‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Beg your pardon.’
‘Good afternoon,’ Anna said.
‘You one of Lydia’s girls?’
‘Yes.’
‘New girl?’
‘I arrived today.’
‘You and I both,’ said the man. He had sandy hair and a slightly grizzled look. ‘Good afternoon to you.’
‘Can I help you?’
He grinned at this. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for the mistress. Is she about?’
‘She has appointments uptown.’
‘What time will she be back?’
‘She said by suppertime,’ Anna said.
‘Well: have you any appointments, before then?’
‘No,’ Anna said.
‘Good,’ the man said. ‘Mind if I reserve the next dance?’
Anna did not know what to say to this. ‘I’m not sure if I ought to receive company when Mrs. Wells is out.’
‘Mrs. Wells,’ said the man, and laughed. ‘Sounds almost respectable, when you put it like that.’ He reached back and closed the door behind him. ‘Crosbie’s my name. What’s yours?’
‘Miss Anna Wetherell,’ said Anna, with increasing alarm.
He was already moving to the sideboard. ‘Care for a drop of something, Miss Anna Wetherell?’
‘No, thank you.’
He picked up a bottle and tilted it at her. ‘No because you don’t have a taste for liquor, or no because you’re being polite?’
‘I only just arrived.’
‘You’ve told me so once already, my girl, and anyway, that doesn’t answer the question I asked.’
‘I wouldn’t want to take advantage of Mrs. Wells’s hospitality,’ said Anna, with a slight emphasis of disapproval—as though to communicate that he ought not to, either.
Crosbie uncorked the bottle, sniffed, and recorked it. ‘Oh, there’s no such thing as hospitality,’ he said, returning the bottle to the tray, and selecting another. ‘You’ll be billed for everything you touch in this room, and quick as thieves. You mark my words.’
‘No,’ Anna said. ‘It’s all been paid for. And Mrs. Wells has been wonderfully hospitable. I’m staying at her personal request.’
He was amused by this. ‘Oh yes? Nearest and dearest, are you? Old friends?’
Anna frowned. ‘We met at the quay this afternoon.’
‘Just by accident, I suppose.’
‘Yes. There was a young woman—a Miss Mackay—who didn’t make the sailing. Her cousin’s cousin. When Miss Mackay didn’t show, Mrs. Wells invited me in place of her. The room and board is all paid in advance.’
‘Oho,’ said the man, pouring out a glassful of liquor.
‘Have you just returned from the fields?’ said Anna, stalling for time.
‘I have,’ said the man. ‘Up in the high country. Arrived back this morning.’ He drank, expelled a breath, and then said, ‘No. It’s not right if I don’t tell you. You’ve been euchred.’
‘I’ve been what?’
‘Euchred.’
‘I don’t know what that means, Mr. Crosbie.’
He smiled at her mistake, but did not correct her. ‘There’s always a Miss Mackay,’ he explained. ‘It’s a line she spins. So you believe her, and you follow her home, and before you know it, you’re beholden. Aren’t you, now? She’s given you a fine meal and a hot bath and nothing but the milk of kindness, and what have you given her? Oh’—he wagged his finger—‘but there will be something, Miss Anna Wetherell. There will be something that you can give.’ He seemed to perceive Anna’s anxiety, for he added, in a gentler tone, ‘Here’s something you ought to know. There’s no charity in a gold town. If it looks like charity, look again.’
‘Oh,’ said Anna.
He drained his glass and set it down. ‘Are you partial to a drink or not?’
‘Not today, thank you.’
He reached into his pocket, withdrew something, and then held up a closed fist. ‘Can you guess what I’m holding?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Go on. Have a guess.’
‘A coin?’
‘Better than a coin. Guess again.’
‘I can’t think,’ she said, in panic.
He opened his fist to reveal a nugget of gold around the size and shape of a chestnut, laughed again at her expression, and then tossed it to her. She caught it in the heels of her hands. ‘That’s enough in gold to buy every last bottle on this tray, with pounds left over,’ he said. ‘It’s yours, if you’ll keep me company until the mistress comes back. How about it? You’ll have a heads-up on those debts, when they start mounting.’
