The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

  ‘I’m not sure what to make of it,’ Gascoigne said at last. He took the glass from her, but did not drink: all of a sudden, he felt extraordinarily sad.

  Aubert Gascoigne felt the pressure of anxiety rather more acutely than other men. When he was made anxious, as he had been by the inexplicable misfire of Anna’s pistol, he tended to give himself over to bursts of powerful emotion—shock, despair, anger, sorrow: emotions which he seized upon because they channelled his anxiety outward, and in a sense regulated the pressure that he felt within. He had earned a reputation for being strong and level-headed at a time of crisis—as he had been, that afternoon—but he tended to unravel after the crisis had been weathered or forestalled. He was still trembling, an agitated motion that had only started when he released the whore from their embrace.

  ‘There’s something I need to speak with you about,’ Anna said now.

  Gascoigne rolled his brandy around his glass. ‘Yes.’

  Anna returned to the armoire and poured herself a measure also. ‘I’m late on my rent. I owe three months. Edgar gave me notice this morning.’

  Abruptly she stopped speaking, turned, and peered at him. Gascoigne had been taking a draught of his cigarette; he paused at the end of the intake, his chest expanded, and made a gesture with his hands to ask how much.

  ‘It’s ten shillings a week, with meals, and a bath every Sunday,’ Anna said. (Gascoigne exhaled.) ‘Over three months—that’s—I don’t know … six pounds.’

  ‘Three months,’ Gascoigne echoed.

  ‘I was set back by that fine,’ said Anna. ‘Five pounds, to the Magistrate. That was a month of wages for me. It cleaned me out.’ She waited.

  ‘Surely the whoremonger pays your rent,’ Gascoigne said.

  ‘No,’ Anna said. ‘He doesn’t. I report direct to Edgar.’

  ‘Your landlord.’

  ‘Yes: Edgar Clinch.’

  ‘Clinch?’ Gascoigne looked up. ‘That’s the man who purchased Crosbie Wells’s estate.’

  ‘His cottage,’ said Anna.

  ‘But he’s just come in on an enormous fortune! What does he care about six pounds?’

  Anna shrugged. ‘He just said to raise it. At once.’

  ‘Perhaps he fears what will happen at the courthouse,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Perhaps he fears he will have to give it all back again, once the appeal is granted.’

  ‘He didn’t say why,’ Anna said. (She had not yet heard about the sudden arrival, on Thursday afternoon, of the widow Wells, and so did not know that the sale of Crosbie Wells’s estate was in danger of being revoked.) ‘But he’s not calling my bluff about it; he said he wasn’t.’

  ‘You can’t—appease him somehow?’ Gascoigne said.

  ‘You can leave off the “somehow”,’ Anna said haughtily. ‘I’m in mourning. My child is dead and I’m in mourning. I won’t do that any more.’

  ‘You could find another line of work.’

  ‘There isn’t one. The only thing I can do is needlework, and there’s no call for it here. There aren’t enough women.’

  ‘There’s mending,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Socks and buttons. Frayed collars. There’s always mending, in a camp.’

  ‘Mending doesn’t pay,’ said Anna.

  She peered at him again—expectantly, Gascoigne thought, and this interpretation gave rise to a flash of anger. He took refuge in another draught. It was not his responsibility that she had no money. She had not walked the streets once in the two weeks since her night in gaol, and whoring was her income: it stood to reason that she was out of pocket. As for this mourning business! Nobody had forced her into it. She was hardly impaired by grief—the child was three months dead, for heaven’s sake. The frock was no real impediment either. She would make a shilling just as easily in Agathe’s black dress as in her habitual orange one—for she had loyal custom in the Hokitika township, and whores were all too few along the Coast. Anyway, Gascoigne thought, what did it matter? One could not tell colours in the dark.

  This burst of irritation was not for want of mercy. Gascoigne had known poverty, and since his youth he had been many times in debt. He would have helped Anna, and gladly, had she chosen to request his assistance in a different way. But like most extremely sensitive people, Gascoigne could not bear sensitivity in others: he required honesty and directness when he was asked a question—and he required it all the more desperately when he was vexed. He recognised that the whore was employing a strategy in order to get something. This strategy angered him because he could see it was a strategy—and also, because he knew exactly what Anna was about to ask for. He expelled a jet of smoke.

