Anna Wetherell’s collapse at court turns a moment of unexplained illness into another episode of detention, while leaving the central question unresolved: whether her condition resulted from renewed opium use, another person’s intervention, or circumstances the witnesses could not establish. George Shepard interprets the smell of laudanum as sufficient reason to send her to the gaol-house; Aubert Gascoigne notices the absence of physical signs he associates with the drug. The ensuing decision places Anna back in custody, thin and dressed in mourning, without resolving how she came to be incapacitated.

The collapse and immediate response

Shepard is waiting for a warrant for a Chinese man when a muffled thump comes from John Fellowes’ office. Fellowes calls for help, and Gascoigne finds Anna lying face down, her eyes closed and mouth partly open. Fellowes, kneeling beside her and shaking her arm, says that she has suddenly collapsed. He appears frightened and insists that he did not touch her. He later describes her as sober when she arrived, then drowsy, and finally unconscious.

The witnesses do not agree on what the signs mean. Fellowes suggests that Anna may have fainted or appeared drunk, but Shepard says he can smell laudanum. Gascoigne also detects the drug’s smell. He checks Anna’s mouth and finds no staining, which he takes as evidence against laudanum having caused the collapse. His observation does not establish what she has taken, however, and no explanation is confirmed in the scene.

From suspected illness to detention

Gascoigne raises the possibility of taking Anna to hospital. Shepard rejects that course and orders her sent to the gaol-house at the Police Camp. He directs that she be chained to a rail and kept sitting upright so she can breathe. The order is made while Anna remains unconscious and unable to explain what has happened. The urgency of keeping her upright is thus combined with a punitive decision about where she is to be taken.

Cowell Devlin later makes room for her in the gaol-house. He sees her as a more wretched figure than she had been after her earlier attempt on her life, two months before: this time she is not feverish, muttering, or thrashing, but lies peacefully in her black mourning gown and appears very thin. Devlin manacles her reluctantly and as loosely as he can. At his request, Margaret Shepard brings a blanket, which he folds beneath Anna’s head. His actions soften the physical conditions of her confinement without changing the fact that she is held there.

Questions about the source of the laudanum

Devlin had escorted Anna to the courthouse that morning and is puzzled by her sudden collapse. He asks Gascoigne whether she might have gone directly to Joseph Pritchard’s shop and bought a phial of laudanum. Gascoigne replies that the shop has been closed all afternoon. The exchange eliminates that proposed route as an easy explanation but supplies no alternative source. Anna cannot answer the question while unconscious, and the people around her do not identify who, if anyone, gave her the drug.

The uncertainty recalls her earlier overdose on 14 January. Anna had said that she did not mean to kill herself, and Pritchard believed that account; he also considered the possibility that she had been made to take the drug or that the resin had been altered to harm her. He knew that she was a seasoned opium user, accustomed to taking it nearly every day, but had never known her to remain unconscious and unrevivable for more than twelve hours. Those facts made the earlier episode suspicious to him, not conclusive. The court collapse renews the same problem without proving that it had the same cause.

Custody, dependence, and the unresolved account

In the weeks before the court collapse, Anna had not returned to the opium den in Kaniere Chinatown since the afternoon of 14 January. The half-ounce of fresh resin that Sook Yongsheng had given her that day would ordinarily have lasted about two weeks at her habitual rate of use, yet more than a month passed without her returning to replenish her supply or share a pipe. Ah Sook missed her visits and could not explain her absence. He suspected Joseph Pritchard of involvement in the January overdose, but also struggled to believe Anna might have overcome her addiction. This reported abstinence makes the later smell of laudanum especially consequential, while still not identifying its source.

After the autumnal equinox, Anna and Emery Staines remain imprisoned at the Police Camp gaol. Anna’s bail is set at eight pounds, far beyond what she can pay: she no longer has a fortune sewn into her clothes, and she has no employer willing to meet the amount. Staines is also remanded on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and dereliction; although his bail is the standard one pound one shilling, he chooses to stay in custody with her. Anna’s later recovery under a physician’s care and a decreasing laudanum dosage shows that her condition is treated as a continuing medical concern, but does not retrospectively settle what caused this collapse. At Staines’s later hearing, he says that he had been under opium’s effects and believed he had spent much of his absence in the Kaniere Chinatown den, another indication that opium remains entangled with the case without supplying a definite account of Anna’s episode.