The Ladies

by Doris Grumbach

  Eleanor waited at the door of the church, wearing her royal blue velvet habit and silk top hat, her only acknowledgement of the day. For the occasion, Sarah wore a gown, a bonnet, and shawl, although she knew Eleanor considered this an unworthy concession to parochial custom, a defection from their agreed-upon costume.

  Walking home together, Sarah attempted what she considered an appropriate topic for Sunday conversation: ‘I learned today that St. Collen never recovered from his guilt at having killed a man, even though his victim was a pagan. He resigned his post as abbot because more than anything he desired to attain the full peace of a recluse.’

  Eleanor celebrated the end of the weekly hour of their separation by being conciliatory. She was willing to listen.

  ‘We both understand that desire. We have felt it ourselves. Except these days we seem to achieve it less and less.’

  Sarah pressed on to complete her lesson in hagiology. She never gave up hope of finding a weak spot in Eleanor’s defense against the God that seemed so real and present to her.

  ‘He found a cave not far from here, the minister told us this morning, in a bank of the Dee. Now, no doubt, it is long since washed away and disappeared, carried off by the fast-flowing river.’

  Eleanor wanted the holy legend to be finished before they arrived at Plas Newydd and the chicken boiled in broth that Mary-Caryll had promised for their dinner. ‘And then?’ she asked, suggesting some urgency.

  ‘It is said he lived the rest of his life in that cave, many, many years. It was there that he wrestled with the Devil, the Power of Darkness, the awesome Lord of the Unknown.’

  ‘Did he win?’

  ‘Who can know? Only God, I believe, keeps account of those mortal battles.’

  ‘I suspect that, like most human battles, he may have been soundly defeated. Why else is the world so filled with misery and pain?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he is called a saint, which must signify that ultimately he won his private war against Satan.’

  ‘Perhaps. Did Mary-Caryll mention what greens she was preparing for dinner?’

  Sarah had grown used to Eleanor’s abrupt change of subject when the discusion was related to God. It no longer angered her. She went valiantly on, trying to complete today’s lesson to Eleanor: ‘We live here, in a village named for St. Collen. Llangollen means the land that surrounds the church of St. Collen, I believe. So his struggles may well be destined to be repeated in the lives of everyone living on his ground. Even on our small portion of it.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I don’t believe it is so.… Well, then. It might be asparagus. Yes,’ Eleanor said as she opened the gate and stepped back to allow Sarah passage ahead of her, ‘I remember now. She did say asparagus in butter sauce.’

  The odd thing about the delicate matter of belief that hung between the Ladies like a spider web, hardly tangible but still visible to them both, was Eleanor’s own set of convictions. The older she grew—she was now in her late fifties—the more she trusted the efficacy of magic. For the amelioration of her terrible headaches she believed in elephant’s hair laid upon her brow. Dried tiger’s feet, she thought, placed over the placenta, removed stomach ache. From a dealer in Edinburgh she ordered samples of exotic teeth: walrus, whale and seal dents, which she kept in a camphorated box and removed on the occasions of toothache. She had read that one or another of these, placed on the tongue, would communicate the great power of their beast to the sufferer’s pain.

  When Sarah turned to John Wesley’s theology, Eleanor countered with a dedication to Gothic matters. For some time she gave serious thought to the need of a tunnel under the full length of the house. At first it was a romantic concept. The possession of an underground passage gripped her imagination.

  ‘We can go from the library to the herb garden without once being seen.’

  ‘Why should we wish to?’ Sarah inquired.

  Eleanor had no ready reply. She abandoned her plan to have Mr Lewis and Mr Jones collaborate on digging and construction. Later on, during the blood-letting on the continent, when aristocrats were suffering violent fates, and Eleanor feared revolutionaries in the British Isles would catch the fires of rebellion, she again raised the subject of an underground tunnel. This time Sarah’s sympathy for the project was engaged. The two women often lay awake expecting the arrival of the French and Irish rabble at their door. An underground tunnel now appeared to be a necessity, a place in which they might escape the democrats intent on rape, pillage, and arson.

