Missing Susan (25 page)

It must look like an accident
, Rowan reminded himself.
She tripped, hit her head on the stone, and she fell unconscious into the pool and drowned. Alas, none of us missed her until it was too late.
Of course he could not maintain his running commentary during the tour, but fortunately this was not necessary. Nigel was nattering away nineteen to the dozen about the plumbing, the drains, the bathing rituals, and all sorts of other diverting things that Rowan might otherwise have listened to. He contrived to fall behind the rest of the party, who obligingly crowded around Nigel, enthralled by his command of water trivia.

Rowan bided his time through the dry east baths, the splendid open air Great Bath, and at last to the dark and inviting west bath, where he was determined to make his move. He let the others go in ahead of him, and then slipped in quietly to the back of the group, discerning a shadowy figure of the right size and shape to be Susan.
Mustn’t do it now
, he thought.
She’d cry out.
He leaned over and whispered, “Wait here a moment.”

He could just make out the nod of her head in the gloom. He held his breath for what seemed like hours until Nigel finished his spiel and the rest of the party turned a corner and disappeared from view. Then with a great sigh of determination, the would-be murderer put his hands on his victim’s shoulders, ready to push her into the pool and hold her head under the murky water.

She spun round at once, and he found himself looking into
the shining Bambi-lashed eyes of Kate Conway. “Oh, Rowan!” she sighed, with a trace of a giggle in her voice. She threw her arms around him. “But what if somebody sees us?”

As quickly and gently as he possibly could, Rowan disengaged himself from the fervent embrace. At any other time a nubile and willing nurse would be more than he could resist, but just now his mind was on murder. “You’re quite right,” he murmured. “Someone might see us. Some other time perhaps.”

“Of course, I’m rooming with Maud,” she sighed. “But I suppose there’s always your room.”

“And I would like a shot, you know,” said Rowan, improvising madly. “Except for my vow.”

“Your vow?” echoed Kate.

“Yes. Pesky old thing.” He was thinking furiously, enveloped in the scents of her duty-free perfume and the Francis Hotel complimentary shampoo. “I’ve sworn to remain celibate until Margaret Thatcher is no longer prime minister.”

In the dimness, he could see Kate’s bewildered face. “But I thought she was already married.”

Rowan shuddered at the implication of
that.
“No, dear,” he said gently. “It’s not Mrs. Thatcher I’m waiting for. This is for political reasons. A protest. Like fasting.”

“Oh,” she said. “But then why did you—”

“An unfortunate lapse,” he assured her. “Lost my head. Please pretend it never happened.”

“Well, okay,” said Kate, shrugging. “I guess we’d better find the others. I want to try some of the spring water.”

Rowan motioned for her to go first. “The others are in the pump room, no doubt hearing how English mineral water compares to Minnesota’s shining big sea waters.”

The fact that he was quite correct in this prediction did nothing to improve his state of mind.

That afternoon Elizabeth MacPherson and Susan Cohen spent an hour looking for Bath’s famous Pulteney Bridge before discovering that they were standing on it. Their hotel brochure did not offer a photo of the bridge, but described it in the text as Florentine style, a term that left them completely baffled.

“With spinach?” suggested Susan.

After determining the whereabouts of the bridge (beneath their feet), they decided that it must mean: built up with shops on each side so that it looks like an ordinary street instead of like a bridge. Still it had some interesting stamp, coin, and antique shops perched over the river, and they spent several hours acquiring more goods than their luggage would accommodate.

“This is such fun,” said Susan, gazing admiringly at her parcels. “If I were back in Minneapolis, Uncle Aaron would be trying to lecture me on mutual funds and treasury bonds and all that boring stuff. And he’s mad because I sold my stock in the business to some very nice Japanese businessmen.” She giggled. “I told Uncle Aaron, ‘If you want me to invest my money in the company, you’d better start publishing thrillers.’ ”

“I take it you two don’t get along,” said Elizabeth.

“I don’t think Uncle Aaron likes me much. He likes making money, but he doesn’t know how to enjoy it. At family gatherings he always looks bored. All he ever gave me for my birthday was a savings bond. He’s my mother’s brother. She died when I was born, but in the pictures we have of her, she looks lovely and silly. I think Uncle Aaron likes his women to be pretty bubblebrains who let him make all the decisions.”

“Look the
other
way when you cross the street, Susan,” said Elizabeth, holding out a restraining hand as they dodged
traffic to investigate another antique shop. “So why wouldn’t your uncle like you? You’re pretty.”

“Only recently,” Susan reminded her. “It’s too late to impress him. He’s had twenty years of ugly duckling me, and he’ll never see me any other way. And I definitely don’t let him make the decisions! But why should I care if he likes me? Thanks to Grandpa Benjie, I have as much money as he does! So what if I lose some of it by not putting it in stupid tax shelters or keeping it in stocks? Spending it is more fun. Anyway, I kind of enjoy annoying him by not putting it into the company.”

“Does the company need your stock?”

“Probably. They’re worried about a takeover or something. The business could get taken out of the family, apparently, and get a lot of longtime employees fired. I don’t listen. Anyway, who cares? Oh, look at that boot scraper shaped like a hedgehog! Isn’t it adorable? And it’s only fifty pounds!”

This combination of search and shopping took them until two o’clock, at which time Elizabeth, with a pang of guilt, remembered her quest for Constance Kent, and went off in search of a library, while Susan, armed with her charge card, disappeared into a bookstore to amass crime novels for her collection.

Elizabeth had little difficulty in locating the public library. Half an hour of browsing in the card catalogue yielded several crime volumes with titles like
Victorian Murderesses.
Further inquiry unearthed back issues of newspapers of that era for further study.
The Trowbridge and North Wilts Advertiser
, the
Frome Times
, and the
Bath Chronicle
all took an intense and parochial interest in their local tragedy. Elizabeth photocopied the articles for further study.

