Carver’s assault on Anna Wetherell and the loss of her child form an event of physical harm, traumatic memory, and divided loyalty. The narrative links the assault in Dunedin to Anna’s later roadside encounter with Carver, where her attempt to protect Crosbie Wells brings the earlier violence back into the present. The child’s loss is then carried into the aftermath through Anna’s testimony and Emery Staines’s grief and promise to share his hidden fortune with her.

Assault and its aftermath

The assault Anna remembers took place in the boudoir of the House of Many Wishes in Dunedin on the night of 12 May. Its consequences are not confined to that night: she recalls it with painful clarity and is made wretched by the memory each day. The account also connects her distress to a later medical procedure for which Dr. Gillies had administered an opiate. As Anna suffers through it, Benjamin Löwenthal and Edgar Clinch are present; Löwenthal, usually able to withstand injury or upheaval, weeps while trying to free her hands. The narrative establishes the gravity of her suffering without making the procedure itself a spectacle.

Anna’s recollection is incomplete. Smoke, violence, and the opiate have each clouded her mind, so her memory of the events does not arrive as a settled, continuous account. This uncertainty matters when she is asked to identify the man responsible. When she wakes, Löwenthal asks what happened and who was involved. Anna names Carver, then says that he was the father. The narrative identifies this as a lie intended to protect Crosbie Wells, not as a reliable statement of the child’s paternity. Her testimony therefore holds two things together: a disclosure of Carver’s assault and a deliberate concealment of the truth she believes would expose Wells.

Carver confronts Anna

The roadside encounter makes the danger of that concealment immediate. Riding inland on the Kaniere road, Carver recognizes Anna standing beside the road. She walks unsteadily and is flushed, but smiles as she tells him that Wells escaped and that she helped him. Her words reveal both Wells’s survival and her own role in enabling his escape; they also bring Carver’s attention directly to the man he is seeking.

Carver stiffens at Wells’s name and demands to know where he is. When Anna does not give him the information he wants, Carver slaps her and presses her for Wells’s whereabouts, asking whether he is nearby or in Otago or Canterbury. Anna tries to run, but Carver catches her by the shoulder and pulls her back. A nearby gunshot interrupts the confrontation: Carver turns, and his horse shies. The episode ends on that sudden break, without establishing who fired the shot or what happened immediately afterward. The interruption does not undo Anna’s exposure to Carver’s violence, but it cuts short his questioning.

Loss, testimony, and loyalty

Anna’s lie is presented as a belated attempt to atone for an earlier betrayal. She has helped Wells escape, but the narrative makes clear that this act of loyalty does not relieve her distress over the assault or her knowledge that she has previously failed him. Her mind’s uncertainty further complicates the choice: she acts to protect Wells even as the memory that guides her is fractured and receding. The result is not a clean confession but a divided account, in which the truth about Carver’s violence sits beside a false claim about the child’s father.

After learning of Anna’s assault, Emery Staines rides to the Arahura Valley and arrives at Wells’s door in distress. He tells Wells that the baby is gone and calls it Wells’s child. Wells brings him inside and shares brandy with him. Once the bottle is empty, Staines says that he will give Anna half of his fortune, which he has secretly buried, and that he will dig it up. His promise turns the loss into a new obligation: what had been concealed wealth is now offered as something to be shared with Anna. The scene does not erase the harm or establish what becomes of the fortune, but it shows Staines responding to the loss with a concrete pledge of support.

Narrative significance

The event’s force comes from the way private suffering intersects with the search for Wells. Anna’s roadside words disclose that she helped him escape, while her refusal to reveal where he is makes her a target of Carver’s demands. Loyalty is therefore expressed not as safety but as a choice made under pressure, with consequences that continue into her account of the assault and the loss of the child.

The narrative also places uncertainty at the centre of what can be known. Anna’s memory has been clouded, and her statement about the father is knowingly false; Staines’s grief, by contrast, is conveyed through his arrival at Wells’s home and his promise to share the hidden money. These different responses do not resolve the loss. They show how its aftermath is carried through memory, testimony, concealment, and an offer of material help.