The Luminaries

leaving Ah Sook’s hut she was always very sleepy and stupid; most often she fell asleep within moments after her arrival, lulled by the heat of Ah Quee’s stove. This suited Ah Quee. Once Anna was arranged comfortably upon the brick bed of his stove, he took her dress apart with a needle and thread. He replaced the tiny nuggets around her hem with leaden makeweights, so that she would not notice the sudden lightness of the fabric when she woke; if she stirred in her sleep, he held a cup of strong liquor to her lips, and encouraged her to drink it down.
    Ah Quee tried to describe how the gold had been hidden in the flounces of Anna’s gowns, but with Mannering’s arm still around his body, he could not supplement his description with gestures, and therefore turned to metaphor in order to describe how the metalhad been sewn into her corset and around her bustle—‘like a suit of armour,’ he said, and Ah Sook, who was always pleased by poetic expressions, smiled. Anna had four dresses in all, Ah Quee said, each containing, in his estimation, roughly a thousand pounds’ worth of pure ore. Ah Quee worked until each dress was empty, smelting every last flake of the dust into his signature blocks, and inscribing each one with the name of the claim to which he was bound—quite as though he had come upon it honestly, and legally, in the gravel pit of the Aurora. For a time, he added, he was very happy: once his surety had been repaid, he could return to Kwangchow at last, and as a wealthy man.
    ‘Well?’ Mannering said to Ah Sook, stamping his foot with impatience . ‘What’s the story? What’s he saying?’
    But Ah Sook had forgotten his role as translator. He was gazing at Ah Quee in wonderment. The story was incredible to him! Thousands of pounds … Anna had been concealing
thousands
of pounds about her person, for months! That was a fortune large enough to retire a dozen men, if not more, in luxury. Anna might have purchased the entire beachfront with that kind of sum … and even then, she would have money to spare! But where was that fortune now?
    In the next moment Ah Sook understood.
    ‘
Sei
qin
,’ he breathed. So the fortune that Ah Quee had lifted from Anna’s dresses had ended up, by some caprice or misdirection , in the possession of the hermit, Crosbie Wells. But what was this misdirection in aid of—and who was to blame?
    ‘Speak English!’ Mannering shouted. ‘Speak
English
, d—n you!’
    Suddenly very excited, Ah Sook asked Ah Quee how the fortune might have come to end up hidden in Wells’s cottage. Ah Quee replied, bitterly, that he did not know. He had never heard the name Crosbie Wells before that afternoon. As far as he knew, the last person to touch the retorted fortune was the Aurora’s current owner, Emery Staines—and Staines, of course, was nowhere to be found. Ah Quee explained that it was Staines who took the Aurora’s returns from the camp station to the Reserve Bank at the end of every month—a duty that had plainly not been carried out.
    ‘All I’m hearing is noise and nonsense,’ said Mannering. ‘If you don’t tell me what it’s all about, Johnny Sook—I’m telling you—’
    ‘They’ve finished talking,’ said Frost. ‘Just wait.’
    Ah Sook was frowning. Did Emery Staines really steal from his own vault, only to stash the smelted fortune in a hermit’s cottage, twelve miles away? Where was the method in that? Why would Staines steal his own fortune, only to gift it to another man?
    ‘I’ll give you the count of five,’ Mannering said. His face was purple. ‘Five!’
    Ah Sook looked at Mannering at last, and sighed.
    ‘Four!’
    ‘I tell you,’ Ah Sook said, holding up his palms. But what a lot there was to tell … and how few words he possessed, to contain the explanation! He thought for a moment, trying to remember the English word for ‘armour’, in order to preserve the poetic metaphor that Ah Quee had used. At last he cleared his throat, and said,
    ‘Bonanza not from Aurora. Anna wear secret armoury, made of gold. Quee Long find secret gold armoury that Anna wear. Quee Long try to bank armoury gold as Aurora gold. Then Staines thief from Quee Long.’
    Dick Mannering, naturally enough, misunderstood this.
    ‘So the bonanza wasn’t from anywhere in the Aurora,’ he repeated. ‘Emery made a strike somewhere—but he kept it secret—until Quee here discovered it. Then Quee tried to bank Emery’s gold against the Aurora, so Mr.