Like a child caught thieving, Balfour put down the glass.
‘Reverend,’ he said. (It was, on reflection, rather early in the day to be drunk.)
‘Good morning,’ returned the reverend man, and from his accent Balfour knew at once that he was Irish; he relaxed, and allowed himself to be rude. He picked up his glass again, and drank deeply.
The clergyman said, ‘Your friend is a lucky man, I think.’
What an unfortunate face he had—caught in a perennial boyhood, with that bunched mouth, that pouting bottom lip, those teeth like nubbins. One envisaged him in shorts and gaiters, munching on a slab of bread-and- dripping, carrying a parcel of books that had been buckled together with an old belt of his father’s, slapping it against his leg as he ate. But he was thirty, perhaps forty in age.
Balfour narrowed his eyes. ‘Don’t recall we were speaking for your benefit.’
The man inclined his head, as if conceding a point. ‘No, indeed,’ he said. ‘And to the benefit of no other man either, I should hope.’
‘Meaning what, precisely?’
‘Merely that no man ought to profit from overhearing bad news. Least of all a member of the clergy.’
‘Bad news, you call it? Thought you just said he was lucky.’
‘Lucky to have you,’ the clergyman said, and Balfour blushed.
‘You know,’ he said angrily, ‘it doesn’t count as a confession, just because it sounds like a secret, and you heard it on the sly.’
‘You are quite right to make that distinction,’ the clergyman said, still in pleasant tones. ‘But I did not overhear you by design.’
‘As to your design—as to what’s intentioned and what’s not. Who’s to know it?’
‘You were talking very loud.’
‘Who’s to know your design, I meant?’
‘With respect to my intentions, I’m afraid you’ll have to trust in my word—or in my cassock, if my word is not enough.’
‘Trust what in your word and your cassock? Trust what enough?’
‘Trust that I did not mean to eavesdrop,’ said the clergyman patiently. ‘Trust that I can keep a secret, when I’m asked.’
‘Well,’ Balfour said, ‘you’ve been asked. I’m asking. And you ought to leave off mentioning luck and bad news. That’s your opinion—that’s not what you heard.’
‘You’re right. I do apologise.’
‘Unsolicited, you know. And not appreciated.’
‘I do apologise. I shall be silent.’
Balfour waved his finger. ‘But you should leave off because I’ve asked you—not because of the confessing rule. Because it wasn’t a confession.’
‘No indeed: we agree on that.’ He added, in a different voice, ‘In any case, confession is a Catholic practice.’
‘But you’re Catholic.’ All of a sudden Balfour was feeling very drunk.
‘Free Methodist,’ the reverend man corrected, without offence; but he added, as a gentle reprimand, ‘You can’t tell a great deal about a man from his accent, you know.’
‘It’s Irish,’ said Balfour, stupidly.
‘My father hails from the county Tyrone. Before I came here, I was in Dunedin; before that, I was in New York.’
‘New York—now there’s a place!’
The reverend shook his head. ‘Everywhere is a place,’ he said.
Balfour faltered. After this admonishment, he felt that he could not pursue the subject of New York—but he could not think of anything else to speak about, beyond the subject he had already forbidden the reverend man to pursue. He sat a moment, scowling; then he said, ‘You’re stopping here?’
‘At this hotel?’
‘Ay.’
‘No: in fact my tent is flooded, and I’m taking my breakfast out of the rain,’ the clergyman said. He spread his hand to indicate the detritus of the meal before him, long since cold. ‘You see I have taken rather a long time of it, to make the shelter last.’
‘You don’t have a church to go to?’
This was a rather rude question, and one to which Balfour already knew the answer, for there were only three churches in Hokitika at that time. But he was feeling somehow thwarted by the man, in a way that he could not quite identify, and he wished to regain the upper hand—not by shaming him, exactly; but by cutting him down to size.
The clergyman only smiled, showing his tiny teeth. ‘Not yet,’ he said.
‘Never heard of a Free Methodist. I suppose it’s one of the new ones.’
‘A new practice, a new polity,’ said the man. He smiled again. ‘But an old doctrine, of course.’
Balfour thought him rather smug.
‘I suppose you’ve come on a mission,’ he said. ‘To turn the heathens.’
‘I notice that you make a great many suppositions,’ said the clergyman. ‘You have not yet asked a question without presuming to answer it as well.’
But Thomas Balfour did not take kindly to this kind of observation: he would not be instructed on the formation of his thought. He pushed his chair back from the table, indicating that he intended to take his leave.
‘To answer you,’ the clergyman went on, as Balfour reached for his coat, ‘I am to be the chaplain of the new gaol-house at Seaview. But until it is built’—he picked up his pamphlet, and slapped it in an explanatory fashion against the palm of his other hand—‘I’m a student of theology, that’s all.’
‘Theology!’ said Balfour. He pushed his arms into the sleeves of his coat. ‘You ought to be reading stiffer stuff than that, you know. Hell of a parish you’re walking into.’
‘God’s people, even so.’
Balfour nodded vaguely and made to leave. Suddenly a new thought struck him.
‘If you called it bad news,’ he said. ‘I’m going to wager that you were listening for a good long while.’
‘Yes,’ said the chaplain humbly. ‘I was. It was a name that caught my attention.’
‘Carver?’
‘No: Wells. Crosbie Wells.’
Balfour narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s Crosbie Wells to you?’
The chaplain hesitated. The truthful answer was that he did not know Crosbie Wells at all—and yet in the fortnight since that man’s death, he had done little else but think of him, and ponder the circumstances of his death. He conceded after a pause that he had had the solemn honour of digging Wells’s grave, and performing the last rites over his coffin, as it was lowered into the ground—an explanation that did not satisfy Thomas Balfour. The shipping agent was still regarding his new acquaintance with an expression of patent mistrust; his eyes narrowed still further when the chaplain (who ordinarily bore up very well under doubtful scrutiny) suddenly winced, and dropped his gaze.
The chaplain’s name—as Walter Moody would discover some nine hours later—was Cowell Devlin. He had arrived in Hokitika upon the clipper ship
Immediately upon landing, he had reported to the Police Camp, where the gaol’s governor, George Shepard, wasted little time in putting him to work. Devlin’s official duties would not begin until the completion of the new Hokitika gaol-house, high on the terrace of Seaview; in the meantime, however, Devlin might make himself useful around the Police Camp, and help with the daily management of the temporary gaol, which was, at
