The Ladies (10 page)

Sarah, like Eleanor, had been entirely innocent of love. But she possessed a loving soul, a part of herself that seemed to float free of objects in search of a place to light ever since the time of her early losses. With relief and instant recognition she had settled her love on Eleanor. Her confusion had not been allayed by this act: What did this alliance
mean?
she wondered. How did it fit into the patterns of conduct taught and demonstrated to her by Miss Parke, by Lady Betty, by Mrs Tighe? How did it look to them? To the world?

In the evening before their departure from the Ellesmere Inn, as they sit opposite each other, holding each other's hands tightly and contemplating their future, Sarah is able to suspend her doubts. It is a time of rare wordless understanding. Their hearts are full. They feel that their bodies have lost their distinguishing marks and become one. Eleanor sighs with contentment and tightens her fingers over Sarah's. A fantasy of the heart arises in their breasts, a vision entirely without sexual topography, a landscape composed of themselves floating free of bodily organs, a place without persons where what they feel for each other, like a yellow mist, like a warm fog, flows over the glowing interior of their land.

Sarah sits still, entranced. But Eleanor's pragmatic mind moves rapidly from epiphanic moments to decisions and plans.

Eleanor speaks: ‘When we settle, we must write a program for our lives. What we vow we shall do and what we know we shall not do. Surely we want none of the foolish comings and goings our families indulged in. What have we to do with such settlements down into ordinary life?'

Sarah wonders: ‘Shall we promise never to leave our cottage, when we have found it, except in each other's company?'

Eleanor says: ‘That is necessary, yes. And further, we'll vow not to stay a night under another's roof, once we are established under our own.'

Eleanor goes on: ‘We must improve ourselves.'

Sarah, surprised: ‘How?'

Eleanor: ‘We'll read together and talk with each other about what we have read. I shall keep a record of our reading and our opinions. We must cultivate languages so that our reading may widen: Italian, French, German. We must learn those languages together.'

Sarah says: ‘I want to make where we live beautiful. To plant something beautiful in every place our eyes light upon from our windows and along the borders of our place. We shall plant gracefully and with love. I want so much to have gardens, to nurture them, then to bring the results into our house as though there were no interruption between the outside and within.'

Sarah goes on: ‘What shall we do about the world outside?'

Eleanor, ponderously: ‘Eschew it and all its vanities. Those effeminate softnesses are not for us.'

Sarah: ‘We shall not go out into society?'

Eleanor: ‘No, we shall wait for society, if it so wishes, to come to us. And then we will welcome only those of high degree, and who will contribute to our self-improvement or our entertainment. Persons like ourselves.'

A long pause.

Then Sarah asks, timidly, almost whispering: ‘Are there other persons like ourselves?'

Eleanor, at once: ‘I speak of breeding and education, not … not anything else. As for that … I do not know. I have never met others. Or heard of them. Perhaps. We shall see.'

Eleanor continues: ‘When we are in full possession of our monies we must practice charity. In our retirement, we must perform the duties of our birth, even to foreigners, should we decide to live among them.'

Sarah: ‘And kind. We must always be kind. We must send for Mary-Caryll at once, else she will forget her intentions towards us and go into service elsewhere.'

Sarah goes on: ‘Painting, drawing, embroidery. I shall return to the practise of those arts which gave me such pleasure at school. And you must continue to write. Your letters to me at school were so fine. You must be our correspondent, and our diarist.'

Eleanor: ‘Our retirement from the world will be rich and full, else we will look for other diversions and perhaps grow apart.'

Sarah: ‘Oh never, my love. That could never happen.'

Sarah hesitates, then continues: ‘We might make room each day for reading in the Gospels and the old books of Holy Writ.'

Eleanor: ‘No.'

Sarah: ‘Never, do you mean, my love? What then will be our guide in spiritual matters? “There shall be no authority except God's Will,” Saint Paul told the Romans.'

Eleanor: ‘We shall be our own guides. Our own wills have taken us this far. Church authority is best left for those weak enough to be bound by empty sacraments from priests, like my poor mother. They are not for us. Ours is … a new way. We need no one's approval. We'll not ask for a sacramental seal to our love. We shall make no explanations to anyone, no confessions, ask for no absolutions.'

