Alistair Lauderback had not been in Hokitika since Wednesday morning, chiefly for the reason that the wreck of the Godspeed was wholly visible from his suite of rooms on the upper floor of the Palace Hotel, and the sight of it caused him no end of bitterness. When he was offered the chance to give an address at the Greymouth Town Hall, and to cut a ribbon on a shaft mine near Kumara, he accepted both invitations heartily, and at once. At the moment we join him—the moment Tauwhare took his leave of Löwenthal—Lauderback was making his way across the Kumara wetlands at a great pace, with a Sharps sporting rifle propped against his shoulder, and a satchel full of shot in his hand. Beside him was his friend Thomas Balfour, similarly armed, and similarly flushed with virtuous exertion. The two had spent the morning shooting at game, and they were now returning to their horses, which were tethered at the edge of the valley, visible from this distance as a small patch of white and a small patch of black against the sky.
‘Hell of a day,’ Lauderback exclaimed, as much to himself as to Balfour. ‘It’s a glorious hell of a day! Why, it almost makes one forgive the rain, does it not—when the sun comes out like this, at the end of it all.’
Balfour laughed. ‘Forgiven, maybe,’ he said, ‘but not forgotten. Not by me.’
‘It’s a grand country,’ said Lauderback. ‘Look at those colours! Those are New Zealand colours, rinsed by New Zealand rain.’
‘And we are New Zealand patriots,’ said Balfour. ‘The view’s all ours, Mr. Lauderback. There for the taking.’
‘Yes indeed,’ said Lauderback. ‘Nature’s patriots!’
‘No need for a flag,’ said Balfour.
‘How lucky we are,’ said Lauderback. ‘Think how few men have laid eyes upon this view. Think how few men have walked this soil.’
‘More than we expect, I don’t doubt,’ said Balfour, ‘if the birds have learned to scatter at the sight of us.’
‘You give them too much credit, Tom,’ said Lauderback. ‘Birds are very stupid.’
‘I shall remember that, next time you come home with a brace of duck and a long account of how you snared them.’
‘You do that: but I shall make you hear the story all the same.’
For Thomas Balfour this good-humoured exchange was very welcome. Over the past three weeks Lauderback had been excessively bad company, and Balfour had long since tired of his capricious moods, which alternated brittle, vicious, and sour. Lauderback tended to revert to childish modes of behaviour whenever his hopes were dashed, and the wreck of the Godspeed had wrought an unbecoming change in him. He had become very jealous of the company of crowds, needing always to be surrounded and attended; he would not spend any length of time alone, and protested if he was required to do so. His public manner was unchanged—he was exuberant and convincing when speaking from a pulpit—but his private manner had become altogether peevish. He flew into a temper at the slightest provocation, and was openly scornful of his two devoted aides, who chalked these vicissitudes of humour up to the taxing nature of political life, and did not protest them. That Sunday they had been granted a reprieve from Lauderback’s company, owing to a shortage of rifles, and, equally, to Lauderback’s disinclination to share; instead they would spend the period of their master’s absence at the Kumara chapel, contemplating, at Lauderback’s instruction, their sins.
Alistair Lauderback was an intensely superstitious man, and he felt that he could date the sudden change in his fortune to the night of his arrival in Hokitika, when he came upon the body of the hermit, Crosbie Wells. When he dwelled upon all the misfortunes he had suffered since that day—the wreck of the Godspeed in particular—he felt soured towards all of Westland, as though the whole forsaken district had been complicit in the project of embarrassing his successes, and frustrating his desires. The ruin of the Godspeed was proof, in his mind, that the very place was cursed against him. (This belief was not as irrational as might be supposed, for the shifty movement of the Hokitika bar owed, in the large part, to the silt and gravel that was carried down the Hokitika River from the claims upstream, and now clotted the river mouth, invisibly, in ever-changing patterns that answered only to the tide: in essence, the Godspeed had met her end upon the tailings of a thousand claims, and for that, every man in Hokitika could be said to be partially to blame for the wreck.)
