The Luminaries

you think?’
    ‘Poor Anna
adores
me,’ Lydia said firmly. ‘We are the closest of friends. We are as two doves—or we were, at least, in Dunedin last year. But time and distance is nothing in the face of true affinity: we shall find each other once again. We
must
arrange it. You
must
make her come.’
    ‘Your generosity is most admirable—but also, perhaps, excessive ,’ said Gascoigne, smiling indulgently at her. ‘You know Anna’s trade. She would bring that trade with her, you know, if only by way of her sullied reputation. Besides, she has no money.’
    ‘Oh, tosh: there’s always money to be made, upon a goldfield,’ said Lydia Wells. ‘She can work for me. I long for a maid. For a companion , as the ladies say. In three weeks the diggers will forget she’d ever been a whore! You won’t change my mind, Aubert—you won’t! I can be very mulish, when I have set my mind on something, and I have set my mind on this.’
    ‘Well.’ Gascoigne looked down at his glass, feeling weary. ‘Shall I walk back across the thoroughfare—to ask her?’
    She purred. ‘You shall do nothing unless you perfectly desire it. I will go myself. I’ll go tonight.’
    ‘But then there will be no surprise,’ said Gascoigne. ‘You were so looking forward to your surprise.’
    Lydia pressed his sleeve. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘The poor dear has been surprised enough. It’s high time she was given reason to relax; high time she was cared for. I shall take her under my wing. I shall spoil her!’
    ‘Are you this good to all your charges?’ Gascoigne said, smiling. ‘I have a vision of you: the lady with the lamp, moving from bedside to bedside, ministering kindness—’
    ‘It is well you spoke that word,’ Lydia said.
    ‘Kindness?’
    ‘No: vision. Oh, Aubert, I am
bursting
with news.’
    ‘News about the estate?’ Gascoigne said. ‘So soon!’
    Gascoigne did not rightly understand the state of relationsbetween Lydia Wells and her late husband, Crosbie. It was strange to him that the two had lived so many hundreds of miles apart—Lydia in Dunedin, and Crosbie in the depths of the Arahura Valley, a place that Lydia Wells never once visited, until now, nearly two weeks after the event of her husband’s death. It was only for very superficial reasons of propriety that Gascoigne had not questioned Lydia directly about her marriage—for he was curious, and Lydia did not appear to be grieving in any visible sense. She became vague and foolish whenever Crosbie’s name was mentioned.
    But Lydia was shaking her head. ‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with that! You must ask me what I have been doing since I saw you last—what I have been doing this very morning, in fact. I have been aching for you to ask. I cannot believe that you haven’t asked.’
    ‘Tell me, do.’
    Lydia sat erect, and opened her grey eyes very wide, so that they sparkled. ‘I have bought an hotel,’ she said.
    ‘An hotel!’ Gascoigne said, marvelling. ‘Which hotel?’
    ‘This one.’
    ‘This—?’
    ‘You think me capricious!’ She clapped her hands together.
    ‘I think you enterprising, and brave, and very beautiful,’ said Gascoigne. ‘And a thousand other things. Tell me why you have bought this whole hotel.’
    ‘I intend to convert the place!’ Lydia said. ‘You know I am a worldly woman: I owned a business in Dunedin for almost ten years, and in Sydney before that. I am quite the entrepreneur, Aubert! You have not yet seen me in my element. You will think me very enterprising, when you do.’
    Gascoigne looked about him. ‘What conversions will you make?’
    ‘We come at last to my “vision”,’ Lydia said. She leaned forward. ‘Did you see the
séance
advertised in this morning’s paper—with the date and location yet to be confirmed?’
    ‘Oh, come—no!’
    Lydia raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh come no what?’
    ‘Table-turning and spirits?’ Gascoigne smiled. ‘A
séance
is an amusing foolishness—but it is not a business! You ought not to try to profit from a parlour trick! Folk get very angry when they suppose they are being cheated out of honest pay. And besides,’ he added, ‘the Church is disapproving.’
    ‘You speak as if the art were not an art! As if the whole business were nothing more than a swindle,’ said Lydia Wells—who was made very bored by the disapproval of the Church. ‘The realm of the paranormal is not a
trick
, Aubert. The ether is not a
cheat
.’
    ‘Now,