The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

by Kate Summerscale

  The Kents had by then been living in Road Hill House for about a year. The second Mrs Kent was eight months pregnant with Saville. Constance and William, aged twelve and eleven, were both home from boarding school for the holidays, Constance apparently afflicted with weak ankles. A doctor advised that she wear laced stockings and avoid exercise. When the family visited Bath for the summer flower show she was pushed around in a wheeled chair.

  One day Constance and William ran away. In the privy in the shrubbery on 17 July Constance changed into some of William's old clothes, which she had mended and hidden for this purpose. She then cut off her hair and threw it, with her discarded dress and petticoats, into the vault of the privy. She and William planned to go to sea as cabin boys, and were headed for Bristol. Like their older brother Edward, they hoped to flee the country. The two walked the ten miles to Bath by evening. When they tried to get a room for the night at the Greyhound Hotel, the innkeeper suspected that they were runaways, on account of their fine clothes and manners, and questioned them closely. Constance was 'very self-possessed, and even insolent, in her manner and language', Stapleton recounted, but 'William soon broke down, and burst into tears'. William was put to bed in the hotel, according to Stapleton, and Constance was handed over to the police. She spent the night at the station house, where she kept a 'determined silence'.

  The reports of this incident in local papers differed from the account given by Stapleton, who may have emphasised William's sensitivity in order to play up Constance's dominant nature; the source for his account was almost certainly Samuel Kent. In one newspaper, which characterised the episode as 'an instance of extraordinary affection and adventurous daring', William did not break down in tears and Constance was not rude. They were both 'exceedingly polite' when interrogated by the landlord, simply repeating that they were going to sea. William was taken to the station. They kept their secret until the morning, when a servant from Road Hill House arrived in Bath and identified the children, complaining that he had worn out three horses searching for them.

  William confessed to the police that he had run away from home, claiming that he had instigated the escapade: 'he desired to go to sea, he said, and his companion, his younger sister, had dressed herself in his clothes, and cut her hair short in order to accompany him to Bristol, where he hoped to be taken as cabin boy by some good-natured captain. All the money which they possessed was eighteenpence, but neither want of cash nor distance had been able to overcome the boy's determination or the sister's affection.' Another report also gave Constance the role of sidekick and William that of protector: 'the boy wanted to go to sea and entrusted his secret to his sister . . . whose ardent affection determined her to accompany him at all hazards'. She 'allowed him to cut her hair, which was then parted at the side'.

  Stapleton and the Bath reporters agreed on Constance's unusual resolve, though they appraised it differently. According to one of the newspapers, 'The little girl, we are told, behaved like a little hero, acting the part of a boy to the admiration of all who saw her. We learn from Mr Inspector Norris . . . that Miss Kent manifested great shrewdness and resolution. The boy's clothes she wore were small for her, and she carried a small stick, which she used as if she had been accustomed to it. It was some time before he suspected that she was of the female sex, which he only discovered by a peculiarity in her mode of sitting.'

  The servant took the children home. Samuel was away on a business trip, inspecting factories in Devonshire, but he returned to Road that afternoon. William 'at once expressed the greatest sorrow and contrition, and sobbed bitterly', according to Stapleton. But Constance refused to apologise to her father or her stepmother. She would say only that she had 'wished to be independent'.

  It was, observed the Bath Express, 'a most strange circumstance in a delicately nurtured gentleman's family'.

  When he had finished his inquiries in Bath on Wednesday, Whicher went by railway to Warminster, five miles east of Road, to speak to one of Constance's schoolfriends.

  Emma Moody, fifteen, lived in a house in Gore Lane with her brother, sister and widowed mother, all wool-workers. Whicher showed Emma the breast flannel, which she said she had never seen before. He asked her if Constance had ever spoken about Saville.

