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Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

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Sometimes its best to leave the past alone. For when biographer Martin Nanther looks into the life of his famous great-grandfather Henry, Queen Victorias favorite physician, he discovers some rather unsettling coincidences, like the fact that the doctor married the sister of his recently murdered fiance. The more Martin researches his distant relative, the more fascinatedand horrifiedhe becomes. Why did people have a habit of dying around his great grandfather? And what did his late daughter mean when she wrote that hes done monstrous, quite appalling things? Barbara Vine (a.k.a. Ruth Rendell) deftly weaves this story of an eminent Victorian with a modern yarn about the embattled biographer, who is watching the House of Lords prepare to annul membership for hereditary peers and thus strip him of his position. Themes of fate and family snake throughout this teasing psychological suspense, a typically chilling tale from a master of the genre. From Publishers Weekly This rich, labyrinthine book by Vine (aka Ruth Rendell) concerns a mystery in history, like her 1998 novel, The Chimney Sweepers Boy. Martin Nanther-biographer and member of the House of Lords-discovers some blighted roots on his family tree while researching the life of his great-great-grandfather, Henry, an expert on hemophilia and physician to Queen Victoria. Martin contacts long-lost relatives who help him uncover some puzzling events in Henrys life. Was Henry a dour workaholic or something much more sinister? Vine can make century-old tragedy come alive. Still, the decades lapsed between Martins and Henrys circles create added emotional distance, and, because they are all at least 50 years dead, we never meet Henry or his cohorts except through diaries and letters. Martins own life-his wifes infertility and troubles with a son from his first marriage-is interesting yet sometimes intrudes on the more intriguing Victorian saga. Vine uses her own experience as a peer to give readers an insiders look into the House of Lords, at the dukes snoozing in the library between votes and eating strawberries on the terrace fronting the Thames. Some minor characters are especially vivid, like Martins elderly cousin Veronica, who belts back gin while stonewalling about the family skeletons all but dancing through her living room. Readers may guess Henrys game before Vine is ready to reveal it, but this doesnt detract from this novel peopled by characters at once repellant and compelling. From Library Journal In her tenth novel writing as Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell offers a novel of suspense based in 19th-century England and centering on deceit, murder, and various other family skeletons. Martin Nanther, the fourth Lord Nanther, has a comfortable life in present-day London as a Hereditary Peer in the House of Lords and as a historical biographer. He chooses as his most recent subject his own great-grandfather, the first Lord Nanther, physician to the royal family (Victoria and Albert) and an early noted researcher into the cause and transmission of hemophilia. The reader is taken through the family history as Martin painstakingly uncovers some not so savory bits of his own familys past. The story is dense with characters, and the author provides family trees of the two principal families, for which any reader will be eternally grateful. The story lacks the usual page-turner suspense of the Rendell/Vine novels but makes up for that with unusually detailed glimpses into Victorian life and the inner workings of the House of Parliament, which American readers will find particularly intriguing. Recommended for all public libraries. Caroline Mann, Univ. of Portland, OR

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PENGUIN BOOKS

THE BLOOD DOCTOR

Barbara Vine is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell, the bestselling crime novelist. She has written many novels, including The Lake of Darkness, The Killing Doll, The Tree of Hands, Live Flesh, Heartstones, The Veiled One and Harm Done. As Barbara Vine she is the author of A Dark-Adapted Eye, which received huge critical acclaim and won the Mystery Writers of Americas Edgar Allan Poe Award; A Fatal Inversion, winner of the 1987 Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award; The House of Stairs, winner of the Angel Award for Fiction; Gallowglass; King Solomons Carpet, winner of the 1991 Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award; Astas Book, shortlisted for the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; The Brimstone Wedding; The Chimney Sweepers Boy; Grasshopper; and The Blood Doctor. All of these titles are published by Penguin. Gallowglass, A Dark-Adapted Eye and A Fatal Inversion have all been the basis of successful BBC television series.

Ruth Rendell is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1991 she was awarded the Crime Writers Association Diamond Dagger for a lifetimes achievement in crime writing. In 1997 she was created a life peer and took the title Baroness Rendell of Babergh.

BARBARA VINE

The Blood Doctor

Picture 1

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published by Viking 2002

Published in Penguin Books 2003

7

Copyright Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd, 2002

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-195650-3

To Richard and Patricia, Lord and Lady Acton, with love and gratitude

1 Blood is going to be its theme Ive made that decision long before I shall - photo 2

1 Blood is going to be its theme Ive made that decision long before I shall - photo 3

1 Blood is going to be its theme Ive made that decision long before I shall - photo 4

1 Blood is going to be its theme Ive made that decision long before I shall - photo 5

1

Blood is going to be its theme. Ive made that decision long before I shall even begin writing the book. Blood in its metaphysical sense as the conductor of an inherited title, and blood as the transmitter of hereditary disease. Genes wed say now, but not in the nineteenth century when Henry Nanther was born and grew up and achieved a kind of greatness, not then. It was blood then. Good blood, bad blood, blue blood, its in the blood, in cold blood, blood and thunder, blood thicker than water, blood money, blood relations, flesh and blood, written in blood the list of phrases is endless. How many of them am I going to find apply to my great-grandfather?

Im not sure if Id have liked him, and up till now its been essential for me to like, or at least admire and respect, the subject of the biographies I write. Perhaps, this time, its only going to be necessary for me to be interested in him. And that wont be difficult. Its only because I found out that hed kept a mistress for nine years and, when his fiance died, married her sister (giving her, incidentally, the same engagement ring) that I decided to write his life at all.

Of course I knew, we all knew, hed been an eminent medical man, the acknowledged expert of his day on diseases of the blood and Physician-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria. I knew that for his services Victoria had given him the peerage Ive inherited, and that he took his seat in the House of Lords in 1896. I knew hed had six children, one of whom was my fathers father, and died in 1909. But although he was distinguished in his day, an acquaintance of Darwin and mentioned as a friend in letters from, among others, T. H. Huxley and Sir Joseph Bazalgette, although he was the first doctor of medicine ever to receive a peerage the great surgeon Joseph Lister got one a year later as a biography candidate I was only keeping him in the back of my mind. In the front of my mind I had Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozarts librettist. Now there was an interesting history: unfrocked priest, political dissident, philanderer, storekeeper, distiller and professor of music at Columbia University. I could have got trips to Italy out of it and maybe Vienna, but reluctantly I had to give him up. I dont have enough musical knowledge. Then the letter came from my sister.

Our mother died last year. Sarah has had the job its always the women who get it, says my wife of sorting out and disposing of or keeping her personal possessions. Among them was a letter from our great-aunt Clara to our grandfather. Sarah thought it would interest me. She even wrote, If youve given up the Marriage of Figaro man, why not Great-grandfather? Ive never seen any of Claras letters before why would I? but Ive a feeling she wrote a lot. My mother probably once had Sarahs task of sorting through her father-in-laws possessions when he came home from Venice to die, found the letter and simply neglected to throw it away.

It makes me feel a bit uneasy, disquieted and at the same time slightly excited, to notice the way Clara, his fourth and youngest daughter, refers to her father not as Father or Dad or Papa but as Henry Nanther. Odd, isnt it? Here is this maiden lady, to use my own fathers expression for her, half-educated, who lived a quiet life in London, who never worked for her living and died at the age of ninety-nine, writing to her brother of their father as if he were some acquaintance she didnt much like. Her letter is dated early in 1966 and must have been sent to Venice. This is what she said:

You always speak of Henry Nanther as if he were some sort of pillar of society and high morality and all that sort of thing. In contrast to you, as you put it. I know you disliked him as much as the rest of us did with the exception of poor George. You will say that if he was a more or less absent father and a remote rather awful figure in the household, that was normal when we were children. But did you know he kept a mistress in a house in Primrose Hill for years and years? I am sure you did not know he was engaged to Mothers sister Eleanor, who was killed in the train. We had all heard the story of the train, but neither Mother nor Henry Nanther ever said he was engaged to her first, and then took up with Mother when she was dead. They kept

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