by Mary Malloy
“There is a manuscript,” she said, “but it is not by Geoffrey Chaucer.” She gave Lizzie a searching look. “When I confided to George that I was having trouble finding someone to help me with an important project, I told him that my greatest concern was that I did not trust the people around me, and I did not know how I could trust a stranger.” She hesitated for a moment, and then said quickly, “George said that I could trust you.”
As she reached out to receive the manuscript, Lizzie studied her companion. She was a handsome woman, with a strong square jaw and blue eyes that had faded with age. Her white hair was pulled back into an elastic band at the nape of her neck. Lizzie found that she was warming to the woman as her crust came off.
The manuscript was made up of several dozen pages, neatly folded and covered from edge to edge with a small script similar to that on the printed page, but with a greater fluidity. Lizzie carefully turned over page after page; several words were obscured where ink had come too quickly off the quill and left a black spidery-edged blotch. The last few pages were covered with lines and squares that looked rather like elaborate games of tic-tac-toe.
“I can’t read it,” Lizzie said apologetically. “What is it?”
Alison sat back in her chair and lit a cigarette. She contemplated Lizzie and Lizzie contemplated her back. It had been a long time since she had seen someone smoke so casually, without any apology or explanation that she was quitting soon. The older woman inhaled deeply and then set her cigarette into an ashtray on the table beside her. She was a tall woman, and seemed stiff as she pushed herself up from her chair and went to a sideboard where she poured herself a glass of scotch and gave it a quick blast of soda with an old-fashioned siphon.
“Do you want one?” she asked Lizzie, holding up the glass.
Lizzie nodded and Alison made her an identical drink before returning to her chair. It was good scotch, strong and peaty. Lizzie wasn’t sorry that Alison had cut it with the soda, which was nice and fizzy, though her husband would have hated to see such a good whiskey diluted.
“I’m going to trust you,” Alison said.
The eyeglasses perched on the end of her nose were small enough that Alison mostly looked over them, but now she tilted her head back to see Lizzie more clearly. Lizzie met her eyes calmly, curiously. She took a sip of her drink and let the fire of the alcohol sit for a moment in her mouth as she waited for her hostess to speak again.
“There are certain parties here in England, and in the larger world of Chaucer scholarship, who would love to get their hands on what I have here,” Alison said finally. “I am concerned about protecting it until I can publish it myself.”
People unaccustomed to the world of academia might have been surprised by such a suspicious approach to the work of an author dead for six hundred years, but Lizzie understood Alison’s concerns perfectly. Professional reputations, promotions and job security were all tied to original scholarship, documented and shared in publications. She assured her companion that she could be trusted to keep Alison’s information confidential until she was ready to share it.
“This is the diary of a woman who made a pilgrimage from Bath to Canterbury in 1387,” Alison said, taking the manuscript. “She was a weaver from Bath and her name was Alison. I am named for her.”
“Dame Alison?” Lizzie asked. “Like the Wife of Bath character in Canterbury Tales?” Even as she said it, she realized the potential importance of those old pieces of paper. “Do you think she could have been the basis for the character in Chaucer’s work?”
Alison continued to give her the same steady look. “I’m certain of it,” she said.
The importance of the diary was now obvious, but Lizzie still didn’t know what role she might play in any work to be done on it.
“If I don’t have expertise in the topic, how can I help you?” she asked.
“I need a smart and clever researcher,” Alison said, watching for Lizzie’s response. “Someone who might have new and original ideas on an old topic.” She leaned forward in her chair. “And someone who can walk for me.”
“Walk for you? Where?”
“Across England,” came the answer. “From Bath to Canterbury to retrace the pilgrimage described in the diary.”
The request was so completely unorthodox and unexpected that Lizzie hardly knew what to think of it. “Isn’t that like two hundred miles or something?” she asked.
“Something like that.”
Lizzie laughed. “I think I could do the first part of what you describe,” she said. “I am a smart and clever researcher, but what made you think I could or would walk two hundred miles?”
Alison sat back again and shrugged. “It was George’s idea,” she said. “Frankly, when I saw you today my first thought was very similar to yours. You don’t look like much of a walker.”
Lizzie was offended by the comment. She was not, in fact, much of a walker, but she didn’t like to have it be observed so casually by someone who was still almost a stranger to her. She put her arm across the plump roundness of her midsection as Alison continued.
“I don’t know what George was thinking. Ordinarily he gives me such excellent advice and recommendations.”
Lizzie took a long swig of the scotch. “Just because I am not in the habit of making long walks doesn’t mean I’m not capable of it,” she insisted impulsively.
She knew it was a mistake to make such a brazen declaration without considering the implications, but she could not help herself. It was not that she felt she needed to protect some image of herself as an example of physical strength or prowess; she had no pretensions to anything of the sort. She prided herself on being an intellectual—for her it was long stretches in the library and at the computer, not long rambles in the country. Maybe it was the strength of the scotch, or the personal nature of the challenge, or the obvious importance of the work, but even acknowledging the mistake of impulsiveness, Lizzie felt suddenly compelled to accept the strange job.
