The Wandering Heart

by Mary Malloy

  “I know who you are,” she said, offering her hand, which, to her surprise, he kissed softly. “I’m Elizabeth Manning.”

  “Elizabeth?” he asked.

  “Well, Lizzie,” she stammered. She felt that she was appearing foolish, girly, stupid. She had said “Elizabeth” because she wanted to appear more elegant; that attempt was now shot to hell.

  “I feel like I know you,” he said.

  She slept with him that night. She had never before slept with any man, and he seemed pleased and surprised that she was a virgin. For the next four days, Lizzie and Martin hardly left his hotel room except when he was scheduled to meet with people about his project. They talked about everything. About themselves and their families, about books and movies, plans and dreams. Lizzie was not as surprised to find herself completely absorbed in him, as she was to find that the feeling was mutual. She was madly in love and so was he.

  Lizzie often laughed to herself as she thought of all that she had learned of him since. In fact, it had been graffiti that had gotten him noticed, but Lizzie had subsequently learned of his comfortable middle-class upbringing in Glendale. His father was the director of the Parks Department and his mother was a librarian at Herbert Hoover High School. While his father had immigrated from Mexico with his own parents when he was still a child, Martin’s mother’s family had been in California for generations. Today, Martin objected to being labeled a “Mexican-American artist.” Though proud of his roots, he wanted now to be defined by his work and, with ever-growing acclaim, he was. Lizzie was proud of him, loved him, and felt confident in his love for her.

  Before she drifted off to sleep, Lizzie tried to imagine Martin at Hengemont and it was an oddly jarring mental picture—as if the page from one book had somehow been mistakenly bound into another on a completely different topic. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t love the place. The paintings alone would thrill him, she knew. And yet, she felt that he just didn’t belong here. How strange, then, that she should feel that she did.

  Chapter 7

  Francis Hatton’s journal held Lizzie’s total attention for several days. She was glad that she was so completely charmed by his prose. If this had been like most seafaring journals—a straightforward account of wind, weather, location, and sail handling—it could never have gripped her imagination the way it did.

  On the day that she turned to the last portion of the journal she announced her intention to George and to Mrs. Jeffries to work straight through the day and hoped she would not be interrupted. This was the part of the voyage of greatest interest to her, the Northwest Coast of the North American continent. It was where she had grown up, and it was a geographical region that she knew not only through historical documents but from firsthand experience. As she read Hatton’s text she could picture each location.

  The Resolution proceeded from Hawaii to the coast of North America in late winter, 1778. On the seventh of March the crew sighted land which Cook called “Cape Foul Weather,” giving an indication of the impossibility of doing anything more than logging its position at 44° 55' North Latitude and 135° 54' Longitude West of Greenwich.

  On the twelfth, Cook named Cape Gregory, after the Pope whose feast day was celebrated on that day. Francis Hatton made the first of several comments in his journal about his captain’s propensity to name landfalls after saints from the Roman Catholic calendar, though Gregory had been useful to mariners by correcting the calendar, and Hatton thought that must be the reason. Stormy weather drove the ships off the coast for ten days, and when they sighted land again it was at Cape Flattery. This was a place well known to Lizzie. Her family had been going there for years, whenever her father felt compelled to see the sea—a compulsion inherited by all of his children. Cape Flattery was at the northwest corner of Washington State and marks the southern entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, though Cook and his crew failed to see the great channel leading inshore.

  A week later the ships dropped anchor in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island. There they stayed for a month, making needed repairs to the ships and trading extensively with the natives. Frank Hatton was in his element here. He quickly became friendly with a boy about fourteen years old, teaching him English and learning from him as much of the language of Nootka Sound as he could collect. Lizzie read through three full pages of vocabulary lists where translations of simple words were given including body parts, numbers up to ten, fish, furs, and other goods traded. There was also the naturalist’s zeal for specific plants and animals, some of which were clearly unfamiliar to Hatton, and, of course, there were native words for all the collectibles like “mask,” “rattle,” “club,” “arrow.”

  “I have seen here,” wrote Hatton in a burst of enthusiasm, “pine, cypress, strawberry, raspberry, currants, alder, wild roses, leeks, mosses & ferns too numerous to count, also numerous specimens of the animal kingdom, some seen live, and others observed through tracks or through furs, claws, and teeth included among the accouterments of the Indians.” Another list followed noting the common occurrence in the region of raccoons, bears, deer, foxes, wolves, whales, porpoises, seals, sea otters, and a number of birds including crows, ravens, magpies, gulls, ducks, swans, sandpipers, plovers, and Lizzie’s favorite, a “large brown eagle with a white head and tail.” Fish and insects were likewise documented. Lizzie was impressed. The descriptions took her from the ancient comfort of Hengemont to the coast of British Columbia.

  Hatton collected everything he could, and wrote warmly of the young man who helped him in his endeavors and whose name he gave as “something resembling Tatooshtikus.” When the Englishmen had been at Nootka Sound for about two weeks, a party of visitors arrived from further north and Tatooshtikus introduced Frank Hatton to a young chief by the name of Eltatsy, with whom Hatton also developed a very friendly relationship. But on April 14 it all ended abruptly. At that point the pages were cut from the journal and no more information was to be had.

