The Blood Doctor

by Barbara Vine

  Of course, I’m now even more wide awake. I lie here thinking that the missed chance of speaking Romansch would weigh very little with Henry against the possibility of visiting the village made notorious among haematologists for its preponderance of ‘bleeder families’. Even though Bulloch and Fildes wasn’t to be published for another thirty years, he’d have read their sources, he’d read Hoessli, so they’d both have been well-known to him. Perhaps he was staying in Chur. It may even be that he didn’t know how relatively near Tenna was until he was there, reading his Baedeker. Still, I can’t check any of this until I get home. I can only speculate.

  Life is so unexciting in Tenna that the arrival of the bus in the late morning is an event. It’s even more of an event when strangers are expected on it. Several people are waiting outside the Gemeindehaus to welcome us. We’re escorted into the shop and given coffee and cakes. The white mist that looks like cloud when you’re lower down the mountain spreads its pall over Tenna and today it’s wet, condensing on our hands and faces and making us shiver. We walk through it up to the Rösslihaus but when it’s in sight I already have a pre-vision I’m going to be disappointed because there’s no car a castle dweller is likely to drive outside it.

  Hot chocolate and shortbread are provided to console us. Mrs Tauber couldn’t come because one of her children is unwell and the new nanny hasn’t yet arrived. I’m given her address and phone number and told she’s a doctor, though she hasn’t practised since she was married. But this leads me to think she may know something about the haemophillia and also won’t get uptight about its existence in Tenna. It’s when I’ve finished writing down the phone number from Jude’s dictation that I look up and see the eggs. They must have been here on Saturday but I didn’t notice them. They’re all red or brown or dark green with a white pattern on them of flowers and leaves or a more abstract design. Mrs Walther – she must have a first name but no one uses it or tells us what it is – says, and Jude translates, that the white isn’t painted on. What happens is that the whole egg is painted dark red or some other colour and the white design is etched out of it with a sharp tool. That is, the white is the natural colour of the egg under the paint. Eggs. The symbol of continuing life, eggs holding the X chromosome, ready to pass on beauty or ugliness, health or sickness, long life or rapid death.

  According to Jude, Mrs Walther is as disappointed as I am at her castle-dweller friend failing to turn up, but she has the added problem of feeling guilty about it. Jude reassures her, it’s not her fault, these things happen. We may as well give it all up and go home, though the bus doesn’t leave till four. Then Mrs Walther apparently has a brainwave and presents us with an egg each, compensatory eggs. She’s decorated them herself, a ginger-brown one for Jude with a white lily on it, and a red one for me with a wreath of flowers. ‘Typical Tenna,’ she says, smiling, and even I can understand her. She packs the eggs into individual boxes because they’re fragile and we have a long way to go.

  The mist has lifted so after we’ve had lunch at the Alpenblick – goulash again but different vegetables – we spend the afternoon going for a long walk along mountain paths and admiring the stupendous views. The bus comes on time, of course, and we go back to Versam and thence to Chur. The effect of all this has been to make me feel a bit of a fool and I ask myself what I really hoped for. Who now alive, after all, is going to know or care what happened to a young peasant woman born in the eighteenth century? If indeed she came from here. For all I know there may be Maibachs all over Switzerland, all over Germany and Austria for that matter. It would be a different story if, like Mrs Tauber, she’d lived in a castle, if she’d been well-born. I realize, as I’m getting out of the train at Chur station, that I’ve based my conviction about Barbla coming from here on the fact that, according to Bulloch and Fildes, a Maibach family lived here. But maybe they came from Nuremberg or Innsbruck, maybe Veronica has been right all along and they weren’t Maibachs at all, but Maybacks from Manchester and my woman had the fairly common English christian name of Barbara.

  If we get up very early tomorrow morning and take an early train to Zurich we could be flying to London before lunch, but we’re booked on a five-thirty flight in the afternoon and we may as well stick with that. Besides, Jude likes it here. She wants to linger a while in the oldest town in Switzerland, eat in a good restaurant tonight and visit the Rhaetian Museum in the morning. She’s a relentless museum visitor and no holiday is complete for her without ‘doing’ as many of them as she can find. We unpack the painted eggs and Jude says they must be a symbol of hope and of the child she’s sure will be born next year. She knows what I think of hope but she doesn’t say so.

