The Wandering Heart

by Mary Malloy

  She shrugged and smiled. “That was a stupid question, I guess, but I was trying to get a sense of what kind of medical arsenal someone like Margaret Hatton had in the fifteenth century. You say that belladonna was a hallucinogen, but how common was it?”

  “It grew wild all over this part of England. You can still see it along roads and walls, and it’s common in the hedges.” He looked surprised at her ignorance. “Don’t you know it? It’s also called nightshade—has a white flower and a green berry.”

  Lizzie shook her head.

  “Well, it’s easy to cultivate, and Margaret Hatton certainly had it in her garden, along with henbane, monkshood, and mandrake, all very powerful drugs.” He began to leaf through the book. “Of course she also used garlic, basil, chamomile, and the more exotic spices that she got from travelers to warmer climates—cinnamon, cloves, cardamon, nutmeg, mace.”

  He found the page he was looking for. “Here,” he said, pointing out a passage. “This is her description of mandrake root.”

  Lizzie pulled the book toward her and read with some difficulty. The handwriting was very careful, but the language was archaic. Margaret Hatton was describing the powerful effects of mandrake; it could be used to anesthetize someone enough to perform a surgical procedure, including amputation, and it could “staunch ye flowe of bludde.” But an overdose could lead to madness, she cautioned, and she did not recommend it as a love potion, though others had used it as such. “Thus did Richard doom Elizabeth,” was the final line.

  “This is in reference to that very first Richard and Elizabeth?”

  He nodded. “As I interpret this, he gave her mandrake as a love potion to convince her to marry him.” He closed the book and folded his hands together. “Mandrake is in the same general family as belladonna, they both contain certain alkaloids that have important medical properties, but as I said, despite old Margaret’s care at writing down the recipe, it was simply impossible to control dosages before the advent of modern laboratory equipment.”

  Lizzie took the book from under Edmund’s hands and began to turn at random to various pages. “She wrote this two hundred years after the event, though.”

  “Yes, but the story is still being told in my family today, and we have many more distractions. She was more than five hundred years closer to it.”

  Lizzie could not help but notice how careful and precise each entry in the book was.

  “I am impressed that Margaret Hatton was trying to understand things from a scientific perspective.”

  “I was too.” Edmund leaned back in his chair and was thoughtful for a moment. “My brother Richard and I once collected belladonna berries and extracted the seeds,” he admitted. “We prepared it using a recipe in this book.”

  Lizzie was surprised at the abruptness of his comment. “Did you do anything with it?” she asked.

  “I didn’t, but I think Dick actually took it several times for its hallucinogenic effect.”

  Lizzie didn’t say anything. She was thinking about Bette Hatton. After a minute she looked at Edmund, and it seemed as if he might have been thinking about her too.

  “I know it was stupid of Dick,” he said. “But it’s one of the reasons why, when I got to medical school, I decided to look into these ‘herbs’ more carefully.”

  There was another moment of silence as Lizzie digested all the information Edmund had given her.

  “So the women in your family who took them, took them for medicinal purposes?”

  He nodded. “I believe so.”

  “And not just to make themselves more beautiful?”

  “I was being too flip when I said that,” he responded. “This is, in fact, quite serious. Most of these girls were probably suffering from depression and all of its attendant symptoms, including digestive problems, and their families were most likely trying to help them by giving them one of these compounds.”

  “In modern terms, what’s in them?” she asked.

  “Scopolamine, which was an important anesthetic and is still used to prevent sea sickness; atropine, one of the first drugs used to treat Parkinson’s disease; and hyoscyamine, which controls spasms in the gastrointestinal tract.” He began to gather up the books and put them in a pile. “All useful and important. But, because of the side effects, all compounds that are now made synthetically.”

  Helen arrived with lunch and the two continued their conversation about medieval pharmacology as they ate. When they finished, Edmund went to call his office and Lizzie stood for several minutes at the tall windows, looking across the terrace. She thought again of Eliza and felt a chill. She rubbed her arms and looked at her watch. It was three-thirty. In the distance a bell rang and a few minutes later Helen appeared again with a package for Lizzie.

  “It’s from Richard,” Lizzie said with surprise, reading the note. “He apologizes for having been so beastly, and says he wishes me luck on my research.” She opened the package to find a small box of fine chocolates. She offered one to Helen, who declined, but took one for herself. She lingered over it as she turned back to the window. She was feeling somewhat warmer, though the terrace stones looked harder and colder than they had even a few minutes earlier.

  Lizzie shivered. She went to her computer and began to add the information from the memorial stones to her growing file on the Hatton women.

  The scrap of paper from her notebook seemed to recede into the desk as she read it, her scribbled writing almost to come loose from the paper and move around on its own. The name repeated itself over and over: Elizabeth Hatton, Elizabeth Hatton, Elizabeth Hatton. The dates of birth and death swirled on the page.

  Edmund came in and began speaking, but at first she couldn’t make out the language.

  “My God, you’re white as a sheet,” was the first thing he said that she could understand. He came to sit in the chair beside her and reached for her hand. “Your pulse is racing,” he said.

