The Ladies (20 page)

Eleanor believes all tradesmen are scoundrels and all professional men villains. During each contact with joiners, carpenters, chimney sweeps, thatchers, tailors, the strains grow great and then the relationship snaps. Eleanor damns them to hell and then sends them away. Sarah waits a diplomatic length of time and intercedes. Often they are re-employed.

Finally, they decide to resume their subscription to the
General Evening Post,
for their curiosity about the doings of the London world cannot be satisfied in correspondence. They read a story worth cutting from the paper, and they paste it into the day book in order to preserve it:

‘It is reported that Anne Darner, the sculptress, second cousin to Horace Walpole, has been accused by Lord Derby of “liking her own sex in a criminal way.” The object of Mrs Darner's “unnatural affection” is said to be the comedienne Miss Farren. Lord Derby, claimed by an acquaintance to be the protector of the beautiful Miss Farren, has forbidden her to meet Mrs Darner again.'

Harriet Bowdler sees the same article. She writes to Sarah: ‘Few men know what real love is.'

Their days are filled with reading, walks, Sarah's knitting of stockings and gloves, and Eleanor's supervision of the bread baking and meat salting. Sarah does a great deal of sewing. She embroiders neckcloths and does gros and petit point for their chair seats. She stitches their initials on embroidered sheets and pillow cases. She re-binds their favourite books, tooling
EB
on the front leather cover,
SP
on the back. Eleanor oversees the milkings and churnings. She is the one courageous enough to wring the necks of turkeys when Mary-Caryll is ailing.

But there are moments when Eleanor's strength fails. A drunken man appears at the door, demanding food and money ‘for a pot.' Eleanor in terror flees. Sarah comes to the door and speaks kindly to the inebriate. He takes the sixpence she offers him, tips his cap, and reels away. Eleanor's fear of men has increased with her years. She imagines them hiding in the shrubbery, skulking about in their fields, in the doorways of the town. Sarah allows herself to show no outward sign of this phobia, but in her dreams …

‘Wake up, my love. You are having a nightmare.'

Sarah sat up in their bed, staring wildly around the room.

‘What were you dreaming?'

‘I was
not
dreaming. I was there, on the Danish coast. A cold rain was falling. I was walking through a high, black forest on a path lined with black cedars. Suddenly it was no longer cedars but tall men in mourning suits walking in unison, stamping and coughing as they walked. I was between the two solid columns, unable to break through at either side, long lines of men-trees on either side of me. It happened.'

‘All men, my love?'

Sarah was still engrossed in the reality of her vision. She lay back among the pillows and reached for Eleanor's hand.

‘How do you know when something is real and when it is a memory? Or a fear?'

‘I suppose you know when there is a transformation, when trees turn into men. That does not happen in the real world, on our walks, for instance, when cedars remain cedars.'

They lay close together. Eleanor held Sarah to her, stroking her hair.

‘Can you sleep now, my love? Is it all over?'

‘Yes. Most of it. The trees are gone.'

‘And the men?'

‘No.'

‘Sarah finishes a White Satin Lettercase with the Cyphers in gold and a border of Shades of Blue and Gold, the quilting White Silk, the Whole lined and bound with Pale Blue,' Eleanor reports in the day book.

Two boys are caught on the Ladies' side of the Cuffleymen. Sarah accosts them, Eleanor grabs one and strikes him across the face with her walking stick. ‘You have been stealing our strawberries,' she shouts. The one she beats is Mr Davis's son John, who runs home screaming to his father, his nose bloody, his eye closed from the blow. The other boy escapes. The Ladies go back to the house and report righteously to Mary-Caryll that they have caught the strawberry thieves.

Horrified, Mary-Caryll tells them
she
has picked the strawberries today as a surprise for their dinner.

Next day, Eleanor and Sarah walk to the village. At the Davis's door, Eleanor meets John's father. To Mr Davis she apologises. ‘We were wrong in suspecting the boys of taking our strawberries,' she says. She asks to see the boy, whose face is still badly bruised when he comes to the door. Eleanor puts a shilling into his hand and says she is sorry. Then the ladies turn away for their walk back to Plas Newydd.

