The Ladies

by Doris Grumbach

  ‘They are gone,’ Sarah told Eleanor.

  ‘Dear Margaret too?’

  ‘Yes. She must not have been able to rise to her feet. She lies just where we last saw her when we visited this evening, her head resting on the barley we left for her.’

  ‘Poor, dear Margaret,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘May her soul rest in peace,’ said Mary-Caryll, struggling to her feet. Sarah gestured to Mary-Caryll, her fingers on her lips as she shook her head. Mary-Caryll understood her intent. Neither of them would tell Eleanor that the fire had consumed Margaret. There was nothing left of her except ash and bones, and burned hide, shrivelled, black and curled away to one side, like a stored carpet. Her great brown eyeballs had survived the holocaust in the dairy and rolled together near the door, two large marbles, close together and staring ahead towards the grove of beeches beyond the dairy door.

  The Ladies mourned Margaret’s passing for months. The Vicar of St. Collen’s, who came weekly to teach them Italian, was asked to remember her in his prayers from the altar. They neglected to tell him that ‘Margaret Ponsonby’ (Eleanor stopped short at appending her family name to the cow’s given name) was not a close relative of Sarah’s. The new cow, Julia, was returned to them by a neighbour and housed in a shed, temporarily, until the dairy could be rebuilt. But her fright was so great that she never again gave milk and had to be kept on, out of sentiment, as a pensioner rather than a producer. Mr Lewis raked up the site of the dairy, shovelling ‘the remains’ into a deep pit he had dug. Before he covered the hole with soil, he added to it a flat brown hat with a wide brim he had found in the bush beside the dairy’s back door. It was now scorched and rendered useless to anyone, he decided, by the thick layer of soot that covered it.

  John Edwards came to the back door to inform the Ladies of his father’s death and, almost in the next sentence, to tell them he wished to raise their rent three pence a quarter, bringing the total paid him each year to £12, 5s 9p.

  Eleanor was horrified. ‘He has seen all the improvements we have made. Do you think if we refuse he will terminate our lease?’

  Sarah reassured her that his father had always been fair to them and she believed the son would be too. ‘Let us pay it. Do not worry, my love.’

  Edwards was a young man, and patient. He expected the acclaimed Place they had created would soon be his. Were they not old women, especially the Lady? He confirmed their lease at the higher rental and agreed it would not change in the following ten years. Then he settled back to wait.

  Others came to call. As Eleanor’s sight failed, she enjoyed conversation more and more. But she stubbornly maintained her criteria for admission: manners and title. Sometime after the turn of the century a gentleman dressed in comfortable country walking breeches caught up with them as they made their way across the Dee to picnic at Castell Dinas Bran.

  ‘I am Mr Wordsworth of London, visiting with the Reverend Thomas Jones now retired from Oxfordshire to Llangollen. My wife and daughter are with him, walking ahead there. I am most honoured to encounter the famed Ladies of the Vale.’ He offered his hand.

  Eleanor did not notice it. She looked closely at him. ‘Are you by any chance the poet William Wordsworth?’

  ‘Madam, I am.’

  Eleanor tipped her hat solemnly towards him. ‘We are honoured. We have read your poetry together, often, in the evenings. Will you and your family come to luncheon tomorrow?’

  ‘Sadly, Lady Eleanor, we are travelling south early tomorrow morning.’

  Eleanor hesitated. ‘Well, then, today.’ Rarely did she change an invitation to suit the convenience of a prospective caller. But a poet …

  They all sat under the largest tree before the front door of Plas Newydd. To the tree was attached a painted board decorated with small daisies and violets. It read: Ecco! Caro Albergo. All around them, smaller trees bore other mottoes in Italian. Mr Wordsworth laughed a little with the Reverend Jones, who considered he too had been invited, at the elaborate sentimentality of the sayings. The poet promised the Ladies he would compose a sonnet for them after he departed. Perhaps they would be able to find phrases in it to transfer to their signs.

  Mr Jones was plump, his cheeks very ruddy, and he smiled constantly. Tufts of grey hair departed from his red skull at erratic angles. Eleanor was in a jovial mood and joked with Sarah about Mr Jones’s healthy appearance, ‘hardly suitable for one known as The Hermit of the Vale of Meditation.’ For so he had been introduced to them by Mr Wordsworth. Gentlemen both, they refrained from pointing out that the same might be said of corpulent Eleanor living in well-advertised ‘gentle poverty.’

  From Ruthin, William Wordsworth mailed the sonnet he had written. It was titled “To the Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss Ponsonby”:

  A stream, to mingle with your favourite Dee,

  Along the Vale of Meditation flows;

  So styled by those fierce Britons, pleased to see

  In Nature’s face the expression of repose;

  Or haply there some pious hermit chose

  To live and die, the peace of heaven his aim;

  To whom the wild sequestered region owes

  At this late day, its sanctifying name.

  Glyn Cafaillgaroch, in the Cambrian tongue,

  In ours, the Vale of Friendship, let this spot

  Be named; where, faithful to a low-roofed Cot

  On Deva’s banks, ye have abode so long;

  Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb,

  Even on this earth, above the reach of Time!

  Sarah thought it quite beautiful. Eleanor was furious when Sarah read it to her. ‘To call our house “a low-roofed cot!” Insulting. Inaccurate!’

  Sarah said: ‘It was for the rhyme, I believe, my dear one. The rest is very complimentary in the reference to my beloved Saint Collen, “the Vale of Friendship,” “Sisters in love”—I think that is lovely.’

  Eleanor muttered ‘low-roofed cot,’ and then said nothing else.

  The poet returned to Llangollen a number of times but never again managed to gain entrance to Lady Eleanor Butler.

