by Barbara Vine
Jude says, ‘So was Henry in the thick of it? Did he go out with one of the boats? Did he see those people or what they thought were people clinging to the wrecked bridge?’
‘I don’t know. Caroline Hamilton didn’t know.’
‘So they never found Richard Hamilton?’
‘Not his body, no. His luggage, a small suitcase with his initials on it, was washed up at Broughty Ferry with a box of table knives and forks, a package of two pounds of tea and a bunch of temperance pledge cards from the Catholic Society for the Suppression of Drunkenness, among a lot of other things. The Times says that two gentlemen – it doesn’t name them – had intended to board the train but changed their minds. Henry must have been one of them.
‘Caroline mentions Henry quite a lot. I don’t know how she knew what his feelings were but the most likely explanation is that he wrote her a condolence letter when he’d found out Richard was dead. Or perhaps wrote to Richard’s parents. Nothing was known of the fate of the train until next day. Henry may not have known the whole of it until he saw a newspaper in Huddersfield.’
‘His first thought would have been,’ Jude says, ‘there but for the grace of God. He’d have been shocked by the narrow squeak he’d had.’
Well, maybe. But he’d been deeply attached to Richard Hamilton and now he’d lost the sister and the brother. Jude wants to know why I believe it was grief he felt rather than relief it wasn’t him and I tell her because his character changed. Losing Richard Hamilton changed him for the worse.
Perhaps Hamilton kept him in check. He must have known about Jimmy Ashworth. An apparently chaste and celibate man himself, a Scots Presbyterian, he may have urged Henry to give up Jimmy and marry. Victorians seemed to think preaching to one’s friends about their conduct perfectly acceptable behaviour, so perhaps Hamilton preached at Henry and up to a point was successful. He could justifiably have said, ‘You’re past forty now and it’s time you became respectable and settled down.’ Henry had already met the Batho family by the end of 1879 and Hamilton may have suggested Olivia as a suitable bride.
I’ve a photograph of Richard Hamilton. He’s wearing a gown and mortar board, sitting in an armchair with one elbow resting on a bamboo table on which stands a potted palm. He might be Olivia Batho’s brother or Jimmy Ashworth’s. A very handsome man, he has their white luminous skin, dark eyes and hair, regular features. His mouth is well-formed and full for a man. Like them, he was Henry’s type. His was the appearance he was most attracted to, both for love and friendship. Yet after the disaster, Hamilton is never again mentioned in the diary. The entries become briefer and colder. His name never occurs in any of Henry’s subsequent letters. Richard Hamilton, dead under the waters of the Tay, passed from his life, superficially as if he had never been. This photograph, in its parchment folder, found in one of the trunks, is the sole memento of him, apart from his letters.
Henry never mentions his dreams in the diary or the notebook. But it’s common for a once loved and now lost person to make an appearance in dreams, promising to come back or denying that he or she has ever been away. So as I put all these papers back into the appropriate files and boxes I ask myself if Henry ever dreamed of Hamilton, of Hamilton as he was or as he might be metamorphosed into a woman or even of the two of them eventually sharing a home, two ageing medical bachelors. But more likely he pictured the storm raging outside the window, the bridge splitting and collapsing and the train breaking and falling in flames to its fate under the waters of the firth.
6
Jude says shrewdly that I may find some big sins when I learn more about Henry’s private life. The worst I’m likely to come across, I tell her, is another Jimmy Ashworth turning up after his marriage to Edith Henderson. A petty sin, a grubby one. I go downstairs and cut Mrs Caspar Raven’s picture out of the Sargent calendar. Jude and I look at it together, admiring the way Sargent could paint flesh, giving it that pearly luminosity, and Jude says Goya did the same thing in The Naked Maja. Taking my second long look at Olivia Batho Raven, trying to find a trace of resemblance to her grandson, Stanley Farrow, I see something spoilt and fretful in her face along with the imperiousness. And I think of some French count or other whose mistress threw her glove into the lion’s den, challenging him to pick it up. This awful feat he performed, whereupon the King of France said, according to Leigh Hunt, ‘No love but vanity asks love a task like this.’
