by Barbara Vine
What was wrong with Albert’s back? It sounds like a slipped disc. Or possibly he’d damaged his spine even more seriously. Young boys in the Nazi concentration camps, forced to move heavy machinery or carry loads, often did damage to their backs which, if they survived, lasted into old age. No doubt a similar thing happened to Victorian youths who were set to manual work without thought that they might be too young and too vulnerable for it. Did Bightford have baggage of his own to carry? We’re not told, but he could hardly have taken up more or less permanent residence with Mrs Mollick and brought no belongings with him. Perhaps this particular morning was breaking point rather than when he was rude to Sir James Thripp. He is out in the street, in pain, carrying his own luggage, unable to get home and, in any case, afraid to confront his father. When the London express drew into Plymouth he gets on it. Meaning to go where, do what? No one knows. It’s likely he didn’t know himself.
Apparently, he bought a ticket to London, Paddington, so he intended to get as far as that. This last rail journey he ever made was also the first time in his life he’d ever been in a train. He sat in a third-class carriage – but not for long. It’s not known what made him get up and walk through the train, complaining to anyone who’d listen that he’d been unfairly dismissed from his portering job. It was atypical behaviour for this morose and usually silent young man. Mental disturbance changes people’s characters and this has to be the answer. I suppose.
The train passed through Newton Abbot, Teignmouth and Dawlish, followed the few miles of beautiful route along the South Devon coast and approached within a dozen miles of Exeter. Albert Bightford entered the carriage where Eleanor sat alone.
Here Stewart Luke digresses to give some family background. To him, writing in Edwardian times, long before women ceased to be defined by the men connected to them, the most important thing about Eleanor is her link with the eminent Dr Nanther. He continually refers to him as Lord Nanther, though Henry wasn’t ennobled until thirteen years later. He gets his degrees and orders wrong (describing him as KCVO, an order of chivalry not instituted until 1896), his position in Queen Victoria’s household and his age, describing him as being forty-five at the time of the murder. But he obviously reveres him. Brilliant Henry. Courtly Henry. Although he calls Eleanor ‘the unfortunate young lady’ and expresses suitable Edwardian shocked horror at the mode and manner of her death, it’s Henry’s loss he dwells on, the blighting of Henry’s happiness and Henry’s amazing devotion to the Henderson family after the loss of his ‘betrothed’.
No attempt is made to account for Bightford’s strangling Eleanor. Motive, of course, is of little significance in British justice. Perhaps, even then, people knew how hard it is to explain human actions, why any of us do the seemingly inexplicable things we do. Psychology and psychiatry can account for some of them but not all. The great mystery remains. Albert Bightford had no girlfriend, had apparently never had one. Was he attracted to Eleanor and did he make an advance which she repelled? He pulled the scarf from her neck – did he do so during an attempt at an embrace? Or did she insult him as Sir James had? Not when he dropped something of hers but when he tried to confide his miseries to her? ‘He saw red,’ Luke writes, using the old bullfighting metaphor not very helpfully. Why he makes no attempt to explain. Albert strangled Eleanor, opened the door or just the window, and threw her body from the train.
The rest of Stewart Luke’s piece is mainly concerned with the trial itself. First he tells how Albert left the train at Exeter and went home to his parents at Tavistock. How he got there neither he nor anyone else seems to know. Walking the distance would have taken a couple of days but people did walk long distances in those days – remember Henry in Switzerland – and some did so when not in the best of health. Once at Livesey Place Albert must have asked his father to hide him and perhaps told his father he’d be wanted by the police but not why. Or he told him why, because he was driven to desperation, struggled to give some explanation for the most heinous of crimes. Whatever it was, Abel refused, turned Albert out and left him to be discovered sheltering in a shepherd’s hut on Dartmoor. It’s a cruel, miserable story as much for Albert Bightford as for my great-great-aunt Eleanor.
