Текст книги "The Luminaries"

Автор книги: Eleanor Catton

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Ah Sook controlled his shock as best he could. He asked how long Carver and Pritchard had been partners in business. Balfour replied that he did not know, but since Carver had been an infrequent face in Hokitika since the spring of the previous year, he imagined that the two men had conducted their relationship for at least that long. It was strange, Balfour went on, that Ah Sook had never encountered Carver, if they were known to one another! (For such was very obvious, from the expression on Ah Sook’s face.) But perhaps not that strange, seeing as Carver so seldom ventured inland, and Ah Sook so seldom ventured into town. Was Carver known to him from his years in Canton? Yes? Well, in that case, it was certainly a shame that they had missed each other! Yes, missed each other: Mr. Carver had recently set sail. Two days ago, in fact. What a pity! For the man had most likely sailed for Canton, in which case he was not likely to return to Hokitika for some time.

Ah Sook had reached this point in his narrative when the kettle began to boil. Ah Quee lifted it down from the range and poured the water over their tea, to steep. Ah Sook paused, watching the tea leaves float to the bottom of his bowl and gather there. After a long moment, he resumed.

Taking Balfour’s supposition—that Carver had left Hokitika for Canton, and would not return for some months—as the truth, Ah Sook again returned to Kaniere to ponder his next move. He knew from the Maori man, Tauwhare, that Francis Carver had been seeking news of a man named Crosbie Wells just prior to his departure. Perhaps he could contact this Crosbie Wells himself, and question him. He remembered, from his brief conversation with Tauwhare, that Wells lived in the Arahura Valley, some few miles upriver from the coast. He journeyed there, and discovered, to his even greater disappointment, that the cottage was empty: the hermit was dead.

In the week that followed, Ah Sook followed the story of the Wells fortune very closely—believing, not unreasonably, that the hermit’s death was in some way related to Carver’s departure. This project had consumed him for nigh on eight days—until that very morning, in fact, the 27th of January, when he had made two discoveries that had surprised him very much indeed.

Ah Sook was just about to announce the reason for his visit when a pistol-crack rent the air—he started in shock—and there came shouting from the clearing beyond Ah Quee’s door.

‘Come out of there, you rotten chink! You come out of there and stand up like a man!’

Ah Sook’s eyes found Ah Quee’s. Who? he asked silently, and Ah Quee pinched his mouth to indicate distaste: Mannering. But his eyes were fearful.

In the next moment the hessian curtain was wrenched aside, and Mannering filled the doorway. He had his pistol in his hand. ‘Sitting around the forge, are you—scheming, are you? Both of you in it together? I’d have thought better of you, Johnny Sook! To dirty yourself in muck such as this! Yellow peril—by God!’

He strode into the cabin—rather less threateningly than he would have liked, for the stud was very low, and he was obliged to stoop—and caught Ah Quee around his body with one strong arm. He placed the muzzle of his Smith & Wesson against the man’s temple, and at once Ah Quee became very still.

‘All right,’ Mannering said. ‘I’m listening. What’s your business with Crosbie Wells?’

For a moment Ah Quee did not move at all. Then he shook his head—minutely, for he was conscious of the muzzle’s pressure against his skull. He did not know a man named Crosbie Wells, beyond what Ah Sook had just narrated to him, which was simply that the man had been a hermit, had lived in the Arahura Valley, and had recently died. Behind Mannering a white-faced Charlie Frost slipped into the room—and then, moments later, the collie-dog Holly bounded in behind him. Her coat was very wet. She trotted the perimeter of the small room, panting gloriously, and uttered several hoarse barks that nobody bothered to hush.

‘Well then,’ Mannering said, when Ah Quee did not respond, ‘I’ll ask it the other way around, shall I? Tell me this, Johnny Quee. What was Crosbie Wells doing with four thousand pounds of Aurora gold?’

Ah Quee made a noise of confusion. Aurora gold? he thought. There was no Aurora gold! Aurora was a duffer claim. Mannering, of all people, knew that!

‘Stuffed into the flour canister,’ Mannering snarled. ‘Wedged into the bellows. Inside the teapot. In the meat safe. Do you understand me? Four thousand pounds’ worth of pure!’

