The Blood Doctor

by Barbara Vine

  I take the letter to the post and Jude comes with me. A hundred-yard trip becomes a walk. She’s looking well again, though she’s very thin, her waist a narrow stem like Olivia’s in the portrait, but Olivia’s was like that because she wore a corset. Of course the streets are full of women with babies, black women and white women and Asian women, all pushing their infants in buggies or carrying them in baby-carriers on their chests. There’s even one with an old-fashioned pram, the child’s face round and pink amid lacy froth and flounces. I feel like telling Jude what a nuisance Henry found his kids, how they get in the way of great enterprises (as Bacon or someone says). I feel like it and that’s as far as it goes.

  We go into a health food shop and Jude buys folic acid and multi-vitamins and gingko biloba and echinacea and St John’s Wort. She used to have a getting-fit-for-the-birth regime and now she has a getting-fit-for-the-conception one. Twice a week she does the Alexander Technique and she’s visiting a herbalist. We come back across Abercorn Place into Hamilton Terrace, talking about how there are certain plant substances which are claimed to prevent miscarriage, or Jude is talking and I’m listening. I tell her it can’t do any harm but maybe to check with her doctor, and we turn aside and stop outside Ainsworth House, now renamed (absurdly) Horizon View, and look up at the millionaire’s windows and at the millionaire’s covered way in which the stained glass has been replaced with clearer and brighter colours.

  The front garden is chock-a-block with the kind of flowers in tubs you plant when they’re already in bloom. Their colours match those in the roof of the covered way, something that must be intentional. None of the windows is open, though it’s a hot day, but no doubt the millionaire has air conditioning. The curtains inside are festoons of silk and velvet and lace. You can’t see much inside. Last time I looked at this house I saw a dispirited young Asian woman at the window of the room that was Henry’s study, but there’s no one today.

  I desperately want Jude to say something. I want her to make some comment on the house or Henry or the changes that have been made. I want her to ask a question about what this room was or that and who slept where, anything but babies and her prospects of having a baby. But she says nothing, only takes my arm and draws me close to her, and I bend and kiss her, there in the street outside my great-grandfather’s house.

  15

  There’s been more discussion in the House today of the Lords Bill, as amended on Report. Lord Mayhew, a former attorney general, rose to move whether questions of hereditary peers’ rights should be referred to the Committee for Privileges.

  I spoke, briefly, more or less echoing the words of Lord Goodhart that what the motion proposed was a waste of time. Everyone knows the Bill’s intention and what its effect will be – to get rid of us as anachronisms and white elephants. Cries of ‘Oh!’ greeted this, especially the white elephants bit.

  But Lord Mayhew presses it to a division and wins. We go on after that, this time about the Treaty of Union and a fundamental principle (apparently) in it guarantees Scotland specific representation in this House. The idea now is that the Committee for Privileges should look into this as well, a ploy which tries the patience of Baroness Jay, the Leader of the House. Another vote is inevitable and the pro-Committee for Privileges faction win yet again. But that’s the end of the Bill until after the long summer recess. We’ll resume sometime in October, and meanwhile we hereditaries are still here. Henry’s line carries on.

  It’s 27 July and the House gets up on Thursday. The Labour Working Peers, always heavily whipped and roster-driven, are panting for their holidays – and so am I. Jude and I are going walking in the mountains of the Tyrol and then for a week on a Greek island. It was fixed up long before the miscarriage and she pretends she wants to go but I know she doesn’t. I can tell.

  We’re off today. Our flight goes in the early afternoon and we’re ready to leave. But just before the cab comes two letters arrive in the post, one from Veronica Croft-Jones and the other, enclosing her draft family tree, the one I didn’t ask her to send, from Janet Forsythe. Veronica, whom of course I’ve never met, writes that she understands from her son that I’d like to talk to her about the family. She’ll be back visiting David and Georgie and Galahad in September and would be very happy to fix up a meeting. Anyway, she says, we’re such close relations really, we ought to get to know each other better, and she signs herself, ‘Your affectionate cousin, Veronica.’

