The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

by Kate Summerscale

  Wagner reached Trowbridge railway station at twelve o'clock, accompanied by Detective-Sergeant Thomas, and went straight into the court. The room was packed. He sat down, his eyes half-closed, his plump hands resting on top of his umbrella and his chin on his hands.

  Constance walked 'calmly and firmly' into the courtroom, reported the Daily Telegraph. She was a stout girl of average height, according to this paper's reporter, and looked to be 'in robust health . . . her cheeks had a ruddy look which did not at all impress upon the spectators the idea that she had been a prey to an accusing conscience. For the first few minutes she looked like a person who felt herself placed in some unpleasant situation.' Miss Gream, who sat next to her, appeared rigid with nerves.

  The clerk began by reading out Wagner's statement and then Ludlow, the chairman, asked Wagner: 'Is that true?' 'Yes,' he replied. Ludlow turned to Constance: 'Have you any question to ask this witness?' 'No, sir. I have not.' The magistrate turned back to Wagner: 'You may retire.'

  Williamson took the stand and the clerk read out his deposition. As the confession was read to the court, Constance's composure gave way. At the word 'murdered' she burst into tears and half-fell to her knees, leaning against Miss Gream and sobbing bitterly. The Lady Superior wept alongside her. Though Constance was offered a vinaigrette - a box of smelling salts - by one woman sitting nearby and a glass of water by another, she was too agitated to accept either. When the Inspector stepped down, Ludlow told Constance that she was remanded for a week. She was taken to Devizes gaol that day.

  Williamson posted a letter to Sir Richard Mayne, asking him to authorise a detective to find Elizabeth Gough, and the next day sent a telegraphic message direct to Dick Tanner, asking him to track the nursemaid down. Detective-Inspector Tanner, who had interviewed the Kents' former servant Harriet Gollop for Whicher in 1860, had become feeted for solving the North London Railway case of 1864, the first murder in England to take place on a train (he traced the killer, Franz Muller, by means of a hat found in the carriage, and chased him to New York by steamship). Though the press reported a rumour that Gough had married an Australian sheep farmer, Tanner found that she was at the family home in Isleworth, twelve miles from London. Jack Whicher, still living in Pimlico, was invited by Mayne to go with Tanner to interview the woman he had defended so fiercely, and fruitlessly, in 1860. The two discovered that she was earning a scant living as a dressmaker, occasionally employed to do needlework in gentlemen's houses for a week at a time.

  Williamson, meanwhile, made inquiries in Road and in Frome, where he interviewed William Dunn and Joshua Parsons - the doctor had moved there from Beckington in 1862, and now ran a busy general practice. The Inspector returned to London on Saturday, and on Sunday visited Gough himself, taking Whicher with him.

  The ex-detective and his one-time protege worked together that week. Afterwards the younger man applied for his former boss to be refunded PS5.7s.6d. for 'travelling and other expenses'. It was just over a year since Whicher had retired from the department, humiliated and disowned. A few newspapers referred to how unjustly he had been maligned. The Time published a letter from Lord Folkestone: 'Will you allow me to state, in justice to Detective Whicher . . . that the last words he said to a friend of mine at the time were, "Mark my words, Sir, nothing now will be known about the murder till Miss Constance Kent confesses." The Somerset and Wilts Journal reminded its readers of the 'merciless and almost universal . . . censure' to which this 'able and experienced' officer had been subjected. But the fact that Constance had confessed was not taken as a sign that the detective had triumphed; as the words on Saville's tombstone had promised, God had triumphed where man - and science, and detection - had failed.

  On Monday, 1 May, Samuel Kent visited his daughter in Devizes gaol, accompanied by Rowland Rodway. Constance was sitting at a desk, writing. She stood up to greet Rodway, but on seeing her father she broke down in tears, recoiled and staggered backwards towards her bed. Samuel caught her in his arms. As the men left, Constance told her father that 'the course she had adopted was due to him and her God'.

  The Standard reported that Samuel was 'completely stunned' by the meeting with his daughter: 'He walks and talks, as it were, mechanically.' He visited Constance every day that week, and arranged for the staff of the Bear Hotel in Devizes to supply her with dinners. To pass the time in prison, she read, wrote and sewed.

