by Mary Malloy
Shorter and shorter entries followed and Hatton’s handwriting deteriorated until Lizzie had a hard time deciphering what was on the page. The man was clearly in agony over his actions and Lizzie felt terrible for him.
January the 26th, 1779. No one in the crew must ever know of the corpse beneath my bunk. The luck of the voyage has turned, and I fear that I may have brought the Jonah on board, yet I feel a sacred duty to return it to the place from which it was taken.
Feb 14—Disaster! There could be no worse news to report. The excellent Captain James Cook is dead, killed by the very Sandwich Islanders who were so civilized and hospitable on our last voyage. Captain Clerk takes his place in command.
April—Clerk now is also dead. What a sorry turn of events has come to this ship. I cannot but wonder if some of the responsibility does not lie with me. My shipmates are worried for my health and my sanity—I cannot confess my guilt to any man on board and the weight is awesome. God willing Captain King will bring us safe back to England.
That was the last entry. Lizzie knew how the voyage ended. Captain King returned safely in 1780, and the publication of the official narrative of the voyage four years later first introduced the world to the value of sea otter pelts from the Northwest Coast in the marketplace at Canton. A number of ships followed in the wake of Cook’s voyage, pioneering a transpacific trade from England and America. Had Francis Hatton returned with the blanket and the box on one of those voyages? The death of his brother and his altered circumstances upon his return would seem to argue against it. Lizzie had no doubt now as to the identity of the two artifacts crossed off Hatton’s list; the only question remaining was whether they had been returned to their original resting place.
She had been to Alaska several times in the course of researching her dissertation and she knew Cross Sound was the passage north of Chichagof Island, lying along Alaska’s “inside passage.” She and Martin had been there on the Alaska ferry on a trip to see nearby Glacier Bay. During the course of her research Lizzie had scanned several nautical charts into a special software program so that she could edit them on her computer and add information from shipboard logbooks. Now she opened the file and brought Cross Sound up onto the screen.
With her finger she traced a passage into the sound, reading Hatton’s description aloud. Cape Bingham was clearly marked. Forty-five miles east brought her past the entrance to Glacier Bay and into a channel called Icy Strait. Just off the north bank was an island called “Pleasant Island,” which had rocky outcroppings to the south and east. The “Porpoise Islands” on the east looked especially promising to Lizzie as a location for Hatton’s “Blanket Island.” There had once been a Tlingit village on the adjacent coast, which was marked on Lizzie’s chart as “Old Hoonah (abandoned).” Across Icy Strait to the south was the newer village of Hoonah, which had replaced it.
“Hoonah,” she whispered. Hatton’s “Whooner” must have been the chief of Hoonah. She tried to remember what the village had looked like when she stopped there briefly on the ferry. She thought there was a cannery and a lot of fishing boats, with the usual stuff that accompanied them—a gas station, motel, cafe, etc. She also thought there was a longhouse and some totem poles there.
“What a different world from this,” she thought to herself as she closed her computer, laid the papers on the table in front of her and sat back in her chair. She looked around the comfortable and elegant room in which she sat. The leather bindings of the books were rich and soft, slightly faded over the years into mellow reds and golds and greens. The oak table had been rubbed for three centuries by soft cloth in rough hands.
What led young Francis Hatton to leave behind this solid and comfortable existence for the discomfort of the ship and the unknown world of the Pacific Ocean? Lizzie shivered as she thought of what it must have been like to encounter the “Icy Straits” of the Alaska coast in April and May. She could almost hear the sound of ice crunching against the wooden planks of the unheated ship.
And then to have had such a horrible experience. She really sympathized with him. His passion for collecting had caused him to steal something that clearly did not belong to him, but his response seemed out of proportion to the crime. It was, after all, obviously an accident that he had stolen a corpse rather than a box of masks or weapons as he thought. Lizzie even doubted that the corpse was that of Eltatsy, as the two days between Eltatsy’s death and Hatton’s discovery hardly seemed enough time for the burial rituals and cremation to have taken place. The crest on the blanket and the box were certainly consistent with the corpse being someone in Eltatsy’s lineage, however. Would Hatton have been as horrified had he thought the corpse was that of a stranger rather than of his new friend? In any case, his response was entirely out of character for an English Navy man of the eighteenth century. That he showed any consideration at all for the feelings and beliefs of a Native American was not consistent with the behavior of most of his fellow countrymen.
Lizzie wondered even more why Francis Hatton would expect his sister to understand, even share in his shame and remorse. “To have so capriciously robbed a grave is unforgivable in any case,” he had written, “but how much more so in mine, whose family has for centuries been cursed by thoughts of a corpse that could not be buried in the family tomb.”
The several papers with the insistent question “Where is his heart?” lay strewn across the table. She picked them up one after another. They had the same kind of urgency, almost horror, as Francis Hatton’s letter.
