The Ladies

by Doris Grumbach

  Five terrible days of uncertainty and fears passed at Woodstock. Then a messenger, the solicitor Edward Parke of Kilkenny (nephew to Sarah’s school mistress), brought word from Eleanor’s father: Lord Butler now acknowledged the inevitable. Eleanor could leave and go where she wished as long as she did not settle in Ireland. She could take the convent monies with her. He would send a small annuity when she was settled and could provide an address. There was one unalterable condition: she was never to seek to visit any member of the family or to communicate with them so long as she should live. Eleanor bowed her head at the absoluteness of the decree, and agreed.

  Lady Betty tried one final appeal to Sarah, for her conscience would not allow her to go off unwarned. While Eleanor rested one afternoon, she sought a private conference with her niece:

  ‘Your friend has a debauched mind,’ she told her. ‘You will never both be able to agree if you live together. Friendship needs to be based on virtue. Yours has no such foundation and will not, I am certain, last.’

  Sarah listened and made no reply.

  Lady Betty wrote to her daughter: ‘Anything said against Miss Butler is death to Sarah.’ And when Lady Betty retired in tears to her bedroom one evening, and Eleanor said she would take her evening walk, Sir William detained Sarah and tried one last time to make a difference in her decision. Awkwardly, heavily, he fell to his knees, his Bible in one hand. With the other he grabbed Sarah’s hand:

  ‘I will never more offend you. I will double the thirty-pound allowance you now receive, if you give up this mad enterprise. Oh Sarah’—he held out his Bible—‘I will never more offend you. I am sorry to have angered you, but I swear on this Holy Writ that it was not meant as you have taken it and understood it.’

  ‘Please, Uncle, please rise.’

  ‘It was my gallantry that you read as an annoyance.’ He did not get up.

  Sarah was silent. She withdrew her hand and left Sir William still on his knees. She went upstairs, where she found Eleanor, who was too concerned at Sarah’s being left alone with Sir William to walk very far from the house. Eleanor took Sarah into her arms. Sarah buried her face in the rough cloth of Eleanor’s riding jacket (for she had worn these clothes every day in expectation of their second flight) and cried.

  ‘If the whole world kneeled to me as Sir William has just done, I would not alter my intention to live and die with you,’ she said. Eleanor stroked Sarah’s hair from her wet face and kissed her on the mouth, sealing their mutual decision in a sacrament she knew the world would surely withhold from them.

  The Woodstock opposition could not withstand the surrender of the castle or the two women’s soundless but adamant resolution. More confused than convinced, the Fowneses gave in, made a promise to send £50 yearly to Sarah, and then retired to their rooms, upset and routed.

  To her daughter Lady Betty sent her daily note: ‘It is most extraordinary. God knows how it could be. Or how they will end.’

  On the twenty-second of April, at six in the morning, eighteen days after their first attempt to achieve their freedom, they leave again, but this time without hampering by difficult plans, darkness, and illness. They are accompanied by Mary-Caryll, who happily volunteers to carry their bags and Frisk as far as Waterford. It is a fine spring morning. For the last time, they pass through the hawthorn hedge and under the great trees. Overhead, hawks wind their slow, commanding way through a flock of starlings. Sarah looks back at the gardens she has loved, at peacocks making an early morning progress from their thicket, and then, she turns quickly ahead.

  Exhausted by the emotional turmoil of the past fortnight, Sir William stands at his upstairs window, watching them through half-opened eyes. They are laughing, they move rapidly along the road that curves past Woodstock toward Inistiogue. The sight of Eleanor’s dark male clothes and cap, the smiling Sarah, the laden-down bulk of the maid, offend his sight. He closes his eyes on the little procession and turns away. Lady Betty is seated at the other end of the room. She refuses to witness the departure and weeps quietly into her handkerchief.

  ‘Stop such silliness. We are well rid of her.’

  Lady Betty stares at him. ‘You … You …’ and then cannot bring herself to finish what she had in mind to say to him.

  ‘When that ungrateful Bruiser of a maid returns, dismiss her.’

  Lady Betty replies: ‘Oh yes. Of course, I had intended to do that.’

