by Mary Malloy
After dinner Lizzie found that the time difference and two days of travel were catching up with her, so she made her excuses and went to her room. She stood for a few minutes at the tall windows looking down the dark expanse to the sea below. She could barely make out the outline of the ruined stone wall in the distance and she became frustrated trying to mentally reconstruct the look of the original fortifications in the darkness.
“I hope there will be time to explore it all while I am here,” she said to herself as she got into bed. As she turned to pull the chain on the lamp near her bed she noticed that the Rossetti painting was on the wall near the door.
That night she had a dream. She was standing on the terrace at Hengemont; the garden was in full bloom. Beyond the garden, and the stone wall, and green fields dotted with sheep, lay the sea. A big square-rigger moved along under full sail. The sailor was returning home.
Lizzie turned in her bed and woke. She knew where she was; she was at George Hatton’s big rambling ancestral home, Hengemont. The house was absolutely silent and she was wide awake.
She had closed the curtains that faced the other wing of the house but left them open on the side facing down the slope to the Bristol Channel. She sat up in bed and looked out at the night sky, perfectly clear and scattered with stars. According to the clock it was 4:30 in the morning and the room was quite chilly. She got up and pulled on the robe that had fallen to the floor at the foot of the bed and then opened the door out into the hall.
A soft lamp glowed on a small table about halfway down the long hall, but the passage was otherwise empty and dark. Lizzie closed the door and went back to stand for a moment at the windows facing the sea. There was a lighthouse at Porlock Weir that blinked twice and then was dark, then blinked twice again and was dark. She counted the seconds between each double flash, a habit from her research days when she had spent several weeks sailing off the coast of Alaska. Eight seconds.
There were a few lights visible in the tiny village of Hengeport twinkling through the trees that stood between it and the house. She pulled the curtains back slightly from the other set of windows and looked across the courtyard to Hengemont’s Tudor wing; it was totally dark.
Lizzie crawled back into bed, taking with her the book that Martin had given her. In her dream she had seen the house as it looked in the book, surrounded by the bloom of summer, and not as she could actually see it in the chilly grayness of winter. She smiled to herself. She had always been very impressionable in her dreams and she enjoyed it when they cast a soft and romantic spell, as this one had.
How many people had crossed this patch of earth, she thought. How many lives lived, loves felt, tears dropped. She looked again at pictures of the house until she fell back to sleep with the light on and the book open.
Chapter 5
Lizzie slept soundly until almost eight the next morning and woke feeling that she had beaten the worst of the time change. Nobody had said anything about breakfast, so she decided to just go down to the library and start working. Mrs. Jeffries heard her as she came down the stairs.
“Did you sleep well, Dr. Manning?” she asked.
“Yes, very well,” Lizzie answered.
“Would you like a full breakfast?”
“No, thank you. I don’t usually have much in the morning.”
“Can I bring some tea to the library?”
“Would coffee be possible?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Jeffries said. She looked up at Lizzie and when Lizzie smiled at her, she smiled back.
Lizzie still had the strange discomfort of not quite knowing how to behave with Mrs. Jeffries. After all, the woman wasn’t her servant. Was it crossing some line of protocol to want to be friendly, even familiar with her? And even if it was, should that matter, Lizzie wondered? She didn’t have to abide by any master/servant nonsense. But what were Mrs. Jeffries’ expectations of guests? Since she was the stranger, Lizzie thought she should be open and friendly but not aggressively so until she better understood the domestic landscape.
The library beckoned and Lizzie was eager to get to work. The temporary office that she had set up the previous day lay before her on the big table and the room was filled with sunlight. Lizzie felt a buzz of satisfaction as she settled into her new work space. This will be a very nice way to spend the month of January, she thought happily. Through the tall windows she could see a layer of frost on the terrace, but she was comfortable inside. A big fire was already roaring in the grate at the other end of the room.
She decided to start right away with a transcription of the journal, which would, she thought, serve as the basis for any book or exhibit that might follow. It was her practice to begin with a thorough description of the document, so she entered:
Shipboard Journal of Francis Hatton, entitled: “A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean and ’Round the World on HMS Resolution, Under the Command of Captain James Cook, R.N., by Francis Hatton, Lieutenant, 1776, 1777, 1778. . . .”
There was a blank space at the end of the title, where Francis Hatton had apparently intended to fill in the subsequent year of the voyage, but had never done so. Lizzie continued:
A manuscript in the collection of Sir George Hatton, a descendent of the journal keeper, Hengemont House, Hengeport, Somerset, England. The record begins with the departure from Portsmouth on July 12, 1776, and ends abruptly on April 14, 1778, while at Nootka Sound; a number of pages are then cut out at the binding. Numerous blank pages follow. In the back…
She turned the journal over to see if Francis Hatton had entered anything on the last pages. There she found a “List of Artefacts for My Cabinet at Hengemont.” It was a wonderful discovery, exactly the kind of thing that she had always hoped to find while working on her dissertation, but had never been so lucky as to locate. She began typing again. There were a number of things from the “Sandwich Islands” or Hawaii, including a feathered helmet and a necklace made of a sperm whale’s tooth and human hair. She glanced up to the cabinet and saw them on the shelves, then moved on to the Northwest Coast Indian objects, typing furiously.
