Sergeant Dewey already knew that Mrs Dyer was not altogether trustworthy. She had first come to his attention following the death of the boy on 13 August. A pitiful sight, his body had been, haggard and wretched. Dewey had recognized instantly that this was a case of neglect. The boy’s body had been lying wrapped in blankets in the parlour, and two other infants at the house were barely clinging to life. When the woman Hacker informed him that another of Dyer’s nurse children had expired, this time a girl named May, he had written to the Somerset County Coroner, Mr Biggs, without delay.
Totterdown, Bristol
19th August 1879
Sir,
I have to inform you that a female child died at Dr J Milne’s surgery, Harford place, Bristol, on Sunday evening, the 17th inst., where it was taken by a married woman, named Dyer, living at 14 Poole’s crescent, Bath Road, Totterdown, who had been taking children to nurse for years; and last Wednesday, the 13th inst., another child died at her house. This numbers five within about twelve or eighteen months, one of them being her own child. For this child that died on Sunday last she obtained a certificate, and gave the name of Ann May Walters Dyer, which is not correct. Dr Milne saw this child first on Saturday, the 16th inst., at 12.30 and prescribed for it. The mother, as he thought she was (Mrs Dyer) reported next day that the child was dead and he gave a certificate. The age was stated as nine weeks – the cause of death convulsions and intestinal disorder.
Dewey was eventually able to determine that the child Dyer had claimed was hers was in fact May Walters, born to Dorcas Walters, a domestic servant from London.
On Thursday 21 August, Dewey learned that the City Coroner was opening an inquest into the death of another of Dyer’s nurse children, Elizabeth Thomas – “Bessie”. Days later, Mrs Hacker informed him that Evalina was now dead.
Four of Dyer’s nurse children dead in two weeks.
He wrote informing the Somerset County Coroner of the Bristol inquests, pointing out that they pertained to the same nurse as in the case of May Walters. The County Coroner ordered that a postmortem should be carried out without delay on May Walters, at the Dyer’s home in Poole’s Crescent, Totterdown.
The body of Little May lay on the parlour table for seven days. Polly, still not quite six years old, knew it was there. The parlour curtains were kept drawn and Mother remained largely out of sight, relying heavily on the little bottle in her apron pocket and sending Ellen out to fetch more.
On Thursday afternoon, four days after Little May’s death, Polly’s home was suddenly overrun by men. There were two police officers and two doctors: Dr Milne, whom she knew, and another who introduced himself as Dr Gardiner. Both doctors carried weighty black bags and one clutched a set of scales under his arm.
The men spent much of the afternoon in the parlour, muttering terms of which Polly could have had had no understanding: “emaciated”; “empty intestines”; “want of nourishment”. She heard the sound of weights against the cold steel of the scales; Dr Milne announcing a body weight of just 6½lb, an estimated age of nine weeks. (in fact, Little May was at least three months old.) The conversation took on the tone of a dispute, the nature of which must also have been lost to Polly: Dr Gardiner repeating the words “narcotics” and “laudanum” with great emphasis, Dr Milne responding with “convulsions”.
After they left the house, they had not taken Little May’s body with them as Polly had hoped. Instead, it remained on the parlour table. Then Mother had decided she should be taken in to see the body. Polly had been terrified: the parlour was plunged into shadow; curtains drawn, lights dim. Little may’s body had been “all cut about” by the doctors – wounds opened up in her little stomach and sliced into her chest and then roughly sewn together again. Polly had wanted to close her eyes and block out the sight of it; but she hadn’t been able to, and had never forgotten it.
Two days later, the house was filled with men again. Mother had been wailing and crying half the night. Polly understood little, but surely sensed the fear. Suddenly, late in the morning, Ellen had run to fetch help: she said she was afraid for mother’s life and believed her to have taken too much laudanum.
The police, when they came, were inexplicably stern with mother, despite her obvious indisposition. Mr Carr, the surgeon, had given her an emetic, which made her vomit violently. An empty bottle of laudanum sat on the bedside table. Polly and Ellen knew there was more.
