The Wandering Heart

by Mary Malloy

  “So what do you think is happening to me then?” she asked finally. She had tried to keep the mood light, but she could not disguise her disquiet from her husband.

  “What do you think is happening?” he asked back.

  “I like Edmund’s explanation that I was in a fugue state brought on by an idiosyncratic reaction to valium,” she said, half joking. She fingered the glass on the table in front of her as Martin waited patiently for her to continue. “But I can’t help worrying about this other thing that he said.”

  Martin reached over and took her hand and held it. “What was that?” he asked gently.

  “When he told me this, neither he nor I knew that we were related. In fact, I’m pretty certain he still doesn’t know. . . .” Her voice trailed off again.

  “And?”

  “And he thinks that there is a genetic predisposition to mental illness among the women in his family,” she said quickly. “Edmund is a doctor and he wants to explain all this by science and genetics,” she went on, “but I can’t help feeling there is something weirder at work here. All of the women who experienced this phenomenon were named Elizabeth Hatton.”

  “But that’s not your name.”

  “No, but if my grandfather had had his father’s surname, rather than his mother’s, then my name would be Elizabeth Hatton.”

  She took her hand from Martin’s and took another sip of the beer. As soon as she set the glass down he grabbed her hand again. He squeezed it until she looked up at him.

  “Is that all that’s worrying you?” he asked. “That you’ve inherited some madness?” He was actually smiling, and Lizzie pulled her hand away again angrily.

  “Thanks for your concern.”

  “Oh now Lizzie,” he said, putting his arm around her and giving her a hard hug. “Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie, this situation is much weirder than that!”

  She looked at him with astonishment.

  “Do you really think,” he continued, “that some sort of madness would transmit itself down through what, twenty-five or more generations, and that each of the sufferers would have precisely the same delusion? If I understand what you told me, the details were the same every time. It was always about the same two people and nothing got altered over seven hundred years, even down to you. Does this really sound like some bad drug reaction?”

  Lizzie pondered his words for a moment. “Are you saying I’m being haunted or something?” she asked. “Because you know I can’t buy that.” She turned her whole body toward him to continue. “And frankly I can’t believe that you would either. You don’t even read your horoscope.”

  “Well I’m not going to start living my life by signs read in stars or cards or chicken bones,” he said, “but I’m also not willing to discount that there might be things out there that we don’t understand.”

  “Supernatural things?”

  “I’m not sure how I’d define the thing I’m thinking about. But I think that between people who have a deep love there is a connection that can be felt somehow.” He took his arm from behind her back and took her hand again. “I knew that I would marry you the first time I saw you. How do we explain that?”

  She shrugged.

  “There is something here,” he tapped his chest and then moved his finger up to tap his temple, “and here, that is more powerful than science can explain.”

  Lizzie sat quietly, thinking about several other occasions in her life when she had felt that loved ones were in danger, or that something extraordinary had happened to one of her siblings, only to have the phone ring soon after.

  “So this Elizabeth d’Hautain, then,” she mumbled, struggling to find words, “she transmitted her pain through her DNA or something?”

  “Maybe. Maybe she felt the love and the loss so strongly that sensitive women among her descendents could feel it somehow.”

  “But most of them killed themselves! It’s hard to believe that she would curse her unborn granddaughters for generations to come.” Lizzie thought about this for a few moments before continuing. “You know, she was still only a teenager when she killed herself. I don’t think she gave much thought to any future.” She took another sip of the beer. “And maybe that’s why all those women who committed suicide were so young. They hadn’t begun to think in terms of the future either.”

  They sat for several minutes in silence.

  “George showed me a very interesting statement, written to his father by his great-aunt,” Lizzie continued, breaking the silence. “She explained all this by saying that the Hatton family romanticized death to such an extent that girls who knew the story would turn to suicide when they were disappointed in their own love lives.”

  “A Romeo and Juliet phenomenon?”

  Lizzie nodded.

  “But you didn’t know the story.”

  Lizzie took a swig of beer. “This is where I am most confused, though,” she said thoughtfully. “I did know the story. Edmund told it to me and the clues to it were all around me, in the paintings and the poems. How much did I learn and incorporate into the dreams? My memory has become very fuzzy about the order in which the information came to me.”

  “You’re looking for a rational explanation.”

  “Yes.”

  “And are you satisfied that you have now described one?”

  “Almost.” She smiled.

  Martin looked at the far end of the bar and Lizzie could see that he was processing all the information she had given him. Finally he spoke again.

  “He knows,” Martin said bluntly. “George Hatton knows.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  Martin turned to look straight at her. “Because I know what you have to do,” he said. “And so does he.”

  Lizzie felt the hair along the back of her neck tingle. Martin’s expression was new to her and she had never seen him look so pale. He waited until she nodded nervously, then he continued.

  “I think there’s a task in all this for you,” he said seriously.

  “A task?”

  “A job, Liz. A quest. A familial responsibility.”

  She looked at him quizzically.

