Eleanor Catton - The Luminaries

Anna rubbed her face—as a tired infant rubs its face: clumsily. ‘I didn’t see Ah Sook last night,’ she said. ‘I told you, I took a pipe at home.’

‘A pipe filled with his opium!’ Gascoigne set the kettle on a rack above the range.

‘Yes—I suppose,’ Anna said. ‘But you might just as well call it Joseph Pritchard’s.’

Gascoigne sat down again. ‘Mr. Staines must be wondering what has happened to you, seeing as you left his bed so abruptly in the night, and did not return. Though I notice he did not come to make your bail today—neither he nor your employer.’

He spoke loudly, meaning to rouse Anna out of her fatigue; when he set out the saucers, he set Anna’s down with a clatter, and pushed it across the table so it scraped.

‘That’s my business,’ Anna said. ‘I shall go and make my apologies, as soon as—’

‘As soon as we are decided what to do with this pile,’ Gascoigne finished for her. ‘Yes: you ought to do that.’

Gascoigne’s mood had changed again: suddenly, he was extremely vexed. No clear explanation had yet presented itself to him as to why Anna’s dress had been filled with gold, or how she had ended up unconscious, or indeed whether these two events were connected in any way. He was vexed that he could not understand it—and so, to appease his own ill humour, he became scornful, an attitude that afforded him at least the semblance of control.

‘How much is this worth?’ said Anna now, moving to touch the pile again. ‘As an estimate, I mean. I don’t have an eye for such things.’

Gascoigne crushed the stub of his cigarette on his saucer. ‘I think the question you ought to be asking, my dear,’ he said, ‘is not how much; it is who, and why. Whose gold is that? Whose claim did it come from? And where was it bound?’

They agreed, that first night, to hide the pile away. They agreed that if anyone asked Anna why she had exchanged her habitual gown for this new, more sombre one, she would reply, quite honestly, that she had wished to enter a belated period of mourning for the death of her unborn child, and she had procured the garment from a trunk that had washed up on the Hokitika spit. All of this was true. If anyone asked to see the old gown, or inquired as to where it was stored, then Anna was to inform Gascoigne immediately—for that person no doubt had knowledge of the gold that had been hidden in her flounces, and would therefore know about the gold’s origin—and perhaps also its intended destination, wherever that was.

With this strategy having been decided, Gascoigne then emptied his tartan biscuit tin, and together they swept the gold into it, wrapped the tin in a blanket, and placed the entire bundle in a flour sack that Gascoigne tied with string. He requested, until they had further intelligence, that the sack be stowed at his quarters, beneath his bed. At first Anna was doubtful, but he persuaded her that the pile would be safest with him: he never entertained visitors, his cabin was locked during the day, and nobody had the slightest reason to think that he was harbouring a pile—after all, he was new in town, and had neither enemies nor friends.

The following fortnight seemed to pass in a blur. Anna returned to Staines’s house to find that he had vanished completely; days later, she learned about the death of Crosbie Wells, and discovered that that event had also taken place during the hours of her unconsciousness. Soon after that she heard that an enormous fortune, the origins of which had yet to be determined, had been discovered hidden on Crosbie Wells’s estate, which had since been purchased by the hotelier, Edgar Clinch—acting proprietor of the Gridiron Hotel, which was owned by Emery Staines, and the current residence of Anna herself.

Gascoigne had not spoken with Anna directly about any of these events, for she refused to be drawn on the subject of Emery Staines, and had nothing at all to say about Crosbie Wells, save that she had never known him. Gascoigne sensed that she was grieving Staines’s disappearance, but he could not gauge whether she believed him to be alive or dead. In deference to her feelings Gascoigne dropped the subject altogether; when they spoke, they spoke of other things. From her high window on the upper floor of the Gridiron Hotel Anna watched the diggers struggle up and down Revell-street, through the rain. She kept to her room, and wore Agathe Gascoigne’s black dress every day. No man inquired about Anna’s change of costume; no man made any kind of intimation to suggest that he knew about the gold that had been hidden in her corset, now safely stowed under Gascoigne’s bed. The responsible party was reluctant, for whatever reason, to come forward and show his hand.

On the day after Crosbie Wells’s burial, Anna was tried for attempted suicide at the petty court, as Gascoigne had predicted she would be. She refused to plead, and in the end was fined a sum of five pounds for her attempted felony—and then scolded roundly, for having wasted the Magistrate’s time.

All this was running through Gascoigne’s mind as he stood in the Gridiron Hotel with Anna Wetherell clasped against his chest, tracing the eyelets of her corset, up her back. He had held Agathe in this way—exactly in this way, exactly so, with one hand splayed beneath her shoulder blade, the other cupping the ball of her shoulder, Agathe with her forearms against his chest, always—having raised her arms to shield herself at the moment of enclosure. How strange that he recalled her, now. One could know a thousand women, Gascoigne thought; one could take a different girl every night for years and years—but sooner or later, the new lovers would do little more than call to mind the old, and one would be forced to wander, lost, in that reflective maze of endless comparison, forever disappointed, forever turning back.

Anna was still trembling from the shock of the misfire. Gascoigne waited until her breathing was steady—some three or four minutes after Pritchard’s tread retreated down the stairs—and then at last, when he felt her body regain some of its strength, he murmured, ‘What on earth got into you?’

But Anna only shook her head, burrowing against him.

‘Was it a blank? A false cartridge?’

She shook her head again.

‘Perhaps you and the chemist—perhaps you devised something together.’

That roused her; she pushed away from him with the heels of her hands, and said, in a voice full of disgust, ‘With Pritchard ?’

It pleased Gascoigne to see her brighten, even in anger. ‘Well, then: what was he wanting you for?’ he said.

Anna almost told him the truth—but felt a sudden shame. Gascoigne had been so kind to her, this past fortnight, and she could not bear to tell him where the opium had gone. Just yesterday he had expressed happiness that she had ended her enslavement to the pipe: he had marvelled at her strength, and praised the clearness of her eyes, and admired her. She had not had the heart to disabuse him then, and she did not now.

‘Old Jo Pritchard,’ she said, looking away. ‘He was lonely, that was all.’

Gascoigne pulled out his cigarette case, and found that he was trembling too. ‘Have you any brandy left?’ he said. ‘I would like to sit a moment, if you don’t mind. I need to gather myself.’

He laid the spent pistol carefully on the whatnot beside Anna’s bed.

‘Things keep happening to you,’ he said. ‘Things you can’t explain. Things nobody seems to be able to explain. I’m not sure …’