  ‘We are well rid of them all,’ he repeats and sits down heavily in his upholstered chair. His legs are painful, his head aches. He puts his foot on the high stool. ‘I feel my age today, Betty,’ he says.

  ‘It is time,’ she says, looking him directly in the eye.

  At Waterford they bid Mary-Caryll goodbye and promise to send for her when they are settled. She tells them: ‘I will then come fast, my Ladies.’ They pay the fifteen guineas for each passage, murmuring at the outlay from their capital, and sail across St. George’s Channel, safely avoiding the rude approaches of the American privateer, Paul Jones, landing at Milford Haven. They have decided they will travel north first, through Wales. They are sustained by the astonishing glory of each other’s loving company; their hearts are set on a journey that will bring them to the haven where they plan to spend the rest of their days savouring their curious union. Their destination, they believe, is London.

  Thirty days later, Sir William Fownes is stricken and starts to die. His doctors decide on bleeding until he is too weak to leave his bed. Leeches are placed on his chest, his arms and thighs and back, but the suppurating blisters raised by the cantharides cause him extreme pain. They cure nothing. He endures a week of such violence against his weakness. One night he wakes with the sense that half of him has died: speechless, blind, and paralyzed, his body is finally rid of its lubricious energies. By morning he is unconscious; he lies mercifully unaware of mortal deprivation. He does not hear Lady Betty praying at his bedside; he does not know of Death’s unwelcome arrival. Death, a libertine figure not unlike Sir William himself, claims the Squire and then, as though a high price had not already been paid for all the unnatural acts of the spring, he returns to Woodstock three weeks later to take weakened and bewildered Lady Betty. Woodstock is now without squire and lady, Mary-Caryll has gone to Ross to await the Ladies’ summons, and Sarah Ponsonby: where is she? Travelling the highways and towns of Wales with her beloved friend, gone from Woodstock forever.

  WALES: 1778–1780

  Later, when they were settled, the Ladies would refer to it pleasantly as their wanderjahr, forgetting to add how terrible it was. Like harassed gypsies they moved from place to place, pursued by fear of poverty, even destitution, hounded by their own troubled indecision and misgivings. Where should they settle? How could they afford the high cost of life in provincial English towns? In London? They travelled in slow stages, explored with distaste the outcroppings of coal at Carmarthen in south Wales, and then went north towards Birmingham. Each village and township was considered a possible stopping place. Each was marked in Eleanor’s travel book with a plus or minus sign, and then noted was the number of miles distant from London.

  Later they were to think it curious that they felt no desire to consider for their settlement the alien world of Wales. In their first contact, the people seemed to them uncouth, small, too dark. The coarse bracken and heavy heather on the hills looked inhospitable, the precipitous mountains uncultivated, rude. A friendly coach driver (was not everyone they met too friendly, they wondered, especially the members of the serving class?) proudly pointed out to them great mounds that appeared to crop out of the Pembrokeshire hills, cromlechs of great antiquity and inexplicable heathen significance. Many believed they were stone monuments to the ancient Welsh dead. He told them legends surrounding those still-haunted megaliths, some of whose blue stones arranged in circles, he said, had been carried by Welshmen to Stonehenge. For five days they walked and drove about the area, listening gravely to alarming druidic myths. Merlin, the natives claimed, had made these
stones dance and so ever after they were able to dance alone. The Ladies shuddered at the thought of a landscape so unreliable, so given to movement and impermanence, but they walked dutifully over the wet, windy hills and fields.

  They believed very little of what they heard. But they felt it urgent that they continue to move towards England, a fertile and pleasant place, they expected, where the tongue spoken was civilised and the weather less capricious and wild. These gregarious and brutish Welsh, leading superstitious lives on their unruly landscape, made them uneasy. Mountains infested by bog and mists, lowlands rutted by dark, wooded dingles, wild streams, rivers pouring down precipitous slopes like cataracts, depthless brooks: what could two gently reared Irish Ladies find among such violences to appeal to their cultivated sensibilities? In all that rugged wasteland and great-bouldered fierce countryside (for there seemed to be almost no cities), was there a haven for them?

