Текст книги "The Luminaries"

Автор книги: Eleanor Catton

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

‘Thomas Balfour,’ Frost repeated.

‘Thomas Balfour, the shipping agent,’ Löwenthal said. He turned the dial to widen the aperture: there was a hiss, and the globe flared orange-red. ‘He came to you this morning, did he not? I think he mentioned that he had seen you at the bank.’

Frost was frowning. ‘Yes, he did,’ he said. ‘But he asked some mighty strange questions, and I wasn’t altogether sure of his purpose, to tell you the truth.’

‘That’s just it,’ Löwenthal said, shaking out the match. ‘There’s another dimension to this whole business, and Tom knows about it. He told me this afternoon that Alistair Lauderback is sitting on a secret—something big. He might be unwilling to break Lauderback’s confidence, of course (he kept his peace with me) but if I put the matter to him in the context of this assembly … well, he can be the master of his own choice. He can make up his own mind. Perhaps, once everyone else has shared his own piece, he might be moved to speak.’

‘To speak,’ Frost repeated. ‘All right. But can he be trusted—to listen?’

Löwenthal paused, pinching the charred match between his finger and his thumb. ‘Please correct me if I am mistaken,’ he said coldly, ‘but I understood from your invitation that this is to be an assembly of innocent men—not of schemers, or conspirators, or felons of any kind.’

‘That’s right,’ said Frost. ‘But even so—’

‘And yet you ask whether Tom can be trusted to listen,’ Löwenthal went on. ‘Surely you are not in possession of any information that might indict you? Surely you know nothing that you would not want to share aloud, and freely, with a company of innocents united by a common cause?’

‘Of course not,’ said Frost, blushing. ‘But we still need to be cautious—’

‘Cautious?’ Löwenthal said. He dropped the match into the woodpile, and rubbed his fingertips together. ‘I am beginning to doubt your better interests, Mr. Frost. I am beginning to wonder whether this is not a kind of conspiracy after all.’

They looked at each other for a long moment, but Frost’s will was not equal to Löwenthal’s; he ducked his head, his cheeks flaming, and nodded once.

‘You should invite Mr. Balfour—certainly,’ he said. ‘Certainly you should.’

Löwenthal clucked his tongue. His manner could be very schoolmasterly when his code of ethics was aggrieved: his reprimands were always stern, and always effective. He gazed at the younger man now with a very sorrowful expression, causing Frost to blush still more furiously, like a schoolboy who has been caught doing violence to a book.

Wishing to redeem himself, Frost said, somewhat wildly, ‘And yet there are things about the sale of the cottage that are not yet public knowledge—that Mr. Clinch would not like to be made public, I mean.’

Löwenthal’s look was almost smouldering. ‘Let me make this very clear,’ he said. ‘I trust in your discretion, just as you trust in mine, and just as we both trust in the discretion of Mr. Clinch. But discretion is a far cry from secrecy, Mr. Frost. I do not consider that any of us is withholding information in the legal sense. Do you?’

In a voice that pretended to be casual Frost said, ‘Well, I suppose we can only hope that Mr. Clinch is of your mind’—meaning, somewhat foolishly, to curry Löwenthal’s favour by applauding his rationale. But Löwenthal shook his head.

‘Mr. Frost,’ he said. ‘You are indiscreet. I do not advise it.’

Benjamin Löwenthal hailed from Hanover, a city that, since his departure from Europe, had fallen under Prussian rule. (With his walrus moustache and severely receded hairline Löwenthal was not unlike Otto von Bismarck, but the correlation was not an imitative one: imitation was not a form of self-styling that Löwenthal had ever thought to adopt.) He was the elder son of a textiles merchant, a man whose life’s ambition had centred wholly upon giving both his sons an education. This aspiration, to the old man’s immeasurable gratification, he achieved. Soon after the boys’ studies were completed, however, both parents contracted influenza. They died, as Löwenthal was later informed, upon the very day that the Jewish people were granted formal emancipation by the Hanoverian state.

