Anna’s suspected suicide shooting in her room

Anna Wetherell’s suspected suicide shooting in her room remains an episode of uncertainty: witnesses report two shots, but the physical evidence consists of a single hole through her pillow. The incident shakes Anna and disrupts a planned outing, while later questioning connects Aubert Gascoigne’s involvement with a separate, still unexplained secret about gold hidden on her person.

The incident and the interrupted outing

The shooting is discussed after the fact, not presented as a fully witnessed scene. Lydia Wells asks Gascoigne whether he means the pistol incident when he says he is unsurprised by something. Her question frames it as another attempt by Anna to take her life, but Lydia immediately clarifies that the pistol is not what she meant: she is unsurprised to find Gascoigne alone. Her response does not establish what Anna intended, and the exchange leaves the act’s meaning unsettled.

Gascoigne explains that he had arranged to take Anna to look at hats without telling her Lydia’s name, intending the meeting to be a surprise. Anna had been pleased by the proposed outing and would have gone. The pistol business intervened: she was shaken by it and, afterwards, was not in a fit state to go. The episode thus has an immediate consequence beyond the room itself. It prevents the meeting Lydia hoped to arrange and leaves Gascoigne explaining both Anna’s absence and his own presence to Lydia.

The reports and the pillow

Later, Edgar Clinch tells Richard Mannering that Gascoigne had been in Anna’s room that afternoon and that shots were fired. Clinch says there were two. When he questioned Gascoigne afterward, Gascoigne answered by bringing up the debt, a response that redirects rather than resolves the question of the shooting. Clinch then went upstairs to inspect the room and found a hole through the middle of Anna’s pillow, with stuffing coming out.

Mannering tests the account against the evidence by asking whether there were two holes. Clinch says there was only one. The distinction matters: the number of reported shots and the number of visible holes do not match. The pillow confirms that a bullet passed through it, but neither it nor the report of two shots explains what happened to the other shot, who fired, or whether Anna meant to kill herself. The episode’s apparent clarity as a suicide attempt therefore rests on an interpretation, not a settled account.

Clinch also recounts the sequence surrounding Lydia’s arrival. Lydia had not seen the hole when it was found; she came later. After leaving Anna, Gascoigne had said he was going to talk to a lady, and Lydia appeared about two hours afterward. This timing helps explain why his solitary visit becomes a subject of scrutiny, but it does not establish that Lydia witnessed the shooting or knew precisely what had happened in the room.

Gascoigne’s account and the hidden gold

When Mannering later questions Gascoigne about gold found beneath his bed, Gascoigne gives an account of his connection to Anna. He says he had cared for her after her release from gaol two weeks earlier and had since courted her friendship. He pitied her, believing that someone was using her for ill, while denying any special intimacy or paid sexual relationship. He also explains that Anna’s black dress had belonged to his late wife and that he gave it to Anna after her own dress was ruined during her imprisonment. These details shape his self-presentation as a helper, but they do not clarify the pistol incident.

Gascoigne says that the morning after Crosbie Wells died, Anna woke in gaol with a great quantity of gold sewn around her corset. She did not know how it had come to be there and was frightened, so she asked Gascoigne for help. He says he hid the gold because neither of them knew who had placed it on her or why. He estimates its value at well over one hundred pounds, probably much more, and says it had not yet been valued. This disclosure supplies a concrete reason for his dealings with Anna and for the gold beneath his bed, but it remains distinct from the unanswered questions surrounding the shots.

Significance and unresolved questions

The shooting is defined by the gap between what others infer and what the evidence can prove. Lydia’s question invokes a renewed suicide attempt; Gascoigne describes Anna as shaken and unfit to go out; Clinch reports two shots but finds one hole. None of these accounts supplies a direct explanation from Anna. The episode therefore leaves her intention unknown while exposing how quickly her distress becomes an object of interpretation by other people.

The surrounding conversations also make the room a point where several forms of uncertainty meet: Gascoigne’s debt, his private visits to Anna, the bullet in the pillow, and the gold he says he concealed. His account of the gold is explicit, but it does not settle the shooting. The distinction between these disclosures preserves the event’s central ambiguity: the physical trace is real, while the intention behind it remains unconfirmed.