The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

CHAPTER NINETEEN

FAIRY-LANDS OF FACT

1884–

In 1884 William and his second wife sailed for Tasmania. He had accepted a position as Superintendent and Inspector of Fisheries in the colony, at a salary of £350. He adopted his middle name as part of his surname, and was now known as William Saville-Kent. His half-sister Mary Amelia, now twenty-nine, travelled with them; she had been working as a governess to two girls on a farm in Wiltshire. Two years later they were joined in Hobart, the island's capital, by William's other three half-siblings, first Acland (now twenty-six, until recently a linen salesman in Manchester), then Eveline (twenty-eight – she had been the baby asleep in the Road Hill nursery on the night of Saville's death) and Florence (twenty-five).

William's main tasks in Tasmania were to revive the native oyster industry, which was in danger of being destroyed by over-exploitation and neglect, and to advance the introduction of salmon to the colony's waters. He soon made enemies. His fellow fisheries commissioners complained that he neglected his 'proper duties' to pursue experiments – he had constructed a huge hatchery in his house in Hobart. He was also 'ungraciously only too prone to attribute ignorance to the Commissioners'. William claimed that the Tasmanians had not succeeded in cultivating salmon in their waters at all, only trout. His contract was terminated in 1887.

However tactless William may have been, his talents were noticed elsewhere in Australia. Over the next decade he was given posts as adviser to the governments of Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. He moved first to the southern city of Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, known in the 1880s as 'Marvellous Melbourne' and 'the Paris of the Antipodes'. His half-brother Acland headed to the goldfields of Victoria in 1887, but quickly fell ill. He died in Melbourne the same year, with William at his side.

William and his wife moved in 1889 to a house on the river by Brisbane, a sprawling, makeshift town that served as the capital of the north-eastern state of Queensland. William adopted two spiny anteaters, 'Prickles' and 'Pins', as pets; though they were shy at first, he wrote, curling away from him under their spikes, after a while they followed him around the house and grounds, or let him carry them, dandled over his arm like lapdogs. He also acquired a pair of fern owls, 'big balls of fluff' with 'gleaming', 'glorious golden eyes', which he adored. William had himself grown a wild, wiry beard that engulfed the lower part of his lean face, leaving all the expression to his high, glinting eyes. His hair lay flat across the scalp, parted in the centre. When out inspecting Queensland's fisheries and oyster beds, he wore linen suits, elasticated boots and a pith helmet.

The 'excessively timid' fern owls, William reported, changed shape according to what they were feeling. They showed 'delightful abandon' before members of the house-hold, but would freeze and shrink into themselves at the approach of a stranger, so that they looked just like sticks. When William came home after a few days' absence, the male bird would puff up in pleasure, extending every feather so that he almost doubled in size. The owls, like the Saville-Kents, had no offspring, but they made an elaborate nest each year. William once slipped some bantam eggs into the empty hollow, and found that the birds sat on them happily, waiting for the chicks to hatch. Three times a day he hand-fed the fern owls with raw beef steeped in water, adding a grasshopper, a beetle or a moth as a treat. To capture the astonishing range of his birds' moods and bodies, he took up photography. A camera, like a microscope, gave its owner extra powers of sight. William could now look for longer as well as more closely, and he could show others what he had seen. He took pictures, enlarged them, studied them with a magnifying glass. With his new instrument, he began to record the extraordinary coral forms of the 1,200-mile-long Great Barrier Reef, which he described as his 'fairy-land of fact' off the Queensland coast.

In 1892 William returned to England with sixty cases of specimens to present to the Natural History Museum and a cache of paintings and photographic prints to show to a publisher. He was accompanied by his wife and the fern owls. The male owl developed a taste for strawberries during its stay in London, and the female for slugs; both were keen on the city's cockroaches.

William Saville-Kent's The Great Barrier Reef was published in London in 1893. This beautifully produced volume made the reef famous, and served as the standard reference work for decades. William's silvery photographic plates were reproduced next to written descriptions of the live corals' colours: lemon, myrtle, shrimp pink, apple, crimson, electric blue. The fish he photographed looked like sea monsters, their eyes shining and their scales dark as iron. At the end of the book were colour plates of his paintings of fish and corals, the anemones waving their tentacles, wild and bright.

