Anna Wetherell’s pocket pistol

Anna Wetherell’s pocket pistol is a small, single-loading weapon that becomes the centre of an unexplained incident in her room. When Anna handles it during a confrontation with Joseph Pritchard, it discharges, yet leaves her unharmed and produces none of the effects expected from a fired cartridge. A later test confirms that the pistol can fire normally, sharpening rather than resolving the mystery. The object shifts from a possible means of self-protection to a piece of evidence that exposes the limits of what the witnesses can establish.

Design and handling

The pistol is described as a compact muff pistol, hardly longer than Pritchard’s finger. Its small size does not make it harmless: Pritchard recognizes that a shot at close range could cause serious injury. It is a single-loading piece, and Anna must turn the barrel sideways to fit a cartridge into the breech before snapping the barrel back into place and cocking it. The sequence matters because its mechanics can be repeated and observed, allowing the witnesses to distinguish the pistol’s ordinary operation from what happened during the first discharge.

Anna keeps the pistol among her belongings and reaches for it as Pritchard lunges toward her. In the confusion, she turns the piece to fit it into her hand while Pritchard steps back and the door opens. The weapon fires as she half-turns toward the interruption. The scene presents several actions happening at once, so the discharge cannot be treated as a deliberate, controlled shot; the immediate question is what the pistol did and whether Anna was injured.

The unexplained discharge

Aubert Gascoigne, a clerk at the Magistrate’s Court, enters just after the shot. He examines Anna and finds no wound. Pritchard picks up the pistol, but the room offers no corresponding sign of an ordinary discharge: there is no spent casing, no damage to the wall behind Anna, and no visible injury to her. Anna touches her breast in confusion, while the two men inspect the room and the weapon. The pistol is no longer merely a threat in the confrontation; it is an object whose apparent action cannot be reconciled with the evidence around it.

Gascoigne asks who loaded the piece. Anna says that she did, and retrieves a tin box containing seven cartridges on a scrap of brown paper. At his request, she repeats the loading procedure. Gascoigne then takes the loaded pistol several paces away and fires at the bed’s headboard. This time the result is plainly visible: the shot pierces the centre of the pillow. The controlled demonstration establishes that the pistol can fire and that Anna’s loading method works, but it does not explain the earlier shot.

The witnesses focus on the second cartridge, which is visibly misshapen. Gascoigne asks what happened to the first, but the evidence supplied by the scene does not disclose an answer. Anna and Gascoigne exchange a look that Pritchard reads as understanding; he does not share whatever conclusion may have passed between them. That difference in perception makes the pistol a focal point for uncertain knowledge as well as a mechanical puzzle: the event is witnessed by several people, but their observations do not yield a shared explanation.

Examination as evidence

The incident returns in questioning at court. A witness is asked to demonstrate how Anna held the pistol, including the position of her hand and the angle of her half-turned body. The questioning reconstructs the moment physically rather than relying only on a verbal account, treating the weapon’s position in Anna’s hand as relevant to assessing what the discharge could have done.

The witness states that a fired cartridge would likely have injured Anna, and adds that even a blank should have left some effect from its casing or powder. This testimony makes the central anomaly precise: the pistol’s first discharge was followed neither by the expected injury nor by the ordinary signs that might explain her escape from harm. The later courtroom discussion therefore preserves the room’s unresolved question instead of supplying a definitive account of the first cartridge.

Narrative significance

The pistol’s importance lies in the gap between a repeatable mechanism and an unrepeated event. When Gascoigne fires it, the weapon behaves as expected; when it first fires in the confusion of Anna’s room, the expected consequences are absent. The second shot provides a useful comparison, but not a solution. Each inspection makes the pistol more legible as an object while leaving its first use harder to account for.

Its movement through the scene also changes who can interpret it. Anna loads and handles the weapon; Pritchard picks it up; Gascoigne tests it and questions her; later, a witness reconstructs her grip for the court. The pistol passes from immediate danger to demonstration and then to testimony, but no examination settles what happened at the decisive moment. It remains a concrete piece of evidence around which competing observations gather, making the unexplained discharge a continuing problem of proof rather than simply an incident of mistaken handling.