  I leave this letter behind but for some reason I stuff the family tree into my pocket, the cab comes and we depart for Heathrow. We’re in the aircraft, going over some alps, before I look at the tree again. I soon see I shall have to take great care of it as it’s obviously the top copy. This genealogical table is done in a fancy way, more like a real tree than a table, with branches and twigs hanging down and coloured brown and green instead of standing up because the trunk part has to be at the top. The male characters are each encased in a leaf shape and the female in an apple. Jude looks over my shoulder and says in a cold voice that it’s nauseating. At first I can’t see any names that I recognize. Then I spot Jemima Ann Ashworth and Leonard Dawson. Their daughter Mary (or Henry’s daughter) is there and so are all the other children that are truly Len Dawson’s, and on a twirly little twig, Janet Forsythe, branching out of Laura Mary Kimball and Robert Arthur Kimball, with her husband and her son Damon. Jimmy Ashworth appears to have had no siblings, but Len Dawson had no fewer than eleven brothers and sisters plus two half-brothers and two half-sisters born after the death of his father and when his mother, a glutton for hard labour apparently, had married again. I can’t see much to interest me in the tree and I put it into my flight carry-on bag, neatly folded this time.

  Jude worries about walking, just as she worries about everything else that involves bodily motion. She worries particularly about four-wheel drive vehicles bouncing up bumpy mountain tracks. I remind her that she can’t be pregnant because she hasn’t yet had a period since the miscarriage. Whether this is true or not, I mean the bit about not possibly being pregnant, I don’t know. Neither does she and she sulks disdainfully. I find myself looking north across the mountains to Switzerland, to where I think the Graubünden must be. Did Henry come walking here? Jude is sitting on a rock, scowling.

  I say to her, ‘Why are you being so disagreeable?’

  To my astonishment she bursts out laughing like the old Jude, like the one I first fell in love with. ‘I love you,’ she says. ‘You’re always using these crazy old-fashioned expressions. Disagreeable! I ask you. No one, but no one, says “disagreeable” but you.’

  So we hug each other and go back to the hotel and make love like we used to before all this baby business. We make love every day and often at night as well and each time it’s like it used to be, so I start thinking it always will be now, this holiday is the beginning of our new happiness. We write postcards to all our friends, we even write one to Paul who despises them, and we sign them off ‘with lots of love’. Love is what we’re engulfed with, soppily, and we even have some over-spill.

  Jude’s period comes when we’re on Skyros but she’s fine about it, she’s glad to see it. She says nothing about babies. ‘Baby’ is now a banned word. It mustn’t pass our lips. It’s as if we’re children and our mother has told us we’re not to say that naughty four-letter word. We swim and lie in the sun, slathered in factor fifteen, and drink things that taste disgusting at home, ouzo and retsina, and Jude says not a word about alcohol poisoning her hormones or whatever.

  On our last day a newcomer to the hotel comes up to us while we’re sitting by the pool and introduces himself as Julian Brewer. ‘Soon to be Lord Brewer,’ he says with an expansive smile. Apparently, he’ll just been made a peer and he’s take his seat in October. I get up and shake hands and tell him I’ll be departing just as he comes in. We order drinks from the waiter who comes round to the tables and I answer his questions about the Lords as best I can, but my mind is only half on what he’s saying, only a quart
er, because one of those revelations has just come to me, one of those flashes of enlightenment. I want him to go away, I want the sun to sink and the wind to get up so that we can all go indoors and I can get up to my room and find Janet Forsythe’s family tree in my carry-on bag.

  Eventually he goes, but not until I’ve made wild promises to have a drink with him after his introduction, meet his wife and children and show him the ropes – that is, where the lavatories are and how to put down a starred question. Anything to get rid of him. Jude is looking at me strangely because I don’t usually do this sort of thing. I explain when we’re in the lift. Brewer, I say to her, Brewer. His name is Brewer and that triggered off something. I’ve got to check it out. If I’m right it’s going to put a whole new complexion on Henry’s life.