  But the idea of a passage, compelling as it was, fell before the estimate of its cost. Mr Jones said it was beyond his skills to accomplish, and Mr Lewis, who knew very well he could not make a tunnel, placed an impossible price, forty guineas, upon its accomplishment. Reluctantly Eleanor abandoned the plan.

  More: Eleanor ordered from her booksellers in France, in Scotland, in England, every volume they had on witchcraft and sorcery, on ghosts and haunted places. Each week, from first page to last, she read the Times, searching for stories of the occult and the supernatural. From that paper she cut a story of one Mr Weed, who retired to the Tower of Ludworth Castle in order to rid himself of the evil in him. Here, Eleanor decided with evidence provided her by other books on the subject, he might have offered sacrifices to the Devil, flagellated himself, and then collected the blood from his torn skin, which, during the ritual he performed each evening, he drank mixed with vinegar. It was, she had read, the form of a Red Mass.

  ‘If you are right, it is the Devil he is communicating with,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Perhaps so. But the newspaper says that after a few months in residence in the Tower he locked its door and threw the key from a window to the ground below.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘When the door was opened by his servitors to rescue him, he was not there.’

  ‘Not there? Gone, all of him?’

  ‘Everything. No one has explained it. My suspicion is his body was taken away by spirits conjured up during his Mass.’

  ‘Oh love, do you really believe that?’

  ‘Does it seem impossible to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My beloved, you have said you believe that Jesus was removed from his tomb by angels. Is that not more impossible?’

  Or:

  ‘I see here that a Sussex woman purports to lay eggs.’

  ‘Oh what foolishness,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Is it more foolish, do you think, than to claim to have borne a child without a father?’

  Sarah was aghast at the comparison: Our Lady who bore Our Lord and a mad vixen of a woman who claimed to be—a hen? She could not speak.

  Once, Eleanor hired Mr Lewis to drive The Hand’s chaise to Wrexham so that she and Sarah could watch a snake-charmer perform. Sarah went unwillingly, opposed to such exotic matters but bound to her friend by time and vow. Eleanor was delighted with the snake’s absolute obedience to the summons of the flute, its straight, upright body rising slowly, at a command, out of a jug, its wise eye and flickering tongue under perfect control.

  But the witchcraft and magic she so sought out finally came home to her, in Llangollen. Mrs Edmunds’s small son Stanley had begun to fail. After Eleanor had visited him in his bed at The Hand, she came out to tell Sarah that he looked to be almost a skeleton. They stood together in front of the inn, debating what might afflict the poor child. Mrs Edmunds spied them from an upper window and rushed down to speak to them.

  ‘We have seen your son,’ said Eleanor, using the royal plural, the pronoun she employed for all her experiences, and Sarah’s.

  Mrs Edmunds shrieked: ‘Shanette. It was Shanette.’

  ‘Who is Shanette?’

  ‘You must have seen her. She’s ninety-nine, they say, the oldest person in the parish. The beggar woman.’

  ‘I have seen her,’ said Sarah, careful not to add that Eleanor had told Shanette never to enter their gate again after she had come to the kitchen door and, in revenge for the meager tea she had been offere
d, scratched a five-pointed star into the fine new wood.

  ‘She begs for charity here every Sunday,’ said Mrs Edmunds, still at the top of her voice. ‘And feast days. She stands at the front and my lodgers are bothered. Six weeks past, I chased her off. As she went, little Stan ran across her path. She reached for him and caught him and turned him to her before I could be out to him. I saw her give him a long look, an evil look from those old yellow eyes she has. Next I know, poor Stan begins to wither away in his clothes there. Now he says nothing and hardly goes out. He droops and is so quiet and will not eat.’

  ‘She must be a witch,’ said Eleanor positively, delighted identification ringing in her voice. ‘Tell the carpenter the tale. Mr Jones and I have discussed such matters. He’ll know what to do.’

  Edward Jones did. He took a pin from the child’s pinafore. For nine days, mornings before sunrise and evenings after sunset, he came to The Hand, sought out little Stanley, held the pin over his head, and read a prayer of his own composition. Then he searched the village until he found the witch Shanette, who had made a shelter for herself under the far arch of the River Dee Bridge.

