Shepard discovered the contract hidden in Devlin's Bible

Harald Nilssen’s disclosure to George Shepard turns a concealed document into evidence with consequences for the disputed gold estate. Under pressure to explain how Shepard’s secret gaol-financing arrangement had become known, Nilssen revealed that Cowell Devlin had kept a partly burned deed of gift found in Crosbie Wells’s cottage. He eventually told Shepard where Devlin had hidden it: inside his Bible. The document named Emery Staines as the giver of £2,000 to Anna Wetherell, with Wells as witness, and linked the missing man, the dead cottage owner, and the contested fortune.

The financial arrangement behind the confrontation

Shepard had proposed that Nilssen invest the whole of his commission from the sale of Wells’s estate in building the Seaview gaol. Nilssen objected that the money was not truly his: if Lydia Wells’s appeal succeeded and the sale was declared void, he would have to return the commission. Shepard answered that the Council could sponsor a loan, that Nilssen would earn his usual commission on labour and materials, and that public funds could repay him when available. The proposal thus presented the investment as both secure and profitable, while relying on money whose ownership remained unsettled. Nilssen’s discomfort was not simply about the financial risk. Shepard had already treated him as potentially implicated in the Wells affair, controlling the conversation and raising the possibility of murder. When Shepard summoned him to the Police Camp, the gaoler accused him of breaking his word because Alistair Lauderback was about to attack Shepard’s character in the West Coast Times, alleging that part of the fortune discovered on Wells’s estate had funded the gaol. Nilssen did not know who had revealed the arrangement and was uncertain whom he could trust. His disclosure of the deed emerged from this pressurized exchange, not from a planned effort to present evidence openly.

Nilssen reveals what Devlin concealed

Shepard demanded to know whom Nilssen had told. After initially responding with bewilderment, Nilssen admitted that he had something to disclose and named Staines as his source of information about the leak, choosing someone he thought he could do the least immediate harm. Nilssen was unsure whether Staines was the blackmailer Shepard suspected. He then explained that a deed had been found in Wells’s stove, partly burned as if someone had tried to destroy it. Devlin, who had gone to the cottage to collect Wells’s body the day after his death, had kept the document rather than reporting it to Shepard or Dr. Gillies. Nilssen described the deed’s contents, but his disclosure did not end with the document’s existence. Hoping to avoid being identified as the person who had betrayed Devlin’s secret, he offered to tell Shepard where it was hidden, provided Shepard promised not to name him to the chaplain. Shepard gave his word. Nilssen then said that Devlin had placed the deed inside his Bible, between the Old and New Testaments. His account shifted the secret from private knowledge to a recoverable object, while Nilssen tried to limit the personal cost of making that change.

The Bible and the recovered deed

Shepard went to the temporary gaol-house, where Devlin was preaching to the prisoners, and asked for his Bible. He did not immediately reveal why he wanted it. After Devlin left the service and entered Shepard’s study, he found the Bible open on the desk and the charred slip of paper displayed on it. Shepard had located the document using Nilssen’s information. The recovered text stated that, on 11 October 1865, Staines was to give £2,000 to Anna, formerly of New South Wales, with Wells presiding as witness. The deed’s physical condition and location matter to the chain of disclosure. It had been partly burned in Wells’s stove, preserved by Devlin after the body was collected, hidden between the sections of his Bible, and finally brought into view by Shepard. Each custodian had made a different choice about the paper: attempted destruction was suggested by its damage, Devlin concealed it, and Nilssen disclosed its hiding place. Shepard’s discovery depended on Nilssen’s account, but the document itself provided the written terms around which the later dispute could form.

What the document establishes—and leaves unresolved

The deed gave Shepard a basis for connecting Staines to the fortune and Anna to a promised share. He reasoned that Wells, who was not generally thought to have been wealthy, might have been holding the money for Staines, who had vanished on the day Wells died. The document appeared to support the idea that the fortune originated with Staines and that he intended to give Anna exactly half. Devlin acknowledged the deed’s relevance but maintained that it was not legally valid because Staines had not signed it. Its contents therefore raised a claim without conclusively settling it. That distinction became important beyond Shepard’s discovery. Devlin later showed Anna the deed, and she recognized that she could read it. At Staines’s trial, the fortune was valued at £4,096; Staines testified that the gold had been excavated by Ah Quee at the Aurora, retorted into squares, and then taken to the Arahura Valley and buried rather than reported as required. The deed’s proposed £2,000 gift was thus evidence of an intended transfer, not a complete account of the gold’s acquisition or its legal status.

Consequences and significance

The revelation changes the deed from an undisclosed remnant in Wells’s cottage into a document that can be examined, interpreted, and used in competing claims. It also exposes the fragility of the secrecy surrounding Shepard’s financing plan: while Nilssen fears the consequences of speaking, the concealment he reveals concerns another concealed transaction, one involving a promised gift and a fortune whose ownership is disputed. His disclosure helps Shepard obtain the paper, but it does not settle what the paper can prove. The episode brings together the novel’s recurring distinctions between possession, obligation, and proof. Nilssen’s commission is formally his to invest only provisionally; the deed records a gift that lacks the signature needed for validity; and the gold later identified with Staines had been hidden rather than entered in the mine’s accounts. The Bible becomes the immediate means of finding the evidence, but the recovery only opens further questions. The deed connects people and money across the Wells estate dispute without resolving who may finally claim the fortune.