The Luminaries (61 page)

Ah Sook had indeed detoured past his den at Kaniere, to smoke his late-afternoon pipe, of which the effects were very plainly
visible
; but he did not like to be chastised. He wrestled himself from Ah Quee’s grasp, saying sourly, ‘I have a weakness.’

‘A weakness!’ Ah Quee cried. He spat into the dirt. ‘It is not weakness: it is hypocrisy. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

‘Do not speak to me as to a child.’

‘A man addicted is a childish man.’

‘Then I am a childish man,’ said Ah Sook. ‘It is not of
consequence
to you.’

‘It is of great consequence to me, if I am to accompany you tonight.’

‘I have no need of your protection.’

‘If that is what you believe, you are deluded,’ said Ah Quee.

‘Deluded—and a hypocrite!’ said Ah Sook, feigning astonishment. ‘Two insults, when I have been nothing but courteous to you!’

‘You deserve to be insulted,’ said Ah Quee. ‘You indulge the very drug that killed your father—and you have the audacity to style yourself his defender! You insist he was betrayed—and yet
you
betray him, every time you light your lamp!’

‘Francis Carver killed my father,’ said Ah Sook, stepping back.

‘Opium killed your father,’ said Ah Quee. ‘
Look
at yourself’—for Ah Sook had stumbled against a root, and partly fallen. ‘You are a fine avenger, Sook Yongsheng; one who cannot even stand on his own two feet!’

Furious, Ah Sook put a hand out to steady himself, hauled
himself
upright, and rounded on Ah Quee, his pupils dark and soft.
‘You know my history,’ he said. ‘I was first given the drug as a
medicine
. I did not take it of my own accord. I cannot help its power over me.’

‘You had ample time to shake your addiction,’ said Ah Quee. ‘You were imprisoned for weeks before your trial, were you not?’

‘That interval was not sufficient to rid me of the craving.’

‘The
craving
!’ said Ah Quee, full of contempt. ‘What a pathetic word that is. No wonder it has no place in the history you recounted to me. No wonder you prefer such grand words as
honour
, and
duty
, and
betrayal
, and
revenge
.’

‘My history—’

‘Your history, as you tell it, dwells far longer on your own
injustices
than on the shame that was brought upon your family. Tell me, Sook Yongsheng. Are you avenging yourself upon the man who killed your father, or the man who refused to come to your aid outside the White Horse Saloon?’

Ah Sook was shocked. ‘You doubt my motives,’ he said.

‘Your motives are not your own,’ said Ah Quee. ‘They cannot be your own! Look at yourself. You can hardly stand.’

There was a silence between them. From the adjacent valley there came a muffled crack of gunshot, and then a distant cry.

Finally Ah Sook nodded. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

‘Why do you farewell me?’

‘You have made your opinions clear,’ said Ah Sook. ‘You
disapprove
of me; you are disgusted by me. I will go to the widow’s celebration tonight regardless.’

Though Ah Quee’s temper was quick to flare, he could not bear to be made the villain in any dispute. He shook his head,
breathing
hard through his nose, and said, ‘I will come with you. I want very much to speak to Mr. Staines.’

‘I know,’ said Ah Sook. ‘I came here on good faith, Quee Long.’

When Ah Quee spoke again, his voice was quiet. ‘A man knows his own heart. I was wrong to doubt your motivation.’

Ah Sook closed his eyes briefly. ‘By the time we reach Hokitika,’ he said, opening them again, ‘I will be sober.’

Ah Quee nodded. ‘You will need to be,’ he said.

Walter Moody, upon taking his leave of Gascoigne, had returned at once to the Crown Hotel, to which place his trunk had been delivered. He wrenched the door open, crossed the foyer at a pace, and took the stairs to the upper landing two by two; when he reached the door at the top of the stairs, he fumbled with his key in the keyhole, and cursed aloud. He was suddenly absurdly impatient to lay eyes upon his possessions—feeling that his reunion with the treasured items of his former life would
somehow
repair a connexion that, since the wreck of the
Godspeed
, had seemed very unreal.

