The Ladies

by Doris Grumbach

  Sarah’s extended abdomen was disguised by her skirt, Eleanor’s blind eyes had sunk into their sockets. The poet reported in a letter to John Lockhart: ‘Lady Eleanor is surprisingly preserved for her eighty-five years and Miss Ponsonby at sixty-nine is in unimpaired health.’ As they had always found it possible to do before, they had once again successfully disguised their true state of being from the world.

  Sarah does no more bookbinding, for her time is occupied with the comfort and care of her beloved friend. Now a Mr Price in Oswestry is entrusted with such work. For Eleanor’s eighty-sixth birthday Sarah has La Nouvelle Héloise rebound in an elaborate maroon velvet cover, with their initials combined and tooled into a single gold-leaf monogram on the front and back. Eleanor likes to hold it in her lap as she feels the fine covers, her thoughts often still on the intricacies and ambiguities of Rousseau’s message.

  Arthur Wellesley is welcomed by them both at the door. Eleanor takes care to address him by his new title, the Duke of Wellington. At dinner, she urges him to tell them his story of the last days of the war.

  ‘Fifteen thousand of my good men died there. When the surgeon’s report was brought to me at Waterloo I was sadder than I have ever been in my life before.’

  Later, he sits on the low flowering bank, deep in violets and ivy, while the Ladies sit near him on a bench made in the shape of a ship’s locker. Eleanor fingers her decorations as she listens, and Sarah cries softly. Tears run down the handsome, rugged face of the Duke of Wellington.

  Softened by their sympathy he goes on to tell them, in his curious, mumbling speech, about his childhood, about his mother’s view of him: ‘I was thought too ugly for the priesthood or politics and therefore fit food only for powder. I outlived the powder, strangely enough, and proceeded to advance rapidly through the ranks of the military. Early, I had proposed to myself that I would get into Fortune’s way, despite my mother’s poor opinion of me. You will recall that I foresaw that the Bonaparte system was doomed. I’m most grateful that I survived my mother’s prediction and lived to bring about its fall.’

  ‘As are we,’ murmured Eleanor, ignoring the clear evidence of the duke’s high self-esteem. The duke was touched. From London he sent the Ladies two finely carved heraldic lions, which they placed at the entrance to their house, two great, noble beasts, tamed, couchant, protecting the gravelled path that led into a formal garden. Eleanor loved the beasts because they reminded her of solitary childhood games at Kilkenny Castle. Often as she passed beside the new lions, she reached to stroke one between its ears, smiling to herself. Sarah never asked the source of her smile and Eleanor never explained. It was her secret not subject to their half-century habit of total communication with each other.

  When the New Place was theirs, they redid the downstairs rooms, lining the walls with carved oak, a decorative addition they believed enriched and strengthened them. The same heavy brown carvings were added to the hall and to the staircase. So pleased were they with the dim and romantic effect that they had workmen add dark wood panels to the porch. They ordered oaken canopies mounted outside over all the windows on the lower floor.

  Sarah wrote in the day book: ‘Recd from George Gordon Lord Byron a complimentary copy of The Corsair inscribed most agreeably to us.’

  Sir Walter Scott writes to John Lockhart of his visit: ‘I met them yet once again in their fowl yard, having only a few minutes in which to pay my respects. They were wearing heavy shoes and their usual men’s hats. Now they seem to totter about, their petticoats tucked up to avoid the chicken messes. At first glance they might have been taken to be a couple of crazy old sailors, but when closer to them you forget the curiosities they are and see only their kindnesses, and their great and endearing devotion to each other.’

  Forty-year-old Mrs Aphra Paulet had been recently widowed. She was childless and filled her empty days by painting romantic landscapes and pretty portraits of ladies holding their cherubic children. But she had grown tired of her lonely life. In the early days she had visited Plas Newydd a few times when Eleanor was still sighted and active and Sarah intent on carrying out her grand plans for the gardens. Mrs Paulet remained in correspondence with the Ladies, who, in the widow’s fond memory, had never aged or grown fat or become ill. To her mind theirs was the perfect existence. After a year without Mr Paulet she wrote to them:

  ‘I would very much like to make a third in your ideal ménage.’

