The Luminaries

But Gascoigne did have some experience in the field of maritime insurance, as he had admitted to Francis Carver, and he had not lied in saying that the subject was of some curiosity to him, being the profession of his former father-in-law, and therefore the subject of much drawing-room conversation over years past. He had made a note of Lauderback’s affiliation to the Garrity Group with interest, filing it away in his mind as something to be examined in better detail at a later time.

Aubert Gascoigne knew that Francis Carver was a brute, and he did not care to court his friendship; he felt, however, that to get Carver on his side would be somehow valuable, and he had solicited the other man’s attention on the spit that afternoon with that purpose in mind.

Carver was still thinking about protection and indemnity. ‘I suppose I’d need Lauderback’s consent,’ he said. ‘To lay claim to that cover. I suppose I’d need him to sign something.’

‘Perhaps you would,’ Gascoigne replied, ‘but the fact that only ten months have passed since Godspeed changed hands might be worth something. That might be a loophole.’ (Indeed it was.) ‘And the fact that you inherited a standard policy from Lauderback might be worth something, too: why, if you inherit the whole, you inherit its parts, do you not?’ (Indeed you do.) With a flourish Gascoigne concluded, ‘You were sailing in New Zealand waters, and if there was no dereliction on your part, as you say, then it’s very possible that you will be entitled to lay claim to those funds.’

He had done his research well. Carver nodded, seeming impressed.

‘Anyway,’ Gascoigne said, sensing that the seeds of curiosity had been adequately sowed, ‘you ought to look into it. You might save yourself a great deal of money.’ He turned his cigarette over in his hand, examining its ember, to give Carver a chance to look him over unobserved.

‘What’s your stake in this?’ said Carver presently.

‘None whatsoever,’ said Gascoigne. ‘As I told you, I work for the Magistrate’s Court.’

‘You’ve got a friend in P&I, maybe.’

‘No,’ Gascoigne said. ‘I don’t. That’s not the way it works—as I’ve told you.’ He flicked the end of his cigarette onto the rocks below the beacon.

‘You’re just a man who tells another man about loopholes.’

‘I suppose I am,’ Gascoigne said.

‘And then strolls away.’

Gascoigne lifted his hat. ‘I shall take that as my cue,’ he said. ‘Good afternoon—Captain …?’

‘Carver,’ said the former captain, shaking Gascoigne’s hand very firmly this time. ‘Frank Carver’s my name.’

‘And I’m Aubert Gascoigne,’ Gascoigne reminded him, with a pleasant smile. ‘I can be found at the Courthouse, should you ever need me. Well—good luck with Godspeed.’

‘All right,’ Carver said.

‘She really is a marvellous craft.’

Gascoigne, strolling away, felt a kind of dawning wonder at himself. He kept his face forward, and did not look back—knowing that Carver’s dark eyes had followed him down the spit, and around the edge of the quay, and all the way to the southern end of Revell-street, where he turned the corner, and disappeared from view.

Sook Yongsheng, en route to Kaniere to seek an interview with his compatriot Quee Long, was at that moment very deep in thought, his hands locked behind his back, his eyes fixed sightlessly upon the ground before him. He hardly registered the figures he passed along the roadside, nor the laden dray-carts that clattered by, nor the infrequent riders making for the gorge—every man hatless and in shirtsleeves, enjoying the pale summer sun that seemed, for its rarity, to shine with a providential, good-hearted light. The mood along the Kaniere-road was merry; through the trees there came, occasionally, a snatch of a hymn, sung unaccompanied and in unison, from one of the makeshift chapels at the inland camps. Ah Sook paid no attention. His reunion that morning with Lydia Greenway—now Lydia Wells—had deeply unsettled him, and as a kind of conciliation to his unrest he was replaying his own history in his mind—narrating the very same tale, in fact, that he had related to Ah Quee three weeks ago.

