20 March 1866

20 March 1866 is a temporal hinge in the closing movement of the novel’s Hokitika story. In the sequence associated with the autumnal equinox, uncertainty about how Anna Wetherell obtained laudanum gives way to the return of Emery Staines, found sick and hidden in Crosbie Wells’s cottage. Their reunion does not bring immediate freedom: both remain in custody, and the later discovery that Anna’s pistol fired the bullet in Staines’s shoulder turns their private history into a public charge.

A date at the equinox threshold

The date belongs to a chapter framed by the astrological heading Mercury in Pisces; Saturn conjunct Moon. That framing places the action within the novel’s recurring conjunction of calendar time and celestial language, but the date’s significance is also practical: it locates a rapid change in the status of Anna and Staines. The narrative looks back to the night of the autumnal equinox as the point after which both are held at the Police Camp gaol-house, then follows the consequences of their reunion toward a hearing scheduled for 27 April.

The chapter sequence moves between a specific day and the longer interval that follows it. The discovery of Staines is presented as an arrival in the gaol-house courtyard; the account of their imprisonment and improving health then compresses the weeks after the equinox. This shift matters because the date marks neither a simple release nor a resolution. It opens into a period in which physical recovery proceeds while legal jeopardy accumulates.

From suspicion to Staines’s return

At the Police Camp gaol-house, Cowell Devlin asks Aubert Gascoigne how Anna could have obtained the laudanum that led to her latest collapse. Devlin had escorted her from the Wayfarer’s Fortune that morning and recalls that she carried no reticule or wallet and, as far as he knew, no money. Pritchard’s Drug Hall is closed for the afternoon, so a fresh purchase there seems unlikely. Devlin’s questions make the phial an unresolved object: someone may have supplied it, but the reason for doing so is unknown.

That uncertainty is interrupted by the arrival of Joseph Pritchard with Staines. Te Rau Tauwhare sits beside the sick young man in the trap, holding him upright; Tauwhare has found him hiding in Crosbie Wells’s cottage. Staines is pale, sunken-eyed, and so weak that Pritchard asks for help getting him down. Devlin is astonished by the contrast between the person he had imagined and the boy before him, whom he judges to be barely older than a child. When Devlin objects to taking him to gaol, the moment exposes the conflict between the sick man’s immediate need for care and the authorities’ power to detain him.

Reunion under confinement

In the account of the weeks following the equinox, Anna and Staines are both still incarcerated. Anna’s bail is eight pounds, a sum described as beyond her reach: she no longer has gold sewn into her clothes and has no employer willing to pay. Staines could have supplied the money, but he too is in custody. He has been arrested on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and dereliction, with bail set at the standard amount of one pound one shilling. Rather than pay it, he chooses to remain with Anna and await his summons to the Magistrate’s Court.

Their decision to remain together gives the reunion a consequence that goes beyond the discovery in the cottage. Staines’s presence cannot secure Anna’s release; instead, his own detention binds their situations together. The legal system measures their cases separately, assigning them very different bail amounts, while their shared confinement becomes the condition in which each begins to recover. The narrative therefore sets intimate loyalty beside institutional restraint: his choice offers companionship, not a way out.

Recovery and the charge that follows

Dr. Gillies visits the gaol-house nearly every day in the weeks after the equinox. Anna’s health improves: her wrists and forearms thicken, the pinched look leaves her face, and colour returns to her cheeks. Gillies warns her about the danger of opium and prescribes a decreasing dose of laudanum intended to wean her gradually from dependence. The treatment registers both progress and continuing vulnerability; recovery is underway, but it requires a controlled supply of the same drug that has endangered her.

Staines receives a related prescription, though for a different immediate reason. His shoulder wound has been sewn and dressed, and the physician prescribes five drams of laudanum a day, to be reduced by one dram every fortnight until the shoulder heals. He still cannot raise his arm above his head, even as his general health improves. Devlin brings the medicine each night and watches him drink it; Staines cannot explain his sudden, distressing thirst for the drug, while Anna appears reluctant to take her dose. The parallel treatment draws their physical recoveries together without making their conditions identical.

The connection between Staines’s wound and Anna’s past becomes a later legal consequence of this period. After Dr. Gillies lets slip that the bullet came from a woman’s pistol, the Gridiron Hotel valet recalls the shots fired in Anna’s room in January. The authorities retrieve Anna’s pistol from Edgar Clinch, and the match between the weapon and the cartridge is confirmed. By the hearing scheduled for 27 April before Justice Kemp, Anna faces charges including forgery, public intoxication resulting in disorderly behaviour, and grievous assault. Thus the chronology opened around 20 March leads from a baffling phial and a long-awaited return to a new evidentiary link: the weapon associated with Anna is identified as the one that wounded Staines.