by Mary Malloy
“I’m sorry you won’t see Lily while you are here,” Edmund said, bringing up a subject that Lizzie had hesitated to address.
“She’s with her mother for Christmas?”
Edmund nodded. He and his ex-wife shared custody of their daughter, and she would consequently spend the holiday in London.
“I’ll miss being Father Christmas and putting her presents in the pillowcase at the end of her bed,” George said sadly. “The holiday is always better when there is a child in the house.”
This was not, Lizzie thought, a good way to begin a Christmas visit; happy memories of past holidays often led to morose feelings in the present.
“I suppose you already know,” she said, changing the subject, “that I met with your friend Alison yesterday and am going to walk across England for her.”
This was news to Edmund, who instantly perked up and asked for details. George actually laughed. “I wasn’t quite sure how serious she was about that when we first talked,” he said. “She has really convinced you to do it?”
“Not quite. She seemed rather unconvinced that I could do it, and I consequently had to persuade her to let me do it.” It occurred to her, as she said it, that Tom Sawyer had gotten his fence painted in exactly the same way.
Edmund needed to be brought up to date on the details and they were deep into the conversation when Helen and Martin arrived with a tray of hot drinks.
“Ah, the posset,” George said. “It’s a Christmas Eve tradition and no one makes it better than Mrs. Jeffries.”
“It’s a terrific recipe,” Martin explained to Lizzie as he handed her a steaming mug. “It’s made with milk and sugar, cooked up with bread to thicken it, and then poured over ale.”
This description did not seem promising to Lizzie, but the drink was hot and sweet, with a tang from the ale, and flavored with cinnamon. “It’s delicious,” she said to both her husband and Helen, “just the right thing for a cold night.”
As the group drank, Martin leaned casually toward her and whispered, “Helen has invited us to go to Mass with her family at midnight.”
When George asked her a few minutes later if the two of them would join him and Edmund in the Hatton family chapel at midnight, she was confused about how to answer. The season of peace was the cause of much public discord and personal conflict, she thought. She asked about her friend Father Folan at the Catholic church, and when she learned he had been transferred to a different parish, decided to go with the Hattons to their ancient chapel, which was more familiar to her.
Lizzie had thought that spending Christmas at Hengemont, with their quaint and charming English traditions, and with people who were related to her, but with whom her history was too short to include the regrets and irritations that were part of sharing holidays with close family, would amuse her and warm her spirits and be different enough that she wouldn’t notice so much that her father was now absent from the planet. But the Hattons had their own disappointments and felt keenly the absence in their circle of Edmund’s daughter Lily, who would come down to Hengemont later in the week, and of Richard, whose death had been preceded by so much fear and meanness.
The youngest man in the house was now Peter Jeffries, Helen’s 24-year-old son, and Lizzie asked about him when Helen brought the posset in with Martin.
“He and Henry are setting up the Yule log in the main hall,” Helen explained. Her husband kept such a low profile in the house that he wasn’t generally seen unless one looked for him.
After a toast with the hot mugs, Lizzie excused herself to go and greet them, taking her drink with her. Martin followed.
This room was the oldest in the house, and Lizzie’s favorite. It had been the hall of the castle when Hengemont consisted only of the tower.
Henry did not speak often, but when he did it was usually interesting.
“Keep your eyes open as you walk to the service tonight,” he said, nodding at Lizzie, “at midnight the sheep in the fields all turn to the east and bow.”
“And bow?” said his son. “I always thought you told me they turn to the east and baaaa!”
They all laughed. On this particular Christmas, the servants in the house had more to celebrate than the master, with all his losses.
Near midnight, Lizzie and Martin walked with George and Edmund across the frozen yard to the chapel that stood just outside the stone wall that defined the property. As they entered, a girl from the village gave each of them an unlit taper, and George led the group down the center aisle of the church to the front pew, which had been the Hatton family’s place to worship for almost nine hundred years. Martin went in first, then Lizzie, Edmund and George, who sat on the aisle to greet the citizens of the town as they passed. In past centuries, their ancestors had been the serfs and servants of his ancestors, and even with the breakdown of the old aristocracy and the inevitable loss of his fortune, he was still treated with respect by everyone in the church.
Lizzie watched this with interest. She shared those ancestors with George, but the obeisance that he continued to receive from people in a lower hereditary social class was uncomfortable, even distasteful to her. She turned her head to look at Edmund and saw that he was watching her.
“Are you reading my thoughts?” she asked.
He nodded. “You are rather transparent on this topic,” he said. They had spoken of it several times when she was previously at Hengemont.
Martin leaned forward to catch their conversation. George was speaking softly to an old woman, and held her hand gently.
“Are you wondering if I will continue this tradition of greeting the rabble when he is gone and I sit at that end of the pew?” Edmund whispered.
“I am, quite simply, unable to see you in that position,” she whispered back. “I can easily see you, as a doctor, speaking consolingly and supportively to anyone and everyone, but you know this idea of inherited position bothers me.”
“Poor Lizzie,” he said, patting her on the arm. “It’s your blood too.”
