by Mary Malloy
She stepped over to the tall French doors and tried to see more closely, her hand resting on the bronze handle of the door. She looked at the ruins at the far end of the garden. Could she make out in them the outline of the castle walls from the triptych? She tried not to think about the fact that she had seen such a scene in her dream as well. The door handle sank under the weight of her hand and the door swung open. Lizzie stepped outside. The air was chilly and she ran her hands up and down her arms again. She told herself that she was excited, not scared. She closed her eyes and captured again the sensations of her dream: the sound of armor clanking, the beat of horses’ hooves, the voices of ladies in a crowd. When she opened her eyes she realized again that this was similar, but not identical, to her dream. She wished she had a better sense of what the landscape had looked like in the age of the Crusades.
She thought of the book Martin had given her. Very quickly she ran to her room and grabbed a jacket and the book. There was still time before the light faded for her to go again to the garden and see if she could trace the outline of the original castle. She opened the book to the description of the original structure and walked with it down to the ruin.
Here were the remains of a small tower and a wall. This would have been the northwest tower shown in the artist’s rendering of the original fortifications. Lizzie followed the wall back toward the house. The family’s church, which she had seen when Henry Jeffries drove her here from Minehead, was visible through a cast-iron gate in the wall and Lizzie stepped up to it, prepared to go through and follow the path on the other side, but the gate was locked. It was bitter cold and the sky was beginning to darken. Lizzie felt a weight of sadness as she looked at the church and the tombstones surrounding it. All those people she was coming to know were there, she thought. She made her way slowly back to the house and plopped herself back into her chair.
The triptych was still standing up on the table and she looked at it again, and at the papers scattered around it. The poems were a mystery. She sat upright again, and spread them out in front of her, including the one written by Francis Hatton’s sister, which was with the logbook pages. From the box where she had been consolidating them over the last few days, she took the other examples and laid them out as well. Placed alongside one another, they made an astonishing display.
The handwriting was all different, the papers were different, the poetic styles ranged from stilted to effusive. There were nine total. Two were on vellum, including the one in French. Another was on parchment, several were on heavy rag paper, and one was typed. They shared certain references to a love affair and a central question: “Where is his heart?” It seemed impossible, but Lizzie had to conclude that they were written many years, in fact many centuries apart. Four had a signature of some sort, and where it was distinguishable the names were similar, either the initials “E.H.” or some form of “E. d’H.” or “Elizabeth Hatton,” the same name that appeared engraved on the stationery. Three had dates: 1382, 1780, 1887.
There was something so strange in this small pile of papers that it made Lizzie’s hand shake slightly as she touched them. One by one she placed them on her scanner and created a computer file, as if by converting them into high-tech bits of data she could somehow dispel her discomfort. She tried to organize them chronologically, guessing the order in which they had been written based on her previous experience with manuscripts, but she quickly realized that her own field of expertise was too limited to material from the late eighteenth century to the present. She just couldn’t be sure about anything other than that the French poem on vellum was probably the oldest and the typewritten text the most recent.
Who could she ask about this, she wondered? And was this really any of her business anyway? It certainly was beyond the scope of the project for which George Hatton had hired her. Did he know what these things were about? She looked again at the triptych lying on the table in front of her. It was an artistic masterpiece and certainly genuine. It had to be enormously valuable. Did George know it was hidden in that compartment?
Before she spoke to him about it, Lizzie decided to send a quick e-mail message to Jackie back at the St. Pat’s College library. Maybe she would be able to find someone to date the manuscripts by their penmanship and poetry.
“Mo chara,” she wrote,
A mystery has emerged here at the stately home of Sir George Hatton. (I have managed to dodge that bullet, by the way. I have so far been able to be polite without being deferential to his Lordship!) I’ve been trying to process several centuries’ worth of miscellaneous papers. I’m not sure whether you, as my model librarian, would find it a dream-come-true or a nightmare, but there is certainly plenty of stuff here to intrigue and challenge an amateur archivist such as myself.
For instance, what do you think of the attached? If I’m not mistaken, they range across several hundred years, yet seem remarkably similar in sentiment. Can you give me a sense of the dates of these? Under the image of each I have written a brief description of the paper. The handwritings are so distinctive that there must be a clue to the age there. What do you think?
I await your thoughts with thanks.
A chara,
Lizzie :)
P.S. Can you translate the French one for me, or find someone who can?
Lizzie sent the e-mail with her new file of scanned images attached. She had just finished reorganizing the material when George appeared at the library door. He wanted her to know he was back, he told her.
She stood up, shoving the small bits of paper into a file folder and laying it on top of the triptych. She wasn’t ready to talk to him about it yet.
He offered her a drink, but she refused.
“I want to apologize to you about Richard,” George stammered.
