The Wandering Heart

by Mary Malloy

  “You are really pushing this, you know.”

  She laughed. “I know. It’s just been such a weird day.”

  He was thoughtful. “I wouldn’t just lie down and die because you did, but if you were about to be hit by a truck and I could rush in and push you out of the way and be killed in the process, would I do that?”

  She waited for him to answer his own question.

  “I can’t say for sure what I would do if I thought about it,” he said, “but I think my instinct would be to do it.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I feel better now.”

  They both laughed. The snow had stopped and the sky was clearing as they continued on hand in hand.

  After several minutes of silence Martin asked Lizzie if she was attracted to Edmund.

  “Why do you ask?” she said, trying to make her voice sound calm and normal.

  “He saved your life,” Martin said, squeezing her hand. “I wish that had been me.”

  Lizzie didn’t say anything.

  “He’s in love with you, you know,” Martin said after another momentary pause.

  Lizzie stopped and turned to him. “And I’m in love with you.” She said it without any doubt in her mind or heart. “I love you.”

  Martin leaned his head down and kissed her.

  • • • • •

  That night, lying in their too-narrow bed at the White Horse, Lizzie asked Martin what he thought of Edmund’s explanation of the Hatton family phenomenon. “Can all of my experiences of the past few weeks be rationally and scientifically explained?”

  “What do you think?” he asked back. “Do you feel more comfortable thinking that George’s sister suffers from schizophrenia than that she inherited or intuited thoughts and feelings from her ancestors?”

  Lizzie turned slightly in his arms. “It’s a bit frightening either way, I guess. Whatever Bette inherited, I may have inherited too.”

  “And is that necessarily bad?”

  Lizzie pushed herself up on her elbow and looked at Martin. “How can you ask that? This is something that caused young women to kill themselves. It’s kept George’s sister in an institution for over thirty years.”

  Martin sat up in the bed and pulled Lizzie back into his arms. “But despite the death, there has also been remarkable passion.”

  “Are you fearful for my sanity?”

  “No more than I was before you left for England,” Martin joked.

  Lizzie gave him a meaningful look and he kissed her. “Not at all,” he said emphatically. “I feel confident that you have now played your role in this drama and can leave it behind when you go home.”

  She settled back down into the crook of his arm and after another silence asked him where he would like to be buried.

  “Boy, you are just not going to let this morbid stuff go, are you?” he said.

  “Well, it’s something I think we need to talk about sometime.”

  “Right now?”

  “No, but sometime.”

  Martin squeezed her in his arms. “You know,” he said, “I can very truthfully say that I don’t care.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Not at all. You decide where you want me to be.”

  “You don’t want to make some artistic statement in death?”

  “Like what? A big funerary mural?” he laughed. “No wait,” he continued, “you could have me cremated, mix my ashes into paint, and do a repro of one of my murals.”

  “Okay,” Lizzie said. “We don’t need to talk about it.”

  “But I’m on a roll,” he said. “Forest Lawn in Glendale might even allow such a thing on one of their walls.”

  “I was serious,” Lizzie said.

  “I know,” Martin said. “But this is a subject that is not worth the attention that you have been giving it recently. It’s not healthy.” He hugged her tightly. “I know where I want to live, and that’s with you in our own house in Boston, Massachusetts.”

  “Me too.

  “Then let’s go there.”

  Lizzie nodded and hugged him back.

  Chapter 26

  The next day was warm for January and the snow from the night before was melting rapidly. Lizzie wore a heavy pullover sweater but no coat as she walked in the early morning mist to the church. Martin was still fast asleep at the White Horse, and she wanted to visit the tomb again by herself after the tumultuous activity of the day before. She picked her away along the side of the road, listening for the sound of oncoming vehicles hidden by the high hedge on either side.

  When the hedge broke to reveal a barren field of earth, there was a “Public Footpath” sign, indicating the most direct walking route to the edge of the Hengemont estate. At the far end of the field Lizzie could see the square Norman tower of the Hatton’s church. She pushed open the gate and made her way over the clods of earth, plowed into furrows and filled with small flinty stones. At the far end she climbed over the fence by way of the two-step wooden stile; the rest of the path was through the small woods that surrounded the church, still choked with the fallen leaves of oak and maple and all frosted with snow. The brown and white patterns of color were broken only occasionally by an evergreen yew tree.

  The gravestones in the churchyard looked cold. It suddenly felt like winter again, to see the slatey stones in their frozen ground. Lizzie pushed open the door of the church and walked up the side aisle toward the altar. Her sneakers made no noise on the stone floor and her attention was on the ground in front of her, reading again the names and dates of Hattons and their neighbors buried beneath.

  She went to stand again by the tomb of Elizabeth and John. Were they happy now? she wondered. Did any of this matter? Lizzie decided that it did. It mattered to her. She felt better today, as if something good had been accomplished. It didn’t even matter if out there in the ether somewhere whatever ancient molecules that might survive of the woman they buried yesterday had any notion of what had been done in her name.