This event was young Löwenthal’s watershed. Although he was not superstitious, and so attached no real value to the fact that these events happened contemporaneously, they were nevertheless linked in his mind: he felt a profound sense of detachment from either circumstance, by virtue of their happening on the very same day. At that time he had just been offered a newspaperman’s apprenticeship at Die Henne in Ilmenau, an opportunity that both his parents would surely have encouraged him to seize—but because the state of Thuringia had not yet formally emancipated its Jewish citizens, he felt that it would be disrespectful to his parents’ memory to accept. He was torn. Löwenthal cherished an outsized fear of catastrophe, and was prone to over-analysis in self-contemplation; his reasons for his actions were always many, and rationalised in the extreme. We shall pass over these reasons why, and remark only that Löwenthal chose neither to move to Ilmenau nor to remain in Hanover. Immediately following his parents’ deaths, he left Europe altogether, never to return. His brother Heinrich took over their father’s business in Hanover, and Benjamin Löwenthal, degree in hand, sailed across the Atlantic, to America—where, for the months and years and decades after that, he recounted this very history to himself, in exactly these words, in exactly this way.

Repetition is a fortification like no other. Over time Löwenthal’s conception of the story of his past had become fixed and (by virtue of its fixity) unassailable. He lost the capacity to talk about his life in any other terms but those he had prescribed: that he was a moral man; that he was a man confronted with paradox; that he was a man who had done the right thing, who did the right thing, who would do the right thing. All of his choices, in his mind, had been moral choices. He ceased to be able to distinguish between personal preference and moral imperative, and he ceased to accept that such a distinction was possible. It was as a consequence of all of this that he chastised Charlie Frost so freely now.

Frost’s eyes were lowered. ‘I can be discreet,’ he said quietly. ‘You needn’t worry about me.’

‘I will go and speak to Tom myself,’ Löwenthal said, crossing the room in two strides, and holding open the door for the banker to leave. ‘I thank you for the invitation. I shall see you tonight, at the Crown.’

Dick Mannering, upon returning from Kaniere, had gone at once to the Gridiron Hotel, where he found Edgar Clinch alone in his private office, sitting at his desk. The magnate sat down without invitation, talked for some time about the afternoon’s occurrences, and very swiftly described the proposed conference that was to take place that evening. The men had decided, for reasons of prudence, to meet upon neutral ground, and the smoking room of the Crown Hotel, as the least attractive room of the least popular establishment in all of Hokitika, had seemed to all the assembled company to be a very sensible choice. Mannering talked with great exuberance, for he liked the idea of a secret council very much; he had always longed to be a member of a guild, the kind possessed of arcane histories, and feudal rankings, and a code. Presently he became aware, however, that the hotelier did not appear to be listening very closely. Clinch had placed both palms of his hands flat on the desk before him, as though to steady himself against a wind, and during Mannering’s long speech he had not once altered his posture, though his gaze darted anxiously around the room. His usually florid face was very pale, and his moustache was twitching.

‘You look as if something’s on your mind—I declare it,’ said Mannering at last, and in a rather sulky tone, for he was sure that whatever this preoccupation was, it could hardly be as exciting as his afternoon in Chinatown, or the prospect of a secret conference to discuss the perplexing disappearance of a very wealthy man.

‘The widow was here,’ said Edgar Clinch, hollowly. ‘She had business with Anna, she said. She went upstairs—and not half an hour later, she was back down again, with Anna in tow.’

‘Lydia Wells?’

‘Lydia Wells,’ Clinch echoed. In his mouth her name was like a curse.

‘When?’

‘Just now,’ said Clinch. ‘They left together, the very moment before you got here.’ He fell silent again.

Mannering made an impatient noise. ‘Don’t make me beg you for it.’

‘They know each other!’ Clinch burst out. ‘They know each other—Lydia and Anna! They’re the best of friends!’

This revelation was not news to Mannering, who was a frequent patron of the House of Many Wishes in Dunedin, and had seen the two women together at that place before: in fact it was at the House of Many Wishes that Mannering had first engaged Anna Wetherell to work for him. He shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘Thick as thieves,’ Clinch said mournfully. ‘And thieves is right, Dick. Thieves is what I mean.’

