The Luminaries (60 page)

Outside Ah Sook tossed both weapons into the water and watched them sink rapidly out of view. There came screaming from inside, and muffled shouts. He turned and began to run. Before he reached the end of the quay he heard footsteps behind him. Then something struck him on the back, and he fell face-first upon the ground. He gave a grunt of pain—his ribs were still very tender—and felt his hands being cuffed, roughly, behind him. He did not protest as he was hoisted to his feet, marched to the horse post, and shoved against it; his captor then cuffed him, with a second pair of handcuffs, to the iron ring, where he remained until the policeman’s wagon arrived to take him to gaol.

Ah Sook could not make head or tail of the questions that were put to him in English, and at length his interrogators despaired of him. He was not afforded the courtesy of a translator, and when he said the name ‘Carver’ the policemen only shook their heads. He was placed in cramped custody with five other men. In due course the case was heard, and judged to warrant a trial, which was
scheduled
to take place some six weeks later. By this time the
Palmerston
must have long since departed; Carver, in all likelihood, was gone for good. Ah Sook passed the next six weeks in a state of great
anxiety
and dejection, and awoke on the morning of his trial as if upon the day of his very execution. How could he hope to defend
himself
? He would be convicted, and hanged before the month was out.

The case was heard in English, and Ah Sook, from the dock, understood virtually none of it. He was surprised when, after
several
hours of speeches and swearings-in, Francis Carver was brought to the stand in handcuffs. Ah Sook wondered why this
witness
was the only one to have been restrained. He stood up as Carver approached the stand, and called out to him in Cantonese. Their gaze met—and in the sudden stillness, Ah Sook, speaking calmly and distinctly, promised to avenge his father’s death. Carver, to his dishonour, was the first to look away.

It was only much later that Ah Sook learned the nature of what transpired during the trial. The name of the man he was accused of having murdered, as he later discovered, was Jeremy Shepard, and the buck-toothed woman who had nursed Ah Sook back to
health was his wife, Margaret. The copper-haired woman was Lydia Greenway; she was the proprietrix of the Darling Harbour brothel, which was known as the White Horse Saloon. At the time of his trial, Ah Sook knew no names at all; it was not until the morning after his acquittal that he found a copy of the
Sydney Herald
and was able to pay a Cantonese trader to translate the account given in the courthouse pages—which, owing to its sensational nature, ran over three columns, nearly filling an entire page.

The case of the prosecutor, according to the
Sydney Herald,
rested upon three points: firstly, that Ah Sook had a very good reason to bear a grudge against Jeremy Shepard, given that the latter had beaten him senseless the week before; secondly, that Ah Sook had been apprehended fleeing the White Horse Saloon in the moments after the shot was fired, which naturally made him the most likely suspect; and thirdly, that Chinese men, in general, could not be trusted, and indeed bore an inherent malice against all white men.

The defence, in the face of these charges, was lackadaisical. The lawyer reasoned that it was unlikely that Ah Sook, being but a
fraction
of Shepard’s height and weight, could have got close enough to place the muzzle of the pistol against the other man’s temple; for this reason, the possibility of suicide ought not to be ruled out. When the prosecutor interjected to assert that the act of suicide was, by the testimony of his friends, vehemently against Jeremy Shepard’s nature, the defence ventured the opinion that no man on earth was wholly incapable of suicide—a surmise that received a sharp reprimand from the judge. Begging the judge’s pardon, the lawyer concluded his argument by suggesting, as a kind of general summation, that perhaps Sook Yongsheng had only fled the White Horse in alarm: a shot had just been fired, after all. When he sat down the prosecutor made no effort to hide his smirk, and the judge sighed very audibly.

At last the prosecutor called for the testimony of Margaret Shepard, Jeremy Shepard’s widow—and it was here that the trial took a startling turn. Upon the stand, Margaret Shepard flatly refused to corroborate with the prosecutor’s line of questioning. She insisted that Sook Yongsheng had not murdered her husband.
She knew this to be true for a very simple reason: she had witnessed his suicide herself.

