“I wonder if she was the suggestible type,” Elizabeth mused. “Next she’ll be claiming she saw tramps lurking around the grounds.”
When a search of the house failed to turn up the missing child, Mr. Kent finally got up, called for his pony and trap, and set off to inform the police. Elizabeth pictured Samuel Kent, a pompous and selfish man of fifty-nine, enraged at this domestic upheaval that inconvenienced him, and perhaps terrified at the prospect of having lost his son. He was a lavish spender, eager to impress the world with his fine horses and fashionable clothes, but his squandering left the house short-staffed and sometimes created hardships for his family. Servants kept leaving because he worked them too hard and paid too little.
“Apparently the governess did double duty,” drawled Elizabeth, thinking of Kent’s hasty marriage to twenty-one-year-old Mary Pratt after the death of his first wife.
Perhaps now the paterfamilias wished that he’d had fewer waistcoats and more servants. Perhaps, as he hurried along the four-mile stretch of road to Trowbridge, he wondered if any of his neighbors had killed the child for revenge. Samuel Kent had prevented the neighbors from fishing in the river near his rented mansion and he had prosecuted some local boys for theft. Besides, tongues were still wagging about his second marriage. Samuel Kent was not a popular man locally.
While he was gone to summon the police, two farmworkers who had joined in the search for the missing child found Francis Savile Kent’s body. It was wrapped in his own crib blanket and stuffed behind the splash board in the outdoor privy a hundred yards or so from Road Hill House. The boy’s body bore a deep stab wound between the ribs and his throat had been slashed from ear to ear.
Elizabeth shivered. “Three and a half years old,” she murmured, picturing the sturdy toddler. The little boy in the apartment next to theirs in Edinburgh was three. Judging from that child’s development, Savile should have weighed more than thirty pounds, and he would have been talking clearly and in complete sentences.
After an hour or so, Samuel Kent returned with two Trowbridge policemen, whom he proceeded to supervise in their investigation. He ordered them to search the grounds and the outbuildings, and he accused his neighbors of killing the child over the fishing rights squabble. Then he suggested Gypsies might have done it. The police were allowed to search the servants, not the family.
“I wonder if he suspected his daughter?” Elizabeth said. “He didn’t want to believe it. That’s for sure.” She read on quickly to see what evidence their search uncovered.
They inspected the child’s bed and found that he had been suffocated there. The mattress and pillow showed deep impressions of Savile’s head and thigh, as if someone had held him down, pushing very hard to smother him. Although the blanket from the bed had been used to wrap the body, the bed had been carefully remade to look undisturbed, so that the marks of the murder were not at first apparent. They also determined that Savile was already dead when his throat was cut in the outside privy.
In a search of the house, the officers found a bloodstained shift of coarse material, stuffed in the back of the scullery boiler. A shift, Elizabeth knew, was a sort of slip that might be worn as a nightgown or as an undergarment. “Oh-ho,” said Elizabeth. “Wouldn’t I like to run tests on those bloodstains.” When was this? Eighteen sixty. It was another thirty years before Paul Uhlenhuth discovered the way to differentiate between human and animal blood. She wondered if they still had that shift.
As if anticipating her curiosity, the next sentence stated that the shift was subsequently lost before its owner could be identified. “The police obviously didn’t secure the area back then,” Elizabeth muttered. “Mr. Kent again?”
The officers did manage to determine that the shift was not the only missing garment in the case. Mrs. Holly, the village laundress, reported that when she received the washing from Road Hill House on the day of the crime, the laundry list indicated that three nightdresses were sent, but she only found two among the soiled clothing. The missing one belonged to Constance.
When after two weeks the local constabulary had made no headway with the case, Scotland Yard sent down Inspector Jonathan Whicher to take over. Perhaps because of the missing nightdress and the tales of a runaway Constance four years earlier, the inspector fixed his suspicions on the sixteen-year-old girl, but he also thought the nursemaid might be guilty. After questioning both, the nursemaid was let go and Constance was arrested and charged with the murder of her half brother.
She appeared before local magistrates on July 27 and Whicher’s scant and circumstantial evidence was presented. Perhaps he hoped that under the pressure of a hearing she would confess to the crime, but she did not. She sat with her black-gloved hands folded and listened calmly to her school-friends testify that she had disliked her stepmother and had found her young half brother annoying.
Other witnesses pointed out that the day before the murder, Constance had been playing happily with Savile and that he was making a bead necklace for her, as she had painted a picture for him not long before.
I’ll bet the locals felt sympathetic toward her, Elizabeth thought. A pretty sixteen-year-old whose stepmother mistreated her and whose father was a louse. The police probably came off looking like bullies. “And she didn’t confess,” Elizabeth said aloud. “Interesting.”
The barrister hired by the Kents to defend Constance made short work of the prosecution’s case. How could this frail girl carry a heavy child down the stairs and so far from the house? he demanded. Of the murder itself, he said: “Is it likely that the weak hand of this young girl… can have inflicted this dreadful blow? Is it likely that hers was the arm which nearly severed the head from the body? It is perfectly incredible.”
“I don’t know,” said Elizabeth. “Lizzie Borden was a nice young gentlewoman and she committed two ax murders. Still, I wonder why Constance waited five years to confess. Why did she confess at all?”
Someone tapped her on the shoulder. Elizabeth looked up to see a nervous-looking librarian, apparently uneasy about approaching this patron who kept muttering to herself. “I’m sorry, but we’re about to close for the day.”
Elizabeth gathered up her photocopies, and thanked him for his help. I suppose I’ll have to find another source of information farther along on the tour, she thought. So far she hadn’t found anything to convince her that Constance Kent was innocent, but the lack of motive troubled her. So did the girl’s winsome smile. Had Constance been a poisoner, Elizabeth wouldn’t have questioned her guilt, but butchering a child? The savagery of the crime seemed beyond the emotional range of that shy young girl who had no other history of violence. But if not Constance, then who? And why?
That evening in the bar of the Francis Hotel, the tour members gathered around for an evening of beer and storytelling. Emma and Miriam were still absent from the group. Susan and Rowan argued for an hour over the guilt of Richard III in the murder of the little princes in the tower. Susan, citing Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time and Elizabeth Peters’ The Murders of Richard III, argued the king’s innocence. Rowan quoted a few historians of the era and insisted that Richard was guilty. Neither succeeded in convincing the other.
Finally, Elizabeth MacPherson managed to divert the conversation to her own pet case. “Did you find out whether Road Hill House is still standing?” she asked.
“I asked another crime expert, Kenneth O’Connor, and he assures me that it is,” Rowan told her. “Unfortunately for our purposes, he also assures me that the road is too narrow for our coach. After the King Harry Ferry incident, I am loath to ask Bernard to make risky excursions to unscheduled places.”