Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

‘And therefore Olivia Batho,’ she said.

‘And Olivia Batho.’

‘Why on earth didn’t Henry marry her?’ she wants to know, and then she asks the same question about Caroline Hamilton and did Caroline look like the other two. I don’t know the answers to these questions, and unless I come across more letters, I never shall. So I leave the subject of Jimmy and her descendants, go back some few years into the eighteen seventies and show Jude the photocopied extracts from The Times of 30 December 1879. The typeface is very small and the text hasn’t come out very well. She says it’s too hard to read, she’ll need a magnifying glass, and why don’t I just tell her the story of Henry and the ill-fated train? She’d like that much better and she takes my hand and kisses it. Our thing. Our special thing, I think, as I kiss her thin very smooth fingers.

‘Henry’s father was far from disapproving of any marriage he might have made,’ I tell her. ‘He died in 1873. His mother still lived at Godby Hall. She had two nurses, paid for by Henry. He was dutiful and correct if not particularly affectionate. She was eighty and senile. I suppose we’d call what she had Alzheimer’s. In a letter to Couch written ten years later he writes that she no longer knew who he was, she’d an almost total memory loss. Couch was some sort of specialist in geriatrics and Henry describes his mother’s condition to him.’

‘This was all ten years later?’

‘That’s right. Before she became senile Henry had been in the habit of going to Godby for Christmas. Presumably he thought there was no longer any point in going once she no longer recognized him. Anyway, in that year, 1879, he was invited by Richard Hamilton to Hamilton’s parents’ home in Newport-on-Tay in Fife. It was a little place then. I believe it’s quite a big town now.’

After Christmas Richard and Henry were to join a houseparty at Luloch Castle. I imagine that the prospect of this had a good deal to do with Henry’s enthusiasm. It would have meant far more to him than a quiet Christmas with an elderly couple in a Scottish village. He was a snob, though a strangely intermittent one. In order to reach Dundee from the Kingdom of Fife it’s necessary to cross the Firth of Tay and at one time this could be done only by ferry. The first railway bridge to span the firth was begun in 1871 and completed seven years later. It was opened on 1 June 1878 and after nineteen months, collapsed into the waters of the firth, taking a train and its passengers with it.

Jude wants to know why. ‘It took seven years to build and in the first bad storm it fell down?’

‘It was all finished and painted by February 1878. Some general inspected it, I don’t know who he was or why he was chosen. They coupled six locomotives together, each one weighing seventy-three tons, and drove them over the bridge at forty miles an hour. I’m quoting now from the report of the inquiry into the disaster, “The behaviour of the bridge under these tests appears to have been satisfactory, there having been only a moderate deflection in the girders, a small degree of tremor, and no indication of looseness in the cross-bracing.” On the fifth of March the general said he saw no reason why the bridge shouldn’t be used for passenger traffic but that, “it would not be desirable that trains should run over the bridge at a high rate of speed”. Twenty-five miles an hour was what he recommended. It was the longest bridge in the world at the time, two miles long, taken in eighty-five spans of iron and concrete, the middle part a hundred and thirty feet above the high water mark.’

‘So what happened?’

I tell her we have to go back to Henry. Since 23 December he’d been staying with the Hamiltons in Newport. He and Richard had decided to take the train from Edinburgh, not an express but a train which stopped at numerous small stations and, having crossed the bridge, was due to reach Dundee at 7.15 in the evening. It was Sunday 28 December, and during the day a great storm had come up with a gale-force wind and driving sleet. Still, the two men saw no reason to postpone their journey. The arrangements were that they would be met by Lord Hamilton’s carriage at the Tay Bridge station.

About an hour before they were due to leave the house where the Hamilton parents lived a telegram was delivered to Henry. It was from the housekeeper at Godby Hall and it told him his mother was sinking fast and he should come as soon as he could if he wanted to see her alive. We don’t know what Henry thought about this. He was looking forward to his visit to Luloch Castle and he seems to have preferred the company of Richard Hamilton above all other. His mother wouldn’t know him and, in any case, would very likely be dead before he reached Yorkshire.

‘Did he go?’

‘To Godby? He tried to. He gave up the idea of Luloch Castle.’

‘I bet he only gave it up because the others had seen the telegram,’ says Jude. ‘If he’d been alone and no one had seen the telegraph boy he’d have screwed it up and pretended it had never come. I know him.’

‘He’d have screwed up the order of release if he had. Once on that train and he’d have been a dead man.’

‘And you’d not be here,’ she says, taking my hand. ‘I’m glad he got the telegram.’

I say that so am I, and maybe he wasn’t quite as callous as she thinks. No doubt, he’d loved his mother and he knew his duty. The two men went to the station together, Henry to catch a southbound train and Richard to go north. In the event, of course, Henry’s train never came. He waited, the train failed to come, no doubt he enquired what was wrong, and was told telegraphic communication between the Fife side and Dundee had ceased, the equipment also having been damaged by the storm. What became of him for the hours and a few days after that isn’t known. Presumably, he could have gone back to the Hamiltons’ house and stayed there. Perhaps he waited on the station in the hope another train would come. Certainly he would have attempted to find out what had happened to the train crossing the Tay Bridge. He may have stayed up all night, for remember his great friendship for Richard Hamilton, even perhaps his love for Hamilton. He’d have been very anxious, he wouldn’t have been able to rest, but he may eventually have found himself somewhere to spend the hours before morning. During that night his mother died.

‘How do you know all this?’ Jude wants to know. ‘I’ll never believe Henry put it in his diary.’

‘It’s the subject of a very long letter Caroline Hamilton Seaton wrote to her cousin in Leuchars.’

Meanwhile, Richard Hamilton had boarded the train among about ninety other people. The storm was, if anything, worse. There’s no reason to think the driver of the train exceeded the prescribed twenty-five miles an hour. Since no one lived to relate what happened there are no eye-witness accounts of how it felt to be in that train, the severity of the storm or whether passengers were afraid. Jude, the publisher, tells me at this point she’s just remembered that the novelist A.J. Cronin wrote an account of it through a passenger’s eyes in a novel called Hatter’s Castle , published in 1931.

‘But he can’t have really known,’ she says.

No one can really know. A man called Lawson of Windsor Place, Dundee (this is according to The Times of 29 December 1879) went out with a friend just after seven on the evening of the disaster. The two men talked about the fury of the gale which was blowing from the south-west and wondered if, on such a night, the Edinburgh train would venture on to the bridge. They followed with their eyes the line of lights along the lower spans and into the high girders and were transfixed by a sudden tremendous flash. This flash, like a shower of fire, descended into the water, a falling mass of flame, and the lights along the span went down with it.