But is there another possible motive? Was Albert employed by someone else to do the deed? He might have done it for money. Fifty pounds would have been a fortune to him, twenty a great deal of money. He could have gone to America on it, gone almost anywhere, begun a new life. But if he was a hitman, paid to kill Eleanor, wouldn’t he have told his father, told the police? What did he have to lose? And he’d surely have been paid first, or paid half first. Why not use this money to hide himself, to lose himself, which was not a difficult thing to do in 1883? No money was found on him. That means nothing, he may have hidden it somewhere, or even buried it on the Moor. None of this accounts for his failure to say anything about a conspiracy when he was captured.
I’m thinking, of course, of Henry. Henry had motive enough for killing Eleanor. His whole future happiness was at stake. If he married her he chanced having handicapped sons and carrier daughters. If he jilted her he stood to lose his position with the Queen and his reputation. But why pick Albert Bightford to do it for him? Did he even know Bightford? Perhaps, but how is another matter. Possibly he was acquainted with Harold Clive or Beatrice Withycombe or Sir James Thripp, all ‘gentlefolk’ quite likely to have been among his acquaintance. On the other hand, it may have been that Maria Mollick was related to one of his servants or was once employed by him or connected to the Dawson-Brewer family. Public records are obviously to be consulted here – then Debrett? Or maybe something called Kelly’s Handbook to the Titled, Landed and Official Classes? It seems impossible now that the real truth can ever be discovered, but if something in Henry’s life could show me that in 1883, between January and October, he made a train journey to or from Plymouth it would be a help. There’s nothing in the diaries and nothing in Alternative Henry.
How am I going to find out?
27
My wife is telling me, in a quietly conversational tone, that sex is no longer necessary for us. Has that occurred to me? The important thing is for her eggs to be taken and my sperm produced. Of course, she says, it wouldn’t matter if there were sex, all she’s saying is that it’s not a ‘prerequisite’.
‘Thanks very much,’ I say, because all this is making me angry now. It’s happening after they’ve secured her eggs and I, in humiliating circumstances, as you’d expect, have supplied the fertilizing elixir. If it doesn’t work I’ll have to do it all over again.
‘It’s worse for me, darling,’ she says.
It probably is, but she wants this baby and I don’t. My face is stiff with smiling and pretending. Still, I don’t see any way out of all this simulation. The alternative is the end of our marriage. These past few weeks I’ve come to see that losing Jude – even the changed Jude she’s becoming – would be the worst thing that could happen to me, the thing I can’t contemplate without panic, without a sense of standing on the edge of an abyss. But to keep her, can I bear anything? The loss of this house, maybe three squalling babies, the imperative to give up writing and get some sort of job? Can I bear no sex with her?
‘You didn’t mean that, did you?’ I ask. ‘That sex wasn’t necessary?’
‘Oh, darling,’ she says, but she doesn’t touch me, she doesn’t take my hand and kiss it. ‘I was only saying such are the miracles of science that to have babies we don’t need each other in that way.’
Babies. ‘In that way.’ It sounds like the sort of euphemism my great-grandmother Edith might have used. Jude and I go back home, the process set in motion, the die cast. I ought to sit down with her. I ought to open a bottle of champagne. Make the most of it before it’s banned lest the twinnies are born with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. I ought to drink a toast to our future as parents and plan the nursery in the top-floor flat we’ll no doubt have to buy in Maida Vale. But I can’t face any more and I go into my study i
nstead to contemplate the stacks of Henry-history.
For a little while I just shift papers about, open folders and look at them unseeing. But the mystery of Henry still has the power to distract me and presently I’m once more caught up in his life. I’ve said there’s nothing in the diaries or the notebook about a visit to Devon but I’ll have to check them again. There are hundreds of letters, neatly filed according to the year they were sent and the name of the sender. One consolation is that I don’t have to examine any written before 1862, the date of Albert Bightford’s birth, or after 1883, the time of the murder. I’ve photocopied every letter I’ve got, but even so many of them have to be read with the aid of a magnifying glass.
