The Ladies Read online

  After Mrs Tighe’s eighty-pound sum had arrived for the year, their first large expenditure was for a New Bed. Their second-storey bedroom was large and held a fine bay window plated with decorative glass and lined with carved oak at the sides. The Bed was built into one side so that an oak-panelled wall became its headboard. The early morning sun reached their pillows as they slept. At the foot were two rich oak posts holding aloft the corners of the rectangular tester. From it hung a heavy moreen curtain. They lay upon a well-packed and covered palliasse and were blanketed in soft-woven woollens they had had sent from Ireland. The New Bed was a protected, stable, private ark, nestled snugly against a wall that had been covered with blossom-embossed paper.

  The day, which usually ended in what Eleanor called, in her day book, ‘sweet peace in the New Bed,’ began in strict order. They rose at six with the first sun (there were to be exceptions) and walked together in their garden. At nine they breakfasted, sometimes at the kitchen table, at other times, when they wished to prolong their united solitude, at the table in the State Bedroom. Mary-Caryll prepared their food and served it but always, when they invited her, politely refused to sit with them to eat her breakfast, claiming she had already partaken. For them she poured tea into a saucer and served them Posel Triog, a treacle posset of boiled fresh milk to which she added cold buttermilk. It was a Welsh dish she had learned about from her friend, the cook at The Hand. Sarah loved it and called it curds and whey.

  ‘Which is exactly what it is, of course,’ Eleanor would say.

  ‘Di olch yn faur,’ said Sarah, proud of her Welsh for ‘Thank you very much.’

  Or Mary-Caryll would serve them what the Welsh countrywomen called Siencyn Tea, pouring hot tea over white-flour bread and adding butter and sugar and then a little fresh, cold milk. They would eat this with slices of thick white cheese, drink their tea, and then set out for a brisk walk to some part of the village, or make a much slower tour of their own grounds. While Eleanor dictated, Sarah took notes in her elegant hand on what they saw needed doing: Mr Hughes the gardener came (at first) only one day in the week to do heavy work. They would sit in the shrubberies to decide what might be substituted for the common overgrown yews and filberts they had found there. Their planning conferences were held as they walked ‘the Home Circuit’: Where would the new fowl yard be put? The new dairy? Should the gravel paths be extended? What soft-fruit trees ought to be planted and where, so that they might, in the future, have a ready supply of wines?

  The adjective for their possessions the Ladies most relished was ‘new.’ For them the word had a strong attraction because they thought of their union as new, unique, without precedent. At times Eleanor would refer to it as a ‘New marriage.’ They had named their cottage Plas Newydd; familiarly with each other they spoke always of ‘our New Place.’

  Lady Adelaide made no response to Eleanor’s increasingly importuning letters. Nonetheless, the two friends agreed on large, lavish expenditures and then gave them no further thought: they were granted unlimited credit, it seemed to them, by workmen and tradesmen who were in awe of Eleanor’s title. At all costs, the Ladies were determined to enrich the quality of their lives. But, in a small concession to weight and economy, their lunch at twelve was spartan: cheese, an egg, fruit, tea. Often they carried it in a basket and ate under a tree or on one of the benches the carpenter had made for them. After other excursions, beyond their ‘demesne,’ to the Tower, or the church, or Valle Crucis, or Dinas Bran, they returned home to rest.

  They became ardent, indurate walkers, always wearing their heavy ploughman’s boots, always carrying their silver-topped walking sticks, always accompanied by their dogs, always alone together. Although Eleanor deplored the rapidity with which they wore down their boots and the cost of having them repaired by the village cobbler, Sarah continued to climb the hills, the Trevor rocks, and the precipices on the Eglwyseg mountains. Her attraction to heights accompanied her fear that she might be tempted to leap. Each time, she went grimly aloft to experience the possibility of a fall.

