by Lucy Worsley
Charles, baulked of what he wanted, treated her with bullying and violence. Florence miscarried again, this time with Bravo’s child, and was terribly ill. Yet he insisted on sleeping with her and on having his rights as her husband and master.
One night in 1876, Florence’s horrible second husband retired to bed, having taken a drink of water from the glass always placed by his bed. When he called out a little later, he was discovered to be writhing in agony, vomiting and passing bloodied stools. He spent the next three days in this distressing condition. He’d been poisoned with antimony. Tasteless when dissolved in water, it causes failure of the kidneys and liver, leading to headaches, depression, violent retching and – in Charles’s case – death.
But it would be very hard to prove what had happened. The doctor who attended the dying man believed that someone had administered poison. ‘I was not satisfied then and I am not satisfied now,’ he said, during the trial; ‘someone in the house knew the truth.’ In this unhappy household, though, with its secrets, collusions and a cast of servants devoted to their mistress, no one broke ranks and told him. Florence herself was questioned in court, but there was not enough evidence to charge her with the crime. One intriguing fact did emerge, though: Dr Gully, Florence’s former lover, who still wished her well, had been meeting up with Florence’s lady companion, Mrs Cox, to pass on a strange medicine in a bottle marked ‘poison’.
The fullest study of the case, by James Ruddick, concludes that Florence was indeed guilty, and that she could not have acted alone. He proposes a female alliance, between Florence and her servant, Jane Cox, with Florence committing the actual deed of the poisoning and Jane covering up for a mistress.
There are several interesting possible explanations as to why Florence might have poisoned her husband with antimony. Some Victorian women used it, and similar drugs, as a crude method of birth control. In 1885, a woman called Adelaide Bartlett was accused of murdering her husband with chloroform. Not so, she said, she had simply used it to send him off to sleep, so that he wouldn’t have sex with her and make her pregnant again.
A drop of antimony in the drink and an unruly husband would fall sick and vomit. It could even have been a defence Florence had used in her first marriage to an alcoholic: a spiked drink that made him nauseous would prevent him either from drinking any more or from assaulting her. Perhaps Florence didn’t even mean to kill him, which would account for her behaviour after his death. She convinced all the doctors and policemen that she was genuinely distraught.
But was she? Ruddick argues that it was hard for people to spot female deception in an age when women deceived men constantly, and Florence benefited from the same assumptions that prevented people from imagining Madeleine Smith as a murderess. Florence herself was something of a renegade, toughened by circumstances. Like Madeleine, she had been brought up to see marriage as the goal of her life, and yet she had the misfortune to marry two successive husbands who had wronged and abused her. So, again like Madeleine, she broke the rules: first, by leaving her first husband, and taking an older lover, Dr Gully. She then went against the grain once more when she insisted on keeping control of her own money in defiance of her second husband. Perhaps she was indeed using drugs to control him – she wouldn’t have been the first woman in her time to do so – and the most charitable explanation is that her power play simply went wrong.
Of course it’s too crude to see Victorian murderesses as proto-feminists, playing the system to defend their rights as individuals against husbands, fathers and men who treated them as pieces of moveable property. And yet it’s a more sympathetic way of looking at a group of women whom many of their contemporaries would have thought simply wicked.
Victorian women reading about the case surely did so with a shudder of horror and fear, knowing that their interest would be considered morbid and prurient by their male relatives. One newspaper condemned the female spectators who avidly followed the trial of Madeleine Smith, who dishonoured their sex by ‘eagerly drinking in that filthy correspondence’. A novelist came down similarly upon women ‘brought up in refined society … who pride themselves on the delicacy of their sensibilities’ and yet who ‘can sit for hours listening to the details of a cold-blooded murder’.
It was ghoulish, yes, but how else could they learn about a woman who, perhaps like them, took a lover? And enjoyed sex? And fought back against a violent husband? Murderesses had something to teach. When female newspaper readers could read the reported words of Florence Bravo – ‘I told him that he had no right to treat me in such a way’ – and see her go unpunished, something small but significant changed in society.
As the historian Mary Hartman put it in her definitive study of Victorian murderesses, the female readers avidly consuming the reports of murder trials ‘could understand the frustrations and terrors that drove the accused, for they had travelled some of the same dark paths themselves’.
13
Detective Fever
‘The tempest … bursts out, in its full fury, to hurl parents, children, servants into one common, inevitable, and promiscuous destruction.’
Joseph Stapleton, The Great Crime of 1860 (1861)
IN 1860, A particularly puzzling murder took place near the village of Rode (then called Road) in Wiltshire. Road Hill House was a substantial mansion built in the 1790s. On the night of 29 June 1860, the house was made secure as the family went to bed. The garden, in which a dog prowled, was surrounded by high walls. The doors and shutters were barred. The 12 people who slept in the house that night were completely sealed off from the world. They included Samuel Kent, an ambitious but indebted inspector of factories, and his second wife, Mary, who had formerly been his household’s governess.