  The museum visit completed, we take a mid-morning train to Zurich and get there in time for lunch, but we still have two or three hours before we need to leave for the airport. The Bahnhofstrasse, according to Baedeker, is one of the finest shopping streets in Europe, but Jude doesn’t want to go shopping, which is just as well considering the state of our finances. She wants to go to more museums.

  I’m booking us into an hotel and Jude is beside me, as excited as I am and not at all perturbed at having to stay on another day. And, as we go up in the lift to our room, I’m reflecting on the operations of chance and contingency. We only had time for one, or at the most two, museums, and Zurich is full of them. She might so easily – for the choice was left to her – have chosen the Thomas Mann Archives in the Schönberggasse, she nearly did, or the Johanna Spyri Foundation – she loved Heidi as a child – but she chose the Zunfthaus zur Meisen Ceramic Collection and the Barengasse Museum of Domestic Life. The ceramics were obvious, she loves china, but why domestic life? Not specially to her taste, I’d have thought, she’s never been an interiors woman, a ‘her indoors’. But thank God she did.

  We were looking at a very upper-class interior, a living room in a small castle on the Rhine called Schlössli Benediktus. The Rhine is a huge river and there was no reason for me to place it anywhere near Tenna. Nor did the photograph of the house, diminutive as castles go, turreted, steep-roofed, with soaring mountains behind, bring any revelations. Enlightenment came from a book which lay open on a small table between a harpsichord and a chaise longue. To me it meant nothing. I can’t read Gothic and this book, which was obviously a diary, was handwritten in that curlicued, elaborate and now obsolete German script. Jude can, up to a point. She looked at the open pages, then at me, then at the left-hand page again.

  ‘Martin, there’s something…’ She had gone rather pale.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said.

  ‘I’m fine.’ She took hold of my hand and for a moment held it tightly. ‘The name Magdalena Maibach is on that page. And a sentence later, “Barbla”.’

  ‘Can you read it?’

  She sighed with exasperation. ‘Not really. I could have once. I’ve forgotten how. I think it says something like, “give her a new name”. It’s definitely “neue Name”, I’m sure of that.’

  The date on the legend beside the diary was 1793 and the author of the diary given as Gertrude Tauber, a widow and owner of the castle since her husband’s death four years before. All this was in English as well as German. A pity they didn’t have a translation of the diary as well. It gave, the legend went on, a fascinating picture of upper-class domestic life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

  ‘If we asked the curator to let us have a closer look, always supposing he or she would, do you think you could read it then?’

  ‘Darling, I know I couldn’t,’ Jude said.

  ‘What do you think it means, this woman, this castle-dweller, re-naming a child called Magdalena, Barbla? Who was she to do that? What right had she?’

  ‘I don’t know. But listen, wasn’t the woman Mrs Walther mentioned called Tauber? And, Martin – this is getting exciting – didn’t she say she lived in a castle? This woman could be her ancestor. We have to know. And we’ve got a flight to catch in two hours’ time.’

  ‘Fli
ghts can be cancelled,’ I said.

  We had to have a hotel room before we could start making phone calls. Or Jude could. She’s the one with the German and, blessedly for me, she seems quite to enjoy practising it. So we’re in our room, a much more sophisticated and elegant place than the one in Chur, and Jude is making phone calls and I’m washing our underclothes in the bathroom sink. We thought Lorraine could have done them tomorrow but we won’t be home tomorrow, we’ll be – where?

  ‘At Schlössli Benediktus, if we can find a way there,’ says Jude.

  She doesn’t know yet. She’s spoken to Mrs Walther who has confirmed we’ve got the right Tauber and that she’s just heard ‘Franziska’s’ child is better and she’s given her the phone number.

  I come out of the bathroom, my hands full of wet tights and underpants. ‘Franziska being the present Mrs Tauber?’

  ‘That’s right, the one who was a doctor.’

  ‘I’d like to see inside a little castle on the Rhine,’ I say.

