The opening of the Wayfarer’s Fortune

Lydia Wells’s purchase and planned reopening of the Wayfarer as the Wayfarer’s Fortune made a hotel into both a stage for spiritualism and, later, a refuge for Anna Wetherell. The opening was promoted as Hokitika’s first séance, with a public evening preceding a restricted, ticketed attempt to summon the missing Emery Staines. Lydia’s new venture joined theatrical self-presentation to a practical change in her circumstances: she was no longer merely announcing a fortune-telling business, but claiming a place for herself as its owner and operator.

Purchase and Reinvention

Lydia revealed her purchase to Aubert Gascoigne with evident excitement. When he asked which hotel she meant, she identified the Wayfarer itself. The exchange makes the acquisition a personal declaration as well as a commercial one: Lydia had not simply found premises for her plans; she had bought the establishment and intended to remake its identity. Gascoigne marvelled at the announcement, while Lydia insisted that he ask what she had been doing and appeared eager to have him attend to the news.

Her proposed name, the Wayfarer’s Fortune, supplied the venture with a new promise. Lydia planned to replace the existing name, Wayfarer, with one that joined travel to the prospect of revelation and luck. Gascoigne responded appreciatively to its sound. The renaming was not a completed alteration in the conversation, but a clear part of Lydia’s announced intention for the hotel.

A Stage for Lydia’s Plans

When Gascoigne asked what changes she would make, Lydia rose and presented the parlour as if it were already a design in progress. She moved around the ottoman, surveying the mullioned window, thinly plastered walls, and a threadbare Union Jack tacked to the wall opposite the window. The room’s existing details offered a sharp contrast to the rich, theatrical setting she envisioned, though the evidence records her plans rather than their eventual completion.

Lydia intended to add drapes and modern fainting-couches. In the drawing room, she proposed a small booth with saloon doors, shaped to resemble a confessional; the front parlour would serve as a waiting room. She planned to conduct séances there, read fortunes, draw up cosmic birth charts, and lay out Tarot patterns. The mix of consultation, performance, and spiritual practice made the proposed hotel more than a lodging house: its rooms were to guide visitors from waiting to encounter, with Lydia herself at the centre of the experience.

Gascoigne played along with her presentation, reaching to clasp her hand and claiming that he had recanted his scepticism. The narration makes clear that he remained a thorough sceptic and was suppressing a smile. Lydia, by contrast, asserted her authority in this particular domain, casting herself as the expert and him as the layman. Their exchange gives the planned enterprise a social as well as a physical shape: it depended on Lydia’s confidence and on an audience willing, or at least curious, to enter the world she was offering.

The Advertised Opening

The opening was announced in the West Coast Times in a conspicuous advertisement spanning two columns. Set in bold eighteen-point type and bordered in black, it presented the Wayfarer’s Fortune as owned and operated by Mrs. Lydia Wells, recently of Dunedin and widow of Crosbie Wells. It described Lydia as a celebrated medium and announced that the establishment would open to the public that evening. The scale and visual treatment of the notice made the launch itself part of the spectacle.

The advertisement divided the occasion into two kinds of access. The séance was reserved for an elite audience, with tickets distributed on a first-come, first-served basis; before it, an evening of drinks and speculation was open to the public. The notice invited Hokitika residents to approach the event with an open mind, even as it framed contact with the dead as an investigation into spiritual tremors that might open communication between this world and the next. The opening therefore promised both a social gathering and a more exclusive supernatural performance.

Lydia’s advertised choice of spirit sharpened the occasion’s intrigue. She planned to summon Emery Staines, who had not returned to Hokitika and whose body had not been found after five weeks’ absence. The notice did not specify what she would ask him. Readers and townspeople could nevertheless infer the central question: how he had died, if he was dead. The advertisement presented the séance as a means of inquiry into an unresolved disappearance, while leaving its answer—and the séance’s result—unknown.

After the Launch

The opening also preceded a more concrete use of the hotel in Lydia’s life and Anna’s. After Anna discovered the remaining gold sewn into her orange dress, she and Gascoigne hid it under his bed. When Edgar Clinch later gave Anna notice to leave the Gridiron, Lydia lent her six pounds to settle her debt to him and invited her to lodge at the Wayfarer’s Fortune. Anna left the Gridiron for good and would no longer call herself a whore. The hotel Lydia had planned as a venue for séances and readings thus became a place where she could offer Anna shelter and help her move away from prostitution.

Lydia’s ownership also sits within a wider story in which claims to property and wealth are contested. The novel reveals that she had once posed as Francis Carver’s wife and sewn gold into the linings of five dresses concealed in a shipping crate. That history links her to the hidden fortune surrounding several characters, but it does not establish that the gold financed her purchase of the Wayfarer. The distinction matters: her new business is clearly an act of ownership and reinvention, while the money behind it is not accounted for in the opening’s evidence.

The Wayfarer’s Fortune consequently begins as a promise of staged contact with the dead, but its narrative importance is not confined to spiritualism. Its advertised divisions—public gathering and private séance, waiting room and confessional-like booth—make it a space organized around access, performance, and what remains concealed. Later, Lydia’s invitation to Anna gives that same establishment a practical role: beneath its promise of fortune-telling, it becomes a home in which a woman can begin to leave an imposed identity behind.