The Luminaries

the courtyard. At the horse-post the chaplain turned and said, ‘I’ll be at Seaview first thing in the morning, to begin digging the grave.’
    Shepard had not moved. ‘Good night, Cowell.’
    ‘Good night, Mr. Shepard.’
    The gaoler watched until Devlin had rounded the side of the gaol-house, and then he pinched the empty glasses between his finger and his thumb, picked up the bottle, and went inside.

    The gaol-house door stood partway open, and the duty sergeant was sitting just inside the entrance, his rifle laid across his knees. He asked with his eyebrows whether the chaplain meant to step inside.
    ‘They’re all abed, I’m afraid,’ he said, his voice low.
    ‘That’s all right,’ said Devlin, also speaking quietly. ‘I’ll only be a moment.’
    The bullet had been removed from Staines’s shoulder, and his wound had been stitched. His filthy clothes had been cut from his body, and the dirt washed from his face and hair; he had been dressed in moleskin trousers and a loose twill shirt, donated by Tiegreen’s Hardware on promise of payment the following day. Throughout all these ministrations the boy had drifted in and out of consciousness, mumbling Anna’s name; when he became aware, however, that the physician meant to install him at the Criterion Hotel opposite the Police Camp, his eyes snapped open at once. He would not leave Anna. He would not go anywhere that Anna did not go. He put up such a fuss to this effect that at length the physician agreed to placate him. A bed was made up for him at the gaol-house, next to where Anna lay, and it was decided that Staines would be manacled like the others, in the interests of preventing disharmony. The boy consented to the manacle without protest, lay down, and reached out a hand to touch Anna’s cheek. After a time his eyes closed, and he slept.
    Since then he had not woken. He and Anna lay facing each other, Staines lying on his left hip, and Anna, on her right, both of them with their knees drawn up to their chests, Staines with one hand tucked beneath his bandaged shoulder, Anna with one hand tucked beneath her cheek. She must have turned towards him, some time in the night: her left arm was flung outward, her fingers reaching, her palm turned down.
    Devlin came closer. He felt overcome—though by what kind of sentiment, he did not exactly know. George Shepard’s whisky had warmed his chest and stomach—there was a blurry tightness in his skull, a blurry heat behind his eyes—but the gaoler’s story had made him feel wretched, even chilled. Perhaps he was about to weep. It would feel good to weep. What a day it had been. His heart was heavy, his limbs exhausted. He looked down at Anna and Emery, their mirrored bodies, facing in. They were breathing in tandem.
    So they are lovers
, he thought, looking down at them.
So they are lovers, after all
. He knew it from the way that they were sleeping.

PART FOUR

Paenga-wha-wha

FIRST POINT OF ARIES
    In which a steamer arrives in Port Chalmers from Sydney, and two passengers are roused before the rest.
    Anna Wetherell’s first glimpse of New Zealand was of the rocky heads of the Otago peninsula: mottled cliffs that dropped sharply into the white foam of the water, and above them, a rumpled cloak of grasses, raked by the wind. It was just past dawn. A pale fog was rising from the ocean, obscuring the far end of the harbour, where the hills became blue, and then purple, as the inlet narrowed, and closed to a point. The sun was still low in the East, throwing a slick of yellow light over the water, and lending an orange tint to the rocks on the Western shore. The city of Dunedin was not yet visible , tucked as it was behind the elbow of the harbour, and there were no dwellings or livestock on this stretch of coastline; Anna’s first impression was of a lonely throat of water, a clear sky, and a rugged land untouched by human life or industry.
    The first sighting had occurred in the grey hours that preceded the dawn, and so Anna had not witnessed the smudge on the horizon growing and thickening to form the contour of the peninsula, as the steamer came nearer and nearer to the coast. She had been woken, some hours later, by a strange cacophony of unfamiliar birdcalls, from which she deduced, rightly, that they must be nearing land at last. She eased herself from her berth, taking care not to wake the other women, and fixed her hair and stockings in thedark. By the time she came up the iron ladder to