by Barbara Vine
Control circumstances and do not let circumstances control you. That’s what he thought he was doing, not understanding it’s impossible. Thomas à Kempis didn’t understand either and nor did all the people who remember Henry Nanther’s words and think them so clever. Circumstances are bigger than you are. They are more powerful and that’s all there is to it. He’s a midget, cowering under their crushing hand.
Who can tell when the idea first came to him? Or why? It’s possible, even likely, that he saw himself as the martyr. Wasn’t it Jenner half a century earlier who injected himself with smallpox, having first been immunized, or so he hoped, with matter taken from cowpox lesions? Henry, supremely egocentric, may well have seen his actions in the same light. Experiments undertaken for the benefit of mankind, for the greater glory of science, but involving the sacrifice of the scientist. Or, at any rate, the sacrifice of the scientist’s happiness.
It’s probable he knew of Tenna’s unique peculiarity from his time at the University of Vienna. There, with his developing interest in diseases of the blood, with his fascination for blood, he would have read the papers by Vieli and Grandidier published a few years earlier. Who knows but that his fondness for walking in the Alps sprang from these findings? It seems highly likely if not certain that his first visit to Tenna was made at that time. Believing, erroneously as it happens, that Romansch was spoken there, he may even have set about learning the language with further researches in mind.
Was he looking for a specific haemophiliac family in the early 1860s? I doubt it. Had he been he’d have found one and taken the steps he took twenty years later at that time. Perhaps it didn’t occur to him. Or else it was only when he’d attained in almost anyone’s eyes – except his own? – spectacular worldly success, when he was the leading expert in his own field, a royal doctor, a professor, that he came to ask himself what in fact he had actually achieved. He had pioneered nothing, made no new discoveries, unless you can call confirming other people’s conclusions, such as the way haemophilia was carried and transmitted, a discovery. But suppose he had a haemophilia carrier in his own family? Suppose he had a haemophiliac of his own?
Did he at first dismiss the idea as monstrous? I’d like to think so, I’d like to think he had one redeeming feature. But I’ve no proof one way or the other. I’ve no proof of any of this except the knowledge that it has to be so, it’s the only explanation. I’m pretty sure that once the possibility had come into his mind it stayed there and grew, he couldn’t get rid of it even if he wanted to. He very likely told himself that if he lacked the courage to do it – for he saw only himself, only the great doctor, the Queen’s favourite, at the centre of everything – if he lacked the courage to do it, he’d regret this omission for the rest of his life. Control circumstances, that’s the answer.
The doorbell is ringing. Paul, of course, having once again forgotten his key. But it’s not Paul, it’s a man from the Maida Vale Society wanting my support in an effort to ban the two high towers they’re proposing to build at Paddington Basin. He wants to come in, he wants to ‘talk it through’ with me, and it’s in vain I protest that this is St John’s Wood, at least a mile away.
‘They’ll be visible from this house,’ he says, and as if this will clinch things. ‘They’ll be visible from Richmond!’
I haven’t the heart to tell him that the huge trees at the end of this garden block out any view as well as most of the light and air at the back. Instead I promise to write to my MP, the Mayor of London and a few Westminster councillors for good measure. He’s looking longingly at the whisky (or so I think) and suddenly I don’t want him to go, he seems rather nice, and I need someone there to talk to me, talk to me about anything, even planning authority solecisms, to keep me from Henry. But when I offer him a drink he says he can’t, he’s driving, and I realize it wasn’t the whisky he was eyeing but all my Henry stuff. He asks me what I’m writing.
‘Someone’s biography,’ I say but I don’t add, I was.
‘That must be very rewarding,’ he says rather wistfully.
‘Sometimes.’
I think to myself, when he goes Paul will come, I won’t have to be alone with these thoughts. As I let him out Paul will come and then Jude will come back. I’m a fool, aren’t I? It’s not my crime, my sin, my horror.
