The Luminaries

out, letting it dangle foolishly from his index finger, and Gascoigne took it up. Deftly he snapped open the barrel and peered into the breech. Then he turned on Anna.

‘Who loaded this piece?’ he demanded.

‘I did it myself,’ Anna said, bewildered. ‘I can show you the spares.’

‘Show me. Show me the spares.’

She clambered up, and went to the whatnot beside the bed; after a moment she returned with a tin box in which seven cartridges were rolling on a scrap of brown paper. Gascoigne touched them with his finger. Then he passed the pistol to the whore. ‘Do it just as you did. The very same.’ Anna nodded dumbly. She pivoted the barrel sideways and fitted a cartridge into the breech. She then snapped the barrel back correctly, cocked the piece, and handed the loaded pistol back to him. She looked terrified, Pritchard thought—dumbfounded, mechanical. Gascoigne took the pistol from her, stepped back several paces, levelled the piece, and fired at the headboard of her bed. The report sounded just as it had before—this time Pritchard heard a murmur of alarm from the floor below, and rapid footsteps—and they all looked to the spot where he had fired. A perfect hole, darkened slightly at its edges by the heat, pierced the centre of her pillow; a puff of feathered dust had risen up from the stuffing, and as they watched, floated down in a film of gauze. Gascoigne moved forward, and tossed the pillow aside. With his fingers he felt around the headboard of the bed, just as Anna had felt around her neck for injury, and after a moment he gave a grunt of satisfaction.

‘It’s there?’ Pritchard said.

‘Hardly made a scratch,’ Gascoigne said, testing the depth of the hole with the end of his finger. ‘Those muff pistols, they’re not worth much.’

‘But where—’ Pritchard was at a loss. His tongue felt thick in his mouth.

‘What happened to the first?’ said Gascoigne, echoing him. They all stared at the second cartridge, the visible cartridge, misshapen in his hand. Then Gascoigne looked at Anna, and Anna at Gascoigne—and it seemed to Pritchard that a look of understanding passed between them.

What a wretched thing it was, to behold one’s whore exchanging glances with another man! Pritchard wanted to despise her, but he could not: he felt dulled, even bewildered. There was a ringing in his ears.

Anna turned to him. ‘Will you go downstairs?’ she said. ‘Tell Edgar I was playing with the gun, or cleaning it, and it went off by accident.’

‘He isn’t at the desk,’ Pritchard said.

‘Tell the valet, then. Just make it known. I don’t want anybody coming up; I don’t want any fuss. Please do it.’

‘All right. I will,’ Pritchard said. ‘And then—’

‘And then you should go.’ Anna was firm.

‘I want what I came for.’ He spoke quietly, glancing sideways at Gascoigne—but the other man’s eyes were discreetly lowered.

‘I can’t help you, Joseph. I don’t have what you want. Please go.’

He looked into her eyes again. They were green, with a thick rind of darkness around the edge of the iris, and flecks of pebbled grey clustered around the pupil in rays. It had been months since he had seen the colour in her eyes, since he had seen her pupil as a point, a grain, and not as a blurred disc of blackness, dulled with sleep. She was sober—of this he had no doubt at all. So she was a liar, and maybe even a thief; so she was deceiving him. And her appointment, the man Gascoigne. There was another secret. Another lie. Going with a lady, to look at hats—!

But Pritchard found that he could not renew his anger. He felt ashamed. He felt as though it had been he who had intruded, as though it had been he who had disturbed an intimate scene in the whore’s own chambers, between Anna and Gascoigne. The shame Pritchard felt was of a very crude and childish sort: it came upon him as a rush of bitter feeling, swelling in his throat.

At last he turned on his heel and made to leave. In the doorway he reached back for the handle, to pull the door shut behind him—but he did it slowly, and watched them through the narrowing crack.

Gascoigne began moving just before the door was quite closed. He spun towards Anna and opened his arms for an embrace, and Anna fell into him, her pale cheek rising to fit into the curve of his neck. Gascoigne wrapped his arms strongly about her waist, and Anna’s body went limp; he lifted her, so that her toes trailed on the floor; she was clasped against him; he lowered his head and pressed his cheek against her hair. His jaw was clenched; his eyes were open; he breathed fiercely through his nose. Pritchard, with his eye at the door, was overcome with loneliness. He felt that he had never loved, and that no soul had ever loved him. He shut the door as softly as he could, and padded down the stairs.

‘May I interject to ask a question?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Can you show me exactly how Miss Wetherell was holding the pistol?’

‘Certainly. Like this—with the heel of her hand right here. I was standing at an angle to her, about where Mr. Mannering is sitting now, in relation to me, and her body was half-turned, like this.’

‘And if the gun had fired as expected, what kind of injury would Miss Wetherell likely have sustained?’

‘If she was lucky, a flesh wound in the shoulder. If she was unlucky—well, perhaps a little lower. Her heart, maybe. The left side … The truly curious thing, of course, is even if the cartridge was a blank, she still should have been impacted by the empty casing, or burnt by the powder, or seared at the very least. We couldn’t make heads or tails of it.’

‘Thank you. I’m sorry to interrupt.’

‘Is there something you can share with us, Mr. Moody?’

‘Presently I will—when I have heard the rest of the story.’

‘I must say, sir—you’re looking awfully queer.’

‘I’m quite well. Please continue.’

It was still early in the afternoon when Pritchard returned to his drug hall on Collingwood-street, but he felt that it ought to be much later—that night ought to be falling, to make sense of the exhaustion that he felt. He entered by way of the shop, and spent a foolish moment straightening the razor-strops with the corners of the shelves, and tidying the bottles so that they stood shoulder-to-shoulder against the lip of the display cabinet—but suddenly he could not bear himself. He set a card in the shop window informing callers to return on Monday, locked the door, and retired to his laboratory.

There were several orders set out upon his desk, to be made up, but he gazed down at the forms almost without seeing them. He took off his jacket and hung it on the hook beside the range. He tied his apron about his waist by habit. Then he stood and gazed at nothing.

Mary Menzies’s words had fixed him—they were his prophecy, his curse. ‘You have never been at peace with good’—he remembered them; he wrote them down; and by doing so he made sure her words came true. He became the man whom she rejected because she rejected him, because she left. And now he was thirty-eight, and he had never been in love, and other men had mistresses, and other men had wives. With his long finger Pritchard touched the shaft of a prescription bottle on the desk before him. She was nineteen. She was Mary Menzies in his mind.

A phrase of his father’s returned to him: you give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life. (‘Remember that, Joseph,’—with one hand on Pritchard’s shoulder, and the other clasping a newborn puppy against his chest; the next day, Pritchard dubbed the young thing Cromwell, and his father nodded once.) Recalling the words, Pritchard thought: is that what I have done, to my own self, to my own fate? Am I the dog in my father’s maxim, badly named? But it was not a question.

He sat down and placed his hands, palm downward, on the laboratory bench. His thoughts drifted back to Anna. By her own account, she had not intended to commit suicide at all—a claim that Pritchard believed was an honest one. Anna’s life was miserable, but she had her pleasures, and she was not a violent type. Pritchard felt that he knew her. He could not imagine that she would try to take her life. And yet—what had she said? It does occur to one, now and again. Yes, Pritchard thought heavily. Now and again, it does.

Anna was a seasoned opium eater. She took the drug nearly every day, and was well accustomed to its