Some days after Godspeed’s ruin Thomas Balfour had confessed to Lauderback that, in fact, the shipping crate containing Lauderback’s documents and personal effects had disappeared from Gibson Quay, due to a mistake of lading for which no one man seemed to be accountable. Lauderback received this information dispiritedly, but without real interest. Now that the Godspeed was ruined, he had no reason to blackmail Francis Carver, the purpose of which had only been to win his beloved ship back again: the barque’s bill of sale, stowed in his trunk among his personal possessions, was no longer of any use to him as leverage.
Lauderback had recently taken to playing dice in the evenings, for gambling was a weakness to which he periodically fell prey whenever he felt shamed, or out of luck. He demanded, naturally, that Jock and Augustus Smith take up this vice also, for he could not endure to sit at the table alone. They dutifully complied, though their bets were always very cautious, and they bowed out early. Lauderback placed his bets with the grim determination of a man for whom winning would mean inordinately much, and he was as chary of his tokens as he was of his whisky, which he drank very slowly, to make the evening last until the dawn.
‘You weren’t going to ride back this afternoon, were you?’ he said to Balfour now, with an emphasis that suggested regret.
‘I was,’ Balfour said. ‘That is—I am. I mean to be in Hokitika by tea-time.’
‘Put it off a day,’ Lauderback entreated. ‘Come along to the Guernsey tonight for craps. No sense to ride back on your own. I have to stay on to cut a ribbon in the morning—but I’ll be back in Hokitika by to-morrow noontime. Noontime on the inside.’
But Balfour shook his head. ‘Can’t do it. I’ve a shipment coming first thing to-morrow morning. Monday sharp.’
‘Surely you don’t need to be present—for a shipment!’
‘Oh—but I need the time to tally up my finances,’ Balfour said with a grin. ‘I’m twelve pounds redder than I was on Wednesday—and that’s twelve pounds into your pocket, you know. One pound for every face of the dice.’
(Balfour concealed the real reason for his haste, which was that he wished to attend the widow’s ‘drinks and speculation’ in the front room of the Wayfarer’s Fortune that evening. He had not spoken of Mrs. Wells to Lauderback since the politician made his confession in the dining room of the Palace Hotel, having judged it prudent to let Lauderback introduce the subject himself, and on his own terms. Lauderback, however, had also avoided any mention of her, though Balfour felt that his silence was of a taut and even desperate quality, as though at any moment he might burst out, and cry her name.)
‘That takes me back to my schooling days,’ Lauderback said. ‘We got one lash for every pip of the dice—if they caught us. Twenty-one pips on a single die. There’s a trivial fact I’ve never forgotten.’
‘I won’t stay until I’m down twenty-one pounds, if that’s your angle.’
‘You ought to stay,’ Lauderback persisted. ‘Just one more night. You ought to.’
‘Look at that marvellous fern,’ said Balfour—and indeed it was marvellous: furled perfectly, like the scroll of a violin. Balfour touched it with the muzzle of his gun.
The recent alteration in Lauderback’s humour had had a very injurious effect upon his friendship with Thomas Balfour. Balfour was certain that Lauderback had not told him the whole truth about his former dealings with Francis Carver and Crosbie Wells, and this exclusion left him very disinclined to pander to him. When Lauderback expressed his dissatisfaction on the subject of Westland, and sandbars, and cold-cut dinners, and disposable collars, and imitation, and German mustard, and the Premier, and bones in fish, and ostentation, and ill-made boots, and
the rain, Balfour responded with less energy and admiration than he might have done but one month prior. Lauderback, to put it plainly, had lost his advantage, and both men knew this to be so. The politician was loath to admit that their friendship had cooled, however; he persisted in speaking to Balfour exactly as he always had done—that is, in a tone that was occasionally supercilious, always declamatory, and very rarely humble—and Balfour, who could be very supercilious himself if only he put his mind to the task, persisted in resenting him.
Presently they retrieved their horses, saddled up, and set off for Kumara at a slow trot. After they had been riding for a short while, Lauderback took up the thread again.
‘We had talked of stopping off at Seaview together—on the return journey,’ he said. ‘To take a look at the foundations for the gaol-house.’
‘Yes,’ said Balfour. ‘You’ll have to tell me all about it.’