  'I have heard her say she disliked the child and pinched it, but it was done in fun,' said Emma. 'She was laughing at the time she said it.' When asked what made Constance tease the younger children, Emma said, 'I believe it was through jealousy, and because the parents showed great partiality.' She explained: 'I said upon one occasion, when we were talking about the holidays - we were going for a walk towards Road - I said, "Won't it be nice to go home so shortly?" She said, "Yes, perhaps it may be to your home, but mine is different" . . . She said that the second family were much better treated than herself and her brother William. She said this on several occasions. We were talking of dress at one time, and she said, Mamma will not let me have what I like. If I said I would have a brown dress she would let me have black, or just the contrary.' As Constance saw it, her stepmother felt such spite towards her that she was denied even the choice between black and brown. Like the coarse nightdress, the drab clothes cast Constance as a wronged and humiliated stepdaughter, a Cinderella shut out of the world of the other girls.

  According to Whicher's reports to his superiors, Emma claimed to have often heard Constance express her aversion to Saville, on the grounds that he was so favoured by Mr and Mrs Kent. Once, Emma said, she remonstrated with Constance on this subject, 'telling her how wrong it was to dislike the child on that account as it was not his fault'. To this Constance replied, 'Well perhaps it is, but how would you like it if you was in my place?'

  Whicher's job was not just to find things out, but to put them in order. The real business of detection was the invention of a plot. Whicher believed he understood Constance's motive: she killed Saville because of the 'jealousy or spite' she felt towards her stepmother's children, working upon a 'mind somewhat affected' by madness. The treatment of the first Mrs Kent could have stirred her youngest daughter into vengefulness. The second Mrs Kent, the woman who had brought Constance up as her own only to reject her once she bore children herself, might have been the object of the girl's rage.

  The children's flight to Bath suggested to Whicher that Constance and William were peculiarly unhappy, and capable of acting on that unhappiness. It showed that they could make secret plans and see them through, that they were capable of disguise and deceit. Most significantly, it pointed to the privy as the children's hideway, the place in which Constance disposed of evidence and took on a new identity. In his reports, Whicher drew attention to 'the circumstance of the body being found in the same privy in which she cast her female apparel and hair before absconding from the home . . . disguised as a boy, previously having made a portion of the male attire herself, which she concealed in a hedge some distance from the house until the day of her departure'. The day she ran away could be construed as a step towards the murder of Saville.

  Whicher worked alone that week. He 'has been actively and assiduously pursuing his inquiries', reported the Somerset and Wilts Journal, 'making no confidants, unless, indeed, Mr Foley be one. He has been plodding on, visiting for himself, and conversing with, all the persons engaged in this catastrophe, and following up, to its utmost, every gleam of light which might be seen to break in upon it.' The Western Daily Press described the detective's investigations as 'energetic' and 'ingenious'.

  Whicher kept quiet about what the house-to-house interviews turned up. Heput out word to the local press that he was 'in possession of a clue by which the mystery will shortly be unravelled', which was dutifully reported by the Bath Chronicle. This was anoverstatement- what he had was a theory - but it stood a chance of rattling the culprit into a confession. The Bristol Daily Post was sceptical about the likelihood that Whicher would succeed: 'it is hoped, rather than expected, that his sagacity may unravel the mystery'.

  'Sagacity' was a qualit
y frequently attributed to detectives, in newspapers and in books. The Times referred to Jack Whicher's 'wonted sagacity'. Dickens praised Charley Field's 'horrible sharpness . . . knowledge and sagacity'. A detective story by Waters alluded to the hero's 'vulpine sagacity'. The word then denoted intuition rather than wisdom. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a 'sagacious' beast had a keen sense of smell: the early detectives were being compared, in their quickness and sharpness, to wolves and dogs.

  Charlotte Bronte described a detective as a 'sleuthhound', a dog that followed the scent of its quarry's 'sleuth' or trail.* In Waters' stories of the 1850s, the hero was an amalgam of huntsman and hound, closing on his prey: 'the chase was hot after him', 'I ran him to earth', 'I was upon the right track'. 'If any profession now-a-days can be enlivened by adventure,' wrote the celebrated Edinburgh detective James McLevy, 'it is that of a detective officer. With the enthusiasm of the sportsman, whose aim is merely to run down and destroy often innocent animals, he is impelled by the superior motive of benefiting mankind, by ridding society of pests.' Urban detectives hunted their prey through the city streets, deduced the identities of burglars and fraudsters by their signs and signatures, their unintended trails and traces. London was 'a vast Wood or Forest', wrote Henry Fielding a century earlier, 'in which a Thief may harbour with as great Security, as wild Beasts do in the Desarts of Africa or Arabia. For by wandering from one Part to another, and often shifting his quarters, he may almost avoid the Possibility of being discovered.' As Victorian explorers spanned out across the empire, charting new lands, the detectives moved inwards to the core of the cities, neighbourhoods that to the middle classes were as strange as Arabia. The detectives learnt to distinguish the different schools of prostitute, of pickpocket, of shoplifter and burglar, and to track them to their lairs.

