Текст книги "The Luminaries"

Автор книги: Eleanor Catton

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‘My real amazement came when I inquired after my brother, and learned that he had been my father’s agent from the outset: they had orchestrated the abandonment together, and had journeyed south as partners. I did not wait to encounter Frederick too—I could not bear it, to see them both together—and made to leave. My father became aggressive, and attempted to detain me. I escaped, and made the immediate plan to journey here. I had money enough to return to London directly, if I wished, but my grief was of a kind that—’ Moody paused, and made a helpless gesture with his fingers. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘I believed the hard labour of the diggings might do me well, for a time. And I do not want to be a lawyer.’

There was a silence. Moody shook his head and sat forward in his chair. ‘It is an unhappy story,’ he said, more briskly. ‘I am ashamed of my blood, Mr. Balfour, but I mean not to dwell upon it. I mean to make new.’

‘Unhappy, indeed!’ Balfour cried, plucking his cigar from his mouth at last, and waving it about. ‘I am sorry for you, Mr. Moody, and commend you, both. But yours is the way of the goldfields, is it not? Reinvention! Dare I say—revolution! That a man might make new—might make himself anew—truly, now!’

‘These are words of encouragement,’ Moody said.

‘Your father—his name is also Moody, I presume.’

‘It is,’ Moody said. ‘His Christian name is Adrian; perhaps you have heard of him?’

‘I have not,’ Balfour said, and then, perceiving that the other was disappointed, he added, ‘—which means very little, of course. I’m in the shipping line of business, as I told you; these days I don’t rub shoulders with the men on the field. I was in Dunedin. I was in Dunedin for three years, near about. But if your pa made his luck on the diggings, he’d have been inland. Up in the high country. He might have been anywhere—Tuapeka, Clyde—anywhere at all. But—listen—as to the here and now, Mr. Moody. You’re not afraid that he will follow you?’

‘No,’ Moody said, simply. ‘I took pains to create the impression that I departed immediately for England, the day I left him. Upon the docks I found a man seeking passage to Liverpool. I explained my circumstances to him, and after a short negotiation we swapped papers with one another. He gave my name to the ticket master, and I his. Should my father inquire at the customhouse, the officers there will be able to show him proof that I have left these islands already, and am returning home.’

‘But perhaps your father—and your brother—will come to the Coast of their own accord. For the diggings.’

‘That I cannot predict,’ Moody agreed. ‘But from what I understood of their current situation, they had made gold enough in Otago.’

‘Gold enough!’ Balfour seemed about to laugh again.

Moody shrugged. ‘Well,’ he said coldly, ‘I shall prepare myself for the possibility of their arrival, of course. But I do not expect it.’

‘No—of course, of course,’ Balfour said, patting Moody’s sleeve with his big hand. ‘Let us now talk of more hopeful things. Tell me, what do you intend to do with your pile, once you have amassed a decent sum? Back to Scotland, is it, to spend your fortune there?’

‘So I hope,’ Moody said. ‘I have heard that a man might make a competence in four months or less, which would take me away from here before the worst months of winter. Is that a probable expectation, in your mind?’

‘Quite probable,’ Balfour said, smiling at the coals, ‘quite probable, indeed—yes, one might expect it. No mates in town, then? Folk to meet you on the quay, join up—lads from home?’

‘None, sir,’ Moody told him, for the third time that evening. ‘I travelled here alone, and, as I have said to you already, I intend to make my own fortune, without the help of other men.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Balfour, ‘making your own—well, going after it, in the modern way. But a digger’s mate is like his shadow—that’s another thing to know—his shadow, or his wife—’

At this remark there was a ripple of amusement around the room: not open laughter, merely a quiet expulsion of breath, issued from several quarters at once. Moody glanced around him. He had sensed a slackening in the air, a collective relief, at the conclusion of his narrative. The men had been afraid of something, he thought, and his story had given them reason to put their fear aside. He wondered for the first time whether their trepidation was connected in some way to the horror he had witnessed aboard the Godspeed. The thought was strangely unpleasant. He did not want to believe that his private memory might be explicable to another man, and still less, that another man might share it. (Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers. This realisation, when it came, surprised him.)

Balfour was grinning. ‘Ay—his shadow, or his wife,’ he repeated, nodding appreciatively at Moody, as though the jest had been Moody’s, rather than his own. He stroked his beard several times with the cup of his hand, and laughed a little.

