The Luminaries

Edgar Clinch attempts to exercise his authority, having deduced that Anna’s recent decline in health owes much to a new dependency both facilitated and encouraged by her employer, Mannering; and Anna Wetherell, whose obstinacy of feeling is more than a match for Clinch’s own, does not indulge him.
    ‘I don’t have anything against the Chinese,’ said Clinch. ‘I just don’t like the look of it, that’s all.’
    ‘What does it matter what it looks like?’
    ‘I don’t like the feel of it. That’s what I meant. The situation.’
    Anna smoothed down the skirt of her dress—muslin, with a cream skirt and a crocheted bust, one of five that she had purchased from the salvage vendors following the wreck of the
Titania
some weeks ago. Two of the gowns had been speckled with black mould, the kind that any amount of washing would not remove. They were all very heavy, and the corsets, very fortified, tokens by which she presumed them to be relics of an older, more rigid age. The salvage man, as he wrapped the purchases in paper, had informed her that, very strangely, the
Titania
had been conveying no female passengers at all on the day she came to ground; stranger still, nobody had come forward to claim this particular trunk after the cargo had been recovered from the wreck. None of the shipping firms seemed to know the first thing about it. The bill of lading had been rendered illegible by salt water, and the log did notlist the item by name. It was certainly a mystery, the salvage man concluded. He hoped that she would not come to any embarrassment or difficulty, in wearing them.
    Clinch pressed on. ‘How are you to keep your wits about you, when you’re under? How are you to defend yourself, if—if—well, if you encounter something—untoward?’
    Anna sighed. ‘It isn’t your concern.’
    ‘It’s my concern when I can see plain as day that he’s got your advantage, and he’s using you for ill.’
    ‘He will always have my advantage, Mr. Clinch.’
    Clinch was becoming upset. ‘Where did it come from—your thirst? Answer me that! You just picked up a pipe, did you, and that was all it took? Why did you do it, if you weren’t compelled by Mr. Mannering himself? He knows the way he wants you: without any room to move, that’s how. Do you think I haven’t seen it before, this method? The other girls won’t touch the stuff. He knows that. But he tried it on you. He set you up. He took you there.’
    ‘Edgar—’
    ‘What?’ said Clinch. ‘What?’
    ‘Please leave me be,’ said Anna. ‘I can’t bear it.’

THE LEO SUN
    In which Emery Staines enjoys a long luncheon with the magnate Mannering, who, over the past month, has made a concerted effort to court his friendship, behaving mayorally, as he prefers to do, as though all goldfields triumphs are his to adjudicate, and his to commend.
    ‘You’re a man who wears his success, Mr. Staines,’ said Mannering. ‘That’s a uniform I like.’
    ‘I’m afraid,’ said Staines, ‘my luck has been rather awfully exaggerated .’
    ‘That’s modesty talking. It was a hell of a find, you know, that nugget. I saw the banker’s report. What did it fetch—a hundred pounds?’
    ‘More or less,’ said Staines, uncomfortably.
    ‘And you picked it up in the gorge, you said!’
    ‘Near the gorge,’ Staines corrected. ‘I can’t remember exactly where.’
    ‘Well, it was a piece of good luck, wherever it came from,’ said Mannering. ‘Will you finish up these mussels, or shall we move on to cheese?’
    ‘Let’s move on.’
    ‘A hundred pounds!’ said Mannering, as he signalled to the waiter to come and take their plates away. ‘That’s a d—n sight more than the price of the Gridiron Hotel, whatever you paid for the freehold. What did you pay?’
    Staines winced. ‘For the Gridiron?’
    ‘Twenty pounds, was it?’
    He could hardly dissemble. ‘Twenty-five,’ he said.
    Mannering slapped the table. ‘There you have it. You’re sitting on a pile of ready money, and you haven’t spent a single penny in four weeks. Why? What’s your story?’
    Staines did not answer immediately. ‘I have always considered,’ he said at last, ‘that there is a great deal of difference between keeping one’s own secret, and keeping a secret for another soul; so much so that I wish we had two words, that is, a word for a secret of one’s own making, and a word for a secret that one did not make, and perhaps did not wish for, but has chosen to