“When would I start?”
The look on Alison’s face was a mixture of surprise and amusement. “Are you saying you would actually do this?”
“Yes,” Lizzie said, nodding her head to convince both herself and her hostess. “Yes, I think I might.” She asked again about the schedule. Her husband, Martin, had been commissioned to complete a work of public art in Newcastle. They were in England over the Christmas holiday to finalize the details, and planned to return in the spring when he would begin the work in earnest. Lizzie would teach the winter term at St. Patrick’s College, and had arranged to take a sabbatical for the spring term to be in England with Martin. She had thought she would spend the time working on a book on museum collections, but every minute that her mind turned to the idea of Alison’s project, with all its physical and intellectual challenges, the more she thought it was meant to be.
“When would I need to start?” she asked again, explaining her teaching schedule to Alison.
“The original pilgrimage began in the last week of April and took a month,” Alison said, the tone of her voice making it obvious that she was not yet convinced that Lizzie was the right person for the job.
Lizzie pretended not to notice Alison’s tone. “Of course,” she said with a broad smile, “Wan that Aprille. . . .”
“There would be preliminary work,” Alison said cautiously.
“I could be back here by the middle of April. Would that be enough time?”
Alison still hesitated. “George said you had an eye for detail, and that would be extremely valuable to me.” She paused. “I need someone who will notice details in the landscape, in villages and churches, and be able to tie them to descriptions in the text.”
There was a long silence as each woman considered the direction the conversation was going, and the implications of Lizzie undertaking the pilgrimage. It would put them in close contact and it would require that they trust each other.
Lizzie was the first to speak, asking Alison why sh
e had not undertaken the project herself.
“I have a bad hip,” Alison said matter-of-factly. “It’s too bad I didn’t discover this manuscript twenty years ago, because I was a good walker.”
Ignoring the insult implied in the comment, Lizzie asked if the route could not be retraced by car.
“Parts of it, of course,” was the answer. “And I have driven back and forth to Canterbury dozens of times. But some parts of the path lie along ridge tops and through forests. They are not accessible by car.”
Lizzie imagined herself out on a high ridge in the English countryside. In the hour they had talked she had gone from being skeptical about the project to having an earnest desire to undertake it.
“I’d like to do this,” Lizzie said. “George was correct; I am the right person for this job.”
When Lizzie left the house an hour later a deal had been struck between the two women. All that was left was to explain to her husband that she would be walking across England, and then to do it.
Chapter 2
George Hatton was very traditional in his celebration of Christmas. In his house, Hengemont, only the housekeeper, Helen Jeffries, was more observant of the details that defined the holiday. As they drove up the long drive, Lizzie saw that the familiar face of the house was illuminated by candles in every window.
“I wonder how long that took Helen,” her husband wondered. “And how often she has to replace them to keep them lit?”
Lizzie answered that she was glad they had arrived at dusk, so that Helen was probably still on the first round of candles.
Her feelings about the house and its occupants were filled with complications, contradictions and confusion. Even though she had known the place and its people for only a year, she had developed deep and passionate relationships, of love and hatred, with George Hatton’s sons Edmund and Richard.
Lizzie was related to both George and his servant Helen through her Irish great-grandmother, who had worked in the house and secretly wed the heir when she became pregnant. His parents swiftly annulled the marriage and the unfortunate girl was shipped off to America. These were facts that the descendants had only learned in the past year, and it had been a time of enormous tumult. George’s oldest son, Richard, lost most of the family’s fortune in bad investments and killed himself in the aftermath. Lizzie had had no love for Richard, who tried to poison her, but she dearly loved Helen and George, and especially George’s younger son Edmund, with whom she shared a warm bond. When she received the invitation to spend Christmas with the Hattons and the Jeffries, she did not think that she could refuse.
The knowledge of the relationship between her family and George Hatton’s family had been a burden to Lizzie in the last year. She struggled with the fact that she knew something about her father’s parentage that he did not. That his grandmother had chosen to keep it a secret through the whole of her long life seemed important to Lizzie, and she did not see how she could just blurt out information that would fundamentally change her father’s past and his notions of his identity. The subject was much on her mind when Lizzie was called to be with her father after a stroke debilitated him in September.
“Is there something on your mind?” he had asked her one night, rousing from sleep. It was past midnight and Lizzie was taking turns with her mother and siblings to sit with him through the night. His speech was slightly slurred from the stroke, but Lizzie understood the question and knew that he sensed her discomfort.
She didn’t know how to answer; she didn’t want the relationship of his grandmother and the Hattons to be the last thing she ever spoke to him about. “I love you,” she said, reverting to the easiest phrase on her list of things that must be said.
Her father began to laugh but it quickly turned to coughing and Lizzie rose from her chair to stand beside his bed. She put her hand on his. “Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t think it was so funny.”
He squeezed her hand. “It wasn’t funny,” he said, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. “It just wasn’t what I was expecting. You looked so pensive,” he continued. “As if you were waiting to tell me some enormous secret.”
