'Have you ever heard the prisoner make use of any expression of ill-feeling towards the deceased?' asked Henry Clark.
'She disliked it through jealousy,' said Emma.
At this Edlin jumped in: 'That is not an answer to the question. What did the prisoner say?'
Emma repeated some of what she had told Whicher: that Constance admitted to teasing and pinching Saville and Eveline, that she was not looking forward to going home for the holidays, that she felt her parents favoured the younger children.
Clark asked if she remembered Constance saying anything else about Saville. Though Emma had told Whicher that she had once reproved Constance for claiming that she hated her half-brother, the girl made no reference to it now. 'I do not remember any other conversation with her about the deceased child. I have only heard her slightly refer to him.'
'Have you ever heard her say anything more with regard to her deceased brother?' urged Clark, but Edlin intervened.
'I submit that this is wrong; the examination is most unusual and improper . . . It seems to me to be a most unusual and unprecedented line of examination.'
'I have only endeavoured to elicit facts,' Clark protested.
'I give you credit for a sincere desire to do your duty,' replied Edlin, 'but in your desire to discharge it, you have unintentionally very far exceeded it.'
Now Henry Ludlow interrupted to defend his clerk. 'Perhaps you will say in what way. That is rather a strong expression.'
'I most courteously express it,' said Edlin. 'I think Mr Clark has exceeded his duty; he seems to have misconceived it. He has a school-fellow of the prisoner's before him, and instead of confining himself to questions, and being satisfied with the answers, he has pursued the examination rather after the method of a cross-examination, and not in the manner examinations in chief are generally conducted, still less in a case of this important nature.' Applause broke out in the hall, which Ludlow angrily hushed.
'If another demonstration of that kind is made,' he warned, 'the magistrates will order the court to be cleared.' He turned to Edlin. 'Perhaps you will make some specific objection, Mr Edlin, instead of advancing those of a general nature.'
Clark added: 'If we get a witness that does not understand what you ask, I do not know how you are to get at the evidence, unless you ask the question again.'
'But after you have got an answer,' said Edlin, 'you must not repeat the question after the manner of a cross-examination.'
'I have been putting questions according to the rule of evidence,' said Clark, 'and if I do not get an answer, I must put the question again.'
'Then you have asked it again and again, and therefore your business is at an end.'
Clark addressed Emma. 'Have you heard the prisoner say anything with regard to her deceased brother?'
'This question has been put again and again,' said Edlin, 'and it has been answered in the negative, so there is an end of it.' Edlin was doing just what he accused Clark of doing: using repetition as a means of intimidation.
Ludlow took over from the clerk. 'We wish you to state what actually took place,' he told Emma, 'any conversation between you and the prisoner – not hearsay evidence. We do not wish to bring out anything not strictly legal and right. Perhaps you were never in a court of justice before, certainly never on so solemn an occasion; now I ask you if ever any conversation took place between you and the prisoner at the school with regard to her feelings towards the deceased.'
'I do not remember anything more.'
In his cross-examination, Edlin asked detailed questions about Whicher's visits to Warminster. 'He called once at our house,' said Emma, 'and another time at Mr Baily's, a private gentleman; he is a married gentleman. I know him; he lives exactly opposite. Mrs Baily, seeing me in my mother's garden, sent for me, and I went and saw Mr Whicher, I was not surprised at seeing him there because Mrs Baily had taken an interest in the matter, and asked me about it.' She testified that Whicher had shown her a breast flannel.
Edlin's line of questioning cast Whicher as sneaky and insinuating – to elicit evidence from Emma Moody, he implied, Whicher stalked her, sent a decoy from a house across the road to reel her in, showed her a piece of female underwear, coaxed her to work up her recollections into a damnation of her schoolfriend.
In the course of this, Whicher interrupted to address Emma directly: 'And I impressed upon you the importance of telling the truth and nothing but the truth.' He hoped, with this prompt, to encourage her to give the testimony he wanted.
Edlin tried to defuse the appeal. 'We take it for granted,' he said to Whicher.
'I would rather have it from the prisoner,' said Whicher. (Emma was not a prisoner but a witness – Whicher's slip reflected his frustration with the girl.)
Emma agreed that Whicher had admonished her to tell the truth.
Ludlow once more asked her if she recalled any other conversation with Constance about Saville. She said not.
'The question has been asked again and again,' said Edlin, again.
'Have you remonstrated with the prisoner respecting any conversation you have had with her?' asked Ludlow.
'Yes, sir,' said Emma, at last approaching the conversation she had reported to Whicher. But Edlin instantly objected. The Bench should not be putting such questions, he said; in the interests of humanity he appealed to them to let Emma go.
After a private consultation with Edlin, the magistrates agreed to dismiss Emma Moody.
Joshua Parsons gave his evidence about the post-mortem, which followed what he had reported at the inquest. 'I knew the poor little fellow that was killed, very well,' he added. The doctor testified that he had seen a very clean nightdress on Constance's bed on the morning of the murder. In reply to Edlin, he acknowledged that 'it might have been worn a week or nearly so', and that 'very great force' would have been needed to inflict the stab at Saville's heart. He was not asked for his views on whether Constance was a maniac.
When Henry Clark questioned Louisa Hatherill, Constance's other schoolfriend, she repeated what Constance had told her about the partiality shown to the new family and the slights to William.
Sarah Cox gave evidence about the missing nightdress: she described how Constance had visited the room in which she was packing the laundry on the Monday after the murder, and the furore in the house-hold when the nightdress was found to be missing. Yet Clark failed to bring out Whicher's theory about how Constance had stolen back an innocent nightdress in order to conceal the destruction of the guilty one.
Cox showed no hostility or suspicion towards Constance. 'I observed nothing unusual in the prisoner's manner or behaviour after the murder, except ordinary grief,' she testified. 'I have never seen or heard from her anything unkind or unsisterly in her conduct to the deceased.'
Mrs Holley was the last witness. She was questioned about the missing nightdress. In the five years that she had been washing the Kents' clothes, she said, only two things had gone missing before: 'one an old duster, the other an old towel'.
Edlin began his closing speech by asking the magistrates instantly to liberate Constance Kent. 'There is not one tittle of evidence against this young lady.' With extraordinary nerve, he equated the investigation of the crime with the crime itself: 'I say that an atrocious murder has been committed, but I am afraid that it has been followed by a judicial murder of a scarcely less atrocious character.'
'It will never, never be forgotten,' he continued, 'that this young lady has been dragged from her home and sent like a common felon – a common vagrant – to Devizes gaol. I say, therefore, that this step ought to have been taken only after the most mature consideration and after something like tangible evidence, and not upon the fact that a paltry bedgown was missing – as to which Inspector Whicher knew that it was in the house, and that Mr Foley examined it with the medical man the day after the murder, together with the young lady's drawers.' Edlin was drawing attention to the many men who had rummaged in Constance's underwear. Deliberately or not, he misunderstood Whicher's theory about how the nightgown's destruction had been disguised. If the nightgown was unstained, Edlin asked, what object could there be in removing it? He insisted that the fact of the missing nightgown 'had been cleared up to the satisfaction of everyone who had heard the evidence that day, and no doubt could remain that this little peg, upon which this fearful charge had been grounded, had fallen to the ground'.