Текст книги "The Luminaries"

Автор книги: Eleanor Catton

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George Shepard’s appointment as governor of the Hokitika Gaol had been met with little opposition from the men who lived and dug within the bounds of his jurisdiction. Shepard was a cold, formidable character, slow moving in a way that seemed constantly to emphasise the breadth of his shoulders and the weight of his arms; when he walked, it was with long, deliberate strides, and when he spoke (which was seldom) he intoned in a rich and august bass. His manner was humourless and not at all likeable, but severity counted as a virtue for a man of his profession, and it was to his credit, the voters agreed, that no charge of bias or prejudice had ever been laid at his door.

If Shepard was the subject of idle rumour, it was of the conjectural sort, and nearly always concerned his private relations with his wife. Their marriage was to all appearances conducted in absolute silence, with a grim determination on his part, and a fearful inhibition on hers. The woman referred to her own self as Mrs. George, and this only in a whisper; she wore the bewildered, panicked aspect of a tortured animal, who sees a cage where there is none, and cowers at every sudden thing. Mrs. George rarely ventured beyond the gaol-house door except, on rare occasions of civic display, to trip red-faced down Revell-street in Governor Shepard’s wake. They had been at Hokitika four months before anyone discovered that she did in fact possess a Christian name—Margaret—though to speak it in her presence was an assault so dreadful that her only recourse was to flee.

‘I come to you on business, Mr. Nilssen,’ Shepard began. He held the bowl of his pipe in his fist against his breast as he spoke. ‘Our present gaol-house is little better than a corral—a holding pen. There is scant light, and insufficient air. To ventilate, we prop open the door upon a chain, and I sit beyond the doorway with my rifle on my knees. It is untenable. We haven’t the resources to cope with—more experienced criminals. More sophisticated crimes. A murder, say.’

‘No—yes, yes,’ Nilssen said. ‘Of course.’

There was a pause, and then Shepard continued. ‘If you will forgive my pessimism,’ he said, ‘I believe that Hokitika is about to meet a darker time. This town is at a threshold. Digger law is still the creed of the hills, and here—why, we are but a backwater of Canterbury still, but soon we will be the jewel in her crown. Westland will split, and Hokitika will prosper; but as she rises, she will have to reconcile herself.’

‘Reconcile—?’

‘The savage and the civil,’ Shepard said.

‘You allude to the natives—the Maori tribes?’

Nilssen spoke with a touch of eagerness; he cherished a romantic passion for what he called ‘the tribal life’. When the Maori canoes came strong and flashing through the Buller Gorge—he had seen them from a distance—he was quelled in awe. The warriors seemed terrible to him, their women unknowable, their customs fearsome and primitive. His transfixion was closer to dread than to reverence, but it was a dread to which he sought to return. In fact Nilssen had been first spurred to make his voyage to New Zealand by a chance encounter with an able seaman at a roadside inn near Southampton, who was boasting (rather improbably, as it turned out) of his own encounters with the primitive peoples of the South Seas. The sailor was a Dutchman, and wore his jacket cut short above his hips. He had traded iron nails for cocoa-nuts; he had permitted island women to place their hands upon the white skin of his chest; he had once made a present of a knot to an island boy. (‘What kind of knot?’ Nilssen begged, coming forward; it was a Turk’s Head; Nilssen did not know it, and the seaman sketched the looping floral shape upon the air.)

But Shepard shook his head at Nilssen’s interjection. ‘I do not use “savage” in the native sense,’ he said. ‘I allude to the land itself. Prospecting is an ugly business: it makes a man start thinking like a thief. And here the conditions are foul enough to make the diggers still more desperate.’

‘But the diggings can be made civil.’

‘Perhaps—after the rivers are spent. After the prospectors give way to dams and dredges and company mines—when the forests are felled—perhaps then.’

‘You do not have faith in the power of the law?’ Nilssen said, frowning. ‘Westland is soon to have a seat in Parliament, you know.’

‘I see that I am not making myself clear,’ Shepard said. ‘Will you allow me to begin again?’

‘By all means.’

