The Wandering Heart

by Mary Malloy

  “She spoke Irish,” Lizzie heard herself say to Mrs. Jeffries.

  “So she was from the west of Ireland?”

  “That was always my understanding.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I’m named for her,” Lizzie answered. “She was Elizabeth Manning—also called Lizzie.”

  The housekeeper nodded to herself. She seemed about to say something more, but George’s arrival at the library door silenced her. She looked at her watch, made a comment about lunch, and left the room.

  • • • • •

  On her fourth morning at Hengemont, Lizzie was feeling herself very productive. She had entered Francis Hatton’s list of artifacts into her computer, but before she actually opened the cabinet and examined each of them she was determined to finish transcribing the journal so that she could print it out and have a working copy. Years of research and writing had made her a fast and accurate typist, and since the young sailor’s penmanship was generally quite legible she worked at a rapid pace. George Hatton stopped in once in the middle of the morning to see how she was getting along and then left her alone until lunchtime.

  The Resolution had already rounded the Cape of Good Hope and was on the coast of New Zealand when a noisy party entered the house and interrupted Lizzie’s momentum. A few moments later an energetic girl burst into the library where Lizzie sat, fingers poised over the keyboard of her computer. Each stopped her activity as their eyes locked, the little girl seeming surprised and embarrassed, Lizzie being only startled. She smiled at the girl and said hello.

  Lizzie was a sucker for cute little red-haired girls, and this was a particularly wonderful example of the species. Freckle-faced and strawberry-haired, with her straight hair pulled back by a black headband and from there falling loose down her back, she was at that wonderful big-toothed age. She had grey-blue eyes that reminded Lizzie of George Hatton’s. The girl’s curiosity soon overtook her fear and she approached Lizzie at the table where she sat.

  “Are you the American?”

  “Yes I am,” she said, holding out her hand to the girl. “I’m Lizzie.”

  “I’m Lily Hatton,” the girl said seriously, shaking Lizzie’s hand.

  “Do you live here at Hengemont?” Lizzie asked her.

  Lily shook her head. “Most of the time I live in London,” she answered, “but on holidays and weekends I live with my dad in Bristol.” She skipped around the table, dragging her hand along the wood. “Sometimes we stay here though,” she added, “with my grandfather.”

  In the hallway beyond the library door Lizzie heard the sound of men in conversation and soon after George entered the room, followed by a man who was introduced as his son, Edmund. Lizzie had thought when she met George Hatton that he must have been extremely attractive as a young man, and his son seemed to stand before her as a demonstration of what he might have looked like thirty years earlier. Edmund had the same height and build as his father, and shared the same remarkable grey-blue eye color that was evident in all three generations of Hattons in the room. His hair was about as dark as it could get and still be considered blond, though lighter streaks of grey were scattered throughout.

  It was in his bearing that Edmund Hatton least resembled his father. He did not have the same aristocratic elegance, though he seemed self-assured and intelligent. He wore jeans and a pullover sweater, had several days’ growth of beard, and had a comfortable and friendly demeanor that made Lizzie like him instantly.

  They shook hands and then he put his hand gently on the head of the little girl. “I see you’ve met my daughter Lily,” he said.

  Lily asked for further explanation of what Lizzie was doing in the house.

  “I’m a history teacher,” Lizzie answered. “And I study the stories of interesting families like yours.”

  The four of them chatted comfortably for about fifteen minutes, and Lizzie found Lily to be a perceptive and intelligent nine-year-old with a wonderful sense of humor. When they moved to the dining room for lunch, Edmund asked Lizzie about the work she was doing and made suggestions about places to look in the house for additional papers that might be tucked away. George told him about the missing logbook pages, and Edmund expressed an interest in seeing what Lizzie had found so far. When they were finished with their meal, Lizzie returned with Edmund to the library, while George and Lily chatted on about school and her life in London.

  Edmund was clearly very knowledgeable about his ancestor’s voyage. He had read the journal more than once, as well as the official narrative of the voyage and all of the other journals that had been published. As they spoke of the collection, Lizzie realized that he was not only smart and well informed, but keenly interested in the period.

  “Have you read my book?” she joked.

  “Indeed I have,” he answered with a smile.

  Lizzie was somewhat embarrassed. She hadn’t been seeking his interest or approval, but she found herself pleased.

  After an hour of conversation about Francis Hatton and his voyage, Edmund asked Lizzie how she liked the house.

  “It’s extraordinary,” Lizzie said. Now it was her turn to be the student and she asked him several questions about the layout of the original castle and the subsequent additions. At one point they rose from the table so that he could point out some of the features of the old castle grounds in the garden.

  When Lily and George came to find them, Edmund was asking Lizzie if she’d had a chance to look around the house and grounds and she replied that she had not.

  “Dad,” Edmund scolded, jokingly, “you’re not being a very good host. Don’t forget that Professor Manning is a historian and will not only be interested, but can probably tell us a thing or two that we don’t know.”

