by Mary Malloy
“Do you want the standard tour?” Helen asked, “or do you want to see the closets with the skeletons?”
“Skeletons please.”
“Any place in particular that you would like to start?”
“Let’s begin with that big Gainsborough on the landing.”
They proceeded to the stairs and Helen handed Lizzie the catalogue as they talked. She read the description: “The Children of Sir John Hatton, 1773, by Thomas Gainsborough,” it said, echoing the title on the frame. The names and dates of each followed: “Richard (1750-80), Francis (1755-1845), Elizabeth (1760-81).” There was then some biographical information about Gainsborough and his prodigious output of portraits and landscapes.
The sketch on which this painting was based had been done here at Hengemont, when the artist lived nearby at Bath. A year later he had moved to London and become enormously fashionable. Lizzie was disappointed that there was not much information about the subjects of the painting. The three young aristocrats were painted sitting on and around a broken stone wall. Several tall trees were immediately behind them, and in the distance the ground sloped down to the edge of a large body of water.
“If you step up the last few stairs there,” Helen said, “and look out the big window, you can see where they were posing.”
“Thanks,” Lizzie said, her reverie broken. “I’d like to do that in a minute.” She looked again at the adjacent portrait of the girl, standing alone. The catalogue said it was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in London in 1781, the year the sitter died a tragic death.
“She died so young,” Lizzie murmured.
“She jumped off the roof of this wing of the house as it was being constructed. . . .” Helen started the explanation without emotion, as if she had told the story a hundred times before to tourists, but as the words came out she seemed to become conscious of their meaning and trailed off into silence.
Lizzie was stunned. “She committed suicide?”
The housekeeper nodded and gave her a meaningful look. “Leapt from the scaffolding as I understand it.”
Eliza, Frank Hatton’s beloved sister, had committed suicide, just as that older Elizabeth had. Lizzie looked again at the date, 1781. He must have been here at the time. What could have happened?
“Do you know why?” she asked.
Helen shook her head. “But I told you already that many of these Hatton girls were cursed with madness.”
Lizzie tried hard to keep from imagining Eliza’s broken body laying on the stones of the terrace, her brother kneeling beside her, insane with grief. She turned back to the Gainsborough. “And the older brother died rather young too, didn’t he?” Lizzie looked again at the catalogue; Richard Hatton had been thirty years old.
“Yes, and without a son,” Helen said. “That’s why your Lieutenant there, his brother, left the Navy and became Lord of the Manor.” She seemed pleased to bring the conversation back to Francis Hatton.
“Of course,” Lizzie said softly. In the portrait the three seemed at ease, as if problems could not touch their lives of wealth and position. Eight years later two of them would be dead.
“The older brother,” Lizzie continued, “how did he die?”
“I’m not exactly sure, but I believe it was some contagious disease,” Helen answered. “It was he that worked on the design of this wing with the architect Robert Adam,” she continued. “He had great plans for Hengemont, and he and his father dedicated an enormous amount of time and money to it.”
“How terrible for the parents to lose two children in two years.”
“I believe the mother was dead more than ten years by that time, and the father did not long survive the daughter.”
“And all these tragedies began while the younger son was still in the Pacific.”
Helen was silent, as if acknowledgement was unnecessary.
“But Francis certainly lived to a ripe old age,” Lizzie added, looking again at the handsome face of the young man. He would have been eighteen years old at the time of this portrait.
“Aye, and there’s another picture of him.” Helen added that in the other portrait Francis Hatton was wearing his uniform. Lizzie knew it must be the picture George and Edmund had mentioned. She expressed her desire to see it next, but before they left the staircase asked if Helen could tell what was under Eliza Hatton’s hand in the Reynolds’ portrait.
The housekeeper did what Lizzie had done a few hours earlier, walking up two stairs and then down two stairs to see if she could get a better perspective. “You know,” she said, “for all his fame, I find that Reynolds was not all that clear on the details, excepting the faces.”
“Do you think it could be a ruby necklace?” Lizzie asked.
“It certainly could be,” Helen answered. “In several of the other pictures there are women wearing such a stone.” Again, her sentence lapsed into sudden silence, as if she had caught herself in an explanation that took her by surprise.
Lizzie felt a tingle of excitement. “After we see Lieutenant Hatton in his uniform,” she asked, trying to make her voice sound casual, “would you mind pointing out those paintings to me?” She sensed that Helen was becoming alarmed at her interest and looked up to find the housekeeper looking at her with a motherly concern.
“Lizzie,” she started.
“Yes?”
“May I ask again why you want to know about these women?”
Lizzie was starting to lose patience with this recurring theme of Helen’s. “I’ve already told you it is simply curiosity at what seems to be an interesting story,” she said, trying not to sound exasperated.
“You don’t fear that you are falling into something dangerous here?”
Lizzie thought about the two vivid dreams she had had, but was able to give Helen a reassuring smile as she shook her head and asked to continue the tour.
