Текст книги "The Luminaries"

Автор книги: Eleanor Catton

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

‘Did you walk back—all the way from Kaniere?’ Clinch asked. Surely she had not just walked four miles—not when she could hardly hold her head up! Not when she could hardly stand!

She hummed again, breaking the tone in two pieces, to indicate a negative.

‘How then?’ Clinch said.

‘Dick was passing through,’ she mumbled. The words were like treacle in her mouth.

Clinch stepped closer. ‘Dick Mannering—passing through Chinatown?’

‘Mm.’ She closed her eyes again.

‘Gave you a lift, did he?’

But Anna did not answer. She had passed back into sleep. Her head lolled back against the lip of the tub, and her crossed arms fell away from her bosom, struck the surface of the water, sank, and rose again.

Clinch was still holding the pinch of gold in his fingers. Carefully he laid the dress over the back of the chair and then dropped the pinch of gold into his pocket, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together to release the flakes, as if he were salting a stew.

‘I’ll leave you to your bath,’ he said, and withdrew from the room.

But instead of returning downstairs he walked swiftly across the hallway, to Anna’s quarters, and fitted his master key easily into her lock. He entered her room and strode across to the armoire, where she kept her clothes. Anna had five dresses, all of them purchased salvage, from a cargo steamer that had been wrecked upon the bar. Clinch turned to the whoring dress first. With swiftly tapping fingers he moved along every seam, and felt inside the bustle. Like the muslin, this too was veritably stuffed with gold! He turned to the next—and the next—and the next; each dress was the same. Why, Clinch thought, doing some calculation in his head, between these five dresses, Anna Wetherell was hoarding a veritable fortune.

He sat down upon her bed.

Anna never wore the orange dress in Chinatown—Clinch knew that with certainty—and yet that gown was packed with gold, just like the others. So this was not just an agreement with the Orientals, as he had first believed! This was an operation that went beyond the bounds of Chinatown. Beyond the bounds of Hokitika, perhaps. Someone, Clinch thought, was preparing a heist of the first degree.

He considered the alternatives. Could Mannering be using Anna as a mule, to traffic ore out of the gorge without her knowledge? Why, Clinch thought, that task would be easy enough: one only needed to feed her a pipe of opium, and wait for her to drift into sleep, and thereafter the gold could be sewn into her dress, one pinch at a time. Perhaps … but no: it was absurd to think that Mannering would court such a colossal risk without the security of the whore’s own discretion. She was bearing hundreds of pounds on her person, for heaven’s sake—perhaps thousands. She must know about it. Mannering was not a fool when it came to money. He would never place a fortune in the custody of a common whore without insurance. Anna must have provided him with some kind of security—some debt, Clinch thought, some obligation. But what could she possibly have to give, that might serve as a surety on a fortune in pure?

Suddenly furious, Clinch punched the quilt with the heels of his hands. Mannering! The presumption of him—to engineer a deception of this kind, when Anna was living under Clinch’s roof, and supping at Clinch’s table! What if the duty sergeants had come calling—what if they had searched her room? Who would bear the responsibility then? Why, Clinch thought, he ought to have been given a cut of the profit, at the very least—he ought to have been told! And the Chinamen were in on the secret, no doubt. That was galling. Perhaps all of Hokitika knew. Clinch uttered an oath. Dick Mannering, he thought sourly, could be d—ned in hell.

He heard splashing in the room next door—Anna must have roused herself—and wondered, quickly, whether he ought to confiscate the dresses from the wardrobe. He could hold them as ransom against Mannering, perhaps. He could wait until Anna had regained her senses, and question her about the matter. He could force a confession—an apology. But his courage failed him. Edgar Clinch was always stymied by ill feeling; his grievances, though acutely felt, rarely developed beyond their unvoiced expression in his mind. With a heavy heart, he left Anna’s room, returned downstairs, and unlocked the foyer door.

‘Please accept my sincere apologies,’ said Gascoigne.

Clinch blinked. ‘What for?’

‘For insinuating that you had anything other than Miss Wetherell’s very best interests at heart.’

‘Oh,’ said Clinch. ‘Yes. Well, thanks.’

‘Goodbye,’ said Gascoigne.