  ‘Edgar’s always been very kind to me,’ Anna continued, when it became evident that Gascoigne was not going to speak. ‘But lately he’s been in a temper. I don’t know what it is. I’ve tried pleading with him, but there’s nothing doing.’ She paused. ‘If I could only—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Only the smallest bit—that’s all I’d need,’ said Anna. ‘Just one of the nuggets. I could tell him I found it in the creek, or on the road somewhere. Or I could tell him I’d been paid in pure—the diggers do that, sometimes. I could say it was from one of the foreign boys. I’m a good liar.’

  Gascoigne shook his head. ‘You cannot touch that gold.’

  ‘But for how long?’ Anna said. ‘For how long?’ ‘Until you find out who sewed it into your corset!’ Gascoigne snapped. ‘And not a moment before!’

  ‘But what am I to do about my rent, in the meantime?’

  Gascoigne looked hard at her. ‘Anna Wetherell,’ he said, ‘you are not my ward.’

  This silenced her, though her eyes flashed in displeasure. She cast about for something to do, some mundane task with which to occupy herself. At last she knelt down to pick up her scattered trinkets, strewn by Pritchard on the floor—scooping them towards her angrily, and throwing them with some violence back into the empty dresser drawer.

  ‘You are right: I am not your ward,’ she said presently. ‘But I will counter that the pile is not your gold—to be kept, and restricted, as you please!’

  ‘Nor does that gold belong to you, Miss Wetherell.’

  ‘It was in my dress,’ she said. ‘It was on my person. I bore the risk.’

  ‘You would risk far more, in spending it.’

  ‘So what do I do?’ Anna cried. ‘Once a whore, always a whore? That’s the only option left me, I suppose!’

  They glared at each other. I would give you a gold sovereign, Gascoigne was thinking, if you plied your trade with me. Aloud he said, ‘How long do you have?’

  Anna wound a scrap of ribbon into a vicious ball before answering. ‘He didn’t say. He said I had to raise the money or get out.’

  ‘Would you like me to talk to him?’ Gascoigne said—baiting her, because he knew this was not what she wanted at all.

  ‘And say what?’ Anna returned, throwing the balled ribbon into the drawer. ‘Beg him to spare me for another week—another month—another quarter? What’s the difference? I shall have to pay him sooner or later.’

  ‘That,’ said Gascoigne in an icy tone, ‘is what characterises a debt, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I wish that I had known you to be a creditor of this kind, two weeks ago,’ Anna said now, and in a waspish tone. ‘I should never have accepted your help, otherwise.’

  ‘Perhaps your memory is faulty,’ Gascoigne said. ‘I will remind you that I gave help only because you asked for it.’

  ‘This? This mouldy dress? This is “help”? I’d rather give you back the dress—and keep the gold!’

  ‘I got you out of the gaol-house, Anna Wetherell, at great personal risk to myself—and that dress belonged to my late wife, in case you did not know it,’ Gascoigne said. He dropped his cigarette onto the floor and ground it to nothing with his heel. Anna was opening her mouth to make a retort, and so he said, loudly: ‘I’m afraid you are not in a fit state for my surprise.’

  ‘I am perfectly fit, thank you.’
>
  ‘A surprise,’ Gascoigne said, raising his voice still further, ‘that I organised for you for reasons of the purest charity and goodwill—’

  ‘Mr. Gascoigne—’

  ‘—for I felt that it might do you good, to get out and enjoy yourself a little,’ Gascoigne concluded. His face was very white. ‘I will inform my lady that your spirits are low, and that you won’t be seen.’

  ‘My spirits aren’t low,’ Anna said.

  ‘I think that they are,’ said Gascoigne. He drained his glass, and then set it on the nightstand next to Anna’s pillow, the centre of which was still pierced by a single blackened hole. ‘I will leave you now. I am sorry that your gun did not fire in the way that you intended, and I am sorry that your lifestyle exceeds your means to pay for it. Thank you for the brandy.’

  MEDIUM COELI / IMUM COELI

  In which Gascoigne raises the issue of Anna’s debt, and Edgar Clinch does not confide in him.

