The Luminaries

whom you sold the ship in the courtroom today?’
    ‘He is,’ said Lauderback.
    ‘Can you identify him, please?’ said Moody.
    Lauderback threw out his arm and levelled his index finger squarely in Carver’s face. ‘That man,’ he said, addressing Moody. ‘That’s the man, right there.’
    ‘Can there be a mistake?’ said Moody. ‘I observe that the deed of sale, submitted to the court by Mr. Carver himself, was signed by a “C. Francis Wells”.’
    ‘It’s an out-and-out forgery,’ said Lauderback, still pointing at Carver. ‘
He
told me his name was Crosbie Wells, and he signed the deed as Crosbie Wells, and I sold him the ship believing all the while that I’d sold it to a man named Crosbie Wells. It wasn’t until eight, nine months later that I realised I’d been played for a fool.’
    Moody dared not make eye contact with Carver—who had stiffened , very slightly, at Lauderback’s falsehood. Moody saw, in the corner of his eye, that Mrs. Carver had reached out a white hand to restrain him: her fingers had closed around his wrist. ‘Can you describe what happened?’ he said.
    ‘He played the jilted husband,’ said Lauderback. ‘He knew I’d been out and about with Lydia—everyone in this room knows it too: I made my confession in the
Times
—and he saw a chance to turn a profit on it. He told me his name was Crosbie Wells and I’d been out and about with his wife. I never even dreamed he might be telling a barefaced lie. I thought, I’ve done this man wrong, and I’ve made a bad woman of his wife.’
    The Carvers had not moved. Still without looking at them, Moody said, ‘What did he want from you?’
    ‘He wanted the ship,’ said Lauderback. ‘He wanted the ship, and he got the ship. But I was blackmailed. I sold it under duress—not willingly.’
    ‘Can you explain the nature of the blackmail?’
    ‘I’d been keeping Lydia in high fashion, over the course of our affair,’ Lauderback said. ‘Sending her old gowns over to Melbourne every month to get stitched up, and then they’d come back with the latest frills or flounces or what have you. There was a shipment thatwent back and forth across the Tasman in my name, and of course I used
Godspeed
as my carrier. Well, he’d intercepted it. Carver had. He’d opened up the trunk, lifted out the gowns, and packed a small fortune underneath them. The trunk was marked with my name, remember, and the arrangement with the dressmaker’s in Melbourne was mine. If that bonanza shipped offshore, I’d be sunk: on paper, I’d be foul of the law on theft, evasion of duty, everything. Once I saw the trap he’d laid, I knew there was nothing to be done. I had to give him the ship. So we shook hands as men, and I apologised again—and then, in keeping with his sham, he signed the contract “Wells”.’
    ‘Did you ever hear from Mr. Carver, alias Wells, after that encounter?’
    ‘Not a peep.’
    ‘Did you ever see the trunk again?’
    ‘Never.’
    ‘Incidentally,’ said Moody, ‘what was the name of the shipping company you used to transport Mrs. Carver’s gowns to and from the dressmaker’s in Melbourne?’
    ‘Danforth Shipping,’ said Lauderback. ‘Jem Danforth was the man I used.’
    Moody paused, to allow the crowd in the gallery to comprehend the full implication of this, and then said, ‘When did you realise Mr. Carver’s true identity?’
    ‘In December,’ said Lauderback. ‘Mr. Wells—the real Mr. Wells, I should say—wrote to me just before he passed. Just a voter introducing himself to a political man, that’s all it was. But from his letter I knew at once that he didn’t know the first thing about me and Lydia—and that’s when I put it all together, and realised that I’d been had.’
    ‘Do you have Mr. Wells’s correspondence with you?’
    ‘Yes.’ Lauderback reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a folded piece of paper.
    ‘The Court will note that the document in Mr. Lauderback’s possession is postmarked the seventeenth of December, 1865,’ said Moody.
    ‘Duly noted, Mr. Moody.’
    Moody turned back to Lauderback. ‘Would you read out the letter, please?’
    ‘Certainly.’ Lauderback held the up the paper, coughed, and then read:
    West Canterbury. December 1865
    Sir I observe in the ‘West Coast Times’ that you mean to make the passage to Hokitika overland & therefore will pass through the Arahura Valley lest you make some deliberately circuitous route. I am a voting man