I go out on to the pavement with him and look tube station-wards down the square. There’s no one but an old lady exercising a Yorkshire terrier, no Paul and, of course, no Jude yet. The Maida Vale man gets into his car and drives off to his next port of call. I go indoors. Dusk is coming fast and if I went back now to look for my son I wouldn’t be able to see to the end of the street. What can Henry’s thoughts have been like at dusk, in the dark? When he was old, when he regretted what he’d done?
The idea was there when he was young and when he was in young middle-age but something had to happen to trigger it off, make it no longer a wild dream but a reality. The trigger may have been Dr Anton Hoessli’s publication of his Tenna conclusions in 1877 or it may have been Richard Hamilton’s death. Henry loved Hamilton and if he had been able to marry Hamilton’s sister – and so in a sense marry Hamilton in a way pleasing to society, binding himself to Hamilton for ever – the great idea might have remained what it was, the kind of horrible fantasy all of us have but never bring to fruition. The kind of fantasy I’ve had when I’ve hoped Jude would turn out to be irremediably barren or her child die. But Hamilton was killed in the Tay Bridge disaster. When that happened Henry may have thought that love and happiness were over for him and only ambition and acclaim for achievements mattered.
Two years later he was in love – or what passed for being in love for him – with Olivia Batho. At the same time he was conducting a typical Victorian gentleman’s liaison with Jimmy Ashworth. Neither of these relationships could be permanent, they got in the way of his grand design. It was time to pursue his researches into the haemophilia-carrying families further.
The phone rings and it’s Paul. A year ago he’d no more have phoned to say he was or wasn’t coming over than he’d have embraced me, something that does occasionally happen these days. He’s not coming but he’ll drop in tomorrow if that’s all right.
‘How’s Jude and my sisters?’
Did I say we now know for sure they’re both girls? I tell him they’re all fine. Jude’s round at the Croft-Joneses and I’m about to have a whisky. Oddly enough, I do feel like a drink now and I pour myself a large one worthy of Lachlan Hamilton. What did those Victorian gentlemen drink? I’ve never bothered to find out. Madeira, probably, and pints of sherry. Brandy, as Samuel Johnson says, is the drink for heroes.
Henry went back to Safiental, walking the twenty miles from Versam to Tenna, and began asking serious questions of the villagers. Haemophilia no longer affected anyone living there but it lingered on in men and women’s memories. This would have been in the spring of 1882. What he discovered was that a woman called Magdalena Maibach later called Barbla, had been taken from Tenna to Zurich and thence to Paris by her adoptive mother and benefactress. Barbla Maibach was worth pursuing. Her father was mentioned as a haemophiliac by Vieli and Grandidier and again by Hoessli, so therefore she must be herself a carrier. Henry believed the disease was in some mysterious way carried in the blood – what else? Perhaps, if his experiment succeeded, he’d find out just what that mysterious way amounted to.
I don’t know how he discovered what had become of Barbla but with many European countries starting to keep birth, marriage and death records, it wouldn’t have been too difficult. It would have taken time, that’s all. In fact, it probably took him getting on for a year. He discovered that Barbla married a Thomas Dornford, a jeweller in Hatton Garden, and had several children. One of them married William Quendon and became the mother of a certain Louisa Quendon, now the wife of Samuel Henderson, a Bloomsbury solicitor.
Why go to all this trouble when part of his job was treating haemophiliac patients? Surely he could have picked the daught
er of one of them. Easily, except that secrecy was of the essence. Who would believe that a doctor who warned the daughters of haemophiliacs not to marry and haemophiliacs themselves not to marry, would, in full knowledge of what he was letting himself in for, marry a woman who had a fifty per cent chance of being a carrier?
His diary tells me that in the spring of 1883 he went on a walking tour of the Lake District. I don’t believe it. He was more likely in Amsterdam, checking on the last stages of his hunt for Barbla and her descendants. His next step was to acquaint himself with the Henderson family. One way would have been to transfer his legal business to Samuel Henderson’s firm. There were a good many reasons not to do this. It was an obscure little partnership of three attorneys, struggling, not doing very well. For a man like Sir Henry Nanther to consult them would have looked odd, even suspicious. Besides, he had his own lawyers, eminent giants in their profession, the Mishcon de Reya of their day. Later on, of course, he did transfer his business but by then he was secure of a Henderson daughter. But for the present, the idea of staging an attack and a rescue appealed to his sense of drama. In any case, it was an excellent plan, guaranteed to earn him as rescuer the gratitude of Samuel Henderson and the approval of the whole family, besides providing him with an excuse to pay frequent visits to the house in Keppel Street.
