Anna Wetherell’s muff-pistol incident

Anna Wetherell’s muff-pistol incident turns a confrontation with Joseph Pritchard into an unexplained firearm mystery. Pritchard demands to know where Anna has hidden something, and the pistol she draws appears to fire into her breast. Yet she is unharmed, and the room bears no trace of a bullet. A second, controlled firing proves that the weapon works, but does not explain what happened the first time. The unresolved shot shifts the scene from accusation to bewilderment, while an exchanged look between Anna and Aubert Gascoigne leaves Pritchard feeling excluded from an understanding he cannot name.

The confrontation

Pritchard’s demand concerns an object he believes Anna has concealed, but the scene does not identify it. Anna resists his accusation and warns him to leave. He answers by insisting that she tell him where it is, and his anger escalates as she continues to deny him an answer. When he lunges toward her, he says he wants to make her tell the truth; the action places Anna under immediate pressure and makes the argument more than a verbal dispute.

The confrontation is also shaped by Pritchard’s unsettled perception. Earlier that afternoon, the same abrupt sensory impression associated with the ocean and cold had interrupted him; it returns as he advances toward Anna and causes him to falter. The recurrence does not explain his reaction or the later shot, but it interrupts the scene at the moment when his conduct is becoming more forceful. Anna keeps her hands raised before her face and insists that she will not be called a liar. The exchange establishes the immediate stakes as a struggle over what Pritchard believes she knows and whether he can compel her to disclose it.

The apparent shot

As Pritchard lunges again, Anna draws a small, single-loading muff pistol from her clothing. It is initially facing the wrong direction, and she has to turn it to hold it properly. At the same moment, Pritchard steps backward, catches his foot on the rattan rug, and the door bursts open. Startled by the interruption, Anna turns and moves forward; the pistol discharges. The sequence is compressed into several simultaneous movements, leaving the shot’s exact cause unclear.

Pritchard turns toward the person at the door rather than immediately understanding what has happened. The newcomer is Gascoigne, a clerk at the Magistrate’s Court whom Pritchard had met only briefly, some three weeks earlier, when Gascoigne came to his laboratory seeking a prescription. Gascoigne rushes to Anna and checks her. She is breathing and uninjured. Pritchard picks up the pistol, but the room offers no ordinary evidence of a bullet’s path: there is no spent casing, no hole in the wall behind Anna, and no visible injury. The report has occurred, yet its expected consequence is absent.

Testing the pistol

Gascoigne asks who loaded the weapon. Anna says she did and offers to show the spare cartridges. She retrieves a tin box from the whatnot beside the bed; seven cartridges are inside, rolling on a scrap of brown paper. Gascoigne hands the pistol back and asks her to repeat what she did. Anna fits a cartridge into the breech, closes the barrel, cocks the weapon, and returns it to him. Her movements are described as mechanical, and she appears frightened and bewildered.

Gascoigne steps back, aims at the bed’s headboard, and fires. This time the result is visible: a hole marks the centre of the pillow, and he finds a small hole in the headboard behind it. The test establishes that the pistol can discharge a cartridge and leave a physical mark. It does not account for the first firing. The cartridge everyone examines is visibly misshapen, but the scene does not establish what altered it or how it relates to the first shot. The ordinary test clarifies the weapon’s capacity while sharpening the mystery of the earlier event.

The unresolved aftermath

Gascoigne asks what happened to the first cartridge. Anna looks at him, and he looks back; Pritchard perceives an understanding pass between them, but neither explains it to him. That moment changes the balance of the room. The question that might have led to a shared investigation instead becomes, in Pritchard’s view, a private exchange between Anna and Gascoigne. He feels bewildered and cannot bring himself to despise Anna, even as he resents the apparent intimacy of their glance.

Anna then asks Pritchard to go downstairs and tell Edgar Clinch that she was playing with or cleaning the pistol and that it went off by accident. This request supplies a practical account for others without resolving the physical anomaly for the people in the room. The scene ends with Pritchard asked to carry a version of events that treats the discharge as accidental, while the first cartridge and the look shared by Anna and Gascoigne remain unexplained. Its central reversal is therefore not an injury but an absence: a gun fires, yet leaves no mark where its first shot should have landed.