Clinch received this farewell with disappointment. He had rather hoped that Gascoigne would stay a moment longer—at least until his valet returned from lunch—and talk the issue over. It always pained him to leave a conversation on a less than civil note, and in fact he did want to discuss the issue of Anna’s debt with Gascoigne, however hostile he had been at its first mention. He had not meant to lose his temper with Anna the previous afternoon. But she had lied to him—saying she had not a shilling to call her own, when there were hundreds, even thousands, sewn into the dresses in her wardrobe! The dresses were still there; he checked them periodically, to make sure that the ore had not been removed. Why should he foot the bill for her daily expenses, when she had access to such extraordinary wealth? Why should he be the one to soothe her troubles, when she was conspiring against him, and even telling falsehoods to his face? Months of silence had made him very bitter, and his bitterness had ripened, in an instant, into spite.

He stepped forward, and even put out his hand, meaning to delay Gascoigne’s departure. He wanted to beg him not to leave; he wanted, suddenly, desperately, not to be alone. But what reason could he give, to persuade Gascoigne to stay? Stalling for time, he said, ‘Where are you off to?’

The question rankled Gascoigne. How dreary frontier living could be! Every man was asked to share his private business; it was not like Paris, or London, where one felt the luxury of strangeness on every corner; where one could really be alone.

‘I have an appointment,’ he said curtly.

‘Who’s your appointment? What’s it all about?’

Gascoigne sighed. It was so dull to be asked. Clinch was looking almost sulky—as if Gascoigne’s departure was vexing to him! Why, they had only met ten minutes before.

‘I’m going with a lady,’ he said, ‘to look at hats.’

TRUE NODE IN VIRGO

In which Quee Long is interrupted thrice; Charlie Frost holds his ground; and Sook Yongsheng names a suspect, to everyone’s surprise.

At the very moment that Gascoigne took his leave of Edgar Clinch, slamming the Gridiron’s front door rather discourteously behind him, Dick Mannering and Charlie Frost were disembarking from the ferry onto the stones at the riverbank at Kaniere. The commission merchant Harald Nilssen was also rapidly approaching that place on foot; he had just passed the wooden marker announcing he was one half-mile distant from the settlement, an encouragement that had induced him to increase his pace considerably, though he continued to swipe the wet grasses at the roadside with his stick. The object of all three men was, of course, to reach Kaniere Chinatown, and there demand an interview with the Chinese goldsmith Quee Long—who had just been startled, as presently he would be again, by the arrival of a very unexpected guest.

‘Chinatown’ was something of a misleading name for the small clutch of tents and stone cabins some few hundred yards upriver from the Kaniere claims, for although every man hailed from Canton, and most from Kwangchow, together they could hardly be said to comprise a township: ‘Chinatown’ was home, at that time, to only fifteen Chinese men. Of this small cluster, Quee Long’s dwelling was notable for its handsome chimney, made of fired clay. The brick oven from which this chimney issued had been constructed as a miniature forge, fitted with a cast-iron chamber beneath a raised clay shelf, and positioned in the centre of the dwelling’s only room; it was upon this clay shelf that Quee Long slept at night, warmed by the bricks that still held the heat of that day’s fire. When he was smelting his weekly yield in ore, he filled the firebox with charcoal, for although that fuel was costly, it burned hotter than coke; today, however, his crucible and bellows had been set aside, and the firebox was stacked with a lattice of slow-burning wood.

Quee Long was a barrel-chested man of capable proportions and a practical strength. His eyes were rounded in their inner corners, but came to a point at his cheeks; the shape of his face was almost square. When he smiled, he revealed a very incomplete set of teeth: he had lost two incisors, as well as his foremost molars in his lower jaw. The gaps in his smile tended to put one in mind of a child whose milk teeth were falling away—a comparison that Quee Long might well have made himself, for he had a critical eye, a quick wit, and a flair for caustic deprecation, most especially when that deprecation was self-imposed. He painted a very feeble picture whenever he spoke about himself, a practice that was humorously meant, but that belied, nevertheless, an excessively vulnerable self-conception. For Quee Long measured all his actions by a private standard of perfection, and laboured in service of this standard: as a consequence he was never really satisfied with any of his efforts, or with their results, and tended, in general, towards defeatism. These nuances of his character were lost upon the subjects of the British Crown, with whom Quee Long shared but eighty or a hundred words, but to his compatriots, he was renowned for his cynical humour, his melancholy spirit, and his dogged perseverance in the service of untouchable ideals.