The best (or the worst) discovery to make would be that Henry knew Harold Clive. Suppose, for instance, he and Richard Hamilton had been on a walking tour on Dartmoor some few years prior to Hamilton’s death in 1879? There are dozens of letters from Hamilton in the collection and thirty from him to his sister Caroline. Hamilton’s handwriting is clear and upright, thank God, and doesn’t need magnification. But although there are plenty of references to walking trips with Henry in them, all these seem to have been in Scotland and Yorkshire with a single excursion to the Peak District. In one of the last letters Hamilton ever wrote to his sister, the date October 1879, he refers to a holiday he’s taken in south Cornwall some years before but that was a very long way from Dartmoor then, and though it’s likely he passed through Plymouth to get there, Bightford was an under-gardener at Livesey Place at the time and had never yet been in a train nor, presumably, on a station platform.
I go through Henry’s letters to his mother and Elizabeth Kirkford’s to her mother but to no avail, and then my conscience smites me as it has a way of doing. I put the letters away, find Jude and open that champagne. She’s so happy and pleased about everything she hasn’t noticed my lukewarm response nor my ill-concealed dismay and she actually asks, for the first time for weeks, ‘How’s Henry getting on?’
I tell her and she says she’s not surprised. ‘I told you he was up to something.’
‘Yes, but you said that about his reasons for marrying Edith.’
‘So? Maybe he murdered Eleanor so that he could marry Edith. That’s being up to something with a vengeance.’
I say I can’t believe in a man of forty-seven falling in love at first sight with a woman he happens to see in the street and then, a few months later, falling out of love with her and into love with her sister.
‘What makes you think love comes into it?’
‘Not because I’m such a romantic,’ I say. ‘I can’t think of any other reason for his wanting to marry either of them. Can you?’
‘Maybe not. But you have to think of a reason for his murdering Eleanor.’
‘Would discovering his prospective bride was a haemophilia carrier be a reason?’
She asks if there’s any evidence for it and I say that there is. My explanation comes out a bit diffidently because I can tell she’s thinking of what she carries herself but she’s also thinking things are very different today, so she smiles and says I’m on the right track. We drink the champagne and go out to eat and it’s like old times. I can’t help noticing that as we go downhill there’s always the occasional good evening when we’re like we used to be, but even these are a fraction paler, a little bit less fervent, the mutual love growing infinitesimally weaker. The lovemaking that follows is good because I force myself to forget how it used to be.
I spend the morning reading the rest of the letters and get nowhere. Mary Craddock writes to her sister Elizabeth Kirkford in 1936 about a holiday she and her husband intend to take in Torquay, but that and Eleanor’s letter from Manaton are the only references to Devon in any of the correspondence. After lunch I go off to consult the Public Records. It takes me hours but I don’t find much. Or not much in the way of answers to my questions.
I do discover that Abel Bightford, Albert’s father, died in early 1885, not much more than a year after his son’s execution. He was only forty-three. Both the sisters married but not men whose family names occur anywhere in the letters or diaries. Jane Bightford and her sister Maria Mollick had fourteen siblings, but again none of them was connected to names appearing in any Henry documents. Harold Clive had been born at Livesey Place but his wife Anne came from London. Before her marriage she had been called Dixon and her birth had taken place in Wimpole Street.
This establishes some sort of link with Henry but a tenuous one considering that she was born in 1829, some forty-three years before he set up in practice there. Still, I’ll follow it up.
The Clives had no children. Nor, of course, did the single lady, Beatrice Withycombe, who appears to have been their friend. She was born in Tavistock and died there. If she was a distant cousin of Henrys there’s nothing to show it. The only point of interest is that her grandmother’s maiden name was Brewer, which brings me a feverish excitement at first, but as far as I can trace it back, from a completely different family from the Brewers of Euston (or, come to that, the Lord Brewer who bought my robe). Sir James Thripp was born in Highgate, seems to have lived in Richmond from the evidence of the births of his children there, and was married to a woman who had been a Justinia Gould.