This startling confession gave rise to such an uproar in the court that the judge was obliged to call for order. Ah Sook, to whom these events would only be translated long after the fact, never dreamed that the woman was risking her own safety in order to save his life. When Margaret Shepard’s questioning was allowed to continue, the prosecutor inquired as to why she had hitherto concealed this very vital information, to which Margaret Shepard replied that she had lived in great fear of her husband, for he abused her daily, as more than one witness could attest. Her spirit was all but broken; she had only just mustered the courage to speak of the incident aloud. After this poignant testimony, the trial dissolved. The judge had no choice but to acquit Ah Sook of the crime of murder, and to release him. Jeremy Shepard, it was decreed, had committed
suicide
, may God rest his soul—though
that
prospect was, theologically speaking, very unlikely.

Ah Sook’s first action, upon his release from gaol, was to seek news of Francis Carver. He learned, to his surprise, that in fact the
Palmerston
had been apprehended in the Sydney Harbour some weeks ago, following a routine search. Francis Carver had been found in breach of the law on charges of smuggling, breach of
customs
, and evasion of duty: according to the report given to the maritime police, there were sixteen young women from Kwangchow in the ship’s hold, all of them severely malnourished, and frightened in the extreme. The
Palmerston
had been seized, the women had been sent back to China, Carver had been remanded in gaol, and Carver’s relationship with Dent & Co. had been formally dissolved. He had been sentenced to ten years of penal servitude at the
penitentiary
upon Cockatoo Island, effective instant.

There was nothing to do but wait for Carver’s sentence to elapse. Ah Sook sailed to Victoria, and began to dig the ground; he acquired some facility in English, apprenticed himself to various trades, and dreamed, with increasing lucidity, of avenging his father’s murder by taking Carver’s life. In July 1864 he sent a
written
inquiry to Cockatoo Island requesting to know where Carver
had gone upon his liberation. He received an answer three months later, informing him that Carver had sailed to Dunedin, New Zealand, upon the steamer
Sparta
. Ah Sook bought a ticket there also—and in Dunedin, the trail suddenly went cold. He searched and searched—and found nothing. At last, defeated, Ah Sook gave up the case as lost. He bought a miner’s right and a one-way ticket to the West Coast—where, eight months later, he chanced upon him: standing in the street, his face newly scarred, his chest newly thickened, counting coins into Te Rau Tauwhare’s hand.

Ah Sook found Ah Quee sitting cross-legged on a shelf of gravel, some few feet from the boundary peg that marked the Aurora’s southeast corner. The goldsmith held a prospector’s dish in both hands, and he was shaking the dish rhythmically, flicking out his wrists in the confident motion of a man long-practised in a single skill. There was a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth, but he did not appear to be smoking it: the ash shredded finely down his tunic as he moved. Before him was a wooden trough of water, and beside him, an iron crucible with a flattened spout.

His rhythm followed a circular pattern. First he shook the largest stones and clods out of his dish, keeping to a persistent tempo, so that the finer sands tumbled, by degrees, to the bottom of the pan; then he leaned forward, dipped the far edge of the pan into the clouded water, and with a sharp movement tilted the pan back towards his body, swirling the liquid carefully clockwise, to create a vortex in the dish. Gold was heavier than stone, and sank to the bottom: once he skimmed the wet gravel from the surface, the pure metal would be left behind, shining wetly, tiny points of light against the dark. Ah Quee plucked out these glistering flakes with his fingers, and transferred them carefully to his crucible; he then refilled his dish with earth and stones, and repeated the procedure, with no variation whatsoever, until the sun sank below the treetops to the west.