  On Thursday Constance returned to the Trowbridge police court. The chief magistrate was Henry Ludlow and his task, as in 1860, was to establish whether there was enough evidence to send Constance for trial at a higher court. At 11 a.m. about thirty reporters rushed in through the narrow passage to the stifling courtroom and scrambled for seats. The crude bench erected for the press at the first Road murder hearings was still in place, but was not large enough for all of them; some grabbed the seats reserved for the lawyers, which prompted angry reprimands from the policemen trying to keep order. There was standing room for only a fraction of the huge crowd that had gathered outside.

  Though Constance at first seemed calm, once she had taken her place in the dock 'her heaving bosom told of the tumult raging within', said the Somerset and Wilts Journal. The witnesses came and went, as they had five years earlier, repeating the little they knew: Gough, Benger, Parsons, Cox (now Sarah Rogers, having married a farmer from the Wiltshire village of Steeple Ashton), Mrs Holley, her daughter Martha (now Martha Nutt, having married one of the Nutts of Road Hill), Police Sergeant James Watts. To some, the images of the murder were still vivid - Benger recalled that when he lifted Saville's body from the privy 'blood was catched on the folds of his little night dress'. Parsons, slightly altering his conclusions of 1860, said that he thought the immediate cause of Saville's death was the incision in his throat, but that he might have been partly suffocated before it was inflicted. He repeated that it was impossible that a razor caused the wound to the chest, which could 'only have been inflicted by a long, strong, sharp-pointed knife . . . there was a notch on one side as though the knife had been withdrawn in a different direction to that which it was forced in'. He said that when he examined the nightdress on Constance's bed on 30 June 1860, he noticed that the cuffs were still stiff with starch.

  After each witness had testified, Constance was asked if she had any questions to put. 'No,' she breathed. She kept her face veiled and her eyes cast down throughout the proceedings, lifting her head only to glance at a new witness or to motion an answer to a question from the chairman.

  Whicher took the stand. As he gave his evidence he produced his relics: the two nightdresses he had confiscated from Constance's room five years earlier, Constance's handwritten list of linen, and the warrant issued for her arrest - he must have been waiting for this day. ('You ought to have been a detective police officer,' Lady Audley tells Robert Audley, her pursuer. He replies: 'I sometimes think I should have been a good one.' 'Why?' 'Because I am patient.') Whicher's account of his investigation at Road Hill in 1860 rehearsed, almost word for word, what he had told the magistrates then. It was as if the story had become an incantation. He expressed no emotion at the turn events had taken - no rancour, no triumph, no relief. Ludlow gave him the opportunity to make clear that the local police had concealed from him their discovery of a bloodstained shift in the boiler hole.

  'Did you ever hear of any bloody garment having been found?' asked the magistrate.

  'No such communication was ever made to me by any member of the police force,' said Whicher. 'I never heard a word of it until some three months after, when I read an account of it in the newspapers.'

  Katharine Gream took the stand next, and the drama in the courtroom escalated. She began by asking the court to respect the confidences Constance had made to her, as they would the confidences between a mother and her child: 'from the first she came to me as a daughter'. Then she explained that Wagner had told her in Holy Week, which ran that year from 9 to 16 April, that Constance had confessed to the killing, and wished to make her conf
ession public. Miss Gream had raised the subject with the girl, never mentioning the word 'murder'. She asked her if she 'fully realised what it involved' to give herself up. Constance said that she did. The next week, Constance told Miss Gream that she had carried Saville downstairs while he was sleeping, that she had left the house through the drawing-room window, and that she had used a razor, taken from her father's dressing case 'for the purpose'. She said that 'it' was done 'not from any dislike to the child, but that it was revenge on her stepmother'. Later, she told Miss Gream that she had stolen a nightdress back from the laundry basket, as Whicher had surmised.

  Ludlow, who was seeking to establish whether any pressure had been exerted on the girl to confess, asked Katharine Gream what had prompted Constance to give these extra details about the murder. 'I think I asked her if the child cried to her for mercy,' said Miss Gream. Ludlow asked what conversation preceded this. 'I was trying to point out the greatness of the sin in God's sight, and I was pointing out to her the things that would aggravate the sin in God's sight.'

  'After all the conversation between you,' asked Ludlow, 'did you at any time offer her any inducement to give herself up?'

  'Never,' said Miss Gream. 'Never.'

