Текст книги "The Luminaries"
Автор книги: Eleanor Catton
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‘A kind of knocking was ensuing from inside the shipping crate nearest me—a furious knocking, loud enough to be heard over all the other din.’
Balfour was looking very alert.
‘It sounded,’ Moody went on, ‘as if a man were trapped in there, and thrashing with all his limbs. I shouted hello and staggered over—the ship was pitching awfully—and from within heard a single name shouted over and over: Magdalena, Magdalena, Magdalena. I knew then that it was a man inside, and not a rat or beast of any other kind. I moved to pry the tacks from the lid of the case, working as fast as I could, and in due course managed to lever the lid open. I believe this was around two o’clock in the afternoon,’ Moody added, with delicate emphasis. ‘It was some four or five hours before we landed at Hokitika, in any case.’
‘Magdalena,’ said Mannering. ‘That’s Anna.’
Gascoigne looked furious.
Moody looked at Mannering. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow. Is Magdalena Miss Wetherell’s middle name?’
‘It’s a name to give a whore,’ Mannering explained.
Moody shook his head, to indicate that he still did not understand.
‘As every dog is called Fido, and every cow is called Bess.’
‘Ah—yes, I see,’ said Moody, thinking privately that the man might have produced two more attractive examples, when he was in the whoring business himself.
‘Perhaps,’ said Benjamin Löwenthal slowly, ‘perhaps we can say—with reasonable doubt, of course—that the man inside that shipping crate was Emery Staines.’
‘He took a particular shine to Anna, that’s for sure,’ Mannering agreed.
‘Staines vanishes the very day Carver weighs anchor!’ Balfour said, sitting forward. ‘And the very day my crate goes missing! Of course: there it is! Staines goes into the crate—Carver swipes the crate—Carver sails away!’
‘But for what purpose?’ Pritchard said.
‘You didn’t happen to get a look at the docking slip, by any chance? The bill of lading?’
‘No, I did not,’ said Moody shortly. He had not yet finished his story, and he did not like being interrupted in mid-performance. But the rapt audience in the room had dissolved, for the umpteenth time that evening, into a murmuring rabble, as each man voiced his suppositions, and expressed his surprise.
‘Emery Staines—on Carver’s ship!’ Mannering was saying. ‘Question is, of course, whether he stowed himself away—that’s one option; whether he was brought on board by accident—that’s another; or whether Carver captured him, and chose to lock him in a shipping crate, in full knowledge—that’s a third.’
Nilssen shook his head. ‘What did he say, though—that the lid was tacked down! You can’t do that from the inside!’
‘You may as well call it a coffin. How’s the man to breathe?’
‘There are slats in the pine—gaps—’
‘Not enough to breathe, surely!’
‘Tom: your shipping crate. Was there room enough inside it for a grown man?’
‘How big is a shipping crate, anyway?’
‘Don’t forget that Carver and Staines are business partners.’
‘About the size of a dray-cart. You’ll have seen them, stacked along the quay. A man could lie inside quite comfortably.’
‘Business partners on a duffer claim!’
‘Strange, though, that he’s still in the crate on the way back from Dunedin. Isn’t that strange? Seems almost to point to the fact that Carver didn’t know he was there.’
‘We ought to let Mr. Moody finish.’
‘That’s a way to treat your business partner—lock him up to die!’
The only men who had not joined this rabble of supposition were the two Chinese men, Quee Long and Sook Yongsheng, who were sitting very erect, with their eyes fixed very solemnly upon Moody—as they had been for the duration of the evening. Moody met Ah Sook’s gaze—and though the latter’s expression did not alter, it seemed to Moody that he conveyed a kind of sympathy, as though to say that he understood Moody’s feeling of impatience very well.