‘Who’s a thief?’

‘They’re in on it together!’ Clinch cried.

Really, Mannering thought, Clinch could be terribly irksome when he was vexed; he became altogether unintelligible. Aloud he said, ‘Is this about the widow’s appeal?’

‘You know what I’m talking about,’ Clinch said. ‘You know.’

‘What?’ Mannering said. ‘Is it about the fortune? What?’

‘Not the Wells fortune. The other fortune.’

‘What other fortune?’

‘You know!’

‘On the contrary: I have not the least idea.’

‘I’m talking about Anna’s dresses!’

This was the first time Clinch had ever mentioned the gold he had discovered in Anna’s dress the previous winter—when he carried her upstairs, and lowered her into the bath, and he picked up her gown, and felt a heaviness along the seam, and broke the thread of the hem, and withdrew, in his fingers, a shining pinch of it. The pressure of a long-time concealment lent an almost crazed aspect to his outburst now; for he was still convinced that the magnate was embroiled in a scheme of some kind, although he had never figured out, exactly, what this scheme might properly entail.

But Mannering only looked confused. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s all this about?’

Clinch was scowling. ‘Don’t play stupid.’

‘Excuse me: I am doing no such thing,’ Mannering said. ‘What are you talking about, Edgar? What do a whore’s fashions have to do with the price of anything at all?’

Studying him, Edgar Clinch felt a tremor of doubt. Mannering’s bewilderment seemed perfectly genuine. He was not behaving like a man exposed. Could that mean that he had not known about the gold hidden in Anna’s gowns? Could Anna have been colluding with quite another man—behind Mannering’s back? Clinch felt bewildered also. He decided to change the subject.

‘I meant that mourning gown,’ he said, clumsily. ‘The one with the stupid collar that she’s taken to wearing this past fortnight.’

Mannering waved his hand. ‘She’s just being pious,’ he said. ‘Giving herself airs. It’ll blow over.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Clinch said. ‘Last week, you see, I told her she had to make good her debts before she quit walking the streets—and we had words, and I suppose I got angry, and I threatened to turn her out of the hotel.’

‘What’s that got to do with Lydia Wells?’ said Mannering impatiently. ‘So you lost your temper. What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Lydia Wells just paid Anna’s debt,’ Clinch said. At last he lifted his hands from the desk: beneath them, slightly damp from the pressure of his palms, lay a crisp banknote, made out for a sum of six pounds. ‘Anna’s gone over to the Wayfarer. Indefinitely. Got a new profession, she says. Won’t answer to the name of whore.’

Mannering looked at the banknote, and did not speak for a moment.

‘But that’s her debt to you,’ he said at last. ‘That’s just for rent. She owes me a hundred pounds—and then some! She’s in the red—and she’s in it deep—and she answers to me, d—n it! Not to you, and certainly not to Lydia bloody Wells! But what do you mean—won’t answer to the name of whore?’

‘Just that,’ said Edgar Clinch. ‘She’s done with the profession. So she says.’

Mannering’s face had turned purple. ‘You can’t just walk out on your own job. I don’t care if you’re a whore or a butcher or a bloody baker! You can’t just walk out—not when there’s a debt outstanding!’

‘That’s the—’

‘In mourning, she said!’ Mannering cried, leaping up. ‘For a time, she said! Give a girl an inch and she takes a bloody mile! Not on my watch, all right! Not with a hundred pounds against her name! No indeed!’

Clinch was looking at the magnate coldly. ‘She said to tell you that Aubert Gascoigne has the money for you,’ he said. ‘She said to tell you that it’s hidden underneath his bed.’

‘Who in hell is Obur Gaskwon?’

‘He’s a clerk at the Magistrate’s Court,’ Clinch said. ‘He filed the widow’s appeal on Crosbie Wells’s fortune.’

‘Aha!’ said Mannering. ‘So we’re coming back around to that, are we? I’ll be God-d—ned!’

