The Ladies Read online

  Against his wife’s counsel, Lord Bessborough sends his niece £150. When he dies, three years later, he leaves her the same sum, to be granted yearly. His son attempts to contest the bequest (‘a moral objection,’ he tells the court) without success.

  ‘Cockroaches? It cannot be.’

  ‘It is indeed. Three, in the pantry, Lady Eleanor.’

  Eleanor is outraged, first at Mary-Caryll for bearing the unwelcome news, and then at the sense of invasion she feels. Her face reddens with fury. She puts on her hat and, saying nothing to Sarah or Mary-Caryll, starts up the road to the village. She pounds her boots against the mossed stones of the bridge and storms into the baker’s shop. Ignoring the waiting customers, she shouts at the baker, informing him that vermin from his shop are marching across the River Dee Bridge, down the Pengwern Road, and into their Place.

  Sarah wakes in the night, crying.

  ‘What is it, my love?’ Eleanor asks.

  ‘I was where a joiner was hammering at pieces and ends of wood and it seemed to me he was constructing a mad house, all angles and uneven floors and short uprights. The roof would not fit the crooked posts, and you said: “Straighten it! Straighten everything,” and at that moment it began to topple over, we and the joiner were buried alive under it …’

  ‘A dream, my love. Now you are awake. It is over. We are on safe and steady ground, in our bed. Try to sleep again.’

  Eleanor cradled Sarah in her arms. Sarah said: ‘Eleanor, my love: do you still scorn the idea of God?’

  ‘Tush, yes. That God my mother worshipped is a father I prefer not to think is real.’

  ‘Do you not believe He made us … as we are? So that it is then all right to be as we are?’

  Eleanor now understood how necessary this theological justification of their life was to Sarah. She hesitated a moment, and then she said: ‘It may be so, my love. He made us as we are. We are God’s superior architecture.’

  Eleanor wakened at three in the morning. One side of her face throbbed painfully. She explored her mouth with her fingers and found a raw root where a tooth had been. She shook Sarah awake. Together they searched and found the tooth in the bedclothes. Eleanor moaned with pain. Sarah held her in her arms until daylight, discovering the unusual pleasure, for once, of being the comforter.

  ‘I must go to Chester. The noon coach is to Wrexham and then from there …’ Eleanor said. Her face was now badly swollen, her eye almost shut above the obtrusive cheek. Sarah said: ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No need, my love. You so dislike the coach and the bridges.’

  Sarah reminded Eleanor of their vow. She did not say she was afraid of being left alone in the Place, even with Mary-Caryll ‘at the back,’ as they referred to the kitchen area. By nightfall they were in Chester, where, by good fortune, a Scots dentist, Mr Blair, had just arrived for a week’s professional visit to the English city. While Eleanor shrieked with pain, Mr Blair extracted the stump of tooth. After she had recovered somewhat, he told her that two more of her teeth would soon crack away in the same fashion and should be removed at once.

  Sarah stood beside her, holding Eleanor’s hand, her eyes shut, while Mr Blair extracted the two teeth. With each extraction, Eleanor screamed, a powerful air-splitting sound, and then fainted. At the end, close to fainting herself, Sarah helped the dentist revive Eleanor with salts and comforted her while he stuffed Eleanor’s mouth and bound her face with straps of tightly woven linen. Hardly able to see from pain and swelling, Eleanor leaned upon Sarah as they walked slowly to their lodgings. They spent a second sleepless night. Eleanor vomited the blood she had swallowed and groaned with pain, giving way to tears and shaking, the blood seeping from the corner of her swollen mouth.

  For two days after their return to Plas Newydd, they remained in bed. On the third day Eleanor was better, although the cheek over the extraction sank into a grey hollow. They resumed their active lives. Eleanor put the terrible days out of her mind by consigning a minute description of them to the day book, where she entered the costs of the journey for them both, the stay at the inn in Oswestry, their purchases: ‘Four boxes toothpowder, two brushes, recommended by Mr Blair. For these and services, gave him his demand: 3 guineas.’