  But that’s not our destiny. The first time Jude phones the line is engaged and she waits impatiently, but after about ten minutes Franziska Tauber answers. Within seconds Jude’s speaking English, saying she’ll cancel our flight, we’ll see Mrs Tauber tomorrow, her husband will be so grateful, she can’t thank her enough, et cetera.

  ‘In Chur. She’ll meet us in Chur. She has to go there to meet someone. We could get the flight tomorrow or would Thursday be safer?’

  Thursday, I tell her, you never know what we may have to follow up.

  Franziska says gently, ‘I believe you’re trying to trace a woman called Magdalena Maibach.’

  We’re all drinking coffee at a table outside the Café Cuera which is on the banks of the river. Franziska – she’s asked us to call her that – is about Jude’s age, tall, thin, very fair. We’ve asked her to lunch with us but she can’t. That’s the purpose of her visit here, to lunch with someone else.

  ‘I’m trying to trace a woman called Barbla Maibach.’

  ‘Yes. One and the same, as I expect you guessed.’

  ‘We didn’t guess. My wife saw the names in a diary in a museum in Zurich.’ I feel a great surge of excitement, which is ridiculous when I haven’t yet got any proof.

  ‘The Gothic script defeated me,’ says Jude.

  ‘Understandable. It defeats me. Barbla was adopted by my husband’s ancestress, his great – multiplied by six or seven – grandmother and taken away from Tenna. It’s all in the journal she kept. Her name was Gertrude Tauber, born Wettach. She had one child of her own, a son, and then her husband died. After that she adopted two children.’

  I hardly dare ask. ‘Is there anything in the diary about haemophilia?’ I ask.

  ‘Lots, but it’s mostly wrong.’

  I ask her if she has copies of the diary but she hasn’t. She’s read it. She and her husband both read it before they gave it to the museum. Would I like her to tell us the story? I nod, I say yes, please. I want to know everything there is to be known.

  ‘Magdalena Maibach,’ Franziska begins, ‘was born in Tenna in 1790. Her father was Hans Maibach and her mother Ursula Rüchli. You already know that? Right. Hans had haemophilia. While his father was a “foreigner” from Rhazuns, his mother was Magdalena Gartmann, einer den Bluterfamilien, and certainly a carrier, but he seemed not to be a bad case. He had various problems in youth, especially when a tooth was extracted, and apparently he was never without haematomas and purpuric spots.’

  At this point Jude asks the waitress for more coffee for all of us. Franziska says no more coffee for her, she gets too hyped-up. She’ll have orange juice.

  ‘Hans grew up, married, fathered this one daughter and died when she was two. Another tooth had been lost, and bleeding from the socket lasted three days. The following week a horse pulling a cart he was travelling in bolted and threw him and he cut his head on a rock and bled to death. It’s all in the journal. Gertrude was fascinated by haemophilia and went about the villages observing cases, though of course she was dreadfully ignorant of its causes and how it was passed on. But everyone was ignorant, including the doctors. Quite a lot of them thought it and scurvy were the same disease.’

  In the following couple of years his wife Ursula died of tuberculosis. ‘Hoessli says there wasn’t any in Tenna,’ I say. Maybe I’m just trying to impress her.

  ‘Hoessli says a lot of inaccurate things, but he wasn’t alone in that. The child Magdalena was left to the care of her aunt, her mother’s sister and a healthy woman, not a carrier as far as is known. She had three healthy sons. Whether the daughters were carriers isn’t known. But there were seven children and, quite naturally, she didn’t really want an eighth to care for.’

  The coffee and orange juice come and rather wonderful Swiss cakes which Franziska refuses but we can’t resist. The sun has come out and it’s quite hot, light sparkling on the river. Franziska goes on to say that Gertrude Tauber had by this time adopted a little boy whose parents had also died and she offered to take Magdalena. She had theories of her own about the ways haemophilia was transmitted and because the sons of a haemophiliac can never themselves be haemophiliacs she assumed that their daughters couldn’t be affected either. Where she had seen cases of the daughters of haemophiliacs giving birth to haemophiliac sons, she believed this had been passed on through those daughters’ mothers. According to this theory, a haemophiliac demonstrated the disease which manifested itself in him in that generation but, with his death, came to an end in that family line. Therefore, she had no fears that in adopting Magdalena she was taking on a carrier of the bleeding sickness.

