The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

  ‘Hi—no need for the truth at all,’ said Paddy Ryan. ‘Who said anything about the truth? You’re a free man in this country, Walter Moody. You tell me any old rubbish you like, and if you string it out until we reach the junction at Kumara, then I shall count it as a very fine tale.’

  SUN & MOON IN CONJUNCTION (NEW MOON)

  In which Mrs. Wells makes two very interesting discoveries.

  When Lydia Wells returned to the House of Many Wishes a little after seven o’clock, she was informed by the maid that Anna Wetherell had received a caller in her absence: Mr. Crosbie Wells, who had returned unexpectedly after many months of absence in the Otago highlands. Mr. Wells had an appointment of some kind upon George-street that evening, the maid reported, but he had left with the assurance that he would return the next morning, in the hope of securing an interview with his wife.

  Mrs. Wells received this news thoughtfully. ‘How long did you say he stayed, Lucy?’

  ‘Two hours, ma’am.’

  ‘From when until when?’

  ‘Three until five.’

  ‘And Miss Wetherell …?’

  ‘I haven’t disturbed her,’ said Lucy. ‘She hasn’t rung the bell since he left, and I didn’t trouble them when he was here.’

  ‘Good girl,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘Now, if Crosbie does come back tomorrow, and if, for whatever reason, I am not here, you show him to Miss Wetherell’s room as before.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘And you’d better put in an order at the wine and spirit merchant first thing to-morrow. A mixed crate should do us fine.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Here’s a pie for our supper. See that it’s heated through, and then send it up. We’ll eat at eight, I think.’

  ‘Very good, ma’am.’

  Lydia Wells arranged her almanacs and star charts in her arms, peered critically into the glass hanging in the hall, and then ascended the stairs to Anna’s room, where she knocked briskly, and opened the door without waiting for an answer.

  ‘Is it not better—to be fed, and dry, and clean?’ she said, in lieu of a greeting.

  Anna had been sitting in the window box. She leaped up when Mrs. Wells strode into the room, blushing deeply, and said, ‘Very much better, ma’am. You are much too kind.’

  ‘There is no such thing as too much kindness,’ declared Mrs. Wells, depositing her books upon the table next to the settee. She glanced quickly at the sideboard, making a mental tally of the bottles, and then turned back to Anna, and smiled. ‘What fun we shall have this evening! I am going to draw your chart.’

  Anna nodded. Her face was still very red.

  ‘I draw a chart each time I make a new acquaintance,’ Mrs. Wells went on. ‘We shall have a glorious good time, finding out what is in store for you. And I have brought home a pie for our supper: the best that can be had in all Dunedin. Isn’t that fine?’

  ‘Very fine,’ said Anna, dropping her gaze to the floor.

  Mrs. Wells seemed not to notice her discomfort. ‘Now,’ she said, sitting down at the settee, and drawing the largest book towards her. ‘What is the date of your birthday, my dear?’

  Anna told her.

  Mrs. Wells drew back; she placed her hand over her heart. ‘No!’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How terribly odd!’

  ‘What’s odd?’ said Anna, looking frightened.

  ‘You have the same birthday as a young man I just …’ Lydia Wells trailed off, and then said, suddenly, ‘How old are you, Miss Wetherell?’

  ‘One-and-twenty.’

  ‘One-and-twenty! And you were born in Sydney?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Right in town?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lydia Wells’s expression was marvellous. ‘You don’t happen to know the precise hour of your birth, do you?’

  ‘I believe I was born at night,’ said Anna, blushing again. ‘That’s the way my mother tells it. But I don’t know the precise hour.’

  ‘It is astonishing,’ cried Mrs. Wells. ‘I am astonished! The exact same birthday! Perhaps even beneath the very same sky!’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Anna.

  In a hushed tone of conspiracy, Lydia Wells explained. She spent her afternoons at a hotel upon George-street, where she gave astral predictions for a small fee. Her customers, for the most part, were young men about to make their fortunes on the goldfield. That afternoon—while Anna was enjoying her bath—she had given a reading to just such a man. The querent (so she described him) was also one-and-twenty, and had also been born in Sydney, upon the very same day as Anna!

