Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

The coffee and orange juice come and rather wonderful Swiss cakes which Franziska refuses but we can’t resist. The sun has come out and it’s quite hot, light sparkling on the river. Franziska goes on to say that Gertrude Tauber had by this time adopted a little boy whose parents had also died and she offered to take Magdalena. She had theories of her own about the ways haemophilia was transmitted and because the sons of a haemophiliac can never themselves be haemophiliacs she assumed that their daughters couldn’t be affected either. Where she had seen cases of the daughters of haemophiliacs giving birth to haemophiliac sons, she believed this had been passed on through those daughters’ mothers. According to this theory, a haemophiliac demonstrated the disease which manifested itself in him in that generation but, with his death, came to an end in that family line. Therefore, she had no fears that in adopting Magdalena she was taking on a carrier of the bleeding sickness.

As soon as she had taken the child back to the castle with her she renamed her. She wrote in her journal that she had always disliked the name Magdalena and wondered at its popularity in Graubünden. Why name your daughter after a loose woman out of whom Our Lord cast seven devils? She called her Barbla instead, the name she would have given her own daughter if she’d ever had one.

‘As you probably know,’ Franziska said, ‘adopting a child in those days was very different from what it would be now. Well, it was very different not only in the nineteenth century but pretty well up to the Second World War. You didn’t have any authorities you had to satisfy with your credentials. No one did a – what do you call it? House study?’

‘Home study, I think,’ says Jude.

‘Right. You just took on a child its parents didn’t want or, more likely, couldn’t afford because they’d already got seven others. And you didn’t feel you were obliged to treat it exactly as if it were your own, give it the same status and privileges. Gertrude wasn’t an aristocrat but she was certainly upper class. She was the lady of the manor and Hans Maibach was a cowherd. The little boy she’d adopted was some relative of her own, she doesn’t say precisely what, but refers to him as “my kinsman’s boy”. So Magdalena, or Barbla as she’s become, never lived on quite an equal footing in the household. By the way, I haven’t asked you, what was she to you?’

‘Barbla? My grandmother four times great.’

‘Ah. I see why you want to know.’

She took her meals in the servants’ hall but spent time with Gertrude, who taught her to read and write and, later, to speak French. She might play with the other adopted child but not think of him or refer to him as her brother. With Gertrude’s own son, the heir, she was not allowed to play and had to address him as ‘mein Herr’. It looks as if Gertrude intended her to become a governess or perhaps an upper servant and it’s hard to see for what purpose she adopted her in the first place. Not to be a companion, certainly not a daughter, perhaps it was only done out of duty and charity.

There are long gaps in the journal, Franziska says, and many entries where the girl is never referred to. After that we only hear of her as accompanying Gertrude on a visit to Bern and another to Vienna, but in what capacity isn’t clear. But if Barbla was originally destined for a lady’s maid, this plan appears to have been dropped. Still, Gertrude is relieved when her son Sigmund departs for the University of Vienna. Though only fourteen Barbla is too good looking for them to associate any longer. But three years later Gertrude writes of Barbla as accompanying her to the opera in Salzburg, then to a ball in Rome. Apparently, she is very pretty, a blue-eyed, full-lipped blonde, and I’m reminded of her great-granddaughter Edith, Henry’s wife. For I’m certain now that this is my ancestress.

They visit Paris and Amsterdam. Barbla is twenty. Gertrude, who is now immensely proud of her good looks and ‘ladylike ways’, is probably regretting she turned her into a bit of a Cinderella in her early youth but not regretting Sigmund’s departure. He is now betrothed to a suitable girl of his own class. A young Englishman who has come to Amsterdam to buy diamonds sees Barbla at some function and comes to call. Gertrude calls him ‘ junge Herr Donfort ’ and I don’t think I’d be making too conjectural a leap to identify him as Thomas Dornford, the jeweller from Hatton Garden. The journal stops for a long while after that. The next entry – or the next extant entry – is six years later and all Gertrude wrote was, ‘Barbla delivered of a son.’ He would have been Luise Quendon’s younger brother, I suppose.

‘Did he have haemophilia?’ I ask Franziska.

‘I don’t know. No one knows. Gertrude was sixty by then and sixty was old in 1816. She gave up the journal a year later and died in 1820.’

That’s it then. Everything I wanted to know and more. There’s a lot to think about. I say a very heartfelt thanks to Franziska and she says it was a pleasure, it’s always enjoyable imparting information. Jude compliments her on her English and she says, nothing to be proud of, her mother’s English. Then she leaves, saying she has to meet her friend at twelve-thirty and will I send her a copy of my book when it comes out?

After she’s gone we take a walk round Chur, looking at all the flowers that have come out since yesterday, that the sun has brought out. I’d like to see Tenna again. It’s become part of my history, if not, thank God, part of my genes. I feel its green meadows and black conifers, alpine flowers and its red chalets, even its icy white mists, would look different to me now. The cradle of my great-great-great-great-grandmother. On a far less cosy level, the death source of George Nanther and Kenneth Kirkford. But it’s a place in my origins no less than Godby and Hatton Garden, Bloomsbury and North London, and I say to Jude that maybe we’ll come back here for a holiday, do a walking tour of Graubünden, because it has the glimmer of a feel of home.

‘With luck,’ she says, ‘we won’t be able to go anywhere on walking tours for the next few years.’

It’s like a splash of cold water in my face. With luck… With luck we’ll have a baby or two and the only holidays we’ll be able to take will be to Disneyland. If we can afford them.

Returning to Zurich in the train this afternoon I think more about Franziska’s account and what it means for me. I decide it’s improbable any of those Quendons and Hendersons knew where their forebear came from. If they knew Thomas Dornford met his wife in Amsterdam they very likely thought she was Dutch. They wouldn’t have wanted to know any more and if they had investigated and found she was a Swiss cowherd’s daughter they’d have hushed it up. But in those days discovering it would have been next to impossible and why would they bother to hunt? It was Veronica who supplied me with Barbla Maibach’s name, but she told me she knew nothing more about her. I notice now something that didn’t strike me before. Gertrude Tauber allowed, or perhaps encouraged, Barbla to keep her own surname. No doubt, she’d have resisted her husband’s distinguished family name passing to a peasant’s child.

The really significant factor in all this is that the haemophilia’s been traced back to its source: Hans Maibach, to whom it was transmitted by his mother, a Gartmann, one of the famous Bluterfamilien of Tenna, who passed it to his daughter Barbla. And she in her turn passed it on undiscernibly to her daughter Luise, Luise to Louisa, Louisa to Edith, Edith to Elizabeth and Mary, and those two, the gene still of course invisibly carried, to the present day.

33