  Often, on the road back to Plas Newydd, they would wave to their neighbours, Matthew the miller, the weaver Robert, the coal dealer John Williams, but never, in that first year, did they stop to speak. To the villagers, who gossiped a great deal about them over their beers at the Hand, they were the Vale Ladies who did not, oddly, indulge themselves like other gentry at gaming tables, at country balls, and race-meetings. They seemed indifferent to summer visits to Llangammarch or Llanwrtyd Wells, the popular watering places. Wherever they walked they were observed: on the hills like two stout black sheep, on the streets, at the ruins and the rocks. To their neighbours, they seemed to be one person endowed with more than the usual number of appendages and heads, peculiarly garbed in their habits and high hats, conspicuously together.

  In season they stopped to watch young children picking stray white wool out of the brambles. At first, they attended the dipping and shearing of their own beloved sheep. The farmer David Morris drove their animals to his dipping vats. They would follow behind to witness the annual process, empathising with Patience and Hope and the others as they were held, painfully Sarah was sure, under their tender front legs and lowered into the vats.

  ‘Oh poor Charity,’ Sarah cried in her anguish.

  ‘It bothers them not a bit, ma’am,’ David Morris assured her. So tenderhearted was she that Eleanor decided they would no longer watch the performance of the cruel acts.

  Curiously, Eleanor sometimes took pleasure in inducing Sarah’s fright. One evening, in the middle of summer, Mary-Caryll served them cabbage soup, hot bread, asparagus in butter sauce, salmon pie, and cranberry tart.

  ‘Shall we make a circuit of the Place?’ Sarah asked. She wanted to make Eleanor exercise after the heavy dinner in order to reduce the weight she was so evidently taking on. They started out along the brook to the Pengwern woods, deciding to return in time to watch the sun dip behind their chimneys and into the horizon, leaving their beloved Place in romantic rose, and then grey, shadow. As was their custom, Eleanor entertained Sarah with an anecdote from her memory as they made their way through the dying light.

  ‘Do you remember hearing of Mrs French?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘An extraordinary story. She lived at Peterswell, and was, I think, a second cousin to Sir Jonah Barrington.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  Eleanor laughed. ‘When you hear this story you will be very glad I did not.’

  ‘Continue, please,’ said Sarah, watching the declining sun intently.

  ‘Well, she was a strong-minded woman who understood the obligation of gentry to instruct the serving class in their duties. A farmer who raised sheep for a neighbouring lord had been insolent to her when she demanded a ewe of him for her table. The farmer claimed the ewe in question was his, not his master’s. In an angry mood, Mrs French drove on to her orchard, where her gardener was pruning cherry trees. To him she poured out the story of the rude farmer.’

  ‘Why? Did she have no one in her house to vent her anger to?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Eleanor impatiently. ‘She was a widow, I think.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Well, however it was, the gardener took it that he might expect preferment of some kind if he acted on behalf of his mistress. His pruning shears under his arm, he ran all the way to the field in which the farmer was tending his sheep. Coming upon the farmer from behind, he was swift to act. He clipped off his ears. The dripping appendages fell to the ground and the farmer ran screaming to his cottage. The gardener gathered up the bloody ears in his glove, carried them carefully to Mrs French’s pantry, pushed the serving maid out of the way to search for a covered silver dish, laid them within, and then carried the dish proudly into his mistress’s parlour, where she was having tea.’

  Sarah was horrified. ‘What then, my love? Did she … lift the cover?’

  Eleanor laughed, a cruel sound to Sarah. ‘I don’t kn
ow anything more. That is all I have heard of the story.’

  Sarah shuddered. The Ladies turned back towards their house. So absorbed were they on the consequences of the story that they wandered without noticing into a field that was not their own. Suddenly Eleanor grabbed Sarah’s hand and began to pull her along. Over her shoulder, Sarah spied the bull that had activated Eleanor. Nothing in the world so frightened them as the prospect of a bull, even at a distance. Hand in hand they clumped heavily through the tall grass, not looking back, imagining as they went that they felt the hot red breath of the fearsome black animal on their necks.

