Authors: Sharyn McCrumb
Her husband shook his head. “I don’t think it would work on them, dear.”
“No,” Rowan agreed. “But it did put Mrs. Armstrong under the dandelions, so to speak. She was a tiresome woman, by all accounts. She banned another solicitor from local society because he came to one of her parties wearing
flannel trousers. Despite this great provocation, her husband was hanged for doing her in, of course.”
“Why are murderers so stupid?” sighed Maud Marsh.
“I rather think that most of them aren’t,” said Rowan, trying not to take the question personally. “Crime experts will tell you that only a small percentage of killers are ever caught. Most murders are passed off as accidents or natural causes. The trick is to stop with one. When lots of acquaintances begin to die, people tend to ask questions.”
“Do you think murder is habit-forming?” asked Elizabeth. She was looking at him thoughtfully.
“For madmen it is,” said Rowan, turning pale as the question hit home. “But I suspect that scores of people commit one prudent little murder and live happily ever after.”
“Surely their conscience torments them terribly,” said Frances Coles.
“Yes, of course,” said Rowan. He thought nothing of the sort, but to say so would be unwise.
“Hay-on-Wye,” Bernard announced, swinging open the doors of the coach. “Two hours for lunch. And don’t get so caught up in shopping that you forget to eat. It’s a long way to Ruthin Castle!”
Two hours later, the tourists returned to the coach, laden with souvenirs emblazoned with the red dragon of Wales, carved wooden courting spoons, and paper bags of old books. Rowan and Bernard, impervious to the commercial lure of the village, had spent the two-hour lunch break in the local pub, enjoying ploughmen’s lunches and a pack of cigarettes between them.
Susan Cohen arrived at the coach with such a stack of books that Bernard had to open the luggage compartment to allow her to stash them away.
“How will you ever get these back to the States?” he asked, shaking his head.
“Ship them,” she replied. “I’ll get back before they do. They had some pretty good stores. Of course, we have better ones in Minneapolis, but ours are more spread out.”
Elizabeth MacPherson boarded the bus waving a battered green volume from one of the bookstores. “Look what I found!” she called out to Rowan. “A book on the Constance Kent case.”
“Oh, good,” said Rowan. “Is it Iseult Bridges’
Saint With Red Hands!”
“No. The bookseller mentioned that one, but he didn’t have a copy. This is an anthology of nineteenth-century murder cases.”
As the coach rumbled down the country lane and onto the main highway, the tourists settled back in their seats to enjoy the pastoral scenery or to read their newly purchased books. Susan took her usual afternoon nap. With a smile of amusement, Rowan Rover watched Elizabeth MacPherson poring over her crime volume. “Reading about Constance again?” he asked.
She nodded without looking up from her reading.
“Well? Did she or didn’t she?”
Elizabeth looked puzzled. “She confessed. Her nightdress was missing. She was admittedly jealous of her stepbrother. It seems very clear-cut and yet it doesn’t sound right somehow. The throat-cutting bothers me. Women poison; they may even strangle; but throat-cutting is very rare indeed. And a helpless baby whom she knew!”
“She didn’t confess at the time,” Rowan reminded her. “Four years later she said she did it.”
“Conscience?”
“Perhaps,” said Rowan. “Or she may have felt that suspicion was hanging over the family. And she offered herself as a scapegoat to remove suspicion from the rest of the household.”
“If she didn’t do it, who did?”
“Let’s leave that for a bit,” said Rowan. “Did you read the newspaper accounts of the initial police investigation?”
“Yes. The police were allowed to search the servants, but not the family.”
“There’s more to it than that. When the officers first arrived at Road Hill House, Mr. Kent offered them something to eat. He showed them into the kitchen and gave them plates of food.”
Elizabeth stared. “Victorian hospitality? Not even my aunt Amanda would be that gracious with a murder in the immediate family. I speak from experience,” she added.
“There’s more. When the Trowbridge policemen had finished their meals, they got up to continue the investigation, and found that the kitchen door was
locked.
No one let them out for two hours.”
“Good God!” said Elizabeth. “That wasn’t Constance’s doing. No one would let a teenage girl get away with that if they really wanted the murder solved.”
“Well put,” said Rowan carefully. “If they really wanted the murder solved. Indeed.”
She considered the implications. “They were hiding something. Then it couldn’t have been one of the neighbors or a marauding tramp, could it?”
“I think not.”
“One of the family, then. And you think Constance was protecting the killer?”
“Or the family was protecting Constance,” Rowan suggested. “Let us be open-minded for now.”
Elizabeth was silent for a few moments while she digested this information. Then she began to reason it out, speaking slowly and ticking off the suspects on her fingers. “Not the stepmother. There was no love lost between her and Constance. Not the nursemaid. Why should Constance bother to help a servant? One of her sisters perhaps?
“I doubt it,” said Rowan. “Constance had the most spunk
of any of them. Besides, all that you said about teenage girls not being able to lock up policemen applies equally to them.”
“Daddy!” whispered Elizabeth. “She’d have confessed to save Daddy!”
“Most daughters would. And Samuel Kent certainly ruled the roost at Road Hill House. If he locked the constables in the kitchen, no one would have dared to let them out.”
“But he wouldn’t kill his own baby son,” Elizabeth protested. “It was such a violent murder.”
Rowan raised his eyebrows. “Well?” he drawled. “Was it?”
She flipped through her notes. “Oh, wait. The throat-cutting was done postmortem, wasn’t it? For effect. And the child was actually smothered in his bed. We know that because the impressions were still there on the mattress.”
“Yes,” said Rowan, nodding approvingly. “So Constance might have gone in during the night and smothered the sleeping child, but that would be a risky sort of murder, wouldn’t it? The nurse was sleeping nearby, of course. Why not take the child out for a walk one afternoon and drown it in the river when no one was around? Much safer.”
“Yes. Why didn’t she do that? Why would anybody kill a child in a nursery with two other children and the nursemaid present? Why would Mr. Kent do it?”
The guide contrived to look innocent. “Why would he be there in the first place?” he said casually.
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. “Well, he fooled around with the first nursemaid, didn’t he? We know he did, because he took her for carriage rides while the first Mrs. Kent languished in her bedroom. And when his first wife died, he married the nursemaid! Mary Pratt, who was baby Savile’s mother. So you think he was up to his old tricks again?”
“I can see how it might be habit forming,” said Rowan, thinking of various escapades on his boat.
“Okay.” Elizabeth nodded, following the sequence now.
“Mary Pratt Kent is asleep. Samuel gets up and goes into the nursery to fool around with the new nursemaid Elizabeth Gough. Baby Savile wakes up and sees them. Perhaps he starts to cry, which might wake the household—and then their little tryst will be discovered.” She was staring off into an expanse of blue sky, picturing the scene in the dark nursery at Road Hill House. “Samuel Kent just wants the child to shut up. He tries to make him stop crying, but he doesn’t know anything about child care or he’s too excited to be cautious, so he slams the baby’s face into its mattress and holds it. A little too hard, a little too long.”
“It wouldn’t take much,” Rowan pointed out. “Children are more fragile than adults. A minute. Not much more.”
Elizabeth shuddered. “The child suddenly goes limp and he realizes he’s killed it. Elizabeth Gough knows, though, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, but what can she do? It’s 1865. If she admits she was having it off with her employer, her character is ruined and she’ll never get a husband or another job. She might even be charged as an accessory to the murder.”
“And instead of thinking about his poor dead son, Samuel Kent worries about his own reputation. He wraps the child in the crib blanket and carries it out of the house.” She flipped through her notes again. “Which is why the housemaid found the door ajar at five
A.M.
! And then to make it look like an outside killing, he cut the baby’s throat.”
“Murderers have done that sort of thing,” Rowan remarked. “In the 1970s the Green Beret doctor Jeffrey MacDonald killed his wife in an argument, and then murdered his two toddlers to make it appear that a band of drug-crazed hippies had killed the family.”
Momentarily distracted from the Road Hill murder, Elizabeth smiled. “Any band of hippies that would kill two babies and a pregnant woman, and then leave a husky Green Beret soldier with only a scratch, would have to be on a ton
of drugs. I don’t think there’s that much stupidity in the world.”
“No, but he nearly got away with it. It took ten years to get the civilian trial that convicted him. And Samuel Kent got away with it, too, didn’t he? He was an upstanding man, well-to-do, and obviously sane. Although people did suspect him, they were finally persuaded to believe the confession of an unbalanced adolescent.”
Rowan pointed to Elizabeth’s newly purchased crime book. “Did you find a transcript of Constance’s confession in there?”
“I remember seeing it,” she said, leafing through the pages. “Here it is. Shall I read it? Okay, this is in 1865, after she’s confessed to her half brother’s murder, and everybody wants to know why she did it. Her lawyer, Mr. Coleridge, asks the court’s permission to say two things on Constance’s behalf:
“ ‘First, solemnly in the presence of Almighty God, she wishes me to say that the guilt is hers alone, and that her father and others who have so long suffered most unjust and cruel suspicion are wholly and absolutely innocent—’”
With a thoughtful expression Elizabeth looked up from the book. “You think that’s why she confessed, don’t you? Because suspicion was still lingering over the household, perhaps damaging her father’s career. The tension of continuing scandal was probably very hard for a young girl to bear. Maybe she thought she had the least to lose.”
“And the second part of her statement?”
Elizabeth ran her finger down the page. “Here it is.
‘Secondly, she was not driven to this act, as has been asserted, by unkind treatment at home, as she met with nothing there but tender and forbearing love
…’ What a crock! So she supposedly had no motive at all for killing her young half brother? Just a whim, huh?”
“So she would have us believe,” said Rowan in a carefully
neutral voice. “Let me see the book. I’ve been told by a fellow crime buff, a Mr. O’Connor, that we will find her explanation of the crime most informative.” He skimmed the pages of the chapter on Constance Kent, paying special attention to the blocks of print in smaller typeface, denoting a quotation from court documents or other primary sources. “This must be it,” he said. “Dr. John Charles Bucknill, the physician who examined Constance by order of the government to determine whether she was of sound mind, published an account of her confession in several newspapers, supposedly at the prisoner’s request.” Rowan considered. “Well, perhaps she did ask him to publish it. If her intention was to divert suspicion from the rest of the family, she would need to convince as many people as possible of her own guilt.”
Elizabeth frowned. “Go on. How does she say she did it?”
Rowan adjusted his glasses and began to read in carefully measured tones. “ ‘
A few days before the murder she obtained possession of a razor from the green case in her father’s wardrobe, and secreted it. This was the sole instrument which she used. She also secreted a candle with matches, by placing them in the corner of the closet in the garden, where the murder was committed.’ ”
Elizabeth looked up sharply. “It was not!” she declared. “The police investigation said that the child was smothered in his own bed! The throat-cutting was postmortem. Why should she lie about that?”
“Why indeed,” murmured Rowan. “Let us continue. ‘
On the night of the murder she undressed herself and went to bed, because she expected that her sisters would visit her room. She lay awake, watching, until she thought that the household were all asleep, and soon after midnight she left her bedroom and went downstairs and opened the drawing room door and the window shutters.’ ”
“How very premeditated!” said Elizabeth sarcastically.
“Why, there’s mafia hit men who are less thorough than that. And this is a sixteen-year-old planning to kill a baby for no particular reason. Sure!”
Without comment, Rowan resumed the narrative. “ ‘
She then went up into the nursery, withdrew the blanket from between the sheet and the counterpane, and placed it on the side of the cot. She then took the child from his bed and carried him downstairs through the drawing room.’ ”
Elizabeth interrupted again. “What about the suffocation?”
“She seems unaware of that detail, doesn’t she? Where was I?—
‘Having the child in one arm, she raised the drawing room window with the other hand, went round the house and into the closet, lighted the candle and placed it on the seat of the closet, the child being wrapped in the blanket and still sleeping, and while the child was in this position, she inflicted the wound in his throat. She says that she thought the blood would never come—’”
“It wouldn’t if he was already dead,” said Elizabeth. She looked thoughtful. “But she says nothing of having smothered him in his bed.”
“No,” Rowan agreed, “in fact, she says that the child was not killed, so she thrust the razor into its left side, and put the body, with the blanket round it, into the vault.”
“What?” cried Elizabeth. “She claims that she stabbed Savile with the
razor?
I’d like to have seen her try that!”