The Luminaries

Balfour tells Moody about his relationship with the statesman Alistair Lauderback. When Lauderback decided to run for Parliament, he asked for Balfour’s assistance in his Westland campaign. Balfour was glad to help him. Lauderback arrived in Hokitika on January 14, 1866, by horseback, to begin campaigning in earnest. The evening he arrived, he stopped at a cabin that belonged to a hermit named Crosbie Wells, and Lauderback discovered that Crosbie was dead; later, Lauderback also found the sex-worker Anna Wetherell unconscious in the middle of the road.

Later, Lauderback tells Balfour that Frank Carver, the captain of the Godspeed, had taken on the name Frank Wells and conspired with his accomplice, Lydia Wells, to blackmail Lauderback; they wanted Lauderback’s barque the Godspeed. Lauderback had an extra-marital relationship with Lydia and they were using this information to threaten him to give them the barque. Carver used the boat to smuggle undeclared gold sewn into Lydia Wells’s dresses.

Additionally, Lauderback had sent a crate with his belongings by sea, ahead of his arrival on horseback; this crate also contained the papers showing that Carver had used the name Wells in the transfer of the Godspeed. Lauderback thinks that these papers can be voided since Carver used a false name to purchase the ship, and he is happy that he can use this information to get the Godspeed back. However, Lauderback doesn’t know that his crate was stolen from the Hokitika dock. Balfour is nervous to tell Lauderback about this piece of bad news, so he hasn’t yet done so.

Next, Reverend Devlin Cowell, the prison chaplain, takes up the narrative. Devlin says he visited Anna Wetherell in prison on January 14 and 15; she was intoxicated on opium and incoherent, so the jailer, Governor Shepard, imprisoned her. On January 15, Devlin also went with the doctor, Dr. Gilles, to collect Crosbie Wells’s body from his cabin. While he was there, he found a scrap of paper in the fireplace; it recorded a transfer of 2,000 pounds from Emery Staines to Anna Wetherell, with Crosbie Wells as witness. However, Staines had not signed the document.

Then, Balfour describes how he later runs into Crosbie Wells’s closest friend, Te Rau Tauwhare. Tauwhare tells him that he saw Francis Carver enter Crosbie’s cottage the night he died; after Carver left, Lauderback and his companions went in. Balfour goes on to the bank, where he learns that Carver had a stake in a mine named Aurora; his partner at the mine was Staines. Balfour also discovers that Staines had disappeared from Hokitika on January 14. At the docks, Balfour learns that Carver was imprisoned for trafficking opium some years ago, and he was held on Cockatoo Island where Governor Shepard had been the jailer.

On the morning of that day, January 27, pharmacist Joseph Pritchard visits Harald Nilssen, a commission agent, in his office. Nilssen oversaw the sale of Crosbie Wells’s property to the hotel manager, Edgar Clinch, including 4,000 pounds’ worth of gold found in the cottage. However, the sale was now on hold because Lydia Wells had arrived in Hokitika soon after Crosbie’s death, claiming she was his widow. Pritchard insinuates that Nilssen was somehow implicated in Crosbie’s death because he gained a commission on the sale of his property. He suggests that Nilssen talk to the digger Quee to learn where the gold came from. Pritchard also tells Nilssen that he suspects the opium Anna had smoked had been poisoned.

After Pritchard leaves, the jailer George Shepard comes to Nilssen’s office and asks him to use the commission he got from the sale of Crosbie’s property to help him build a new jail. Under pressure, Nilssen agrees.

Pritchard then visits Anna at the Gridiron Hotel. He tells her he thinks that her opium was poisoned. He also reveals that there was a vial of his laudanum under Crosbie’s bed even though he hadn’t sold it to the hermit. Pritchard wants to test Anna’s opium, but she tells him she already ate the rest of it. Pritchard thinks she is lying because she seems sober, so he begins to search her room for the opium. Anna is frustrated and pulls out a gun; it goes off accidentally in her direction, but no bullet is fired. Aubert Gascoigne, a courthouse clerk, arrives in Anna’s rooms; but when he tests the gun, it fires correctly.

Pritchard is Hokitika’s sole supplier of opium and he purchased it from Carver. He decides Anna is lying about the opium “on another man’s behalf” (168). Just then, Nilssen’s clerk arrives with a note from Nilssen confirming that, according to Quee, the gold in Crosbie’s cabin was Quee’s work.

Charlie Frost, the banker, looks into the records of the Aurora gold mine and learns that Emery Staines bought the mine sometime around May 1865. Staines transferred half the shares to Carver a few weeks later, and then the mine dried up. Frost goes to see the businessman Dick Mannering, who is also Anna’s procurer. Mannering tells Frost that Anna was with Staines on the night Staines disappeared and Crosbie died. Frost then tells Mannering that the gold found in Crosbie’s cottage had been marked “Aurora.” Mannering says that the Aurora claim was dry; he had been planting gold on it (a practice known as “salting”), so there is no way that the gold came from Aurora. However, he assumes that gold showed up on the records because the digger Quee always found the planted gold.

Balfour visits the newspaper man Löwenthal, who tells him that Anna had put an ad in the paper asking for news about Staines. He also tells Balfour that Carver left town in the middle of the night on January 14, on the Godspeed. Löwenthal also recounts to Moody that Carver, under the name Crosbie Francis Wells, had put an ad in the paper in May, promising a reward upon return of a lost crate.