He had travelled to New Zealand under contract. In exchange for the cost of his return passage from Kwangchow, Quee Long agreed to surrender the majority percentage of his earnings on the goldfield to a corporate purse. Quee Long was made very poor by the conditions of his indenture, which were neither flexible nor charitable; but he remained a diligent worker nonetheless. His dream—an unlikely one, alas—was to return to Kwangchow with seven hundred and sixty-eight shillings in his pocket: upon this, he had decided, he would live out his days. (This particular sum had been chosen both for auspicious reasons—for, when spoken in Cantonese, it sounded like the phrase ‘perennial fortune’; and also for reasons of partiality—for Quee Long worked best when he could envision the fulfilment of a goal.)

Quee Long’s father, Quee Zuang, had worked in Kwangchow as a city watchman. He had spent his working life marching up and down the city wall, supervising the opening and closing of doors, and ensuring that the porters’ rotation was executed correctly. It was an important occupation, if a routine one, and as a boy Quee Long had been not unduly proud of his father’s station. In the trade wars of recent years, however, the relative prestige of Quee Zuang’s position had paled. When Kwangchow was stormed in 1841, the city looked to its fortifications—only to despair. British soldiers swarmed the forts in numbers that far exceeded the forces of the Qing, and the Chinese defences were overrun. The British took the city, and Quee Zuang, along with hundreds of his fellows, was captured—to be released on the condition that Kwangchow agreed to open her port to trade.

The natural shame that Quee Long felt for his city’s repeated surrender (for Kwangchow would be captured by British soldiers no less than four times in the coming score of years) was amplified a hundredfold by the shame he felt on his father’s behalf. Quee Zuang was all but broken by the ignominy he suffered. The old man died soon after the conclusion of the second war; by the time of his death, he had faced down the barrel of a British rifle three times.

Quee Long did not like to imagine what his father might think, were he to look upon him now. Quee Zuang had given his honour and his life in defending China from Britain’s unreasonable demands—and now, not eight years after his death, Quee Long was here, in New Zealand, profiting from the very circumstance that his father—and his country—had attempted, vainly, to forestall. He was sleeping on foreign soil, digging for gold (for gold, not silver), and conceding the bigger portion of his daily earnings to a British-owned firm, the governing ranks of which he would never be entitled to join. His discomfort, when he tallied up these betrayals, was characterised less by filial shame than by a pervasive kind of disenfranchisement. Looking back upon the long crisis of his own life (for so he perceived it, as if his selfhood was balanced, always, upon the point of choice—but what choice, he did not know, for this ambivalence was without a real beginning, and without a perceptible end) Quee Long felt only disassociated: from his own work, from his father’s wishes, from the circumstances under which his country, and his family, had been shamed. He felt that he did not know how to feel.

But there was one point upon which Quee Long remained loyal to his father’s shade. He would not take opium, and would not suffer it to be taken in his presence, or by the ones he loved. The drug, for Quee Long, was a symbol, signifying the unforgivable depths of Western barbarism towards his civilisation, and the contempt with which the Chinese life was held, in the face of the lifeless Western goals of profit and greed. Opium was China’s warning. It was the shadow-side of Western expansion—its dark complement, as a yin to a yang. Quee Long often said that a man with no memory was a man with no foresight—to which he added, humorously, that he had quoted this maxim many times before, and he was determined to keep quoting it, without alteration. Any Chinese man who took a pipe in his hands was, in Quee Long’s estimation, both a traitor and a fool. Whenever he passed the opium den at Kaniere, he turned his head, and spat upon the ground.

It will come as some surprise, then, when we identify the man with whom Quee Long was currently talking as none other than Sook Yongsheng—the man who operated the opium den at Kaniere, and who had sold Anna Wetherell the lump of opium by which she had so nearly perished, two weeks prior to the present day. (Quee Long’s forbidding code did not extend to Anna Wetherell, who often visited him after she had taken her pipe at the Kaniere den, when her body had become limp and supple with the drug, and she could not speak above a moan. But Quee Long never saw the instruments of her addiction, though he profited greatly from its effects; had she ever produced the drug in his presence, he would have knocked it from her hand. So he told himself, at least. Beneath this vague assertion ran another, more inarticulate belief: that a cosmic justice, in the case of Anna’s pitiful addiction, had somehow been served.)

