Текст книги "The Luminaries"
Автор книги: Eleanor Catton
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Роман
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Текущая страница: 52 (всего у книги 53 страниц)
JUPITER’S LONG REIGN
In which Alistair Lauderback, believing his half-brother Crosbie Wells to be the half-brother, on his mother’s side, of the blackguard Francis Carver, and believing, consequently, that Crosbie Wells had been in some way complicit in the blackmail under which he, Lauderback, surrendered his beloved barque Godspeed, is perplexed to receive a letter with a Hokitika postmark, the contents of which make clear that his apprehension has been quite false, a revelation that prompts him, after a great deal of solemn contemplation, to write a letter of his own.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the renewed correspondence of Mr. Crosbie Wells comprised the sole reason for Alistair Lauderback’s decision to run for the Westland seat in Parliament; the letter did serve, however, to tip the scales in the district’s favour. Lauderback read the letter through six times, then, sighing, tossed it onto his desk, and lit his pipe.
West Canterbury. June 1865
Sir you will notice from my postmark that I am no longer a resident of the province of Otago but have ‘upped my sticks’ as the saying goes. You most likely have had little cause to venture west of the mountains so I shall tell you that West Canterbury is a world apart from the grasses of the South. The sunrise over the coastline is a scarlet marvel & the snowy peaks hold the colour of the sky. The bush is wet & tangled & the water very white. It is a lonely place though not quiet for the birdsong is constant & very pleasant for its constancy. As you may have guessed already I have put my former life behind me. I am estranged from my wife. I ought to tell you that I concealed much in my correspondence with you fearing that if you knew the bitter truth you might think less of me. I shall not trouble you with the details of my escape to this place for it is a sorry tale & one that saddens me to recall. I am twice bitten three times shy which is a less admirable ratio than other men can boast but suffice to say that I have learned my lesson. Enough upon that subject instead I shall speak about the present & the future. I mean to dig for gold no longer though West Canterbury is flush with colour & men are making fortunes every day. No I will not prospect & have my fortune stolen once again. Instead I shall try my hand at the timber trade. I have made a fine acquaintance of a Maori man Terou Tow-Faray. This name in his native tongue means ‘The Hundred House of Years’. What poor names we British fellows have compared to these! I fancy it might be a line from a poem. Tow-Faray is a noble savage of the first degree & we are fast becoming friends. I confess it lifts my spirits to be in the companionship of men again.
Yours &c,
CROSBIE WELLS
INHERENT DIGNITY
In which Emery Staines pays a call upon Anna Wetherell at the Gridiron Hotel, where he begs her, after some preamble, to narrate her version of Crosbie Wells’s escape; and Anna, made curious by the urgency and frankness of his appeal, sees no reason not to recount the tale in full.
Emery Staines did not recognise the dress that Anna was wearing as one of the five that he had been charged to safeguard, pistol in hand, at the Hawthorn Hotel on the afternoon of the 12th of May. It did strike him, when he first appraised her, that the garment fit her rather oddly—it had clearly been tailored for a woman much more buxom than she—but he put the thought aside just as quickly. They greeted one another warmly, but with mutual uncertainty, and after an awkward pause Anna invited him into the parlour, where they sat down on the straight-backed chairs that faced the hearth.
‘Miss Wetherell,’ said Staines at once, ‘there’s something I would like to ask you—something terribly impertinent—and you must knock me back at once if—if you don’t want to give an answer—if you do not want to indulge me, I should say—for whatever reason at all.’
‘Oh,’ said Anna—and then she drew a breath, as if to steel herself, and turned her face away.
‘What is it?’ said Staines, drawing back.
Abruptly she rose from her chair and crossed the room; she stood a moment, breathing deeply, her face turned towards the wall. ‘It’s stupid,’ she said thickly. ‘It’s stupid. Don’t mind me. I’ll be all right in a moment.’
Staines had risen also, in astonishment. ‘Have I offended you?’ he said. ‘I’m terribly sorry if I have—but what is the matter? Whatever can be the matter?’
