Gift deed found in Wells’s cottage

The Gift deed found in Wells’s cottage is a damaged, concealed document that turns an obscure piece of paper into a crucial link among Emery Staines, Anna Wetherell, and Crosbie Wells. It records a proposed £2,000 gift from Staines to Anna, witnessed by Wells, and raises questions about their association and the ownership of the gold behind the promise. Its discovery does not settle those questions: the deed bears Staines’s name but not his signature, and its wording presents the money as something to be given rather than proof that the transfer occurred.

Discovery and concealment

The deed came to light after Crosbie Wells’s death. The day after the hermit died, Cowell Devlin found it in the ash-drawer of Wells’s range. Rather than show it to anyone, Devlin kept it secret while trying to learn more about the people named in it. He concealed the document inside his Bible, between the Old Testament and the New, where it remained as he weighed whether and when to produce it.

The concealment made the deed more than a passive record. Devlin’s possession of it gave him control over when its contents could enter the wider dispute. At the Crown Hotel council, he brought the Bible with him and resolved to reveal the document only if the occasion and timing seemed right. His hesitation reflects the deed’s uncertain implications: it might explain a connection among the dead hermit, the missing prospector, and Anna, but it could also expose facts whose significance Devlin did not yet understand.

What the document records

The surviving text dates the proposed transaction to 11 October 1865. It states that £2,000 is to be given to Anna, formerly of New South Wales, by Staines, also formerly of New South Wales, with Wells presiding as witness. The sum and the named witness make the paper a substantial clue to a relationship between Staines and Wells, not merely a promise made in isolation. The deed appears to place Wells in a position of knowledge or authority over an arrangement involving Staines’s money and Anna’s future.

But the instrument is incomplete as evidence of a completed gift. It bears Staines’s name, yet no signature from him. Its wording sets out an intended payment; it does not establish that Anna received the £2,000, that Staines owned the gold in question, or that the promise could be enforced. The distinction matters because the fortune associated with Wells’s cottage was Wells’s hoarded wealth, while the deed seemed to assign part of that wealth to Anna through Staines. As Walter Moody later recognizes, the arrangement is perplexing precisely because the gold was not Staines’s to give away.

Disclosure and interpretation

Devlin eventually took the charred deed to Anna at the Wayfarer’s Fortune. In the parlour, he withdrew it from his Bible and handed it to her without explanation. Anna was nearly illiterate: reading even a printed line was slow and difficult for her. Yet the document’s contents drew her attention, and she recognized that she could read it. The moment gives Anna direct access to a record that men had found, hidden, and debated without her knowledge.

For Moody, the deed deepens rather than resolves the mystery. It suggests that Staines and Wells were associates and that Wells’s concealed fortune was somehow intended as a gift from Staines to Anna. The names on the paper therefore connect the fortune in Wells’s cottage to Anna’s gold-bearing dresses and to Staines’s disappearance, but they do not explain how those strands fit together. The deed supplies a relationship and a proposed purpose; its missing signature and uncertain source of funds leave the central questions open.

The deed within the circulation of wealth

Across the novel’s competing claims, the deed belongs to a world in which wealth changes meaning as it changes hands. Gold is hidden in Wells’s cottage, sewn into Lydia Wells’s dresses, and carried unknowingly by Anna; the deed attempts to give part of that wealth a named recipient and a documented purpose. Yet the paper itself is charred, unsigned by the purported giver, and withheld in a Bible. Its material condition and chain of custody mirror the uncertainty surrounding the fortune it describes.

The promise also sits uneasily beside the obligations that later surround Anna’s money. When the gold extracted from her orange gown remains hidden beneath Aubert Gascoigne’s bed, Staines agrees that her debt to Dick Mannering should be paid from his share of the bonanza, leaving Anna with means to live while he is in gaol. That later arrangement does not verify the deed or prove that its £2,000 was ever transferred. It does, however, echo the document’s central tension: a proposed gift becomes entangled with debts, ownership, and the practical question of who can claim a share of concealed wealth.