  ‘Kiss this,’ he commanded the old woman. She was delighted to obey, believing that he intended to inflict the pin upon some deserving victim. So she did as she was bid. Then the carpenter murmured ‘God Bless it’ nine times and returned it to the child’s clothing. The next time he had occasion he knocked on the kitchen door of Plas Newydd.

  ‘Little Stanley Edmunds is better,’ he told Mary-Caryll. ‘He is fatter now and always hungry. Please tell your mistress Lady Eleanor.’ He gave Mary-Caryll all the details of his curing method.

  The story was brought to Eleanor while she sat in the library bay window reading La Nouvelle Héloise. Sarah sat close to her, listening and netting a small purse for Mrs Tighe’s birthday.

  ‘Edward Jones has been, and says little Stanley Edmunds is recovered in health.’ She repeated the sentence twice before Eleanor looked up from her book.

  ‘So,’ said Eleanor. The single syllable was full of pleased complaisance. ‘Thank you for bringing the news.’

  Mary-Caryll went back to her butter making.

  Sarah said: ‘It was the prayers.’

  Eleanor smiled. ‘Perhaps. But far more powerful is a witch’s kiss. And the pin.’

  The day book: ‘My sweet love and I talked of Rousseau.’ A few days later: ‘From 12 to 3 I read Rousseau to my Beloved.’

  La Nouvelle Héloise was translated into English after its huge success in France, where five editions were issued from 1761 until the Revolution. It came to the Ladies’ library as a gift from Julia Tighe with the best of intentions: to provide Sarah, at least, with a model of true marital virtue. She could not have guessed that the Ladies would read the moral letters that composed the story in the light of their own lives. The tale of premarital love that turns into an example of marital virtue was seen by them as a rubric for their own situation, a reflection of the model society they believed they had created for themselves. In their minds, Rousseau had reinforced their illicit attachment to each other. They believed he was their author, their philosopher and guide, and that he may even have had their revolt against custom in mind when he created Julie d’Etange and Saint-Preur. Had they not discovered, like Rousseau, that virtue blossomed when persons dealt directly and simply with each other? Did not the young girl and her beloved tutor resemble the Ladies themselves when Julie, the redeemed sinner, lay dying because her tutor has been sent away? Was Saint-Preur not smuggled into her sickroom, where a superbly romantic and passionate reunion saved the dying girl? More than that, did the lovers not believe, indeed know, that they were not sinning because their love was both simple and natural, because in the eyes of God they were married? Were not their souls elevated beyond the common man’s ground by the beauty of the world they had constructed around them, where every vista raised the spirits to heights of metaphysical pleasure, each moment of delighted contemplation fed on the beauties of nature? In this way the Ladies talked on and on to each other of the novel they both so loved, and of themselves.

  La Nouvelle Héloise became their text, the homily for their days, their walks, their nights together. At first, the willingness of Julie to marry her father’s friend Wolmer after years of passionate love for Saint-Preur, had disturbed them. But they came to recognize that Wolmer’s was a great heart and mind, his the philosophy of the will directed to the higher good, trained to the acquisition of virtue.

  ‘How extraordinary it is. He knows full well that Julie has loved Saint-Preur and yet he is large-spirited enough to invite him to live with them, and to tutor their children.’

  ‘He believes he has remade Julie, stimulated her to innate goodness. He has a great faith in her new person, has he not?’

  Sarah wondered. How did Julie and Saint-Preur learn to control their passion for each other? By accepting Wolmer’s theorising? By example?

  She reread Julie’s last letter before her death. She asked Eleanor: ‘Does it not turn it all around, so that Wolmer’s lessons … are not entirely successful? Even, questionable in their ultimate effect?’

  But Eleanor was quite sure of the existence of human reform: ‘She is dying, of course, a wonderful end because her death results from saving her drowning child. She has said in other letters that in every respect her life is a happy one. She asks Saint-Preur to marry Claire, her widowed cousin, who loves him.’

  ‘Yes. But somehow, it seems, in her last moments, that her thoughts are with Saint-Preur rather than with her husband. All Wolmer has taught her has, somehow … fallen away.’

