Текст книги "The Luminaries"

Автор книги: Eleanor Catton

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Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

MERCURY IN CAPRICORN

In which Gascoigne repeats his theories, and Moody speaks of death.

Walter Moody was finishing his luncheon at Maxwell’s dining hall when he received a message that the cargo of the Godspeed had at last been cleared, and his trunk had been delivered to his room at the Crown Hotel.

‘Well!’ he exclaimed, as he passed the messenger a twopenny bit, and the boy scampered away. ‘That puts paid to my so-called apparition at last—does it not? If Emery Staines was on board, they would have surely found his corpse among the cargo.’

‘I doubt it would have been so neat as all that,’ said Gascoigne.

‘You mean his corpse might not have been reported?’

‘I mean his corpse might not have been found,’ Gascoigne said. ‘A man—even an injured man—could fight his way towards a hatch … and the wreck was not entirely submerged. I think it far more likely that he was swept away.’

Over the past three weeks Moody had struck up a very cordial acquaintance with Aubert Gascoigne, having discovered that the latter’s character improved very much in successive interviews—for Gascoigne was very skilled at adapting himself to every kind of social situation, and could court another man’s favour with great success if only he put his mind to the task. Gascoigne had determined that he would befriend Moody with a force of ambition that, if known, might have caused the latter some alarm; as it was, however, Moody thought him a very sophisticated personage, and was pleased to have an intellectual equal with whom he could comfortably converse. They took luncheon together nearly every day, and smoked cigars at the Star and Garter in the evenings, where they played partners at whist.

‘You are persisting with your original theory,’ Moody observed. ‘Jetsam, not flotsam.’

‘Either that, or his remains have been destroyed,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Perhaps he called to be rescued, only to be killed, tied to something heavy, and then dropped into the sea. Carver has rowed out to the wreck a fair few times, as you know—and there has been ample opportunity for drowning.’

‘That is also possible,’ Moody said, folding the delivered message into halves, and then quarters, and running his thumbnail along each fold. ‘But the problem remains that we cannot know for certain one way or another, and if you are right that Staines has drowned, whether by chance or by design, then we shall never know at all. What a poor crime this is—when we have no body, and no murderer!’

‘It is a very poor crime,’ Gascoigne agreed.

‘And we are very poor detectives,’ Moody said, meaning this as a closing statement of a kind, but Gascoigne was reaching for the gravy boat, and showed no sign at all of wishing to conclude their discussion.

‘I dare say we shall feel excessively foolish,’ he said, pouring gravy over the remainder of his meal, ‘when Staines is found in the bottom of a gully, with a broken neck, and not a sign of harm upon him.’

Moody pushed his knife a little closer to his fork. ‘I am afraid that we all rather want Mr. Staines to have been murdered—even you and I, who have never met the man in our lives. We would not be contented with a broken neck.’

Moody’s jacket was hanging over the back of his chair. He knew that it would be impolite to reach back and put it on, when his friend had not yet finished his luncheon … but now that he knew his trunk had been recovered at last, he was very anxious to leave, and go to it. Not only did he not yet know whether his belongings had survived the wreck, he had not changed his jacket and trousers in three weeks.

Gascoigne chuckled. ‘Poor Mr. Staines,’ he agreed. ‘And how Mrs. Wells is making sport of him! If my shade were summoned to a shilling séance … why, I should be aghast, you know. I should not know how to take the invitation.’

‘If mine were summoned, I should be relieved; I should accept at once,’ Moody said. ‘I daresay the afterlife is a very dreary place.’

‘How do you conceive it so?’

‘We spend our entire lives thinking about death. Without that project to divert us, I expect we would all be dreadfully bored. We would have nothing to evade, and nothing to forestall, and nothing to wonder about. Time would have no consequence.’

‘And yet it would be entertaining, to spy upon the living,’ Gascoigne said.

‘On the contrary, I should consider that a very lonely prospect,’ Moody said. ‘Looking down on the world, unable to touch it, unable to alter it, knowing everything that had been, and everything that was.’

Gascoigne was salting his plate. ‘I have heard that in the New Zealand native tradition, the soul, when it dies, becomes a star.’

‘That is the best recommendation I have yet heard, to go native.’

‘Will you get your face tattooed—and wear a skirt made of grass?’

‘Perhaps I will.’

‘I would like to see that,’ Gascoigne said, picking up his fork again. ‘I would like to see that even more than I should like to see you don your slouch hat and knee-boots, and fossick for gold! I have yet to believe even that, you know.’

