Wayfarer’s Fortune

Wayfarer’s Fortune is a hotel on Revell Street that Lydia Wells buys and transforms into a spiritualist establishment. Its decisive importance lies in this double life: it is both a theatrical public business, built around fortunes and communication with the dead, and a private refuge for Anna Wetherell. The hotel’s new name and staged rooms give Lydia a place to exercise her entrepreneurial skill, while its guests and inhabitants remain entangled in the novel’s unsettled questions about wealth, identity, and what can be known.

From hotel to enterprise

When Aubert Gascoigne asks Lydia what she has been doing, she reveals that she has bought the hotel they are in. The purchase is not a passing whim. Lydia describes herself as worldly and entrepreneurial, with nearly ten years of business experience in Dunedin and earlier experience in Sydney; she tells Gascoigne that he has not yet seen her in her element. She plans to convert the establishment rather than merely manage it as it stands.

The first change is its name: it will no longer be the Wayfarer but Wayfarer’s Fortune. Lydia’s planned use of the building gives that change practical force. A cubicle with saloon doors in the drawing room will resemble a confessional, while the front parlour will function as a waiting room. There, Lydia intends to conduct séances, tell fortunes, draw cosmic birth charts, and lay out Tarot patterns. She imagines an establishment whose rooms move visitors from ordinary public sociability toward an encounter with hidden knowledge.

The conversion is visible from the street as well as inside. By the hotel’s public opening, its hanging sign has been repainted: the familiar figure carrying a bundle now walks beneath a starry sky. The entrance has been freshly maintained, with a polished knocker, washed windows, and a new doormat. Beside the door, a card identifies Lydia as a medium and spiritist and advertises the uncovering of secrets and the telling of fortunes. The old hotel has not vanished so much as acquired a new public identity, one that makes spectacle part of its address.

A staged interior and a public programme

The interior that Mannering sees bears little resemblance to the grimy parlour where Lydia had received Gascoigne three weeks earlier. She has installed drapes and a new suite of furniture, covered the front rooms with striking rose-and-thorn wallpaper, and placed exotic prints behind glass. The stairwell has been painted; a lectern holds her almanac; shawled lamps are positioned around the rooms to produce a more mystical atmosphere. These alterations make the building an instrument of Lydia’s work: its décor gives visitors a setting in which fortune-telling can appear at once intimate, theatrical, and commercially inviting.

The opening is promoted as both a business launch and a civic novelty. A large, black-bordered newspaper advertisement announces the first public opening of the establishment, owned and operated by Lydia, identified as the widow of Crosbie Wells. Lydia offers a séance for an elite audience, with limited tickets allocated on a first-come basis, and an open gathering beforehand for drinks and speculation. The advertised séance is to attempt contact with Emery Staines, who has not returned to Hokitika and has been missing for five weeks; his body has not been found. The advertisement leaves Lydia’s intended questions unstated, but the prospect of learning how Staines died gives the performance a particular charge.

The venue’s first séance turns that publicity into a carefully managed scene. The front room is arranged for a gathering of eleven seeking to summon a twelfth. For the ticketed portion, Lydia leads seven guests into the parlour, where Ah Sook and Ah Quee sit cross-legged beside the hearth in heavy greasepaint. The windows are curtained, nearly all the paraffin lamps are extinguished, and a single lamp warms attar in a tin dish, filling the room with the scent of roses. The guests sit in a circle while Lydia arranges five candles in a star pattern. The gestures, lighting, and seating convert a former hotel room into a space where a commercial gathering can take on the air of private communion.

Business after the séance

The séance does not become a repeated attraction. Lydia later says in an open letter in the West Coast Times that her attempt to communicate with Staines was unsuccessful, describing the failure as unprecedented and suggesting that the afterlife had been unable, rather than unwilling, to produce him. From that claim she draws the conclusion that he may still be alive and expresses confidence that he will return. The men associated with the earlier secret council are confounded by the statement, but its effect on the hotel is commercially favourable: the enterprise’s value rises, and Wayfarer’s Fortune begins to trade well.

The establishment develops a regular rhythm. It opens every evening from seven until ten, offering cut-price brandy and conversation of a speculative kind. Fortune-telling is available in the afternoons by private appointment. Lydia does not host a second séance, despite the public attention to the first; her decision keeps the event singular rather than turning it into a repeat performance for the same audience. The hotel’s trade therefore rests not only on a promised supernatural encounter but also on the everyday sociability that surrounds it: drink, talk, private consultations, and the unresolved story of Staines.

Shelter, secrecy, and the circulating fortune

Wayfarer’s Fortune is also where Anna’s circumstances change. After Anna leaves the Gridiron Hotel, Lydia invites her to lodge at the newly acquired establishment. Anna has paid her debt to Edgar Clinch with a six-pound loan from Lydia, not with the gold hidden in her dresses or with her legal earnings. At the hotel, she will no longer call herself a whore. The building thus offers her an alternative to her previous lodging and occupation, even as Lydia’s business depends on drawing the public into its rooms. Anna remains out of public view, continuing the policy that she not be seen at the establishment’s fortune-telling business.

The hotel’s rooms also stand close to the novel’s circuit of concealed gold and uncertain knowledge. Lydia had been posing as Francis Carver’s wife when she made five dresses with a fortune sewn into their linings. Anna later wears those dresses without a clear understanding of their origin; Ah Quee secretly removes the gold from four of them while she sleeps. Moody considers whether Lydia might recognize the garments if she saw them in Anna’s room at Wayfarer’s Fortune, but the question remains uncertain. By then, Ah Quee has lined the dresses with leaden weights as a decoy, so their appearance and feel may conceal that the original fortune has been removed. The hotel is not simply a backdrop to that chain of transfers: as Anna’s new lodging, it is one of the places where the old garments and their hidden history might become legible, or remain disguised.

Narrative significance

The transformation of the Wayfarer into Wayfarer’s Fortune gives a physical address to Lydia’s ability to turn uncertainty into an enterprise. She recasts the building through a new name, a starry sign, altered rooms, and an advertised programme, then sustains its business by combining the promise of revelation with ordinary hospitality. Yet the fortunes sought there are not confined to the supernatural. Staines’s disappearance, Anna’s concealed gold, Lydia’s disputed connection to Crosbie Wells, and the uncertain ownership of wealth all make the hotel a meeting point for claims whose evidence is incomplete.

That tension shapes the place’s significance. Its staged intimacy invites visitors to believe that hidden things may speak, while the people connected to it continue to manage what they reveal. Anna receives shelter there but stays out of sight; Lydia publicly sells access to secrets while remaining implicated in secrets of her own. Wayfarer’s Fortune therefore functions at once as a commercial performance space, a household, and a threshold between what is displayed and what remains concealed.