The Ladies Read online

‘See,’ she managed to command, with her last energy. Then she dozed off.

  The baby lay still, tired out by its first violent protests at the indignities of birth, its large head on a satin pillow, whirls of lace above and tufted white quilting over its plump body. Lord Butler’s need overcame his fear of the unfamiliar, curious creature. He reached deep within the folds of blue coverings, removing layer after layer of the soft stuff that encased the sleeping child until he reached its raw, flaking flesh. He saw a still-bleeding stump protruding from its belly, and then the small, neat seam between its fat thighs. Lord Butler’s cheeks reddened dangerously. He looked ready to burst into flame. Roughly he pushed the garments and coverlets back into place.

  ‘No!’ he shouted. The expelled monosyllable sounded like a small explosion. ‘No!’ he said again. He backed away from the cradle. Lady Adelaide awakened in fright. He saw her swollen, blackened, questioning eyes, but he could not prepare an answer. Instead, he turned and rushed from the room without saying anything to her, leaving her immobile and terrified among the wet bedclothes, wondering what she had done, whether he was angered by her long travail, which must have occupied the entire attention of everyone at Kilkenny to the disruption of his usual routine, or—the unthinkable for her at this moment—whether the baby was deformed in some way. Worn out and confused, she fell back to sleep.

  Outside, Lord Butler stood facing the standing hall mirror, recognising his coarse, red features as enlargements of the baby’s. He concentrated on bringing his shaking flesh and clenched, shocked hands under control. Seated again in the chair he had occupied for most of the past three days, he held his head in his hands. In his mouth was the burning, acid taste of the terrible feminine common noun: a girl.

  On her seventh birthday Eleanor learned from her nurse, Miss Colum, that she was a girl. For years Lord Butler’s disappointment with her sex had been somewhat appeased by the child’s absence from his sight, and her deceptive appearance on the rare occasions when he did catch a glimpse of her. She ran after balls or rode beside the nurse in the pony cart, dressed in Irish woollen knickers and vest, a white linen shirt, and miniature cravat. The boy’s clothes, and the glow of her close-cropped red curls, helped to mollify his choler. If she were not a boy, to him she was at least a credible semblance of one. Her slim, wiry athletic body in its boy’s accoutrements advanced the illusion for her father. As for Eleanor, she did not require the illusion. She never doubted she was male.

  ‘I will explain it to you once again,’ Miss Colum said. ‘There is a difference.’

  ‘What is it then? What is the difference?’

  Miss Colum’s stern grey face revealed her Irish puritanism, which prevented her from offering a detailed explanation, and certainly not a description. She thought a moment and then said, ‘Girls have long hair, wear gowns and petticoats, slippers and sashes and hair ribbons. And,’ she hesitated, ‘are made differently.’

  ‘In what way? Where?’

  ‘On their chests—and between their legs.’ Miss Colum’s discomfort at the questions showed in the spots that appeared on her cheeks. Pushed to definition, the end of her nose became cherry-coloured, her eyelids and chin an unaccustomed ruddy hue.

  Eleanor asked nothing further. She saw no problem in the whole matter. It was clear now to her: ‘If I do not allow my hair to grow I will never be a girl,’ she told herself. ‘If I refuse to wear dresses as ladies do, I will always be a boy.’ As for the other, less well-defined differences, her fine flat chest and the bare opening between her legs for her necessary occasions: surely these places could make no difference. They would be well hidden from public view by her shirts and knickers. She would be a boy, and then a man. She saw no difficulty at all.

  In her room, left to herself when Miss Colum went off for visits to the servant’s quarters, and after a long day of play and pretending, she cut her hair close to her head. For this purpose she used the hunting knife she had found in the stables and kept from Miss Colum’s eyes under the toy chest. The curls she cut off were saved in a tin box. To her mind they served as talisman against the sex she had abnegated. Preserved in this way, her curls could be controlled and would not reattach themselves, she believed, especially since she took care to keep the tin box tightly closed. Regular shearing would prevent excessive growth, she believed, and would guarantee her chosen sex.

