Alistair Lauderback—Lydia Wells

Alistair Lauderback and Lydia Wells’s affair is a hidden relationship with public and financial consequences. Lauderback believed Lydia was unmarried, while Lydia knew that her husband, Crosbie Wells, was Lauderback’s half-brother and had written to him for years. When Walter Moody pieces these facts together, the affair appears not only as a concealed intimacy but as part of a scheme in which family connections and private shame could be converted into leverage.

The affair behind the public reputation

Lydia was involved with Lauderback while she was married to Crosbie. During the affair she used her maiden name, Greenway; according to Lauderback’s account to Thomas Balfour, he did not know she was married. Nor, on this account, did he know that the woman he had taken as his mistress was his half-brother’s wife. Lydia’s concealed marital identity therefore shaped the relationship from its beginning: Lauderback understood it as an affair with Greenway, while Lydia knew the connection to Crosbie that he did not.

Moody is troubled by the affair when he reads Crosbie’s letters. He initially sees Lauderback’s silence toward his half-brother as callous: Crosbie had written yearningly for thirteen years, seeking even a brief meeting, and Lauderback never replied. The worn, repeatedly folded letters suggest that Lauderback had nevertheless kept and reread them. Moody then recognizes the further injury: Lauderback had been intimate with the wife of the brother whose appeals he ignored. The discovery alters the moral shape of the silence, making the brothers’ relationship not merely a story of unanswered letters but one entangled with Lydia’s divided loyalties.

Knowledge, concealment, and the brothers

The letters make a crucial difference to Moody’s reconstruction. Crosbie had explained his illegitimate parentage to Lydia, including the connection to Lauderback. Moody therefore concludes that Lydia knew about the half-brothers from the beginning of her affair with the politician. Lauderback, by contrast, did not learn that Lydia was married, or that her name was properly Lydia Wells, until Francis Carver returned from gaol calling himself Francis Wells. That disclosure connected Lydia to the man Lauderback understood as his brother and exposed the identity she had kept from him.

Moody considers whether Lydia deliberately sought out Lauderback to exploit the connection. The possibility follows from her knowledge of Crosbie’s letters and Lauderback’s long refusal to answer them, but it remains Moody’s inference, not an established account of how the affair began. His uncertainty matters: the relationship is pieced together from letters and other people’s reports, rather than narrated as a complete, mutually confirmed history. The gap between what Lauderback knew and what Lydia knew is clearer than her original purpose.

Intimacy turned into leverage

Moody links the affair to the theft of Crosbie’s fortune and the blackmail of Lauderback. In his reconstruction, Lydia betrayed Crosbie’s secret to Carver, and she and Carver devised a plan to steal the fortune and use Lauderback’s shame to secure the Godspeed. Carver had posed as Crosbie’s brother under the name Francis Wells, giving Lauderback reason to believe that the supposed claimant was another illegitimate half-brother. The ruse drew force from a real but concealed family connection: Crosbie was Lauderback’s half-brother, while Carver’s claimed kinship was part of his deception.

The affair is thus implicated in a larger chain of concealments, though Moody’s account distinguishes evidence from suspicion. Crosbie’s letters establish that Lydia knew the family connection; Lauderback’s account establishes that he did not know Lydia was married during their affair. Moody’s conclusion that Lydia deliberately used his private feelings about his illegitimate birth to help Carver blackmail him is a reasoned reconstruction of how those facts could serve the scheme. He also recognizes the irony that the money used against Lauderback originated not with Carver, but with Crosbie’s discovery at Dunstan.

A private scandal made public

The relationship becomes an explicit political weapon in George Shepard’s letter of 18 February 1866. Responding to Lauderback’s damaging accusations about the proposed Hokitika gaol-house, Shepard defends Harald Nilssen’s donation of approximately four hundred pounds and argues that a donation, unlike an investment, did not create a debt to be repaid. He then challenges Lauderback to disclose his former intimate relationship with Lydia, identified as Crosbie’s widow. The letter turns a private affair into a threat of public exposure, bringing Lauderback’s hidden connection to Lydia into the dispute over public works and propriety.

Shepard’s challenge does not itself establish every detail of the affair or settle the contested claims surrounding Crosbie’s estate. It does show how readily the relationship could be used to damage Lauderback’s public standing. Across the episodes Moody considers, intimacy carries information that can be concealed, withheld, or deployed: Lydia’s name hides her marriage, Crosbie’s letters preserve the family connection Lauderback never answered, and Shepard’s letter threatens to make the affair political currency. The relationship matters because its private history is inseparable from the wider struggle over identity, money, and who controls the telling of the past.