For he was indeed relieved. Lost inheritance, falseness in marriage, a highborn woman put to work—these betrayals belonged to a different world entirely, Balfour thought; a world of drawing rooms, and calling cards, and gowns. It was charming to him, that such changes in fortune might be counted as tragedies—that the young man might confess them, with the stern, controlled embarrassment of a man who had been taught to believe, from the moment of his birth, that his estate would never change. To speak of that here—at the vanguard of the civilised world! Hokitika was growing faster than San Francisco, the papers said, and out of nothing … out of the ancient rotting life of the jungle … out of the tidal marshes and the shifting gullies and the fog … out of sly waters, rich in ore. Here the men were not self-made; they were self-making, as they squatted in the dirt to wash it clean. Balfour touched his lapel. Moody’s story was pathetic, and had aroused in him an indulgent, fatherly feeling—for Balfour liked very much to be reminded that he himself was modern (entrepreneurial, unencumbered by connexion) while other men still foundered in the trappings of an outworn age.

This, of course, was a verdict that said less about the prisoner than about the judge. Balfour’s will was too strong to admit philosophy, unless it was of the soundest empirical sort; his liberality could make no sense of despair, which was to him as a fathomless shaft, possessed of depth but not of breadth, stifled in its isolation, navigable only by touch, and starved of any kind of curiosity. He had no real fascination with the soul, and saw it only as a pretext for the greater, livelier mysteries of humour and adventure; of the soul’s dark nights, he had no opinion. He often said that the only inner void to which he paid any kind of notice was appetite, and although he laughed when he said it, and seemed very well pleased, it was true that his sympathy rarely extended to situations where sympathy was expected to extend. He was indulgent towards the open spaces of other men’s futures, but he was impatient with the shuttered quarters of their pasts.

‘In any case,’ he went on, ‘mark this as your second piece of advice, Mr. Moody: find yourself a friend. Plenty of parties about that’d be glad for an extra pair of hands. That’s the way, you know—find a mate, then form a party. Never known a man to make it solo. You kitted with a costume, and a swag?’

‘I’m afraid I am at the mercy of the weather on that count,’ Moody said. ‘My trunk is still aboard ship; the weather was too inclement to risk crossing the bar tonight, and I was told to expect my belongings at the customhouse to-morrow afternoon. I myself was conveyed by lighter—a small crew rowed out, very bravely, to fetch the passengers in.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Balfour said, more soberly. ‘We’ve seen three wrecks in the past month alone, coming over the bar. It’s a frightful business. There’s a penny to be made in it, mind. When the ships are coming in people don’t pay too much attention. But when they’re going out—when they’re going out, there’s gold aboard.’

‘I am told that the landing here at Hokitika is notoriously treacherous.’

‘Notoriously—oh yes. And there’s nothing to be done about it, if a vessel’s on the long side of a hundred feet. She might blow off a full head of steam and it’s not enough to force her over. Capital firework show, with the flares shooting up all around. But then—it’s not just the steamers. Not just the big ones. It’s any man’s game on the Hokitika Bar, Walter. That sand will ground a schooner on the wrong tide.’

‘I well believe it,’ Moody said. ‘Our vessel was a barque—none too large, agile, hardy enough to weather the most dreadful of storms—and yet the captain wouldn’t risk her. He elected to drop anchor in the roadstead, and wait for the morning.’

‘The Waterloo, that her name? She’s a regular, in and out from Chalmers.’

‘A private charter, as a matter of fact,’ Moody said. ‘Name of Godspeed.’

He might have pulled a pistol from his pocket, such was the shock that name produced. Moody looked around (his expression was still mild) and saw that the attention of the room was now openly fixed upon him. Several of the men put down their papers; those who had been dozing opened their eyes; and one of the billiard players advanced a step towards him, into the light of the lamp.

Balfour, too, had flinched at the mention of the barque’s name, but his grey eyes held Moody’s gaze coolly. ‘Indeed,’ he said, seeming in an instant to shed all the effusion and bluster that had characterised his manner up until that point. ‘I confess to you the name of that craft is not unknown to me, Mr. Moody—not unknown—but I should like to confirm the captain’s name also, if you have no objection.’

