The Luminaries

‘I’m in mourning. My child is dead and I’m in mourning. I won’t do that any more.’
    ‘You could find another line of work.’
    ‘There isn’t one. The only thing I can do is needlework, and there’s no call for it here. There aren’t enough women.’
    ‘There’s mending,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Socks and buttons. Frayed collars. There’s always mending, in a camp.’
    ‘Mending doesn’t pay,’ said Anna.
    She peered at him again—expectantly, Gascoigne thought, andthis interpretation gave rise to a flash of anger. He took refuge in another draught. It was not his responsibility that she had no money. She had not walked the streets once in the two weeks since her night in gaol, and whoring was her income: it stood to reason that she was out of pocket. As for this mourning business! Nobody had forced her into it. She was hardly impaired by grief—the child was three months dead, for heaven’s sake. The frock was no real impediment either. She would make a shilling just as easily in Agathe’s black dress as in her habitual orange one—for she had loyal custom in the Hokitika township, and whores were all too few along the Coast. Anyway, Gascoigne thought, what did it matter? One could not tell colours in the dark.
    This burst of irritation was not for want of mercy. Gascoigne had known poverty, and since his youth he had been many times in debt. He would have helped Anna, and gladly, had she chosen to request his assistance in a different way. But like most extremely sensitive people, Gascoigne could not bear sensitivity in others: he required honesty and directness when he was asked a question—and he required it all the more desperately when he was vexed. He recognised that the whore was employing a strategy in order to get something. This strategy angered him because he could see it was a strategy—and also, because he knew exactly what Anna was about to ask for. He expelled a jet of smoke.
    ‘Edgar’s always been very kind to me,’ Anna continued, when it became evident that Gascoigne was not going to speak. ‘But lately he’s been in a temper. I don’t know what it is. I’ve tried pleading with him, but there’s nothing doing.’ She paused. ‘If I could only—’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Only the smallest bit—that’s all I’d need,’ said Anna. ‘Just one of the nuggets. I could tell him I found it in the creek, or on the road somewhere. Or I could tell him I’d been paid in pure—the diggers do that, sometimes. I could say it was from one of the foreign boys. I’m a good liar.’
    Gascoigne shook his head. ‘You cannot touch that gold.’
    ‘But for how long?’ Anna said. ‘For how long?’‘Until you find out who sewed it into your corset!’ Gascoigne snapped. ‘And not a moment before!’
    ‘But what am I to do about my rent, in the meantime?’
    Gascoigne looked hard at her. ‘Anna Wetherell,’ he said, ‘you are not my ward.’
    This silenced her, though her eyes flashed in displeasure. She cast about for something to do, some mundane task with which to occupy herself. At last she knelt down to pick up her scattered trinkets, strewn by Pritchard on the floor—scooping them towards her angrily, and throwing them with some violence back into the empty dresser drawer.
    ‘You are right: I am not your ward,’ she said presently. ‘But I will counter that the pile is not your gold—to be kept, and restricted, as you please!’
    ‘Nor does that gold belong to you, Miss Wetherell.’
    ‘It was in my dress,’ she said. ‘It was on my person. I bore the risk.’
    ‘You would risk far more, in spending it.’
    ‘So what do I do?’ Anna cried. ‘Once a whore, always a whore? That’s the only option left me, I suppose!’
    They glared at each other.
I would give you a gold sovereign,
Gascoigne was thinking,
if you plied your trade with me.
Aloud he said, ‘How long do you have?’
    Anna wound a scrap of ribbon into a vicious ball before answering . ‘He didn’t say. He said I had to raise the money or get out.’
    ‘Would you like me to talk to him?’ Gascoigne said—baiting her, because he knew this was not what she wanted at all.
    ‘And say what?’ Anna returned, throwing the balled ribbon into the drawer. ‘Beg him to spare me for another week—another month—another quarter? What’s the difference? I shall have to pay him sooner or later.’
    ‘That,’ said Gascoigne in an icy tone, ‘is what characterises a debt, I’m afraid.’
    ‘I wish