  Turning around, she slid down to sit on the top of the two steps that raised the tomb above the floor, and rested her back against the cold stone. It was, she thought, only a thin wall that divided her from the last mortal bits of John and Elizabeth d’Hautain. That shriveled thing that was John’s heart had once pumped blood through his young and virile body, and some part of that blood still circulated through her own system.

  She looked around her at the other Norman graves in the chapel. In those tombs were the desiccated fragments of people who had known these two behind her as vibrant teenagers, full of hope, passion, fear, envy, and all the other non-corporeal parts of a human being. And now all of them were a part of her. Did she feel a part of them?

  On the day that she first confronted the fact that the Hattons were her ancestors, she had felt such conflicting emotions. On the one hand it connected her to something important that she had always thought was lacking in her life: a sense of belonging to a place and to a known history. On the other hand, not having had those things for her whole existence up to that point had formed her identity in a different way, and the sudden acquisition of such an unexpected legacy threatened to overwhelm her very sense of herself.

  For a moment she indulged the fantasy and imagined herself living the life of the Hattons in medieval times. She loved the idea of that life, the clothes they wore, the landscape through which they walked. But she would not really ever want to be there rather than where she was. She would never have been able to do the things she had done, to go to the places she had gone, to have loved Martin.

  It was more than a slab of stone that separated her from Elizabeth and John, she thought, as she leaned against their tomb and stood up. It was seven centuries and a world of ideas, expectations, and possibilities. She did not need them to give her a sense of herself. She did not need that other Lizzie Manning, either. Her identi
ty was neither from the master nor the maid. In all the essentials of her life she had created her own identity and at that moment she felt quite satisfied with it.

  The sound of footsteps coming up the main aisle of the church broke her reverie and brought her out of the niche in which she was standing. It was Edmund, and he seemed startled to see her.

  “Lizzie, I didn’t expect to see you here so early.”

  “I’m saying good-bye,” she said.

  “Good. I would hate to see you invest any more in this business.”

  She sat down in a nearby pew and he sat down next to her.

  “What are you doing here at this hour?” she asked.

  “I came to get the Indian things.”

  The bentwood box and Chilkat blanket were still where she had left them the day before.

  “I’m glad to get a chance to talk with you alone, Lizzie, because I don’t know when the opportunity will come again and there are some things I need to tell you,” Edmund continued.

  She was almost afraid that he was going to admit feelings for her that she didn’t want to know, but he began to talk about Richard.

  “I called my brother last night,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “to tell him about all of this business with the heart. And I’ve found out some things that are important.” He fumbled with his words. “I hardly know how to tell you this.”

  “Is this about his financial problems?” she asked candidly.

  He looked surprised that she knew about them.

  “Yes, and no,” he said. “That night that you had the episode up on the roof, I took a blood sample.”

  This was not the direction she had expected the conversation to go.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said uncomfortably. “There were traces of belladonna in your blood.”

  “What?”

  “I specifically asked the lab to look for it.”

  “What?” she said again, louder this time. “That’s impossible! I never even knew what it was until you told me about it a few days ago.”

  “It was that conversation that got me thinking about it,” he continued. “The chocolates Richard sent you were laced with it. I sent them, and a sample of your blood, to a lab to be tested.”

  Lizzie felt as if she had been struck by lightning. For several minutes she couldn’t say a word, and Edmund remained silent through it all, waiting for her to process the information.

  “He tried to kill me?” she asked incredulously.

  Edmund was emphatic in denying that was his brother’s intention. “He swore to me that he didn’t mean you any real harm. He hoped that you would just get sick, and maybe frightened, and leave.”

  Lizzie started to rise, but Edmund put his hand on her arm to detain her. “I told you that he had taken it himself on several occasions, but your experience was worse than anything he experienced or expected.”

  She slumped back into the pew.

  “Your symptoms,” he said, clearing his throat. “Your symptoms were so extreme. When you told me that it had happened two other times, and that each time you had ingested something conveyed to you by Richard, well. . . .” He didn’t know how to end the sentence.

  It was clear to Lizzie that Edmund was working very hard to maintain an air of calm professionalism as he told her all this, but his hand was shaking as he touched her, and she was getting more and more angry as the implications of what had happened to her sank in.

  “He can’t possibly have done this to me just so that he could get someone else to work on the Cook material?” she said angrily. “I can’t believe. . . .”

  Edmund interrupted her. “It’s much more serious than that.”

  She pulled her elbow away from his hand and folded her arms tightly across her chest.

  “All right,” she said, “explain it if you can.”

  “Richard has lost a great deal of money in the last few years.”

  “And he wants to curry favor with the British Museum,” Lizzie fumed. “I know.”

  “It’s not that, Lizzie.” Edmund leaned forward so she would have to look at him. “He’s lost more than two hundred million pounds.”

  Lizzie stared at him in disbelief.

  “He’s sold or leveraged all of my family’s property except this estate,” Edmund continued. “The house in London, the agricultural lands and probably much of the art will have to be sold.”

  It took a minute for all of this to sink in. “But how could he?” she asked. “Don’t those things belong to your father?”

  “Richard will inherit it all and he used that fact to leverage huge sums; he also convinced others, many of them old family friends, to invest their money, using my father’s property as collateral.”

  “But that still doesn’t explain why I was a problem for him,” she said slowly, pondering the enormity of what it all meant. “If it wasn’t the British Museum business, then why would he care about me at a time when his other problems were so enormous?”

  “You and your family presented a potential claim on the estate, and that was a prospect so frightening to Richard. . . .”

  Lizzie cut him off. “What?” she asked incredulously. “Are you saying that your family has known about my family all along?”

  “No,” Edmund said convincingly. “When Richard asked my father why he hired you for this job, Dad told him about that other Elizabeth Manning. That was the first he knew of her. Then when Richard saw that you had access to many of the papers around the house, he became terrified that you would discover the relationship.”

  Her mind was working furiously, trying to comprehend the timeline of who knew what and when.

  “When did your brother find out that it was more than a coincidence that my name was the same as your ancestor’s lover?”

  “Richard knew sooner than my father, I think. He is rather sophisticated about using technology to answer questions of this sort. For him, it was easy enough to follow your family tree back four generations on the Internet.”

  Lizzie was not convinced. “I’ve looked for information on my great grandparents for the last two decades,” she said, “and never found anything—and I’m no slouch on the Internet.” She thought about this for a few minutes. Richard had known what she hadn’t: that Manning was the woman’s maiden name. She had always been searching for the wrong great-grandfather.

  “Damn him!” she exploded, beating her fists on the back of the pew in front of her. “Damn your brother!” She turned to look at Edmund. “I’m sorry to say this, but I hope he goes straight to hell. I hate him for what he did to me!”

  “I’m not so fond of him myself at the moment.”

  Lizzie slumped back for a moment and then came forward again and hit her fist once more on the back of the pew. “Damn him!” she said again. She pulled at her hair and groaned with anger. “And it’s not just because he tried to kill me. He made me doubt my sanity! He made me lose all perspective! Oh damn, I have been such a dope!”

  She looked at Edmund and laughed at the ridiculousness of her behavior. “God, you must have thought I was a fool.”

  “No, Lizzie. No, how could you say that? You were a victim.”

  She leaned back again and crossed her legs. “You know all this supernatural stuff?” she said. “The only, I repeat the only reason I fell into that damned trap was because of those dreams. They were so vivid, they were like hyper-reality, with the colors and the smells and the emotions all heightened beyond anything I had ever experienced.” She uncrossed her leg and stomped it on the floor.

  “Damn him to hell!” she said again. “All the time they were drug-induced hallucinations.”

  So many questions were swirling around in her brain. The first was whether or not there were likely to be any long-term repercussions of the drug. Would she hav
e flashbacks? Edmund assured her that it was extremely unlikely. Belladonna was not as potent as LSD, and the fact that she had vomited after every episode was a good sign.

  “Why did you tell me this?” she asked.

  “Because you had to know.” He looked up at her again. “You aren’t crazy and you aren’t haunted.”

  She tried to smile.

  He continued. “It is rather ironic, though, that Richard’s stupidity led you into an experience that paralleled those of the other women even more closely than you imagined.”

  She thought about that for a moment, then asked Edmund what he wanted to do about the situation with his brother.

  He seemed surprised by the question. “Whatever you think is right,” he answered finally. “Whatever you decide, you will have my full support.”

  “Did you notify the police?”

  “Not yet, but I certainly will if you want to press charges against him for assault.”

  “What would that do to your father?”

  “I think that the knowledge that you might have died because of Richard’s actions against you would be a blow from which he would not recover. Far, far worse than the financial losses, even the loss of this estate. And,” he added, “one way or another, Richard is probably going to jail anyway.”

  There was a certain satisfaction in that, and Lizzie did not look forward to returning to England in order to testify against one of the Hattons. It would be devastating to George, embarrassing to Edmund and Lily, and would bring out a story that would do her no credit, despite the fact that she was the victim.

  “There’s one more thing,” Edmund said haltingly, “and then I think you will know everything that I know.”

  It was difficult to believe that there could be anything worse than what she already knew, but Edmund’s tone was so serious.

  “They were married.”

  He blurted it out as if it was the most important piece of information of the day, and then looked surprised that Lizzie didn’t seem to accept it in the same way. She shrugged.

  Edmund went on tentatively. “Richard found a record of a marriage. That other Edmund married that other Lizzie Manning, but when his father found out, he had the marriage annulled. I think the father must have tried to convince the poor girl that the whole thing was a sham.”