The Blood Doctor

by Barbara Vine

  Keeping an eye on her, though she never wakes once she’s in a deep sleep, I sit up, switch on the bedlamp and open the Bulloch and Fildes I’ve brought with me. I turn to page 255. ‘The combination of a long day’s sun and a dry atmosphere renders the village a healthy one,’ Hoessli wrote, and at once I recognize the line. Where else have I read it? The Tenna population was on average 150. Poverty was unknown. Organic heart disease, scurvy and purpura were never seen, though inhabitants were prone to bronchitis, pneumonia and pleurisy. That’s familiar too, from some other source.

  Hoessli was by no means the first to research haemophilia in Tenna. Thormann published his findings as early as 1837. Another well-known compiler of haemophilia records was Grandidier who produced a monograph on Tenna in 1855 while a Dr Vieli, a physician at Rhazuns with an ancient family castle on the Rhine, contributed his observations to Grandidier’s work. In their time many haemophiliac males remained in the area but when Hoessli arrived in 1877 all were dead. No one could say, of course, how many haemophilia carriers remained.

  In the year of Henry’s death, a man called Ludwig Pincus quoted a newspaper paragraph that the girls of the Graubünden area where Tenna is, had refused to marry on account of the disease. His investigations found that there was no truth in this statement, it was a fabrication, but a doctor in the hospital at Chur discovered two cases of abstentions from marriage for this reason. In Tenna itself there had been no cases of haemophilia for thirty years.

  I’ve read all this before, of course, and struggled through the tables of inheritance and the lists of Tenna people who had, or might have had or carried or died of, haemophilia. They are exhausting to decipher and somehow unmemorable except for the case histories which shock or dismay. ‘Was called to Robert, aged one year and ten months, for epistaxis [nosebleeding]. Desired to plug the anterior and posterior nares [nostrils], but was resisted by the parents, who said the haemorrhage invariably lasted some days. Robert lay absolutely quiet, as if he recognized the danger of his condition. The blood slowly dropped from clots about his nares. The haemorrhage stopped spontaneously in five days. Robert is a bright strong boy, though spare. His skin is thin and transparent… Cuts or knocks are immediately followed by uncontrollable haemorrhage.’ Was it like this for George Nanther? Did his parents have to witness this? The doctor goes on to tell what happened when Robert injured his throat with a stick. ‘The blood was found issuing from the palate at no particular place. It was arrested but broke out again next day and continued all night. Blood was vomited…’ Robert’s ultimate fate isn’t chronicled but after a long catalogue of haematomas, swellings, bleeding and pain, the doctor leaves him, aged ten, with one damaged leg permanently affected, and goes on to his next case history. He mentions, among many others, six sisters of whom four gave birth to haemophiliacs, a family of whom there were nine haemophiliacs in three generations and a boy who died at the age of five after bleeding for six weeks.

  George Nanther, Kenneth Kirkford, John Corrie… I put out the light and lie wakeful in the dark thinking of Henry and Edith discovering, when he was perhaps nine or ten months old, that their younger son was a haemophiliac, and I wonder how they did. Perhaps his nappy pin scratched him. Or maybe he was older than that and walking and had his first fall. It doesn’t matter how. Henry would have been scarcely able to believe his eyes, that he who had studied the bleeding disease all his life should be cursed with its appearance in his own family…

  It’s a cloudy brightish morning. There’s snow on the mountains but perhaps there always is. Shreds of cloud drift across their lower slopes. The train takes us along the banks of the Walensee, then beside a wide rushing river, the Rabiusa, its water dove grey and its beaches grey sand. Lilies-of-the-valley are growing on the embankment, cow parsley and buttercups in the fields. Used to the kind of thing that happens at home, I can’t believe a bus will be waiting at Versam to take us up the mountain, though we’ve been assured it will be there – and it is. It climbs up a road where every flower seems to be coming into bloom, violets and daisies and more lily-of-the-valley, then there are hairpin bends and we look down into a mist-filled valley with a river flowing through it on which people are canoeing, shooting the rapids. Orchards are in blossom and the fields are full of yellow daisies. I’d promised Jude flowers, so I’m happy to see plenty. She tells me their names, says they’re wild orchids and geraniums, forget-me-nots and Solomon’s seal.

