by Barbara Vine
It’s true. I’d made what I thought was an intelligent guess. I’d no evidence.
‘How old was she? Forty-five? Forty-six? She could have thought she was pregnant. Or having the menopause. You’ve thought this up because you can’t think of any other way Henry might have suspected Eleanor was a carrier.’
‘There was the bruising too.’
‘Yes, but she mentions it in a letter to her sister Edith, not to Henry. She could have told him but you don’t know that she did. You’re adapting the facts to fit your theory.’
‘Then how did Henry know?’
‘He didn’t know. That’s the only explanation, the only one that fits the facts.’
‘Then we come up against coincidence again. The enormous coincidence that Henry, the top haemophilia specialist, married by chance a woman who was a carrier.’
‘Coincidences do happen, Martin.’
‘And you still think Henry murdered Eleanor?’
‘I do. But not because she might have been a carrier. Because he wanted her out of the way in order to marry her sister. It’s an irony, if you like to think of it that way, a man murdering one girl because she was possibly a carrier and marrying, as a result of this act, another who certainly was.’
Then Jude says something highly significant, a change from her usual determined efforts to make Henry a murderer at any price. She’s looking at David Croft-Jones’s family tree.
‘Where did the haemophilia come from?’
I say firmly, ‘A mutation in Louisa Henderson’s mother’s cells.’
‘Why should it have been a mutation at all?’
‘No reason. It’s just that John Corrie told me about a third of all cases of haemophilia result from mutation. Take Queen Victoria, for instance. There’s no evidence of haemophilia in her ancestry, though all kinds of speculation are rife, one being that some young haemophiliac was her father rather than the ageing Duke of Kent.’ Jude’s not interested in Queen Victoria. She takes her republicanism to great lengths.
‘If a third of all cases result from mutation, double that number don’t. Have you tried tracing the haemophilia back?’
‘It would be very difficult,’ I say. ‘We’d have to go back before records began. Louisa was born in eighteen thirty-seven.’
‘Just the same, I think you should try. Do you know the names of her parents?’
‘William Quendon and Luise Dornford.’
‘You pronounced her mother’s name “Leweesa”.’
‘In the German way, yes.’
Jude, who’s a German speaker, obviously doesn’t think much of my accent. She asks if I mean this Luise was German, do I know, and I have to tell her I don’t, I just assume she was. It seems of no importance. ‘I think I know the answer, anyway,’ I say. ‘I think it was this way. Henry was in love with Eleanor and he didn’t know anything about her bruising or heavy bleeding or any of that. The consultation her mother had with him was about something entirely different, her own menopause or a cold in the head, anything. He and Eleanor became engaged with the approval of her family, she went to visit her aunt in Devon and on the way back was murdered in the train. Henry grieved along with the Henderson family and, seeing them so often, sharing their grief, realized that he had a duty towards them. He owed it to them, trusting him and admiring him as they did, to marry their surviving daughter. Duty was very important to these Victorians. And why not marry Edith? Remember he knew nothing of the haemophilia. No one did, none of the Hendersons did. It was just in there, lying dormant.’
Jude says, but gently, ‘That has to be rubbish, my darling. He murdered her. He paid Bightford to murder her.’
28
I’ve reached an impasse with Henry. It’s a month since I’ve done any real research. The last step I took to uncover the mystery of how haemophilia got into my family was to ring up Veronica and ask her if she knew the names of any of Edith Nanther’s female forebears.
She sounded less than pleased to hear who it was. ‘I’ve already told you everything I know and a lot more than I wanted to.’
‘You haven’t told me what your great-great-grandmother and great-great-great-grandmother were called.’
‘All these greats,’ she said in a very impatient way. ‘It’s ridiculous, it’s so far back. Who cares any more? What can it possibly matter?’
‘It matters to me, Veronica. It may be important.’
‘Yes, I’m sure. In your judgement. Well, all right. But this is absolutely all I know. Lady Nanther’ – this ancestress we have in common suddenly ceased to be a relative and became a peeress – ‘Lady Nanther’s mother’s mother was called Dornford and her mother Mayback.’
