by Mary Malloy
“Here’s something that may interest you,” he said, “if only for the coincidence of being about a young woman with your same name.”
Lizzie tried to gather her thoughts together and show interest. Father Folan pointed out a letter dated June 14, 1888. She pulled the heavy volume toward her and read.
Dear Father,
I am writing to you on behalf of one of my parishioners, Lizzy Manning. She worked until recently on the Hengemont estate and said that she would be known to you. Miss Manning is with child and says that the father is Edmund Hatton, the heir of Hengemont Manor. She knows that a marriage between them is out of the question. She cannot go back to her family in Ireland. It is her plan to emigrate to America and to say that she is a widow. For this she needs money, and it seems that young Hatton should pay her expenses for a time.
Would you be so good as to approach him on her behalf? She thinks £50 should be enough to pay her passage and get her settled in America. Confidentially between us, I think she deserves a good deal more, and Hatton is certainly being relieved of his responsibilities with very little inconvenience to himself. Please urge him to do what he thinks is right. A boat leaves from here in a fortnight for New York and Miss Manning is hoping to book passage. Let us know at your earliest convenience if Hatton is willing to do his duty.
Father John Sullivan,
St. Joseph’s Parish
Liverpool
P.S. I hope you will not be too quick to dismiss or condemn this girl for the predicament in which she finds herself. She seems a very good girl, proud and independent and believes herself in love with this young man. She is making a great sacrifice on his behalf and it is probably more than he deserves.
On the bottom of the letter was a note in another hand indicating that £300 had been sent via courier to Liverpool.
Lizzie sat dumbstruck. This was what Helen Jeffries had been hinting at with all her questions and meaningful looks. This was Helen’s great-aunt and also, in Helen’s mind, Lizzie’s great grandmother. But was that really possible? Lizzie’s thoughts tumbled back and forth from what she knew to what she could deduce, and from there to speculation, imagination, and desire.
She knew enough of her own family history to know that her great grandmother had immigrated through Ellis Island in the 1880s and that her grandfather had been born shortly after in New York City. Lizzie’s grandfather had told her more than once that his father died before he was born, in a shipboard accident en route from Ireland to England. His mother was not on the same ship, having gone ahead to Liverpool to arrange their passage to the U.S. while her husband wrapped up business at home. She was, consequently, left pregnant and a widow at the age of twenty and had emigrated under those difficult circumstances.
Was it possible that the pregnant girl described in this letter was her great grandmother? If so, then none of her grandfather’s history was true except the voyage to America and his own birth. She closed the big book slowly and set it on top of a jumble of papers on the priest’s desk.
She sank back in her chair. Surely Helen could not know more about Lizzie’s identity than she did herself. There were plenty of Elizabeth Mannings in the world. The Boston Public Library alone had six of them in its computer, a fact that had created certain glitches in Lizzie’s records over the years. There was no reason to think that the name had not been just as common a hundred and twenty years ago. Even the coincidence of two pregnant women of that name getting on a Liverpool ship at roughly the same time could be explained by the large numbers of Irish and English immigrants heading across the Atlantic to New York. They were the two biggest ports involved in the immigrant business. Manning was a common enough name in both countries, and Elizabeth was certainly a popular name for girls.
But there had always been in the stories she heard from her father and grandfather that glaring gap in information, that inability to know the whole story; something was always missing or held back.
She began to grapple with the very strong possibility that the Hatton’s family history was now her family history. Her mind was racing. First she thought about her dad. What would it do to him to learn that his father was the illegitimate son of a British aristocrat who had rejected his pregnant grandmother? She knew he would hate it. Her thoughts then went quickly to Edmund. Her conflicting thoughts about him had a historical echo in the last century in characters with their very same names! This was a coincidence that she could hardly even articulate. Scariest of all, she might now be in a direct line of descent for an obsessive madness that had caused nine women to commit suicide, and she not only knew she was susceptible, but feared she already had the disease.
Father Folan had been silent as she worked rapidly through these thoughts, none of them pleasant. Now she looked up at him and he spoke.
“You look like you’ve had something of a shock,” he said, dragging her back to the present. “I’ll heat up the water again and we can have another cup of tea.”
She nodded. “Yes, please. If it’s no trouble.” Her voice was hoarse.
She opened the ledger and read the letter again several times. Though she needed to check the passenger lists to be sure, she was becoming more and more convinced that she was as much a descendent of Elizabeth Pintard as was Eliza or Bette or anyone else who had succumbed to the obsession. She looked through the rest of the letters in the book; nothing else pertained to the woman who might have been her great grandmother. There was, however, a card announcing the death of Edmund Hatton in 1889 at the age of twenty-five. She wondered if that other Lizzie Manning had ever known.
Father Folan returned with the teapot.
“I take it, then, that this is not just a coincidence with the names,” he said gently.