Lizzie had not thought even once about George’s rude son since he left. “Please don’t worry about it,” she said. “We talked more civilly before he left.”
Her host looked somewhat relieved. “It was uncharacteristic of him to be so loutish,” he said.
Lizzie was not convinced that this was true and she made no response.
“It’s very important to me that you do this project, Lizzie.”
“Thank you, George. I appreciate that and I’ll try to do a good job for you.”
“I have no doubts about your abilities,” he continued.
“How much will Richard be involved?” she asked hesitantly.
“He won’t be involved in your part at all,” George said emphatically. He offered her his arm to escort her to dinner, and she took it. His polite concern kept the conversation superficial, which was just as well. Lizzie didn’t want to have to admit that she hadn’t thought even once about Francis Hatton that day, and she wanted to think about her new discoveries for a bit before she asked George about them.
Chapter 11
Lizzie tried to go through some of the Pacific Ocean voyage narratives the next day, but she eventually lost interest and returned to her room to get her coat so that she could walk outside. On the way, she paused to look again at the large portrait of Francis Hatton with his brother and sister that stood on the central staircase of the house. Next to it was the portrait that Helen had told her was of the sister when she was a bit older. There was something remarkable about the sweet, pensive face of Eliza Hatton as Joshua Reynolds had painted her. Her auburn hair was swept up rather gently to the top of her head and several small flowers were woven into the soft curls. She held a straw bonnet in her left hand against her waist. There was a delicate lace scarf wrapped around her shoulders, which she held closed with her right hand. Just below that hand Lizzie thought she could see a necklace.
She couldn’t be sure, but it looked very much like the gold-chained ruby she had seen illustrated in the triptych. She walked up and down several stairs, trying to get a better angle from which to see the details, but the details weren’t there. The artist
had suggested it, without actually showing it with any detail. It suddenly struck Lizzie that the Rossetti painting might have the same necklace and she went quickly to her room to look at it again.
There it was. There could be no mistaking it. The knight held a necklace out to the waking Elizabeth: the gold chain dangled from his hand, but in his palm was a red jewel or something like it.
Rossetti’s knight wore the same armor and the same heraldic device that she had seen on her lover in the dream and later in the triptych. It must have been the source of it, she thought again, though she hadn’t really taken the time to look closely at the painting until this moment. She viewed it from various distances, and from several different places in the room. Finally she took it from the wall and brought it over to the window, in the process remembering the manila envelope she had seen taped to the back of the canvas when George moved it in the library a few days before. She leaned it carefully against the wall and looked again at the envelope. The stiff old tape that held it to the canvas gave way easily as Lizzie slipped her finger under it. Inside were two pages of text typed on the letterhead of a London art gallery, and several folded newspaper articles.
“Wicked Ways of Well-to-Do Women!” read one of the headlines. The article was dated August 10, 1979, and described the partying, lurid affairs, exhibitionism, and drug use of several upper-class British girls and women. The newspaper was one of the English tabloids that published a picture of a topless woman every day. The text on Page One was entirely gossip; where it “continued on pg. 16A,” Lizzie was surprised to see the Rossetti painting reproduced as an illustration.
“Naughty Daughter of Hengemont Manor Lord,” was the caption.
Lady Elizabeth Hatton, whose father, Sir John, was Lord of the Manor at Hengemont in Somerset, was one of the naughty misses of a century ago. She was a wild child at school, and a handful at home. Lady Elizabeth ran away to London at the tender age of eighteen and joined in on the fun and games of the ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,’ a group of artistic geniuses who flaunted convention or anything that hinted at propriety.
Lizzie groaned.
The other two articles were no better. She unfolded the typed sheets and read a description of the painting as it was to appear in an auction catalogue.
“Rare and Valuable Painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” was the title.
Elizabeth Wakes from the Dream, 1868
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
The London-born Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a member of the group of artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848 by Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, under the influence of Ford Maddox Brown.
The artist William Morris, who joined the circle at a later date, introduced Rossetti to the subject of this painting, Lady Elizabeth Hatton, in 1867. Having lost his wife of two years in 1862, Rossetti was in a period of depression and failing health. Miss Hatton was, according to Morris, “haunted by remarkable dreams that brought on a melancholy state.” Her tragic demeanor made her attractive to Rossetti, still mourning the loss of his wife, and he asked her to sit for this painting.
In 1870 Rossetti had the coffin of his young bride exhumed in order to recover and publish a volume of his poetry he had buried with her corpse. The resulting publicity and the poor critical response to the work sent a despondent Rossetti retreating to the countryside where he shared a home at Kelmscott with Morris. Miss Hatton was invited to join them and thereafter remained at Rossetti’s side. She lived at his London home at 16 Cheyne Walk during his period of virtual isolation in 1877, and was with him at Birchington-on-Sea when he died in April, 1882. Miss Hatton returned to Rossetti’s London house and lived there until her death in 1930 at the age of eighty-one.
