The Luminaries

her finger against her lips, to signify a secret. She then opened the caddy, fished around amongst the tea leaves, and withdrew from the interior a small square package, wrapped in paper. She smiled at him. Ah Sook was confused. He turned his head painfully to the right, so as to see the implements the woman had unrolled from her bundle—and saw a short, inelegant pipe, laid out next to a needle, a knife, and a tin bowl. He turned back to her, questioningly, but she was busy adjusting the wick of the lamp, assembling the pipe, and preparing the resin. When at last the opium was bubbling, and a tendril of white smoke escaped the thin aperture of the bowl, she pressed the mouthpiece of the pipe to Ah Sook’s lips. He was too exhausted to decline. He took the vapour into his mouth, and held it there.

There came a dawn in his chest, a liquid light. A perfect calm flooded through his body. The pain in his head and chest drained out of him, as simply and suddenly as water seeping through a piece of silk. Opium, he thought, dully. Opium. It was extraordinary. The drug was extraordinary. It was a miracle, a cure. She passed him the pipe again and he supped from its end greedily, like a beggar supping from a spoon. He did not remember passing out of consciousness, but when he next opened his eyes it was daylight, and the barmaid was gone. He was lying propped between two slop-crates at the back of the building, with a blanket spread over his body, and another folded beneath his cheek. Someone—the barmaid, perhaps?—must have dragged him there. Or had he come here of his own accord? Ah Sook could not remember. He had a terrible headache, and the pain in his ribcage had returned. From within the building he could hear splashing water and the sound of knives.

Then he remembered the can of opium, buried in the middle of the box of tea. Dent & Co. had been paying for their wares in opium—for Britain had no more silver, and China had no need for gold. How could he have been so stupid? Francis Carver had been smuggling the drug into China, using the Sook family warehouse as a liaison point. Francis Carver had betrayed his father. Francis Carver had turned away from him, and pretended not to understand his cry. Ah Sook lay on his side in the alley without moving. A deadly conviction was swelling in his chest.

Over the course of the next week the buck-toothed woman kept him fed, watered and sedated. She checked upon him several times daily, always under the pretence of feeding the pig, emptying the dishwater, or taking the laundry to the buckled line; after nightfall, she came with the pipe, and fed him smoke until the pain lessened, and he fell asleep. She conducted these ministrations in silence, and Ah Sook, as he watched her, was quiet too. He wondered about her. One night she came out with her own eye blackened. He raised his hand to touch it, but she frowned, and turned away.

Within a few days Ah Sook could stand, though it was painful to do so, and within the week he could walk slowly around the yard. He knew that the Palmerston had only scheduled a fortnight’s stopover in Sydney; soon it would be departing for the Victorian goldfields, in the south. Ah Sook no longer cared whether he continued on to Melbourne. He wanted only to confront Carver before the clipper sailed.

Since the Palmerston had reached her mooring Carver had not spent a single night aboard: he spent his nights at the dockside brothel, in the company of the woman with copper-coloured hair. Ah Sook saw him approaching every evening, striding along the quay with his arms swinging and his coat-tails flared. He did not leave the brothel until the early hours of the afternoon, and very often the copper-haired woman accompanied him to the alley doorway to bid him a private goodbye. Ah Sook had twice glimpsed the pair walking along the docks together, well after sundown. They spoke as intimates. Each leaned in close to listen when the other spoke, and the woman’s hand was always in the crook of Carver’s elbow, pressing close.

The eighth night after Ah Sook’s assault was a Sunday, and the carousing at the brothel quit well before midnight, in accordance with curfew. Ah Sook crept around to the front of the place and saw Carver silhouetted in the central window of the upper floor, leaning his forearm against the lintel and looking down into the dark. As Ah Sook watched the red-haired woman came up behind him, caught his sleeve in her hand, and pulled him back out of sight, into the depths of the room. Keeping to the shadows, Ah Sook crept back to the sash window above the kitchen cutting-board, and slid it open. He climbed inside. The room was deserted. He looked around for a weapon, selecting, finally, a bone-handled cleaver from the rack above the board. He had never wielded a weapon of any kind against another man, but it gave him confidence, to feel the thing heavy in his hand. He moved to find the staircase in the gloom.

There were three doors at the top of the staircase, all of them closed. He listened at the first (only silence) and then the second (muted scuffling) and then the third, behind which he could hear the rumble of a man’s voice, the creak of a chair, and then a woman’s low reply. Ah Sook tried to estimate the distance from the edge of the house to the upper window at which he had seen Carver standing moments before. Could this third door lead to that central room—did it square? Yes: for he was ten feet from the edge of the landing, and if he imagined the brothel’s frontage in his mind, the window was easily twelve feet from the building’s edge. Unless the second door led to a larger room, of course, and this third door led to a small one. Ah Sook put his ear to the door. He heard the man raise his voice and speak several words in English—sharply, and with a terse accent, as though he were very displeased. It must be Carver, Ah Sook thought. It could only be Carver. Full of sudden fury, he wrenched the door open—but it was not Carver. It was the man who had beaten him, little more than a week earlier. He had the buck-toothed woman on his lap, one hand encircling her throat, the other spread flat across her breast. Ah Sook stepped back in surprise—and the man, roaring his displeasure, threw the woman from his lap, and leaped to his feet.

He uttered a string of syllables that Ah Sook did not understand, and reached for his revolver, which was lying on a nightstand next to the bed. In the same instant, the buck-toothed woman reached into her bosom and withdrew a muff pistol. The man levelled his gun and pulled the hammer—Ah Sook flinched—but the mechanism jammed; there was a spent casing in the breech. By the time the man had tipped his revolver up to release the spent casing, the woman had rushed upon him and shoved the muzzle of her pistol into his temple. Distracted, he tried to push her away—and there was a clap—and the man crumpled. His revolver fell from his hand, and thudded upon the floor. Ah Sook had not moved. The buck-toothed woman darted forward, removed the revolver from the dead man’s hand, and fitted her own muff pistol in place of it. She then thrust the heavy revolver upon Ah Sook, closed his fingers over the barrel, and motioned for him to leave, and leave quickly. Bewildered, he turned on his heel, revolver in one hand, cleaver in the other. She grabbed his shoulders, yanked him back, and directed him, instead, to the servants’ stairwell on the other side of the hall—down which he vanished, hearing footsteps, and clamour, on the main stair.

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