The Luminaries

For Gascoigne was extraordinarily moody. The wave of compassion that had compelled him to lie on A

A

Now, two weeks later, in the Gridiron Hotel—with his arms about her, his hand splayed firmly in the hollow of her back, her forearms pressed against his chest, her breath dampening his collarbone—Gascoigne’s thoughts again turned to the possibility that perhaps she had tried, a second time, to end her life. But where was the bullet that ought to have lodged in her breastbone? Had she known that the gun would misfire in such a peculiar way, when she pointed the muzzle at her own throat, and pulled the hammer down? How could she have known it?

‘All men want their whores to be unhappy’—A

And he had been married. Agathe Gascoigne—Agathe Prideaux, as he had known her first. Elfin, quick-witted, teasing, and consumptive—a fact he had known when he made his proposal, but which had somehow seemed immaterial, surmountable; more a proof of her delicacy than a promise of ill tidings to come. But her lungs would not heal. They had travelled south, in pursuit of the climate cure, and she had died on the open ocean, somewhere off the Indian coast—horrible, that he did not know exactly where. Horrible, how her body had bent when it had struck the surface of the water—that slapping sound. She had made him promise not to order a coffin, nor to have one approximated, should she die before they reached their port of call. If it happened, she said, it would happen in the mariners’ way: sewn into a hammock with a double-backed seam. And because the hammock was hers, that bloom of scarlet, darkened now to brown—he’d knelt and kissed it, macabre though that was. After that, Gascoigne kept sailing. He stopped only when his money ran dry.

A

After leaving the gaol-house they had detoured past the Magistrate’s Court, so that Gascoigne could leave his bail purse in the deposit box there, and file the bail notices, ready for the morning. A

When they reached Gascoigne’s cottage (for he had a whole cottage to himself, though a small one; a one-roomed clapboard cabin, some hundred yards from the beach), Gascoigne directed A

‘It’s no palace,’ he said foolishly—though, by Hokitika standards, it was.

A

‘You keep a clean house,’ was all she said.

‘I live alone.’ Gascoigne pointed with a stick to the trunk at the base of his bed. ‘Open that.’

She loosed the clasps, and heaved open the top. He directed her to a swatch of dark linen, which she lifted up, and Agathe’s dress slithered out over her knees—the black one, with the tatted collar, that he had so despised.

(‘People will think me an ascetic,’ she had said cheerfully, ‘but black is a sober colour; one ought to have a sober dress.’

It was to hide the bloodstains, the fine spray that peppered her cuffs; he knew it, but did not say so. He agreed, aloud, that one ought to have a sober dress.)

‘Put it on,’ Gascoigne said, watching as A

It was the only dress of Agathe’s that Gascoigne still possessed. The others, packed in their camphor-smelling cedar case, had been lost when the steamer ran aground—the berths first looted, then flooded, when the steamer fell at last upon her side, and the surf closed in. For Gascoigne the loss was a blessing. He had Agathe’s miniature: that was all he wished to keep. He would pay her memory due respect, but he was a young man, and still hot-blooded, and he meant to begin again.

By the time A

‘Now I will be able to mourn,’ she said. ‘I never had a black dress before.’