Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

‘Then how did Henry know?’

‘He didn’t know. That’s the only explanation, the only one that fits the facts.’

‘Then we come up against coincidence again. The enormous coincidence that Henry, the top haemophilia specialist, married by chance a woman who was a carrier.’

‘Coincidences do happen, Martin.’

‘And you still think Henry murdered Eleanor?’

‘I do. But not because she might have been a carrier. Because he wanted her out of the way in order to marry her sister. It’s an irony, if you like to think of it that way, a man murdering one girl because she was possibly a carrier and marrying, as a result of this act, another who certainly was.’

Then Jude says something highly significant, a change from her usual determined efforts to make Henry a murderer at any price. She’s looking at David Croft-Jones’s family tree.

‘Where did the haemophilia come from?’

I say firmly, ‘A mutation in Louisa Henderson’s mother’s cells.’

‘Why should it have been a mutation at all?’

‘No reason. It’s just that John Corrie told me about a third of all cases of haemophilia result from mutation. Take Queen Victoria, for instance. There’s no evidence of haemophilia in her ancestry, though all kinds of speculation are rife, one being that some young haemophiliac was her father rather than the ageing Duke of Kent.’ Jude’s not interested in Queen Victoria. She takes her republicanism to great lengths.

‘If a third of all cases result from mutation, double that number don’t. Have you tried tracing the haemophilia back?’

‘It would be very difficult,’ I say. ‘We’d have to go back before records began. Louisa was born in eighteen thirty-seven.’

‘Just the same, I think you should try. Do you know the names of her parents?’

‘William Quendon and Luise Dornford.’

‘You pronounced her mother’s name “Leweesa”.’

‘In the German way, yes.’

Jude, who’s a German speaker, obviously doesn’t think much of my accent. She asks if I mean this Luise was German, do I know, and I have to tell her I don’t, I just assume she was. It seems of no importance. ‘I think I know the answer, anyway,’ I say. ‘I think it was this way. Henry was in love with Eleanor and he didn’t know anything about her bruising or heavy bleeding or any of that. The consultation her mother had with him was about something entirely different, her own menopause or a cold in the head, anything. He and Eleanor became engaged with the approval of her family, she went to visit her aunt in Devon and on the way back was murdered in the train. Henry grieved along with the Henderson family and, seeing them so often, sharing their grief, realized that he had a duty towards them. He owed it to them, trusting him and admiring him as they did, to marry their surviving daughter. Duty was very important to these Victorians. And why not marry Edith? Remember he knew nothing of the haemophilia. No one did, none of the Hendersons did. It was just in there, lying dormant.’

Jude says, but gently, ‘That has to be rubbish, my darling. He murdered her. He paid Bightford to murder her.’

28

I’ve reached an impasse with Henry. It’s a month since I’ve done any real research. The last step I took to uncover the mystery of how haemophilia got into my family was to ring up Veronica and ask her if she knew the names of any of Edith Nanther’s female forebears.

She sounded less than pleased to hear who it was. ‘I’ve already told you everything I know and a lot more than I wanted to.’

‘You haven’t told me what your great-great-grandmother and great-great-great-grandmother were called.’

‘All these greats,’ she said in a very impatient way. ‘It’s ridiculous, it’s so far back. Who cares any more? What can it possibly matter?’

‘It matters to me, Veronica. It may be important.’

‘Yes, I’m sure. In your judgement. Well, all right. But this is absolutely all I know. Lady Nanther’ – this ancestress we have in common suddenly ceased to be a relative and became a peeress – ‘Lady Nanther’s mother’s mother was called Dornford and her mother Mayback.’

Or that’s what I heard. I asked her to spell it. She didn’t want to but when I tell her David will want these names, they will be indispensable for his tree she becomes more willing.

‘All right then. M-a-i-b-a-c-h.’ Before I could get a word in she says, ‘But she wasn’t German, I can assure you of that. It’s a very rare old English name like her christian name. That was Barbla.’

‘Barbara?’ I said, thinking she’d developed a lisp.

‘No, Barbla. B-a-r-b-1-a.’

Veronica is seriously xenophobic. She kept and keeps on insisting Maibach wasn’t a German name. I don’t argue, there’s no point. ‘I have no foreign ancestry,’ she said. The very idea, that I could even have thought of it shocked her. I was not to let David get the wrong impression. She’d phone him and tell him the whole family is pure English as far back as anyone can go.

But David, I later realize, has other things on his mind. Georgie is pregnant again. The Holy Grail is only seven months old and Georgie is still breastfeeding him, but still she is pregnant again. She pretends dismay, but in fact she’s bursting with pride at her fecundity, a pure matter of physiology over which she has no control and has done nothing to promote. Much the same attitude in fact as Veronica’s pride in her genetic purity and mine, before I knew the truth, in my own.

‘I can’t imagine how it happened!’

She’s said it a dozen times with wide-eyed smiling incredulity. If she belonged rather lower down the social scale and was inclined to vulgarity she’d say David only has to hang his trousers over the end of the bed for her to be in the family way. Jude makes no comment on any of this. She hasn’t even mentioned it to me when we’re alone. I believe she feels none of it has anything to do with her, she’s a special case. Not for her this simple trouble-free fertility. When the time is ripe she will have a designer baby. It’s almost as if it’s another kind of thing altogether, because it will start off very differently from David and Georgie’s easy fruitful coupling and the result too will be different.

PGD is what she is going to have, Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. Only four clinics in the country do it at present and hers happens to be one of them. The last time she went there she came back and told me a heart-warming tale of a woman she met who’d had triplets as a result of the technique. David and Georgie are going to sell their flat and buy a house because the flat isn’t big enough for two kids but, paradoxically, it would be for three or four (or so Jude thinks, I believe) so we could do a swap and they buy our house. Jude doesn’t care. She doesn’t think or speak of anything much but babies. Full of hope and anticipation, she is simply waiting, biding her time until they say, now is the moment, tomorrow or next week or in two weeks’ time is the day we take your eggs and his sperm.

All this has brought me a kind of affinity with Henry, though. Poor Henry. Sometimes, surely, astounded Henry. That he of all people should marry a haemophilia carrier. The woman who was his wife and the mother of his children carried this tainted faulty thing, had now given birth to a haemophiliac son – and to how many carrier daughters? He who had warned King Alfonso not to marry the Princess Ena had himself done the very thing he cautioned the King against. Did he tell his daughters? Did he alert them to the consequences they might expect from marriage? In the case of the eldest did he warn young James Kirkford as he’d warned Alfonso? We don’t know. But someone warned them or they somehow found out.