Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

So, appalling as it sounds, can Jude be right and was Henry a murderer?

26

I wish I’d thrashed this out while I was still with Lachlan so that I could have another opinion. He’d have given the theory his measured consideration. And maybe he’d have said it was ridiculous, bizarre, because in Ibsen’s words, ‘People don’t do such things.’

Of course there’s no question of Henry’s having murdered Eleanor himself – that is, killed her with his own hands. But doing the deed oneself is not a prerequisite for murder. Did he pay Albert George Bightford to kill her?

I haven’t done sufficient research into Bightford. It seemed enough for the purposes of Henry’s biography to read the newspaper accounts of Eleanor’s death, the inquest, and the trial and execution. Still, it obviously won’t be enough. One of the Famous British Trials volumes contains a more detailed assessment of Bightford, his life and death, included presumably, not because he was particularly interesting or the murder he committed bizarre, but due to the identity of his victim and her connection with the soon-to-be Lord Nanther. My next step must be to get this book from the London Library.

Before I’ve done that there isn’t much point in speculating about whether, for instance, Henry had any connection with Devon or the Great Western Railway or if the Brewer-Dawson family had. There’s no point in speculation at all. For all that, I’d love to talk to Jude about it. Once she’d have been only too happy to find any further evidence of wrongdoing against Henry and happily played the devil’s advocate, but now I know very well she won’t be interested, will even ask wearily if we have to talk about him again .

I get off the bus and walk round the corner into Alma Square. Jude is in bed and fast asleep. By the light from the landing I see a new jar has joined the other remedies and supplements on her bedside table. It’s labelled Kava-kava and I’ve no idea what it’s for.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to wake up this morning and find the whole theory preposterous, ask myself how even for a moment I could have thought of my eminently respectable great-grandfather as a murderer. But I don’t. I feel exactly as I did last night on the 189 bus. A man who’ll plan an assault on a stranger and stage a rescue, who’ll marry off his mistress and abandon his daughter, court a woman, enjoy her father’s hospitality and drop her for another, isn’t that man capable of worse crimes?

Usually, in the past when I’ve called at the London Library, I’ve taken my books, crossed the square and, by way of St James’s Park and Queen Anne’s Gate, walked down to the House of Lords. I can’t do that now without some ‘sponsor’ to let me in, but I do walk as far as the park and stop in the middle of the bridge. It’s a fine sunny day, the sky blue and a bright sheen on the lake. You can stand here and if you look northwards see, beyond the water and the trees, Buckingham Palace. Look south and beyond the water and the trees, the swans and pelicans, you see Horse Guards and Whitehall and the Foreign Office. Now the London Eye, the Millennium Wheel, rears up like a bow-shaped crane behind the white walls and green and silver rooftops. I try not to see it, to see the view through Henry’s eyes, for I’m sure he often passed this way. The air was smokier then, the buildings dirtier, the streets car-less but soiled by horses, the sky above the same blue and the grass the same green. Did he ever think of what he’d done to get what he wanted, or rather, avoid getting what he didn’t want?

I start on the Famous British Trials as soon as I get home, reading to the accompaniment of Lorraine’s vacuum cleaner, droning away upstairs. The section on Bightford is by a man called Stewart S. Luke and it’s called ‘Murder on the Cornish Express’. Luke wrote it in 1909, the year of Henry’s death, and I wonder if this is coincidence. I feel a little frisson of excitement. A good reason to await someone’s death before writing on a subject connected with him is that the dead can’t be libelled.

According to Stewart Luke, Bightford was born in 1862, the eldest son of Jane Bightford, born Edwards, and her husband Abel Bightford, coachman to Harold Merlin Clive of Livesey Place, near Tavistock. The name Albert, which had no precedent in the family, was probably bestowed on him in memory of the Prince Consort who had died the previous year. The Bightfords had many children but only three of them survived to adulthood, Albert and two girls, Jane and Maria. The entire family worked for Mr and Mrs Clive. Mrs Bightford helped out with the cleaning, her daughter Jane was under-housemaid and her daughter Maria worked in the kitchens, while Albert was employed as one of the assistants to the head gardener, Thomas Flitton.

The Bightfords had married very young [writes Luke] and were only just over forty when their son was hanged for the murder of Miss Henderson. Three years before Albert, then aged nineteen, had taken the unparalleled step in that family and at that time of declaring himself discontented in his employment and desirous of leaving it. It was his father in whom he confided, saying he hated gardening. The collecting and spreading of manure was distasteful to him and the bending hurt his back, which he had injured when he was fifteen lifting heavy sacks for his mother. He also averred that Thomas Flitton ‘had it in for him’.

It would be no exaggeration to say that Abel Bightford was more frightened than angry at this disclosure. It was not, after all, young Albert’s livelihood in jeopardy here but the whole family’s, for if he were obliged to continue working under Mr Flitton he declared that he would run away to Plymouth and seek his fortune elsewhere or even abroad. Abel went first to Thomas Flitton, a fellow-worker for many years and a friend. Flitton was obliged to tell the father that his son had proved unsatisfactory. He was surly and uncivil and complained constantly about pain in his back, behaviour Flitton found incomprehensible in one so young. He advised Abel to seek an interview with Mr Clive himself.

It is easy to imagine the terror this notion inspired in Abel Bightford. Probably, he had never spoken to his employer except when first addressed by him, had taken orders but not commented upon them and if his master levelled harsh criticism at him, accepted it as a servant’s lot. However, he plucked up his courage, and next day, while driving Mr Clive to a Landowners’ Association meeting in Yelverton, asked if he might have a few words with him at Mr Clive’s convenience.

How Luke knows all this he doesn’t say. Perhaps it all came out at the Assizes. I shall see when I get to the trial. Harold Clive sounds in some respects a reasonable man, not the ogreish squire of certain kinds of Victorian fiction, for when Abel spoke to him about Albert he was sympathetic. Apparently, he told Abel that he had a high opinion of the Bightford family and would be most unwilling to lose their service. The two men were agreed upon that and Abel must have breathed more than a sigh of relief. Clive asked if he thought Albert would be happier away from home and when Abel said he would, promised to see what he could do for him. First, it appears, he consulted a neighbour, a Miss Withycombe of Tavistock, believing she might be in need of a general handyman, and this woman gave Albert a week’s trial. He wasn’t satisfactory, though Luke doesn’t say why. With great forbearance, Clive tried again.

He was a director of the Great Western Railway. ‘Or something of that sort,’ as Luke curiously puts it. ‘He enjoyed considerable influence over whom that body employed.’ Whatever his position may have been, Clive secured a job for Albert as a porter at North Road, Plymouth station. One wonders at the wisdom, not to mention the kindness, in anyone’s finding a porter’s job for a man with a bad back. Stewart Luke doesn’t question it. It’s plain he’s never on Albert’s side. In his view Albert was lucky to get any sort of employment. He couldn’t have complained if he’d been thrown out to starve. Anyway, he took the job, no doubt having little choice, and though he walked the ten miles or so to Plymouth his first day he couldn’t walk there and back daily, so lodged with his aunt, Mrs Bightford’s sister Maria Mollick, who had a cottage five minutes from North Road station.