The Luminaries

object—whose face, Moody saw with embarrassment, had turned a very dark shade of red.
    ‘I could not help but admire your watch chain, earlier,’ Moody said at last, addressing Mannering. ‘Is it Hokitika gold?’
    ‘Nice piece, isn’t it?’ Mannering said, without looking down at his chest, or lifting his fingers to touch the admired item. He rapped the arms of his chair a second time. ‘Clutha nuggets, in actual fact. I was at Kawarau, Dunstan, then Clutha.’
    ‘I confess I’m not familiar with the names,’ Moody said. ‘I assume they’re Otago fields?’
    Mannering assented that they were, and began to expound on the subject of company mining and the value of the dredge.
    ‘You’re all diggers here?’ Moody said when he was done, moving his fingertips in a little circle in the air, to indicate that he meant the room at large.
    ‘Not one—excepting the Chinamen, of course,’ Mannering said. ‘Camp followers is the term, though most of us started off in the gorge. Most gold on a goldfield’s found where? At the hotels. At the shanties. Mates spend the stuff as soon as they find it. Tell you what: you might do better to open a business than to head to the hills. Get yourself a licence, start selling grog.’
    ‘That must be wise advice, if you have acted upon it yourself,’ Moody said.
    Mannering settled back into his chair, seeming very contented with the compliment. Yes, he had quit the fields, and now paid other men to work his claims for a percentage of the yield; he was from Sussex; Hokitika was a fine place, but there were fewer girls than was proper in a town of such a size; he loved all kinds of harmony ; he had modelled his opera house upon the Adelphi at the West End; he felt that the old song-and-supper could not be beat; he could not abide public houses, and small beer made him ill; the floods at Dunstan had been dreadful—dreadful; the Hokitika rain was hard to bear; he would say again that there was nothing nicer than a four-part harmony—the voices like threads in a piece of silk.
    ‘Splendid,’ Moody murmured. Gascoigne had made no movement at all during this soliloquy, save for the compulsive rhythm of his long, pale hands, as he turned the silver object over in his lap; Mannering, for his part, had not registered the clerk’s presence at all, and in fact had directed his speech at a spot some three feet above Moody’s head, as if Moody’s presence did not really concern him either.
    At length the whispered drama that was taking place on their periphery began to approach a kind of resolution, and the fat man’s patter subsided. The dark-haired man returned, sitting down in his former position on Moody’s left; Balfour came after him, carrying two sizeable measures of brandy. He passed one of the glasses to Moody, waved his hand at the latter’s thanks, and sat down.
    ‘I owe an explanation,’ he said, ‘for the rudeness with which I was questioning you just now, Mr. Moody—you needn’t demur, it’s quite true. The truth is—the truth is—well, the truth, sir, deserves a tale, and that’s as short as I can make it.’
    ‘If you would be so kind as to enter our confidence,’ Gascoigne added, from Balfour’s other side, in a rather nasty show of false politeness.
    The dark-haired man sat forward in his chair suddenly and added, ‘Does any man present wish to voice his reservations?’
    Moody looked around him, blinking, but nobody spoke.
    Balfour nodded; he waited a moment more, as if to append his own courtesy to that of the other, and then resumed.
    ‘Let me tell you at once,’ he said to Moody, ‘that a man has been murdered. That blackguard of yours—Carver, I mean; I shan’t call him Captain—he is the murderer, though I’ll be d—ned if I could tell you how or why. I just know it, as sure as I see that glass in your hand. Now: if you’d do me the honour of hearing a piece of that villain’s history, then you might … well, you might be willing to help us, placed as you are.’
    ‘Excuse me, sir,’ Moody said. At the mention of murder his heart had begun to beat very fast: perhaps this had something to do with the phantom aboard the
Godspeed
, after all. ‘How am I placed?’
    ‘With your trunk still aboard the barque, is what he means,’ the dark-haired man said. ‘And your appointment at the customhouse to-morrow afternoon.’
    Balfour looked faintly annoyed; he waved his hand. ‘Let us talk of that in a moment,’ he said. ‘I