by Barbara Vine
So where does the haemophilia come in?
Henry cannot have known Samuel Henderson’s wife was a carrier. Or let’s say I can’t think of any way he could have known it. Of course it’s possible Louisa Henderson was his patient, as Lachlan suggested her daughter might have been, and came to his consulting rooms in Wimpole Street because she was a symptomatic carrier and suffered, as such women sometimes do, from problems with her joints or bleeding gums. But if she had done so he’d have had no need to stage that street attack on Samuel, he would have known the family already. So Henry didn’t know. He didn’t know but he found out and the discovery appalled him.
How did he find out? Lionel Henderson, Eleanor’s brother, wasn’t a haemophiliac. Eleanor bruised easily, a sign of a symptomatic carrier, but there are many reasons for a tendency to bruise and Henry wouldn’t have been alarmed by it. No, surely the answer is that ‘consultation’, as he calls it in the diary, which Louisa Henderson had with Henry after he’d begun calling in Keppel Street, when she confided in him that her daughter suffered from heavy menstrual bleeding. This worried her since she thought it might mean Eleanor would have problems in childbearing.
It must also be taken into account that Louisa may not have known she was herself a carrier. Her father William Quendon was not a haemophiliac. But Louisa had had a brother who died in infancy or when young. He was younger than she but how much younger? I must check, find out. If he had haemophilia and died as a result of it and if he and she were babies when he died, she may never have known the cause of his death. Altogether, it seems likely, taking into consideration the lack of knowledge among ordinary people at that time – I think of Queen Victoria adamant that the disorder wasn’t ‘in the family’ – that Louisa didn’t know.
But Henry, the expert, would have known. As soon as she told him her daughter had heavy periods and bruised easily, perhaps had nosebleeds too, and very likely added that she herself suffered from similar abnormalities, Henry would have suspected both were carriers. A few judicious questions from him, perhaps on the subject of family history, would have gathered more information. He asked about any brothers or uncles Louisa had and learned of her brother who died in infancy. What did he die of? His blood failed to clot like other people’s, says his future mother-in-law. He had some illness, she can’t remember the name. Henry can remember it, it’s written on his heart in blood-red letters, and he sees the risk he’s running.
But he wasn’t engaged to Eleanor at the time. I should rather say that he wasn’t officially engaged to her. All that is known of the date of his engagement is from the notice in The Times and his diary entry. He may very well have asked Eleanor to marry him as early as July before the consultation. First asked her parents’ permission, explaining that he agreed with the possible objection that they had known each other only a short time but his mind was made up, and he believed his affection was returned. Then he asked her. The consultation took place the following week, Louisa Henderson believing the time had come to warn her prospective son-in-law of the difficulties her daughter might have in giving birth.
Henry is appalled. But it is too late now. The announcement goes into The Times and he notes his engagement gloomily in his diary. Six weeks later Eleanor goes to stay with her aunt in Devon. It’s known that she wrote home to her sister Edith. Did she also write to Henry, her fiancé? And if she did was he also told about the bruising, the result of her fall, confirming – as if he needed confirmation – what her mother had told him? Two weeks later she attempts to return home but never does because she is murdered on the way and her body thrown from the train.
Henry is due to marry her in February 1884, just four months away. His discovery has profoundly affected his feelings for her. He sees her as tainted, diseased. He knows a great deal about haemophilia, perhaps more than any other living doctor. He knows what marriage to this woman would mean: any son they might have could be afflicted, any daughter a carrier. Marrying her would be a disaster he can’t contemplate.
I’m at Baker Street but I can’t get onto a train. Jubilee Line trains aren’t stopping here because something’s gone wrong with the escalators. I get a 189 bus instead. It’ll take me closer to home than the tube would have. I don’t at all like what I’m thinking about my great-grandfather, it’s not something which distance and more than a hundred years can wipe away.
