The Wandering Heart

by Mary Malloy

  “I found some interesting scraps of poetry in Francis Hatton’s cabinet,” she started.

  Edmund turned to her.

  “They were all written by young women, and. . . .” Lizzie felt her voice catch in her throat and coughed. “I don’t want to sound too morbid,” she continued, somewhat haltingly, “but I can’t help wondering what happened to them. Where is Francis’s sister Eliza, for instance?”

  Edmund looked at her intently. “I’m beginning to see the danger of hiring a historian to poke through the family papers,” he said. “One then has to face the prospect that she might find an old skeleton.”

  Lizzie tried to make a joke. “But that’s the problem,” she said, “there don’t seem to be enough old skeletons.” She immediately regretted the tastelessness of the remark, but Edmund seemed to take it in stride.

  “Ouch,” he said. “I guess I deserved that, but this is getting to be a rather unseemly conversation to have in a mausoleum.”

  “Sorry,” Lizzie said softly, “I don’t mean to make light of it. I just find it intriguing.”

  Edmund was thoughtful for a moment and then led her over to the south transept of the chapel. “I don’t see any reason to keep it a secret,” he said, “though it has always been treated that way.” He gestured to Lizzie to help him move one of the pews back and pointed to a series of marked stones set into the floor. “These women all committed suicide quite young. They couldn’t be buried in the consecrated church so they are buried in an adjacent burial ground.”

  Lizzie looked at the stones. There were ten of them, small bricks engraved with names and dates, laid into the floor of the church in a row. Except for one man, named Edmund, who had lived in the late nineteenth century, each of the stones had the name Elizabeth Hatton, or one of the versions she recognized from the paintings and poetry. The earliest set of dates was 1234-1254, the most recent 1868-1887. There was at least one in every century from the thirteenth to the nineteenth.

  These were the authors of the poetry. The women in the paintings.

  “Whoa!” Lizzie said, grabbing unsteadily at the back of the pew.

  She was building a file of these women, and here they all were. She plopped herself into the pew and fumbled in her purse for a Kleenex to wipe her forehead.

  “Are you all right?” Edmund asked with concern. He sat beside her.

  Lizzie felt her heart pounding. She knew her face was flushed but when she reached up to touch her temple with her fingertips it was cold and clammy. She attempted a smile.

  “This is really, really weird,” she said.

  Edmund put his arm around her and waited for her to explain.

  Lizzie did not know how even to formulate a logical question, let alone an explanation about how she had made links between these women through such disparate sources. In a disorganized jumble she begin to spill the information out to Edmund: the poems, the paintings, her correspondence with Jackie and Professor Brandon back in Boston, the ruby.

  “Wait a minute,” Edmund said, pulling his arm back and folding his hands in his lap. “When you say you found ‘scraps of poetry,’ what are we talking about here?”

  More coherently now, Lizzie described her discoveries in detail, then explained how she had linked almost every poem to a painting.

  “There is no marker here except the one for that man Edmund,” she said, pointing to the one stone that didn’t fit into her file, “that I don’t have some document for, either a text or a painting.” She had hoped that by saying it out loud, and sharing it with Edmund, she could dissipate the strangeness of the experience; but it was not so. If anything, the extraordinary coincidence that brought all the threads together was even more astonishing when she put it into words.

  Edmund was silent for a long time as he processed the information. Lizzie pondered the stones at their feet.

  “My God,” he said at last, “I hardly know how to respond. I thought I knew all about these women, but I never saw any of that stuff you describe.”

  “Surely you’ve seen the paintings. . . .”

  “Well, of course I’ve seen them, but I never consciously linked any of them to these girls, I never noticed any ruby, and I’ve never seen the poems.” He paused and put his arm along the back of the pew behind Lizzie. “Why did you make this file you’re talking about?”

  “Total coincidence!” she insisted. “I found the poems, noticed that they were very similar but written generations apart and I just got curious. Then I found the triptych and started to notice the ruby everywhere, so I began very casually to assemble the file. Purely as an academic exercise,” she added.

  After another period of silence it occurred to Lizzie that these were not simply abstract ideas to Edmund. They were his relations.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Your response to Francis’s actions seemed interested and concerned, but you didn’t seem to take it personally. I begin to forget that this is your family.”

  “It’s not that,” he said after a moment’s silence. “Francis behaved like a human being. He made mistakes and he regretted them. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about in being descended from him.” He paused again. “But these women. . . .” He fumbled for words. “It’s hard to explain.”

  Lizzie did not know what to say in response. She touched her forehead again; now it felt hot. “You know,” she said, finally, “I think I may have a fever.”

  Edmund rested his hand lightly against her cheek. “You do feel a bit warm,” he said. He asked if she wanted to go back to the house.

  “Could we just sit here for another minute?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Of course.”

  She had a bottle of water in her purse and she pulled it out and took several sips.

  “I’m sorry I can’t let this go,” she said. “But how did they die?”

  “I think in every case they jumped from the roof.”