  Anna could not make sense of Mrs. Wells’s exhilaration. ‘What does it mean?’ she said.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Lydia Wells’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘It means that you may share a destiny, Miss Wetherell, with another soul!’

  ‘Oh,’ Anna said.

  ‘You may have an astral soul-mate, whose path through life perfectly mirrors your own!’

  Anna was not as impressed by this as Mrs. Wells might have hoped. ‘Oh,’ she said again.

  ‘The phenomenon is very rare,’ said Mrs. Wells.

  ‘But I had a cousin with the same birthday as me,’ Anna said, ‘and we can’t have shared a destiny, because he died.’

  ‘It is not enough to share a day,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘You must be born at the exact same minute—and at the exact same latitude and longitude: that is, under the exact same sky. Only then will your charts be identical. Even twins, you see, are born some minutes apart, and in the interim the skies have shifted a little, and the patterns have changed.’

  ‘I don’t know the exact minute I was born,’ Anna said, frowning.

  ‘Nor did he,’ said Mrs. Wells, ‘but I shall lay my money upon the fact that your charts are identical—for we know already that the two of you have something in common.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Me,’ said Mrs. Wells, triumphantly. ‘On the twenty-seventh of April, 1865, you both arrived in Dunedin, and you both had your natal charts drawn by Mrs. Crosbie Wells!’

  Anna brought her hand up to her throat. ‘What?’ she whispered. ‘Mrs.—what?’

  Lydia Wells continued with the same enthusiasm. ‘And there are other correspondences! He was travelling alone, as you were, and he arrived this morning, as you did. Perhaps he made a friend by some accident of circumstances—quite as you did, when you met me!’

  Anna was looking as though she might be sick.

  ‘Edward is his name. Edward Sullivan. Oh, how I wish I had brought him back with me—how I wish I had known! Are you not aching to make his acquaintance?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she whispered.

  ‘What an extraordinary thing,’ said Lydia Wells, gazing at her. ‘It is most extraordinary. I wonder what would happen, were you ever to meet.’

  SILVER

  In which Crosbie Wells makes a request; Lydia Wells is imprudent; and Anna Wetherell plays witness to a rather ugly scene.

  The mortification that Anna Wetherell had suffered, upon discovering that the man whom she had entertained upon the afternoon of her arrival in Dunedin had been, in fact, the master of the house, only intensified over the weeks that followed. Crosbie Wells was now installed in the rear bedroom of number 35, Cumberland-street, and as a consequence they saw each other every day.

  Anna Wetherell was painfully and perpetually conscious of the impression she created, and as a consequence of this abiding self-consciousness, her self-regard was critical to the point of fantasy. She had the inconsolable sense that there was something visible about her own character that she herself could not see, and this anxiety could not be appeased by persuasion, proof, or compliment. She was certain, when in conversation, that the unvoiced conclusions formed by those around her were both censorious and wholly apt, and because the shame she felt at this imagined censure was very real, she sought all the harder to court the good opinion of those whom she met—feeling,
as she did so, that even in this project her intentions were all too visible.

  Believing herself uniformly criticised, Anna would have been very surprised to learn that the impressions others formed of her were not uniform in the slightest. The artless simplicity with which she most often spoke indicated to some that she possessed an alarming store of private opinions, the frank expression of which was even more alarmingly unfeminine; to others, her speech was entirely without artifice, and refreshing for that reason. Likewise her tendency to squint upon the world was suggestive to some of fearfulness, and to others, of calculation. To Crosbie Wells, she was merely, and very simply, sweet: he found her frequent embarrassments very amusing, and had told her so more than once.

  ‘You’d do well in a camp, my girl,’ he said. ‘A breath of fresh air, is what you are. Unspoiled. Nothing worse than a woman with a ready answer. Nothing worse than a woman who’s forgotten how to blush.’

  Lydia Wells—a woman with a great many ready answers, and who very rarely blushed—had been only infrequently seen at number 35, Cumberland-street since her husband’s unexpected return. She left the house in the late morning, and often did not return until the dusk, when the gambling parlour opened for the night. Wells, in her absence, kept mostly to the first-floor boudoir, where the decanters on the sideboard were refilled daily. Drink softened him. Anna found that she liked him best in the late afternoons, when three or four glasses of whisky had turned him pensive, but not yet sad.