Of course he couldn’t yet be sure that Hans Maibach’s haemophilia had been carried down the female line by subsequent generations. But even at this stage he could make an intelligent guess. Perhaps Barbla’s son had died young. Her daughter Luise had lost a young son, Louisa Henderson’s brother. There again this offered no positive identification of Louisa herself as a carrier and later, when Henry had been warmly received into the bosom of the family, it must have dismayed him to see Lionel Henderson enjoying good health and clearly not suffering from a disease of the blood. By then too he would have ascertained from Louisa or her daughters by subtle enquiries that the latter had no dead small brothers.
Before this he had directed his drama in Gower Street and it succeeded even better than he expected. I was surely right when I concluded, much earlier on in my researches, that he employed Brewer to do the deed for a satisfactory payment and the promise of a wife, a house and a lump sum for his half-brother. Presumably, the little matter of Jimmy’s pregnancy was glossed over. Henry was in, an honoured guest in Keppel Street and the recipient of confidences. The two girls were not so bad, not a patch on Olivia of course, but then Olivia didn’t carry haemophilia. He dropped her and soon afterwards he dropped Jimmy.
Now he had to make his choice between the Henderson daughters. It’s possible he preferred Edith from the first but made himself agreeable to both, trying to detect the signs, if any, of a haemophilia carrier. In his diary he writes that from early on he could tell that Princess Beatrice was a ‘conductor’ but this may have been no more than vanity on his part. No doubt he watched both girls carefully. At that time for a young girl to have mentioned menstruation in the presence of a man, even a doctor, would have been unthinkable. It was the height of indelicacy to speak of it in the presence of another woman, apart from one’s mother, and then in the most veiled and euphemistic terms. Girls were supposed to pretend ‘the curse of Eve’ didn’t exist. Yet something happened that summer to make Henry certain of his quarry and fix his interest on Eleanor. Can there be any doubt that this was the ‘consultation’ the girls’ mother had with him in July 1883?
I’m guessing when I say Louisa Henderson wanted to ask him about Eleanor’s periods, what we would call today her dysmenorrhoea. That and perhaps her tendency to bruise very easily. Would these disabilities mean she was a carrier? I don’t know but I’m sure Henry thought he knew. What is the answer, that is the question. He had that answer. In the following month he proposed to Eleanor and was accepted. Now he was engaged to a woman who was a direct descendant of Hans Maibach of Tenna, a haemophiliac, whose daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter were very likely carriers, who was herself almost certainly a carrier.
Any ideas I or Jude may have had about Henry arranging her murder in the Great Western train disappear now, for Eleanor was the woman all his researches and records-tracing had led him to, the more certain of the two sisters to be a haemophilia carrier. Her death must have been as great a blow to him as if he’d been in love with her. He had no need to put on a pretence of grief. Real sorrow and bitter disappointment were what he felt. Now he’d have to start again, perhaps return to Tenna, find another haemophiliac whose female descendants, scattered across Europe, might or might not have, as he saw it, the fatal flaw in their blood.
Or was there instead someone nearer at hand? Eleanor had a sister, more attractive to look at than she. But how to be sure this sister was a carrier? If he had another consultation with Louisa Henderson there’s nothing about it in the diaries but that doesn’t mean it never took place. This time it was he who was asking the questions and Edith’s mother supplying the answers. Henry may even have gone so far as to intimate to Mrs Henderson that he’d like to marry Edith but was worried about her health. Would she, for instance, be able to bear children? Did she too suffer from dysmenorrhoea?
