The Blood Doctor

by Barbara Vine

  Trains were the preferred form of travel in the nineteenth century, indeed the only fast form of travel. Twice they brought disaster into Henry’s life – at least, it would seem like disaster to anyone else. There is no way of knowing what he felt about these two particular incidents. Rather cryptically he mentions Eleanor’s death in his diary but gives no details and still less indicates his emotions.

  Still, I’m assuming that the tragedy affected him at least as deeply as Hamilton’s death in the Tay Bridge disaster. He was in love with Eleanor Henderson. Love is the only possible reason for his wanting to marry her. They were engaged and the wedding was to take place in February. Did Henry reflect, did he remember, that this was the month in which Jimmy Ashworth Dawson was to give birth to his child? No one knows. The engagement ring Henry gave to Eleanor is in the possession of my sister Sarah, a clumsy piece of jewellery, the diamonds half buried in the thick heavy gold. It was taken from Eleanor’s finger before her funeral and somehow found its way back to Henry, there to become, in its turn, Edith’s engagement ring.

  This is something assumed in my branch of the family. My grandfather Alexander knew it and passed it on to his son. Confirmation comes from Mary Craddock’s letter to her sister Elizabeth Kirkford. Her mother Edith had told her the ring she wore had been Eleanor’s. This piece of information is wrapped up in Victorian sentimental flummery, which may have been Mary’s, not Edith’s, about the sacredness of Henry’s first love and Edith’s own desire to have the ring so that she and Henry would never forget it was her dead sister who brought them together. That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that Henry, having got the ring back by some means or another, saw no reason to spend money on a new one. Thrifty Henry.

  The closest relation the Hendersons had, outside the immediate family, was Samuel Henderson’s only sister Dorothea. David Croft-Jones’s genealogical table shows me that Louisa Henderson, the girls’ mother, had one sister and a brother, who died at the age of seven. These people, of course, were Quendons, the children of William Quendon and his wife Luise, née Dornford. Dorothea Vincent belonged on a rather higher social plane than the Hendersons. She was a comfortably off widow who lived with her two daughters in the village of Manaton in Devon, where her late husband had been the squire. She was Eleanor’s godmother and closer to her than she was to the other Henderson children. Eleanor was in the habit of going to stay with her for a couple of weeks every year in the late summer, in her early years accompanied by her mother, later on by her sister Edith. This was only the second time she had gone alone.

  Most of my information about this visit and its consequences comes from newspapers. The relationships between the various people I’ve gleaned – and ‘gleaned’ is the word if that means what I take it to mean – picking out tiny usable grains from a mass of chaff – from David’s mother’s and grandmother’s letters. Unfortunately, there’s not much in them about what people felt and thought, no more than a shocked referring back to the ‘terrible tragedy’ and a reflection on Veronica’s part that if Eleanor hadn’t died they wouldn’t exist.

  Eleanor’s habit was to visit her aunt in August, but there was an obvious reason for her not going in the August of 1883. Perhaps she planned to go but postponed her visit when it seemed likely Henry would propose. Instead she went in early October, travelling by the Great Western train that went, and still goes, from Paddington to Penzance, and she travelled first class. Ladies Only compartments existed in 1883 but not on that line. At Newton Abbot she changed on to the local line to Moretonhampstead and got off at Bovey Tracey, which in those days was simply called Bovey. She was met at the station by her aunt with the pony and trap. Her visits must have been a pleasant change for Eleanor, coming as she did from a London that was often fogbound in winter and hot and dusty in summer. Manaton in those days, and to a great extent still, is in beautiful country on the edge of Dartmoor, a place of high tors, deep leafy lanes and trout streams. Aunt Dorothea’s was a more luxurious home than her own in Keppel Street. She employed a cook and two maids and two men to do the garden. The family wanted for nothing. The pony carriage was nice to go about in and there were beautiful places within easy reach of Moor House to walk to. Eleanor got on well with her cousins and the purpose of her visit was, in part, to ask them to be her bridesmaids.