  Eleanor could not abandon her position. ‘We must understand the story in two ways. First, that true love, like Julie’s for Saint-Preur, like Wolmer’s for Julie and Claire’s for Saint Preur, like Héloise’s for Abelard … like ours, endures over all obstacles placed in its way by custom and rules. And then, that society’s views of true love are stiflingly narrow, and always in terms of marriage. A union of the highest virtue, of two lovers whose minds and bodies come together simply and directly in beautiful places is not necessarily marriage. Marriage is a tired name, a legality, an announcement, little more.’

  ‘What will we call what we have then?’

  ‘Natural love, my dearest. In Rousseau’s words.’

  Sarah turned her head away so Eleanor would not see the tears that rushed to her eyes. The splendour of their mutual desires, the sweetness of their companionship, the way the unimaginable had become ‘natural’: Sarah’s throat closed at the thought. Her tears flowed freely down her cheeks.

  They debated the implications of the novel as they walked their scrupulously raked stone paths, leaning together on each other’s arms, like two elderly theologians engaged in exegesis upon a sacred text. Briefly they rested on a bench placed strategically to afford a view of the brook on one side, and beyond that, their huge potato garden on the other.

  Mrs Tighe included in her letter to Sarah a detailed history of her neighbour, Mrs Long, who had been discovered by her husband to have been unfaithful with the minister of the local church. Sarah’s indignation could not be contained, ‘I think,’ she wrote to Mrs Tighe, ‘that a lady guilty of adultery should be branded with a great A on her forehead.’

  Eleanor told Sarah to add: ‘It is my opinion that such a woman should have her ring finger cut off.’

  Always they said yes to the requests for temporary haven from aristocrats escaping the retributive injustices of the rebelling French peasantry. Madame de Genlis and Mile d’Orleans stayed overnight at Plas Newydd, entertaining the Ladies at dinner with gruesome tales of trials by ruffians and imprisonment of their kin in the Bastille in the company of syphilitic prostitutes and street villains. Eleanor told the French ladies about the recent Dublin uprising that she thought might have been set off by the example of the revolution abroad. She was assured there was no comparison in brutality, viciousness, bloodshed, and terror.

  Invited to stay
on, Madame de Genlis refused. She had been driven to distraction, as she lay abed attempting to sleep on the first night, by the eerie moans of a harp, so successfully hidden from view that she could not find it to silence it. It twanged and sighed throughout the house the entire night. Next morning she packed her portmanteau and left for a village inn.

  In her fortnightly letter to Mrs. Tighe, Sarah wrote: ‘It is Democratic and French Principles alone—which began with removing their God and their King—from whence such Diabolical Acts can proceed.’

  Eleanor, the more conscious prose stylist of the Ladies, recorded her observations about rebellions in the two hemispheres: ‘Fatally spreads the pestilential taint of insubordinate principles.’

  When Anna Seward appeared at their door with no prior announcement of her intent to call, Eleanor sent Mary-Caryll to turn her away. So Miss Seward proceeded on to Lichfield, like Harriet Bowdler heartened by what she had glimpsed through the half-opened door: white-haired figures standing shoulder to shoulder peering from a side window. She was determined to return. By the next post she sent the Ladies a copy of Louisa: a Poetical Novel, her popular book now in its fourth edition. To the new edition had been added a frontispiece—a portrait of herself by George Romney. The tall, handsome, stern-faced woman the Ladies had glimpsed from the window had been metamorphosized by the romantic painter into a rosy, ringletted nubile young creature of sunny smiles and girlish countenance.

  Dutifully, the Ladies read Louisa and determined that it was indeed poetical. They marvelled that a woman, writing under the guise of a man, could achieve so high-minded and extravagantly romantic a novel. Penitent, Eleanor sent a thank-you letter to Miss Seward, acknowledging the receipt of ‘the beautiful story.’ Miss Seward responded by mentioning she would be leaving Edinburgh after a spring visit and returning for her summer stop in Bath. A somewhat circuitous path might bring her to Llangollen.

  ‘She must be wealthy,’ observed Eleanor. ‘All that traveling.’ And then she added, not so much a sequitur as a sudden idea: ‘Shall we invite her to visit?’