If Henry paid Albert Bightford to kill Eleanor it looks as if he must have become acquainted with him on the platform at North Road, Plymouth when Bightford carried his bags from the train. But if he paid a visit to Plymouth, wouldn’t he have noted it somewhere in his diary for 1883? It was just the sort of thing he did note. No emotion, not a scrap of feeling, insight, observation, but only economical comment on journeys he made or was about to make. And he was very fond of trains. But would he have recorded this trip if during the course of it he set Bightford up as his hitman? No, but he would surely have noted down that he was about to make the trip, not knowing then that he would encounter Bightford on the station platform.
The difficulty here is that it’s preposterous. I try to imagine it and I can’t. Here is this respectable and distinguished gentleman, a Knight and royal physician, forty-seven years old, probably wearing a tailcoat and high silk hat, suddenly taking it into his head that the youth who’s humping his luggage would make a suitable murderer of his young fiancée. So he gets the youth’s name and address and that same evening leaves his hotel or the private house where he’s staying, pops round to Mrs Mollick’s, and conspires with the youth to bump off Eleanor, paying him fifteen quid in advance. It won’t do. It won’t do for a moment. However it may have happened, if it happened, it wasn’t like that.
Jude has alerted me to another difficulty. If Henry murdered Eleanor to remove the possibility of his becoming the father of haemophiliac children, why on earth did he stick around and marry her sister? For there was absolutely no reason why, simply because Eleanor was a carrier, her sister wouldn’t be. Two of Queen Victoria’s daughters were carriers as were two of the daughters of her daughter Alice of Hesse. Henry knew this better than anyone. And we now know that Edith was a carrier. The argument might be that he didn’t kill Eleanor because he suspected she was a carrier, but because he’d fallen in love with her sister. I find this as preposterous as the theory that he met Bightford on a station platform.
The whole thing is a mystery because as it stands it involves people behaving out of their natures, the way people don’t behave. They don’t do such things. I present myself with an account of what I think would have happened, given the cast of characters. Henry saw Eleanor in the street, fell in love with her, found out who she was and rigged up the mugging of her father to get to know her. This I can just about accept. He engages himself to Eleanor, then finds out from her mother that she bruises and bleeds easily and that Louisa Henderson had a brother who died young from haemophilia. Immediately he realizes that his fiancée may be a carrier. But he doesn’t plot to kill her. His whole way of life, upbringing and training, respectability and reputation, recoil from such an act. Anyway, it wouldn’t cross his min
d. He must extricate himself from the engagement.
This is tricky, especially since he’s already stood up Olivia, and he postpones the interviews he must have with Eleanor and her father. Meanwhile, Eleanor is murdered in a train by a crazy boy, suffering from clinical depression or schizophrenia. That lets Henry out. Free, he can do the decent thing and commiserate with the bereaved parents. And the bereaved sister.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, he marries that sister? No. Never. It’s absurd. But he did.
Henry’s practice was in Wimpole Street and Anne Clive was born there, seven houses apart. So the houses were not very far from each other. She was twenty-one when she married Harold Clive and that was in 1850, by which time it appears her family no longer lived there, since her father Richard Dixon died the following year in a house in Bloomsbury. I can’t neglect this sort of thing, though I’m coming increasingly to believe Henry had nothing to do with the murder. Jude, on the other hand, is adamant that he did. But she hates him, in so far as you can hate a man who died half a century before you were born. I don’t mind what she believes, I’m just so pleased she can talk about something other than ova and sperm quality and multiple births.
‘You do realize, don’t you,’ she says, ‘that you don’t absolutely know what this talk Louisa Henderson had with Henry was about? All you know is from his diary that she had a consultation with him. It may not have been about her daughter. She may have thought she’d got cancer herself, she may have had a haemorrhage or she may even have just had a bad nosebleed. God knows, I’ve had enough bleeds and I’m not a carrier of haemophilia. Why shouldn’t she just have asked him about something like I’ve had?’