Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

‘I suppose so,’ I say.

‘Well,’ she says, playing the devil’s advocate, ‘you could look at it the other way about and say Henry was innocent. He only met Joseph Edward Heyford Brewer because he knocked Samuel down. Maybe he was one of those Victorian philanthropists who were prison visitors and he sought Brewer out in jail, got to know him and his family and met Len Dawson.’

‘Only there’s no evidence at all that Henry was a prison visitor,’ I tell her, ‘and quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. One of the letters to Couch is devoted to a long diatribe on the treatment of prisoners. In Henry’s view it was too lenient. He actually says he thinks prison visitors are misguided. Criminals on whatever level, in his view, should be ostracized by society even more than they were.’

‘I’m glad. I want Henry to turn out a villain. Didn’t I always say he was up to something? And now we know what it was.’

She goes off to have a shower and I sit on the bed and think about that one. Where and how did Henry meet Joseph Brewer? Or did he meet Len Dawson first? I doubt if I’m ever going to find out. I suddenly remember that Joseph Brewer’s address was somewhere in Euston but that doesn’t help. Maybe he was one of those ‘exhibits’ doctors had up before their students and asked them to observe certain anomalies or deformities about their anatomy. But I’ve no reason to believe Joseph had any deformities or was in any way peculiar. He was very likely a completely normal young man.

How much did Henry give him to ‘do the job’? A hundred pounds would have been a fortune to a man like that. Later on he rewarded his half-brother with marriage to Jimmy Ashworth, accommodation and no doubt a considerable down-payment. Why pick on Len? Why not Joseph himself? Possibly because Joseph was married already. I take another look at the family tree and see that of the Dawson and Brewer children nine were male and seven female. In 1883 the oldest male was forty-one and the youngest nineteen. The five oldest were all married by 1883, another was widowed and left with five children. Len was single and I notice something I didn’t see before. His youngest full brother had died aged fourteen and a brother a year younger than he died aged one year. Of the Brewers, two were girls. Joseph had been married three years. The nineteen-year-old Albert was still single. Henry wouldn’t have foisted a widower with five children on Jimmy, even he would have stopped short at that, and the nineteen-year-old was too young for her. Hence, Len was the only possible choice.

He didn’t meet Len because he was a hospital porter. He was probably a porter at Euston Station and Henry met him when Joseph introduced them. Why hadn’t Len married before? Perhaps there was something about him that didn’t appeal to women, he had a birthmark or a wart on his face or something. I must find out if Laura Kimball has a photograph.

Henry can only have had one motive in fixing this assault and his own heroic intervention: to meet the Henderson family. There were other ways he could have done this but perhaps none so effective. He could have arranged an interview with Samuel to consult him on some legal aspect of his medical research. But how to make such a consultation lead to friendship and invitations to the Henderson home? It would have taken a long time, nothing might have come of it. In fact, it’s hard to see how Henry could have thought of a sounder and surer plan of action than the one he arranged. Nothing could be more likely than that he earn the gratitude of the whole family. Nothing more natural than that he call at the Henderson house to ask after the health of the victim.

What it doesn’t tell me is why Henry so much wanted to know the Hendersons that he, a hitherto law-abiding man, an eminent figure, a professor, a royal doctor, would stoop to criminal conspiracy to gain access to their home. What was so attractive about them? They were very ordinary people. A solicitor was far less respected then than he’d be today and Samuel wasn’t even doing very well. They were middle-class, not rich, living in an overcrowded poky house in an unfashionable part of London. None of them would have been accepted in the kind of society the Bathos belonged to. The girls were pretty but so were a thousand young girls in London, many of them far more eligible.

Another curious factor in this business comes to mind. Henry must have known of the Hendersons before he set up the encounter in Gower Street and he could only have known of them by making enquiries about them. Did he use a detective agency? Someone on the lines of Sherlock Holmes? I’ve a picture in my mind of a rather sinister figure, very Victorian, a character out of Wilkie Collins, following Samuel, watching his house, maybe striking up an acquaintance with old Mr Quendon when he went out for his ‘constitutional’, eyeing the girls from a shop doorway. But why? What for?

I decide to sleep on it, knowing from experience how different things can be in the morning. Tomorrow it may all fall to the ground, it may turn out to have been in my head, a think-piece, as the journalists say. But I sleep and get up early because we’ve a plane to catch, and things are just the same. Henry is still a conspirator and a villain and I still don’t know why he wanted to know the Hendersons.

Devious Henry. Criminal Henry.

16

At home there are no personal letters awaiting us, no more titillating revelations, only bills, a pile of appeals for my time and money sent on from the House of Lords and two books from a literary editor for me to review. I’m glad to see them, this history of the parliamentary system in Great Britain and a biography of Bonar Law. The two reviews will earn me a thousand pounds or a bit less. On the way back, in the plane, I’ve been thinking, not of Henry, but of money.

Jude hasn’t given up her job. Sadly, she didn’t have to. I was in publishing myself once, until I left on the strength of the flash-in-the-pan success of my first biography. My latest one won’t even go into paperback and research takes so long I don’t anticipate beginning the writing of the Henry book until the end of next year at the earliest. What occurred to me in the aircraft was something that simply hadn’t struck me before, though no doubt it’s struck many wiser than I. When I’m chucked out of the Lords I’ll lose my expenses. A peer who goes into the Chamber four times a week and five times if the House sits on a Friday, can claim expenses often thousand a year or more, and it’s tax-free. I may have to get a job – if I can. I can’t depend on my wife to keep me. Besides, what about this baby? The baby that’s never come yet but may come.

Lamb wrote an essay called ‘Dream Children’ about the family he never had. It’s sentimental but it has its finer moments. Ghostly children gather round to listen to his tales of the people who might have been their ancestors if they’d ever been born. They want ‘stories about their pretty dead mother’ but at last they fade mournfully away saying, ‘We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name.’

I don’t know if Jude knows this essay. Of course, I’d rather she didn’t. There are no two ways about it for me; I must want her to have a child, I must stop it any longer waiting on the tedious shores of Lethe, I must teach myself to want it as much as she does, because that’s the only way we can survive together. I must stop being relieved when another day passes and she hasn’t used the dreaded four-letter word. More than that, I must begin using it myself, show enthusiasm for what dismays me, pretend a longing I don’t feel. Even that must change. The dismay must go and my whole attitude towards our life be altered. I must get myself into Henry-the-father mode, think of how he longed for a second son, though he had four daughters and a son already. It would be better too if I stopped telling myself it was easy for him, he had a wife at home and nannies for his children, and remembered his involvement with George the youngest, the sick boy, the child whose crying so distressed him.