The Aurora was a good distance from both the river and the sea, an inconvenience that accounted, in part, for its undesirability as
a goldmine. It was necessary for Ah Quee to transport his own river water to the claim every morning, for without water, his task was all but impossible; once the water was clouded with dirt and silt, however, it was very hard to see the gold, and he was obliged to tramp back to the river, in order to fill his buckets again. A tailrace might have been constructed from the Hokitika River, or a shaft might have been dropped for a well, but the goldmine’s owner had made it clear from the outset that he would spare the Aurora no resources at all. There was no point. The two acres that comprised the Aurora was only barely payable ground: it was only a dull patch of stones, treeless. The tailing pile at Ah Quee’s back, testament to long hours of solitary industry, was long and low; a burial mound, under which no body had been interred.

Ah Quee looked up as Ah Sook approached.

‘
Neih
hou.
’

‘
Neih
hou, neih hou
.’

The two men regarded each other with neither hostility nor kindness, but the gaze they shared was long. After a moment Ah Quee plucked the last of the cigarette from his mouth, and flicked it away over the stones.

‘The yield is small today,’ he said in Cantonese.

‘A thousand sympathies,’ replied Ah Sook, speaking in his native language also.

‘The yield is small every day.’

‘You deserve better.’

‘Do I?’ said Ah Quee, who was in an irritable temper.

‘Yes,’ said Ah Sook. ‘Diligence deserves to be rewarded.’

‘In what proportion? And in what currency? These are empty words.’

Ah Sook placed the palms of his hands together. ‘I come
bearing
good news.’

‘Good news and flattery,’ Ah Quee observed.

The hatter took no notice of this correction. ‘Emery Staines has returned,’ he said.

Ah Quee stiffened. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You have seen him?’

‘Not yet,’ said Ah Sook. ‘I am told that he will be in Hokitika
tonight, at a hotel upon Revell-street where a celebration has been planned to welcome his return. I have been invited, and as a
gesture
of my good faith, I extend my invitation to you.’

‘Who is your host?’

‘Anna Wetherell—and the widow of the dead man, Crosbie Wells.’

‘Two women,’ said Ah Quee, sceptically.

‘Yes,’ said Ah Sook. He hesitated, and then admitted what he had discovered that morning: that in fact Crosbie’s widow was the very same woman who had operated the White Horse Saloon in Darling Harbour, who had testified against Ah Sook at his own trial, and who had once been the lover of his enemy, Francis Carver. Formerly Lydia Greenway, her name was now Lydia Wells.

Ah Quee took a moment to digest this information. ‘This is a trap,’ he said at last.

‘No,’ said Ah Sook. ‘I came here of my own accord, not under instruction.’

‘This is a trap to capture
you
,’ said Ah Quee. ‘I am sure of it. Why else would your presence be so specifically requested at the celebration tonight? You have no connexion to Mr. Staines. What purpose can you serve, in a party to welcome his return?’

‘I am to play a part in a staged drama. I am to sit on a cushion, and pretend to be a statue.’ This sounded foolish even to Ah Sook. He rushed on: ‘It is a kind of theatre. I shall be paid a fee for my participation.’

‘You shall be paid?’

‘Yes; as a performer.’

Ah Quee studied him. ‘What if the woman Greenway is still in league with Francis Carver? They were lovers once. Perhaps she has already sent word to him, that you will be present at the party tonight.’

‘Carver is at sea.’

‘Even so, she will notify him as soon as she can.’

‘When that happens, I will be ready.’

‘How will you be ready?’

‘I will be ready,’ Ah Sook said, stubbornly. ‘It does not matter yet. Carver is at sea.’

‘The woman’s allegiance is with him—and you have sworn to avenge yourself upon him, as she must remember. She cannot wish you well.’

‘I will be on my guard.’

Ah Quee sighed. He stood, brushing himself down, and then he paused, inhaling sharply through his nose. He advanced several steps upon Ah Sook, and gripped his shoulders in both hands.

‘You reek with it,’ he said. ‘You are reeling on your feet, Sook Yongsheng. I can smell the stink of it from twenty paces!’