The Luminaries

comes around.’
    ‘Frank Carver speaks
Chinese
?’ one of the others said, in a voice of incredulity.
    ‘He goes back and forth from Canton, does he not?’
    ‘Born in Hong Kong.’
    ‘Yes, but to
speak
the language—as they do!’
    ‘Makes you think different of the man.’
    At this point the digger who had been discharged to the kitchen returned with a glass of water, and threw it across Lydia’s face. Gasping, she revived. The men crowded closer, asking in an anxious chorus after her health and safety, so that it was some moments before the widow had a chance to respond. Lydia Wells looked from face to face in some confusion; after a moment, she even managed a weak laugh. But her laughter was without its usual surety, and as she accepted a glass of Andalusian brandy from the man at her elbow her hand visibly trembled.
    She drank, and in the moments that followed, all manner of questions were put to her—what had she seen? What could she remember? Whom had she channelled? Had she made any contact with Emery Staines?
    Her answers were disappointing. She could remember nothing at all from the point she fell into her trance—which was unusual, she said, for usually she could recall her ‘visions’ very well indeed. The men prompted her, but without success; she simply could not remember anything at all. When it was revealed to her that she had spoken in a foreign tongue, quite fluently and for some time, she looked genuinely puzzled.
    ‘But I don’t know a word of Chinese,’ she said. ‘Are you sure? And the johnnies confirmed it? Real Chinese? You’re really sure?’
    This was confirmed, with much perplexity and excitement.
    ‘And what is all
this
mess?’ She gestured weakly at the scorched table and the remains of the fire.
    ‘The lamp just fell,’ said one of the diggers. ‘It just fell, of its own accord.’
    ‘It did more than fall: it
levitated
!’
    Lydia looked at the paraffin lamp a moment, and then seemed to rouse herself. ‘
Well
!’ She raised herself a little higher on the sofa. ‘So I channelled the ghost of a Chinaman!’
    ‘Interference wasn’t what I paid for,’ the stubborn digger said.
    ‘No,’ said Lydia Wells, soothingly, ‘no—of course it wasn’t. Of course we must refund the cost of
all
your tickets … but tell me: what were the very words I spoke?’
    ‘Something to do with a murder,’ said Frost, who was still watching her very closely. ‘Something to do with revenge.’
    ‘Indeed!’ said Mrs. Wells. She seemed impressed.
    ‘Ah Sook said it had something to do with Francis Carver,’ said Frost.
    Mrs. Wells went pale; she started forward. ‘What were the very words—the exact words?’
    The diggers looked around them, but perceived only Ah Quee, who returned their gaze stonily, and did not speak.
    ‘He doesn’t have English.’
    ‘Where’s the other one?’
    ‘Where did he go?’
    Ah Sook had extracted himself from the group some minutes before, padding from the room and into the foyer so quietly that nobody had noticed his departure. The revelation that Francis Carver had returned to Hokitika—that he had been in Hokitika for
three weeks
—had caused a flood of private emotion in his breast, and he desired, all of a sudden, to be alone.
    He leaned against the rail of the porch and looked out, down the long arm of Revell-street, towards the quay. The long row of hanging lanterns formed a doubled seam of light that came together, ina haze of yellow, some two hundred yards to the south; their brightness was so intense that upon the camber of the street it might have been high noon, and the shadows of the alleys were made all the blacker, by contrast. A pair of drunks staggered past him, clutching one another around the waist. A whore passed in the other direction, her skirts gathered high above her knees. She looked at him curiously, and Ah Sook, after a moment of blankness, remembered that his face was still heavily painted, the corners of his eyes lengthened with kohl, his cheeks rounded with white. She called out to him, but he shook his head, and she walked on. From somewhere nearby there came a sudden roar of laughter and applause.
    Ah Sook sucked his lips between his teeth. So Francis Carver had returned to Hokitika once again. He surely was not aware that his old associate was living in a hut at Kaniere, less than five miles away! Carver was not a man to bear a risk if he could remove the threat of that risk altogether. In that case, Ah