Lizzie shook her head as he poured her a hot cup. “There is a very good possibility that that woman was my great grandmother,” she said.
“And you knew nothing about this?”
“This probably makes me look very dense,” she said, “because the hints were all around me. Helen Jeffries, the housekeeper at Hengemont, practically hit me over the head with it on more than one occasion.”
“And why didn’t you take the hint?”
Lizzie thought about this for a moment. Her comfortable sense of who she was had been shaken by this new knowledge. She tried to explain it to the priest.
“It seemed impossible,” she said. “Two of the people I have loved best in the world, my father and grandfather, never admitted of such a possibility.” She brushed at a tear as it slid down her cheek. “We have always celebrated our Irishness, reviled people like the Hattons as exploiters, reveled in our oppression. For forty years that has been a central part of my identity.” There was a pause as she caught at a sob in her throat. “I hardly know what to think. Did they lie to me?”
Father Folan asked her if she really thought that was possible and she shook her head.
“No,” she said thinking about each of the men in turn. “I don’t think they knew. I don’t think she ever told them.”
“And do you blame her for that?”
She shook her head again. The priest was so nice that she found herself telling him everything that she knew about her great grandmother. “I guess it was just too hard in those days to acknowledge an illegitimate baby,” she said sadly. “There were always gaps in the story about where exactly she came from and what the relationship was between the Mannings and the Hattons in her background.”
She sipped the tea and thought about how hard it must have been for that other Lizzie Manning; she had kept her secret for the rest of her life.
Father Folan broke her train of thought. “I must admit to you,” he said slowly, “that I knew something about all this before you arrived here this morning.”
Lizzie looked up at him, confused by the comment.
“Helen Jeffries has expressed her concerns about you to me o
n more than one occasion over the last month,” he said. “She doesn’t know about this document, but I remembered having seen it on an earlier perusal of the ledger.”
“Is that why you invited me in? Just to show it to me?”
He shook his head and smiled. “No. One is seldom able to lay such plans. I didn’t know if she was right about the relationship or not, and you sounded like an interesting woman, so I was hoping at some point you’d come around.” He chuckled and patted her on the hand. “And if you did, then I thought I’d just slip it over to you casually to let you have a look.”
Lizzie didn’t know how to respond. The priest was a cipher to her; he was taking the situation with too little seriousness and too much joviality for her taste. She sat glumly as he continued to grin at her, until finally she began to wonder if she was taking it all too seriously.
She asked if he had had a similar motive with the material about Francis Hatton and John d’Hautain.
“No,” he said with enthusiasm. “That was just a wonderful bonus! Who knew anyone would ever be interested in that stuff!”
Now she could not resist smiling at him. As grisly as the information was, the discovery of it was exciting. In many ways she saw that he was a kindred soul. The time would come she knew, and hopefully not far from now, when she would find herself telling this whole story with a humorous spin.
Father Folan patted her hand again, seeing in her expression the trend of her thoughts. “Well then,” he said warmly, “this will change your relationship to the Hattons.”
Lizzie had been thinking that very thought, and remembered that George was expecting her. Draining her teacup, Lizzie rose and shook hands again with the priest. “I was due at Hengemont ages ago,” she said, “and I really need to get up there.” She picked up her bag. “Thank you for a most interesting morning.”
“Mo chara,” he said, “good luck on your quest.”
Lizzie smiled at his comfortable use of the Gaelic word for friend, which she and Jackie had adopted a few years earlier. Her world of Boston and Saint Pat’s seemed very far away.
Chapter 18
Lizzie entered the house now with very different feelings than she’d had on that first day. It was hard to believe that less than three weeks had passed. The large portraits on either side of the main hall took on new meaning as she looked at them for a resemblance to herself or her family. Certainly her own pale complexion and wide-set eyes were everywhere, though they had always been there and she had never thought it meaningful before. Now, with her new knowledge, she thought several times that she saw something in the shape of a nose or the fullness of a lip to remind her of her father or one of her siblings. As her hand ran along the polished railing of the staircase she thought of ancestors that had passed the same way for centuries. She felt a glow, not quite of pride, but of knowingness, and her interest in Hengemont and its history was suddenly more tangible.
Helen walked beside her. The two women had said very little beyond hellos when Lizzie returned. Helen was worried about Lizzie and the bizarre circumstances under which she had left the house. Lizzie was waiting for the right moment to begin, in earnest, the conversation Helen had been wanting to have with her since she first arrived. As she looked at her friend, Lizzie was reminded that she wasn’t just a descendent of the Hatton’s, but of their maid as well.
“I hope you are all right, Lizzie,” Helen started.
Lizzie could not resist hugging the woman. “Let’s talk later,” she said.
Helen agreed. “Sir George is expecting you,” she said. “I’ll tell him you’ve arrived.”