The lack of a common language had prevented Ah Sook from articulating the full story of his dealings with Francis Carver to the assembly that evening, and as a result, the English-speaking company remained quite ignorant of the particulars of this former association, beyond the fact that Carver had committed a murder, and Ah Sook had resolved to avenge it. Moody regarded him now, holding Ah Sook’s dark gaze in his pale one. He wondered at the history the two men had shared. Ah Sook had confided only that he had known Carver as a boy; he had divulged nothing else. Moody guessed that Ah Sook was around forty-five in age, which would mean he had been born in the early twenties; perhaps, then, he and Carver had known one another during the Chinese wars.
‘Mr. Moody,’ said Cowell Devlin. ‘Let us put the question to you. Do you believe the man inside the shipping case could have been Emery Staines?’
The room fell quiet at once.
‘I have never met Mr. Staines, and so would not recognise him,’ Moody said stiffly, ‘but yes, that is my guess.’
Pritchard was doing some calculation in his head. ‘If Staines had been inside that shipping case since Carver left for Dunedin,’ he said, ‘that makes thirteen days without water or air.’
‘Unlucky number,’ somebody muttered, and Moody was struck by the thought that thirteen was also the number of men currently assembled in the smoking room—and that he himself was the thirteenth man.
‘Is that possible—thirteen days?’ said Gascoigne.
‘Without water? Barely.’ Pritchard stroked his chin. ‘But without air, of course … impossible.’
‘But he might not have been in there since leaving Hokitika,’ Balfour pointed out. ‘He might have been put into the case in Dunedin—though whether by his own volition, or by force—’
‘I have not yet finished my story,’ Moody said.
‘Yes,’ said Mannering. ‘Quite right! He hasn’t finished. Hold your tongues.’
The supposition ceased. Moody rocked on his heels again, and after a moment, resumed.
‘Once I had determined that the thing inside the crate was indeed a man,’ he said, ‘I helped him out—with difficulty, for he was very weak, and not breathing at all well. He seemed to have spent all of his strength upon the knocking. I loosed his collar—he was wearing a cravat—and just as I did so, his chest began to bleed.’
‘You cut him somehow?’ said Nilssen.
But this time Moody did not answer; he closed his eyes and continued, as if in a trance. ‘The blood was welling up—bubbling, as from a pump; the man clutched at his chest, trying to staunch the flow, all the while sobbing that name, Magdalena, Magdalena … I watched him in horror, gentlemen. I could not speak. The volume—’
‘He scratched himself on the crate?’ Nilssen said again, persistently.
‘The blood was veritably pumping from his body,’ Moody said, opening his eyes. ‘It was most definitely not a scratch wound, sir. I could hardly have scratched him, except perhaps with a fingernail, and I keep my nails very close, as you can observe. And I repeat, the blood began to pump well after he was out of the crate, and seated upright. I thought perhaps there had been a stickpin in his cravat—but he was not wearing a stickpin. His cravat had been tied in a bow.’
Pritchard was frowning. ‘He must have been already injured, then,’ he said. ‘Before you opened the crate. Perhaps he cut himself—before you arrived on the scene.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Moody, without conviction. ‘I’m afraid my understanding of the event is rather less …’
‘What?’
‘Well,’ Moody said, gathering himself, ‘let me put it this way. The injury did not seem—natural.’
‘Not natural?’ Mannering said.
Moody looked embarrassed. He had faith in the analytic properties of reason: he believed in logic with the same calm conviction with which he believed in his ability to perceive it. Truth, for him, could be perfected, and a perfect truth was always utterly beautiful and entirely clear. We have mentioned already that Moody had no religion—and therefore did not perceive truth in mystery, in the inexplicable and the unexplained, in those mists that clouded one’s scientific perception as the material cloud now obscured the Hokitika sky.
‘I know this sounds very odd,’ he said, ‘but I am not altogether sure that the man inside the shipping case was even alive. By the light in the hold—and the shadows—’ He trailed off, and then said, in a harsher voice, ‘Let me say this. I am not sure if I would even call the thing a man.’
‘What else?’ said Balfour. ‘What else, if not a man?’
‘An apparition,’ Moody replied. ‘A vision of some kind. A ghost. It sounds very foolish; I know that. Perhaps Lydia Wells would be able to describe it better than I.’
