The Luminaries

your last encounter with the man?’ said Löwenthal.
    ‘Yes,’ said Moody heavily. ‘I did not venture down into the hold again—and when we arrived at Hokitika, the passengers were conveyed by lighter to the shore. If the man in question was indeed
real
—if he
was
Emery Staines—then he is still aboard the
Godspeed
as we speak … as is Francis Carver, of course. They are both offshore , just beyond the river mouth, waiting for the tide. But perhaps I imagined it. The man, the blood, all of it. I have never suffered from hallucinations before, but … well; you see that I am very undecided. At the time, however, I was sure that I had seen a ghost.’
    ‘Perhaps you had,’ said Devlin.
    ‘Perhaps I had,’ Moody said, bowing his head. ‘I will accept that explanation as the truth, if there is compelling proof enough. Butyou will forgive me for admitting that the explanation is, to my mind, a fantastic one.’
    ‘Ghost or no ghost, it seems that we are facing some kind of a solution at last,’ said Löwenthal—who was looking very tired. ‘ Tomorrow morning, when Mr. Moody goes to the wharf to collect his trunk—’
    But Löwenthal was interrupted. The door of the smoking room suddenly swung to and struck the wall with such violence that every man in the room started in surprise. As one they turned—and saw, in the doorway, Mannering’s boy, breathless, and clutching a stitch in his side.
    ‘The lights,’ he gasped.
    ‘What is it?’ said Mannering, levering himself up. ‘What lights? What’s wrong?’
    ‘The lights on the spit,’ the boy said, still clutching his side—for his breath was coming in gasps.
    ‘Out with it!’
    ‘I can’t—’ He began to cough.
    ‘Why on earth have you been running?’ Mannering shouted. ‘You were supposed to be standing right outside! Standing
still
, d—n you! I don’t pay your wage so you can take your bloody constitutional!’
    ‘It’s the
Godspeed
,’ the boy managed.
    All of a sudden the room was very still.
    ‘The
Godspeed
?’ Mannering barked, his eyes bulging. ‘What about it? Talk, you idiot!’
    ‘The nav lights on the spit,’ the boy said. ‘They went out—in the wind, and—the tide—’
    ‘What
happened
?’
    ‘
Godspeed
’s run aground,’ the boy said. ‘Foundered on the bar—she rolled, not ten minutes ago.’ He drew a ragged breath. ‘Her mainmast cracked—and then she rolled again—and then the surf came through the hatches and pulled her down. She’s a goner, sir. She’s a goner. She’s wrecked.’

PART TWO

Auguries

ECLIPTIC
    In which our allegiances have shifted, as our countenance makes clear.
    Three weeks have passed since Walter Moody first set foot upon the sand, since the council at the Crown convened in stealth, and since the barque
Godspeed
was added to the wrecks upon the bar. When the twelve men greet each other now, it is with a special understanding —as when a mason meets a member of his guild, in daylight, and shares a glance that is eloquent and grave. Dick Mannering has nodded to Cowell Devlin in the Kaniere thoroughfare ; Harald Nilssen has twice raised his hat to Thomas Balfour; Charlie Frost has exchanged the morning’s greetings with Joseph Pritchard while in line for breakfast at the sixpenny saloon. A secret always has a strengthening effect upon a newborn friendship , as does the shared impression that an external figure is to blame: the men of the Crown have become united less by their shared beliefs, we observe, than by their shared misgivings—which are, in the main, externally directed. In their analyses, variously made, of Alistair Lauderback, George Shepard, Lydia Wells, Francis Carver, Anna Wetherell, and Emery Staines, the Crown men have become more and more suggestive, despite the fact that nothing has been proven, no body has been tried, and no new information has come to light. Their beliefs have become more fanciful , their hypotheses less practical, their counsel less germane.Unconfirmed suspicion tends, over time, to become wilful, fallacious , and prey to the vicissitudes of mood—it acquires all the qualities of common superstition—and the men of the Crown Hotel, whose nexus of allegiance is stitched, after all, in the bright thread of time and motion, have, like all men, no immunity to influence.
    For the planets have changed places against the wheeling canvas of the stars. The Sun has advanced one-twelfth along the tilted wheel of her ecliptic path, and with