  Lizzie closed the journal in frustration. What had happened to the rest of it?

  As she could go no further with the journal itself, Lizzie decided to concentrate for the rest of the day on cataloging the manuscripts in the drawers of the cabinet. It might be that the missing pages had become separated from the journal, but still survived and were somewhere else in the house. The first drawer she pulled out was filled almost to the top with loose papers that gave the impression that they had been dumped in randomly over many years. Lizzie opened each drawer in turn, collecting the odds and ends of paper and the miscellaneous souvenirs of many generations that filled them, and placed the contents in neat piles on the table.

  Several piles were devoted to receipts for repairs, renovations, or additions to the house, and to new furnishings or decorations. There were invitations to parties, weddings, and other social events, including a number at court, that dated from the time of Francis Hatton right down to the 1950s. There was a whole drawer full of calling cards, many of which were engraved with the names of the most prominent people of five generations of British art and politics. There were postcards from all over the world, and letters, mostly bound into neat bundles and tied with ribbon.

  The last drawer contained odds and ends of broken toys, thin pieces of veneer, and bits of ivory, wood, and mother-of-pearl that looked like they must have come from the decorative inlay of furniture. There was a small disc of abalone shell that might have once been part of a Northwest Coast Indian artifact and Lizzie held it carefully as she looked at the objects in the cabinet above her. The whalebone club from Nootka Sound was missing a piece of its elaborate abalone inlay; she opened the door of the case and laid the disc on the shelf near the club. When she came back to the artifacts she would put it in an envelope, attach it to the club, and flag it for the conservator at the British Museum. She poked through the remaining fragments in the drawer, but nothing else looked at all familiar.

  When the drawers had b
een emptied of their papers, Lizzie made herself comfortable at the table and took stock of the piles before her. She turned first to the receipts. These she thought would have little relevance to her current project and she would be able to get through them quickly. Many of them were actually related to the building or outfitting of the cabinet. There were small scraps of paper on which an illiterate carpenter or glazer had left his mark of “x” in lieu of a signature, and there were some notes of exchanges of things collected by Francis Hatton for things collected by friends or acquaintances. Mostly these related to coins and medals, and Lizzie quickly saw that none of the ethnographic artifacts collected by Hatton on his voyage had been traded away. She heaved a sigh of relief; she would not have to track down things that long ago had entered other collections.

  The bundles of letters were tackled next. Most were personal correspondence of a sort that would have interested Lizzie were she not on a specific mission—including love letters from three different centuries. The last bunch to be examined was the correspondence between Francis Hatton and his father, Sir John Hatton, which George had told her about. They were mostly chatty letters from son to father, filled with descriptions of places visited along the route of the voyage. Lizzie assumed these must have been sent from Canton at the same time that Frank sent the box with the journal to his sister. She wondered why he hadn’t addressed the journal to his father, as the two of them obviously had a very open and affectionate relationship. She turned over another page to find a letter edged in black. It was the notice to Frank Hatton of the death of his older brother Richard, and it included a plea for his return at the earliest possible moment, even though his father knew that that time had to be at least several months away. “At such a time as this,” it concluded, “it is painful but necessary to remind you that your obligations to your family take on a new prospect. You are now the heir to the title and property of Hengemont, and your place is here.”

  Frank’s response was very moving. He gently comforted his father on the loss of Richard, and told him that even if he left the Resolution and returned on one of the East India Company vessels then in Canton, it could only speed his return by a few weeks or months and, given the death of his captain, James Cook, he felt obliged to see his voyage through to the end.

  Lizzie turned over the last page and paused a few minutes before wrapping the papers back into their bundle and tying the faded ribbon around it. She looked into the cabinet again. It seemed that Frank Hatton had come home and concentrated his efforts on his collection, as his change in circumstances would certainly have prevented him from making another voyage.

  She worked her way quickly through pile after pile of papers, refilling the drawers as she went along. As there had clearly been no organizational principle in their arrangement, she made no attempt to retain the original location of the papers she had transferred to the library table as she put them back in the cabinet. She filled the lowest drawers with things that she had surveyed and knew that she wouldn’t need on this project. She paid the greatest attention to the documents that were related to Francis Hatton, but the other piles were shaping up as well. Correspondence, bills, scraps of poetry, household inventories, instructions to servants, invitations, all came into her hand in a random order and were shuffled into organizing piles.

  There was one intriguing scrap of paper, obviously very old, on which someone had written with a quill in heavy black ink:

  Where is his heart?

  Except for its age it didn’t seem to hold any value, and it certainly wasn’t pertinent to Francis Hatton, Lizzie thought as she set it aside. From the paper and the penmanship she thought it was probably a few centuries older than Francis Hatton’s day. She smiled as she touched the paper. Some bastard must have done something terribly wrong to warrant such a documentation of his heartlessness. She could picture some ruffed Elizabethan getting his marching orders from a similarly ruffed woman, perhaps standing in this very house.

  As she went through the loose manuscripts she found a small piece of stationery engraved with the name “Elizabeth Hatton” and the address “Hengemont.” It was covered with sentence fragments written in a trembling hand, among which appeared the question “Where is his heart?”

  “The women in this family appear to have been very unlucky in love,” Lizzie thought to herself as she quickly divided papers by subject matter.

  There were two bits of mediocre poetry, each asking the question again: “Where is his heart?” Lizzie began to wonder if it was some family lore connected with the sword-pierced heart on the Hatton crest. Maybe it was referring to honor or family duty or something other than love. She pulled out the piece of old stationery again and the scrap of paper on which she had originally seen the question, and decided to form them into a pile of their own.

  Francis Hatton had also mentioned a heart in his letter to his sister, she thought. She opened the journal and unfolded the letter. “Look for my heart in this box, as our ancestress looked for the heart of her Crusader,” she read softly. She looked inside the box again, but once the journal had been removed it was empty. She sat back in her chair and stretched her legs out to rest her feet on the long bar of the table. George Hatton had known what the heart reference meant, but hadn’t wanted to share it with her. It was a puzzle, but not one that she could solve now. She put the scraps of paper into the box with the journal and letter and moved back to the piles of bills, receipts, and correspondence that had come out of the cabinet drawers.

  As the afternoon turned to early evening she remembered to turn the lights on, and at one point Mr. Jeffries came in and asked if she would like him to build up the fire. In the course of their casual conversation she was pleased to learn that George’s son was expected for dinner. Lizzie wrapped up the rest of her work quickly and went to her room to change. She hadn’t expected Edmund to return until the next day and had planned to dress up a bit before she saw him again.

  When Lizzie came back downstairs, George was in the library with another man, but it wasn’t Edmund. If Edmund was a more-relaxed version of his father, this man was a stiffer and haughtier model of the handsome Hatton male approaching middle age. He was impeccably groomed, clean shaven with an angular face that was not softened by his expression. His eyes were bluer than those of his father and brother. They landed on Lizzie for a moment, before dismissing her and moving back to the papers that surrounded her computer.

  George introduced Lizzie to his son Richard, who waved at her with the back of his hand without looking at her again. He had a drink in one hand, and with the other he pushed around the letters between Francis Hatton and his father, which he had untied from their bundle. He had obviously gone through several of the piles of papers that she had organized, dispersing them across the table. Lizzie fumed at his rudeness and crossed the room to reclaim her workspace, giving some effort to keeping her anger in check and maintaining a calm and professional demeanor. George sensed she was upset and called to his son.

  “Richard,” he said, “Don’t undo any of Lizzie’s hard work.” He started to describe what Lizzie had found in the journal to his son, who now turned to look hard at Lizzie. She returned what she felt was a rude and condescending stare, taking stock of him while George continued to talk as if the two of them had just met on the friendliest of terms.

  The younger man stiffened when he heard Lizzie refer to his father as “George,” and made no attempt to disguise his surprise and irritation when he learned that Lizzie would join them for dinner. There had been a time, before Lizzie arrived at Hengemont, when she wondered if George Hatton was intending to treat her as a guest or as the hired help, and she had been pleased to be received and treated so graciously. Richard Hatton apparently had a different idea about what her role was, or should be, in the household.

  The contrast between the atmosphere around the dining table that night and the afternoon she had spent there with Edmund and Lily could
not have been more pronounced. Richard Hatton positively bristled with hostility and Lizzie was at a loss to understand the source of it. He was everything his brother was not: imperious, stuffy, arrogant. The hour and a half spent at the table was agony for Lizzie, clearly uncomfortable for George, and a trial which Richard made no attempt to disguise by polite behavior, preferring instead an exaggerated and dramatic stiffness and silence.

  Mrs. Jeffries exchanged a look with Lizzie at one point, and then quickly looked away as she moved wordlessly around the table, serving and clearing dishes. Her husband brought out the big tray with coffee, which his wife then poured. It was obvious that there could be few if any secrets in the Hatton family that were not well known to the couple who worked for and lived with them. Lizzie looked to see if either George or Richard Hatton had any notion of this. George often thanked the Jeffries for a helpful action, but Richard never acknowledged either of them, except in gestures indicating when he wanted something more or wanted something taken away. Lizzie could appreciate that George had a relationship with the couple that was apparently built on trust and reliance. Richard, on the other hand, treated them like necessary parts of the background machinery that made him comfortable, not unlike good pieces of furniture. As the meal progressed she liked George more, Richard less, and was determined to get to know the Jeffries, especially Mrs. Jeffries, better.

  When she went to her room that night, she once again threw the windows open, breathed deeply and tried hard to relax. She was used to being liked by almost everyone. It was unusual enough for someone to dislike her, unheard of for them to make such a display of it, and she condemned Richard Hatton for his unwarranted rudeness. The whole episode left her feeling tight inside and unable to sleep for several hours. Only the interesting nature of Francis Hatton’s voyage, and the promised return of Edmund the next day, made it worth spending that night at Hengemont.