There was a brief moment of quiet.
‘What happened next, Mr. Moody?’ said Frost.
Moody turned to address the banker. ‘My next action, I’m afraid, was a cowardly one. I turned, grabbed my valise, and swarmed back up the ladder. I left him there—still bleeding.’
‘I don’t suppose you saw the bill of lading—on the crate?’ said Balfour again, but Moody did not answer him.
‘Was that your last encounter with the man?’ said Löwenthal.
‘Yes,’ said Moody heavily. ‘I did not venture down into the hold again—and when we arrived at Hokitika, the passengers were conveyed by lighter to the shore. If the man in question was indeed real—if he was Emery Staines—then he is still aboard the Godspeed as we speak … as is Francis Carver, of course. They are both offshore, just beyond the river mouth, waiting for the tide. But perhaps I imagined it. The man, the blood, all of it. I have never suffered from hallucinations before, but … well; you see that I am very undecided. At the time, however, I was sure that I had seen a ghost.’
‘Perhaps you had,’ said Devlin.
‘Perhaps I had,’ Moody said, bowing his head. ‘I will accept that explanation as the truth, if there is compelling proof enough. But you will forgive me for admitting that the explanation is, to my mind, a fantastic one.’
‘Ghost or no ghost, it seems that we are facing some kind of a solution at last,’ said Löwenthal—who was looking very tired. ‘Tomorrow morning, when Mr. Moody goes to the wharf to collect his trunk—’
But Löwenthal was interrupted. The door of the smoking room suddenly swung to and struck the wall with such violence that every man in the room started in surprise. As one they turned—and saw, in the doorway, Mannering’s boy, breathless, and clutching a stitch in his side.
‘The lights,’ he gasped.
‘What is it?’ said Mannering, levering himself up. ‘What lights? What’s wrong?’
‘The lights on the spit,’ the boy said, still clutching his side—for his breath was coming in gasps.
‘Out with it!’
‘I can’t—’ He began to cough.
‘Why on earth have you been running?’ Mannering shouted. ‘You were supposed to be standing right outside! Standing still, d—n you! I don’t pay your wage so you can take your bloody constitutional!’
‘It’s the Godspeed,’ the boy managed.
All of a sudden the room was very still.
‘The Godspeed?’ Mannering barked, his eyes bulging. ‘What about it? Talk, you idiot!’
‘The nav lights on the spit,’ the boy said. ‘They went out—in the wind, and—the tide—’
‘What happened?’
‘Godspeed’s run aground,’ the boy said. ‘Foundered on the bar—she rolled, not ten minutes ago.’ He drew a ragged breath. ‘Her mainmast cracked—and then she rolled again—and then the surf came through the hatches and pulled her down. She’s a goner, sir. She’s a goner. She’s wrecked.’
ECLIPTIC
In which our allegiances have shifted, as our countenance makes clear.
Three weeks have passed since Walter Moody first set foot upon the sand, since the council at the Crown convened in stealth, and since the barque Godspeed was added to the wrecks upon the bar. When the twelve men greet each other now, it is with a special understanding—as when a mason meets a member of his guild, in daylight, and shares a glance that is eloquent and grave. Dick Mannering has nodded to Cowell Devlin in the Kaniere thoroughfare; Harald Nilssen has twice raised his hat to Thomas Balfour; Charlie Frost has exchanged the morning’s greetings with Joseph Pritchard while in line for breakfast at the sixpenny saloon. A secret always has a strengthening effect upon a newborn friendship, as does the shared impression that an external figure is to blame: the men of the Crown have become united less by their shared beliefs, we observe, than by their shared misgivings—which are, in the main, externally directed. In their analyses, variously made, of Alistair Lauderback, George Shepard, Lydia Wells, Francis Carver, Anna Wetherell, and Emery Staines, the Crown men have become more and more suggestive, despite the fact that nothing has been proven, no body has been tried, and no new information has come to light. Their beliefs have become more fanciful, their hypotheses less practical, their counsel less germane. Unconfirmed suspicion tends, over time, to become wilful, fallacious, and prey to the vicissitudes of mood—it acquires all the qualities of common superstition—and the men of the Crown Hotel, whose nexus of allegiance is stitched, after all, in the bright thread of time and motion, have, like all men, no immunity to influence.
