The Luminaries

moment, scowling; then he said, ‘You’re stopping here?’
    ‘At this hotel?’
    ‘Ay.’
    ‘No: in fact my tent is flooded, and I’m taking my breakfast out of the rain,’ the clergyman said. He spread his hand to indicate the detritus of the meal before him, long since cold. ‘You see I have taken rather a long time of it, to make the shelter last.’
    ‘You don’t have a church to go to?’
    This was a rather rude question, and one to which Balfour already knew the answer, for there were only three churches in Hokitika at that time. But he was feeling somehow thwarted by theman, in a way that he could not quite identify, and he wished to regain the upper hand—not by shaming him, exactly; but by cutting him down to size.
    The clergyman only smiled, showing his tiny teeth. ‘Not yet,’ he said.
    ‘Never heard of a Free Methodist. I suppose it’s one of the new ones.’
    ‘A new practice, a new polity,’ said the man. He smiled again. ‘But an old doctrine, of course.’
    Balfour thought him rather smug.
    ‘I suppose you’ve come on a mission,’ he said. ‘To turn the heathens .’
    ‘I notice that you make a great many suppositions,’ said the clergyman . ‘You have not yet asked a question without presuming to answer it as well.’
    But Thomas Balfour did not take kindly to this kind of observation: he would not be instructed on the formation of his thought. He pushed his chair back from the table, indicating that he intended to take his leave.
    ‘To answer you,’ the clergyman went on, as Balfour reached for his coat, ‘I am to be the chaplain of the new gaol-house at Seaview. But until it is built’—he picked up his pamphlet, and slapped it in an explanatory fashion against the palm of his other hand—‘I’m a student of theology, that’s all.’
    ‘Theology!’ said Balfour. He pushed his arms into the sleeves of his coat. ‘You ought to be reading stiffer stuff than that, you know. Hell of a parish you’re walking into.’
    ‘God’s people, even so.’
    Balfour nodded vaguely and made to leave. Suddenly a new thought struck him.
    ‘If you called it bad news,’ he said. ‘I’m going to wager that you were listening for a good long while.’
    ‘Yes,’ said the chaplain humbly. ‘I was. It was a name that caught my attention.’
    ‘Carver?’
    ‘No: Wells. Crosbie Wells.’
    Balfour narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s Crosbie Wells to you?’
    The chaplain hesitated. The truthful answer was that he did not know Crosbie Wells at all—and yet in the fortnight since that man’s death, he had done little else but think of him, and ponder the circumstances of his death. He conceded after a pause that he had had the solemn honour of digging Wells’s grave, and performing the last rites over his coffin, as it was lowered into the ground—an explanation that did not satisfy Thomas Balfour. The shipping agent was still regarding his new acquaintance with an expression of patent mistrust; his eyes narrowed still further when the chaplain (who ordinarily bore up very well under doubtful scrutiny) suddenly winced, and dropped his gaze.
    The chaplain’s name—as Walter Moody would discover some nine hours later—was Cowell Devlin. He had arrived in Hokitika upon the clipper ship
Virtue
, which was leased and operated by Balfour Shipping, and which had conveyed, along with sundry passengers , timber, iron, fasteners, many tins of paint, assorted dry goods, several crates of livestock, and a great quantity of calico, the now-vanished shipping crate containing Alistair Lauderback’s trunk, and inside that, the copy of the contract under which the barque
Godspeed
had been sold. The
Virtue
had reached Hokitika two days before Alistair Lauderback himself; the Reverend Cowell Devlin had first arrived in Hokitika, therefore, two days before the death of Crosbie Wells.
    Immediately upon landing, he had reported to the Police Camp, where the gaol’s governor, George Shepard, wasted little time in putting him to work. Devlin’s official duties would not begin until the completion of the new Hokitika gaol-house, high on the terrace of Seaview; in the meantime, however, Devlin might make himself useful around the Police Camp, and help with the daily management of the temporary gaol, which was, at that time, the residence of two women and nineteen men. Devlin was to teach each one of them to fear their Maker, and to instil in their wayward hearts a proper respect for the iron cladding