Ah Quee was frowning: his understanding of English was very limited, but he knew ‘gold’, and he knew ‘Aurora’, and he knew ‘thousand’, and it was very plain to him that Mannering wished to recover something that was lost. He must be referring to the gold from Anna’s dresses, Ah Quee thought—the gold that he had come upon, one afternoon, lifting a flounce of her skirt and finding it heavy, mineral, weighted with stones; the gold that he had siphoned, week by week, taking out the threads, a seam at a time, while she lay sleeping atop the brick bed of this very range, the waxing half-sphere of her pregnancy rising and falling with every breath, murmuring only when the snick of his needle touched her skin. He had smelted that metal, over the weeks and months following his discovery, and he had stamped each square with the name of the claim to which he was indentured—the Aurora—before taking it to the camp station at Kaniere …

‘Four thousand pounds!’ Mannering shouted. (Holly began to bark.) ‘The Aurora is a bloody duffer—she’s a bloody tailing pile! I know that! Staines knows that! Aurora’s dry and always has been. You tell me the truth. Did you strike it rich on the Aurora? Did you find a seam? Did you find a seam and retort the gold and hide it at Crosbie Wells’s cottage? Tell me, d—n you! Quiet, Holly! Quiet!’

It was the Aurora mine to which Ah Quee was exclusively indentured; his contract would not allow him to make a profit, except from ore lifted from that plot of land. After smelting the gold from Anna’s dresses, and inscribing each smelted block with the word Aurora, he had delivered the ore to the camp station to be banked and weighed. When the Aurora’s quarterly return was published in the first week of January, however, Ah Quee had discovered, to his shock, that the gold had not been banked against the claim at all. Somebody had stolen it from the camp station vault.

Mannering shoved the gun harder into Ah Quee’s temple, and again instructed him to speak, uttering several profanities too vulgar to set down here.

Ah Quee wet his lips. He did not have enough English to articulate a full confession; he cast about for the few English words he knew. ‘Unlucky,’ he said at last. ‘Very unlucky.’

‘D—ned right you’re unlucky,’ Mannering shouted. ‘And you’re about to become unluckier still.’ He struck Ah Quee’s cheek with the butt of his revolver, and then shoved the muzzle into his temple again, pushing the man’s head painfully to the side. ‘You had better start thinking about your luck, Johnny Quee. You had better start thinking about how to turn your luck around. I will shoot you. I will put a hole in your head, with two men to witness. I will.’

But Charlie Frost had become very agitated, and it was he who spoke. ‘You stop that,’ he said.

‘Hush up, Charlie.’

‘I won’t hush up,’ Frost said. ‘You put down that gun.’

‘Not for Africa.’

‘You’re confusing him!’

‘Rot.’

‘You are!’

‘I’m speaking the only language he can understand.’

‘You’ve got your pocketbook!’

This was very true. After a moment, as if in concession, Mannering took the revolver away from Ah Quee’s temple. But he did not return the weapon to its holster. He paused a moment, weighing the piece in his hand, and then he raised it again, and levelled it—not at Ah Quee, but at Ah Sook, who, of the two men, had the better English. With the muzzle pointed directly at Ah Sook’s face, Mannering said, ‘I want to know whether the Aurora turned up a bonanza, and I want the truth. Ask him.’

Ah Sook relayed Mannering’s question to Ah Quee in Cantonese, who responded at length. The goldsmith recounted the full history of the Aurora goldmine, salted by Mannering, since purchased by Staines; he explained the reason why he had first chosen to retort his weekly earnings, and later, to inscribe the blocks with the name of the mine to which he was indentured; he assured Ah Sook that the Aurora, to the best of his knowledge, was worth nothing at all—having barely turned up pay dirt for six months. Mannering shifted from foot to foot, scowling. All the while Holly was circling the room, her mouth in a grin, her wide tail thumping. Charlie Frost put his hand down for her to lick.

‘No nugget,’ Ah Sook translated, when Ah Quee was done. ‘No bonanza. Ah Quee say Aurora is duffer claim.’

