Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

The rest of Stewart Luke’s piece is mainly concerned with the trial itself. First he tells how Albert left the train at Exeter and went home to his parents at Tavistock. How he got there neither he nor anyone else seems to know. Walking the distance would have taken a couple of days but people did walk long distances in those days – remember Henry in Switzerland – and some did so when not in the best of health. Once at Livesey Place Albert must have asked his father to hide him and perhaps told his father he’d be wanted by the police but not why. Or he told him why, because he was driven to desperation, struggled to give some explanation for the most heinous of crimes. Whatever it was, Abel refused, turned Albert out and left him to be discovered sheltering in a shepherd’s hut on Dartmoor. It’s a cruel, miserable story as much for Albert Bightford as for my great-great-aunt Eleanor.

But is there another possible motive? Was Albert employed by someone else to do the deed? He might have done it for money. Fifty pounds would have been a fortune to him, twenty a great deal of money. He could have gone to America on it, gone almost anywhere, begun a new life. But if he was a hitman, paid to kill Eleanor, wouldn’t he have told his father, told the police? What did he have to lose? And he’d surely have been paid first, or paid half first. Why not use this money to hide himself, to lose himself, which was not a difficult thing to do in 1883? No money was found on him. That means nothing, he may have hidden it somewhere, or even buried it on the Moor. None of this accounts for his failure to say anything about a conspiracy when he was captured.

I’m thinking, of course, of Henry. Henry had motive enough for killing Eleanor. His whole future happiness was at stake. If he married her he chanced having handicapped sons and carrier daughters. If he jilted her he stood to lose his position with the Queen and his reputation. But why pick Albert Bightford to do it for him? Did he even know Bightford? Perhaps, but how is another matter. Possibly he was acquainted with Harold Clive or Beatrice Withycombe or Sir James Thripp, all ‘gentlefolk’ quite likely to have been among his acquaintance. On the other hand, it may have been that Maria Mollick was related to one of his servants or was once employed by him or connected to the Dawson-Brewer family. Public records are obviously to be consulted here – then Debrett ? Or maybe something called Kelly’s Handbook to the Titled, Landed and Official Classes ? It seems impossible now that the real truth can ever be discovered, but if something in Henry’s life could show me that in 1883, between January and October, he made a train journey to or from Plymouth it would be a help. There’s nothing in the diaries and nothing in Alternative Henry.

How am I going to find out?

27

My wife is telling me, in a quietly conversational tone, that sex is no longer necessary for us. Has that occurred to me? The important thing is for her eggs to be taken and my sperm produced. Of course, she says, it wouldn’t matter if there were sex, all she’s saying is that it’s not a ‘prerequisite’.

‘Thanks very much,’ I say, because all this is making me angry now. It’s happening after they’ve secured her eggs and I, in humiliating circumstances, as you’d expect, have supplied the fertilizing elixir. If it doesn’t work I’ll have to do it all over again.

‘It’s worse for me, darling,’ she says.

It probably is, but she wants this baby and I don’t. My face is stiff with smiling and pretending. Still, I don’t see any way out of all this simulation. The alternative is the end of our marriage. These past few weeks I’ve come to see that losing Jude – even the changed Jude she’s becoming – would be the worst thing that could happen to me, the thing I can’t contemplate without panic, without a sense of standing on the edge of an abyss. But to keep her, can I bear anything? The loss of this house, maybe three squalling babies, the imperative to give up writing and get some sort of job? Can I bear no sex with her?

‘You didn’t mean that, did you?’ I ask. ‘That sex wasn’t necessary?’

‘Oh, darling,’ she says, but she doesn’t touch me, she doesn’t take my hand and kiss it. ‘I was only saying such are the miracles of science that to have babies we don’t need each other in that way.’

Babies. ‘In that way.’ It sounds like the sort of euphemism my great-grandmother Edith might have used. Jude and I go back home, the process set in motion, the die cast. I ought to sit down with her. I ought to open a bottle of champagne. Make the most of it before it’s banned lest the twinnies are born with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. I ought to drink a toast to our future as parents and plan the nursery in the top-floor flat we’ll no doubt have to buy in Maida Vale. But I can’t face any more and I go into my study instead to contemplate the stacks of Henry-history.

For a little while I just shift papers about, open folders and look at them unseeing. But the mystery of Henry still has the power to distract me and presently I’m once more caught up in his life. I’ve said there’s nothing in the diaries or the notebook about a visit to Devon but I’ll have to check them again. There are hundreds of letters, neatly filed according to the year they were sent and the name of the sender. One consolation is that I don’t have to examine any written before 1862, the date of Albert Bightford’s birth, or after 1883, the time of the murder. I’ve photocopied every letter I’ve got, but even so many of them have to be read with the aid of a magnifying glass.

The best (or the worst) discovery to make would be that Henry knew Harold Clive. Suppose, for instance, he and Richard Hamilton had been on a walking tour on Dartmoor some few years prior to Hamilton’s death in 1879? There are dozens of letters from Hamilton in the collection and thirty from him to his sister Caroline. Hamilton’s handwriting is clear and upright, thank God, and doesn’t need magnification. But although there are plenty of references to walking trips with Henry in them, all these seem to have been in Scotland and Yorkshire with a single excursion to the Peak District. In one of the last letters Hamilton ever wrote to his sister, the date October 1879, he refers to a holiday he’s taken in south Cornwall some years before but that was a very long way from Dartmoor then, and though it’s likely he passed through Plymouth to get there, Bightford was an under-gardener at Livesey Place at the time and had never yet been in a train nor, presumably, on a station platform.

I go through Henry’s letters to his mother and Elizabeth Kirkford’s to her mother but to no avail, and then my conscience smites me as it has a way of doing. I put the letters away, find Jude and open that champagne. She’s so happy and pleased about everything she hasn’t noticed my lukewarm response nor my ill-concealed dismay and she actually asks, for the first time for weeks, ‘How’s Henry getting on?’

I tell her and she says she’s not surprised. ‘I told you he was up to something.’

‘Yes, but you said that about his reasons for marrying Edith.’

‘So? Maybe he murdered Eleanor so that he could marry Edith. That’s being up to something with a vengeance.’

I say I can’t believe in a man of forty-seven falling in love at first sight with a woman he happens to see in the street and then, a few months later, falling out of love with her and into love with her sister.

‘What makes you think love comes into it?’

‘Not because I’m such a romantic,’ I say. ‘I can’t think of any other reason for his wanting to marry either of them. Can you?’

‘Maybe not. But you have to think of a reason for his murdering Eleanor.’