The gaoler began immediately, without altering his posture or his tone. ‘When two codes of justice are available at once,’ he said, ‘a man will always use the one to inveigh against the other. Consider a man who thinks it just and right to bring a complaint to the Magistrate’s Court against his own whore—expecting both the exercise of the law, and his exemption from it. He is refused, and perhaps he is even charged for consorting with the girl; now he blames the law and the girl both. The law cannot answer for his digger’s sense of what is due, and so he takes the law upon himself, and throttles her. In former days he would have solved his quarrel with his fists, at once—that was digger’s law. Perhaps the whore would perish, or survive, but either way his action was his own. But now—now he feels his very right to demand justice has been threatened, and that is what he acts upon. He is doubly angry, and his rage is doubly spent. I am seeing examples of this kind every day.’

Shepard sat back, and replaced his pipe in his mouth. His manner was composed, but his pale eyes were fixed very intently upon his host.

Nilssen never refused an opportunity to provoke a hypothetical. ‘Yes, but—to follow your argument,’ he said, ‘surely you are not suggesting a preference for digger’s law?’

‘Digger’s law is philistine and base,’ Governor Shepard said calmly. ‘We are not savages; we are civilised men. I do not consider the law to be deficient; I mean to point out, merely, what happens when the savage meets the civil. Four months ago the men and women in my gaol-house were drunks and petty thieves. Now I see drunks and petty thieves who feel indignant, and entitled, and speak righteously, as if they have been unjustly tried. And they are angry.’

‘But—again—to conclude,’ Nilssen said. ‘After the whore is throttled, after the digger’s rage is spent. Surely the civil law then returns to condemn this man? Surely he’s punished justly—in the end?’

‘Not if his fellows rally round him, to preserve his digger’s rights,’ Shepard replied. ‘No man holds to any code as strong as he does when his code’s affronted, Mr. Nilssen, and there’s nothing more brutal than a gang of angry men. I’ve been a gaoler sixteen years.’

Nilssen sat back in his chair. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I take your point; it’s this twilight that’s the danger, between the old world and the new.’

‘We must do away with the old,’ Shepard said. ‘I will not suffer whores, and I will not suffer those who frequent them.’

Shepard’s autobiography (a document which, if ever penned, would be rigid, admonishing, and frugal) did not possess that necessary chapter wherein the young hero sows his oats and strays; since his marriage, his imagination had conjured nothing beyond the squarish figure of Mrs. George, whose measures were so familiar, and so regular, that he might have set his pocket watch by the rhythm of her days. He had always been irreproachable in his conduct, and as a consequence, his capacity for empathy was small. Anna Wetherell’s profession did not fascinate him in the least, and he had no boyhood memories of tenderness or embarrassment to soften him towards the subtleties of her trade; when he looked at her, he saw only a catalogue of indiscretions, a volatile intelligence, and a severe want of promise. That a whore might attempt to take her own life did not strike him as a remarkable thing, nor a very sad one; in this particular case, he might even call a termination merciful. Miss Wetherell lived by the will of the dragon, after all, a drug that played steward to an imbecile king, and she would guard that throne with jealous eyes forever.

It is fair to say that, of the seven virtues, Governor Shepard inclined towards the cardinal four. He was well apprised of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness, but only as a creed to be studied, and obeyed. We do not mean to diminish his religion by remarking that forgiveness is a thing that one must first be obliged to ask for in order to know how to give, and Governor Shepard had never in his life met any imperative to ask. He had prayed for Miss Wetherell’s soul, as he did for all the men and women in his keeping, but his prayers were expressions of duty rather than of hope. He believed the soul to inhabit the body, and consequently, that the body’s desecration was an assault upon the soul: a common whore, when judged by this substantive theology, fared ill indeed, and Anna Wetherell was malnourished, mistreated, and as wretched a picture as any he had seen. He did not wish her damned, but he believed, privately, that her salvation was impossible.

Miss Wetherell’s spiritual fate, and the method by which she had sought to determine it forever, did not interest him; her corporeal merits did not interest him either. In this Shepard was set apart from the majority of men in Hokitika, who (as Gascoigne was to remark to Moody some seven hours later) had been talking of little else for a fortnight. When they exhausted the former subject, they fell back upon the latter, an arrangement that kept them in conversation for a great while.

Nilssen’s pipe had gone out. He rapped the bowl against his desktop to empty the ash and then began to refill it. ‘I believe Alistair Lauderback means to make a change,’ he said, unlacing the strings of his tobacco pouch with his free hand. ‘If he is elected, of course.’

Shepard did not answer at once. ‘You’ve been following the campaigns?’