Frost and Mannering go to the nearby Kaniere mining camp to meet with Quee.

On January 15, Gascoigne is collecting bail at the jail. Anna tells him that she can pay him back for her bail with the gold she has found sewn into her dress. He pays her bail, she is released, and they go together to Gascoigne’s house. He gives her his dead wife’s black dress to wear. Then, they take all of the gold out of Anna’s dress and hide it under Gascoigne’s bed. She tells him that when she was pregnant, the man who fathered the child beat her until she had a miscarriage. She also tells him that on the night of January 14, she had been with Staines. She left to smoke opium with Ah Sook, and then woke up in jail.

On January 27, Gascoigne goes to see Anna at the Gridiron Hotel. He tells her he has a surprise for her—he is taking her to meet a woman so she and Anna can shop for hats together. Anna tells him that the hotel manager Edgar Clinch is threatening to evict her for unpaid rent, and that she doesn’t have the money to pay up since she will no longer be doing sex work. She asks Gascoigne for money, and they argue because he refuses to give her any. He then also refuses to take her shopping for hats with the other woman.

Gascoigne talks to Clinch, who tells him that Staines owns the hotel. Clinch resents Pritchard for selling opium to Ah Sook, who then sells it to Anna. Gascoigne and Clinch argue about Clinch’s threats to throw Anna out of the hotel. Clinch is in love with Anna and takes care of her when she has had too much opium. He thinks about how he found gold sewn into the lining of one of her dresses when he took care of her one day. He later checked all five of her dresses and thinks there is gold in all of them. He does not mention the gold to Gascoigne.

On January 27, Quee Long, the digger who works at the Aurora mine, is at his home in Kaniere Chinatown talking to Ah Sook, the opium den operator. Ah Sook tells Quee that on January 14, he purchased half a pound of opium from Pritchard and, when leaving town, had seen Francis Carver. Sook “explain[s] to [Quee] that Francis Carver was a murderer and that he, Sook Yongsheng, had sworn to take Carver’s life as an act of vengeance” (264). That day, he saw Carver talking to Te Rau Tauwhare. Later, Tauwhare told Sook that Carver had previously asked him for information on the whereabouts of Crosbie Wells, and Tauwhare had sold him that information on January 14.

Mannering and Frost suddenly arrive at Quee’s house and begin asking him about the gold. Quee explains that he’d actually stolen the gold marked “Aurora” from the linings of four of Anna’s five dresses; he had smelted and marked the gold “Aurora” in order to bank it. He replaced the gold with weights, which is what Clinch had felt. However, Staines had never taken the gold from the camp station to the bank, and it had gone missing. Then, Nilssen arrives, too. Sook tells the group that Crosbie Wells had found a lot of gold in Dunstan in Otago, two years before.

Gascoigne goes to the Wayfarer Hotel where he meets with Lydia Wells, the widow of Crosbie Wells. When Gascoigne and Lydia met three days before, she told him that she and Anna had met in Dunedin. She said they were old friends and that she wanted to surprise Anna, which is why Gascoigne had arranged for Anna to go hat shopping with her. Lydia tells Gascoigne she has purchased the Wayfarer Hotel and that she will be holding séances there. She also tells him she is engaged, but she won’t say to whom. She tells him that she and Crosbie got married when he hit the jackpot on her fixed wheel at her gambling hall in Dunedin and, rather than pay out, she offered to marry him.

Reverend Devlin runs into Tauwhare when he is out walking. Together, they visit Crosbie’s grave. Tauwhare feels guilty that he might have had a role in Crosbie’s death since he had sold information about Crosbie’s whereabouts to Carver; he doesn’t share these thoughts with Devlin. Meanwhile, Frost visits Löwenthal and they agree to gather the other interested men and meet at the Crown that evening to discuss the events of January 14. Mannering goes to his office in the Gridiron Hotel, where the manager Clinch tells him that Anna has left with Lydia to stay with her at the Wayfarer Hotel. Lydia paid Anna’s outstanding rent. Anna left word with Clinch that if Mannering wants the 100 pounds she owes him, he is to ask Aubert Gascoigne for it. Mannering goes to Gascoigne’s and threatens him for his payment, but Gascoigne refuses to give up the gold. Nilssen arrives, and they all decide to go to the Crown together.

The 12 men gathered at the Crown Hotel on the evening of January 27 are Tauwhare, Frost, Löwenthal, Clinch, Mannering, Quee, Nilssen, Prichard, Balfour, Gascoigne, Sook, and Devlin. Moody summarizes to them everything he has heard that evening about the events of January 14: the murdered man, Crosbie Wells; the possibly poisoned sex worker, Anna Wetherell; the missing man, Emery Staines; the arrival of Lauderback and Lydia; and, the discovery of gold in Crosbie’s cottage and Anna’s dresses, which Anna had purchased second-hand and were presumably Lydia’s.

Then, Moody recounts what had happened to him that day, January 27, when he was travelling on the Godspeed from Dunedin to Hokitika. It was storming and he dropped his papers in the hold. While he was gathering them, he heard a voice moaning “Magdalena” in a crate. Moody opened the crate and found a man who was bleeding from his chest. Moody pulled him out, but thinking the man was an apparition, he left the bleeding man in the hold and went on the deck. Moody didn’t see him again.

After Moody tells his story, Mannering’s servant runs in to tell them that the Godspeed has been wrecked on a sandbar near the port.