For the planets have changed places against the wheeling canvas of the stars. The Sun has advanced one-twelfth along the tilted wheel of her ecliptic path, and with that motion comes a new world order, a new perspective on the whole. With the Sun in Capricorn we were reserved, exacting, and lofty in our distance. When we looked upon Man, we sought to fix him: we mourned his failures and measured his gifts. We could not imagine what he might have been, had he been tempted to betray his very nature—or had he betrayed himself without temptation, better still. But there is no truth except truth in relation, and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clockwork orchestration that alters every minute, never repeating, never still. We are no longer sheltered in a cloistered reminiscence of the past. We now look outward, through the phantasm of our own convictions: we see the world as we wish to perfect it, and we imagine dwelling there.
ARIES IN THE THIRD HOUSE
In which Te Rau Tauwhare goes in search of employment and Löwenthal’s suggestions are rebuffed.
At the newspaper office on Weld-street, Te Rau Tauwhare found the door propped open with a hatstand, and the sound of whistling issuing from within. He entered without knocking, and passed through the shop to the workroom at the rear, where the paper’s editor, Benjamin Löwenthal, was sitting at his workbench, setting the type for Monday’s edition of the West Coast Times.
In his left hand Löwenthal held a steel composing stick, roughly the size of a schoolboy’s rule; with his right, he selected and deftly fitted tiny blocks of type, their nicks facing outward, onto the square edge of the stick—a task that required him to read not only right-to-left, but also back-to-front, for the galley text was both mirrored and reversed. Once the line was set, he would slide it into the forme, a flat steel tray a little larger than a newspaper broadsheet; beneath each line he slotted thin straps of lead, to create a space between the lines, and occasionally, a raised brass rule, to produce a solid underscore. When he had slid the last line of text into the forme, he fitted wooden quoins around the edge of the tray, tapping them with a mallet to ensure that every block was snug; then he planed the surface of the galley with a piece of two-by-four to ensure each block of type sat at a uniform height. Finally, he dipped his hand-roller in a tray of ink, and coated the entire galley in a thin film of glossy black—working swiftly, so the ink did not have time to dry—and laid a trembling sheet of newsprint over it. Löwenthal always printed his first proof by hand, so as to check it for errors before committing the galley to the press—though he made few errors of an accidental or careless sort, being, by nature, something of a stickler for perfection.
He greeted Tauwhare very warmly. ‘I’m sure I haven’t seen you since the night Godspeed came to ground, Mr. Tauwhare,’ he said. ‘Can that be true?’
‘Yes,’ Tauwhare said, indifferently. ‘I have been in the north.’ He cast his eye over the other man’s workbench: cases of type, pots of ink and lye, brushes, tweezers, mallets, assorted blocks of lead and brass, a bowl of spotted apples, a paring knife.
‘Just arrived back, have you?’
‘This morning.’
‘Well then, I am sure I can guess why you’ve returned.’
Tauwhare frowned. ‘How can you guess?’
‘Why—for the widow’s séance! Do I not hit upon it?’
Tauwhare said nothing for a moment, still frowning. Then he said, with a tone of suspicion, ‘What is a séance?’
Löwenthal chuckled. He put down his composing stick, crossed the room, and took up Saturday’s paper from where it lay folded on the side of the washstand. ‘Here,’ he said. He unfolded it to the second page, tapped an advertisement with his ink-stained finger, and passed the paper to Tauwhare. ‘You ought to come along. Not to the séance itself—you need a special ticket for that—but to the party beforehand.’
