Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

We’re off today. Our flight goes in the early afternoon and we’re ready to leave. But just before the cab comes two letters arrive in the post, one from Veronica Croft-Jones and the other, enclosing her draft family tree, the one I didn’t ask her to send, from Janet Forsythe. Veronica, whom of course I’ve never met, writes that she understands from her son that I’d like to talk to her about the family. She’ll be back visiting David and Georgie and Galahad in September and would be very happy to fix up a meeting. Anyway, she says, we’re such close relations really, we ought to get to know each other better, and she signs herself, ‘Your affectionate cousin, Veronica.’

I leave this letter behind but for some reason I stuff the family tree into my pocket, the cab comes and we depart for Heathrow. We’re in the aircraft, going over some alps, before I look at the tree again. I soon see I shall have to take great care of it as it’s obviously the top copy. This genealogical table is done in a fancy way, more like a real tree than a table, with branches and twigs hanging down and coloured brown and green instead of standing up because the trunk part has to be at the top. The male characters are each encased in a leaf shape and the female in an apple. Jude looks over my shoulder and says in a cold voice that it’s nauseating. At first I can’t see any names that I recognize. Then I spot Jemima Ann Ashworth and Leonard Dawson. Their daughter Mary (or Henry’s daughter) is there and so are all the other children that are truly Len Dawson’s, and on a twirly little twig, Janet Forsythe, branching out of Laura Mary Kimball and Robert Arthur Kimball, with her husband and her son Damon. Jimmy Ashworth appears to have had no siblings, but Len Dawson had no fewer than eleven brothers and sisters plus two half-brothers and two half-sisters born after the death of his father and when his mother, a glutton for hard labour apparently, had married again. I can’t see much to interest me in the tree and I put it into my flight carry-on bag, neatly folded this time.

Jude worries about walking, just as she worries about everything else that involves bodily motion. She worries particularly about four-wheel drive vehicles bouncing up bumpy mountain tracks. I remind her that she can’t be pregnant because she hasn’t yet had a period since the miscarriage. Whether this is true or not, I mean the bit about not possibly being pregnant, I don’t know. Neither does she and she sulks disdainfully. I find myself looking north across the mountains to Switzerland, to where I think the Graubünden must be. Did Henry come walking here? Jude is sitting on a rock, scowling.

I say to her, ‘Why are you being so disagreeable?’

To my astonishment she bursts out laughing like the old Jude, like the one I first fell in love with. ‘I love you,’ she says. ‘You’re always using these crazy old-fashioned expressions. Disagreeable! I ask you. No one, but no one , says “disagreeable” but you.’

So we hug each other and go back to the hotel and make love like we used to before all this baby business. We make love every day and often at night as well and each time it’s like it used to be, so I start thinking it always will be now, this holiday is the beginning of our new happiness. We write postcards to all our friends, we even write one to Paul who despises them, and we sign them off ‘with lots of love’. Love is what we’re engulfed with, soppily, and we even have some over-spill.

Jude’s period comes when we’re on Skyros but she’s fine about it, she’s glad to see it. She says nothing about babies. ‘Baby’ is now a banned word. It mustn’t pass our lips. It’s as if we’re children and our mother has told us we’re not to say that naughty four-letter word. We swim and lie in the sun, slathered in factor fifteen, and drink things that taste disgusting at home, ouzo and retsina, and Jude says not a word about alcohol poisoning her hormones or whatever.

On our last day a newcomer to the hotel comes up to us while we’re sitting by the pool and introduces himself as Julian Brewer. ‘Soon to be Lord Brewer,’ he says with an expansive smile. Apparently, he’ll just been made a peer and he’s take his seat in October. I get up and shake hands and tell him I’ll be departing just as he comes in. We order drinks from the waiter who comes round to the tables and I answer his questions about the Lords as best I can, but my mind is only half on what he’s saying, only a quarter, because one of those revelations has just come to me, one of those flashes of enlightenment. I want him to go away, I want the sun to sink and the wind to get up so that we can all go indoors and I can get up to my room and find Janet Forsythe’s family tree in my carry-on bag.

Eventually he goes, but not until I’ve made wild promises to have a drink with him after his introduction, meet his wife and children and show him the ropes – that is, where the lavatories are and how to put down a starred question. Anything to get rid of him. Jude is looking at me strangely because I don’t usually do this sort of thing. I explain when we’re in the lift. Brewer, I say to her, Brewer. His name is Brewer and that triggered off something. I’ve got to check it out. If I’m right it’s going to put a whole new complexion on Henry’s life.

There it is, in Janet Forsythe’s tree: Joseph Edward Heyford Brewer, second son of Joseph William Brewer and his wife Mary Ann Dawson, née Heyford. These two had four children and they all had Heyford among their names. But the important, the astounding, point is that Mary Ann Dawson had been married to Clarence George Dawson and by him become the mother, among twelve children, of Leonard Dawson, husband of Jimmy Ashworth. Therefore, the man who assaulted my great-great-grandfather Samuel Henderson in Gower Street, and was interrupted in his nefarious work by my great-grandfather Henry Nanther, was Len Dawson’s half-brother.

I haven’t got the cutting from The Times about the appearance of Brewer in the magistrates’ court but I remember the name perfectly. It’s the Heyford bit that’s stuck in my mind, I don’t know why. His age has too, twenty-six. According to Janet’s tree Joseph Edward Heyford Brewer was born in 1857, which makes it about right. I shall have to check his age and where he was born but they have to be the same man. They have to be. Anything else would be too enormous a coincidence.

Does Janet realize? She must do. That is, she must have noticed that the man who attacked Samuel Henderson was Len Dawson’s half-brother. But has she put two and two together and seen that Len Dawson’s half-brother was convicted and sent to prison for an assault on my great-great-grandfather and Henry’s future father-in-law ? Somehow I doubt it. I talk to Jude about it and tell her there was nothing in the police court proceedings about Henry, he wasn’t mentioned, and she agrees with me. Janet very likely hasn’t made the connection.

‘But why did she draw your attention to it by sending you that cutting?’

I’ve thought about that and I tell her I’d make a guess it’s because, when we met, her mother seemed to censor everything about Jimmy Ashworth, make her come out pure and innocent, while she, Janet, is more of a woman of the world than that. ‘She wants to show me her family had their black sheep. Most people would think anything like that in their family history quite amusing. Jimmy being a kept woman and this Joseph a Victorian thug. Only Laura Kimball wouldn’t. Janet wants to show she’s broader-minded than her mother. Besides, Joseph was barely related to her.’

‘He wasn’t related to her at all if what you say is true and Henry was her grandmother’s father.’

I ask her to tell me what she thinks was behind it all and she’s silent for a moment. Then she says things look black for Henry. ‘I mean, is there any other way of looking at it but that Henry put Joseph up to it? Paid him? Joseph was a sort of contract mugger and Henry paid him to waylay poor old Samuel in the street, knock him around a bit but not too much, and then gallant Henry the white knight comes along and rescues Joseph’s victim.’