Moody found that Lauderback and Crosbie are brothers

Walter Moody’s discovery of Crosbie Wells’s hidden letters in Alistair Lauderback’s trunk turns a shipping mix-up into a revelation of family, silence, and concealed history. Reading the correspondence, Moody learns that Lauderback and Wells were half-brothers, and that Lauderback had preserved years of appeals from the brother he never publicly acknowledged. The discovery also casts new light on Lauderback’s dealings with Francis Carver, his visit to Wells shortly before Wells’s death, and his relationship with Lydia Wells.

The misplaced trunk

When Moody entered his room, he found a trunk that was not his: a black, iron-strapped chest with a domed, barrel-like lid, bearing travel labels for Southampton and Lyttelton. Instead of reporting the mistake, he locked the door and opened it. A paper fixed inside identified the owner as Alistair Lauderback, a provincial councilman and Member of Parliament. Moody reasoned that the two unmarked trunks had been switched: his own had gone to Lauderback’s rooms at the Palace Hotel, while Lauderback’s had been delivered to the Crown Hotel.

Lauderback was away campaigning in the north and was not expected back until the following afternoon. Moody took the opportunity to search the chest, making no confession or apology to himself for violating its owner’s privacy. The contents were mostly the working materials of a politician and lawyer: stationery, seals, ledgers, law books, and documents. Among them were a woollen scarf, a brass paperweight shaped like a pig, and a leather briefcase. The trunk smelled of the sea, though its contents were scarcely damp, suggesting it had escaped full immersion.

A signature that conceals a name

In the briefcase, Moody found the bill of sale for the barque Godspeed. Its date confirmed Lauderback’s account that the ship had changed hands in May 1865, nine months before the present events. The purchaser had signed as Francis Wells, as Lauderback had told Thomas Balfour. But the signature’s large flourish and a small ink dot made the initial ambiguous: it could be read as a C joined to the F, suggesting the fuller name C. Francis Wells. Moody noticed that the writing appeared deliberately slow and carefully shaped to sustain both readings.

The signature connected the sale to Francis Carver’s use of assumed identities. Carver had used Crosbie Wells’s identity when speaking to Benjamin Löwenthal, but had presented himself to Lauderback as Francis Wells. Given Lauderback’s belief that Carver and Crosbie Wells were brothers, Moody inferred that Carver had represented himself to Lauderback as Wells’s brother. The bill offered a clue to the deception, but not its purpose; Moody could not yet explain why Carver had chosen that particular guise.

The concealed correspondence

After returning the bill to the briefcase, Moody continued his methodical search, replacing each item as he found it. Feeling along the trunk’s lid, he discovered a slit in the tartan-stamped calico lining. The neat opening was disguised among the vertical stripes, and behind it lay a slim package hidden between the cedar and cloth. Inside was a bundle of about fifteen letters addressed to Lauderback in an unpolished hand.

Moody took care to memorize how the string was knotted and tied before unfastening it. The letters had been arranged from most recent to oldest, so he turned to the first one Wells had sent. Dated March 1852 in Dunedin, it identified its writer as Lauderback’s brother: their father had acknowledged Wells privately, but had refused to name him in his will for fear of damaging his own reputation. Wells explained that he had been raised under the surname of his parish priest, had grown up in the Newington brothel called The Jewel, and had long wished simply to see his father.

The letter described Wells’s failed attempt to visit the family home. He had mistaken Lauderback for his father after seeing news that a lawyer with that name was sailing for the colonies. Wells followed on a later ship, then realized at a public address on a rain-soaked Dunedin wharf that Lauderback was not his father but his brother. Unable to afford the journey back, having spent the twenty pounds their father sent and sold the coat he had bought for the visit, he wrote to ask for charity rather than an introduction. He signed himself Crosbie Wells and supplied a Dunedin post-office box as a forwarding address.

Years of appeals and silence

The letters made a chronology out of a relationship that Lauderback had kept from public view. A later letter dated June 1862 announced that Wells had married after a short courtship. He referred to his wife as Mrs. Wells, imagined that she might now be Lauderback’s sister, and described digging near Lawrence before returning to Dunstan to provide for her. The letter also set his account of the goldfields against a politician’s condemnation of the gold rush: Wells acknowledged the degradation he had seen on the diggings, but did not treat it as something unique to them.

By June 1865, Wells was writing from West Canterbury, having left Otago and moved west of the mountains. He said he was estranged from his wife and had concealed painful truths about the marriage in earlier letters, fearing Lauderback would think less of him. He had resolved to stop prospecting, although the region was rich in gold, because he feared having another fortune stolen. Instead, he meant to enter the timber trade. He described finding companionship with Te Rau Tauwhare, a Māori man, and presented that friendship as a source of renewed spirits. The final letter in the bundle had been written a little over two months before Moody read it and less than a month before Wells’s death.

What the letters change

The correspondence established the kinship Lauderback had not disclosed to the magistrate when he said he had reached Wells’s deathbed half an hour too late, or to his friend Balfour. Moody also recognized that Wells’s letters repeatedly alluded to Lauderback’s silence: for thirteen years, the politician had never replied. Their worn folds showed that the letters had been handled and reread, even as the writer received no answer. Lauderback had kept the appeals, and eventually travelled to Wells’s cottage in the Arahura Valley, but arrived too late to see him alive.

The discovery made Lauderback’s silence more than an omission. Wells had plainly wanted to meet the brother whose shape and voice he had once hoped to see, while Lauderback had possessed the means to answer, send money, or acknowledge the relationship. Moody judged the silence callous, yet the letters left its cause uncertain: shame over Wells’s illegitimate birth was one possibility, but Moody could not exclude another. He then connected the revelation to Lauderback’s affair with Lydia Wells, Crosbie’s wife, and questioned whether Lauderback could really have been ignorant of his connection to her husband. The hidden letters therefore disclose a family bond while deepening, rather than resolving, the moral and personal mystery around Lauderback.