  Finally they reached Birmingham and found a congenial inn. At once, Sarah sent word to Sir William and Lady Betty of their address, reminding them of the allowance due, for their funds had fallen low during their month of wandering. Eleanor made no effort to inform her relatives, remembering the demeaning terms of her promise.

  Comfortably lodged, but without presentable clothing, Eleanor decided they must find a tailor. Sarah wondered about the expenditure, but her companion told her they could no longer appear in public in their travel-worn and inappropriate clothing. A month had passed since their ‘elopement’ (as Mrs Tighe had named it to her Kilbride friends), or their ‘retirement’ as the Ladies themselves called the event from which they dated the beginning of their new lives. Eleanor still wore her borrowed men’s outer-garments and Sarah a gown she had donned on shipboard and for which she did not possess a change.

  They found a fine tailor, D. D. Sutton & Son Ltd., whose windows opened on High Street. It looked to be elegant, tasteful, and, no doubt, costly. Eleanor strode into the establishment first, Sarah a step behind. The proprietor, who introduced himself as Mr. Sutton the son, was well used to providing ladies with riding habits, worn by English gentry for travel by coach or horse. He greeted the two Ladies, heard their desires, and sent his sewing mistress into the disrobing room with them to take their measurements. While they were thus occupied, he set out on his broad display table the materials they might choose among. The sewing mistress fitted the Ladies for the full, plain long skirts and tight spencer jackets for which the Sutton tailors were noted. Then she suggested they step out to select their cloths.

  This enterprise was to be Eleanor’s, they had decided before entering the shop. Sarah agreed to wear whatever Eleanor chose for her, for it was clear from the first that Eleanor wished them both to have the same materials.

  Eleanor said: ‘We shall require habits and all the accoutrements. Do you provide shirts and stocks, such things?’

  ‘For ladies? No, my lady, but there is a fine ladies’ place a square distant from here that—’

  ‘No matter. We prefer those made for men, in suitable sizes, of course,’ said Eleanor firmly.

  ‘For ladies, yes. Of course,’ said Mr Sutton the son, sounding dubious.

  He gestured the Ladies back into the disrobing room. They donned plain and ruffled shirts and tried stocks and ascot neck scarfs of a variety and size suitable ordinarily to male anatomy. The sewing mistress, mystified but agreeable, made the necessary adjustments. When they returned, Mr Sutton wished to know their preference in cloth for the habits. They looked carefully over his thick bolts of black, blue, deep green, and russet worsteds, rough woollens, and fine velvets, fingering each one carefully.

  Then Eleanor told Mr Sutton: ‘We will have three for each of us, four in this dark blue material, two in black velvet.’

  ‘Six, do you mean, my lady?’

  ‘Six, yes. And we require cloaks, in black, of this smooth Irish tweed cloth.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, indeed. It will take some time, but …’

  ‘We are in no hurry except for the first sets of clothes, which we shall require when we travel soon from Birmingham. Those you may send to us at The Lark on Brewster street. We shall pay for all the work in advance. I trust you will send the remainder to us when we notify you of our permanent address.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Mr Sutton. His bland English face betrayed nothing of his delighted astonishment at the size of the order. Never before in his memory (and he intended to ask his father, now in retirement, if his memory contained any such a thing) had a lady ordered more than one set of travelling clothes at a time. These ladies were … well, indeed, they were … odd.

  ‘Riding gloves with gauntlets. Do you have those?’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed we do.’

  They each chose two pairs of fine leather gloves and then inspected Indian muslin cravats. Mr Sutton saw how things were progressing. This time he was better prepared to maintain a countenance that betrayed no surprise when Eleanor chose six for each of them. He offered them silver-tipped crops of excellent leather. They ordered two, smiling to each other at the useless but handsome acquisitions. They realized that to refuse the crops would reveal their true intentions. So they said nothing.

  They were being ushered across the sill of the shop when Eleanor remembered something more.

  ‘Hats,’ she said to Mr Sutton the son.

  ‘Hats, my lady? Of what variety?’

  ‘Top hats, of beaver or silk. Perhaps both.’

