bowed her head. He said he wished to remove any thought from my mind that Mrs. Kinder had cared for me from the moment she saw him.
On another occasion while I was lying in bed and he was standing at the foot of it he reiterated how very fond he was of Mrs. Kinder, that he would do anything for her, and I must not be surprised at anything I might hear after I went away. He had given me some money to go away, and said: “You would not like to be implicated in a charge for the murder of Kinder?” I said: “No, I should think it impossible.” He said if I stayed in Sydney I might be implicated. I said it was impossible, and he said there were many stranger things in the country than that. He said in a year of two he would marry Mrs. Kinder. I said it was impossible, her husband being alive. He said: “All things are possible, and time will show.”
Bertrand offered to pay my passage to Melbourne, and held the threat over me that if I did not go I might be implicated in Kinder’s death, and remarked about the Devil having a strong will.
Jackson went to West Maitland, apparently moved by this threat. It is odd to see with what assurance Bertrand shifted about the pieces in his lunatic game, and difficult to account for their docility. Jane’s submissiveness came from terror, or possibly from the administration of drugs; her stupors and dozings, which were observed not only by her sister-in-law but by visitors to the house, seem to lend colour to this explanation. She was wholly in Bertrand’s power, and so maintained by his occasional and mysterious threats against the children. Not so Burne, an employee, who could leave his service when he chose; a young man with his wits about him, and over whose head Bertrand held no threat, so far as the evidence goes. And not so Jackson, another free agent.
Yet Burne did errands which he must have known were dangerous, and escorted his employer on expeditions whose confessed object was murder. Jackson, who was in a strong position to defy him, established as he was in the Kinder’s house, and the lover of Mrs. Kinder; Jackson who had only to report these threats to the police to be rid of his rival; Jackson took himself out of the way obediently, and for a time held his tongue. True, he wrote a blackmailing letter later, when he learned of the coroner’s verdict on Kinder; but he was not a subtle man, and there is no reason to suppose that he took himself off in order to leave Bertrand free to commit a murder from which he thus might draw some profit. Nor was it a fact that he was tired of Mrs. Kinder. He was still intent upon her, and took such steps as he might to see her alone.
After my intimacy with Mrs. Kinder commenced I had an object in getting him [Kinder] to drink to excess. That was, to get him stupid so as to afford me opportunities for interviews or intimacy with Mrs. Kinder. The human mind is very base. I was base enough for that. By constant drinking with him I thought it would shorten his days. It would shorten anybody’s days.
That Mrs. Kinder had anything to do with the murder he refused to believe. She had constantly tried to prevent Kinder from drinking in New Zealand and after they came to Sydney. She was not present at any of the conversations when Bertrand hinted that Kinder might die. She had tried to do her duty as a wife.
I remember her saying that she would rather not have anything to do with either of us, that she intended to do her duty as a wife. At that time she requested me to leave her, and never to come near her again. Any interviews I had with her were of my own seeking. She told me she feared Bertrand. She said: “He seems to be a perfect devil,” and spoke of him as being able to make her do things against her will, having a sort of clairvoyance [sic] over her, or mesmeric influence. There is nothing that I know of to incriminate her in this charge beyond intimacy with Bertrand.
He did the best he could for the accused woman, but the fact of the confessed relationship between her and Bertrand deprived his testimony of weight. A jury was not likely to be much impressed by his picture of practical Ellen Kinder as the helpless victim of a mesmerist, even though this theory found corroboration in the recollections of the witness who followed him.
So much for Jackson. Mrs. Robertson, on whose account Bertrand was undergoing imprisonment, spoke of Bertrand’s mesmeric influence, which she had felt upon more than one occasion.
When I felt a dizziness in my eyes I ran out of the room. I know he has tried to mesmerize me by following me about the house, and looking at me. He compelled me that night to kiss him in the presence of Mrs. Kinder, and made me feel very unwell. Since then I have kissed him to save his wife from violence. He said: “Do you intend to do as I bid you?” I said no. He then called his wife so that he might flog her unless I kissed him, and to save her from violence I did so.
Mrs. Robertson too had been obliged to listen to threats against Kinder, and to confidences concerning the murder. Bertrand had been at her house on Thursday, the night before Kinder died; he fell on the floor there in a kind of fit, calling: “Bring the milk and mix the poison.” He declared that he must go next day and confess that it was he who fired the shot. He told a fantastic story of having bought pistols at Kinder’s request, that he might fight a duel with Jackson. He maintained that it was Mrs. Kinder’s suggestion that her husband should be shot while Jackson was in the house, in order that the blame might fall on him.
A chemist was recalled, there was a question or two concerning the poisons generally used in the practice of dentistry, and the case for the Crown, at this first hearing before the magistrates, closed. The magistrates refused to dismiss Mrs. Bertrand, refused bail all round, and committed all three prisoners for trial at the next sitting of the Criminal Court, to be held on Monday, December 18th.
IX
Before the prisoners came to trial, Jane Bertrand was set free. There was no evidence that she knew anything of Bertrand’s preparations, and although she was, by her own confession, in the room at the time when the murder was committed, nobody could suppose that she had had any hand in it. Motive lacked wholly. She was aware of the relationship between her husband and Kinder’s wife; it was not to be credited that she should connive at a crime whose sole object was to bring them together, or that she should not do all in her power to hinder a death by which, as she might have suspected, her own was foreshadowed.
Nor could a sufficient case be made out against Mrs. Kinder. Her letters, though they showed her to be infatuated with Bertrand, nowhere gave any least hint that she shared his guilt as a murderer. Bertrand’s accusations against her, made to Mrs. Robertson, were unsupported; and though she showed some callousness (if Jane’s account is to be believed), walking up and down with Bertrand’s arm round her waist while her husband lay bleeding, and also, according to Mrs. Robertson, driving with Bertrand in a ‘patent safety’ hansom on the Friday that he died, there was no actual proof of her complicity. Jackson’s statement—“there is nothing that I know of to incriminate her in this charge beyond intimacy with Bertrand”—eventually was echoed by the Crown.
Thus, Bertrand went into the dock of the Central Criminal Court alone.
Two new facts were brought forward at the trial, and Bert-rand’s counsel, Mr. Dalley, made the very most of both. It was proved that Bertrand, in the three hours which elapsed before a doctor could be found and brought to the wounded man, had staunched the bleeding and bound up Kinder’s head skilfully and carefully; also that Kinder, during the days before his death, asked constantly for Bertrand, saying that he would rather have his services than those of any doctor. It was revealed, also, that Kinder supposed his wife to have shot him. Not for a moment did he behave like a suicide who has been baulked of his purpose, or like a man who knows himself to be the victim of accident; which theory the defence continued to put forward.
The Lord Chief Justice dealt with these points in his summing up. He warned the jury; told them that there could not be conceived a case which demanded a more entire absence of prejudice, if justice were to be done. After the manner of judges, even those most nearly in touch with common life, he bade the jurymen expunge from their minds all recollection of anything they might have read or heard concerning the prisoner,
