The Luminaries

‘I was in gaol.’

‘But after that.’

‘What good would that have done?’

‘It might have saved you a good deal of trouble,’ he said curtly. ‘I could have proven that opium was poisoned, if you’d let me testify.’

‘You knew it was poisoned?’

‘I’m guessing. How else, Ann? Unless—’

Anna moved away from him again, to the bedhead this time, and wrapped her fingers around the iron knob. As she moved he smelled her again—the sea. The intensity of the sensation startled him. He had to check the urge to step towards her, to follow her, and breathe her in. He smelled salt, and iron, and the heavy, metallic taste of foul weather … low cloud, he thought, and rain. And not just the sea: a ship. That tarred ropy smell, the dusty damp of bleached teak, oiled sailcloth, candle wax. His mouth began to water.

‘Poisoned,’ Anna said, peering at him. ‘By whom?’

(Perhaps it was a sensory memory—merely a chance echo, the kind that suddenly flooded one’s body, and then vanished just as swiftly. He put it from his mind.)

‘The possibility must have occurred to you,’ he said, frowning.

‘I suppose. I don’t remember anything.’

‘Anything at all?’

‘Only sitting down with the pipe. Heating the pin. After that, nothing.’

‘I believed you weren’t a suicide—that you didn’t mean harm. I believed that.’

‘Oh well,’ Anna said, ‘but it does occur to one, now and again.’

‘Of course—now and again,’ Pritchard said, too quickly. He felt bested, and took a half step backward.

‘I don’t know a thing about poison,’ she said.

‘If I could examine the rest of the lump I could tell you whether or not the stuff had been cut with something else,’ Pritchard said. ‘That’s why I came. I want to know if I can buy some of it back from you to take a look at. Ah Sook won’t give me the time of day.’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘You want to examine it—or swap it out?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You might be covering your tracks.’

Pritchard flushed with indignation. ‘What tracks?’ She said nothing, so he said again, ‘What tracks?’

‘Ah Sook thinks you poisoned it,’ Anna said at last, peering at him.

‘Does he? Bloody roundabout way of doing it, if I wanted to see you dead.’

‘What if you wanted to see him dead?’

‘And lose his business?’ Pritchard’s voice became low. ‘Look here: I don’t claim a brotherly feeling or anything of that sort, but I’ve got no quarrel with Oriental folk. Do you hear? I’ve got no reason to wish any one of them harm. None at all.’

‘His claim tent was slashed again. Last month. All his medicines got spoiled.’

‘What—you think that was me?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Then what’s the story?’ Pritchard said. ‘Give it up, Ann. What?’

‘He thinks you’re running a racket.’

‘Poisoning chinks?’ Pritchard snorted.

‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘And it’s not as stupid as all that, you know.’

‘Is that right! Come around to his perspective, have you?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ she said. ‘It’s not me who thinks—’

‘You think me a cross old man,’ Pritchard said. ‘I know it. I am a cross old man, Anna. But I’m not a murderer.’

The whore’s conviction disappeared as swiftly as it had come to animate her. She shrank back again, stepping sideways towards the window, and her hand moved to the tatted lace of her collar. She began to pluck at it. Prichard felt soothed. He recognised the gesture: not as her own, but as a motion that belonged to a girl, any girl.

‘Well, anyway,’ he said, trying to make amends. ‘Anyway.’

‘You’re not so very old,’ she said.

He wanted to touch her. ‘And then this laudanum business—the Crosbie Wells debacle,’ he said. ‘My mind’s been full of that.’

‘What laudanum business?’

‘Phial of laudanum, found underneath the hermit’s bed. It’s mine.’

‘Corked or uncorked?’

‘Corked. But only half full.’

She looked interested. ‘Yours—does that mean belonging to you personal, or just bought from your place?’

‘Bought,’ said Pritchard. ‘And not by Crosbie. I never sold that man a dram.’

Anna placed her hand against her cheek, thinking. ‘That’s strange.’

‘Old Crosbie Wells,’ said Pritchard, trying to be jolly. ‘Nobody ever paid the man a scrap of thought when he was living—and now this.’

‘Crosbie—’ Anna began, but then all at once, she was crying.

Pritchard made no move to advance towards her, to open his arms, to offer comfort. He watched her fish in her sleeve for a handkerchief and waited, his hands locked behind his back. She was not crying for Crosbie Wells. She hadn’t even known the man. She was crying for herself.

Of course, Pritchard thought, it must have been unpleasant, to have been tried for attempted suicide at the petty courts, and hounded by all manner of men, and discussed in the Times as a curiosity, and spoken about over breakfasts, and between rounds at billiards, as if one’s soul were a common property, a cause. He watched as she blew her nose, fumbling with her thin fingers to tuck the handkerchief away. This was not exhaustion merely: this was a grief of a different kind. She seemed not so much harassed as halved.

‘Never mind,’ Anna said at last, when she had regained control. ‘Never mind me.’

‘If I could just take a look at a piece of it,’ Pritchard said.

‘What?’

‘The resin. I’ll buy it back from you. I’m not going to swap it out—you can give me just a piece, you know; you don’t have to give up the whole lump.’

She shook her head, and in the sharpness of the movement Pritchard caught what was different about her. He strode forward, covering the space between them in three quick strides, and grabbed her sleeve.

‘Where is it?’ he said. ‘Where’s the tar?’

She pulled free of him. ‘I ate it,’ she said. ‘I ate the last of it last night, if you must know.’

‘You didn’t—you couldn’t have!’

Pritchard followed her, and turned her by the shoulders so she faced him. He placed the pad of his thumb on her chin and tilted her head back, to better see her eyes.

‘You’re lying,’ he said. ‘You’re dry.’

‘I ate it,’ Anna repeated. She shook herself free.

‘Did you give it back to Sook? Did he take it back?’

‘I ate it. Same as ever.’

‘Come off it, Ann. Don’t be a liar.’

‘I’m not a liar.’

‘You ate a lump of poisoned tar and your eyes are clear as dawn?’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Who’s to say it was poisoned?’

‘Even if it wasn’t—’

‘You know that it was poisoned? You’re sure?’

‘I don’t know a d—ned thing about this d—ned business, and I don’t like your tone,’ Pritchard snapped. ‘I