by Mary Malloy
Lily’s clear voice rang through the hall. Lizzie quickly gathered up the triptych, diary, and manuscript poems and returned them to their hiding place in the cabinet. The computer printouts she slipped into a file folder. She wasn’t ready to share all this with either Edmund or George. They probably knew about it already anyway, and it was not the history she had been hired to write. She was closing her files and shutting down her computer when Lily came into the library. Lizzie couldn’t resist grabbing her into a warm hug, and Lily hugged back.
The two of them strolled hand in hand from the library into the hall and from there into the medieval part of the house, the big room that had been Lizzie’s first interior glimpse of Hengemont and which she had only been in a few times since. Her midnight excursion there was now seeming more and more like a dream and less and less frightening.
“I love this room,” Lily said.
“Why do you love it so much?”
“Because it’s so old!”
“That is exactly why I love it too,” Lizzie exclaimed, squeezing the little girl’s hand. They talked for several minutes about history, as Lily pointed out her favorite things in the big medieval hall, and they continued their conversation as they went to join George and Edmund for lunch.
“There you are!” George called out to Lily. “I hope you weren’t bothering Dr. Manning.”
“Not at all,” Lizzie said. “She is a very knowledgeable guide to the house.”
George asked Lizzie if she was finding the research interesting today. She was embarrassed by the question. She was finding her work today exceedingly interesting, but it was not the work he thought she was doing.
The atmosphere at lunch was warm and lively. Lizzie felt herself drawn into conversation by turns with each of the Hattons. Again she couldn’t help but notice how attractive Edmund was, not just physically, but as a person. He had good relationships with his father and daughter, was obviously very smart, and if his father’s reports were correct also had a social conscience and a generous spirit. She blushed when she thought about the dream she had had about him, but kept up an animated exchange with him all through the meal.
Edmund offered to refill Lizzie’s coffee cup and poured one for himself as well. “You’ve probably noticed that my father drinks tea,” he said smiling, “but I’ve been converted to American ways.”
“I believe morning coffee to be our greatest gift to the English people,” Lizzie said as she thanked him.
“And as a gesture of thanks for all my countrymen, I shall finally give you the tour of the house and grounds that I have been promising.”
“But it’s too cold today for the outside part of your tour,” George said. He looked at Lizzie.
“I’ve already put it off too many times,” Edmund began, “and if we don’t do it today I don’t know when I’ll get back to do it.” He looked at Lizzie. “We’ll start inside and if it gets any warmer move outside later.”
George seemed to think it was a good plan, and he explained to Lizzie that he and Lily would be gone for the rest of the day. “We’re going into Bath to visit an old friend of mine.”
Edmund seemed like such a good dad, Lizzie thought as she watched him bundle his daughter up for her car trip through the snowy countryside. When the good-byes had finally been said, the house seemed quiet. Edmund heaved a mock sigh of relief and they began their tour.
Hengemont was a very different place as seen through the eyes of Edmund Hatton, who had grown up there and obviously loved the old house. No catalogue or floor plan could capture the life of the place as he did. As he pointed out portraits, he told Lizzie amusing anecdotes about his ancestors. He had a good knowledge of his family history without letting pride in his genealogy make him prejudiced in an examination of it. They shared personal information as they moved from room to room. She told him about her teaching, and about Martin’s work as an artist. He described some of the traveling he had done, working as a volunteer physician in Africa. Lizzie learned that Edmund was divorced from Lily’s mother. She was again impressed with both his intelligence and his good humor and the time passed quickly.
They spent a fair bit of time in the Navy Gallery, and when they went from there into the Tudor wing, Lizzie asked him about the panel through which Helen had disappeared on her earlier tour. He showed her the catch disguised behind a border of the paneling and the door swung silently open. Behind it was a narrow staircase going up and down.
“Above us are the Jeffries’ rooms,” he said. “Below us the big Tudor galleries.”
“Was this designed as some kind of secret passage?” she asked, intrigued.
“Are you picturing Jacobites hiding here during the Rebellion?”
She smiled with delight. “No, I was hoping it might be priests lying low with the relics of saints during Henry VIII’s destruction of the monasteries,” she answered. “Or pirates coming up from the Bristol Channel to store their booty.”
Edmund laughed. “I’m sorry to tell you it is not as intriguing as either of those options. There are passages all over the house that were built to allow the servants to get around without being seen.”
Lizzie lost her jovial tone. “Really?”
He answered her with more seriousness. “Not only in the house. There is a tunnel that runs from outside the wall of the estate directly to the kitchen. It made it possible for servants to come and go without passing through the garden.”
She thought about this for several moments, remembering how much she had felt the change of station just going from the kitchen into the dining room. The idea that the Hattons had gone to such elaborate efforts to keep their servants from cluttering up the landscape was absolutely disgusting to her.
“Was this an invention unique to Hengemont?” she asked.