Moody had purchased a swag, a cradle, and a digger’s costume of moleskin and serge, but apart from a few indifferent forays into Kaniere, he had not really applied his mind to the prospect of panning for gold. He did not yet feel ready to begin his new life as a digger, and had resolved not to do so until the case pertaining to Emery Staines and Crosbie Wells was finally closed—a resolution that he had made under the pretence of necessity, but in reality there was nothing at all for him to do except to wait for new information, and, like Gascoigne, to continue to speculate upon the information he already possessed.

He had twice extended his board at the Crown Hotel, and on the afternoon of the 18th of February, was about to do so for a third time. Edgar Clinch had invited him to transfer to the Gridiron, suggesting that he might like to take up the room formerly occupied by Anna Wetherell, which now stood empty. The handsome view over the Hokitika rooftops to the snow-clad Alps in the East would be wasted on a common digger, and Moody, as a gentleman, would find pleasure in the harmonies of nature that other men would likely miss. But Moody had respectfully declined: he had grown rather fond of the Crown, shabby though the establishment was, and in any case he did not like to mingle too closely with Edgar Clinch, for there was still a very good chance that the case of Crosbie Wells’s hoarded fortune would go to trial, in which event Clinch—along with Nilssen, and Frost, and sundry other men—would certainly be called in to be questioned. The thirteen men had sworn, each upon his honour, to keep the secret of the council at the Crown, but Moody did not like to rely on another man’s honour, having little confidence in any expression of integrity save his own; he expected, in time, that at least one of the other twelve would break his word, and he had determined, in anticipation of that event, to remain aloof from them.

Moody had introduced himself to Alistair Lauderback, having discovered, through their mutual background in the law, that they shared several acquaintances in common: lawyers and judges in London whom Lauderback variously exalted, decried, and dismissed, in a recitation of confident opinion that brokered neither interruption nor reply. Moody listened to him politely, but the impression he formed was an unfavourable one, and he had left the scene of their first acquaintance with no intention of repeating it. He saw that Lauderback was the kind of man who did not care to court the good opinion of any man whose connexions could not benefit his own.

This had been quite contrary to his expectation; in fact Moody had been very surprised to discover that his natural sympathies aligned far more closely with the gaol’s governor, George Shepard, than they did with the politician Lauderback. Moody had met Shepard only in passing, at a Public Assembly in Revell-street, but he admired the gaoler as a man who kept himself in check, and who was unfailingly courteous, however cold and rigid the expression of his courtesy might be. The summation of Shepard’s character by the council at the Crown Hotel had been as critical as Lauderback’s had been sympathetic—which only showed, Moody thought, that a man ought never to trust another man’s evaluation of a third man’s disposition. For human temperament was a volatile compound of perception and circumstance; Moody saw now that he could no more have extracted the true Shepard from Nilssen’s account of him than he could have extracted the true Nilssen from his portrayal of Shepard.

‘Do you know,’ he said now, tapping the folded message with his finger, ‘until this afternoon, I half-believed that Staines was still alive. Perhaps I was foolish … but I did believe that he was aboard that wreck, and I did believe that he would be found.’

‘Yes,’ Gascoigne said.

‘But now it seems that he can only be dead.’ Moody tapped his fingers, brooding. ‘And gone forever, no doubt. Hang not knowing! I would give any money for a seat at the widow’s séance tonight.’

‘Not just the widow’s,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Don’t forget that she is to be assisted.’

Moody shook his head. ‘I hardly think this business is Miss Wetherell’s doing.’

‘She was mentioned in the paper by name,’ Gascoigne pointed out. ‘And not only by name: her role was specifically indicated. She is to be the widow’s aide.’

‘Well, her apprenticeship has been extraordinarily short,’ Moody said, with some acidity. ‘It makes one rather doubt the quality of the training—or the quality of the subject.’

Gascoigne grinned at this. ‘Is a whore’s praxis not the original arcana?’ he said. ‘Perhaps she has been in training all her life.’

Moody was always embarrassed by conversation of this kind. ‘Her former praxis is arcane, in the proper sense of the word,’ he conceded, drawing himself up, ‘but the female arts are natural; they cannot be compared to the conjuration of the dead.’

‘Oh, I am sure that the tricks of both professions are more or less the same,’ Gascoigne said. ‘A whore is the very mistress of persuasion, just as a sibyl must be persuasive, if she is to be believed … and you must not forget that beauty and conviction are always persuasive, whatever the context in which they appear. Why, the shape of Anna’s fortunes is not so very greatly changed. You may as well keep calling her Magdalena!’

‘Mary Magdalene was no clairvoyant,’ Moody said stiffly.

‘No,’ Gascoigne agreed, still grinning, ‘but she was the first to come upon the open tomb. She was the one to swear that the stone had been rolled away. It bears mention, that the news of the ascension first came as a woman’s oath—and that at first the oath was disbelieved.’