  As Gascoigne was crossing the foyer of the Gridiron Hotel, the door was wrenched open, and the hotelier, Mr. Edgar Clinch, entered at a pace. Gascoigne slowed in his step so that the two men would not have to pass too close to one another—an action that Clinch mistook for a different kind of hesitation. He stopped abruptly in the middle of the doorway, blocking Gascoigne’s exit. Behind him, the door thudded shut.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, no,’ Gascoigne said politely—and hovered a moment, waiting for Clinch to move from the doorway so that he might leave without having to brush shoulders with the other man.

  But the valet had been alerted by the slam of the door. ‘Oi—you!’ he called out to Gascoigne, coming forward from his cubicle beneath the stairs. ‘What was the story behind those pistol shots? Jo Pritchard came downstairs like death incarnate. Like he’d seen a ghost.’

  ‘It was a mistake,’ said Gascoigne curtly. ‘Just a mistake.’

  ‘Pistol shots?’ said Edgar Clinch—who had not moved from the doorway.

  Clinch was a tall man, forty-three years of age, with sandy-coloured hair and a harmless, pleasant look. He wore an imperial moustache, greased at the tips, a handsome accessory that had not silvered at the same rate as his hair—which was likewise greased, parted in the middle, and cut to the level of his earlobes. He had apple-shaped cheeks, a reddish nose, and a blunted profile. His eyes were set so deep in his face that they seemed to shut altogether when he smiled, which he did often, as the crowfoot lines around his eyes could testify. At present, however, he was frowning.

  ‘I was down here at the desk,’ said the valet. ‘This man, he was there—he saw it. He’d run up, on account of the shouting—the gun went off just after he walked in. After that there was another shot—a second. I’m about to go up, to investigate, but then Jo Pritchard comes down, and tells me not to worry. Tells me the whore was cleaning the piece, and it went off by accident—but that explanation only accounts for the first.’

  Edgar Clinch slid his gaze back to Gascoigne.

  ‘The second shot was mine,’ Gascoigne said, speaking with ill-concealed annoyance; he did not like to be detained against his will. ‘I fired the piece experimentally, once I could see that the first shot had fouled.’

  ‘What was the shouting on account of?’ asked the hotelier.

  ‘That situation is now resolved.’

  ‘Jo Pritchard—laying into her?’

  ‘Sounded like that from here,’ said the valet.

  Gascoigne shot the valet a poisonous look, and then turned back to Clinch. ‘There was no violence done to the whore,’ he said. ‘She is perfectly sound, and the situation is now resolved, as I have already told you.’

  Clinch narrowed his eyes. ‘Strange how many guns go off while being cleaned,’ he said. ‘Strange how many whores get it into their heads to clean their guns, when there’s gentlemen about. Strange how many times that’s happened, in my hotel.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t offer an opinion on that subject,’ Gascoigne said.

  ‘I think you can,’ said Edgar Clinch. He planted his feet a little wider apart, and folded his arms across his chest.

  Gascoigne sighed. He was in no mood for bullish displays of proprietorship.

  ‘What happened?’ Clinch said. ‘Did something happen to Anna?’

  ‘I suggest you ask her yourself,’ Gascoigne said, ‘and save us both some time. You can do that very easily, you know: she’s right upstairs.’

  ‘I don’t appreciate being made a fool in my own hotel.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that I was making you a fool.’

  Clinch’s moustache twitched dangerously. ‘What’s your quarrel?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I have one,’ said Gascoigne. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Pritchard.’ He spat out the name.

  ‘You needn’t bring that to me,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Pritchard’s not my man.’ He felt trapped. It was useless pretending to reason with a man whose mind was already fixed, and Edgar Clinch, by the looks of things, was spoiling for a fight.

  ‘That’s a true fact,’ put in the valet, coming to Gascoigne’s rescue. He had also observed that his employer was out of sorts. The hotelier’s face was very red, and his trouser leg was twitching, as though he were bouncing his weight up and down upon his heel—a sure sign that he was angry. The valet explained, in soothing tones, that Gascoigne had only interrupted the argument between Pritchard and Anna; he had not been present for its origin.

  Clinch did not cut a terribly intimidating figure, even when poised in fighting stance, as he currently was: he seemed fretful rather than fearsome. His anger, though palpable, seemed to render him somehow powerless. He was occupied by his emotion; he was its servant, not its liege. Watching him, Gascoigne was put more in mind of a child preparing for a tantrum than a fighter preparing for a brawl—though of course the former was no less dangerous, when the provocation was the same. Clinch was still blocking the door. It was clear that he would not be rational—but perhaps, Gascoigne thought, he could be calmed.

