The Luminaries

man who did not care to court the good opinion of any man whose connexions could not benefit his own.
    This had been quite contrary to his expectation; in fact Moody had been very surprised to discover that his natural sympathies aligned far more closely with the gaol’s governor, George Shepard, than they did with the politician Lauderback. Moody had met Shepard only in passing, at a Public Assembly in Revell-street, but he admired the gaoler as a man who kept himself in check, and who was unfailingly courteous, however cold and rigid the expression of his courtesy might be. The summation of Shepard’s character by the council at the Crown Hotel had been as critical as Lauderback’s had been sympathetic—which only showed, Moody thought, that a man ought never to trust another man’s evaluation of a third man’s disposition. For human temperament was a volatile compound of perception and circumstance; Moody saw now that he could no more have extracted the true Shepard from Nilssen’s account of him than he could have extracted the true Nilssen from his portrayal of Shepard.
    ‘Do you know,’ he said now, tapping the folded message with his finger, ‘until this afternoon, I half-believed that Staines was still alive. Perhaps I was foolish … but I did believe that he was aboard that wreck, and I did believe that he would be found.’
    ‘Yes,’ Gascoigne said.
    ‘But now it seems that he can only be dead.’ Moody tapped his fingers, brooding. ‘And gone forever, no doubt. Hang not knowing! I would give any money for a seat at the widow’s
séance
tonight.’
    ‘Not just the widow’s,’ Gascoigne said. ‘Don’t forget that she is to be assisted.’
    Moody shook his head. ‘I hardly think this business is Miss Wetherell’s doing.’
    ‘She was mentioned in the paper by name,’ Gascoigne pointed out. ‘And not only by name: her role was specifically indicated. She is to be the widow’s aide.’
    ‘Well, her apprenticeship has been extraordinarily short,’ Moody said, with some acidity. ‘It makes one rather doubt the quality of the training—or the quality of the subject.’
    Gascoigne grinned at this. ‘Is a whore’s praxis not the original arcana?’ he said. ‘Perhaps she has been in training all her life.’
    Moody was always embarrassed by conversation of this kind. ‘Her former praxis
is
arcane, in the proper sense of the word,’ he conceded, drawing himself up, ‘but the female arts are natural; they cannot be compared to the conjuration of the dead.’
    ‘Oh, I am sure that the tricks of both professions are more or less the same,’ Gascoigne said. ‘A whore is the very mistress of persuasion , just as a sibyl must be persuasive, if she is to be believed … and you must not forget that beauty and conviction are always persuasive , whatever the context in which they appear. Why, the shape of Anna’s fortunes is not so very greatly changed. You may as well keep calling her Magdalena!’
    ‘Mary Magdalene was no clairvoyant,’ Moody said stiffly.
    ‘No,’ Gascoigne agreed, still grinning, ‘but she was the first to come upon the open tomb. She was the one to swear that the stone had been rolled away. It bears mention, that the news of the ascension first came as a woman’s oath—and that at first the oath was disbelieved.’
    ‘Well, tonight Anna Wetherell will make her oath upon another man’s tomb,’ Moody said. ‘And we will not be there to disbelieve it.’ He twitched his knife and fork still straighter, wishing that the waiter would come and clear his plate away.
    ‘We have the party beforehand to look forward to,’ said Gascoigne, but the cheer had gone from his voice. He too had been excessively disappointed by his exclusion from the widow’s impending communion with the dead. The exclusion rankled him rather more bitterly than it did Moody, for he felt, as the first friend Lydia Wells had made in Hokitika, that a place ought properly to have been reserved for him. But Lydia Wells had not once paid a call upon him, since the afternoon of the 27th of January, and nor had she once received him, even for tea.
    Moody had not yet met either woman formally. He had glimpsed them hanging drapes in the front windows of the former hotel, silhouetted darkly, like paper dolls against the glass. Perceiving them, he felt a rather strange thrill of longing—unusual for him, for it was not his habit to envy the relations that women conduct with other women, nor