Nilssen, busy with his pouch, did not notice the other man’s hesitation. When the gaoler had first entered Nilssen had been fearful of himself, even guarded, but he rarely dwelled long in a state of embarrassment. Shepard’s theory of law had roused his intelligence, and gratified it, and he again felt master of his faculties. The absorbing rituals that attended the filling of his pipe—the worn thinness of the leather strings, the dry spice of the tobacco—had restored a kind of order to his senses. He replied, without looking up, ‘Yes indeed. Reading the speeches every day, and with keen attention. Lauderback is here now—in Hokitika—is he not?’

‘He is,’ Shepard said.

‘He will take the seat, I think,’ said Nilssen, rubbing a pinch of tobacco between his fingers. ‘The Lyttelton Times is backing his play.’

‘You value him?’

‘Tunnels and railways,’ Nilssen said, ‘that’s his game, isn’t it? Progress, civilisation, all of that. Strikes me that your thinking squares quite nicely with Lauderback’s campaign.’ He struck a match.

Shepard made to reply, then hesitated. ‘I don’t make a habit of speaking my politics in another man’s office unless I’m invited to do so, Mr. Nilssen.’

‘Oh—please,’ said Nilssen politely, shaking out the match.

‘But with your leave,’ nodding his great pale head, ‘I will say this. I too think that Lauderback will take the seat—Parliament and the Super both. He has a great force of personality on his side, and of course his connexion to the Bar and to the Provincial Council speak highly of his character and skill.’

‘And this is a re-election for him, of course,’ interrupted Nilssen, who very often made a habit of speaking politics in other men’s offices, and forgot for a moment that he had granted the other man licence to speak his own mind. ‘He’s familiar.’

‘He is familiar—to his own circle,’ Shepard said. ‘His loyalty is to Canterbury, and his tunnels and railways—to take your phrase—are the Lyttelton tunnel and the projected railway between Christchurch and Dunedin. As Superintendent he will reapportion whatever funds are not already tied into this tunnel and this railway—as he must, of course, to make good the promises of his campaign.’

‘You may be right about the Super,’ Nilssen said, ‘but as an M.P.? He will represent Westland—’

‘Lauderback is a Westland man in electorate only,’ Shepard said. ‘I do not fault him on it—he has my vote, Mr. Nilssen—but he does not know the digger’s life.’

Nilssen looked as if he meant to interrupt again, so Shepard pressed on, raising his voice a little. ‘I arrive now at the business that compelled this interview. I have the Commissioner’s endorsement to begin work upon a new gaol-house, away from the Police Camp, on the terrace north of town. You recall it was a company of convicts who first cleared the Hokitika-road? I intend to do the same thing here: I shall use my own convict labour to build the prison at Seaview.’

This notion appealed to Nilssen’s sense of retribution, and he smiled.

‘However, as you have already remarked,’ Shepard continued, ‘Alistair Lauderback’s focus is on transport: in his address to the Council he has argued in favour of using convict labour to build and maintain the Christchurch road. The route over the Alps is still treacherous—unfit for a horseman, much less for a coach.’

‘The Superintendent has the final word on the matter?’ Nilssen asked. ‘Are your convicts not yours to employ?’

‘Alas,’ Shepard said. ‘They are only mine to keep.’

The clerk entered, bearing coffee on a wooden tray. He was in a state of considerable excitement, for it was not often that Nilssen had visitors, and never visitors of such enigmatic repute as Pritchard (who was famous for his opium) and Shepard (who was famous for his wife). The clerk had arranged the coffee pot and saucers on the tray with particular attention, and he carried it high with his elbows cocked and his back held very straight. Nilssen nodded approvingly: it was not their custom for the clerk to wait on his employer, but Nilssen was pleased at the effect it must be creating in the mind of his guest. The clerk set the tray upon the sideboard and began to pour. He was hoping that the men would resume their conversation while he was still in the room, and so tried to pour slowly, feeling a pang of regret at the floating grains of chicory that he had added to the coffee grounds for reasons of economy, and now, with their ugly film of grit, seemed to admonish his pretensions.

Behind him Shepard said, ‘By the bye, Mr. Nilssen: what do you know about Emery Staines?’

There was a pause. ‘I know that he is missing,’ Nilssen responded.

‘Missing, yes,’ said Shepard. ‘He hasn’t been seen for almost a fortnight. Very strange.’

‘I do not know him well,’ Nilssen said.

‘Don’t you?’ said Shepard.

‘He is an acquaintance—but not a friend.’

‘Ah.’