‘Then he’s a God-d—ned liar,’ Mannering said.

‘Dick!’ said Frost. ‘You said yourself that the Aurora’s a duffer!’

‘Of course it is!’ shouted Mannering. ‘So where in hell did all that gold come from—all of it smelted by this filthy heathen—and in this very room? Is he in league with Crosbie Wells? Ask him!’

He shook his pistol at Ah Sook, who said, after confirming the answer with Ah Quee, ‘He not know Crosbie Wells.’

Ah Sook could easily have shared his own intelligence with Mannering—the intelligence that had brought him to Ah Quee’s hut that very afternoon, seeking the other man’s advice—but he did not approve of Mannering’s interrogative technique, and he felt that the magnate did not deserve a helpful answer.

‘What about Staines, then?’ said Mannering to Ah Sook. His fury was acquiring a desperate edge. ‘What about Emery Staines? Aha: you know that name, don’t you, Johnny Quee—of course you do! Go on: where is he?’

This question was relayed from Ah Sook to Ah Quee, as before.

‘He not know,’ said Ah Sook again, when Ah Quee was done.

Mannering exploded with annoyance. ‘He not know? He not know? He not know a lot of things, Johnny Sook, wouldn’t you say?’

‘He won’t answer if you ask him like that!’ Frost cried.

‘You hush, Charlie.’

‘I won’t hush!’

‘This isn’t your business, d—n it. You’re getting in the way.’

‘It’ll be my business if any blood gets spilled,’ Frost said. ‘Put down your gun.’

But Mannering only thrust it once again at Ah Sook. ‘Well?’ he snarled. ‘And you can wipe that stupid look off your face, or I’ll wipe it off for you. I’m asking you, now—not him, not Johnny Quee. I’m asking you, Sook. What do you know about Staines?’

Ah Quee’s eyes were moving back and forth between them.

‘Mr. Staines very nice man,’ said Ah Sook pleasantly.

‘Nice man, is he? Care to say where the nice man might have disappeared to?’

‘He leave,’ said Ah Sook.

‘Did he, now?’ Mannering said. ‘Just upped his sticks, did he? Left all his claims behind? Walked out on everyone he knows?’

‘Yes,’ said Ah Sook. ‘It was in the paper.’

‘Tell me why,’ said Mannering. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘I not know,’ said Ah Sook.

‘You are playing a very stupid hand—both of you,’ said Mannering. ‘I’ll ask you one last time, and I’ll spell it out slowly, so you understand. A very large fortune has recently come into play. Hidden in a dead man’s house. All of it—every last flake of it—had been smelted and stamped with the word Aurora. That’s the signature of my old friend Quee here and if he denies it he can rot in hell. Now, what I want to know is this. Did that gold really come from the Aurora, or did it not? You ask him that. Yes or no.’

Ah Sook put this question to Ah Quee, who decided, given the gravity of the circumstances, to respond with the truth. Yes, he had found a bonanza, and no, it had not come from the Aurora, though when he smelted the gold he had stamped it with the goldmine’s name, in order to ensure that the profits, at least in part, would return to him. He explained that, strange as it sounded, he had found the gold on Anna Wetherell’s person, sewn into the seams of her gown. He had first discovered it nearly six months ago, and had deduced, after some thought, that Anna must be trafficking the metal on behalf of someone else. He knew that Anna Wetherell was Mannering’s girl; he also knew that Mannering had falsified his own financial records before. It was reasonable to conclude, therefore, that Mannering was using Anna Wetherell as a method of transporting gold out of the gorge, in order to evade duty at the bank.

‘What’s he saying?’ said Mannering. ‘What’s his answer?’

‘He’s telling a frightfully long story,’ said Frost.

He was—and it was Ah Sook’s turn to be enthralled. Anna Wetherell had been concealing a bonanza? Anna, whom Mannering would not permit to carry even a purse upon her person, for fear of thieves? He could not believe it!

Ah Quee continued.

