The Wayfarer Hotel is a modest Hokitika lodging house whose promise of low-cost, no-questions accommodation becomes the foundation for Lydia Wells’s reinvention of it as the Wayfarer’s Fortune. Under Lydia, the building is meant to become more than a place to sleep: it is a planned fortune-telling and séance venue, and later a home for Anna Wetherell as she leaves the Gridiron Hotel and prostitution behind.

Setting and policy

When Aubert Gascoigne arrives, the hotel advertises itself with a painted silhouette of a man carrying a bundle, but its apparent male-only character is misleading. The brass spittoon on the veranda, the lean-to privy in the alley, and the lack of drapes signal thrift, not exclusion. The hotel does not discriminate between the sexes; it asks no questions of its lodgers, promises them nothing, and charges only a very small nightly tariff. Its bargain is therefore deliberately spare: guests accept the building’s deficiencies in exchange for cheap lodging and discretion.

That combination reflects Lydia’s own practical economy. She is its resident before she becomes its owner, and the building’s unadorned state contrasts with the luxurious postures she adopts when receiving visitors. The contrast makes the hotel a useful setting for her enterprise: a plainly furnished, low-cost lodging house that Lydia intends to remake through performance and atmosphere.

Lydia’s purchase and planned transformation

Lydia tells Gascoigne that she has bought the hotel, surprising him with the scale of her new venture. She intends to change its name from the Wayfarer Hotel to the Wayfarer’s Fortune, turning the anonymous lodging house into a place whose identity promises insight into luck and destiny.

Her proposed alterations are specific. She wants drapes and modern fainting-couches, and plans a small, confessional-like cubicle with saloon doors. The front parlour is to serve as a waiting room, while the séances will take place in the hotel. Lydia also imagines reading fortunes, drawing cosmic birth charts, and interpreting Tarot patterns. These are plans rather than a complete account of the finished interior, but they show how she means to convert the building’s austere rooms into a theatrical setting for paid spiritual services.

Opening as the Wayfarer’s Fortune

The hotel’s new public identity is announced through a prominent newspaper advertisement. Owned and operated by Mrs. Lydia Wells, described as Crosbie Wells’s widow and a celebrated medium, the Wayfarer’s Fortune is to open to the public with Hokitika’s inaugural séance. The séance itself is restricted to an elite audience, with tickets allocated on a first-come basis; an evening of drinks and speculation beforehand is open to the wider public.

Lydia advertises a proposed attempt to contact Emery Staines, who has not returned to Hokitika and whose body has not been found after five weeks. The séance is therefore not presented merely as entertainment: it attaches the hotel’s opening to a local disappearance and the unresolved question of Staines’s fate. The advertisement makes the Wayfarer’s Fortune a public meeting place for speculation about the dead, while reserving its central event for selected guests.

Lodging, refuge, and intersecting fortunes

The hotel’s role as lodging house persists alongside Lydia’s new business. After Anna Wetherell discovers gold sewn into the remaining folds of her orange dress, she and Gascoigne remove the metal and hide it in a flour sack under his bed. When Anna returns to the Gridiron Hotel in Gascoigne’s late wife’s black dress, Edgar Clinch’s suspicions about the gold and her missing orange gown intensify. Lydia has already lent Anna six pounds to settle her debt to Clinch; after paying him, Anna leaves the Gridiron for good and is invited to lodge with Lydia at the Wayfarer’s Fortune, where she will no longer call herself a prostitute.

This refuge intersects with a wider chain of concealed wealth associated with Lydia. Months earlier, when she was posing as Francis Carver’s wife, she had sewn approximately four thousand pounds in gold into the linings of five dresses packed in a trunk. The dresses later came into Anna’s possession; Ah Quee secretly removed the gold from four of them, while the gold in the orange dress remained until Anna found it. The Wayfarer’s Fortune is not where that fortune is first hidden or recovered, but Lydia’s hotel becomes the place to which Anna turns after the discovery changes her circumstances. Its no-questions policy thus acquires a different resonance: the lodging house that once offered cheap discretion becomes a refuge for a woman seeking another life.