  “Hence the padlock?”

  Edmund nodded. “The survivors of these girls went to some rather extraordinary lengths to remove access to the highest parts of the house.” He touched one of the stones with the toe of his boot. “The stone steps that went up the corners of the original tower, as well as most of the walls of the fortification, were actually torn down by angry, grief-stricken fathers.” His eyes met Lizzie’s.

  She looked down at the stone where Edmund’s boot lay: “Elizabeth Hatton, 1760-1781.” It was Frank’s sister, Eliza. Helen said that she had jumped from the scaffolding as they were building the Adam wing of the house. Not two hours ago, Lizzie had walked across the very spot on the terrace where she died. She took another long drink of the water.

  “I’m sorry, Edmund,” she said when she had emptied the bottle, “but I want to ask you another personal question about your family.”

  He nodded, touching her shoulder softly with his hand.

  “Your father’s sister,” she stammered. “Is she buried here?”

  “Bette?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Bette’s not dead,” he said. “Why did you think she was?”

  “Helen Jeffries told me.”

  Edmund smiled and stroked his beard. “I suppose Mrs. Jeffries thinks she is protecting the family honor,” he said wryly.

  Lizzie turned slightly to catch his eye.

  “My aunt Bette is in a convent in France,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “She’s a nun?” Lizzie asked with surprise.

  Edmund laughed. “Oh no, it’s not as bad as that! She’s just loony!”

  Lizzie smiled. “I know this is none of my business,” she said apologetically. “But, as you said earlier, poking around in people’s papers makes one more curious than is polite.”

  “Did you find papers that belonged to Bette?” he asked.

  “I found a poem comparing a man’s heart to his pen
is,” she said.

  Edmund laughed again. “That sounds like the Bette I remember,” he said warmly, “though that’s not why she was committed.” He shifted a bit and moved his feet back underneath the pew on which they sat. “She was a wonderful aunt when I was a boy. Beautiful and full of life, but in her early twenties she turned dark and became suicidal, just like these women.” He paused before turning again to Lizzie and continuing. “I had just gone away to school at the time, so I must have been about thirteen years old, and nobody would really tell me what happened to her when I came home on holiday. I finally learned, much later, that she was committed to a mental institution in London, and after several years was transferred to this convent in France.”

  Edmund explained that Bette had become so obsessed with the story of Elizabeth and John that she had gradually assumed Elizabeth Pintard d’Hautain’s identity. “She was a good student in French,” he said, “and started to speak it almost exclusively. She also wore a sort of modified medieval costume, which made people mistake her for a nun. Eventually my father thought it was best to find a community of kind people who could take care of her.”

  Lizzie was still curious, but she knew it would be rude to question him further on the subject. She didn’t tell him that she had read some of Bette’s diary. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a sad story.”

  He nodded.

  They were silent for a few minutes.

  “Who put these stones here?” Lizzie asked eventually.

  “I’m not positive,” he answered, “but I think it was the woman from the Rossetti painting.”

  Lizzie asked him if he would be offended if she copied down the information from the stones and he shook his head. She pulled a notebook from her purse and quickly took the name and dates from each. He then offered her a hand to help her to her feet, and she helped him move the pew back into its place.

  It was snowing softly again when they left the church. As they walked through the churchyard, Lizzie tried to read the names on some of the gravestones, but she was getting a terrible headache and it was hard to focus. Edmund saw that she was unsteady and slipped his arm through hers as they walked.

  “Who are all these people?” she asked gesturing at the headstones.

  “People who lived in the community,” he answered softly.

  “Not your family?”

  Edmund led her through the gate and out onto the path that would lead them back to the Hengemont grounds. “I suppose some of them are, but I think my family is mostly buried inside the chapel.”

  Lizzie wanted to ask him where the women were, but hesitated. As if sensing her thoughts, he pointed to a separate area of the churchyard, just beyond the original wall. A large oak was surrounded by stone slabs and the area was enclosed by its own low stone wall.

  “Why did your family persist in naming girls Elizabeth?” she asked. “It almost seems like it was a sort of curse.”

  Edmund shrugged his shoulders. “In my own case, I simply didn’t take it very seriously,” he said. “I didn’t really want to name my daughter Elizabeth, but it was my ex-wife’s mother’s name and she insisted. I went along thinking it wouldn’t make a difference.”

  Lizzie felt a bit of a breeze and shivered. She had forgotten that Lily’s name was also Elizabeth. She couldn’t help making the leap to the fact that it was also her own name. Is that why Helen had been so concerned about her?

  When she looked up at him, Edmund smiled ironically. “You know,” he said, “my father was more angry at me for naming my daughter Elizabeth than he has ever been at any other time in my life.”

  Chapter 14

  As they came in through the terrace doors into the library Edmund turned to Lizzie.

  “Are you up for lunch?” he asked.

  She wasn’t feeling hungry, but something hot to drink sounded good. “Maybe some coffee and something light?”

  Even as she said it, Helen Jeffries was at the door, offering to bring those very items.