  I should have realized that if there’s cloud on the mountains, once we get up there and penetrate it we’ll find ourselves in thick mist. And that’s what has happened. We’re in the midst of it. The second bus, a small one, takes us to Tenna. And it’s very cold up here. The mist is white and drifting and it puts a touch of ice on the skin. Luckily we’ve brought warm jackets. We’re outside the village shop, a little supermarket of the kind you find all over Europe, and we go in and buy ourselves warming chocolate bars. The shopkeeper, who speaks quite good English, knows who we are and why we’re here. Everyone in the village will know, of course. The historian we’re to meet will be waiting for us, she says, and she points out her house, halfway up the next ridge of the mountain. I tell her we’d like to see the church first and, eating our chocolate, we make our way up there.

  It’s a pretty church, about as different from St Mark’s, Hamilton Terrace, as you can imagine. All they have in common is that they both have spires. Tenna church is white, its tower and spire adjoining it but not standing at the end of the nave as ours would. Both are roofed in grey slate. We go in, where it’s marginally warmer, and look at the fifteenth-century wall paintings, but it’s the churchyard I’m more interested in and the graves. I’m rewarded and disappointed, both at the same time. Rewarded because many of the names recorded by the Vieli-Grandidier-Hoessli triumvirate are here, people called Gartmann and Joos and Buchli. Disappointed because these Tenna residents all died fairly recently, there’s no one left from the nineteenth century. There’s no Maibach at all but a couple of Barblas are here and this surprises me. I’d thought it was a diminutive of Barbara but it seems to be a name in its own right, a Safiental name.

  Someone’s waving to us from just down the hillside. It’s the postman who’s married to the shopkeeper and is also the keeper of the archives. I’ve already been told the archives are incomplete and that the period I’m interested in is missing. Someone borrowed the church books – we’d call them the parish registers – twenty years ago and they’ve never been returned. The postman doesn’t speak much English but he’s very happy to speak German to Jude. She translates and tells me the books that cover a great deal of the nineteenth century and quite a lot of the twentieth are missing. I can’t understand how they came to let these documents out of their sight, let alone have them disappear, but I don’t say so. Missing archives are noted in Bulloch and Fildes, so losing church books seems to have often gone on in Tenna. Jude interprets that the ones they have cover from 1666 to 1791. Are these any good to me?

  ‘The trouble is,’ I say, ‘that I don’t know.’

  And I don’t. A Magdalena Maibach is listed in Bulloch and Fildes, among the Hoessli findings, as being born in 1721. She had several sons, two of whom merit no further mention, and they are not even named, while the third is listed as dying at the age of six, nachdem das Blut ihm alles ausgelofen, ist es in Gott entschlafen (after all his blood had run from him, he went to sleep in God). So this Magdalena must have been a carrier. She may be a forebear of my Barbla. But when was Barbla born? David Croft-Jones doesn’t know any more than he knows the birth date of her daughter Luise. I have to work this backwards. Edith Nanther was born in 1861 and her mother Louisa Henderson in 1837. So her mother Luise Quendon née Dornford may have been born any time between, say, 1800 and 1821, which makes it possible for her mother Barbla to have been born – when? If I had to guess I’d put her late in the eighteenth century or the first years of the nineteenth, and the archives for those years are missing.

  The archivist unlocks the
door of a wooden building rather like a typical village hall, but, because this is Switzerland, however remote, it’s very trim and neat. The books have faded brown pages in ancient covers. Jude translates and tells me the population used to be double the present number in the nineteenth century, something which doesn’t tally with Hoessli. The archivist goes into a complicated explanation of which books are missing but I can tell Jude’s giving up the struggle to follow all this.

  ‘Let’s just have a look,’ I say.