  “You have to find the heart,” he said finally.

  Lizzie drew her hand out of his and ran it through her hair. She massaged herself lightly on the neck to stop the tingling sensation, which persisted. Her hand felt cold and clammy against the warm skin under her hair.

  Martin was looking at her very seriously. He was clearly concerned.

  “Frankly, Mart,” she said hoarsely, “You’re scaring me. I expected you to help me rationalize all this, to support the logical explanation.” She gulped down everything left in the pint glass and held it up in the direction of the bar man to order another. “You are implying that I’m getting a message from seven hundred years ago to go out and find a disembodied human heart?”

  “It sounds strange, I know,” he said gently. “But sometimes there is no rational explanation. This is clearly not just some kind of congenital mental illness. These are very strange circumstances—how else can you explain them?”

  “But why would it have to be me who finds it?

  “Because you can.”

  She stared at the empty glass as she twirled it around and around in her hands. Martin took the glass from her, put it firmly on the table and took both her hands in his. She looked up to meet his warm brown eyes.

  “You can,” he said again. “None of those previous women was in a position to do it. George Hatton knows it too.”

  Lizzie pondered that. “I don’t really think he knows,” she said. “He was really upset when I had that fit or whatever it was. He made me move out of the house that very day.”

  “I’m not sure he necessarily acknowledged it consciously,” Martin said, “but he knew that you had the skills to dig into the past and e
nd this thing once and for all.”

  “What if there is no heart?” she asked.

  Martin withdrew his hands and adjusted himself on the bench as the bar man approached with two new pints and their lunches on a tray.

  “I don’t think this curse would have survived if the heart hadn’t,” he said when they were alone again. He chose his words carefully. “This is a request,” he continued, “an assignment. This ancestor of yours is looking for someone to take away a pain so great that it has outlived her by centuries.” He held up the new glass of beer as if to make a toast and then brought it straight to his mouth. Lizzie waited for him to speak again.

  “I can’t believe the pain would last without the possibility of a solution.” He saw her worried face and smiled. “Of course I’m just speculating,” he said with a laugh.

  Lizzie smiled uncomfortably. “How much of my life should I dedicate to this search?” she asked.

  “Don’t let it become any more of a life-altering obsession,” he answered seriously. “And don’t ever let yourself get so caught up in her life that you lose your own.” He reached across and gripped her hand again tightly. “You planned to stay another week in England anyway. Why don’t you put all your skills to work on this and see what you can find. Just think of it as a research problem, and then if there’s nothing to it you can go home and leave it behind you.”

  She thought for a moment and then nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll give it a shot. But now that you’re here, you’ll have to protect me from the forces of evil.”

  “Can do,” he said, raising his glass again. “Here’s to luck in your quest to uncover the secrets of the human heart.”

  Chapter 20

  Martin raised certain fears in the deep, superstitious part of Lizzie that, until that point, she had not consciously confronted. Despite the voicing of things she might have preferred to leave unsaid, however, she still could not countenance a supernatural source for the misfortunes that had befallen the Hattons over the years. As to her own experiences, however unusual and startling they might have been, she could not and would not attribute them to the ghosts of a couple of aristocratic teenagers whose romantic notions got the better of whatever good sense they might have possessed.

  It was necessary, therefore, for her to approach the problem logically. There were three subject areas for which she required quick history lessons: medieval heart burials, the Crusade of 1250, and the Knights Templar. Martin agreed to look into the first and headed off to Westminster Abbey, the great mausoleum of English History, to see what he could find. Lizzie headed to the British Library, expecting that some previous scholars had already done the work on the other two topics. Both the Crusades and the Templars were represented by hundreds of titles. Several books actually discussed both topics and Lizzie ordered a stack and then went to wait at the numbered seat assigned to her in the reading room.

  As she looked around the room at the bowed heads of other researchers Lizzie thought about Martin and what a rare man he was. He provided her with perspective while always taking her seriously. The thought of Edmund Hatton made her blush. Now that she had held Martin in her arms again, had Edmund’s attractions vanished? She could not deny that he was wonderful, and not just physically. He was gentle and kind, really thoughtful, and he had saved her life, which made him particularly compelling. But Lizzie wondered if part of the attraction to Edmund might not actually be an attraction to Hengemont and the life there. Distant from him now by a few days and a hundred miles she couldn’t even remember if he felt anything for her. Could she have projected onto him her own fantasies? She made a determination that she would not threaten her relationship with Martin by any further thoughts of Edmund Hatton. But she wondered where he was at that moment. Had he returned to Bristol? Was he with George? With Lily? With a patient?

  Her multi-volume History of the Crusades arrived and Lizzie began to scan the table of contents. She quickly passed over the First Crusade of 1090. There was a lot on Richard the Lionhearted and the Third Crusade a hundred years later. Richard was apparently the favorite Crusader of Englishmen, while King Louis IX of France, who became St. Louis, was the clear leader among French authors.

