The Ladies Read online

  Sarah sits still, entranced. But Eleanor’s pragmatic mind moves rapidly from epiphanic moments to decisions and plans.

  Eleanor speaks: ‘When we settle, we must write a program for our lives. What we vow we shall do and what we know we shall not do. Surely we want none of the foolish comings and goings our families indulged in. What have we to do with such settlements down into ordinary life?’

  Sarah wonders: ‘Shall we promise never to leave our cottage, when we have found it, except in each other’s company?’

  Eleanor says: ‘That is necessary, yes. And further, we’ll vow not to stay a night under another’s roof, once we are established under our own.’

  Eleanor goes on: ‘We must improve ourselves.’

  Sarah, surprised: ‘How?’

  Eleanor: ‘We’ll read together and talk with each other about what we have read. I shall keep a record of our reading and our opinions. We must cultivate languages so that our reading may widen: Italian, French, German. We must learn those languages together.’

  Sarah says: ‘I want to make where we live beautiful. To plant something beautiful in every place our eyes light upon from our windows and along the borders of our place. We shall plant gracefully and with love. I want so much to have gardens, to nurture them, then to bring the results into our house as though there were no interruption between the outside and within.’

  Sarah goes on: ‘What shall we do about the world outside?’

  Eleanor, ponderously: ‘Eschew it and all its vanities. Those effeminate softnesses are not for us.’

  Sarah: ‘We shall not go out into society?’

  Eleanor: ‘No, we shall wait for society, if it so wishes, to come to us. And then we will welcome only those of high degree, and who will contribute to our self-improvement or our entertainment. Persons like ourselves.’

  A long pause.

  Then Sarah asks, timidly, almost whispering: ‘Are there other persons like ourselves?’

  Eleanor, at once: ‘I speak of breeding and education, not … not anything else. As for that … I do not know. I have never met others. Or heard of them. Perhaps. We shall see.’

  Eleanor continues: ‘When we are in full possession of our monies we must practice charity. In our retirement, we must perform the duties of our birth, even to foreigners, should we decide to live among them.’

  Sarah: ‘And kind. We must always be kind. We must send for Mary-Caryll at once, else she will forget her intentions towards us and go into service elsewhere.’

  Sarah goes on: ‘Painting, drawing, embroidery. I shall return to the practise of those arts which gave me such pleasure at school. And you must continue to write. Your letters to me at school were so fine. You must be our correspondent, and our diarist.’

  Eleanor: ‘Our retirement from the world will be rich and full, else we will look for other diversions and perhaps grow apart.’

  Sarah: ‘Oh never, my love. That could never happen.’

  Sarah hesitates, then continues: ‘We might make room each day for reading in the Gospels and the old books of Holy Writ.’

  Eleanor: ‘No.’

  Sarah: ‘Never, do you mean, my love? What then will be our guide in spiritual matters? “There shall be no authority except God’s Will,” Saint Paul told the Romans.’

  Eleanor: ‘We shall be our own guides. Our own wills have taken us this far. Church authority is best left for those weak enough to be bound by empty sacraments from priests, like my poor mother. They are not for us. Ours is … a new way. We need no one’s approval. We’ll not ask for a sacramental seal to our love. We shall make no explanations to anyone, no confessions, ask for no absolutions.’

  Sarah: ‘No explanations?’

  Eleanor: ‘None.’

  PLAS NEWYDD: 1780–1790

  Late the next day they came by stagecoach to the small village of Llangollen in the County Clwyd, a word they could spell but not, at first, pronounce. They took a room at The Hand, because they admired the two-storey grey stone public house and the view from their room of small houses of dark stone. Early in the morning they set out on foot to see the village and the surrounding country. Spanning the rushing River Dee were four Gothic arches of ancient stone, a warm-appearing solid bridge that suggested to them an unchanging reverberant past as they crossed, hand in hand. They climbed a conical hill until they arrived at the ruins of old Crow Castle. Beside the ruins ran a deeply wooded dingle and through it a rapid stream moved. They were alone at Castell Dinas Bran, as the place was named, so they took off their heavy shoes and bathed their feet in the cold water.

