‘Bad news, you call it? Thought you just said he was lucky.’
‘Lucky to have you,’ the clergyman said, and Balfour blushed.
‘You know,’ he said angrily, ‘it doesn’t count as a confession, just because it sounds like a secret, and you heard it on the sly.’
‘You are quite right to make that distinction,’ the clergyman said, still in pleasant tones. ‘But I did not overhear you by design.’
‘As to your design—as to what’s intentioned and what’s not. Who’s to know it?’
‘You were talking very loud.’
‘Who’s to know your design, I meant?’
‘With respect to my intentions, I’m afraid you’ll have to trust in my word—or in my cassock, if my word is not enough.’
‘Trust what in your word and your cassock? Trust what enough?’
‘Trust that I did not mean to eavesdrop,’ said the clergyman patiently. ‘Trust that I can keep a secret, when I’m asked.’
‘Well,’ Balfour said, ‘you’ve been asked. I’m asking. And you ought to leave off mentioning luck and bad news. That’s your opinion—that’s not what you heard.’
‘You’re right. I do apologise.’
‘Unsolicited, you know. And not appreciated.’
‘I do apologise. I shall be silent.’
Balfour waved his finger. ‘But you should leave off because I’ve asked you—not because of the confessing rule. Because it wasn’t a confession.’
‘No indeed: we agree on that.’ He added, in a different voice, ‘In any case, confession is a Catholic practice.’
‘But you’re Catholic.’ All of a sudden Balfour was feeling very drunk.
‘Free Methodist,’ the reverend man corrected, without offence; but he added, as a gentle reprimand, ‘You can’t tell a great deal about a man from his accent, you know.’
‘It’s Irish,’ said Balfour, stupidly.
‘My father hails from the county Tyrone. Before I came here, I was in Dunedin; before that, I was in New York.’
‘New York—now there’s a place!’
The reverend shook his head. ‘Everywhere is a place,’ he said.
Balfour faltered. After this admonishment, he felt that he could not pursue the subject of New York—but he could not think of anything else to speak about, beyond the subject he had already forbidden the reverend man to pursue. He sat a moment, scowling; then he said, ‘You’re stopping here?’
‘At this hotel?’
‘Ay.’
‘No: in fact my tent is flooded, and I’m taking my breakfast out of the rain,’ the clergyman said. He spread his hand to indicate the detritus of the meal before him, long since cold. ‘You see I have taken rather a long time of it, to make the shelter last.’
‘You don’t have a church to go to?’
This was a rather rude question, and one to which Balfour already knew the answer, for there were only three churches in Hokitika at that time. But he was feeling somehow thwarted by the man, in a way that he could not quite identify, and he wished to regain the upper hand—not by shaming him, exactly; but by cutting him down to size.
The clergyman only smiled, showing his tiny teeth. ‘Not yet,’ he said.
‘Never heard of a Free Methodist. I suppose it’s one of the new ones.’
‘A new practice, a new polity,’ said the man. He smiled again. ‘But an old doctrine, of course.’
Balfour thought him rather smug.
‘I suppose you’ve come on a mission,’ he said. ‘To turn the heathens.’
‘I notice that you make a great many suppositions,’ said the clergyman. ‘You have not yet asked a question without presuming to answer it as well.’
But Thomas Balfour did not take kindly to this kind of observation: he would not be instructed on the formation of his thought. He pushed his chair back from the table, indicating that he intended to take his leave.
‘To answer you,’ the clergyman went on, as Balfour reached for his coat, ‘I am to be the chaplain of the new gaol-house at Seaview. But until it is built’—he picked up his pamphlet, and slapped it in an explanatory fashion against the palm of his other hand—‘I’m a student of theology, that’s all.’
‘Theology!’ said Balfour. He pushed his arms into the sleeves of his coat. ‘You ought to be reading stiffer stuff than that, you know. Hell of a parish you’re walking into.’
‘God’s people, even so.’
Balfour nodded vaguely and made to leave. Suddenly a new thought struck him.
‘If you called it bad news,’ he said. ‘I’m going to wager that you were listening for a good long while.’
‘Yes,’ said the chaplain humbly. ‘I was. It was a name that caught my attention.’
‘Carver?’
‘No: Wells. Crosbie Wells.’
Balfour narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s Crosbie Wells to you?’
The chaplain hesitated. The truthful answer was that he did not know Crosbie Wells at all—and yet in the fortnight since that man’s death, he had done little else but think of him, and ponder the circumstances of his death. He conceded after a pause that he had had the solemn honour of digging Wells’s grave, and performing the last rites over his coffin, as it was lowered into the ground—an explanation that did not satisfy Thomas Balfour. The shipping agent was still regarding his new acquaintance with an expression of patent mistrust; his eyes narrowed still further when the chaplain (who ordinarily bore up very well under doubtful scrutiny) suddenly winced, and dropped his gaze.
The chaplain’s name—as Walter Moody would discover some nine hours later—was Cowell Devlin. He had arrived in Hokitika upon the clipper ship Virtue, which was leased and operated by Balfour Shipping, and which had conveyed, along with sundry passengers, timber, iron, fasteners, many tins of paint, assorted dry goods, several crates of livestock, and a great quantity of calico, the now-vanished shipping crate containing Alistair Lauderback’s trunk, and inside that, the copy of the contract under which the barque Godspeed had been sold. The Virtue had reached Hokitika two days before Alistair Lauderback himself; the Reverend Cowell Devlin had first arrived in Hokitika, therefore, two days before the death of Crosbie Wells.
Immediately upon landing, he had reported to the Police Camp, where the gaol’s governor, George Shepard, wasted little time in putting him to work. Devlin’s official duties would not begin until the completion of the new Hokitika gaol-house, high on the terrace of Seaview; in the meantime, however, Devlin might make himself useful around the Police Camp, and help with the daily management of the temporary gaol, which was, at that time, the residence of two women and nineteen men. Devlin was to teach each one of them to fear their Maker, and to instil in their wayward hearts a proper respect for the iron cladding of the law—or so the gaoler phrased it. (Devlin would soon discover that he and Shepard differed very radically in their pedagogic sensibilities.) Having taken a brief tour of the Police Camp and praised the style of its management, Devlin inquired whether he might take his lodging in the gaol-house each night, so as to sleep among the felons, and share their bread. The gaoler received this proposition with distaste. He did not exactly reject Devlin’s inquiry, but he paused, licked his lip with a pale, dry tongue, and then suggested that Devlin might do better to take up residence in one of Hokitika’s many hotels. Shepard went on to warn the chaplain that his Irish accent might invite demonstrations of partisanship from Englishmen, and the expectation of a Catholic sensibility from his fellow Irish; he advised him, finally, to be discerning when choosing his company, and still more discerning when choosing his words—and with this pronouncement, he welcomed Devlin to Hokitika, and promptly bid him good morning.
But Cowell Devlin did not have funds enough to support several months’ lodging in a hotel, and it was not his habit, furthermore, to indulge another man’s pessimism about partisan displays. He did not take Shepard’s advice, and he did not heed his warning. He purchased a standard-issue miner’s tent, strung it up some fifty yards from the Hokitika beachfront, and weighted the calico pockets with stones. Then he made his way back to Revell-street, bought a mug of small beer at the most crowded hotel he could find, and began to introduce himself, to Englishmen and Irishmen alike.