Anna and Emery’s detention

Anna Wetherell and Emery Staines’s detention keeps them together through illness, legal uncertainty, and a transfer between gaols. Their custody is not merely a shared legal condition: Staines refuses release from Anna’s side, and their gradual recovery unfolds in a space where the authorities treat them as prisoners while tending to their injuries and dependence.

Arrest, charges, and bail

After Staines reappears, he is arrested on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and dereliction and remanded in custody. His bail is set at one pound one shilling, the standard rate, but he chooses not to pay it, preferring to remain with Anna and await his summons to the Magistrate’s Court. Anna’s bail, by contrast, is set at eight pounds, a sum she cannot hope to raise. She no longer has gold sewn into her clothes to offer as surety, nor an employer who might pay on her behalf. The unequal practical weight of their separate bail amounts leaves Anna dependent on outside help while Staines makes his continued imprisonment a choice.

Together in the gaol-house

When Staines is first treated for a bullet wound to his shoulder, the physician proposes installing him at the Criterion Hotel opposite the Police Camp. Still drifting in and out of consciousness, Staines becomes immediately alert at the prospect of being separated from Anna. He insists that he will go nowhere she does not go, and the physician eventually agrees to place him in the gaol-house beside her. Staines accepts being manacled like the other prisoners without protest. Once settled, he reaches out to touch Anna’s cheek, then falls asleep.

He remains asleep beside her, his injured shoulder bandaged, while Anna lies facing him. Their bodies settle into closely mirrored positions, and Anna’s outstretched hand reaches toward him. Watching them breathe in tandem, Cowell Devlin is overcome by an emotion he cannot name. The quiet image makes their confinement at once an instrument of control and the place where their reunion is sustained.

Treatment and recovery

In the weeks after the autumnal equinox, both remain in the Police Camp gaol. Anna’s health improves following her reunion with Staines: her arms and wrists thicken, her face loses its pinched appearance, and colour returns to her cheeks. Dr. Gillies visits nearly every day and warns her sternly about opium, cautioning that she cannot count on being lucky a third time. He prescribes laudanum in gradually decreasing doses to wean her from the addiction.

Dr. Gillies prescribes Staines the same drug, five drams a day, reduced by one dram every fortnight until his shoulder heals. The wound improves after being stitched and dressed, although the joint remains stiff and he cannot yet raise his arm above his head. Staines experiences an urgent thirst for laudanum; Anna, unlike him, dislikes the daily dose and wrinkles her nose at its smell. Devlin mixes it with sugar and sometimes sweet sherry to soften its bitterness, then watches as they drink their prescribed measures. Within minutes, both grow drowsy and pass into a scarlet-tinted sleep. Their recovery is therefore managed through a drug that is simultaneously medical treatment and a substance to which each has a troubled relationship.

Transfer and continued custody

On 12 April, Anna and Staines are transferred with the other prisoners from the temporary Police Camp quarters to the new gaol-house on the Seaview terrace. The change of building does not end their detention: Staines is still awaiting the Magistrate’s Court verdict, and Devlin turns away visitors while assuring them that he is alive, recovering from a grave illness, and will be released in due course pending the court’s decision.

Devlin makes an exception for Te Rau Tauwhare, whose visits have an notably beneficial effect on Staines’s mood and health. Their presence at Seaview thus remains defined by both institutional restraint and personal ties: Staines is held under guard, but companionship, care, and the decision to stay beside Anna shape what that confinement means.