“Ah, but mine has been polluted by the rabble.”
“Diluted, maybe.”
They both laughed quietly and she put her hand on his.
Martin moved again to catch her eye and she smiled at him. She knew he was somewhat jealous of her relationship with Edmund; she moved her hand and Edmund withdrew his.
Lizzie leaned toward her husband and pointed to the bronze plaque that he had designed at her request and mounted on the stone wall of the church. There were hundreds of candles burning on the altar, and several evergreen trees covered with small white lights. The golden metal of the plaque caught the lights and reflected them back, shimmering softly against the darkness of the interior of the chapel.
“It is so beautiful,” she said. “I am happy to see it again.”
There were carolers at the service, and a nativity play, but the most moving moment of the night was when the priest came down and with his large candle lit George’s slim taper. George turned to his son to pass the flame, then Edmund turned to Lizzie and lit her candle from his. Their eyes met and she saw the reflection of the flame flicker there before she turned to her husband and lit his candle from her own. He also looked deeply at her, the flame caught in his warm brown eyes. From candle to candle, the light was passed around the church until the interior glowed. Lizzie looked up to the rafters and down to the stones of the floor, and moved her eyes around the monuments to dead ancestors and wondered that she could share blood, not only with George and Edmund, but with a few hundred dead, memorialized and entombed here over the centuries.
On Christmas Day their small party sat at one end of the massive oak table of the great medieval hall of Hengemont. Helen had decorated the mantle of the big stone fireplace in which the Yule log burned, and a Christmas tree stretched up beyond the height that any of them could reach, and yet was still dwarfed by the size of the room, with its ceiling details disappearing into the gloom high above them.
There was something of a
gloom around the table as well. The most comfortable topic of conversation turned out to be Lizzie’s upcoming walk, and the research project on the Wife of Bath.
“Last year, the Christmas pantomime in Bristol was Canterbury Tales,” Edmund said after several minutes of talking about the route of the pilgrimage.
Lizzie expressed her surprise. “It must have been watered down a lot,” she said. “None of the stories are appropriate for children.”
“The panto wasn’t considered a children’s event when I was young,” George said. “It was an opportunity for the laboring classes to take a jab at their betters, and they frequently did so in the rudest way possible.”
“Be careful, Father,” Edmund said, winking at Lizzie. “‘Betters’ is one of those terms that must be used with caution around Lizzie.”
George looked uncomfortable and Lizzie blushed with embarrassment. Edmund was usually not so ungracious.
“But you are right of course,” Edmund continued, “it was very much reduced to the bare bones of the story.”
Martin asked what story was being told in this year’s pantomime and Edmund answered that it was “Hansel and Gretel.”
“Much better,” George said ironically. “Children and cannibalism. Who could possibly object to that?”
Each of his three companions had a witty remark to make, but all remained silent in deference to the others.
Chapter 3
Lizzie and Martin returned to Boston in time for the New Year, and she began her winter term at St. Patrick’s College the following week. On her first day back on campus, Lizzie headed to the library to see her friend Jackie Harrigan, who would be a good sounding board as she devised a reading list on the Wife of Bath, Canterbury Tales, and the biography of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Jackie was sitting at her post in the reading room. Around her a few scattered students were looking at reserve readings for courses and making last-minute decisions on registration. She didn’t look up when Lizzie came into the room.
“Excuse me, Ma’am,” Lizzie whispered loudly as she approached Jackie’s desk. “Can you tell me about the middle of English?”
Jackie kept her hand on the book she was reading and looked up, ready to correct her exasperating interruption. When she saw Lizzie she smiled.
“Professor Manning,” she said, closing the book. She raised her hand and gave Lizzie’s a hard slap. “When did you get back?”
“Just a few days ago.”
“And how was the holiday in England? All villagey, I imagine, with chestnuts and pantos and Father Christmas and wassailing.”
It occurred to Lizzie for the first time that she had had no wassail, nor even heard the word mentioned when she was at Hengemont. “Hmm,” she said, “no wassail. But all those other things and a fairly intriguing wassail substitute called posset.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that they insist on saying Happy Christmas instead of Merry Christmas?”
“Not in the least,” Lizzie said. “And did you have a happy Christmas?”
“I don’t know, does anybody these days?”
“Not the folks at Hengemont. They are feeling their losses this year. Death and divorce do take their toll on a family.”
Jackie nodded ruefully. “Too true,” she said.
“But now we are in a New Year and that gives us all hope,” Lizzie said cheerfully. “Merry New Year to you, my dear friend!” She leaned over and kissed the librarian on the cheek.
“And a Happy one to you,” Jackie returned.
A student stepped up to put a book on the desk, and said a quiet hello to Lizzie. After he left, she began to explain her upcoming project to Jackie. Though she trusted her friend, she did not tell her about Alison’s manuscript. Unlike herself, Jackie had a wide circle of correspondents in the field, and even if she had not sworn an oath to Alison, Lizzie would not want to put her in the position of having to keep a secret about such an important find.
“I am going to walk across England,” Lizzie said, blurting out the news without any preamble. “A literary scholar has hired me to retrace the pilgrimage of the Wife of Bath.”
