The Luminaries

friend Staines doing, then? Kicking up his heels in there?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Tauwhare.
    ‘I popped my head in. Couldn’t hear much. Good show, is it?’
    ‘Very good,’ Tauwhare said.
    ‘Gov. Shepard got a rap on the knuckles this morning, didn’t he?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I would have liked to have seen that,’ the sergeant said.
    Just then the rear door of the courthouse opened and the bailiff appeared in the doorway. ‘Drake!’ he called.
    ‘Yes, sir,’ said the sergeant, standing tall.
    ‘Justice wants Francis Carver escorted to Seaview,’ the bailiffsaid. ‘Special orders. You’re to take him up the hill, and then come straight back again.’
    Drake ran to open the doors of the carriage. ‘Only Carver?’
    ‘Only Carver,’ the bailiff said. ‘Mind you’re back in time for the verdict. Straight up to Seaview, and straight back again.’
    ‘Can do.’
    ‘Quick about it—he’s coming now.’
    Francis Carver was brought out into the yard, and bundled into the carriage. His hands had been cuffed behind him. Inside the carriage , Drake produced a second set of cuffs from his belt, and used these to cuff Carver’s linked wrists to a clew that had been fixed to the wall behind the driver’s seat.
    ‘
That’s
not going anywhere,’ he said cheerfully, rattling the clew to prove his point. ‘There’s an inch of iron between you and the world, Mr. Carver. Hoo! What have you done, that they don’t trust you with all the rest? Last I checked, you were a bloody witness; next minute, you’re in irons!’
    Carver said nothing.
    ‘One hour,’ the bailiff said, and returned inside.
    Drake jumped out of the carriage and closed the doors. ‘Hi, Mr. Tauwhare,’ he said, as he set the latch. ‘Care for a dash up the hill and back? You’ll be down in time for the verdict.’
    Tauwhare hesitated.
    ‘What do you say?’ the sergeant said. ‘Beautiful day for a ride—and we’ll pick up bit of speed, coming down.’
    Still Tauwhare hesitated. He was staring at the latch upon the carriage door.
    ‘How about it?’
    ‘No,’ Tauwhare said at last.
    ‘Suit yourself,’ said Drake, shrugging. He clambered up onto the driver’s seat, picked up the reins, and urged the horses; the carriage rattled away.

    ‘Mr. Emery Staines. You plead guilty to having falsified the records of the Aurora goldmine in order to avoid share payments owing toMr. Francis Carver, at a value of fifty percent net profit per annum, and to avoid a bonus payment owing to John Long Quee, at an undisclosed value. You plead guilty to having embezzled a great quantity of raw gold, found by John Long Quee upon the Aurora, which has since been valued at
£
4096. You admit that you thieved this gold from the Aurora and buried it in the Arahura Valley, with the purpose of concealment. You also plead guilty to dereliction, stating that you have been incapacitated for the past two months by excessive and prolonged consumption of opium.’
    The justice laid his papers aside, and folded his hands together.
    ‘Your counsel, Mr. Staines,’ he said, ‘has done a very good job of painting Mr. Carver in a poor light this afternoon. Notwithstanding his performance, however, the fact remains that provocation to break the law is not licence to break the law: your poor opinion of Mr. Carver does not give you the right to determine what he does, or does not, deserve.
    ‘You did not witness the assault against Miss Wetherell first-hand , and nor, it seems, did anybody else; therefore you cannot know beyond a shadow of a doubt whether Mr. Carver truly
was
the author of that assault, or indeed, if an assault took place at all. Of course the loss of any child is a tragedy, and tragedy cannot be mitigated by circumstance; but in adjudicating
your
crime, Mr. Staines, we must put aside the tragic nature of the event, and consider it purely as a provocation—an
indirect
provocation, I should say—for your having committed the rather more cold-blooded crimes of embezzlement and fraud, in retaliation. Yes, you had provocation to dislike Mr. Carver, to resent Mr. Carver, even to despise him; but I feel that I state a very obvious point when I say that you might have brought your grievance to the attention of the Hokitika police, and saved us all a great deal of bother.
    ‘Your guilty plea does you credit. I also acknowledge that you have shown courtesy and humility in your responses this morning. All this suggests contrition, and deference to the proper