Crosbie Wells—Alistair Lauderback

Crosbie Wells and Alistair Lauderback are paternal half-brothers whose relationship is shaped by a withheld name, an unanswered correspondence, and a meeting missed by half an hour. Their kinship recasts both the origin of the fortune at the center of the case and the leverage used to seize the Godspeed: what appears to be a tale of unrelated men turns out to be a family history of abandonment and concealed obligation.

Kinship and Crosbie Wells’s first appeal

The relationship becomes known through a bundle of letters that Walter Moody finds concealed beneath the calico lining of a trunk. About fifteen letters, addressed to Lauderback in Crosbie Wells’s plain hand, are tied together and arranged in reverse chronological order. Moody begins with the earliest, dated March 1852 in Dunedin. In it, Crosbie identifies himself as Lauderback’s brother: their father had acknowledged him privately, but had declined to recognize him in his will, fearing damage to his name.

Crosbie explains that he was raised under the surname of a parish priest and grew up knowing himself to be illegitimate. His childhood was spent in the Newington brothel called The Jewel. Though he describes his later life as modest, his central wish was to see his father and know his shape and voice. When his father finally sent him a letter, it included £20 and a blessing, but no signature. Crosbie traced the rented carriage that delivered it to Glen House, his father’s home, then bought a coat, shaved, and traveled there. He could not bring himself to ring the bell and returned home distressed.

A mistake brought him instead to his brother. Seeing a shipping notice for Alistair Lauderback, a lawyer departing for the colonies, Crosbie believed he had found his father and followed on the next ship. In Dunedin, he attended Lauderback’s public address in the rain on the wharf, where the Harbour Master presented Lauderback with a pocket watch. Seeing the politician, Crosbie understood that he had mistaken a son for the father: Lauderback was his brother. Unable to afford passage to Lyttelton, where Lauderback had gone, Crosbie wrote asking for enough charity to return home. He had spent the £20 on the journey and necessities, and the coat he sold brought back barely half its price. The letter ends with Crosbie signing himself as Lauderback’s brother.

Thirteen years of silence

The letters record a relationship pursued almost entirely from one side. Crosbie continued writing, while Lauderback did not answer. The correspondence makes the duration tangible: thirteen years of appeals, including a final letter dated a little over two months before Moody reads it and less than a month before Crosbie’s death. Moody observes that Crosbie repeatedly alludes to Lauderback’s silence, and that the older letters are worn from being folded and refolded. The evidence suggests that Lauderback kept, read, and reread the letters even as he withheld a reply.

That silence carries more than one possible meaning. Crosbie’s first letter gives Lauderback a way to acknowledge a brother he had never met, but it also places their father’s decision in view: Crosbie had been given private money and blessings, not a place in the family name or will. Moody considers shame a possible reason for Lauderback’s concealment, though the letters cannot establish his motive. The contrast is stark: Crosbie’s writing is candid and yearning, while Lauderback’s response, for thirteen years, is no response at all.

Yet estrangement is not the whole record. Lauderback kept the letters, and he eventually traveled to Crosbie Wells’s cottage in the Arahura Valley. He arrived at Crosbie’s deathbed half an hour too late. Moody cannot know whether Lauderback intended to apologize, make amends for the years of silence, or simply meet his brother, speak his name, and shake his hand. The visit changes the meaning of the silence without undoing it: Lauderback had at last gone to Crosbie, but there was no longer time for an answer between them.

Kinship entangled with betrayal and fortune

The concealed brotherhood intersects with Lauderback’s affair with Lydia Wells. Lauderback had told Thomas Balfour that he did not know Lydia was married during their affair, because she used her maiden name, Greenway. He learned she was Crosbie’s wife only after Francis Carver returned from gaol calling himself Francis Wells. But Crosbie’s letters show that he had told Lydia about his illegitimate parentage and his connection to Lauderback. Moody therefore reasons that Lydia knew of the brothers’ relationship from early in her affair with the politician, and considers whether she deliberately used that knowledge. The letters establish what Crosbie disclosed to his wife; Moody’s suspicion about her purpose remains an interpretation rather than a proven fact.

They also change the apparent source of the money used against Lauderback. The correspondence attests that Crosbie struck gold at Dunstan. Moody concludes that the fortune at issue had been stolen from Crosbie, not earned through Carver’s own claim, and that Lydia betrayed Crosbie’s secret to Carver. In Moody’s reconstruction, she and Carver used the stolen wealth and Lauderback’s vulnerability to secure both their fortune and the Godspeed. Crosbie’s private family history thus becomes part of a scheme reaching from the goldfields to a political figure and a ship.

Carver’s choice to call himself Francis Wells provides another use for the name. Moody recognizes this as the twinkle, the private leverage behind Carver’s blackmail of Lauderback and the forced silence surrounding the sale of the Godspeed. By presenting himself as Francis Wells, Carver could encourage Lauderback to imagine him as another illegitimate brother, perhaps even someone with the same mother as Crosbie. The possibility is part of the deception, not an established kinship. The actual half-brother relationship gave that invented resemblance its force: Lauderback’s concealed family history made a false claim of brotherhood an effective instrument of coercion.

Recognition after estrangement

Moody’s discovery gives the brothers’ story its emotional weight as well as its evidentiary force. He imagines Crosbie dead in his cottage, one hand curled around an empty bottle, and is moved by the thought of a man who had sought his brother across the world only to remain alone. The correspondence describes Crosbie watching Lauderback’s rise through the Provincial Council and into Parliament while he struggled in hardship. For Moody, this pattern resembles his own experience of paternal abandonment and betrayal by a brother. His response turns the letters from case evidence into an account of kinship denied and recognition delayed.

Lauderback’s later public reply to George Shepard concerns his affair with Lydia, not a public acknowledgment of Crosbie as his half-brother. He admits concealing the affair from voters, apologizes, accepts responsibility for its consequences, and says he will regret for the rest of his life arriving too late to beg Crosbie’s forgiveness. The confession brings an outpouring of sympathy, and some even consider his reputation improved. That public response cannot repair the private relationship: the brothers’ kinship remains a truth Moody has uncovered, while their only possible reconciliation ended at the cottage door.