Anna wiped her face with her hand. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, still without turning. ‘It came as a surprise, that’s all—but I was stupid to think otherwise. It’s not your fault.’
‘What has come as a surprise?’ said Staines. ‘What’s otherwise?’
‘Only that you—’
‘Yes? Please tell me—so that I can put it right. Please.’
She composed herself at last and turned. ‘You may ask your question,’ she said, managing a smile.
‘Are you quite sure you’re all right?’
‘Quite sure,’ Anna said. ‘Please ask.’
‘Well, all right,’ said Staines. ‘Here. It’s about a man named Crosbie Wells.’
Anna’s expression of misery dissolved into one of shock. ‘Crosbie Wells?’
‘He is a mutual friend of ours, I think. At least—that is to say—he has my loyalty; I am under the impression that he also has yours.’
She did not reply; after squinting at him a moment she said, ‘How do you know him?’
‘I can’t tell you that exactly,’ said Staines. ‘He charged me to keep it a secret—his whereabouts, I mean; and the circumstances of our having met. But he mentioned your name in connexion with a gold nugget, and a man named Francis Carver, and a robbery of some kind; and if you don’t think me too impertinent—which I am; I know I am—then I should very much like to hear the whole story. I can’t say that it’s a matter of life or death, because it isn’t, and I can’t say that very much depends on my knowing, because really, nothing at all depends on it; except that I’ve gone into a kind of partnership with Mr. Carver—I was a fool to do it; I know that now—and I’ve got the sense, the awful sense, that I was wrong about him; that he’s a villain after all.’
‘Is he here?’ she said. ‘Crosbie. Is he in Hokitika?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,’ said Staines.
Her hands had moved to her belly. ‘You don’t need to tell me where he is,’ she said. ‘But I need you to take him a message. An important message—from me.’
THE ASCENDANT
In which Te Rau Tauwhare declines to mention Francis Carver’s name to Crosbie Wells, much less to describe the circumstances of their brief interaction one month prior, an omission that owes in equal parts to a deeply private nature and to a certain cunning when it comes to financial profit; the next time he sees Francis Carver, Tauwhare thinks, he will make an easy shilling, perhaps more.
Crosbie Wells had bought four panes of glass for a quartered window, but he had yet to cut the hole, and set the sill; for the moment, the panes were propped against the wall, reflecting, faintly, the flickering lamplight, and the square grating of the stove.
‘I knew a man who lost an arm in the floods at Dunstan,’ Wells was saying. He was lying on his bolster, a bottle of spirits on his chest; Tauwhare sat opposite, nursing a bottle of his own. ‘Got caught in a rapid, you see, and his arm got trapped, and they couldn’t save it. He had a plain name. Smith or Stone or something like that. Anyway—the point is—he talked of it afterwards, the incident, and his real sorrow, he said, was that the arm he’d lost had been tattooed. A full-rigged ship was the picture—a present to himself, after coming round the Horn—and it bothered him extremely that he’d lost it. For some reason it stayed with me—that story. Losing a tattoo. I asked him if he mightn’t just tattoo the other arm, but he was strange about it. I’ll never do that, he said. I’ll never do it.’
‘It is painful,’ said Tauwhare. ‘Ta moko.’
Wells looked over at him. ‘Is it sometimes a shock,’ he said, ‘to see yourself? After you haven’t been near a looking glass in a while, I mean. Do you forget?’
‘No,’ Tauwhare said. ‘Never.’ His face was shadowed; the lamplight accented the lines around his mouth, giving his expression a hawkish, solemn look.
‘I think I would.’
‘We have a saying,’ Tauwhare said. ‘Taia a moko hei hoa matenga mou.’
‘I cut a man’s face with a knife,’ Wells said, still staring at him. ‘Gave him a scar. Right here. Eye to mouth. It bled like anything. Did yours bleed like anything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you ever killed a man, Tauwhare?’