  They had been settled in the vale for two years when word reached them by post: Walter Butler’s hereditary title had been restored. The letter was from Margaret Cavanaugh. Mr Butler was now legitimately Lord Walter Butler, Duke of Ormonde, and Eleanor’s mother Lady Adelaide. The titles they had assumed unto themselves since their marriage and insisted be used by friends and servants alike, were now rightfully theirs.

  ‘At last, I am truly a Lady,’ said Eleanor. She and Sarah laughed at the belated legitimisation. They rejoiced about the one advantage it gave them: Now it was possible for Eleanor, in her ‘retirement,’ to apply for a pension from the government and thus add to their slender resources.

  For Lord Butler it came too late. As though the restoration had overtaxed his almost blind eyes and his goutish body, the novus homo died in his sleep the following year. Eleanor was informed of his death by her sister in the same letter that contained the details of the funeral planned for the week next.

  ‘I shall not go.’

  ‘If it were I …’

  ‘You would go?’

  ‘Oh yes. As much to be in Ireland again as to pay my respects. And I will go with you should you change your mind. And, of course, should you wish me to.’

  ‘All very well, and thank you, but I don’t intend to go. Ireland is no longer my country. Walter Butler was never a father to me. I do not mourn his passing, any more than I would one of our troublesome foxes. Less.’

  ‘You have no feeling for him at all?’

  ‘Yes, I confess to having one: curiosity. I am eager to know how much provision he has made for me.’

  Eleanor was in bed suffering from migraine. Sarah offered to read her mail to her.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing, my love. Your sister writes that you are not mentioned at all.’

  ‘Not mentioned,’ Eleanor said, as though the phrase were an incantation uttered to produce income by magical repetition. ‘Not mentioned at all.’

  ‘But your sister adds that Morton Cavanaugh is prepared to make provision for you, two hundred pounds yearly, from their share of the estate. The great bulk of it, she says, is of course left to your mother. But upon her death the title and the castle devolve upon Margaret and Morton’s son, Walter, now aged eighteen months.’

  ‘I had no knowledge of a nephew,’ Eleanor said wearily. She reversed the cloth that covered her eyes.

  Eleanor replied to her mother at Kilkenny and to her sister at Borris, with the same letter, angrily protesting the will: ‘I will appeal to the English crown for a suitable settlement. Then it will be seen by the whole world how barbarously I have been treated.’

  So it is: The longer they live together the more the Ladies think of themselves as victims, not agents, of their bold act. They are convinced they have been cruelly misunderstood by their families. Theirs is the innocence of invention and discovery. They believe they deserve support befitting their station and praise for the uniqueness of their courageous excursion into a new human continent: They are explorers who have scaled unknown peaks. In demanding support, they wish their families, even their country, to reward their ambition and their bravery.

  Eleanor computes in her day book while Sarah sketches Flirt, asleep on the love seat: £180—Mrs Tighe. £150—from the Lord Bessborough estate. £150—my sister. Until our pensions are granted,’ she writes, ‘we can just nearly make do. The tradesmen in the district are trusting.’

  ‘We might of course buy fewer books,’ Sarah says.

  Eleanor looks at her unbelievingly and says nothing.

  ‘Less meat?’ Sarah ventures.

  Eleanor’s appetite has grown with her girth. She eats twice as much as Sarah, so she sees this suggestion as a gentle reprimand. She makes no reply. Sara
h then says quickly: ‘Oh my love, yes. We shall easily make do.’

  So their lives advance, secluded, serene, secret, and, to them, exceptional. They address each other always by the sentimental appellations they used in their earliest love. Eleanor’s day book continues to keep note of sugary small daily events: ‘My beloved and I in sweet repose,’ she writes.

  ‘My beloved and I walked to Balen Baeche … there found a very pretty young woman spinning,’ she writes.

  ‘My beloved and I went a delicious walk round Edward Evans’s field,’ she writes, and ‘The delight of my heart and I spent a day of strict retirement, sentiment, and delight.’