  “Please,” she said, “call me Lizzie. ‘Professor Manning’ seems to be putting unreasonably grandiose expectations of my expertise into your head.”

  “You’re the best guide,” George said to Edmund. “Why don’t you show her around?”

  Edmund agreed that he would, and they spoke for a few minutes about his schedule.

  “I have to get back to Bristol this evening,” he explained, “but Lily wants time to visit with her friends in Hengeport before she goes back to London, so we’ll be back in a couple of days. Can you wait till then to tour the house?”

  Lizzie answered that she could and as they said their goodbyes, she found herself looking forward to their next meeting.

  When she retired to her room after dinner, Lizzie flung open the tall windows facing down to the sea. The air was bitter cold. There was almost a balcony beyond the windows, but it was so narrow that she thought it must have been made more for the look of the house from the outside than for the use of the guests on the inside. There was no room for her to step outside, but she leaned on the stone railing and admired the view of the village lights until it became too cold.

  She found herself thinking about Edmund Hatton. It was a long time since she had met anyone so interesting. There was nothing romantic or sexual about her attraction to him. She had a happy marriage and he had a daughter, so he must also have a wife. Still, if this were a romance novel, Edmund would be the perfect hero. Lizzie laughed out loud as she thought it. She turned back the covers and climbed into bed. She was in a situation that had all the classic elements: a big old stately home in the English countryside, a handsome aristocrat, and herself as a spunky and intelligent heroine. Except that she also had her husband at home, a job to do, and a philosophical aversion to the whole notion of an aristocracy in the twenty-first century.

  Chapter 6

  For the first time, Lizzie woke early enough to join George for breakfast. She told him how much she had enjoyed meeting Edmund and Lily the day before.

  “Your granddaughter is a wonderful girl.”

  “Yes she is,” George said with pride. “Smart as a whip, just l
ike her father.”

  “Edmund said that he’s a physician?”

  George spread marmalade onto his toast and nodded. “Has a practice in Bristol,” he said. “Runs a clinic there.”

  Lizzie couldn’t help thinking that someone with the Hatton connections could certainly have done better than that and George seemed to read her mind. He gave her a brief history of Edmund’s medical career, which included several years volunteering with various international charitable organizations.

  Lizzie asked George about his other children. She already knew there was a son John in Australia, and her host told her about his third son, Richard.

  “The oldest,” he said. “He’s a financial man in London.”

  “He’s the one who was with you when you visited Tom Clark at the British Museum?”

  “Yes, and he is keenly interested in seeing us get the collection organized to make it accessible to them.”

  “Is he a history buff?”

  George laughed. “No, I don’t think anyone would ever accuse him of that. He is more interested in the social and political connections that it will bring him. Those things are valuable in his business.”

  Lizzie appreciated his frankness. It explained why the Hattons had finally opened up access to the collection after having kept it secreted away for so many years. She had also wondered how a family like the Hattons supported their anachronistic lifestyle in the modern world, and the fact that Richard, who must be the heir to Hengemont, was some sort of banker or broker made sense to her. A big fortune could be used to generate its own money.

  They had a few more minutes of conversation on family topics before Lizzie felt that it was time to get to work.

  “I must resume my voyage with your ancestor out to the Pacific Ocean,” she said to George as she rose from the table.

  “I can’t wait to hear the outcome of your adventure,” George said. “If you need anything from me today, I’ll be working up in my own study. Have Mrs. Jeffries give me a call.”

  She thanked him for the offer and they each went off to their projects, Lizzie settling in with the journal to finish transcribing the text.

  The first part of the voyage was just as she knew it from having read the journals of a number of Hatton’s shipmates and the official narrative published by the British Admiralty.

  The Royal Navy ships Resolution, under the command of Captain James Cook, and Discovery, under the command of Captain James King, departed from Portsmouth on the twelfth of July, 1776, just a week after the American colonists claimed their independence. Cook and his men would have known nothing of the news across the Atlantic at that time, though a few future American citizens were among the crew.

  The ships sailed south, rounding the Cape of Good Hope at the end of November, midsummer in the southern hemisphere. They touched at Tasmania, then New Zealand, and then headed north into the Pacific. Their mission was to seek a passage across the top of the North American continent back to the Atlantic Ocean. In February 1778, to their surprise and delight, they stumbled upon a group of islands, which Cook named the Sandwich Islands after one of his patrons. Francis Hatton’s descriptions of Hawaiian people and of the lush landscape in which they lived were filled with enthusiastic detail. Lizzie loved Francis Hatton; he had few of the pretensions she expected of an upper-class Brit, and even fewer of the stereotypes that most eighteenth-century mariners held of the native people they encountered on a voyage.

  She found herself laughing at his wonderful prose as he described his comical attempts to communicate with people with whom he had no common language, and where even sign language was riddled with cross-cultural confusion. “Frank,” as she now regularly found herself calling him, knew that the girls he was trying to impress were laughing at his antics, and he laughed at them himself. He was an avid collector and Lizzie loved that about him. He had a keen eye for cultural details, an open but detailed manner of describing them, and a fair hand for sketching houses, people, plants, animals, and artifacts. He delighted in what he considered his “conquests”—every time an object came into his collection he meticulously detailed the circumstances of acquisition and as much as he could tell about the thing, without knowing the language.

  Lizzie found herself looking frequently up to the cabinet, where most of these objects were sitting quietly. Every now and then she stood up and walked over to open the glass-fronted cases to look more closely at the fish hook, carved drum, gourd rattle, or bark cloth being described. It was a wonderful day. By dinner time she was able to report to George Hatton that there was a tremendous amount of information in the journal about the Hawaiian collection and that it would make a very good exhibition and catalogue.

  She called Martin that night to report on her progress. He was leaving for New York the next day and for at least a week it would be difficult to reach him during hours that were convenient in both their time zones.

  “All is well in my world!” she declared, “except for the absence of you, of course.”

  “So the work remains interesting?”

  “It isn’t just that the collection is large,” Lizzie explained, “but that dear old Frank described almost every piece.” Her enthusiasm was obvious even across the Atlantic, and she expounded on the relationship between the journal and the artifacts in some detail to her husband. “It is a truly extraordinary assemblage of stuff. I still can’t believe that I am the first person to get a chance to work with it like this.”

  “Now that you know him better, has George explained why he chose to bestow this honor on you?”

  “That, I think, was luck,” she said. “One of his sons is some kind of an investment guy in London. He wants to be a player at the British Museum and is using this collection as his ticket in.” Lizzie told Martin how George had accompanied his son on a visit to meet Tom Clark at the museum, had seen a number of different books on similar subjects and had liked hers. “The rest is history!” she concluded.

  “Well, I hope my time in New York will be as productive,” he said.

  Lizzie realized that she had been doing most of the talking. “I hope so too,” she said. “Are you excited about going?”

  “Nah,” he admitted. “I think it’s going to be a good mural, but I’m starting to hate these bank jobs. They bring in the money, but they don’t excite me like the community projects.”

  They spoke for several minutes about the potential projects that Martin was considering and the one that interested him most was the one in Newcastle. It was apparent to Lizzie that he had been thinking about it seriously in the few days she had been away. The possibility that he would join her in England was now a probability.

  “Though it doesn’t seem quite fair that you will be in a stately home while I’m holed up in a coal town,” he joked.

  “Oh come now,” she argued, “you’d much rather be in a coal mine than a castle.”

  “I’m missing you,” he said.

  She kissed her hand and touched the phone. “Me too.”

  • • • • •

  Lizzie knew that she would marry Martin the first time she saw his picture. At the time she was a graduate student at Berkeley, with a part-time job in the office of the Anthropology Department. Among her other menial tasks, she sorted the mail and opened up the general announcements that weren’t addressed to anyone in particular. That day as she leaned against the metal cabinet with its dymo-labeled cubbyholes, she slid her forefinger under the tape that sealed a single sheet of folded paper; it was an announcement of an upcoming campus lecture series.

  As the paper opened, she was immediately drawn to the picture of the third speaker on the list, identified as “Martin Sanchez, Mexican-American Artist.” There was just something about him that captivated her. Instead of posting the flyer on the departmental bulletin board, she slipped it into her backpack. When she got back to her room, she cut the picture
out and tacked it to the edge of the bookshelf above her typewriter and stared at it for a long time. The lecture wasn’t for six weeks, and according to his biography Martin Sanchez lived in Los Angeles, so there was nothing for Lizzie to do but wait.

  Jean Marie, her roommate, was clearly puzzled. “Who is that guy anyway?” she asked on several occasions. But Lizzie never seemed inclined to answer. She looked at the picture often. Medieval European royalty had exchanged miniature paintings to sell themselves to prospective mates, she thought, and she would have agreed to marry Martin Sanchez from this picture.

  When he finally came to San Francisco to talk about his work, Lizzie was completely bowled over. He was funny and smart and she loved his paintings. At that time he was selling himself as a barrio boy, whose astonishing graffiti was discovered by an art critic for the L. A. Times. Lizzie found him exotic and romantic, hung on every word at his lecture, and studied each slide carefully.

  Even then, his work had consisted almost entirely of murals. In the last slide he showed the sketches for a new work, which would be a neighborhood project in San Francisco. When the lights came up Martin turned and looked directly at Lizzie and each felt a jolt. Though the audience around her was applauding, Lizzie felt as if she were in a vacuum, her eyes locked on his. When the time came for questions, he suddenly seemed uncomfortable, shaken. He looked relieved when the professor who had introduced him thanked him and invited the crowd to wine and cheese in the lobby. His eyes sought Lizzie’s again and she smiled. They continued to exchange looks through the interminable reception. Finally, after twenty minutes of chit-chat with strangers, he approached her and introduced himself.