Nilssen seemed about to cough; then he burst out, ‘Are you quite finished, Albert?’

The clerk set down the coffee pot.

‘Shall I leave the tray, sir?’

‘Yes, yes—then go, for God’s sake,’ Nilssen said. He lurched for the cup as it was handed him, causing a small tide of coffee to slop into the saucer, and set it down before him with a clatter. The clerk brought a second cup to Shepard, who made no move to touch it, and pointed to the desk before him without a word.

‘I shall say it plain,’ Shepard said, when the disappointed clerk had shut the door behind him. ‘I mean to begin work on the gaol-house at once, before the elections, so that when Lauderback takes office the work is already well underway. I am aware that this may seem to others as if I seek to actively thwart the success of his campaign. I come to you to solicit both your business and your discretion.’

‘What do you need?’ Nilssen said cautiously.

‘Materials to build, and perhaps ten or twenty able bodies to begin digging the foundation,’ Shepard said, reaching into his breast for the plans. ‘I can offer you commission at your standard rate. The site has been purchased already, and approved. Here is the architect’s design.’

‘This is the original? Or a copy?’ Nilssen took the papers from Shepard’s massive hand and unfolded them.

‘The original. There is no copy,’ Shepard said. ‘I keep these documents on my person always, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Nilssen agreed, reaching for his spectacles.

‘The reason I have come to you,’ Shepard continued, ‘and not to Cochran, or Morrison, or another competitor whose business—forgive me—is faring rather better than yours at present, owes only in part to your reputation as an efficient man.’

Nilssen looked up.

‘Permit me to speak frankly,’ Shepard said. ‘The matter is indelicate, I know; I will try and be as delicate as I can. It has come to my attention that you took home a commission to the value of many hundreds of pounds, upon closing the estate of Mr. Crosbie Wells.’

Nilssen started, but Shepard held up his hand to silence him.

‘Do not implicate yourself by speaking before you have heard what I have to say,’ he said. ‘I will tell you exactly what I know. The man’s body came through the Police Camp before his burial; given that he had no family or friends to speak of, we conducted the wake at the Camp itself. I had the solemn honour of viewing his body, and of being present while the physician checked his vital organs for signs of harm. Dr. Gillies concluded the cause of death was drink; I, with my slender knowledge of the subject, could only agree with his ruling. Dr. Gillies was careful in his examination of the contents of the dead man’s stomach and intestines, however, which contained not only food and spirits, but traces of laudanum—though not enough, I should add, to warrant undue suspicion. I do not believe that Crosbie Wells was poisoned, except by drink.

‘Now: even before the wake was over, Wells’s land and mill were sold. The land, as you know, was reclaimed by the bank, and was then purchased almost immediately by a Mr. Edgar Clinch; while the transaction was perfectly legal, it is nevertheless curious how swiftly the property changed hands. I understand that you were then called upon to clear the cottage and sell on the dead man’s effects, for a fee that would be set against their total value; you accepted this employment, and promptly discovered a great deal of hoarded gold (where was it hidden, in the flour canister?) to the aggregate value of four thousand pounds. A “homeward bounder”, to use the local phrase. Now, Mr. Nilssen, you ought have then been able to walk away with your percentage, which was by now a very handsome cut; the whole enterprise was thwarted, however, when Mr. Wells’s widow landed on the beach, and declared herself. She was one week too late to attend his burial, but not at all too late to contest the sale of his estate, and any transactions that had taken place as a consequence of that sale.

‘As I have said, I do not believe that Crosbie Wells was poisoned,’ Shepard said. ‘But I also do not believe that the hoarded gold belonged to him, much less to his widow. The apparition of the widow Wells is a curiosity in a tale already rather too curious for my taste.’ He paused. ‘Have I said anything so far that you know or guess to be untrue? You can decline to answer that if you wish.’

‘You mean to blackmail me?’ Nilssen managed.

‘Not at all,’ Shepard said. ‘But you must agree this smacks of plotting.’

‘Yes. I do.’

‘I am not a detective,’ Shepard said, ‘and profess no inclination towards that field. I care very little about how much you know. But I must have my new gaol-house, and I see an opportunity for both of us to gain.’

‘Speak it, sir.’

