The Luminaries

full, but not with the gold in her gowns, and not with her legal earnings either. The debt had been paid out that very afternoon by way of a six-pound loan from Crosbie’s widow, Lydia Wells; her debt to Mannering, which by the magnate’s reckoning was well over a hundred pounds, would be more than covered by the gold she and Gascoigne had excavated from the orange gown. Anna had since quit the Gridiron for good. She had been invited, henceforth, to take her lodging with Lydia Wells at the Wayfarer’s Fortune, where she would no longer call herself a whore.
    Did Lydia Wells know that Carver’s missing shipping crate had ended up in Hokitika, and that the dresses had been purchased by Anna, and that the fortune at Crosbie Wells’s cottage was one and the same as the fortune with which Carver had blackmailed the politician Lauderback, some ten months ago? Such a question depended entirely upon Anna. How much did Anna know about her own involvement in this very circular affair? And how much, for that matter, was she willing to reveal to Lydia Wells? It was very possible that Anna did
not
know the dresses had once been Lydia’s. In this case, Mrs. Wells would remain ignorant of this fact also, for Anna was still wearing the black dress that had once belonged to Gascoigne’s late wife, and she had vowed to remain in mourning for some time. Of course, Moody thought, Anna would only need to have opened the wardrobe in her room for the widow to have recognised the dresses … but given that the gowns were currently lined with leaden makeweights, placed there as a decoy by the goldsmith Quee, Mrs. Wells might not have realised, at first glance or first touch, that the original fortune had been replaced by a worthless replica. Clinch had been fooled to this effect already. Moody wondered whether it was upon this false surety that the widow had paid Anna’s debt that afternoon.
    If Anna
did
know that the five dresses had once belonged toLydia Wells, however, then she surely must have known about their concealed fortune all along, and therefore, about Lauderback’s blackmail, and the forced sale of the
Godspeed
, ten months prior. In light of this, Moody thought, the circumstance under which Anna’s baby had been killed suddenly seemed
very
pertinent to the mysteries at hand, for Anna’s relation to Francis Carver, like her relation to Lydia Wells, was a matter about which no man present knew anything at all.
    Moody ran his finger absent-mindedly around the rim of his glass. There had to be a better explanation for all of this than merely the correlative accident of circumstance. What had Balfour said, hours ago? ‘A string of coincidences is not a coincidence’? And what was a coincidence, Moody thought, but a stilled moment in a sequence that had yet to be explained?
    ‘That’s our part in it, at least,’ Balfour added, in a tone of some apology. ‘It’s not much of an answer, Mr. Moody—but it accounts for what got us here tonight; the cause, as I said, of our assembly.’
    ‘A little more than he bargained for, perhaps,’ said Dick Mannering.
    ‘It’s always that—when it’s the truth,’ replied Balfour.
    Moody looked from face to face. No one man could really be called ‘guilty’, just as no one man could really be called ‘innocent’. They were—associated? Involved? Entangled? Moody frowned. He felt that he did not possess the right word to describe their interrelation . Pritchard had used the word ‘conspiracy’ … but the term was hardly applicable, when each man’s involvement was so incidental , and each man’s relation to the events in question so palpably different. No: the real agents, and the real conspirators, were surely those men and women who were
not
present—who each had a secret that he or she was trying to hide!
    Moody considered the absentees.
    Francis Carver, as had been asserted many times that evening, was certainly ‘behind’ something. By Lauderback’s account at least, Carver was an inveterate schemer with a taste for blackmail; what’s more, he had visited Crosbie Wells on the day of his death, and perhaps had even watched him die. This reputation ought not to be forgotten, but it ought not to be given undue credence either,Moody thought: Carver could not be ‘behind’ everything at once, and he certainly could not have engineered a plot of such elaborate proportion as to simultaneously indict twelve men.
    Then there was Lydia Wells, the alleged wife