The Wandering Heart

by Mary Malloy

  There was a silence of several seconds when she finished. She expected her husband to ask her if she was still sane. Instead he said, “You must get out of that house immediately.”

  Martin had always been more superstitious than she, but the fervor of his response took her by surprise.

  “I’ve already moved out,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m now at the White Horse Inn in Hengeport village.”

  “What are your plans?” he asked with concern.

  “I finish at the house tomorrow and then I’m going up to London.”

  “Are you okay working there? I’m not so sure you should go back at all.”

  “No, I’m okay,” she assured him. “My host is concerned enough about my sanity that I don’t think he’s going to let me out of his sight.”

  “I don’t think you take these things seriously enough Lizzie,” Martin said. “There are things out there in the world that we don’t really understand.”

  Lizzie tried to lighten the tone of the conversation. “Well, when we hang up you can call the Psychic Friends Network and ask them what I should do.”

  Her husband was not amused. “Those people aren’t really psychic,” he said. “But you may be. Please take this seriously and be careful.”

  “I will,” she said soberly. “I wish you were here. I could use a hug.”

  “I don’t suppose you want to come home until you know more about what’s happening?” he asked. “Or are you going to force me to chase you over there?”

  “You know me so well, dear Martin. When can you get here?”

  “I’ll make the arrangements and meet you in London in a few days,” he said. “I was planning to come next week anyway, but I’ll change my ticket.”

  “Thanks, darling,” she said. “I feel better already.”

  “And I feel worse.”

  “I’m perfectly fine.”

  “Call me tomorrow night and let me know what’s happening. I’ll have made my travel arrangements by then and I’ll meet you soon after in London.”

  They said their goodbyes and Lizzie hung up the phone. She was feeling very anxious and now Martin knew it. She was also feeling guilty about her growing attachment to Edmund.

  Lizzie could no longer deny that she was powerfully attracted to Edmund Hatton. Why wouldn’t she be, she thought? He was kind, intelligent, handsome, and rich; he had a wry wit but wasn’t overtly funny like Martin. At first she had thought he might have an English reserve, but he had definitely warmed to her, as she had to him.

  When they first met they had shaken hands, then exchanged light kisses on the cheek, which evolved into warm hugs. But something had happened recently that she had a hard time reconciling. Now they kissed on the lips, and the friendly hugs had somehow turned into something longer and tighter, something more like an embrace.

  She certainly loved Martin, and there was a profound guilt in all of this. Guilt and fear and curiosity and excitement. How far would she go with it? To commit adultery with Edmund would, she knew, mean the end of her marriage to Martin, and that she did not want. Still, Edmund’s arms felt very good around her, his warm, soft lips fit well against her own. When she was expecting him, she found herself feeling not only a sense of anticipation, but something physical as well, some surge of energy, which she tried very hard to cover with a patina of nonchalance.

  She hadn’t actually felt like this in many years. Occasionally she found men she encountered sexy and attractive, but she had thought that this high-school-crush response was years behind her. She liked the comparison though. It allowed her to think there might be some hormonal rationalization for her feelings and actions, but did not lessen the feelings of anxiety, desire, and the various fears: fear of rejection, fear of acceptance, fear of misunderstanding, fear of change, fear of sameness.

  For now, she told herself, her first priority must be to protect Martin and her relationship with him. Even though she hadn’t really done anything wrong, she had felt things that now stood between them. It was the first time in the whole of their relationship that she had ever failed to share something important with him.

  Chapter 17

  The Norman chapel in which the Hattons were buried was not the only church in Hengeport. When the Church of England took over the properties of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century there continued to be a small local population that practiced Catholicism, secretly at first, but with greater openness as the various monarchs came and went, dragging the country back and forth with them from Protestantism to Catholicism and back. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the first wave of a flood of Irish immigrants came to the area to fish, to work in new factories that were beginning to dot the landscape, and to enter the employment of the Hattons, either as domestic or agricultural labor. Within a few decades a new Catholic church had been built in the neighborhood and Lizzie passed it as she walked the next morning from the White Horse Inn to Hengemont. It was a plain brick structure, with none of the Norman solidness or the gothic impressiveness of the older church at the edge of the estate.

  As she stood pondering it the door opened and a man came out. He wore a priest’s collar, a rubber apron, gloves, and Wellington boots. He was carrying a bucket in one hand and a mop in the other. He saw Lizzie and waved, leaning the mop against the wall and calling out a greeting.

  Lizzie saw there was no way to avoid a chat with the priest. He introduced himself as Father Folan, and Lizzie was surprised to hear his Irish accent. Being an active and curious small-town pastor, he already knew who she was and what she was doing at Hengemont

  “So how is your work going?” he asked, after their preliminary introductions were finished.

  Lizzie explained to him a little about the Francis Hatton collection from the Pacific Ocean. The priest was friendly and comfortable and seemed very interested in the project.

  “You know,” he said, after thinking for a minute, “there may be something related to him in our little document collection here.” He turned and gestured for her to follow him into the side door of the church. “I remember something about the man being on a voyage with Captain Cook.”

  Lizzie was completely astonished. They arrived in his crowded study behind the altar and Father Folan took down an old metal file box with a rusted key in the lock and a peeling paper label that said “Hengemont.” Inside were a number of leather-bound ledger books of the kind used as ships’ logs or estate account books, and several loose papers.

  “I’m surprised,” she admitted. “I never expected to find anything relevant here.”

  From behind the next door Lizzie heard the whistle of a kettle.

  “I just put some water on for tea,” the priest explained. “May I offer you a cup?”

  Lizzie nodded. As he stepped out of the room she took off her coat and looked around at the shelves crowded with books, boxes, and loose papers. Father Folan returned with a small tray on which he had put two cups, a teapot, milk, sugar, and a small plate of cookies. He served Lizzie and then turned to one of the ledger books. It was bulging with manuscript letters pasted to each page, which he turned over quickly until he came to the one he sought.

  “This is it,” he said. “I remembered that there was something here signed by Lieutenant Francis Hatton. It struck me as odd enough when I saw it, because by his time the family was firmly in the Church of England and it seemed strange that he would request a Catholic priest to come down to his own church.”

  “It does seem strange,” Lizzie responded. “What did he want, absolution?” She knew how seriously he had taken his transgression with Eltatsy’s corpse. Could it have driven him to the local priest? The Anglican vicar would have been in the employ of his family.

  Father Folan interrupted her thoughts with a little chuckle. “Nothing so radical as that,” he said, “but odd nonetheless. Here it is.” He pointed to the signature of F
rancis Hatton, which Lizzie recognized from his letters. “He is requesting a priest to come to their church for the opening of a tomb in 1781.”

  Lizzie looked at the letter with puzzlement. “A grisly bit of business,” she said, “but I can’t see why he would need the help of a priest to do it.”

  “Because the corpse had been buried as a Catholic and there was clearly some family superstition involved in the whole business,” he said. He read the letter again, and then looked at another page attached to it with a pin and written in another hand. “This is a sort of report from the priest,” Father Folan said, detaching the second piece of paper. “They opened up one of the Crusader tombs in the church. Apparently the sister of Lieutenant Hatton was unstable and had become obsessed with knowing if your man, the Crusader, was in fact interred there. Her brother had the tomb opened at her insistence.”

  Lizzie felt goose bumps rising on her arms. “And was he there?” she asked.

  “No,” the old priest answered, shoving his glasses up onto his head and holding the paper close to his face. “The strange thing is that the sarcophagus was so clean that it was apparent to them all that neither the Crusader nor his wife had ever been buried there, though the effigies of both were carved on the lid, and the inscription indicated the tomb was built for them.”

  Lizzie was trying very hard to maintain a nonchalant tone. “Well, it had been over five hundred years by then,” she said. “Maybe they had just completely deteriorated into dust.”

  “The priest here is pretty clear that he had been called to witness the removal of other twelfth and thirteenth-century corpses from local tombs and that there was always some remnant of bones, teeth, clothing, or something. He was convinced there had never been any bodies buried in that sarcophagus.” He looked back at Lizzie. “Certainly his experience in these matters was much greater than mine.” He patted her hand as he saw her wan complexion. “I’ve read some of his other papers and I have no doubts about the trustworthiness of his comments.”

  “What happened to them?” she asked, hoping the priest had additional information somewhere in his file.

  “Well, the Crusader may, in fact, never have returned from the Holy Land,” he answered. “There’s something else here. I sent to Rome for it.” He reached up to a high shelf and pulled down another box in which Lizzie could see old papers bound up with string, and one impressive large roll of vellum.

  “When I was a young priest in Ireland,” Father Folan continued, “I heard that at the time of the Reformation a number of priests fled from England to Rome, taking their parish documents with them. When they told me I would be assigned to Hengeport, I wrote to the Vatican to see if they had anything that should be returned to this parish and I got this file.” He pulled several bundles out of the box and laid them on the table. “Most of them are in very old Latin, and I’m still struggling with the translations.” He removed the roll of vellum from the box with care; two ribbons were wrapped around it.

  “Here it is,” he said, “from the time of the Crusades.” He unrolled the scroll; the ribbons each had a flat disk attached to them. “Wax seals,” he said to Lizzie as he picked up first one and then the other. Lizzie pulled her chair in close. One of the seals she recognized: the three lions of the crown of England.

  “It’s the old seal of the king,” she said.

  Father Folan nodded. “Indeed it is,” he answered, “the seal of Richard the First—Richard the Lionhearted, and here’s his mark,” he said, pointing at the “Rex” scrolled at the bottom of the vellum document. “No wait,” he said, looking more closely, “that’s not an ‘R’ for ‘Richard.’ What is it?”

  He fumbled about with his glasses until Lizzie reached into her bag and pulled out her flexible plastic magnifying square. She passed it to the priest and he nodded his thanks. She was so impatient to look at the paper that she was tempted to squeeze in beside him, but she remained silent until he raised his face and looked at her.

  “It’s an ‘H’,” he said finally, “with the Roman numeral for three.”

  “Henry the third,” they said simultaneously.

  Father Folan winked at her. “It was a number of years before they began to add the symbols of the other countries they plundered, Ireland foremost, of course,” he said, “but also France, Scotland, and Wales.”

  He picked up the other seal. “Ah, look at this,” he said. Lizzie obeyed, examining the hard red disk closely. The impression was still remarkably clear: a horse with two riders, each wearing armor and carrying a shield.

  “Do you recognize the arms?” Father Folan asked.

  She shook her head.

  “If I’m not mistaken,” the priest said, looking at it again under the magnifier, “it’s the seal of the Knights Templar, the great warrior priests of the Crusades.”

  “What does the document say?” Lizzie asked, her excitement tinged with nervousness.

  “Well, as I said, it’s a very old-fashioned Latin,” he said, pushing his glasses up to the top of his head again and lowering his face almost to the page to take advantage of her magnifying glass. “It appears to be a contract between King Henry and the Knights Templar for the care of a young English knight, John the Proud, and, in the case of his death, their agreement to send his remains back to his bride in England; for which services William Longespèe, the Earl of Salisbury, will leave some amount of money that I can’t translate.”

  “Without embalming, how did they propose to transport a corpse from the Holy Land to England?”

  “I’m sorry, my translation may not be entirely accurate, and there is sort of a mixture of Latin and French here. They talk of sending his ‘coeurs,’ which I first took to mean his corpse, but on second thought it may actually refer to his ‘coeur,’ his heart.”

  She had heard about heart burials, but couldn’t imagine how they would have been managed in medieval times and, despite her morbid curiosity, couldn’t ask about it without cringing.

  “I heard a rumor you are a doctor,” the priest said. “Surely the idea of removing a heart from a corpse can’t be entirely alien to you.”

  “I’m not that kind of doctor,” she replied. “I can solve your history problems, but not your medical ones.”

  “Well, if you were a doctor in the Middle Ages you would not have had the luxury of making such distinctions. Everyone had a pretty conversational knowledge of blood and body parts, and it wouldn’t have been unheard of to send young John the Proud’s heart back in lieu of his entire body.”

  She asked him again if he knew how it would have been preserved.

  “I think they tried to dry or mummify it with salt or hot sand, and then packed it into some sort of small casket. Certainly the body parts of saints were sent all over Europe in jeweled ‘reliquaries’ or relic carriers. For the Knights Templar it would all have been in a day’s work.”

  He continued to study the document, now pulling a small Latin dictionary down from the shelf behind him.

  “Who is this ‘John the Proud’?” Lizzie asked.

  “I was just trying to figure that out,” he said, thumbing through his dictionary. “They give the name as ‘Celsum,’ which could be ‘proud’ or ‘lofty’ or ‘haughty,’ or even just mean that he was very tall. I’m not sure.”

  “What would it be in French?”

  “Maybe ‘fier’ or ‘hautain.’”

  “That’s the original name of the Hattons,” Lizzie exclaimed, “d’Hautain, the first one came over with the Normans.” Her words caught in her throat.

  “Where is his heart?” she thought.

  When the question had been asked, it was in reference to his actual heart!

  While she had been sipping tea and munching cookies, they had been talking about his heart, the heart. She tried to keep her hands from rattling the cup against the saucer.

  Father Folan, his face deep
in his dictionary and the manuscript, did not seem to notice her consternation.

  “Of course,” he nodded, “John the Proud, Jean d’Hautain, John Hatton, that would be the reason this contract came back to this church. In the thirteenth century there probably wasn’t anyone living at the castle who could read it, so they would have brought it to the priest.”

  “But the heart never came back or it would have been in that sarcophagus in the church down the road,” Lizzie pressed. “So maybe John the Proud didn’t die then after all, or maybe the Knights Templar took advantage of the distance and simply kept the money.” Lizzie stood up now and began to pace around the small room, trying to fit the pieces together.

  Father Folan rolled up the document. “Oh I don’t think the Knights Templar would have reneged on a contract signed by the king. Though they were destroyed by torture and disgusting lies in the end, their success depended on their honor. If Hatton, or ‘d’Hautain’ as he was apparently called in Norman times, had died in their care, I’m positive the Templars would have tried to live up to their agreement.”

  “So where is his heart?”

  Lizzie had asked the question and now she repeated it. “Where is his heart?”

  She sat down again by Father Folan. “Where was this contract made?”

  The priest scanned the signature area again. “The document was signed in London, but the reference here to the Earl of Salisbury implies that he was the one responsible for the delivery of the heart to the right person.”

  “Who’s the Earl of Salisbury?”

  “I’m sorry, my dear, but I have no idea.”

  She sat down again. If Father Folan had noticed her agitation, he was polite enough not to mention it, turning instead to other documents in the ledger of the Hatton family and leafing through them. He stopped at a letter and read it several times before turning the whole volume toward Lizzie.