‘The widow Wells has made her appeal, to contest the sale of her late husband’s effects,’ Shepard said. ‘The appeal will take months to action, of course, as legal matters do, and in the meantime the money will be held in escrow by the bank. In the end, I expect that the sale will be revoked, and if no greater plot is exposed, the widow will claim the ’bounder as her own. Incidentally, I have enjoyed several conversations with Crosbie Wells these past few months, and he certainly never spoke of being married—not to me, nor to any other man I’ve spoken to.’

Nilssen had a vision of a cat tapping a small rodent back and forth with the flat of its paw, its claws in sheath. He was not guilty—he had done no wrong—and yet he felt guilty; he felt implicated, as though he had performed a terrible misdeed while sleeping, and had woken to find his bolster smeared with blood. He felt certain that any moment now the gaoler would expose him—but for what crime, he did not yet know. What was the word Pritchard had used? Associated. Yes—he felt that acutely.

When he was a small boy Nilssen had stolen a precious button from his cousin’s treasure chest. It was a cuff button from a military jacket, brass in colour, and engraved with the lithe body of a fox, running forward with its jaws parted and its ears cocked back. The button was domed, and greyer on one side than on the other, as if the wearer had tended to caress its edge with his finger, and over time had worn the shine away. Cousin Magnus had rickets and a bandy-legged gait: he would die soon, so he did not have to share his toys. But Nilssen’s longing for the button became so great that one night when Magnus was sleeping he crept in, unlatched the chest, and stole it; he walked about the darkened nursery for a while, fingering the thing, testing its weight, running his finger over the body of the fox, feeling the brass take on the warmth of his hand—until something overcame him, not remorse exactly, but a dawning fatigue, an emptiness, and he returned the button to the place where he had found it. Cousin Magnus never knew. Nobody knew. But for months and years and even decades afterwards, long after Cousin Magnus was dead, that theft was as a splinter in his heart. He saw the moonlit nursery every time he spoke his cousin’s name; he blushed at nothing; he sometimes pinched himself, or uttered an oath, at the memory. For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

‘I estimate that it will be at least April before the sale is successfully repealed,’ Shepard was saying, with the same perfect gravity. ‘In the meantime—immediately, in fact—I propose that you invest the entire sum of your commission into the building of my gaol-house.’

Nilssen raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘But the money is not mine,’ he said, for the second time that afternoon. ‘It has already been revoked de jure, if not de facto. Once the widow’s appeal has been granted, and the sale of the estate declared void, I shall have to pay my commission back in full.’

‘The Council can sponsor your loan, with interest,’ Shepard said. ‘The gaol is publicly funded, after all; by the time your commission is recalled, I will be able to draw down funds from the Reserve, and repay you. We shall have a contract drawn up; you may name your terms. Your investment will be secure.’

‘If you have public funding,’ Nilssen said, ‘then why propose this to me at all? What need do you have of these four hundred pounds?’

‘Yours is ready money, and will be privately invested,’ Shepard said. ‘My Council funding has been approved, but not paid out; if I wait for the sum to be apportioned, and deposited into the gaol’s account, I will be waiting for thirty bankers to push my contract across thirty desks, and back again. It will be March, or April, and the elections will be past.’

‘And Lauderback will have his convicts,’ Nilssen said.

‘Yes, and he will have siphoned off a great deal more of the district’s budget, besides.’

‘Very well,’ Nilssen said. ‘Let us suppose that I agree to this, and you get your gaol-house. You said that both of us would stand to gain.’

‘Well, yes,’ Shepard said, blinking. ‘You will have employment, Mr. Nilssen. You will get your standard commission on the labour, and the iron, and the timber, and the nails, and every small thing. Legal profit—that is how you stand to gain.’

Nilssen could not fault this (certainly, it had been many weeks since he had contracted work that promised this degree of yield), but Shepard’s method of proposition was making him very uncomfortable. The gaoler had used the word murder, and called that crime ‘sophisticated’; he had waited until Albert was present as a witness to ask about Emery Staines; and when he narrated the story of the Wells affair, he had made a great show of preventing Nilssen’s interruption, lest the commission merchant implicate himself by speaking too much or too soon—thereby assuming that he could implicate himself in some way. Shepard was treating his host as a guilty man.

Nilssen said, ‘And what if I refuse your offer—what then?’

Shepard pulled his lips back in a rare smile, the effect of which was rather gruesome. ‘You are determined to see this offer as a blackmail,’ he said. ‘I cannot imagine why that might be so.’

Nilssen could not hold the gaoler’s gaze for long. ‘I will grant you the loan, and offer my services on commission,’ he said at last. His voice was low. He pulled the architect’s plans towards him. ‘Please be so good as to wait a moment,’ he added, ‘while I make a record of the materials you require.’

Shepard inclined his head, and at last picked up the cup of coffee that was cooling on the desktop before him. He took up the saucer with great care; in his great hand the china seemed impossibly fragile, as if he might close his fist and with a single motion crush the vessel to a dust. He drained the cup and returned it to the exact position it had formerly occupied upon Nilssen’s desk. He then replaced his pipe in his mouth, folded his hands, and waited. The irregular scratch of Nilssen’s pen was the only sound between them.

‘I shall draw you down a cheque on Monday morning,’ Nilssen said at last, as he penned the final sum. ‘We can advertise for tender in Monday’s paper—I’ll send a note to Löwenthal direct. I shall recommend that the labourers meet here, in the Auction Yards, at ten sharp, to be signed—that will give the men a chance to read the paper and spread the word. By Monday noon, weather permitting, we can begin work on the land.’

Shepard’s eyes had narrowed. ‘You said Löwenthal? Ben Löwenthal—the Jew?’

‘Yes,’ Nilssen said, blinking. ‘We can’t advertise without the paper. You could do it by flyer and gazette if you wanted—but everybody reads the Times.’

‘I hope that we are understood that the investment of your commission is strictly a private matter.’

‘We are understood, sir.’ There was a pause. ‘On my oath,’ Nilssen added, and then immediately regretted the phrase.

‘Perhaps we ought to insert a clause into our contract to that tune,’ Shepard said lightly. ‘For peace of mind.’

‘You can trust my discretion,’ Nilssen said, blushing again.

‘I truly hope I can,’ said Shepard. He stood, and extended his hand.

Nilssen rose also, and they shook hands.

‘Mr. Shepard,’ Nilssen said suddenly, as Shepard made to depart. ‘The way you were speaking before—about the savage and the civil, the old world and the new.’

Shepard regarded him impassively. ‘Yes.’

‘I’m curious to hear how that line of thinking applies to all of this—the estate, the ’bounder, the widow Wells.’

Shepard took a long time to answer. ‘A homeward bounder is a chance for total reinvention, Mr. Nilssen,’ he said at last. ‘Find a nugget, and a man can buy his own life. That kind of promise isn’t offered in the civil world.’

Nilssen sat alone in his office for a long time after Shepard left, turning the gaoler’s proposition over and over in his mind. A feeling of doubt was seeding in his breast. He felt that he had missed a connexion somewhere—as if he had come across a knotted handkerchief, balled in the watch-pocket of an old vest, and could not for the life of him recall what the knot was supposed to prompt him to remember—what errand, what responsibility; where he’d been, even, when he tied the corners, and tucked the thing away against his heart. He drummed his fingers; he toyed with his lapel. The rain beat against the window. The grey shadows in the room changed places, as the sun sank behind the cloud.

Suddenly he got up, went to the door, and opened it a fraction. ‘Albert!’ he called, through the chink.

‘Yes, sir,’ Albert called back, from the outer office.

‘Crosbie Wells—the man who died.’

‘Sir.’

‘Who found his body? Remind me.’

‘A company of men, sir,’ Albert replied.

‘You recall the story?’

‘It was in the papers—I can find it for you, if you like.’

‘Just tell me what you remember.’

‘The party stopped in to refresh themselves, and found Mr. Wells fresh dead—that’s my understanding. Sitting at his kitchen table, the papers had it.’

‘Give us the name?’—But he already knew. He rested his head against the doorframe, and felt sick.

‘That fellow in contest for the Westland seat,’ said Albert. ‘The Canterbury man. You met him last week at the Star. Alistair Lauderback’s his name.’

 Some ten minutes later Nilssen appeared in the doorway of the outer office, snapping out his top hat with such a tremendous crack that the clerk leaped out of his chair. He was holding his stick in a rather brutish fashion, gripping it halfway down its shaft, as if he meant to wield it as a cudgel. His face was very pale.

‘Shall I direct any callers to the Nonpareil?’ Albert called after him, as the commission merchant made for the door.

‘No—leave me be. Tell them to wait. Tell them to come back Monday,’ Nilssen snapped, without turning. He quitted the gatehouse and strode off down the quay, but when he reached his accustomed pie-house on the corner he did not stop. He drew his coat tighter across his body and turned inland, towards Kaniere, and the goldfields.