The Luminaries

‘There isn’t time,’ said Ma

‘No,’ said Charlie Frost—finding, to his surprise, that he could muster a delicate firmness, and hold his ground. ‘You’re not in a rush; you’re only excited. Tell me now.’

Ma

Frost blinked. ‘The Aurora was yours?’

‘And when Staines bought it,’ Ma

‘I didn’t know the Aurora had been yours.’

‘Half the land between here and the Grey has belonged to me at one stage or another,’ said Ma

‘You what?’

‘I fed it back into the claim.’

‘You were salting your own land!’ said Frost, with a shocked expression.

Charlie Frost was no great observer of human nature, and as a consequence, felt betrayed by others very frequently. The air of cryptic strategy with which he most often spoke was not manufactured, though he was entirely sensible of its effects; it came, rather, out of a fundamental blindness to all experience exterior to his own. Frost did not know how to listen to himself as if he were somebody else; he did not know how to see the world from another man’s eyes; he did not know how to contemplate another man’s nature, except to compare it, either enviously or pitiably, to his own. He was a private hedonist, pere

Ma

‘For shame,’ said Frost.

But shame, for Ma

‘I can’t believe you,’ said Frost.

‘Believe it or not, as you please,’ said Ma

‘But you never told him what you were doing.’

Ma

Ma

‘But then Quee started to catch on,’ he said. ‘Must have been watching, or maybe he just figured me out. So what does he do? Cu

‘No matter, I thought. I had plenty of other claims for sale, and the other ones were pulling good dust. I could shuffle it around. So I started banking Quee’s squares as returns against the Dream of England claim, and every week, I’d salt the Aurora just as before, only I’d use Dream of England dust, not Aurora dust—do you see? Aurora had been pulling twenty pounds a week until then; she had to maintain that same yield, or it would look like her profits had started to fall away—and I wouldn’t get my profit, when I sold.

‘But then Quee got wise to that,’ Ma

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Frost, who was still feeling very much betrayed.

‘Well, there it is, anyway,’ said Ma

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘Well—what happened?’

‘You know what happened. I sold him the Aurora.’

‘But the claim was a duffer, you said!’

‘Yes,’ said Ma

‘You sold him a duffer claim!’

‘Yes.’

‘But he’s your friend,’ said Charlie Frost, and even as he spoke the words he regretted them. How pathetic it sounded—to reprimand a man like Ma

Ma

Frost felt that Ma