by Mary Malloy
“The fact that you have one document identified already gives you a good starting point,” he mumbled, turning back and forth from the index to the body of the book. He looked up at her and smiled. “This is my own field of interest,” he said, “the Templars and the Plantagenet kings.”
Lizzie could not believe her luck.
“Here’s your document,” Anthony said, turning the book toward Lizzie and pointing to the index. “And here’s something that seems to be related.” He flipped through the book to the page indicated. She looked at the page of Latin text in front of her and apologized for her ignorance. The librarian gallantly agreed to translate.
“It seems that William Longespèe, the Earl of Salisbury, was on the same Crusade as your man, John d’Hautain,” Anthony said slowly, running his finger back and forth across the page. “He was eager to have his remains lie in England and so, on his behalf his wife, the Countess of Salisbury, asked Henry to make the arrangement with the Templars.” He looked up. “Henry III was a special friend to the Templars.”
Lizzie gave a nod of interest.
“He wanted for a long time to be buried in the Temple Church in London, but then he spent so much time rebuilding Westminster Abbey and the shrine of Edward the Confessor that he ultimately decided to be buried there instead.”
Without giving the details, Lizzie told him that she had been to the Temple Church the previous day.
Anthony pulled the book back to his side of the desk and continued to thumb through the index, all the while giving Lizzie a running commentary on the burial practices of the Plantagenet kings.
“And of course the Templars were masters of organ preservation,” he said at one point.
“Really?” Lizzie asked, her interest especially piqued by this bit of information.
“Oh yes,” he continued. For a moment he looked up at her. “One of the Provincial Grand Masters, the head of the order in England, died on a trip to France about 1275.” He looked back down at the index as he continued to talk. “His chaplain was traveling with him and actually boiled his corpse, stripped off his flesh, buried that in Spain, then preserved the heart and brought it and the skeleton back to England.”
“He actually boiled up his boss?” Lizzie said, recoiling slightly.
The librarian nodded. “And he wasn’t just his boss in the Templars, he was also the Bishop of Hereford.”
“But he knew him,” Lizzie said with horror. “I mean this wasn’t just like dropping a chicken into the pot.”
He smiled knowingly at her. “Ghastly, isn’t it?”
She nodded.
“Anyway,” Anthony continued in his droning accent, “Henry received letters on behalf of these two men, the Earl of Salisbury and your man, and he wrote to the Templars on their behalf, enclosing some money to cover the expenses.” He turned back to the master list and flipped forward in the volume several pages. “Here is the response from the Templars; Henry added a note and then sent it on with his own seal. That’s the one you already have,” he said, nodding at Lizzie’s photocopied document. “There is another here sent to the Countess of Salisbury. And here’s something interesting,” he said, flipping to another page in the volume. “This is a letter from the Templars to Henry, telling him that both men are dead, and describing the bloodbath at Mansoura.” He looked up at Lizzie, “That was a horrific battle,” he said.
“Yes, that much I do know.” Lizzie said.
“The Templars say that they have preserved the heart of Jean d’Hautain in a golden box with his mark on it.” Anthony looked up. “That must be arms of some kind, but it’s rather early for regular heraldic markings.”
Lizzie was sitting up straighter and leaning across the desk. She felt a surge of excitement. She knew what the crest was. Her heart was pumping faster.
Anthony Parker had gone back to the book and was reading with interest. “Oh I say,” he said, suddenly, “this is interesting. Apparently, as they are in Egypt, they are going to try a sort of modified mummification process and send the whole corpse of Longespèe back.”
Lizzie mumbled something about it sounding very unusual, but wanted him to get back to John d’Hautain’s heart.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Anthony said. “In fact, I’m surprised I’ve never noticed it before.” He inserted a strip of paper from a pile on his desk as a bookmark and then went back to the index. “There’s one more thing that deals with Longespèe here, and it is several years later.” He turned again to the volume of documents and took a few minutes to read through the Latin before attempting a translation.
“All right,” he said, “I think I’ve got it and this could be very interesting to you.” He turned the volume around again so that Lizzie could see it. “The head man of the Templars, the Grand Master, was almost always a Frenchman.” He gestured at the Templar list that Lizzie had been looking at earlier. “It was really the French king, Philip the Fair, who brought them down, though Edward II didn’t do anything to support them here.”
He pointed to the book again. “But there was one English Grand Master, Thomas Berard, and that was during the reign of Henry III, when the Templars had a lot of support here. According to this letter to Henry, written in September 1256, Berard was going to be returning from the Holy Land to England, and he would bring with him the remains of William Longespèe and a heart casket, but there is no name mentioned in association with it.”
Lizzie felt such a pronounced tingling in her scalp that she worried for a moment that her hair might be standing straight up from her head. Her voice was a hoarse croak when she asked again, “So where is it? Where is his heart?”
“Well, not to be too disrespectful, but Longespèe is clearly the more influential guy here,” Anthony said. “You know he was the cousin of Henry III?”
Lizzie shrugged her ignorance, wishing he would get on with it.
“Oh yes, his father, William Longespèe the elder, was one of the famous illegitimate sons of Henry II,” Anthony continued. “So the corpse in question here was the king’s cousin.”
“And where did he end up, this younger Longespèe?” she whispered.
“Haven’t you been there?” Anthony asked. “He’s in Salisbury Cathedral and it’s well worth seeing if you haven’t been there before.”
Lizzie collapsed back in the chair. “He’s buried in Salisbury Cathedral?” Her mind was racing.
Anthony Parker continued to jabber on, as if this were the kind of knowledge one stumbled onto every day. “Oh yes, the knight effigies of the Longespèes, father and son, are some of the best Medieval tomb carvings left in England,” he said. “And some of the oldest carvings in the cathedral.”
Hadn’t Martin said that there was a heart burial in Salisbury Cathedral? Lizzie warned herself not to get too excited. There were plenty of heart burials around and it could be anybody. She asked Anthony Parker if he knew, but he couldn’t remember anything that might be the heart burial of John d’Hautain. She began to pile up her papers.
“I might have something else of interest to you however,” he said, turning his chair around and pulling a catalogue drawer out of the cabinet behind him. He looked up at Lizzie. “I still like the old cards, even though we’re now trying to get it all on computer.”
Lizzie smiled sympathetically. She liked the old card catalogue too.
“If I remember correctly,” he mumbled, flipping through the cards, “we may have some correspondence of Lieutenant Francis Hatton in the Admiralty papers.”
She had almost forgotten about Francis Hatton, now her ancestor. She asked what the correspondence referred to.
“Lieutenant Hatton was an interesting character,” Anthony started. “There are several letters here to Captains heading to the North Pacific, always asking if they are going to touch on the coast of the North American continent.” He shoved the box across the desk
to Lizzie. There were inquiries to George Vancouver, George Dixon, and James Colnett; all of them had been his shipmates on the Cook voyage, and all led subsequent expeditions to the Northwest Coast. There was even a letter to William Bligh about the Bounty expedition.
The librarian pointed to the next batch of cards. “These are responses from the Admiralty and the captains, almost always inviting him to accompany them if he wants to.” Lizzie quickly flipped through them. The next group of letters was again from Hatton.
“These are the strange ones,” Parker said, “having expressed such interest and received the invitation, he always regretfully declines.”
“His father, brother, and sister, all died around this time,” Lizzie said, by way of explanation.
“It’s still strange though,” Parker continued, “it’s as if he needs to go, but doesn’t really want to go.”
He was so close to the truth that Lizzie decided to tell him about Francis Hatton’s inadvertent grave robbing and subsequent feelings of guilt.
He nodded. “That explains it then,” he said. “It seems logical that it had to do with his collection. I thought that maybe what he was really fishing for was someone to collect items for his famous specimen cabinet.”
“Not far off, I think,” Lizzie said. “I don’t think that any of those other guys, Vancouver and the lot, would have understood his wanting to return a Native American corpse to its original burial site.” She watched him return the catalogue drawer to its cubbyhole. “In the end, I don’t think he could bring himself to ask it, and the demands of his own estate prevented his leaving again.”
“So what became of those things?”
“I have no idea,” she answered. “They’ve gone the way of the heart, I guess.”
He gestured at the box. “Do you want to see any of these documents?” he asked.
Lizzie shook her head. “Not today, thanks.” She asked for photocopies of the transcriptions of the Templar and Henry III documents though, which Anthony quickly provided from the book.
“You have been so helpful,” she said, standing and extending her hand, “thank you.”
It wasn’t even noon yet as she walked out into the grey January day. George wasn’t due until seven o’clock and Martin probably wouldn’t be back until at least then. Lizzie hailed a cab and asked the driver which station she should go to for a train to Salisbury.
“That would be Waterloo,” he answered. “Is that where you’re headed?”
“Yes please,” she said, tossing her bag onto the seat and following it in.
There was a train leaving for Salisbury some twenty minutes after her arrival at the station, so she just had time to buy a ticket, a prawn sandwich, and a cup of coffee. The train was one of the old ones that still had private compartments and, as few people seemed to be heading to Salisbury in the middle of the day in the middle of the week in the middle of the winter, she had a compartment to herself. She spread her notes out around her and looked for the paper that Martin had given her with the information he had found about heart burials. It said there might be a heart burial in Salisbury cathedral, but it might also be the tomb of a boy bishop.
Lizzie cracked open the plastic lid of her coffee cup, wondering what strange politics would have led to the ordination of a kid. Then she sat back and gazed at the countryside as the train rumbled along. Here and there was snow, but mostly it just looked bleak. Frozen fields and cold-looking cows and sheep. Occasionally the train passed near a village, but with such speed that it could only be seen clearly in the distant views. Up close the churches and cottages and country pubs all became a blur. Lizzie finished her lunch, repacked her papers and began to look anxiously for the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, which finally came into view as a tiny white needle in the distance.
With every minute and every mile it became larger, nothing ever obscuring the view of it. No hill, no building, not even trees came between Lizzie and the steeple of Salisbury Cathedral from the moment she first saw it through the train window until she rolled into the city, and her eyes never left it. It was hypnotic to her as it grew larger and larger.
It wasn’t a long walk from the station to the cathedral, but she was so anxious to get there quickly that she hopped into one of the cabs waiting out front. The route through the town began on broad streets but finally ended in the narrow tangle around the wall of the cathedral grounds, called the “close.” Though she had seen the tower of the cathedral from a distance of several miles on the train, now she couldn’t see it at all until the cab drove through the gates of the close and the vast open area around the cathedral gave her a magnificent view. The front face was entirely covered with the carvings of saints, standing in remote stillness. Lizzie felt her heart beat rapidly as she paid the driver and, with her bag over her shoulder, saluted the saints on the massive front wall. Whatever expression might have been on their faces once was worn away by time and the elements, and they gave Lizzie no clue of what she would find inside.
She paid the entrance fee, picked up a guidebook and stood for a long moment staring down the length of the cathedral when she first entered. Unlike at Westminster Abbey, she could see from one end of Salisbury Cathedral to the other, and it had nothing like Westminster’s profusion of tombs. The inside cover of the visitor’s guide showed an outline map of the church with highlights for tourists.
She skipped over the description of the ancient clock, which she could see against the wall opposite her, and read quickly down the list: “Hungerford Monument, St. Osmund’s Shrine, Beauchamp tomb, Longespèe effigy.” Lizzie stood still for a moment and read the words again: “Longespèe effigy.” Her skin felt clammy and she could feel her heart beating in her neck as she walked down the long aisle to the place marked with the small circled number three on the map.
Past a cluster of delicate columns and under a gothic arch of stone lay the tomb of a knight. The stone effigy was wearing armor and was almost half-covered by a large shield decorated with animals standing or running. Lizzie caught her breath. There was a lengthy written description posted on the column nearby, and a full-color illustration of what the tomb had looked like when it was covered with its medieval paint. “William Longespèe, Earl of Salisbury, was half-brother to King John,” read the label. “On his death in 1226 he was the first person to be buried in the cathedral.”
Lizzie sighed audibly. This was the father, not the son. She looked at the map again, but there was no mention of another Longespèe tomb. The afternoon sun was inching its way across the stone floor of the cathedral from the high arched window behind her. Lizzie followed the track of a beam of light back to the west end of the cathedral where she had come in. On the far aisle was another knight effigy, with a smaller tomb at its head. She bundled her jacket a little closer against her and walked tentatively across the church and down the other aisle to the end of the cathedral.
Even before she read the accompanying panel of text she knew it was the place. “William Longespèe the Younger, Son of William, Earl of Salisbury, was General of the English Crusaders and died heroically, fighting the Saracens in the assault on Mansoura, Egypt, in 1250.” She hurried to the next label, over a miniature effigy in religious vestments. “This figure has been believed to commemorate a Boy Bishop of the thirteenth century, but it is possible that it covered the heart of Bishop Richard Poore (1217-1229), founder of this Cathedral, whose body was buried at Tarrant Crawford in Dorset.”
“Oh God, it’s here,” she said, surprised that she had spoken aloud, but knowing without a doubt that John d’Hautain’s heart was under the stone in front of her. For several minutes she stared at it, not knowing what to do. Then she went around the raised platform on which the tombs were mounted to the other side. She sat in one of the folding chairs set up in rows along the nave of the cathedral and stared again at the effigy of the “boy bishop” from the other side. It was certainly not meant to represen
t John d’Hautain, but she still felt absolute confidence that his heart was here. If she could pass her hand through the stone she would touch it. As if to confirm her belief, the wandering beam of sunshine now reached into the dark corner and played on the worn features of knight and boy. Lizzie looked at the younger Longespèe; he had been John’s comrade-in-arms.
It was almost ten minutes before Lizzie moved again. She massaged her temples and considered how to proceed. George Hatton probably had enough influence to get the tomb opened if she could marshal the evidence to warrant it. But where to begin? The Templar documents made the link between William Longespèe the Younger and John d’Hautain, but the effigy that now lay over the heart muddied the waters considerably. Where had that come from? She knew nothing of boy bishops and would just as soon not tread down that path. She did know enough about medieval heart burials to believe that one could have been confused for another, and the label here was ambiguous. Whoever wrote it was clearly in doubt as to the identity of these remains.
Lizzie stood up and walked back to the desk where she had purchased her ticket. “Who wrote the labels in the cathedral?” she asked the young man behind the counter.
“I’m not sure,” he said, shaking his head. “It might have been the librarian.”
“Is the library open now?” she asked hopefully.
“Yes it is,” he answered, looking at his watch, “for another hour.” He looked up at Lizzie again and added, “but it’s not open to the public. It’s just for scholars.”
Lizzie dragged her wallet out of her bag and gave him one of her business cards. “I’m a historian,” she said, “working on a project for Sir George Hatton.”
The young man pointed the way. Up a flight of ancient stone steps Lizzie found a carved oak door that had an index card tacked to it reading “Library. Researchers Only.” Inside she found herself in an organized but overstuffed room of bookshelves, tables, document boxes, and bundles of papers. Behind the desk a woman of about her own age looked up and smiled.