  Lizzie’s head throbbed, though it cleared enough to make her embarrassed. She had prodded too deeply into the subject of these suicides during the day. She felt that Edmund was near the end of his patience with her on the subject. She withdrew her hand.

  “Thanks,” she said, “but I’m really fine.”

  He looked worried. “You look exhausted.”

  She told him that she hadn’t been sleeping well the last several nights.

  He looked at her again closely. “Bed is probably the best place for you.”

  She mumbled her agreement, and began to rise from her chair but felt very unsteady. He took her arm.

  “Would you like me to give you something to help you sleep?” he asked.

  Ordinarily, she would never have found it necessary, but she was feeling so jittery and unnerved that she assented.

  “Have you taken valium before?” he asked.

  “No. I don’t remember ever taking any kind of sedative.”

  “Are you allergic to any drugs?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

  “It’s usually a pretty good bet,” he said. “I’ll call down to the chemist and have them send over a few tablets.” He left to make the call and Lizzie sat down again. The paper on the table seemed solid enough. She put it into the file folder with the poems and shut off her computer. She was able to stand more steadily now.

  “You look a little better,” Edmund said when he returned. “Can you make it up to your room?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Please stop worrying.”

  He couldn’t resist attempting to take her arm, but she shook him off.

  “If you want to go up and get into bed,” he said, “I’ll bring the prescription up when it comes.”

  “Thanks,” Lizzie said. She forced herself to walk steadily to the library door, into the hall, and up the stairs.

  There were the portraits again. Eliza’s sad eye
s followed her as she reached the landing. Lizzie was glad that she was going to have some pharmaceutical help getting to sleep that night.

  When she got to her room she slipped into her nightgown and robe, trying to make herself presentable to receive a visitor in her bedroom. Bette’s diary was still lying on her night table and she picked it up again. It would be stupid to start working at this point, especially since she was sure the valium would probably knock her out pretty quickly. She thought she would just read a bit before Edmund arrived, and she was feeling better now that she was could lie down.

  The fact that she now knew that Bette wasn’t dead made reading her diary seem like even more of an intrusion into her privacy, but Lizzie thought that there might also be an explanation of some of the family’s tragic history. She leafed through it until she found a passage that seemed to be relevant. There was “a story that must be told,” Bette wrote. “My aunt wrote it down for my father, and I will copy it here.”

  Though Bette occasionally had a wonderfully idiomatic sixties turn-of-phrase, the story she related was written with stylish grace and with flashes of wit. It was the same story that Edmund had told her, about a Norman woman named Elizabeth Pintard who arrived at Hengemont in the middle of the thirteenth century to marry the heir to the d’Hautains, another Norman family. Before she was introduced to her intended husband, the young bride-to-be accidentally met his brother, John, in a chance encounter on the roof of the castle, and fell instantly in love.

  Bette described that first encounter with potent romantic imagery, and was almost pornographic in her depiction of their next encounter on the tower, as newlyweds. When they met there a third time to say good-bye, Elizabeth made her husband promise that he would come back and John promised he would, that “his heart was hers,” as Bette put it.

  John gave Elizabeth a heart-shaped ruby. This, he said, was in token of his heart until that day when he would come back to her. This ruby, exchanged in love seven hundred and fifty years before, was the very stone that Bette had discovered in the compartment secreted in Francis Hatton’s cabinet, and that all those Hatton women had worn through the years. Lizzie picked up the triptych again. Clearly this was the story told in the three paintings.

  In the triptych there were several knights in evidence, one wearing a crown over his helmet. Lizzie wondered who he might be. There was no mistaking which one was John d’Hautain, the hero of the story. He was the knight in the effigy on the tomb. And Elizabeth Pintard d’Hautain was the woman who lay beside him. Lizzie went back to Bette’s diary.

  Bette admitted that she had dropped acid several times the year before and was occasionally having mild hallucinations, which she described as flashbacks. They presented themselves as extremely vivid colors, motions in inanimate objects, a heightened sense of taste, and acute hearing. She wrote endlessly of sexual encounters; she was obviously very promiscuous, but there was no love or joy in it. Her depression was palpable in her writing, and Lizzie felt very sad reading it.

  Edmund’s knock startled her. She had forgotten that she was expecting him. Lizzie quickly closed Bette’s diary, fastened the latch on the triptych case, and placed everything she had taken from the cabinet into the drawer of the bedside table. She crossed the room and let Edmund in. Helen was with him and she brought a tray with a pot of tea, a little pitcher of water, and the box of chocolates that Richard had sent.

  “My goodness this is good service,” Lizzie said. “I wish you were my doctor at home.”

  “This is the service that I give to house guests,” Edmund said with a smile. “I never treat my patients this well.” He gave her the prescription and a glass of water. “Take one of these now,” he said. “The other is in case you need it tomorrow night.”

  Lizzie took the pill as instructed.

  “Will you be down for dinner?” Helen asked.

  “I don’t think so, thanks.”

  “Should I bring you a tray?”

  “No thank you,” Lizzie answered. “I expect I might sleep right on through it, but I will have another chocolate.” She offered one to Edmund. “This was a rather nice gesture on your brother’s part,” she said.

  He agreed that the gesture was unexpectedly thoughtful, but refused the chocolate. “Like most of the Hattons, I am allergic to the stuff,” he explained.

  “That’s unfortunate,” Lizzie said, popping one into her mouth. “It is possibly the best medicine of all.” She asked him to make her excuses to his father and Lily.

  He smiled at her. “Of course. I hope you’re recovered in the morning.”

  When he and Helen were gone, Lizzie got back into bed and returned to Bette’s diary.

  My father told me that his great-aunt made him promise that he would tell this story to his daughter if he had one, and that now he had done his duty. He told me this story without emotion.

  I asked if he would take me up to the roof and show me where those two lovers met. He told me I could get the key and go there myself. I said the story he told me was so romantic. He said “Death isn’t romantic.”

  My father has no fear of the past. This kind of thing doesn’t scare him—though he told me his aunt was scared when she told it to him. Told him to take it seriously, but he doesn’t. “War is serious,” he told me. “Human beings are dangerous. Germans are dangerous. Your own government can be dangerous,” he said, “but the past can’t hurt you.”

  I’m sorry that I can’t remember my brothers who mean so much to him. I’m sorry that my mother died when I was so young. I can’t help thinking that it was somehow my fault, though George once told me I shouldn’t think like that. Our parents were too old to have another baby, he said, but wanted to replace their sons that died. That didn’t make me feel better.

  “What is love?” she wrote repeatedly, and “What is the relationship between love and sex?” There were questions about the faithfulness of men, and a comment on the suffering of women that resulted when promises were broken.

  “I have been wondering a lot about sex,” she wrote, “and why I don’t like it much, especially because other women seem to.”

  I guess the real problem is that I have never been in love. Not really in love—deeply, madly in love. Not Elizabeth’s kind of love where you would actually die because you couldn’t be with the object of your affection. I wish I could feel that. To feel those hands, those lips.

  Lizzie began to find the subsequent entries frightening. Bette’s breakdown was becoming apparent. More and more she identified with her ancestress, Elizabeth d’Hautain, who had pledged a profound devotion and had subsequently been shattered by her lover’s death. Eventually Bette began to go to the roof on an almost daily basis.

  October 19, 1965—I went up there again today just as the sun was setting. I felt so alone. I actually climbed up on the wall and looked down at the ground. The trees below me in the garden looked lovely, just at the peak of their autumn colours. I have decided to keep the key.

  October 25, 1965—George arrived today. He left Jane and the boys in London. I think my father called him down here to cheer me. He is such a good fellow, really. We went for a long walk and talked for hours. He took my picture in the garden.

  When I think about love, I can’t help thinking back to a time when George was home on a school holiday. He came into my room one evening, bursting to tell someone that he was in love. She was a woman he met at Oxford. “So brilliant, so beautiful,” he said. A few days later he screwed up his courage and told our father.

  For the next few days they were completely silent. Finally I heard my father tell George he must end it. “She is not suitable,” he said. Within a few months he was married to Jane.

  Today I asked George about that woman from college. He laughed. I asked him if he had really loved her and he said yes. No hesitation at all, just “yes.” I asked him if he had had sex with her and he actually blushed. “I don�
��t think that’s the kind of thing I should be discussing with my little sister,” he said.

  I asked him why he didn’t marry her. He said that because she was a Catholic, father said he couldn’t. I don’t think George was ever in love with Jane in the same way. She was just more “suitable.”

  What’s wrong with men? Even the good ones can be asses.

  George returned to London and Bette went back to the roof. She began to see a local doctor for some kind of therapy on a weekly basis, which soon became daily, and eventually the doctor became so concerned that he convinced her father that she should go into a hospital in London.

  Father says I have to go away. I know they are planning to put me in an institution. If only there was a woman I could talk to. I wish my mum was alive, but even she probably would not understand what is wrong with me. I wish Elizabeth d’Hautain could come through time and tell me what it was like to love John. I wish father’s great-aunt Elizabeth could come through time and tell me what to do. Unlike father, I would appreciate all the things she had to share. He keeps asking me where the key to the roof is. They watch me all the time. They let me go to the library, but practically nowhere else. I feel like a prisoner now. Why are men so heartless? If one cannot have real love, then is life worth living?

  Lizzie felt nauseous as she read it. There was now something undeniably scary about the poems, the portraits, the gravestones, the dreams. What had happened to all those girls?

  Lizzie snapped the book shut and tossed it onto the bedside table. She had to get up to move the tray from the bed to the dresser; then she took a sip of water, turned out the light, and walked to the window. The moon was just rising, a bit fuller than the night before, cold and stark white. She shivered in her thin nightgown.

  Across the courtyard she could see the yellow glow of a lamp in the end room of the Tudor wing. Was that Edmund’s room, she wondered? Edmund, whom she was beginning to find so fascinating. Was he a heart breaker like his great-great-great-great-grandfather? Lizzie still felt slightly sick, her stomach in a knot. Her arms were covered with goose bumps, her teeth chattering with the cold. She climbed back into the bed and pulled the comforter up to her chin. She was still feeling agitated. Why wasn’t the valium working? Even as she asked herself the question, she drifted off to sleep.