  As soon as she had taken the child back to the castle with her she renamed her. She wrote in her journal that she had always disliked the name Magdalena and wondered at its popularity in Graubünden. Why name your daughter after a loose woman out of whom Our Lord cast seven devils? She called her Barbla instead, the name she would have given her own daughter if she’d ever had one.

  ‘As you probably know,’ Franziska said, ‘adopting a child in those days was very different from what it would be now. Well, it was very different not only in the nineteenth century but pretty well up to the Second World War. You didn’t have any authorities you had to satisfy with your credentials. No one did a – what do you call it? House study?’

  ‘Home study, I think,’ says Jude.

  ‘Right. You just took on a child its parents didn’t want or, more likely, couldn’t afford because they’d already got seven others. And you didn’t feel you were obliged to treat it exactly as if it were your own, give it the same status and privileges. Gertrude wasn’t an aristocrat but she was certainly upper class. She was the lady of the manor and Hans Maibach was a cowherd. The little boy she’d adopted was some relative of her own, she doesn’t say precisely what, but refers to him as “my kinsman’s boy”. So Magdalena, or Barbla as she’s become, never lived on quite an equal footing in the household. By the way, I haven’t asked you, what was she to you?’

  ‘Barbla? My grandmother four times great.’

  ‘Ah. I see why you want to know.’

  She took her meals in the servants’ hall but spent time with Gertrude, who taught her to read and write and, later, to speak French. She might play with the other adopted child but not think of him or refer to him as her brother. With Gertrude’s own son, the heir, she was not allowed to play and had to address him as ‘mein Herr’. It looks as if Gertrude intended her to become a governess or perhaps an upper servant and it’s hard to see for what purpose she adopted her in the first place. Not to be a companion, certainly not a daughter, perhaps it was only done out of duty and charity.

  There are long gaps in the journal, Franziska says, and many entries where the girl is never referred to. After that we only hear of her as accompanying Gertrude on a visit to Bern and another to Vienna, but in what capacity isn’t clear. But if Barbla was originally destined for a lady’s maid, this plan appears to have been dropped. Still, Gertrude is relieved
when her son Sigmund departs for the University of Vienna. Though only fourteen Barbla is too good looking for them to associate any longer. But three years later Gertrude writes of Barbla as accompanying her to the opera in Salzburg, then to a ball in Rome. Apparently, she is very pretty, a blue-eyed, full-lipped blonde, and I’m reminded of her great-granddaughter Edith, Henry’s wife. For I’m certain now that this is my ancestress.

  They visit Paris and Amsterdam. Barbla is twenty. Gertrude, who is now immensely proud of her good looks and ‘ladylike ways’, is probably regretting she turned her into a bit of a Cinderella in her early youth but not regretting Sigmund’s departure. He is now betrothed to a suitable girl of his own class. A young Englishman who has come to Amsterdam to buy diamonds sees Barbla at some function and comes to call. Gertrude calls him ‘junge Herr Donfort’ and I don’t think I’d be making too conjectural a leap to identify him as Thomas Dornford, the jeweller from Hatton Garden. The journal stops for a long while after that. The next entry – or the next extant entry – is six years later and all Gertrude wrote was, ‘Barbla delivered of a son.’ He would have been Luise Quendon’s younger brother, I suppose.

  ‘Did he have haemophilia?’ I ask Franziska.

  ‘I don’t know. No one knows. Gertrude was sixty by then and sixty was old in 1816. She gave up the journal a year later and died in 1820.’

  That’s it then. Everything I wanted to know and more. There’s a lot to think about. I say a very heartfelt thanks to Franziska and she says it was a pleasure, it’s always enjoyable imparting information. Jude compliments her on her English and she says, nothing to be proud of, her mother’s English. Then she leaves, saying she has to meet her friend at twelve-thirty and will I send her a copy of my book when it comes out?