She commandeered a table for her research, stacking all her parcels in a vacant chair, and setting the books and papers around her while she took notes, pawing through first one
source and then another. As the minutes passed, she found the scene beginning to take shape in her mind, as if it were a play she half remembered.

There was Constance Kent, a pretty adolescent looking a bit like the young Princess Anne, turning her profile before the camera with a winsome smile. She wore a stylish brimmed bonnet that curled over the chignon at the nape of her neck, and her girlish figure was shrouded beneath the folds of a tentlike duster coat. Was that before the murder? Difficult to determine her age from that one surviving photograph, but it was a pleasant face, seeming both sensitive and intelligent.

Elizabeth thought of the surly pouts on the faces of other murderesses she had studied: Lizzie Borden with her goose-berry eyes and her pugnacious sneer; the vacant stare of husband-poisoner Adelaide Bartlett; the tight-lipped scowl of Glasgow’s Madeleine Smith, who dosed her lover with arsenic. The shy smile of Constance Kent looked out of place among the faces of these older, harder women. Yet all of them had been acquitted (wrongly, Elizabeth was sure), and little Constance had been sent to prison.

What had happened at Road Hill House, a few miles south of Bath, on the night of June 29, 1860?

Elizabeth searched the sources for a list of the occupants of the house on that fatal night. Constance was there, of course. She was sixteen years old, living with her father Samuel and his new wife, the former governess Mary Pratt. There was a new young governess now, Elizabeth Gough, who took care of Mr. Kent’s children by his second wife: Amelia, five; Francis, three and one half; and the baby Eveline. There were also three older children, Constance’s full siblings, who slept on the third floor of the house, as did Constance, the cook, and the maid.

“That shows you where they stood in the pecking order,” Elizabeth muttered, noting down the locations of the rooms.
The small children slept in the second-floor nursery with Miss Gough.

On the morning of June 30, 1860, Elizabeth Gough awakened at seven to find that the little boy was missing from his bed. When she knocked at his parents’ door to ask if Mrs. Kent had taken the child during the night, she was told that the Kents had not seen the child since his bedtime the night before. Mrs. Kent was angry with the distraught nursemaid. Mr. Kent lay in bed with his eyes closed, silent but not asleep.

The search was on.

The older Kent daughters came down from their rooms and two of them became quite upset at the news that their half brother was missing. Constance, however, stood silently composed. The third-floor sleepers all maintained that they had slept through the night without hearing any disturbance, but the maid did recall that when she had gone downstairs at five that morning a window was open, and the door was ajar.

“I wonder if she was the suggestible type,” Elizabeth mused. “Next she’ll be claiming she saw tramps lurking around the grounds.”

When a search of the house failed to turn up the missing child, Mr. Kent finally got up, called for his pony and trap, and set off to inform the police. Elizabeth pictured Samuel Kent, a pompous and selfish man of fifty-nine, enraged at this domestic upheaval that inconvenienced him, and perhaps terrified at the prospect of having lost his son. He was a lavish spender, eager to impress the world with his fine horses and fashionable clothes, but his squandering left the house short-staffed and sometimes created hardships for his family. Servants kept leaving because he worked them too hard and paid too little.

“Apparently the governess did double duty,” drawled Elizabeth, thinking of Kent’s hasty marriage to twenty-one-year-old Mary Pratt after the death of his first wife.

Perhaps now the paterfamilias wished that he’d had fewer
waistcoats and more servants. Perhaps, as he hurried along the four-mile stretch of road to Trowbridge, he wondered if any of his neighbors had killed the child for revenge. Samuel Kent had prevented the neighbors from fishing in the river near his rented mansion and he had prosecuted some local boys for theft. Besides, tongues were still wagging about his second marriage. Samuel Kent was not a popular man locally.

While he was gone to summon the police, two farmworkers who had joined in the search for the missing child found Francis Savile Kent’s body. It was wrapped in his own crib blanket and stuffed behind the splash board in the outdoor privy a hundred yards or so from Road Hill House. The boy’s body bore a deep stab wound between the ribs and his throat had been slashed from ear to ear.

Elizabeth shivered. “Three and a half years old,” she murmured, picturing the sturdy toddler. The little boy in the apartment next to theirs in Edinburgh was three. Judging from that child’s development, Savile should have weighed more than thirty pounds, and he would have been talking clearly and in complete sentences.

After an hour or so, Samuel Kent returned with two Trowbridge policemen, whom he proceeded to supervise in their investigation. He ordered them to search the grounds and the outbuildings, and he accused his neighbors of killing the child over the fishing rights squabble. Then he suggested Gypsies might have done it. The police were allowed to search the servants, not the family.

“I wonder if he suspected his daughter?” Elizabeth said. “He didn’t want to believe it. That’s for sure.” She read on quickly to see what evidence their search uncovered.

They inspected the child’s bed and found that he had been suffocated there. The mattress and pillow showed deep impressions of Savile’s head and thigh, as if someone had held him down, pushing very hard to smother him. Although the
blanket from the bed had been used to wrap the body, the bed had been carefully remade to look undisturbed, so that the marks of the murder were not at first apparent. They also determined that Savile was already dead when his throat was cut in the outside privy.

In a search of the house, the officers found a bloodstained shift of coarse material, stuffed in the back of the scullery boiler. A shift, Elizabeth knew, was a sort of slip that might be worn as a nightgown or as an undergarment. “Oh-ho,” said Elizabeth. “Wouldn’t I like to run tests on those bloodstains.” When was this? Eighteen sixty. It was another thirty years before Paul Uhlenhuth discovered the way to differentiate between human and animal blood. She wondered if they still had that shift.