The Wandering Heart

by Mary Malloy

  Even though she felt, strangely, that she knew Francis Hatton’s personality and character rather well from having read his journal and letters, Lizzie knew almost nothing about the details of his life either before or after the voyage. Now she dedicated herself to sketching them in.

  Quickly leafing through descriptions of the early generations of Hattons, Lizzie found her way to the chapter on Francis. Not everyone in the family had his or her own chapter, but Frank’s adventure on the Cook voyage made him one of the more famous members of the family. As the second son of Sir John Hatton, Francis Hatton had not been raised with any expectation of inheriting the family title or property. He had gone to Oxford and served a stint as a midshipman in the Royal Navy. Traveling through Europe on a “grand tour,” he was captivated by the various collections regularly visited by young men like himself. On his return to England he visited the Royal Academy in London, expressing an interest in learning more about the new science of Natural History. Through a series of connections and coincidences he found himself introduced to Sir Joseph Banks, one of the most influential members of the Royal Society, and a man who had risen to prominence after accompanying Captain James Cook on his first voyage to the Pacific Ocean.

  It was Banks who encouraged Francis Hatton to enlist for the voyage then being planned, Cook’s third visit to the Pacific. The Hatton family had strong ties to the Royal Navy and, with Frank’s earlier service as a midshipmen, there was no difficulty in arranging a commission and fixing him with an appointment to the ship Resolution. Between the time he enlisted and the time the voyage commenced, he had several months to apply himself to navigation and take the examinations that allowed him to enter the ship’s crew with the rank of lieutenant. The biography gave an extensive description of the voyage, which Lizzie skimmed quickly, noting that Hatton’s collecting tendencies were always considered an important part of his identity. He was famous for his museum cabinet.

  Upon the death of his brother, he unexpectedly became heir to the family titles and fortune; he returned to Hengemont at the age of twenty-five in 1780. There he discovered his sister suffering from something the biography called a “decline of spirits,” which Lizzie thought must have been depression or something like it. The book was becoming very frustrating now that she wanted something more than facts delivered in the most polite and politic manner possible. The author of The Hattons of Hengemont was clearly not going to interpret for her what life was like in the house in the years following Frank Hatton’s return.

  There was a mention of Frank’s marriage to Margaret Gurney on New Year’s Day, 1781. Lizzie smiled. Had he ever told her that he’d traded her miniature for the bear helmet?

  One full page of the book was then devoted to the building project that the Hattons, father and sons, undertook with the architect Robert Adam. The library in which she sat was constructed at that time, along with the cabinet, though most of the fame of the wing was concentrated on the foyer and staircase that backed the old medieval hall.

  In 1781, as the work on the new addition was being completed, and before the exterior scaffolding was removed, Eliza Hatton climbed to the top of it and threw herself onto the stone terrace below. John Hatton had a stroke when he learned about it and died the following year.

  Even though Lizzie already knew the facts from Helen Jeffries, she felt the tears well up as she read.

  The terrace on which Eliza died lay just beyond the window in front of her, the window that she had looked through with such pleasure every day as she worked here at this table. Her eyes were drawn to the terrace. The stones looked hard and cold. Lizzie could not keep herself from wondering exactly where it had happened. Had Eliza’s blood soaked into the stones? Was there any trace of those molecules after more than two centuries? A tear slid down Lizzie’s cheek and she wiped it away. She tried to tell herself that this was history and she was a historian. These people were not her friends, or her family; they were her subject matter. With difficulty she finished her notes. Frank lived to be ninety years old, dying in 1845 and leaving behind several children and grandchildren.

  Lizzie closed the book. She sat motionless, scanning the room with its tall shelves of books and the prominent museum cabinet. She felt agitated, sad about these people who had died so long ago, worried about them even.

  George was surprised to find her working so early when he passed by the library door on his way to breakfast. Lizzie rose and joined him, taking out a tissue and pretending to blow her nose as she wiped her eyes. Edmund and his daughter were already at the table.

  Lily was her usual effervescent self, amused this morning that both she and Lizzie were named Elizabeth. “I’m named for my grandmother,” Lily explained, “my mum’s mum.”

  “My grandfather used to tell me that I was named after his mother,” Lizzie answered, “but my mother tells me that I’m really named after Elizabeth Bennet in the novel Pride and Prejudice.”

  “She named you after someone in a book?”

  “Well, it’s her favorite book,” Lizzie explained.

  They talked for several more minutes about books that they both liked, until Edmund interrupted to ask Lizzie if she wanted to take their tour around the grounds. “The weather is much better today,” he said.

  Lily was going to a party at the home of a friend in the village, and left right after breakfast. Edmund and George saw her off while Lizzie went back to her room for her coat. When she arrived back in the library, she reminded Edmund that she wanted to see the church as well as the grounds, and he fished in his pocket for a key which he held up.

  “I remembered,” he said. “We are ready to go.”

  They started their tour in the old medieval hall. Edmund showed Lizzie the interior features that survived from the Norman castle, and then proceeded out through the main front door, as he pointed out the three big stones that framed it.