He could not forget his earlier grievance with Dick Mannering, for it was explicitly by Mannering’s hand that he was now forced to remain indentured to a duffer claim. Here was a chance both to get his revenge, and earn his freedom. Ah Quee began inviting Anna Wetherell back to his hut each week, always when she was addled with opium, for upon leaving Ah Sook’s hut she was always very sleepy and stupid; most often she fell asleep within moments after her arrival, lulled by the heat of Ah Quee’s stove. This suited Ah Quee. Once Anna was arranged comfortably upon the brick bed of his stove, he took her dress apart with a needle and thread. He replaced the tiny nuggets around her hem with leaden makeweights, so that she would not notice the sudden lightness of the fabric when she woke; if she stirred in her sleep, he held a cup of strong liquor to her lips, and encouraged her to drink it down.

Ah Quee tried to describe how the gold had been hidden in the flounces of Anna’s gowns, but with Mannering’s arm still around his body, he could not supplement his description with gestures, and therefore turned to metaphor in order to describe how the metal had been sewn into her corset and around her bustle—‘like a suit of armour,’ he said, and Ah Sook, who was always pleased by poetic expressions, smiled. Anna had four dresses in all, Ah Quee said, each containing, in his estimation, roughly a thousand pounds’ worth of pure ore. Ah Quee worked until each dress was empty, smelting every last flake of the dust into his signature blocks, and inscribing each one with the name of the claim to which he was bound—quite as though he had come upon it honestly, and legally, in the gravel pit of the Aurora. For a time, he added, he was very happy: once his surety had been repaid, he could return to Kwangchow at last, and as a wealthy man.

‘Well?’ Mannering said to Ah Sook, stamping his foot with impatience. ‘What’s the story? What’s he saying?’

But Ah Sook had forgotten his role as translator. He was gazing at Ah Quee in wonderment. The story was incredible to him! Thousands of pounds … Anna had been concealing thousands of pounds about her person, for months! That was a fortune large enough to retire a dozen men, if not more, in luxury. Anna might have purchased the entire beachfront with that kind of sum … and even then, she would have money to spare! But where was that fortune now?

In the next moment Ah Sook understood.

‘Sei qin,’ he breathed. So the fortune that Ah Quee had lifted from Anna’s dresses had ended up, by some caprice or misdirection, in the possession of the hermit, Crosbie Wells. But what was this misdirection in aid of—and who was to blame?

‘Speak English!’ Mannering shouted. ‘Speak English, d—n you!’

Suddenly very excited, Ah Sook asked Ah Quee how the fortune might have come to end up hidden in Wells’s cottage. Ah Quee replied, bitterly, that he did not know. He had never heard the name Crosbie Wells before that afternoon. As far as he knew, the last person to touch the retorted fortune was the Aurora’s current owner, Emery Staines—and Staines, of course, was nowhere to be found. Ah Quee explained that it was Staines who took the Aurora’s returns from the camp station to the Reserve Bank at the end of every month—a duty that had plainly not been carried out.

‘All I’m hearing is noise and nonsense,’ said Mannering. ‘If you don’t tell me what it’s all about, Johnny Sook—I’m telling you—’

‘They’ve finished talking,’ said Frost. ‘Just wait.’

Ah Sook was frowning. Did Emery Staines really steal from his own vault, only to stash the smelted fortune in a hermit’s cottage, twelve miles away? Where was the method in that? Why would Staines steal his own fortune, only to gift it to another man?

‘I’ll give you the count of five,’ Mannering said. His face was purple. ‘Five!’

Ah Sook looked at Mannering at last, and sighed.

‘Four!’

‘I tell you,’ Ah Sook said, holding up his palms. But what a lot there was to tell … and how few words he possessed, to contain the explanation! He thought for a moment, trying to remember the English word for ‘armour’, in order to preserve the poetic metaphor that Ah Quee had used. At last he cleared his throat, and said,

‘Bonanza not from Aurora. Anna wear secret armoury, made of gold. Quee Long find secret gold armoury that Anna wear. Quee Long try to bank armoury gold as Aurora gold. Then Staines thief from Quee Long.’

Dick Mannering, naturally enough, misunderstood this.

