Anna Wetherell’s forged deed-of-gift claim

Anna Wetherell’s forged deed-of-gift claim turns a damaged document into both a possible claim to wealth and an act of fraud. The deed promises her £2,000 from Emery Staines, with Crosbie Wells as witness; when Cowell Devlin reveals it, Anna supplies the absent donor’s signature herself. Her effort to make the promise legally effective leads her to seek payment while Staines is missing, and places her claim amid a larger struggle over the fortune connected to Wells’s estate.

The deed and its damaged history

The document reaches Anna in the parlour at the Wayfarer’s Fortune, where Cowell Devlin has arranged the room for the widow’s afternoon appointments. After Anna has finished arranging saucers, he waits for her to sit, opens his Bible, and draws out the charred deed. Its surviving text records a promise made on 11 October 1865: Emery Staines is to give Anna £2,000, and Crosbie Wells is named as witness. The document is already damaged when she receives it, so its condition is part of the problem as well as part of its history.

Anna is nearly illiterate. She knows the alphabet and can sound out printed words slowly, with good light, but reading is laborious and error-prone. At first she takes up the deed with a glazed look, not expecting to understand it at a glance. Then she recognizes that she can read it and brings the paper close to her eyes. Her reaction shifts the document from an obscure remnant preserved in Devlin’s Bible into a promise she can attempt to claim.

The deed’s terms matter because they connect Anna to two men whose positions have changed radically. Staines is absent, and Wells is dead; the promised sum is substantial, but the document’s survival does not mean the money is immediately available. Its wording also gives the claim a chain of apparent authority: Staines is the donor, Wells the witness, and Anna the named recipient. The later dispute turns on whether that written promise can still operate when its donor cannot be found and its witness cannot speak for himself.

Anna adds the missing signature

Devlin leaves the parlour at Anna’s request, believing she wants time alone. As soon as he is gone, she crosses to the writing desk with the deed, uncorks the ink, takes Mrs. Wells’s pen, and writes Emery Staines’s name. She has never seen his signature, yet believes she has reproduced it exactly. The imitation is described as confidently careless: the surname diminishes in size, the first name is cheerfully illegible, and a doubled curlicue before the E and a flattened S give the writing the appearance of a familiar, practiced signature.

Devlin returns with the tea tray and recognizes what she has done. He calls it an act of fraud. Anna does not retreat or show shame; she insists that the signature is Staines’s and that the deed is good. In her reasoning, the document has acquired the element it lacked: the donor’s signature. Since Staines has vanished and Wells is dead, neither man is present to contradict her account. The forged mark is therefore not merely an effort to deceive Devlin. It is Anna’s attempt to turn a promise preserved in damaged ink into an enforceable claim.

She takes the paper back and slips it beneath the bodice of Agathe Gascoigne’s dress, against her skin. The movement gives the document a new kind of concealment: it is no longer hidden in Devlin’s Bible but carried on Anna’s body. Devlin has seen the forgery, and the exchange leaves them opposed over what the deed means. He regards the signature as false; Anna maintains that the paper, now signed, can support her claim.

From private forgery to legal claim

Anna later brings the charred document to the Hokitika Courthouse and hands it to John Fellowes, a solicitor she has not met before. He squares it against the table and studies it before asking where she obtained it. Anna says it was given to her anonymously, withholding Devlin’s involvement. Her account conceals the immediate chain by which the deed passed from the Bible to her hands, even as she submits the paper for legal scrutiny.

Fellowes explains that the deed’s promise does not solve the practical problem of payment. Staines’s assets have been seized because of his absence, and his claims have been transferred to other men. Unless he is found alive with considerable money, Fellowes says, he cannot pay the £2,000. Anna repeats that the deed is binding. Her insistence distinguishes the legal force she believes the document possesses from the material difficulty of collecting the sum it names.

She also raises a further possibility: that the fortune associated with Wells’s estate may be involved. If so, she reasons, £2,000 belongs to her by authority of the deed. Fellowes warns that money cannot simply be drawn down by presenting a paper, but notes that Lydia Wells’s appeal has just been granted and that Lydia’s share is being released. He offers to place a hold on that claim while the deed is investigated. Anna agrees, and he proposes to act as her solicitor for a retainer of £2 per week, with expenses, charged in advance. When Anna asks for the document back, he keeps it in his wallet for the time being, making the deed an object held within the legal process rather than a claim she can carry away at will.

Signatures, identity, and the wider fortune

The deed’s evidentiary importance grows because the novel’s other documents also depend on signatures and names. In June 1865, a scarred man advertised in the West Coast Times for a lost shipping crate, identifying himself through a birth certificate as Crosbie Francis Wells. The advertisement sought £20 for the crate’s return, or £50 if it came back unopened. When the newspaper’s editor, Benjamin Löwenthal, shortened the name to prevent the final word from being stranded at the top of a column, the man returned to insist that his middle name be printed. The small alteration makes the name itself consequential evidence.

Walter Moody later finds a bill of sale for the Godspeed among Alistair Lauderback’s papers. Its purchaser is named Francis Wells, but the expansive flourish on the F can also resemble a C, and a dot of ink makes the signature appear deliberately ambiguous. Moody connects that document with Francis Carver’s earlier use of Crosbie Wells’s birth certificate and concludes that Carver had assumed Wells’s identity. These papers supply the context for the deed’s own signature problem: a handwritten name can seem to establish identity while also concealing or manufacturing it.

The fortune at issue is dispersed among several objects and claims. Francis Carver had lost a shipping crate containing a trunk and approximately £4,000 in gold sewn into five dresses; Lydia Wells had made the dresses while posing as Carver’s wife. Separately, Crosbie Wells had concealed thousands of pounds from an earlier gold strike, and the gold discovered in his cottage was valued at a little over £4,000. Anna’s orange dress retained the final portion of the gold sewn into the gowns, which she found after waking in gaol with no memory of the preceding twelve hours. The deed’s £2,000 promise therefore enters a story in which wealth has already been hidden, moved, and divided, while legal ownership remains contested.

The deed as evidence and dramatic reversal

At the later proceedings, Moody compares the signature on Lauderback’s private correspondence with the signature on the deed, which is dated 11 October 1865 and names Staines as donor and Wells as witness. He also compares them with the signature on Wells’s marriage certificate submitted by Lydia. The two signatures associated with Wells resemble one another, while the signature on the Godspeed bill of sale does not. That comparison establishes the bill of sale as a forgery and exposes the significance of Carver’s impersonation. It also gives the deed a role beyond Anna’s immediate effort to obtain money: the witness’s signature helps distinguish a genuine connection to Wells from a false identity constructed around his name.

The claim’s force rests on a tension between a promise and the means by which it is asserted. Anna is named in a deed that records a substantial gift, but the donor is missing, the witness is dead, the paper is charred, and the signature she supplies is her own imitation. She treats the act of signing as a way to recover an entitlement that might otherwise disappear; Devlin identifies it as fraud, while the solicitor treats the document as a matter requiring investigation and a hold on Lydia’s share. The episode leaves the deed suspended between intimate promise, forged evidence, and public legal proof, reflecting the broader struggle in the novel over who can make a name—and a fortune—count as someone’s own.