Lizzie went to the library, where the pile of poems and the pictures were still on the table where they had left them on that awful night; she leafed through them again. Including herself, twelve women had sought John d’Hautain’s heart. Nine had killed themselves and one, after a suicide attempt, had been institutionalized for mental illness for more than thirty years. That left herself and the subject of Rossetti’s painting.
Lizzie looked again at the photograph of that painting. This woman had left Hengemont and formed a relationship with a real man. A man who, admittedly, was as obsessed with love and death as she was, but who still had a beating heart through most of their years together. And yet she had also clearly felt the obsession at some time. It was the subject of the painting, and it was the subject of her poem.
“Her poem,” Lizzie murmured as she turned to it. It had been written not in memory of Elizabeth or John d’Hautain, but of the young Elizabeth Hatton, dead at the age of eighteen in 1887.
Where is his heart?
The question forced upon a young girl just entering into womanhood,
To rob her of her life and loves.
As if those lovers of past times
Could, with vicarious passion
Replace her own experience
As a stone might stand for a heart.
“Where is his heart?”
Better to ask, “Where is hers?”
The last word was underlined. Lizzie wondered who it meant. The young woman who killed herself? Or Elizabeth d’Hautain, viewed not as a martyr for love, but as a curse of sorts, carried down through the generations.
Lizzie sighed and felt her concerns about her own safety evaporate. None of this was about Lizzie Manning. She had a life and a love and she would not risk them further in this business. She had a moment of sudden clarity; there was no danger now that this information would harm her, or that she would harm herself.
She realized that she, like Rossetti’s lover, had regained herself before it was too late. If she had lived in this house and experienced the feelings of two nights ago when she was twenty years younger she wasn’t so sure that she would have gotten to this point. But she had, fortunately, blundered her way into the story when she was closer in age to the woman who had written this poem than to the girls who had written all the others.
There was a sound behind her and she turned to see Edmund come into the room. With everything that she had learned this morning, she hadn’t had time to think about how she should greet him, or prepare herself to do so. She stood up as he came toward her and kissed him on the cheek. When she turned back to the table to sit down again, he touched her softly on the waist, as if to escort her back to the chair.
They had barely said hello when George came in, followed by Helen, who stood just inside the door, seemingly waiting for instructions from her employer. Lizzie was glad to have her nearby.
“Are you all right?” George asked with real concern.
“I am completely recovered,” she said. “Thank you.”
He pulled up the chair beside her at the table and looked at her intently. “Are you sure?”
“I am sure.”
Edmund pulled up a chair at the opposite side of the table.
“And what about all this?” George asked, gesturing at the documentation that Lizzie had gathered. “What do you plan to do about this?”
“At this point, nothing,” Lizzie answered emphatically, separating the manuscripts from her printouts, and putting the latter into her bag. “I’m going to hand these over to you,” she said, piling the scraps of poetry into a pile, “along with the triptych, and I am going to let you decide how to handle them.”
“There’s Lily to think of,” Edmund murmured.
Lizzie nodded. She had already decided not to tell them that she had learned that she was related to them. It would only make the link to Lily more tangible. “It would be better that she not see these things,” she said. “Though I don’t think that just seeing them necessarily leads to the obsessive paranoia, or whatever it is.” She pointed out the case of the Elizabeth Hatton who had been Rossetti’s model and said that it was possible to know the details, feel the pain, and still move on and live a long life. “I honestly believe I have moved past this,” she said.
“But Bette never got over it,” George said. “She still lives in a medieval fantasy world, even thirty years later.”
Edmund gave Lizzie a look. She knew that a significant part of Bette’s mental state was due to mental illness and drug use, but she didn’t know if George acknowledged it.
“I wish I had a better sense of what, exactly, triggered this obsession over the years,” Lizzie said thoughtfully. “Clearly there were plenty of Hatton women who were completely unaffected.”
George paused in looking through the papers Lizzie had handed him. “There is a document that you haven’t seen that might help explain this,” he said.
Lizzie looked at him, clearly puzzled. George looked back at her steadily, and then pushed several pieces of paper toward her.
“I got these out yesterday,” he explained, “thinking that you might like to see them.”
Edmund sat silently watching the exchange.
“This letter was written to my father by his great-aunt when he was still at Oxford.”
Lizzie pulled it forward and began to read. It was the letter Bette had described in her diary.
Dear John,
I cannot help but feel that you did not take our conversation of last week very seriously. I know you think me an eccentric and somewhat amusing relation, and I do not doubt but that stories of me and my unorthodox choices in life have been the subject of many conversations around your family table. I must, however, be very firm in stressing that should you ever have a daughter, the information I am giving you must be made known to her.
While this notion of a “family curse,” especially one surviving from Mediaeval times, must seem very silly to a well-educated man of the modern era, you can see the proof of it in the history of our family. This is not a legend but a legacy. That so many Hatton girls would die at their own hands is the sad testimony of the power of this horrendous obsession.