The Luminaries

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:

PROPERTY OF MR. ALISTAIR LAUDERBACK,

PROVINCIAL COUNCILMAN, M.P.

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 Lowenthal 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 Lowenthal 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.

Dunedin. March 1852

Sir you are my brother though you do not know me. Your father sired a bastard I am that bastard. I was raised CROSBIE WELLS taking the surname of my parish priest not knowing my father but knowing myself a whoreson. I passed my childhood in the Newington whorehouse THE JEWEL. I have lived a modest life such as I am able as a man of little means. I have not suffered. However I desired always to see my father just to know his shape & voice. Finally these prayers were answered with a letter from the man himself. He had always known of me he wrote. He expected he would soon be gone & confessed he would not identify me in his will for fear of tarnishing his name but he enclosed me ?20 & blessings. He did not sign his name but I made inquiries about the servant who had brought the note & tracked his carriage though it was a rented one