  There it is, in Janet Forsythe’s tree: Joseph Edward Heyford Brewer, second son of Joseph William Brewer and his wife Mary Ann Dawson, née Heyford. These two had four children and they all had Heyford among their names. But the important, the astounding, point is that Mary Ann Dawson had been married to Clarence George Dawson and by him become the mother, among twelve children, of Leonard Dawson, husband of Jimmy Ashworth. Therefore, the man who assaulted my great-great-grandfather Samuel Henderson in Gower Street, and was interrupted in his nefarious work by my great-grandfather Henry Nanther, was Len Dawson’s half-brother.

  I haven’t got the cutting from The Times about the appearance of Brewer in the magistrates’ court but I remember the name perfectly. It’s the Heyford bit that’s stuck in my mind, I don’t know why. His age has too, twenty-six. According to Janet’s tree Joseph Edward Heyford Brewer was born in 1857, which makes it about right. I shall have to check his age and where he was born but they have to be the same man. They have to be. Anything else would be too enormous a coincidence.

  Does Janet realize? She must do. That is, she must have noticed that the man who attacked Samuel Henderson was Len Dawson’s half-brother. But has she put two and two together and seen that Len Dawson’s half-brother was convicted and sent to prison for an assault on my great-great-grandfather and Henry’s future father-in-law? Somehow I doubt it. I talk to Jude about it and tell her there was nothing in the police court proceedings about Henry, he wasn’t mentioned, and she agrees with me. Janet very likely hasn’t made the connection.

  ‘But why did she draw your attention to it by sending you that cutting?’

  I’ve thought about that and I tell her I’d make a guess it’s because, when we met, her mother seemed to censor everything about Jimmy Ashworth, make her come out pure and innocent, while she, Janet, is more of a woman of the world than that. ‘She wants to show me her family had their black sheep. Most people would think anything like that in their family history quite amusing. Jimmy being a kept woman and this Joseph a Victorian thug. Only Laura Kimball wouldn’t. Janet wants to show she’s broader-minded than her mother. Besides, Joseph was barely related to her.’

  ‘He wasn’t related to her at all if what you say is true and Henry was her grandmother’s father.’

  I ask her to tell me what she thinks was behind it all and she’s silent for a moment. Then she says things look black for Henry. ‘I mean, is there any other way of looking at it but that Henry put Joseph up to it? Paid him? Joseph was a sort of contract mugger and Henry paid him to waylay poor old Samuel in the street, knock him around a bit but not too much, and then gallant Henry the white knight comes along and rescues Joseph’s victim.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I say.

  ‘Well,’ she says, playing the devil’s advocate, ‘you could look at it the other way about and say Henry was innocent. He only met Joseph Edward Heyford Brewer because he knocked Samuel down. Maybe he was one of those Victorian philanthropists who were prison visitors and he sought Brewer out in jail, got to know him and his family and met Len Dawson.’

  ‘Only there’s no evidence at all that Henry was a prison visitor,’ I tell her, ‘and quite a lot of evidence to the contrary. One of the letters to Couch is devoted to a long diatribe on the treatment of prisoners. In Henry’s view it was too lenient. He actually says he thinks prison visitors are misguided. Criminals on whatever level, in his view, should be ostracized by society even more than they were.’

  ‘I’m glad. I want Henry to turn out a villain. Didn’t I always say he was up to something? And now we know what it was.’

  She goes off to have a shower and I sit on the bed and think about that one. Where and how did Henry meet Joseph Brewer? Or did he meet Len Dawson first? I doubt if I’m ever going to find out. I suddenly remember that Joseph Brewer’s address was somewhere in Euston but that doesn’t help. Maybe he was one of those ‘exhibits’ doctors had up before their students and asked them to observe certain anomalies or deformities about their anatomy. But I’ve no reason to believe Joseph had any deformities or was in any way peculiar. He was very likely a completely normal young man.