  And we do. I have very little hope of finding anything and all we find is a Magdalena Maibach, daughter of Hans Maibach and Ursula Maibach, born Rüchli, being baptized in 1790, the year before the church book comes to an end. I ask myself if Hans Maibach was the son of that Magdalena Maibach mentioned by Hoessli who was born in 1721 and who gave birth to three sons, one of them the sad child who went to sleep in God when all his blood had run from him. I can’t verify this because the relevant books are missing, but the dates work. Hans could be one of that child’s brothers, a haemophiliac but, like Prince Leopold, still well enough to grow up, marry and have children. In Hans’s case, he seems to have had just the one daughter, and not to have had any more. Perhaps he died. The archivist wants to show us much more, but I’m firm about this and say I’ve got as much as I want. Jude and I thank him and go down the hillside to the Hotel Alpenblick to see what they have for lunch.

  Goulash. We don’t have a choice. It arrives quite promptly, a rich brown stew with potatoes and peas and carrots, all served up together on our two plates. The dining room has a lot of carved wood, a wood floor and checked cloths on the tables. I tell Jude I’m so glad she came with me, I couldn’t have managed without her. It’s a strange thing that you can be married to someone for seven years, know they have a particular skill or knowledge you know nothing about, but never see or hear them demonstrate it. I’d never before heard Jude speak German, I just supposed she could because once or twice she had occasion to say so. It awakens in me a new admiration for her. And there in the cosy dining room of the Hotel Alpenblick I feel a strong surge of desire for her, a different kind of desire, and I ask myself rather uneasily if this is because her linguistic skill has made her into a slightly different person. She’s smiling at me as if she’s reading my mind, which I hope she isn’t, and I say hastily that what we found back at the archives place was wonderful, was more than I’d hoped for.

  ‘Could it be the same woman?’

  ‘Why would you call yourself Barbla if your name was Magdalena?’

  Jude doesn’t know. ‘The more I see of this village,’ she says, ‘so remote and isolated, the more I wonder how anyone living in it in those days could get to Versam, let alone London.’

  I agree that that’s a difficult one. It would be nothing today, it would be expected. A girl would have been studying English and come on a university exchange, or come over as an au pair or just on holiday. But no one left these villages in the early part of the nineteenth century. To get away you had to walk miles over the mountains, a trek that could only be managed in summer. There were no roads. This inaccessibility is what accounts for the concentration of haemophilia and why Tenna was such a rich fund for research by men like Thormann, Vieli and Grandidier. A woman married the neighbour who was there, irrespective of whether he bled profusely when he cut himself shaving or she had a brother from whom das Blut ihm alles ausgelofen. I say that maybe the historian will have the answer to both questions. We have crème caramel for our pudding and then big cups of coffee. Jude has a look round and comes back to tell me that perhaps we ought to be staying here, on the spot. But when we emerge into the chilly white mist I’m glad we’re not. If need be we can come back here on Monday. We walk up the hill and find the historian’s house. It’s quite a spacious chalet with chamois’ antlers stuck up under the wide eaves and its name Rösslihaus done in what I suppose is pokerwork. She answers the door to us, a stout elderly woman in blouse and skirt, her iron-grey hair in a bun. It turns out that she’s an amateur historian and she begins by showing us genealogical tables. Some of them go back to the start of the eighteenth century and a Hans Maibach is in one of them, as is his daughter Magdalena. As I thought, he died when she was a small child and his wife a few years afterwards. But this is no help to me as there’s no Barbla Maibach in any of the tables. Plenty of other Barblas are though, and the historian agrees that it was a popular Graubünden name. Too popular for me, I wish there’d been only one.

  About haemophilia she knows very little. After all, there hasn’t been any here since about 1870. There was none in her family, the Engels, or her late husband’s, the Walthers, and it’s true that when I look at their family trees there’s not a single name as far as I can remember that occurs in Bulloch and Fildes.

  ‘How would anyone have got away from here in, say, 1810?’

  Jude relays this to her in German and maybe she doesn’t put it any more tactfully than I did, for Mrs Walther takes it as a slight on her beloved Tenna and replies that she’s never wanted to get away. When she’s been to Zurich, as she has a few times, to Berne and even, once, to Paris, she’s been homesick and longed to get back.

  Jude asks her how would you have left the village then if, for instance, you were obliged to. Mrs Walther says that the first time she went it was on her honeymoon (Flitterwochen) but I tell Jude to ask her for what reason a departure might have happened nearly two hundred years ago. She can’t think of anything. People didn’t leave.

