The Blood Doctor

By Barbara Vine



Lord Martin Nanther is about to lose his inherited peerage as sweeping changes hit the House of Lords when the life and hereditary peers must decide their fates and dissolve the livelihoods of many. Martin needs the income from his attendance yet his conscience tells him to vote for his own removal from office.

Lord Nanther is not only a hereditary peer but also known for his well written biographies, he now intends to research his great-grandfather, Dr Henry Nanther. Fascinated with blood diseases, he was a 19th-century expert in bleeding disorders and, when Queen Victoria's eighth child, Leopold, was diagnosed as a haemophiliac (“a bleeder”), Henry was appointed physician to the royal household. He was later knighted by Queen Victoria for work with her haemophiliac children.

The sufferers of haemophilia are male. Women carry the gene silently, realising their inheritance only when they give birth to an affected boy, who need not be their first son. By then they may have had daughters, some of whom will, in turn, pass the mutation to their children.

Today, 120 years later, Martin reads his relative’s letters, notebooks and scientific works and learns of distant cousins he never knew. Among the mysteries Nanther must clear up is why the incidence of haemophilia in his own family -- an American cousin has it -- increased after 48-year-old Sir Henry bought off a long-time mistress, jilted a desirable woman and became engaged to one both less attractive and less respectable and then, when she was strangled on a train trip, married her sister.

At the same time, Martin’s second wife, Jude, is desperate for a child and hopes he might come upon some reason to explain her inability to carry a child even though he has a son from his former marriage. In the end the doctors find evidence of a biological mismatch between the couple causing Jude to repeatedly miscarry every time she gets pregnant.

Toward the end of Sir Henry's life, Nanther learns that the queen's esteemed adviser on haemophilia began to act crazily out of character. After a lifetime of emotional aridity, Sir Henry found both love and tears of grief as his brilliant and gentle-natured young son, George, lay dying of haemophilia. When Martin uncovers the truth behind his great-grandfather’s actions, he ceases his research for the truth is indeed chilling.