The Luminaries

the fact—perhaps—that he had contracted you to remain until the morning.’
    ‘I’m telling you,’ Anna said, ‘I only meant to be gone a little while.’
    ‘But then you lost consciousness,’ Gascoigne said.
    ‘Perhaps I fainted.’
    ‘You don’t believe that.’
    Anna chewed her lip. ‘Oh, it doesn’t make
sense
!’ she exclaimed after a moment. ‘The gold doesn’t make sense; the opium doesn’t make sense. Why would I end up
there
? Out cold, quite alone, and halfway to Arahura!’
    ‘Surely much of what happens when you are under the effects of opium does not make sense.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, all right.’
    ‘But I would be happy to defer to you on that point,’ Gascoigne said, ‘having never touched the drug myself.’
    The kettle began to whistle. Gascoigne stuck his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, wrapped his hand in a scrap of serge, and lifted it down from the range. As he poured the water over the tea leaves he said, ‘What about your chink? He touched the opium, did he not?’
    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 aflour 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