The Luminaries

When Godspeed returned from Port Phillip on the 14th of June, Carver met with James Raxworthy to inform him that his tenure as captain had come to an end. The barque had been sold from under him, and by order of the ship’s new owner, a Mr. Wells, Carver himself had been promoted to the captaincy, an honour that gave him the licence to disband Raxworthy’s crew, and assemble his own. The meeting between Carver and his former captain was long, and not at all cordial; relations became further strained when Carver discovered that a certain item had been struck from Godspeed’s inventory one month ago. He appealed to Raxworthy, who only shrugged: as far as he could see, there had been no breach of regulation or protocol in the trunk’s having been recalled. Carver’s fury turned to anguish. He applied to the customhouse, and to all the shipping firms along the quay, and to all the doss-houses in the sailors’ district. His inquiries turned up nothing. Poring over the shipping news of the Otago Witness later that evening, he discovered that, besides Godspeed, there had been only one departure from Port Chalmers on the 13th of May: the schooner Blanche, bound for Hokitika.

‘It’s hardly even a clue,’ he said to Mrs. Wells, ‘but I can’t stand to do nothing. If I do nothing I’ll go mad. I’ve still got his birth certificate, after all—and the miner’s right. I’ll say my name is Crosbie Wells, and I’ll say I’ve lost a shipping crate. I’ll offer a reward for its return.’

‘But what about Crosbie himself?’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘There’s a chance—’

‘If I see him,’ said Carver, ‘I’ll kill him.’

‘Francis—’

‘I’ll kill him.’

‘He will be expecting you to pursue him. He won’t be caught off guard—not a second time.’

‘Neither will I.’

The day before Godspeed’s departure, Anna Wetherell was summoned to the downstairs parlour, where she found Mrs. Wells waiting for her.

‘Now that Mr. Carver has recovered his health,’ said Mrs. Wells, ‘I can turn my mind to less pressing matters, such as the matter of your future. You cannot remain in my household even a moment longer, Miss Wetherell, and you know the reason why.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Anna whispered.

‘I might have turned a blind eye to your betrayal,’ Mrs. Wells went on, ‘and suffered in silence, as is a woman’s lot; the violence brought upon Mr. Carver, however, I cannot ignore. Your alliance with my husband has passed beyond the realm of wickedness, and into the realm of evil. Mr. Carver has been permanently disfigured. Indeed he was lucky to have kept his life, given the severity of the injuries he sustained. He will bear that scar forever.’

‘I was asleep,’ said Anna. ‘I didn’t see any of it.’

‘Where is Mr. Wells?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you telling me the truth, Miss Wetherell?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I swear.’

Mrs. Wells drew herself up. ‘Mr. Carver sails to the West Coast tomorrow, as you know,’ she said, changing the subject, ‘and as it happens I have an acquaintance in a Hokitika man. Dick Mannering is his name. He will set you up in Hokitika as he sees fit: you will become a camp follower, as was your original ambition, and you and I will not cross paths again. I have taken the liberty of costing all of your expenses over the last two months, and passing the debt to him. I can see you are surprised. Perhaps you believe that liquor grows on trees. Do you believe that liquor grows on trees?’

‘No, ma’am,’ she whispered.

‘Then it will not come as a surprise to you that your habit of drinking alone has cost me more than pennies, this month past.’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Evidently you are not as stupid as you are wicked,’ said Mrs. Wells, ‘though given the scope and degree of your wickedness, this hardly signifies as an intellectual achievement. Mr. Mannering, I ought to inform you, is unmarried, so you are in no danger of bringing shame upon his household as you have done upon mine.’

Anna choked; she could not speak. When Mrs. Wells dismissed her she flew to the boudoir, went to her bureau, pulled the stopper from the decanter of laudanum-laced whisky and drank straight from the neck, in two desperate, wretched slugs. Then she threw herself upon her bed, and sobbed until the opiate took effect.

Anna knew very well what awaited her in Hokitika, but her guilt and self-reproach were such that she had steeled herself against all impending fates, as a body against a wind. She might have protested any or all of Mrs. Wells’s arrangements; she might have fled in the night; she might have formed a plan of her own. But she was no longer in any doubt about the fact of her condition, and she knew that it would not be long before she began to show. She needed to quit Mrs. Wells’s household as soon as possible, before the other woman guessed her secret, and she would do so by whatever method available to her.

A gull made a long, low pass down Gibson Quay; once it reached the spit it turned and began climbing on the updraft, circling back to make the pass again. Anna pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. By now Godspeed had received clearance to drop anchor. A line had been thrown ashore, and the sails were being furled and reefed at Carver’s instruction; slowly, the barque rolled towards the wharf. A small crowd of stevedores had gathered to assist, and Anna, blinking suddenly, saw that several of them were pointing at her and talking behind their hands. When they saw that she was looking, they doffed their hats, and bowed, and laughed, hoisting up their trousers by the buckles of their belts. Anna flushed. Suddenly wretched, she crossed the deck to the starboard rail, gripped it with both hands, and, breathing deeply, looked out over the high shelf of the spit, to where the breakers threw up a fine mist of white, blurring the line of the horizon. She remained there until Carver, calling her name with a curt accent, bid her to descend to the quay; a Mr. Edgar Clinch, acting proprietor of the Gridiron Hotel, had made her an offer of lodging, which Carver had accepted on her behalf.

TE-RA-O-TAINUI

In which Crosbie Wells makes for the Arahura Valley, and the steamer Titania is wrecked upon the bar.

Wells’s nugget, banked by Staines, fetched over a hundred pounds in cash money. While the buyer completed his evaluation, and the banker made his notes, Staines was interrogated from a great many quarters about the nugget’s origin. He gave vague replies to these inquiries, waving his hand in an easterly direction, and mentioning general landmarks such as ‘a gully’ and ‘a hill’, but his attempts to downplay the yield were unsuccessful. When the nugget’s value was chalked onto the board above the buyer’s desk, the banker led a round of applause, and the diggers chanted his name.

‘If you like, we could have it copied, before it’s smelted down,’ said the banker, Frost, as Staines made to depart. ‘You could paint the copy gold, and keep it—or you could send it home to a sweetheart, as a token. It’s a handsome piece.’

‘I don’t need a replica,’ said Staines. ‘Thanks anyway.’

‘You might want to remember it,’ said Frost. ‘Your luckiest day.’

‘I hope my luckiest day is yet to come,’ said Staines—prompting another round of applause, and more admiration, and propositions to ‘go mates’ from at least half a dozen men. By the time he had extracted himself from the crowd and returned outside, he felt more than a little annoyed.

‘I have been declared the luckiest man in Hokitika,’ he said, as he handed Crosbie Wells his envelope. ‘I have been advised to keep hold of my luck, and to share my luck around, and to confess the secret of my luck, and I don’t know what else. I fancy that the story you told me was not at all true, Mr. Wells; you simply knew what would happen to a man foolish enough to walk into the Reserve Bank with a nugget of that size at this hour of the day.’

Wells was grinning. ‘The luckiest man in Hokitika,’ he said. ‘Quite an expectation. I trust you’ll bear