They accumulated goods, rented land, fertile and abundant flower gardens, streams and paths, and notoriety. After 1800, their plan for bushes, trees, and flowers executed to their satisfaction, they concentrated on the ‘useful beauties' of vegetables and fruit. They raised animals for food and for sale at fairs, they bartered milk, butter, and cheese for services. They made money on their farm; Mary-Caryll added to her savings by selling her share of the produce to innkeepers in the village.

Their covenanted privacy had been invaded, not entirely without their complicity. In many ways these invasions were fortunate, for old age and worn custom had formed a crust over the passionate hunger of their earlier love, what Eleanor had once called ‘the sweet union of our hearts.' They had learned the lessons that made living together possible: to bear each other's failings with fortitude and to freely indulge their own without guilt. They grew more and more like each other, their faults became common to them both, their virtues a kind of mutual feast that they celebrated together.

The longer they lived together, the stronger became their resentment of the outside world, a shared sentiment that bound them even closer. They believed the world continued to be silently critical of them; to them, expressed cordiality covered a malignant curiosity. Paradoxically, the more visitors they received, the larger their correspondence grew, the more gifts arrived to fill the tables in the library and overflow into the hall—the more their faith in the good will of humanity diminished.

Sarah's suspicion, her nagging worry, was that the fates were trying to punish them, to bring them down. Eleanor accepted prosperity, fame (or notoriety), gifts, in an Olympian spirit, believing everything was her due, tribute to the innovations they had devised, the acknowledged superiority of their united personages.

Each year in late April, on the anniversary of their successful escape, it was their custom to examine seriously the quality of their present lives and to renew their vows. Always the ceremony, if indeed their perambulations could be called that, took place out of doors, surrounded by the gracious botanical world they had created. Seated among the crocuses and anemones on the bank of the Cuffleymen, beside the grove of birches, or walking the paths they had so carefully laid out, they talked of the past and the present, they reviewed their accomplishments and holdings. On that day their steps took them to every corner of their beloved property, to the drying green, to the mushroom hut and the fowl yard, to the bosky aviary and the kitchen gardens, and beyond to the wide, full vegetable fields now beginning to show their dark green shoots, to the orchard where stood the new rustic shed with thatched roof.

Their gardens and their lives had followed the pattern set down by Henry Phillips in his book, which they had almost memorised.
Shrubbery Historically and Botanically Treated
taught them that ‘Each walk should lead to some particular object.… The walker should be conducted in the most agreeable manner to each outlet and building of utility or pleasure.'

They made the complete Home Circuit, at each place of utility or pleasure stopping to remember the events of their past that had led so agreeably to the present: the meeting at Kilkenny Castle when Eleanor first looked upon the young face of Sarah Ponsonby and at once loved her, the day Sarah first spied the stalwart Eleanor Butler striding through the field at a distance and thought her to be the son of the house. They re-created the fateful first escape, the wondrous second one, the wandering year that in reality had been so terrible but now in memory was transformed into a series of pleasant, educational stops.

They promised each other to continue their studies in the next year: they would ask the vicar to teach them Latin. Sarah would work at greater accomplishment in her ‘decorative arts,' their reading would expand into modern English writers, perhaps even Laurence Sterne. They would reduce the three hours an evening Eleanor gave to correspondence now that her vision had begun to trouble her. ‘It must be saved, not wasted on others,' Sarah said. Eleanor agreed. They discussed their acquaintances (rarely did they think of them as friends with the exception of Mary-Caryll), those they would ‘admit' again and those they had excommunicated forever, reviewing them as if they were soldiers on parade ground being inspected for endurance, continuing interest, and contributions to their household. Some few were labelled ‘false and perfidious,' like those who, knowing no better, patronised The Hand, or others who were foolish enough to ask for the return of sums the Ladies had borrowed from them for some pressing purpose, like a meat or a bookseller's bill.

After the traditional walk and much talk, they always arrived at the moment of lustration in their lives: the wonder of finding and knowing each other, the still inexplicable miracle of their first love. They continued to be amazed at ‘how we knew,' ‘when we first thought,' how, from the limited possibilities their early existences had offered them, they had plucked their unique state of being that had coloured, shaped, and saved their lives, how they had realised a consummation granted to very few other women, they now were convinced.

