The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

  ‘To die in our sleep—in our own homes? I dare say it is the best that any of us can hope for.’ Löwenthal felt that he had gained some ground. He added, ‘Though it was a great pity his wife was not present at his passing.’

  Carver shrugged. Whatever sudden fire had prompted his last outburst had been smothered just as suddenly. ‘A marriage is a man’s own business,’ he said.

  ‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ Löwenthal said. He smiled. ‘Are you at all acquainted with Mrs. Wells?’

  Carver made an inscrutable noise.

  ‘I have had the pleasure of meeting her, but only briefly,’ Löwenthal went on, undeterred. ‘I had intended to go along to the Wayfarer’s Fortune this evening—as a sceptic, of course, but with an open mind. Can I expect to see you there?’

  ‘No,’ Carver said, ‘you can’t.’

  ‘Perhaps your scepticism about séances exceeds even mine!’

  ‘I don’t have an opinion about séances,’ Carver said. ‘I might be there or I might not.’

  ‘In any case, I expect Mrs. Wells welcomed your return to Hokitika very gladly,’ said Löwenthal—whose conversational gambits were becoming tenuous indeed. ‘Yes: I am sure she must have been very pleased, to know that you had returned!’

  Carver was now looking openly annoyed. ‘Why?’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ said Löwenthal. ‘Because of all the fuss over his estate, of course! Because the legal proceedings have been halted precisely on account of Wells’s birth certificate! It’s nowhere to be found!’

  Löwenthal’s voice rang out rather more loudly than he had intended, and he worried briefly that perhaps he had overplayed his hand. What he had said was perfectly true, and what’s more, it was public knowledge: Mrs. Wells’s appeal to revoke the sale of Wells’s estate had not yet been heard by the Magistrate’s Court because no documentation had survived the dead man that might have served as proof of his true identity. Lydia Wells had arrived in Hokitika several days after her late husband had been buried, and therefore had not identified his body; short of digging his body up (the Magistrate begged the widow’s pardon) there was, it seemed, no way of proving that the hermit who had died in the Arahura Valley and the Mr. Crosbie Wells who had signed Mrs. Wells’s marriage certificate were the same man. Given the enormity of the inheritance in question, the Magistrate thought it prudent to delay the Court proceedings until a more definite conclusion could be reached—for which pronouncement Mrs. Wells thanked him very nicely. She assured him that her patience was of the most stalwart female variety, and that she would wait for as long as necessary for the outstanding debt (so she conceived of the inheritance) to be paid out to her.

  But Carver was not provoked; he only looked the editor up and down, and then said, in a voice of surly indifference, ‘I want to place a notice in the Times.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Löwenthal said. His heart was beating fast. Drawing a sheet of paper towards him, he said, ‘What is it that you are wishing to sell?’

  Carver explained that the hull of the Godspeed would shortly be dismantled, and in advance of this event, he wished to sell her parts at auction on Friday, care of Glasson & Rowley Salvage. He gave his instructions very curtly. No part was to be sold prior to auction. No privilege would be given, and no correspondence entered into. All inquiries were to be directed, by post, to Mr. Francis Carver, at the Palace Hotel.

  ‘You see I am making careful note of it,’ Löwenthal said. ‘I will not make the mistake of omitting any part of your name—not this time! Say—I don’t suppose that you and Crosbie were related?’

  Carver’s mouth twisted again. ‘No.’

  ‘It’s true that Francis is a very common name,’ Löwenthal said, nodding. He was still making note of the name of Carver’s hotel, and did not look up for several seconds; when he did, however, he found that Carver’s expression had soured still further.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Carver demanded, accenting the fact that he had not bothered to use it before. When Löwenthal replied, Carver nodded slowly, as if committing the name to heart. Then he said, ‘You’ll shut your f—ing mouth.’

  Löwenthal was shocked. He received the payment for the advertisement and wrote up Carver’s receipt in silence—penning the words very slowly and carefully, but with a steady hand. This was the first time he had ever been insulted in his own office, and his shock was such that he could not immediately respond. He felt an exhilaration building within him; a pressure; an exultant, roaring sound. Löwenthal was the kind of man who became almost gladiatorial when he was shamed. He felt a martial stirring in his breast that was triumphal, even glad, as if a long-awaited call to arms had sounded somewhere close at hand, and he alone had felt its private resonation, drumming in his ribcage, drumming in his blood.

