Lydia Greenway Wells Carver—Venus Timeline and Summary

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• Lydia Greenway carries on an affair with Francis Carver in Sydney, where she owns a brothel.
• At some point, she starts a gambling house (complete with "dancing girls") in Dunedin.
• Despite remaining involved with Carver, she marries Crosbie Wells to get out of having to pay him when he hits the jackpot in her gambling house. The marriage quickly becomes an unhappy one.
• Frank Carver and Lydia steal Crosbie Wells's money, mining right, and birth certificate as part of a scheme to blackmail Alistair Lauderback.
• Lydia meets Anna Wetherell upon the latter's arrival in Dunedin and tricks her into becoming obligated to her.
• She encourages the affair between Anna and Crosbie and then kicks Anna out when the resulting pregnancy starts showing.
• After Crosbie Wells leaves for Hokitika and then turns up dead, she travels there to claim his fortune as his widow.
• However, she has to wait until he courts resolve the claim, since his estate had already been sold off before anyone realized she existed. While she's waiting, she buys a hotel and turns it into a fortune-telling/tarot enterprise. She hires Anna Wetherell to assist her.
• Just as she's about to get her fortune, Anna turns up at the court with a signed deed claiming half of that fortune was to go to her.
• Lydia marries Francis Carver.
• During the trial for Anna and Emery that follows Emery's return, Lydia's nefarious doings with Carver come out—and then Carver is killed while being taken into custody. The last time we hear about Lydia in the novel's present-day timeline, she's fainted in the wake of her new husband's death.