‘I’ve never touched a piece of gold,’ Anna said, turning it over. It was heavier than she had imagined it would be, and more elemental. It seemed to turn dull in her hands.
‘Come here,’ said Crosbie. He took the brandy bottle to the little sofa, sat down, and patted the space beside him. ‘Share a drink with a fellow, my girl. I’ve been walking for two weeks, and I’m thirsty as hell, and I want something nice to look at. Come here. I’ll tell you everything you need to know about Mrs. Lydia Wells.’
CRUX
In which two verdicts are delivered, and the justice fits the sentence to the crime.
Te Rau Tauwhare had not been invited to testify at either trial. He had watched the day’s proceedings from the rear of the courtroom, his expression sombre, his back against the wall. When Justice Kemp called for a final recess, giving the order for all the day’s witnesses to be remanded in custody, Tauwhare left the courthouse with the rest. Outside he saw the armoured carriage, waiting to transport the felons back to the gaol, and went to greet the duty sergeant, who was standing by.
‘Hello, Mr. Tauwhare,’ the sergeant said.
‘Hello.’
‘How’s your friend Staines doing, then? Kicking up his heels in there?’
‘Yes,’ said Tauwhare.
‘I popped my head in. Couldn’t hear much. Good show, is it?’
‘Very good,’ Tauwhare said.
‘Gov. Shepard got a rap on the knuckles this morning, didn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘I would have liked to have seen that,’ the sergeant said.
Just then the rear door of the courthouse opened and the bailiff appeared in the doorway. ‘Drake!’ he called.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the sergeant, standing tall.
‘Justice wants Francis Carver escorted to Seaview,’ the bailiff said. ‘Special orders. You’re to take him up the hill, and then come straight back again.’
Drake ran to open the doors of the carriage. ‘Only Carver?’
‘Only Carver,’ the bailiff said. ‘Mind you’re back in time for the verdict. Straight up to Seaview, and straight back again.’
‘Can do.’
‘Quick about it—he’s coming now.’
Francis Carver was brought out into the yard, and bundled into the carriage. His hands had been cuffed behind him. Inside the carriage, Drake produced a second set of cuffs from his belt, and used these to cuff Carver’s linked wrists to a clew that had been fixed to the wall behind the driver’s seat.
‘That’s not going anywhere,’ he said cheerfully, rattling the clew to prove his point. ‘There’s an inch of iron between you and the world, Mr. Carver. Hoo! What have you done, that they don’t trust you with all the rest? Last I checked, you were a bloody witness; next minute, you’re in irons!’
Carver said nothing.
‘One hour,’ the bailiff said, and returned inside.
Drake jumped out of the carriage and closed the doors. ‘Hi, Mr. Tauwhare,’ he said, as he set the latch. ‘Care for a dash up the hill and back? You’ll be down in time for the verdict.’
Tauwhare hesitated.
‘What do you say?’ the sergeant said. ‘Beautiful day for a ride—and we’ll pick up bit of speed, coming down.’
Still Tauwhare hesitated. He was staring at the latch upon the carriage door.
‘Ho
w about it?’
‘No,’ Tauwhare said at last.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Drake, shrugging. He clambered up onto the driver’s seat, picked up the reins, and urged the horses; the carriage rattled away.
‘Mr. Emery Staines. You plead guilty to having falsified the records of the Aurora goldmine in order to avoid share payments owing to Mr. Francis Carver, at a value of fifty percent net profit per annum, and to avoid a bonus payment owing to John Long Quee, at an undisclosed value. You plead guilty to having embezzled a great quantity of raw gold, found by John Long Quee upon the Aurora, which has since been valued at £4096. You admit that you thieved this gold from the Aurora and buried it in the Arahura Valley, with the purpose of concealment. You also plead guilty to dereliction, stating that you have been incapacitated for the past two months by excessive and prolonged consumption of opium.’
The justice laid his papers aside, and folded his hands together.