  Carver had taken up the receipt. He turned, and made to leave the shop without either thanking Löwenthal or bidding him goodbye—a discourtesy that released a surge of outrage in Löwenthal’s breast: he could contain himself no longer. He burst out, ‘You’ve got a lot to answer for, showing your face around here!’

  Carver stopped, his hand upon the doorknob.

  ‘After what you did to Anna,’ Löwenthal said. ‘I was the one to find her, you know. All bloody. It’s not a way to treat a woman. I don’t care who she is. It’s not a way to treat a woman—still less when she’s expecting, and so close to being due!’

  Carver did not answer.

  ‘It was a hair short of a double murder. Do you know that?’ Löwenthal felt his anger mounting into fury. ‘Do you know what she looked like? Did you see her when the bruises were going down? Did you know that she had to use a cane for two weeks? Just to be able to walk! Did you know that?’

  At last Carver said, ‘Her hands weren’t clean.’

  Löwenthal almost laughed. ‘What—she left you in a bloody pool, then? She boxed you senseless? What is the phrase—an eye for an eye?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘She killed your child? She killed your child—so you killed hers?’ Löwenthal was almost shouting. ‘Say the words, man! Say them!’

  But Carver was unmoved. ‘I meant she’s no blushing flower.’

  ‘Blushing flower! Now I expect you’re going to tell me she brought it all upon herself—that she deserved it!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Francis Carver. ‘She got what she was owed.’

  ‘You are short on friends in Hokitika, Mr. Carver,’ said Löwenthal, levelling his ink-blackened finger at the other man. ‘Anna Wetherell may be a common whore but she is treasured by more men in this town than you can hold off, armed or no, and you ought not to forget that. If any harm should come to her—let me warn you—if any harm—’

  ‘Not by my hand,’ Carver said. ‘I’ve got nothing more to do with her. I’ve settled my dues.’

  ‘Your dues!’ Löwenthal spat on the floor. ‘You mean the baby? Your own child—dead, before its own first breath! That’s what you call dues!’

  But suddenly Carver was looking at him with a very amused expression.

  ‘My own child?’ he repeated.

  ‘I’ll tell you, though you haven’t asked,’ Löwenthal shouted. ‘Your baby’s dead. Do you hear me? Your own child—dead, before its first breath! And by your hand!’

  And Carver laughed—harshly, as though clearing something foul from his throat. ‘That whore carried no baby of mine,’ he said. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Anna herself,’ Löwenthal said, feeling a flash of trepidation for the first time. ‘Do you deny it?’

  Carver laughed again. ‘I wouldn’t touch that girl with a boathook,’ he said, and before Löwenthal could reply, he was gone.

  SUN IN AQUARIUS

  In which Sook Yongsheng pays another unexpected call; Lydia Wells has a most prophetic notion; and Anna finds herself alone.

  Anna Wetherell had not visited the opium den in Kaniere since the afternoon of the 14th of January. The half-ounce of fresh resin that Sook Yongsheng had gifted
her that afternoon ought to have lasted no more than two weeks, by Anna’s habitual rate of consumption. But now over a month had passed, and Anna had not once returned to Kaniere to share a pipe with her old companion, or to replenish her supply—an absence for which Ah Sook could not produce any kind of reasonable explanation.

  The hatter missed the whore’s visits very much. Every afternoon he waited, in vain, for her to appear at the edge of the clearing beyond the bounds of Kaniere Chinatown, her bonnet hanging down her back, and every afternoon he was disappointed. He guessed that she must have ceased to take opium altogether: either that, or she had decided to source the drug from the chemist directly. This latter alternative ought to have been the more hurtful to Ah Sook, for he still suspected that Joseph Pritchard had played a part in engineering Anna’s overdose, on the night of the 14th: he still believed, despite many assurances to the contrary, that Pritchard had tried for some reason to end Anna’s life. But in fact it was the former alternative that was the more difficult for Ah Sook to bear. He simply could not believe—did not want to believe—that Anna had managed to rid herself, once and for all, of her addiction.