Sook Yongsheng and Quee Long were not friends. When the former had knocked upon Quee Long’s door earlier that afternoon, begging his compatriot’s help and hospitality, the latter had received him with no small sense of trepidation. The two men, as far as Quee Long knew, shared only three things in common: a birthplace, a language, and a fondness for a Western whore. Quee Long guessed that it was concerning this third article of connexion that Sook Yongsheng desired to speak, for Anna Wetherell had been a topic of much speculation and opinion in recent days; he was further surprised, therefore, when his guest announced that his information pertained to two men: one named Francis Carver, the other, Crosbie Wells.

Sook Yongsheng was perhaps ten years younger then Quee Long. His eyebrows were very faint, and sloped in such a way as to express gentle surprise. His eyes were large, his nose broad, and his lips finely formed in a Cupid’s bow. Though he spoke with much animation, he tended to keep his face very still when he was listening, and because of this habit he was often perceived to be wise. He too was clean-shaven, and also wore a pigtail—though in fact Sook Yongsheng harboured strong anti-Manchu sentiments, and cared little for the empire of the Qing; his hairstyle was not a token of affiliation, but one of habit, carried over from the days of his youth. He was wearing, again like his host, a grey cotton shift and simple trousers, over which he had belted a black woollen coat.

Quee Long had never heard of either Francis Carver or Crosbie Wells, but he nodded gravely, stood aside, and welcomed the other man into his home, insisting that Sook Yongsheng seat himself in pride of place nearest the fire. He set out the choicest selection of food that he could offer, filled a pot of water for tea, and apologised for the poverty of his offerings. The opium dealer waited in silence until his host had completed these tasks. He then bowed deeply, praised Ah Quee’s excellent generosity, and tasted each one of the dishes that had been set before him, commending every one. With these formalities discharged, Sook Yongsheng began to explain the real purpose of his visit—speaking, as he always did, in a style that was vital, poetically exaggerated, and accented by proverbs, the meaning of which was always beautiful, but not always particularly clear.

He began speaking, for example, by observing that upon a big tree there are always dead branches; that the best soldiers are never warlike; and that even good firewood can ruin a stove—sentiments which, because they came in very quick succession, and lacked any kind of stabilising context, rather bewildered Quee Long. The latter, impelled to exercise his wit, retaliated with the rather acidic observation that a steelyard always goes with the weights—implying, with the aid of yet another proverb, that his guest had not begun speaking with consistency.

We shall therefore intervene, and render Sook Yongsheng’s story in a way that is accurate to the events he wished to disclose, rather than to the style of his narration.

Ah Sook rarely ventured into Hokitika proper. He kept, in the main, to his hut in Kaniere, which was fitted like a salon, with sofa-beds against every wall, and cushions strewn about, and fabrics pinned up to conserve and subdue the heavy smoke that coiled up from the pipes, the chafing dishes, the spirit lamps, the stove. The opium den had an air of stout impregnability about it, an impression compounded by the warm fug of its close atmosphere, and this was a comfort upon which Ah Sook had come to depend. Over the course of the past fortnight, however, he had made the journey to the river mouth no less than five times.

Upon the morning of the 14th of January (some twelve hours prior to Anna Wetherell’s near-death), Ah Sook had received word from Joseph Pritchard that a long-awaited shipment of opium had just been delivered to his drug emporium, and was available for purchase. Ah Sook’s own supplies of the drug were very low. He donned his hat, and made for Hokitika at once.

At Pritchard’s emporium he purchased a half-pound block of resin and paid for it in pure. In the street, with the paper-wrapped block stowed safely in the bottom of his satchel, he felt a rush of summery possibility, the likes of which a Hokitika morning rarely produced in him. The sun was shining, and the Tasman wind lent a briny sharpness to the air. The crowds in the street seemed very gay, and as he stepped across the gutter, a passing digger tipped his hat, and smiled at him. Emboldened by this incidental gesture, Ah Sook resolved to delay his return to Kaniere. He would spend an hour or so browsing the salvage crates on Tancred-street, as a special present to himself. After that, he thought, he might even purchase a joint of meat from the butcher’s, and take it home to make a soup.

But on the corner of Tancred-street he came up short: his festive mood dissolved at once. Standing at the far end of the street was a man whom Ah Sook had not seen in over a decade, and whom Ah Sook had believed, prior to that moment, he would never see again.