  Sarah keeps no record of her life and thoughts. She trusts Eleanor’s accounting, knowing it is far better arithmetic than she could do. She prefers her pictures, her elegant embroidery work, the books she binds and decorates. She reads the day book and frowns at the generalisations with which Eleanor covers their moments of passion. Had she her way they would not be recorded at all.

  But Eleanor never thinks of discretion. She has no concern for the reaction of anyone who happens upon the record when they are both gone. Posterity will admire their careful notation of the money strictly meted out to them and spent so recklessly. The word ‘sentiment,’ she writes often, and ‘sentiment and delight.’ With that phrase she covers the fusions of their days and nights, the linking of hands and mouths, the coupling of warm arms, every pleasure of their bodies, and their now free spirits.

  In the first years their company was limited to each other, the gardener, and to the domestics, farm animals, and, always, the faithful Mary-Caryll, more friend than servant. Later, they acquired a second gardener, a maid for chamber work, and another for scullery; those young girls came to them each day from the village, and so the Place often seemed to the Ladies too full of people. Eleanor had many disagreements with the servants and gardeners, during which she lost her temper and called them all manner of names reflecting upon their mental capacities and their family origins. One after another, they left the Ladies’ employ.

  A small altercation between a hireling and Eleanor created a near revolution in the town. A boy taken on by the gardener to help with some repairs to the pond came late to work one morning. This defection from strict duty might have gone unnoticed had Eleanor not had a bad night due to the midnight onset of a migraine headache. Standing at her window at half after eight, her burning forehead pressed against the cold pane, and waiting for Sarah to wake and tend to her, she saw the boy racing towards the dairy, bent over against the hedge to avoid, she was certain, being seen during his criminally late arrival. For days, while she recovered from her affliction, she pondered a fit punishment for the tardy lad. She sought him out while he was shovelling out the dairy.

  ‘You were late, very late on Monday,’ she said to the boy.

  ‘Monday you say, ma’am? Oh ya, Monday. Well Monday me maw had me baby brother and I waited to see,’ he said in a low, ashamed voice.

  ‘So,’ said Eleanor. ‘Now it will be necessary to come at five, not seven-thirty as you have been. Margaret needs her feed earlier, I believe.’ Eleanor felt safe in this decree, knowing the family now had a new mouth to feed and the boy’s employment was necessary.

  Indignation filled the boy’s family when he reported Lady Eleanor’s dictum, and spread to the neighbours. It was decided to send a delegation to Plas Newydd to protest. The argument was that the boy’s maw had need of the lad in the early morning to see to the younger ones. Eleanor would not come to the door to meet the group of townspeople when Mary-Caryll brought word of their arrival. Sarah said she would go.

  ‘No,’ said Eleanor firmly. ‘They do not deserve a hearing. This is absurd.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sarah firmly, for once.

  Sarah’s soft voice and gentle manner persuaded the delegation that perhaps five was a bit early for the domestic affairs of the boy’s family but that six-thirty was a good time for Margaret’s breakfast. The group departed content.

  Soon after the visitation Sarah took over the management of the household, and Eleanor retired to her studies and her books. They began to read more widely, Tasso, Ariosto, and other medieval Italian writers, the Latin classics in English translations, Ossian, William Cowper, Dr. Johnson. They enjoyed travel books and collections of French letters, books about formal gardens, animal husbandry, the novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. In everything they read, they searched for literary confirmation of their own natures, evidence of the existence of women like themselves. Their desire was not so much to find allies as to identify themselves as belonging properly in some corner, at the point of some acute angle in the geometry of the human race. In the evenings, with all the windows closed and the shutters secured against the ambiguities and terrors of the night outside, a clutch of candles lit close to their book, they scoured the pages for some mention of an existence like their own.