Helen agreed. She led Lizzie down the hall to the room directly above the library, where they found the life-sized portrait of Lieutenant Francis Hatton in the blue-coated uniform of the Royal Navy. It had been painted in 1775, the year before he departed on his voyage to the Pacific. The catalogue explained that the artist, Nathaniel Dance, painted numerous portraits of naval officers in the late eighteenth century, including a famous one of Captain Cook, the commander of the expedition on which Francis Hatton made his collection.
This was a very different Francis than the one in the Gainsborough portrait on the main staircase. Then, Frank had been eighteen, posing with his brother and sister. Now, at twenty, he looked as if he had made the transition from boy to man and was bound on the great adventure of his life. His eyes seemed to shine in anticipation and his lips were almost breaking into a smile. He stood beside a table on which sat a chart, a telescope, a large shell, and the boomerang, which Lizzie recognized from his cabinet—the gift of Joseph Banks from the first Cook expedition. Through a window behind him two ships were visible in a harbor. He looked straight out from the portrait into Lizzie’s eyes. His hair was soft and curling, long enough on the sides to touch the embroidered collar of his uniform, and pulled into a ponytail in the back. Lizzie thought she could detect a resemblance to Edmund.
Next to the portrait of Francis was one of his uncle, also a naval officer, and also painted by Dance. Though painted in the same decade, the two men were clearly from different generations. The older man wore a white wig, curled up along the bottom edge. Where Frank was lithe, this man was bluff and heavy. He leaned one hand on a sword and looked down to the right corner of the painting. Behind him a red curtain was swept back to reveal a large frigate, probably the vessel he commanded when this portrait was painted.
These two paintings were in a large hall which Helen told Lizzie was called the “Navy Gallery.” In addition to the pictures, the room had a number of ship models, dozens of swords, some uniforms on mannequins with numerous additional hats m
ounted around them, and even two small cannons. So many Hatton men had been officers in the Royal Navy that their portraits covered the walls almost from floor to ceiling, with gaps filled in only occasionally by the unusually stern-looking women who were presumably their wives. Lizzie began to leaf through the printed guide to identify some of them, and Helen explained that the female portraits were only placed in this hall if they had been painted as the other half of a pair of matching portraits with their naval husbands.
“You could write a history of changes in Royal Navy uniforms across the centuries and illustrate it with the pictures in this room,” Lizzie said to Helen.
“You could,” she answered. “And of hairdos too.”
Lizzie nodded her agreement. They strolled along the length of the room. Sometimes the subject of a portrait was depicted standing on a ship, his hand upon the railing, the planking of the deck visible beneath his buckled shoes. Sometimes the sailor was unaccountably shown standing in a pastoral landscape of meadows, hills, and trees, but in the distance a ship was in a harbor and in the man’s hand was a telescope, as if he was just itching to finish posing, turn around, and check out the seafaring activity behind him.
A few of the men were depicted leaning on anchors; several held their uniform hats in one hand, a sword in the other. One of them wore a cape that was gathered up into one hand across his waist. His other hand, just visible beneath the cape, rested on the hilt of a sword. A few of the pictures had more than one subject, usually a pair of brothers in matching uniforms. One showed a father in the uniform of a captain, examining a small ship model with his sailor-suited son.
The paintings were hung in roughly chronological order, and Lizzie was fascinated as she watched long wigs be replaced by hair that grew and was cut as decades passed. Facial hair ranged from clean-shaven to full beards, with every possible combination of sideburns, moustaches, and beards in between. Uniform collars and cuffs showed a full range of evolution. Some collars rose up to mid cheek, others were invisible beneath a row of gold braid or embroidery. Cuffs went from simple and unadorned to large and elegant, folded back all the way to the elbow and elaborately secured with rows of buttons. Scarves of black or white alternated with ruffled cravats for covering the necks of the uniformed men in the pictures. There were sashes and epaulets, loops of gold braid, and medals galore, some hanging on ribbons around the neck, others pinned to the chest. Several of the Hatton officers wore the Star of the Garter—the highest rank one could achieve in England.
Lizzie spent a bit of time examining the models and a case of navigating instruments in the center of the room. Several of the same instruments could be seen in the paintings where the subject, like Frank Hatton, exhibited them nearby or held them in a gloved hand. There were globes and charts, sextants and telescopes.
“It’s a fabulous collection!” Lizzie said with enthusiasm.
Helen nodded.
As they headed to the far end of the room, Lizzie saw two framed photographs, one from each of the two World Wars, and each with a pair of brothers. In the more recent one, two handsome young men wearing the white dress uniforms of the period looked confidently into the camera. They had small fair moustaches, ruddy cheeks, and straight white teeth. Lizzie wondered where they were today.
The photographs reminded Lizzie that she wanted to document some of the portraits with her own camera. She asked Helen if she would mind waiting while she ran to her room to get it. Lizzie made a quick trip down the hall and around the corner to her own room and was back within five minutes. She snapped a picture of the large Naval painting of Francis Hatton and then asked again about the necklace. She already knew of three portraits in which it appeared, but were there others?
