Anna’s forgery of Staines’s signature

Anna Wetherell’s forgery of Emery Staines’s signature gave a compromised document the appearance of a legal promise: a £2,000 gift to Anna, witnessed by Crosbie Wells. Its discovery did not simply offer her a route to money. Once the forgery was disclosed, the deed could be used to suggest that she had a motive to wish Staines dead, turning an attempted claim into a danger in her own case. The episode belongs to a wider plot in which signatures, names, and papers repeatedly decide what people can claim—and what they can be accused of.

The deed and its changing status

The deed concerned a substantial bequest from Staines to Anna, with Crosbie as witness. When Cowell Devlin first kept it from the authorities, he considered it invalid: Staines had not signed to authorize the gift. Devlin also judged that Anna, brought to the Police Camp on suspicion of attempted suicide and unfit for a surprise, should not be confronted with news about a document involving so much money. His explanation establishes the deed’s initial condition clearly: it existed, but without Staines’s signature it did not yet authorize the promised bequest.

The crucial change came later. In court, Devlin said that he first noticed a signature on the document on the morning of March 20, when he took it to Anna at the Wayfarer’s Fortune. He had not witnessed anyone sign it and could not explain how the signature came to be there. His testimony does not describe the act of forgery as a witnessed scene; it reconstructs it through the document’s condition before and after his visit. Devlin subsequently admitted to George Shepard that Anna herself had forged Staines’s name. The distinction matters: the deed’s appearance of authorization arose after Devlin had found it invalid, but no one in his account saw Anna write the signature.

From apparent gift to incriminating evidence

The forged signature altered the deed’s use. While it looked like a valid promise, it could support Anna’s claim to the money Staines had supposedly given her. Once Devlin acknowledged that the signature was hers, the same paper could be turned against her. He warned that if Anna pleaded guilty to assaulting Staines, prosecutors might characterize the assault as attempted murder and use the deed as evidence that she had a financial reason to want him dead. The document therefore did not merely fail to secure her inheritance: it supplied an apparent motive for a more serious charge.

That reversal is sharpened by the deed’s genuine component. Crosbie had witnessed the proposed gift, and his signature on the deed was later compared in court with his signature on his marriage certificate and private correspondence. Walter Moody drew attention to the resemblance among those signatures and contrasted them with the signature on the sale document for the Godspeed, which he argued was forged. The comparison did not make Staines’s signature genuine; it showed that the deed contained evidence attributable to Crosbie even as its authorization by Staines was fraudulent. In this world, a document can mix reliable marks with a fabricated one, and its legal force depends on separating them.

A world of disputed names and signatures

The case surrounding Anna’s deed echoes an earlier deception involving Francis Carver. In June 1865, Carver advertised in the West Coast Times under the name Crosbie Francis Wells, producing a birth certificate to establish that identity. When the advertisement would not fit its column, the editor, Benjamin Löwenthal, removed the middle name; Carver returned to insist that Francis be restored. The episode made the full name materially important, while leaving open why Carver possessed the certificate and what he intended by adopting the identity.

Carver’s ambiguous signature on the Godspeed bill of sale extended that uncertainty into another legal instrument. He signed as Francis Wells with a flourish that could be read as a C before the F, allowing the name to suggest C. Francis Wells. Walter Moody later found the sale document among Alistair Lauderback’s papers and identified the ambiguity as deliberate. Anna’s deed and Carver’s bill of sale are not the same fraud: one falsely supplies Staines’s authorization for a gift, while the other disguises the signer’s identity. Together, however, they show how a signature can be made to perform several roles at once—as proof, disguise, and potential escape from accusation.

Consequences and narrative significance

Anna’s forgery placed her in a precarious position precisely because the deed joined money to a relationship that was already under scrutiny. The intended bequest was for £2,000, and Crosbie’s presence as witness connected the paper to the wider disputes over his identity, marriage, and estate. Yet the record of the deed’s discovery remained incomplete: Devlin had not seen Anna sign, and his first knowledge of the signature came only when he brought the document to her in March. The court had to consider testimony about both what the paper showed and what its witnesses could not establish directly.

The deed’s movement from invalid instrument to apparent gift and then to evidence of forgery makes it a compact instance of the novel’s larger concern with documentary truth. Papers do not settle identity or ownership simply by existing. Their dates, signatures, witnesses, custody, and alterations shape what they can prove. Anna’s forged signature changes the deed’s meaning without changing its material form: what promised security becomes a liability, and what looks like legal evidence also records the limits of legal certainty.