The Ladies (11 page)

‘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 sheep 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.

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 know 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.