Or that’s what I heard. I asked her to spell it. She didn’t want to but when I tell her David will want these names, they will be indispensable for his tree she becomes more willing.
‘All right then. M-a-i-b-a-c-h.’ Before I could get a word in she says, ‘But she wasn’t German, I can assure you of that. It’s a very rare old English name like her christian name. That was Barbla.’
‘Barbara?’ I said, thinking she’d developed a lisp.
‘No, Barbla. B-a-r-b-1-a.’
Veronica is seriously xenophobic. She kept and keeps on insisting Maibach wasn’t a German name. I don’t argue, there’s no point. ‘I have no foreign ancestry,’ she said. The very idea, that I could even have thought of it shocked her. I was not to let David get the wrong impression. She’d phone him and tell him the whole family is pure English as far back as anyone can go.
But David, I later realize, has other things on his mind. Georgie is pregnant again. The Holy Grail is only seven months old and Georgie is still breastfeeding him, but still she is pregnant again. She pretends dismay, but in fact she’s bursting with pride at her fecundity, a pure matter of physiology over which she has no control and has done nothing to promote. Much the same attitude in fact as Veronica’s pride in her genetic purity and mine, before I knew the truth, in my own.
‘I can’t imagine how it happened!’
She’s said it a dozen times with wide-eyed smiling incredulity. If she belonged rather lower down the social scale and was inclined to vulgarity she’d say David only has to hang his trousers over the end of the bed for her to be in the family way. Jude makes no comment on any of this. She hasn’t even mentioned it to me when we’re alone. I believe she feels none of it has anything to do with her, she’s a special case. Not for her this simple trouble-free fertility. When the time is ripe she will have a designer baby. It’s almost as if it’s another kind of thing altogether, because it will start off very differently from David and Georgie’s easy fruitful coupling and the result too will be different.
PGD is what she is going to have, Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. Only four clinics in the country do it at present and hers happens to be one of them. The last time she went there she came back and told me a heart-warming tale of a woman she met who’d had triplets as a result of the technique. David and Georgie are going to sell their flat and buy a house because the flat isn’t big enough for two kids but, paradoxically, it would be for three or four (or so Jude thinks, I believe) so we could do a swap and they buy our house. Jude doesn’t care. She doesn’t think or speak of anything much but babies. Full of hope and anticipation, she is simply waiting, biding her time until they say, now is the moment, tomorrow or next week or in two weeks’ time is the day we take your eggs and his sperm.
All this has brought me a kind of affinity with Henry, though. Poor Henry. Sometimes, surely, astounded Henry. That he of all people should marry a haemophilia carrier. The woman who was his wife and the mother of his children carried this tainted faulty thing, had now given birth to a haemophiliac son – and to how many carrier daughters? He who had warned King Alfonso not to marry the Princess Ena had himself done the very thing he cautioned the King against. Did he tell his daughters? Did he alert them to the consequences they might expect from marriage? In the case of the eldest did he warn
young James Kirkford as he’d warned Alfonso? We don’t know. But someone warned them or they somehow found out.
Isn’t the fact that they knew of the family inheritance the true reason behind Helena and Clara’s decision not to marry? I haven’t done any research but I keep looking at my copy ofDavid’s amended tree, pondering and wondering. In the Quendon-Henderson line it doesn’t go back any further than Barbla Maibach and the man she married, Thomas Dornford. David, temporarily indifferent to genealogy, couldn’t find their forebears or he hasn’t yet tried. Barbla married Thomas and they had a daughter called Luise. They had three sons too. Next to one of them David has put the initials ‘d.y.’ for ‘died young’ and beside the others only question marks. He hasn’t christian names for any of them. Luise married William Quendon and had two daughters and a son, Louisa, William and Maria. Louisa was my great-grandmother Edith’s mother and Henry’s mother-in-law. What happened to Maria isn’t clear. William died aged seven. Of haemophilia is what I guessed when I was trying to prove Henry a murderer but it’s only a guess. Louisa married Samuel Henderson and became the mother of Lionel, Eleanor and Edith.