  ‘What has Pritchard done to you, Mr. Clinch?’ he said—thinking that if he gave the man a chance to speak, his anger might run its course, and he might calm himself that way.

  Clinch’s reply was strangled and inarticulate. ‘To Anna!’ he cried. ‘Feeds her the very drug that’s killing her—sells it!’

  This was hardly explanation enough: there must be more. To coax him, Gascoigne said, lightly, ‘Yes—but when a man’s a drunk, do you blame the publican?’

  Clinch ignored this piece of rhetoric. ‘Joseph Pritchard,’ he said. ‘He’d feed it to her if he could, like a babe at suck; he’d do that. You agree with me, Mr. Gascoigne.’

  ‘Ah—you know me!’ said Gascoigne, in a tone of relief, and then, ‘I do?’

  ‘Your sermon in yesterday’s Times. A d—n fine sentiment, by the bye; a d—n fine piece,’ said Clinch. (Paying a compliment appeared to soothe him—but then his features darkened again.) ‘He might have done well to read it. Do you know where he gets it from? That filthy muck? The resin? Do you know? Francis Carver, that’s who!’

  Gascoigne shrugged; the name meant nothing to him.

  ‘Francis bloody Carver, who kicked her—kicked her, beat her—and it was his baby! His baby in her belly! Killed his own spawn!’

  Clinch was almost shouting—and Gascoigne was suddenly very interested. ‘What’s that you’re saying?’ he said, stepping forward. Anna had confided to him that her unborn baby had been killed by its own father—and now it appeared that this same man was connected to the opium by which she herself had nearly perished!

  But Clinch had rounded on his valet. ‘You,’ he said. ‘If Pritchard comes by again, and I’m not here, it’s you I’m counting on to turn him back. Do you hear me?’

  He was very upset.

  ‘Who is Francis Carver?’ said Gascoigne.

  Clinch hawked and spat on the floor. ‘Piece of filth,’ he said. ‘Piece of murderous filth. Jo Pritchard—he’s just a
reprobate. Carver—he’s the devil himself; he’s the one.’

  ‘They are friends?’

  ‘Not friends,’ said Clinch. ‘Not friends.’ He jabbed his finger at the valet. ‘Did you hear me? If Jo Pritchard sets foot on that staircase—the bottom stair—you’re out on your own!’

  Evidently the hotelier no longer regarded Gascoigne as a threat—for he moved from the doorway, snatching his hat from his head; Gascoigne was now free to exit, as he pleased. He did not move, however; instead he waited for the hotelier to elaborate, which, after slicking his hair back with the palm of his hand, and hanging his hat upon the hatstand, he did.

  ‘Francis Carver’s a trafficker,’ he said. ‘Godspeed—that’s his ship; you might have seen her at anchor. A barque—three-masted.’

  ‘What’s his connexion to Pritchard?’

  ‘Opium, of course!’ said Edgar Clinch, with impatience. He evidently did not take well to being questioned; he frowned anew at Gascoigne, and it seemed that a new wave of suspicion came over him. ‘What were you doing in Anna’s room?’

  Gascoigne said, in a tone of polite surprise, ‘I was not aware that Anna Wetherell is in your employ, Mr. Clinch.’

  ‘She’s in my care,’ said Clinch. He slicked back his hair a second time. ‘She lodges here—it’s part of the arrangement—and I have a right to know her business, if it happens on my province, and there are pistols involved. You can go: you’ve got ten minutes’—this last to the valet, who scuttled off to the dining room, to take his lunch.

  Gascoigne took hold of his lapels. ‘I suppose you think she’s lucky, living here, with you to watch over her,’ he said.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Clinch. ‘I don’t think that.’

  Gascoigne paused, surprised. Then he said, delicately, ‘Do you care for many girls like her?’

  ‘Only three right now,’ Clinch said. ‘Dick—he’s got an eye for them. Only the class acts—and he doesn’t drop his standard; he holds to it. You want a shilling whore, you go down to Clap Alley, and see what you catch. There’s no spending your loose change with him. It’s pounds or nothing. Dick, he put you on to Anna?’