  Beyond the ruins was heaped a long line of limestone rocks, so tempting to the foot that Sarah climbed them, holding her riding skirt in her hand. Eleanor stood at the bottom watching, enjoying the sight of her beloved friend stepping from crest to peak in long, graceful steps.

  Arm in arm, they retraced their steps and then took the way along the canal towing-path out past a flagstone quarry until they came to mouldering church ruins, lying snug in a quiet and most beautiful dale. A small sign said this was Llan Eglewest Abbey. A villager gathering mushrooms along the sheepwalks and among the graves of long-dead Cistercian monks told them it was now called Valle Crucis and had been built around 1200.

  ‘How long have the monks been gone?’ asked Eleanor.

  ‘Since King Henry took the gold and silver things and sent the monks no one knows where. Two hundred years ago maybe.’

  The villager left with his basket full of soil-colored mushrooms. The Ladies rested, leaning upon the decaying broken stones, alone together in the silent courtyard of the abbey, in the shadow of the steep hill that rose above the monastery remains. The sentimental hearts of the two women were prone to emotional responses to ancient buildings in ruins, if not to the religious aura of the place. They kissed, a long, loving kiss, and then stood apart and looked at each other.

  They walked back along the abbey road, their arms upon each other, moved by having witnessed the half-destroyed Gothic aspirations of monks. Re-crossing the beautiful old bridge, they followed cobbled Bridge Street to the Church of St. Collen, and stood back to admire its carved roof. The sacristan came out to tell them that it had been carried from the abbey and held aloft by Welshmen of great spiritual and physical gifts until it was placed upon the walls of the parish church.

  Late in the day, as they walked south of the village on Hill Street, to visit Pengwern Hall, a deserted old mansion they had been told was picturesque, they came upon the cottage. No one seemed to occupy it. It stood in a vale from one side of which rose the blue Berwyn mountain dotted with sheep. A plain two-storey, square structure, its tile roof held five chimneys. The surface stone was whitewashed. The Ladies tried to look into the windows, but in the dying light they could see very little except that the rooms seemed empty of furnishings. One of the windows was broken. They thought, standing close, that they could hear the flap of bat wings.

  ‘Can this be the place?’ Sarah asked. ‘Would we like it here?’

  ‘In this house? In this vale? I believe so. Let’s inquire of the people in the village who own it and if it is available to rent.’

  Mrs Edmunds of The Hand was a well of information. Recently widowed, she was lonely and loved to talk. Her monologues were filled with complaints as well as vivid descriptions of Llangollen sights. First, she bemoaned the absence of her husband and the difficulty of raising children and keeping an inn without a man to do the heavy work. Then she urged upon them a walk out Canal Road to the Tower. They ate their chops and goose tarts in silence, waiting patiently for the answer to their question about the cottage. ‘The Tower is twelve feet high and named Eliseg’s Pillar,’ Mrs Edmunds told them. ‘He was slain by Saxons in the seventh century and his father then erected it in his memory. I believe. It stands on a tumulus which may be his grave. We believe so.’

  The Ladies were afraid to ask why the Saxons had committed the act, fearing the question would take the garrulous Mrs Edmunds too far fro
m their original query. Finally, she came back to their subject. She recognised that her boarders were ladies of high degree, oddly clothed, it was true, but of a station well above the people of the village, or even of nearby Ruthin and Berwyn. True, it was strange that they were both without husbands: Were they spinster sisters, or congenial cousins? she wondered. But they clearly intended to be domiciled together, nonetheless, or they would not have inquired about the cottage. She acknowledged to herself that surely none of this concerned her. She gave them the name and location of the owner, and said she hoped they would stay on at The Hand until they found lodgings to rent, and not venture into the cold and unclean Lyons Inn across the road.

