Over the course of 1893, Mother’s house of confinement continued to thrive. Throughout the courtship and engagement of Arthur and Polly the ladies had come and gone; so had their infants, as nameless as they had always been. As many as seven women at a time took up temporary residence at 144 Wells Road, each paying a substantial fee for the privilege. Most of the women stayed at least two or three months before their confinement and some for as long as five or six. Polly said, “as far as I could make out … at that time she had plenty of money”.
While babies quietly disappeared in the background, Father continued to labour at the vinegar brewery. Mother swung from relative good health, when in “calm moments she was very kind and affectionate”, to dark and “peculiar”, drug- and alcohol-induced delusional melancholia.
At the beginning of December 1893, Mother’s mood plummeted. Her anxiety levels raged out of control (a common symptom of long-term, habitual opium abuse); she could not be consoled. Polly sent for the young doctor who had been attending Mother since she had returned to Totterdown in 1891. Dr Henry McQuade was a thirty-year-old Irishman who lived just minutes from the Dyers. In what condition McQuade found Amelia Dyer has not been recorded, but whatever had triggered her troubles would soon become apparent.
On the afternoon of Friday 23 December 1893, a well-dressed couple approached the house on the Wells Road. There was no Yuletide cheer apparent on their careworn faces, but their tireless investigations had at last led them to the door of number 144.
It had been almost two years since the governess and her husband had last seen the nurse, three since the birth of their child. In all that time they had not given up their search. Whatever characteristic steely coolness Dyer presented them with on that December afternoon was short lived. As with their exchange of 1891, the details of the meeting have been lost, but its consequences were to prove considerable.
Mother set off from the house almost immediately the couple left; Polly recalled her returning with threepence-worth of laudanum from one apothecary and the same amount from another. This amounted to a substantial overdose, comparable to that which had almost carried her off fourteen years before. Over the ensuing years, sustained use would have boosted her tolerance, as, little by little, she had raised her dose to stave off the agony of withdrawal.
By 1893 recreational opium eating or laudanum drinking was widely regarded as socially unacceptable, but in reality many doctors – as well as their patients – functioned well with an opium habit of their own. The feeling was that within the limits of your “level of individual tolerance” an opium habit was largely harmless, and certainly less offensive than alcoholism. As a household painkiller it therefore remained easily accessible and largely unregulated.
Perhaps less acknowledged by its late nineteenth-century advocates, in the long term a laudanum habit brought on mood swings and periods of considerable melancholy. It could certainly account for Mother’s periodic “peculiar look”. And when a substantial habit was combined with excessive alcohol consumption (as many who knew her acknowledged), erratic, anti-social and psychotic behaviour were predictable consequences. Moreover, a sudden withdrawal from the drug could produce the kind of delusional episodes she periodically displayed.
Now that the governess and her husband had tracked her down to her Totterdown address, Mother realized she was once again faced with a very real threat of arrest and imprisonment. Laudanum now represented a painless way out. Mother consumed both bottles on Christmas Eve, leaving Polly to cope with the consequences.
Dr McQuade instantly recognized the severity of Mother’s condition and notified the relieving officer. Later that day Dr Frederick Thomas Bishop Logan came to examine Mother. Polly let him in without a word, and introduced him, saying simply, “There’s somebody come to see you,” before retreating to a seat in the corner.
Unlike McQuade, Dr Logan was not acquainted with the family and could have had no idea what he would find as he entered the parlour. The woman was sitting in an easy chair by a roaring fire. Dr Logan took a seat away from her at a table and began to take out a notebook and pencil.
Suddenly Dyer made a move. In a moment, she was out of her chair. She grabbed the poker from the fireplace, and, raising it high above her head, rushed at the doctor, screaming, “I’ll break your skull!”
The doctor wrestled with her for a minute or so, until he could gain control. He was left in no doubt as to her state of mind: “she was very excitable and wild in her manner … she would have struck me a blow had I allowed her”. Once she had been overpowered, Dyer became highly distressed, crying and muttering in despair. Logan sat her down and waited for her to calm sufficiently so that he could begin to question her.
Polly explained that Mother was periodically very violent and that she had sent for the local doctor earlier that day as a result of her suicide attempt.
“I’ve no peace in this world, only in heaven. I’ll soon get there.” Dyer wanted to leave the doctor in no doubt of her intentions, repeating several times that she wanted only death and that she would kill herself. “The voices tell me to do it,” she said. “And the birds. They tell me ‘go and do it’.”
It was more than enough to convince Logan, who issued a certificate recommending that Amelia Dyer be taken to an asylum for treatment.
The next day, Christmas Day, passed sombrely. Early on Boxing Day morning, the local magistrate made the necessary order for Amelia Dyer to be transferred to the Somerset County Asylum in Wells. She had once again escaped the retribution of the young governess, and therefore also the law. Exhausted from the laudanum overdose and the events of the previous forty-eight hours, for Amelia Dyer the ride to Wells offered a welcome reprieve from her worries.