The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

  Shepard collected Miss Wetherell’s body as he was bid, propped her up against the wall, and shackled her. He ensured that she could breathe and was performing that function tolerably; he then looked at his pocket watch, and commented upon the lateness of the hour. Devlin took his cue, and donned his hat and coat—though as he left the gaol he cast a yearning look over his shoulder. He wished that the girl had been arranged more comfortably. But the gaoler was bidding him good night, and in the next moment the door had been shut and locked behind him.

  When Devlin returned to the Police Camp early the next morning Anna Wetherell was still unconscious; her head had lolled sideways, and her mouth was slightly agape. There was a bluish-purple bruise upon her temple, and her cheekbone was painfully swollen: had she fallen, or had she been struck? Devlin had no time to investigate, however, or to press the gaoler for more information on the circumstances of the girl’s arrest: it transpired that a man had died during the night, and Devlin was requested to accompany the physician to the Arahura Valley to assist in the collection of the dead man’s remains—and perhaps also to say a prayer or two over his body. The dead man’s name, Shepard informed him, was Crosbie Wells. On Shepard’s information he had died peacefully, of age, infirmity, and drink; there was no reason, at this stage, to suspect homicide. In life, Shepard went on, Wells had been a hermit. He would be remembered neither as a good nor as a wicked man, for his acquaintances had been few, and no family had survived him.

  The chaplain and the physician drove northward up the beach, and turned inland once they reached the mouth of the Arahura River. Crosbie Wells’s cottage, situated some three or four miles upriver, was of simple construction—a timber box beneath a sloping roof of sheet iron—though Crosbie Wells had afforded himself the handsome luxury of a glass window, set into the north side of the house. The cottage was plainly visible from the Christchurch road, for it was elevated some twenty feet above the riverbank, and was surrounded by a cleared plot of land.

  All in all, the dwelling made for a very lonely picture—and all the more so, after the man’s corpse had been wrapped in blankets and carried from the room. Every surface was tacky and furred with dust. The bolster was stained yellow, the pillow sprayed with mould. A side of bacon, hanging from a rafter, was cracked and greasy-dry. Empty demijohns of liquor were ranged around the room’s perimeter. The bottle on the dead man’s table was likewise empty, signifying that the hermit’s last action had been to drain his vessel, rest his head on his hands, and sleep. The place had an animal smell—the smell of loneliness, Devlin thought, with sympathy. He knelt before the range and pulled out the ash drawer—intending to build a fire in the stove, in order to burn off the dead-seeming odour of the room—and saw a piece of paper, trapped between the grating and the bottom of the drawer.

  It appeared as if someone (Wells, presumably) had attempted to burn the document, but had closed the door of the range before the paper caught; the document had only caught fire along one edge before it dropped between the slats of the firebox to the drawer below, and was only very slightly charred. Devlin plucked it out and brushed it clean of ash. It was still legible.

  On this 11th day of October 1865 a sum of two thousand pounds is to be given to MISS ANNA WETHERELL, formerly of New South Wales, by MR. EMERY STAINES, formerly of New South Wales, as witnessed by MR. CROSBIE WELLS, presiding.

  Next to Wells’s name there was a shaky signature, but next to the other man’s name, only a space. Devlin raised his eyebrows. The deed was therefore invalid, for the witness had signed before the principal, and the principal had not signed at all.

  Devlin recalled the name Anna Wetherell: this was the whore who had been admitted to the gaol-house late the previous night, drugged with opium. He halted a moment, frowning, and then suddenly folded the deed in half and thrust it between the buttons of his shirt, against his skin. He continued building the fire. Presently the physician came back inside (he had been feeding the horses) and the two men sat and shared a cup of tea, looking out the plate-glass window over the river, and to the clouded mountains beyond. Outside, the horses champed at their nosebags, and stamped their feet; on the tray of the cart, the blanket covering Wells’s body gained a film of beaded silver, from the rain.

  Cowell Devlin could not quite justify his impulse to conceal the deed of gift from the physician, Dr. Gillies. Perhaps, he thought, he had been impelled by the atmosphere of quiet in the dead man’s house. Perhaps he had meant the act of suppression as a gesture of respect. Perhaps his curiosity had been aroused by the name Anna Wetherell—the attempted suicide, found unconscious in the Christchurch-road—and he had concealed the paper out of an obscure wish to protect her. The chaplain mused over these various possibilities as he drank his tea. He did not speak to the physician, who was likewise silent. When they were done they washed their cups, covered the fire, closed the door, and clambered back upon the cart, to convey their sorry freight back to the Police Camp in Hokitika, where a post-mortem was to be conducted upon the dead man’s remains.

  It was characteristic of Cowell Devlin that he would not attach a precise motivation to an action of questionable integrity, and that he chose, instead, to indulge a kind of dreamy confusion about his motivations as a whole. It was characteristic, too, that he saw no real obligation to confess this action—either then, or in the fortnight that followed, for it was not until the night of the 27th of January, two weeks later, that he showed this purloined deed of gift to anyone. Devlin believed himself to be a virtuous man, and his self-conception remained, in the face of all contradiction, impregnable. Whenever he behaved badly, or questionably, he simply jettisoned the memory, and turned his mind to something else. On the way back to Hokitika he held the deed flat against his chest with the palm of his hand. He spoke only to remark upon the power of the breakers, as the surf furled white against the shore beside them. The physician did not speak at all. After they returned to the Police Camp, and had carried Crosbie Wells’s body inside, Devlin did half-heartedly consider sharing the deed with Governor Shepard, but he was distracted by a new commotion, and the opportunity expired. Anna Wetherell, it turned out, was beginning to revive.

  Her eyes fluttered behind their lids, and her tongue shifted in her mouth; she made a murmuring noise. Her fever appeared to have broken, for there was a spray of beaded perspiration on her brow and nose, and the orange silk of her dress had turned brownish at her collar and beneath her arms. Devlin dropped to his knees before her. He clasped her hands in his—they were soft, and chill to the touch—and called to Shepard’s wife for water.

  When at last the girl woke, it was as if from a death. Her head reared back, and her eye rolled forward; she made a rasping noise. She seemed to register where she was, but the after-effects of opium had left her ravaged; evidently, she did not possess the energy even to express surprise. She drew her hands weakly away from Devlin’s grasp, and he retreated. He noticed that her hands moved at once to encircle her corset—as though her belly had been punctured, he thought, and she was trying to staunch the wound. He spoke, but she did not respond, and presently she closed her eyes again, and drifted back to sleep. An altercation broke out in another quarter of the gaol-house, and Devlin was called over to officiate; this duty, and others pertaining to his station, claimed his attention for the remainder of the afternoon.

  At the end of the day the justice’s clerk arrived from the courthouse to collect bail from any miscreant who could raise the necessary sum. At the sound of this newcomer’s voice, Miss Wetherell lifted her dark head, made damp by fever, and beckoned. (The clerk was another new face in town, slim and very dapper; Gascoigne was his name.) The whore extracted several coins from between the sorry bones of her corset, and pressed them one by one into the clerk’s open palm. She was shivering a great deal, and wore a look of great humiliation. The bail was recorded as met, and Governor Shepard was then obligated to release her, which he did promptly. Devlin did not attend her hearing at the Magistrate’s Cou
rt the next day, for he had been charged with the task of digging a grave for the hermit, Crosbie Wells. He heard later that she had declined to plead, and had paid the fine that was levied against her without argument.

  The day after the burial, a four-thousand-pound fortune was discovered in Crosbie Wells’s cottage—exactly twice the sum named in the partially burned deed of gift, which Devlin had since stowed between the pages of his Bible, between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New. Still Devlin did not confess; still he did not show the deed to anyone. He told himself that once Anna Wetherell was stronger—once the episode of her near-suicide was safely behind her—he would show the piece of paper to her; for the moment, however, he judged it prudent to keep the information to himself.

  Now, in the dining room of the Palace Hotel, Devlin reached out and placed his hand over the battered cover of his Bible, which was unmarked except for a small Canterbury cross, stamped into the leather in gold. The movement was protective: although he did not yet know that the enclosed deed, pressed, apocryphal, between Malachi and Matthew, was to be of great importance to Thomas Balfour, as it would be to sundry other men, still he felt the need to keep it close to him. He knew that the deed—receipt of a gift that was never given, codicil to a will that was never made—was valuable somehow, and he was loath to part with it until he knew what its exact value truly was.

  ‘Grave-digging,’ said Balfour, taking his derby hat from its hook and running his fingers around the brim. ‘That’s something you’ll need to read up on.’

  ‘I do not know of any tracts on the subject,’ Devlin said.

  ‘For your new parish,’ said Balfour, ignoring him. ‘There’s a gallows going in.’ He put his hat on, pushed it back off his forehead with his thumb, and turned to leave. At the door he lingered. ‘I don’t know your name, Reverend,’ he said.

  ‘And I don’t know yours,’ Devlin returned. There was a silence—and then Balfour burst out laughing, tipped his hat to show his pleasure, and strode from the room.

  Saturday in Hokitika was a day of bustle and appointment. The diggers flooded back to the township in droves, swelling the total population to some four thousand, and filling the dosshouses and hotels along Revell-street to riotous capacity. The clerks at the Magistrate’s Court were overrun with petty claims and mining rights, the brokers with pledges, the merchants with orders from the rich men, and petitions for extended credit from the poor. Gibson Quay was a hive of industry; it seemed that with every hour that passed, a new timber frame was hammered into place, a new door was hung, and a new store unfurled its banner to billow and crack in the Tasman wind. Every spoke on the great wheel of luck was visible on a Saturday—there were men rising, risen, just falling, fallen, and at rest—and that night every digger would either drink his sorrow, or his joy.

  Today, however, the heavy rain had discouraged all but the most urgent traffic in the streets, and Hokitika did not throng with its usual crowd. The few bedraggled men Balfour passed were hunched under the awnings of hotels, cupping their hands to keep their cigarettes alight. Even the horses had an air of grim surrender. They stood muzzled by the wet cones of their nosebags, unmoving in the torn muck of the road, and as he strode by they showed not even a flicker in the half-lidded slack of their eyes.

  As Balfour turned into Revell-street he met with such a lash of wind and rain that he was obliged to clamp his hat to his head with his hand. According to Saxby’s Weather Warnings, that dubious oracle published daily in the West Coast Times, the deluge would let up within a day or three—for Saxby was expansive in his predictions, and allowed himself a generous margin of error on either side of his guess. In truth the specifics of his column changed but rarely: downpour was as much a part of the Hokitika constitution as frost and sunburn had been in Otago, and red dust in the Victorian hills. Balfour quickened his pace, pulling his coat tighter around his body with his free hand.

  There were a dozen-odd men upon the covered veranda of the Reserve Bank, pocketed in groups of three and four. The windows behind them were fogged pearl-grey. Balfour scanned the faces, squinting through the rain, but saw nobody he recognised. A ragged plume of smoke directed his gaze downward, to a figure sitting alone: a Maori man was squatting under the eave with his back against a piling. He was smoking a cigar.

  His face was tattooed in a way that reminded Balfour of the wind patterns on a map. Two large swirls gave fullness to his cheeks, and spokes radiated upward from his brows to join his hairline. A pair of deep whorls on either side of his nostrils lent an almost prideful definition to his nose. His lips had been coloured blue. He was wearing serge trousers and an open-necked twill shirt, unbuttoned to the sternum; flat against the brown skin of his chest hung an enormous green pendant, shaped like an adze. He had almost finished his cigar, and as Balfour approached, he threw the butt into the thoroughfare, where it rolled down the camber of the road and then came to rest, still reeking, against the wet edge of the grass.

  ‘You’re that Maori fellow,’ said Balfour. ‘Crosbie Wells’s mate.’

  The man moved his eyes to Balfour’s, but did not speak.

  ‘Give us your name again? Your name.’

  ‘Ko Te Rau Tauwhare toku ingoa.’

  ‘Crikey,’ Balfour said. ‘Give us just the name part.’ He held his palms close together, to signify a small amount. ‘Just the name.’

  ‘Te Rau Tauwhare.’

  ‘Can’t say that either,’ Balfour said. He shook his head. ‘Well—what do your friends call you, then—your white-man friends? What did Crosbie call you?’

  ‘Te Rau.’

  ‘Not much better, is it?’ Balfour said. ‘I’d be a fool to try, wouldn’t I? How about I call you Ted? That’s a good British name for you. Short for Theodore or Edward—you can choose. Edward’s a nice name.’

  Tauwhare did not respond.

  ‘I’m Thomas,’ Balfour said, placing his hand on his heart. ‘And you’re Ted.’ He leaned over and patted Tauwhare on the crown of his head. The man flinched, and Balfour, in surprise, quickly snatched back his hand and took a step backwards. Feeling foolish, he stuck out his leg and shoved both hands into the pockets of his vest.

  ‘Tamati,’ said Tauwhare.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘In my tongue, your name is Tamati.’

  ‘Oh,’ Balfour said, very relieved. He took his hands out of his pockets, clapped them together, and then folded his arms. ‘You’ve got a bit of English—good!’

  ‘I have a great many English words,’ said Tauwhare. ‘I am told I speak your language very well.’

  ‘Crosbie teach you a bit of English, Ted?’

  ‘I taught him,’ said Tauwhare. ‘I taught him korero Maori! You say Thomas—I say Tamati. You say Crosbie—I say korero mai!’

  He grinned, showing teeth that were very white and very square. Evidently he had made a joke of some kind, and so Balfour smiled back.

  ‘Never had a head for languages,’ he said, pulling his coat tighter across his body. ‘If it’s not English, it’s Spanish—that’s what my old dad always said. Listen, though, Ted: I’m sorry about your mate. I’m sorry about Crosbie Wells.’

  Tauwhare’s expression became sober at once. ‘Hei maumaharatanga,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, well,’ Balfour said, wishing that the other man would stop talking in his own tongue, ‘it was a d—n shame, is what it was. And now all this kerfuffle—all this bother, about the fortune and so forth—and his wife.’

  He peered expectantly at Tauwhare, through the rain.

  ‘He pounamu kakano rua,’ said Te Rau Tauwhare. With his first two fingers he touched the pendant that hung around his neck. Perhaps it was a talisman of some kind, Balfour thought: they all had them, the Maori fellows. Tauwhare’s was almost the size of his hand, and polished to a shine; it was made of a dark green stone, clouded with bands of a lighter green, and was fitted to a braid that ran around Tauwhare’s neck, so that the narrow end of the adze sat high in the notch o
f his collarbone.

  ‘Say,’ Balfour said, opting for a shot in the dark, ‘Say, where were you when it happened, Ted? Where were you when Crosbie died?’

  (Perhaps the Maori fellow could start him on his way; perhaps he knew something. It wouldn’t do to ask too many questions about the town, of course, for fear of attracting suspicion, but a Maori man was a much safer bet than most: his acquaintance was, most likely, very limited.)

  Te Rau Tauwhare turned his dark eyes on Balfour, and considered him.

  ‘Do you understand the question?’ Balfour said.

  ‘I understand the question,’ Tauwhare said.

  He understood that Balfour was asking about the death of Crosbie Wells, and yet had not been present at his funeral—that shameful excuse for a funeral, Tauwhare thought, with a flash of anger and disgust. He understood that Balfour had made only the most superficial show of sympathy, and had not even removed his hat. He understood that Balfour was looking to make a profit in some way, for he had a greedy look, in the way that men often did when they saw a chance to receive something and give nothing in return. Yes, Tauwhare thought: he understood the question.

  Te Rau Tauwhare was not quite thirty years of age. He was handsomely muscular, and carried himself with assurance and the tightly wound energy of youth; though not openly prideful, he never showed that he was impressed or intimidated by any other man. He possessed a deeply private arrogance, a bedrock of self-certainty that needed neither proof nor explication—for although he had a warrior’s reputation, and an honourable standing within his tribe, his self-conception had not been shaped by his achievements. He simply knew that his beauty and his strength were without compare; he simply knew that he was better than most other men.

  This estimation did make Tauwhare anxious, however: he felt that it pointed to a spiritual dearth. He knew that any self-reflexive certainty was the hallmark of shallowness, and that valuation was no index of true worth—and yet he could not shake his certainty about himself. This worried him. He worried that he was only an ornament, a shell without meat, a hollow clam; he worried that his own self-estimation was a vain one. He therefore apprenticed himself to the spiritual life. He quested after the wisdom of his ancestors, so as to teach himself to doubt himself. As a monk seeks to transcend the lesser functions of his body, so did Te Rau Tauwhare seek to transcend this lesser function of his will—but a man cannot master his will without the expression of it. Tauwhare could never strike a balance between surrendering to his impulses, and fighting them.