‘Hang it all,’ he whispered. ‘She’s lying—and on another man’s behalf.’
So the afternoon wore on.
In time Pritchard picked up his unfinished orders, and, for want of a more diverting occupation, began to work. He was not aware of the passing of the hours until a gentle knock at the laboratory door returned him to the present. He turned—noting, with a dim surprise, that the light had become very thin, and dusk was approaching—and saw Albert, Nilssen’s junior clerk, hovering in the doorway with his breath caught in his chest and an abashed look upon his face. He was carrying a note.
‘Oh—something from Nilssen,’ Pritchard said, coming forward. He had quite forgotten his conversation with Nilssen earlier that afternoon, and the request he had made of him—to find the goldsmith Quee, and to question him regarding the retorted gold that had been discovered on Crosbie Wells’s estate. He had forgotten about Crosbie Wells entirely—and his fortune, and his widow, and the vanished Mr. Staines. How silently the world revolved, when one was brooding, and alone.
Pritchard was fishing in his apron for a sixpence—but Albert, blushing furiously, stammered, ‘No, sir—’ and held up his palms, to show that the honour of having made the delivery was quite sufficient to sustain him.
In fact Albert was sure he had never had so exciting an afternoon in all his life. His employer, upon returning from Kaniere Chinatown some half hour previous, had been in such a state of agitation that he had almost torn the door from its hinges. He had penned the note that Albert was carrying now with all the passion of a symphonic composer in collusion with his muse. He had sealed it badly, dropped wax upon himself, cursed, and then thrust the folded, lumpy sheet at Albert, saying hoarsely, ‘Pritchard—to Pritchard—quick as you can.’ In the privacy of the chemist’s receiving room, just before he entered the laboratory, Albert had pinched the edges of the letter together to make the folded paper form a kind of tube, and by squinting down its length he had made out several words that seemed to him to smack of the gravest piracy. It thrilled him that his employer was up to no good.
‘Very well, then—thanks,’ Pritchard said, taking the letter. ‘Did he say a reply was needed?’
The boy said, ‘There’s not to be a reply, sir. But he said to stay and watch you burn it, after you’d read it through.’
Pritchard gave a snort of laughter. This was so like Nilssen: first he sulked, and then he complained of the messiness of it all, and then he dallied, and then he tried to remove all the burden of responsibility from himself—but as soon as he became a participant, as soon as he felt crucial, and impressive, then everything became a pantomime, a cloak-and-dagger show; he gloried in it.
Pritchard walked away a few paces (the boy looked disappointed), tore the seal with his fingers, and flattened the paper upon his laboratory desk. The letter read:
Jo—
Called on Quee, as per your request. You were right about the gold—his work—though he swears he has no notion how the stuff ended up with Wells. The whore’s mixed up in it all—perhaps you knew that already—though we can’t quite get to the bottom of it—the author, to use your phrase. Seems every man is implicated as we are—peripherally. Too much to set down here. I proposed a council. Orientals too. We meet in the back room of the CROWN, at SUNSET. Will ensure our council not disturbed. Tell no one—not even if you trust them & they are connected & may one day stand beside us as Accused. Be so good as to destroy this—
H. N.
MOON IN TAURUS, WAXING
In which Charlie Frost forms a hunch; Dick Mannering buckles on his holsters; and we venture upriver to the Kaniere claims.
Thomas Balfour’s inquiry at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand that morning had piqued the banker’s curiosity on several fronts, and as soon as the former had left the building, Mr. Frost immediately resolved to do some inquiring of his own. He was still holding in his hand the shares profile of the Aurora goldmine, owned and operated by the vanished prospector, Emery Staines. Aurora, Frost thought, tapping the document with his lean finger. Aurora. He knew that he had seen that name recently—but where? After a moment he laid the document aside, clambered down from his stool, and padded to the cabinet opposite his cubicle, where a row of leather spines were marked with the words ‘Returns by Quarter’. He selected the third and fourth quarters of the previous year, and returned to his desk to examine the goldmine’s records.
Charlie Frost was a man of scant reputation, for such a thing is only ever claimed, and Frost was a quiet soul, modest in his dress, mild in his features, and disinclined, whatever the provocation, to disturb the peace. When he spoke, it was slowly and with care. He rarely laughed openly, and although his posture was languid and easy, he always seemed alert, as if perpetually mindful of some rule of etiquette that other men no longer observed. He did not like to declare his preferences or to hold forth in speech; in fact he was reluctant, when in conversation, to assert an agenda of any kind. This was not at all to say that Frost lacked agenda, or that his preferences were few; in fact, the many rituals of his private life were regulated in the extreme, and his ambitions were tremendously particular. Rather, Frost had learned the value of appearing to be unassuming. He knew the latent power of obscurity (powerful, because it aroused curiosity in others) and he was capable of great strategy in wielding it—but he took extreme care to keep this talent hidden. The impression that strangers invariably formed, upon first meeting him, was that he was a man of reaction rather than of action, who was managed in business, seduced in love, and steadfastly docile in all his pleasures.
Frost was but four-and-twenty years of age, and New Zealand-born. His father had been a high-level official in the now defunct New Zealand Company, who, upon disembarking at the mouth of the Hutt River and finding a wealth of flat land to be divided and sold, had promptly sent home for a wife. Frost was not proud of the fact of his birth, for it was a rare citizenship for a white man to hold, and he felt that it was shaming. He told no stories about his childhood, spent in the marshy flat of the Hutt Valley, reading and re-reading his father’s thumbed copy of Paradise Lost, the only book besides the Bible that the family possessed. (By the age of eight, Frost could recite every speech of God’s, the Son’s, and Adam’s—but never Satan’s, whom he found pugnacious, and never Eve’s, whom he thought feeble, and a bore.) It was not an unhappy childhood, but Frost was unhappy when he recalled it. When he spoke about England, it was as though he missed that place very dearly, and could not wait to return.
With the dissolution of the New Zealand Company, Mr. Frost senior was all but bankrupted, and cast into disrepute. He turned to his only son for aid. Charlie Frost secured scribal work in Wellington, and soon was offered a place at a bank in the Lambton quarter, a position that earned him enough to keep his parents in health and relative comfort. When gold was discovered in Otago, Frost transferred to a bank at Lawrence, promising to send the larger portion of his wages home, each month, by private mail—a promise he had never broken. He had not once returned home to the Hutt Valley, however, and did not plan to. Charlie Frost tended to conceive of all his relationships in terms of profit and return, and he did not spare a thought for others once he considered that his duty had been served. Now, in Hokitika (for he had followed the rush from Lawrence to the Coast), he did not think at all about his parents, except when he was writing to them each month. This was a difficult task, for his father’s letters were abrupt and mortified, and his mother’s, full of a dismayed silence—sentiments that grieved Charlie Frost, but only briefly. After his replies had been written and dispatched, he shredded their letters into spills for lighting his cigars, cutting the pages lengthwise so as to occlude their import absolutely; the spills he burned, with great indifference.