The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

Reverend Wagner, in his vicar's garb, and by Katharine Gream, the Lady Superior of St Mary's, in full regalia (a long black cloak with a high white frill). Constance wore a loose veil. She appeared 'pale and sorrowful', said the Daily Telegraph, 'but perfectly composed'. When she reached the court shortly before four o'clock, she told the officials inside that she had come to confess to a murder.

The Bow Street office, the first and most famous of the London magistrates' courts, occupied two stucco- fronted terrace houses in the disreputable district around Covent Garden market and the opera house. A policeman stood guard outside, under a gaslamp and a carving of the royal arms. Constance and her companions were shown down a narrow passage to a single-storey courtroom behind the main building. The room was criss-crossed with metal railings and wooden platforms; the sun shone through a skylight in the ceiling; a clock and several oil paintings hung on the discoloured walls. Sir Thomas Henry, the chief magistrate of Bow Street, was sitting at the Bench. Constance handed him the letter that she had brought with her. She took a seat. The room, on an April day as hot as midsummer, was close and airless.

Henry read the letter, written on silky notepaper in a confident, flowery hand:

I, Constance Emilie Kent, alone and unaided, on the night of the 29th of June, 1860, murdered at Road-hill-house, Wiltshire, one Francis Saville Kent. Before the deed was done no one knew of my intention, nor afterwards of my guilt. No one assisted me in the crime, nor in the evasion of discovery.

The magistrate looked at Constance. 'Am I to understand, Miss Kent,' he asked, 'that you have given yourself up of your own free act and will on this charge?'

'Yes, sir.' Constance spoke 'firmly, though sadly', said The Times.

'Anything you may say here will be written down, and may be used against you. Do you quite understand that?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Is this paper, now produced before me, in your own handwriting, and written of your own free will?'

'It is, sir.'

'Then let the charge be entered in her own words.' The magistrates' clerk wrote down the murder charge on a blue form, asking Constance only whether she spelt her middle name 'Emily' or 'Emilie'.

'It is quite indifferent,' she replied. 'I sometimes spell it one way, and sometimes the other.'

'I observe that on this paper, which you say is your own handwriting, it is spelt 'Emilie'.'

'Yes, sir.'

Henry asked her if she would sign her confession. 'I must again remind you,' he added, 'that it is the most serious crime that can be committed, and that your statement will be used against you at your trial. I have had the words written copied upon this charge sheet, but I do not wish you to sign it unless you desire to do so.'

'I will do so if necessary,' said Constance.

'It is not absolutely necessary,' Henry told her. 'There is no occasion for you to sign the charge unless you wish it. I will have your statement attached to the depositions, and I will again ask you if you have made it by your own desire, and without any inducement from any quarter whatever to give yourself up.'

'Yes.'

Henry turned his attention to the Reverend Wagner, and asked him to identify himself. Wagner was a well- known figure, an Eton-and Oxford-educated curate who had used his inherited riches to build five churches in Brighton, for which he commissioned ornate windows and altar-pieces from artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, Augustus Pugin and William Morris. He established the seaside town as a centre of the Anglo-Catholic movement. Some considered him a papist, and a danger to the English Church.

'I am a clerk in holy orders and perpetual curate of St Paul's Church, Brighton,' said Wagner. The vicar had a handsome, fleshy face, inset with small, appraising eyes. 'I have known Constance Kent nearly two years – since the summer of 1863.'

Constance interrupted: 'In August.'

'About twenty-one months?' asked Henry.

'Yes,' said Wagner. 'As far as I can remember an English family wrote to me, asking for her admission to St Mary's . . . in consequence of her having no home, or of some difficulty respecting her. The 'home', or rather 'hospital', as it is now called, is a house for religious ladies, and is attached to St Mary's Church. She came about that time as a visitor, and has been there up to the present day.'

'Now, Mr Wagner,' said Henry, 'it is my duty to ask you if any inducement has been made to the prisoner in any way to make this confession.'

'None whatever has been made by me. The confession is entirely her own voluntary act, to the best of my belief. It was about a fortnight ago, as far as I can recollect, that the circumstance first came to my knowledge. It was entirely her own proposition that she should be taken before a London magistrate. She herself proposed to come to London for the purpose. The nature of the confession she made to me was the same, in substance, as the statement produced in her own writing, and copied upon the charge sheet.'

Wagner added that when he spoke of Constance's confession he was referring to her public statement, not to anything that she had told him in private.

'I will not go into that point here,' replied Henry. 'It may be gone into at the trial, perhaps very fully.' He turned to Constance again, clearly uneasy about the priest's role in her surrender. 'I hope you understand that whatever you say must be entirely your own free and voluntary statement, and that no inducement that may have been held out to you is to have any effect upon your mind.'

'No inducement ever has, sir.'

'I am anxious you should most seriously consider that.'

Wagner spoke up: 'I wish to mention that many are in the habit of coming to confess to me as a religious exercise, but I never held out any inducement to her to make a public confession.'

'Yes,' said Henry, a little sternly, 'I think you ought to mention that. Did you in the first instance induce her to