  Wells, it transpired, had no desire to return to the fields at Dunstan. Anna learned that he had made a strike of significant value the previous year, and he now desired to put that fortune to some use: he was considering various investments, both in Dunedin and beyond, and he spent a great deal of time poring over the local papers, comparing prices for gold, and tracking the rise and fall of various stocks. ‘Would you fancy me better as a flockmaster, or as a timber man, Miss Wetherell?’ he said, and then laughed very freely at her rising blush.

  Whether Mrs. Wells comprehended Anna’s embarrassment, or the reason for it, Anna did not know. The older woman was no less warm, and her speech no less conspiratorial, than at the scene of their first meeting; but it seemed to Anna that her manner had acquired a glaze of distance—as though she were steeling herself, privately, for an impending breach in their relations. With her husband, she was similarly removed. Whenever Wells spoke she simply gazed at him, unsmiling, and then turned the conversation to an unrelated theme. Anna was devastated by these subtle tokens of displeasure, and as a consequence she strove to secure her mistress’s good opinion all the more. By now she knew very well that she had been, as Crosbie Wells had phrased it, ‘euchred’, but any energy that she might have expended in confronting her mistress on the matter of the fictitious Elizabeth Mackay (who was never again mentioned) had been directed, instead, into a disgusted self-admonishment, and a belief, privately held, that she alone could make restitution for what she and Crosbie Wells had done.

  The operations of the House of Many Wishes had been revealed to Anna gently, and in degrees. The morning after her arrival in Dunedin, Mrs. Wells had showed her the downstairs parlour, and Anna had loved it at once: the velvet booths, the green glass bottles behind the bar, the card tables, the gambling wheel, the small confessional with the saloon-style doors where Mrs. Wells occasionally told fortunes for a fee. In the daylight the room seemed somehow preserved: the motes of dust, trapped in the shafts of light that fell through the high windows, had a patient, potent feel. Anna was quite awed. At her mistress’s invitation, she stepped onto the podium, and spun the gambling wheel—watching the rubber needle clack, clack, clack, towards the jackpot, only to fall, with a final clack, past it.

  Mrs. Wells did not invite her to attend the evening parties immediately. From her bedroom window Anna watched the men arrive, stepping down from carriages, removing their gloves, striding up the walk to rap upon the door; soon afterwards, cigar smoke began to seep through the floorboards into her room, lending a spicy, acrid tint to the air, and turning the lamplight grey. By nine the hum of conversation had thickened to a hubbub, punctuated by snatches of laughter and applause. Anna could hear only what came up through the floor, though every time someone opened the door to the downstairs passage the noise intensified, and she could make out individual voices. Her curiosity was roused to the point of disconsolation, and after several days she inquired of Mrs. Wells, very tentatively and with much apology, whether she might be permitted to tend bar. She now did so every night, though Mrs. Wells had imposed two regulations: none of the patrons was to address her directly, and she was not permitted to dance.

  ‘She’s raising your value,’ Wells explained. ‘The longer they have to wait, the more you’ll fetch, when it comes time to go to market.’

  ‘Oh, Crosbie,’ snapped Mrs. Wells. ‘Nobody’s going to market. Don’t be absurd.’

  ‘Farming,’ said Wells. ‘There’s an enterprise. I could be a farmer—and you could be my farmer wife.’ To Anna he said, ‘It’s quite all right. My old ma was a whore, God rest her.’

  ‘He’s only trying to frighten you,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘Don’t listen to him.’

  ‘I’m not frightened,’ said Anna.

  ‘She’s not frightened,’ said Wells.

  ‘There’s nothing to be frightened about,’ said Mrs. Wells.