‘Well, tonight Anna Wetherell will make her oath upon another man’s tomb,’ Moody said. ‘And we will not be there to disbelieve it.’ He twitched his knife and fork still straighter, wishing that the waiter would come and clear his plate away.

‘We have the party beforehand to look forward to,’ said Gascoigne, but the cheer had gone from his voice. He too had been excessively disappointed by his exclusion from the widow’s impending communion with the dead. The exclusion rankled him rather more bitterly than it did Moody, for he felt, as the first friend Lydia Wells had made in Hokitika, that a place ought properly to have been reserved for him. But Lydia Wells had not once paid a call upon him, since the afternoon of the 27th of January, and nor had she once received him, even for tea.

Moody had not yet met either woman formally. He had glimpsed them hanging drapes in the front windows of the former hotel, silhouetted darkly, like paper dolls against the glass. Perceiving them, he felt a rather strange thrill of longing—unusual for him, for it was not his habit to envy the relations that women conduct with other women, nor really, to think about them with any great interest at all. But as he walked past the shadowed frontage of the Wayfarer’s Fortune and saw their bodies shifting behind the contorting pane he wished very much that he could hear what they were saying. He wished to know what caused Anna to redden, and bite her lip, and move the heel of her hand to her cheekbone, as if to test it for heat; he wished to know what caused Lydia to smile, and dust her hands, and turn away—leaving Anna with her arms full of fabric, and her dress-front stuck all over with pins.

‘I think that you are right to doubt Anna’s part in all this—or at least, to wonder at it,’ Gascoigne went on. ‘I got the impression, when I first spoke to her about Staines, that she held the boy in rather high esteem; I even fancied that she might care for him. And now by all appearances she is seeking to profit from his death!’

‘We cannot be certain of the degree of Miss Wetherell’s complicity,’ Moody said. ‘It depends entirely upon her knowledge of the fortune hidden in the gowns—and therefore, of Mr. Lauderback’s blackmail.’

‘There has been no mention of the orange gown—from any quarter,’ said Gascoigne. ‘One would think Mrs. Wells might have been more active in its recovery, had Anna told her that it was stowed beneath my bed.’

‘Presumably Miss Wetherell believes the gold was paid out to Mr. Mannering, as she instructed.’

‘Yes—presumably,’ Gascoigne said, ‘but wouldn’t you suppose that in that case, Mrs. Wells would pay a call upon Mannering, to see about recovering it? There’s no want of love between them: she and Mannering are old friends from gambling days. No: I think it far more possible that Mrs. Wells remains entirely ignorant about the orange gown—and about all the others.’

‘Hm,’ said Moody.

‘Mannering won’t touch it,’ Gascoigne said, ‘for fear of what will happen down the line—and I’m certainly not going to take it to the bank. So there it stays. Under my bed.’

‘Have you had it valued?’

‘Yes, though unofficially: Mr. Frost came by to look it over. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of a hundred and twenty pounds, he thought.’

‘Well, I hope for Miss Wetherell’s sake that she has not confided in Mrs. Wells,’ Moody said. ‘I dread to think how Mrs. Wells might respond to such a revelation, behind closed doors. She would only blame Anna for the loss of the fortune—I am sure of it.’

Suddenly Gascoigne put down his fork. ‘I’ve just had a thought,’ he said. ‘The money in the dresses became the money in the cottage. So if the widow’s appeal goes through, and she receives the fortune as her inheritance, she’ll get it all back—less the money in the orange gown, of course. She’ll end up where she started, after all.’

‘In my experience people are rarely contented to end up where they started,’ Moody said. ‘If my impression of Lydia Wells is accurate, I think that she will feel very bitter about Anna’s having been in possession of those dresses, no matter what Anna’s intentions might have been, and no matter what the outcome.’

‘But we’re fairly certain that Anna did not even know about the gold she was carrying—at least, not until very recently.’

‘Mr. Gascoigne,’ Moody said, holding up his hand, ‘despite my youth, I possess a certain store of wisdom about the fairer sex, and I can tell you categorically that women do not like it when other women wear their clothes without their asking.’

Gascoigne laughed. Cheered by this joke, he applied himself to finishing his luncheon with a renewed energy, and a good humour.

The truth of Moody’s observation notwithstanding, it must be owned that his store of wisdom, as he had termed it, could be called empirical only in that it had been formed upon the close observation of his late mother, his stepmother, and his two maternal aunts: to put it plainly, Moody had never taken a lover, and did not know a great deal about women, save for how to address them properly, and how to dote upon them as a nephew and as a son. It was not despite the natural partialities of youth that the compass of Moody’s worldly experience was scarcely larger than a keyhole, through which he had perceived, metaphorically speaking, only glimpses of the shadowed chamber of adulthood that lay beyond. In fact he had met with ample opportunity to widen this aperture, and indeed, to unlock the door altogether, and pass through it, into that most private and solitary of rooms … but he had declined these opportunities with quite the same discomfort and stiff propriety with which he fielded Gascoigne’s rhetorical teases now.