  When Wagner took the witness box he folded his arms across his chest and asked ('in a whining tone', said the Somerset and Wilts Journal) to read a brief statement he had written. Ludlow said he could not do so until he had given his evidence. None the less, as soon as the examination began Wagner stated: 'All the communication I have had with Miss Constance Kent was made to me under the seal of confession, and therefore I must decline to answer any question that would involve a breach of that secrecy.'

  This was strong stuff. The Roman Catholic Church might hold the confessional to be sacred, but the Anglican Church was subject to the laws of the state. The spectators hissed their disapproval.

  Ludlow warned him: 'You have sworn, Mr Wagner, before God, that you will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in this inquiry.'

  'My duty to God,' returned Wagner, 'forbids me to divulge anything received in confession.' Again the courtroom was filled with hissing.

  All that he could disclose, Wagner said, was that three or four weeks earlier Constance had asked him to communicate to Sir George Grey, who had replaced Cornewall Lewis as Home Secretary in 1861, that she was guilty of the Road murder. He insisted that he had on no occasion induced her to confess. Ludlow did not pursue Wagner's defiance over the confessional - that could wait for the trial.

  Shortly before six o'clock the last witness was dismissed and Constance was asked if she had anything to say. She lightly shook her head. Ludlow committed her for trial, and she quietly left the dock. At seven o'clock she was sent back to Devizes gaol.

  Almost three months passed before Constance was tried for murder. In the interim Williamson continued to round up witnesses and evidence in case she changed her plea. In late May Dr Mallam, Saville's godfather, wrote to Scotland Yard from Holloway, north London, offering to talk to the detectives. When Williamson interviewed him, Mallam said he had witnessed the way in which the children of Samuel Kent's first wife were slighted by their father and their stepmother. If the police wanted corroboration, he suggested they ask Mary Ann. He also described the conversation between himself, Parsons, Stapleton and Rodway after Saville's funeral, in which they had all agreed that Constance was guilty. 'Dr Mallam also informed me,' wrote Williamson, 'that he had heard that a man named Stephens now residing in Frome and who was formerly gardener in Mr Kent's family, had stated that Miss Constance on an occasion about 18 months before the murder asked him how she could get a razor out of her father's dressing case.' This implausible rumour may have had some substance, since a man named William Stevens was among the few new witnesses listed to appear at Constance's trial in July.

  Williamson went to Dublin on 29 June to subpoena Emma Moody. He went to Oldbury-on-the-Hill, Gloucestershire, two weeks later to summon Louisa Long, formerly Hatherill, the other schoolfriend Whicher had interviewed in 1860.

  The Reverend Wagner, far from being thanked for helping to solve the crime, became a scapegoat for the press and the public. He was excoriated in the English newspapers, in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords (Lord Ebury said the 'scandal' of his involvement with Constance Kent revealed how the Church of England was being 'undermined and destroyed'). By presenting himself as the keeper of Constance's secrets, Wagner drove some into a frenzy of frustration. Gangs in Brighton tore down confessional notices at St Paul's, where Wagner preached, assaulted him in the street and threw objects at the windows of St Mary's Home. On 6 May an anonymous correspondent to the Standard asked what had become of the PS1,000 bequest that Constance had received on her twenty-first birthday, in February. Wagner's solicitor replied that Constance had tried to hand over PS800 of the inheritance to St Mary's, but the clergyman had refused it. On the night before they set off for Bow Street, she stuffed the money into a collection box at St Paul's. Wagner found it there the next day, and notified the Home Secretary. This story was confirmed by Rowland Rodway, who wrote to the newspapers to say that Wagner had given the money to Samuel Kent to use on his daughter's behalf.

  The Road Hill case had become a battleground for the great religious controversy of the century, the fight between the High and Low elements in the Anglican Church. The Reverend James Davies argued in a pamphlet that Constance Kent's confession proved the value of monastic, Anglo-Catholic institutions. St Mary's, he said, had inspired the girl to confess: 'the devoted lives, the self-denying discipline which she saw around her, and the very atmosphere which she breathed within the holy retreat, subdued, and melted, and moulded her, as a preparation. Then when the heart is softened, it must be opened.' The semi-erotic tones in which Davies described the girl's surrender to God recalled the raptures of the female Catholic saints rather than the sober piety of a Protestant heroine.

  In reply, the congregational minister Edwin Paxton Hood published a pamphlet that cast doubt on the substitute religious families to which a young woman might 'submit herself' without her natural family's assent - High Church practices could undermine the authority of the Victorian home. Paxton Hood was impatient with the romance that had come to surround Constance Kent: 'There is nothing at all wonderful about her or her crime, or her five years' silence, or her confession, except that she was very cruel, very close, and very callous. And much as she was she probably is. Her confession does not exalt her; and we decline to accept her either as a model penitent or, as has been attempted, as a heroine. She is simply a very wicked young woman.'

  Some said that Wagner had encouraged Constance to confess because he wanted to publicise his views about the sanctity of the confessional. Some suspected that his High Church fervour had stirred the girl into a false confession. James Redding Ware reprinted his pamphlet of 1862, in which he had implied that a somnambulant Elizabeth Gough had committed the crime, with 'further remarks' that cast doubt on Constance's admission of guilt. He argued that the 'Romanish' Church cultivated the idea of self-sacrifice: 'If Miss Constance Kent's confession shows one "style" more than other, it is that of emphatically gathering to herself all the odium attached to the death of her brother.'

  A Wiltshire rector who visited Constance in prison in May tried to ascertain the state of her soul. When he entered her cell he found her writing at a table strewn with open books. She was 'very plain and stout', he told the Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 'and her cheeks very full'. Her manner was 'perfectly self-possessed, hard and cold'. He asked her if she believed that God had forgiven her. She answered: 'I do not feel sure that my sin is forgiven, for no one on this side of the grave can feel sure of that.' She showed no self-pity, he said, nor any regret.

  From her cell Constance wrote to her solicitor, Rodway:

  It has been stated that my feelings of revenge were excited in consequence of cruel treatment. This is entirely false. I have received the greatest kindness from b
oth the persons accused of subjecting me to it. I have never had any ill will towards either of them on account of their behaviour to me, which has been very kind. I shall feel obliged if you will make use of this statement in order that the public may be undeceived on this point.

  This seemed straightforward enough, but it left the matter of Constance's motive more mysterious than ever. The newspapers continued to hope that she was crazy. If mad, she could be excused, pitied, accommodated. 'The insane theory is the one that resolves all difficulties,' observed the Saturday Review on 20 May.

  Women accused of murder often pleaded insanity in the hope that the courts would treat them with leniency, and it would have been easy for Constance or her representatives to argue that she had been afflicted by homicidal monomania when she killed her brother.* Her apparent sanity was no bar to such a plea - as Mary Braddon wrote in Lady Audley's Secret, 'remember how many minds must tremble upon the narrow boundary between reason

  and unreason, mad to-day and sane to-morrow, mad yesterday and sane to-day'. Inherited insanity, argued the alienist James Prichard, could lie dormant until startled into life by circumstances, and could as quickly subside. Women were thought to be prone to insanity, whether as a result of suppressed menstruation, a surplus of sexual energy, or the upheavals of puberty. In an article of 1860 the physician James Crichton-Browne argued that monomania was most common in childhood. 'Impressions, created by the ever fertile imagination of a child . . . are soon believed in as realities, and become a part of the child's psychical existence. They become, in fact, actual delusions.' Children, he wrote elsewhere, were 'diamond editions of remote ancestors, full of savage whims and impulses'. Many doctors emphasised the madness, disorder, even devilishness that could flourish in young breasts - not all Victorians were set on sweetening or sanctifying the figure of the child.

  Yet when the eminent alienist Charles Bucknill examined Constance in gaol, she insisted that she was sane, then and now. The doctor interrogated her about her motive for killing Saville, asking why she had not attacked the real object of her anger, her stepmother. Constance replied that this would have been 'too short'. Bucknill understood her to mean that by killing Saville she intended to inflict a prolonged torture on the woman she hated, rather than a quick extinction. Later, Bucknill told the Home Secretary that he thought Constance 'had inherited a strong tendency to insanity', but that she had 'refused to let him' state his belief in public, because she wished to protect the interests of her father and brother. Rodway explained Constance's rationale in similar terms: 'A plea of insanity at the time of the deed might, it is believed, have been set up with success,' he told the Home Secretary, 'but she, fearing that such a plea might affect prejudicially her brother's chances in life, earnestly entreated that it should not be urged on her behalf.' She was determined to protect William from the taint of madness.