Did William Quendon meet his German (or German-christian-named) bride Luise in this country or in Europe? When did he go to Germany or Austria, and why? People didn’t pop across to Europe a dozen times a year in 1830 the way they do now, unless they were rich or grand or both, in which case they might have done the Grand Tour. Perhaps he was and perhaps he did. When I do get back into my research I shall have to look into this. I roll up the tree. It’s no more use to me now.
I miss the House of Lords. Not in the recesses. Over Christmas and the New Year as well as in the slack times I barely noticed my banishment but now, at the end of February, when the House is getting busy again and the politics pages of newspapers are full of altercations among peers, bons mots from Earl Russell and quips from Lord McKay of Ardbrecknish, I feel great spasms of nostalgia and a real sense of the gates of paradise shut in my face. Not that it seemed much like paradise when I was in there, staying late at night to do a self-imposed duty, supporting a party I didn’t belong to and whose whip I hadn’t taken. I’ve given up taking Hansard, but I can’t resist reading the papers.
I miss walking in through the Peers’ Entrance, hanging my coat on the Nanther peg, mounting the great staircase, dropping into the Printed Paper Office to pick up the order paper and the amendments to a bill. But most of all I miss entering the Chamber, making a court bow to the mysterious invisible Cloth of Estate and taking my place on the cross-benches. Well, maybe not most of all. I greatly miss my expenses, which, because I haven’t been in there since the beginning of November, would have amounted to not far short of five thousand pounds.
PGD is going to cost us £2,500 a go. And very likely there will be at least two goes.
Both Lachlan and Stanley Farrow have invited me into the House for dinner. I’ve said a regretful no. I’ve done it once and I don’t feel like doing it again, facing the embarrassment of hanging about and waiting for them to find me in some area of the Palace open to the public. I can’t face walking into the dining room and having to pause and chat with a dozen old acquaintances, not to mention sitting tight, and pretending to read the menu when the division bell rings and they go off to vote. So do I wish I was back there? Not entirely. Sometimes not at all. But perhaps what I do wish is that I’d never been in there in the first place, for I’m no adherent to the theory that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
The House was a club to me as well as a legislative assembly. I do still have the right to book a table in the guest dining room once a month, but I suppose I’m too proud to avail myself of it and invite David in for a drink or a meal when he phones and says he wants to talk to me. Jude won’t have the Croft-Joneses to dinner here at the moment and I don’t blame her. She says it’s not that she minds seeing the Holy Grail or hearing about the coming child, but that she’s embarrassed by the way Georgie goes on, the pride she takes in conceiving ‘without trying’ and in that weedy owlish David’s potency. So we must meet outside, in a pub or something, and he selects the Prince Alfred in Formosa Street.
He’s there before me, drinking red wine, not being a beer man, and he launches straight into a request that Jude and I consider selling our house to them. Jude, apparently, in spite of her embarrassment at Georgie’s boasting, has told her about the PGD. This doesn’t exactly delight me as I don’t much want the Croft-Joneses thinking we’re on our uppers. I tell David I’m not thinking of selling. If Jude has a couple of children – I say it airily, great actor that I am – I’ll need a big house. This takes him aback. His wife or mine must have given him the idea I’d jump at the chance. I take advantage of his silence to apologize for springing haemophilia on him and I explain how it’s impossible for him and Georgie to have affected children. Of course it’s not impossible, Georgie might herself be a carrier or a spontaneous mutation might take place in her cells, but I say nothing of this, only that he can’t pass the family gene on.
‘I’ve talked to my GP,’ he says. ‘He said what you said, only with expertise.’
