The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale Page A

found out,' she said. Gough 'manifested some alarm' and paced the room restlessly. 'I hope I shall not be called in today, for I feel I shall be as bad as I was on Tuesday,' she said, alluding to her bout of hysteria.
    'Pressing her hands to her side,' reported Ann Stokes, 'she said she felt as if the blood had gone from one side to the other. She also said that she could not hold out much longer, and that she could not have held out so long but that Mrs Kent had begged of her to do so.' Gough claimed that Mrs Kent had urged her on: 'You must hold up a little longer, Elizabeth; do for my sake.' Afterwards, said Ann Stokes, Gough 'remarked that she had since the murder pulled some grey hairs from her head, which she had never done before, that no one knew how she suffered, and that if anything else occurred she thought she should die'.
    In Road Hill House the magistrates interviewed Mrs Kent and Mary Ann Kent. Neither had been able to come to the Temperance Hall, the former because her pregnancy was so advanced, the latter because she was 'seized with violent hysterical fits, on hearing that her presence would be required'.
    When the magistrates returned to the hall they summoned Gough. Eight reporters had turned up, but none was admitted - the proceedings were strictly private, they were told. A policeman stood outside to make sure no one got close enough to the doors to eavesdrop.
    At about seven o'clock that evening, the magistrates adjourned the inquiry and told Gough she was free to spend the weekend with her father and cousin, who had arrived that afternoon from Isleworth, near London, as long as she returned to the Temperance Hall on Monday. She said she would remain at the police station in Trowbridge. The magistrates probably reassured her before releasing her, for when she reached the town she 'appeared quite cheerful', reported the Bath Chronicle , 'and jumped from the trap in a lively manner'.
    On Tuesday, 10 July, an editorial in the Morning Post , an influential national newspaper, ridiculed the efforts of the Wiltshire police to discover Saville's killer. It criticised the rushed, peremptory way the coroner had conducted the inquest, and demanded that the investigation into the child's death be taken over by 'the most experienced of detectives'. The article argued that the security of all the homes of England rested on uncovering the secrets of Road Hill House. It acknowledged that this would mean violating a sacred space:
Every Englishman is accustomed to pride himself with more than usual complacency upon what is called the sanctity of an English home. No soldier, no policeman, no spy of the Government dare enter it . . . Unlike the tenant of a foreign domicile, the occupier of an English house, whether it be mansion or cottage, possesses an indisputable title against every kind of aggression upon his threshold. He defies everybody below the Home Secretary; and even he can only violate the traditional security of a man's house under extreme circumstances, and with the prospect of a Parliamentary indemnity. It is with this thoroughly innate feeling of security that every Englishman feels a strong sense of the inviolability of his own house. It is this that converts the moorside cottage into a castle. The moral sanctions of an English home are, in the nineteenth century, what the moat, and the keep, and the drawbridge were in the fourteenth. In the strength of these we lie down to sleep at night, and leave our homes in the day, feeling that a whole neighbourhood would be raised, nay, the whole country, were any attempt made to violate what so many traditions, and such long custom, have rendered sacred.
    These sentiments were felt deeply in Victorian England. On a visit to the country in the late 1840s Dr Carus, physician to the King of Saxony, noted that the English house embodied 'the long-cherished principle of separation and retirement' that lay 'at the very foundation of the national character . . . it is