The advertisement ran over two columns. It had been printed in a bold eighteen-point type that Löwenthal typically reserved for mastheads and historic headlines only, and it was bordered thickly in black. The Wayfarer’s Fortune, owned and operated by Mrs. Lydia Wells, late of the city of Dunedin, widow to Crosbie, was to open to the public for the first time that very evening. In honour of this occasion Mrs. Wells, a celebrated medium, would condescend to host Hokitika’s inaugural séance. This séance would be restricted to an elite audience, with tickets allocated according to the principle ‘first to come, first to be served’; the occasion would be prefaced, however, by an evening of ‘drinks and speculation’, open to the discerning public—who was encouraged, collectively, to come with an open mind.
This last injunction was perhaps easier said than done, for as the paper had it, the purpose of the séance was to locate, via the extraordinarily sensitive instrument of Mrs. Wells herself, certain tremors of spirit, the investigation of which would open a channel between this realm and the next, and thereby establish some kind of a rapport with the dead. Within the broad category of the dead, Mrs. Wells had been both excessively particular and excessively confident in making her selection: she planned to summon the shade of Mr. Emery Staines, who had not yet returned to Hokitika, and whose body, after five weeks of absence, had not yet been found.
The widow had not made clear what she planned to ask the shade of Mr. Staines, but it was universally assumed that, if nothing else, she would surely request to know the manner of his death. Any medium worth her salt will tell you that a spirit who has been murdered is far more loquacious than a spirit who has left this world in peace—and Lydia Wells, we need hardly remark, was worth every grain of hers.
‘What is a séance?’ said Tauwhare again.
‘It is a piece of utter foolishness,’ said Löwenthal cheerfully. ‘Lydia Wells has announced to all of Hokitika that she is going to commune with the spirit of Emery Staines, and more than half of Hokitika has taken her at her word. The séance itself is just a performance. She will go into a trance—as though she’s having a fit, or a seizure—and then she’ll say a few words in a man’s voice, or make the curtains move in some unexpected fashion, or pay a boy a penny to climb up the chimney and call down the pipe. It’s a piece of cheap theatre. Of course every man will go home believing he’s made contact with a ghost. Where did you say you’ve been?’
‘Mawhera,’ said Tauwhare. ‘Greymouth.’ He was still frowning at the paper.
‘No word of Mr. Staines up there, I suppose.’
‘No.’
‘Nor here. We’re rather losing hope, I’m sorry to say. But perhaps we’ll get a clue of some kind this evening. The real cause for suspicion, you see, is Mrs. Wells’s certainty that Mr. Staines really is dead. If she knows that much, then what else does she know, and how does she know it? Oh: tongues have been wagging, Mr. Tauwhare, this fortnight past. I wouldn’t miss this party for the world. How I wish that I’d got my hands on a ticket.’
For the widow had chosen to limit her séance to only seven souls—seven being a number of magical allusion, possessed of a darkly mysterious ring—and Löwenthal, arriving at the Wayfarer’s Fortune some fifteen minutes before nine in the morning, discovered, to his immense regret, that these seven places had already been filled. (Of the Crown men, only Charlie Frost and Harald Nilssen had been successful in securing a ticket.) Löwenthal, along with scores of other disappointed men, would have to content himself with attending the preliminary ‘drinks and speculation’, and leaving before the séance was officially conducted. He attempted to buy a ticket at double price from one of the lucky seven, but to no avail. Frost and Nilssen both refused his offer outright, though Nilssen promised to describe the event in a high degree of detail, after the fact, and Frost suggested that Löwenthal might like to assist him in developing a strategy of reconnaissance, beforehand.
‘It’ll be three shillings on the door,’ Löwenthal supplied, in case Tauwhare could not read, and was disguising his lack of ability.
‘Three shillings?’ Tauwhare said, glancing up. That was an extraordinary sum, for one evening’s entertainment. ‘What for?’
