Staines pays for a night with Anna and shares her bed

Emery Staines’s decision to pay for a night with Anna Wetherell brings desire, money, and a promised gift into direct conflict. He means to take her to the Arahura Valley and offer her half the fortune he has buried there, but he cannot decide whether paying for her company compromises that gift. The night thus begins not as a settled romance but as an uneasy attempt to turn a commercial arrangement into a relationship freely shared.

The decision and its conflict

Staines’s deliberation grows out of a thought that he cannot comfortably set aside. Joseph Pritchard’s observation that Anna’s debt and dependency limit the offers made to her keeps returning to Staines’s mind. It does not simply inform him of her circumstances: it alters how he understands his own desire. He recognizes his attraction and the ease with which he might obtain her company, but the recognition makes him hesitate. He feels a bond with Anna, whose nature seems at once opposed to and in accord with his own, and imagines that she makes aspects of his character visible to him. In her presence he feels doubled; away from her, halved. The contrast leaves him less certain of the frankness and uncomplicated good nature on which he usually relies.

The practical proposal that follows is morally unsettled. Staines considers paying for Anna’s time, taking her to the valley in the morning, showing her the gold, and explaining that he intends to give her half. He asks himself whether the gift would be defeated if he had already paid for her company. The evidence does not resolve that question for him. Instead, it presents his uncertainty as the hinge of the scene: he wants both to act on his desire and to make a gift whose meaning is not reduced to payment.

The fortune behind the offer

The fortune Staines means to share is not an abstract promise. In court, he later explains that the ore came from the Aurora claim, was excavated by his employee Ah Quee, and was retorted into squares before being submitted as legal earnings. Staines admits that he did not bank the gold against the claim as he was obliged to do. He took it to the Arahura Valley and buried it. His offer to Anna therefore rests on wealth he has concealed, rather than on money already converted into an ordinary, settled inheritance.

The valley also carries a history that complicates any simple idea of possession. Crosbie Wells had paid the Crown fifty pounds for one hundred acres at the eastern end of the Arahura Valley, where he built a cottage and began a timber mill. That purchase followed the Crown’s acquisition of an extensive tract associated with Poutini Ngāi Tahu for three hundred pounds, leaving the people with only restricted lands, including the Arahura River and a parcel at Mawhera. The novel describes the purchase as unfair and, in retrospect, as theft. The hidden gold and the proposed gift sit within this wider conflict over who may claim land and wealth, even though Staines’s immediate dilemma is personal: what it means to give Anna a share of a fortune whose ownership and concealment are already charged with obligation.

The night and the promise of a beginning

The closing sequence confirms that Anna is purchased for the night and that she and Staines lie down together. Their brief exchange gives the encounter a language of beginnings without making its future certain. Staines declares, “Tonight shall be the very beginning.” Anna asks, “Was it?” When he answers, “It shall be. For me,” the difference between his resolve and her question remains audible. His statement promises a change in his own understanding; her response leaves open whether the same beginning has already taken shape for her.

The conversation that follows shifts from declaration to inward change. Anna says, “I feel—more than myself,” and then, “I feel—as though a new chamber of my heart has opened.” These words register the night as more than the execution of Staines’s plan, but they do not establish a lasting outcome or erase the conditions under which the encounter began. The scene holds together payment and intimacy, his proposed gift and her uncertain response, without treating one as proof of the other.

Place in the closing sequence

The book situates the night within a tightly interwoven final itinerary. While Anna and Staines lie together, Francis Carver travels toward the Arahura Valley after receiving a tip, and other characters move through their own linked episodes. The sequence later returns to the lovers: Staines wakes to an empty bed, while Anna, in need of solace, lights her pipe. Both set out into the night in confusion and collapse separately. These events mark the fragile opening they have imagined against an immediate separation; the shared bed does not protect either of them from the dangers unfolding around them.

The episode’s significance lies in that gap between intention and consequence. Staines hopes to combine desire with generosity by offering Anna half the buried fortune, yet his plan begins with a payment that troubles his own sense of what the gift should mean. The final exchange allows a possible new bond to be spoken, but the chapter’s parallel movements—hidden gold, a concealed history of land purchase, Carver’s journey, and the lovers’ subsequent departures—prevent the promise from becoming a secure resolution. The night is a beginning for Staines, as he insists, but the narrative immediately tests what such a beginning can withstand.