Devlin discovers and hides the deed gifting money to Anna

Cowell Devlin’s discovery of a deed in Crosbie Wells’s cottage turns an overlooked scrap of paper into a concealed legal and moral complication. The document records a proposed £2,000 gift from Emery Staines to Anna Wetherell, witnessed by Wells, but Staines has not signed it. Devlin recognizes the defect and nevertheless hides the deed from Dr. Gillies, then keeps it secret for weeks. His unexplained decision links the lonely death at the cottage to Anna’s precarious circumstances and to the later disputes over Wells’s fortune and the authenticity of documents.

The deed in Wells’s cottage

After Crosbie Wells’s body has been removed, Devlin and Dr. Gillies examine the cottage, a modest, isolated home upriver from Hokitika. The room’s neglected surfaces, empty liquor vessels, and dead man’s belongings convey how solitary Wells’s final days had been. While preparing to light the stove, Devlin pulls out the ash drawer and notices a paper caught between its grate and bottom. Someone appears to have tried to burn it: one edge is charred, but the sheet remains legible. The attempt’s author is uncertain, though Wells seems a possible candidate.

The document is dated 11 October 1865. It states that Staines is to give Anna £2,000 and names Wells as the witness. Wells’s signature is present, but the space for Staines’s signature is blank. Devlin understands the practical consequence: as written, the deed is invalid, since the witness has signed while the person making the promised gift has not. Its wording therefore records an intention, not a completed transfer. The distinction matters in a story where claims to wealth repeatedly depend on what a document can prove, who signed it, and what remains missing.

Devlin’s concealment

Devlin recognizes Anna’s name from the young woman recently admitted to the gaol-house after an opium overdose. He pauses, then folds the deed and hides it against his skin beneath his shirt, without telling Dr. Gillies. The two men share tea in silence while Wells’s body lies outside beneath a blanket; the paper remains with Devlin as they return to the Police Camp, where a post-mortem is to be conducted.

Devlin cannot settle on a clear reason for withholding it. He considers whether the stillness of Wells’s home made concealment feel like a gesture of respect, whether curiosity about Anna influenced him, or whether some indistinct wish to protect her was at work. Rather than resolve these motives, he lets them remain blurred. That uncertainty is characteristic of his self-understanding: he thinks of himself as virtuous, yet avoids treating his questionable conduct as an obligation to confess. On the journey back, he holds the deed flat against his chest and speaks only about the breakers; the physical closeness of the paper contrasts with his silence about its significance.

Delay and private custody

At the Police Camp, Devlin considers telling George Shepard about the deed, but a commotion interrupts him. Anna is beginning to revive, and Devlin kneels beside her, takes her hands, and calls for water. Later, she raises the money for bail and is released. Devlin does not attend her hearing the following day: he has been assigned to dig Wells’s grave, and hears afterward that Anna declined to plead and paid her fine. These events bring him close to the person named in the deed without prompting him to disclose it to her.

The day after Wells’s burial, a fortune of £4,000 is discovered in the cottage—twice the amount specified in the deed. Devlin still keeps the document secret. He tells himself that he will show it to Anna once she is stronger and that, for now, withholding the information is prudent. Instead of carrying it openly, he places it between the final pages of the Old Testament and the opening pages of the New Testament in his Bible. Weeks later, on 27 January, he has still not confessed his earlier concealment; by then, he has kept the document through the discovery of Wells’s fortune and Anna’s recovery from the immediate crisis.

The deed’s wider significance

The paper acquires a reach beyond Devlin’s private decision. It connects Anna to Staines’s promised gift, Wells to the witnessing of that promise, and the proposed £2,000 to the much larger fortune uncovered after Wells’s death. Yet the deed cannot by itself establish that Anna received the money: Staines’s signature is absent, and the gift was never completed in the form the document describes. The gap between a promised transfer and a legally effective one makes the deed both a potential claim and evidence of how fragile such claims can be.

Later, the signature attributed to Wells on the deed is compared in court with signatures on his private correspondence and marriage certificate. Their resemblance, set against the markedly different signature on the Godspeed bill of sale, helps expose that bill of sale as a forgery. The deed thus becomes part of a larger inquiry into identity and documentary proof, though its immediate history begins not with a courtroom disclosure but with Devlin’s decision to keep it. His concealment does not alter the paper’s contents; it alters when others can know of them, leaving an uncertain promise suspended between private conscience and public evidence.