  The Queen’s potter had no difficulty gaining an audience. For his gift, Josiah Wedgewood brought an Egyptian-black fruit bowl with elegant white cameos embossed on the sides. He limped along after the Ladies to explore all the exotic beauties of Plas Newydd. He explained he had been lame since a boyhood affliction of small pox. His father had died soon after, and so his son became a potter at that age. As he departed, he pleased the Ladies by asking them to visit his factory in Etruria, an invitation he extended to very few, he told them. They collected such invitations from important persons: Eleanor listed them at the back of her day book with directions about how to reach places. Of course, they never went.

  The gift pleased them more than anything. Eleanor had formed the habit of putting such presents on the long refectory table in the library. For each successive guest, the table was a stopping place on the tour of the house. Sarah, the guide since Eleanor had become uncertain of her footing, identified each one with the name of the donor, the occasion, the time of the visit. The Ladies had observed that the custom of displaying elaborate and expensive house presents generated more such offerings.

  Their incomes had increased. Mrs Tighe died of tuberculosis, leaving a substantial sum to Sarah, and Eleanor’s sister, killed in a carriage accident, increased her yearly gifts in her legacy. Their pensions were now paid regularly. At last they had become prosperous. Nonetheless, Eleanor’s fear of poverty grew with affluence. Her judgments on her guests depended on the generosity of their gifts; she had increased her admittance criteria to three.

  Some of the gifts: Lt. Colonel Arthur Wellesley, aide-de-camp to Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, brought magnificent book ends carved in bronze. Walter Scott (‘a lovely man,’ as Sarah described him in a letter, ‘who writes novels’) left a stuffed and mounted fox, killed during a hunt at his beloved Abbotford. It was distinguished by a handsome grey tail, erect and regal. Horace
Walpole placed on their table a tooled-leather copy of his The Castle of Otranto, suitably inscribed to his hostesses. The sculptor Anne Damer donated a study for a head of her grandfather, Lord Milton, and a small drawing by Cruikshank, the master under whom she had studied art.

  A letter comes from Anna Seward, now in her fifties, and, as usual, full of revealing autobiography: ‘I have found a beloved friend. I resist the idea because I remember how terrible it was when Honora Sneyd married. I may have told you, perhaps not, but once she was wooed by Major John Andre, who died so bravely in the Colonies’ War. How deeply was I a sufferer with Major André upon her marriage. We both lost her forever! My new attachment is a beautiful young woman who favours musk perfume, not unlike yours, my beloved Sarah. She is Elizabeth Cornwallis, whom I call Clarissa. Her parents are hard at work to persuade her to marry. But she refuses. Like my dear Vale friends, she despises society, loves reading, and favours the joys of solitude with me! Our friendship was inspired solely by my publications. Ours is a deep and loving friendship, although her parents forbid her my house. Our correspondence must be clandestine. I have not been too well this winter, the doctors are puzzled by my many symptoms and suggest it may be some form of scorbutic disorder. No doubt it will soon pass. I enclose with this letter a copy, made for me by Clarissa, of the fine review of my Poems and Other Utterances in Fortnightly and, so you may laugh, a vicious one by Horace Walpole, who says my poems contain “thoughts and phrases like my gowns, old remnants cut and turned.” Did you know that effeminate fop is related to the glorious and talented Anne Darner, who is now travelling Europe with Mrs Piozzi? I send my ardent love to my most precious friends in their sweet and Blessed Vale.’

  A letter comes from Harriet Bowdler, from Bath, addressed to Sarah as ‘My Dearest Angel!’ It concludes: ‘O that I cd shelter you in my arms and guard you from every danger. Fire. Wild villagers. Invaders into your privity. My peerless one, I feel for you even in your sacred Friendship. How terrible!’ Sarah shudders and destroys the letter before Eleanor can see it and ask that it be read to her.

  Servant problems plagued them. Early one September Eleanor persuaded Sarah to discharge the kitchen maid Betsy Haynes ‘for Idleness, dirt and Such a Tongue!’ The footman Edward Parry was sent away for making too free with the kitchen sherry. The gardener, Moses Jones, a source of irritation to Eleanor because he appeared to her to follow Sarah too closely as she directed him in his chores, was dismissed. In his place, Eleanor engaged a man-of-all-work, Simon, at a reduced wage, nine shillings the week. Now they had a worker who promised to do everything well, and failed to satisfy Eleanor in anything. Fourteen labourers now worked the farm, assisted with haymaking on the newly rented land, and tended the gardens. But these too were a transient source of help as Eleanor’s temper flared at the sight of a man resting or stopping to take a drink of water from the well. She would send Mary-Caryll to threaten him with dismissal, and then discharge him if she saw him resting again. The growing staff was expensive. Eleanor records in the day book: ‘Taxes on house, servants, dogs: £ 6, 6s. Income tax: £ 21, 6s. and 8p. Such an amount for the renegade Sir William Pitt to demand of two poor Ladies!’

  Prince Puckler Muskaus leaves his carriage at the Lion and comes on foot to call. When Eleanor hears his trade has gone to the inn she so dislikes, for no reason that Sarah has ever understood, she cuts the call short, and turns the confused prince out after an abbreviated walk about the vegetable garden. Then, a few months later, Mrs Edmunds sends her coachman to present the yearly bill for the Ladies’ use of her coach. Eleanor thinks it is excessive. She refuses to pay and sends the coachman away. Now the long relationship with Mrs Edmunds is over. Eleanor does not attend the funeral of her son Stanley, who has at last succumbed to a long series of mysterious illnesses. When the Ladies wish to travel abroad—very seldom now—they rent a chaise from a hostler at a new inn, The King’s.

  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.