The Luminaries

upon the floor; a ceramic bust, fashioned in the Roman style, served as a scowling bookend; under the window a specimen box displayedthree black butterflies, each the size of a child’s outspread hand. Behind Mannering’s desk hung a sublime watercolour landscape, framed in gold: it showed a high cliff, slanting beams of sunlight, silhouetted foliage of a purplish hue, and, in the hazy distance, the pale wash of a rainbow, curving out of a cloud. Charlie Frost thought it a very fine piece of art, and one that commended Mannering’s taste most favourably. He was always pleased when he thought up a reason to pay a call upon the older man, so that he might sit in this very chair, and gaze up at it, and imagine that he was somewhere very grand and far away.
    ‘Yes: what a fortnight it’s been,’ Mannering was saying. ‘And now my best whore has gone off and declared herself in mourning! Bloody pain in the neck, I’m telling you. Beginning to think she might be cracked. That’s a blow. When it’s your best whore. That’s a blow. You know she was there with Emery, the night he disappeared. ’
    ‘Miss Wetherell—and Mr. Staines?’ Frost had curled his hands around the scrolled arms of his chair, and was tracing the groove of the carving with the tips of his fingers.
    Beauty, for Charlie Frost, was more or less synonymous with refinement. The ideal woman, in his mind, was one devoted to the project of her own enhancement, who was accomplished in the female arts of embroidery, piano-playing, pressing leaves, and the like; who sang sweetly, read quietly, and demurred to all opinion; who was a charming and priceless collectible; who loved, above all things, to be loved. Anna Wetherell had none of these qualities, but to admit that Anna did not at all resemble the fantastic shape of Frost’s phantasmic ideal is not at all to say that the banker did not care for her, or that he did not take his satisfaction like the rest. Imagining Anna and Staines together now, he felt a twinge of discomfort—almost of distaste.
    ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mannering, plucking the crystal plug from the neck of the decanter, and swirling the liquid about. ‘He bought her for the whole night, and b—er the constable, or whoever might come knocking! At his own house, too! No slag hotels for him! He was most particular: it had to be her, he said, not Kate, not Lizzie;it had to be Anna. And then the next morning she’s half dead and he’s nowhere to be found. It’s done my head in, Charlie. Of course
she’s
no help.
She
says she can’t remember a d—n thing before the moment she woke up in gaol—and by the stupid look on her face I’m inclined to believe her. She’s my best whore, Charlie—but devil take that drug of hers; devil take it for his own. You’ll have a cigar?’
    Frost accepted a cigar from the box, and Mannering bent to hold a paper spill to the coals—but the spill was too short, and flared too quickly, and Mannering burned his fingers. He dropped the paper into the grate with an oath. He was obliged to fashion another spill out of a twist of blotting paper, and it was several moments before both their cigars were lit.
    ‘But that’s not to say a word of the troubles
you’ve
been going through,’ Mannering added, as he sat down.
    Frost looked pained. ‘My troubles—as you call them—are under control,’ he said.
    ‘I should say they are
not,
’ said Mannering. ‘What with the widow arriving Thursday—and now the whole town’s talking! I’ll tell you what it looks like from where I’m standing. It looks an awful lot like you
knew
that gold was planted in the hermit’s cottage, and once he died, you made d—ned sure the sale went through just as fast as could be.’
    ‘That’s not the truth of it,’ said the banker.
    ‘It looks like you’re in it together, Charlie,’ Mannering went on. ‘You and Clinch: you look like partners, to the hilt. They’ll bring in a judge, you know. They’ll send someone from the High Court. This kind of thing doesn’t just blow over. We’ll all be drawn into it—where we were on the night of the fourteenth of January, all of that. We’d better get our stories straight before that happens. I’m not accusing you. I’m describing it from where I stand.’
    There was often a touch of the sovereign address about Mannering’s speech, for his self-perception was an unshakeable one, authoritarian and absolute. He could not view the world but from the perspective