The Luminaries (6 page)

‘And yet …’ Balfour prompted, when Moody did not go on. He waited.

‘To be frank with you, sir,’ Moody said, turning squarely to face the other man, ‘I discovered certain particulars concerning the ship’s cargo, while aboard, that made me doubt her errand was an honest one. If I am certain of one thing, it is this: I wish never to make an enemy of Mr. Carver, if that event is in my power to avoid.’

The dark-haired man on Moody’s left had stiffened. ‘Found something in cargo, you said?’ he interposed, leaning forward.

Aha!
Moody thought, and then:
now is the time to press my advantage
. He turned to address the new speaker. ‘Please forgive me if I
neglect
to elaborate,’ he said. ‘I mean no disrespect to you, sir, but we are strangers to one another; or rather,
you
are a stranger to
me
, for my conversation with Mr. Balfour tonight has reached more ears than his alone. In this I am disadvantaged, not unto myself, as I have represented myself truthfully, but unto you, for you have made my acquaintance without introduction, and heard my piece
without
invitation or reply. I have nothing to conceal, concerning this or any journey I have made, but I confess,’ (he turned back to Balfour) ‘it rankles to be questioned so relentlessly by an
interrogator
who divulges nothing of his own design.’

This was rather more aggressively worded than was Moody’s habit in speech, but he had spoken calmly and with dignity, and he knew that he was in the right. He did not blink; he stared at Balfour and waited, his mild eyes wide, for the other man’s response. Balfour’s gaze flickered sideways to the dark-haired man who had made the interruption, and then back to meet Moody’s own. He exhaled. He rose from his chair, tossed the stump of his cigar into the fire, and held out his hand. ‘Your glass needs refilling, Mr. Moody,’ he said quietly. ‘Please be so kind as to allow me.’

He went to the sideboard in silence, followed by the dark-haired man, who, when he had unfurled himself to his full height, almost grazed the low ceiling of the room. He leaned close to Balfour and began to mutter something urgently in his ear. Balfour nodded and muttered something back. It must have been an instruction, for the tall man then moved to the billiard table, beckoned the blond-haired man to approach him, and conveyed a whispered message to him. The blond-haired man began nodding, vigorously and at once. Watching them, Moody felt his habitual quickness return. The brandy had roused him; he was warmed and dried; and nothing caused his spirits to lift more surely than the promise of a tale.

It often happens that when a soul under duress is required to attend to a separate difficulty, one that does not concern him in the least, then this second problem works upon the first as a kind of salve. Moody felt this now. For the first time since he had
disembarked
from the lighter he found that he was able to think upon his recent misadventure clearly. In the context of this new secret, his private memory was somehow freed. He could recall the scene that haunted him—the dead man rising, his bloody throat, his cry—and find it fabular, sensational; still horrific, but somehow much more explicably so. The story had gained a kind of value: he could turn it into profit, by exchange.

He watched the whispered message pass from man to man. He could not distinguish any proper nouns—the jumble of unfamiliar accents made that impossible—but it was evident that the matter under discussion was one that concerned every man in the room. He forced his mind to evaluate the situation carefully and rationally. Inattention had led him to err in judgment once already that evening; he would not err again. Some kind of heist was in the offing, he guessed, or maybe they were forming an alliance against another man. Mr. Carver, perhaps. They numbered twelve, which put Moody in mind of a jury … but the presence of the Chinese men and the Maori native made that impossible. Had he interrupted a secret council of a kind? But what kind of council could possibly comprise such a diverse range of race, income, and estate?

Needless to say that Walter Moody’s countenance did not betray the subject of his thoughts. He had calibrated his expression
precisely
between grave bafflement and apology, as if to communicate that he was very sensible of the trouble he was causing, but he had no idea what that trouble might be, and as to how he should
proceed
, he was willing to take anyone’s direction but his own.

Outside, the wind changed direction, sending a damp gust down the chimney, so that the embers swelled scarlet and for a brief moment Moody could smell the salt of the sea. The movement in the hearth seemed to rouse the fat man nearest the fire. He levered himself from his armchair with a grunt of effort and shuffled off to join the others at the sideboard. When he had gone, Moody found himself alone before the fire with the man in the herringbone suit; the latter now leaned forward and spoke.