“What?” Jackie said in complete surprise.
“Please,” Lizzie whispered, putting a finger to her lip. “Library voice!”
“What?” Jackie said again, equally loudly. “The Wife of Bath? Do you remember the awful story she tells in Canterbury Tales?”
“Of course,” Lizzie insisted. “I’m not a cretin, and I just reread it a few weeks ago.”
“It is awful!”
In her short discussion with Alison in Bath a few weeks earlier, the story told by the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s work had never come up. It wasn’t part of the manuscript and so it clearly wasn’t on Alison’s mind at the time.
“In fact,” Jackie continued, “the first time I read the book I thought how awful it was for Chaucer to put that story in her mouth. When we read about her in the prologue she’s an impressive independent woman for her time, she has her own income from being a fine weaver, she’s had an active sex life with multiple husbands, she’s traveled all over Europe and the Mediterranean, and she’s very well read—though Chaucer mocks her for that.”
“So it is the story she tells that you object to and not the character herself?”
“Yes, of course,” Jackie said. “In fact I wrote a paper in grad school speculating that Chaucer must have had a real woman as his model. He fell in love with her and when she rejected him, punished her by making her into a caricature in his book and having her tell a raunchy story where a rapist creep gets rewarded for his deed by a bunch of women who should have known better.”
Lizzie stared at her in astonishment. It was very hard not to confide to her right then that there very likely was such a woman, and she had left a document. She decided to contact Alison and ask if she could bring Jackie into their circle.
“And Chaucer was a rapist,” Jackie added, not noticing Lizzie’s response to her last speech. “Did you know that?”
“I did not,” Lizzie said, emphasizing the last word. “Is all this in the paper you wrote? And if so, can I have a copy of it?”
“It is and you can, but I will have to dig through my files to find it. I wrote it so long ago that the electronic version is on a diskette that I can’t even play anymore. I’d have to go to the Science Museum to find an old computer to read it.”
“But you have a paper copy?”
Jackie said that she did and promised to find it for Lizzie. “I should have it by Thursday,” she said. “Are we on for lunch? It’s a long time since we’ve all been in town at the same time.”
“Geminiani’s at noon,” Lizzie answered. “I’m looking forward to it.”
Chapter 4
When her business allowed it, Rose Geminiani always joined Lizzie, Jackie, and their friend Kate Wentworth, for their weekly lunches at her restaurant. Consequently a table for four was spread and waiting for them, with a bottle of wine already opened to breathe, and a fresh basket of bread. The day was cold, so the three women from St. Pat’s walked quickly across the bridge from Charlestown, where their small campus was located, to Boston’s North End, where Rose’s restaurant was tucked into a small storefront on Prince Street.
“Happy New Year!” Rose shouted as she saw her friends come through the front door, stomping the snow off their boots. She raced across the restaurant to meet them, simultaneously wrestling them out of their coats and hugging them.
“Everyone, tell me what you did for Christmas,” Rose said, speaking fast as she sat them at their table. She waved away a waitress, saying, “It’s okay, Tina, I’ll order for them.” She poured wine into each glass and proposed a toast that they would each have an adventure in the New Year.
“Well, Lizzie already has hers scheduled,” Jackie said, matching Rose for speed of talking and launching into a description of Lizzie’s proposed walk.
“No fair!” Rose interrupted. “Lizzie had the great adventure last year!”
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Lizzie touched her glass to those of each of her friends. “I’m hoping this won’t be quite so adventurous,” she said with a laugh.
“No death threats?” Jackie teased.
“Absolutely no death threats are anticipated.”
Rose and Kate pressed her for details and she explained quickly about the offer from Alison Kent.
“You are going to walk how far?” Rose asked, shaking her head with disbelief when Lizzie answered.
“I don’t remember the details of Canterbury Tales,” Kate said. “Can one of you give me the short version?”
“It was written at the end of the fourteenth century and describes the travels of a group of people to Canterbury on a pilgrimage to visit the tomb of St. Thomas Becket,” Lizzie started.
“They met at a tavern in London and decided to travel together,” Jackie continued, “and their host suggested that they amuse each other by telling stories along the way.”
“Ah yes,” Kate said, “I remember now. There were some very naughty schoolboys in ‘The Miller’s Tale.’”
Rose’s attention had been divided between listening to the conversation and supervising her staff, but Kate’s comment brought her fully back to the discussion. “I remember that story too. It wasn’t on the reading list at St. Angela’s but it managed to make the rounds!”
“We all read that as comedy when we were in high school,” Jackie said, “but it isn’t clear that the sex in that story was consensual.”
Her friends all knew that this was potentially the launching point for a lengthy discourse on the disempowerment of women in literature, a subject they had discussed for many hours at this very table. Rose was disinclined to hear it again and said that she needed to check something in the kitchen. Lizzie remembered that Jackie had written a paper on Chaucer’s treatment of the Wife of Bath character and asked her if she brought it. Jackie reached into her bag and pulled out an old typescript, held together by a rusty staple.