The Luminaries

boy.
This
was Emery Staines—this limp, inconsequential thing? The boy was much younger than he had envisaged. Why, he was but one-and-twenty—perhaps even younger. He was barely older than a child.
    ‘Tauwhare found him hiding out in Crosbie’s cottage,’ Pritchard said shortly. ‘He’s very sick, as you can see. Give us a hand getting him down.’
    ‘You’re not taking him to gaol!’ Devlin said.
    ‘Of course not,’ Pritchard said. ‘He’s going to the hospital. He needs to see Dr. Gillies at once.’
    ‘Don’t,’ said Gascoigne.
    ‘What?’ said Pritchard.
    ‘He won’t last an hour if you take him there,’ Gascoigne said.
    ‘Well, we can’t exactly take him back to his own rooms,’ said Pritchard.
    ‘Get him a hotel, then. Get him a room somewhere. Anywhere’s better than the hospital.’
    ‘Give us a hand,’ Pritchard said again. ‘And someone send for Dr. Gillies, while we’re at it. He’ll have the last word.’
    They helped Emery Staines down from the trap.
    ‘Mr. Staines,’ said Pritchard. ‘Do you know where you are?’
    ‘Anna Magdalena,’ he mumbled. ‘Where’s Anna?’
    ‘Anna’s right here,’ said Cowell Devlin. ‘She’s right inside.’
    His eyes opened. ‘I want to see her.’
    ‘He’s not talking sense,’ said Pritchard. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’
    ‘I want to see Anna,’ said the boy, suddenly lucid. ‘Where is she? I want to see her.’
    ‘He seems coherent to me,’ said Gascoigne.
    ‘Bring him inside,’ said Devlin. ‘Just until the doctor gets here. Come on: it’s what he wants. Bring him into the gaol.’

THE GREATER MALEFIC
    In which Sook Yongsheng overhears the beginning of a conversation.
    Ah Sook crouched in the allotment behind the Crown Hotel, his back against the timber of the building, his knees bent, the Kerr Patent revolver cradled loosely in both his hands. He looked like an altogether different man from the one who had purchased the pistol that morning. Margaret Shepard had cut off his pigtail, shadowed his chin and throat with blacking, and thickened his eyebrows with the same; she had found a threadbare jacket for him, and a shirt of gaol-issue twill, and a red kerchief to tie about his neck. With the brim of his hat turned down, and the collar of his jacket turned up, he did not look Chinese in the slightest. Walking the three-hundred-yard distance from the Police Camp to the Crown, he had not attracted the least bit of attention from anyone at all; now, crouched in the allotment, he was all but invisible in the darkness.
    Inside the hotel two people were talking: a man and a woman. Their voices came down to him quite clearly through the gap between the window shutter and the frame.
    ‘Looks like it’ll come off,’ the man was saying. ‘Protected and indemnified.’
    ‘You still sound uneasy,’ said the woman.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What are you doubting? The money’s in your hand, almost!’
    ‘You know I don’t trust a fellow without connexions. I couldn’t dig up anything on this Gascoigne at all. He arrived in Hokitika some time before Christmas. Landed himself a job at the Courthouse without any fuss. Lives alone. No friends to speak of.
You
say he’s nothing but a dandy.
I
say: how do I know that Lauderback hasn’t set him up?’
    ‘He does have one connexion. He brought a friend along to the opening of the Wayfarer’s Fortune, I recall. An aristocratic type.’
    ‘What does he go by? The friend.’
    ‘Walter Moody was his name.’
    ‘He can’t be Adrian Moody’s son?’
    ‘That was my first thought, too. He did speak with a Scottish lilt.’
    ‘Well, there you have it: they must be related.’
    There was the clink of glasses.
    ‘I saw him just before I left Dunedin,’ the man went on. ‘Adrian, I mean. Tight as all get-up.’
    ‘And out for blood, no doubt,’ said the woman.
    ‘I don’t like a man beyond his own control.’
    ‘No,’ the woman agreed, ‘and Moody is of the worst variety—the kind of man who loves to be offended, so that he can vent his temper—for he knows not how to vent it, otherwise. He’s a decent man when he’s sober.’
    ‘But anyway,’ the man said, ‘if this chap Gascoigne is in thick with one of the Moody family, he ought to do us fine. His advice ought to be fine.’
    ‘The family resemblance is
excessively
slight. The mother’s features must have been strong.’
    The man laughed. ‘You’re never short of an opinion, Greenway. An opinion is