  “You see here how the house got its name,” he explained. “The stone circle, or ‘henge’ that stood here in prehistoric times was dismantled and the stones incorporated into the castle. As it sits on this hilltop it was the henge on the ‘mont’ or mountain, and consequently became Hengemont.”

  Edmund was able to point out to Lizzie where each of the other nine known stones were in the foundation, and gave her a general idea of where archaeologists thought the circle had stood.

  “This area is rich in prehistoric sites,” he added. “Was the weather clear enough to see the white horse on the hillside coming from Minehead?”

  Lizzie told him that it was and that she had seen the horse. Edmund pointed out the gothic additions to the front of the house and they then went back inside, through the main hall and into the foyer of the Robert Adam wing. From here they went out to the terrace as Edmund gave Lizzie a rundown of the construction of the various additions to the house. The general outline was pretty much as she had read about it in Martin’s book, but Edmund was able to add numerous details. Their conversation was easy and comfortable, and occasionally they stood close enough for their arms to touch as they looked at one or another of the details of the house.

  As they went down the terrace steps into the garden, and from there down the slope toward the gate to the church, Edmund described the footprint of the original stone walls. He touched Lizzie on the arm to get her attention before motioning around the outline of the old castle keep.

  “There was a passage along the connecting walls right around the whole compound,” he said as he pointed out the castle yard, from the church down to the harbor, and back up the slope again. “The connection was broken with the building of the first additions in the late fourteenth century.”

  From where they stood they could see the original roofline of the tower as it stood up squarely behind Robert Adam’s elegant Georgian addition.

  “What a great view it must be from there,” Lizzie said, looking at the top of the tower.

  �
��Well as you know from the story I told you, it was a favorite place for romantic trysts back in medieval times.”

  Standing here in the bright sunshine, the images from her dreams seemed very distant. She studied the crenellated roofline. “Can we go up there?” she asked, surprised to hear herself asking the question.

  “You know I thought you might be interested in that,” Edmund answered, smiling at her. “When I got the keys to the gate and the church from Mrs. Jeffries I asked her for the roof key as well. She says it’s been lost for years.”

  “When were you up there last?”

  “I think I was about eight or nine. My Aunt Bette took me up there.”

  They stood silently for a moment as Lizzie took in the prospect from every angle around her, and then Edmund gestured toward the gate and the church beyond it. Without thinking about the action, she slipped her arm through his as they walked across the garden and he, with equal comfort, rested his hand upon her arm.

  “The chapel was built by the first member of my family to live in England,” he said as they walked. When they reached the gate, he took the key from his pocket and opened it. They passed along the path through the churchyard to the big oak door of the church and Edmund produced another key to open it.

  Inside it was cool and dark. Light filtered in through tall narrow windows and Lizzie’s eyes gradually adjusted. She had been in a number of churches of this vintage in England, and she couldn’t help feeling that this was a particularly wonderful example. Each generation had added its own details and monuments, and changes and additions had been made over the years, but the resulting clash of styles was not so jarring as it often seemed in other churches.

  Near the door were two matching monuments commemorating local men lost in the two world wars. As Lizzie scanned the names she noticed that each list had two men named Hatton. She thought again of the photographs she had seen in the Navy Room, and of Bette’s description of her uncles and her brothers. These were those young men. Like Francis Hatton they had served in the Royal Navy—one had been a Lieutenant on the Hood, sunk by the Bismarck.

  Below the two plaques was a quotation from a poem by Rudyard Kipling: “If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God we ha’ paid in full!” Lizzie blinked back tears. She turned from the monument and smiled sheepishly at Edmund.

  “These are long lists for a small village,” she said softly, gesturing to the war memorial. She wanted to add something about the impact on his own family, but her emotions were suddenly so close to the surface that she feared a deep discussion might result in a flood of tears. Edmund looked at her with an expression that Lizzie thought lay somewhere between pity and exasperation. She grinned back sheepishly.

  They circled around the church and Edmund pointed out interesting features here and there, speaking in a low voice. Lizzie was impressed with his knowledge of architecture and history, and the Hatton family monuments were like a textbook of memorial styles through the centuries. It wasn’t like other tours, however; Edmund was no disinterested stranger. Though his descriptions were always in the third person, Lizzie couldn’t help thinking that these were the graves of his own family.

  They stopped at a remarkable Elizabethan alabaster carving of a ship. A man in armor, with a ruff around his neck and his hands clasped in prayer, was being lowered by two comrades into the sea.

  “He died on a voyage to Portugal,” Edmund said from behind her. “He was on a diplomatic mission and was buried at sea.” A woman carved from similar stone was kneeling in prayer before it. Edmund pointed her out as the wife of the sailor.

  They looked at other monuments and finally stopped at the one that memorialized Francis Hatton. It was a marble oval, inlaid with a mosaic map of the world. The route of Hatton’s voyage was shown in colored stones.

  “It’s strange,” Lizzie said, looking at it, “but I almost feel like I know him. I’ve read so much of his writing now, and his personality just infuses it. He’s a very easy man to like.”

  Edmund let her study it for several minutes.

