‘Out with it!’

‘I can’t—’ He began to cough.

‘Why on earth have you been running?’ Mannering shouted. ‘You were supposed to be standing right outside! Standing still, d—n you! I don’t pay your wage so you can take your bloody constitutional!’

‘It’s the Godspeed,’ the boy managed.

All of a sudden the room was very still.

‘The Godspeed?’ Mannering barked, his eyes bulging. ‘What about it? Talk, you idiot!’

‘The nav lights on the spit,’ the boy said. ‘They went out—in the wind, and—the tide—’

‘What happened?’

‘Godspeed’s run aground,’ the boy said. ‘Foundered on the bar—she rolled, not ten minutes ago.’ He drew a ragged breath. ‘Her mainmast cracked—and then she rolled again—and then the surf came through the hatches and pulled her down. She’s a goner, sir. She’s a goner. She’s wrecked.’

ECLIPTIC

In which our allegiances have shifted, as our countenance makes clear.

Three weeks have passed since Walter Moody first set foot upon the sand, since the council at the Crown convened in stealth, and since the barque Godspeed was added to the wrecks upon the bar. When the twelve men greet each other now, it is with a special understanding—as when a mason meets a member of his guild, in daylight, and shares a glance that is eloquent and grave. Dick Mannering has nodded to Cowell Devlin in the Kaniere thoroughfare; Harald Nilssen has twice raised his hat to Thomas Balfour; Charlie Frost has exchanged the morning’s greetings with Joseph Pritchard while in line for breakfast at the sixpenny saloon. A secret always has a strengthening effect upon a newborn friendship, as does the shared impression that an external figure is to blame: the men of the Crown have become united less by their shared beliefs, we observe, than by their shared misgivings—which are, in the main, externally directed. In their analyses, variously made, of Alistair Lauderback, George Shepard, Lydia Wells, Francis Carver, Anna Wetherell, and Emery Staines, the Crown men have become more and more suggestive, despite the fact that nothing has been proven, no body has been tried, and no new information has come to light. Their beliefs have become more fanciful, their hypotheses less practical, their counsel less germane. Unconfirmed suspicion tends, over time, to become wilful, fallacious, and prey to the vicissitudes of mood—it acquires all the qualities of common superstition—and the men of the Crown Hotel, whose nexus of allegiance is stitched, after all, in the bright thread of time and motion, have, like all men, no immunity to influence.

For the planets have changed places against the wheeling canvas of the stars. The Sun has advanced one-twelfth along the tilted wheel of her ecliptic path, and with that motion comes a new world order, a new perspective on the whole. With the Sun in Capricorn we were reserved, exacting, and lofty in our distance. When we looked upon Man, we sought to fix him: we mourned his failures and measured his gifts. We could not imagine what he might have been, had he been tempted to betray his very nature—or had he betrayed himself without temptation, better still. But there is no truth except truth in relation, and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clockwork orchestration that alters every minute, never repeating, never still. We are no longer sheltered in a cloistered reminiscence of the past. We now look outward, through the phantasm of our own convictions: we see the world as we wish to perfect it, and we imagine dwelling there.

ARIES IN THE THIRD HOUSE

In which Te Rau Tauwhare goes in search of employment and Löwenthal’s suggestions are rebuffed.

At the newspaper office on Weld-street, Te Rau Tauwhare found the door propped open with a hatstand, and the sound of whistling issuing from within. He entered without knocking, and passed through the shop to the workroom at the rear, where the paper’s editor, Benjamin Löwenthal, was sitting at his workbench, setting the type for Monday’s edition of the West Coast Times.

In his left hand Löwenthal held a steel composing stick, roughly the size of a schoolboy’s rule; with his right, he selected and deftly fitted tiny blocks of type, their nicks facing outward, onto the square edge of the stick—a task that required him to read not only right-to-left, but also back-to-front, for the galley text was both mirrored and reversed. Once the line was set, he would slide it into the forme, a flat steel tray a little larger than a newspaper broadsheet; beneath each line he slotted thin straps of lead, to create a space between the lines, and occasionally, a raised brass rule, to produce a solid underscore. When he had slid the last line of text into the forme, he fitted wooden quoins around the edge of the tray, tapping them with a mallet to ensure that every block was snug; then he planed the surface of the galley with a piece of two-by-four to ensure each block of type sat at a uniform height. Finally, he dipped his hand-roller in a tray of ink, and coated the entire galley in a thin film of glossy black—working swiftly, so the ink did not have time to dry—and laid a trembling sheet of newsprint over it. Löwenthal always printed his first proof by hand, so as to check it for errors before committing the galley to the press—though he made few errors of an accidental or careless sort, being, by nature, something of a stickler for perfection.

He greeted Tauwhare very warmly. ‘I’m sure I haven’t seen you since the night Godspeed came to ground, Mr. Tauwhare,’ he said. ‘Can that be true?’

‘Yes,’ Tauwhare said, indifferently. ‘I have been in the north.’ He cast his eye over the other man’s workbench: cases of type, pots of ink and lye, brushes, tweezers, mallets, assorted blocks of lead and brass, a bowl of spotted apples, a paring knife.

‘Just arrived back, have you?’

‘This morning.’

‘Well then, I am sure I can guess why you’ve returned.’

Tauwhare frowned. ‘How can you guess?’

‘Why—for the widow’s séance! Do I not hit upon it?’

Tauwhare said nothing for a moment, still frowning. Then he said, with a tone of suspicion, ‘What is a séance?’

Löwenthal chuckled. He put down his composing stick, crossed the room, and took up Saturday’s paper from where it lay folded on the side of the washstand. ‘Here,’ he said. He unfolded it to the second page, tapped an advertisement with his ink-stained finger, and passed the paper to Tauwhare. ‘You ought to come along. Not to the séance itself—you need a special ticket for that—but to the party beforehand.’

The advertisement ran over two columns. It had been printed in a bold eighteen-point type that Löwenthal typically reserved for mastheads and historic headlines only, and it was bordered thickly in black. The Wayfarer’s Fortune, owned and operated by Mrs. Lydia Wells, late of the city of Dunedin, widow to Crosbie, was to open to the public for the first time that very evening. In honour of this occasion Mrs. Wells, a celebrated medium, would condescend to host Hokitika’s inaugural séance. This séance would be restricted to an elite audience, with tickets allocated according to the principle ‘first to come, first to be served’; the occasion would be prefaced, however, by an evening of ‘drinks and speculation’, open to the discerning public—who was encouraged, collectively, to come with an open mind.

This last injunction was perhaps easier said than done, for as the paper had it, the purpose of the séance was to locate, via the extraordinarily sensitive instrument of Mrs. Wells herself, certain tremors of spirit, the investigation of which would open a channel between this realm and the next, and thereby establish some kind of a rapport with the dead. Within the broad category of the dead, Mrs. Wells had been both excessively particular and excessively confident in making her selection: she planned to summon the shade of Mr. Emery Staines, who had not yet returned to Hokitika, and whose body, after five weeks of absence, had not yet been found.