  In fact Anna thought the dancing girls quite marvellous. They were incurious about her, calling her either ‘Sydney’ or ‘Port Jackson’ if they addressed her at all, but she did not possess pride enough to be offended; in any case, their air of weary indifference was a sophistication to which she privately aspired. They brought up the drinks orders from the gentlemen playing cards, and waited as Anna set out the glasses and poured. ‘A dash and a splash,’ they said, for whisky-and-water, and ‘a hard dash’, for whisky poured neat. When the drinks were poured, they slid the tray onto their hip, or hoisted it high above their heads, and sashayed back through the crowd, leaving behind them the powdery-sickly scent of greasepaint and perfume.

  On the 12th of May the inhabitants of number 35, Cumberland-street rose early. The House of Many Wishes was to host a party that evening in honour of naval officers and ‘gentlemen with marine connexions’, and there was much to be done in preparation for this grand event. Mrs. Wells had hired a fiddler, and put in an order at the store for lemons, spruce liquor, rum, and several hundred yards of rope, which she planned to cut into lengths and plait, so as to adorn each table with a knotted wreath as a centrepiece.

  ‘I shall make the first wreath, as a template,’ she said to Anna, ‘and you can do the rest this afternoon: I will guide you through the steps, and show you how to tuck the ends away.’

  ‘Waste of a good Manila line,’ said Wells.

  Mrs. Wells continued as if he had not spoken. ‘The wreaths look quite arresting, I think; one can never over-decorate at a themed event. If there is any rope left over, we can it pin up behind the bar.’

  They were eating breakfast together—an infrequent occasion, for it was rare that Wells rose before noon, and Mrs. Wells had usually quit the place by the time Anna woke. Mrs. Wells seemed nervous; perhaps she was fearful for the success of the party.

  ‘They will look marvellous,’ Anna said.

  ‘What’s next?’ said Wells, who was out of humour. ‘A party for diggers—with a riffle-box on each table, and a tailrace from the bar? “In honour of the common man”, you could say. “A party for the unremarkable man. Gentlemen with no connexions whatsoever.” There’s a theme.’

  ‘Have you had enough toast, Anna?’ said Mrs. Wells.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Anna.

  ‘One of tonight’s guests is a decorated man,’ Mrs. Wells went on, changing the subject. ‘How about that? I think it will be the first time that I have played hostess to a naval hero. We shall have to ask him all about it—shan’t we, Anna?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anna.

  ‘Captain Raxworthy is his name. He has a Victor
ia Cross; I do hope he wears it. Pass the butter, please.’

  Wells passed the butter. After a moment he said, ‘Have you today’s Witness?’

  ‘Yes, I read it already; there was nothing of consequence to report,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘Friday papers are always light on the news.’

  ‘Where is it?’ said Wells. ‘The paper.’

  ‘Oh—I burned it,’ said Mrs. Wells.

  Wells stared at her. ‘It’s still morning,’ he said.

  ‘I am quite aware that it is still the morning, Crosbie!’ she said, giving a little laugh. ‘I used it to light the fire in my bedroom, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s nine o’clock,’ Wells complained. ‘You don’t burn today’s paper at nine o’clock. Not when I haven’t even seen it yet. I’ll have to go out and buy another.’

  ‘Save your sixpence,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘It was nothing but gossip. Nothing to report—I’ve told you.’ She glanced at the carriage clock—the second time she had done so in as many minutes, Anna observed.

  ‘I like a bit of gossip,’ said Wells. ‘Anyway, you know that I’m looking at making an investment. How am I supposed to keep up with the stocks, without the paper?’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s done now, and it won’t hurt you to wait until tomorrow. Have you had enough toast, Anna?’

  Anna frowned slightly: Mrs. Wells had asked her this already. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Good,’ said Mrs. Wells. She was tapping her foot. ‘What fun we shall have, tonight! I love to look forward to a party. And naval men are so high-spirited. And terribly good storytellers. Their stories are never dull.’

  Wells was sulking. ‘You know I spend my mornings with the paper. I do it every day.’

  ‘You can catch up on the Leader,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘Or last week’s Lyttelton Times; it’s on my writing desk.’

  ‘Why didn’t you burn that, then?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Crosbie!’ snapped Mrs. Wells. ‘I’m sure it won’t do you any harm to occupy yourself in some other way. Read a settler’s pamphlet. I have a store of them on the bureau downstairs.’