When he was one-and-twenty a late night of carousing in London had led him, by the usual methods and channels, to a lamp lit courtyard not far from Smithfield Market. This courtyard, by the authority of Moody’s college chums, was frequented by the most fashionable of whores—so identifiable for their red Garibaldi jackets, brass-buttoned, that were the height of Parisian fashion at the time, and alarming to English ladies for that reason. Although the military style of their jackets gave the women a deliberate and brazen look, they pretended at shyness, turning away so they might look at the men over the rounded curve of their shoulders, and feint, and titter, and point their toes. Moody, watching them, felt suddenly sad. He could not help but think of his father—for how many times, over the years of Moody’s youth, had he come across the man in some dark corner of the house, to perceive, upon his father’s lap, a perfect stranger? She would be gasping unnaturally, or squealing like a pig, or speaking in a high-pitched voice that was not her own, and she would leave behind her, always, that same greasy musk: the smell of the theatre. Moody’s college chums were pooling their sovereigns and cutting straws to draw for the first pick; silently, he withdrew from the courtyard, hailed a hansom, and retired to bed. It was a point of pride for him, thereafter, that he would not do as his father had done; that he would not fall prey to his father’s vices; that he would be the better man. And yet how easy it might have been—to contribute his sovereign, and select his straw, and choose one of the red-shirted ladies to follow into the cobbled alcove on the dark side of the church! His college chums supposed him to have set his sights upon a clerical vocation. They were surprised, some years later, when Moody enrolled at Inner Temple, and began to study for the Bar.

It was therefore with a very well-concealed ignorance that Moody played interlocutor to Gascoigne, and Clinch, and Mannering, and Pritchard, and all the others, when they spoke of Anna Wetherell, and the esteem in which they held her, as a whore. Moody’s well-timed murmurs of ‘naturally’ and ‘of course’ and ‘exactly so’, combined with a general rigidity of posture whenever Anna’s name was mentioned, implied to these men merely that Moody was made uncomfortable by the more candid truths of human nature, and that he preferred, like most men of exalted social rank, to keep his earthly business to himself. We observe that one of the great attributes of discretion is that it can mask ignorance of all the most common and lowly varieties, and Walter Moody was nothing if not excessively discreet. The truth was that he had never spoken two words together to a woman of Anna Wetherell’s profession or experience, and would hardly know how to address her—or upon what subject—should the chance arise.

‘And of course,’ he said now, ‘we ought to be cheered by the fact that Miss Wetherell’s trunk did not follow her to the Wayfarer’s Fortune.’

‘Did it not?’ said Gascoigne, in surprise.

‘No. The lead-lined dresses remain at the Gridiron, along with her pipe, and her opium lamp, and other miscellaneous items; she never sent for them.’

‘And Mr. Clinch has not raised the issue?’

‘No,’ said Moody. ‘It is cheering, I think: whatever role Miss Wetherell played in Mr. Staines’s disappearance, and whatever role she is to play in the ridiculous séance this evening, we can at least be fairly certain that she has not confided in Mrs. Wells absolutely. I take heart in that.’

He looked about for the waiter, for Gascoigne had finished eating, and he wished to settle his account as soon as possible, so that he might return to the Crown, and unpack his trunk at long last.

‘You are anxious to depart,’ Gascoigne observed, wiping his mouth with his table napkin.

‘Forgive my rudeness,’ Moody said. ‘I am not tired of your company—but I am rather anxious to be reunited with my possessions. I have not changed my jacket in some weeks, and I do not yet know the degree to which my trunk survived the storm. It is possible that all my clothes and documents were ruined.’

‘What are we waiting for? Let us go, at once,’ said Gascoigne, for whom this explanation was not only entirely reasonable, but also something of a relief. Gascoigne feared very much that his own society was tiring, and he was made very anxious whenever a man he respected showed boredom in his company. He insisted upon settling the cheque himself, shooing away Moody in the manner of an indulgent governess; once this was done, the two friends stepped out into the noisy rush of Revell-street, where a party of diggers was swarming cheerfully past. Behind them came a shout from a surveyor on horseback, reining in, and above them, the solitary bell in the Wesleyan chapel, which was striking the hour, once, twice. Raising their voices above this noise—the creaking wheels of a gig, the snap of canvas, laughter, hammering, the shrill voice of a woman calling to a man—the two friends bid one another good afternoon, and shook hands very warmly as they parted ways.