Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

I’m booking us into an hotel and Jude is beside me, as excited as I am and not at all perturbed at having to stay on another day. And, as we go up in the lift to our room, I’m reflecting on the operations of chance and contingency. We only had time for one, or at the most two, museums, and Zurich is full of them. She might so easily – for the choice was left to her – have chosen the Thomas Mann Archives in the Schönberggasse, she nearly did, or the Johanna Spyri Foundation – she loved Heidi as a child – but she chose the Zunfthaus zur Meisen Ceramic Collection and the Barengasse Museum of Domestic Life. The ceramics were obvious, she loves china, but why domestic life? Not specially to her taste, I’d have thought, she’s never been an interiors woman, a ‘her indoors’. But thank God she did.

We were looking at a very upper-class interior, a living room in a small castle on the Rhine called Schlössli Benediktus. The Rhine is a huge river and there was no reason for me to place it anywhere near Tenna. Nor did the photograph of the house, diminutive as castles go, turreted, steep-roofed, with soaring mountains behind, bring any revelations. Enlightenment came from a book which lay open on a small table between a harpsichord and a chaise longue. To me it meant nothing. I can’t read Gothic and this book, which was obviously a diary, was handwritten in that curlicued, elaborate and now obsolete German script. Jude can, up to a point. She looked at the open pages, then at me, then at the left-hand page again.

‘Martin, there’s something…’ She had gone rather pale.

‘Are you all right?’ I said.

‘I’m fine.’ She took hold of my hand and for a moment held it tightly. ‘The name Magdalena Maibach is on that page. And a sentence later, “Barbla”.’

‘Can you read it?’

She sighed with exasperation. ‘Not really. I could have once. I’ve forgotten how. I think it says something like, “give her a new name”. It’s definitely “ neue Name ”, I’m sure of that.’

The date on the legend beside the diary was 1793 and the author of the diary given as Gertrude Tauber, a widow and owner of the castle since her husband’s death four years before. All this was in English as well as German. A pity they didn’t have a translation of the diary as well. It gave, the legend went on, a fascinating picture of upper-class domestic life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

‘If we asked the curator to let us have a closer look, always supposing he or she would, do you think you could read it then?’

‘Darling, I know I couldn’t,’ Jude said.

‘What do you think it means, this woman, this castle-dweller, re-naming a child called Magdalena, Barbla? Who was she to do that? What right had she?’

‘I don’t know. But listen, wasn’t the woman Mrs Walther mentioned called Tauber? And, Martin – this is getting exciting – didn’t she say she lived in a castle? This woman could be her ancestor. We have to know. And we’ve got a flight to catch in two hours’ time.’

‘Flights can be cancelled,’ I said.

We had to have a hotel room before we could start making phone calls. Or Jude could. She’s the one with the German and, blessedly for me, she seems quite to enjoy practising it. So we’re in our room, a much more sophisticated and elegant place than the one in Chur, and Jude is making phone calls and I’m washing our underclothes in the bathroom sink. We thought Lorraine could have done them tomorrow but we won’t be home tomorrow, we’ll be – where?

‘At Schlössli Benediktus, if we can find a way there,’ says Jude.

She doesn’t know yet. She’s spoken to Mrs Walther who has confirmed we’ve got the right Tauber and that she’s just heard ‘Franziska’s’ child is better and she’s given her the phone number.

I come out of the bathroom, my hands full of wet tights and underpants. ‘Franziska being the present Mrs Tauber?’

‘That’s right, the one who was a doctor.’

‘I’d like to see inside a little castle on the Rhine,’ I say.

But that’s not our destiny. The first time Jude phones the line is engaged and she waits impatiently, but after about ten minutes Franziska Tauber answers. Within seconds Jude’s speaking English, saying she’ll cancel our flight, we’ll see Mrs Tauber tomorrow, her husband will be so grateful, she can’t thank her enough, et cetera.

‘In Chur. She’ll meet us in Chur. She has to go there to meet someone. We could get the flight tomorrow or would Thursday be safer?’

Thursday, I tell her, you never know what we may have to follow up.

Franziska says gently, ‘I believe you’re trying to trace a woman called Magdalena Maibach.’

We’re all drinking coffee at a table outside the Café Cuera which is on the banks of the river. Franziska – she’s asked us to call her that – is about Jude’s age, tall, thin, very fair. We’ve asked her to lunch with us but she can’t. That’s the purpose of her visit here, to lunch with someone else.

‘I’m trying to trace a woman called Barbla Maibach.’

‘Yes. One and the same, as I expect you guessed.’

‘We didn’t guess. My wife saw the names in a diary in a museum in Zurich.’ I feel a great surge of excitement, which is ridiculous when I haven’t yet got any proof.

‘The Gothic script defeated me,’ says Jude.

‘Understandable. It defeats me . Barbla was adopted by my husband’s ancestress, his great – multiplied by six or seven – grandmother and taken away from Tenna. It’s all in the journal she kept. Her name was Gertrude Tauber, born Wettach. She had one child of her own, a son, and then her husband died. After that she adopted two children.’

I hardly dare ask. ‘Is there anything in the diary about haemophilia?’ I ask.

‘Lots, but it’s mostly wrong.’

I ask her if she has copies of the diary but she hasn’t. She’s read it. She and her husband both read it before they gave it to the museum. Would I like her to tell us the story? I nod, I say yes, please. I want to know everything there is to be known.

‘Magdalena Maibach,’ Franziska begins, ‘was born in Tenna in 1790. Her father was Hans Maibach and her mother Ursula Rüchli. You already know that? Right. Hans had haemophilia. While his father was a “foreigner” from Rhazuns, his mother was Magdalena Gartmann, einer den Bluterfamilien , and certainly a carrier, but he seemed not to be a bad case. He had various problems in youth, especially when a tooth was extracted, and apparently he was never without haematomas and purpuric spots.’

At this point Jude asks the waitress for more coffee for all of us. Franziska says no more coffee for her, she gets too hyped-up. She’ll have orange juice.

‘Hans grew up, married, fathered this one daughter and died when she was two. Another tooth had been lost, and bleeding from the socket lasted three days. The following week a horse pulling a cart he was travelling in bolted and threw him and he cut his head on a rock and bled to death. It’s all in the journal. Gertrude was fascinated by haemophilia and went about the villages observing cases, though of course she was dreadfully ignorant of its causes and how it was passed on. But everyone was ignorant, including the doctors. Quite a lot of them thought it and scurvy were the same disease.’

In the following couple of years his wife Ursula died of tuberculosis. ‘Hoessli says there wasn’t any in Tenna,’ I say. Maybe I’m just trying to impress her.

‘Hoessli says a lot of inaccurate things, but he wasn’t alone in that. The child Magdalena was left to the care of her aunt, her mother’s sister and a healthy woman, not a carrier as far as is known. She had three healthy sons. Whether the daughters were carriers isn’t known. But there were seven children and, quite naturally, she didn’t really want an eighth to care for.’