Löwenthal shrugged. ‘She knows that she can charge what she likes, and she’s going to do just that. It might pay for your brandy if you drink quick enough: she’s doing bottomless cups, you see, not drink-for-drink. But you’re right—it’s a robbery. Of course every second man is champing at the bit to get a word with Anna. She’s the real attraction—the real draw! You know she’s barely been seen beyond the Wayfarer’s front door in three weeks. Goodness only knows what’s been happening inside.’
‘I wish to place a notice in your paper,’ Tauwhare said. He tossed the paper down onto the desk, somewhat rudely, so that it skidded over Löwenthal’s forme.
‘Certainly,’ said Löwenthal, with disapproval. He reached for his pencil. ‘Do you have an advertisement prepared?’
‘“Maori guide, very experienced, fluent in English, locally knowledgeable, offers services to surveyors, diggers, explorers and the like. Success and safety guaranteed.”’
‘Surveyors, diggers, explorers,’ repeated Löwenthal, as he wrote. ‘Success and safety. Yes, very good. And then I’ll put your name, shall I?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll need an address as well. Are you stopping off in town?’
Tauwhare hesitated. He had planned to return to the Arahura Valley that night, and spend the night in Crosbie Wells’s deserted cottage; he did not wish to disclose this fact to Löwenthal, however, given Löwenthal’s close acquaintance with Edgar Clinch, the man to whom the dwelling now legally belonged.
Edgar Clinch had been the frequent object of Tauwhare’s meditations ever since the assembly at the Crown Hotel three weeks ago, for despite all the transactions between Maori and Pakeha that had occurred over the past decade, Te Rau Tauwhare still looked upon the Arahura Valley as his own, and he was made very angry whenever any tract of Te Tai Poutini land was bought for profit rather than for use. As far as Tauwhare knew, Clinch had not spent any length of time in the Arahura prior to the sale; since the purchase, he had not even troubled himself to walk the perimeter of the acreage that now belonged to him by law. What had been the point of the purchase? Did Clinch mean to settle there? Did he mean to till the soil? Fell the native timbers? Dam the river? Drop a shaft, perhaps, and mine for gold? Certainly he had not done a thing to Crosbie’s cottage beyond stripping it of all that he could sell—and even that he had done by proxy. It was a hollow dividend that required no skill, no love, and no hours of patient industry: such a dividend could only be wasted, for it was borne from waste, and to waste it would return. Tauwhare could not respect a man who treated land as though it was just another kind of currency. Land could not be minted! Land could only be lived upon, and loved.
In this Te Rau Tauwhare was no hypocrite. He had travelled every inch of the West Coast, on foot, by cart, on horseback, and by canoe. He could picture the entire length of it, as though upon a richly illustrated map: in the far north, Mohikinui and Karamea, where the mosses were fat and damp, where the leaves were waxy, where the bush was an earthy-smelling tangle, where the Nikau fronds, shed from the trunks of the palms, lay upon the ground as huge and heavy as the flukes of whales; further south, the bronze lacquer of the Taramakau, the crenulated towers at Punakaiki, the marshy flats north of Hokitika, always crawling with the smoky mist of not-quite-rain; then the cradled lakes; then the silent valleys, thick with green; then the twisting flanks of the glaciers, rippled blue and grey; then the comb of the high Alps; then, at last, Okahu and Mahitahi in the far South—wide, shingled beaches littered with the bones of mighty trees, where the surf was a ceaseless battery, and the wind a ceaseless roar. After Okahu the coastline became sheer and impassable. Beyond it, Tauwhare knew, lay the deep waterways of the southern fjords, where the sun set early behind the sudden peaks, so that the water took on the blackened look of tarnished silver, and the shadows pooled like oil. Tauwhare had never seen Piopiotahi, but he had heard tell of it, and he loved it because it was Te Tai Poutini land.