  So they did. The summer months were spent awaiting or overseeing repairs and changes to the cottage. With Mr Edwards, the owner, a gruff and incommunicative old Welsh farmer who had retired to his daughter’s cottage in Chirk, they settled upon a yearly rent of £22, and were granted permission to make extensive changes they themselves would pay for. At once a painter, a carpenter, and a joiner were hired. Eleanor drew plans for the improvements. A room, to serve as library, was to be added to the four already there. Water was to be brought into the kitchen from the hillside stream. Their dressing room upstairs was to be formed of the old nursery. The ‘state’ bedchamber for their guests was to be widened, and a small maid’s room constructed where open sheds now stood behind the kitchen. Chests and cabinets were ordered from the joiner, who would make them for the carpenter to decorate in their places. Mary-Caryll was on her way to Plas Newydd.

  The Ladies were worn down from incessant travel, the emotional strain of their escapes, and by the constant worry over monies. Two years after their elopement, they and their maid Mary-Caryll, with all the heavy, ornamented carved oak furniture they had ordered in Oswestry, were moved into the cottage they named Plas Newydd, the New Place. It was the fall of 1780. Despite their weariness, their sense of their strange, unique mission buoyed them. Their apostolic zeal for a way of life they believed they had devised for the first time in the history of the world was very strong. As William Wordsworth, forty years later, was to write of them: They were about to ‘retire into notice.’

  It was the first home the Ladies had ever had. For Eleanor, Kilkenny Castle was where she had waited impatiently to be grown enough to leave, even when she could not imagine how such a departure could be effected without ending in the novitiate or in marriage. At Woodstock Sarah had believed she held her room on Sir William’s impatient sufferance. She was an orphan, at the mercy of those who lent her space, her room, her hiding places in the garden. But Plas Newydd was the place they had chosen to remake into their ideal of home. A cave of oak and stone, it was designed to safeguard the privity of their love.

  During the first year of their residence no one visited Plas Newydd. This suited their desires exactly; they had promised to be alone with each other. Word of their flight and their occupancy at Llangollen had spread in English circles to which both families were connected, and to Ireland when Eleanor sent a beseeching letter for money to her mother and because Sarah maintained a lively correspondence with her cousin Julia Tighe. Travellers to Dublin and back to London who passed through Llangollen knew that the Ponsonby woman and the curious Lady of Ormonde lineage were there but did not venture to call, some of them out of reluctance to enter upon the embarrassing mystery of their lives.

  It happened, by pure chance, that the Ladies had settled in a place likely to bring visitors to their door. The highway from London went north and west to Oxford and thence to Birmingham and on to Shrewsbury and Llangollen. The stage coach made a stately swath through Llangollen’s small main street, depositing visitors to the outlying manors at The Hand or The Lion’s Inn, and then went on to Holyhead, where a steamer carried the English travellers to Dublin. It returned with Irish gentry (in the main) on their way to stays among the social pleasures of London.

  Quickly, the routine the Ladies had agreed upon was established. They never deviated: it was as though a single exception would shake the whole structure of their exceptional lives. They lived strictly and carefully, rarely leaving the Place. Mary-Caryll went to the market in the village less than a mile away, visiting the grocery lady, Mrs Parry the greengrocer, the baker, and the butcher. Sometimes she took the borrowed cob as far as Bryn Kivalt to the lady who sold cheese; astride the small horse she looked huge and brought smiles to the faces of villagers. The market men soon learned to fear her tart tongue and ready, rough hand. She was as large and as strong as any man in the village. She wished to be called Miss Mary, she informed them, and the tradesmen and farmers (from whom she obtained eggs, milk, cream, and buttermilk) were quick to obey. The man who brought beers and ales to The Hand remembered her well from her Irish employment.

  ‘They used to call her Mary the Bruiser,’ he told Mrs Edmunds. ‘Many’s the time I saw her haul out customers from Inistiogue pub at closing time when they got out of hand, sometimes two at a time.’ The Ladies could not have had a better guardian of their retirement, a protector against beggars and unwanted visitors. A woman of noticeable and intimidating masculinity, Mary-Caryll provided muscular protection of her Ladies against intruders, the insobriety of the town’s boys, and the temptation of the tradesmen to scale their prices upwards for gentry.

