The Luminaries

and Nilssen both refused his offer outright, though Nilssen promised to describe the event in a high degree of detail, after the fact, and Frost suggested that Lowenthal might like to assist him in developing a strategy of reconnaissance, beforehand.

‘It’ll be three shillings on the door,’ Lowenthal supplied, in case Tauwhare could not read, and was disguising his lack of ability.

‘Three shillings?’ Tauwhare said, glancing up. That was an extraordinary sum, for one evening’s entertainment. ‘What for?’

Lowenthal shrugged. ‘She knows that she can charge what she likes, and she’s going to do just that. It might pay for your brandy if you drink quick enough: she’s doing bottomless cups, you see, not drink-for-drink. But you’re right—it’s a robbery. Of course every second man is champing at the bit to get a word with Anna. She’s the real attraction—the real draw! You know she’s barely been seen beyond the Wayfarer’s front door in three weeks. Goodness only knows what’s been happening inside.’

‘I wish to place a notice in your paper,’ Tauwhare said. He tossed the paper down onto the desk, somewhat rudely, so that it skidded over Lowenthal’s forme.

‘Certainly,’ said Lowenthal, with disapproval. He reached for his pencil. ‘Do you have an advertisement prepared?’

‘“Maori guide, very experienced, fluent in English, locally knowledgeable, offers services to surveyors, diggers, explorers and the like. Success and safety guaranteed.”’

‘Surveyors, diggers, explorers,’ repeated Lowenthal, as he wrote. ‘Success and safety. Yes, very good. And then I’ll put your name, shall I?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll need an address as well. Are you stopping off in town?’

Tauwhare hesitated. He had planned to return to the Arahura Valley that night, and spend the night in Crosbie Wells’s deserted cottage; he did not wish to disclose this fact to Lowenthal, however, given Lowenthal’s close acquaintance with Edgar Clinch, the man to whom the dwelling now legally belonged.

Edgar Clinch had been the frequent object of Tauwhare’s meditations ever since the assembly at the Crown Hotel three weeks ago, for despite all the transactions between Maori and Pakeha that had occurred over the past decade, Te Rau Tauwhare still looked upon the Arahura Valley as his own, and he was made very angry whenever any tract of Te Tai Poutini land was bought for profit rather than for use. As far as Tauwhare knew, Clinch had not spent any length of time in the Arahura prior to the sale; since the purchase, he had not even troubled himself to walk the perimeter of the acreage that now belonged to him by law. What had been the point of the purchase? Did Clinch mean to settle there? Did he mean to till the soil? Fell the native timbers? Dam the river? Drop a shaft, perhaps, and mine for gold? Certainly he had not done a thing to Crosbie’s cottage beyond stripping it of all that he could sell—and even that he had done by proxy. It was a hollow dividend that required no skill, no love, and no hours of patient industry: such a dividend could only be wasted, for it was borne from waste, and to waste it would return. Tauwhare could not respect a man who treated land as though it was just another kind of currency. Land could not be minted! Land could only be lived upon, and loved.

In this Te Rau Tauwhare was no hypocrite. He had travelled every inch of the West Coast, on foot, by cart, on horseback, and by canoe. He could picture the entire length of it, as though upon a richly illustrated map: in the far north, Mohikinui and Karamea, where the mosses were fat and damp, where the leaves were waxy, where the bush was an earthy-smelling tangle, where the Nikau fronds, shed from the trunks of the palms, lay upon the ground as huge and heavy as the flukes of whales; further south, the bronze lacquer of the Taramakau, the crenulated towers at Punakaiki, the marshy flats north of Hokitika, always crawling with the smoky mist of not- quite-rain; then the cradled lakes; then the silent valleys, thick with green; then the twisting flanks of the glaciers, rippled blue and grey; then the comb of the high Alps; then, at last, Okahu and Mahitahi in the far South—wide, shingled beaches littered with the bones of mighty trees, where the surf was a ceaseless battery, and the wind a ceaseless roar. After Okahu the coastline became sheer and impassable. Beyond it, Tauwhare knew, lay the deep waterways of the southern fjords, where the sun set early behind the sudden peaks, so that the water took on the blackened look of tarnished silver, and the shadows pooled like oil. Tauwhare had never seen Piopiotahi, but he had heard tell of it, and he loved it because it was Te Tai Poutini land.

Thus the ribbon of the Coast—and there at the heart of it all, the Arahura River, taonga, wahi tapu, he matahiapo i te iwi! If the Arahura was Tauwhare’s equator, dividing the land of Te Tai Poutini into halves, then Crosbie’s cottage, situated in the valley more or less halfway between the mountains and the ocean, was his meridian. And yet he could not claim it; his hapu could not claim it; his iwi could not claim it. Before Crosbie Wells’s body had been committed to the ground, those hundred rolling acres in the Arahura Valley had been purchased by a profit-hungry Pakeha, who had sworn, upon his honour, that he had come by the land honestly: there had been no foul play of any kind, he had said, and he certainly had not broken any laws.

‘A hotel?’ said Lowenthal. ‘Or a doss house? Just the name will do.’

‘I do not have an address,’ Tauwhare said.

‘Well, here,’ said Lowenthal, coming to his aid. ‘I’ll write “inquiries care of the editor, Weld-street”. How about that? You can come to me later this week and ask if anyone has inquired.’

‘That’s fine,’ said Tauwhare.

Lowenthal waited for an expression of gratitude, but none came. ‘Very good,’ he said, after a pause. His voice was cold. ‘It’s sixpence, for a week in the columns. Ten pence for a fortnight, and a shilling sixpence for a month. In advance, of course.’

‘A week,’ Tauwhare said, shaking the contents of his purse carefully onto his palm. The small pile of pennies and farthings showed plainly that he was in need of work. His only income since the night at the Crown had been a silver shilling, won on a game of strength two weeks ago. Once he had paid Lowenthal for the advertisement, he would barely have enough to cover the following day’s meals.

Lowenthal watched him count pennies a moment, and then said, in a kinder voice, ‘I say, Mr. Tauwhare: if you’re short of ready money, you might please yourself to head down to the spit. There’s a call for hands on Gibson Quay. You might not have heard it—the bell sounded an hour ago. Godspeed’s out of the water at long last, you see, and they need men to clear the cargo.’

Over the past three weeks the barque had been shunted into shallower waters by two large tugboats; from there her hull had been lifted onto rollers, laid flush with the shore; finally, at low tide that morning, she had been hauled clear of the surf by a team of harnessed Clydesdales and a winch. She was now dry upon the spit— seeming, in her shattered enormity, less like a beached creature of the water than like a fallen creature of the air. Lowenthal had detoured past the spit that morning; he had fancied that the ship had plunged from a great height, and had perished, where she fell. All three of her masts had broken off at the base, and without her sails and rigging she seemed almost shorn. He had gazed at her for a long moment before moving on. Once her cargo had been cleared and her fixings removed she would be dismantled and sold, piecemeal, for salvage and repair.

‘Now that I mention it,’ he went on, ‘we might do very well to have one of our own men on hand, while the cargo’s being cleared. On account of Tom’s shipping crate, I mean—and whatever it was that Mr. Moody thought he saw, below. You can be our eyes and ears, Mr. Tauwhare. You have the perfect excuse, if you’re short on cash, and in need of honest work. Nobody will ask you how or why.’

But Tauwhare shook his head. He had pledged, privately, never to transact with Francis Carver again, under any circumstances. ‘I do not do odd jobs,’ he said, placing six pennies on the countertop.

‘Go on down to the Godspeed,’ Lowenthal insisted. ‘Nobody’s going to ask you any questions. You have the perfect excuse.’

But Tauwhare did not like to take advice from other men, however well intentioned. ‘I will wait for surveying work,’ he said.

‘You might be waiting a good long time.’

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

Lowenthal was becoming annoyed. ‘You aren’t seeing sense,’ he said. ‘Here’s a chance for you to do us all a good turn, and yourself besides. You won’t be able to attend the widow’s party without a ticket, and you won’t be able to buy a ticket if you’ve got an empty purse. Go on down to Gibson Quay, and put in a day’s work, and do us all a favour.’

‘I do not want to attend the party.’

Lowenthal was incredulous. ‘Why on earth not?’