The Ladies
Page 18
Upon his death, a Liverpool cotton merchant, Mr G. H. Robertson, bought Plas Newydd and increased its grandeur. He built two reception rooms, halls, bedrooms, and four bathrooms. Now it had become the mansion Eleanor had always thought it to be. In 1910 Robertson retired and sold the place to a man from Lincolnshire, who lived there until after the First World War. He found it hard to maintain the gardens. When the ‘New’ gazebo overlooking Hill Road fell into disrepair he had it taken down. Other buildings, the dairy, the bird cote, became rotten and were removed.
Then, for twelve years, Plas Newydd had what the Ladies would have considered fitting tenants. The Seventh Earl of Tamberville and his wife purchased it for use as a summer home. They made very few adjustments and occupied it only occasionally. When the Earl died, Llangollen’s town council, upon the advice of the Bureau of Tourists, acquired the Place. Advertised in brochures and fully described in travel magazines and newspapers, Plas Newydd joined Dinas Bras, Valle Crucis, St. Collen’s, and the Dee Bridge as a tourist attraction.
In the 1930s a stocky woman in her early seventies with grey close-cropped hair, Dr Mary Gordon, visited Dr Carl Jung in Bollingen, Switzerland. During the unburdening of her troubled spirit to the eminent psychoanalyst, Dr Gordon described a place in her girlhood she was dreaming about, almost to obsession: the ruins of the Valle Crucis Abbey. Dr Jung decided she should return to Llangollen as part of her treatment.
She followed his advice. Though she had not been to her home village in fifty-six years she found her way easily through its ‘sights’ and streets. One early evening she walked to Plas Newydd, which she did not remember having visited before. In the dusk she wandered through the gardens, searching for the custodian to admit her to the mansion.
When she found him, an old man in a worsted suit and cap, he stared at her in amazement. To set his mind at rest she thrust out her hand to him.
‘I am Doctor Gordon,’ she said. ‘I am hoping to be able to see the inside of the house.’
The custodian did not reply.
‘I am sorry. I must have startled you.’
Still he said nothing.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘For a moment there, ma’am, just for a moment, mind you, in the darkness and all, I took you for Lady Eleanor Butler.’
In 1936 Doctor Mary Gordon wrote a book about the Ladies. She said she had caught sight of them in their garden and had felt their presence in the State Bedroom. They were dressed in light-blue linen habits and fine muslin shirts. The three women, she reported, talked together until cockcrow. She saw that the Ladies’ spirits were still in residence, and she believed they intended to remain as long as a shell of their New Place stood, a tree to which they had nailed a motto remained, a single shapely shrub survived.
Dr Gordon’s book was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at their Hogarth Press in London.
The Ladies share a headstone, a four-sided, carved stone that rises above most of the other grave markers in St. Collen’s graveyard. On the stone, contrary to Dr Gordon’s prediction, these words are carved:
JOB: BUT THEY STILL SHALL NO MORE
RETURN TO THEIR HOUSE, NEITHER SHALL
THEIR PLACE KNOW THEM NO MORE.
Yaddo, Saratoga Springs.
Moody Beach, Maine.
Writers Workshop, Iowa City:
1981–1983.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For some facts and stories, which I have everywhere garbled, changed, or rearranged, I looked into the following books: The Hamwood Papers, edited by Mrs. G. H. Bell, and Cross Roads in Ireland by Padraic Colum, both volumes published in London by Macmillan in 1930. Chase of the Wild Goose by Mary Gordon, published by the Hogarth Press in 1936. The Land of Wales by Eilund and Peter Lewis, published in London in 1937 by B. T. Batsford. Mary Alden Hopkins’s Dr. Johnson’s Lichfield appeared in New York in 1952, published by Hastings House. The Ladies of Llangollen by Elizabeth Mavor, a most useful book, was published in London by Michael Joseph in 1971, and Wales, compiled by Jan Morris, a lovely small book by a veteran travel writer and resident of Wales, was published in 1982 by Oxford University Press.
The story of Mrs French and the farmer’s clipped ears is told in “The Tower” by William Butler Yeats.
About the Author
Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including Fifty Days of Solitude, Life in a Day, The Ladies, and Chamber Music, has been literary editor of the New Republic, a nonfiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1984 by Doris Grumbach
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7669-5
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