  She went into great detail, listing her assets, both personal and financial, and expressing her willingness to sell the property left to her by her late husband in order to join them on an equal footing. She reminded them that her artistic talent would be of assistance to them:

  ‘I wd immortalize in water colours the wondrous surroundings you have created and transfer your distinguished visages onto canvas with oil. These are arts in which many have said I have no little ability.’

  Eleanor dictated a testy note to Mrs Paulet. And then, on second thought, she tore up the letter and never corresponded with the lady again.

  General Isaiah Yorke, a boy when the Ladies first came to Llangollen, remembered in years to come that Lady Eleanor’s jacket fronts were always stained by melted butter dropped from the crumpets he had been occasionally invited to share with her after he had run some errand or other, and that her decorations were showered with hair powder.

  Queen Charlotte sent a messenger over the New Holyhead Road to inquire if the Honorable Sarah Ponsonby could be persuaded to supply her with the plans of her ‘miniature estate,’ as she termed Plas Newydd. Sarah replied at once that she would be delighted to do so, but unfortunately, there were no complete plans, only sketches made over the years as the occasion required. These of course she would be honoured to send to Her Majesty.

  To Madame Louise, a French Carmelite (and aunt of the French monarch) Sarah sent a hand-embroidered satin portfolio. The gift was in response to an eloquent and most flattering letter from the royal nun defending the Ladies’ life of retirement against its critics, and assuring them that it bore a resemblance to her seclusion. ‘It matters not at all,’ she wrote, ‘whether such a life be led under religious or personal auspices.’

  An English novelist and economist, Miss Harriet Martineau, paid them a visit. In her diary, later published, she recorded her impression of two ‘ancient dames with rolled and powdered hair and the stately manners of the past century.’

  By the time Walter Scott recommended the novels of Jane Austin to their attention, Eleanor could not see to read them and Sarah was too impatient with the lady novelist’s subject matter to become interested in the stories. ‘They are all about marriage, and mothers and daughters,’ she told Eleanor. ‘Neither subject is of especial interest to us.’

  In the last years their wine bill was high because Eleanor hid her resentment against her bodily weakness in sips of wine and liqueurs throughout the day and evening. They continued to purchase many books, far more than they would ever read. Their plans became chaotic, their expenditures foolish. They ordered sheets of marble and strips of carved oak intended for further wall decoration of their house but never found the right place for any of it. They did many favours for friends: wrote letters of introduction, helped them to obtain curacies and pensions. After such services were rendered, Eleanor sat back to await the opportunity to request a return, in services or in gifts, for their kindnesses.

  Eleanor wrote for the last time in her day book on the evening before she went to Wrexham for the cataract cutting. She noted that it had been ‘a Silent, Pensive day.’ She said she was touched by ‘my sweet love’s affecting exclamations about my approaching trials.’ She composed an epigraph:

  Society is all but rude

  To this delicious solitude.

  1828: a cold and often fog-ridden winter. From January until March it snowed occasionally and then froze. There could be no walking about; the Ladies were imprisoned in their Place. The vicar sent to say he would not be able to continue the Latin lessons as
his knee had swelled from a fall on their path following his last visit. No visitors braved the bad roads. Eleanor grew quiet, even submissive, allowing Sarah to lead her through their rooms, to decide what their sedentary occupations would be, to choose their reading matter. Sometimes she nodded while Sarah read, at other times her mind strayed to worry about the security of her possessions.

  ‘Do you remember, my love, who borrowed our copy of Vathek? Has it been returned?’

  Dutifully, and to put her mind to rest, Sarah went in search of the William Beckford volume but was forced to report she could not find it. Eleanor was agitated. Sarah promised to continue to look on the following day, and Eleanor seemed content. She sat quietly, touching the Cross of St. Louis on her jacket, a book in her lap.

