Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

‘It happens just as much now as it did then, women having children by men they’re not married to or living with. Probably more. And as for Henry, I don’t suppose he made the connection between the expected birth and the wedding day. He wouldn’t have thought about the two events on the – well, the same plane.’

‘Hateful Henry,’ says Jude. ‘Must you write his life? He’s so dreadful.’

I tell her I must and that Henry wasn’t any worse than other professional men of his time. As for guilt and shame, I feel plenty of that myself over my feigned enthusiasm for our coming child, but at the same time I’m revelling in being able to talk to my wife again, to say anything I like about anything, not to keep breaking off in mid-sentence and blushing the way no man of my age ever should.

If Eleanor wrote to Henry from Manaton her letters haven’t survived. I wonder how many times I’m going to write that sentence, changing only the names and the place? Biographers get to feel that letter writing should be compulsory on everyone’s part and letter preserving even more important. Still, she wrote one letter home and that single one to her sister Edith. It exists only because, probably, its date is just before the murder, and for this reason Edith kept it.

We don’t know how Eleanor passed the time in Manaton. Jude says, and I agree with her, that it’s hard to know how any middle-class Victorian woman passed the time. If you have servants and no job, what do you do all day? Read, sew, write letters, read, walk, talk, sew, I suppose. Eleanor mentions none of this in her letter to her sister. Its main purpose seems to be to tell the family she’ll get a cab home from Paddington station. It is as follows:

Moor House,

Manaton,

Devon

St Luke’s Day

Dearest Edith,

The weather is beautiful. Aunt says the fine weather in mid October is called St Luke’s Little Summer. That is why I have put St Luke’s Day instead of October the eighteenth at the top of this letter. You have been here so you know how lovely the countryside is. I should really like to live in this neighbourhood once I am married but Henry cannot be away from London where his work is. Perhaps one day we could have a house here, though I think he would call that no more than a romantic dream.

Isobel and Laetitia have consented to be my bridesmaids, indeed they were very happy to accept the invitation. You, of course, will be the third, my dearest sister. You have already said you will, so I do not think I am being presumptuous in taking it for granted! Henry talks of Italy for our honeymoon and I dare not suggest we come down here. Of course, it would not be nearly so nice in February.

I have had one of ‘my falls’. It happened out walking with I and L. I stumbled in the middle of a field, caught my foot in a rabbit hole, and fell headlong. Mud all over my blue serge frock but the worst was (of course!) the bruising. I am black and blue. The bruises on my left side and leg are a sight to behold, but luckily no one but me does behold them!

I shall return on Saturday by the 11.14 train from Bovey. The journey takes hours and hours, as you know, but it is due to reach Paddington at five minutes past five. There is no need at all for Father to meet the train. I shall be quite safe on my own and will take a cab. My dear love to Father and Mother, Grandpapa, Lionel and your dear self.

Your affectionate sister,

Eleanor

She mentions Henry as a Victorian wife-to-be should. His work was paramount, he made the decisions. When she says she ‘dare not’ suggest they come to Devon for their honeymoon she doesn’t sound seriously fearful. She says it much as a present-day wife would say she daren’t ask what’s-his-name to go out to dinner again this week. From the sound of it, she and Henry had a simple and cheerful relationship. Perhaps the passion was all on his side. There is nothing in her letter to betray her love or even her pride in landing such a prize. Perhaps she’d said all that to her sister beforehand. Still, I find it hard to believe that the Henderson family as a whole weren’t ecstatic that one of their number was making this amazing match. A knight! A royal doctor! A rich man – at least, in their estimation. The daughter who was already twenty-four, on the shelf, dowry-less, a burden for ever on her parents, was about to become Lady Nanther and in the following year would be living in a house fine beyond their dreams.

For Henry was house-hunting once more. His friend Barnabus Couch had a post as Visiting Professor of Anatomy at the Owens College in Manchester once attended by Henry himself. To him he wrote as follows on 18 October 1883:

My dear Couch,

I have to thank you for your kind letter of congratulation on my engagement to Miss Henderson. You will like her. She is gentle, charming and quiet, very far from the ‘New Woman’ we hear so much about these days. I doubt if she knows what the franchise is, still less would she wish to play a part in choosing a member to send to Parliament. I am confident she will do her duty by me as my wife and will never exhibit the restlessness and, worse, neurasthenia, you and I see so much of in those female patients whom modern notions of ‘freedom’ and emancipation have so adversely affected. At present she is staying with her aunt in Devon where plans are afoot for the coming nuptials, but will return on Saturday.

I have been looking out for a suitable residence for us and would like to have settled on a property by the end of January. Then, if we spend six weeks away on our wedding journey – I have Rome and Naples in mind – all transactions could be complete by the time we return. However, I shall take a house somewhere until midsummer by which time my wife will have purchased furniture, carpets and whatever else may be necessary for our future home. Our permanent residence will, I think, be somewhere in that district I consider the most salubrious of anywhere in North London – St John’s Wood. I had thought of the Eyre Estate or the almost rustic Loudoun Road but tomorrow I am to be taken on a conducted tour of a very fine place in Carlton Hill, at present the property of Mr Hapgood, the brother of a colleague of mine.

You will remind me, my dear Couch, of St John’s Wood’s reputation as the hiding place for a gentleman’s belle amie . On being told that the philosopher Herbert Spencer had taken up residence there, a bishop is said to have asked, ‘And who is the lady?’ But I believe its disreputability, if such it has been, is passing. After all, the great T. H. Huxley, with whom I am proud to have some acquaintance, has been living there at various addresses for the past thirty years. My wife and I will no doubt attend St Mark’s Church, Hamilton Terrace, that place of worship made distinguished by the incumbency of Canon Duckworth, who also resides in the neighbourhood and whom I had the honour of knowing while he was tutor to His Royal Highness, the Prince Leopold. So I believe we may take up residence without danger to our morals!

I trust you are well and that Mrs Couch’s health is keeping up. Bear February the fourteenth in mind! You will receive Mr and Mrs Henderson’s invitation in due course.

Yours most sincerely,

Henry Nanther

Jude’s comment on that is, ‘I don’t know how he had the nerve,’ referring, of course, to Jimmy Ashworth whom Henry had only recently pensioned off. The answer is that he was not necessarily a hypocrite; he was not one person but many people who lived alongside one another inside his lanky frame and noble head.

‘Very fine’ the house may have been, but Carlton Hill was scarcely Park Lane. In 1883 St John’s Wood wasn’t considered part of London as it is now, but a suburb, and much of it, especially on the western side of Maida Vale, a building site. In the event, Henry didn’t buy Mr Hapgood’s house. The woman who was to choose its furniture and carpets met her death the day after her fiancé went to look at it.