  It is hard to know if the girl-child born to Lord and Lady Butler and named, in the fourth week of her life, Eleanor, would have demanded boy’s clothes and cropped hair had they not been first accorded her by her deeply disappointed parents. No effort was made to replace the wardrobe and toys prepared for their son before her birth. Lady Adelaide’s frail health kept her from influencing her daughter’s wardrobe even had she wished to. As it was, she desired only to be freed of responsibility for her so that she might concentrate her whole attention on her own uncertain health and her private devotions to the Holy Mother and Her Blessed Son. She hardly noticed Eleanor’s clothes when she was brought to table to say goodnight at the start of supper, dressed carefully in velvet knickers, Eton spencer, a sparkling white shirt, and linen stock.

  As Eleanor grew older, Miss Colum complained to the cook, she was given ‘the run of the place.’ She stayed away from the castle for hours, exploring the demesnes and the hills beyond, running through the fields of furze, the meadows filled with foxglove and buttercup, returning only for meals and to sleep.

  Until she was eleven, Eleanor was that oddity among children, a contented solitary. She grew tall, her shoulders broadened, her waist thickened, her legs formed straight and thick. To her delight, her breasts remained rudimentary, and her hands and flat sturdy feet were larger than most boys’. Outdoors, far from the sight of those in the castle, she donned her ‘play’ costume, heavy leathern boots and cut-down breeches left from her father’s riding days. She wound a thick cashmere scarf about her throat and covered her hair with a woolen tam. Otherwise, she made no concession to the wild, cold Irish wind. Miss Colum was lethargic, short-legged, flat-footed, and did not attempt to follow her charge on her excursions. Eleanor never discussed the contents of her solitary games with her, or with anyone, for that matter. Where she went, what she did was known only to herself. Her pursuits were full and sustaining, enough to make her happy and occupy an essential part of her days. When she finally appeared at half after three before her nurse to be made presentable for her appearance at supper she would be muddy and weary, but exultant.

  ‘Ride, harder,’ she told the gaunt stone lion, one of a pair that guarded the farthest gate near the old stables. Her knees numb from the cold (for she always removed her breeches) she rode him hard, rocking forward and back on his broad boney back, leaning out perilously from his sides, feeling him move under her. The pleasures of her ride rose up in her until, at their height, she screamed. Her delight filled her whole body. When her ride was over (a journey she took two or three times a day in all weather), she climbed down slowly and whispered her gratitude into the lion’s stone ear. She rescued her breeches from her secret hiding place between his haunches and put them on. Lovingly, she moved her hand over his back.

  ‘You are all wet,’ she said to him, convincing herself he was capable of furious sweat, never allowing herself to believe that in her ecstasy it was she who had dampened his granite back.

  When Eleanor was twelve another daughter was born to Lady and Lord Butler. This time there was no disappointment, for the couple had been afraid to hope. The baby was named Margaret. She grew up adoring Eleanor but too distant in years and too different in nature to be influenced by her sister’s boyish posturings. Margaret was small, blonde, and nervous, afraid of the garden snakes that seemed to stalk her during outdoor games while ignoring her sthenic sister, who liked to catch the slippery creatures and hold them before her little sister’s skittish eyes. Except to frighten and to tease her, Eleanor left the child entirely alone. Soon after Margaret’s second birthday Miss Colum was transferred to her care, to
the nurse’s disguised delight: little Margaret was pretty and biddable, undemanding and dull. Her parents had decided it was time to have Eleanor instructed by someone possessed of more than the elementary capacities of the governess.

  The tutor hired away from a Dublin family, Theo O’Phelan, was a serious and delicate young man. His arms were long and very thin, his wrists and hands protruding from his coat as though dangled from strings. His face looked perpetually frostbitten. In his inadequate clothes, he seemed never to have experienced bodily warmth. His boots were too tight, so he walked with a curiously extended gait, his feet thrown out at variance to each other. Eleanor sometimes amused herself by shadowing him. She imitated his walk by extending her hands and feet at incongruous angles. Always irreverent, she called him Theodore, a name he disliked. But he was so in awe of the Butlers, even of their fourteen-year-old daughter, and the general aura of Kilkenny Castle, that he never reproved her. A theology student at Trinity College in Dublin, he paid his tuition with the money he earned by tutoring. His belief in God was intense: His Name appeared in some part of speech in many of his sentences, his seemingly disembodied hands appeared to be invoking His Presence in the air.