‘I should like to introduce myself, if you have no objection,’ he said, snapping open his silver cigarette case for the first time, and selecting a cigarette. He spoke with an accent identifiably French, and a manner that was clipped and courteous. ‘My name is Aubert Gascoigne. I hope that you will forgive that I know your name already.’

‘Well, as it happens,’ Moody said, with a little jolt of surprise, ‘I believe I also know yours.’

‘Then we are well met,’ said Aubert Gascoigne. He had been fishing for his matches; he paused now with his hand in his breast pocket, like a rakish colonel posing for a sketch. ‘But I am intrigued. How is it that you know me, Mr. Moody?’

‘I read your address this evening, in Friday’s edition of the
West Coast Times
—am I right? If I remember correctly, you penned an opinion on behalf of the Magistrate’s Court.’

Gascoigne smiled, and pulled out his matches. ‘Now I
understand
. I am yesterday’s news.’ He shook out a match, placed the side of his boot against his knee, and struck his light upon the sole.

‘Forgive me,’ Moody began, fearing that he had offended, but Gascoigne shook his head.

‘I am not insulted,’ he said when his cigarette was lit. ‘So. You arrive as a stranger in an unfamiliar town, and what is your first
move? You find a day-old paper and read the courthouse bulletin. You learn the names of the lawbreakers, on the one hand, and the law enforcers, on the other. This is quite a strategy.’

‘There was no method in it,’ Moody said modestly.

Gascoigne’s name had appeared on the third page of the paper, beneath a short sermon, perhaps the length of a paragraph, on the iniquity of crime. The address was preceded by a list of all the arrests that had been made that month. (He could not recall any of those names, and in truth had only remembered Gascoigne’s because his former Latin master had been Gascoyen—the
familiarity
had drawn his eye.)

‘Perhaps not,’ Gascoigne returned, ‘but it has brought you to the very heart of our disquiet nonetheless: a subject that has been on every man’s lips for a fortnight.’

Moody frowned. ‘Petty criminals?’

‘One in particular.’

‘Shall I guess?’ Moody asked lightly, when the other did not go on.

Gascoigne shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. I am referring to the whore.’

Moody raised his eyebrows. He tried to recall the catalogue of arrests to his mind—yes, perhaps one of the listed names had been a woman’s. He wondered what every man in Hokitika had to say about a whore’s arrest. It took him a moment to find the words to form an appropriate answer, and to his surprise, Gascoigne laughed. ‘I am teasing you,’ he said. ‘You must not let me tease you. Her crime was not listed, of course, but if you read with a little imagination you will see it. Anna Wetherell is the name she gives.’

‘I am not sure I know how to read with imagination.’

Gascoigne laughed again, expelling a sharp breath of smoke. ‘But you are a barrister, are you not?’

‘By training only,’ Moody said stiffly. ‘I have not yet been called to the Bar.’

‘Well, here: there is always an overtone in the magistrate’s address,’ Gascoigne explained. ‘
Gentlemen of Westland
—there is your first clue.
Crimes of shame and degradation
—there is your second.’

‘I see,’ Moody said, though he did not. His gaze flickered over Gascoigne’s shoulder: the fat man had moved to the pair of Chinese men, and was scribbling something on the flyleaf of his pocketbook for them to read. ‘Perhaps the woman was wrongly indicted? Perhaps that is what captured everyone’s attention?’

‘Oh, she wasn’t gaoled for whoring,’ Gascoigne said. ‘The
sergeants
don’t care a straw about
that
! As long as a man is discreet enough, they are quite content to look the other way.’

Moody waited. There was an unsettling quality to the way that Gascoigne spoke: it was both guarded and confiding at once. Moody felt that he could not trust him. The clerk was perhaps in his middle thirties. His pale hair had begun to silver above his ears, and he wore a pale moustache, brushed sideways from a central part. His herringbone suit was tailored closely to his body.

‘Why,’ Gascoigne added after a moment, ‘the sergeant himself made a proposition of her, directly after the committal!’

‘The committal?’ Moody echoed, feeling foolish. He wished that the other man would speak a little less cryptically, and at greater length. He had a cultivated air (he made Thomas Balfour seem as blunt as a doorstop) but it was a cultivation somehow mourned. He spoke as a disappointed man, for whom perfection existed only as something remembered—and then regretted, because it was lost.