  Whicher was a specialist in the city's shape-shifters. Like the heroine of Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective, he 'had been much mixed up with people who wore masks'. In 1847, for instance, he caught Richard Martin, alias Aubrey, alias Beaufort Cooper, alias Captain Conyngham, who took delivery of orders of fancy shirts by impersonating a gentleman; and the next year he captured Frederick Herbert, a young man of 'fashionable exterior' who had conned a London saddler out of a gun case, an artist out of two enamel paintings, and an ornithologist out of eighteen hummingbird skins. Whicher's fictional double was Jack Hawk-shaw, the detective in Tom Taylor's play The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863), whose surname suggests a sure-sighted bird of prey. Hawkshaw is 'the 'cutest [acutest] detective on the force'. He pursues a master criminal who 'has as many outsides as he has aliases'. 'You may identify him for a felon today, and pull your hat off to him for a parson tomorrow,' says Hawkshaw. 'But I'll hunt him out of all his skins.'

  Some of the local newspapers welcomed Whicher's presence in Wiltshire. 'The skill of a London detective, accustomed to the darker criminal atmosphere of a city, has been called in aid of our own able officers,' reported the Bath Chronicle that Wednesday. 'We cannot but believe the searchers are on the track.' Yet the crime in this pretty village took Whicher into murkier territory than he ever encountered in the city: this was not an investigation into aliases and false addresses, but into hidden fantasies, buried desires, secret selves.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ALL TIGHT SHUT UP

  19 July

  On Thursday, 19 July, Whicher arranged for the waters of the Frome to be lowered so that the river could be dragged. The Frome lay at the edge of the Kents' grounds, down a steep bank and under a thick, feathery arch of trees. After almost three dry weeks, the river was not as swollen as it had been at the start of the month, but it was still full and restless. To lower its level, men blocked off the rush of water from the weir upstream, and then pushed out in their boats, scraping rakes or grappling hooks along the riverbed in the hope of pulling up a discarded weapon or garment.

  The police rooted in the flowerbeds and gardens around the house. They combed the field beyond the lawns. Samuel Kent described the grounds behind his property: 'At the back of the house is a large garden, and a field in which was standing grass; that field is about seven acres in extent . . . The place is much exposed; the premises are large and very accessible.' His description of a home that was helplessly open, as if backing onto a plain, captured his feeling of defencelessness after Saville's death. The family's privacy was destroyed, its secrets uncovered, the house and grounds and the lives of everyone within exposed to all.

  At first Samuel did his best to point the police away from the rooms of his family and servants. Like Elizabeth Gough, he insisted that a stranger had killed Saville. Perhaps the murderer was a disgruntled former servant, he suggested, taking revenge on the family. Before Whicher's arrival, Samuel showed Superintendent Wolfe the places in which an intruder could have hidden. 'Here is a room which is not often occupied,' he said, indicating a furnished spare room. Wolfe pointed out that a stranger could not have known that the room was rarely entered. Kent took him to a lumber room in which toys were stored. No one would hide here, Wolfe said, because they would have feared someone coming in to fetch a toy. As for the cockloft beneath the roof, said Wolfe, 'There was a considerable quantity of dust . . . and I think that if a person had been there I must have seen traces.'

  A few newspapers speculated that a stranger had committed the crime. 'A intimate personal knowledge of every room in Road Hill House . . . convinces us that it would have been perfectly possible not only for one but for half-a-dozen persons to have been secreted on the premises, without risk of detection, on that night,' reported the Somerset and Wilts Journal later, in an astonishingly detailed exposure of the building's private places:

  In no house of nineteen rooms that we know do we remember greater facilities for concealment. A cellar, divided into six large and small compartments, is entered by two several doorways and sets of steps. Midway up the back staircase is a large empty cupboard. A spare bedroom over the drawing-room contains a bedstead with valances, a dressing-table with a covering reaching to the ground, and two large and lofty closets, one of which are nearly always empty, and can be locked both inside and out. On this floor also are two small rooms, opening out of one another, each partly filled with lumber. On the floor above is a second spare bedroom, the bedstead having valances, a table, screen, and closets as in the room below . . . two small rooms, one almost empty, and the other containing Mr Kent's travelling apparatus; a large long closet, in which a dozen men might stand side by side; and a small room, without windows, containing two water tanks, and a ladder which communicates with the loft and the roof. . . All these we have ourselves seen.

  Any number of villagers were already familiar with the nooks and crannies of Road Hill House, said the Journal's reporter, 'they having had the run of the house in a singular manner during the two years that it was void, previous to Mr Kent's occupation . . . this was so marked that, when the house was being prepared for him, six several times the stairs had to be painted, owing to the mischievous intrusion of village boys'. The building 'had almost been considered as public property', said the Frome Times, 'for those who chose to do so rambled over it without let or hindrance'.

  The Kents kept indoors during Whicher's first week in Road, though the groom, Holcombe, took Mary Ann and Elizabeth by carriage to the shops in the town of Frome two or three times. In Frome, unlike Road or Trowbridge, members of the Kent family could usually pass an afternoon unmolested by hoots and hisses.

  We have no physical descriptions of Elizabeth or of Mary Ann. They seem to move as one. Only in glimpses - Elizabeth standing alone as she scanned the night sky, or clutching the baby Eveline when Saville's corpse was brought into the kitchen - do they fleetingly acquire separate selves. They were intensely private young women. Mary Ann became hysterical when summoned to court. Elizabeth would not let the servants touch her clothes, either before or after they were washed: 'Miss Elizabeth makes up her own bundle herself,' said Cox, 'and I never meddle with it.' Since Mary Ann a
nd Elizabeth were nearly thirty, neither was now likely to marry. The older sisters - like Constance and William - kept their own counsel, their bond with one another freeing them of the need to say much to anyone else.

  By the end of the week Samuel had started to brief the police about Constance's insanity. Having denied the possibility of his daughter's guilt, he now seemed to be advancing it. 'Mr Kent,' said the Devizes and Wilts Gazette on 19 July, 'has not hesitated to intimate - and that in the plainest manner - that his own daughter committed the murder! and it has been alleged as a reason . . . that she has been guilty of freaks during childhood.' Was he incriminating her to protect himself? Was he shielding someone else in the family? Or was he trying to save Constance from the death penalty by advertising her instability? Dark rumours about Samuel were in circulation: some said that he and Mary Pratt had poisoned his first wife, even that he had killed the four Kent infants who died in Devonshire. Perhaps the first Mrs Kent had not been a raging lunatic, like the wife locked in Mr Rochester's attic in Jane Eyre, but an innocent, like the heroine of The Woman in White, sealed up in a wing of the house to seal her lips.

  Publicly, Samuel still avoided any direct comment on his late wife's mental health: 'As to whether insanity had previously run in either branch of the family,' said the Bath Chronicle on Thursday, 'Mr Kent has been closely interrogated on that point; and he avers that he has never made an application to a medical man respecting anything of the kind.' This contradicted what he told Stapleton - that an Exeter doctor had diagnosed his late wife's madness - but it stopped short of denying that she had been insane. Parsons and Stapleton, both friends of Samuel, were on hand to insist on Constance's volatile nature: 'The two medical men . . . who have been privately examined, give it as their opinion that the young lady Constance possesses a temperament of mind likely to be influenced by sudden fits of passion.' To Whicher, Samuel openly stated that his former wife's family was riddled with madness: 'the Father . . . informed me that [Miss Constance's] Mother and Grandmother were of unsound mind', the detective wrote, 'and that her Uncle also on the Mother's side had been twice confined in a Lunatic Asylum'.