Helen Jeffries made a sound near the door of the library and Lizzie jumped with surprise, her heart beating rapidly.
She looked up at the housekeeper.
“Helen,” she said, pushing her chair back from the table, “you startled me.”
“Sorry, Miss, I came to tell you that lunch would be ready in about fifteen minutes.
“I thought you were going to call me Lizzie when we were alone.”
Helen smiled at her, crossed the room and came to stand near Lizzie’s chair. The scraps of poetry caught her eye and she reached out to pick one up, then set it down and quickly picked up another.
“What are these?” she asked.
Lizzie sensed an urgency in Helen’s voice and answered that she didn’t know. “I found them when I was going through the papers in the cabinet,” she said, watching curiously as Helen picked up one after another of the papers. “Do you know what they are?”
“No,” Helen answered, “but I don’t like them.”
“Don’t like them?” Lizzie responded with astonishment. “Why not?”
“They are all by Hatton girls aren’t they?”
“I suppose so,” Lizzie said.
“They weren’t sane,” Helen said bluntly. “They all suffered from some sort of curse.” She seemed really upset and turned to look directly at Lizzie. “I thought you said your research didn’t include them.”
Lizzie stood up and put a reassuring hand on Helen’s shoulder.
“These are all things I found by accident,” she explained. “I thought they were interesting, but they aren’t the subject of my research.” She couldn’t understand why Helen was acting so strangely. She took the paper which Helen still held, gathered the rest of the poems into a stack, placed them back in the carved box and closed the lid.
There was no chance at that moment for Lizzie to ask Helen what, in particular, bothered her about the poems or about the “Hatton girls” having written them, because George arrived looking to escort Lizzie to lunch.
In her enthusiasm to show George her discovery of the morning, Lizzie pushed Helen’s concerns, and her curiosity about the poems, into the background.
“I found the missing pages from the journal!” she said excitedly.
She sat down again and when George sat beside her she passed them to him and he began to read.
“What about lunch?” Helen asked.
“Will you be wanting it later?”
George’s first inclination was to abandon lunch altogether, but then he asked her to bring whatever was portable to them in the library.
For the next three hours Lizzie and George talked through each of the new pages. She was able to point out to him on her computer chart exactly where the ship was for each entry, and he moved as quickly as he could from one page to the next without losing sight of the important details.
His excitement turned to something like regret when he read the last pages that Francis Hatton had written, and his letters to his sister. It was clear to Lizzie that the missing journal pages took him completely by surprise and he was visibly disturbed by the thought of Eltatsy’s stolen corpse. George didn’t elaborate, but Lizzie thought he might be unnerved by the thought that it was somewhere in the house. She was still surprised, though, when he asked her the very question she was about to ask him.
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s certainly not in the cabinet.”
“I had no idea,” he said shaking his head. “I have never heard even a hint of this before.”
Lizzie described to him what she thought the box and blanket looked like, and even showed him some pictures of similar objects from the pile of catalogues of Northwest Coast Indian artifacts that she had brought with her as a working library.
“Have you ever seen anything like either of these anywhere in the house?”
He was certain that he hadn’t.
Helen had been in and out of the room with lunch and Lizzie had an idea that she had followed at least some of the conversation. She asked George if she might show the pictures to the housekeeper in case she had seen them.
“That’s a good idea,” he said. “Mrs. Jeffries is more familiar than I am with some of the odd nooks and crannies of the house.”
Helen looked closely at the pictures and listened to Lizzie’s description of the two items and, like George, was emphatic in her answer that she had never encountered either of them, but promised to keep them in mind as she went through the house.
As Helen left the room, Lizzie turned back to George. “Did Francis Hatton ever make another voyage?” she asked.
George was thoughtful. “I certainly don’t remember ever hearing about another voyage.”
“You have a very complete collection of voyage narratives,” Lizzie said, gesturing up to one of the bookshelves behind him. She had discovered this collection on her second day at Hengemont and had been meaning to look at them more carefully. “There weren’t all that many British voyages to the North Pacific in the next decade,” she continued. “And it’s unlikely Francis could have returned to the Northwest Coast except on one of the voyages you have documented here. I’ll take a little time today and see if I can find any indication that he ever returned the corpse.”
George took off his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief. “You’ve been working so hard,” he said, “I’m sorry that it is too cold for walking outside. You are welcome any time you need a break to have Jeffries drive you into the village or down to the harbor.”
Lizzie thanked him. “Edmund told me he’d give me a personalized tour around the house and grounds when he comes back, and I’ve been waiting for that.”
George stood to go. “Well, he should be back tomorrow, and then you really should get out of the house.”
He looked tired, and less poised than Lizzie had ever seen him. She couldn’t help reaching out and giving him an affectionate pat on the arm. “Thanks,” she said again, “but I’m doing just fine.”