  Harriet Bowdler, whose unacknowledged notions had been fired by the sight of the two good companions seemingly welded into a single unit by the bonds of love and friendship, wrote to Sarah, the one she deemed most amenable to correspondence. She received a most civil reply. Sarah’s letter suggested to Harriet that she would relish receiving mail, and so began a constant exchange of letters. Harriet had placed herself in readiness, she told Sarah, to receive an invitation to visit Plas Newydd. None was offered, so she compensated for the lapse by inventing a gay and lively social life of her own in Oswestry with which she filled the pages of her letters, one each week. Sarah, for her part, kept her abreast of the small household details of life at the New Place. Every planting was given a paragraph, every building full description; often she made a small illustration to accompany the prose. But never did she ask Harriet Bowdler to visit: ‘We do not go about beyond the village. We have no visitors,’ she wrote to the avid Harriet.

  Canny Harriet read the letter about the newly erected dairy and decided on a way to bring herself, eventually, into the Ladies’ company. When she heard that the last nail had been driven into the building ‘which now is ample for a single beast,’ she wrote to Sarah:

  ‘For long I have wanted to send something to make your Shrine to Friendship, as I think of it, more sufficient unto itself. With a farmer whose cart is being driven to Llangollen to bring back hay I have sent to you and Lady Eleanor a milk cow.’

  Margaret the cow quickly became a well-loved member of the household. In the evenings the Ladies took a lantern and walked a quarter of the Home Circuit to visit their ‘dear Margaret,’ as Eleanor described her in the day book. Her mournful, polished-brown eyes appealed to their romantic souls. They petted and smoothed her suede back; she in turn bestowed her flat, red tongue upon their palms, a gesture they interpreted as a sign of bovine affection. They were delighted at the gift. They had acquired a new friend.

  Rarely did they purchase ‘modern books,’ Eleanor’s term for anything issued by the presses after the year 1750. But they had heard of one Thomas Pennant, an inveterate traveller who had published an account of his tours of Wales a few years before. The Ladies sent to England for the book, and Eleanor began to read it aloud in the evening, pleased to be able to retrace their own footsteps while they sat comfortably in their library.

  ‘She was an unusual woman,’ Eleanor said. She fell silent while Sarah searched under her chair for her dropped needle.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Margaret uch Evan. Thomas Pennant writes of her.’

  ‘Read to me about her.’

  ‘“She is at this time about ninety years of age—”’

  ‘Ninety?’

  ‘Ninety. “She was Wales’s greatest hunter, shooter, and fisher of her time.” Do you imagine he means when she was younger by “of her time” or when she was ninety?’

  ‘Go on. Perhaps he will say.’

  ‘Such imprecision is very tiresome.’

  ‘Go on, love.’

  ‘“She kept a dozen at least of dogs, t
erriers, greyhounds and spaniels, all excellent in their kinds. She killed more foxes, in one year, than all the confederate hunts do in ten; rowed stoutly and was queen of the lake—”’

  ‘Queen of the lake. What lake? Where did she live?’

  ‘Penllyn, he says.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  ‘I have no idea. He goes on: “She fiddled excellently, and knew all our old music; did not neglect the mechanic arts, for she was a very good joiner—”’

  ‘That too. He does not say that she played the harp?’

  Eleanor laughed. ‘No, but he does report that she made harps. Also, she shoed her own horses and made her own shoes as well.’

  Sarah laughed. ‘We would do well to learn that art.’

  ‘Oh, indeed we would.’

  ‘Read on.’

  ‘“Margaret was also blacksmith, shoemaker, boat builder.” That seems to be because she had a contract to convey copper ore down the lakes in her own boats.’

  ‘What lakes?’

  ‘He does not specify.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘“All the neighbouring bards paid their addresses to Margaret, and celebrated her exploits in pure British verse.”’

  ‘How wonderful! To be celebrated in verse. I suppose she never married?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘She must have been so accomplished, so … so sufficient to herself that she would not have required the support of a husband.’

  ‘That might have been true. Nevertheless, she married, very late it seems. Mr Pennant says: “At length”—which is hardly informative, is it?—“at length she gave her hand to the most effeminate of her admirers as if predetermined to maintain the superiority which Nature had bestowed on her.”’

  They sat in silence, contemplating Thomas Pennant’s narrative.

  Then Sarah asked: ‘“The most effeminate of her admirers?” Does that mean that manly Margaret uch Evan married a ladylike man?’

  ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘Perhaps he was a woman?’