Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

She doesn’t seem at all tired and wants to know where we’re going next as if I had a nightclub in view. But I take them round a bit, show them the House’s treasures, Charles I’s death warrant that we keep in a glass case in the Royal Gallery, the Dyce frescoes, tell a few anecdotes and ask them if they’d like to go into the Chamber. Georgie is keen to go in but loses her enthusiasm when I tell her she and David will have to sit on the right below the bar and Jude on the left in the peers’ spouses’ seats. Rules of the House, I’m afraid. She seems to have taken a shine to Jude and says that rules are made to be broken. I tell her that if we break this rule a doorkeeper will come and either move them or move Jude, and we go downstairs to say our goodbyes in the Peers’ Entrance, David promising to send me the tree when it reaches its next stage.

The House is very quiet now and there’s a tense feeling in the air, everyone having either gone home or disappeared into the Chamber. I tell Jude I’ll go in myself for a bit, see what happens, and would she like to go home? She says she’ll stay with me, she’s not tired, she’s so happy she doesn’t want to waste her time sleeping. Walking slowly up that august red-carpeted staircase, I take her hand and say very quietly, ‘I love you. I’m so happy for you.’

‘I hope you’re happy for yourself too,’ she says shrewdly, too shrewdly, but I tell her I am, I am.

10

This story has been as famous in the family as Henry’s heroic rescue of Samuel Henderson. My father told it to me when I was thought old enough not to be given nightmares and I’m afraid he told it with Gothic relish, in which mode – probably – his father had told it to him. You could call it a very Victorian murder.

Trains were the preferred form of travel in the nineteenth century, indeed the only fast form of travel. Twice they brought disaster into Henry’s life – at least, it would seem like disaster to anyone else. There is no way of knowing what he felt about these two particular incidents. Rather cryptically he mentions Eleanor’s death in his diary but gives no details and still less indicates his emotions.

Still, I’m assuming that the tragedy affected him at least as deeply as Hamilton’s death in the Tay Bridge disaster. He was in love with Eleanor Henderson. Love is the only possible reason for his wanting to marry her. They were engaged and the wedding was to take place in February. Did Henry reflect, did he remember , that this was the month in which Jimmy Ashworth Dawson was to give birth to his child? No one knows. The engagement ring Henry gave to Eleanor is in the possession of my sister Sarah, a clumsy piece of jewellery, the diamonds half buried in the thick heavy gold. It was taken from Eleanor’s finger before her funeral and somehow found its way back to Henry, there to become, in its turn, Edith’s engagement ring.

This is something assumed in my branch of the family. My grandfather Alexander knew it and passed it on to his son. Confirmation comes from Mary Craddock’s letter to her sister Elizabeth Kirkford. Her mother Edith had told her the ring she wore had been Eleanor’s. This piece of information is wrapped up in Victorian sentimental flummery, which may have been Mary’s, not Edith’s, about the sacredness of Henry’s first love and Edith’s own desire to have the ring so that she and Henry would never forget it was her dead sister who brought them together. That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that Henry, having got the ring back by some means or another, saw no reason to spend money on a new one. Thrifty Henry.

The closest relation the Hendersons had, outside the immediate family, was Samuel Henderson’s only sister Dorothea. David Croft-Jones’s genealogical table shows me that Louisa Henderson, the girls’ mother, had one sister and a brother, who died at the age of seven. These people, of course, were Quendons, the children of William Quendon and his wife Luise, née Dornford. Dorothea Vincent belonged on a rather higher social plane than the Hendersons. She was a comfortably off widow who lived with her two daughters in the village of Manaton in Devon, where her late husband had been the squire. She was Eleanor’s godmother and closer to her than she was to the other Henderson children. Eleanor was in the habit of going to stay with her for a couple of weeks every year in the late summer, in her early years accompanied by her mother, later on by her sister Edith. This was only the second time she had gone alone.

Most of my information about this visit and its consequences comes from newspapers. The relationships between the various people I’ve gleaned – and ‘gleaned’ is the word if that means what I take it to mean – picking out tiny usable grains from a mass of chaff – from David’s mother’s and grandmother’s letters. Unfortunately, there’s not much in them about what people felt and thought, no more than a shocked referring back to the ‘terrible tragedy’ and a reflection on Veronica’s part that if Eleanor hadn’t died they wouldn’t exist.

Eleanor’s habit was to visit her aunt in August, but there was an obvious reason for her not going in the August of 1883. Perhaps she planned to go but postponed her visit when it seemed likely Henry would propose. Instead she went in early October, travelling by the Great Western train that went, and still goes, from Paddington to Penzance, and she travelled first class. Ladies Only compartments existed in 1883 but not on that line. At Newton Abbot she changed on to the local line to Moretonhampstead and got off at Bovey Tracey, which in those days was simply called Bovey. She was met at the station by her aunt with the pony and trap. Her visits must have been a pleasant change for Eleanor, coming as she did from a London that was often fogbound in winter and hot and dusty in summer. Manaton in those days, and to a great extent still, is in beautiful country on the edge of Dartmoor, a place of high tors, deep leafy lanes and trout streams. Aunt Dorothea’s was a more luxurious home than her own in Keppel Street. She employed a cook and two maids and two men to do the garden. The family wanted for nothing. The pony carriage was nice to go about in and there were beautiful places within easy reach of Moor House to walk to. Eleanor got on well with her cousins and the purpose of her visit was, in part, to ask them to be her bridesmaids.

Her wedding was fixed for 14 February, St Valentine’s Day, though less was made of that as a lovers’ festival in the nineteenth century than today. As things turned out, the wedding never took place, so the fact that Jimmy Dawson gave birth to her daughter Mary on the 13th isn’t as significant as it might have been. Jude, who is perfectly happy now to discuss anyone and everyone’s babies, who prefers baby-discussion to all other types of conversation, says that the prospect must have hung over Henry. He must have felt guilt as well as an excited anticipation. How could he simply turn his back on his own child?

‘I don’t think men felt the same then,’ I tell her. ‘The divide between good women and bad women has so entirely changed it’s difficult to imagine it, but it was very marked in the eighteen eighties. And the divide between the children one’s wife had and the by-blows or wrong side of the blanket children was very wide. Henry would have given Jimmy money, probably in the form of an ongoing income to her husband. There may have been a condition that he himself was never to see or hear of the child. At all costs its existence must never get to his wife’s ears.’

Jude says she can’t imagine being married to one man and carrying another man’s child. ‘They’d never have been able to talk about it the way we do. She must have felt frightened and ashamed all the time.’