A Very British Murder (18 page)

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’.

‘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.