The Ladies (13 page)

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. Sarah 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, terriers, 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?'

‘Perhaps.'

‘And was she really a man wearing the clothing of a woman, do you suppose?'

‘Why should we suppose that? She was extraordinary because she combined womanliness with masculine accomplishments. Does that make her a man—or more a woman?'

Sarah was unable to reply to Eleanor's question. She was in tears.

‘Oh my dear. What
is
it?' Eleanor did not wait for an answer, indeed expected none. Sarah's crying spells had mysterious origins, rising out of the ground or from the shadows like the fair folk Twlwyth Teg. They lasted only a short time, and then dissipated into apology and regret. Never was she sure, yet Eleanor postulated the causes from her experience of them: sexual matters, especially those that contained confusion of sexes, reduced Sarah to tears. Animal suffering, dead birds and chipmunks and field mice. Eleanor's pain. Religious discussions. Unpleasantness of any sort in the household. The appearance of a hole at the bottom of a boot or walking shoe. Thoughts of death. Eleanor kept a silent, annotated catalogue of such subjects so that she might recognize a new cause when it appeared or be prepared for the inevitable results of the old causes.