Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

The archivist unlocks the door of a wooden building rather like a typical village hall, but, because this is Switzerland, however remote, it’s very trim and neat. The books have faded brown pages in ancient covers. Jude translates and tells me the population used to be double the present number in the nineteenth century, something which doesn’t tally with Hoessli. The archivist goes into a complicated explanation of which books are missing but I can tell Jude’s giving up the struggle to follow all this.

‘Let’s just have a look,’ I say.

And we do. I have very little hope of finding anything and all we find is a Magdalena Maibach, daughter of Hans Maibach and Ursula Maibach, born Rüchli, being baptized in 1790, the year before the church book comes to an end. I ask myself if Hans Maibach was the son of that Magdalena Maibach mentioned by Hoessli who was born in 1721 and who gave birth to three sons, one of them the sad child who went to sleep in God when all his blood had run from him. I can’t verify this because the relevant books are missing, but the dates work. Hans could be one of that child’s brothers, a haemophiliac but, like Prince Leopold, still well enough to grow up, marry and have children. In Hans’s case, he seems to have had just the one daughter, and not to have had any more. Perhaps he died. The archivist wants to show us much more, but I’m firm about this and say I’ve got as much as I want. Jude and I thank him and go down the hillside to the Hotel Alpenblick to see what they have for lunch.

Goulash. We don’t have a choice. It arrives quite promptly, a rich brown stew with potatoes and peas and carrots, all served up together on our two plates. The dining room has a lot of carved wood, a wood floor and checked cloths on the tables. I tell Jude I’m so glad she came with me, I couldn’t have managed without her. It’s a strange thing that you can be married to someone for seven years, know they have a particular skill or knowledge you know nothing about, but never see or hear them demonstrate it. I’d never before heard Jude speak German, I just supposed she could because once or twice she had occasion to say so. It awakens in me a new admiration for her. And there in the cosy dining room of the Hotel Alpenblick I feel a strong surge of desire for her, a different kind of desire, and I ask myself rather uneasily if this is because her linguistic skill has made her into a slightly different person. She’s smiling at me as if she’s reading my mind, which I hope she isn’t, and I say hastily that what we found back at the archives place was wonderful, was more than I’d hoped for.

‘Could it be the same woman?’

‘Why would you call yourself Barbla if your name was Magdalena?’

Jude doesn’t know. ‘The more I see of this village,’ she says, ‘so remote and isolated, the more I wonder how anyone living in it in those days could get to Versam, let alone London.’

I agree that that’s a difficult one. It would be nothing today, it would be expected. A girl would have been studying English and come on a university exchange, or come over as an au pair or just on holiday. But no one left these villages in the early part of the nineteenth century. To get away you had to walk miles over the mountains, a trek that could only be managed in summer. There were no roads. This inaccessibility is what accounts for the concentration of haemophilia and why Tenna was such a rich fund for research by men like Thormann, Vieli and Grandidier. A woman married the neighbour who was there, irrespective of whether he bled profusely when he cut himself shaving or she had a brother from whom das Blut ihm alles ausgelofen . I say that maybe the historian will have the answer to both questions. We have crème caramel for our pudding and then big cups of coffee. Jude has a look round and comes back to tell me that perhaps we ought to be staying here, on the spot. But when we emerge into the chilly white mist I’m glad we’re not. If need be we can come back here on Monday. We walk up the hill and find the historian’s house. It’s quite a spacious chalet with chamois’ antlers stuck up under the wide eaves and its name Rösslihaus done in what I suppose is pokerwork. She answers the door to us, a stout elderly woman in blouse and skirt, her iron-grey hair in a bun. It turns out that she’s an amateur historian and she begins by showing us genealogical tables. Some of them go back to the start of the eighteenth century and a Hans Maibach is in one of them, as is his daughter Magdalena. As I thought, he died when she was a small child and his wife a few years afterwards. But this is no help to me as there’s no Barbla Maibach in any of the tables. Plenty of other Barblas are though, and the historian agrees that it was a popular Graubünden name. Too popular for me, I wish there’d been only one.

About haemophilia she knows very little. After all, there hasn’t been any here since about 1870. There was none in her family, the Engels, or her late husband’s, the Walthers, and it’s true that when I look at their family trees there’s not a single name as far as I can remember that occurs in Bulloch and Fildes.

‘How would anyone have got away from here in, say, 1810?’

Jude relays this to her in German and maybe she doesn’t put it any more tactfully than I did, for Mrs Walther takes it as a slight on her beloved Tenna and replies that she’s never wanted to get away. When she’s been to Zurich, as she has a few times, to Berne and even, once, to Paris, she’s been homesick and longed to get back.

Jude asks her how would you have left the village then if, for instance, you were obliged to. Mrs Walther says that the first time she went it was on her honeymoon ( Flitterwochen ) but I tell Jude to ask her for what reason a departure might have happened nearly two hundred years ago. She can’t think of anything. People didn’t leave.

‘This one did,’ I say.

I’m no more disappointed than I expected to be. Finding Barbla has loomed very large in my Henry-history but, after all, it’s not that important. When I do the chapter on his forebears and his wife’s I can write something like, ‘Edith had a Swiss great-grandmother who brought the haemophilia into the Henderson family,’ I don’t have to say how she came to meet and marry Thomas Dornford. And yet I’ll come back on Monday after I’ve had a day in which to think about it. I get Jude to ask Mrs Walther if Romansch is still spoken here. She says not, it never was spoken in the Safien Valley but only along the Rhine. I’ve been thinking about Henry – what else? – and since, I suspect, he only visited places where he could practise his Romansch, perhaps he never came here.

We’re leaving when she says she’s thought of something. Jude listens carefully to Mrs Walther and tells me there’s a woman she knows living nearby who may help us. Mrs Walther refers to this Mrs Tauber in rather an awed tone, apparently because she lives in a castle. If we’re coming back on Monday she’ll do her best to get her here. We emerge into sunshine, the clouds all sinking behind the snowcapped ranges. From this steep hillside we have a magnificent view of mountains soaring into the blue sky, green and flowery meadows and the village lying there, its chalets red and black and the church tower pointing skywards like a silver knife. A ringing of cow bells comes from the cattle up on the slopes. Outside the Gemeindehaus the bus is waiting to take us back.

A day, Sunday, in which to think about it. It’s a fine sunny one and we go for a long walk round the town, dropping in at a couple of churches to listen to the choirs and for Jude to hear the mass in German. All the shops are closed but cafés and bars are open. I consider the possibility of Barbla coming here to work in a hotel or inn and there meeting an English traveller called Thomas Dornford. Anyone might do that but I don’t think a respectable girl would have done so in, say, 1808. Also it seems unlikely that someone able to travel in Europe would marry a girl who served him in an inn. Unless he spoke German they’d have had no means of communication.