The Luminaries

lit, and he had sat down, put up his feet, and crossed his ankles, he did not feel reassured. He felt chilly. His skin was damp to the touch, and the rhythm of his heart would not slow. He stuck the pipe in the corner of his mouth, as he liked to do, and turned his attention to the subject of his disquiet: the promise he had made, earlier that day, to George Shepard, Governor of the Hokitika Gaol.
    Nilssen wondered whether he ought to break his vow of silence and share the details of Shepard’s proposition with the assembly that evening. The matter was certainly relevant to their prospective discussion, principally for the reason that it concerned a percentage of Crosbie Wells’s fortune, but also because, Nilssen suspected, Shepard’s antipathy towards the politician Lauderback was not just a matter of convict labour, gaol-houses, and roads. When one considered that the politician Alistair Lauderback had been the first to encounter Crosbie Wells’s dead body—well, Nilssen thought, it was clear that Governor Shepard was as mixed up in the Crosbie Wells conspiracy as the rest of them! But how much did Shepard know—and whom was he serving, beyond his own self-interest? Had he known about the fortune hidden in Crosbie Wells’s cottage? Had
Lauderback
known about it, for that matter? Brooding, Nilssen recrossed his ankles, and repositionedhis pipe in his mouth, cupping the bowl between the crook of his index finger and the pad of his thumb. Whichever way one looked at it, he thought, there was no denying that George Shepard knew a great deal more than he was letting on.
    Harald Nilssen was used to commanding public attention, an authority he achieved through the use of wit, declamation, and comical self-styling. He became very quickly bored when he was required, for whatever reason, to inhabit the periphery of a crowded room. His vanity required constant stimulation, and constant proof that the ongoing creation of his selfhood was a project that he himself controlled. He was vexed, now, to think that he had been played as a fool, not because he believed himself undeserving of such treatment (Nilssen knew very well that he was an impressionable type, and often joked about this very fact) but because he could not perceive Shepard’s motivation in having treated him so.
    He puffed at his pipe, conjuring in his mind the prospective gaol-house , the asylum, the scaffold of the gallows, built high above the drop. All of it would be built with his commission, and by his leave.
Hang Governor Shepard
, he thought suddenly. He had no real obligation to keep Shepard’s secret—why, he did not even know, exactly, what that secret really
was
! He would share Shepard’s request with the assembly that evening, and he would share his own suspicions about the man, to boot. He was not yet contractually bound to keep his silence. He had not yet signed his name to any document. What did that matter, anyway? A gaol-house was not a private property. It belonged to all of Hokitika. A gaol-house was built by the government —and on behalf of the adherents of the law.
    Presently Nilssen heard the door in the outer office open and close. He leaped up. It was Albert, returning from Joseph Pritchard’s drug hall. His jacket was very wet, and when he stepped into Nilssen’s office, he carried with him the earthy smell of rain.
    ‘Did he burn the letter?’ Nilssen said anxiously. ‘Did you watch him burn it? What’s that you’ve got there?’
    ‘Pritchard’s reply,’ said Albert. He held up a folded piece of paper.
    ‘I said there wasn’t to be a reply! I said that!’
    ‘Yes,’ said Albert, ‘and I told him—but he penned one anyway.’
    Nilssen eyed the document in Albert’s hand. ‘Did he burn my letter, at least?’
    ‘Yes,’ Albert said, but then he hesitated.
    ‘What? What?’
    ‘Well,’ Albert said, ‘when I said he had to burn it—he laughed.’
    Nilssen narrowed his eyes. ‘Why did he laugh?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Albert. ‘But I thought I should tell you that he did. Maybe it doesn’t matter.’
    The muscle beneath Nilssen’s eye began to pulse. ‘He laughed when he read the letter? When he read the words?’
    ‘No,’ said Albert. ‘He only laughed before. When I said he had to burn it.’
    ‘He found it amusing, did he?’
    ‘That you’d told him to burn it,’ said Albert, nodding. He was fingering the edges of the letter in his hand. He wanted very much to ask his employer what