His old acquaintance was very much changed since their last encounter. His proud face was much disfigured, and a decade in gaol had lent a muscled bulk to his chest and arms. His posture was familiar, however: he was standing with his shoulders slightly rounded, and the backs of his hands against his hips, as in the days of old. (How strange, Ah Sook thought later, that one’s gestures remain the same, even as the body changes, weathers, and gives itself over to age—as though the gestures were the real vessel, the vase to the body’s flower. For it was Francis Carver through and through, to stand with his hips cocked slightly forward, and his shoulders hunched—a posture that would have been slovenly in another man. But Carver’s presence, grave, dark, and imposing, was such that he could afford to neglect those rules of carriage that other men were obliged, by virtue of their very mediocrity, to observe.) Carver half-turned to cast his gaze down the street, and Ah Sook leaped sideways, out of view. He leaned against the rough pine of the grocery store wall and waited there a moment until the beating of his heart had slowed.

The full account of Sook Yongsheng’s history with Francis Carver was not yet known to Quee Long, but Ah Sook did not recount the full particulars of the story at this time. He explained to his host only that Francis Carver was a murderer, and that he, Sook Yongsheng, had sworn to take Carver’s life as an act of vengeance. He gave this information almost carelessly, as though it were altogether commonplace to swear vengeance upon one’s foes; in truth, however, the source of this carelessness was pain, for he did not like to dwell upon the unhappy details of his private past. Ah Quee, sensing that this was not the time to interrupt, only nodded—but he stored the pertinent facts away, resolving to remember them.

Ah Sook continued his tale.

He remained for several seconds with his forehead pressed against the rough cladding of the grocery store wall. When his breathing was steady, he edged back to the corner of the building to look at Carver again—for to look at last upon the face that one has conjured in one’s most vengeful dreams is a pleasure of the most rare and passionate sort, and Ah Sook had conjured Carver’s image in his sleep for nigh on fifteen years. His hatred of the man needed no renewal, but he felt, upon perceiving Carver now, a surge of sudden fury, unfamiliar, uncontrolled: he had never hated the man more than he did at that instant. If he had a pistol he would have shot him at once, and in the back.

Carver was speaking to a young Maori man, though from their respective postures Ah Sook guessed they were not familiar: they were standing slightly apart from one another, as affiliates rather than as friends. He could not quite hear their conversation, but from its rapidly staccato nature he guessed that they were bartering; the Maori man was gesticulating very firmly, and kept shaking his head. At length it seemed that a fixed price had been agreed, and Carver, taking out his purse, counted several coins into the Maori man’s open hand. He had evidently purchased information of some kind, for now the Maori man began to speak at length, and with exaggerated motions. Carver repeated back the information, to fix it in his mind. The Maori man nodded his assent, and spoke a little more. Presently they shook hands and parted ways, the Maori man eastward, towards the mountains, and Carver westward, towards the mouth of the river, and the quays.

Ah Sook considered pursuing Carver at a safe distance, but decided against it: he did not wish to force a reunion with the man until he was prepared for such an event. At present he was unarmed, and he guessed that Carver had at least a knife about his person, and possibly also a firearm of some kind: it would be folly to accost him when at a disadvantage. Instead Ah Sook set off in pursuit of the Maori man—who was on his way back to the Arahura Valley to build a bird trap, having purchased from the Hokitika Dry Goods several yards of strong fishing line, and a small loaf of hardtack to crumble into bait.

Ah Sook caught up with him in the next block, and caught his sleeve. He begged to know the import of the man’s conversation with Carver, and produced a coin to show that he would pay for the information if necessary. Te Rau Tauwhare looked at him inscrutably for a moment, and then shrugged, took the coin, and gave his explanation.

Many months prior to the present day, Tauwhare said, Francis Carver had offered him a monetary reward for any news of a man named Crosbie Wells. Soon after this offer was made, Carver returned to Dunedin, and Tauwhare to Greymouth; the two men did not cross paths again. But as chance would have it, Tauwhare did then meet the very man for whom Carver was searching, and Crosbie Wells had since become his very good friend. Mr. Wells, Tauwhare added, lived in the Arahura Valley; he was a former prospector, and had given his life over, more recently, to the project of building a mill.

(Tauwhare spoke slowly, and with much gesticulation; he was evidently well used to communicating with his hands and his expressions, and paused after every clause to make sure that he was accurately understood. Ah Sook found that he could understand his meaning very clearly, though English was neither man’s native tongue. He whispered the names to himself: Arahura Valley, Te Rau Tauwhare, Crosbie Wells.)