  Her wedding was fixed for 14 February, St Valentine’s Day, though less was made of that as a lovers’ festival in the nineteenth century than today. As things turned out, the wedding never took place, so the fact that Jimmy Dawson gave birth to her daughter Mary on the 13th isn’t as significant as it might have been. Jude, who is perfectly happy now to discuss anyone and everyone’s babies, who prefers baby-discussion to all other types of conversation, says that the prospect must have hung over Henry. He must have felt guilt as well as an excited anticipation. How could he simply turn his back on his own child?

  ‘I don’t think men felt the same then,’ I tell her. ‘The divide between good women and bad women has so entirely changed it’s difficult to imagine it, but it was very marked in the eighteen eighties. And the divide between the children one’s wife had and the by-blows or wrong side of the blanket children was very wide. Henry would have given Jimmy money, probably in the form of an ongoing income to her husband. There may have been a condition that he himself was never to see or hear of the child. At all costs its existence must never get to his wife’s ears.’

  Jude says she can’t imagine being married to one man and carrying another man’s child. ‘They’d never have been able to talk about it the way we do. She must have felt frightened and ashamed all the time.’

  ‘It happens just as much now as it did then, women having children by men they’re not married to or living with. Probably more. And as for Henry, I don’t suppose he made the connection between the expected birth and the wedding day. He wouldn’t have thought about the two events on the – well, the same plane.’

  ‘Hateful Henry,’ says Jude. ‘Must you write his life? He’s so dreadful.’

  I tell her I must and that Henry wasn’t any worse than other professional men of his time. As for guilt and shame, I feel plenty of that myself over my feigned enthusiasm for our coming child, but at the same time I’m revelling in being able to talk to my wife again, to say anything I like about anything, not to keep breaking off in mid-sentence and blushing the way no man of my age ever should.

  If Eleanor wrote to Henry from Manaton her letters haven’t survived. I wonder how many times I’m going to write that sentence, changing only the names and the place? Biographers get to feel that letter writing should be compulsory on everyone’s part and letter preserving even more important. Still, she wrote one letter home and that single one to her sister Edith. It exists only because, probably, its date is just before the murder, and for this reason Edith kept it.

  We don’t know how Eleanor passed the time in Manaton. Jude says, and I agree with her, that it’s hard to know how any middle-class Victorian woman passed the time. If you have servants and no job, what do you do all day? Read, sew, write letters, read, walk, talk, sew, I suppose. Eleanor mentions none of this in her letter to her sister. Its main purpose seems to be to tell the family she’ll get a cab home from Paddington station. It is as follows:

  Moor House,

  Manaton,

  Devon

  St Luke’s Day

  Dearest Edith,

  The weather is beautiful. Aunt says the fine weather in mid October is called St Luke’s Little Summer. That is why I have put St Luke’s Day instead of October the eighteenth at the top of this letter. You have been here so you know how lovely the countryside is. I should really like to live in this neighbourhood once I am married but Henry cannot be away from London where his work is. Perhaps one day we could have a house here, though I think he would call that no more than a romantic dream.

  Isobel and Laetitia have consented to be my bridesmaids, indeed they were very happy to accept the invitation. You, of course, will b
e the third, my dearest sister. You have already said you will, so I do not think I am being presumptuous in taking it for granted! Henry talks of Italy for our honeymoon and I dare not suggest we come down here. Of course, it would not be nearly so nice in February.

  I have had one of ‘my falls’. It happened out walking with I and L. I stumbled in the middle of a field, caught my foot in a rabbit hole, and fell headlong. Mud all over my blue serge frock but the worst was (of course!) the bruising. I am black and blue. The bruises on my left side and leg are a sight to behold, but luckily no one but me does behold them!

  I shall return on Saturday by the 11.14 train from Bovey. The journey takes hours and hours, as you know, but it is due to reach Paddington at five minutes past five. There is no need at all for Father to meet the train. I shall be quite safe on my own and will take a cab. My dear love to Father and Mother, Grandpapa, Lionel and your dear self.

  Your affectionate sister,

  Eleanor

  She mentions Henry as a Victorian wife-to-be should. His work was paramount, he made the decisions. When she says she ‘dare not’ suggest they come to Devon for their honeymoon she doesn’t sound seriously fearful. She says it much as a present-day wife would say she daren’t ask what’s-his-name to go out to dinner again this week. From the sound of it, she and Henry had a simple and cheerful relationship. Perhaps the passion was all on his side. There is nothing in her letter to betray her love or even her pride in landing such a prize. Perhaps she’d said all that to her sister beforehand. Still, I find it hard to believe that the Henderson family as a whole weren’t ecstatic that one of their number was making this amazing match. A knight! A royal doctor! A rich man – at least, in their estimation. The daughter who was already twenty-four, on the shelf, dowry-less, a burden for ever on her parents, was about to become Lady Nanther and in the following year would be living in a house fine beyond their dreams.

  For Henry was house-hunting once more. His friend Barnabus Couch had a post as Visiting Professor of Anatomy at the Owens College in Manchester once attended by Henry himself. To him he wrote as follows on 18 October 1883:

  My dear Couch,

  I have to thank you for your kind letter of congratulation on my engagement to Miss Henderson. You will like her. She is gentle, charming and quiet, very far from the ‘New Woman’ we hear so much about these days. I doubt if she knows what the franchise is, still less would she wish to play a part in choosing a member to send to Parliament. I am confident she will do her duty by me as my wife and will never exhibit the restlessness and, worse, neurasthenia, you and I see so much of in those female patients whom modern notions of ‘freedom’ and emancipation have so adversely affected. At present she is staying with her aunt in Devon where plans are afoot for the coming nuptials, but will return on Saturday.

  I have been looking out for a suitable residence for us and would like to have settled on a property by the end of January. Then, if we spend six weeks away on our wedding journey – I have Rome and Naples in mind – all transactions could be complete by the time we return. However, I shall take a house somewhere until midsummer by which time my wife will have purchased furniture, carpets and whatever else may be necessary for our future home. Our permanent residence will, I think, be somewhere in that district I consider the most salubrious of anywhere in North London – St John’s Wood. I had thought of the Eyre Estate or the almost rustic Loudoun Road but tomorrow I am to be taken on a conducted tour of a very fine place in Carlton Hill, at present the property of Mr Hapgood, the brother of a colleague of mine.

  You will remind me, my dear Couch, of St John’s Wood’s reputation as the hiding place for a gentleman’s belle amie. On being told that the philosopher Herbert Spencer had taken up residence there, a bishop is said to have asked, ‘And who is the lady?’ But I believe its disreputability, if such it has been, is passing. After all, the great T. H. Huxley, with whom I am proud to have some acquaintance, has been living there at various addresses for the past thirty years. My wife and I will no doubt attend St Mark’s Church, Hamilton Terrace, that place of worship made distinguished by the incumbency of Canon Duckworth, who also resides in the neighbourhood and whom I had the honour of knowing while he was tutor to His Royal Highness, the Prince Leopold. So I believe we may take up residence without danger to our morals!

  I trust you are well and that Mrs Couch’s health is keeping up. Bear February the fourteenth in mind! You will receive Mr and Mrs Henderson’s invitation in due course.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Henry Nanther

  Jude’s comment on that is, ‘I don’t know how he had the nerve,’ referring, of course, to Jimmy Ashworth whom Henry had only recently pensioned off. The answer is that he was not necessarily a hypocrite; he was not one person but many people who lived alongside one another inside his lanky frame and noble head.

  ‘Very fine’ the house may have been, but Carlton Hill was scarcely Park Lane. In 1883 St John’s Wood wasn’t considered part of London as it is now, but a suburb, and much of it, especially on the western side of Maida Vale, a building site. In the event, Henry didn’t buy Mr Hapgood’s house. The woman who was to choose its furniture and carpets met her death the day after her fiancé went to look at it.

