Moody gazed into the fire, the coals of which had long since gone to ash. Thomas Balfour had not told his tale at all chronologically, and his narrative had been further convoluted by countless interruptions, clarifications, and echoes—all chasing one another, as endless circles, going round. What a convoluted picture it was—and how difficult to see, in its entirety! Moody turned his mind to all that he had heard that evening. He tried to place the recounted events into the order in which they had actually occurred.
Roughly nine months prior to the present day, the former convict Francis Carver had successfully cheated Alistair Lauderback out of his ship, the Godspeed. At some point thereafter, and by an unknown complication, he had then lost the shipping crate by which he had forced the politician’s hand. Inside this shipping crate was a trunk containing approximately four thousand pounds in pure gold, a fortune that had been meticulously sewn into the lining of five dresses. The seamstress was a woman named Lydia Wells, who was, at that time, posing as Francis Carver’s wife.
Four thousand pounds was a great deal of money, and Carver, naturally, wished to recover it, once he discovered that the thing had been lost. He sailed to Hokitika, presumably guessing that the crate had been delivered there by mistake, and placed an advertisement in the West Coast Times, offering a large reward for the crate’s safe return. He placed this advertisement under the name of Crosbie Francis Wells—producing a birth certificate to confirm this identity—though he was known, both beforehand and thereafter, by the name of Francis Carver. It was yet unknown why Carver’s blackmail of Lauderback had required him (or inspired him) to assume an alias. It was also unknown why Crosbie Wells’s birth certificate, if indeed genuine, had been in Carver’s possession at that time.
The real Crosbie Wells (or perhaps, Moody thought, another Crosbie Wells) lived alone in the Arahura Valley, some miles north of Hokitika. Wells was not a notorious personage, and his acquaintance was small; before his death he was little known in Hokitika, and those who did know him did not suspect him to be a person of any wealth or consequence. It was Ah Sook, investigating the circumstances of his death nine months later, who discovered that Wells had made a strike on the fields at Dunstan several years before, pulling in a fortune of thousands of pounds. Evidently Wells had desired, for some reason, to keep this information a secret.
Francis Carver placed his advertisement in the Times in early June (the precise month having been confirmed by Benjamin Löwenthal). While in Hokitika he offered Te Rau Tauwhare a private reward for any news of a man named Crosbie Wells. Tauwhare did not know a man of that name or description, however, and the shipping crate was not found; Carver returned to Dunedin empty-handed.
Anna Wetherell had also arrived in Hokitika upon the Godspeed, clad in a purple working gown rented from her new employer, Dick Mannering. When she learned, some weeks after her arrival, that a trunk containing women’s dresses had been salvaged from a wreck, she purchased all five.
It was not unreasonable to presume that Anna was ignorant of the fortune these gowns contained, and ignorant, also, of their origin. She had never spoken of the hidden gold to any man, and she had never attempted in any visible way to remove it. Moody considered this. Was total ignorance really possible? As an opium eater, perhaps she had not noticed the added weight about her person as a sober woman might; then again, she was, as Gascoigne had attested, a former acquaintance of Lydia Wells’s, and perhaps she had recognised the garments as Lydia’s. Well, Moody thought, whatever the case, Anna had been wearing that entire fortune—a portion at a time, of course—ever since then, save for a month-long period in September and October, when the advanced stage of her pregnancy had compelled her to wear, instead, a frock designed for lying-in.
When Anna’s landlord, Edgar Clinch, discovered the fortune hidden in the gowns, he concluded that the whoremonger Dick Mannering must be using Anna to smuggle raw ore off the goldfields, as a way of evading duty at the bank. The thought of this collusion grieved Clinch extremely, but he had no reason to press the matter with either party, and did not do so.
Clinch was not the only man to chance upon the hidden fortune in Anna’s gowns, however, and he was not the only man to misapprehend its likely meaning. The digger Quee Long had also uncovered the secrets hidden in Anna’s seams—around much the same time, in fact—and had leaped to the very same conclusion as Clinch. Ah Quee knew first-hand that Mannering was more than capable of fraud, for he had been cheated by the magnate once before. Ah Quee decided to beat Mannering at his own game. He began siphoning the gold out of Anna’s dresses, retorting the dust into squares, and stamping these squares with the name of the goldmine Aurora—so as to ensure that the profit would be banked against his own claim, which by this time had been purchased by a young prospector named Emery Staines.
The project of removing the gold from Anna’s dress took several months. Whenever Anna visited Ah Quee’s hut in Kaniere Chinatown, she was all but senseless with opium; Ah Quee was therefore able to remove the gold with his thread and needle without her knowledge, while she slept. Anna did not wear her orange whoring dress when she travelled to Chinatown. For this reason, the orange dress had remained filled with gold, long after Ah Quee had stripped the other four of their fortune.
Nobody knew how, or why, Ah Quee’s retorted fortune had been stolen from the vault at the camp station. The most probable thief, given the information currently available, was the vanished prospector, Staines—who, significantly, lacked a motivation. The young man was colossally rich, and, by popular opinion at least, colossally fortunate. Why should he desire to steal from his own indentured worker? And why should he choose to stash the gold in another man’s cottage, so far from his own claims? Well, whatever the young man’s reasons, Moody thought, at least one thing was certain: Staines had never banked Ah Quee’s earnings against the Aurora as he was legally obliged to do. This was very perplexing, for the retorted gold, if banked, would have transformed the Aurora goldmine from a duffer into a homeward-bounder overnight.
Emery Staines was also very strangely implicated by the deed of gift that Cowell Devlin had discovered in Crosbie Wells’s stove—which, though it did not bear his signature, bore his name. This deed seemed to imply that Emery Staines and Crosbie Wells had been associates of some kind, and that the hoarded fortune had been intended, for some reason, as a gift from Emery Staines to Anna Wetherell. But this was even more confounding, for whichever way one looked at it, the gold was not Staines’s to give away!