The Luminaries

breast: he could contain himself no longer. He burst out, ‘You’ve got a lot to answer for, showing your face around here!’
    Carver stopped, his hand upon the doorknob.
    ‘After what you did to Anna,’ Löwenthal said. ‘I was the one to find her, you know. All bloody. It’s not a way to treat a woman. I don’t care who she is. It’s not a way to treat a woman—still less when she’s expecting, and so close to being due!’
    Carver did not answer.
    ‘It was a hair short of a double murder. Do you know that?’ Löwenthal felt his anger mounting into fury. ‘Do you know what she looked like? Did you see her when the bruises were going down? Did you know that she had to use a cane for two weeks? Just to be able to
walk
! Did you know that?’
    At last Carver said, ‘Her hands weren’t clean.’
    Löwenthal almost laughed. ‘What—she left
you
in a bloody pool, then? She boxed
you
senseless? What is the phrase—an eye for an eye?’
    ‘I didn’t say that.’
    ‘She killed your child? She killed your child—so you killed hers?’ Löwenthal was almost shouting. ‘Say the words, man! Say them!’
    But Carver was unmoved. ‘I meant she’s no blushing flower.’
    ‘Blushing
flower
! Now I expect you’re going to tell me she brought it all upon herself—that she deserved it!’
    ‘Yes,’ said Francis Carver. ‘She got what she was owed.’
    ‘You are short on friends in Hokitika, Mr. Carver,’ said Löwenthal, levelling his ink-blackened finger at the other man. ‘Anna Wetherell may be a common whore but she is treasured by more men in this town than you can hold off, armed or no, and youought not to forget that. If any harm should come to her—let me warn you—if any harm—’
    ‘Not by my hand,’ Carver said. ‘I’ve got nothing more to do with her. I’ve settled my dues.’
    ‘Your
dues
!’ Löwenthal spat on the floor. ‘You mean the baby? Your own child—dead, before its own first breath! That’s what you call
dues
!’
    But suddenly Carver was looking at him with a very amused expression.
    ‘My own child?’ he repeated.
    ‘I’ll tell you, though you haven’t asked,’ Löwenthal shouted. ‘Your baby’s dead. Do you hear me? Your own child—dead, before its first breath! And by your hand!’
    And Carver laughed—harshly, as though clearing something foul from his throat. ‘That whore carried no baby of
mine
,’ he said. ‘Who told you that?’
    ‘Anna herself,’ Löwenthal said, feeling a flash of trepidation for the first time. ‘Do you deny it?’
    Carver laughed again. ‘I wouldn’t touch that girl with a boathook,’ he said, and before Löwenthal could reply, he was gone.

SUN IN AQUARIUS
    In which Sook Yongsheng pays another unexpected call; Lydia Wells has a most prophetic notion; and Anna finds herself alone.
    Anna Wetherell had not visited the opium den in Kaniere since the afternoon of the 14th of January. The half-ounce of fresh resin that Sook Yongsheng had gifted her that afternoon ought to have lasted no more than two weeks, by Anna’s habitual rate of consumption. But now over a month had passed, and Anna had not once returned to Kaniere to share a pipe with her old companion, or to replenish her supply—an absence for which Ah Sook could not produce any kind of reasonable explanation.
    The hatter missed the whore’s visits very much. Every afternoon he waited, in vain, for her to appear at the edge of the clearing beyond the bounds of Kaniere Chinatown, her bonnet hanging down her back, and every afternoon he was disappointed. He guessed that she must have ceased to take opium altogether: either that, or she had decided to source the drug from the chemist directly. This latter alternative ought to have been the more hurtful to Ah Sook, for he still suspected that Joseph Pritchard had played a part in engineering Anna’s overdose, on the night of the 14th: he still believed, despite many assurances to the contrary, that Pritchard had tried for some reason to end Anna’s life. But in fact it was the former alternative that was the more difficult for Ah Sook to bear. He simply could not believe—did not
want
tobelieve—that Anna had managed to rid herself, once and for all, of her addiction.
    Ah Sook was very fond of Anna, and he believed that she was fond of him also. He knew, however, that the intimacy that they enjoyed together was less a togetherness than it was a shared isolation—for there is no relationship as private as that