The Luminaries

‘Do you know,’ he said now, tapping the folded message with his finger, ‘until this afternoon, I half-believed that Staines was still alive. Perhaps I was foolish … but I did believe that he was aboard that wreck, and I did believe that he would be found.’

‘Yes,’ Gascoigne said.

‘But now it seems that he can only be dead.’ Moody tapped his fingers, brooding. ‘And gone forever, no doubt. Hang not knowing! I would give any money for a seat at the widow’s séance tonight.’

‘Not just the widow’s,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Don’t forget that she is to be assisted.’

Moody shook his head. ‘I hardly think this business is Miss Wetherell’s doing.’

‘She was mentioned in the paper by name,’ Gascoigne pointed out. ‘And not only by name: her role was specifically indicated. She is to be the widow’s aide.’

‘Well, her apprenticeship has been extraordinarily short,’ Moody said, with some acidity. ‘It makes one rather doubt the quality of the training—or the quality of the subject.’

Gascoigne gri

Moody was always embarrassed by conversation of this kind. ‘Her former praxis is arcane, in the proper sense of the word,’ he conceded, drawing himself up, ‘but the female arts are natural; they ca

‘Oh, I am sure that the tricks of both professions are more or less the same,’ Gascoigne said. ‘A whore is the very mistress of persuasion, just as a sibyl must be persuasive, if she is to be believed … and you must not forget that beauty and conviction are always persuasive, whatever the context in which they appear. Why, the shape of A

‘Mary Magdalene was no clairvoyant,’ Moody said stiffly.

‘No,’ Gascoigne agreed, still gri

‘Well, tonight A

‘We have the party beforehand to look forward to,’ said Gascoigne, but the cheer had gone from his voice. He too had been excessively disappointed by his exclusion from the widow’s impending communion with the dead. The exclusion rankled him rather more bitterly than it did Moody, for he felt, as the first friend Lydia Wells had made in Hokitika, that a place ought properly to have been reserved for him. But Lydia Wells had not once paid a call upon him, since the afternoon of the 27th of January, and nor had she once received him, even for tea.

Moody had not yet met either woman formally. He had glimpsed them hanging drapes in the front windows of the former hotel, silhouetted darkly, like paper dolls against the glass. Perceiving them, he felt a rather strange thrill of longing—unusual for him, for it was not his habit to envy the relations that women conduct with other women, nor really, to think about them with any great interest at all. But as he walked past the shadowed frontage of the Wayfarer’s Fortune and saw their bodies shifting behind the contorting pane he wished very much that he could hear what they were saying. He wished to know what caused A

‘I think that you are right to doubt A

‘We ca

‘There has been no mention of the orange gown—from any quarter,’ said Gascoigne. ‘One would think Mrs. Wells might have been more active in its recovery, had A

‘Presumably Miss Wetherell believes the gold was paid out to Mr. Ma

‘Yes—presumably,’ Gascoigne said, ‘but wouldn’t you suppose that in that case, Mrs. Wells would pay a call upon Ma

‘Hm,’ said Moody.

‘Ma

‘Have you had it valued?’

‘Yes, though unofficially: Mr. Frost came by to look it over. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of a hundred and twenty pounds, he thought.’

‘Well, I hope for Miss Wetherell’s sake that she has not confided in Mrs. Wells,’ Moody said. ‘I dread to think how Mrs. Wells might respond to such a revelation, behind closed doors. She would only blame A

Suddenly Gascoigne put down his fork. ‘I’ve just had a thought,’ he said. ‘The money in the dresses became the money in the cottage. So if the widow’s appeal goes through, and she receives the fortune as her inheritance, she’ll get it all back—less the money in the orange gown, of course. She’ll end up where she started, after all.’

‘In my experience people are rarely contented to end up where they started,’ Moody said. ‘If my impression of Lydia Wells is accurate, I think that she will feel very bitter about A

‘But we’re fairly certain that A

‘Mr. Gascoigne,’ Moody said, holding up his hand, ‘despite my youth, I possess a certain store of wisdom about the fairer sex, and I can tell you categorically that women do not like it when other women wear their clothes without their asking.’

Gascoigne laughed. Cheered by this joke, he applied himself to finishing his luncheon with a renewed energy, and a good humour.

The truth of Moody’s observation notwithstanding, it must be owned that his store of wisdom, as he had termed it, could be called empirical only in that it had been formed upon the close observation of his late mother, his stepmother, and his two maternal aunts: to put it plainly, Moody had never taken a lover, and did not know a great deal about women, save for how to address them properly, and how to dote upon them as a nephew and as a son. It was not despite the natural partialities of youth that the compass of Moody’s worldly experience was scarcely larger than a keyhole, through which he had perceived, metaphorically speaking, only glimpses of the shadowed chamber of adulthood that lay beyond. In fact he had met with ample opportunity to widen this aperture, and indeed, to unlock the door altogether, and pass through it, into that most private and solitary of rooms … but he had declined these opportunities with quite the same discomfort and stiff propriety with which he fielded Gascoigne’s rhetorical teases now.