On the outskirts of Hokitika their company was further delayed. As they advanced upon the township they came upon a woman, utterly insensate and soaking wet, lying in the middle of the thoroughfare. She was alive, but only barely. Lauderback guessed that she had been drugged, but he could not elicit any kind of intelligence from her beyond a moan. He dispatched his aides to find a duty sergeant, lifted her body out of the mud, and, while he waited for his aides to return, reflected that his electoral campaign was off to a rather morbid start. The first three introductions he would make, in town, would be with the magistrate, the coroner, and the editor of the West Coast Times.
In the two weeks following this ill-starred arrival, Hokitika did not pay the impending elections much mind: it seemed that the death of a hermit and the fate of a whore (this, as Lauderback soon discovered, was the profession of the woman in the road) were subjects with which an electoral candidacy could not be expected to compete. Lauderback’s passage over the mountains was only very briefly mentioned in the West Coast Times, though two columns were devoted to his description of the dead man, Crosbie Wells. Lauderback was unperturbed by this. He was anticipating the parliamentary elections with the same relaxed self-possession with which he awaited all acts of providence, and all rewards. He had determined that he would win; therefore, he would win.
On the morning of Walter Moody’s arrival in Hokitika—the morning we take up Balfour’s tale—the shipping agent was sitting with his old acquaintance in the dining room of the Palace Hotel in Revell-street, talking about rigs. Lauderback was wearing a woollen suit of the lightest fawn, a hue that took moisture badly. The rain on his shoulders had not yet dried, so that it appeared as if he was wearing epaulettes; his lapels had turned dark and furry. But Lauderback was not the kind of man for whom a sartorial imperfection could lessen the impact of his bearing—in fact, the very opposite was true: the damp suit only made the man look finer. His hands had been scrubbed that morning with real soap; his hair was oiled; his leather gaiters shone like polished brass; in his buttonhole he had placed a native sprig of some sort, a pale, bunched flower whose name Balfour did not know. His recent journey across the Southern Alps had left a ruddy bloom of health in his cheeks. In sum, he looked very well indeed.
Balfour gazed at his friend across the table, only half-listening as the statesman, talking animatedly, made his case in defence of the ship-of-the-line—holding up his two palms as main and mizzen, and making use of the salt cellar as the fore. It was an argument that Balfour would ordinarily find engrossing, but the expression on the shipping agent’s face was anxious and detached. He was tapping the base of his glass against the table, and shifting in his seat, and, every few minutes, reaching up to pull hard on his nose. For he knew that with all this talk of ships, their conversation would turn, before long, to the subject of the Virtue, and to the cargo that she had been charged to carry to the Coast.
The crate containing Alistair Lauderback’s trunk had arrived in Hokitika on the morning of the 12th of January, two days before Lauderback himself. Balfour saw that the shipment was cleared, and gave instructions for the crate to be transferred from the quay into his warehouse. To the best of his knowledge, these instructions were obeyed. But by an unhappy twist of fate (so much unhappier, that Lauderback stood so high in Balfour’s esteem), the shipping crate then vanished altogether.
Balfour, upon discovering the crate was missing, was horrified. He applied himself to the project of its recovery—walking up and down the quay, inquiring at every door, and registering queries with every stevedore, porter, mariner, and customs officer—but his effort was to no avail. The crate was gone.
Lauderback had not yet spent two nights together in the suite of rooms on the upper floor of the Palace Hotel. He had spent the past fortnight making his introductions at camps and settlements up and down the Coast, a preliminary tour of duty from which he had only been released that very morning. Thus preoccupied, and believing the Virtue to be still in transit from Dunedin, he had not yet asked after his shipment—but Balfour knew that the question was coming, and once it did, he would have to tell the other man the truth. He swallowed a mouthful of wine.
On the table between them lay the remains of their ‘elevenses’, a term Lauderback used to refer to any meal or dish taken at an irregular hour, whether morning or night. He had eaten his fill, and had pressed Balfour to do likewise, but the shipping agent had repeatedly declined the invitation—he was not hungry, most especially for pickled onions and lamb’s fry, two dishes whose smell never failed to curl his tongue. As a compromise to his host, out of whose pocket he was dining, he had drunk an entire pitcher of wine, and a mug of beer besides—Dutch courage, he might have called it, but the spirits had done little to conquer his trepidation, and now he was feeling very sick.
‘Just one more piece of liver,’ said Lauderback.
‘Excellent stuff,’ Balfour mumbled. ‘Excellent—but I’m quite satisfied—my constitution—quite satisfied, thank you.’
‘It’s Canterbury lamb,’ said Lauderback.
‘Canterbury—yes—very fine.’
‘Caviar of the highlands, Tom.’
‘Quite satisfied, thank you.’
Lauderback looked down at the liver a moment. ‘I might have driven a flock myself,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘Up and over the pass. Five pounds a head, ten pounds a head—why, I’d have made a fortune, selling up. You might have told me that every piece of meat in this town is salt or smoked: I’d have brought a month of dinners with me. With a pair of dogs I might have done it very easily.’
‘Nothing easy about it,’ said Balfour.
‘Made myself a killing,’ said Lauderback.
‘Saving every sheep that breaks its neck in the rapids,’ said Balfour, ‘and every one that’s lost, and every one that won’t be driven. And all the miserable hours you’d spend counting them—rounding them up—chasing them down. I wouldn’t fancy it.’
‘No profit without risk,’ returned the politician, ‘and the journey was miserable enough; I might at least have made some money at the end of it. Heaven knows it might have improved my welcome.’
‘Cows, perhaps,’ said Balfour. ‘A herd of cows behaves itself.’
‘Still going begging,’ said Lauderback, pushing the plate of liver towards Balfour.
‘Couldn’t do it,’ said Balfour. ‘Couldn’t possibly.’
‘You take the rest of it then, Jock, old man,’ said Lauderback, turning to his aide. (He addressed his two attendants by their Christian names, for the reason that they shared the surname Smith. There was an amusing asymmetry to their Christian names: one was Jock, the other, Augustus.) ‘Stop your mouth with an onion, and we shall not have to hear any more tripe about your blessed brigantines—eh, Tom? Stop his mouth?’
And, smiling, he bent his head back towards Balfour.
Balfour pulled again at his nose. This was very like Lauderback, he thought; he encouraged agreement on the most trivial of points; he angled for consensus when a consensus was not due—and before one knew it, one was on his side, and campaigning.