one may call a professional manner of turning down the clothes which was rigidly adhered to in the present instance. An ordinary thief who had secreted himself in the house for the purpose of plunder, would not, in the first place, have been very likely to have blundered into the nursery in which a night light was burning. It is not in such an apartment that money, plate, &c., are to be found. Nor, even upon the very forced hypothesis that such was the case, and that little Saville Kent had awoken, and raised an alarm, is it credible that more would have been done than to suffocate the child and leave it there. The night-spoiler and chance-murderer would not have been so foolish as to add a thousandfold to the chances of discovery by lingering about the room, and tidying up the bed.
Such a person, if he had sufficient presence of mind to do all that was done, would have done something more in order to fix suspicion upon the young woman in the room. This point should be well considered. What in all probability would have been the conduct of a burglar or child-stealer, about 2 a. m. on the 29th of June last, standing in the nursery at Mr. Kent’s, by the side of the cot in which lay the body of the child, whom he had just suffocated, with the nursemaid asleep in the adjacent bed? The bedroom occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Kent, too, was only distant a few feet. Whoever it may have been who killed the child, he or she was perfectly aware of the interior arrangements of the house. That may be assumed as positive. Even under ordinary circumstances, the most inexperienced burglar would take care to inform himself of the exact position of each sleeping apartment in the house, and of the persons by whom each was ordinarily occupied. This is the mere elementary learning of the science of burglary. Detective officers will tell you that in well-nigh every case of burglary, the servants of the family—actually in service, or discharged—are “in it.”
Now, it seems in the present case that there has been question of a discharged housemaid, or nursemaid, who, moreover, is stated to have expressed herself in very vindictive terms with regard to Mr. and Mrs. Kent. But we have the authority of the magistrate for saying that it has been proved to their entire satisfaction that this woman was at the time of the murder in a distant part of the country. This in itself would be conclusive; but, independently of this, if a discharged female servant had, out of revenge, resolved to compass the death of one of the young children of her family, it is too violent a demand upon human credulity to ask us to admit the supposition that she would have secreted herself in the house, stolen up into the nursery in the dark hours of the night, and done all that was done. This conjecture may be dismissed as erroneous. Such a person, of all others, would have been in a position to estimate the full danger of the attempt. Had she desired to spirit away the child and murder it, the attempt would have been made in some other manner not so pregnant with awful hazard to herself.
If, then, neither a burglar nor a discharged servant, nor a robber who had secreted himself in the house, did the deed—who did it? On the one hand, we have the well-nigh insuperable difficulties which surround the hypothesis that the child could have been murdered, or even removed from the room, without the knowledge and complicity of the nurse. On the other hand, there is well-nigh absence of motive impelling to the commission of so grave an offence, if we suppose the death of the child to have been intended, in the first instance, either by the nurse or by her and some person unknown, present with her in her room on the fatal night. Much of this difficulty, however, disappears, if we fall back on the theory that the original intention was not to murder the child, but to stifle its cries, and that the blanket was pressed too long to its little lips. When the person, or persons, who had suffocated the child without intending to proceed so far, discovered what they had done, the rest might follow naturally enough.
If we admit that the nursemaid must have had a guilty knowledge of what took place in the nursery on that Saturday morning, we must also admit that she must have been a participator in what was going forward. She would else have obeyed Nature’s instinct and raised the alarm at once, or at least she would have done so when the present terror was removed from her. Not only she did not so, but although she was fully aware that the child upon the night in question was so far indisposed as to have required the administration of medicine, according to her own account she awoke at 5 a.m., discovered that the child was absent from its cot; and although she was so broadly awake that she kneeled up in her bed to see if Saville Kent was in his proper place, and had satisfied herself that he was not there, she did nothing in consequence. This is very improbable.
There seems to have been a total absence of motive if the young woman was about in the room, unless we presume that, as servants will sometimes do, she was irritated by the child’s peevish cries, endeavoured to silence it in a rough way, and succeeded but too well. Suppose that some other person had entered the room, and for whatever motive, was in conversation with the nurse—why should they have been desirous to stifle the child’s cries? Was it a man?—was it a woman? The only adult male in the house was Mr. Kent himself. It has been suggested that he might have come into the room for an improper purpose; but leaving out of the question the many other difficulties by which such a suggestion is surrounded, there is this well-nigh insurmountable difficulty to be disposed of before we could admit such an hypothesis. Mr. Kent had gone to bed about midnight—he says himself that he fell asleep at once, and slept till 7 a.m. the next morning. Now Mrs. Kent occupied the same bed—she was indisposed and slept badly—but yet not so badly, but that she was not disturbed by the footfalls of the person or persons who certainly carried the body of the child down-stairs, and passed out of the house.
This, however, is one thing, as Mr. and Mrs. Kent slept with the door of their bedroom closed—it is quite another to suppose that the husband