He shook his head. “All of the big old houses have them,” he said, sensing her discomfort. “It’s not the proudest part of the family history, but it made for some very interesting games of hide-and-seek with my brothers.”
He nudged her gently with his arm in an attempt to restore her good humor, and looked at her with a smile so warm that Lizzie could not help smiling back.
“Do you want to see the best of the secret passages?” he offered.
When she accepted, he led her back to the big double staircase in the Adam wing of the house. Though she had gone up and down it several times each day during her stay at Hengemont, she had never noticed a door there, well-disguised in the paneling. It opened onto another set of stairs, much steeper and narrower than the public one. Edmund found the light switch and led her up behind the wall on which the Gainsborough painting hung.
“This wing of the house was attached directly to the old Norman tower,” he explained, pointing out the small round stones that formed one wall of the staircase.
One of the niches that had formed a window in the original tower had been widened into a doorway at the top of the stairs, and they passed into the musicians’ gallery above the main medieval hall.
Lizzie couldn’t help recalling her first dream as she looked down onto the stone floor below her. It had begun with a climb up to the top of the Norman tower with Edmund. She wobbled a bit, then blushed when she saw that he was looking at her.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Steep climb,” she said. “I’m just a little out of breath.”
“Do you want to sit down for a minute?”
She shook her head and then asked, somewhat nervously, “Can you get up to the top of the tower from here?”
He showed her the door that led to the next set of stairs. A sturdy iron bar had been mounted on it and was secured with a padlock. “I don’t know where the key is,” he said apologetically. “I’ll run down and ask Mrs. Jeffries about it if you want me to, but it’s kind of a cold and snowy day to go up on the roof.”
She shook her h
ead again and tried to smile. He led her back down the stairs, explaining as they went that he hadn’t been up on the roof since he was a boy. They went back to the library and he pointed out some of the features visible across the terrace. The sun was low in the sky and it was snowing lightly; they decided to put off the tour of the grounds until the next day.
“I’d love to see the church if that’s possible.”
He told her there was a monument there to Francis Hatton and she expressed her eagerness to see it. They settled into the chairs in front of the fireplace and he offered to pour her a drink.
“Only club soda,” she said. “The last time we sat here drinking I suffered for it the next day.”
They spent the evening talking about the various places to which they had traveled, of Alaska and Africa, and of the nature of the world in their time. There was no talk of a past that did not include themselves. When they parted he gave her a quick kiss on the lips and it felt very natural.
• • • • •
It was very late, past midnight, but Lizzie could not sleep. The three scenes from the triptych were stuck in her head like a bad song that could not be dispelled. She put on her bathrobe and tiptoed downstairs. Throughout the house there were small lights on and she was able to get to the library without difficulty. She went to the cabinet and took the triptych and Bette’s diary back to her room.
Sitting on the bed, Lizzie once again looked carefully at the triptych. She had to angle the shade of her lamp to illuminate it and when the light was just right, the bright reds, blues, yellows, and gold sparkled with the reflected light. The details of the faces, though tiny, were wonderful and filled with expression. Lizzie pulled out her magnifying glass and studied each panel again, starting with the meeting of the lovers on the castle tower.
“This has to be the Norman part of this house,” she thought, rising and going to the window. Most of the time when she had looked out the window she’d concentrated her gaze downhill toward the sea, but now she looked back in the other direction. The moon was almost full, bright white, and high in the sky across the Bristol Channel. The outline of the castle was illuminated perfectly. Lizzie held the small painting next to the window at eye level and looked from it to the silhouette of the castle roof. There was no doubt that the meeting between the lovers depicted in the painting was set on that tower. She felt a thrill of discovery followed by another, tinged with fear, at the memory of her own dream, which had also been set there.
She went back to the bed and pulled out Bette’s diary. She had until now avoided looking at it. Now she scanned a few entries in the middle; they were filled with romantic and sexual fantasies. Lizzie closed the book. It felt like an invasion of privacy, but she rationalized that this was what historians did—invade the privacy of dead people. Her curiosity was so great that she knew she would be unable to concentrate on the business at hand if she didn’t put this mystery behind her. She opened the diary again.
“I write this at the advice of Doctor Stuart,” it began, “but whether I will actually ever share its contents with him or not is uncertain. It is becoming increasingly clear that my family thinks I am mentally ill.”
Lizzie closed the book again. This really was a very personal chronicle and the woman who wrote it had lived in her own lifetime. That safe distance of centuries or even decades was missing. There was no excuse that she was a historian doing research; this was prying, uninvited, into someone else’s painful secrets. She sat for several minutes and then opened it again.
Where to begin is always a problem. I think I’ve always been sad, but things are worse now. Maybe I should start with those strange poems I found. I was playing in great-great-grandfather’s little museum and discovered the secret hiding place behind the carving. There was a ruby there. I took it to Mrs. Hastings and asked if I could wear it. She said it was probably glass if I found it in the cabinet. She even made a joke that it was probably something that Francis Hatton got from some Indian maharajah or the Shah of Persia. There were other things hidden with it, including the poems.