  Lizzie looked at Edmund and smiled. He laughed. “I used to try to trick Mrs. Jeffries with my comings and goings, but she cannot be fooled.”

  As they took off their coats, Lizzie could not stop thinking of those two rows of memorial stones, and the young women they represented.

  “Not to be too morbid,” she said finally, “but there do seem to have been an inordinate number of young girls with emotional problems in your family.”

  “You do get right to the point, don’t you,” Edmund responded, with better humor than the comment deserved.

  Lizzie realized her rudeness and apologized. “It’s really none of my business,” she said quickly, “but I can’t stop thinking about them.”

  “No, it’s all right,” he answered. “I’ve actually tried to look at the suicides as clinically as possible. I even wrote a paper about them in medical school.”

  Her interest was piqued. “And did you draw any conclusions?” she asked. “Were you able to form a diagnosis?”

  “No, not exactly. There was clearly a family tendency toward depression and, at least in Bette’s case, something more serious. Bette is a schizophrenic, in addition to having taken LSD and other drugs in the sixties. But I think there was drug use in some of the other cases as well. In fact, I think that even going back to medieval times the women in my family may have had hallucinations brought on by drugs.”

  “In medieval times?” Lizzie responded with complete surprise.

  He nodded. “It wasn’t uncommon then for women to put drops of belladonna in their eyes to make their pupils dilate. They thought it made them more attractive.”

  Lizzie gave a gasp of surprise.

  “Belladonna,” he continued, “means ‘beautiful woman,’ but it can be a hallucinogen, and the state of pharmacology then was imprecise enough that people didn’t always know what they were brewing. They used different parts of the plant, prepared it in different ways, and regularly had disastrous side effects.”

  “But how could you possibly know all this?” she asked. Her mind was racing back over the evidence that she had seen. “The first one was more than seven hundred years ago. What sort of proof could survive?” She was silent for a moment and then asked again, “How could you possibly know?”

  “I’m not the first person in my family to be interested in medicine,” Edmund explained. “There is an extraordinary collection of medical texts in this library that go back to the time the house was built.” He stood up and walked to the corner bookshelves that ran between the doors to the hall and the terrace. Lizzie had concentrated so intently on the voyage narratives that she had never looked at the books in this section. She rose and followed as he began to pull books off the shelf and laid them on a small table nearby. “A few of them are in Arabic, brought back from the Crusades, several are in Old and Middle English, and even more are in Latin.”

  Lizzie picked them up as Edmund laid them down. The authors were Bartholomaeus Anglicus, John of Trevisa, and Wynkyn de Worde. One Latin text, Causae et Curae, was by Hildegard of Bingen; Lizzie recognized the name as that of a composer of a number of extraordinary pieces for women’s voices. She had sung them in college.

  There was a small volume in dark leather covered with gold-tooled Arabic script. Lizzie picked it up carefully and opened it from the back. There, someone had long ago written the title in Roman letters with an old-fashioned hand: “Uniform ti Qanun fi al-tibb; The Canon of Medicine of Avicenna, ca. 1000.”

  “This is extraordinary,” she said. She picked up another one and read the title Liber de Proprietatibus Rerum.

  Edmund looked over her shoulder and translated, “On the properties of things. I always loved that title,” he added. “It tells about heaven and earth, angels, animals, rocks, plants, anything and everything.” He took the book from her hands and carried it and the others back to the bigger table. “It’s a keys
tone in the history of medicine, and I paid special attention in my Latin classes just so I would be able to read it.”

  They sat in the same chairs they had earlier taken to look at Francis Hatton’s journal, and Edmund took over Lizzie’s role as the expert as they talked about the early medical texts. He obviously loved these particular books, each a carefully transcribed manuscript, painstakingly written by hand centuries before the printing press.

  “Here’s the earliest known medical text in English,” he said, showing her a volume with neat, but undecipherable, script. “Old, old, English,” he laughed, seeing the puzzled look on her face. “The Leechbook of Bald. I love the title; it says something about the state of medicine in the age of Alfred the Great.”

  Lizzie was impressed at the age and condition of the book.

  “The most important one for understanding what happened in my family is this one,” Edmund continued, carefully opening the most innocuous-looking book on the table. It had no title stamped in gold on the old leather, and it had obviously been read many times, as the binding was coming apart at the edges. Inside, the thick paper was covered with rows of black ink.

  “It was compiled by one of my ancestors,” Edmund explained, “a woman who grew herbs, compiled careful recipes for preparing them, and collected anecdotes about their use.”

  Lizzie leaned over to look at the book, and asked who the author was.

  “Margaret Hatton,” Edmund answered. “She kept this book between 1425 and 1460, more than five hundred years ago. It gave me my first introduction to the drugs in use in medieval times.”

  “When you say ‘drugs,’” Lizzie asked, “do you mean herbs?”

  “Where do you think drugs come from?” he responded. “Aren’t you the one who reads The New England Journal of Medicine?”