A mask representing a wooden-lipped woman, and two of the wooden lips.
A bone club from Nootka Sound, curiously carved.
A hat woven of rushes representing their manner of hunting whales.
A whaling harpoon with the tip some kind of hard shell.
A garment made from the fibres of the trunk of a tree.
A hat or cap in the form of a bear’s face.
Except for the cedar bark garment, which had likely disintegrated over two centuries, Lizzie looked to each item in the cabinet as she read the description. It was an extraordinary collection. The mask, especially, was really a work of art. Finely carved and painted, it had a wonderfully expressive face.
There were two additional entries but they had been crossed out. Lizzie studied them under her magnifying lens, held them up to the light at different angles, and even took the journal over to the window to see if direct sunlight would help expose the writing underneath the inky scratches, but try as she might she could not decipher what had been written originally on the last two lines. She went to the cabinet with the book in her hand and ticked off each item on the list against the objects that she saw. There didn’t seem to be anything in the collection from either Hawaii or the Northwest Coast that was not on the list.
During the course of the morning Mrs. Jeffries came in with a pot of coffee and some scones with jam. Lizzie took a break and enjoyed just being in such a lovely room. She tried to picture Francis Hatton in this very room, looking at his cabinet and handling his artifacts.
Soon after she had returned to work in earnest, George came in to check on her progress. She showed him the list in the back of the book and her enthusiasm over it infected him. When she asked him if he could decipher the crossed-out entries he looked at them for several minutes, borrowing Lizzie’s ma
gnifying lens again and giving it a thorough examination, but without success.
They broke for lunch in midday and talked more about the project, and after a full afternoon of work, Lizzie was once more surprised when Mrs. Jeffries came to call her to dinner. Unlike the day before, when she had arrived in the library in the afternoon, with the lamps lit and the fire roaring, today no one had disturbed her to turn on the lights or feed the fire and the room had grown decidedly gloomy. Lizzie was working at the table with a single lamp that threw a pool of light onto her computer and the journal she was transcribing, but the room was otherwise quite dark.
“My goodness,” Mrs. Jeffries said, throwing the switch to turn on the chandeliers, “you’ll ruin your eyes working in the dark like this.”
“I didn’t even notice,” Lizzie explained. She had been so absorbed in Francis Hatton’s journal that she hadn’t noticed either the passage of time or the loss of light. She closed the book and turned to Mrs. Jeffries. “It’s really interesting work.”
Mrs. Jeffries took a few steps toward Lizzie.
“Do you mind if I ask what you’re working on?”
“Not at all,” Lizzie said, pleased at the request. She gave a quick outline of her project.
“So you’re only working on the man who collected the things in the cabinet?”
Lizzie answered that she was.
“So that’s why you were interested in the Gainsborough painting,” Mrs. Jeffries said, almost to herself. She looked up at Lizzie. “I thought you might be here to look into the history of the women in the family.”
Mrs. Jeffries seemed to read the confusion on Lizzie’s face; she hesitated before speaking again.
“Well, dinner will be ready very soon,” she said finally, turning and walking ahead of Lizzie across the hall to the family dining room.
Maybe Mrs. Jeffries was shy, Lizzie thought. She didn’t like to think that her behavior was based on some expectation placed on servants to be distant or obsequious. As she developed the thought more, she wondered if perhaps the housekeeper was still feeling out Lizzie’s position in the household, just as she was herself.
Dinner passed quickly. George was interested in knowing her progress, but not intrusively so. Mrs. Jeffries brought food to the table, but never spoke conversationally to Lizzie when George was present.
Lizzie found herself missing her husband’s company and went from the dining room back to the library to call him at the end of the meal.
“How’s the work going?” Martin asked.
Lizzie described Francis Hatton’s journal and told her husband how she felt she was really getting to know this man, dead for almost two centuries.
“Should I be jealous of old Frank?”
She laughed. “You know, I started to think of him as Frank today.”
“Then it must be a great journal,” Martin said. “If you like him so much from such a distance of time.”
“Not to mention social class,” Lizzie added.
“Yes please,” he said, “Not to mention it.” They laughed. “I don’t want you to think that we need to rely on the weather to have a conversation, but it snowed hard here today, almost eight inches. I never left the house.”
“Are you getting plenty to eat?”
“Of course,” he said. “Why do you always worry so much about me when you’re not here?”
“I like to think that you need me.”
“Rest assured I do,” he said. “I don’t need you to feed me, necessarily, but I sure am missing you.”
She hung up the phone and went into the hall beyond the library. There was no sign of Mrs. Jeffries or George, or any sound except the ticking of clocks. Lizzie wondered if she might sneak for a few minutes back into the medieval hall through which she had come the day before. It lay just beyond the hallway that she was in; Robert Adam had designed this extension so that it backed on the original structure of the house, the square Norman tower. She passed beneath the double staircase and pulled open two sets of doors. The first was in the Georgian style of the newer wing, with painted wood and plaster friezes surrounding the casing of the door. Beyond it was a short passage through the thick stone wall of the original castle tower and another door, a massive ancient oak door, covered with the square iron heads of numerous hand-forged nails.