The relationships between the nine blood members of the Kent family (they had three live-in servants) were complex but important for understanding the background to the crime. Mary had come to prominence during the illness, some say insanity, of Samuel’s first wife, also called Mary. The four children of Samuel’s first marriage were now treated with less affection and respect than their young half-sisters and brothers, the three children of his second.
That night, a boy of nearly four years old, Savill Kent, son of the second Mrs Kent and one of the favoured children, was silently removed from his cot in a first-floor bedroom. It was done without waking the nursery maid and his sister who were sleeping in the same room, and without disturbing his mother and father in their bedroom next door. The killer took the sleeping boy down the servants’ stairs at the back of the house. The next morning, Savill was nowhere to be found. After a few hours of searching, and of growing panic, his body was discovered in the chamber beneath an outdoor privy. His throat had been slashed so deeply that his head was almost completely cut off.
The investigation that followed was macabrely inept. Textiles and clothing provided a series of seemingly important, but indecipherable, clues. The nursemaid came under intense suspicion, because she changed her story about the exact moment when she noticed that the blanket had gone missing from the boy’s bed. Then, a breast-cloth (an item worn beneath a Victorian corset) was discovered down the privy along with the boy’s body. It was tried for size (like Cinderella’s slipper) against the chests of the females of the house, but only the servants, not the young ladies. But there were hierarchical distinctions even among the female family members. The 16-year-old Constance became a suspect, because one of her nightgowns had gone missing in the wash. It was argued that she had destroyed it because it had been stained with blood during the throat-slashing. It’s poignant to learn that the missing nightgown was identified as Constance’s because it was plainer than those of her more favoured, younger half-sisters. Yet Constance herself was protected, in court, from questioning on the matter because of the undesirability of talking in public about what a well-born young lady wore in bed.
Meanwhile, her father, Samuel Kent, as head of the household, was apparently above suspicion. He was invited to take
part in a police trap to identify the female member of the household who had placed another nightgown, covered in blood, in the scullery boiler. It could have been evidence of violent, sanguinary nighttime activities. But it could also have been just a discarded item of clothing that had been used as a sanitary towel.
Under Samuel’s supervision, a roomful of policemen, provided with cheese and beer, planned to spend the night staking out the scullery containing the boiler in the hope that its owner would come down and retrieve her nightclothes. But unfortunately Samuel accidentally locked the door of the room where they were waiting and watching, so that even if they had heard the nightgown’s owner coming down to the scullery to recover it, they would not have been able to catch her. And – doubly embarrassing for the policemen – during their incarceration the nightgown did indeed disappear.
None of this actually emerged in the official inquiry into the case. The story of the bungling policemen, locked into the kitchen while the clues vanished, only came out after the official investigation had failed, and local residents gathered in the Temperance Hall for an informal, community-based attempt to solve the crime.
Because of the inability of the local authorities to crack the case, Jack Whicher, a celebrated member of the original team of eight Scotland Yard detectives formed 18 years previously, was brought in to investigate. He suspected, but could not prove, the guilt of the sullen, unwomanly, teenage Constance, who had previously run away from home dressed in boy’s clothes, and who had told her friends that she was treated cruelly. She was described as ‘lacking in delicacy’, and it was clear she ‘wished to be independent’.
Constance Kent, who eventually confessed to slitting her half-brother’s throat.
There was a good deal of sympathy, locally, for Constance, but little in her own home. Despite Mr Whicher’s failure to make the case against his prime suspect stick, the following year a friend of Constance’s father’s published a book that seemed to point the finger at this child of a mad mother. ‘It is in the woman’s soul,’ he begins, ‘that poets and moralists have sought and found the most frequent and disastrous examples of revenge.’
Five years later, Mr Whicher was proved correct, for Constance made a confession to the crime. However, Kate Summerscale, in the most recent book on the Road Hill House Murder, argues that she was just an accomplice. Perhaps she had indeed taken part, but she could equally well have been covering up for her beloved brother William, both of them united in their dislike of the second family who had made them cuckoos in the nest.
AFTER THE OFFICIAL investigation petered out, the Kent family were left in a state of stasis. They were offered no solution at all to the mystery that had unfolded as they slept. They commemorated their son Savill with a gravestone that still stands in the churchyard of St Thomas’s Church, East Coulston, in Wiltshire. Its epitaph baldly announces that he had been ‘cruelly murdered’ and that the killer’s capture seemed unlikely:
SHALL NOT GOD SEARCH THIS OUT? FOR HE KNOWETH THE SECRETS OF THE HEART.
Enormous efforts still continued in the hope of untying the knot, and this particular murder contributed to a new craze among members of the public, for detecting crime themselves. Novelist Wilkie Collins described this fresh enthusiasm for clues and mysteries, and the fervid search for solutions, that sprung up in the wake of the Road Hill House mystery, in terms of a new illness: ‘Do you feel an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach … and a nasty thumping at the top of your head? … I call it the detective-fever.’
