The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (31 page)

'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 confession 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 both 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.

After meeting Constance, Bucknill fell in with her wishes and declared her sane, but he gave the newspapers a hint of his unease. Like Whicher, he found the clue to Constance's disturbance in her stillness. The sensationalism of the murder sat strangely with the blankness of the girl. 'The only peculiarity which at all struck Bucknill,' reported the
Salisbury and Winchester Journal
, 'was her extreme calmness - the utter absence of any symptom of emotion.'

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MY LOVE TURNED

July-August 1865

On the evening of Tuesday, 18 July Constance was transferred to the county gaol at Salisbury. Usually prisoners were moved between towns by train, but the governor of Devizes prison took Constance by post-chaise across Salisbury Plain, a journey of forty miles. She joined about forty-five men and five women at Fisherton gaol, on the outskirts of the city. That Wednesday - two days before the trial - Rowland Rodway visited her to tell her that her lawyers believed that, despite her confession, she would be acquitted if she pleaded not guilty. He urged her to make her peace with God in private: her spiritual atonement, he argued, did not depend on a public confession and conviction. Constance reiterated her intention to plead guilty; it was 'her plain duty', she told the lawyer, 'the only course which would satisfy her conscience', and the only one that would lift suspicion from others.