Of late Moody’s thoughts had been drifting, with increasing
frequency
, back to his reunion with his father in Dunedin. He found that he regretted the haste with which he had quitted the unhappy scene. It was true that his father had betrayed him. It was true that his brother had betrayed him. But even so, he might have been
forgiving
; he might have stayed on, and heard Frederick’s part in the story. He had not seen his brother while in Dunedin, for he had fled the scene of reunion with his father before Frederick could be
summoned
, and so he did not know whether Frederick was well, or married, or happy; he did not know what Frederick had made of Otago, and whether he meant to live out his days in New Zealand;
he did not know whether his father and brother had dug the ground as a party, or whether they had gone mates with other men, or whether they had prospected alone. Whenever Moody dwelled upon these uncertainties, he felt sad. He ought to have sought an audience with his brother. But would Frederick have desired such a thing? Even that Moody did not know. Since arriving in Hokitika he had thrice sat down to write to him, but after penning the
salutation
and the date, sat motionless.

At last the key turned in the lock. Moody shoved open the door, strode into the room—and stopped. There was indeed a trunk in the middle of the room, but it was a trunk he had never seen before. His own trunk was painted red, and was rectangular in its
dimensions
. This one was black, with iron straps, and a long square hasp through which a horizontal bar had been thrust to keep it closed; its lid was domed, and slatted like a barrel that had been laid upon its side. There were several baggage labels plastered to the half-barrel of the lid, one marked ‘Southampton’, one marked ‘Lyttelton’, and the standard ‘Not Wanted On Voyage’. Moody could tell at once that the trunk’s owner had always travelled first class.

Instead of ringing the bell to inform the maid of the mistake, Moody closed the door behind him, locked it, and moved forward to kneel before the unfamiliar chest. He unfastened the hasp, and heaved open the lid—and saw, pasted to the underside, a square of paper that read:

Moody exhaled, and sat back on his heels. Now
this
was a
misunderstanding
! So Lauderback’s trunk had been aboard
Godspeed,
as Balfour had suspected: the shipping crate must indeed have been wrongly taken from the Hokitika quay. Moody’s trunk, like Lauderback’s, was not engraved with the name of its owner, and bore no particular marks of identification save for on the interior, where his name and address had been stamped into a square of leather and sewn into the lining of the lid. Presumably the two
trunks had been switched: Moody’s trunk had been delivered to Lauderback’s rooms at the Palace Hotel, and Lauderback’s, to the Crown.

Moody thought for a moment. Lauderback was not currently in Hokitika: according to the
West Coast Times
, he was campaigning in the north, and was not due to return until to-morrow afternoon. Suddenly decisive, Moody shucked off his jacket, leaned forward on his knees, and began to go through Lauderback’s belongings.

Walter Moody did not chastise himself for intrusions upon other people’s privacy, and nor did he see any reason to confess them. His mind was of a most phlegmatic sort, cool in its private applications, quick, and excessively rational; he possessed a fault common to those of high intelligence, however, which was that he tended to regard the gift of his intellect as a licence of a kind, by whose rarefied authority he was protected, in all circumstances, from ever behaving ill. He considered his moral obligations to be of an altogether different class than those of lesser men, and so rarely felt shame or compunction, except in very general terms.

He went through Lauderback’s chest swiftly and methodically, handling each item and then replacing it exactly as he found it. The trunk contained largely items of stationery—letter-sets, seals, ledgers, books of law, and all the necessities that might furnish the desk of a Member of Parliament. Lauderback’s clothing and
personal
effects had presumably been packed elsewhere, for the only item of clothing in this cedar chest was a woollen scarf, which had been wrapped around a rather ugly brass paperweight in the shape of a pig. The trunk carried with it the smell of the sea—a briny odour, less salty than sour—but its contents were hardly even damp; mercifully for Lauderback, the trunk must have been spared a full immersion.

At the bottom of the trunk was a leather briefcase. Moody opened it and withdrew a sheaf of papers, all of them contracts, receipts, and bills of sale. After several minutes’ searching he found the deed for the sale of the barque
Godspeed
, and pulled that
document
free of the others—handling it carefully, so that the legal seal did not crumble, or pull away.

The contract had been signed, as Lauderback had attested to Balfour three weeks ago, by a Mr. Francis Wells. The date of the sale also corroborated with the politician’s story: the ship had changed ownership in May of 1865, nine months prior to the present day.

