West Canterbury. June 1865

Sir you will notice from my postmark that I am no longer a resident of the province of Otago but have ‘upped my sticks’ as the saying goes. You most likely have had little cause to venture west of the mountains so I shall tell you that West Canterbury is a world apart from the grasses of the South. The sunrise over the coastline is a scarlet marvel & the snowy peaks hold the colour of the sky. The bush is wet & tangled & the water very white. It is a lonely place though not quiet for the birdsong is constant & very pleasant for its constancy. As you may have guessed already I have put my former life behind me. I am estranged from my wife. I ought to tell you that I concealed much in my correspondence with you fearing that if you knew the bitter truth you might think less of me. I shall not trouble you with the details of my escape to this place for it is a sorry tale & one that saddens me to recall. I am twice bitten three times shy which is a less admirable ratio than other men can boast but suffice to say that I have learned my lesson. Enough upon that subject instead I shall speak about the present & the future. I mean to dig for gold no longer though West Canterbury is flush with colour & men are making fortunes every day. No I will not prospect & have my fortune stolen once again. Instead I shall try my hand at the timber trade. I have made a fine acquaintance of a Maori man Terou Tow-Faray. This name in his native tongue means ‘The Hundred House of Years’. What poor names we British fellows have compared to these! I fancy it might be a line from a poem. Tow-Faray is a noble savage of the first degree & we are fast becoming friends. I confess it lifts my spirits to be in the companionship of men again.

Yours &c,

CROSBIE WELLS

INHERENT DIGNITY

In which Emery Staines pays a call upon Anna Wetherell at the Gridiron Hotel, where he begs her, after some preamble, to narrate her version of Crosbie Wells’s escape; and Anna, made curious by the urgency and frankness of his appeal, sees no reason not to recount the tale in full.

Emery Staines did not recognise the dress that Anna was wearing as one of the five that he had been charged to safeguard, pistol in hand, at the Hawthorn Hotel on the afternoon of the 12th of May. It did strike him, when he first appraised her, that the garment fit her rather oddly—it had clearly been tailored for a woman much more buxom than she—but he put the thought aside just as quickly. They greeted one another warmly, but with mutual uncertainty, and after an awkward pause Anna invited him into the parlour, where they sat down on the straight-backed chairs that faced the hearth.

‘Miss Wetherell,’ said Staines at once, ‘there’s something I would like to ask you—something terribly impertinent—and you must knock me back at once if—if you don’t want to give an answer—if you do not want to indulge me, I should say—for whatever reason at all.’

‘Oh,’ said Anna—and then she drew a breath, as if to steel herself, and turned her face away.

‘What is it?’ said Staines, drawing back.

Abruptly she rose from her chair and crossed the room; she stood a moment, breathing deeply, her face turned towards the wall. ‘It’s stupid,’ she said thickly. ‘It’s stupid. Don’t mind me. I’ll be all right in a moment.’

Staines had risen also, in astonishment. ‘Have I offended you?’ he said. ‘I’m terribly sorry if I have—but what is the matter? Whatever can be the matter?’

Anna wiped her face with her hand. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, still without turning. ‘It came as a surprise, that’s all—but I was stupid to think otherwise. It’s not your fault.’

‘What has come as a surprise?’ said Staines. ‘What’s otherwise?’

‘Only that you—’

‘Yes? Please tell me—so that I can put it right. Please.’

She composed herself at last and turned. ‘You may ask your question,’ she said, managing a smile.

‘Are you quite sure you’re all right?’

‘Quite sure,’ Anna said. ‘Please ask.’

‘Well, all right,’ said Staines. ‘Here. It’s about a man named Crosbie Wells.’

Anna’s expression of misery dissolved into one of shock. ‘Crosbie Wells?’

‘He is a mutual friend of ours, I think. At least—that is to say—he has my loyalty; I am under the impression that he also has yours.’

She did not reply; after squinting at him a moment she said, ‘How do you know him?’

‘I can’t tell you that exactly,’ said Staines. ‘He charged me to keep it a secret—his whereabouts, I mean; and the circumstances of our having met. But he mentioned your name in connexion with a gold nugget, and a man named Francis Carver, and a robbery of some kind; and if you don’t think me too impertinent—which I am; I know I am—then I should very much like to hear the whole story. I can’t say that it’s a matter of life or death, because it isn’t, and I can’t say that very much depends on my knowing, because really, nothing at all depends on it; except that I’ve gone into a kind of partnership with Mr. Carver—I was a fool to do it; I know that now—and I’ve got the sense, the awful sense, that I was wrong about him; that he’s a villain after all.’

‘Is he here?’ she said. ‘Crosbie. Is he in Hokitika?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,’ said Staines.

Her hands had moved to her belly. ‘You don’t need to tell me where he is,’ she said. ‘But I need you to take him a message. An important message—from me.’

THE ASCENDANT

In which Te Rau Tauwhare declines to mention Francis Carver’s name to Crosbie Wells, much less to describe the circumstances of their brief interaction one month prior, an omission that owes in equal parts to a deeply private nature and to a certain cunning when it comes to financial profit; the next time he sees Francis Carver, Tauwhare thinks, he will make an easy shilling, perhaps more.

Crosbie Wells had bought four panes of glass for a quartered window, but he had yet to cut the hole, and set the sill; for the moment, the panes were propped against the wall, reflecting, faintly, the flickering lamplight, and the square grating of the stove.

‘I knew a man who lost an arm in the floods at Dunstan,’ Wells was saying. He was lying on his bolster, a bottle of spirits on his chest; Tauwhare sat opposite, nursing a bottle of his own. ‘Got caught in a rapid, you see, and his arm got trapped, and they couldn’t save it. He had a plain name. Smith or Stone or something like that. Anyway—the point is—he talked of it afterwards, the incident, and his real sorrow, he said, was that the arm he’d lost had been tattooed. A full-rigged ship was the picture—a present to himself, after coming round the Horn—and it bothered him extremely that he’d lost it. For some reason it stayed with me—that story. Losing a tattoo. I asked him if he mightn’t just tattoo the other arm, but he was strange about it. I’ll never do that, he said. I’ll never do it.’

‘It is painful,’ said Tauwhare. ‘Ta moko.’

Wells looked over at him. ‘Is it sometimes a shock,’ he said, ‘to see yourself? After you haven’t been near a looking glass in a while, I mean. Do you forget?’

‘No,’ Tauwhare said. ‘Never.’ His face was shadowed; the lamplight accented the lines around his mouth, giving his expression a hawkish, solemn look.

‘I think I would.’

‘We have a saying,’ Tauwhare said. ‘Taia a moko hei hoa matenga mou.’

‘I cut a man’s face with a knife,’ Wells said, still staring at him. ‘Gave him a scar. Right here. Eye to mouth. It bled like anything. Did yours bleed like anything?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you ever killed a man, Tauwhare?’

‘No.’

‘No,’ said Wells, turning back to his bottle. ‘Nor have I.’