Chapter 9
George seemed not to want to talk to Lizzie any further that day about her discovery and sent his regrets that he would be not be joining her for dinner, preferring to take a tray in his own room.
Lizzie was surprised and somewhat miffed. Having found the new journal pages, she understood why Francis Hatton had wanted to keep it from being published, and she wanted to know more about what he might have said in his will regarding the subject. She wondered if George was now feeling some hesitation about seeing the project through to the end, and was worried that her expectations of enhancing her own career through a publication of Francis Hatton’s collection and journal might be dashed.
All these things raced through her mind as Helen still stood near her, having just delivered George’s message.
“Would you like to join me and Henry in the kitchen for dinner?” Helen asked her. (It was the first time that anyone had acknowledged to Lizzie that “Jeffries” had a first name.) She welcomed the invitation and found herself in a new part of the house for the first time since her arrival more than a week earlier.
The kitchen was set behind the informal dining room in which she had taken her meals with George, and was obviously in a much older part of the house. It had a huge stone fireplace, a legacy of the days when the meals had been cooked over open flames. Set into it at various levels were small ovens for baking bread and keeping food warm, now made obsolete by the big gas range that stood in a corner of the kitchen. The room was enormous, with long tables for preparing food and high banks of glass-fronted cupboards filled with row upon row of dishes and serving pieces. It was obvious that very large parties could be served from this kitchen.
A small pine table near the fireplace was set for four. Lizzie knew that there was at least one other man who worked at Hengemont, but she hadn’t seen him since her arrival, when he had carried her luggage in from the car. Now she was finally introduced to Bob Moran who, Henry Jeffries said, managed the “outdoor affairs” of the Hattons.
Outside of George Hatton’s presence, the three were talkative and amusing. Henry Jeffries had a wry sense of humor, Helen smiled easily, and Bob, who had the broadest English accent Lizzie had ever heard, told story after story about communicative dogs, eccentric farm machinery, and remarkable examples of oddly shaped vegetables that he had encountered over his sixty-plus years. The food was the very same food served on the Hattons’ table, and Lizzie felt more comfortable than she had at any meal eaten in the house.
After dinner, the two men retired from the kitchen and Lizzie helped Helen clean up the dishes. For the first time that evening, talk turned to the Hattons. Though she suspected that the family was often the topic of conversation around their table when they were alone, the servants were very careful not to discuss their employers in her presence. Helen, however, had now clearly left both her discomfort and much of her discretion behind, and Lizzie took it as a compliment to herself. She knew the housekeeper was far too loyal and discreet ever to gossip about the Hattons with outsiders.
Helen asked how Lizzie’s work was going, hoped that Richard’s presence in the house hadn’t been too awful for her, and shared Lizzie’s high opinion for Edmund. About George they were each more circumspect. Lizzie respected him but hadn’t really warmed to him, and she wasn’t sure that Helen Jeffries, after sharing a house with him for many decades, had either.
“How long have you worked for the Hattons?” Lizzie asked, wondering just how far back the relationship extended.
“I was born in this house and have always lived here,” Helen replied.
This took Lizzie by surprise. Though she had suspected the older woman had been here a long time, she was unprepared for the fact that Helen Jeffries had spent her whole life at Hengemont. They finished the dishes and Helen prepared a pot of tea and brought it back to the table, where Lizzie joined her.
“I told you that my grandmother came here as a servant more than a hundred years ago,” she explained, sensing Lizzie’s interest. “There were lots of Irish girls working here then. My grandmother and her sister were only fifteen and sixteen when they arrived, still with the hay in their hair and speaking mostly Irish.”
Helen’s grandmother had married a local fisherman in Hengeport, bore nine children, and come back to work in
the house in middle age, eventually becoming the head housekeeper. Most of her children had worked for the Hattons, and her daughter—Helen’s mother—had also become the housekeeper.
Helen described to Lizzie how much Hengemont had changed in the years since her grandmother first arrived in the last decades of the nineteenth century. There had been some twenty servants working in the house then, several men who kept the grounds, and a few hundred engaged in the agricultural enterprises of the estate, almost all in positions that were now gone. The Hattons and Bob Moran were all that were left at the house, except for a few teenagers from Hengeport who came in part time to help with the housekeeping and yard work.
“But the house isn’t any smaller,” Lizzie commented. “It must be an enormous job for you and Henry to do the work formerly done by twenty.” She could have added that neither of them was young, either, but held her tongue. The Jeffries must each be close to seventy—and maybe older.
“Most of the house isn’t in use now,” Helen explained. “There used to be grand parties, continuous guests, and meals and entertaining in the big rooms at the front of the house. Now all we do is dust them. When there is the occasional party, I can get extra help from the village.”
The two women continued to talk for almost two hours. Lizzie was curious about George’s financial situation and asked Helen how the Hattons supported themselves. She couldn’t help but wonder how an old family continued to live in such style without a pretty big influx of cash.