When Gough was accused in the Wiltshire magistrates' court, Samuel Kent was indirectly accused too: 'If Mr Kent has not yet been put formally upon his trial,' noted Joseph Stapleton, 'he has not the less been subjected to its infamy by the convenient proxy of Elizabeth Gough.' After the nursemaid's release, both Joshua Parsons and Mrs Kent – sensing that the feeling against Samuel was running higher than ever – made statements to the press in his defence. Mrs Kent said that Samuel had not left her side on the night of Saville's death; she could be sure of this because her advanced pregnancy made her sleep very lightly. Parsons said that Samuel's 'mind was so affected by intense excitement, and by the persecution he had undergone, that no amount of reliance ought to be placed in any statements which under such circumstances he might make'. He thought his mental state 'very precarious'. Stapleton made similar excuses for his friend: Samuel was 'stupefied and confused' by his son's death, the surgeon argued, so that 'his mind seemed to wander irregularly, discursively, and unsteadily over a large field'.
Dickens thought that Gough and her employer were the killers. The novelist had lost faith in the detectives' powers of deduction. In a letter to Wilkie Collins on 24 October he sketched his theory: 'Mr Kent, intriguing with the nursemaid, poor little child wakes in Crib, and sits up, contemplating blissful proceedings. Nursemaid strangles him then and there. Mr Kent gashes body, to mystify discoverers, and disposes of same.'
The press was disillusioned with detection. The Saturday Review in September dismissed even Poe's stories as 'delusions' of cleverness, 'playing chess with the right hand against the left'. As for live detectives, 'they are very ordinary people, who are worth nothing when they are taken beyond their routine'. The consensus in Road, according to the Western Daily Press, was that only a confession would put an end to the uncertainty, and the confession might be a long time coming: 'Ay,' the villagers predicted, 'this'll be a deathbed job.'
The idea took hold that England had become prey to outbreaks of weird violence. Some blamed the weather. 'How is it that the daily newspapers are stuffed so full of horrors just now?' asked the magazine Once a Week. The broadsheets, it estimated, were devoting sixteen to twenty columns a day to murder. 'People . . . have said . . . that the long continuance of bad weather – the eternal gloom – the perennial rain of the last twelvemonth, has inspired a certain degree of moroseness and acrimony into the minds of our countrymen.'
A freak storm had hit Wiltshire as the year dawned. On 30 December 1859 a hurricane descended on Calne, twenty miles or so north-east of Road, and stripped a six-mile swathe of land in five minutes: the tornado ripped trees out of the earth and snapped them like matchsticks, upending their trunks and ramming the limbs into the ground; it tore the roofs off cottages and hurled them aside; it threw a wagon over a hedge. Giant hailstones fell from the sky and slashed the hands of those who tried to catch them; the chunks of ice were shaped like crosses, cogs and spears, according to a local woman, and one took the form of a small child. In January tourists came to look on the scene of the storm, as they came towards the close of the year to look at the place in which Saville Kent had died.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WOMEN! HOLD YOUR TONGUES!
November–December 1860
In the first, cold days of November, the strangest inquiry yet opened at the Temperance Hall. Thomas Saunders, a barrister and magistrate of Bradford-upon-Avon, Wiltshire, had become convinced that the villagers of Road were in possession of important information about the murder, and he took it upon himself to elicit it from them. Though he was acting entirely on his own initiative, his status as a Wiltshire magistrate gave him an apparent authority, and no one at first challenged his right to investigate the case.
From 3 November onwards, Saunders summoned an array of local people to offer their thoughts and observations, some of it illuminating about the life of the village and of Road Hill House, but nearly all of it utterly irrelevant to the murder. This was the stuff that Whicher had sifted through during his fortnight in Road, the huge bank of rumour and peripheral detail that a police investigation threw up, and that usually never reached the public. Saunders aired these bits and bobs in a distinctly haphazard fashion: 'evidence, if evidence it may be called, was adduced in a most singular and undignified manner', said the Bristol Daily Post. 'On several occasions those present were at no pains to conceal the laughter which the proceedings were calculated to give rise to, and all throughout they seemed to consider that the whole affair was got up for their special amusement, rather than for the elucidation of a mysterious and terrible crime.'
The next two weeks in Road resembled a comic interlude in a tragic play, with Saunders as the buffoon who stumbled onstage to mangle and misunderstand all that had preceded him. He opened and closed the proceedings at whim, forgot the witnesses' names and puffed himself up with mysterious allusions to 'the secrets within my breast', while wandering in and out of the Temperance Hall with a bottle of liquid that according to the Bristol Daily Post 'had very much the appearance of brandy'. Saunders said it was medicine to treat a cold he had caught from a window draught on the premises (he castigated the hall's caretaker, Charles Stokes, for the poor insulation). The magistrate gulped at his potion during the proceedings, and nibbled on biscuits. He frequently interrupted his witnesses by issuing demands that squalling babies be removed from the hall or women silenced: 'Women! Hold your tongues!'
A typical witness was Mrs Quance, an old lady who lived in the cottages by Road Hill House. On Tuesday Saunders examined her about a rumour that she had said that her husband, who worked in the mill at Tellisford, saw Samuel Kent in a field at 5 a.m. on 30 June. She flatly denied it, complaining that the police had already questioned her on the matter.
'I think it is done too clever to be found out,' she added, 'except one of the party "peaches" [informs on another].'
'What has been too cleverly done?' asked Saunders.
'The child-murder.' Then Mrs Quance abruptly rose, shuffled about, said, 'Oh, Lord, I can't stay yer, my boiler's a-goin all the while,' and scampered out, to appreciative hoots from the onlookers.
James Fricker, the plumber and glazier, testified to having been pestered to fix Samuel Kent's lantern in the last week of June: 'It did not strike me at first that there was anything singular in this particular hurry for the lamp in the summer time, but it has since.'
Before Saunders opened his inquiry he had snooped around Road for a few days, and he now reported his observations to the court. One evening, he said, he and a police officer saw a young lady dressed in black, with a white petticoat, heading for Road Hill House. She paused at the gate, walked past it a little way, turned back and went in. A few minutes later Saunders saw a young lady, possibly the same one, combing her hair at an upstairs window. His account of this unremarkable incident drew complaints from the Kent family, and later in the week he apologised, acknowledging that the 'slight trepidation' the lady had shown may have been prompted by her awareness of the 'two strange persons who were watching her movements'. Someone in the audience called out that the young woman was Mary Ann.
The last witness examined by Saunders was Charles Lansdowne, a labourer, 'the pith of whose statement', observed the Frome Times, drily, 'was that he had seen nothing, had heard nothing, and knew nothing, about what had been done at Road Hill House, on the night of 29th June'.