  A further half hour was spent discovering the Ladies’ sizes and fitting to their slender heads the hats made of curved brims and high round shining tops. Four such items of headwear were ordered, two in smooth brushed beaver, two in black silk. Once again they turned to the door.

  Two weeks were agreed upon as a reasonable time for the first delivery. Eleanor gave the tailor her name, preceded naturally by the title she was not entitled to, and Sarah’s, the Honorable Sarah Ponsonby. She paid from the purse that held their combined resources and they left Mr Sutton’s place, arm in arm, elated at their purchases, even though Sarah’s hands shook at the thought of their extravagance. For the moment Eleanor could not concern herself with the state of their finances, so pleased was she that they had found a comfortable and satisfying costume that they could wear on all occasions, suitable, and acceptable, she was sure, to the world at large. That they meant to expand this dress to morning, afternoon, and evening use while never mounting horse or entering carriage again (for Sarah was sick of travel and fully intended when they settled to stay still in that place forever) was not revealed to the tailor.

  They walked toward their inn. ‘Is it possible there will be word from Woodstock about my allowance?’ Sarah asked. Such an addition to their funds would go far toward mitigating the huge expenditure they had just so blithely made. Eleanor had never given the presence or absence of money a thought; she considered Sarah’s concern unworthy.

  A letter for Sarah waited at the innkeeper’s table, from Mrs Tighe:

  ‘Yr letter of July the twelfth arrived the day after my mother’s sad demise. I regret to inform you further that my father departed this life three weeks before my beloved mother. There can be no immediate thought of monies to you until the estate, devolving upon me and my children, is determined. Woodstock will be sold. I am sorry to send you this news, but of course you have chosen yr path and must now walk upon it. Obediently yrs. Julia Tighe.’

  They departed from Birmingham in their new clothes. Again they were in search of lodgings. They thought they might try a town on the English border, Shrewsbury in Shropshire, where, they had been told, society was warm towards Irish aristocracy. Soon after they arrived, Sarah thought to call upon Molly Hinton, who lived on High Street. She was an Irish acquaintance from Miss Parke’s, where she had been, as Sarah recalled, an excellent penman. Sarah was told at the door that her old acquaintance was not at home. She left a card. They waited but received no word in return. The Ladies decided to make a last try. This time they were met at the door by the mother of Molly
, who invited them in to tea and said her daughter had gone abroad to make the Tour with her great aunt Hinton. Then, somewhat abruptly, she asked if there was something she could do for Miss Sarah. The presence of Lady Eleanor and Sarah Ponsonby resplendent in royal blue velvet riding clothes and black silk beaver hats, and both clearly on foot, so stunned the mother of Sarah’s schoolmate that she was not able to summon her customary amiable manners. Sarah carried with her the small greyhound, who would not be quieted without a generous helping of tea cakes.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ said Sarah. ‘He is usually very well behaved.’

  Mrs Hinton made no reply. Her eyes strayed to the tall hats that the Ladies had removed and placed beside them on nearby chairs. The room in which they sat was very cold, there was no fire since no guests had been expected, yet it was October. How can it have grown so late in the year, so close to winter, Eleanor wondered, sipping her tea, feeling frantic now at not being settled anywhere. Sarah occupied herself by holding Frisk’s muzzle to keep him from the cake.

  ‘How are your parents?’ Mrs Hinton knew nothing about Sarah’s life but assumed a young woman of her age and social status must surely be endowed with at least one parent.

  ‘They are both dead,’ said Sarah politely.

  ‘Oh, I see. I am sorry. Under whose care do you live?’

  ‘In recent years with Sir William and Lady Betty Fownes of Woodstock. Sadly they are this spring deceased.’

  ‘That is sad. Will you remain in England or return to our dear country?’ Mrs Hinton’s conversation was pointedly directed to Sarah, nonplussed as she was by the unexplained presence of the lordly Lady Eleanor.

  ‘We are not sure. We are deciding upon a place to settle, a home, before the winter quite sets in.’ Sarah’s eyes sought Eleanor’s, asking her silently to intervene somehow in these explanations. Bored with Mrs Hinton, Eleanor sat in what seemed to Sarah to be disapproving silence.