‘There’s another thing,’ Clinch said. ‘Mr. Gascoigne was up in Anna’s room this afternoon, and shots were fired. Two shots. I asked him about it afterwards—and he countered by mentioning the debt. I went up to look. There’s a hole in Anna’s pillow. Right through the middle. The stuffing came out.’

‘Two holes?’

‘Just one.’

‘And the widow saw it,’ Mannering said.

‘No,’ Clinch said. ‘She came later. But when Mr. Gascoigne left, he did say that he was going to talk to a lady … and then she showed up about two hours after that.’

‘What’s the other fortune?’ Mannering said suddenly. ‘You said there was another fortune.’

‘I thought—’ Clinch dropped his gaze. ‘No. It doesn’t matter. I made a mistake. Forget it.’

Mannering was frowning. ‘What obligation does Lydia Wells have, to pay off Anna’s debt?’ he said. ‘Where’s her profit there?’

‘I don’t know,’ Clinch said. ‘But the two of them seemed very intimate this afternoon.’

‘Intimate—that’s not a profit.’

‘I don’t know,’ Clinch said again.

‘They were on each others’ arms? They were in good spirits? What?’

‘Yes,’ said Clinch. ‘They were linked at the elbow—and when the widow spoke, Anna leaned in close.’

He fell silent, dwelling on the memory.

‘And you let her go!’ Mannering barked suddenly. ‘You let her go—without asking me—without calling me over? She’s my best girl, Edgar! You know that without me telling you! The others aren’t a patch on Anna!’

‘I could hardly have detained her,’ Clinch said, looking sour. ‘What would I have done—locked her up? And anyway, you were in Kaniere.’

Mannering leaped up from his chair.

‘So Chinaman’s Ann is no longer any man’s Ann!’ He thumped his hat on his leg. ‘She makes it seem altogether simple—does she not? Quitting her profession! As if we could all just wake up one morning, and decide …!’

But Edgar Clinch did not care to pursue this rhetorical line. He was meditating, sorrowfully, upon the fact that to-morrow was Sunday, and the first Sunday in many months when he did not have the drawing of Anna’s bath to look forward to. Aloud he said, ‘Maybe you ought to go and speak to Mr. Gascoigne about that money.’

‘Do you know what makes me angry, Edgar?’ Mannering said. ‘Second-hand news makes me angry. Picking up after other men makes me angry. Hearing all this from you—it makes me angry. What does Anna want me to do? Knock on the door of a man I barely know? What would I say? “Excuse me, sir, I believe there’s a great deal of money under your bed, and Anna Wetherell owes it to me!” It’s disrespectful. Disrespectful is what it is. No: as far as I’m concerned, that girl is still in my employ. She is still very much a whore, and her debt to me is still very much unpaid.’

Clinch nodded. His energy had dissipated, and he wanted now to be alone. He picked up the banknote, folded it, and placed it inside his wallet, against his heart. ‘What time did you say, for the meeting tonight?’

‘Sundown,’ said Mannering. ‘Only you might want to arrive before or after, so we’re not all trooping in at once. You’ll find a fair clutch of men have come out of this business feeling like there’s someone to blame.’

‘Can’t say I care for the Crown,’ said Clinch, half to himself. ‘They skimped on glass, I think. The frontage windows ought to be wider—and there ought to be a roof over the porch.’

‘Well, it’ll be quiet, and that’s all that matters.’

‘Yes.’

Mannering put his hat on. ‘If you’d asked me last week who was to blame for all of this madness, I would have guessed the Jew. If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have guessed the widow. This afternoon, I would have told you Chinamen. And now? Well, Edgar, I’m d—ned if I don’t lay my money on that whore. You mark my words: Anna Wetherell knows exactly why that money turned up at Crosbie Wells’s, and she knows exactly what happened to Emery Staines—God rest his soul, though I do speak prematurely. Attempted suicide, my hat. Mourning dress, my hat. She’s in to the teeth with Lydia Wells—and together, they’re up to something.’