  Sarah went on with her reading although she felt Eleanor no longer listened. In the midst of Michael (left as a gift by an admirer of Mr Wordsworth’s poetry) Eleanor asked: ‘Are the doors well bolted?’ and then: ‘Do we expect dinner guests?’ Sarah reassured her of their safety and their seclusion.

  Now they received no one. It was Sarah’s decision to save what time they had for themselves and to spare Eleanor the indignity of witnesses to her infirmities. Only once, and unknown to them both, was their complete seclusion broken. The new owner of The Hand, Mrs Parker (the Edmunds had sold the inn and gone to live near Snowden) had a daughter May, a young woman ambitious to become a painter of portraits. Three times she had requested permission to ‘do’ the Ladies’ portraits. Sarah consulted Eleanor, who refused; she had always hated the thought of being ‘pictured.’ Now she was more adamant than ever.

  The sisters Hughes, friends of May Parker, did a strange thing to the Ladies, whom they had served so faithfully for so long. They smuggled the painter into the house and stationed her behind the drawn curtains of the library window. There she sat, drawing the heads and upper bodies of the Ladies as they sat at their desk, one’s hand resting upon the other’s.

  So, rendered by the brush of an untrained artist, posterity sees them: surrounded by books and all manner of small objects, their shoulders rounded as though they were each sheltering a secret inner core from common view. Sarah looks hard at Eleanor and Eleanor’s eyes are fixed ahead on vast, dark space.

  Eleanor died in her sleep, making no sign to Sarah, who slept undisturbed beside her. It was the twelfth of June, 1829.

  All the shops in Llangollen closed on the day of the funeral. Many of the villagers put on black clothes. The wagon that bore the coffin from Plas Newydd to the church was draped in black velvet and drawn by a pair of fine black horses. Lady Eleanor’s grandnephew, the Marquess of Ormonde and his wife, his five children, and Mrs Tighe’s daughter, Lady Carolyn Hamilton, were among the mourners. To the villagers who lined the streets to watch the procession pass, it seemed a royal occasion. A large bouquet of flowers from the Ladies’ garden, picked that morning by the Hughes sisters, lay upon the velvet covering to which was pinned the Ormonde crest.

  Sarah sat in the library while the body of her beloved friend was taken away. She was so overcome that the sisters Hughes, standing to each side of her, were unsure how to assist her.

  What she said to them was: ‘I wish to be helped to our bed.’

  Sarah did not attend the funeral, and so failed to witness the odd incident at graveside. A stray dog, whom no one present could identify and certainly, in its underfed and dishevelled state, no one wished to claim, stood among the mourners during the graveside ceremonies, and then followed them back to Plas Newydd. Next morning, Anna Hughes found him lying between the lions at the front door and led him around to the kitchen, where she fed him scraps. When Sarah resumed her short walks about the Place, he accompanied her. She named him Chance and treated him with respect because she had been told the story of his mysterious presence at St. Collen’s and decided he was the last one to see her beloved.

  For a new inhabitant of the Place, Chance rapidly became fiercely protective. Young Lewis Parker, about to leave for his school in September, came to ask Sarah if he might borrow a Latin dictionary. Sarah presented him with hers as a gift, keeping Eleanor’s for herself. But Chance would not permit it. He beleaguered the boy when he tried to leave, howled at his heels, and would not be quieted until the boy handed the book back to Sarah. Then Chance went to lie in his chosen spot on the doorstep. When school began Sarah sent the Dictionary to the village in Anna Hughes’ market basket, where it was dispatched in the mail coach to Lewis Parker.

  The Duke of Wellington, who was not able to be present for the funeral, wrote to inform Sarah that he had obtained for her an additional pension of £200 to compensate for the revenue lost to her upon Eleanor’s death.

  For the first time, Sarah felt no pleasure at the thought of additional income. She was, she wrote to Julia Tighe’s daughter, ‘waiting to be allowed to leave.’ She made her will, providing £24 a year for the Hughes sisters, and assigned the rest of her estate to the grandchildren of Lady Betty and Sir William Fownes. She bought no more books. Seated alone at their desk in the evenings, she reread the ones Eleanor had once read to her, hearing the beloved voice as her eyes passed over the words. She continued to be concerned about the well-being of their farm and the animals. She saw that the gardens were planted and weeded and that flowers were always in the house, the shrubberies shaped, the grass scythed. She oversaw the house cleaning, requiring of all the maids ‘perfect neatness,’ as she said. She was especially strict about the paths, insisting that the gravel be raked daily in careful, straight lines because, she said to the gardener, otherwise Eleanor might stumble.

  During the thirty months between Eleanor’s death and her own, Sarah was lonely but never alone. Her walks were companionable as she made her slow way, leaning on Eleanor’s silver-headed cane as though it were her arm, to all the places they had loved to see, looking down the vistas they had cherished. She relished her morning turns over the Dee Bridge and often paused to look down. No longer did she fear the rushing waters through the central arch. She hoped that her long dream of submersion would somehow become a reality, as real as she had thought it to be during their first strolls in Llangollen. And when she returned, walking with her beloved friend down the long line of cedars they had planted, the trees stood erect, not once bending in towards her, never again assailing her with threatening corporeal shapes. She talked to Eleanor, who was there beside her. She pointed out to her the glories of the bank of the Cuffleymen, she told her it would not be long before they would have fresh artichoke again and then they would share it, with melted butter.

  When she scolded the maids, her voice took on Eleanor’s imperious tones.

  She reassured Eleanor that she no longer needed to worry about the bell attached to her dead toe, for no longer did she fear being buried alive. She now wished so much for death that she did not need to be protected from any way that it might come to her. Many evenings she hung the aeolian harp in the window hidden by curtains. As she lay in their bed she listened with Eleanor’s ears to its throbbing tones.

  After a lifetime of crying at her fears and her life’s small tragedies, she never shed a tear again.

  Mornings before she arose, she listened for cuckoo and linnet and lark cries. When she identified them she asked Eleanor if she too did not hear the calls. She heard Eleanor’s replies, always knowing exactly what she said. When they sat together having their dinner (for Eleanor’s place was set, her chair drawn up to the table beside her own) Sarah watched for spilled food on her shirt front. With her own good eyes she saw the dear, blind face of her beloved. And because Eleanor had so hated it, she abandoned her Wesleyan dogma for a New faith, an ancient belief in the presence of her beloved.

  Sarah went on sharing her life with Lady Eleanor Butler for two years, until the dropsy, as the doctor diagnosed it, reached her heart, and she died. Eleanor’s arms were around her as she left her life behind. Her ears closed upon the sound of Eleanor’s voice assuring her that once again they would manage thei
r escape together, somehow: nothing, no one, would prevent them.

  The Ladies left Plas Newydd together. Sarah was beside Eleanor as they walked arm in arm along the gravelled path and straight down the aisle of cedar trees. They wore their newly made habits of fine white cloth. Their faces were set towards a New country.

  EPILOGUE

  After Sarah’s death, Robert Tighe came to settle her estate. The house and the beautiful grounds did not in the least interest him or stir his imagination. Furthermore, he regarded Wales as an outpost on the edge of civilisation. Nothing would persuade him to live and raise his sons in such a barbaric place, not even for part of the year. So he arranged with a land agent to sell the house for him.

  In six months it was bought by two New recluses (as the Ladies might have called them), Miss Amelia Lawley and Miss Charlotte Andrewes, who had lived in the village for some time. They made only one addition to the decor: a large stuffed bear (of which Sarah would surely have approved), which stood in the corner of the library until they died. The Place was bought by General Isaiah Yorke for the purpose of ‘restoring’ it. The entire front was redone in Elizabethan style, with oak strips covering the stone, thus burying the old beloved face of the house in dark gloom. General Yorke built a new wing at the back, changing the original form of the house. He constructed a New building, which he called the Hermitage, at the northwest end of the property.

  There he lived, turning the house itself into a museum of relics of the Ladies: Eleanor’s decorations, Chance’s collar, the lovespoons, two beaver hats, Eleanor’s telescope and Sarah’s kaleidoscope, the vast collection of labelled gifts, and furniture, including the New bed.