‘So the bonanza wasn’t from anywhere in the Aurora,’ he repeated. ‘Emery made a strike somewhere—but he kept it secret—until Quee here discovered it. Then Quee tried to bank Emery’s gold against the Aurora, so Mr. Staines took it back.’

That was confounding! Ah Sook began talking rapidly to Ah Quee in Cantonese—which Mannering, evidently, interpreted as a sign of assent. ‘Where is Mr. Staines now?’ he demanded. ‘Stop with your other questions. Ask him that. Where is Mr. Staines now?’

Obediently Ah Sook broke off, and relayed the question. This time Ah Quee responded in a tone of patent distress. He said that he had not spoken with Emery Staines since December, but he was very desirous to see him again, for it had not been until the Aurora’s quarterly return was published in early January that he had realised that he had been cheated. The fortune he had found in Anna’s dresses had not been banked against the Aurora as he had intended it to be, and Ah Quee was certain that Mr. Staines was responsible for this error. By the time he figured this out, however, Mr. Staines had disappeared. As to where he might have disappeared to, Ah Quee had no idea.

Ah Sook turned back to Mannering, and said, for the second time, ‘He not know.’

‘Did you hear that, Dick?’ said Charlie Frost, from the corner. ‘He doesn’t know.’

Mannering ignored him. He kept his revolver levelled at Ah Sook’s face, and said, ‘You tell him that unless he plays fair with me, I’m going to kill you.’ He twitched the gun, to emphasise his point. ‘You tell him that: either Johnny Quee talks, or Johnny Sook dies. Tell him that. Tell him now.’

Ah Sook dutifully relayed this threat to Ah Quee, who made no answer. There was a pause, in which every man seemed to be expecting one of the others to speak—and then suddenly Mannering made a lightning motion with his right hand, knocked Ah Quee forward, grabbed a fistful of his pigtail, and jerked his head violently back. His pistol was still pointed at Ah Sook. Ah Quee did not make a sound, but his eyes filled instantly with tears.

‘Nobody misses a Chinaman,’ Mannering said to Ah Sook. ‘In Hokitika least of all. How would your friend here explain it to the Commissioner, I wonder? “Unlucky,” he’d say. “Sook die—valley unlucky.” And what would the Commissioner say?’ Mannering gave a vicious wrench to Ah Quee’s pigtail. ‘He’d say—“Johnny Sook? He’s the hatter with the smoke, is he not? Laid out most afternoons with the dragon in his eye? Selling poisoned tar to chinks and useless whores? He’s dead? Well, then! Why in heaven would you assume I care?”’

This venom was unprecedented, as Mannering and Ah Sook had always been on equable terms; but if Ah Sook was angry, or insulted, he did not show it. He gazed back at Mannering with a glassy expression, and did not blink or break his gaze. Ah Quee, whose neck was still bent backwards, so that the muscles of his throat showed against his skin, was likewise still.

‘Not poison,’ Ah Sook said after a moment. ‘I not poison Anna.’

‘I’ll tell you this,’ Mannering said. ‘You poison Anna every day.’

‘Dick,’ Frost said desperately. ‘This is hardly on point—’

‘On point?’ Mannering shouted. He aimed his revolver about a foot away from Ah Sook’s head and fired. There was a clap—Ah Sook cried out in shock, and flung up his arm—and then a pattering noise, as the powdered rubble ran away from the hole. ‘Here’s on point,’ Mannering shouted. ‘Anna Wetherell is laid out flat at this man’s filthy joint’ (he pointed the revolver at Ah Sook) ‘six days out of seven. This man’ (he gave Ah Quee’s scalp a furious wrench) ‘calls Staines a thief. He apparently uncovered some secret that has something to do with gold, and something to do with a bonanza. I know for a fact that Anna Wetherell was with Emery Staines the night he disappeared—which was also the night, by the way, that a bonanza showed up in a very peculiar location, and Anna lost her bloody mind! D—n it, Charlie, don’t tell me to talk on point!’

In the next moment all four men spoke at once.

Ah Quee said, ‘Li goh sih hai ngh wiuh—’

Frost said, ‘If you’re so sure about the Aurora—’

Ah Sook said, ‘Ngor moh zou chor yeh—’

Mannering said, ‘Somebody gave that gold to Crosbie Wells!’

And then from behind Charlie Frost came another voice: ‘What in all heaven is going on?’

It was the commission merchant, Harald Nilssen. He ducked under the low lintel of the hut and looked around him, astonished. The collie-dog leaped upon him, sniffing at the hem of his jacket and his cuffs. Nilssen reached down and caught her behind the ears. ‘What is going on?’ he repeated. ‘For heaven’s sake, Dick—I could hear your voice from fifty paces! The celestials are all staring out of their windows!’

Mannering tightened his grip on Ah Quee’s pigtail. ‘Harald Nilssen,’ he cried. ‘Witness to the prosecution! You’re just the man to lend a hand.’

‘Quiet down,’ Nilssen said, lowering Holly to the floor and placing his hand upon her head, to calm her. ‘Quiet! You’ll bring in the sergeant in another moment. What are you doing?’

‘You went to Crosbie’s cottage,’ Mannering continued, without lowering his voice. ‘You saw that the gold had been retorted—did you not? This yellow devil’s playing us for fools!’

‘Yes,’ Nilssen said. Somewhat absurdly, he was attempting to brush the rain from his coat. ‘I saw that the gold had been retorted. That, in fact, is the reason why I’m here. But you might have asked me quietly. You’ve an audience, you know!’

‘See?’ Mannering was saying to Ah Quee. ‘Here’s another man, come to make you talk! Here’s another man to hold a pistol to your head!’

‘Excuse me,’ Nilssen said. ‘I did not come to hold a pistol to anybody’s head. And I wouldn’t mind asking again what it is that you are doing. It looks ugly, whatever it is.’

‘He won’t hear any kind of reason,’ said Frost, who was anxious not to be implicated in this ugliness.

‘Let a man speak for himself!’ Nilssen snapped. ‘What’s going on?’

We shall omit Mannering’s answer to this question, which was both inaccurate and inflammatory; we shall omit, also, the ensuing discussion, during which Mannering and Nilssen discovered that their purpose in journeying to Chinatown was one and the same, and Frost, who could intuit quite plainly that the commission merchant was holding him in some suspicion over the sale of the Wells estate, maintained a rather sullen silence. The clarifications took some time, and it was nearly ten minutes later that the conversation turned, at last, to the goldsmith Ah Quee, who was still being held by the nape of his neck in a posture of much discomfort and indignity. Mannering suggested that his pigtail be cut off altogether, in order to impress upon the man the urgency of the matter at hand; he tugged at Ah Quee’s head as he said it, taking evident pleasure in the motion, as if weighing a spoil. Nilssen’s code of ethics did not permit humiliation, however, just as his code of aesthetics did not permit ugliness; again he made his disapproval known, prompting a quarrel with Mannering that delayed Ah Quee’s release still further, and excited Holly to the point of riotous and irrepressible joy.

Finally Charlie Frost, who had been hitherto very successfully ignored, suggested that perhaps the Chinese men had simply not understood Mannering’s line of questioning. He proposed instead that the questions be put to Ah Sook again, and this time in writing: that way, he said, they could be sure that nothing had been lost in the act of translation. Nilssen saw the sense in this idea, and approved of it. Mannering was disappointed—but he was in the minority, and presently he was forced to agree. He released Ah Quee, returned his revolver to its holster, and retrieved his pocketbook from his vest, in order to compose a question in Chinese script.

Mannering’s pocketbook was an artefact about which he was not unreasonably proud. The pages of the book had been laid out rather like an alphabet primer, with the Chinese characters written beneath their English meanings; Mannering had devised an index by which the characters could be placed together, to form longer words. There was no phonetic translation, and for this reason the pocketbook occasionally caused more confusion than it allayed, but on the whole it was an ingenious and helpful conversational tool. Mannering set the tip of his tongue in the corner of his mouth, as he always did when he was reading or writing, and began thumbing through the book.

But before Mannering found his question, Ah Sook answered it. The hatter stood up from where he had been seated, next to the forge—the hut seemed very small indeed, once he too was standing—and cleared his throat.

