Introduction

In late June 1860 Constance Kent, then sixteen, was home from school on holiday. She had brought her four-year-old half-brother Savill a bracelet and spent the afternoon playing with him in the garden of the house at Road, in Wiltshire. The next morning Savill was missing from his crib. Their father, Samuel Savill Kent, rode off to summon the police. Late that morning two workmen thought to look in the garden privy. They fished up a blanket and saw the body, horribly mutilated. The case became national news and inspired both Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Constance was accused but found guiltless at the inquest; then, in 1865, she created a sensation by confessing. Her statement was met with frank disbelief, but she persisted. When the judge pronounced the sentence of death upon her, he and everyone else in the court wept.

Over the next twenty years she inhabited five prisons and executed church mosaics as a penance. After she was released in 1885, her brother William fetched her to Australia, where she worked under a new name as a nurse and a trainer of nurses till she died, in 1944.

Because so much historical fiction plays irresponsibly with the past, I wish to be as transparent as possible about my method in BLUE FIRE. In the course of my reading, I encountered one stumbling-block, Joseph Stapleton’s The Great Crime of 1860, which established the genre of "true crime" and which, to exonerate Samuel Kent (on the evidence the more likely killer), placed the blame on Constance. Stapleton’s rhetoric so repelled me that I decided to select one word from each line of his book, proceeding line by line but never choosing two words that followed consecutively. Every text contains its own critique, like a statue hidden in a block of marble; one has only to liberate it.

At the same time I was selecting passages from my reading: books Constance had read and works contemporary with them. I arrived at the following algorithm: the number of words in a section of my text would be paralleled by a passage with the same number of lines, which I would place on the facing page. So a section derived from Stapleton that was fifteen words long would appear opposite a prose excerpt of fifteen lines. The prose passage would be selected for its commentary upon the derived section. After that I could entrust to the form what content would emerge. In the full version of BLUE FIRE, which awaits a publisher bold enough to undertake a complex venture, I added images: photographs and plans of the sites where Constance lived, documents from the Public Record office and elsewhere, and photographs of the mosaics that Constance made.

As I studied these intricate floors, my own mosaic method, requiring several different orders and directions of reading, came to seem more and more appropriate.

This excerpt treats of the first Mrs. Kent, mother of Constance and her three full siblings. The first Mrs. Kent died mysteriously, of "convulsions." Shortly thereafter Mr.Kent married Mary Pratt, the governess with whom he had been conducting an affair for many years.