Thus the ribbon of the Coast—and there at the heart of it all, the Arahura River, taonga, wahi tapu, he matahiapo i te iwi! If the Arahura was Tauwhare’s equator, dividing the land of Te Tai Poutini into halves, then Crosbie’s cottage, situated in the valley more or less halfway between the mountains and the ocean, was his meridian. And yet he could not claim it; his hapu could not claim it; his iwi could not claim it. Before Crosbie Wells’s body had been committed to the ground, those hundred rolling acres in the Arahura Valley had been purchased by a profit-hungry Pakeha, who had sworn, upon his honour, that he had come by the land honestly: there had been no foul play of any kind, he had said, and he certainly had not broken any laws.
‘A hotel?’ said Löwenthal. ‘Or a doss house? Just the name will do.’
‘I do not have an address,’ Tauwhare said.
‘Well, here,’ said Löwenthal, coming to his aid. ‘I’ll write “inquiries care of the editor, Weld-street”. How about that? You can come to me later this week and ask if anyone has inquired.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Tauwhare.
Löwenthal waited for an expression of gratitude, but none came. ‘Very good,’ he said, after a pause. His voice was cold. ‘It’s sixpence, for a week in the columns. Ten pence for a fortnight, and a shilling sixpence for a month. In advance, of course.’
‘A week,’ Tauwhare said, shaking the contents of his purse carefully onto his palm. The small pile of pennies and farthings showed plainly that he was in need of work. His only income since the night at the Crown had been a silver shilling, won on a game of strength two weeks ago. Once he had paid Löwenthal for the advertisement, he would barely have enough to cover the following day’s meals.
Löwenthal watched him count pennies a moment, and then said, in a kinder voice, ‘I say, Mr. Tauwhare: if you’re short of ready money, you might please yourself to head down to the spit. There’s a call for hands on Gibson Quay. You might not have heard it—the bell sounded an hour ago. Godspeed’s out of the water at long last, you see, and they need men to clear the cargo.’
Over the past three weeks the barque had been shunted into shallower waters by two large tugboats; from there her hull had been lifted onto rollers, laid flush with the shore; finally, at low tide that morning, she had been hauled clear of the surf by a team of harnessed Clydesdales and a winch. She was now dry upon the spit—seeming, in her shattered enormity, less like a beached creature of the water than like a fallen creature of the air. Löwenthal had detoured past the spit that morning; he had fancied that the ship had plunged from a great height, and had perished, where she fell. All three of her masts had broken off at the base, and without her sails and rigging she seemed almost shorn. He had gazed at her for a long moment before moving on. Once her cargo had been cleared and her fixings removed she would be dismantled and sold, piecemeal, for salvage and repair.
‘Now that I mention it,’ he went on, ‘we might do very well to have one of our own men on hand, while the cargo’s being cleared. On account of Tom’s shipping crate, I mean—and whatever it was that Mr. Moody thought he saw, below. You can be our eyes and ears, Mr. Tauwhare. You have the perfect excuse, if you’re short on cash, and in need of honest work. Nobody will ask you how or why.’
But Tauwhare shook his head. He had pledged, privately, never to transact with Francis Carver again, under any circumstances. ‘I do not do odd jobs,’ he said, placing six pennies on the countertop.
‘Go on down to the Godspeed,’ Löwenthal insisted. ‘Nobody’s going to ask you any questions. You have the perfect excuse.’
But Tauwhare did not like to take advice from other men, however well intentioned. ‘I will wait for surveying work,’ he said.
‘You might be waiting a good long time.’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’
Löwenthal was becoming annoyed. ‘You aren’t seeing sense,’ he said. ‘Here’s a chance for you to do us all a good turn, and yourself besides. You won’t be able to attend the widow’s party without a ticket, and you won’t be able to buy a ticket if you’ve got an empty purse. Go on down to Gibson Quay, and put in a day’s work, and do us all a favour.’
‘I do not want to attend the party.’
Löwenthal was incredulous. ‘Why on earth not?’
‘You said it would be foolish. A piece of theatre.’
A moment of quiet passed between them. Then Löwenthal said, ‘Did you know they’ve brought in a barrister? A Mr. John Fellowes, from the Greymouth Police. He’s been assigned to straighten out the Crosbie Wells affair.’