  Eleanor hated the idea of being tutored, most particularly by Theo O’Phelan. He was too much like a girl, too soft, quiet, easily bent and swayed, too physically awkward. Her fingers were more dextrous than his, and she easily outran him the few times she had been able to persuade him to race with her. Once, in mid-race, he stumbled and fell over the root of a tree. She returned to offer him her hand, feeling strong and manly, and he took it. But he was well-educated, he taught her to recite Burns and Wordsworth and Cowper and Donne, to read French, to conjugate Latin verbs. They started to study Greek, but she balked at the long list of irregular verbs, so he surrendered on this point. Once lessons were over, however, Eleanor could not persuade the tutor to go further from the house than the stone porch. He disliked everything about the outdoors and would accompany her only on formal, stated afternoon walks if the weather was exceptionally fine. She believed he felt threatened by the overgrown hedgerows.

  ‘You are a true baby,’ she told him.

  He denied this, but there was some truth in Eleanor’s conviction about his fear of the great towering ash and beech trees that arched towards each other along Kilkenny Castle roads. They terrified him, as much as a bird rising quickly out of a grassy hollow. He would not walk at the back of the castle where laurel and hawthorn hedges grew thick and broad, preferring to follow the edges of meadows and greens. All his life he had lived in a Dublin row house, a low, narrow structure comfortably supported on both sides by another house just like itself. Such snug buildings, their facades facing honestly to the street with no intervening greenery between them and the brick street, their rear ends aligned similarly in communal sameness with a bit of green as big as a square of paper behind them, and all without sides or obscure entries or exits, made him feel entirely safe.

  Most of all, Theo O’Phelan hated the loud noises peculiar to the countryside. Fowlers’ guns sounding in the game preserves startled him, causing his head and hands to tremble. With each succeeding explosion his tremors grew stronger until it seemed as though his whole body were possessed. On these occasions, Eleanor was cruel, calling him Saint O’Vitus, and laughing while he shook. If he was not able to stop, she grew quickly bored by the cowardly spectacle and went off without him to her own pursuits. When they met again, at supper, she would lecture him, to the amusement of her parents or guests, on the arts of hunting, fishing, and fowling, hoping he would reproduce his bizarre behaviour at table at the very suggestion of guns exploding.

  Eleanor would have liked to have her lessons outdoors in fine weather, but O’Phelan would not hear of it. He insisted they study in the dark panelled library, surrounded by heavy oak tables, portraits of the dukes of Ormonde already almost blackened beyond identification by the huge fire built in the library, and walls hung with tapestries to hide cracks and crevices. Here O’Phelan felt secure; here Eleanor felt closeted and bound in. She learned her lessons as quickly as possible in order to escape outside. Prepared to make a quick departure, she lounged in a cushioned library chair in her rough stable boy’s clothing, her boots resting on the table, while O’Phelan sat behind a small desk asking questions to which she replied scornfully but always correctly. Freed from the four hours’ confinement, the time allotted to languages, mathematics, and literature, she left without a word. Outside, she plotted every sort of revenge upon the fearful tutor, elaborate tricks to show what a goose-livered girl he was, what a courageous man she was becoming. Oddly it was her mother, hardly aware of the tutor’s existence, who, without intention, effected Eleanor’s freedom from the theology student. In this way:

  One late afternoon in the coldest month of that year 1755, Lord Butler sat at the head of a long dining table at which the local gentry as well as guests from some distance from Kilkenny were assembled. Once or twice a year such hospitality was offered at the castle. At that time all its heavy but splendid furnishings were displayed, a footman in livery placed behind every chair, a feast of meats and fish and puddings and fruit served, with a constant supply of wines of every variety. Still suffering under the illegality of his title and the degradation of his loss of ancient rank, Lord Butler (as he called himself always) sat enthroned in his cushioned chair at the head of the table. Because Lady Adelaide was not up to her duties as hostess that evening, sixteen-year-old Eleanor, in one of her mother’s old, stiff, richly brocaded gowns, occupied the foot. In a rare moment of thoughtfulness, Lady Adelaide had invited the tutor to be present. Theo sat huddled into himself, looking to neither side, his eyes fixed on his downturned glass. For he did not drink, knowing the effects of liquor on his weak nervous system.