There was more information on who had owned the painting, where it had been exhibited in the years since it was painted, and some quotations from reviewers who, for the most part, considered it to be among Rossetti’s strongest work. He had certainly captured something in the expression of the sitter, Lizzie thought as she returned the envelope to the back of the canvas and hung the painting back on the wall.
Whatever fear she had felt earlier that there might be something to her dreams beyond her own fertile imagination began to fade. Here was the knight she had seen. She had always had an active imagination and a tendency to be suggestible. Suddenly a flood of memories came to mind of earlier dreams influenced by landscapes through which she traveled, by work she had done, and by books, movies, and television.
Lizzie decided to go back to work. She had already lost too much time on other things than the project for which she’d been hired. As she went downstairs, though, she couldn’t help looking one more time at Eliza Hatton’s portrait, and she wondered if there were others with the same jewel. “Okay,” she told herself, “give it a few more hours just to put the whole thing behind you.”
She found George looking for her in the library when she returned and gave him an update on where she stood with the project.
“I’ve transcribed the whole of the journal,” she told him, “and it really is remarkable, one of the most detailed and interesting I’ve ever encountered.”
“Including the pages that were removed from it?”
Lizzie told him that even without those missing pages it would be an important record of Cook’s voyage; with them, it showed the humanity and complexity of Francis Hatton in exceptionally moving terms.
“And the objects?” he asked her.
“I’ve photographed and catalogued all of the artifacts that he collected in the Pacific,” she said. “Logically, that would be the focus of a book or exhibit since his journal doesn’t record the Asian or Indian Ocean parts of the voyage.” She glanced up into the cabinet. “And he seemed to have lost his passion for collecting things on the return voyage, after he discovered Eltatsy’s corpse. There are a few things from Indonesia that I would include, but the rest of the stuff seems to have been given to him by other people and not collected first hand.”
They talked about how she would write up the material. George did not object to including the Eltatsy material. Neither of them mentioned Richard or his objections, though Lizzie thought they were probably both thinking in that direction. She prodded him gently about the reference to the other corpse in Francis’s letter to Eliza, but once again George declared ignorance or disinterest with an affected naiveté that was nonetheless quite firm.
“So what is left to do?” George asked her.
Lizzie had been wondering how to answer this question, especially since her interest had wandered somewhat in the last few days.
“Before I can write my own text, I need to fill in the biographical details about Francis’s life, and especially to look at the subsequent voyages to the Pacific, to see if he was on one, or found a way to return the burial box and the Chilkat blanket.” She paused for a moment. “Without knowing what happened to those items, there is a real hole in the story,” she said finally.
George nodded. He seemed pleased with her progress and felt that she had accomplished a lot in a short period of time. “You’ve been working on this pretty hard since you got here,” he said. “It hardly seems like you’ve left the library.”
It was the perfect opening. Lizzie asked him if she could take a few hours that afternoon and look more closely at the collection of Hatton family pictures hanging around the house.
“Of course,” he answered. “I’m sorry that I didn’t think to offer that suggestion myself. Mrs. Jeffries has a catalogue of the paintings and can show you around.” He called his housekeeper on the intercom and asked her to join them with the book.
“In the summertime, we open portions of the house to the public and Mrs. Jeffries is our tour guide,” he explained. “The collection really is quite good. The Victoria and Albert Museum sent someone here to inventory the paintings about forty-five years ago so
that they could be included in a big compendium of British art, and we benefitted by getting a catalogue for our own purposes.”
“Do you mind if I take some pictures for my research?” Lizzie asked.
George agreed, apologizing again that he had never shown her Francis Hatton’s portrait. “Be sure to have Mrs. Jeffries point it out to you,” he said.
“I’ve seen that Gainsborough portrait with his brother and sister,” Lizzie said, “but Edmund mentioned that there was another one.”
“And it has the boomerang in it.”
Lizzie was surprised and pleased by the information. “Eighteenth-century portraits with ethnographic artifacts that can still be identified are very rare,” she told George. Her enthusiasm for her subject matter was returning. “And I’m anxious to see what Francis looked like at an older age.”
“He’s not much older than in the other painting,” George explained. “But it shows him at the age of the voyage.” He invited her to make herself quite at home in any part of the house that interested her, an offer which he had never made before.
Helen was waiting for them to finish their conversation, and George turned and gestured for her to join them, instructing her to show Lizzie any portraits that interested her and especially “the Navy Room.” He poured himself a glass of sherry and settled into one of the fireplace chairs with a newspaper as they left the room.