  ‘This one did,’ I say.

  I’m no more disappointed than I expected to be. Finding Barbla has loomed very large in my Henry-history but, after all, it’s not that important. When I do the chapter on his forebears and his wife’s I can write something like, ‘Edith had a Swiss great-grandmother who brought the haemophilia into the Henderson family,’ I don’t have to say how she came to meet and marry Thomas Dornford. And yet I’ll come back on Monday after I’ve had a day in which to think about it. I get Jude to ask Mrs Walther if Romansch is still spoken here. She says not, it never was spoken in the Safien Valley but only along the Rhine. I’ve been thinking about Henry – what else? – and since, I suspect, he only visited places where he could practise his Romansch, perhaps he never came here.

  We’re leaving when she says she’s thought of something. Jude listens carefully to Mrs Walther and tells me there’s a woman she knows living nearby who may help us. Mrs Walther refers to this Mrs Tauber in rather an awed tone, apparently because she lives in a castle. If we’re coming back on Monday she’ll do her best to get her here. We emerge into sunshine, the clouds all sinking behind the snowcapped ranges. From this steep hillside we have a magnificent view of mountains soaring into the blue sky, green and flowery meadows and the village lying there, its chalets red and black and the church tower pointing skywards like a silver knife. A ringing of cow bells comes from the cattle up on the slopes. Outside the Gemeindehaus the bus is waiting to take us back.

  A day, Sunday, in which to think about it. It’s a fine sunny one and we go for a long walk round the town, dropping in at a couple of churches to listen to the choirs and for Jude to hear the mass in German. All the shops are closed but cafés and bars are open. I consider the possibility of Barbla coming here to work in a hotel or inn and there meeting an English traveller called Thomas Dornford. Anyone might do that but I don’t think a respectable girl would have done so in, say, 1808. Also it seems unlikely that someone able to travel in Europe would marry a girl who served him in an inn. Unless he spoke German they’d have had no means of communication.

  We sit down at a table outside a café and order coffee. ‘If she was born after 1791,’ Jude says, ‘you won’t be able to find her. And she could have been. She could have been born in 1792 or 3 and still be Louisa Henderson’s grandmother. She’d be about forty-five. It’s quite possible to be a grandmother at forty-five and even more likely then.’

  ‘Then whose daughter was she? Not Hans’s. He only had the one child, Magdalena,
and he died when she was two.’

  ‘There was another brother, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Magdalena senior had three sons. One of them bled to death at the age of six. Hans grew up and married and fathered Magdalena junior but died young. Ofhaemophilia? We don’t know. If he had it Magdalena would be bound to be a carrier. But it would be unusual for the three sons of a carrier all to have haemophilia, so it’s likely Magdalena senior’s third son didn’t have it.’

  It seems like a dead end. I try to dismiss it from my mind for the time being. We eat a big lunch and go back to the hotel to sleep, make love, sleep again. In the evening we wander about the town holding hands. Like young lovers, we stroll along the river bank, stop to kiss, then go into a bar and drink wine, finally we find somewhere to have dinner. By then it’s quite late and we’re going back to Tenna in the morning, but it can’t be helped. It’s a long time since I’ve seen Jude so happy and relaxed.

  32

  I’m tired but it takes me a long while to fall asleep. I suppose there are too many things going round and round in my head. Versam’s been mentioned a lot since we arrived here, we’ve even been there en route to Tenna, and now at last I remember why it rings a bell with me. Or I think I do. Though I’ve brought Bulloch and Fildes with me, I could hardly bring the stacks of Henry correspondence, and I’m pretty sure it’s in a letter Henry wrote to Couch or Fetter or someone that the name Versam occurs. The context, I think, is a long walk he made from there to a village in the Safiental. The figure of twenty miles is given, I think, though I can’t be sure of this. But if it is, is the village Tenna? Even if Romansch was never spoken there? And I remember something else, or I think I do. That line from Hoessli about the climate of Tenna which Henry quotes directly in that same letter. ‘The combination of a long day’s sun and a dry atmosphere renders the village a healthy one…’ Unfortunately, I can’t be quite sure of any of this without seeing the letter and that’s at home in its appropriate folder on my work table.