The Luminaries

ignorant of this fact also, for Anna was still wearing the black dress that had once belonged to Gascoigne’s late wife, and she had vowed to remain in mourning for some time. Of course, Moody thought, Anna would only need to have opened the wardrobe in her room for the widow to have recognised the dresses … but given that the gowns were currently lined with leaden makeweights, placed there as a decoy by the goldsmith Quee, Mrs. Wells might not have realised, at first glance or first touch, that the original fortune had been replaced by a worthless replica. Clinch had been fooled to this effect already. Moody wondered whether it was upon this false surety that the widow had paid Anna’s debt that afternoon.

If Anna did know that the five dresses had once belonged to Lydia Wells, however, then she surely must have known about their concealed fortune all along, and therefore, about Lauderback’s blackmail, and the forced sale of the Godspeed, ten months prior. In light of this, Moody thought, the circumstance under which Anna’s baby had been killed suddenly seemed very pertinent to the mysteries at hand, for Anna’s relation to Francis Carver, like her relation to Lydia Wells, was a matter about which no man present knew anything at all.

Moody ran his finger absent-mindedly around the rim of his glass. There had to be a better explanation for all of this than merely the correlative accident of circumstance. What had Balfour said, hours ago? ‘A string of coincidences is not a coincidence’? And what was a coincidence, Moody thought, but a stilled moment in a sequence that had yet to be explained?

‘That’s our part in it, at least,’ Balfour added, in a tone of some apology. ‘It’s not much of an answer, Mr. Moody—but it accounts for what got us here tonight; the cause, as I said, of our assembly.’

‘A little more than he bargained for, perhaps,’ said Dick Mannering.

‘It’s always that—when it’s the truth,’ replied Balfour.

Moody looked from face to face. No one man could really be called ‘guilty’, just as no one man could really be called ‘innocent’. They were—associated? Involved? Entangled? Moody frowned. He felt that he did not possess the right word to describe their interrelation. Pritchard had used the word ‘conspiracy’ … but the term was hardly applicable, when each man’s involvement was so incidental, and each man’s relation to the events in question so palpably different. No: the real agents, and the real conspirators, were surely those men and women who were not present—who each had a secret that he or she was trying to hide!

Moody considered the absentees.

Francis Carver, as had been asserted many times that evening, was certainly ‘behind’ something. By Lauderback’s account at least, Carver was an inveterate schemer with a taste for blackmail; what’s more, he had visited Crosbie Wells on the day of his death, and perhaps had even watched him die. This reputation ought not to be forgotten, but it ought not to be given undue credence either, Moody thought: Carver could not be ‘behind’ everything at once, and he certainly could not have engineered a plot of such elaborate proportion as to simultaneously indict twelve men.

Then there was Lydia Wells, the alleged wife of both Wells and Carver, the erstwhile mistress of Alistair Lauderback, and now (as she had recently confided to Gascoigne) the clandestine fiancee of an unnamed man. Like Carver, Mrs. Wells had shown herself to be capable of the most ruthless blackmail, and the most elaborate lies. She had also acted in partnership with Carver once before. The validity of her claim upon Crosbie Wells’s fortune would be determined by the law in due course… though even if her claim was valid, Moody thought, the method of her claiming it was at best discourteous, and at worst, downright heartless. He felt that he distrusted Lydia Wells rather more than he distrusted Francis Carver—though of course this was unreasonable, for he had never met her, nor laid eyes upon her; he knew her only by report, and by a most disjointed and multifarious report at that.

Moody turned now to the other couple, Anna Wetherell and Emery Staines—who had been together on the night of the 14th of January, hours before Anna lapsed into unconsciousness, and Emery disappeared. What had really happened on that night, and what role had they played, whether witting or unwitting, in the Crosbie Wells affair? On the surface of things, it rather seemed as though Emery Staines had all the luck, and Anna, none of it —and yet Anna had survived her brush with death, and Staines, presumably, had not. It struck Moody that every man present, in his own way, was terribly envious of Staines, and terribly jealous of Anna. Staines’s luck as a prospector was shared by no one, and Anna, as a camp whore, was a common property, shared by them all.

He was left with the politician and the gaoler. Moody considered them together. Alistair Lauderback, like his antagonist George Shepard, was a delegator, a man who was protected from the fullest consequences of his actions for the reason that his whims were most often performed and carried out by other men. There were other parallels too. Lauderback was soon to stand for the seat of Westland; Shepard was soon to begin building his gaol-house and asylum on the terrace at Seaview. Lauderback had a personal history with Lydia Wells, his former mistress at the gambling house, just as Shepard had a personal history with Francis Carver, his former prisoner at the Sydney gaol.

In his mind Moody had arranged these external figures into three pairs: the widow and the trafficker; the politician and the gaoler; the prospector and the whore. This realisation pleased him—for Moody’s mind was an orderly one, and he was reassured by patterns of any kind. Almost whimsically he wondered what role he himself played, in this strange tangle of association, yet to be solved. He wondered if he, too, had an opposite. Crosbie Wells, perhaps? Was his counterpart a dead man? Moody recalled, all of a sudden, the apparition upon the barque Godspeed, and he gave an involuntary shiver.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ said Harald Nilssen, and Moody became aware that the men in the room had been waiting for him to speak for some time. They were gazing at him with more or less the same expression of hopeful expectation—the emotion betrayed, restrained, or displayed, according to the temper of the man. So I am to be the unraveller, Moody thought. The detective: that is the role I am to play.

‘Don’t rush him,’ Harald Nilssen added, addressing the room at large—though it had been he who had encouraged Moody to break his silence. ‘Let him speak on his own time.’

But Moody found he could not speak. He looked from face to face, at a loss for what to say.

After another moment, Pritchard leaned in and placed a long finger on the arm of Moody’s chair. ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘You said you had found something in the cargo of the Godspeed, Mr. Moody—something that made you doubt her errand was an honest one. What was it?’

‘The shipping crate, maybe?’ said Balfour.

‘Opium?’ said Mannering. ‘Something to do with opium?’

‘Don’t rush him,’ Nilssen said again. ‘Let him answer as he will.’

Walter Moody had entered the smoking room that evening with no intention of divulging what had happened on his journey from Dunedin. He had barely been able to acknowledge what he had witnessed to himself, let alone make sense of it for other men to hear and understand. In the context of the story that had just been related to him, however, he could see that his recent experience presented an explanation of a kind.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said at last. ‘I have been honoured to enter your confidence this evening, and I thank you for your story. I have a tale to offer in return. There are several points upon which I think my story will be of interest to you, though I am afraid I will be doing little more than exchanging your present questions for different ones.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Balfour. ‘Have the stage, Mr. Moody; have at it.’

Obediently Moody got to his feet, and turned his back to the fire; immediately upon doing so, however, he felt very foolish, and wished that he had remained seated. He clasped his hands behind his back, and rocked forward several times on his heels before speaking.

‘I should like to tell you all at the outset,’ he said at last, ‘that I believe I have news about Emery Staines.’

‘Good or bad?’ said Mannering. ‘He’s alive? You’ve seen him?’

Aubert Gascoigne was looking progressively sourer each time Mannering opened his mouth: he had not yet forgiven the magnate for his rudeness that afternoon, and nor was he likely to do so. Gascoigne bore humiliation extremely ill, and he could hold a grudge for a very long time. At this interruption he hissed audibly through his teeth, in disapproval.

‘I cannot say for certain,’ Moody replied. ‘I must warn you, Mr. Mannering, as I must warn you all, that my story contains several particulars that do not (how shall I put it?) lead me to an immediately rational conclusion. I hope you will forgive me for not disclosing the full narrative of my journey earlier this evening; I confess, I knew not what to make of it myself.’