Collins was not the only one to find the sensation painful and yet enjoyable at the same time. ‘I like a good murder that can’t be found out,’ said one character in a novel of 1859, voicing the feelings of many in Victorian Britain. ‘That is, of course, it is very shocking, but I like to hear about it.’ The Road Hill House case became a touchstone for these sensations due to the ‘deepened and prolonged’ mystery attached to the crime. As a result, wrote one observer in 1861, ‘suspicion has become a passion’.
The evidence that Britain in the 1860s became afflicted by this ‘detective fever’ can be seen at the National Archives. It lies in the thick stacks of letters, written by ordinary people during the course of the Road Hill House investigation, to both the police and the Home Office. Each letter contains the writer’s own personal solution to the mystery.
With complete and minute accounts of the crime scene, along with full transcripts of the inquest published in the newspapers, the players of this real-life guessing game were much better informed than their equivalents would be today. One of the great attractions of the Road Hill House mystery was the way that a solution seemed tantalizingly within the reach of anyone who might devote the necessary time to weighing up the evidence.
Poor old Jack Whicher was obliged to read each letter, and indeed to write notes assessing the value of each suggestion. The letters of the nation’s armchair detectives were taken surprisingly seriously. The people sending in these suggestions did not yet entirely trust the police to do their job properly, and, indeed, the bumpy progress of the investigation would not have reassured them. They expected their letters to be answered.
‘I fancy that step by step I can trace the crime,’ wrote one lady, who lived in Westbourne Grove, London. ‘The murderer is the brother of [local resident] William Nutt, and the son in law of Mrs Holly the laundress.’ Her letter was just one among many. And so Mr Whicher is to be found writing that, no, he did not think that chloroform had been used, because no trace of it was found in the victim’s body, and that, yes, he had indeed considered the possibility that the nursemaid and the master had been having an affair.
When I interviewed Kate Summerscale, the author of the bestselling The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, about these letters, she pointed out a fascinating trend among them. The most popular solution to the crime, the one mentioned most often by members of the public, was indeed the theory that Samuel Kent had been having an adulterous relationship with his nursemaid (just as he had done previously with his children’s governess before he married her). People were quick to suggest that the murdered child had seen something that he shouldn’t, and had been silenced permanently so that the secret should not come out.
Our popular image of Victorian life, to this day, is of sexual secrets buried beneath hypocrisy, the head of a respectable household with a double life, the vulnerability, and the silencing, of his women. Many historians have sought to overturn, or at least to nuance, such a bald view of Victorian domestic life. And yet, as Summerscale suggests, the letters written to Mr Whicher suggesting that Samuel Kent was sleeping with his nursemaid really do place the very worst construction that the writers could imagine upon events and relationships. The cliché exists because it was – and remains – powerful. The strangers who wrote these letters show that our stock image is how Victorian society indeed saw itself. Detective fever involved assuming the worst, trusting no one and ferreting about for dirt. No wonder the residual middle-class fear and dislike of the professional detective lingered on, even while people came reluctantly to admire his achievements.
What did this mean for professional detectives like Jack Whicher? Like Inspector Field, his fellow member of the original Detective Branch of the Metropolitan Police, Whicher was far from well born. He was the son of a gardener, and worked as a labourer before he joined the police. This lowly background is one of the reasons he was looked upon askance by the family at Road Hill House.
As was the case for Inspector Field, working for the police allowed Whicher to better himself through using his brains. He was regarded with high esteem by journalists: Dickens described him as possessing ‘a reserved and thoughtful air, as if he were engaged in deep arithmetical calculations’. Another journalist simply labelled him as ‘a man of mystery’. He was considered to be the best, and was certainly the best-known, detective on the force when he was sent down to Road Hill House. Yet his failure to pin the blame firmly on Constance Kent would gravely bruise Whicher’s r
eputation. Many of the letters in the National Archives criticize Whicher personally, for failing to make the pieces fit together, for a lack of subtlety in his investigations, even for originating from the wrong social class.
Dickens had done much, in journalism and fiction, to boost the image of the Detective Branch. But Jack Whicher’s failure and public humiliation at Road Hill House did even more to set back their cause. So, too, did a great scandal uncovered in 1877, when most of the detectives on the force were discovered to have been complicit in a betting racket they were supposed to be investigating.
Kate Summerscale points out that the damage done to the standing of the professional policeman in the 1860s and 1870s was transferred to their image in literature as well. All the great fictional detectives until the Second World War – Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot, Albert Campion – are amateurs or private investigators. And, indeed, the Detective Branch had not replaced the private sector – far from it. A boost to the private eye business was provided in 1857 when an Act was passed ‘to amend the Law relating to Divorce and Matrimonial Causes’. This made divorce a matter for the civil, rather than the ecclesiastical, courts, and – for the first time since the seventeenth-century Commonwealth period – marriage was made a contract between two citizens as well as a divine sacrament. Before this, if you’d wanted a divorce you either had to seek a religious annulment, or a Private Bill in Parliament. This had effectively limited divorce to the wealthy and well connected. In the year before the passing of the Act, there had been three requests for divorce. In the year after it, there were 300.