Moody bent closer to look at the purchaser’s signature. ‘Francis Wells’ had signed his false name expansively. The inscriber had made a huge looping flourish on the left-hand side of the capital ‘F’, so large that it might have been a letter of its own. Moody squinted at it sideways. Why, he thought: in fact that flourish might have easily been a C, cursively joined to the next letter. He peered closer. There was even a dot of ink between the C and the F—a dot that one might have taken for a spatter, if one glanced at the paper carelessly—which seemed to suggest that Carver had signed the name deliberately ambiguously, so that it might read either ‘Francis Wells’ merely,
or
‘C. Francis Wells’. The penmanship was rather shaky, as often happens when one writes very slowly,
wishing
to ensure a particular effect.

Moody was frowning. In June of the previous year, Francis Carver had been in possession of Crosbie Wells’s birth certificate, a document that proved (as Benjamin Löwenthal had attested) that Crosbie Wells’s middle name was Francis. Why, Moody thought, it was plain enough: Francis Carver had stolen Crosbie Wells’s birth certificate with the intention of posing as the other man. The
ambiguities
of this bill of sale must surely be deliberate. If Carver were brought to court on the charge of false impersonation, he could deny that he had ever signed it.

Was the shared name, Francis, merely a happy coincidence? Or could Wells’s birth certificate have been falsified after the fact? A middle name would be very easy to add to any document, Moody thought, and one could easily use a lighter shade of ink, or fade the word somehow, to mask the fact of the later addition. But why should Carver have
wanted
to falsify his own identity—most
especially
, upon a bill of sale? How could it have been to his advantage, to use another man’s name?

Moody reviewed what he knew about the matter. Francis Carver had used Crosbie Wells’s identity when speaking to Benjamin
Löwenthal in the office of the
West Coast Times
in June … but he had
not
used Crosbie Wells’s identity when confronting Alistair Lauderback, the month before. To Lauderback he had called
himself
Francis Wells … and then he had signed his name with deliberate ambiguity. Bearing in mind Lauderback’s mysterious belief that Crosbie Wells and Carver had been brothers, Moody could only assume that Carver had posed as Crosbie Wells’s brother in his dealings with Lauderback. As to why he might have done such a thing, however, Moody had no idea.

He scrutinised the bill of sale for a long moment, committing its particulars to memory, and then returned it to the briefcase,
slotted
the briefcase back into the trunk, and continued with his methodical investigation.

At length he was satisfied that the trunk contained no more clues that were of use to him, and, in a gesture that was partly idle, ran his fingers around the edge of the lid. All of a sudden he gave a murmur of surprise. A slim package, squarish in shape, had been slipped beneath the calico lining, so that it lay, concealed, between the cedar and the cloth. He bent closer, and his fingers found a neat slit in the fabric, roughly the size of the span of his hand, and
delicately
hemmed so that it would not fray. The calico lining was stamped with a tartan pattern, and the slit in the cloth was cleverly disguised against the vertical stripes of the tartan, which ran flush with the edge of the trunk. Moody wormed his fingers into the cavity and withdrew the squarish object that his fingers had located. It was a wad of letters, tied with string.

There were around fifteen letters in total, each addressed to Lauderback in a plain and unsophisticated hand. Moody took a moment to memorise the look of the knot, and the length of the strings of the bow. He then untied the ends, tossed the string to one side, and smoothed the folded letters over his knee. He could see from their postmarks that they were arranged in reverse
chronological
order, with the most recent letter first; he shuffled to the back of the pile, selected the very first letter that Lauderback had received, and began to read it. In the next moment his heart jumped into his throat.

There was a forwarding address beneath his name, a post-office box in Dunedin.

Moody put down the letter with a beating heart. So
Lauderback
and Crosbie Wells were brothers. That was a turn of events indeed! But Lauderback had not mentioned this connexion to the magistrate, when he admitted to having arrived at Crosbie Wells’s deathbed half an hour too late; nor had he confessed it to his friend, the shipping agent Thomas Balfour. What reason did he have to conceal his brother’s illegitimate parentage? Shame, perhaps? Or something else?

Moody took up the bundle and moved to the window, where there was more light. He unfolded the next letter and tilted it towards the glass.