Bill looked at the nugget for a long moment. Then he looked up, and said, ‘No. You keep your nugget, Crosbie Wells. I don’t want a part in any scheme.’
PART SIX
The Widow and the Weeds
FIXED EARTH
In which Emery Staines takes his metal to the bank; Crosbie Wells proposes a deceit; and Staines begins to doubt his first impression, much too late.
Emery Staines was yet to make a strike in Hokitika. He had not yet found a patch of ground he liked well enough to stake, or indeed, a company he liked well enough to join. He had amassed a small ‘competence’ in dust, but the pile had been collected variously, from beaches both north and south of the river, and from small gullies on the far side of the Hokitika Gorge: it was an inconstant yield, of which the greater portion by far had already disappeared. Staines tended towards profligacy whenever the time and money spent were his very own: he far preferred to sleep and dine in the society of others than to do so alone in his tent beneath the stars, the romance of which did not endure, he discovered, past the first experience. He had not been prepared for the bitterness of the West Canterbury winter, and was very frequently driven indoors by the rain; with poor weather as his excuse, he drank wine and ate salt beef and played at cards every evening, venturing out the next morning to fill his handkerchief anew. Had it not been for his agreement with Francis Carver, he might have continued in this haphazard way indefinitely, which is to say, following a two-part pattern of excess and recovery; but he had not forgotten the conditions of his sponsorship, under which he would shortly be obliged to ‘throw down an anchor’, as the diggers termed it, and invest.
On the morning of the 18th of June Staines woke early. He had spent the night at a flophouse in Kaniere, a long, low clapboard shanty with a lean-to kitchen and hammocks strung in tiers. There was a damp chill in the air; as he dressed, his breath showed white. Outside, he paid a halfpenny for a plate of porridge, ladled from a steaming vat, and ate standing, gazing eastward to where the ridge of the high Alps formed a crisp silhouette against the winter sky. When the plate was clean he returned it to the hatch, tipped his hat to his fellows, and set off for Hokitika, where he intended to make an appointment with a gold buyer preparatory to purchasing a claim.
As he came around the river to the spit he perceived a ship make its stately approach into the neck of the harbour; it glided into the roadstead and seemed to hover, broadside to the river, in the deep water on the far side of the bar. Staines admired the craft as he walked around the long curve of the quay. It was a handsome three-masted affair, none too large, with a figurehead carved in the shape of an eagle, its beak wide and screaming, its wings outspread. There was a woman at the portside rail: from this distance Staines could not make out her face, much less her expression, but he supposed that she was lost in a reverie, for she stood very still, both hands gripping the rail, her skirts whipping about her legs, the strings of her bonnet slapping at her breast. He wondered what preoccupied her—whether she was absorbed in a memory, a scene recalled, or in a forecast, something that she wished for, something that she feared.
At the Reserve Bank he produced his kid pouch of dust, and, at the banker’s request, surrendered its contents to be examined and weighed. The valuation took some time, but the eventual price offered was a good one, and Staines left the building with a paper note made out for twenty pounds folded in his vest pocket, against his heart.
‘Stop you there, lad.’
Staines turned. On the steps of the bank, just rising, was a sandy-haired man, perhaps fifty in age. His skin was very weathered, and his nose very red. He sported a patchy week-old beard, the stubble of which was quite white.
‘Can I help you?’ said Staines.
‘You can answer me a couple of questions,’ said the man. ‘Here’s the first. Are you a Company man?’
‘I’m not a Company man.’
‘All right. Here’s the second. Honesty or loyalty?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Honesty or loyalty,’ said the man. ‘Which do you value higher?’
‘Is this a trick?’
‘A genuine inquiry. If you wouldn’t mind.’
‘Well,’ said Staines, frowning slightly, ‘that’s very difficult to say—which to value higher. Honesty or loyalty. From a certain point of view one might say that honesty is a kind of loyalty—a loyalty to the truth … though one would hardly call loyalty a kind of honesty! I suppose that when it came down to it—if I had to choose between being dishonest but loyal, or being disloyal but honest—I’d rather stand by my men, or by my country, or by my family, than by the truth. So I suppose I’d say loyalty … in myself. But in others … in the case of others, I feel quite differently. I’d much prefer an honest friend to a friend who was merely loyal to me; and I’d much rather
‘That’s good,’ said the man. ‘That’s very good.’
‘Is it?’ said Staines, smiling now. ‘Have I passed some kind of a test?’
‘Almost,’ said the man. ‘I’m after a favour. In good faith—and on your terms. Look here—’
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a nugget, around the size of a short cigar. He held it up, so that it caught the light. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’
‘Very nice,’ said Staines, but he was no longer smiling.
The man continued. ‘Picked this up in the Clutha Valley. Otago way. Been carrying it about for a month— two months—but I’m wanting to turn it into land, you see—got my eye on a patch of land—and the land agent won’t touch anything but paper money. Here’s the problem. I’ve been robbed. Got no proof of my own identity. My papers, my miner’s right. Everything’s gone. So I can’t bank this nugget on my own accord.’
‘Ah,’ said Staines.
‘What I’m after is a favour. You take this nugget into the bank. Say it’s your own—that you found it, on Crown land. Change it into paper money for me. It wouldn’t take you half an hour, all up. You can name your price.’
‘I see,’ said Staines, uncertainly. He hovered a moment. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you might simply explain your situation to the fellows inside. You might tell them that you’ve been robbed—as you’ve just told me.’
‘I can’t do that,’ said the man.
‘There are always records,’ said Staines. ‘Even if you don’t have your papers, they’ll have other ways of tracking who you are. The shipping news and so forth.’
The man shook his head. ‘I was on an Otago certificate,’ he said, ‘and I never came through the customhouse when I arrived. There’s no record of me here.’
‘Oh,’ said Staines—who was beginning to feel very uncomfortable.
The man stepped forward. ‘I’m telling you a straight story, lad. The nugget’s mine. Picked it up in the Clutha Valley. I’ll sketch the place for you. I’ll draw you a bloody map. My story’s straight.’
Staines looked again at the nugget. ‘Can anyone vouch for you?’ he said.
‘I haven’t gone waving this about,’ the man snapped, shaking his fist. ‘Where would be the sense in that? I’ve been robbed already; I won’t be robbed again. There’s only one soul on earth who’s touched this piece besides me. Young woman by the name of Anna Wetherell.
