by Mary Malloy
She slipped into the interior and took a moment to get her bearings. Her attention was immediately drawn to the effigies of several knights, carved in stone and set directly into the floor in the center of the round part of the church. There was a small stack of printed guides on a table near the door and Lizzie picked one up. A wedding program was handed to her immediately after and she slipped the guide inside it. There was no time to do more than glance around the church before the smokers were herded in from outside for the start of the service.
The church was almost full and as one of the last to be seated, Lizzie found herself on the aisle at the back. As the organ started, she opened the wedding program, positioning the guide to the church inside it so that she could study it without attracting the attention of the people around her. She felt a bit like a teenager smuggling a comic book or a Playboy magazine inside his school textbook. She stood and sat as the movement of the crowd dictated, but paid no attention to the ceremony, other than to note that it was filled with beautiful young people, lovely and expensive clothes, and a smattering of adorable children. There were no visible tears. The organ, which the guide informed her was one of the primary attractions of the church, filled the space with sound at the appropriate moments and the flowers with which her Good Samaritan had filled the church a few hours earlier added a delicate but definite perfume to the air.
Lizzie’s attention went from the guide in her hands to those parts of the church described in it. The floor plan was simple. In 1185 the Templars had constructed a round church, just under sixty feet in diameter, and in 1240 they added a rectangular addition to its eastern edge. The addition, called the “chancel,” was about one and a half times the length of the round nave. The resulting outline had the shape of a thick, blocky, lower-case letter “i.” It looked to Lizzie like the icon that indicated tourist information, or the silhouette of one of the little people that populated her nephew’s favorite toys, with their big round heads and short, armless, columnar bodies.
Two small porches had been added later, one at the neck where the round head of the church met the rectangular body, and one that sat like a little hat on the top of the head at the western edge.
The altar, where the happy couple stood amidst the flowers, was at the end of the chancel farthest from the original round structure of the church. The pews in the chancel were set up for a choir, facing the center aisle and with a slight rise. Folding chairs had been placed along the center aisle to accommodate wedding guests. Lizzie was seated in the highest row of the choir and at the end farthest from the altar, and it was a perfect position from which to observe the church.
In addition to being able to see the whole of the chancel, she could look in the opposite direction from the action of the wedding and examine the round nave without attracting attention.
The circle of the nave was dominated by six columns and ten tombs. Unlike the knight effigies in the Hengemont church, these were lying right on the floor. One of them was a simple coffin shape, but the others were portrait sculptures of knights, presumably Templars. They were all at least a few decades too early to have been associated with John d’Hautain, but Lizzie couldn’t help wondering if his heart had come to this church. It would be a logical place for it to have lain upon arriving back in England, though she could not imagine why it would not then have been sent on to Hengemont.
The church had sustained heavy damage in the bombing blitz of London during World War II, and had been “extensively restored” both before and after that event, according to the guide. Lizzie looked around her. How much of what she could see from where she sat was original to the thirteenth century? The chancel’s surface features all looked newer that that. If there was anything to be found in the Temple Church, she decided, it would be in the round nave. The graves were all identified by name in the guide, and none was familiar. The rest of the stones in the floor were worth looking at for old markings, though she couldn’t see any from where she sat.
Around the circular wall, the surface was decorated with a repeating pattern of relief-carved columns and gothic arches, reaching up to a height of about ten feet. The shallow niches that were created in the process looked like they could once have contained memorials of some kind.
The ceremony merging the attractive young attorneys into one firm wrapped up with a round of applause, and Lizzie followed the bridal party into the round nave of the church. As the bride and groom received their congratulations from a line of well-wishers, Lizzie circled the church, examining the stones of the floor and wall as quickly as she could in the dim light. It became apparent that there was not going to be time to do it carefully before the party moved to the reception in a nearby building on the Temple grounds. Around her, people were bundling themselves up in preparation for going out into the cold.
The minister who performed the service was standing near the door talking to people as they passed, and Lizzie moved herself into position to chat with him a bit before she left the church.
“This is such a lovely building,” she said casually.
The minister replied that it was. He asked if she was a friend of the bride. She lied and said that her husband had gone to school with the groom. He recognized her American accent. It seemed a good opening.
“Do you get many American visitors?”
“Yes, many thousands every year.”
“Does the tourist traffic ever conflict with the weddings and other services you perform?”
He explained that the Temple Church held a rather unique position among English Churches. It had no regular parish population and was not supported under the usual management of the Church of England. “We operate for the benefit of the attorneys and solicitors who occupy the Temple grounds,” he concluded, “and with their support.”
Lizzie understood this to mean that the church didn’t have the usual obligation for regular public access. Weddings, funerals, and other services for the legal community always took precedence. The minister turned his attention to other guests, waving and shaking hands simultaneously. Lizzie thanked him and turned back into the church, pretending to look for someone.
“Is the church open tomorrow?” she asked the rude young man.
“Not to the public,” he answered.
“What about for research?” she asked.
“What kind of research?”
“Templar research.”
“We don’t have any of those records here,” he explained. “You can do legal research at the Law Library, but the surviving Templar records are mostly at the Public Record Office.”
The crowd was thinning and Lizzie had to make a decision. There wouldn’t be another opportunity to visit this church while she was in London. The old Norman door on the far side of the nave had a red exit light above it and Lizzie meandered over to take a closer look. A small sign on the door above a modern-looking push bar said “Emergency Exit Only, Alarm Will Sound.” She breathed slowly. If she could find a place to hide, she would not need to see everything quickly. She made a motion of looking for something, opening and closing her purse and glancing around her on the floor, then returned to the pew where she had been sitting during the wedding. When she was certain that no one was looking in her direction, she slid down to the floor. If, by some cruel act of fate, she was discovered, she would say that she was looking for a lost glove.
It was not long before she heard the minister and the rude man exchanging good-byes. “Is everyone out then?” one asked the other. Lizzie didn’t hear the rest of the conversation as they disappeared into the vestibule that led to the porch. The lights began to go out one row at a time until the church was in total darkness. Lizzie sat up in the pew and waited for her eyes to adjust.
The only lights were the ones that marked the emergency exits and one on the altar. Lizzie felt her way carefully down the steps that led to the main floor of the church and proceeded back to the na
ve. Her new shoes were not comfortable and the heels were higher than she was used to. She felt her way around a column and stumbled on the carved foot of one of the effigies.
She fell hard and landed in the narrow space between two of the stone knights.
She lay perfectly still for a moment until she caught her breath again. Her hip and elbow had taken the force of the fall. There would be an impressive bruise on her hip the next day, Lizzie could tell already, but she was not seriously hurt. She reached out her hand, found the arm of one of the knights and pulled herself up into a sitting position. She took off her shoes and rubbed her stockinged feet, then reached around and found her small purse. If only she had her regular bag, she thought, she’d have a flashlight.
The switches for the lights were undoubtedly in the vestibule; that was where the minister and his assistant were when the lights went out. But turning them on might draw attention from the outside. Lizzie sat thoughtfully. On either side of her lay the knights, just barely visible in the red glow of the emergency exit sign. She wondered if anyone was buried under the stone on which she sat. Strangely enough, though she was locked in a mausoleum in the dark, she wasn’t scared. She hadn’t consumed anything but potato chips and beer since breakfast, and after her fall she felt a little bit disoriented, but she gradually began to feel her decision-making power returning.
Laying her shoes and purse gently at the base of the knight who’d tripped her, Lizzie took off her coat and hat and laid them carefully across the effigy. There had been a large candle used as part of the marriage rite and if she could find it she would use it to look around the rest of the church. In her stocking feet she padded up the aisle of the chancel, moving carefully and feeling with her toe for obstacles, especially as she neared the steps to the altar. The candle was where she remembered and Lizzie groped around the altar near it, hoping to find something to light it with. Three long sticks under her hand felt like matches as she moved her fingertips up to the heads. She struck one against the altar and it made a satisfying sound as it first scratched along the stone and then popped into flame.
The church was cold, especially for someone without shoes, but Lizzie felt no apprehension as she made her way back to the circular wall of the nave, holding the candle in her right hand and shielding the flame with her left. She took up her position at the place where she had been forced to abandon her examination earlier and began to walk, counter clockwise, around the whole of the church. She moved the candle up or down as needed and explored the surface of the floor and walls.
How many Templars had walked this path with a candle in their hands? She hummed as she proceeded. She didn’t really expect to find anything here. What could she find anyway? If John d’Hautain’s name were engraved on some stone, surely some member of the Hatton family would have discovered it by now. Nonetheless, she felt like she was going through an important process, if for no other reason than that it gave her a sense of connection with the days of John and Elizabeth d’Hautain.
When she had gone around the whole wall of the church she returned to the effigies at the center and, one by one, examined them by candlelight. They wore much the same costume as John d’Hautain did on his tomb and in his portrait in the triptych. Chain mail under a loosely belted cloth tunic. Each of these knights had a sword and shield. A few had their hands folded in prayer, several had crossed legs, two of them rested their chain-mailed feet on the backs of small lions or dogs. Lizzie laid her coat on the stone floor and sat on it, leaning back against the stone shield of one of the knights. The burning candle was lodged safely between his legs.
Three times today she had completely lost perspective. The first time was in the Public Record Office when she had abandoned the quest. The second time was in the pub when she found herself writing the question without thinking. The third was her emotional outburst on the church porch when she thought she would never be able to get inside the building in which she now sat, cold but comfortable. Even feeling such an irrational compulsion to see the church was evidence of the out-of-control state of her emotions at the time.
If she worked backwards through the episodes, she could now tick them off on her fingers as being soluble or understandable. The third, of course, was solved. Here she was. Admittedly here she was sitting in the dark and breaking some trespassing law, but here she was.
Was it all that strange for her to have written that question in a list of questions, she wondered? As she thought about it with rational calmness, Lizzie acknowledged that it was not.
“Where is his heart?” She said it aloud. It was not so scary. She was looking for it after all.
The question of the research was the one that required the greatest concentration. She actually laughed when she realized what a state she must have been in to think that she could, with two pocket dictionaries and a list of words, approach hundreds of boxes of documents in languages that she could not read.
She turned to one of the knights lying near her. “You know,” she said, “there is a process to doing historical research.” She laughed again. If an amateur had approached her own field by going directly to miscellaneous manuscripts, without knowing anything of the finding aids, indexes, reference works, or secondary sources, she would think her an idiot—or a lunatic. Today, she had been both.
The eyes of her friendly knight seemed to move slightly in the flickering candlelight. Lizzie patted him on the cheek. “Thank you for listening,” she said. “You are absolutely right. This is a research problem.”
She was clearly at a point beyond which she could only proceed with extraordinary good luck. Or if not luck, then expert assistance. She stood up. She would start the next morning at the Public Record Office as soon as it opened, and she would begin by asking for help with her quest for information.
She put on her shoes, her coat, and her hat, tucked her ridiculously small new purse under her arm, and charged the door. A bright light came on, an alarm bell sounded, and the cold air rushed at her. She let the door slam behind her and proceeded, calmly but quickly, around the church to the footpath that led to Fleet Street. A bell chimed midnight as she got a cab for the Grosvenor.
Chapter 22
The next day was sunny and clear. Lizzie woke refreshed and famished, went for the full English breakfast in the hotel dining room, and still had time to walk the few miles to the Public Record Office. The air had a crisp snap to it, and she felt ready to work when she arrived at the library just as the doors were opening to the public.
“Is there anyone on the staff who is particularly knowledgeable about the Knights Templar?” she asked the woman at the information desk.
“I think Mr. Parker has done some work on that topic.”
“Would it be possible to speak to him for a few minutes?”
Lizzie waited as the woman spoke on the phone, and was then directed to an office at the far end of the reading room.
Anthony Parker sat behind a big desk piled high with papers. A kindred soul, Lizzie thought. She dug in her purse for a business card and handed it to him as she introduced herself. He looked at the card and then back to her.
“I remember you,” he said, “from when you were here several years ago working on the Pacific trade material.”
Lizzie smiled with surprise. “You have a good memory.” She was embarrassed that she did not remember him.
“Congratulations on finishing the Ph.D.,” he said, filing her card in a box on his desk. “What are you working on now?” He gestured to the chair opposite him.
Lizzie sat down and explained very briefly about the Francis Hatton project.
“I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent, though,” she continued. “Back into the family history at the time of the Crusades.” She pulled a file folder from her bag and took out a photocopy of the Henry III document at the Hengemont church. Father Folan had had no qualms about sticking the ancient document on his office c
opy machine. She handed it across the desk to Anthony Parker.
“Ah, now you’re getting into my period,” he said, taking it with interest.
“I am at a loss with this,” Lizzie said, “though I find it very interesting.” She gave him a moment to read it before continuing. “I need expert advice and I hope that you are the person who can give it to me.”
“It’s a contract between Henry III and the Knights Templar. In case of the death of a certain young Crusader knight, the Templars agree to preserve his heart and ship it back to England.” He looked up from the document to Lizzie. “I’ve seen other manuscripts like this. What do you want to know about it?”
“Where is his heart?” she asked. She could not help smiling as she said it.
He smiled back, but his look was puzzled.
She continued. “The knight in question was John d’Hautain, an ancestor of Sir George Hatton. They never got the heart.”
“And they are still looking for it?”
She nodded. “I know this is a very strange sort of search, but do you think I might be able to find any other information about this in the records of Henry III or the Templars?”
“Well, the official documents from the reign of Henry III have all been published,” he said. He stood up and walked to one of the crammed shelves in his office, pulling down a big volume. “Let’s see what we can find,” he said, returning to his desk and turning to the index of the book.
Lizzie leaned back in her chair with a sense of relief. She should have started here yesterday. It was stupid to have wasted a morning of research without asking for assistance. She looked at Anthony Parker. He was the sort of man who would, in America, be called a geek, but here represented a certain class of well-educated, rumpled Englishmen of middle age. She liked him. She admired knowledge and expertise and Anthony Parker clearly had both.