Sook Yongsheng and Quee Long stamped down the Kaniere-road towards Hokitika, identically clad in wide-brimmed felt hats, woollen capes, and canvas overshoes. Dusk was falling, bringing with it a rapid drop in temperature, and turning the standing water at the roadside from brown to glossy blue. There was little traffic save for the infrequent cart or lone rider making for the warmth and light of the town ahead—still some two miles distant, though one could hear the roar of the ocean already, a dull, pitchless sound, and above it, the infrequent cry of a sea-bird, the call floating thin and weightless above the sound of the rain.

The two men were conversing in Cantonese.

‘There is no gold in the Aurora,’ Ah Quee was saying.

‘Can you be certain?’

‘The claim is barren. It is as if the earth has been already turned.’

‘Turned earth can be surprising,’ replied Ah Sook. ‘I know of many men who make their livings out of tailing piles.’

‘You know of many Chinese men who make their livings out of tailing piles,’ Ah Quee corrected. ‘And then they are beaten, even killed, by those men whose eyes were not as sharp.’

‘Money is a burden,’ said Ah Sook. This was a proverb he quoted often.

‘A burden that is felt most keenly by the poor,’ said Ah Quee. He glanced sidelong at the other man. ‘Your trade has also been slow, of late.’

‘It has,’ said Ah Sook, evenly.

‘The whore has lost her taste for the smoke.’

‘Yes. I cannot account for it.’

‘Perhaps she has found an alternate supplier.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘You do not believe that.’

‘I do not know what to believe.’

‘You are suspicious of the chemist.’

‘Yes; among other men.’

Ah Quee mused a moment, and then said, ‘I do not think that the fortune I uncovered ever belonged to Anna herself.’

‘No,’ Ah Sook agreed. ‘That is likely. After all, she did not remark its theft.’

Ah Quee glanced at him. ‘Do you think of my action as a theft?’

‘I do not wish to impugn your honour,’ Ah Sook began, but then he hesitated.

‘Your implication goes against your wish, Sook Yongsheng.’

Ah Sook ducked his head. ‘Forgive me. I am ignorant, and my ignorance shines brighter than my intent.’

‘Even ignorant men have opinions,’ said Ah Quee. ‘Tell me. Am I a thief to you?’

‘It is the wish for secrecy that defines a theft,’ the hatter said at last, somewhat lamely.

‘In saying so, you impugn the honour of more men than me!’

‘If I speak untruly, I will swallow back my words.’

‘You speak untruly,’ Ah Quee snapped. ‘When a man finds a nugget on the goldfields, he does not proclaim it. He hides it, and speaks nothing to his fellows. Here on the goldfields, every man has a wish for secrecy. Only a fool speaks of his discoveries aloud. You would be no different, Sook Yongsheng, if you came upon a pile.’

‘But the gold you speak of was not discovered on the field,’ Ah Sook said. ‘You found your fortune in a woman’s pocket; you took it from her person, not from the ground.’

‘The woman had no knowledge of what she carried! She was like a man who camps beside a river rich in gold, and sees nothing, suspects nothing.’

‘But the gold in a river does not belong to anyone; nor does it belong to the river.’

‘You have said yourself that the gold could not have belonged to Anna!’

‘Not to Anna; but what of the tailor’s claim upon it? What of the tailor’s purpose, in hiding such a sum in the folds of a woman’s gown?’

‘I had no knowledge of the tailor,’ said Ah Quee hotly. ‘When you come upon a silver penny, do you ask who forged it? No: you ask only who touched that penny last! I am not a thief, for taking something that was lost.’

‘Lost?’

‘Lost,’ said Ah Quee. ‘That fortune had been claimed by no one. It had been stolen before me, and it has been stolen since.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Ah Sook. ‘I stand corrected.’

‘A whore is not a concubine,’ said Ah Quee. He was getting worked up; evidently this was a subject on which he had desired to defend himself for some time. ‘A whore cannot become respectable. A whore cannot become rich. All the prestige and all the profit belong to the whoremonger, never to the whore. Yes: the only one who truly profits from her trade is the man who stands behind her, purse in one hand, pistol in the other. I did not steal from Anna! What could I have stolen? She owns nothing. That gold was never hers.’

