The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

make the confession to you?'

'No, sir. I did not seek her out or in any way ask her to come to confession. She herself wished to do so.'

'If you think that the confession she now makes has been induced in consequence of anything which she has said to you, or which you have said to her, you ought to say so.'

'I never even recommended it,' insisted Wagner. 'I have been simply passive. I thought she was doing right, and I did not dissuade her.'

'But do you say that you did not persuade her?'

'I do say so.'

Henry lifted up Constance's letter of confession. 'This is the paper you wish to hand in as your statement, is it?' he asked. 'It is not too late even now . . . You are not bound to make any statement unless you desire to do so.'

The chief clerk asked her if the document was in her own handwriting.

'Yes,' she said, 'it is.'

Henry asked Wagner if he knew Miss Kent's handwriting but he said he did not, having never seen her write.

The clerk read Constance's confession back to her and she confirmed its accuracy. She signed it, using the original spelling of her middle name: Emily. When Henry explained that he would be committing her for trial she sighed, as if in relief, and sat back in her chair.

In the course of this examination Superintendent Durkin and Inspector Williamson had entered the chamber, having been summoned from Scotland Yard.

'The offence was committed in Wiltshire,' observed Henry, 'and the trial must be in that county. It will therefore be necessary to send her to be examined before the magistrates in that county. Inspector Williamson was present at the former inquiry, and knows what took place and who were the magistrates.'

'Yes, Sir Thomas,' said Dolly Williamson. 'I do.'

'And the residences of the magistrates?'

'One of them resides at Trowbridge.'

'One justice of the peace can hear the case in the first instance,' said Henry. He asked where Detective- Inspector Whicher was, and Williamson told him that he had retired.

Williamson took Constance Kent and Miss Gream to Paddington railway station, where, with Detective-Sergeant Robinson, who had worked on the Kingswood case, they caught the 8.10 p.m. train to Chippenham. During the journey Constance was silent, even when the Inspector tried to prompt her with friendly questions. This was the first time she had been back to Wiltshire since 1861. She seemed, Williamson said, 'in a state of deep dejection'. The party reached Chippenham just before midnight and then took a post-chaise – a closed, four-wheeled carriage – on to Trowbridge, about fifteen miles away. Again Williamson tried to interest Constance in conversation, asking her if she knew how far they were from the town, but met with silence. The driver of the chaise got so lost on the country lanes that they did not reach Trowbridge until 2 a.m. At the police station, Constance was looked after by a Mrs Harris, the wife of the new Superintendent (John Foley had died the previous September, aged sixty-nine).

The press greeted Constance's confession with astonishment. Several newspapers were reluctant to accept the validity of her statement. After all, some disturbed people committed crimes; others, like the troubled bricklayer who had claimed to have killed Saville Kent, pretended to have done so, perhaps in the hope that confession to a crime might bring relief from a morbid, unfocused sense of guilt and misery. Maybe Constance was 'mad instead of guilty', suggested the Daily Telegraph; the past five years of 'slow agony' could have deprived her of her senses, incited her to a false confession. 'Better a hundred times that she should prove a maniac than a murderess.' Yet the lucidity and 'terrible courage' of her words, the newspaper admitted, 'do not look at all like insanity'. The Morning Star suggested that Constance had murdered her half- brother out of 'passionate fondness' for William. Quasi-romantic friendships between brothers and sisters were familiar to a Victorian audience – in the cloistered, chaperoned middle-class family, a sibling might be a young man or woman's only close acquaintance of the opposite sex. The London Standard thought there was something fishy about Constance's statement, which she had supposedly penned herself: 'There is an attorney's stamp upon it.' The London Review, hinting that sinister papist forces were at work, found 'in the language of the document palpable indications of a foreign hand and a strange influence'.

The Time, though, took Constance at her word, and offered an explanation for the crime that assigned feelings of violent hatred to half of the English population. 'From twelve or fourteen to eighteen or twenty is that period of life in which the tide of natural affection runs the lowest, leaving the body and the intellect unfettered and unweakened in the work of development, and leaving the heart itself open for the strong passions and overwhelming preferences that will then seize it . . . sad to say, it is the softer sex especially which is said to go through a period of almost utter heartlessness.' Girls were 'harder and more selfish' than boys; in preparation for the sexual passion to come, their hearts were emptied of all tenderness. And when a girl happened also to have a 'peculiar brooding, imaginative, inventive tendency . . . the dream seems to grow and become an inner life, unchecked by social feeling and by outward occupation, till a mere idea, equally causeless and wicked, fills the soul'. The newspaper, in defiance of the idea of the middle-class Victorian woman as an 'angel in the house', was suggesting that most adolescent girls were given to murderous desires: 'Constance Kent, it is said, only did what myriads of her age and sex only wish should come to pass by other agency than their own.'

Some newspapers reported that Constance had already written to her father in Wales, to spare him the shock of first hearing of her confession through the pages of the press. But an anecdote recounted in the Somerset and Wilts Journal contradicted this. An acquaintance of Samuel Kent noticed that he was in good spirits when he visited the Welsh town of Oswestry, near his home in Llangollen, on the morning of Wednesday, 26 April. At about 2 p.m., he was seen buying a newspaper at the railway station. While reading the newspaper, which carried an account of his daughter's confession at Bow Street the previous afternoon, he became 'temporarily paralysed' before rushing up the main street to a hotel, from which he ordered a carriage and immediately started for home. He failed to keep an appointment he had made in Oswestry that afternoon.

Williamson, who had been given sole charge of the case, gathered several magistrates at the Trowbridge police court at eleven on Wednesday morning. The chairman, as before, was Henry Ludlow. The magistrates' clerk, Henry Clark, was also present, as were Captain Meredith, the Chief Constable of the Wiltshire police, Superintendent Harris, Joseph Stapleton and the two solicitors who had been employed by Samuel Kent in 1860, Rowland Rodway and William Dunn. The proceedings were delayed by the late arrival of a key witness, the Reverend Wagner. Hundreds of people who had not gained entry waited outside in the sun.