The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE MUSIC OF THE SCYTHE ON THE LAWN OUTSIDE

In 1928, sixteen years before Constance Kent's death, the crime writer John Rhode published a book about the murder at Road Hill House. In February the next year his publisher received an anonymous letter postmarked Sydney, Australia, which began with the instructions: 'Dear Sir, Do what you like with this, if any cash value send it to the Welsh miners to men who our civilization is torturing into degeneration Please acknowledge receipt in the Sydney Morning Herald under Missing Friends.' The letter went on to give a child's-eye view of the Kent family's early life. It was an astonishingly vivid document, about three thousand words long, and it was difficult to believe that it could have been written (or dictated) by anyone other than Constance. In places, it closely matched the letter she wrote to Eardley Wilmot and the petitions to the Home Secretaries, none of which was made public until many years later. Though it made no mention of Saville, the letter from Sydney sought to explain the origins of his death.

According to this document, Constance loved the 'pretty, very capable' governess who joined the Kent house-hold in the early 1840s, and Miss Pratt made 'a pet' of her. But Miss Pratt's arrival soon divided the family. The elder son, Edward, quarrelled with Samuel when he met him emerging from the governess's bedroom one morning. As a result, he and the two older daughters were dispatched to boarding school. When home from school all three favoured their mother's wing of the house, as did William, the youngest, to whom Mrs Kent was 'devotedly attached'. Mary Ann and Elizabeth, according to the letter-writer, were always adamant that their mother was sane. Constance, meanwhile, spent her days in the library with her father and her governess. Miss Pratt 'spoke of Mrs Kent with a sneer, calling her a Certain Person, ridiculing her. Constance was sometimes rude to her mother & would tell the governess what she had said, she made no comment other than a Mona Lisa smile.' Mrs Kent used to describe herself to her children as 'your poor mama', which puzzled Constance.

The house-hold became reclusive, and as the children grew up their friendships were closely monitored. One day Constance and William were tending their plots of earth behind the shrubbery when they were drawn to the sound of 'merry laughter' from the next garden. They looked longingly over the hedge and, though they had been forbidden to play with the neighbours, could not resist an invitation to join in. Their transgression was discovered, and as punishment their 'little gardens' were 'uprooted and trampled down'. Outsiders were not welcome: two tropical birds sent by Edward to his siblings were confined to a cold back room, where they died.

Constance was once encouraged to befriend a girl who lived a mile or so away, but the relationship was not a success: 'after a period of mutual boredom, the girl falsely accused C of trying to set her against her mother'. The accusation was poignant, given that Constance had herself been taught to treat her mother as an enemy.

As Constance grew up, the affection between her and the governess wore thin. Lessons were particularly fraught. If Constance mistook a letter or word, she was punished for obstinacy.

The letter H gave Constance many hours of confinement in a room while she listened longingly to the music of the scythe on the lawn outside, when words were to be mastered punishments became more severe 2 days were spent shut up in a room with dry bread & milk & water for tea, at other times she would be stood up in a corner in the hall sobbing I want to be good I do I do, till she came to the conclusion that goodness was impossible for a child & could only hope to grow up quickly as grown-ups were never naughty.

The letter from Sydney was written throughout in this loosely punctuated, fevered style, as if the writer were rushing to channel a torrent of memory.

When the family moved to Baynton House, Wiltshire, the letter-writer continued, Miss Pratt punished Constance's fits of temper by locking her in a garret, and the girl delighted in perplexing her gaoler. She used to 'act the monkey' by draping a fur across her chest, climbing out of the window, scaling the roof, sliding down the other side and slipping into a different attic room. She would then return to the room in which she had been confined, unlock the door and let herself in: 'the governess was puzzled at always finding the door unlocked, the key was left in, the servants were questioned but of course knew nothing'.

If imprisoned in the wine cellar, Constance lay on a pile of hay and 'fancied herself in the dungeon of a great castle, a prisoner taken in battle fighting Bonnie Prince Charlie & to be taken to the block the next morning'. Once, when Miss Pratt released her, the girl was smiling, 'looking rather pleased over her fancies'. The governess asked her why.

'Oh,' she said, 'only the funny rats.'

'What rats?' asked Miss Pratt.

'They do not hurt,' said Constance, 'only dance and play about.'

Her next gaol was a beer cellar, where she pulled the spigot off a cask, and after that she was locked in two spare bedrooms that were said to be haunted – on a certain date, a 'blue fire' burned in the grate. If confined in her father's study on the ground floor, she clambered out to climb trees, 'displaying a very cruel disposition by impaling slugs and snails on sticks in trees and calling them crucifixtions'. She was a 'provocative and passionate' child, who longed for excitement, even violence. She would slip away to the woods 'half hoping half fearing, she might see a lion or a bear'.

At boarding school she was 'a black sheep', said the author of the letter, 'resentful of authority', 'ever in trouble', though she had 'nothing to do with the gas escape, which was probably owing to the taps having been forgotten when the meter was turned off'. (The writer's anxiety to clear Constance of the school gas leak is a convincing detail.) Constance gave nicknames to her teachers. One was 'Bear in a bush' for his thick black hair. A minister who took Bible class learnt that he was known as 'the Octagon Magpie' (a reference to the shape of his chapel). Instead of reprimanding her, the minister laughed and 'thinking he might bring some good out of her took some extra pains with her, but seeing the other girls were jealous she gave stupid replies on purpose & so fell from grace'. After this she made an attempt to 'turn religious', but a book by the Puritan preacher Richard Baxter convinced her that she had already committed 'the unforgivable sin' – blasphemy against the Holy Spirit – and so might as well give up on goodness.

The letter claimed that Constance read Darwin as a girl, and scandalised her family by expressing her belief in his theory of evolution. Constance, like William, seemed to find release in the natural world. Animals ran through the letter from Sydney like emissaries of freedom – the lion, the bear, the sheep, the monkey, the magpie, the tropical birds, the dancing rats, even the sacrificial slugs and snails.

After her mother's death, Constance was convinced that 'she was not wanted, everyone was against her', and her new stepmother confirmed this to her. Once, when Constance was home from boarding school, the second Mrs Kent told her that 'only for me you would have remained at school when I said you were coming one of your sisters exclaimed What! That tiresome girl so you see they do not want you'. Constance was inspired to run away to sea with William, said the letter-writer, by reading about 'women disguised as men earning their living and never found out until they were dead'. She persuaded her brother to go with her, and afterwards 'was treated as a bad boy who had led the other astray'.

Constance began to suspect that her mother, whom she had mocked, had never been insane; rather, 'she must have been a saint': 'about her mother there seemed to be some sort of mystery'. The letter-writer explained that Constance slowly came to realise that her father and her governess had been lovers since she was very young. With hindsight, she guessed at the sexual secrets that had been kept from her – her memories were ignited and disfigured by suspicion. As a small child, Constance had 'slept in a room inside that of the governess, who always locked the door between when she came to bed. Mr Kents bed & dressing room were on the other side & when he was away the governess said she was frightened to be alone & Constance had to sleep with her.' Once, in the library, Miss Pratt took fright during a thunderstorm and rushed over to Samuel. He drew her down onto his knee and kissed her. 'O! not before the child,' she exclaimed. Constance was disturbingly entangled in this sexual scene, bearing witness to their intimacies, sleeping in a locked chamber of the governess's room, or taking her father's place in the governess's bed.

Like the heroine of Henry James's What Maisie Knew (1897), Constance was a child obliged 'to see much more than she at first understood'. This was how the impulse to detect might begin, in confusion or fear, in an urge to grasp the half-guessed-at secrets of the adult world. Constance read the clues scattered through her early life, pieced together a crime (the betrayal of her mother), identified the criminals (her father and her governess). Perhaps all detectives learn their curiosity in childhood, and remain unusually absorbed by the past.

The letter from Sydney threw out an intriguing suggestion about the Kent family history: the writer remarked that Constance and William had 'Hutchinsonian' teeth; that William had an abscess on one of his legs; and that several of their siblings had died in infancy. Hutchinsonian teeth are notched incisors, identified by the physician Jonathan Hutchinson in the 1880s as a symptom of congenital syphilis. This condition also causes leg ulcers (gummata), and used to claim the lives of many babies. The writer of the Sydney letter was hinting that Samuel's first wife was syphilitic.

Syphilis is an affliction easy to suspect in retrospect, and difficult to prove – Isabella Beeton and her husband, Thomas Hardy and his wife, Beethoven, Schubert, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, van Gogh have all been identified as possible sufferers. The illness was widespread in the nineteenth century – there was then no cure – and was known as the 'Great Imitator' for its capacity to mimic other afflictions, taking on their colours like a chameleon. Since it was usually contracted through illicit sex, its victims hid its existence. Those with the money to buy confidential medical care often succeeded in keeping their secret.

Supposing Samuel caught syphilis in London, the symptoms might have forced his resignation from the dry-salters company and his flight to Devonshire in 1833: the disease manifests itself in painless chancres, usually on the genitals, for the first few weeks, but then produces a fever, aches, and an unsightly rash all over the body. Samuel may have needed to escape from view. If he had 'the pox', his desire for seclusion and secrecy is easier to understand, as is his apparent failure to find another job until 1836.

In the first few months, syphilis is wildly infectious – when Samuel had sex with his wife, the bacteria issuing from the chancres on his body are almost certain to have swarmed through a tiny cut or tear in hers. (These bacteria, which were identified under the microscope in 1905, are known as spirochetes, a name derived from the Greek for 'turning threads'.) The first Mrs Kent would unwittingly have passed the illness on to the babies in her womb. A foetus with congenital syphilis was likely to be miscarried or stillborn, and if it survived birth was typically puny, wizened, feeble, barely able to feed, and prone to die in infancy. Syphilis could have accounted for the several miscarriages that Mrs Kent suffered, as well as the four infants in succession that she saw die. Some children of syphilitic mothers showed no signs of the illness in their youth but grew up to develop notched teeth, bowed legs or other of the symptoms identified by Hutchinson. Perhaps Joseph Stapleton suspected syphilis when he alluded to how a man's 'intemperance' – alcoholic, financial or sexual – could damage his children.

If Samuel had syphilis, he was presumably one of the lucky majority of sufferers who after a year or two showed no obvious further symptoms. But his wife seems to have been one of the unlucky minority who after some years (typically between five and twenty) developed tertiary syphilis, a condition not understood until long after her death: this often manifested itself in personality disorders and then paresis, 'general paralysis of the insane', a steady, incurable deterioration of the brain. As well as explaining her mental illness and frailty, tertiary syphilis could account for her early death (at forty-four) from intestinal blockage – gastrointestinal problems were among the many possible symptoms, and death usually took place between fifteen and thirty years after the initial infection.

It is tempting to blame syphilis for the similarly early death of the second Mrs Kent, who became paralysed and almost blinded before dying in Wales at forty-six – her symptoms are characteristic of tabes dorsalis, also a manifestation of tertiary syphilis – but she could only have caught it from Samuel if he became re-infected. This was possible. Samuel would have thought himself cured once his chancres and rashes subsided. Mid-Victorians believed that the pox could not be caught twice – a myth that arose because re-infection was not accompanied by lesions or spots.

The evidence is circumstantial and inconclusive. Even the author of the Sydney letter was probably not sure. But if we hypothesise backwards from the Hutchinsonian teeth, the beginning of the story of the Kent family's tragedy may have been a sexual encounter between Saville's father and a London prostitute in the early 1830s. The clue may have ended in the almost invisible world by which William Saville-Kent was so enthralled, in a thread-like, silvery, twisting creature so tiny that it could be seen only through the glass of a microscope.

The connection between syphilis and diseases such as tabes dorsalis and paresis was not recognised until the late nineteenth century, so it is only with hindsight that we can suspect Samuel of causing his wives' ill-health. When he publicised the insanity of the first Mrs Kent, or the paralysis and blindness of the second, Samuel Kent had no idea that he might be leaving clues to the corruptions of his own body.

Strangely, the letter from Sydney in no way cleared up the implausible elements in Constance's confession of 1865, even though the book by John Rhode that provoked the letter had described that confession as 'frankly incredible' and so 'utterly unsatisfactory' that there were grounds for doubting the girl's guilt. 'Her psychology appears so amazing that almost any speculation based upon it is justified,' wrote Rhode. 'It is indeed possible that, in the intensively religious atmosphere of St Mary's Hospital, she conceived the idea of offering herself as a sacrifice, in order to clear away the cloud that rested upon her family.' The person best placed to solve a crime ought to be its perpetrator. As The Times observed on 28 August 1865: 'The previous failure of all investigation had shown that the mysteries of the murder could never be unravelled but by the person who had committed it.' Constance had proved an imperfect detective, in her confessions and in the anonymous letter in which she seemed to bare her soul: her solution was flawed. Did this mean she was not the murderer?

The holes in her story left the way open for other theories about the murder, which were formulated in private from the start, and in public once all the main players in the case had died. Long before these, Whicher himself had a theory that could account for the gaps in Constance's evidence. It was never made public, but was outlined in his confidential reports to Sir Richard Mayne.

In his first surviving report, Whicher noted that Constance 'was the only person who slept alone except her Brother, also home for his holidays (and who I have some suspicion assisted in the murder but at present not sufficient evidence to apprehend him)'. Back in London, after Constance had been bailed, Whicher observed that both Constance and William had come home a fortnight before the murder: 'Supposing Miss Constance to be the guilty party and to have had an accomplice, that accomplice in my opinion would in all probability be her brother "William" . . . judging from the close intimacy existing between the two.' Whicher added to this report:

as far as I am able to form an opinion that the murder was committed either by Miss Constance alone while in a fit of insanity or by her and her brother William from motives of spite and jealousy entertained towards the younger children and their parents, and I am strongly impressed with the latter opinion judging from the sympathy existing between the two, the fact of their sleeping in rooms alone, and especially the dejected state of the Boy both before and after his sister's arrest, and I think there would not have been much difficulty for the Father or some of the relatives to have obtained a confession from him while his sister was in Prison, but under the peculiar circumstances of the case I could not advise such a course.

It would seem natural for William to be 'dejected' after the death of his brother; for Whicher to note it, the form this dejection took must have been peculiar – a turning inwards, a curdling guilt or fear. Whicher made clear the alternatives he discerned: either Constance was crazy, and killed Saville alone; or she was sane, and killed Saville with William's help. From the start, Whicher suspected that William and Constance had planned and carried out the killing together. By the time he left Road, he was almost certain of it.

Whicher believed that Constance, as the older, odder and more determined of the two, had instigated the murder plot, but he believed she had done so on her brother's behalf and with his help. William had the clearer motive for murder: Saville had supplanted him in his parents' affections, and his father often told him that he was inferior to the younger boy. If both he and Constance had plotted to kill Saville, the fact that the plan came to fruition was less surprising: the two children together, isolated and embittered, may have inhabited a fantasy world secured by the other's belief, both imagining that they were acting in defence of each other and of their dead mother. Their resolve would have been strengthened by the determination not to let one another down.

Samuel Kent may have encouraged the police to suspect Constance in order to shield his son. He may have been protecting William when he told Stapleton the story of the children's escape to Bath, twisting the narrative to suggest the boy's sensitivity and the girl's unshakeable nerve. At the time of the investigation, William was often dismissed as a suspect on account of his timidity. Yet Whicher believed that he was capable of taking part in a murder. The press reports of the Bath escapade suggested that the boy had a strong-willed, inventive nature, and his later life bore this out.

Throughout the investigation into Saville's murder many had argued that two people must have participated in the crime. If William helped Constance, this would explain how the bedclothes had been smoothed down when Saville was taken out of the nursery, how Saville was kept hushed as the windows and doors were negotiated, how the evidence was destroyed afterwards. Constance may have mentioned only the razor in her confession because she herself used only a razor, while William wielded the knife. The letter from Sydney avoided any reference to the murder itself; perhaps this was because there was no explanation that could fail to implicate her accomplice.

Several of the stories that drew on the case seem haunted with the possibility that Constance and William were still hiding something. In The Moonstone, the heroine protects the man she loves by allowing herself to be a suspect. The runaway brother and sister in The Mystery of Edwin Drood share a dark history. The enigma of The Turn of the Screw lies in the silence of two children, a brother and sister locked together by a secret.^*

Whether William had been her accomplice or simply her confidant, Constance worked at all times to shelter him. As soon as she confessed, she insisted that she had committed the crime 'alone and unaided'. She told her lawyer that she refused to plead insanity because she wanted to protect William, and she tailored her statements about the murder and its motive to the same end. In none of them did she mention him. Though she had complained to her schoolfriends about how he was treated by Samuel and Mary – the humiliating comparisons to Saville, the way he was made to push a perambulator around the village – she made no reference to this in 1865. She said of her father and stepmother, 'I have never had any ill will towards either of them on account of their behaviour to me,' carefully avoiding the ill will she might bear them on anyone else's account. The answer to the mystery of Saville's murder might lie in Constance's silence after all; specifically, her silence about the brother she loved.

Constance gave herself up in the year before William's twenty-first birthday, when he was due to inherit a £1,000 bequest from their mother. He hoped to use the money to fund a career in science, but was still hampered by the uncertainty and suspicion surrounding the family. Rather than both of them live under the cloud of the murder, Constance chose to gather the darkness to herself. Her act of atonement liberated William, made his future possible.