‘No.’
‘No,’ said Wells, turning back to his bottle. ‘Nor have I.’
SATURN IN VIRGO
In which Quee Long brings a complaint before the law, and George Shepard, whose personal hatred of Sook Yongsheng has grown, over time, to include all Chinese men, declines to honour it, an injustice for which he does not, either then, or afterwards, feel any compunction.
‘I do not understand what you are saying.’
Ah Quee sighed. He pointed a third time to his certificate of indenture, which lay between them on Shepard’s desk. In the box marked ‘present site of employment’ was written the word Aurora.
‘Duffer,’ he explained. ‘Aurora is duffer claim.’
‘The Aurora is a duffer claim, and you work the Aurora, yes. That much I understand.’
‘Mannering,’ said Ah Quee. ‘Mannering make duffer not duffer.’
‘Mannering make duffer not duffer,’ Shepard repeated.
‘Very good,’ said Ah Quee, nodding. ‘Very bad man.’
‘Which is he—very good or very bad?’
Ah Quee frowned; then he said, ‘Very bad man.’
‘How does he make the duffer not a duffer? How? How?’
Ah Quee took his purse and held it up. Moving very deliberately, so that the action would not be lost on Shepard, he extracted a silver penny, which he then transferred to his left pocket. He waited a moment, and then he took the penny from his pocket, and returned it to his purse, as before.
Shepard sighed. ‘Mr. Quee,’ he said. ‘I see that the term of your indenture will not expire for some years; the term of my patience, however, reached its expiration some minutes ago. I have neither the resources nor the inclination to launch an investigation into Mr. Mannering’s finances on the strength of a half-articulated tip. I suggest you return to the Aurora, and count yourself lucky that you have any kind of work at all.’
JUPITER IN SAGITTARIUS
In which Alistair Lauderback, having now officially announced his intention to run for the Westland seat in the Fourth New Zealand Parliament, an ambition that, in addition to furthering his already illustrious political career, will take him over the Alps to Westland proper in the coming months, thus granting the interview his bastard brother has so long desired, now turns his mind to practical matters, or, more accurately, entreats an old associate to turn his mind to practical matters on his, Lauderback’s, behalf.
Akaroa. 22 Aug.
My dear Tom—
I expect you know already of my ambition to run for the Westland seat; but if this news comes as a surprise to you, I have enclosed an article from the Lyttelton Times that explains the announcement, and my reasons for it, in more detail than I have time for here. You can be sure that I am eager to see the fine sights of West Canterbury with my own eyes. I plan to arrive in Hokitika by 15 January, an estimate dependent upon weather, as I will make the journey overland, rather than by sea, in order to follow and inspect the future Christchurch-road. I prefer to travel light, as you know; I have arranged for a trunk of personal effects to be transferred from Lyttelton in the last days of December. Might the Virtue collect the trunk in Dunedin prior to her departure on the 10th of January, and convey it to the Coast? As a West Canterbury foreigner I shall defer to your expertise on questions of Hokitika lodging, dining, coach hire, club membership &c. I trust fully in your good taste and capability, and remain,
Yours, &c.,
A. LAUDERBACK
MOON IN LEO, NEW
In which Mannering, driving Anna Wetherell to Kaniere, perceives in her a new quality, a hardness, a kind of distance; an observation that moves him, internally, to pity, though when he speaks, some three miles after this observation is first made, it is not to console her, the intervening miles having wrought in him a hardness of his own.
‘Misery won’t do. Misery is bad for business, whatever the business. A man won’t bet on it, and a man won’t bet against it—and it has to be one or the other, you see, in our line of work. Do you see?’
‘Yes,’ Anna said. ‘I see.’
He was driving her to Chinatown, where Ah Sook was waiting with his resin and his pipe.
‘I’ve never had a girl murdered, and I’ve never had a girl beat,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘So you can trust me,’ he said.
SUN IN LEO
In which Staines confides in Mannering to the extent that he admits regret in having entered into a sponsorship agreement with Mr. Francis Carver, explaining that the initial opinion that he, Staines, formed of Carver’s character and history was and is grievously in error, his opinion now being that Carver is a villain of the first degree, and one not at all deserving of good fortune; to which Mannering, chuckling slightly, proposes a somewhat thrilling, because dastardly, solution.
‘There’s only one true crime upon a goldfield,’ said Mannering to Staines as they stamped through the undergrowth towards the southern edge of the Aurora claim. ‘Don’t you bother your head about murder, or theft, or treason. No: it’s fraud that’s the crime of crimes. Making sport of a digger’s hopes, you see, and a digger’s hopes are all he has. Digger fraud has two varieties. Salting a claim is the first. Crying a duffer is the second.’
‘Which is considered to be the more grievous?’
‘Depends on what you call grievous,’ said Mannering, swiping away a vine. ‘Salt a claim and get caught, you might get murdered in your bed; cry a duffer and get caught, you’re liable to get lynched. Cold-blooded, hot-blooded. That’s your choice.’
Staines smiled. ‘Am I to do business with a cold-blooded man?’
‘You can decide for yourself,’ said Mannering, throwing out his arm. ‘Here it is: the Aurora.’
‘Ah,’ said Staines, stopping also. They were both panting slightly from the walk. ‘Well—very good.’
They surveyed the land together. Staines perceived a Chinese man, squatting some thirty yards distant, his panning dish loose in his hands.
‘What’s the opposite of a homeward-bounder?’ said Mannering presently. ‘A never-going-homer? A stick-it-to-Mr.-Carver?’
‘Who’s that?’ said Staines.
‘That’s Quee,’ said Mannering. ‘He’ll stay on.’
Staines dropped his voice. ‘Does he know?’
Mannering laughed. ‘“Does he know?” What have I just told you? I’m not keen on getting murdered in my bed, thank you.’
‘He must think this a terribly poor enterprise.’
‘I haven’t the first idea what that man thinks,’ said Mannering, scornfully.
ANOTHER KIND OF DAWN
In which Ah Quee, placing his hands upon the armoured curve of Anna’s bodice, makes a curious discovery, the full significance of which he will not appreciate until eight days later, when the complete rotation of Anna’s four muslin gowns has given him a mental estimation of the extent of the riches they contain, excluding, of course, the dust contained within the gown of orange silk, which Anna never wears to Kaniere.
Anna lay perfectly still, her eyes closed, as Ah Quee ran his hands over her gown. He tapped every part of her corset with his fingers; he traced each flounce; he picked up the weighted hem and poured the fabric through his hands. His methodical touch seemed to anchor her in time and space; she felt that it was imperative that he touched every part of the garment before he touched her, and this certainty filled her with a lucid, powerful calm. When he slid his arm beneath her shoulders to roll her over, she complied without a sound, bringing her limp hands up to her mouth, like a baby, and turning her face towards his chest.
MOON IN VIRGO, CRESCENT
In which Ah Quee fills his firebox with charcoal, meaning to smelt the last of the dust excavated from Anna’s gown, and to inscribe the smelted bars with the name of the goldmine to which he is indentured, the Aurora; and Anna, as she sleeps, mutters syllables of distress, and moves her hand to her cheek, as if intending to staunch a wound.
When Anna woke, it was morning. Ah Quee had moved her to the corner of his hut. He had placed a folded blanket beneath her cheek, and had covered her with a woollen cape, his own. She knew upon waking that she had been talking in her sleep, for she felt flushed and disturbed, and much too hot; her hair was damp. Ah Quee had not yet noticed that she had woken. She lay still and watched him as he fussed over his breakfast, and examined his fingernails, and nodded, and hummed, and bent to rake the coals.
SUN IN VIRGO
In which Emery Staines, to whom Crosbie Wells has since narrated the full story of his betrayal at the hands of Francis Carver, each having won the other’s trust and loyalty, decides in a moment to falsify the quarterly report, removing all evidence of the bonanza from the goldfield records, and quite forgetting as he does so the determined worker Quee, who, according to protocol, and notwithstanding the circumstances of his indenture, is nevertheless deserving of a bonus.
Emery Staines, arriving at the camp station, was surprised to see that the Aurora’s box was flagged, meaning that a yield had been submitted. He requested the gold escort to unlock the box. Inside there was a neat lattice of smelted gold bars. Staines took one of the bars in his hand. ‘If I asked you to turn your back a moment,’ he said presently, ‘while I transferred the contents of this box elsewhere, what would be your price?’
The escort thought a moment, running his fingers up and down the barrel of his rifle. ‘I’d do it for twenty pounds,’ he said. ‘Sterling. Not pure.’
‘I’ll give you fifty,’ said Staines.
A PARTIAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN
In which Emery Staines journeys to the Arahura Valley, sack in hand, with the intention of burying the bonanza, for a period of safekeeping, upon a portion of land set aside for Maori use, having not considered the possibility that Francis Carver might soon return to Hokitika to investigate why the Aurora goldmine, such a promising investment, has become a veritable duffer.
In the flax at Staines’s shoulder a tui dipped its head and gave its rattling cry—sounding, to his ear, like a stick being dragged across pickets, while a reedy whistle played a tune. How wonderfully strange the sound! He stretched out his palm and touched the waxy blades of the flax, noting the vivid colours with pleasure: purple at the blade’s edges, melting to a whitish green in the very centre of the leaf.
The tui beat away, and it was quiet. Staines reached down and took up the smelted bars. He laid them carefully at the bottom of the hole that he had dug. After they were buried, he arranged above them several flat-topped stones in a sequence that he was sure to recognise, and then kicked away his footprints.
PAPA-TU-A-NUKU
In which, some half mile downriver from the site of the newly buried gold, Crosbie Wells and Tauwhare are sitting down to a hangi, a meal cooked in a fire pit that was covered in earth, later to be excavated, and the leaves around the meat unwrapped to yield a feast that is moist and richly flavoured with smoke and tannin and the rich, loamy flavours of the soil.
‘What I’m saying is that there’s nothing in it. You with your greenstone, us with our gold. It might just as well be the other way about. The greenstone rushes, we might call them. A greenrush, we might say.’
Tauwhare thought about this, still chewing. After a moment he swallowed and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.
‘There’s no difference,’ Wells insisted, reaching for another piece of meat. ‘You might not like it—but you have to admit—there’s no difference. It’s just one mineral or another. One rock or another.’
‘No,’ Tauwhare said. He looked angry. ‘It is not the same.’
DETRIMENT
In which Anna Wetherell, who remembers the assault that occurred in the boudoir of the House of Many Wishes in Dunedin upon the night of the 12th of May with a stricken, nauseated clarity, and who is made wretched, daily, by the memory of that assault, a wretchedness not assuaged by the knowledge that her collusion, however tacit, helped an innocent man to escape unharmed, is surprised by the appearance of the disfigured man himself, and, in a moment of weakness, forgets herself.
Francis Carver was riding inland on the Kaniere-road when he spotted a familiar figure on the roadside. He reined in, dismounted his horse, and approached her, perceiving that her walk was unsteady and her face, very flushed. She was smiling.
‘He got away,’ she mumbled. ‘I helped him.’
Carver came closer. He put his finger beneath her chin, and tilted her face. ‘Who?’
‘Crosbie.’
Carver stiffened at once. ‘Wells,’ he said. ‘Where is he?’
She hiccupped; suddenly she looked frightened.
‘Where?’ He pulled back and slapped her, hard, across the face. ‘Answer me. Is he here?’
‘No!’
‘In Otago? Canterbury? Where?’
In desperation, she turned to run. Carver caught her by the shoulder, jerked her back—but just then there came the clap of gunshot, nearby—
‘Whoa,’ Carver shouted, spinning away—
And the horse shied up—