‘I suppose I’ll have to go alone.’
‘Alone—with Jock and Augustus! Alone in a party of three!’
Lauderback shifted on his saddle, seeming very disgruntled. Presently he said, ‘What’s the gaoler’s name again—Sheffield?’
Balfour glanced at him sharply. ‘Shepard. George Shepard.’
‘Shepard, yes. I wonder if he’s angling for a shot at Magistrate. He’s done very well on the Commissioner’s budget—to get everything moving so smartly. He’s done very well indeed.’
‘I suppose he has. Hark at that one!’ Balfour pointed with the end of his crop at another fern frond, more orange than the first, and furrier. ‘What a pleasant shape it is,’ he added. ‘The motion of it—eh? As though it’s stilled in motion. There’s a thought!’
But Lauderback was not to be distracted by the pleasant shape of ferns. ‘He’s right in the Commissioner’s pocket, of course,’ he said, still referring to George Shepard. ‘And I gather he’s the Magistrate’s old friend.’
‘Perhaps they’ll keep it in the family then.’
‘Smacks of ambition. Don’t you think? The gaol-house, I mean. His devotion to the project. His devotion to the whole affair. He’s done very well about it.’
Lauderback, as an ambitious man, was very much the kind to be suspicious of ambition in others. Balfour, however, only snorted.
‘What?’ said Lauderback.
‘Nothing,’ said Balfour. (But it was not nothing! He detested it when a man received moral credit—however distantly—for something undeserved.)
‘What?’ said Lauderback again. ‘You made a noise.’
‘Well, tally it all up,’ Balfour said. ‘Timber for the gallows. Iron for the fencing. Stone for the foundation. Twenty navvies on a daily wage.’
‘What?’
‘Commissioner’s budget my hat!’ Balfour cried. ‘That money must be coming in from another quarter—from another source! Tally it up in your head!’
Lauderback looked across at him. ‘A private investment? Is that what you mean?’
Balfour shrugged. He knew full well that George Shepard had funded the construction of the gaol-house with Harald Nilssen’s commission on Crosbie Wells’s estate—but he had vowed to keep the secret, at the council of the Crown Hotel, and he did not like to break his promises.
‘Private investment, you said?’ Lauderback persisted.
‘Listen,’ said Balfour. ‘I don’t want to break any oaths. I don’t want to tread on any toes. But I will say this: if you stop in at Seaview, you ought to sniff around a bit. That’s all I’m saying. Sniff around, and you might come up with something.’
‘Is that why you’re heading home early?’ Lauderback demanded. ‘To avoid Shepard? Is this something between the two of you?’
‘No!’ Balfour said. ‘No, no. I was tipped off, that’s all.’
‘Tipped off? By whom?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘Come on, Tom! Don’t go proud on me. What did you mean by that?’
Balfour thought for a moment, squinting over the valley floor towards the rumpled slopes in the East. His horse was slightly shorter than Lauderback’s black mare, and because he was a shorter man than Lauderback, his shoulders were a clear foot below the other man’s—even when he squared them, which he did now. ‘It’s just common sense, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Twenty navvies on the foundation at once? All the materials paid up in cash? That’s not the way that Council funding gets paid out. You know that yourself! Shepard must be dealing ready money.’
‘Which one is it?’ said Lauderback. ‘Common sense—or a tip-off?’
‘Common sense!’
‘So you weren’t tipped off.’
‘Yes, I was,’ Balfour said hotly. ‘But I might just as well have figured it out. That’s what I’m saying: I might just as well have figured it out on my own.’
‘So what was the point in it?’
‘In what?’
‘Tipping you off!’
Balfour was scowling. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’ he said. ‘You’re not making any sense.’
But Lauderback was making perfect sense, and Balfour knew it. ‘What doesn’t make sense, Tom,’ he said, ‘is that you’re the one tipped off about a gaol-house! What does Balfour Shipping care about public funding, and how it’s spent? What do you care about a private investment—unless it’s wrapped up in something else?’
Balfour shook his head. ‘You’ve got me wrong,’ he said.
‘Something to do with one of the felons maybe,’ Lauderback said. ‘A private investment—in exchange for—’
‘No, no,’ Balfour said. ‘Nothing like that.’
‘What then?’
When Balfour did not immediately respond, Lauderback added, ‘Listen: if it has to do with private funding, that’s a campaign matter, and I need to know. Anything that gets rushed over the Commissioner’s desk right before an election is worth looking at—and clearly this man Shepard is rushing something. Looks to me as though he’s got political designs, and I want to know what they are. If it’s all a matter of common sense, then why don’t you just tell me what you know—and if anyone asks me, I’ll pretend I worked it out on my own.’
This seemed reasonable enough to Balfour. His affection for Lauderback had not dissolved altogether over the course of the last month, and he wanted to remain in the politician’s good opinion, despite any new opinions he might have developed, in his turn. It could not hurt to tell him where Shepard’s money was coming from—not if Lauderback could pretend to have worked it out on his own!
Balfour was pleased, also, by the sudden sharpness of Lauderback’s expression, and the eagerness with which the older man was pressing him for news. He disliked it when Lauderback was broody, and this sudden change in the politician’s humour put Balfour in mind of the old Lauderback, the Lauderback of Dunedin days, who spoke like a general, and walked like a king; who made his fortune, and then doubled it; who rubbed shoulders with the Premier; who would never dare to beg a man to stay on one extra night in Kumara, so that he would not have to take his sorrows to the gambling house alone. Balfour was sympathetic to this old Lauderback, of whom he was still very fond, and it flattered him to be begged for news.
And so, after a long pause, Balfour told his old acquaintance what he knew about the gaol-house: that the construction had been funded by a cut of the fortune discovered in Crosbie Wells’s cottage. He did not say why, or how, this arrangement had come about, and he did not say who had tipped him off about the situation. He did say that the investment had occurred at George Shepard’s instigation, two weeks after Crosbie Wells’s death, and that the gaoler was very anxious to keep it quiet.
But Lauderback’s legal training had not been for nothing: he was a canny inquisitor, and never more than when he knew that he was being told a partial truth. He asked the value of the cut, and Balfour replied that the investment totalled a little over four hundred pounds. Lauderback was quick to ask the reason why the investment comprised ten percent of the total value discovered in the cottage, and when Ba
lfour remained silent, he guessed, with even more alarming quickness, that ten percent was the standard rate of commission, and perhaps this investment represented the commission merchant’s fee.
Balfour was appalled that Lauderback had figured this out so quickly, and protested that it wasn’t Harald Nilssen’s fault.
Lauderback laughed. ‘He consented! He gave his commission away!’
‘Shepard had him in a corner. He’s not to blame. It was an inch short of blackmail, the way it played out—really. You oughtn’t make a meal of it. You oughtn’t, for Mr. Nilssen’s sake.’
‘A private investment, upon the eleventh hour!’ Lauderback exclaimed. (He was not particularly interested in Harald Nilssen, whom he had met only once at the Star Hotel in Hokitika, over a month ago. Nilssen had struck him as a very provincial type, rather too accustomed to a loyal audience of three or four, and rather too garrulous when drinking; Lauderback had written him off as bore, who was self-satisfied, and would never amount to anything at all.) He stood up on his stirrups. ‘This is politics, Tom—oh, this is politics, all right! Do you know what Shepard’s trying to do? He’s trying to get the gaol-house underway before Westland gets her seat, and he’s using a private investment to spur the enterprise along. Oh-ho! I shall have something to say about this in the Times—rest assured!’
But Balfour was not particularly assured by this, and nor did he feel inclined to rest. He protested, and after a short negotiation Lauderback agreed to leave Nilssen’s name out of it—‘Though I shan’t spare George Shepard the same courtesy,’ he added, and laughed again.
‘I take it you don’t fancy him as Magistrate,’ Balfour said—wondering whether Lauderback had designs upon that eminent position himself.
‘I don’t give two shakes about the Magistrate’s seat!’ Lauderback returned. ‘It’s the principle of the thing: that’s what I shall stand upon.’
‘Where’s the principle?’ Balfour said, with momentary confusion: Lauderback did care about the Magistrate’s seat. He had begun by mentioning it, and in a very surly humour at that.