Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

Of course he couldn’t yet be sure that Hans Maibach’s haemophilia had been carried down the female line by subsequent generations. But even at this stage he could make an intelligent guess. Perhaps Barbla’s son had died young. Her daughter Luise had lost a young son, Louisa Henderson’s brother. There again this offered no positive identification of Louisa herself as a carrier and later, when Henry had been warmly received into the bosom of the family, it must have dismayed him to see Lionel Henderson enjoying good health and clearly not suffering from a disease of the blood. By then too he would have ascertained from Louisa or her daughters by subtle enquiries that the latter had no dead small brothers.

Before this he had directed his drama in Gower Street and it succeeded even better than he expected. I was surely right when I concluded, much earlier on in my researches, that he employed Brewer to do the deed for a satisfactory payment and the promise of a wife, a house and a lump sum for his half-brother. Presumably, the little matter of Jimmy’s pregnancy was glossed over. Henry was in, an honoured guest in Keppel Street and the recipient of confidences. The two girls were not so bad, not a patch on Olivia of course, but then Olivia didn’t carry haemophilia. He dropped her and soon afterwards he dropped Jimmy.

Now he had to make his choice between the Henderson daughters. It’s possible he preferred Edith from the first but made himself agreeable to both, trying to detect the signs, if any, of a haemophilia carrier. In his diary he writes that from early on he could tell that Princess Beatrice was a ‘conductor’ but this may have been no more than vanity on his part. No doubt he watched both girls carefully. At that time for a young girl to have mentioned menstruation in the presence of a man, even a doctor, would have been unthinkable. It was the height of indelicacy to speak of it in the presence of another woman, apart from one’s mother, and then in the most veiled and euphemistic terms. Girls were supposed to pretend ‘the curse of Eve’ didn’t exist. Yet something happened that summer to make Henry certain of his quarry and fix his interest on Eleanor. Can there be any doubt that this was the ‘consultation’ the girls’ mother had with him in July 1883?

I’m guessing when I say Louisa Henderson wanted to ask him about Eleanor’s periods, what we would call today her dysmenorrhoea. That and perhaps her tendency to bruise very easily. Would these disabilities mean she was a carrier? I don’t know but I’m sure Henry thought he knew. What is the answer, that is the question . He had that answer. In the following month he proposed to Eleanor and was accepted. Now he was engaged to a woman who was a direct descendant of Hans Maibach of Tenna, a haemophiliac, whose daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter were very likely carriers, who was herself almost certainly a carrier.

Any ideas I or Jude may have had about Henry arranging her murder in the Great Western train disappear now, for Eleanor was the woman all his researches and records-tracing had led him to, the more certain of the two sisters to be a haemophilia carrier. Her death must have been as great a blow to him as if he’d been in love with her. He had no need to put on a pretence of grief. Real sorrow and bitter disappointment were what he felt. Now he’d have to start again, perhaps return to Tenna, find another haemophiliac whose female descendants, scattered across Europe, might or might not have, as he saw it, the fatal flaw in their blood.

Or was there instead someone nearer at hand? Eleanor had a sister, more attractive to look at than she. But how to be sure this sister was a carrier? If he had another consultation with Louisa Henderson there’s nothing about it in the diaries but that doesn’t mean it never took place. This time it was he who was asking the questions and Edith’s mother supplying the answers. Henry may even have gone so far as to intimate to Mrs Henderson that he’d like to marry Edith but was worried about her health. Would she, for instance, be able to bear children? Did she too suffer from dysmenorrhoea?

For a prospective bridegroom to ask such things of his future mother-in-law seems to us a terrible instance of male pride in male domination, and the worst of bad taste. We revolt against it as the Victorians revolted against openness and calling a spade a spade. But taste changes, just as what it is acceptable to utter does. Besides, before we say any mother worthy of the name would have refused to discuss it, would have shown Henry the door, we must remember how dreadfully the Hendersons’ hopes had been dashed by Eleanor’s death. The good marriage, the big house in a fashionable suburb, the title, the famous eminent husband – all that went out of the window with Eleanor’s body. But they had been given a second chance. His eye had lighted on their other daughter and everything Mrs Henderson could do to encourage the match must be done.

So what did she say to Henry? Something which she, surely, believed wouldn’t have a discouraging effect. Perhaps that Edith’s periods though heavy were regular. As to the bruising she may have acceded to this because it would have seemed harmless to her. She may even – I am stretching rather far out here – have said that Edith bled profusely when she cut herself, believing this to be a sign of health.

As to Edith herself, was Henry so cold-blooded that he could transfer what affections he had had for Eleanor straight on to her sister? They were sisters, they may have been very much alike. By all accounts Edith was a steady, calm and phlegmatic woman, the kind who wouldn’t cause her husband any trouble. And Henry must have thought of the purpose of this marriage: to produce children. He wasn’t getting any younger, he’d become forty-eight in the February of 1884. Was he to begin the weary work of finding a suitable bride and courting her all over again when here was one for the taking?

Control circumstances and do not let circumstances control you.

Jude has come in, full of news about the Croft-Joneses’ new house which they move into next week. They have the biggest mortgage she has ever heard of anyone taking on because this ‘town house’ in Hampstead is costing them nearly a million pounds. I’ve kissed her when she first came in but now I take her in my arms and hold her, hug her so tightly that she struggles free and asks me what’s wrong.

‘Does something have to be wrong for me to hug you?’

‘It does when it’s desperate.’

She wants to know what ‘this’ is and when I tell her it’s Henry she casts up her eyes and says, ‘Bloody Henry.’

‘He was, wasn’t he? In more ways than one. If I wanted to be melodramatic I’d say he waded through blood all his life.’

She says I always want to be melodramatic and to tell her about it. So I do. I forget all that nonsense about treating a pregnant woman with great delicacy and I tell her. She takes the egg out of my hand and looks at it, at the place where my worrying it has begun to rub the red paint off.

‘He was worse than even I thought,’ she says.

We go into the living room and sit on the sofa, side by side. ‘Go on,’ she says.

‘He married Edith, as you know, and got her pregnant at once. Their first child Elizabeth was born nine months later in August.’

‘Do you think Henry looked at the baby and wondered if she was a carrier?’

‘Probably. He’d have wondered the same thing about the next daughter and the next and the next. By the standards of the time he was becoming an old man. He might not live long enough to see his eldest married and discover if she was in fact a carrier.’

Jude has brought David’s family tree with her and she’s studying it. ‘By the time Clara was born he was fifty-five.’