They heard hoof beats behind them, and turned: a pair of riders, both sitting very low in the saddle, were heading for Hokitika at a canter; both horses were in a lather, and both riders were making very free with their crops, to urge them still faster. The Chinese men stood aside to let them pass.

‘Forgive me,’ said Ah Sook again, when they were gone. ‘I was mistaken. You are not a thief, Quee Long.’

They resumed walking. ‘Mr. Staines is the true thief,’ said the goldsmith. ‘He stole with intent, and then fled without compunction. I was foolish to place my trust in him.’

‘Staines is in league with Francis Carver,’ said Ah Sook. ‘The Aurora’s records prove as much. That alliance is reason enough to doubt his worth.’

Ah Quee glanced across at his companion. ‘I do not know your Francis Carver,’ he said. ‘I have never heard his name before today.’

‘He is a merchant trader,’ said Ah Sook, without expression. ‘I knew him in Guangzhou, as a boy. He betrayed my family, and I have sworn to take his life.’

‘This much I know already,’ said Ah Quee. ‘I should like to know more.’

‘It is a pitiful story.’

‘Then I will listen with compassion. A betrayal of any of my countrymen is a betrayal of me.’

Ah Sook frowned at this. ‘The betrayal is mine to avenge,’ he said.

‘I meant only that we must help each other, Sook Yongsheng.’

‘Why do you say “must”?’

‘Chinese life is cheap in this country.’

‘All life is cheap, upon a goldfield.’

‘You are wrong,’ said Ah Quee. ‘Today you saw a man strike me, pull my hair, insult me, and threaten me with death—all without consequence. And there will be no consequence. Every man in Hokitika would sooner take Mannering’s part than mine, and why? Because I am Chinese and he is not Chinese. You and I must help each other, Ah Sook. We must. The law is united against us; we must have the means to unite against the law.’

This was a sentiment that Ah Sook had never heard expressed; he was silent for a time, digesting it. Ah Quee took off his hat, struck it several times with his palm, and replaced it on his head. Somewhere in the bush nearby a bellbird gave its lusty, open-throated cry; the call was taken up by another, and another, and for a moment the trees around them were alive with song.

It was by preference, and not by necessity, that Sook Yongsheng lived and worked alone. He was not surly by temperament, and in fact did not find it difficult to form friendships, nor to allow those friendships to deepen, once they had been formed; he simply preferred to answer to himself. He disliked all burdens of responsibility, most especially when those responsibilities were expected, or enforced—and friendship, in his experience, nearly always devolved into matters of debt, guilt, and expectation. Those men he did choose to call his intimates were those who demanded nothing, and gave much; as a consequence, there were many charitable figures in Ah Sook’s past, and very few upon whom he had expressly doted. He had the sensibility of a social vanguard, unattached, full of conviction, and, in his own perception at least, almost universally misunderstood. The sense of being constantly undervalued by the world at large would develop, over time, into a kind of private demagoguery; he was certain of the comprehensive scope of his own vision, and rarely thought it necessary to explain himself to other men. In general his beliefs were projections of a simpler, better world, in which he liked, fantastically, to dwell—for he preferred the immaculate fervour of his own solitude to all other social obligations, and tended, when in company, to hold himself aloof. Of this propensity, he was not at all unaware, for he was highly reflexive, and given to extensive self-analysis of the most rigorous and contemplative kind. But he analysed his own mind as a prophet analyses his own strange visions—that is, with reverence, and believing always that he was destined to be the herald of a cosmic raison d’être, a universal plan.

‘My history with Francis Carver,’ he said at last, ‘is a story with many beginnings; but I hope that it will only have one end.’

‘Tell it,’ said Ah Quee.