‘I know secret of Crosbie Wells,’ he said.

This was what he had discovered in Kaniere that very morning; this was what he had come to Ah Quee’s dwelling to discuss.

‘What?’ Mannering said. ‘What?’

‘He was in Dunstan,’ Ah Sook said. ‘Otago field.’

Mannering collapsed in disappointment. ‘What’s the use of that?’ he snapped. ‘What’s secret about that? Crosbie Wells—in Dunstan! When was Dunstan? Two years ago—three years ago! Why—I was in Dunstan! All of Hokitika was in Dunstan!’

Nilssen said to Mannering, ‘You didn’t encounter Wells there—did you?’

‘No,’ said Mannering. ‘Never knew him. I knew his wife, though. From Dunedin days.’

Nilssen looked surprised. ‘You knew his wife? The widow?’

‘Yes,’ Mannering said shortly, not caring to elaborate. He turned a page. ‘But never Crosbie. They were estranged. Now hush up, all of you: I can’t hear myself think without a patch of quiet.’

‘Dunstan,’ said Walter Moody. He was stroking his chin with his finger and thumb.

‘It’s an Otago field.’

‘Central Otago.’

‘Past its prime now, Dunstan. It’s all company dredges these days. But she was a shiner in her time.’

‘That is the second time this particular goldfield has been referenced this evening,’ Moody said. ‘Am I right?’

‘You are quite right, Mr. Moody.’

‘Steady on. How is he quite right?’

‘The gold that was used to blackmail Mr. Lauderback hailed from a Dunstan field. Lauderback said so.’

‘Lauderback said so: precisely,’ Moody said. He nodded. ‘I am wondering whether I trust Mr. Lauderback’s intentions, in referencing the name of that goldfield so casually to Mr. Balfour this morning.’

‘What do you mean by that, Mr. Moody?’

‘Don’t you trust him—Lauderback, I mean?’

‘It would be most irrational if I mistrusted Mr. Lauderback,’ Moody said, ‘seeing as I have never met the man in my life. I am very conscious of the fact that the pertinent facts of this tale are being relayed to me second-hand—and, in some cases, third-hand. Take the mention of the Dunstan goldfield, for example. Francis Carver apparently mentioned the name of that field to Mr. Lauderback, who in turn narrated that encounter to Mr. Balfour, who in turn relayed that conversation to me, tonight! You will all agree that I would be a fool to take Mr. Balfour’s words to be true.’

But Moody had misjudged his audience, in questioning so sensitive a subject as the truth. There was an explosion of indignation around the room.

‘What—you don’t trust a man to tell his own story?’

‘This is all as true as I can make it, Mr. Moody!’

‘What else can he tell you, except what he was told?’

Moody was taken aback. ‘I do not believe that any part of your story has been altered or withheld,’ he replied, more carefully this time. He looked from face to face. ‘I only wished to remark that one should never take another man’s truth for one’s own.’

‘Why not?’ This question came from several quarters at once.

Moody paused a moment, thinking. ‘In a court of law,’ he said at last, ‘a witness takes his oath to speak the truth: his own truth, that is. He agrees to two parameters. His testimony must be the whole truth, and his testimony must be nothing but the truth. Only the second of these parameters is a true limit. The first, of course, is largely a matter of discretion. When we say the whole truth we mean, more precisely, all the facts and impressions that are pertinent to the matter at hand. All that is impertinent is not only immaterial; it is, in many cases, deliberately misleading. Gentlemen,’ (though this collective address sat oddly, considering the mixed company in the room) ‘I contend that there are no whole truths, there are only pertinent truths—and pertinence, you must agree, is always a matter of perspective. I do not believe that any one of you has perjured himself in any way tonight. I trust that you have given me the truth, and nothing but the truth. But your perspectives are very many, and you will forgive me if I do not take your tale for something whole.’

There was a silence at this, and Moody saw that he had offended. ‘Of course,’ he added, more quietly, ‘I speak importunately; for you have not yet finished your story.’ He looked from man to man. ‘I ought not to have interrupted. I repeat that I meant no slight to anyone. Please: go on.’