  One day in November, after almost half a year in seclusion, they decided upon an extended walk beyond their hedge and away from the customary circuit of the New Place they took each morning and evening. Asking at the inn, where Mrs Edmunds was delighted to see them again, they were directed by the lady, who tried to detain them with her cascading river of talk, to Mr Turner the barber, whose cottage stood on a small road beside the river. The Dee was high and wild at that time of year. It tore through the middle arch of the bridge rasping against the fourteenth-century stones and creating an excited melody of turbulent sounds.

  ‘It must be very deep where it passes under the bridge,’ Sarah said. She stooped to look over, and then gripped the side. ‘Often I dream of being bourne along on such a violent stream.’

  ‘Mrs Edmunds, who seems to know everything about this village, said in this season it is twenty feet,’ said Eleanor, pushing at Sarah’s elbow to move her along. She had noticed her friend’s tendency to dwell overlong at high cliffs, bridges, and threatening streams as though the prospect of falling from them was enticing. Sarah stared a long time into the rushing river. ‘At Woodstock the stream only covered one’s ankles. Here, one might be … submerged.’ Eleanor did not reply. It had been a long time since Sarah had had a spell. She thought they were over, that the New Place with its calm security had worked a cure.

  ‘Come along, my love, we must be on our way.’

  They found the cottage of Mr Turner and instructed him in the manner in which they wished to have their hair barbered and dressed. Eleanor’s hair was now grey, Sarah’s still bright brown. The barber was told to cut their hair short, so that it fell no lower than their ears, in what Eleanor called the ‘Titus-style.’ Mr Turner followed their orders precisely. When he had finished, their heads resembled two deep porridge bowls, he thought. He curled the ends and powdered their short Irish curls (as he thought of them). They left his cottage, well pleased with the results, having arranged for him to come to their cottage to dress their hair every fortnight. Their high silk hats set on their heads, they provided the villagers with what they were to call, at the Pub that evening, ‘a sight.’ They might have been twin coachmen or perhaps two elderly priests making their way to call upon ailing parishioners.

  As for Mr Turner, he felt he had made a major advance in his profession. For the first time in forty-seven years at his trade he had barbered the heads of women. He smiled as he swept the mat of hair on his floor. How strange this day’s business was: to cut two women’s hair on the same afternoon and to cut it to make them look exactly like gentlemen!… Who, he wondered, was Titus?

  In the first year at Plas Newydd the Ladies added six Welsh mountain she
ep to their demesne, a word Eleanor used ironically for their four acres of rented property. The sheep were hardy, active animals for whom Sarah conceived a great affection. She named them carefully according to what she conceived to be their characters, and enjoyed caressing their soft wool and cradling the ewes in her arms. They were tame and loving, their joints supple, their bones as small as young children’s. Sarah bought a brindled, white-breasted greyhound to accompany them on their walks with Frisk, who had grown old and no longer earned his name. The new hound, almost white and as thin as a walking stick, she named Flirt and trained to sleep on the end of their bed: poor Frisk could no longer make the leap. From the carpenter’s wife they came by a kitten of such varied colours and ancestry that Sarah named him Tatters. And for Mary-Caryll’s use they purchased a cob, a short-legged, stocky and, at first, overactive little horse. He was tethered on the hill among the sheep and quickly acquired some of their ruminative complaisance. Even so, Eleanor shuddered at the sight of him: Never again would she mount a horse, even a steady little Welsh cob.

  Except for Mary-Caryll, Love, Charity, Pride, Faith, Hope, Patience (the sheep), Nathan, the cob, and the two greyhounds, the Ladies were alone. With scrupulous care they boxed and contained their units of time, enjoying such highly organised solitude. They began by learning three useful Welsh words each day from a primer they had ordered from Wrexham (‘O, the luxury of buying books,’ Eleanor wrote in her day book upon the arrival of the package). They found that Wales was properly called Cymru, the people of Cymru the Cymry, the word for mourning at a loss, hiraeth. From another new volume, they studied the Bronze-Age history of the stone circles, menhirs, and cromlechs they had seen in Pembrokeshire. For the Tuatha De Danaan, the Celtic myths on which they had been nurtured, they began to substitute those of the Tylwyth Teg and the history of the Cymry who lived west of the eighth-century King Offa’s Dike. The Cymry were the people among whom they had chosen to live.