the neighbouring district of Stamford Hill. In a miniature painted the year before the marriage, Mary Ann was shown with curly brown hair, dark eyes, bright, pursed lips in a pale face, and a wary, guarded cast to her features. Her father was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries and an expert on the Portland Vase; the family home was crammed with paintings and curios.
The newlywed couple moved into a house near Finsbury Square, in the centre of London. Though their first child, Thomas, died of convulsions in 1831, they had a second – Mary Ann – before the year was out, and a third – Elizabeth – the year after that. Samuel worked as a partner in a firm of dry-salters, dealers in preserved meats and pickles, but in 1833 he resigned on account of an unspecified illness. 'The health of Mr Kent became so precarious,' said Stapleton, 'that he was compelled to relinquish his share of the business.' He took his family to Sidmouth on the Devonshire coast. There he secured a position as sub-inspector of factories for the west of England, the hub of the wool trade.
Mrs Kent first showed signs of madness in 1836, according to Samuel, a year after the birth of another son, Edward. She suffered from 'weakness and bewilderment of intellect' and 'various though harmless delusions'. Samuel later gave three examples of his wife's mental disturbance: she once got lost while out walking with her children near their home; on a Sunday, while he was at church, she tore the pictures out of one of his books and burnt them; and a knife was found hidden under her bed. Samuel consulted physicians about Mrs Kent's condition, and a Dr Blackall of Exeter confirmed that she was weak-minded. Her physical health was also poor.
Samuel continued nevertheless to impregnate her, and the couple saw four babies die in succession: Henry Saville in 1838, at fifteen months; Ellen in 1839, at three months; John Saville in 1841, at five months; and Julia in 1842, also at five months. ('Saville' – spelt sometimes with one '1', sometimes without an 'e' – was the maiden name of Samuel's mother, who came from a well-to-do Essex family.) The cause of several of their deaths was given as 'atrophy', or wasting away. All were buried in the Sidmouth graveyard.
Constance Emily was born on 6 February 1844. Samuel gave the care of his new child to Mary Drewe Pratt, a twenty-three-year-old farmer's daughter who had joined the house-hold the previous year as governess to the older girls. She was a short, attractive, self-assured young woman who had previously been employed as a live-out governess by the families of a solicitor and of a clergyman; she came recommended by a Sidmouth doctor. Miss Pratt was granted complete control of Constance, and she devoted herself to her charge. She fattened the frail baby into a sleek, powerful little girl. Constance was the first of the Kents' children to survive in nearly a decade.
The next year, on 10 July 1845, Mary Ann Kent gave birth to her last child, William Saville. During her confinements with Constance and William, Samuel said, her madness intensified. The management of the house- hold was placed entirely in the hands of Miss Pratt.
In 1848 Samuel's boss, one of the four chief factory inspectors, urged him to move house in order to escape gossip about the family: the government inspector with the deranged wife and the favoured governess (the triangle echoed that in Charlotte Brontee's
In August 1853, Samuel Kent married the governess. They travelled to Lewisham, just south of London, for the ceremony. Samuel's three daughters – Mary Ann, Elizabeth and Constance – were bridesmaids. Edward Kent, now a headstrong eighteen-year-old, had joined the merchant navy and was away at sea when his father and Miss Pratt were married. He was horrified upon his return to learn of the marriage, and argued bitterly with his father. A few months later – in 1854, the year Constance turned ten and William nine – the transport ship in which Edward was sailing went down on its way to Balaklava, and all its crew were thought to have drowned. As the Kents were setting out for Bath to buy mourning clothes, the postman arrived with a letter from Edward: he had survived the wreck. 'The father staggered back, almost fainting, into his house,' wrote Stapleton. 'We shall close the door upon the scene which ensued; upon that revulsion of feeling, under the shock of which his heart must have almost stood still with joy.'
That June, in another violent capsizing of emotions, Samuel's new wife was prematurely delivered of her first, and stillborn, child.
The second Mrs Kent was said to be an impatient woman who ran a strict house-hold. Constance became troublesome at home, sometimes insolent. For punishment her former governess boxed her ears or, more usually, banished her from the parlour to the hall.
In 1855 Samuel's boss urged him to find another home, now that his first wife's death had removed the need to hide from the world. Baynton House was too secluded, said the chief inspector; Kent should be nearer to the mills that he supervised and to the railways by which he travelled round his region, an area that stretched hundreds of miles from Reading to Land's End. For the sake of his family – especially Mary Ann and Elizabeth, in their twenties and nowhere near married – he should be living closer to other people of his rank.
The move to Road Hill House, a slightly more modest residence, may also have eased some financial difficulties – Stapleton remarked that Baynton was beyond the means of a government employee with a family of four, being a house suited 'to the wants and pretensions of a country gentleman of considerable and independent fortune'.*
In June 1855 the second Mrs Kent gave birth to Mary Amelia Saville. In August the next year, she had her first son, Francis Saville, known as Saville. Her second daughter, Eveline, was born in October 1858. Mr and Mrs Kent were besotted with their new children. That year Edward, now twenty-two, sailed to the West Indies with the merchant navy, and in July died suddenly in Havana of yellow fever.
According to a rumour reported by Stapleton, Edward was the father of Saville, his supposed half-brother. If this were so, Edward's anger about his own father's second marriage would have been prompted by sexual rivalry rather than disapproval. But Stapleton insisted that the new Mrs Kent and her stepson were not lovers – the evidence he gave for this, bizarrely, was the stillbirth of her first child. This event indicated that she had been made pregnant at least once by Samuel (Edward was at sea when the baby was conceived), although it suggested nothing about the paternity of her next two children, Saville and Eveline.
The family story that Whicher pieced together at Road Hill House suggested that Saville's death was part of a mesh of deception and concealment. The detective stories that the case engendered, beginning with
The danger, in a real murder case, was that the detective might fail to solve the crime he had been sent to investigate. He might instead get lost in the tangle of the past, mired in the mess he had dug up.
