‘What are you doing?’ Anna said.
‘You’re hiding it—only you won’t tell me why!’
‘Those are my things.’
He laughed. ‘Keepsakes, are they? Precious mementos? Antiques?’
He wrenched the drawer from her dresser, and upended it over the floor. A cascade of trinkets rattled out. Coins, wooden spools of thread, ribbons, covered buttons, a pair of dressmaker’s shears. Three rolling champagne corks. A man’s shaving brush—she must have stolen that from somewhere. Matches, stays. The ticket from her passage to New Zealand. Wads of cloth. A silver-backed looking glass. Pritchard raked the pile. There was Anna’s pipe—and there ought to be a little box to match it, or perhaps a little pouch, inside of which her resin would be folded in a square of waxed paper, like toffee purchased from a store. He cursed.
‘You’re a beast,’ Anna said. ‘You’re detestable.’
He ignored her, and picked up the pipe.
It was of Chinese making, fashioned from bamboo, and about as long as Pritchard’s forearm. The bowl of the pipe sat some three inches away from its end; it protruded like a doorknob, and was fixed to the wood by means of a metal saddle. Pritchard weighed the thing in his hands, holding it as a flautist holds a flute. He sniffed it. There was a dark residue around the rim of the bowl—so someone had partaken of the pipe, and recently.
‘Happy?’ she said.
‘Watch your lip. Where’s the needle?’
‘There.’ She pointed at a square of cloth among the sorry detritus on the floor, through which was pushed a long hatpin, stained black at the tip. Pritchard sniffed this also. He then inserted the hatpin into the aperture of the bowl and rolled the tip about.
‘You’re going to break it.’
‘Be doing you a favour, then.’
(Pritchard deplored Anna’s craving for the drug—but why? He himself had taken opium many times. He had taken it in Kaniere, in fact, with Ah Sook, in the tiny hut that Sook had hung with Oriental fabrics, to still the air so that his precious lamps would not flicker in a draught.)
At last Pritchard tossed the pipe aside—but carelessly, so that the bowl struck the floorboards, and rang out.
‘Beast,’ Anna said again.
‘I’m a beast, am I?’
He lunged for her, not really intending to hurt her, but merely to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, until she told him the truth. But he was clumsy, and she wrenched away, and for the third time that afternoon, Pritchard’s nostrils were filled with the rich, briny smell of the ocean—and, impossibly, the metallic taste of cold—as if a wind had slapped him in the face, as if a sail had snapped above him, as if a storm was in the air. He faltered.
‘Get back,’ she said. She was holding her hands before her face, her fingers half-curled into fists. ‘I mean it, Joseph. I won’t be called a liar. Get back and get out.’
‘I’ll call you a liar if you d—ned well lie.’
‘Get back.’
‘Tell me where you’ve hidden it.’
‘Get back!’
‘Not until you tell me where it is!’ he shouted. ‘Tell me, you useless bloody whore!’
He lunged for her again, in desperation; he saw her eyes flash, and in the next moment she had reached into her breast and withdrawn a muff pistol, the single-loading kind. It was a slip of a piece, hardly longer than Pritchard’s finger, but from a distance of two paces it could shatter his chest. Instinctively he put up his hands. The piece was facing backward, with the muzzle pointing up towards her chin, and Anna had to spin the piece to fit it into her hand—but she was frantic, and in that moment three things happened at once. Pritchard stepped backwards, and stumbled on the edge of the rattan rug; behind him, the door burst open, and someone gave a cry; and Anna half-turned at the noise, started forwards, and shot herself in the breast.
The report from the small gun was hollow, even unremarkable—like the cracking of a topsail far above a deck. It seemed an echo of itself, as if the real shot had fired somewhere much further away, and this noise was just a copy. Stupidly Pritchard wheeled about, turning his back on Anna, to confront the figure at the door. His mind felt full of fog; he registered, in some distant way, that the man who had just entered was Aubert Gascoigne, the new clerk at the Magistrate’s Court. Pritchard did not know Gascoigne at all well. Some three weeks ago the clerk had come to his laboratory, seeking to fill a prescription for a bowel complaint—absurdly, Pritchard thought of that now. He wondered whether his tincture had helped the other man as he had promised it would.
For the briefest second, nobody moved … or perhaps no time passed at all. Then Gascoigne roared an oath, started forward, and fell upon the body of the whore. He wrenched her head back and the pistol clattered to the side—but the white of her neck was unscarred—there was no blood—and she was breathing. Her hands flew to her throat.
‘You fool—you fool!’ Gascoigne shouted. There was a sob in his voice. He grabbed her tatted collar with both hands and ripped it open. ‘Blank cartridge, was it? Wax pellet, was it? Thought you’d give us all another scare? What the devil do you think you’re playing at?’
Anna’s hand was moving over her breast, her fingers touching and tapping in confusion. Her eyes were wide.
Pritchard said, ‘A blank?’ He leaned down and picked up the pistol.
The barrel was hot, and the smell of gunpowder was in the air. But he could see no spent casing, and no hole anywhere. The wall behind Anna was plastered and smooth, just as it had been a second ago. The two men looked about—at the walls, at the floor, at Anna. The whore looked down at her breast. Pritchard held the pistol out, letting it dangle foolishly from his index finger, and Gascoigne took it up. Deftly he snapped open the barrel and peered into the breech. Then he turned on Anna.
‘Who loaded this piece?’ he demanded.
‘I did it myself,’ Anna said, bewildered. ‘I can show you the spares.’
‘Show me. Show me the spares.’
She clambered up, and went to the whatnot beside the bed; after a moment she returned with a tin box in which seven cartridges were rolling on a scrap of brown paper. Gascoigne touched them with his finger. Then he passed the pistol to the whore. ‘Do it just as you did. The very same.’ Anna nodded dumbly. She pivoted the barrel sideways and fitted a cartridge into the breech. She then snapped the barrel back correctly, cocked the piece, and handed the loaded pistol back to him. She looked terrified, Pritchard thought—dumbfounded, mechanical. Gascoigne took the pistol from her, stepped back several paces, levelled the piece, and fired at the headboard of her bed. The report sounded just as it had before—this time Pritchard heard a murmur of alarm from the floor below, and rapid footsteps—and they all looked to the spot where he had fired. A perfect hole, darkened slightly at its edges by the heat, pierced the centre of her pillow; a puff of feathered dust had risen up from the stuffing, and as they watched, floated down in a film of gauze. Gascoigne moved forward, and tossed the pillow aside. With his fingers he felt around the headboard of the bed, just as Anna had felt around her neck for injury, and after a moment he gave a grunt of satisfaction.
‘It’s there?’ Pritchard said.
‘Hardly made a scratch,’ Gascoigne said, testing the depth of the hole with the end of his finger. ‘Those muff pistols, they’re not worth much.’