The Luminaries

smeared with blood. He felt certain that any moment now the gaoler would expose him—but for what crime, he did not yet know. What was the word Pritchard had used?
Associated.
Yes—he felt that acutely.
    When he was a small boy Nilssen had stolen a precious button from his cousin’s treasure chest. It was a cuff button from a military jacket, brass in colour, and engraved with the lithe body of a fox, running forward with its jaws parted and its ears cocked back. The button was domed, and greyer on one side than on the other, as if the wearer had tended to caress its edge with his finger, and over time had worn the shine away. Cousin Magnus had rickets and a bandy-legged gait: he would die soon, so he did not have to share his toys. But Nilssen’s longing for the button became so great that one night when Magnus was sleeping he crept in, unlatchedthe chest, and stole it; he walked about the darkened nursery for a while, fingering the thing, testing its weight, running his finger over the body of the fox, feeling the brass take on the warmth of his hand—until something overcame him, not remorse exactly, but a dawning fatigue, an emptiness, and he returned the button to the place where he had found it. Cousin Magnus never knew. Nobody knew. But for months and years and even decades afterwards, long after Cousin Magnus was dead, that theft was as a splinter in his heart. He saw the moonlit nursery every time he spoke his cousin’s name; he blushed at nothing; he sometimes pinched himself, or uttered an oath, at the memory. For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.
    ‘I estimate that it will be at least April before the sale is successfully repealed,’ Shepard was saying, with the same perfect gravity. ‘In the meantime—immediately, in fact—I propose that you invest the entire sum of your commission into the building of my gaol-house.’
    Nilssen raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘But the money is not mine,’ he said, for the second time that afternoon. ‘It has already been revoked de jure, if not de facto. Once the widow’s appeal has been granted, and the sale of the estate declared void, I shall have to pay my commission back in full.’
    ‘The Council can sponsor your loan, with interest,’ Shepard said. ‘The gaol is publicly funded, after all; by the time your commission is recalled, I will be able to draw down funds from the Reserve, and repay you. We shall have a contract drawn up; you may name your terms. Your investment will be secure.’
    ‘If you have public funding,’ Nilssen said, ‘then why propose this to me at all? What need do you have of these four hundred pounds?’
    ‘Yours is ready money, and will be privately invested,’ Shepard said. ‘My Council funding has been approved, but not paid out; if I wait for the sum to be apportioned, and deposited into the gaol’s account, I will be waiting for thirty bankers to push my contractacross thirty desks, and back again. It will be March, or April, and the elections will be past.’
    ‘And Lauderback will have his convicts,’ Nilssen said.
    ‘Yes, and he will have siphoned off a great deal more of the district’s budget, besides.’
    ‘Very well,’ Nilssen said. ‘Let us suppose that I agree to this, and you get your gaol-house. You said that
both
of us would stand to gain.’
    ‘Well, yes,’ Shepard said, blinking. ‘You will have employment, Mr. Nilssen. You will get your standard commission on the labour, and the iron, and the timber, and the nails, and every small thing. Legal profit—that is how you stand to gain.’
    Nilssen could not fault this (certainly, it had been many weeks since he had contracted work that promised this degree of yield), but Shepard’s method of proposition was making him very uncomfortable. The gaoler had used the word
murder
, and called that crime ‘sophisticated’; he had waited until Albert was present as a witness to ask about Emery Staines; and when he narrated the story of the Wells affair, he had made a great show of preventing Nilssen’s interruption , lest the commission merchant implicate himself by speaking too much or too soon—thereby assuming that he
could
implicate himself in some