  They spent hours of their evenings reading. Eleanor transcribed long passages into her day book. Sometimes she practised her harp, sometimes they played backgammon and kept their scores faithfully, although skill and luck were bestowed equally upon them. Sarah embroidered and wrote faithful letters to Mrs Tighe or to her father’s brother, with whom she had begun to correspond. (Passing through Llangollen one Easter season on his way to London, he had sent a polite inquiry about her health.) Eleanor’s harp made rough, twangy, rasping noises that Sarah claimed she enjoyed while she painted.

  Every evening before they retired, Eleanor recorded the state of their finances. She would put money into envelopes for the current, small bills to be dispensed when the creditors called at the kitchen door: ‘For the Corn Man.’ ‘For the Coal Man.’ ‘For the Butcher: our first year’s provision of pork.’ Relieved that they had once more cleared themselves in the district, she would shut the day book and reach for Sarah’s hand. Carrying their candle and a book they would go up the stairs and come to the room where, for them both, the most pleasurable hours of the day would begin. It was now nine o’clock.

  Settled into the New Bed, the moreen curtain drawn across its length, Tatters and Flirt drowsing on the flourished quilt at their feet, they are alone, within a silent house (Mary-Caryll is permitted to retire directly after supper is disposed of), in a vale isolated from the village: emigrants in a foreign state, far from what they regard as the common world. Here they are royalty, goddesses, elevated and aristocratic. They suspend all rules and relax into warm, loving chaos. Theirs is the lenity of illicit love. They provide their own sanctions for the singular acts they believe they have invented. In their enormous nightcaps, which they always wear to prevent toothache despite the fire burning in the grate and the thick grey carpet that warms the floor, they might appear, were they to be seen, as figures of fun, heavy Roman generals (Titus Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus) of the first century engaging in unlikely activities behind the heavy arras. In each other’s eyes, they are beautiful, elegant, graceful women, more desirable than other persons in the world of either sex. They believe they live on a higher plane and in a fuller life, committed to a more passionate engagement than any known to women before. They have discovered acts of tender mutual satisfaction that reduces them to languor and to sleep by midnight, in each other’s arms, exhausted and happy.

  ‘Madame de Sévigné has just such a bed, I have read,’ Eleanor tells Sarah soon after theirs was erected. She does not go on to say that she believes Madame de Sévigné, whose letters she is reading, had a passionate love for her daughter, Françoise, ‘the prettiest girl in France,’ the love-struck mother wrote. Twenty years younger than her mother, Françoise married a count, moved some distance away from Paris, and broke her mother’s heart.

  On days of constant rain they rose later and spent their morning before the library fire near the bookshelves they had had built to hold their growing (‘expensive’) collection. On such mornings Eleanor read La Nouvelle Héloise aloud, because she thought she saw in its eloquent pages a resemblance to their own lives, while Sarah worked her cross-stitch.

  Or: Eleanor entered in her day book, made by Sarah of mottled green boards and crimson leather spine and corners, their weekly accounts: ‘shoe bill (high): £4.4s’ ‘candles: 6s.4p.’ ‘Moses Jones gardener: 10s.’ ‘books: 14s.3p.’ ‘chimney sweep: 5s.’ ‘cheese maker: 8s.’ ‘meat: 12s.’

  Or: She wrote of the activities of the day past: ‘My love and I spent from 5 to 7 in the Shrubbery in the field endeavouring to talk and walk away our little Sorrows.’ The little sorrows she does not enumerate, they being well known to them both. Worst of them all are the migraines that plague her monthly, so that she stays in bed for two days, Sarah with her, bathing her forehead, purging her with emetics and laxatives, feeding her broth and milk toast. There are Sarah’s dreams and fantasies, which fail to be understood by Eleanor as real but that haunt poor Sarah for days after she has ‘seen’ them. There are Eleanor’s continuing worries about money. Or nagging creditors. Or, for Sarah, Eleanor’s increasingly bad temper. Or Sarah’s fright at bulls, cliffs, the river, the impending deaths of Frisk and Hope the lamb, the rough boys on the road, the cries of babies, the poisons possibly concealed in the cheeses they are sold, being buried alive. Or Sarah’s throat mucus and coughing that causes her voice, on occasion, to entirely disappear. Or Sarah’s withdrawal from Eleanor that always accompanies this loss, from the traffic of the house and garden, into the silent vault of her inner self. The sorrows mount and nag, but they are always seen as ‘little.’ Nothing can diminish the tie that binds them, the inexplicable love they share.

