The Ladies

by Doris Grumbach

  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.r />
  It was the anticipated passage of the Holyhead Road through their village to which the Ladies objected. The new turnpike would, they wrote in their long letter to the Times of London, ‘crowd their streets and make noisy progress across the historic bridge over the Dee, still considered one of the seven wonders of Cymru. Our valley wd be overrun with London-Dublin travellers who will not stop here to view the beauties that are here but will race through on fast and clattersome horses and chaises.’

  The Holyhead Road, carrying Royal Mail coaches, became a reality, moving closer each year to Llangollen. The new weaver, Mr Cuddy, Mr Parkes of The Lion’s, and other tradespeople to whom the Ladies were often in debt, came in a group to explain to Lady Eleanor and Miss Sarah the advantages of the road. A number of friends, among them Arthur Wellesley, Sir Walter Scott, Mrs Paulet, a painter in London, and the English actor Charles Matthews, wrote to tell them how much they looked forward to travelling to them when the new road reached their vale.

  For the first time in recent history, Eleanor changed her mind. To the Telford Road Construction Fund, established in each county that might be benefitted by the road, she sent a contribution of one pound.

  Mary-Caryll took sick during the haying season. Sarah sent one of the field men to the village for a messenger to be sent to the doctor in Wrexham. It was almost a week before one was able to come. By then it was too late. In the last months of her life Mary-Caryll was unable to walk, for she was afflicted with a crippling rheumatism. The big stalwart Molly was reduced to a joint-locked cripple. She remained in bed, on Eleanor’s theory that rest might ease her frozen joints. When the doctor arrived, her lungs had filled with liquid. Sarah stood at the door to her small room watching her struggle against drowning. When the doctor lowered her wrist to the bed and covered her face with a sheet, Sarah sobbed loudly. She touched the still warm hand with its swollen knotty places as though to comfort her during her journey away from them. Then she went to tell Eleanor, who sat in the sunny New window, mumbling angrily about ‘the idle, drunken gardener, Richard,’ whose absence from the little piece of garden she was able to see could only be explained, to her mind, in most denigratory terms.

  ‘Oh my love, she has left us. Our dearest friend is gone.’

  They sat together, comforting each other in their loss. Eleanor’s eyes, full of hot and painful tears, were fixed on the empty kitchen. Sarah cried copiously, her head on Eleanor’s shoulder. Miss Mary’s passing was mourned by the whole village. The Vicar of St. Collen’s agreed to hold the service for her funeral in his church, although he could not offer her the proper rites of her Church.

  Sarah and Eleanor followed the coffin, carried by The Lion’s wagon and driven by Mr Parkes, to the church. Then they stood at the graveside within the close of the church while the body of their friend was lowered into the grave by four of the farm help. The square plot of ground in which she lay had been purchased by the Ladies. Some day they would there be with her.

  The young Duke of Gloucester, the King’s nephew, was waiting on their doorstep when they arrived home from the funeral. Always before, he had been granted admission at any time of the day or night that he happened to be stopping in the neighbourhood or passing through to London. This time, they told him, they had no heart for company and turned him away. The duke expressed his sympathy and said he understood entirely and would call again.

  Inside the house, sounds of movement in the kitchen startled the Ladies. Sarah went to the back and found two acquaintances from the village, the two Hughes sisters, Anna and Helen, preparing their dinner.

  ‘How good of you,’ said Sarah. ‘We had not thought of dinner, but how kind of you to think of it.’

  The sisters smiled and went on with their cooking. Despite their grief the Ladies were able to eat heartily of the well-prepared dinner. With no prospects of their own, the Hughes sisters stayed on to take over Mary-Caryll’s duties.

  A month later, a bank officer from Aberystwyth called on the Ladies and presented them with an envelope. It contained bank notes, with heads of cattle printed upon them, in the amount of five thousand pounds: Mary-Caryll’s life savings. She had left everything she had so arduously saved to ‘my beloved Ladies, to make them both as safe as they have made me.’

  Saddened, astonished by the generous spirit from the grave of their friend, they believed they knew Mary-Caryll’s wish, without her having had to specify it. They sent Anna Hughes to fetch one of the Edwards. John came, looking very seedy and tired. His wife Jane ailed and was due to go to Bath for the ‘treatment of the waters,’ he said.

  Eleanor had no time for amenities or sympathy. Her eagerness was barely disguised. ‘Will you sell Plas Newydd to us?’ she asked, in a tone more commanding than interrogating.

  After many patient years, John Edwards was now ready to admit that the Ladies had outlived his expectations. Besides, there was the money to be raised for his wife’s cure and travel expenses.…

  ‘I will, m’lady.’

  ‘What price, Mr Edwards, will you demand of us?’

  Mr Edwards thought of the largest sum he could imagine, thinking of the cottage near him that had recently been sold for a thousand pounds and some.

  ‘Three thousand pounds, m’lady. Not a shilling less.’

  1819. So. After almost forty years, Plas Newydd was theirs. They wept when the paper was brought to them, cried in each others’ arms for the achievement of their dream to be secure and independent in their own Place. They wept for Miss Mary who had made it possible, and for themselves: who would be next to go, and how would the other survive the decimation?

  When Walter Scott visited in the early twenties, he found the Ladies much changed. Eleanor was very heavy and almost blind. Sarah had grown dropsical. To her waist she was gaunt, her neck full of strings, her arms thin as broomsticks. But below her waist a great swelling had grown, so wide, so thick, that her skirts had to be gusseted in each side by one of the Miss Hughes. Her legs were not subject to the swelling that afflicted her abdomen. But their greatest pleasure, walking, was now difficult for them. Sarah’s balance was affected; Eleanor’s eyesight was uncertain. Always now, Eleanor walked leaning upon a cane, which she moved a little above the ground now and then to be able to detect obstacles. Still, arduous as it was for them, they were to be seen by visitors and villagers moving slowly over the Pengwern foothills or picking their way carefully along the outskirts of their demesne, or seated on the bench that girdled the great trunk of an elm, resting in preparation for walking again.

  By 1821 Eleanor’s writing in her day book had become almost illegible. Doctor Lewes in Wrexham examined her eyes, and told her the cataract formed over the left eye should be cut.

  ‘Shall we have it done, my love?’ she asked Sarah, as though the operation involved a mutual eye. Sarah thought if there were a chance that sight might be restored, it should be.

  Eleanor told Dr Lewes she would submit to his knife. The day came, a bright, sunny, warm, late-spring day. Mr Parkes came for them and they set out in his chaise, dressed as they continued to be, even when their figures no longer suited the costume, in their riding habits, their cropped hair, still powdered despite their own white color, pushing out from beneath their well-worn, brushed beaver hats. During the long drive, Sarah held Eleanor’s hand tightly and prayed to herself: ‘Let nothing bad happen to my beloved, please, God.’ With her suppressed prayer, she formed a deep resolution: to do everything she could to survive Eleanor. Without her, she knew, Eleanor would be unbearably unhappy.

  The cataract cutting was brutal. Sarah sat outside waiting, covering her ears against the screams of pain. When it was over she led the shaking, bandaged Eleanor to the chaise and held her head to keep the eye from being jarred as they drove the miles to home. Eleanor went directly to bed and stayed supine for a week. Much of the time, Sarah stayed with her in bed, reading aloud and talking to her, easing her pain with cold cloths, whispering to her of the promise of full sight.

&nb
sp; When Eleanor could be up and walking the paths again, or sitting in the library window to feel the sun on her face, she refused to wear the blue eye shield recommended by Doctor Lewes. Instead she dressed as usual, pulling the short brim of her beaver hat down over her forehead to keep the light from her left eye. Outdoors she surrendered and covered her cut eye with a bandage against the bruising noon light.

  Two months after the operation the Ladies were compelled to make another trip to the surgeon, this time to question why the other eye had become strangely inflamed and painful. His examination confirmed Sarah’s fears. Her prayers had failed. Much sight in the cut eye was gone and, because of Eleanor’s age and the inflammation, there was little chance of saving the other.

  Leeches might be effective, the doctor thought, or if not, a second cutting. Returned to home, and Eleanor back in their bed, Sarah applied leeches to Eleanor’s temple, wiping away the blood that escaped the thirsty sucking of the insects. But under the treatment, the pain increased until Eleanor asked to be driven back to Wrexham. The second operation was worse—longer and more painful—than the first. Her convalescence extended into spring, preventing, for the first time in forty years, the celebration of their anniversary walk. But when she recovered and tried to walk the Home Circuit, when the perennial gardens began to flower and the grass was high enough to scythe and the orchard trees beginning to bud, it was found that Eleanor was totally blind.

  William Wordsworth stopped to visit. Sarah was afraid to agitate Eleanor by the knowledge of his presence. Sarah and the poet walked to the farm building and the New bird cote, which he asked especially to see, while Eleanor sat in the library. Sarah permitted him to leave with nothing more than the brave sight of her beloved, glimpsed through the bay window, seated and comfortable, lifting her sightless face towards the sun. On the left side of her jacket Wordsworth was able to see that she wore her Croix de St. Louis, now a part of her daily dress, Sarah told him, sent to her by the French king in recognition of her ardent support of the Bourbon regime. Beside it she wore a large, gleaming fleur-de-lis, a present from Madame de Genlis before that lady had sat down to write her Memoirs.