This was a sentiment that Ah Sook had never heard expressed; he was silent for a time, digesting it. Ah Quee took off his hat, struck it several times with his palm, and replaced it on his head. Somewhere in the bush nearby a bellbird gave its lusty, open-throated cry; the call was taken up by another, and another, and for a moment the trees around them were alive with song.
It was by preference, and not by necessity, that Sook Yongsheng lived and worked alone. He was not surly by temperament, and in fact did not find it difficult to form friendships, nor to allow those friendships to deepen, once they had been formed; he simply preferred to answer to himself. He disliked all burdens of responsibility, most especially when those responsibilities were expected, or enforced—and friendship, in his experience, nearly always devolved into matters of debt, guilt, and expectation. Those men he did choose to call his intimates were those who demanded nothing, and gave much; as a consequence, there were many charitable figures in Ah Sook’s past, and very few upon whom he had expressly doted. He had the sensibility of a social vanguard, unattached, full of conviction, and, in his own perception at least, almost universally misunderstood. The sense of being constantly undervalued by the world at large would develop, over time, into a kind of private demagoguery; he was certain of the comprehensive scope of his own vision, and rarely thought it necessary to explain himself to other men. In general his beliefs were projections of a simpler, better world, in which he liked, fantastically, to dwell—for he preferred the immaculate fervour of his own solitude to all other social obligations, and tended, when in company, to hold himself aloof. Of this propensity, he was not at all unaware, for he was highly reflexive, and given to extensive self-analysis of the most rigorous and contemplative kind. But he analysed his own mind as a prophet analyses his own strange visions—that is, with reverence, and believing always that he was destined to be the herald of a cosmic raison d’être, a universal plan.
‘My history with Francis Carver,’ he said at last, ‘is a story with many beginnings; but I hope that it will only have one end.’
‘Tell it,’ said Ah Quee.
Harald Nilssen closed the door of his quayside office, sat down at his desk, and without first removing his hat or his coat, penned a hasty note to Joseph Pritchard. The tone of his letter was frantic, even slovenly, but Nilssen did not care to revise it. Without re-reading his words, he blotted the page, folded the paper, and stamped the sealing wax with the circular matrix of Nilssen & Co. He then summoned Albert, and instructed the boy to deliver the note to Pritchard’s drug emporium on Collingwood-street post-haste.
Once Albert had departed Nilssen hung up his hat, exchanged his rain-soaked coat for a dry robe, and reached for his pipe—but even after the tobacco was lit, and he had sat down, put up his feet, and crossed his ankles, he did not feel reassured. He felt chilly. His skin was damp to the touch, and the rhythm of his heart would not slow. He stuck the pipe in the corner of his mouth, as he liked to do, and turned his attention to the subject of his disquiet: the promise he had made, earlier that day, to George Shepard, Governor of the Hokitika Gaol.
Nilssen wondered whether he ought to break his vow of silence and share the details of Shepard’s proposition with the assembly that evening. The matter was certainly relevant to their prospective discussion, principally for the reason that it concerned a percentage of Crosbie Wells’s fortune, but also because, Nilssen suspected, Shepard’s antipathy towards the politician Lauderback was not just a matter of convict labour, gaol-houses, and roads. When one considered that the politician Alistair Lauderback had been the first to encounter Crosbie Wells’s dead body—well, Nilssen thought, it was clear that Governor Shepard was as mixed up in the Crosbie Wells conspiracy as the rest of them! But how much did Shepard know—and whom was he serving, beyond his own self-interest? Had he known about the fortune hidden in Crosbie Wells’s cottage? Had Lauderback known about it, for that matter? Brooding, Nilssen recrossed his ankles, and repositioned his pipe in his mouth, cupping the bowl between the crook of his index finger and the pad of his thumb. Whichever way one looked at it, he thought, there was no denying that George Shepard knew a great deal more than he was letting on.
Harald Nilssen was used to commanding public attention, an authority he achieved through the use of wit, declamation, and comical self-styling. He became very quickly bored when he was required, for whatever reason, to inhabit the periphery of a crowded room. His vanity required constant stimulation, and constant proof that the ongoing creation of his selfhood was a project that he himself controlled. He was vexed, now, to think that he had been played as a fool, not because he believed himself undeserving of such treatment (Nilssen knew very well that he was an impressionable type, and often joked about this very fact) but because he could not perceive Shepard’s motivation in having treated him so.
He puffed at his pipe, conjuring in his mind the prospective gaol-house, the asylum, the scaffold of the gallows, built high above the drop. All of it would be built with his commission, and by his leave. Hang Governor Shepard, he thought suddenly. He had no real obligation to keep Shepard’s secret—why, he did not even know, exactly, what that secret really was! He would share Shepard’s request with the assembly that evening, and he would share his own suspicions about the man, to boot. He was not yet contractually bound to keep his silence. He had not yet signed his name to any document. What did that matter, anyway? A gaol-house was not a private property. It belonged to all of Hokitika. A gaol-house was built by the government—and on behalf of the adherents of the law.
Presently Nilssen heard the door in the outer office open and close. He leaped up. It was Albert, returning from Joseph Pritchard’s drug hall. His jacket was very wet, and when he stepped into Nilssen’s office, he carried with him the earthy smell of rain.
‘Did he burn the letter?’ Nilssen said anxiously. ‘Did you watch him burn it? What’s that you’ve got there?’
‘Pritchard’s reply,’ said Albert. He held up a folded piece of paper.
‘I said there wasn’t to be a reply! I said that!’
‘Yes,’ said Albert, ‘and I told him—but he penned one anyway.’
Nilssen eyed the document in Albert’s hand. ‘Did he burn my letter, at least?’
‘Yes,’ Albert said, but then he hesitated.
‘What? What?’
‘Well,’ Albert said, ‘when I said he had to burn it—he laughed.’
Nilssen narrowed his eyes. ‘Why did he laugh?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Albert. ‘But I thought I should tell you that he did. Maybe it doesn’t matter.’
The muscle beneath Nilssen’s eye began to pulse. ‘He laughed when he read the letter? When he read the words?’
‘No,’ said Albert. ‘He only laughed before. When I said he had to burn it.’
‘He found it amusing, did he?’
‘That you’d told him to burn it,’ said Albert, nodding. He was fingering the edges of the letter in his hand. He wanted very much to ask his employer what all of this to-do was on account of, but he did not know how to ask without risking a rebuke. Aloud he said, ‘Do you want to read the reply?’
Nilssen held out his hand. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You didn’t read it, did you?’
‘No,’ Albert said, looking wounded. ‘It’s sealed.’
‘Oh, yes, so it is,’ said Nilssen. He took the note from Albert’s hand, turned it over, and broke apart the seal with his fingers. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he said, before he unfolded the paper. ‘You can go.’