The Luminaries

done with whoring for a time.’
    He raised his eyebrows, and then, to cover his surprise, laughed at her. ‘Honest woman, are you now? Hats and window boxes, is it? Gloves in the street?’
    ‘Just while I mourn.’
    He felt that this answer—stated simply and quietly—made him look foolish for having laughed, and a knot of frustration began to gather in his chest.
    ‘What’s Dick got to say about that?’ he said, referring to Anna’s employer, Mr. Mannering.
    Anna turned away. ‘He’s not happy,’ she said.
    ‘I should imagine not!’
    ‘I don’t want to talk about that with you, Jo.’
    He bristled. ‘What’s your meaning?’
    ‘I don’t have a meaning. Not a special one. I’m just tired of thinking about him.’
    ‘Has he been a beast to you?’
    ‘No,’ Anna said. ‘Not really.’
    Pritchard knew about whores. The mincing types who pretended shock and spoke in high-pitched voices full of air; the buxom, helpful types who wore draped-elbow sleeves in any season, and called one ‘lad’; the drunkards, greedy and whining, with chipped red knuckles and watery eyes—and then there was the category to which Anna belonged, the unknowable types, by turns limpid and flashing, whose carriage bespoke an exquisite misery, a wretchedness so perfect and so absolute that it manifested as dignity, as calm. Anna Wetherell was more than a dark horse; she was darkness itself, the cloak of it. She was a silent oracle, Pritchard thought, knowing not wisdom, but wickedness—for whatever vicious things one mighthave done, or said, or witnessed, she was sure to have witnessed worse.
    ‘Why didn’t you come to me?’ he said at last, wanting to accuse her of something.
    ‘When?’
    ‘When you took ill.’
    ‘I was in gaol.’
    ‘But after that.’
    ‘What good would that have done?’
    ‘It might have saved you a good deal of trouble,’ he said curtly. ‘I could have proven that opium was poisoned, if you’d let me testify.’
    ‘You knew it was poisoned?’
    ‘I’m guessing. How else, Ann? Unless—’
    Anna moved away from him again, to the bedhead this time, and wrapped her fingers around the iron knob. As she moved he smelled her again—the sea. The intensity of the sensation startled him. He had to check the urge to step towards her, to follow her, and breathe her in. He smelled salt, and iron, and the heavy, metallic taste of foul weather … low cloud, he thought, and rain. And not just the sea: a
ship.
That tarred ropy smell, the dusty damp of bleached teak, oiled sailcloth, candle wax. His mouth began to water.
    ‘Poisoned,’ Anna said, peering at him. ‘By whom?’
    (Perhaps it was a sensory memory—merely a chance echo, the kind that suddenly flooded one’s body, and then vanished just as swiftly. He put it from his mind.)
    ‘The possibility must have occurred to you,’ he said, frowning.
    ‘I suppose. I don’t remember anything.’
    ‘Anything at all?’
    ‘Only sitting down with the pipe. Heating the pin. After that, nothing.’
    ‘I believed you weren’t a suicide—that you didn’t mean harm. I believed that.’
    ‘Oh well,’ Anna said, ‘but it does occur to one, now and again.’
    ‘Of course—now and again,’ Pritchard said, too quickly. He felt bested, and took a half step backward.
    ‘I don’t know a thing about poison,’ she said.
    ‘If I could examine the rest of the lump I could tell you whether or not the stuff had been cut with something else,’ Pritchard said. ‘That’s why I came. I want to know if I can buy some of it back from you to take a look at. Ah Sook won’t give me the time of day.’
    She narrowed her eyes. ‘You want to examine it—or swap it out?’
    ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
    ‘You might be covering your tracks.’
    Pritchard flushed with indignation. ‘What tracks?’ She said nothing , so he said again, ‘What tracks?’
    ‘Ah Sook thinks
you
poisoned it,’ Anna said at last, peering at him.
    ‘Does he? Bloody roundabout way of doing it, if I wanted to see you dead.’
    ‘What if you wanted to see
him
dead?’
    ‘And lose his business?’ Pritchard’s voice became low. ‘Look here: I don’t claim a brotherly feeling or anything of that sort, but I’ve got no quarrel with Oriental folk. Do you hear? I’ve got no reason to wish any one of them harm. None at all.’
    ‘His claim tent was slashed again. Last month. All his medicines got spoiled.’
    ‘What—you think that was me?’
    ‘No, I