Harald Nilssen closed the door of his quayside office, sat down at his desk, and without first removing his hat or his coat, penned a hasty note to Joseph Pritchard. The tone of his letter was frantic, even slovenly, but Nilssen did not care to revise it. Without re-reading his words, he blotted the page, folded the paper, and stamped the sealing wax with the circular matrix of Nilssen & Co. He then summoned Albert, and instructed the boy to deliver the note to Pritchard’s drug emporium on Collingwood-street post-haste.

Once Albert had departed Nilssen hung up his hat, exchanged his rain-soaked coat for a dry robe, and reached for his pipe—but even after the tobacco was lit, and he had sat down, put up his feet, and crossed his ankles, he did not feel reassured. He felt chilly. His skin was damp to the touch, and the rhythm of his heart would not slow. He stuck the pipe in the corner of his mouth, as he liked to do, and turned his attention to the subject of his disquiet: the promise he had made, earlier that day, to George Shepard, Governor of the Hokitika Gaol.

Nilssen wondered whether he ought to break his vow of silence and share the details of Shepard’s proposition with the assembly that evening. The matter was certainly relevant to their prospective discussion, principally for the reason that it concerned a percentage of Crosbie Wells’s fortune, but also because, Nilssen suspected, Shepard’s antipathy towards the politician Lauderback was not just a matter of convict labour, gaol-houses, and roads. When one considered that the politician Alistair Lauderback had been the first to encounter Crosbie Wells’s dead body—well, Nilssen thought, it was clear that Governor Shepard was as mixed up in the Crosbie Wells conspiracy as the rest of them! But how much did Shepard know—and whom was he serving, beyond his own self-interest? Had he known about the fortune hidden in Crosbie Wells’s cottage? Had Lauderback known about it, for that matter? Brooding, Nilssen recrossed his ankles, and repositioned his pipe in his mouth, cupping the bowl between the crook of his index finger and the pad of his thumb. Whichever way one looked at it, he thought, there was no denying that George Shepard knew a great deal more than he was letting on.

Harald Nilssen was used to commanding public attention, an authority he achieved through the use of wit, declamation, and comical self-styling. He became very quickly bored when he was required, for whatever reason, to inhabit the periphery of a crowded room. His vanity required constant stimulation, and constant proof that the ongoing creation of his selfhood was a project that he himself controlled. He was vexed, now, to think that he had been played as a fool, not because he believed himself undeserving of such treatment (Nilssen knew very well that he was an impressionable type, and often joked about this very fact) but because he could not perceive Shepard’s motivation in having treated him so.

He puffed at his pipe, conjuring in his mind the prospective gaol-house, the asylum, the scaffold of the gallows, built high above the drop. All of it would be built with his commission, and by his leave. Hang Governor Shepard, he thought suddenly. He had no real obligation to keep Shepard’s secret—why, he did not even know, exactly, what that secret really was! He would share Shepard’s request with the assembly that evening, and he would share his own suspicions about the man, to boot. He was not yet contractually bound to keep his silence. He had not yet signed his name to any document. What did that matter, anyway? A gaol-house was not a private property. It belonged to all of Hokitika. A gaol-house was built by the government—and on behalf of the adherents of the law.

Presently Nilssen heard the door in the outer office open and close. He leaped up. It was Albert, returning from Joseph Pritchard’s drug hall. His jacket was very wet, and when he stepped into Nilssen’s office, he carried with him the earthy smell of rain.

‘Did he burn the letter?’ Nilssen said anxiously. ‘Did you watch him burn it? What’s that you’ve got there?’

‘Pritchard’s reply,’ said Albert. He held up a folded piece of paper.

‘I said there wasn’t to be a reply! I said that!’

‘Yes,’ said Albert, ‘and I told him—but he penned one anyway.’

Nilssen eyed the document in Albert’s hand. ‘Did he burn my letter, at least?’

‘Yes,’ Albert said, but then he hesitated.

‘What? What?’

‘Well,’ Albert said, ‘when I said he had to burn it—he laughed.’

Nilssen narrowed his eyes. ‘Why did he laugh?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Albert. ‘But I thought I should tell you that he did. Maybe it doesn’t matter.’