If Henry could arrange a street mugging in order to meet a girl, might he also arrange a murder to avoid marrying her? The crimes aren’t really on a par. Samuel Henderson wasn’t really harmed while Eleanor was brutally strangled. And why go to such terrible lengths? He could have just left her. Jilted her. But things were different then. An action for breach of promise was a very real possibility for a jilted girl and her family. An angry father could insert a notice in a newspaper, naming Sir Henry Nanther as a trifler with women’s affections, someone to avoid, a man from whom to protect one’s daughters. Olivia Batho’s father is said to have contemplated such a step. Did Henry know of it? And here one must remember Samuel Henderson was a solicitor and would be familiar with such things. Henry, the royal doctor, was a man of considerable repute, and his livelihood depended on that reputation being sustained. Queen Victoria had been so rigid in her morality when she was young that she and the Prince Consort refused to receive a woman whose marriage was the result of an elopement. She would never have countenanced the behaviour of one of her physicians publicly announcing his engagement to a respectable and virtuous young woman with her parents’ full consent, and then deserting her.
So, appalling as it sounds, can Jude be right and was Henry a murderer?
26
I wish I’d thrashed this out while I was still with Lachlan so that I could have another opinion. He’d have given the theory his measured consideration. And maybe he’d have said it was ridiculous, bizarre, because in Ibsen’s words, ‘People don’t do such things.’
Of course there’s no question of Henry’s having murdered Eleanor himself – that is, killed her with his own hands. But doing the deed oneself is not a prerequisite for murder. Did he pay Albert George Bightford to kill her?
I haven’t done sufficient research into Bightford. It seemed enough for the purposes of Henry’s biography to read the newspaper accounts of Eleanor’s death, the inquest, and the trial and execution. Still, it obviously won’t be enough. One of the Famous British Trials volumes contains a more detailed assessment of Bightford, his life and death, included presumably, not because he was particularly interesting or the murder he committed bizarre, but due to the identity of his victim and her connection with the soon-to-be Lord Nanther. My next step must be to get this book from the London Library.
Before I’ve done that there isn’t much point in speculating about whether, for instance, Henry had any connection with Devon or the Great Western Railway or if the Brewer-Dawson family had. There’s no point in speculation at all. For all that, I’d love to talk to Jude about it. Once she’d have been only too happy to find any further evidence of wrongdoing against Henry and happily played the devil’s advocate, but now I know very well she won’t be interested, will even ask wearily if we have to talk about him again.
I get off the bus and walk round the corner into Alma Square. Jude is in bed and fast asleep. By the light from the landing I see a new jar has joined the other remedies and supplements on her bedside table. It’s labelled Kava-kava and I’ve no idea what it’s for.
I wouldn’t have been surprised to wake up this morning and find the whole theory preposterous, ask myself how even for a moment I could have thought of my eminently respectable great-grandfather as a murderer. But I don’t. I feel exactly as I did last night on the 189 bus. A man who’ll plan an assault on a stranger and stage a rescue, who’ll marry off his mistress and abandon his daughter, court a woman, enjoy her father’s hospitality and drop her for another, isn’t that man capable of worse crimes?
Usually, in the past when I’ve called at the London Library, I’
ve taken my books, crossed the square and, by way of St James’s Park and Queen Anne’s Gate, walked down to the House of Lords. I can’t do that now without some ‘sponsor’ to let me in, but I do walk as far as the park and stop in the middle of the bridge. It’s a fine sunny day, the sky blue and a bright sheen on the lake. You can stand here and if you look northwards see, beyond the water and the trees, Buckingham Palace. Look south and beyond the water and the trees, the swans and pelicans, you see Horse Guards and Whitehall and the Foreign Office. Now the London Eye, the Millennium Wheel, rears up like a bow-shaped crane behind the white walls and green and silver rooftops. I try not to see it, to see the view through Henry’s eyes, for I’m sure he often passed this way. The air was smokier then, the buildings dirtier, the streets car-less but soiled by horses, the sky above the same blue and the grass the same green. Did he ever think of what he’d done to get what he wanted, or rather, avoid getting what he didn’t want?
I start on the Famous British Trials as soon as I get home, reading to the accompaniment of Lorraine’s vacuum cleaner, droning away upstairs. The section on Bightford is by a man called Stewart S. Luke and it’s called ‘Murder on the Cornish Express’. Luke wrote it in 1909, the year of Henry’s death, and I wonder if this is coincidence. I feel a little frisson of excitement. A good reason to await someone’s death before writing on a subject connected with him is that the dead can’t be libelled.
According to Stewart Luke, Bightford was born in 1862, the eldest son of Jane Bightford, born Edwards, and her husband Abel Bightford, coachman to Harold Merlin Clive of Livesey Place, near Tavistock. The name Albert, which had no precedent in the family, was probably bestowed on him in memory of the Prince Consort who had died the previous year. The Bightfords had many children but only three of them survived to adulthood, Albert and two girls, Jane and Maria. The entire family worked for Mr and Mrs Clive. Mrs Bightford helped out with the cleaning, her daughter Jane was under-housemaid and her daughter Maria worked in the kitchens, while Albert was employed as one of the assistants to the head gardener, Thomas Flitton.
The Bightfords had married very young [writes Luke] and were only just over forty when their son was hanged for the murder of Miss Henderson. Three years before Albert, then aged nineteen, had taken the unparalleled step in that family and at that time of declaring himself discontented in his employment and desirous of leaving it. It was his father in whom he confided, saying he hated gardening. The collecting and spreading of manure was distasteful to him and the bending hurt his back, which he had injured when he was fifteen lifting heavy sacks for his mother. He also averred that Thomas Flitton ‘had it in for him’.
It would be no exaggeration to say that Abel Bightford was more frightened than angry at this disclosure. It was not, after all, young Albert’s livelihood in jeopardy here but the whole family’s, for if he were obliged to continue working under Mr Flitton he declared that he would run away to Plymouth and seek his fortune elsewhere or even abroad. Abel went first to Thomas Flitton, a fellow-worker for many years and a friend. Flitton was obliged to tell the father that his son had proved unsatisfactory. He was surly and uncivil and complained constantly about pain in his back, behaviour Flitton found incomprehensible in one so young. He advised Abel to seek an interview with Mr Clive himself.
It is easy to imagine the terror this notion inspired in Abel Bightford. Probably, he had never spoken to his employer except when first addressed by him, had taken orders but not commented upon them and if his master levelled harsh criticism at him, accepted it as a servant’s lot. However, he plucked up his courage, and next day, while driving Mr Clive to a Landowners’ Association meeting in Yelverton, asked if he might have a few words with him at Mr Clive’s convenience.
How Luke knows all this he doesn’t say. Perhaps it all came out at the Assizes. I shall see when I get to the trial. Harold Clive sounds in some respects a reasonable man, not the ogreish squire of certain kinds of Victorian fiction, for when Abel spoke to him about Albert he was sympathetic. Apparently, he told Abel that he had a high opinion of the Bightford family and would be most unwilling to lose their service. The two men were agreed upon that and Abel must have breathed more than a sigh of relief. Clive asked if he thought Albert would be happier away from home and when Abel said he would, promised to see what he could do for him. First, it appears, he consulted a neighbour, a Miss Withycombe of Tavistock, believing she might be in need of a general handyman, and this woman gave Albert a week’s trial. He wasn’t satisfactory, though Luke doesn’t say why. With great forbearance, Clive tried again.
He was a director of the Great Western Railway. ‘Or something of that sort,’ as Luke curiously puts it. ‘He enjoyed considerable influence over whom that body employed.’ Whatever his position may have been, Clive secured a job for Albert as a porter at North Road, Plymouth station. One wonders at the wisdom, not to mention the kindness, in anyone’s finding a porter’s job for a man with a bad back. Stewart Luke doesn’t question it. It’s plain he’s never on Albert’s side. In his view Albert was lucky to get any sort of employment. He couldn’t have complained if he’d been thrown out to starve. Anyway, he took the job, no doubt having little choice, and though he walked the ten miles or so to Plymouth his first day he couldn’t walk there and back daily, so lodged with his aunt, Mrs Bightford’s sister Maria Mollick, who had a cottage five minutes from North Road station.
Albert Bightford was by now twenty years old. He appears to have led a solitary and dour existence, portering by day but speaking little to his fellow station employees, returning to his aunt’s house, eating his evening meal and retiring early to bed. There was a working men’s club in North Road at the time but Bightford did not visit its premises nor attend its meetings. Several of his fellows at the station invited him to partake of refreshment with them in the local hostelry but he always refused. It was remarked upon that he was never once heard to call any of them by their names. Even the station master, an august personage in these circles, who was addressed as ‘Sir’ was not so called by Bightford. He complained from time to time of pain in his back and of the peremptory way passengers spoke to him. Otherwise, he hardly spoke.
It sounds to our more empathetic twenty-first century ears as if Albert was suffering from chronic depression. Perhaps he’d been depressed for years but things were worse now he was separated from his family, his old home and the friends he perhaps had at Livesey Place. He knew no one but this aunt in Plymouth, he had no girl and no friends. Anyone in his situation today would call up sympathy and perhaps help from many quarters, he would be less isolated, he could have sought training for a trade and once over eighteen, lived on benefit until he got a job. Or that’s how it looks. Maybe it’s not that easy, but it’s certainly easier than it was in Victorian England.
Of course, from this distance in time and with so little evidence it’s hard to tell. Luke gives no help. Depression to him is a hollow place between hills. Albert may have suffered from something deeper and sadder than depression. It’s possible he was schizophrenic. The contemporary attitude would have been to tell him to pull himself together, be a man, that work and bettering oneself are what matter. A working man can’t have ‘nerves’ like the gentry, like a young lady. Over the distance of a hundred and twenty years one’s heart goes out to Albert Bightford, lonely and confused and in pain.
He was rude to his fellows and silent with the passengers. One day in early October 1883, when the express drew into North Road from London, a man called Sir James Thripp, of Caraman House, Plymbridge, alighted from a first-class carriage and told Albert to bring his bags out to his brougham that had come to meet the train. Albert said nothing but obeyed.
Later he said that his back had been painful. Whatever the cause, he dropped one of Sir James’s leather grips on the platform, for which Sir James, justifiably but perhaps harshly, reproved him with the words, ‘Look sharp, you damned fool! There are breakables in that bag and you shall pay to the last farthing
if any are broken.’ Whereupon Bightford set down the luggage he was carrying and replied in a loud carrying tone, ‘Call yourself a gentleman? If there is any fool here it is yourself!’
Very evidently he’d reached breaking point and he broke. So also did a glass case of rare butterflies Sir James was bringing home, for what purpose no one seems to know. The whole matter was reported at once to the station master, who was probably delighted to have a reason for getting rid of Albert. Nothing more seems to have been said about paying for the broken butterfly case.
Albert went home to Mrs Mollick. What happened between them isn’t known. He seems to have stayed with her for rather more than a week, during which time he left the house only to loiter, mostly in silence, about the station platforms. Finally, he was told to leave and not come back. While Eleanor Henderson was enjoying herself at her aunt’s, talking of her forthcoming wedding, appreciating the luxury of the house and walking (and bruising herself) with her cousins, Albert was either closeted with his, constantly berated perhaps for his conduct and no doubt repeatedly asked what he was going to do next, or hanging about North Road station. Mrs Mollick seems to have been a sharp-tongued woman who ‘stood no nonsense’. However it was, after nine days, she turned him out, telling him to go home to his parents. Albert protested that he couldn’t walk so far, he was ill and in constant pain. She insisted and he left her house at about ten on the morning of 20 October.