Thanks. I ask him if this has put his mind at rest and he says it has, especially with the new baby on the way. Has he spoken to his mother again? Apparently, she phoned him, indignantly wanting to know where I’d got the idea from that her ancestors were German. She won’t have it Barbla was anything but English, though she doesn’t know, she’s trusting to her instincts. She hates Germans even more than she hates Russians and Japanese, and come to that, the French, she has done all her life. He says that she’s told him William Quendon met his wife Luise in this country. Her father, Thomas Dornford, was a jeweller in Hatton Garden. Her mother Barbla had died in childbirth, giving birth to her second daughter, but David hasn’t put her death date into his tree because he doesn’t know it, and Veronica didn’t know it. Nor did she know precisely where Thomas Dornford met Barbla Maibach.
Yesterday was the day. I managed it with some difficulty and, going into no details, it didn’t take long. I suppose I’d worked myself up into such a state of horror at the prospect that the reality couldn’t have possibly been so bad. The ancient hospital sample was the first pornography I’ve looked at since I was eighteen and I think it was the same magazine. Jude’s eggs were taken and now we wait to know what can be grown out of the mix. I’ve decided I don’t want to hear how many of the embryos whose cells they test have the abnormality – remember my sperm may carry it too – and Jude doesn’t want to know either. All we want, all she wants, is to know they’ve found some healthy ones ready for implantation.
What would Henry think if he could know? Would he be fascinated, approving, delighted at this culminating breakthrough in a series of steps to put an end to inherited disorders? Or resentful that it didn’t happen a hundred years before? Would his pleasure be overwhelmed by his knowledge of the suffering men and women used to endure from their inability to limit their families or prevent abnormality? Would he think of children like his son George who, with these techniques, would in a few years from now never again be born?
Strangely enough, I feel a lot better now the deed’s done or the die cast or whatever. Presumably, since there’s nothing in Jude’s reproductive process that makes her miscarry, only the fact that she carries damaged foetuses, once she’s pregnant with a sound one she’ll carry it to term. Or am I being naïve and ignorant? Does the implantation itself conduce to the foetus aborting? I don’t know and I don’t want to know. If I tell myself often enough that I want this child, I’m going to want it in the very nature of things. I reason it’s a bit like the Alexander Technique. Repeat commands to the body often enough – ‘let the neck be free’, ‘the head to go forwards and upwards’ – and it will automatically respond. The same with the mind, surely. I want this baby, I want this baby, I even want three babies…
But I’m feeling better and able to get back to Henry research properly. To this end I’v
e got out my Bulloch and Fildes and I’m checking that it’s possible for haemophilia to lie dormant for several generations in cases when only female children are born. And it seems that it is, though in most cases the gene doesn’t really lie dormant at all. Male children are born, they have haemophilia and they die young from it. In my own family we find William Quendon (probably) succumbing to it at the age of seven and later on Kenneth Kirkford doing the same, at the age of nine. While I’m going through the various tables, David phones. I ask after Georgie. She, as always, is fine, and the Holy Grail is fine and what do I think of Yseult as a name if the expected one is a girl? Not much, I say. No one will be able to pronounce it. I didn’t know how to pronounce it myself until I heard him do it and then spell it out.
After that I go back to Bulloch and Fildes. Jude is in bed already. She’s sleeping away the time, she says, until they implant in her the healthy embryos. I scan the tables, all the statistics from Tenna and the neighbouring villages the haemophilia investigators compiled. And it’s then it happens. The name jumps out at me from all the other names: Maibach. And not just Maibach but Barbla Maibach. It can’t be my one, my great-great-great-great-grandmother, the date’s too early even for her, being back in the early eighteenth century, but it’s a collateral ancestress of hers, her father’s sister or aunt maybe. I must have seen it a dozen times before, I’ve been through these lists so often, but of course I’d no reason to notice it. There are a lot of other Barblas. It seems to be a local name, or a local diminutive of Barbara.
At least one of my questions is answered. Edith Nanther’s great-grandmother wasn’t German, she was Swiss. And she came from an area of Switzerland well-known for its concentration of haemophiliacs and haemophilia carriers. How on earth did she get to England and marry Thomas Dornford? People didn’t leave the Safiental. That was the point, that was why in-breeding perpetuated haemophilia, carriers marrying ‘bleeders’ and producing whole families of afflicted offspring. Bulloch and Fildes says: