The Luminaries

‘You said it would be foolish. A piece of theatre.’

A moment of quiet passed between them. Then Lowenthal said, ‘Did you know they’ve brought in a barrister? A Mr. John Fellowes, from the Greymouth Police. He’s been assigned to straighten out the Crosbie Wells affair.’

Tauwhare shrugged.

‘He’s doing his research as we speak,’ Lowenthal continued, ‘in order to find out if this business warrants an inquiry. He’s making a report for a Supreme Court judge. Supreme Court means murder, Mr. Tauwhare. A murder trial.’

‘I have had no part in murder,’ said Tauwhare.

‘Perhaps not—but we both know that you’re as mixed up in this business as the rest of us. Come! Mr. Moody saw something in the hold of the Godspeed, and you have a perfect chance to find out what he saw.’

But Tauwhare did not care what Mr. Moody saw, or did not see. ‘I will wait for honest work,’ he said again.

‘You might show a little loyalty.’

Tauwhare flared at this. ‘I have not broken my oath,’ he said.

Lowenthal reached across the workbench, put his hand over the pile of pennies, and swept them into his apron pocket. ‘I don’t mean to the Crown lot,’ he said. ‘I mean to your old friend Wells. This is his widow we’re talking about, after all. His widow, and his inheritance, and his memory. You’ll do as you please, of course. But if I were you, I’d make it my business to attend the party tonight.’ ‘Why?’ Tauwhare spat out the word contemptuously.

‘Why?’ said Lowenthal, picking up his composing stick again.

‘Why show loyalty to your good friend Wells? Only that I would have thought you owed it to the man, after selling him out to Francis Carver.’

JUPITER IN SAGITTARIUS

In which Thomas Balfour suffers a lapse of discretion; old subjects are revived; and Alistair Lauderback pens a letter of complaint.

Alistair Lauderback had not been in Hokitika since Wednesday morning, chiefly for the reason that the wreck of the Godspeed was wholly visible from his suite of rooms on the upper floor of the Palace Hotel, and the sight of it caused him no end of bitterness. When he was offered the chance to give an address at the Greymouth Town Hall, and to cut a ribbon on a shaft mine near Kumara, he accepted both invitations heartily, and at once. At the moment we join him—the moment Tauwhare took his leave of Lowenthal —Lauderback was making his way across the Kumara wetlands at a great pace, with a Sharps sporting rifle propped against his shoulder, and a satchel full of shot in his hand. Beside him was his friend Thomas Balfour, similarly armed, and similarly flushed with virtuous exertion. The two had spent the morning shooting at game, and they were now returning to their horses, which were tethered at the edge of the valley, visible from this distance as a small patch of white and a small patch of black against the sky.

‘Hell of a day,’ Lauderback exclaimed, as much to himself as to Balfour. ‘It’s a glorious hell of a day! Why, it almost makes one forgive the rain, does it not—when the sun comes out like this, at the end of it all.’

Balfour laughed. ‘Forgiven, maybe,’ he said, ‘but not forgotten. Not by me.’

‘It’s a grand country,’ said Lauderback. ‘Look at those colours! Those are New Zealand colours, rinsed by New Zealand rain.’

‘And we are New Zealand patriots,’ said Balfour. ‘The view’s all ours, Mr. Lauderback. There for the taking.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Lauderback. ‘Nature’s patriots!’

‘No need for a flag,’ said Balfour.

‘How lucky we are,’ said Lauderback. ‘Think how few men have laid eyes upon this view. Think how few men have walked this soil.’

‘More than we expect, I don’t doubt,’ said Balfour, ‘if the birds have learned to scatter at the sight of us.’

‘You give them too much credit, Tom,’ said Lauderback. ‘Birds are very stupid.’

‘I shall remember that, next time you come home with a brace of duck and a long account of how you snared them.’

‘You do that: but I shall make you hear the story all the same.’

For Thomas Balfour this good-humoured exchange was very welcome. Over the past three weeks Lauderback had been excessively bad company, and Balfour had long since tired of his capricious moods, which alternated brittle, vicious, and sour. Lauderback tended to revert to childish modes of behaviour whenever his hopes were dashed, and the wreck of the Godspeed had wrought an unbecoming change in him. He had become very jealous of the company of crowds, needing always to be surrounded and attended; he would not spend any length of time alone, and protested if he was required to do so. His public manner was unchanged—he was exuberant and convincing when speaking from a pulpit—but his private manner had become altogether peevish. He flew into a temper at the slightest provocation, and was openly scornful of his two devoted aides, who chalked these vicissitudes of humour up to the taxing nature of political life, and did not protest them. That Sunday they had been granted a reprieve from Lauderback’s company, owing to a shortage of rifles, and, equally, to Lauderback’s disinclination to share; instead they would spend the period of their master’s absence at the Kumara chapel, contemplating, at Lauderback’s instruction, their sins.

Alistair Lauderback was an intensely superstitious man, and he felt that he could date the sudden change in his fortune to the night of his arrival in Hokitika, when he came upon the body of the hermit, Crosbie Wells. When he dwelled upon all the misfortunes he had suffered since that day—the wreck of the Godspeed in particular—he felt soured towards all of Westland, as though the whole forsaken district had been complicit in the project of embarrassing his successes, and frustrating his desires. The ruin of the Godspeed was proof, in his mind, that the very place was cursed against him. (This belief was not as irrational as might be supposed, for the shifty movement of the Hokitika bar owed, in the large part, to the silt and gravel that was carried down the Hokitika River from the claims upstream, and now clotted the river mouth, invisibly, in ever-changing patterns that answered only to the tide: in essence, the Godspeed had met her end upon the tailings of a thousand claims, and for that, every man in Hokitika could be said to be partially to blame for the wreck.)

Some days after Godspeed’s ruin Thomas Balfour had confessed to Lauderback that, in fact, the shipping crate containing Lauderback’s documents and personal effects had disappeared from Gibson Quay, due to a mistake of lading for which no one man seemed to be accountable. Lauderback received this information dispiritedly, but without real interest. Now that the Godspeed was ruined, he had no reason to blackmail Francis Carver, the purpose of which had only been to win his beloved ship back again: the barque’s bill of sale, stowed in his trunk among his personal possessions, was no longer of any use to him as leverage.

Lauderback had recently taken to playing dice in the evenings, for gambling was a weakness to which he periodically fell prey whenever he felt shamed, or out of luck. He demanded, naturally, that Jock and Augustus Smith take up this vice also, for he could not endure to sit at the table alone. They dutifully complied, though their bets were always very cautious, and they bowed out early. Lauderback placed his bets with the grim determination of a man for whom winning would mean inordinately much, and he was as chary of his tokens as he was of his whisky, which he drank very slowly, to make the evening last until the dawn.

‘You weren’t going to ride back this afternoon, were you?’ he said to Balfour now, with an emphasis that suggested regret.

‘I was,’ Balfour said. ‘That is—I am. I mean to be in Hokitika by tea-time.’