Sarah: ‘No explanations?'

Eleanor: ‘None.'

PLAS NEWYDD: 1780–1790

Late the next day they came by stagecoach to the small village of Llangollen in the County Clwyd, a word they could spell but not, at first, pronounce. They took a room at The Hand, because they admired the two-storey grey stone public house and the view from their room of small houses of dark stone. Early in the morning they set out on foot to see the village and the surrounding country. Spanning the rushing River Dee were four Gothic arches of ancient stone, a warm-appearing solid bridge that suggested to them an unchanging reverberant past as they crossed, hand in hand. They climbed a conical hill until they arrived at the ruins of old Crow Castle. Beside the ruins ran a deeply wooded dingle and through it a rapid stream moved. They were alone at Castell Dinas Bran, as the place was named, so they took off their heavy shoes and bathed their feet in the cold water.

Beyond the ruins was heaped a long line of limestone rocks, so tempting to the foot that Sarah climbed them, holding her riding skirt in her hand. Eleanor stood at the bottom watching, enjoying the sight of her beloved friend stepping from crest to peak in long, graceful steps.

Arm in arm, they retraced their steps and then took the way along the canal towing-path out past a flagstone quarry until they came to mouldering church ruins, lying snug in a quiet and most beautiful dale. A small sign said this was Llan Eglewest Abbey. A villager gathering mushrooms along the sheepwalks and among the graves of long-dead Cistercian monks told them it was now called Valle Crucis and had been built around 1200.

‘How long have the monks been gone?' asked Eleanor.

‘Since King Henry took the gold and silver things and sent the monks no one knows where. Two hundred years ago maybe.'

The villager left with his basket full of soil-colored mushrooms. The Ladies rested, leaning upon the decaying broken stones, alone together in the silent courtyard of the abbey, in the shadow of the steep hill that rose above the monastery remains. The sentimental hearts of the two women were prone to emotional responses to ancient buildings in ruins, if not to the religious aura of the place. They kissed, a long, loving kiss, and then stood apart and looked at each other.

They walked back along the abbey road, their arms upon each other, moved by having witnessed the half-destroyed Gothic aspirations of monks. Re-crossing the beautiful old bridge, they followed cobbled Bridge Street to the Church of St. Collen, and stood back to admire its carved roof. The sacristan came out to tell them that it had been carried from the abbey and held aloft by Welshmen of great spiritual and physical gifts until it was placed upon the walls of the parish church.

Late in the day, as they walked south of the village on Hill Street, to visit Pengwern Hall, a deserted old mansion they had been told was picturesque, they came upon the cottage. No one seemed to occupy it. It stood in a vale from one side of which rose the blue Berwyn mountain dotted with sheep. A plain two-storey, square structure, its tile roof held five chimneys. The surface stone was whitewashed. The Ladies tried to look into the windows, but in the dying light they could see very little except that the rooms seemed empty of furnishings. One of the windows was broken. They thought, standing close, that they could hear the flap of bat wings.

‘Can this be the place?' Sarah asked. ‘Would we like it here?'

‘In this house? In this vale? I believe so. Let's inquire of the people in the village who own it and if it is available to rent.'

Mrs Edmunds of The Hand was a well of information. Recently widowed, she was lonely and loved to talk. Her monologues were filled with complaints as well as vivid descriptions of Llangollen sights. First, she bemoaned the absence of her husband and the difficulty of raising children and keeping an inn without a man to do the heavy work. Then she urged upon them a walk out Canal Road to the Tower. They ate their chops and goose tarts in silence, waiting patiently for the answer to their question about the cottage. ‘The Tower is twelve feet high and named Eliseg's Pillar,' Mrs Edmunds told them. ‘He was slain by Saxons in the seventh century and his father then erected it in his memory. I believe. It stands on a tumulus which may be his grave. We believe so.'

