Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

‘The Contents will go to the right by the throne and the Not Contents to the left by the bar.’

There are hundreds of Opposition peers filing towards the Content lobby. The LibDems are going with the Government but fifteen Labour peers aren’t. It’s strange and rather unpleasant to watch it and not be one with it. Foreign nationals think us very odd not to have electronic voting, but to stroll, often laughing and talking, down a passage and give our names to a clerk, who if he knows you will have crossed it off before you pass. The name of Nanther will have been struck off the list three months ago. Lachlan comes to talk to me, then sits on the step beside me. The Government – I nearly said ‘we’ – have lost by forty-five votes.

‘We tried,’ says Lachlan at his gloomiest.

I leave alone, not needing him to show me the way. The policeman at the gate asks if I need a taxi, my Lord, but I shake my head. I’m going to walk, not all the way, but a good part of it, and maybe get onto the tube at Baker Street. The evening is dark and damp but the sky is clear. Having only just finished building the new Westminster tube station, they’re digging up Parliament Square. No one seems to know why. There aren’t many people about on foot and the Pinochet protesters who station themselves here in the daytime, the ones who want the old General extradited and the ones who want to send him home, have all gone for the night. I think about Henry, the reason for my walking.

It’s a curious conclusion I’m coming to. Surely it’s beyond doubt that my great-grandfather arranged that assault on Samuel Henderson, paying his Victorian hit man to attack Samuel so that he could rush to the rescue and thus create a pretext for meeting the Henderson family. It wasn’t Samuel himself or his wife or his son Henry wanted to meet but one of his daughters. He had seen Eleanor in the street and fallen in love with her, just as I saw Jude across a room at a party. Conspiring to assault a man seems a complicated, not to say criminal, way of getting to know a woman. Perhaps he simply couldn’t think of any other or he was closer to the Dawson–Brewer family than appears and one of them had suggested it to him.

So where does the haemophilia come in?

Henry cannot have known Samuel Henderson’s wife was a carrier. Or let’s say I can’t think of any way he could have known it. Of course it’s possible Louisa Henderson was his patient, as Lachlan suggested her daughter might have been, and came to his consulting rooms in Wimpole Street because she was a symptomatic carrier and suffered, as such women sometimes do, from problems with her joints or bleeding gums. But if she had done so he’d have had no need to stage that street attack on Samuel, he would have known the family already. So Henry didn’t know. He didn’t know but he found out and the discovery appalled him.

How did he find out? Lionel Henderson, Eleanor’s brother, wasn’t a haemophiliac. Eleanor bruised easily, a sign of a symptomatic carrier, but there are many reasons for a tendency to bruise and Henry wouldn’t have been alarmed by it. No, surely the answer is that ‘consultation’, as he calls it in the diary, which Louisa Henderson had with Henry after he’d begun calling in Keppel Street, when she confided in him that her daughter suffered from heavy menstrual bleeding. This worried her since she thought it might mean Eleanor would have problems in childbearing.

It must also be taken into account that Louisa may not have known she was herself a carrier. Her father William Quendon was not a haemophiliac. But Louisa had had a brother who died in infancy or when young. He was younger than she but how much younger? I must check, find out. If he had haemophilia and died as a result of it and if he and she were babies when he died, she may never have known the cause of his death. Altogether, it seems likely, taking into consideration the lack of knowledge among ordinary people at that time – I think of Queen Victoria adamant that the disorder wasn’t ‘in the family’ – that Louisa didn’t know.

But Henry, the expert, would have known. As soon as she told him her daughter had heavy periods and bruised easily, perhaps had nosebleeds too, and very likely added that she herself suffered from similar abnormalities, Henry would have suspected both were carriers. A few judicious questions from him, perhaps on the subject of family history, would have gathered more information. He asked about any brothers or uncles Louisa had and learned of her brother who died in infancy. What did he die of? His blood failed to clot like other people’s, says his future mother-in-law. He had some illness, she can’t remember the name. Henry can remember it, it’s written on his heart in blood-red letters, and he sees the risk he’s running.

But he wasn’t engaged to Eleanor at the time. I should rather say that he wasn’t officially engaged to her. All that is known of the date of his engagement is from the notice in The Times and his diary entry. He may very well have asked Eleanor to marry him as early as July before the consultation. First asked her parents’ permission, explaining that he agreed with the possible objection that they had known each other only a short time but his mind was made up, and he believed his affection was returned. Then he asked her. The consultation took place the following week, Louisa Henderson believing the time had come to warn her prospective son-in-law of the difficulties her daughter might have in giving birth.

Henry is appalled. But it is too late now. The announcement goes into The Times and he notes his engagement gloomily in his diary. Six weeks later Eleanor goes to stay with her aunt in Devon. It’s known that she wrote home to her sister Edith. Did she also write to Henry, her fiancé? And if she did was he also told about the bruising, the result of her fall, confirming – as if he needed confirmation – what her mother had told him? Two weeks later she attempts to return home but never does because she is murdered on the way and her body thrown from the train.

Henry is due to marry her in February 1884, just four months away. His discovery has profoundly affected his feelings for her. He sees her as tainted, diseased. He knows a great deal about haemophilia, perhaps more than any other living doctor. He knows what marriage to this woman would mean: any son they might have could be afflicted, any daughter a carrier. Marrying her would be a disaster he can’t contemplate.

I’m at Baker Street but I can’t get onto a train. Jubilee Line trains aren’t stopping here because something’s gone wrong with the escalators. I get a 189 bus instead. It’ll take me closer to home than the tube would have. I don’t at all like what I’m thinking about my great-grandfather, it’s not something which distance and more than a hundred years can wipe away.

If Henry could arrange a street mugging in order to meet a girl, might he also arrange a murder to avoid marrying her? The crimes aren’t really on a par. Samuel Henderson wasn’t really harmed while Eleanor was brutally strangled. And why go to such terrible lengths? He could have just left her. Jilted her. But things were different then. An action for breach of promise was a very real possibility for a jilted girl and her family. An angry father could insert a notice in a newspaper, naming Sir Henry Nanther as a trifler with women’s affections, someone to avoid, a man from whom to protect one’s daughters. Olivia Batho’s father is said to have contemplated such a step. Did Henry know of it? And here one must remember Samuel Henderson was a solicitor and would be familiar with such things. Henry, the royal doctor, was a man of considerable repute, and his livelihood depended on that reputation being sustained. Queen Victoria had been so rigid in her morality when she was young that she and the Prince Consort refused to receive a woman whose marriage was the result of an elopement. She would never have countenanced the behaviour of one of her physicians publicly announcing his engagement to a respectable and virtuous young woman with her parents’ full consent, and then deserting her.