William sailed back to the Antipodes that year to take up an appointment at the oyster fisheries in Perth, Western Australia. Though the owls went with him, Mary Ann remained in England. Their marriage seemed to have fractured. On a visit to Tasmania, William stayed with the elderly naturalist and watercolourist Louisa Anne Meredith, and had an affair with her twenty-one-year-old granddaughter.

He returned to England in 1895, though, and bought a house with his wife on the fossil-packed cliffs of Hampshire, about a hundred miles east of the cottage on the cliffs in which he and Constance had been born. William kept Australian lizards in the greenhouse, finches in the study. At Burlington House, London, in 1896 he staged an exhibition of his photographs and water-colours, along with 'some Western Australian pearls of abnormal foundation', reported The Times, 'one of these, two inches in diameter, presenting a striking resemblance to a child's head and torso'. He donated two lizards to London Zoo: a frilled lizard and a spiny-tailed monitor. With the first of these he demonstrated that lizards could walk on two legs, which suggested that – as his patron Huxley had argued – these creatures were descended from bi-pedal dinosaurs. The lizards were 'link species' in the evolutionary chain.

William was a great enthusiast for the lumpy, the scaly, the oddities and cast-offs of natural history. In The Naturalist in Australia (1897), his second book about the southern hemisphere, he described his love for the baobab tree, with its swollen trunk and spiky crown of branches. He was struck by the tree's 'tenacity of life', he said. It seemed possessed of a freakish creative force. In the bush, he wrote, it was common to see a baobab's trunk 'prostrated, probably centuries ago by some abnormal storm, out of which a fresh tree has reared itself phoenix-like with renewed youth and vigour'. He knew of only one truly dead baobab, he said – it had been struck by lightning, a 'cataclysmic overthrow' as a result of which the tree's 'destruction is thorough and complete'. William took a picture of its blasted trunk, part of which reared above the ruined tree in the shape of 'a weird monstrous bird that has mounted guard and broods like a disembodied spirit over the destruction wrought'.

In 1904 William was lured back to Australia for eighteen months to work for a private company that was trying to transplant and culture pearl oysters. On his return to England he found backers for his own project to cultivate pearls artificially, and then once more headed for the islands of the South Pacific.

Pearls are the only jewels made by living creatures, glowing objects locked in gnarled, primeval cases. In about 1890 William had become the first man artificially to culture half-pearls, or blister pearls; now he was planning to create fully spherical, or 'free', pearls, which took shape deep in the flesh of the oyster. In 1906 he set up a pearl farm on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, at the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, where he developed a method of opening the shell of the oyster without killing the creature within, then slipping a particle of shell into its fleshy folds. The soft oyster would coat the irritant in thin layers of nacre, eventually producing a prismic, lustrous sphere, the product of shell and flesh. Two Japanese scientists were credited with being the first to create spherical pearls, in 1907, but recent research suggests that William Saville-Kent developed the technique, and perhaps the pearls themselves, before them. He refused to divulge the details of his method to his backers, but agreed to write them down and deposit them in a bank, to be opened in the event of his death.

In 1908 William fell ill and went home to England to die. He succumbed on 11 October to an obstruction of the bowel, the same condition that killed his mother and his first wife. When the investors in his oyster project opened the envelope in the bank, they found nothing intelligible within it – William took the secret of artificial pearl cultivation, with his other secrets, to the grave. His widow, who inherited £166, covered his tombstone at the church of All Saint's, Milford-on-Sea, with coral skeletons. She sold off the rest of his corals, sponges, shells and pearls, and lived alone in their Hampshire cliff house until her own death eleven years later.

Mary Ann and Elizabeth, the two eldest Kent sisters, had moved in 1886 from their lodgings in Regent's Park to St Peter's Hospital, Wandsworth, an almshouse a mile or so from Lavender Hill which housed forty-two people, and had its own chapel, hall and library. Mary Ann died in 1913, aged eighty-two, leaving her estate (worth £129) to Elizabeth. Elizabeth followed her nine years after that, at ninety, bequeathing £250 to a cousin called Constance Amelia Barnes and £100 to her half-sister Mary Amelia, with whom she had corresponded to the end.

Constance Kent had a gift for invisibility – the townspeople of Dinan in the 1860s and the Millbank prison warders in the 1870s had been struck by her ability to merge with her surroundings, to disappear, and in the 1880s she vanished even more conclusively. The public had no idea where Constance went after leaving gaol, and they were not to find out for almost a century.

It emerged in the 1950s that when Constance was released from prison in 1885 the Reverend Wagner took her to stay with a sisterhood he had established at Buxted, Sussex. Each month she reported to the police at Brighton, about twenty miles away. One of the sisters at Buxted recalled that on her arrival Constance walked 'like a convict, flatly', and had dark spectacles, cropped hair and rough, hardened hands. Her table manners were coarse. She was 'very silent' at first, said the sister, but later talked about the mosaics she made in prison, especially those in the crypt of St Paul's. She never spoke of her family. She told the sisters that she was going to emigrate to Canada and find work as a nurse, under the name Emilie King. This, it turned out, was a half-truth, a misdirection.

In the 1970s it was discovered that early in 1886 Constance sailed for Tasmania with her half-sisters Eveline and Florence, using the alias Emilie Kaye (a homonym of 'Emily K') – Acland had made the crossing a few months before. They joined William and his wife in Hobart. The closeness of these brothers and sisters, who might have been divided by murder, was a reminder of how private, and odd, the emotional life of the family remained.

Constance and William kept a constant and delicate connection for as long as both lived. Constance moved to Brisbane with her brother and his wife in 1889 – she shared a house with them and the shy owls. A year later she went to Melbourne to help look after typhoid victims, and stayed to train as a nurse. She was working as a matron in a private hospital in Perth when William arrived there in 1893. In the mid-1890s she moved to Sydney, which William visited several times between 1895 and 1908. She worked in a lepers' colony at Long Bay, and as matron of an institute for young offenders in Parramatta, on the outskirts of the city.

Constance outlived her brother. In 1911, still using the name Emilie Kaye, she opened a nurses' home in Maitland, north of Sydney, which she ran until her retirement in the mid-1930s. She spent the next decade in rest homes in the suburbs of Sydney. She kept in touch with Mary Amelia's daughter Olive, though Olive did not know that 'Miss Kaye' was her aunt – she thought she was an old friend of her mother and of her aunts Eveline and Florence.^* For Christmas 1943 Constance ordered a reference work on birds for her great-nephew, Olive's only child. She sent it to Olive with a letter expressing her disappointment in the book: 'I expected illustrations of nests, eggs etc in a popular form It is a mere bird catalogue.' But at least it was better than most children's books, she added, which were 'grotesque bizarre & hideous . . . all fancy fiction on monstrosities The ugly gollywog has banished the beautiful Fairy.'

When Constance turned one hundred, in February 1944, the local paper pictured her on a sofa, smiling at the camera. The newspaper paid tribute to 'Emilie Kaye', a 'pioneer nurse'. 'Once she nursed lepers,' it announced, oblivious to her deeper past. The King and Queen sent her a congratulatory telegram, and the Archbishop of Sydney called round with a bunch of flowers. Olive attended the birthday celebrations. Emilie Kaye was a 'really wonderful old lady', she reported, 'quite jolly. Everyone seemed fond of her too.'

Two months later Miss Kaye died. In her will she left Olive several mementoes, including a brooch, a gold watch and chain, and two cases, which remained unopened for more than thirty years.

In 1974 Olive and her son made a trip to England. They visited Baynton House, where Olive's mother was born, and learnt the story of the murder at Road Hill. Olive began to wonder whether Emilie Kaye had been her lost aunt, the murderess Constance Kent. Back at home in Australia, Olive and her son cut open the cases that 'Miss Kaye' had left and found in one a daguerrotype of Edward, Constance's older brother, who had died in Havana of yellow fever, and in the other a portrait of the first Mrs Kent.