Anna Wetherell’s forgery of Emery Staines’s signature turns a charred document into a claim on the fortune found in Crosbie Wells’s cottage. The episode is both an act of deliberate deception and a struggle for legal standing: Anna seeks £2,000 promised by a deed, while Lydia Wells’s successful appeal is bringing her own share of the same estate within reach. The claim’s force depends on absent people, disputed signatures, and a paper whose truth cannot be separated from the circumstances in which it is produced.

The deed and its promise

In the parlour arranged for the widow’s afternoon appointments, Cowell Devlin waits for Anna to sit, opens his Bible, and removes the deed of gift he has kept between its pages. The document is charred, but its central promise is legible: on 11 October 1865, Emery Staines is to give Anna £2,000, with Crosbie Wells as witness. The sum is substantial, and the named witness connects the paper directly to the dead man whose cottage has yielded a fortune.

Anna’s response is shaped by her difficulty with reading. She explains that she never learned to read properly: she can slowly sound out a line, but struggles with a newspaper. Yet this document comes to her with startling ease. Her account makes the moment more than a simple discovery of a possible inheritance. The deed is at once written evidence and something she can, unexpectedly, read without labor; its meaning arrives with a clarity that contrasts with her limited literacy.

The sum named on the deed also gives the claim a concrete scale. Anna later describes herself as entitled to half the fortune in Crosbie’s cottage, while the document itself promises £2,000. The connection places her demand within the larger contest over the Wells gold, but it does not make her entitlement self-evident. A promise to give money, a fortune found after the donor has disappeared, and the legal process for recovering assets are different matters, even when the same piece of paper appears to join them.

Anna’s signature and Devlin’s discovery

Once Devlin leaves, Anna crosses the parlour to the writing desk. She takes Mrs. Wells’s pen, opens the ink, and writes Emery Staines’s name on the deed. She has never seen his signature, yet believes she has reproduced its form exactly. The signature, as she understands it, is carelessly diminishing and cheerfully illegible, with a doubled curl before the E and a flattened S. Her confidence rests not on having copied a known specimen but on her conviction that she has captured the signature’s recognizable character.

Devlin returns carrying the tea tray and catches her with the document. He sets the tray down sharply, advances, and holds out his hand. Anna gives him the paper. He is outraged, but she does not retreat: she insists that the signature is Staines’s and that the deed is valid. Her assertion brings the scene’s central contradiction into focus. She has just written a name that is not her own to write, yet treats her skill in forming it as sufficient to make the document legally sound.

Anna’s own reasoning is brutally practical. With Staines missing and Crosbie dead, she believes neither donor nor witness is in a position to challenge the paper. In her view, the document has been signed, witnessed, and made effective by the very act she has performed. She feels unusually clear-minded and without shame, and regards the forged signature not as a weakness in the claim but as the step that makes it usable. The episode does not turn that confidence into proof: it shows instead how readily a desperate claim can become, in its claimant’s mind, an accomplished right.

A claim against Lydia Wells

The forged deed soon enters a direct confrontation with Lydia Wells’s claim to the estate. In Lydia’s parlour, she challenges Anna to explain what she is doing there. Anna says that, by the authority of a document, half the fortune in Crosbie’s cottage belongs to her. Lydia tells her to fetch the paper. Devlin refuses to disclose anything further, observes Lydia’s pallor, and offers to escort Anna directly to the courthouse. Anna takes his arm and makes clear that she does not intend merely to repay Lydia’s kindness.

The exchange changes the meaning of the document from a private discovery into a competing legal claim. Anna’s assertion is directed not only at the estate but at Lydia, whose appeal has just been granted. Their encounter is charged by the prospect that the same fortune may be divided or delayed by rival claims. Anna leaves with Devlin rather than resolving the matter in the parlour; the deed must now be tested in an institutional setting.

At the Hokitika Courthouse, Anna hands the charred paper to solicitor John Fellowes without explanation. He examines it and says that it appears in order, while stressing that it is not equivalent to a cheque. Eight weeks have passed with Staines still missing, and his assets have been seized. Fellowes says that even a valid deed cannot simply transfer £2,000 when Staines no longer possesses that sum; the remaining assets might yield only a few hundred pounds. The distinction is crucial: the paper may assert a gift, but it cannot by itself restore money that has been confiscated or establish what remains available to pay it.

When Fellowes asks whether the basis for Anna’s claim can be proved, she frames the consequence conditionally: if her account is true, £2,000 of the fortune is hers by the deed’s authority. Fellowes then explains that the timing is unusually consequential. Lydia’s appeal has just been granted, and her apportioned share is in the process of being released. He can place a hold on Lydia’s claim while the deed is examined. The document thus threatens to interrupt an inheritance already moving toward payment, even though Anna has not yet established that it entitles her to the sum she seeks. Fellowes keeps the deed for the time being, retaining the central piece of evidence while the competing claim remains unresolved.

Signatures, identity, and the limits of proof

The wider documentary trail makes the deed’s signatures part of a larger problem of identity and authenticity. Months earlier, Francis Carver advertised in the West Coast Times for a missing shipping crate under the name Crosbie Francis Wells, presenting a birth certificate to support that identity. The crate contained a trunk holding about £4,000 in gold sewn into five dresses. Carver’s use of the Wells name and his possession of the certificate leave the provenance of his assumed identity uncertain; the newspaper notice itself preserves a name attached to a lost object and a reward, but not a reliable explanation of how the certificate came into his hands.

Later, Walter Moody finds a different clue in a trunk associated with Francis Wells: a concealed packet of letters hidden beneath the calico lining. The trunk’s bill of sale bears a signature designed to be read ambiguously as Francis Wells or C. Francis Wells. This is a separate document from Anna’s deed, but it underlines the recurring danger of treating a name on paper as transparent proof of the person behind it. In this story, signatures and certificates can identify, disguise, or implicate; their meaning depends on comparison and custody as much as on what they say.

That distinction becomes explicit in court. Walter Moody points to the signature of Crosbie Wells on the deed and compares it with the signature on private correspondence involving Alistair Lauderback and on Crosbie’s marriage certificate. He says that these resemble one another, whereas the signature on the Godspeed bill of sale does not, supporting the conclusion that Carver’s bill of sale is forged. This comparison bears on the deed’s documentary history and on Carver’s fraud; it does not erase Anna’s act of writing Staines’s name. The event therefore leaves two evidentiary questions in view: whether the deed’s witness and surrounding documents can be authenticated, and whether the donor’s promised gift can be established through the signature Anna supplied.

Anna’s pursuit exposes the gap between possession of a document and possession of an enforceable right. The charred deed can be read, carried to court, and used to delay Lydia’s inheritance claim, yet its value remains vulnerable to missing assets, absent signatories, and scrutiny of the marks on the page. A fortune travels through clothing, a cottage, an estate claim, and a solicitor’s wallet; at each stage, ownership depends on a story the documents can only partly tell. Anna’s forged signature is an attempt to make that story conclusive, but the ensuing legal contest reveals how much remains unsettled.