  Ah Sook was very fond of Anna, and he believed that she was fond of him also. He knew, however, that the intimacy that they enjoyed together was less a togetherness than it was a shared isolation—for there is no relationship as private as that between the addict and his drug, and they both felt that isolation very keenly. Ah Sook loathed his own enslavement to opium, and the more he loathed it, the more his craving for the drug strengthened, taking a disgusted shape in his heart and mind. Anna, too, had loathed the habit in herself. She had loathed it all the more when she began to swell with child, and her trade in Hokitika dwindled, and she was left with days and weeks of twilit smoke, an acreage of time, that softened at the edges, and blurred, until the baby died, and Anna’s dependence acquired a desperation that even Ah Sook did not attempt to understand. He did not know how the baby came to perish, and had not asked.

  They never spoke in the Kaniere den—not as they lit the lamp, not as they lay back, not as they waited for the resin to soften and bubble in the bowl. Sometimes Anna filled Ah Sook’s pipe first, and held it for him as he took the smoke into his body, and breathed, and slipped away—only to wake, later, and find her stretched out beside him, supple and clammy, her hair plastered wet against her cheek. It was important to the lighting of the pipe that no words were ever spoken, and Ah Sook was pleased that they had adopted this practice without any kind of negotiation or request. As the conjugal act cannot be spoken of aloud for reasons both sacred and profane, the ritual of the pipe was, for the pair of them, a holy ritual that was unspeakable and mortified, just as it was ecstatic and divine: its sacredness lay in its very profanity, and its profanity, in its sacred form. For what a solemn joy it was, to wait in silence for the resin to melt; to ache for it, shamefully, wondrously, as the sweet scent of it reached one’s nose; to pull the needle through the tar; to cut the flame, and lie back, and take the smoke into one’s body, and feel it, miraculous, rushing to one’s very extremities, one’s fingers, one’s toes, the top of one’s head! And how tenderly he looked upon her, when they woke.

  On the afternoon of the widow’s séance (it was a Sunday—a provocative scheduling on Mrs. Wells’s part, and one of which she was very well aware) Ah Sook was sitting in the rectangular patch of sunshine that fell through the doorway of his hut, scraping clean the bowl of his opium pipe, humming through his teeth, and thinking about Anna. This had been his occupation for the better part of an hour, and the bowl was long since clean. His knife no longer turned up the reddish powder left by the burnt opium gum; the long chamber of the pipe was clear. But the redundant motion matched the redundancy of his repeating thoughts, and helped to reassure him.

  ‘Ah Quee faat sang me si aa?’

  Tong Wei, a smooth-faced young man of thirty, was watching him from the other side of the clearing. Ah Sook did not respond. He had pledged not to speak of the council at the Crown Hotel, or the events that preceded it, to any man.

  The lad persisted. ‘Keoi hai mai bei yan daa gip aa?’

  Still Ah Sook said nothing, and presently Tong Wei gave up, muttering his displeasure, and sloped off in the direction of the river.

  Ah Sook sat still for a long while after the lad’s departure, and then all of a sudden he sat back, uttered an oath, and folded his knife away. It was hell to spend his days waiting for her, thinking about her, wondering. He would not endure it. He would journey to Hokitika that very afternoon, and demand an audience with her. He would go at once. He rolled up his pipe and tools, stood, and went inside to fetch his coat.

  Ah Sook had only understood part of what was discussed in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel three weeks prior. In his confusions he had received no aid from his compatriot, for Ah Quee’s English was even more severely limited than his own, and none from the remaining men of the Crown, whose collective patience was worn very thin by any request for clarification from Chinese men. Balfour’s narration had been much too swift and poetically accented to be readily understood by a foreign ear, and both Ah Sook and Ah Quee had left the assembly at the Crown with only a partial understanding of all that had been discussed.