  To the tutor’s left was Beauchamp Bagenal, Member of Parliament for bordering County Carlow. Bagenal was a man of generous proportions and more than generous appetite. He ate and drank so steadily that he had little time to talk at table. Downing a generous mouthful of wine after every swallow of food, Bagenal paid no attention to the conversation, which, this evening, centered about the rumored escape to a convent of a duchess. Her husband and other indignant noblemen had broken into its locked confines to retrieve, not the duchess, but her property. The tutor was appalled at the roars of approving laughter that greeted this irreverent story. He fixed his indignant stare lower to the table. So he failed to notice that Beauchamp Bagenal had placed a brace of pistols beside his plate. When dinner was finally over, the ladies retired, all but Eleanor, who did not consider herself one of them and exercised the hostess’s privilege of remaining seated. Milligan entered the dining room with a new cask of claret.

  ‘Over here, oul’ man,’ the Member of Parliament called at Milligan, who circled the table to deposit the cask before Bagenal. With a gesture so wide that his elbow grazed the oblivious tutor’s head, Bagenal picked up a pistol in his left hand, aimed it precisely at the side of the cask, and tapped it with a bullet. Milligan, seemingly well-prepared for the guest’s gross act, quickly held a glass to the flow, but not before a blood-red puddle had filled the table in front of the marksman and the tutor. So startled was O’Phelan that he brought up his trembling hands to try to stop the flow of wine into his lap.

  Flushed with pleasure at the success of his colourful uncapping, the fevered Bagenal spun the other pistol in his right hand and aimed it at the hesitant partakers. It came to rest on the tutor.

  ‘Come on now, my fellow, drink up,’ he roared at the shaking tutor. O’Phelan was hypnotized by the red stains on his fawn-coloured trousers. He made no sound, he could not move, indeed, he did not see the pistol aimed at his ear until the Member of Parliament tucked the point of the barrel playfully into his neck. Terrified, the tutor screamed, and stood up so quickly that glasses and plates scattered around him to the floor. He ran to the door, knocking into two footmen as he careened past them. Laughter at the table, led by the tutor’s pupil, Elea
nor, was raucous. The M.P. restored his pistols to their case and fell back into his chair, delighted by his success, downed a full goblet of claret, and promptly joined Lord Butler in sleep, his head resting on the table on the edge of the claret pool. No one paid any attention, so intent were the still-awake guests to hear Lady Eleanor’s detailed philippic against her tutor’s unseemly cowardice, womanly nerves, and general ineptitude.

  The next morning Theo O’Phelan was gone, having packed his clothes and books and set out on foot to Kilkenny to join the stagecoach to Dublin before the household was awake.

  An elegant, grey Georgian house called Woodstock stands on a hill facing towards the town of Inistiogue twelve miles distant. It ‘commands the village,’ Sir William Fownes, the Squire, says, when the name of the house is mentioned. The grounds on every side are well kept, ringed by an ancient planting of great oaks. Scattered here and there among them, unclothed statues of Greek maidens hug their marble flesh against the Irish damp. Thick woods beyond the oaks and yews shelter pied goats who periodically make themselves useful in the sunny patches of the day by cropping the lawns. In places where the goats have been left too long, the grass is yellow and limp, fogged over and full of sprets. Far back of the house the grass grows full and heavy, surrounded and laced with arbutus in which a muster of Lady Betty Fownes’ peacocks stalk periodically.

  The house appears to sit firmly, settled and perfectly balanced like a steamer on calm seas. The stolid effect is due to the precise arrangement of windows—eight on each floor symmetrically arranged around and above the great central door. In the late afternoon the windows turn a many-eyed vision upon the driveway that curves up to, and then away from, the door. At sunset, on a day that has been sunny, the windows seem to become overly bright and then blind and incapable any longer of spying on hopeful arrivals or disgruntled departures.