‘Now, Crosbie, listen,’ said Mrs. Wells. ‘I can get it back—the bonanza. I only put it away for a while. Somewhere safe. I can get it back for you, but not until to-morrow. All right? Tonight there are a great many distinguished gentlemen coming to the house, and I haven’t the time to—to go to—to where I’ve hidden it. There’s just too much to do.’

‘Where are my papers?’ said Wells. ‘My miner’s right. My birth certificate. The letter from my father.’

‘They’re with the bonanza.’

‘Are they, now. And where is that?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Why not, Mrs. Wells?’

‘It’s complicated,’ she said.

‘I would imagine it is.’

‘I can get them back for you.’

‘Can you?’

‘To-morrow. After the party.’

‘Why not today? Why not this morning?’

‘You can stop hectoring me,’ she said, flaring up. ‘I simply can’t manage it today. You’ll have to wait until to-morrow.’

‘You’re asking for time,’ said Wells. ‘I wonder why.’

‘Crosbie, the party,’ she said.

Wells looked at her for a long moment. Then he crossed the room and pulled sharply upon the bell-rope. The maid Lucy appeared within moments.

‘Lucy,’ said Wells, ‘go on down to George-street and pick me up a copy of today’s Otago Witness. Mrs. Wells appears to have burned our copy, by mistake.’

GOLD

In which Francis Carver receives a message, and Staines is left alone.

The fit of whimsical good humour that had prompted Emery Staines, on the afternoon of his arrival in Dunedin, to commission a natal chart from Mrs. Lydia Wells, medium, spiritist, had been only intensified by the forecast itself, which, being uniformly providential, had put him in such high spirits that he felt inclined to celebrate. He had awoken the next morning with a terrible headache and a guilty sensation of indebtedness; upon applying to the hotelier he discovered, to his alarm, that he was in debt to the house to the tune of eight pounds, having put up a fortnight’s stipend on a game of brag, only to lose every penny of it, and five pounds more. The circumstances under which he had become so grossly indebted were somewhat hazy in his memory, and he begged the hotelier for a cup of coffee on credit so that he might sit awhile and consider how best to proceed. This request was granted, and he was still sitting at the bar some three quarters of an hour later when Francis Carver appeared, sponsorship papers in hand.

Carver made his offer in plain speech and without preamble. He would provide enough capital to furnish Staines with a miner’s right, a swag, and a ticket to the nearest payable goldfield; he added, casually, that he would also be happy to pay any debts that Staines might have incurred in Dunedin since his arrival the previous day. In return, Staines would agree to sign over half-shares of his first claim, with dividends in perpetuity, and this income would be routed back to Carver’s account in Dunedin by private mail.

Emery Staines knew at once that he had been played for a fool. He remembered enough of the early hours of the previous evening to know that Carver had been excessively solicitous of him, ensuring that his bets were always matched, his company was always lively, and his glass was always filled. He also had the shadowy sense that the gambling debt had been imposed upon him in some way, for his weakness for cards was of a very ordinary, cheerful sort, and he had never before thrown away such a large sum of money in a single evening. But he was amused that he had been swindled so soon after his adventure began, and his amusement led him to feel a kind of affection for Carver, as one feels affection for a crafty opponent in chess. He decided to chalk the whole business up to experience, and accepted Carver’s terms of sponsorship with characteristic good humour; but he resolved, privately, to be more vigilant in the future. To have been bested once was diverting, but he swore that he would not be bested a second time.

Staines was not a terribly good judge of character. He loved to be enchanted, and so was very often drawn to persons whose manner was suggestive of tragedy, romance, or myth. If he suspected that there was a strain of something very dastardly in Carver, he conceived of that quality only in the most fanciful, piratical sense; had he pursued this impression, he would have found only that it delighted him. Carver was more than twenty years Staines’s senior, and was as brawny and dark as Staines was slight and fair. He held himself in the manner of one ready to inflict damage at any moment, spoke gruffly, and very rarely smiled. Staines thought him wonderful.

Once the contract had been signed, Carver’s manner became gruffer still. Otago, he said, was past its prime as a goldfield. Staines would do much better to make for the new-built town of Hokitika in the West, where, as rumour had it, a man could make his fortune in a single day. The Hokitika landing was notoriously treacherous, however, and two steamers had been wrecked already upon the bar: for this reason Carver insisted that Staines make the passage to the West Coast under sail rather than under steam. If Staines would consent to accompany him firstly to the customhouse, secondly to the outfitter’s on Princes-street, and thirdly to the Reserve Bank, their arrangement could be finalised by noon. Staines did consent, and within three hours he was in possession of a miner’s right, a swag, and a ticket to Hokitika upon the schooner Blanche, which was not due to depart Port Chalmers until the morning of the 13th of May.

Over the two weeks that followed Staines and Carver saw a great deal of one another. Carver had a month of shore leave while the barque upon which he worked was refitted and recaulked; he took his lodging, as Staines also did, at the Hawthorn Hotel on George-street. They very often breakfasted together, and occasionally Staines accompanied Carver in his chores and appointments around the city, chattering all the while. Carver did not discourage this, and although he communicated little beyond a repressed and constant anxiety, Staines flattered himself that his company was a gratifying and much-needed diversion.

Emery Staines knew very well that he created a singular impression in the minds of all those whom he met. This knowledge had become, over time, an expectation, as a consequence of which, his singularity had become even more pronounced. His manner showed a curious mixture of longing and enthusiasm, which is to say that his enthusiasms were always of a wistful sort, and his longings, always enthusiastic. He was delighted by things of an improbable or impractical nature, which he sought out with the open-hearted gladness of a child at play. When he spoke, he did so originally, and with an idealistic agony that was enough to make all but the most rigid of his critics smile; when he was silent, one had the sense, watching him, that his imagination was nevertheless usefully occupied, for he often sighed, or nodded, as though in agreement with an interlocutor whom no one else could see.

His disposition to be sunny was, it seemed, unshakeable; however this attitude had not been formed in consultation with any moral code. In general his beliefs were intuitively rather than scrupulously held, and he was not selective in choosing his society—feeling, in his intuitive way, that it was the duty of every thinking man to expose himself to a great range of characters, situations, and points of view. He had read extensively, and although he favoured the Romantics above all others, and never tired of discussing the properties of the sublime, he was by no means a strict disciple of that school, or indeed, of any school at all. A solitary, unsupervised childhood, spent for the most part in his father’s library, had prepared Emery Staines for a great many possible lives without ever preferring one. He might just as soon be found in morning dress debating Cicero and Seneca as in boots and woollen trousers, ascending a mountain in search of a view, and in both cases he was bound to be enjoying himself a great deal.