The Luminaries

Jewish citizens, he felt that it would be disrespectful to his parents ’ memory to accept. He was torn. Löwenthal cherished an outsized fear of catastrophe, and was prone to over-analysis in self-contemplation ; his reasons for his actions were always many, and rationalised in the extreme. We shall pass over these reasons why, and remark only that Löwenthal chose neither to move to Ilmenau nor to remain in Hanover. Immediately following his parents’ deaths, he left Europe altogether, never to return. His brother Heinrich took over their father’s business in Hanover, and Benjamin Löwenthal, degree in hand, sailed across the Atlantic, to America—where, for the months and years and decades after that, he recounted this very history to himself, in exactly these words, in exactly this way.
    Repetition is a fortification like no other. Over time Löwenthal’s conception of the story of his past had become fixed and (by virtue of its fixity) unassailable. He lost the capacity to talk about his life in any other terms but those he had prescribed: that he was a moral man; that he was a man confronted with paradox; that he was a man who had done the right thing, who did the right thing, who would do the right thing. All of his choices, in his mind, had been moral choices. He ceased to be able to distinguish between personal preference and moral imperative, and he ceased to accept that such a distinction was possible. It was as a consequence of all of this that he chastised Charlie Frost so freely now.
    Frost’s eyes were lowered. ‘I can be discreet,’ he said quietly. ‘You needn’t worry about me.’
    ‘I will go and speak to Tom myself,’ Löwenthal said, crossing the room in two strides, and holding open the door for the banker toleave. ‘I thank you for the invitation. I shall see you tonight, at the Crown.’

    Dick Mannering, upon returning from Kaniere, had gone at once to the Gridiron Hotel, where he found Edgar Clinch alone in his private office, sitting at his desk. The magnate sat down without invitation, talked for some time about the afternoon’s occurrences, and very swiftly described the proposed conference that was to take place that evening. The men had decided, for reasons of prudence , to meet upon neutral ground, and the smoking room of the Crown Hotel, as the least attractive room of the least popular establishment in all of Hokitika, had seemed to all the assembled company to be a very sensible choice. Mannering talked with great exuberance, for he liked the idea of a secret council very much; he had always longed to be a member of a guild, the kind possessed of arcane histories, and feudal rankings, and a code. Presently he became aware, however, that the hotelier did not appear to be listening very closely. Clinch had placed both palms of his hands flat on the desk before him, as though to steady himself against a wind, and during Mannering’s long speech he had not once altered his posture, though his gaze darted anxiously around the room. His usually florid face was very pale, and his moustache was twitching.
    ‘
You
look as if something’s on your mind—I declare it,’ said Mannering at last, and in a rather sulky tone, for he was sure that whatever this preoccupation was, it could hardly be as exciting as his afternoon in Chinatown, or the prospect of a secret conference to discuss the perplexing disappearance of a very wealthy man.
    ‘The widow was here,’ said Edgar Clinch, hollowly. ‘She had business with Anna, she said. She went upstairs—and not half an hour later, she was back down again, with Anna in tow.’
    ‘Lydia Wells?’
    ‘Lydia Wells,’ Clinch echoed. In his mouth her name was like a curse.
    ‘When?’
    ‘Just now,’ said Clinch. ‘They left together, the very moment before you got here.’ He fell silent again.
    Mannering made an impatient noise. ‘Don’t make me beg you for it.’
    ‘They know each other!’ Clinch burst out. ‘They
know
each other—Lydia and Anna! They’re the best of friends!’
    This revelation was not news to Mannering, who was a frequent patron of the House of Many Wishes in Dunedin, and had seen the two women together at that place before: in fact it was at the House of Many Wishes that Mannering had first engaged Anna Wetherell to work for him. He shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What’s the problem?’
    ‘Thick as thieves,’ Clinch said mournfully. ‘And thieves is right, Dick. Thieves is what I