  When they cannot be out of doors they talk endlessly about their poverty and plot strategies to recover regular funds. They hope for Butler and Fownes generosity but are granted no sign of it. At times they allow themselves to speculate on prospective family deaths to rescue them from restraints upon their vision of life as they wish to live it, to free them from debts. Behind their talk, they hear loud, violent argument: Mary-Caryll fighting with tradesmen at the door. Once, it is with the fishmonger, who has come selling herring and oysters. The Ladies judge that the fisherman has asked too high a price for his wares. Mary-Caryll receives his quotation by beating him about the head until he lowers his price. Staunch Mary-Caryll understands well the restricted conditions under which they all live, so, acting always in their interests, she performs her loyal attacks upon those who would cheat them. As for herself, she asks no pay from her Ladies. Tradespeople fear her fists, so the day book is able to record prices lower than might be expected.

  On fine days, they gardened assiduously, instructing Moses Jones how to accomplish what they envisioned. Eleanor disliked him because he often broke in upon their talk without so much as an apology and always directed his questions to Sarah, whom he thought possessed all horticultural authority about the Place. They themselves planted and weeded, trimmed and picked, working from the Plan for the garden Sarah had drawn. The grounds began to take on the aspect of decorative art: hedges, gravelled walks, the gazebo and rustic sheds and benches, statues and water font, purloined stone by stone from the courtyard of Valle Crucis, little pools and garden beds hidden in the high shrubbery, which were Sarah’s greatest love.

  At first they were able to hire only one gardener. Mary-Caryll had no assistance for two years. She went to the market, oiled the fine-carved oak furniture, beat and swept the rugs, and brushed and repaired her Ladies’ habits and their beaver hats, which hard wear and worse weather had reduced almost to shreds. She fed the animals, built fires in every room, and heated water for their baths. Later, after the cow Margaret (named by Eleanor for her mild sister) was sent to them, she did the milking, made the butter, and sold the excess to her friend at The Hand, keeping the returns (with the Ladies’ consent) for her savings. She slept well after her sixteen hours of hard labour, and grew heavier and more muscular each year.

  Before the Ladies sleep, they fall into the habit of inserting into their ears balls of brown paper. Eleanor has heard, and now believes, that the practise will ward off deafness.

  Eleanor enters into her diary an extract from Madame de Sévigné’s letter to her married daughter:

  I have seated myself to write to you, at the end of this shady little walk which you love, upon a mossy bank where I have so often seen you lying. But, mon Dieu
! where have I not seen you here? and how these memories grieve my heart! There is no place, no spot,—either in the house or in the church, in the country or in the garden,—where I have not seen you. Everything brings some memory to mind; and whatever it may be, it makes my heart ache. I see you; you are present to me. I think of everything and think again. My brain and heart grow confused. But in vain I turn—in vain I look for you: that dear child whom I passionately love is two hundred leagues distant from me. I have her no more; and then I weep and cannot cease. My love, that is weakness; but as for me, I do not know how to be strong against a feeling so powerful and so natural.

  They acquire Jersey hens for whom they build a coop. They plant melon and mushroom beds, and many asparagus plants. A small stable is built by the joiner to house their cob. They put in a rose garden and holly bushes. Later, they come to think, the gardens must be both beautiful and useful. ‘We will have a show place from which we can also eat,’ says Eleanor, and so they proceed to build it. Now they eat very well: boiled chicken on Sundays as well as on Irish and Welsh holidays and feast days, new-laid eggs, ham they have cured themselves, and mutton from village sheep because they cannot bring themselves to slaughter their own.

  Sarah writes to her father’s brother, Lord Bessborough: ‘I would not intrude upon your attention were it not that we are entirely without money. Had my father survived I cannot help but think he would not have had his daughter in such straits.’