‘A prayer needn’t always be a supplication, of course,’ Devlin added. ‘Some prayers are expressions of gladness; some are expressions of thanks. But there is hope in all good feeling, Te Rau, even in feelings that remember the past. The prayerful man, the good man, is always hopeful; he is always an optimist. A man is made hopeful by his prayers.’

Tauwhare, who had received this sermon doubtfully, only nodded. ‘These are wise words,’ he added, feeling pity for his interlocutor.

In general Tauwhare’s conception of prayer was restricted to the most ritualised and oratorical sort. The ordered obeisance of the whaikorero produced in him, as did all rituals of speech and ceremony, a feeling of centrality and calm, the likes of which he could not manufacture alone, and nor did he wish to. The sensation was quite distinct from the love he felt for his family, which he experienced as a private leaping in his breast, and distinct, too, from the pride he felt in himself, which he felt as a pressurised excitement, an elated certainty that no man would ever match him, and no man would ever dare to try. It ran deeper than the natural goodness that he felt, watching his mother shuck mussels and pile the slippery meat into a wide-mouthed flax basket on the shore, and knowing, as he watched her, that his love was good, and wholly pure; it ran deeper than the virtuous exhaustion he felt after a day stacking the rua kumara, or hauling timber, or plaiting harakeke until the ends of his fingers were pricked and raw. Te Rau Tauwhare was a man for whom the act of love was the true religion, and the altar of this religion was one in place of which no idols could be made.

‘Shall we go to the grave together?’ Devlin said.

The wooden headstone that marked Crosbie Wells’s grave had surrendered already to the coastal climate. Two weeks following the hermit’s death, the wooden plaque was already swollen, the face already spotted with a rime of black mould. The indentation of the cooper’s engraving had softened, and the thin accent of paint had faded from white to a murky yellow-grey, giving the impression, not altogether dispelled by the stated year of his death, that the man had been deceased for a very long time. The plot was yet unseeded by lichen or grass, and, despite the rain, had a barren look—not of earth recently turned, but of earth that had settled, and would not be turned again.

The favoured epitaphs here were chiefly beatitudes from Matthew, or oft-quoted verses from the Psalms. Injunctions to sleep and be at peace did not reassure, however, as they might have done in some hedged and cobbled parish, ten thousand miles away. It was in the company of the lost and the drowned that Crosbie Wells lay at his eternal rest, for there were yet only a handful of headstones in the plot at Seaview, and most of them were memorials erected in honour of vessels that had been wrecked, or lost at sea: the Glasgow, the City of Dunedin, the New Zealand—as though entire cities, entire nations, had been bound for the Coast, only to run aground, or sink, or disappear. On the hermit’s right was a memorial to the brigantine Oak, the first ship to founder at the mouth of the Hokitika River, a fact engraved with forbidding premonition upon the greenish stone; on Wells’s left was a wooden headstone barely larger than a plaque, which bore no name at all, only a verse, unattributed: MY TIMES ARE IN YOUR HAND. None too far from the cemetery was the site of George Shepard’s future gaol-house, the foundations of which had been paced and measured out already, the dimensions marked in white lead paint upon the soil.

It was the first time that Tauwhare had ventured to Seaview since Wells’s interment, a ceremony that had taken place before a small and perfunctory audience, and despite very heavy rain. In these aspects, and in the general speed with which the conventional blessings were dispatched, Wells’s funeral had seemed to embody every kind of inconvenience, and every kind of dreariness. Needless to say Te Rau Tauwhare had not been invited to contribute to the proceedings; in fact George Shepard had specifically enjoined him, with an ominous wag of his large-knuckled finger, to keep silent during all but the chaplain’s ‘Amen’—a chorus to which Tauwhare did not, in the event, add his voice, for Devlin’s benediction was quite swallowed in the downpour. He was permitted to assist in lowering Wells’s coffin down into the mud of the hole, however, and in depositing thirty, forty, fifty shovelfuls of wet earth after it. He should have liked to do this alone, for the party made short work of filling the hole, and it seemed to Tauwhare that everything was over far too soon. The men, pulling their collars up about their ears, buttoned their coats, took up their earth-spattered tools, and trooped single-file back down the muddy switchback to the warmth and light of Hokitika proper, where they shucked their greatcoats, and wiped their faces dry, and changed their sodden boots for indoor shoes.

Tauwhare came silently upon the grave of his friend, Devlin following, his hands folded, his expression peaceful. Tauwhare halted some five or six feet from the wooden headstone, and looked upon the plot as though upon a deathbed from a chamber doorway—as though fearing to step, bodily, into the room.

Tauwhare had never seen Crosbie Wells beyond the Arahura Valley. He had certainly never seen him here, upon this forsaken terrace, ravaged by the sky. Had the man not said countless times that it was in the solitary Arahura that he wished to end his days? It was senseless that he should have been laid to rest here, among men who were not his brethren, upon soil he had not worked, and did not love—while his dear old cottage stood empty and abandoned, some dozen miles away! It was that soil that ought to have claimed him. It was that earth that ought to have turned his death to fertile life. It was in the Arahura, Tauwhare thought, that he ought to have been buried, in the end. At the edge of the clearing, perhaps … or by the plot of his tiny garden … or on the north-facing side of the cottage, in a patch of sun.

Te Rau Tauwhare came closer—into the phantom chamber, to the foot of the phantom bed. A wave of guilt overcame him. Ought he to confess to the chaplain after all—that he, Tauwhare, had led Crosbie to his death? Yes: he would make his confession; and Devlin would pray for him, as though for a Christian man. Tauwhare squatted down upon his haunches, placed a careful palm over the wet earth that covered Crosbie’s heart, and held it there.

‘Weeping may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning,’ Devlin said.

‘Whatu ngarongaro he tangata, toitu he whenua.’

‘May the Lord keep him; may the Lord keep us, as we pray for him.’

Tauwhare’s palm had made an indentation in the soil; seeing this, he lifted his hand a little, and with his fingertips, smoothed the print away.

At the West Coast Times office on Weld-street, Benjamin Löwenthal’s Shabbat was just coming to an end. Charlie Frost found him sitting at his kitchen table, finishing his supper.

Löwenthal was rather less pleased to see Frost than he had been to see Thomas Balfour earlier that afternoon, for he guessed, rightly, that Frost was come to speak about the estate of Crosbie Wells—a subject of which he had long since tired. He welcomed Frost into his kitchen courteously, however, and invited the young banker to take a seat.

Frost, for his part, did not apologise for interrupting Löwenthal’s devotions, for he was not worldly, and he did not know them to be devotions. He sat down at the ink-stained table, thinking it very strange that Löwenthal had cooked himself such an elaborate supper, only to partake of it alone. The candle he took for an eccentricity; he glanced at it only once.