  “If I were you, I think I would derive a great deal of comfort from a place like this,” Lizzie said hesitantly, turning to face him.

  “What do you mean?” Edmund asked.

  “I don’t know,” she stammered. “It just seems that there is a sense of belonging or something.” She paused before a monument of three marble men, each resting casually on an elbow, their full-length effigies mounted one above the other, each looking into the space above her.

  “Three brothers who died young,” Edmund murmured. They walked in silence toward the front of the church. “More than thirty generations of my family are buried here,” he said when he spoke again, “and I guess there is a certain sense of comfort in that.” He paused before a small and simple plaque in the wall: “Jane Merrill Hatton, 1932-1994”.

  It had to be the memorial for his mother, she thought, wondering where the actual grave was, and moving forward without speaking.

  “One is constantly reminded of all the tragedies in the family by a place like this, however,” he said finally, glancing around at the dozens of graves. “I don’t know if it’s true in every family, but there do seem to be an awful lot of Hattons who died young or tragically, and I am reminded of that every time I come in here.”

  “That is, of course, the other side of the coin,” Lizzie said philosophically. “I have always rather regretted not having a family burial place, because it seemed that there was such a sense of history in it.” She paused and looked at him. “But there is a lot of tragedy in the past.”

  “We like to think of it as a unique feature of our own lives?”

  Lizzie responded with a nod and slight smile.

  As they reached the transept of the church, Edmund pointed out the oldest Norman features, and in the gloom Lizzie saw several full-length tomb chests with carved effigies on the top. The light filtered through a stained glass window and fell with an orange glow on the oldest of them. In marble, stone, and alabaster, the medieval Hattons lay head-to-foot around the wall of the north transept, each in a set-back cell with a gothic arch. Edmund pointed out the ancestor who had come from Normandy with Henry II, and his heirs. Many were carved wearing the armor they carried into battle.

  As they reached the fourth niche along the wall, Lizzie stopped short. The couple lying side by side before her were the lovers from the triptych.

  The painting that showed the two of them in the “clothing appropriate to their own time” was taken directly from this carving. The knight wore the Crusader armor that Lizzie knew from the triptych, the Rossetti painting, and her dream. The chapel suddenly felt clammy and Lizzie shivered slightly as she moved toward the tomb.

  The effigy of the pair had been carved flat but was mounted at an angle that allowed both of the lovers to be seen from the floor of the church. Nonetheless, Lizzie stepped up the two steps that would allow her to stand directly beside the carving and look closely at the details. The faces were beautifully carved, the clothing wonderfully detailed. The stone was now almost entirely grey, but it was possible here and there to see slight vestiges of paint on them and Lizzie realized that the triptych artist had depicted their clothes in the colors that must still have been visible on the carving in the middle of the fifteenth century.

  On the tunic of the knight she could just barely see the rust-colored background covered with small white crosses. His shield and epaulets showed the same heraldic device she had noticed in the triptych and the Rossetti painting: two hearts atop a battlement, with the waves of the sea beneath. Along the edge of the stone were their names: Jean d’Hautain and Elizabeth Pintard d’Hautain.

  She reached out her hand and tentatively touched the face of the knight. His eyes were closed, the stone cool.

  “John,” she whispered softly.

  Edmund came up to stand beside her. Lizzie was suddenly flustered.
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  “What is it?” Edmund asked.

  She cleared her throat, trying to sound calm. “I recognize these two as John and Elizabeth from the story you told me,” she said. “Do you know the little medieval painting of the jousting scene that’s in the cabinet? Two of the figures were taken directly from this carving.”

  Edmund shook his head. “I’m sorry to say that there are probably lots of things in the house that have escaped my attention; that doesn’t even sound familiar.”

  They were standing so close that Lizzie could feel the contour of his arm through her sweater. Through the whole of the day they had often touched each other and the contact was casual, easy. But now, standing in front of these two lovers, Lizzie felt for the first time that there was the potential for something more. She thought again of her dream and the passion that had filled it. The image of Edmund’s mouth on hers, his tongue on her lips, his body lying naked on her own. She felt herself flush from her core to the roots of her hair and was relieved that the dim light of the chapel disguised it from her companion.

  She stepped back. Commanding herself to think of other things she turned her thought to the paintings that she had examined so closely the day before. Looking around the chapel she thought about the women wearing the ruby. Where were those women anyway?

  “Where is the woman from the Rossetti painting?” she asked Edmund.

  “My goodness, you have been getting through the collection very thoroughly,” he answered. He turned his back to the Crusader effigy and stepped down the few stairs to the stone floor of the church. “If I remember the story correctly,” he continued, “she requested to be buried with him. I think they are down in Brighton or someplace.”

  Lizzie thought for a moment. It was possible that the other young women had married and consequently been buried with the families of their husbands. The fact that their graves were not immediately obvious here shouldn’t be such a mystery. But, she thought, at least one had died single in the late nineteenth century. Her aunt had written a poem for her. Where was she? And where was Eliza, Frank’s sister? She had also been single and died young. Lizzie could no longer resist asking Edmund about those women.