When Francis Carver had first made his introduction to the Sook family he had been but one-and-twenty, and Ah Sook, as a boy of twelve, had very naturally looked up to him. Carver was a terse and brooding young man, born in Hong Kong to a British merchant trader, and raised at sea. He was fluent in Cantonese, though he cherished no love for China, and meant to leave that place as soon as he acquired a ship of his own—an ambition he referenced very frequently. He worked for the Kwangchow branch of the merchant firm Dent & Co., of which his father was a high-ranking official, and he was responsible for overseeing the transfer of Chinese wares to and from the export warehouses along the Pearl River. One of these warehouses was owned by Sook Yongsheng’s father, Sook Chun-Yuen.

Sook Yongsheng understood very little about the financial operations of his father’s business. He knew that the Sook warehouse served as a liaison point for buyers, the majority of which were British merchant firms. He knew that Dent & Co. was by far the most illustrious and well connected of these firms, and that his father was very proud of this association. He knew that his father’s clients all paid for their wares in silver ore, and that this was a further point of pride for Sook Chun-Yuen; he knew also that his father hated opium, and that he held the imperial commissioner, Lin Tse-Hsu, in very high esteem. Ah Sook did not know the significance of any of these particulars; but he was a loyal son, and he accepted his father’s beliefs without comment, trusting them to be both virtuous and wise.

In February 1839, the Sook warehouse was targeted for an imperial investigation—a fairly routine procedure, but a dangerous one, for under Commissioner Lin’s decree, any Chinese merchants harbouring opium faced the penalty of death. Sook Chun-Yuen welcomed the imperial forces into his warehouse cordially—where they discovered, hidden amongst the tea, some thirty or forty crates of opium resin, each weighing roughly fifty pounds. Sook Chun-Yuen’s protestations came to nothing. He was executed without trial, and at once.

Ah Sook did not know what to believe. His natural trust in his father’s honesty prompted him to believe that the man had been framed, and his natural trust in his father’s acumen made him doubt that the man could have been framed. He was in two minds—but he had no time to contemplate the matter, for within a week of the execution, war broke out in Kwangchow. Fearing for his own safety, and for the safety of his mother, who had been driven near to madness with grief, Ah Sook turned to the only man he knew to trust: the young delegate from Dent & Co., Francis Carver.

It transpired that Mr. Carver was more than happy to take on the Sook family business as a holding, and to accept all burdens of organisation and management upon himself—at least, he said, until Ah Sook’s grief had run its course, and the civil wars had quieted, or resolved themselves. In a show of kindness to the boy, Carver suggested that he might like to continue working in the export trade, in order to honour the memory of his late father, disgraced though that memory now was. If Ah Sook wished it, Carver could find work for him packing merchandise—a decent, honourable job, if menial, which would see him through the war. This proposition gratified Ah Sook extremely. Within hours of this conversation he had become Francis Carver’s employee.

For the next fifteen years Ah Sook packed chaff around specimens of porcelain and china, wrapped bolts of printed silk in paper, stacked caddies of tea into boxes, loaded and unloaded packages, hammered the lids of shipping crates, pasted labels onto cartons, and itemised those finely wrought and purposeless objects that were termed, upon the merchandise inventories, Chinoiserie. He saw Carver only infrequently over this period, for the latter was often at sea, but their interactions, when they happened, were always cordial: it was their custom to sit upon the wharf together and share a bottle of liquor, gazing out over the estuary as the water turned from brown to blue to silver, and finally to black, whereupon Carver would rise, clap his hand upon Ah Sook’s shoulder, toss the empty bottle into the river, and depart.

In the summer of 1854 Carver returned to Kwangchow after several months’ absence, and informed Ah Sook—now a man of nearly thirty years—that their agreement was finally to come to an end. His lifelong ambition to one day command a trade vessel had at last been realised: Dent & Co. was to establish a trade run to Sydney and the Victorian goldfields, and his father had chartered a handsome clipper ship, the Palmerston, on his behalf. It was a fine promotion, and one that Carver could not ignore. He had come, he said, to bid the Sook family, and this era of his life, goodbye.

Ah Sook received Carver’s farewell with sadness. By this time his mother was dead, and the opium wars had given way to a new rebellion in Kwangchow—one that was bloody, and incensed: it promised war, and