The Luminaries

really, to think about them withany great interest at all. But as he walked past the shadowed frontage of the Wayfarer’s Fortune and saw their bodies shifting behind the contorting pane he wished very much that he could hear what they were saying. He wished to know what caused Anna to redden, and bite her lip, and move the heel of her hand to her cheekbone, as if to test it for heat; he wished to know what caused Lydia to smile, and dust her hands, and turn away—leaving Anna with her arms full of fabric, and her dress-front stuck all over with pins.
    ‘I think that you are right to doubt Anna’s part in all this—or at least, to wonder at it,’ Gascoigne went on. ‘I got the impression, when I first spoke to her about Staines, that she held the boy in rather high esteem; I even fancied that she might care for him. And now by all appearances she is seeking to profit from his death!’
    ‘We cannot be certain of the degree of Miss Wetherell’s complicity ,’ Moody said. ‘It depends entirely upon her knowledge of the fortune hidden in the gowns—and therefore, of Mr. Lauderback’s blackmail.’
    ‘There has been no mention of the orange gown—from any quarter,’ said Gascoigne. ‘One would think Mrs. Wells might have been more active in its recovery, had Anna told her that it was stowed beneath my bed.’
    ‘Presumably Miss Wetherell believes the gold was paid out to Mr. Mannering, as she instructed.’
    ‘Yes—presumably,’ Gascoigne said, ‘but wouldn’t you suppose that in that case, Mrs. Wells would pay a call upon Mannering, to see about recovering it? There’s no want of love between
them
: she and Mannering are old friends from gambling days. No: I think it far more possible that Mrs. Wells remains entirely ignorant about the orange gown—
and
about all the others.’
    ‘Hm,’ said Moody.
    ‘Mannering won’t touch it,’ Gascoigne said, ‘for fear of what will happen down the line—and I’m certainly not going to take it to the bank. So there it stays. Under my bed.’
    ‘Have you had it valued?’
    ‘Yes, though unofficially: Mr. Frost came by to look it over.Somewhere in the neighbourhood of a hundred and twenty pounds, he thought.’
    ‘Well, I hope for Miss Wetherell’s sake that she has not confided in Mrs. Wells,’ Moody said. ‘I dread to think how Mrs. Wells might respond to such a revelation, behind closed doors. She would only blame Anna for the loss of the fortune—I am sure of it.’
    Suddenly Gascoigne put down his fork. ‘I’ve just had a thought,’ he said. ‘The money in the dresses
became
the money in the cottage. So if the widow’s appeal goes through, and she receives the fortune as her inheritance, she’ll get it all back—less the money in the orange gown, of course. She’ll end up where she started, after all.’
    ‘In my experience people are rarely contented to end up where they started,’ Moody said. ‘If my impression of Lydia Wells is accurate , I think that she will feel very bitter about Anna’s having been in possession of those dresses, no matter what Anna’s intentions might have been, and no matter what the outcome.’
    ‘But we’re fairly certain that Anna did not even know about the gold she was carrying—at least, not until very recently.’
    ‘Mr. Gascoigne,’ Moody said, holding up his hand, ‘despite my youth, I possess a certain store of wisdom about the fairer sex, and I can tell you categorically that women do not like it when other women wear their clothes without their asking.’
    Gascoigne laughed. Cheered by this joke, he applied himself to finishing his luncheon with a renewed energy, and a good humour.
    The truth of Moody’s observation notwithstanding, it must be owned that his store of wisdom, as he had termed it, could be called empirical only in that it had been formed upon the close observation of his late mother, his stepmother, and his two maternal aunts: to put it plainly, Moody had never taken a lover, and did not know a great deal about women, save for how to address them properly, and how to dote upon them as a nephew and as a son. It was not despite the natural partialities of youth that the compass of Moody’s worldly experience was scarcely larger than a keyhole, through which he had perceived, metaphorically speaking, only glimpses of the shadowed chamber of adulthood that lay beyond. In fact he had met with ample opportunity to widen this aperture,and indeed, to unlock the door