‘She was tried for trying to take her own life,’ Gascoigne said. ‘There’s a symmetry in that, do you not think? Tried for trying.’

Moody thought it inappropriate to agree, and in any case he did not care to pursue that line of thinking. He said, to change the
subject
,

‘And the master of my vessel—Mr. Carver? He is connected to this woman somehow, I presume?’

‘Oh yes, Carver’s
connected
,’ Gascoigne said. He looked at the
cigarette
in his hand, seemed suddenly disgusted with it, and threw it into the fire. ‘He killed his own child.’

Moody drew back in horror. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘They can’t prove it, of course,’ Gascoigne said darkly. ‘But the man’s a brute. You are quite right to want to avoid him.’

Moody stared at him, again at a loss for how to reply.

‘Every man has his currency,’ Gascoigne added after a moment.
‘Perhaps it’s gold; perhaps it’s women. Anna Wetherell, you see, was both.’

At this point the fat man returned, with his glass refreshed; he sat down, looked first to Gascoigne and then to Moody, and seemed to recognise, obscurely, a social obligation to introduce himself. He leaned forward and thrust out his hand. ‘Name’s Dick Mannering.’

‘It’s a pleasure,’ Moody said, in a rather automatic tone. He felt disoriented. He wished Gascoigne had not been interrupted quite at that moment, so he could have pressed him further on the subject of the whore. It was indelicate to attempt to revive the subject now; in any case Gascoigne had retreated back into his armchair, and his face had closed. He began turning his cigarette case over again in his hands.

‘Prince of Wales Opera House, that’s me,’ Mannering added, as he sat back.

‘Capital,’ said Moody.

‘Only show in town.’ Mannering rapped the arm of his chair with his knuckles, casting about for a way to proceed. Moody glanced at Gascoigne, but the clerk was staring sourly into his lap. It was clear that the fat man’s reappearance had severely displeased him; it was also clear that he saw no reason to conceal his
displeasure
from its object—whose face, Moody saw with embarrassment, had turned a very dark shade of red.

‘I could not help but admire your watch chain, earlier,’ Moody said at last, addressing Mannering. ‘Is it Hokitika gold?’

‘Nice piece, isn’t it?’ Mannering said, without looking down at his chest, or lifting his fingers to touch the admired item. He rapped the arms of his chair a second time. ‘Clutha nuggets, in actual fact. I was at Kawarau, Dunstan, then Clutha.’

‘I confess I’m not familiar with the names,’ Moody said. ‘I assume they’re Otago fields?’

Mannering assented that they were, and began to expound on the subject of company mining and the value of the dredge.

‘You’re all diggers here?’ Moody said when he was done, moving his fingertips in a little circle in the air, to indicate that he meant the room at large.

‘Not one—excepting the Chinamen, of course,’ Mannering said. ‘Camp followers is the term, though most of us started off in the gorge. Most gold on a goldfield’s found where? At the hotels. At the shanties. Mates spend the stuff as soon as they find it. Tell you what: you might do better to open a business than to head to the hills. Get yourself a licence, start selling grog.’

‘That must be wise advice, if you have acted upon it yourself,’ Moody said.

Mannering settled back into his chair, seeming very contented with the compliment. Yes, he had quit the fields, and now paid other men to work his claims for a percentage of the yield; he was from Sussex; Hokitika was a fine place, but there were fewer girls than was proper in a town of such a size; he loved all kinds of
harmony
; he had modelled his opera house upon the Adelphi at the West End; he felt that the old song-and-supper could not be beat; he could not abide public houses, and small beer made him ill; the floods at Dunstan had been dreadful—dreadful; the Hokitika rain was hard to bear; he would say again that there was nothing nicer than a four-part harmony—the voices like threads in a piece of silk.

‘Splendid,’ Moody murmured. Gascoigne had made no
movement
at all during this soliloquy, save for the compulsive rhythm of his long, pale hands, as he turned the silver object over in his lap; Mannering, for his part, had not registered the clerk’s presence at all, and in fact had directed his speech at a spot some three feet above Moody’s head, as if Moody’s presence did not really concern him either.