  How much did Henry give him to ‘do the job’? A hundred pounds would have been a fortune to a man like that. Later on he rewarded his half-brother with marriage to Jimmy Ashworth, accommodation and no doubt a considerable down-payment. Why pick on Len? Why not Joseph himself? Possibly because Joseph was married already. I take another look at the family tree and see that of the Dawson and Brewer children nine were male and seven female. In 1883 the oldest male was forty-one and the youngest nineteen. The five oldest were all married by 1883, another was widowed and left with five children. Len was single and I notice something I didn’t see before. His youngest full brother had died aged fourteen and a brother a year younger than he died aged one year. Of the Brewers, two were girls. Joseph had been married three years. The nineteen-year-old Albert was still single. Henry wouldn’t have foisted a widower with five children on Jimmy, even he would have stopped short at that, and the nineteen-year-old was too young for her. Hence, Len was the only possible choice.

  He didn’t meet Len because he was a hospital porter. He was probably a porter at Euston Station and Henry met him when Joseph introduced them. Why hadn’t Len married before? Perhaps there was something about him that didn’t appeal to women, he had a birthmark or a wart on his face or something. I must find out if Laura Kimball has a photograph.

  Henry can only have had one motive in fixing this assault and his own heroic intervention: to meet the Henderson family. There were other ways he could have done this but perhaps none so effective. He could have arranged an interview with Samuel to consult him on some legal aspect of his medical research. But how to make such a consultation lead to friendship and invitations to the Henderson home? It would have taken a long time, nothing might have come of it. In fact, it’s hard to see how Henry could have thought of a sounder and surer plan of action than the one he arranged. Nothing could be more likely than that he earn the gratitude of the whole family. Nothing more natural than that he call at the Henderson house to ask after the health of the victim.

  What it doesn’t tell me is why Henry so much wanted to know the Hendersons that he, a hitherto law-abiding man, an eminent figure, a professor, a royal doctor, would stoop to criminal conspiracy to gain access to their home. What was so attractive about them? They were very ordinary people. A solicitor was far less respected then than he’d be today and Samuel wasn’t even doing very well. They were middle-class, not rich, living in an overcrowded poky house in an unfashionable part of London. None of them would have been accepted in the kind of society the Bathos belonged to. The girls were pretty but so were a thousand young girls in London, many of them far more eligible.

  Another curious factor in this business comes to mind. Henry must have known of the Hendersons before he set up the encounter in Gower Street and he could only have known of them by making enquiries about them. Did he use a detective agency? Someone on the lines of Sherlock Holmes? I’ve a picture in my mind of a rather sinister figure, very Victorian, a character out of Wilkie Collins, following Samuel, watching his house, maybe striking up an acquaintance with old Mr Quendo
n when he went out for his ‘constitutional’, eyeing the girls from a shop doorway. But why? What for?

  I decide to sleep on it, knowing from experience how different things can be in the morning. Tomorrow it may all fall to the ground, it may turn out to have been in my head, a think-piece, as the journalists say. But I sleep and get up early because we’ve a plane to catch, and things are just the same. Henry is still a conspirator and a villain and I still don’t know why he wanted to know the Hendersons.

  Devious Henry. Criminal Henry.

  16

  At home there are no personal letters awaiting us, no more titillating revelations, only bills, a pile of appeals for my time and money sent on from the House of Lords and two books from a literary editor for me to review. I’m glad to see them, this history of the parliamentary system in Great Britain and a biography of Bonar Law. The two reviews will earn me a thousand pounds or a bit less. On the way back, in the plane, I’ve been thinking, not of Henry, but of money.

  Jude hasn’t given up her job. Sadly, she didn’t have to. I was in publishing myself once, until I left on the strength of the flash-in-the-pan success of my first biography. My latest one won’t even go into paperback and research takes so long I don’t anticipate beginning the writing of the Henry book until the end of next year at the earliest. What occurred to me in the aircraft was something that simply hadn’t struck me before, though no doubt it’s struck many wiser than I. When I’m chucked out of the Lords I’ll lose my expenses. A peer who goes into the Chamber four times a week and five times if the House sits on a Friday, can claim expenses often thousand a year or more, and it’s tax-free. I may have to get a job – if I can. I can’t depend on my wife to keep me. Besides, what about this baby? The baby that’s never come yet but may come.