Helen looked at her watch and then leafed through the catalogue. “If you don’t mind, Lizzie,” she said, “I’ll tell you which ones I think are worth looking at, and let you stroll around a bit on your own. I have some other things I need to do today.” She seemed torn between needing to be elsewhere and worrying about leaving Lizzie on her own. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”
When Lizzie assured her that she would, Helen laid the catalogue on one of the exhibit cases and opened it to a floor plan of the house. “It should be pretty clear where you are if you use this as a guide,” she said, turning the booklet so that Lizzie could see it as she pointed out the pertinent spots. “Two of the paintings are in the Tudor wing of the house, one upstairs and one downstairs.” She nodded toward the far door of the room they stood in. “You’ll get to it most easily by continuing straight on through there.”
She described a route through the house and traced it with her finger on the diagram. It would take Lizzie to the end of the Tudor wing on the floor they were on. At the end of that wing she could go downstairs and then double back on the ground floor. That would bring her to the west end of the old gothic extension on the west side of the tower. Helen called the large room there the “salon,” and told her there were several large portraits hanging there, including, she thought, one of a woman wearing a similar necklace.
Lizzie thanked her for her help. “You’re sure it’s no problem for me to be wandering around on my own?” she asked.
Helen assured her that all of the places she mentioned were “more or less public” areas of the house. “You won’t need to go poking into any of the family’s private rooms,” she said, though as soon as she said it she seemed to have another thought. “Though, now that I think of it,” she said slowly, “there is a picture in Sir George’s study of his sister, and if I’m not mistaken she is also wearing a ruby necklace.”
Lizzie remembered that Edmund had told her that his father’s younger sister, Bette, had first related to him the story of Elizabeth and John.
“Do you think I could see the picture?”
“Well if we go in quickly, I don’t think Sir George will mind,” Helen answered, “and it’s right on the way. He keeps his rooms in the Tudor wing.”
Lizzie followed the housekeeper through the door at the far end of the Navy Gallery and into the room beyond it. She hadn’t yet been in the Tudor wing of the house and the feeling was very different. The ceilings were lower, the exposed beams carved and dark. The walls were covered with a similarly dark-stained carved paneling. George Hatton’s study was in the first room they came to. It faced into the courtyard at the corner of the building. It was an old-fashioned man’s sort of room, with leather chairs and heavy furniture; the big leather-topped mahogany desk was neatly organized, with papers filed into all the various cubbyholes. The windows were made up of small diamonds of leaded glass set into arched stone casements. The room was smaller and darker than Lizzie would have expected the owner of the house to choose as his sanctuary, especially with such a large and diverse selection, but she liked the room and liked him more for having chosen it. Helen sensed her curiosity.
“Sir George moved back into this part of the house after his wife died,” she said. “This and the adjoining room were his as a child.”
Such private information made Lizzie feel a bit like an intruder, and she was glad to turn her attention to the framed picture Helen held out to her. It was a color photograph taken in the garden at Hengemont on an autumn day and was inscribed across the lower right corner, “To George—A great brother. All my love, Bette.”
The girl in the picture had long straight strawberry-blond hair, parted in the middle and falling almost to her waist. Lizzie loved her outfit; as a girl she had been a big fan of mod Londoners, and Bette’s clothes in this picture were just the sort of thing that Mary Quant had designed and Twiggy had worn in the late sixties. Lizzie was too young then to be mod, but she remembered her older sisters trying hard to get their mother to let them wear something just like this. Bette’s short dress was covered with a design of large flowers in pink, green, and white. She wore textured tights on her slim legs, and white leather boots up to her knees. In one hand she
held a white leather hat with a clear plastic visor, and around her neck she wore several strings of large and small beads, and the ruby necklace.
“I didn’t expect her to be so young,” Lizzie said, handing the picture back. “Where is she now?”
“She died long ago,” Helen said sadly, looking at the girl in the picture as she placed it back on the top of George’s desk. “Not long after this was taken I think.”
Lizzie noticed there were other family photographs there. One showed George with a woman who must have been his late wife. Others showed the two of them with three boys in different stages of growth, and another showed a larger extended family, the boys now husbands and fathers with their own families. She recognized Edmund through the whole series. She wanted to step up and look more closely at his wife, but Helen was leading the way out of the room and Lizzie knew it would be unseemly to stay and probe the family’s personal business in this way.
As they stood together in the hallway, Helen hesitated, then said one last thing to Lizzie about the Hatton women.
“I know this is an interesting story, Lizzie,” she said, “but there is some danger for women with Hatton blood and I hope you will be careful.”
Lizzie looked as closely as she could at Helen in the dim light. The woman had finally said what she had wanted to say for several days.
“And you think I’m susceptible?” Lizzie asked.
“I do.”
“Because I have ancestors named Hatton?”
Helen nodded.
Lizzie tried to laugh off Helen’s concerns, though she knew the older woman was completely serious. She stepped forward and kissed her on the cheek.
“Thanks Helen,” she said. “I will be careful.”
Helen was thoughtful for a moment as she looked at Lizzie, but finally seemed somewhat relieved, at least at having said her piece.
