another kind of currency.
Land could not be minted! Land could only be lived upon, and loved.

In this Te Rau Tauwhare was no hypocrite. He had travelled every inch of the West Coast, on foot, by cart, on horseback, and by canoe. He could picture the entire length of it, as though upon a richly illustrated map: in the far north, Mohikinui and Karamea, where the mosses were fat and damp, where the leaves were waxy, where the bush was an earthy-smelling tangle, where the Nikau fronds, shed from the trunks of the palms, lay upon the ground as huge and heavy as the flukes of whales; further south, the bronze lacquer of the Taramakau, the crenulated towers at Punakaiki, the marshy flats north of Hokitika, always crawling with the smoky mist of not-quite-rain; then the cradled lakes; then the silent
valleys
, thick with green; then the twisting flanks of the glaciers, rippled blue and grey; then the comb of the high Alps; then, at last, Okahu and Mahitahi in the far South—wide, shingled beaches
littered
with the bones of mighty trees, where the surf was a ceaseless battery, and the wind a ceaseless roar. After Okahu the coastline became sheer and impassable. Beyond it, Tauwhare knew, lay the deep waterways of the southern fjords, where the sun set early behind the sudden peaks, so that the water took on the blackened look of tarnished silver, and the shadows pooled like oil. Tauwhare had never seen Piopiotahi, but he had heard tell of it, and he loved it because it was Te Tai Poutini land.

Thus the ribbon of the Coast—and there at the heart of it all, the Arahura River,
taonga, wahi tapu, he matahiapo i te iwi
! If the Arahura was Tauwhare’s equator, dividing the land of Te Tai Poutini into halves, then Crosbie’s cottage, situated in the valley more or less halfway between the mountains and the ocean, was his meridian. And yet he could not claim it; his hapu could not claim it; his iwi could not claim it. Before Crosbie Wells’s body had been committed to the ground, those hundred rolling acres in the Arahura Valley had been purchased by a profit-hungry Pakeha, who had sworn, upon his honour, that he had come by the land honestly: there had been no foul play of any kind, he had said, and he certainly had not broken any laws.

‘A hotel?’ said Löwenthal. ‘Or a doss house? Just the name will do.’

‘I do not have an address,’ Tauwhare said.

‘Well, here,’ said Löwenthal, coming to his aid. ‘I’ll write “inquiries care of the editor, Weld-street”. How about that? You can come to me later this week and ask if anyone has inquired.’

‘That’s fine,’ said Tauwhare.

Löwenthal waited for an expression of gratitude, but none came. ‘Very good,’ he said, after a pause. His voice was cold. ‘It’s sixpence, for a week in the columns. Ten pence for a fortnight, and a shilling sixpence for a month. In advance, of course.’

‘A week,’ Tauwhare said, shaking the contents of his purse
carefully
onto his palm. The small pile of pennies and farthings showed plainly that he was in need of work. His only income since the night at the Crown had been a silver shilling, won on a game of strength two weeks ago. Once he had paid Löwenthal for the advertisement, he would barely have enough to cover the
following
day’s meals.

Löwenthal watched him count pennies a moment, and then said, in a kinder voice, ‘I say, Mr. Tauwhare: if you’re short of ready money, you might please yourself to head down to the spit. There’s a call for hands on Gibson Quay. You might not have heard it—the bell sounded an hour ago.
Godspeed
’s out of the water at long last, you see, and they need men to clear the cargo.’

Over the past three weeks the barque had been shunted into shallower waters by two large tugboats; from there her hull had been lifted onto rollers, laid flush with the shore; finally, at low tide that morning, she had been hauled clear of the surf by a team of harnessed Clydesdales and a winch. She was now dry upon the spit—seeming, in her shattered enormity, less like a beached
creature
of the water than like a fallen creature of the air. Löwenthal had detoured past the spit that morning; he had fancied that the ship had plunged from a great height, and had perished, where she fell. All three of her masts had broken off at the base, and without her sails and rigging she seemed almost shorn. He had gazed at her for a long moment before moving on. Once her cargo had been
cleared and her fixings removed she would be dismantled and sold, piecemeal, for salvage and repair.