‘Your counsel, Mr. Staines,’ he said, ‘has done a very good job of painting Mr. Carver in a poor light this afternoon. Notwithstanding his performance, however, the fact remains that provocation to break the law is not licence to break the law: your poor opinion of Mr. Carver does not give you the right to determine what he does, or does not, deserve.
‘You did not witness the assault against Miss Wetherell first-hand, and nor, it seems, did anybody else; therefore you cannot know beyond a shadow of a doubt whether Mr. Carver truly was the author of that assault, or indeed, if an assault took place at all. Of course the loss of any child is a tragedy, and tragedy cannot be mitigated by circumstance; but in adjudicating your crime, Mr. Staines, we must put aside the tragic nature of the event, and consider it purely as a provocation—an indirect provocation, I should say—for your having committed the rather more cold-blooded crimes of embezzlement and fraud, in retaliation. Yes, you had provocation to dislike Mr. Carver, to resent Mr. Carver, even to despise him; but I feel that I state a very obvious point when I say that you might have brought your grievance to the attention of the Hokitika police, and saved us all a great deal of bother.
‘Your guilty plea does you credit. I also acknowledge that you have shown courtesy and humility in your responses this morning. All this suggests contrition, and deference to the proper execution of the law. Your charges, however, show a selfish disregard for contractual obligation, a capricious and decadent temperament, and a dereliction of duty, not only to your claims, but to your fellow men. Your poor opinion of Mr. Carver, however justified that opinion might be, has led you to take the law into your own hands on more than one occasion, and in more than one respect. In light of this I consider that it will do you a great deal of good to put away your grand philosophy for a time, and learn to walk in another man’s shoes.
‘Mr. Carver has been a shareholder of the Aurora for nine months. He has fulfilled his contractual obligation to you, and he has been ill rewarded. Emery Staines, I hereby sentence you to nine months’ servitude, with labour.’
Staines’s face betrayed nothing at all. ‘Yes, sir.’
The justice turned to Anna.
‘Miss Anna Wetherell,’ he said. ‘You have pleaded not guilty to all charges brought to bear against you, and in a civilised court we hold to the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty. I am sensible of the fact that aspersions cast by Mr. Moody upon Governor Shepard are aspersions only; however they have been duly recorded by this court, and may be productive in the future, pending investigations made upon Governor Shepard and others. In the meantime, I do not see that there is sufficient evidence to prove your guilt. You are acquitted of all charges. You shall be released from gaol, effective instant. I trust that from here you will continue on the righteous path to sobriety, chastity, and other virtues of a civilised kind; needless to say that I never wish to see you in this courtroom again, on any charge, least of all a charge of public intoxication and disorderly behaviour. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good.’ He turned to the barristers’ bench. ‘Now,’ he said heavily, but before he got any further, there came the sound of shouting in the street, and a terrible crash, and the high whinny of panicked horses—and then a terrible thump on the courthouse door, as though someone had thrown their bodily weight against it.
‘What’s going on?’ said the justice, frowning.
Moody had started up: he heard shouting from the porch, and a great clatter.
‘Open the door, someone. See what’s happening,’ the justice said.
The door was thrown open.
‘Sergeant Drake,’ exclaimed the justice. ‘What is it?’
The sergeant’s eyes were wild. ‘It’s Carver!’ he cried.
‘What about him?’
‘He’s dead!’
‘What?’
‘Some point between here and Seaview—someone must have opened the doors—and I never noticed. I was driving. I opened the doors to unload him—and there he was—and he’s dead!’
Moody whipped about, half expecting that Mrs. Carver might have fallen into a faint; but she had not. She was looking at Drake, white-faced. Quickly, Moody scanned the faces around her. All the witnesses had been remanded during the recess, including those who had testified in the morning: none of them had left the Courthouse. Shepard was there—and Lauderback—and Frost—and Löwenthal, and Clinch, and Mannering, and Quee, and Nilssen, and Pritchard, and Balfour, and Gascoigne, and Devlin. Who was missing?
‘He’s right outside!’ cried Drake, throwing out his arm. ‘His body—I came right back—I couldn’t—it wasn’t—’
The justice raised his voice above the commotion. ‘He took his own life?’