Sergeant Dewey had been in the house before, and took the stairs two at a time straight to mother’s bedroom. Their exchange was reported verbatim for the benefit of the Coroner’s Court later that afternoon:
“You foolish woman; you are making things ten times worse!”
Mother answering: “I’ve not taken much.”
A second, younger policeman, who had followed Sergeant Dewey up the stairs, was ordered inside the bedroom while Sergeant Dewey spoke to Ellen quietly for a minute or two.
It was hard for anyone to make out mother’s words now: she was groggy and her voice sounded sleepy.
“You have another bottle about here,” Sergeant Dewey barked. “I must have it!”
Downstairs, Polly cowered at the anger in the policeman’s voice. She knew the bottle would be in the right-hand pocket of mother’s apron, just as it always was. Minutes later Dewey came downstairs, two empty bottles in his hand, their labels cautioning “laudanum – POISON”, should anyone be left in any doubt.
It was no small dose, as Amelia had claimed. In fact, it was a wonder she was alive. Two bottles of laudanum were easily a fatal dose for anyone who had never been exposed to opiates before. Only a habitual laudanum drinker could have tolerated such a large dose.
In the nineteenth century, stories of opium dependency were well chronicled: men and women who for years consumed a daily dose sufficient to take out a shipful of unexposed crewmen. Men and women who would consume a half-pint of laudanum every day and yet continue to function and go about their business. As the writer Thomas De Quincey opined in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, only a fool would time his doses so as to sleep during the day: unconsciousness would come sure enough, but space out the doses carefully and first would come eight or ten daylight hours of clearheaded lucidity.
Yet for those who had never indulged, a medicinal dose of opiates sufficient to induce unconsciousness for surgery, for example, could easily prove fatal. Opium is a fickle narcotic; it was one in which this woman had clearly indulged before.
Mother continued to vomit. She vomited throughout the arrival of a houseful of well-dressed gentlemen, who let themselves in and examined every square inch of the house and its occupants, before finally crowding into the parlour where they scrutinized the body of Little May.
One of the gentlemen came out of the parlour and, after a brief word with Sergeant Dewey, followed him upstairs and into mother’s bedroom. He stood over her for several minutes, and questioned her in harsh tones. As he descended the staircase, he announced to the other gentlemen, now filing out of the parlour, “The woman has all the symptoms of poisoning by opium. She’ll not be fit to attend today.”
As the sickness wore off mother grew more excitable. Sergeant Dewey returned that evening, by which time she was raging, shouting, “I am determined to do it!” and, “I can’t live!” Her breathing was strange: fast and light. She was light-headed, as if she would swoon if she tried to stand. With a sunken-eyed, ghostly countenance, she stared through those who faced her, as if looking at some spectre beyond. Sleep mostly escaped her but when it came, it brought with it no rest, and she cried out and thrashed about in her bed, troubled by the most fearsome nightmares. Eventually, she descended into a heavy and unnatural sleep, from which she could not be stirred. Awake or not, a police officer remained at her side morning and night for the duration of the week.
The doctor had said he feared Mother might never wake. But by the following afternoon, she was able to sit up and have brief conversations again. When Sergeant Dewey returned in the early evening, she was downcast, muttering miserably that she didn’t understand why she was still alive: “I took about the right quantity. I am half doctor myself.”
The wind began picking up that Sunday night. By Monday morning, the South-West was plunged into the bleak half-light of a late summer storm, the wind wild enough to warrant a special mention in the local press. The rain started that night and continued into the next day, falling in torrents and wreaking havoc on garden fetes and village flower shows. Inside 14 Poole’s Crescent, Mother was maudlin and taciturn, not helped by the lingering effects of the laudanum overdose. Polly was confused and frightened. And in torrential rainfall on the morning of Tuesday 26 August 1879, a black prison van pulled up outside Poole’s Crescent and took Mother away.
Polly recalled that it would seem like years before she would see her again.