The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton Page A

on the one hand, and the law enforcers, on the other. This is quite a strategy.’
    ‘There was no method in it,’ Moody said modestly.
    Gascoigne’s name had appeared on the third page of the paper, beneath a short sermon, perhaps the length of a paragraph, on the iniquity of crime. The address was preceded by a list of all the arrests that had been made that month. (He could not recall any of those names, and in truth had only remembered Gascoigne’s because his former Latin master had been Gascoyen—the familiarity had drawn his eye.)
    ‘Perhaps not,’ Gascoigne returned, ‘but it has brought you to the very heart of our disquiet nonetheless: a subject that has been on every man’s lips for a fortnight.’
    Moody frowned. ‘Petty criminals?’
    ‘One in particular.’
    ‘Shall I guess?’ Moody asked lightly, when the other did not go on.
    Gascoigne shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. I am referring to the whore.’
    Moody raised his eyebrows. He tried to recall the catalogue of arrests to his mind—yes, perhaps one of the listed names had been a woman’s. He wondered what every man in Hokitika had to say about a whore’s arrest. It took him a moment to find the words to form an appropriate answer, and to his surprise, Gascoigne laughed. ‘I am teasing you,’ he said. ‘You must not let me tease you. Her crime was not listed, of course, but if you read with a little imagination you will see it. Anna Wetherell is the name she gives.’
    ‘I am not sure I know how to read with imagination.’
    Gascoigne laughed again, expelling a sharp breath of smoke. ‘But you are a barrister, are you not?’
    ‘By training only,’ Moody said stiffly. ‘I have not yet been called to the Bar.’
    ‘Well, here: there is always an overtone in the magistrate’s address,’ Gascoigne explained. ‘
Gentlemen of Westland
—there is your first clue.
Crimes of shame and degradation
—there is your second.’
    ‘I see,’ Moody said, though he did not. His gaze flickered over Gascoigne’s shoulder: the fat man had moved to the pair of Chinese men, and was scribbling something on the flyleaf of his pocketbook for them to read. ‘Perhaps the woman was wrongly indicted? Perhaps that is what captured everyone’s attention?’
    ‘Oh, she wasn’t gaoled for whoring,’ Gascoigne said. ‘The sergeants don’t care a straw about
that
! As long as a man is discreet enough, they are quite content to look the other way.’
    Moody waited. There was an unsettling quality to the way that Gascoigne spoke: it was both guarded and confiding at once. Moody felt that he could not trust him. The clerk was perhaps in his middle thirties. His pale hair had begun to silver above his ears, and he wore a pale moustache, brushed sideways from a central part. His herringbone suit was tailored closely to his body.
    ‘Why,’ Gascoigne added after a moment, ‘the sergeant himself made a proposition of her, directly after the committal!’
    ‘The committal?’ Moody echoed, feeling foolish. He wished that the other man would speak a little less cryptically, and at greater length. He had a cultivated air (he made Thomas Balfour seem as blunt as a doorstop) but it was a cultivation somehow mourned. He spoke as a disappointed man, for whom perfection existed only as something remembered—and then regretted, because it was lost.
    ‘She was tried for trying to take her own life,’ Gascoigne said. ‘There’s a symmetry in that, do you not think? Tried for trying.’
    Moody thought it inappropriate to agree, and in any case he did not care to pursue that line of thinking. He said, to change the subject ,
    ‘And the master of my vessel—Mr. Carver? He is connected to this woman somehow, I presume?’
    ‘Oh yes, Carver’s
connected
,’ Gascoigne said. He looked at the cigarette in his hand, seemed suddenly disgusted with it, and threw it into the fire. ‘He killed his own child.’
    Moody drew back in horror. ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘They