Chapter 6

For the first time, Lizzie woke early enough to join George for breakfast. She told him how much she had enjoyed meeting Edmund and Lily the day before.

“Your granddaughter is a wonderful girl.”

“Yes she is,” George said with pride. “Smart as a whip, just like her father.”

“Edmund said that he’s a physician?”

George spread marmalade onto his toast and nodded. “Has a practice in Bristol,” he said. “Runs a clinic there.”

Lizzie couldn’t help thinking that someone with the Hatton connections could certainly have done better than that and George seemed to read her mind. He gave her a brief history of Edmund’s medical career, which included several years volunteering with various international charitable organizations.

Lizzie asked George about his other children. She already knew there was a son John in Australia, and her host told her about his third son, Richard.

“The oldest,” he said. “He’s a financial man in London.”

“He’s the one who was with you when you visited Tom Clark at the British Museum?”

“Yes, and he is keenly interested in seeing us get the collection organized to make it accessible to them.”

“Is he a history buff?”

George laughed. “No, I don’t think anyone would ever accuse him of that. He is more interested in the social and political connections that it will bring him. Those things are valuable in his business.”

Lizzie appreciated his frankness. It explained why the Hattons had finally opened up access to the collection after having kept it secreted away for so many years. She had also wondered how a family like the Hattons supported their anachronistic lifestyle in the modern world, and the fact that Richard, who must be the heir to Hengemont, was some sort of banker or broker made sense to her. A big fortune could be used to generate its own money.

They had a few more minutes of conversation on family topics before Lizzie felt that it was time to get to work.

“I must resume my voyage with your ancestor out to the Pacific Ocean,” she said to George as she rose from the table.

“I can’t wait to hear the outcome of your adventure,” George said. “If you need anything from me today, I’ll be working up in my own study. Have Mrs. Jeffries give me a call.”

She thanked him for the offer and they each went off to their projects, Lizzie settling in with the journal to finish transcribing the text.

The first part of the voyage was just as she knew it from having read the journals of a number of Hatton’s shipmates and the official narrative published by the British Admiralty.

The Royal Navy ships Resolution, under the command of Captain James Cook, and Discovery, under the command of Captain James King, departed from Portsmouth on the twelfth of July, 1776, just a week after the American colonists claimed their independence. Cook and his men would have known nothing of the news across the Atlantic at that time, though a few future American citizens were among the crew.

The ships sailed south, rounding the Cape of Good Hope at the end of November, midsummer in the southern hemisphere. They touched at Tasmania, then New Zealand, and then headed north into the Pacific. Their mission was to seek a passage across the top of the North American continent back to the Atlantic Ocean. In February 1778, to their surprise and delight, they stumbled upon a group of islands, which Cook named the Sandwich Islands after one of his patrons. Francis Hatton’s descriptions of Hawaiian people and of the lush landscape in which they lived were filled with enthusiastic detail. Lizzie loved Francis Hatton; he had few of the pretensions she expected of an upper-class Brit, and even fewer of the stereotypes that most eighteenth-century mariners held of the native people they encountered on a voyage.

She found herself laughing at his wonderful prose as he described his comical attempts to communicate with people with whom he had no common language, and where even sign language was riddled with cross-cultural confusion. “Frank,” as she now regularly found herself calling him, knew that the girls he was trying to impress were laughing at his antics, and he laughed at them himself. He was an avid collector and Lizzie loved that about him. He had a keen eye for cultural details, an open but detailed manner of describing them, and a fair hand for sketching houses, people, plants, animals, and artifacts. He delighted in what he considered his “conquests”—every time an object came into his collection he meticulously detailed the circumstances of acquisition and as much as he could tell about the thing, without knowing the language.

Lizzie found herself looking frequently up to the cabinet, where most of these objects were sitting quietly. Every now and then she stood up and walked over to open the glass-fronted cases to look more closely at the fish hook, carved drum, gourd rattle, or bark cloth being described. It was a wonderful day. By dinner time she was able to report to George Hatton that there was a tremendous amount of information in the journal about the Hawaiian collection and that it would make a very good exhibition and catalogue.

She called Martin that night to report on her progress. He was leaving for New York the next day and for at least a week it would be difficult to reach him during hours that were convenient in both their time zones.

“All is well in my world!” she declared, “except for the absence of you, of course.”

“So the work remains interesting?”

“It isn’t just that the collection is large,” Lizzie explained, “but that dear old Frank described almost every piece.” Her enthusiasm was obvious even across the Atlantic, and she expounded on the relationship between the journal and the artifacts in some detail to her husband. “It is a truly extraordinary assemblage of stuff. I still can’t believe that I am the first person to get a chance to work with it like this.”

“Now that you know him better, has George explained why he chose to bestow this honor on you?”

“That, I think, was luck,” she said. “One of his sons is some kind of an investment guy in London. He wants to be a player at the British Museum and is using this collection as his ticket in.” Lizzie told Martin how George had accompanied his son on a visit to meet Tom Clark at the museum, had seen a number of different books on similar subjects and had liked hers. “The rest is history!” she concluded.

“Well, I hope my time in New York will be as productive,” he said.

Lizzie realized that she had been doing most of the talking. “I hope so too,” she said. “Are you excited about going?”

“Nah,” he admitted. “I think it’s going to be a good mural, but I’m starting to hate these bank jobs. They bring in the money, but they don’t excite me like the community projects.”

They spoke for several minutes about the potential projects that Martin was considering and the one that interested him most was the one in Newcastle. It was apparent to Lizzie that he had been thinking about it seriously in the few days she had been away. The possibility that he would join her in England was now a probability.

“Though it doesn’t seem quite fair that you will be in a stately home while I’m holed up in a coal town,” he joked.

“Oh come now,” she argued, “you’d much rather be in a coal mine than a castle.”

“I’m missing you,” he said.

She kissed her hand and touched the phone. “Me too.”

 

• • • • •

 

Lizzie knew that she would marry Martin the first time she saw his picture. At the time she was a graduate student at Berkeley, with a part-time job in the office of the Anthropology Department. Among her other menial tasks, she sorted the mail and opened up the general announcements that weren’t addressed to anyone in particular. That day as she leaned against the metal cabinet with its dymo-labeled cubbyholes, she slid her forefinger under the tape that sealed a single sheet of folded paper; it was an announcement of an upcoming campus lecture series.

As the paper opened, she was immediately drawn to the picture of the third speaker on the list, identified as “Martin Sanchez, Mexican-American Artist.” There was just something about him that captivated her. Instead of posting the flyer on the departmental bulletin board, she slipped it into her backpack. When she got back to her room, she cut the picture out and tacked it to the edge of the bookshelf above her typewriter and stared at it for a long time. The lecture wasn’t for six weeks, and according to his biography Martin Sanchez lived in Los Angeles, so there was nothing for Lizzie to do but wait.

Jean Marie, her roommate, was clearly puzzled. “Who is that guy anyway?” she asked on several occasions. But Lizzie never seemed inclined to answer. She looked at the picture often. Medieval European royalty had exchanged miniature paintings to sell themselves to prospective mates, she thought, and she would have agreed to marry Martin Sanchez from this picture.

When he finally came to San Francisco to talk about his work, Lizzie was completely bowled over. He was funny and smart and she loved his paintings. At that time he was selling himself as a barrio boy, whose astonishing graffiti was discovered by an art critic for the L. A. Times. Lizzie found him exotic and romantic, hung on every word at his lecture, and studied each slide carefully.

Even then, his work had consisted almost entirely of murals. In the last slide he showed the sketches for a new work, which would be a neighborhood project in San Francisco. When the lights came up Martin turned and looked directly at Lizzie and each felt a jolt. Though the audience around her was applauding, Lizzie felt as if she were in a vacuum, her eyes locked on his. When the time came for questions, he suddenly seemed uncomfortable, shaken. He looked relieved when the professor who had introduced him thanked him and invited the crowd to wine and cheese in the lobby. His eyes sought Lizzie’s again and she smiled. They continued to exchange looks through the interminable reception. Finally, after twenty minutes of chit-chat with strangers, he approached her and introduced himself.

“I know who you are,” she said, offering her hand, which, to her surprise, he kissed softly. “I’m Elizabeth Manning.”

“Elizabeth?” he asked.

“Well, Lizzie,” she stammered. She felt that she was appearing foolish, girly, stupid. She had said “Elizabeth” because she wanted to appear more elegant; that attempt was now shot to hell.

“I feel like I know you,” he said.

She slept with him that night. She had never before slept with any man, and he seemed pleased and surprised that she was a virgin. For the next four days, Lizzie and Martin hardly left his hotel room except when he was scheduled to meet with people about his project. They talked about everything. About themselves and their families, about books and movies, plans and dreams. Lizzie was not as surprised to find herself completely absorbed in him, as she was to find that the feeling was mutual. She was madly in love and so was he.

Lizzie often laughed to herself as she thought of all that she had learned of him since. In fact, it had been graffiti that had gotten him noticed, but Lizzie had subsequently learned of his comfortable middle-class upbringing in Glendale. His father was the director of the Parks Department and his mother was a librarian at Herbert Hoover High School. While his father had immigrated from Mexico with his own parents when he was still a child, Martin’s mother’s family had been in California for generations. Today, Martin objected to being labeled a “Mexican-American artist.” Though proud of his roots, he wanted now to be defined by his work and, with ever-growing acclaim, he was. Lizzie was proud of him, loved him, and felt confident in his love for her.

Before she drifted off to sleep, Lizzie tried to imagine Martin at Hengemont and it was an oddly jarring mental picture—as if the page from one book had somehow been mistakenly bound into another on a completely different topic. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t love the place. The paintings alone would thrill him, she knew. And yet, she felt that he just didn’t belong here. How strange, then, that she should feel that she did.