Lizzie pushed on the door, which creaked loudly on its iron hinges. She stopped for a moment and looked around again. She hadn’t been invited to make herself at home in the house, though she certainly was beginning to feel very comfortable in it. She didn’t know when she might cross over the line and invade someone’s privacy—George’s or the Jeffries’, or that of some occupant not currently at home. In truth, she didn’t even know if there were other people in the house. There was at least one other servant, the man she had seen when she arrived. Were there other family members who might want to avoid strangers, that she didn’t know about? Lizzie spun the question out to include the odd folks secreted away somewhere in garrets or cellars—mad aunts or ex-wives, or bonded servants all but enslaved and sweating on those toils that made the Hattons rich.
It occurred to her that she would be embarrassed if she were found walking around the dark house. She slowly pulled the door closed and quietly retraced her steps to the big staircase. She climbed up to the landing and stared at the Gainsborough painting of Francis Hatton and his siblings. The portrait was larger than life size, and as Lizzie stepped up to look at it closely she found that her eyes were on a level with his, as he sat comfortably in his painted rural landscape.
“Frank,” she whispered, “you and I are going to be great friends.”
She continued on to her room and after a hot bath fell sound asleep.
• • • • •
Over the next few days, Lizzie settled into a pattern of work. She felt remarkably comfortable in those parts of the grand old house through which she walked each day, loved the library as a work space, and found George an intelligent sounding board for each new discovery. She didn’t often have the opportunity to discuss work-in-progress in this way, and she enjoyed the process. That George made no attempt to direct the course of her work, or really to do much more than praise what she was doing, made his comments especially valuable. He was generally able to answer Lizzie’s questions about his family history, and when he was not, he knew where to find the books that could.
Mrs. Jeffries kept up a regular supply of hot coffee and small snacks and Lizzie would frequently take breaks from her transcription to sip and munch and ponder the delights of playing the aristocrat. She would often stand at the tall windows that faced across the terrace. The cold landscape beyond made her glad to be inside, but she also tried to picture the garden in other seasons, and enjoyed daydreaming about the house in other centuries.
During one of her reveries, as she leaned against the tall back of her chair, Lizzie felt eyes on her and turned softly to find Mrs. Jeffries watching her from the doorway. She smiled at the housekeeper who smiled back, embarrassed, and asked if she needed anything.
“I enjoyed meeting your son in London,” Lizzie said, hoping to finally engage the older woman in a real conversation. Except for the brief exchange about her work, it seemed that, during the whole time Lizzie had been at Hengemont, they had talked only about whether or not Lizzie wanted to eat or drink something.
“Peter told me that you and he talked,” she said.
“I liked him very much,” Lizzie continued. She added what she knew about the competitive nature of the program at the University of London, and commended Peter Jeffries’ obvious talent and effort.
“I believe you are a professor?”
Lizzie responded that she was, and Mrs. Jeffries asked her some additional questions about where she was from in the U.S.
“Are you married?” she asked.
Lizzie answered that she was.
; “So is Manning your married name?”
“No, my husband’s name is Sanchez.” With women of her mother’s generation, Lizzie often felt that some explanation was necessary for not taking Martin’s name, but Mrs. Jeffries didn’t seem to require such an explanation, or even, Lizzie thought, to be interested.
“Your ancestors,” Mrs. Jeffries continued, “were they English or Irish?”
“All four of my grandparents were born in America, but my great-grandparents were from Ireland,” Lizzie answered, somewhat surprised by Mrs. Jeffries’ curiosity.
The housekeeper seemed to sense Lizzie’s surprise. “My grandmother was a Manning,” she said, by way of explanation. “She came from Ireland with her sister over a hundred years ago. They worked in this house.”
“Maybe we’re related,” Lizzie said, pleased to make a friendly connection
Mrs. Jeffries continued to press her for information for a few more minutes. Did she know what part of Ireland her Manning ancestor had come from? Was it a man or a woman? Lizzie was unable to answer most of her questions. She had asked these very same things of her father just before she left for England, and of her grandfather a decade or so earlier. His mother, he said, had always given him excuses rather than information. Her husband had died just before they were to emigrate, she had two tickets for the transatlantic passage and had redeemed one to support herself for a time on her arrival in New York, before she got a job working as a domestic servant. Her son, Lizzie’s grandfather, was born shortly thereafter. Lizzie had spent some time trying to identify what ship she came on, but had never had any luck. This was very much in contrast to the other side of her family. For her mother’s grandparents Lizzie had birth certificates, immigration data, and oral histories.
She thought of the dream she had had on the plane coming over. Her father’s grandmother had lived to be a hundred, and Lizzie had some hazy memories of the old woman from when she was a small child. She had a brogue so thick that as a little girl Lizzie was often completely mystified by what she was saying, and occasionally the old lady lapsed into a tongue that even her son couldn’t understand.