She pulled the chair right up to the bed and put her elbows on the mattress, holding his hand between hers. “If I had a big secret, would you want me to tell it to you?”
“Now?” he said. He looked as if he were ready to laugh again, but controlled the impulse to keep from coughing. “Now, when I’m dying and can’t do anything about it you are going to tell me your secrets?” He smiled at her and reached his hand up to touch her cheek. “If it has anything to do with sex, money, religion, drugs, arrests, secret marriages or unwanted pregnancies, I don’t want to know,” he said, struggling to get through the long list.
Surprised at how close he had come to the truth in several categories, Lizzie pulled back a bit.
“What?” the old man insisted. “Did you have an abortion?”
“Of course not,” Lizzie answered quickly. She took his hand again to reassure him. “And I’m not even talking about myself.”
“Is this one of your sisters then?”
Again Lizzie quickly assured him that it wasn’t. She was regretting having brought up the topic at all when her father said, “This isn’t something about your mother, is it?”
“Oh God no,” Lizzie said. “What could you be thinking?”
“Well, what are you thinking,” he asked.
It was clear that he was getting agitated and Lizzie did not see how she could get herself out of the awkward conversation easily. “I learned something about your grandmother when I was in England,” she blurted.
Her father relaxed instantly. “My grandmother?” he said with a smile. “Don’t worry about her.” He closed his eyes as if in thought, but after a few minutes passed Lizzie began to think he might have gone to sleep. She remained motionless, her hand held to the bed by the weight of his. Perhaps he had known his grandmother’s story, she thought. Maybe he was the one who kept the secret all those years, not she. He opened his eyes again.
“What were we speaking about?” he asked.
“Nothing important,” she said softly.
He turned to rest his gaze on her face. “It was my grandmother,” he said. “And anything I need to know about her I can learn from her soon enough.”
Lizzie felt a tear run unbidden and unexpected down her cheek.
He suffered another stroke and died a week later. Lizzie had told no one else in her family about the relationship with the Hattons. To them, they were simply people for whom she had worked as a researcher, and with whom she had developed a close relationship.
Only Martin knew the whole story and his voice brought her out of her reverie.
“I wonder if it’s possible that the candles are electric?” he mused. “Most of the ones you see in Boston are.”
“We will find out soon enough,” Lizzie said, driving to the back of the house.
Her first entry into the house the previous January had been through the grand main door that brought visitors into the base of the medieval tower, the oldest part of the house, but she felt more comfortable now going to the kitchen entrance. There they found Helen, wiping her hands on an apron as she came through the door and extended her arms to greet them. She gave Lizzie a warm embrace, with all the affection of family, and Lizzie hugged her back.
“Come,” Helen said, ushering them directly into the kitchen. “Come and stir the pudding. I can’t put it in to cook until everyone in the house has stirred it.” She handed Lizzie a wooden spoon and instructed her to give a good stir to the concoction in a large ceramic bowl, and then took the spoon from her and gave it to Martin.
“It smells wonderful,” he said as he turned the spoon around and around the bowl, scraping the sticky mixture from the sides into the center. “What is in it?”
“Fruits of various kinds, raisins, and citrus peel, which I have been marinating for weeks in brandy,” Helen answered. “Flour, sugar, almonds, eggs, sp
ices, and suet, which I think most Americans find unappetizing, but is necessary to the success of any good pudding.”
Martin wasn’t sure what that was, but was unfazed when Helen defined suet for him as the hard fat of a cow or lamb. “We use something very similar to that in Mexican cooking,” he said. “Manteca—and my mother puts it into wonderful donuts called roscos de manteca.”
He was interested in hearing the whole process of how the batter was put into the old pudding molds and lowered into boiling water to cook. Helen was explaining that the process would take the whole night, when Lizzie, fearing they would never leave the kitchen, asked if Edmund had arrived.
“Indeed he has,” Helen said, taking off her apron. “I’m sorry Lizzie, you must be anxious to see them, and he and Sir George are waiting for you.”
Helen turned to Martin as she took Lizzie by the arm. “Come back if you want to help me make the posset. It’s our Christmas Eve drink and I think you will find that recipe interesting too.”
He assured her he would return after he greeted the hosts, and they proceeded through the house to the library. Helen had brought a forest of greens inside; evergreen boughs and holly were entwined around the railing of the grand staircase and laid out on every windowsill and mantelpiece. Lizzie stopped at the bottom of the staircase and looked to see her old friends in the paintings—they had been an important part of her experience when she lived here the previous January.
The reunion with the Hattons was tinged by memories of the losses of the last year, not only Lizzie’s father and George’s son, but also the collection that had first brought her here as a researcher, and had been subsequently donated to the British Museum. The doors to the empty museum cabinet were closed and a Christmas tree stood in front of them. Lizzie glanced toward it but made no comment. The tree was a nice touch, she thought, and wondered which of them had thought of it.
After a few minutes of conversation, Martin made his excuses and returned to the kitchen, where Helen’s Christmas preparations intrigued him. He knew that Lizzie would want to catch up with her old friends and that he wasn’t needed for that part of the reunion.