whoremonger Dick Mannering must be using Anna to smuggle raw ore off the goldfields, as a way of evading duty at the bank. The thought of this collusion grieved Clinch extremely, but he had no reason to press the matter with either party, and did not do so.
Clinch was not the only man to chance upon the hidden fortune in Anna’s gowns, however, and he was not the only man to misapprehend its likely meaning. The digger Quee Long had also uncovered the secrets hidden in Anna’s seams—around much the same time, in fact—and had leaped to the very same conclusion as Clinch. Ah Quee knew first-hand that Mannering was more than capable of fraud, for he had been cheated by the magnate once before. Ah Quee decided to beat Mannering at his own game. He began siphoning the gold out of Anna’s dresses, retorting the dust into squares, and stamping these squares with the name of the goldmine Aurora—so as to ensure that the profit would be banked against his own claim, which by this time had been purchased by a young prospector named Emery Staines.
The project of removing the gold from Anna’s dress took several months. Whenever Anna visited Ah Quee’s hut in Kaniere Chinatown, she was all but senseless with opium; Ah Quee was therefore able to remove the gold with his thread and needle without her knowledge, while she slept. Anna did not wear her orange whoring dress when she travelled to Chinatown. For this reason, the orange dress had remained filled with gold, long after Ah Quee had stripped the other four of their fortune.
Nobody knew how, or why, Ah Quee’s retorted fortune had been stolen from the vault at the camp station. The most probable thief, given the information currently available, was the vanished prospector, Staines—who, significantly, lacked a motivation. The young man was colossally rich, and, by popular opinion at least, colossally fortunate. Why should he desire to steal from his own indentured worker? And why should he choose to stash the gold in another man’s cottage, so far from his own claims? Well, whatever the young man’s reasons, Moody thought, at least one thing was certain: Staines had never banked Ah Quee’s earnings against the Aurora as he was legally obliged to do. This was very perplexing, for the retorted gold, if banked, would have transformed the Aurora goldmine from a duffer into a homeward-bounder overnight.
Emery Staines was also very strangely implicated by the deed of gift that Cowell Devlin had discovered in Crosbie Wells’s stove—which, though it did not bear his signature, bore his name. This deed seemed to imply that Emery Staines and Crosbie Wells had been associates of some kind, and that the hoarded fortune had been intended, for some reason, as a gift from Emery Staines to Anna Wetherell. But this was even more confounding, for whichever way one looked at it, the gold was not Staines’s to give away!
Anna had been carrying a child—Carver’s child—since before she arrived in Hokitika, and in the springtime she began at last to show. Her condition was never to fully ripen into birth, however: in mid-October, Carver returned to Hokitika, confronted Anna, and beat her severely. The unborn child did not survive this encounter. Anna’s later intimation, when she described the scene to Edgar Clinch, was that Carver had killed the child in cold blood.
Moody paused in his chronology to dwell upon this unhappy event. Although the child’s death had been referenced in passing several times that evening, it did not seem as though any man present was entirely clear about how this fatal altercation had come about. It was for reasons of natural delicacy that Moody had not pressed the men for further information, but he wondered now how Anna’s relations with Carver fitted in to the scheme of the story at large. He wondered whether the child’s death had truly been intended, and, if so, what might have motivated Francis Carver to commit such a heinous act. None of the twelve men currently present could answer this question with any kind of objective certainty, of course; they could only describe what they had been told to be true.
(How opaque, the minds of absent men and women! And how elusive, motivation! For Francis Carver might have killed his child in cold repudiation, as an act of loathing, as a brutal prophylactic, or quite by accident: short of asking the man directly, there was no way to tell. Even Anna Wetherell, who had named Carver as the murderer, might have had any number of reasons to lie.)
Having reflected upon this, Moody continued.
Te Rau Tauwhare, encountering Carver by chance on the morning of the 14th of January, had remembered the offer that the man had made him the previous year. For a price of two shillings, Tauwhare offered to tell Carver where Crosbie Wells was living. The men shook hands, Tauwhare gave directions, and Carver made for the Arahura Valley that very same day—a night that was to be Wells’s last. Perhaps Carver had witnessed the hermit’s death, or perhaps he had left moments before its occurrence, but in either case, he had arrived at the cottage with a phial of laudanum, traces of which were later discovered in Crosbie Wells’s stomach during his post-mortem. Following their encounter, Carver returned to Hokitika, manned the
Alistair Lauderback, arriving at Wells’s cottage soon after Carver departed it, found the hermit dead at his kitchen table, his head resting on his arms. He journeyed on to Hokitika, where he was interviewed by the editor Benjamin Lowenthal, who was intending to run a political special in Monday’s edition of the
Clinch then commissioned Harald Nilssen to clear the dead man’s cottage and dispose of his effects. Nilssen did so—and discovered, to his astonishment, a perfect fortune, hidden in every conceivable hiding place around the dwelling’s single room. The ore, once it had been purified by the bank, was valued at a little over four thousand pounds. Nilssen was paid his ten percent commission, leaving a little over thirty-six hundred; out of this had been paid sundry death taxes, fees, and incidentals, which included a present of thirty pounds to the banker, Charlie Frost. The remainder—still a certifiable fortune—was currently being held in escrow at the Reserve Bank. Clinch was not likely to see a single penny of the sum, however: Lydia Wells, arriving mysteriously from Dunedin some days after the hermit’s funeral, had since appealed to revoke Clinch’s purchase, on the grounds that his property and effects legally belonged to her.
Of course, the gold found in Crosbie’s cottage did not represent the sum total of the fortune at play. Ah Quee had only stripped four out of Anna’s five gowns. The final portion, sewn into the folds of Anna’s orange whoring dress, had been discovered by Anna Wetherell herself but two weeks ago, when she woke up in gaol following the crisis of her overdose. She had assumed, reasonably enough, that the gold had only just been planted on her person—for she had no memory of what had happened to her in the twelve hours prior to her arrest, and was in a state of considerable confusion. She entreated Gascoigne’s help, and together they excavated the metal from the orange gown and hid it in a flour sack under Gascoigne’s bed.
When Anna then returned to the Gridiron Hotel, wearing the black dress that had belonged to Gascoigne’s late wife, Edgar Clinch’s old suspicions were renewed. He felt sure—rightly this time—that Anna’s change of dress had something to do with the hidden gold, and he noted with bitterness that her orange whoring gown had now disappeared. He resented very much that she claimed to be unable to pay her debts to him, when he knew full well that she was flush with colour; letting his resentment get the better of him, he spoke to her cruelly, and gave her notice to leave.
But Clinch’s threat did not have the consequence he was expecting. Anna Wetherell had since paid her debt to him in full, but not with the gold in her gowns, and not with her legal earnings either. The debt had been paid out that very afternoon by way of a six-pound loan from Crosbie’s widow, Lydia Wells; her debt to Mannering, which by the magnate’s reckoning was well over a hundred pounds, would be more than covered by the gold she and Gascoigne had excavated from the orange gown. Anna had since quit the Gridiron for good. She had been invited, henceforth, to take her lodging with Lydia Wells at the Wayfarer’s Fortune, where she would no longer call herself a whore.
Did Lydia Wells know that Carver’s missing shipping crate had ended up in Hokitika, and that the dresses had been purchased by Anna, and that the fortune at Crosbie Wells’s cottage was one and the same as the fortune with which Carver had blackmailed the politician Lauderback, some ten months ago? Such a question depended entirely upon Anna. How much did Anna know about her own involvement in this very circular affair? And how much, for that matter, was she willing to reveal to Lydia Wells? It was very possible that Anna did