  Lizzie skimmed rapidly over the early material, remembering the other knight-effigy crypts in the Hatton church and the history of the family she had read at the White Horse. She vaguely remembered that someone, probably an uncle of Alun d’Hautain, had gone crusading with Richard and never come back. “That was 1190 though and sixty years too early to have anything to do with the heart,” Lizzie mumbled to herself. Richard himself, she was reminded, was captured on his return journey and held prisoner until 1194 by the German emperor. Names jumped out from the page as she flipped through the thick book: Messina, Acre, Saladin.

  Richard was succeeded by his brother John, who Lizzie remembered principally as the villain of Robin Hood movies, and then by John’s son, Henry III. The next king, Edward I, called “Longshanks,” had also gone on a crusade, but that was 1271 and twenty years too late. Lizzie thumbed back to the reign of Henry III, looking for a description of the English participation in a mid-thirteenth-century crusade. John d’Hautain had died at a place called Mansoura, according to the Hatton family history.

  She finally found the episode she was seeking. Crusading had lost much of its appeal by the time Alun and John d’Hautain set out from Hengemont in 1248. Even with a tremendous sacrifice of lives, European Crusaders had been losing rather than gaining ground in the Holy Land. It was the king of France, Louis IX, who really inspired the European return to the wars, after a charismatic religious experience some five years earlier. He led the force that set sail from Marseilles toward the Holy Land in August 1248. The book reprinted a description of the departure from the account of one Jean de Joinville.

  When the horses were embarked, our master mariner called to his sailors, who were in the prow of the ship, “Is all fast?” “Aye aye, sir,” they answered; “the clerks and priests may come forward.” As soon as they had done so, he called out to them, “In the name of God, strike up a song!” They all sang in unison VENI, CREATOR SPIRITUS; the master called to the sailors, “In the name of God, make sail”; and so they set the sails.

  Lizzie could picture the armored John d’Hautain among them. The force wintered in Cyprus and set out the following May with a large fleet, many more soldiers having joined them in the interim. Their objective was to take Cairo and proceed from there toward Jerusalem. On Christmas Day they were within sight of the Egyptian walled city of Mansoura, but it was more than a month before they were able to enter it. When they did so, it was in an ill-judged and poorly executed maneuver that led the Europeans by the hundreds into the narrow streets of the town, where they were massacred by archers stationed on the rooftops. As many as two thousand armored knights may have died on the first day.

  Louis, camped beyond the walls of the city, held out for two more months, while the rest of the European force dwindled from disease and starvation. Finally beaten, the last survivors of the fleet walked away. Louis was captured. Later he would pay a ransom for his release and become a saint.

  Lizzie didn’t know if John d’Hautain and his father had died in the bloody rout in the streets of Mansoura, or from hunger or disease in the weeks that followed. Was there any way that his body could have been recovered and identified in all that mess, she wondered? The Templars were certainly there in numbers in the battle, but they had sustained devastating losses as well.

  The shadows in the reading room were lengthening as Lizzie turned to the book on the Knights Templar. On the title page was the seal with the two knights sharing a horse. She looked at her watch. She had an appointment at four o’clock with Tom Clark, the curator of the British Museum, who was squeezing her into his schedule as a personal favor. She had about fifteen minutes to copy down the basic timeline of Templar history. Like most libraries, the British Library al
lowed only pencils, so Lizzie stacked a pile of sharp ones near the top of the desk and wrote quickly in her notebook under the title “Templar Chronology.”

  1118: Order of Knights Templar founded for the protection of Pilgrims to the Holy Land. (Named after a wing of the king of Jerusalem’s palace which was built on the foundation of the old Temple of Solomon.)

  1128: Recognized as a religious military order, answerable only to the Pope.

  1147: Embarked on the second crusade. Established trade networks, money transfers, etc.

  1305: Beginning of the suppression of Templars by the king of France. Under torture they confessed (supposedly) to Devil Worship and Denying Christ.

  1312: Order is dissolved by a Papal Bull.

  According to one historian, the Templars left a great treasure that had never been discovered; according to another, a nineteenth-century French priest discovered cryptic parchments, which supposedly held the key to where the Templars hid their fabled wealth. Lizzie flipped to the index and looked under “England.” The Templars had property and religious houses all over the country. In London, their home church now stood in the middle of the British Law Courts, commonly called “Temple Bar.” Lizzie closed the books, slipped the pencils and her notebook into her bag, returned the books to the desk, and walked quickly out the front door of the library. She was lucky to find a cab, and pulled up to the British Museum at five minutes to four.

  Tom Clark was his usual amiable self. Literate and funny, he had always been Lizzie’s model of the cultured Englishman. After exchanging information on mutual friends and institutions, Lizzie told him that all was not going well with the Hatton project.

  “Not finding what you hoped?” Tom asked.

  “Just the opposite,” she laughed, “there is too much to process, and it’s not all about Francis Hatton and his collection.”

  Tom looked curious. “How can I help?”