Mrs Raven was the kind of woman who threw her glove through the bars of the cage and took away her favours if men didn’t brave the lion to rescue it. But her husband was the kind of man who’d throw her to the lion if she spoke to him like that. And, remembering what Lord Farrow told me, as I take the calendar page into my study and put it into Henry File I, I ask myself what sort of a life she must have led Caspar and he her. But what sort of life does any husband lead a wife and wife a husband?
*
I’ve never read about this or heard anyone say it, but I do wonder how many men in my peculiar position feel the way I do. It’s been growing for some time now, the feeling, to put it bluntly, that I’m wanted only as a sperm provider. Although it’s never been voiced, it’s there, real in my mind, and I’m pretty sure real and urgent in Jude’s. Her ardour, if that’s the word, happens to be strongest on those vital days in the middle of the month, on each one of those days. There’s no longer any spontaneity, but a calculated and I think simulated urgency. If I instigate our lovemaking there’s something unreal about her ardent response. I never get a ‘no’ or even a hesitation. Sometimes I feel like a fertility machine, to be switched on as often as possible. If I were eighteen I think this might be acceptable, but I’m not and it isn’t. And there are times now when if I don’t actually say no, I hesitate. A fear is taking root that I’ll become impotent.
And that makes it all the more strange that I have an erotic dream. I haven’t had one for years. If this were a matter for joking one might say I haven’t needed to with my passionate – if that’s the right word – bed companion. But I have one tonight, in the small hours. It’s about Olivia Batho and, strangely enough, her sister Constance, and Jimmy Ashworth. I’m Henry, I think, very correct in frock coat and silk hat, and they’re taking part in one of those tableaux vivants that were the Victorian equivalent of shows in strip clubs. They’re the Three Graces, naked and all looking like each other and like Jude. I wake up and turn and reach for Jude. She’s deeply asleep and she doesn’t want me. In sleep her contrived passion has gone away somewhere and her unconscious mind rules, the part of her that demonstrates what she really wants – or doesn’t want. She even murmurs crossly, ‘No, no,’ but I’m just as insistent with my urgent, ‘Yes, yes’ and she gives way with a pettish, still half asleep, ‘Oh, all right.’ This must be the first time for a year I’ve really wanted sex, really wanted, that is, what lovemaking should be, a free and spontaneous impulse. Only it’s not that for her and when it’s all over, which happens much more quickly than it should, I’m afraid – and I’m ashamed of myself later – I’ m exultant that I got my way for once.
One thing’s for sure. I’m pretty certain it won’t happen like that again.
Henry wrote his first book in 1869 when he was thirty-three. He called his book Diseases of the Blood and subtitled it Haemophilia in Europe and America. At that time medical opinion was that haemophilia had only recently become known. This was true, but it isn’t to say that haemophilia wasn’t happening. As far as is known men have been ‘bleeders’ and women carriers since the beginning of time. Diseases of the Blood was probably instrumental in moving the Royal College of Physicians to recognize haemophilia by name, which it did in the mid-eighteen seventies.
Haemophilia is a condition characterized by a chronic liability to immoderate haemorrhage. Certain clotting factors are absent from the blood of sufferers or are in low supply. The haemophilia gene is carried by females on one of their X chromosomes and that’s why, today, the disease is called an X-linked condition. A carrier has one X
chromosome with a normal gene and one X with a defective gene. Therefore there’s a 50 per cent chance of each of her male children having haemophilia and a 50 per cent chance she’ll pass on the defective gene to her female children, which means each of her daughters has a 50 per cent chance of also being a carrier. Boys born to a haemophilic father and a non-carrier mother won’t have the disease because, in order to be male at all they must have his Y chromosome, but all daughters born to haemophilic men will be carriers because in order to be female they must have his X chromosome. Most female carriers have no health problems related to the gene they carry but others suffer excessive menstrual bleeding, and copious bleeding after surgery or dental work and in childbirth.
Some of this was known in the later decades of the nineteenth century but nothing, of course, about genes or chromosomes. Nor was the cause of haemophilia known, so there was no effective treatment. What Henry did was describe all the cases documented or hinted at in medical and non-medical literature during the centuries of ignorance. He mentions Judaism’s Tractate Jebamoth in which the story is told of the four sisters living in Zipporah. The first had her baby son circumcised; the clotting factor being absent in his blood, he bled to death. Infant sons of the second and third sisters met the same fate. When the fourth sister had a son she went for advice to the Rabbi Simon ben Gamaliel and he ordered that her son was not to be circumcised. Since Gamaliel lived in the second century AD, Henry claimed that this was the oldest known reference to the disease. He writes next of Maimonides’ ruling that a boy was not to be circumcised if his two brothers by the same mother but by different fathers had died after the operation, though Henry of course knew by then that the condition of their fathers could make no difference.