For a prospective bridegroom to ask such things of his future mother-in-law seems to us a terrible instance of male pride in male domination, and the worst of bad taste. We revolt against it as the Victorians revolted against openness and calling a spade a spade. But taste changes, just as what it is acceptable to utter does. Besides, before we say any mother worthy of the name would have refused to discuss it, would have shown Henry the door, we must remember how dreadfully the Hendersons’ hopes had been dashed by Eleanor’s death. The good marriage, the big house in a fashionable suburb, the title, the famous eminent husband – all that went out of the window with Eleanor’s body. But they had been given a second chance. His eye had lighted on their other daughter and everything Mrs Henderson could do to encourage the match must be done.
So what did she say to Henry? Something which she, surely, believed wouldn’t have a discouraging effect. Perhaps that Edith’s periods though heavy were regular. As to the bruising she may have acceded to this because it would have seemed harmless to her. She may even – I am stretching rather far out here – have said that Edith bled profusely when she cut herself, believing this to be a sign of health.
As to Edith herself, was Henry so cold-blooded that he could transfer what affections he had had for Eleanor straight on to her sister? They were sisters, they may have been very much alike. By all accounts Edith was a steady, calm and phlegmatic woman, the kind who wouldn’t cause her husband any trouble. And Henry must have thought of the purpose of this marriage: to produce children. He wasn’t getting any younger, he’d become forty-eight in the February of 1884. Was he to begin the weary work of finding a suitable bride and courting her all over again when here was one for the taking?
Control circumstances and do not let circumstances control you.
Jude has come in, full of news about the Croft-Joneses’ new house which they move into next week. They have the biggest mortgage she has ever heard of anyone taking on because this ‘town house’ in Hampstead is costing them nearly a million pounds. I’ve kissed her when she first came in but now I take her in my arms and hold her, hug her so tightly that she struggles free and asks me what’s wrong.
‘Does something have to be wrong for me to hug you?’
‘It does when it’s desperate.’
She wants to know what ‘this’ is and when I tell her it’s Henry she casts up her eyes and says, ‘Bloody Henry.’
‘He was, wasn’t he? In more ways than one. If I wanted to be melodramatic I’d say he waded through blood all his life.’
She says I always want to be melodramatic and to tell her about it. So I do. I forget all that nonsense about treating a pregnant woman with great delicacy and I tell her. She takes the egg out of my hand and looks at it, at the place where my worrying it has begun to rub the red paint off.
‘He
was worse than even I thought,’ she says.
We go into the living room and sit on the sofa, side by side. ‘Go on,’ she says.
‘He married Edith, as you know, and got her pregnant at once. Their first child Elizabeth was born nine months later in August.’
‘Do you think Henry looked at the baby and wondered if she was a carrier?’
‘Probably. He’d have wondered the same thing about the next daughter and the next and the next. By the standards of the time he was becoming an old man. He might not live long enough to see his eldest married and discover if she was in fact a carrier.’
Jude has brought David’s family tree with her and she’s studying it. ‘By the time Clara was born he was fifty-five.’
‘Considered old then. Another thing, he still didn’t know for sure if his wife was a carrier. Four years later she had a son.’
‘Alexander,’ says Jude. ‘He still wouldn’t have known because Alexander wasn’t a haemophiliac.’
‘He may not have been sure of that for several months. He got his peerage but he still hadn’t achieved the groundbreaking discovery he aimed at, that which was to be the subject of his final definitive work.’
‘But two years later Edith had George,’ says Jude.
‘Yes, George. When did he know? Did he carry out some test to see if he bled abnormally?’
‘Don’t.’
‘I’m not going to. The boy seems to have been a severe case. I wonder if the parents discussed it much. We don’t know how close they were, only that Edith was the only one who could “do anything” with Henry. I’ve never considered till now whether she and her mother and perhaps her sister knew about the haemophilia in the family. They may have had some idea. Henry’s mother-in-law had seen her small brother die and may have been told what he died of. When Lord and Lady Nanther knew what was wrong with their younger son, her mother may have said something to Henry about her brother dying from a bleeding disorder and hearing that a similar thing had happened to an uncle.’