The Ladies were afraid to ask why the Saxons had committed the act, fearing the question would take the garrulous Mrs Edmunds too far from their original query. Finally, she came back to their subject. She recognised that her boarders were ladies of high degree, oddly clothed, it was true, but of a station well above the people of the village, or even of nearby Ruthin and Berwyn. True, it was strange that they were both without husbands: Were they spinster sisters, or congenial cousins? she wondered. But they clearly intended to be domiciled together, nonetheless, or they would not have inquired about the cottage. She acknowledged to herself that surely none of this concerned her. She gave them the name and location of the owner, and said she hoped they would stay on at The Hand until they found lodgings to rent, and not venture into the cold and unclean Lyons Inn across the road.

So they did. The summer months were spent awaiting or overseeing repairs and changes to the cottage. With Mr Edwards, the owner, a gruff and incommunicative old Welsh farmer who had retired to his daughter's cottage in Chirk, they settled upon a yearly rent of £22, and were granted permission to make extensive changes they themselves would pay for. At once a painter, a carpenter, and a joiner were hired. Eleanor drew plans for the improvements. A room, to serve as library, was to be added to the four already there. Water was to be brought into the kitchen from the hillside stream. Their dressing room upstairs was to be formed of the old nursery. The ‘state' bedchamber for their guests was to be widened, and a small maid's room constructed where open sheds now stood behind the kitchen. Chests and cabinets were ordered from the joiner, who would make them for the carpenter to decorate in their places. Mary-Caryll was on her way to Plas Newydd.

The Ladies were worn down from incessant travel, the emotional strain of their escapes, and by the constant worry over monies. Two years after their elopement, they and their maid Mary-Caryll, with all the heavy, ornamented carved oak furniture they had ordered in Oswestry, were moved into the cottage they named Plas Newydd, the New Place. It was the fall of 1780. Despite their weariness, their sense of their strange, unique mission buoyed them. Their apostolic zeal for a way of life they believed they had devised for the first time in the history of the world was very strong. As William Wordsworth, forty years later, was to write of them: They were about to ‘retire into notice.'

It was the first home the Ladies had ever had. For Eleanor, Kilkenny Castle was where she had waited impatiently to be grown enough to leave, even when she could not imagine how such a departure could be effected without ending in the novitiate or in marriage. At Woodstock Sarah had believed she held her room on Sir William's impatient sufferance. She was an orphan, at the mercy of those who lent her space, her room, her hiding places in the garden. But Plas Newydd was the place they had chosen to remake into their ideal of home. A cave of oak and stone, it was designed to safeguard the privity of their love.

During the first year of their residence no one visited Plas Newydd. This suited their desires exactly; they had promised to be alone with each other. Word of their flight and their occupancy at Llangollen had spread in English circles to which both families were connected, and to Ireland when Eleanor sent a beseeching letter for money to her mother and because Sarah maintained a lively correspondence with her cousin Julia Tighe. Travellers to Dublin and back to London who passed through Llangollen knew that the Ponsonby woman and the curious Lady of Ormonde lineage were there but did not venture to call, some of them out of reluctance to enter upon the embarrassing mystery of their lives.

It happened, by pure chance, that the Ladies had settled in a place likely to bring visitors to their door. The highway from London went north and west to Oxford and thence to Birmingham and on to Shrewsbury and Llangollen. The stage coach made a stately swath through Llangollen's small main street, depositing visitors to the outlying manors at The Hand or The Lion's Inn, and then went on to Holyhead, where a steamer carried the English travellers to Dublin. It returned with Irish gentry (in the main) on their way to stays among the social pleasures of London.

Quickly, the routine the Ladies had agreed upon was established. They never deviated: it was as though a single exception would shake the whole structure of their exceptional lives. They lived strictly and carefully, rarely leaving the Place. Mary-Caryll went to the market in the village less than a mile away, visiting the grocery lady, Mrs Parry the greengrocer, the baker, and the butcher. Sometimes she took the borrowed cob as far as Bryn Kivalt to the lady who sold cheese; astride the small horse she looked huge and brought smiles to the faces of villagers. The market men soon learned to fear her tart tongue and ready, rough hand. She was as large and as strong as any man in the village. She wished to be called Miss Mary, she informed them, and the tradesmen and farmers (from whom she obtained eggs, milk, cream, and buttermilk) were quick to obey. The man who brought beers and ales to The Hand remembered her well from her Irish employment.