Moody was searching his face for a very particular quality—one that, if he had been pressed, he would have been embarrassed to name aloud. He was trying to see if Balfour seemed haunted. He was sure that if the other man’s mind leaped to imagine, or to remember, the kind of preternatural horror that Moody himself had encountered aboard the Godspeed, then its effect would be only too visible. But Balfour merely looked wary, as when a man hears of the return of one of his creditors, and begins in his mind to tally his excuses, and methods of escape—he did not look tormented, or afraid. Moody was certain that anyone who had witnessed what he had would bear the mark of it. And yet Balfour was changed—there was a new shrewdness to the other man’s aspect, a new sharpness to his gaze. Moody felt energised by the alteration. He realised, with a surge of excitement, that he had underestimated him.

‘I believe the captain’s name was Carver,’ he said slowly, ‘Francis Carver, if I remember rightly; a man of considerable strength, with a brooding look, and a white scar upon his cheek—does that description match your man?’

‘It does.’ Balfour was scanning Moody’s face, in turn. ‘I am very curious to know how you and Mr. Carver came to be acquainted,’ he said after a moment. ‘If you would indulge the intrusion, of course.’

‘Forgive me: we are not acquainted,’ Moody said. ‘That is, I am sure he would not recognise me if he saw me again.’

He was resolved, in accordance with his strategy, to field Balfour’s questions politely and without reservation: it would give him licence later to demand some answers of his own. Moody had no small genius for the art of diplomacy. As a child he had known instinctively that it was always better to tell a partial truth with a willing aspect than to tell a perfect truth in a defensive way. The appearance of co-operation was worth a great deal, if only because it forced a reciprocity, fair met with fair. He did not look about him again, but instead kept his eyes wide and his face open, and directed his speech wholly to Balfour, as if the eleven staring men on his periphery did not trouble him in the least.

‘In that case,’ Balfour was saying, ‘I shall hazard to guess that you purchased your ticket from the ship’s mate.’

‘Paid him into his own pocket, sir.’

‘You had a private arrangement with the man?’

‘The scheme had been devised by the crew, with the master’s consent,’ Moody replied. ‘An easy enough way to turn an extra shilling, I suppose. There were no berths of any kind—one was allotted a place below decks, and instructed to stay sharp and keep out of the way. The situation was not at all ideal, of course, but my circumstances compelled my immediate departure from Dunedin, as you know, and Godspeed was the only scheduled departure on the day I wished to leave. I did not know the mate prior to our transaction, nor any of the other passengers, nor any of the crew.’

‘How many passengers came in under this arrangement?’

Moody met Balfour’s gaze levelly. ‘Eight,’ he said, and put his mouth on his cigar.

Balfour was quick to pounce upon this. ‘That’s you and seven others? Eight in sum?’

Moody declined to answer the question directly. ‘The passenger list will be published in Monday’s paper; of course you may examine it yourself,’ he said, with a slightly incredulous expression, as though to imply that Balfour’s need for clarification was not only unnecessary, but unbecoming. He added, ‘My real name, of course, will not appear there. I travelled under the name Philip de Lacy, this being the name of the man whose papers I purchased in Dunedin. Walter Moody, as the authorities have it, is currently somewhere in the South Pacific—bearing eastward, I expect, towards the Horn.’

Balfour’s expression was still cool. ‘Please allow me to inquire one thing further,’ he said. ‘I should like to know—merely—whether you have cause to think well or ill of him. Mr. Carver, I mean.’

‘I am not sure that I can answer you fairly,’ Moody said. ‘I have on my authority only suspicion and report. I believe that the man was under some duress to leave Dunedin, for he was anxious to weigh anchor despite predictions of a coming storm, but I am entirely ignorant of the business that compelled his haste. I did not formally meet him, and saw him only from a distance during the voyage, and then only rarely, for he kept to his cabin much of the time. So you see my opinion is not worth very much. And yet—’

‘And yet …’ Balfour prompted, when Moody did not go on. He waited.

‘To be frank with you, sir,’ Moody said, turning squarely to face the other man, ‘I discovered certain particulars concerning the ship’s cargo, while aboard, that made me doubt her errand was an honest one. If I am certain of one thing, it is this: I wish never to make an enemy of Mr. Carver, if that event is in my power to avoid.’

The dark-haired man on Moody’s left had stiffened. ‘Found something in cargo, you said?’ he interposed, leaning forward.

Aha! Moody thought, and then: now is the time to press my advantage. He turned to address the new speaker. ‘Please forgive me if I neglect to elaborate,’ he said. ‘I mean no disrespect to you, sir, but we are strangers to one another; or rather, you are a stranger to me, for my conversation with Mr. Balfour tonight has reached more ears than his alone. In this I am disadvantaged, not unto myself, as I have represented myself truthfully, but unto you, for you have made my acquaintance without introduction, and heard my piece without invitation or reply. I have nothing to conceal, concerning this or any journey I have made, but I confess,’ (he turned back to Balfour) ‘it rankles to be questioned so relentlessly by an interrogator who divulges nothing of his own design.’

This was rather more aggressively worded than was Moody’s habit in speech, but he had spoken calmly and with dignity, and he knew that he was in the right. He did not blink; he stared at Balfour and waited, his mild eyes wide, for the other man’s response. Balfour’s gaze flickered sideways to the dark-haired man who had made the interruption, and then back to meet Moody’s own. He exhaled. He rose from his chair, tossed the stump of his cigar into the fire, and held out his hand. ‘Your glass needs refilling, Mr. Moody,’ he said quietly. ‘Please be so kind as to allow me.’

He went to the sideboard in silence, followed by the dark-haired man, who, when he had unfurled himself to his full height, almost grazed the low ceiling of the room. He leaned close to Balfour and began to mutter something urgently in his ear. Balfour nodded and muttered something back. It must have been an instruction, for the tall man then moved to the billiard table, beckoned the blond-haired man to approach him, and conveyed a whispered message to him. The blond-haired man began nodding, vigorously and at once. Watching them, Moody felt his habitual quickness return. The brandy had roused him; he was warmed and dried; and nothing caused his spirits to lift more surely than the promise of a tale.

It often happens that when a soul under duress is required to attend to a separate difficulty, one that does not concern him in the least, then this second problem works upon the first as a kind of salve. Moody felt this now. For the first time since he had disembarked from the lighter he found that he was able to think upon his recent misadventure clearly. In the context of this new secret, his private memory was somehow freed. He could recall the scene that haunted him—the dead man rising, his bloody throat, his cry—and find it fabular, sensational; still horrific, but somehow much more explicably so. The story had gained a kind of value: he could turn it into profit, by exchange.

He watched the whispered message pass from man to man. He could not distinguish any proper nouns—the jumble of unfamiliar accents made that impossible—but it was evident that the matter under discussion was one that concerned every man in the room. He forced his mind to evaluate the situation carefully and rationally. Inattention had led him to err in judgment once already that evening; he would not err again. Some kind of heist was in the offing, he guessed, or maybe they were forming an alliance against another man. Mr. Carver, perhaps. They numbered twelve, which put Moody in mind of a jury … but the presence of the Chinese men and the Maori native made that impossible. Had he interrupted a secret council of a kind? But what kind of council could possibly comprise such a diverse range of race, income, and estate?

Needless to say that Walter Moody’s countenance did not betray the subject of his thoughts. He had calibrated his expression precisely between grave bafflement and apology, as if to communicate that he was very sensible of the trouble he was causing, but he had no idea what that trouble might be, and as to how he should proceed, he was willing to take anyone’s direction but his own.

Outside, the wind changed direction, sending a damp gust down the chimney, so that the embers swelled scarlet and for a brief moment Moody could smell the salt of the sea. The movement in the hearth seemed to rouse the fat man nearest the fire. He levered himself from his armchair with a grunt of effort and shuffled off to join the others at the sideboard. When he had gone, Moody found himself alone before the fire with the man in the herringbone suit; the latter now leaned forward and spoke.

‘I should like to introduce myself, if you have no objection,’ he said, snapping open his silver cigarette case for the first time, and selecting a cigarette. He spoke with an accent identifiably French, and a manner that was clipped and courteous. ‘My name is Aubert Gascoigne. I hope that you will forgive that I know your name already.’

‘Well, as it happens,’ Moody said, with a little jolt of surprise, ‘I believe I also know yours.’

‘Then we are well met,’ said Aubert Gascoigne. He had been fishing for his matches; he paused now with his hand in his breast pocket, like a rakish colonel posing for a sketch. ‘But I am intrigued. How is it that you know me, Mr. Moody?’

‘I read your address this evening, in Friday’s edition of the West Coast Times—am I right? If I remember correctly, you penned an opinion on behalf of the Magistrate’s Court.’

Gascoigne smiled, and pulled out his matches. ‘Now I understand. I am yesterday’s news.’ He shook out a match, placed the side of his boot against his knee, and struck his light upon the sole.

‘Forgive me,’ Moody began, fearing that he had offended, but Gascoigne shook his head.

‘I am not insulted,’ he said when his cigarette was lit. ‘So. You arrive as a stranger in an unfamiliar town, and what is your first move? You find a day-old paper and read the courthouse bulletin. You learn the names of the lawbreakers, on the one hand, and the law enforcers, on the other. This is quite a strategy.’

‘There was no method in it,’ Moody said modestly.

Gascoigne’s name had appeared on the third page of the paper, beneath a short sermon, perhaps the length of a paragraph, on the iniquity of crime. The address was preceded by a list of all the arrests that had been made that month. (He could not recall any of those names, and in truth had only remembered Gascoigne’s because his former Latin master had been Gascoyen—the familiarity had drawn his eye.)

‘Perhaps not,’ Gascoigne returned, ‘but it has brought you to the very heart of our disquiet nonetheless: a subject that has been on every man’s lips for a fortnight.’

Moody frowned. ‘Petty criminals?’

‘One in particular.’

‘Shall I guess?’ Moody asked lightly, when the other did not go on.

Gascoigne shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. I am referring to the whore.’

Moody raised his eyebrows. He tried to recall the catalogue of arrests to his mind—yes, perhaps one of the listed names had been a woman’s. He wondered what every man in Hokitika had to say about a whore’s arrest. It took him a moment to find the words to form an appropriate answer, and to his surprise, Gascoigne laughed. ‘I am teasing you,’ he said. ‘You must not let me tease you. Her crime was not listed, of course, but if you read with a little imagination you will see it. Anna Wetherell is the name she gives.’

‘I am not sure I know how to read with imagination.’

Gascoigne laughed again, expelling a sharp breath of smoke. ‘But you are a barrister, are you not?’

‘By training only,’ Moody said stiffly. ‘I have not yet been called to the Bar.’

‘Well, here: there is always an overtone in the magistrate’s address,’ Gascoigne explained. ‘Gentlemen of Westland—there is your first clue. Crimes of shame and degradation—there is your second.’

‘I see,’ Moody said, though he did not. His gaze flickered over Gascoigne’s shoulder: the fat man had moved to the pair of Chinese men, and was scribbling something on the flyleaf of his pocketbook for them to read. ‘Perhaps the woman was wrongly indicted? Perhaps that is what captured everyone’s attention?’

‘Oh, she wasn’t gaoled for whoring,’ Gascoigne said. ‘The sergeants don’t care a straw about that! As long as a man is discreet enough, they are quite content to look the other way.’

Moody waited. There was an unsettling quality to the way that Gascoigne spoke: it was both guarded and confiding at once. Moody felt that he could not trust him. The clerk was perhaps in his middle thirties. His pale hair had begun to silver above his ears, and he wore a pale moustache, brushed sideways from a central part. His herringbone suit was tailored closely to his body.

‘Why,’ Gascoigne added after a moment, ‘the sergeant himself made a proposition of her, directly after the committal!’

‘The committal?’ Moody echoed, feeling foolish. He wished that the other man would speak a little less cryptically, and at greater length. He had a cultivated air (he made Thomas Balfour seem as blunt as a doorstop) but it was a cultivation somehow mourned. He spoke as a disappointed man, for whom perfection existed only as something remembered—and then regretted, because it was lost.

‘She was tried for trying to take her own life,’ Gascoigne said. ‘There’s a symmetry in that, do you not think? Tried for trying.’

Moody thought it inappropriate to agree, and in any case he did not care to pursue that line of thinking. He said, to change the subject,

‘And the master of my vessel—Mr. Carver? He is connected to this woman somehow, I presume?’

‘Oh yes, Carver’s connected,’ Gascoigne said. He looked at the cigarette in his hand, seemed suddenly disgusted with it, and threw it into the fire. ‘He killed his own child.’

Moody drew back in horror. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘They can’t prove it, of course,’ Gascoigne said darkly. ‘But the man’s a brute. You are quite right to want to avoid him.’

Moody stared at him, again at a loss for how to reply.

‘Every man has his currency,’ Gascoigne added after a moment. ‘Perhaps it’s gold; perhaps it’s women. Anna Wetherell, you see, was both.’

At this point the fat man returned, with his glass refreshed; he sat down, looked first to Gascoigne and then to Moody, and seemed to recognise, obscurely, a social obligation to introduce himself. He leaned forward and thrust out his hand. ‘Name’s Dick Mannering.’

‘It’s a pleasure,’ Moody said, in a rather automatic tone. He felt disoriented. He wished Gascoigne had not been interrupted quite at that moment, so he could have pressed him further on the subject of the whore. It was indelicate to attempt to revive the subject now; in any case Gascoigne had retreated back into his armchair, and his face had closed. He began turning his cigarette case over again in his hands.

‘Prince of Wales Opera House, that’s me,’ Mannering added, as he sat back.

‘Capital,’ said Moody.

‘Only show in town.’ Mannering rapped the arm of his chair with his knuckles, casting about for a way to proceed. Moody glanced at Gascoigne, but the clerk was staring sourly into his lap. It was clear that the fat man’s reappearance had severely displeased him; it was also clear that he saw no reason to conceal his displeasure from its object—whose face, Moody saw with embarrassment, had turned a very dark shade of red.

‘I could not help but admire your watch chain, earlier,’ Moody said at last, addressing Mannering. ‘Is it Hokitika gold?’

‘Nice piece, isn’t it?’ Mannering said, without looking down at his chest, or lifting his fingers to touch the admired item. He rapped the arms of his chair a second time. ‘Clutha nuggets, in actual fact. I was at Kawarau, Dunstan, then Clutha.’

‘I confess I’m not familiar with the names,’ Moody said. ‘I assume they’re Otago fields?’

Mannering assented that they were, and began to expound on the subject of company mining and the value of the dredge.

‘You’re all diggers here?’ Moody said when he was done, moving his fingertips in a little circle in the air, to indicate that he meant the room at large.

‘Not one—excepting the Chinamen, of course,’ Mannering said. ‘Camp followers is the term, though most of us started off in the gorge. Most gold on a goldfield’s found where? At the hotels. At the shanties. Mates spend the stuff as soon as they find it. Tell you what: you might do better to open a business than to head to the hills. Get yourself a licence, start selling grog.’

‘That must be wise advice, if you have acted upon it yourself,’ Moody said.

Mannering settled back into his chair, seeming very contented with the compliment. Yes, he had quit the fields, and now paid other men to work his claims for a percentage of the yield; he was from Sussex; Hokitika was a fine place, but there were fewer girls than was proper in a town of such a size; he loved all kinds of harmony; he had modelled his opera house upon the Adelphi at the West End; he felt that the old song-and-supper could not be beat; he could not abide public houses, and small beer made him ill; the floods at Dunstan had been dreadful—dreadful; the Hokitika rain was hard to bear; he would say again that there was nothing nicer than a four-part harmony—the voices like threads in a piece of silk.

‘Splendid,’ Moody murmured. Gascoigne had made no movement at all during this soliloquy, save for the compulsive rhythm of his long, pale hands, as he turned the silver object over in his lap; Mannering, for his part, had not registered the clerk’s presence at all, and in fact had directed his speech at a spot some three feet above Moody’s head, as if Moody’s presence did not really concern him either.

At length the whispered drama that was taking place on their periphery began to approach a kind of resolution, and the fat man’s patter subsided. The dark-haired man returned, sitting down in his former position on Moody’s left; Balfour came after him, carrying two sizeable measures of brandy. He passed one of the glasses to Moody, waved his hand at the latter’s thanks, and sat down.

‘I owe an explanation,’ he said, ‘for the rudeness with which I was questioning you just now, Mr. Moody—you needn’t demur, it’s quite true. The truth is—the truth is—well, the truth, sir, deserves a tale, and that’s as short as I can make it.’

‘If you would be so kind as to enter our confidence,’ Gascoigne added, from Balfour’s other side, in a rather nasty show of false politeness.

The dark-haired man sat forward in his chair suddenly and added, ‘Does any man present wish to voice his reservations?’

Moody looked around him, blinking, but nobody spoke.

Balfour nodded; he waited a moment more, as if to append his own courtesy to that of the other, and then resumed.

‘Let me tell you at once,’ he said to Moody, ‘that a man has been murdered. That blackguard of yours—Carver, I mean; I shan’t call him Captain—he is the murderer, though I’ll be d—ned if I could tell you how or why. I just know it, as sure as I see that glass in your hand. Now: if you’d do me the honour of hearing a piece of that villain’s history, then you might … well, you might be willing to help us, placed as you are.’

‘Excuse me, sir,’ Moody said. At the mention of murder his heart had begun to beat very fast: perhaps this had something to do with the phantom aboard the Godspeed, after all. ‘How am I placed?’

‘With your trunk still aboard the barque, is what he means,’ the dark-haired man said. ‘And your appointment at the customhouse to-morrow afternoon.’