  On the morning of Saturday 20 October, her aunt drove her to Bovey station to catch the local train for Newton Abbot. They must have set off quite early for Eleanor to make the connection at that little Devon junction on to the Great Western express. Once again she travelled first class. The train came into Paddington on time and Samuel Henderson was there to meet it, in spite of Eleanor’s injunction to her sister that this wouldn’t be necessary. She wasn’t on the train and Samuel went home. There would be one more train arriving but not until 10.20 in the evening. After some sort of consultation with his wife and other children, he telegraphed to his sister to find out if Eleanor would be on that train instead. Telegrams, which were still used but lost their novelty with the coming of phones, were an efficient form of communication in the late nineteenth century, yet it was not until the Sunday morning that Dorothea’s answer reached Keppel Street. Long before that Samuel Henderson had been back to Paddington in the hope his daughter would be on the 10.20 train.

  By Sunday morning the police had been called in. Before they had done much, a farm worker in east Devon had spotted a woman’s body lying on the railway embankment somewhere between Alphington and Exeter. It was identified by Samuel Henderson on the following day, the Monday, as that of his daughter. Here is a rather sensational account of the inquest from a national daily paper, though not so sensational as my father’s:

  The inquest took place in Exeter yesterday on Miss Eleanor Mary Henderson, aged twenty-four years, of Keppel Street, London, whose dead body was discovered on the railway embankment at Alphington on Sunday last. The coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown.

  William Newcombe, a cowman of Alphington, said he saw a dark-blue object like a bolt of cloth on the grass of the embankment and supposing it was a portmanteau or other piece of luggage fallen from a train, negotiated the fence which divides the embankment from the meadow and went to investigate. To his horror he perceived it to be the body of a young woman clothed in a dark-blue costume and cape of similar colour. Wisely refraining from touching the tragic cadaver, Mr Newcombe went for help to the nearest police station which, unfortunately, was some miles away.

  Heavily veiled and speaking in a low, often scarcely audible voice, Mrs Dorothea Jane Vincent, the dead woman’s aunt, told the court her niece had been staying with her for the past fortnight.

  She personally drove Miss Henderson to the station at Bovey to catch the 11.14 train. She cautioned her to enter a first-class compartment of the Great Western express, departing from Newton Abbot at 11.50, and Miss Henderson undertook to do so. She saw her niece board the local train and then she drove back to her residence in Manaton.

  Dr Charles Warren said he had examined the
body. It was that of a well-nourished and formerly healthy young woman in her early twenties. He had no doubt that death was by strangulation. It was his belief that Miss Henderson was dead before she was thrown from the train. No marks on the body, apart from the disfigurement of her face and neck, had been made prior to death. There was bruising, but the physician’s opinion was that this occurred several days earlier. When asked by the coroner, Mr Swithun Miles, to give a time of death, Dr Warren said that officials of the Great Western Railway would be more accurate arbiters of that than he. No doubt, Miss Henderson’s assassin, having committed the dreadful deed, wasted no time in ridding himself of her body. Estimating the time of death should merely be a matter of ascertaining at what time the express passed through Alphington. For his part, he would suppose death to have occurred during the late morning of Saturday, the twentieth of October, say between noon and twelve-thirty.

  (No doubt the doctor had done some detective work of his own, for it turned out that the train had passed through Alphington at twelve twenty-five.)

  Only one witness came forward to say he had seen Miss Henderson on the train. Mr Christopher Morris, a solicitor’s clerk of Heavitree Road, Exeter, travelling from Plymouth to Exeter St David’s, said he saw a young woman in dark-blue garments board the Great Western express at Newton Abbot. She was carrying a small black portmanteau and he believed a porter was beside her, holding a larger suitcase, but of this he could not be sure. He noticed her because, although some two dozen persons were among those waiting on the platform, she was the only woman travelling unaccompanied. In answer to the coroner’s question, he said he did not observe what carriage she entered, whether it was an ordinary third-class compartment or a first-class compartment. He never saw her again.

  Mr Frederick Formby, a guard on the Great Western express, said that a small portmanteau and a large leather suitcase were among the four pieces of unclaimed property found on the train at Paddington station after the passengers had departed.