The Blood Doctor

Having built a name for himself as Queen Victoria's favoured physician - expert on blood diseases and particularly the royal disease of haemophilia - he fastidiously set about recording the details of his eminent life, carefully cataloguing every significant letter, diary and medical essay that he'd written, apparently offering himself up as an open book. But when the present Lord Nanther begins to research the life of his great-grandfather, he soon realizes there is little of interest in his ancestor's dry-as-dust account. Indeed he begins to suspect that these old records conceal more than they reveal as he comes upon mysteries and anomolies in almost every decade of his great-grandfather's personal life. Why did he prefer to marry a lowly solicitor's daughter rather than the upper class girl who offered him entry into the social world he appeared to crave? What was the true explanation for the apalling tragedy that befell his fiancee? And why did his apparently successful life end in such pain and sorrow? As Martin Nanther begins to catch glimpses of 'some monstrous, quite appalling things' in the blood doctor's past, so he realizes that Henry died a quilty man - carrying a horrific secret to the grave.