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 £1,000 bequest that Constance had received on her twenty-first birthday, in February. Wagner's solicitor replied that Constance had tried to hand over £800 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.