In their own eyes they appeared as heroines of a great drama that had raised them above the ‘common' level. They had triumphed over society's failures of imagination, their lives were rich and varied, their fortunes increased by legacies, and there were occasional but still extraordinary moments of bliss behind the curtains of their Bed. At such times, even now, they felt themselves among the Immortals, two persons chosen from birth, they believed, to walk a higher way. They seemed to each other to be divine survivors, well beyond the confines of social rules, inhabitants of an ideal society, of a utopia composed of strange and lovely elements of their own invention. They had uncovered a lost continent on which they could live, in harmony, quite alone and together.

As late as 1825, and only in her memoirs, did Madame de Genlis put to paper her opinion, for posterity, of the Ladies: ‘Although to begin I found their way of life most impressive, even idyllic, I have come to think theirs is a wholly
mistaken
existence. I pity them greatly. Just as they will often drown out the comforting and
natural
sounds of night time with their odious harp, so they eliminate
natural
affections for other persons by their exclusive devotion to each other. Without children, without family ties, they are both victims of
l'exalte plus dangereuse de la tête et sensibilité!
How very sad! They are
chained
to each other forever!'

Before her death from gangrene, in 1807, Anna Seward had a serious falling out with Eleanor over a small matter of unreturned borrowed money. In her final letter, sent from Ghent before she succumbed to the scurvy she had been battling for some years, she told Sarah that she had come to dislike Eleanor's ‘harsh masculinity,' her violent and arrogant nature. She had begun to wonder why Sarah always acquiesced to her demands and to her terrible temper. ‘I do not pay her sufficient homage, I suppose,' wrote Anna, ‘and I make mistakes which offend her code of behaviour. I cannot seem to please her and I no longer have the wish or the strength to try. But you, my dearest Sarah, you have lighted every day of my last years with your sunny temperament. I will always cherish the sight of your Fairy Place in the Vale. While I am in France attempting a recovery I shall miss you.'

Anna Seward, consoled against her disease by copious potions of opium and brandy, died in a state of painless exultation. She was brought back to Lichfield and buried in the churchyard. Eleanor would not travel, so neither of the Ladies attended. Reports in the newspaper, which they read with interest and then cut and pasted into the day book, listed a Miss Ellen Corkerly among the mourners. She was reported to be the heiress to Miss Seward's entire estate.

Anna Seward left Sarah a mourning ring.

Word came to the Ladies that plans were being formulated to build a large cotton mill in the Dee Valley, only a mile or so from Plas Newydd. The news brought Eleanor to bed with severe migraine. Sarah sat with her, a day and two nights, ministering to her sickness. As the pain receded Eleanor was able to dictate a firm, commanding letter to Mr Thomas Jones, owner of the land on which the mill would stand, attacking the plans of the prospective mill proprietors. The very idea of a mill was destructive to the peace of their valley, she wrote. ‘Our quiet mansion's prospects would be destroyed, our precious retirement offended.' The health of all who lived adjacent to it was threatened. A new population of mill workers would be a danger to the morals of the village of Llangollen. Further, she wrote, ‘enough merioneth is already being manufactured in nearby towns, and small cloth in Ruthin to satisfy the needs of trade.' She urged Mr Jones to give careful thought to the matter of taxes and rates, which would rise to an insupportable degree. ‘Already, as you yourself must realise, they are sufficiently oppressive.'

Word of the letter, signed by both Ladies, reached the local newspaper, which reported, dramatically, that ‘the fair recluses of Llangollen are leaving the Valley because of the cotton mill to be put up close to their cherished abode.'

The invasion was prevented. Not so the projected construction of the New Road. It was Thomas Telford's plan to build a great highway from Holyhead on Holy Island over the high-walled Stanley Embankment and through Angelsey, across a suspension bridge over the Menai Strait to Bangor, thence south east to Corwen and Llangollen, south from there to Oswestry, to Shrewsbury, to Birmingham, and ultimately to London. Racing for time against the plans of a Mr Macadam for a similar enterprise, Mr Telford, a shepherd's son, began his Great Irish Road, as some called it, the Telford Way in others' words, the Holyhead Road as it finally came to be named.