  The crucial points of ignorance were these. Ah Sook did not know that Anna Wetherell had quit her lodgings at the Gridiron Hotel, and had taken up instead with Lydia Wells. He also did not know that Francis Carver was the master of the ship Godspeed, the craft that had foundered on the Hokitika bar. When the assembly at the Crown broke up, soon after midnight, Ah Sook had not followed the other men to the Hokitika spit to look over the wreck: shipping misadventures did not interest him, and he did not like to be on the Hokitika streets after dark. He had returned, instead, to Kaniere, where he had remained ever since. As a consequence, he still believed that Francis Carver had departed nearly a month ago for Canton, and would not be due back in Hokitika for some time. Thomas Balfour, who had quite forgotten imparting this piece of misinformation to Ah Sook in the first place, had not thought to disabuse him.

  By the time the bells rang out half past three, Ah Sook was mounting the steps to the veranda of the Gridiron Hotel. At the front desk, he requested an audience with Anna Wetherell, pronouncing her name with both gravity and satisfaction, as though the meeting had been scheduled many months in advance. He produced a shilling, to show that he was willing to pay for the privilege of the whore’s conversation, and then bowed very deeply, as a gesture of respect. He remembered Edgar Clinch from the secret council, and had judged him, then, to be a decent and reasonable man.

  Clinch, however, only shook his head. He gestured, repeatedly, towards the newly washed Wayfarer’s Fortune, on Revell-street’s opposite side, and spoke a flurry of words; when Ah Sook did not understand, Clinch brought him outside by the elbow, pointed at the hotel opposite, and explained, more slowly, that Anna now took her lodging there. Eventually Ah Sook spied a thrust of movement in the front window of the former hotel, and perceived that the figure behind the glass was Anna; satisfied, he bowed to Clinch a second time, retrieved his shilling from the other man’s palm, and pocketed it. He then crossed the thoroughfare, mounted the steps to the Wayfarer’s veranda, and rapped smartly upon the door.

  Anna must have been in the foyer, for she answered the door within seconds. She appeared, as was her habit of late, in the distracted posture of a lady’s maid, full of annoyance and disapproval, keeping one hand upon the doorframe, so as to be ready to close the door at once. (Over the past three weeks she had received a great many callers: wistful diggers, for the most part, who missed her presence at the Dust and Nugget in the evenings. They begged to buy her a glass of champagne, or brandy, or small beer, and to ‘shoot the bull’ at one of the brightly lit saloons along Revell-street—but their pleading had no effect: Anna only shook her head, and shut the door.) When she saw who was on the threshold, however, she pulled the door open wide, and made an exclamation of surprise.

&nb
sp; Ah Sook was surprised also; for a moment he simply stared. After so many weeks of recalling her shape to his mind—here she was! Was she truly so altered? Or was his memory so imperfect, that she seemed, standing in the doorway, to be a wholly different woman than the one with whom he had passed so many luxurious afternoons, with the cold light of winter falling slantwise through the square of the window, and the smoke winding about their bodies, in coils? Her dress was a new one: black, and cut very severely. But this was not merely a new dress, Ah Sook thought. This was a different woman altogether.

  She was sober. Her cheeks held a new lustre, and her eyes were brighter, larger, and more alert. The syrupy quality to her movements was gone—and gone, too, was the slightly dreamy gauze that had always overlaid her features, like a veil of lawn. Gone was the vague half-smile, the trembling corner of her mouth, the awed confusion—as though she were privy, always, to some small bewilderment that no one else could see. In the next moment Ah Sook’s astonishment had given way to bitterness. So it was true. Anna had rid herself of opium’s dragon. She had cured herself—when he had tried for over a decade to do the same, remaining, always, that shapeless creature’s slave.

  Anna made a little snatching motion with her hand, as though wishing to steady herself upon the frame of the door. In a whisper she said, ‘But you can’t come in—you can’t come in, Ah Sook.’

  Ah Sook waited a moment before he made his bow, for he trusted his own first impressions, and he wished to make this impression last. She was much thinner than he remembered: he could see the bones of her wrist quite plainly, and her cheeks were sunken in.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.

  ‘What do you want?’ Anna whispered. ‘Yes—good afternoon. You know I’m not taking opium any more. Did you know that?’

  He peered at her.

  ‘Three weeks,’ she added, as if to persuade him. ‘I haven’t had a pipe in three weeks.’