The Luminaries

the
Otago Witness
every day, hoping to see the blackguard’s name among the dead, may God forgive me. But nothing happened.
    ‘Nearly a year later—this is almost a year ago, maybe February, March last year—I get a letter in the mail. It’s an annual receipt from Danforth Shipping, and it’s filled out in my name.’
    ‘Danforth? Jem Danforth?’
    ‘The same,’ said Lauderback. ‘I’ve never shipped with Danforth—not for personals—but I know him, of course; he rents part of
Godspeed
’s hold for cargo.’
    ‘And
Virtue
too, on occasion.’
    ‘Yes—on occasion,
Virtue
too. All right: so I examine the receipt. I see that there’s a recurring shipment on
Godspeed
’s trans-Tasman route under the name of Lauderback. My name. Again and again, on the westbound voyage across the Tasman—each voyage, there it is, shipper Danforth, carrier
Godspeed
, master James Raxworthy, one shipment of personals, standard size, paid in full by Alistair Lauderback. Me. I tell you, my blood went cold. My name, written so neatly; that column of figures, going down.
    ‘The amount due was zero pounds. Nothing outstanding. Each month the account had been paid in cash, as the record showed. Someone had engineered this whole business in my name, and paid good money for it, to boot. I had a quick look over my own finances: I wasn’t missing any money, and certainly nothing to the tune of eighty, ninety pounds in shipping fees. I’d have noticed a slow leak of that kind, wherever it was coming from. No. Something was cooking.
    ‘As soon as I could, I left for Dunedin, to see about the affair myself. This was—April, I suppose. May, maybe. Some time in the early autumn. When I reached Dunedin I hardly even stepped ashore. I made straight for
Godspeed
. She was at anchor, and rafted up to the wharf, with the gangway down; I boarded, seeing no one at all. I was intending to speak to Raxworthy, of course—but he was nowhere about. In the fo’c’sle, I found Wells.’
    ‘Carver.’
    ‘Carver, I mean. Yes. He was alone. Holding a policeman’s whistle in one hand, a pistol in the other. Tells me he can blow the whistle any time. The harbour master’s office is fifty yards from where we’re standing and the hatch is open wide. I keep quiet. He tells me there’s a shipping crate in
Godspeed
’s hold with my name on it, and a paper trail that connects my name to that shipment every month for the last year. Everything legal, everything logged. In the eyes of the law, I’ve been paying for this shipment for a year, back and forth from Melbourne, back and forth, back and forth, and nothing I can say will disprove that fact. All right, so what’s inside it, I ask. Women’s fashions, he says. Dresses. A pile of gowns.
    ‘Why dresses, I ask. He gives me a smile—horrible—and says, why Mr. Lauderback, you’ve been sending for the latest fashions in Melbourne every month for a year! You’ve been keeping your lovely mistress Lydia Wells in good nick, you have, and it’s all on the books, to boot. Every time that trunk arrives in Melbourne, it’s shipped in to a dressmaker’s on Bourke-street—the very best, you understand—and every time it leaves, it’s packed full of the finest threads that can be had for money, this face of the globe. You, Mr. Lauderback, are a very generous man.’
    Lauderback’s voice had become sour.
    ‘But how is it that this shipping case came to be registered in my name, I ask him, and he has a good laugh at that. He tells me that every rat in Dunedin knows Lydia Wells, and what she does to make her bread. All she had to do is tell old Jem Danforth I was keeping her in bells and ribbons, but please could he keep
her
name out of it, out of respect for my poor old wife! The fellow believed her. Logged the shipment in my name. She paid in cash, saying thecash was mine—and nobody mentioned a word to me. Thinking they were being discreet, you realise: thinking they were doing me a d—ned good turn, by not letting their Christian judgment show.
    ‘But this isn’t the half of it. Women’s fashions are not the bloody half of it.
This
time, he says, there’s something else in the trunk besides gowns. I ask him what. A fortune, he says, stolen, and all of it pure. Stolen from whom, I ask. Stolen from yours truly, he answers, and by my own wife, Lydia Wells—and then he laughs, because of course that’s part of the lie: they’re in on it together, the two of them. Well, what’s
he
doing