He treats in the book of other isolated recorded examples, quoting the Al-tasrif of Alsaharavius, the greatest surgical writer of the Moorish period. There Alsaharavius writes of a village in Spain where men who were wounded suffered an uncontrollable haemorrhage. Boys whose gums were rubbed too harshly had also been known to bleed to death. In 1539 Alexander Benedictus described the case of a barber who haemorrhaged to death when he accidentally cut his nose with a pair of scissors. Another was that of a rare instance of the boy who at birth bled from the umbilicus. Henry comes to the nineteenth century and refers to Dr John C. Otto, a physician of Philadelphia and his An Account of a Haemorrhagic Disposition Existing in Certain Families, published in 1803. He lays before the reader ‘Nasse’s Law’, the assertion of Christian Friedrich Nasse, Professor of Medicine at Bonn, that males alone are the subject of haemophilia and females alone the transmitters, but adds the discovery he may have made himself but was probably made by some other, that the daughters of a male haemophiliac are always carriers. These principles inform Diseases of the Blood, a tome eight hundred pages long, packed with pedigrees, engraved maps of Swiss Cantons and New England counties, genealogical tables in which subjects are marked in black rings and carriers in white squares, and, of course, a learned, detailed, meticulous text that Henry evidently saw no reason to make accessible, still less interesting, to the layman. It is as dry as dust. I don’t know how I managed to grind my way through it. Difficult though it was, the medical profession liked it and it started Henry on the road to fame.
It’s unlikely that Queen Victoria read it. If she had, and understood what she read, if she had read there that life expectancy for a haemophiliac was eight years, would she have made its author Physician-in-Ordinary to her haemophiliac son? By the eighteen seventies the theory of haemophilia and its inheritance was well-known and thoroughly documented in publications of Elsaesser, Davis, Coates, Rieken, Hughes, Wachsmuth and many others. The late Prince Albert, always fascinated by anything scientific, and with German as his native tongue, would have been acquainted with some of them and would surely have passed information on to the Queen. Leopold’s haemophilia was known to his parents but the truth is that Queen Victoria didn’t want to know. Least of all did she want to believe that it was through her agency that the disease was passed. We can be sure she didn’t read Henry’s book, nor probably its successor, Haemorrhagic Disposition in Families, and equally certain Henry never passed on to her the current medical opinion, that marriage should be banned for the sisters of haemophiliacs. Taking that advice to heart would have prohibited the dynastic alliances made by at least three of Prince Leopold’s sisters.
Henry himself must have had something of the courtier about him to find his way into Victoria’s favour. We know he was handsome from his photographs, that he had a beautiful voice, ‘low, rich and mellifluous’, from a letter Olivia Batho’s sister Constance wrote to her friend Lucy Rice. Henry was learned, with probably a charming bedside manner, and can we doubt that he had the assurance and confidence which come from excelling at the job one is good at and most wants to do? Did he perhaps tell the Queen what we now know to be true but which he himself believed not to be the case, that haemophilia may occur at random, no one knows why? An irony if he did. It was not until well into this century the discovery was made that the disease may begin through spontaneous mutation.
Whatever Henry said or did, the fact was that he was appointed physician to the Prince, at that time nineteen years old. Leopold had been the most unruly of Victoria’s children. Boys with haemophilia are often daredevils, playing the sort of games most dangerous to them, just as their mothers are over-protective. The kind of minor injuries which all children encounter, bruised knees, small cuts and grazes, resulted in Leopold’s case in prolonged blood loss. Almost worse were the internal bleeding and bleeding into the joints and from the gums.
He was also, some say, the nicest of the Queen’s four sons and the most intellectual and he insisted on being allowed to go up to Oxford. That Henry was sometimes in attendance on him there is mentioned in the Queen’s letters to her eldest daughter, the Crown Princess Frederick. In 1881 Leopold was made Duke of Albany and eventually decided to marry, in spite of his mother’s terrors and warnings. Perhaps Henry was able to calm her fears. Many years later, while on holiday with his own family in the Lake District, he wrote the following to Barnabus Couch, a propos of his attendance on the haemophilic son of Princess Beatrice of Battenberg:
I very well remember Her Majesty the Queen’s distress when HRH the Duke of Albany proposed to marry. She had determined HRH was far too great an invalid to consider matrimony. Her opinion was that he should remain quietly at Court, pursuing if he wished to do so his scholarly interests. Even she, with her fervid imagination, could not conceive of a haemophiliac subject injuring himself with writing and reading materials, though in fact HRH did once cause a violent and protracted bleed through piercing the roof of his mouth with a steel pen! Then, when he proposed to the Princess Helene and was accepted, there came first shock and grief but this was swiftly followed by assertions on HM’s part that she, and none but she, had arranged the alliance and nothing could be more proper. I was anxious not to tell her falsehoods but there was one question I avoided. Fortunately, she did not ask it. I could not tell her the truth, that any daughters HRH might beget would inevitably be conductors of haemophilia.
It was extraordinary how coarse HM could be. She told me without a blush and with not the least diffidence that she doubted if the Prince was capable of fatherhood. There, of course, she was wrong, for the Duchess of Albany had produced a daughter – certainly a conductor – and was soon to produce a son when her husband met his untimely death. As HM and I discussed Prince Leopold’s future, making reference principally to the various treatments (the application of ice, cauterization, rest) I had in mind for his incurable condition – she believed, if you please, that he would ‘grow out of it’ – she turned suddenly upon me and remarked that it was time I considered matrimony myself. I must be approaching forty, she said, flattering me greatly by lopping some five years off my age. She then astonished me more than I can say by quoting Shakespeare! She looked at me and declared I must not take such ‘graces to the grave and leave th
e world no copy’. You, my dear Couch, are the only man (or, come to that, woman) to whom I have related these extraordinary events. As you know, I did marry three years later, though my decision and my choice of wife had little to do with Her Majesty’s counsel.
That is. the single reference in letter or diary that Henry makes to his wife with the exception of noting at the appropriate time in the diary, ‘E. delivered of a daughter’ or later on, ‘E. delivered of a son.’ Of course that means very little. Henry was a Victorian and, like most Victorian men out of the upper middle class, kept his domestic life distinct from his professional life, even to the extent of regarding his diaries as the repository of professional engagements and his letters as purely man-to-man confidences. None of that indicates that he married Edith Henderson for any reason but personal choice, because, in fact, he was in love with her.
*
But, at the time of Prince Leopold’s marriage to Princess Helene of Waldeck-Pyrmont, Henry was in love with Olivia Florence Charlotte Batho, or he was giving a very good imitation of being so. She also is never mentioned by name in the diaries or letters but her father and mother are, along with their London house and their country home, Grassingham Hall in Norfolk. He seems to have met the Bathos some time before but the first diary entry is in March 1882. Henry notes, ‘Dined with Sir John Batho in Grosvenor Square.’ There is something else on that page of the diary, for the same day: a pentagram, indicating an afternoon with Jimmy Ashworth.
Henry dines with the Bathos again in April and again in May, two days before taking a two-week walking holiday in Switzerland, and one week after his return goes riding in Hyde Park with ‘Lady Batho and her daughters’. There is nothing, anywhere, to tell us how he met the Bathos, still less how he felt about them. But in the early October of that same year he ‘went down to Norfolk for the shooting’ and, although he doesn’t say where he’s staying, the entry ends with the words, ‘Grassingham Hall very fine’. In September he had given a dinner party at his rooms in Wimpole Street, having apparently nipped back from Chalcot Road, for there’s a five-pointed star on this page too. The dinner party is the first ever recorded in the diaries, and he lists the guests in strict alphabetical order: Mr and Mrs Annerley, Sir John and Lady Batho and – there it is again – ‘their daughters’, Dr Barnabus Couch and Dr and Mrs Vickersley. Who were the Annerleys and the Vickersleys? They occasionally have a place in the diaries, but without a clue as to their identity. Henry had very correctly invited an equal number of men and women. Who sat where? No record of that exists either. The one significant fact to emerge is that, by Victorian standards, Henry was seeing a lot of Olivia.