Bette then described what she had found in the cabinet, which was basically what Lizzie had found there, except that Lizzie hadn’t seen the necklace. Bette described the triptych, the poem in French, and some, though not all, of the other bits of verse, along with the necklace.
I thought these things were interesting and I took the little painting and the necklace to Father in his study and asked him what they were. He seemed very surprised that I had found them. He had never seen them before, but he told me that he knew what they were.
In a sidebar directed to “Dr. Stuart if you ever read this,” Bette noted that this was one of the most memorable conversations she ever had with her father. “Ever since my two oldest brothers died in the war,” she wrote, “he does not seem to want to show affection to his other children.”
John Hatton told his daughter that he had learned the story from his great-aunt, an eccentric old woman who came to see him at his Oxford University lodgings on his twenty-first birthday. He was, at that time, the last male Hatton. His two older brothers had been killed in World War I and he had not yet married and had his own children
Lizzie thought of the two photographs she had seen in the Naval Gallery. Was it possible that both pairs of brothers had been killed? What a tragedy that would have been for Bette’s father, who would have had to face the loss not just of his brothers, but of his sons. Thinking about the man, Lizzie remembered that he was also George’s father. She had not recognized George as one of the young men in the World War II photo. Were those his brothers? Lizzie remembered that when they were in the Naval Gallery during their tour, she and Edmund had talked only of Francis Hatton. Would it be intruding to ask him about those men who were so much closer?
Chapter 13
Lizzie had promised George that she would try to find out if Frank Hatton could have made another voyage to the Pacific to return the corpse of Eltatsy and the blanket, and she was determined to spend some time on the question the next morning before breakfast. The snow had stopped and the sun was just peeking over the horizon. She hoped that she would be able to finally get a tour of the old castle grounds of Hengemont and visit the family church with Edmund.
The library had a first-class collection of voyage narratives, and Lizzie pulled down the volumes for the voyages of Captains Dixon, Meares, and Vancouver. If Francis Hatton had returned to the Northwest Coast, those would have been the likeliest opportunities. She scanned the crew lists of the first two volumes; no Hatton. As she opened the first edition of Vancouver’s Voyages a letter fell out. Lizzie stooped to pick it up and found that it was signed by George Vancouver himself. It was addressed to Francis Hatton, dated March 23, 1790.
Dear Friend,
Your letter of the 14th inst. gave me great pleasure. To sail again with a shipmate such as yourself would be just the thing to insure the voyage would pass with both humour and honour. I was somewhat surprised by your request to come along as all word received of you of late has painted you rather the gentleman farmer than the salt, but you are certainly not the first man called back to the sea from a pleasurable life ashore and I suspect it is the opportunity to add to your splendid cabinet that really draws you.
Let me know what I can do to encourage your participation in this enterprise. You could not have given me more promising news as I make the final preparations for this voyage.
Fair winds old friend,
George Vancouver, R.N.
The signature had been scratched with a quill and Lizzie ran her thumb across it. George Vancouver. He had touched the same paper that she now held in her hand. She momentarily reached across time. Outside, the sun was beginning to show itself with force. Lizzie opened the first volume of the published narrative of Vancouver’s voyage and scanned the crew list printed in the first pages. Francis Hatton was not there, though according to this letter he c
learly intended to go on the voyage. She needed a good biography of the man and now she scoured the shelves in earnest for a family genealogy of the type written for aristocratic families in the nineteenth century and packed with the sort of details she was looking for. It didn’t take long to locate The Hattons of Hengemont on a shelf too high to reach.
The library was equipped with a chair whose top could be pushed back to form a step ladder. Lizzie loved this special piece of library furniture and had explored several high shelves just to be able to use it. Now she pulled out the Hatton genealogy and turned around to make her way back down to the big table. For a moment she glanced out the window, across the formal garden and the sloping hill down to the sea. The sun was starting to pick out the details of the stone wall at the end of the garden.
Even this slight elevation made a difference in the view and Lizzie felt a twinge like static electricity at the base of her skull. It was the view she had seen in her dream as she sat in the wooden stands at the tournament. The heavy book wobbled in her hand and she turned and sat on the top step of the ladder, clutching the book as if it would keep her from falling. For a moment she thought that she might faint. She closed her eyes and saw again the landscape from her dream, smelled the odors, heard the sounds.
She sat quite still for several minutes, breathing heavily. Then she climbed slowly down the ladder, still clutching the book. It was the same powerful sense of déjà vu she had felt upon seeing the triptych. She felt a confusion of centuries, as if she was, waking and sleeping, moving through time, from the medieval world of her dreams to the seagoing career of Francis Hatton to the present. Once again she attempted to rationalize and justify things that she did not actually believe could be rationalized and justified. She spoke purposefully to herself again about the sources of the images, and willed herself to move on. She opened the book and breathed deeply.