The Luminaries

Anna said, frowning.
    ‘Nor did he,’ said Mrs. Wells, ‘but I shall lay my money upon the fact that your charts are identical—for we know already that the two of you have something in common.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘
Me
,’ said Mrs. Wells, triumphantly. ‘On the twenty-seventh of April, 1865, you both arrived in Dunedin, and you both had your natal charts drawn by Mrs. Crosbie Wells!’
    Anna brought her hand up to her throat. ‘What?’ she whispered. ‘Mrs.—what?’
    Lydia Wells continued with the same enthusiasm. ‘And there are other correspondences! He was travelling alone, as you were, and he arrived this morning, as you did. Perhaps he made a friend by some accident of circumstances—quite as you did, when you met me!’
    Anna was looking as though she might be sick.
    ‘Edward is his name. Edward Sullivan. Oh, how I wish I had brought him back with me—how I wish I had known! Are you not
aching
to make his acquaintance?’
    ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she whispered.
    ‘What an extraordinary thing,’ said Lydia Wells, gazing at her. ‘It is most extraordinary. I wonder what would happen, were you ever to meet.’

PART FIVE

Weight and Lucre

SILVER
    In which Crosbie Wells makes a request; Lydia Wells is imprudent; and Anna Wetherell plays witness to a rather ugly scene.
    The mortification that Anna Wetherell had suffered, upon discovering that the man whom she had entertained upon the afternoon of her arrival in Dunedin had been, in fact, the master of the house, only intensified over the weeks that followed. Crosbie Wells was now installed in the rear bedroom of number 35, Cumberland-street, and as a consequence they saw each other every day.
    Anna Wetherell was painfully and perpetually conscious of the impression she created, and as a consequence of this abiding self-consciousness , her self-regard was critical to the point of fantasy. She had the inconsolable sense that there was something visible about her own character that she herself could not see, and this anxiety could not be appeased by persuasion, proof, or compliment . She was certain, when in conversation, that the unvoiced conclusions formed by those around her were both censorious and wholly apt, and because the shame she felt at this imagined censure was very real, she sought all the harder to court the good opinion of those whom she met—feeling, as she did so, that even in this project her intentions were all too visible.
    Believing herself uniformly criticised, Anna would have been very surprised to learn that the impressions others formed of her were not uniform in the slightest. The artless simplicity with whichshe most often spoke indicated to some that she possessed an alarming store of private opinions, the frank expression of which was even more alarmingly unfeminine; to others, her speech was entirely without artifice, and refreshing for that reason. Likewise her tendency to squint upon the world was suggestive to some of fearfulness, and to others, of calculation. To Crosbie Wells, she was merely, and very simply, sweet: he found her frequent embarrassments very amusing, and had told her so more than once.
    ‘You’d do well in a camp, my girl,’ he said. ‘A breath of fresh air, is what you are. Unspoiled. Nothing worse than a woman with a ready answer. Nothing worse than a woman who’s forgotten how to blush.’
    Lydia Wells—a woman with a great many ready answers, and who very rarely blushed—had been only infrequently seen at number 35, Cumberland-street since her husband’s unexpected return. She left the house in the late morning, and often did not return until the dusk, when the gambling parlour opened for the night. Wells, in her absence, kept mostly to the first-floor boudoir, where the decanters on the sideboard were refilled daily. Drink softened him. Anna found that she liked him best in the late afternoons, when three or four glasses of whisky had turned him pensive, but not yet sad.
    Wells, it transpired, had no desire to return to the fields at Dunstan. Anna learned that he had made a strike of significant value the previous year, and he now desired to put that fortune to some use: he was considering various investments, both in Dunedin and beyond, and he spent a great deal of time poring over the local papers, comparing prices for gold, and tracking the rise and fall of various stocks. ‘Would you fancy me better as a flockmaster, or as a timber man, Miss Wetherell?’ he said, and then laughed very