‘Hardly,’ cried Drake, his voice cracking into a sob. ‘Hardly!’
The crowd began crushing through the doors, past him.
‘Sergeant Drake,’ shouted the justice. ‘How in all heaven did Francis Carver die?’
Drake was now lost in the crowd. His voice floated up: ‘Somebody bashed his head in!’
The justice’s face had turned purple. ‘Who?’ he roared. ‘Who did it?’
‘I’m telling you I don’t know!’
There came a terrible shriek from the street, and then shouting; the courthouse emptied. Mrs. Carver, watching the last of the crowd fight its way through the doorway, brought her hands up to her mouth.
COMBUST
In which Mrs. Wells receives a false impression, and Francis Carver relays important news.
While Anna Wetherell entertained ‘Mr. Crosbie’ at the House of Many Wishes on Cumberland-street, Lydia Wells was doing some entertaining of her own. It was her habit, in the afternoons, to take her almanacs and star charts to the Hawthorn Hotel upon George-street, where she set up shop in a corner of the dining room, and offered to tell the fortunes of diggers and travellers newly arrived. Her sole customer, that afternoon, had been a golden-haired boy in a felt cap who, as it turned out, had also arrived on the steamer Fortunate Wind. He was a voluble subject, and seemed both delighted and fascinated by Mrs. Wells’s affinity for the arcane; his enthusiasm was flattering, and inclined her to be generous with her prognostications. By the time his natal chart was drawn, his past and present canvassed, and his future foretold, it was coming on four o’clock.
She looked up to see Francis Carver striding across the dining room towards her.
‘Edward,’ she said, to the golden-haired boy, ‘be a darling, would you, and ask the waiter to wrap up a pie with a hot-water crust? Tell him to put it on my account; I’ll take it home for my dinner.’
The boy obliged.
‘I’ve just had some good news,’ said Carver, when the boy was gone.
‘What is it?’
‘Lauderback’s on his way.’
‘Ah,’ said Lydia Wells.
‘He must have seen the shipping receipt from Danforth at long last. I hear from Billy Bruce that he’s bought his passage on the Active, sailing out of Akaroa. He arrives on the twelfth
of May, and he sends an advance message that Godspeed is not to depart until then.’
‘Three weeks away.’
‘We’ve got him, Greenway. Like a fish in a trap, we’ve got him.’
‘Poor Mr. Lauderback,’ said Mrs. Wells, vaguely.
‘You might step over to the naval club this week and make an offer to the boys. A free night of craps, or double the jackpot, or a girl with every spin of the wheel. Something to tempt Raxworthy away from the ship that night, so that I can get a chance to get at Lauderback alone.’
‘I will go to the club in the morning,’ said Mrs. Wells. She began to tidy her books and charts away. ‘Poor Mr. Lauderback,’ she said again.
‘He made his own bed,’ said Carver, watching her.
‘Yes, he did; but you and I warmed the sheets for him.’
‘Don’t feel sorry for a coward,’ said Carver. ‘Least of all a coward with money to spare.’
‘I pity him.’
‘Why? Because of the bastard? I’d sooner feel sorry for the bastard. Lauderback’s had nothing but good luck from start to finish. He’s a made man.’
‘He is; and yet he is pitiable,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘He is so ashamed, Francis. Of Crosbie, of his father, of himself. I cannot help but feel pity for a man who is ashamed.’
‘No chance of Wells turning up unexpectedly, is there?’
‘You talk as if he and I were intimates,’ snapped Mrs. Wells. ‘I can’t answer for him; I certainly can’t control his every move.’
‘How long since he was last in town?’
‘Months.’
‘Does he write before he comes home?’
‘Good Lord,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘No, he doesn’t write.’
‘Is there any way you can make sure he keeps away? It wouldn’t do for him to come face to face with Lauderback—not at the eleventh hour.’
‘A drink will always tempt him—whatever the hour.’
Carver grinned. ‘Send him a mixed crate in the post? Set him up with a tally at the Diggers Arms?’