Tauwhare explained that he had not seen Carver again until that very morning—the morning of the 14th of January. He had spied Carver upon the Hokitika waterfront less than half an hour before, and, remembering the offer the captain had made many months ago, he saw an opportunity to make an easy profit. He approached Carver and announced that he could offer news of Crosbie Wells at a price, if Carver’s offer was still valid—which, evidently, it was. They agreed upon the fee (two shillings) and once the coins were in his hand, Tauwhare told the other man where Crosbie Wells was living.

Ah Sook, in what he had understood of Tauwhare’s narrative, had discovered nothing that was of immediate use to him; however, he thanked the man very courteously for his information, and bid him goodbye. He then returned to Kaniere—where he found Anna Wetherell sitting in a patch of sunshine beyond his front door, waiting for him. Feeling suddenly tender towards her (any reminder of the troubles of his past life tended to furnish Ah Sook with a wealth of redemptive feeling about his present) he made her a present of a fresh half-ounce, cut from the new block of resin that he had purchased from Pritchard that morning. She wrapped the gift in a square of cheesecloth, and stuck it into the band of her hat. Ah Sook then lit his lamp, and they lay down together, waking only when the air began to cool with the coming of the dusk, whereupon Anna took her leave of him, and Ah Sook turned his mind to supper.

The goldsmith Ah Quee, to whom this was being narrated at a great pace, found that his impression of his guest was rapidly changing. Ah Quee had never cherished a very great regard for Ah Sook, who was clothed always in the conjured shadows of his reeking smoke, who shunned the company of other men, who squandered his meagre profits at the gambling house, where he rolled his dice in silence, and spat with little grace upon the floor. Perceiving Ah Sook now, however, Ah Quee felt that he had been mistaken, to repudiate the hatter’s character so completely. The man who sat before him now seemed—what? Virtuous? Principled? The words were not quite right. His speech was ardent, and there was a sweetness to this ardour, almost a naïvety. Ah Quee realised, to his surprise, that he did not at all dislike him. He was flattered that Ah Sook had sought his company—and his confidence—that afternoon, and this pleasure disposed him to be sympathetic; what was more, he had not yet guessed the purpose of the other man’s visit, and therefore was very much enthralled in his tale. He had forgotten, for the moment, his disapproval of the other man’s trade, and the sickly smell of the smoke, which he had brought with him, on his clothing, in his hair.

Ah Sook had paused to eat a mouthful of curd. He praised the dish a second time, and then resumed his tale.

On the night of the 14th of January, directly following Francis Carver’s rendezvous with Crosbie Wells, Godspeed weighed anchor—a fact about which Ah Sook would remain ignorant for some days. He remained in Kaniere, where he was occupied with planning the logistics of his impending crime. He had a keen sense of ceremony, and he desired very much that Carver’s death should happen in the proper way; however, he did not possess a pistol, and to his knowledge nor did any one of his compatriots. He would have to purchase one, discreetly, and learn to use it on his own. He had just spent the sum total of his dust upon the opium he had purchased from Pritchard’s emporium, and he had no more money at his disposal. Ought he to ask one of his fellows for a loan? He was pondering this problem when there came another unexpected tiding from Hokitika: Anna Wetherell had tried, and failed, to end her life.

Ah Sook was very distressed by this intelligence—though he found, upon reflection, that he did not believe it to be true. He decided instead that Pritchard’s latest shipment of opium must have been poisoned. Anna’s constitution was well accustomed to the drug, and a fraction of an ounce was hardly enough to cause her to lose consciousness for many hours, such that she could not be revived. Ah Sook returned to Hokitika the following morning and requested an immediate interview with Pritchard’s shipping agent, Thomas Balfour.

It so happened that this morning (the 16th of January) was the very morning that Balfour discovered that the shipping crate containing Alistair Lauderback’s personal effects had disappeared from the Hokitika waterfront; as a consequence of this, the shipping agent was curt, and very much distracted. Yes, Balfour Shipping had Pritchard’s contract; Balfour had little to do with the cargo itself, however. Perhaps Ah Sook might do better to contact Pritchard’s supplier, who was a rather brutish-seeming man, thick-set, with a scarred cheek and a gruff nature. His name was Francis Carver. Was Ah Sook at all acquainted with this man?