The Ladies (17 page)

‘Oh what foolishness,' said Sarah.

‘Is it more foolish, do you think, than to claim to have borne a child without a father?'

Sarah was aghast at the comparison: Our Lady who bore Our Lord and a mad vixen of a woman who claimed to be—a hen? She could not speak.

Once, Eleanor hired Mr Lewis to drive The Hand's chaise to Wrexham so that she and Sarah could watch a snake-charmer perform. Sarah went unwillingly, opposed to such exotic matters but bound to her friend by time and vow. Eleanor was delighted with the snake's absolute obedience to the summons of the flute, its straight, upright body rising slowly, at a command, out of a jug, its wise eye and flickering tongue under perfect control.

But the witchcraft and magic she so sought out finally came home to her, in Llangollen. Mrs Edmunds's small son Stanley had begun to fail. After Eleanor had visited him in his bed at The Hand, she came out to tell Sarah that he looked to be almost a skeleton. They stood together in front of the inn, debating what might afflict the poor child. Mrs Edmunds spied them from an upper window and rushed down to speak to them.

‘We have seen your son,' said Eleanor, using the royal plural, the pronoun she employed for all her experiences, and Sarah's.

Mrs Edmunds shrieked: ‘Shanette. It was Shanette.'

‘Who is Shanette?'

‘You must have seen her. She's ninety-nine, they say, the oldest person in the parish. The beggar woman.'

‘I have seen her,' said Sarah, careful not to add that Eleanor had told Shanette never to enter their gate again after she had come to the kitchen door and, in revenge for the meager tea she had been offered, scratched a five-pointed star into the fine new wood.

‘She begs for charity here every Sunday,' said Mrs Edmunds, still at the top of her voice. ‘And feast days. She stands at the front and my lodgers are bothered. Six weeks past, I chased her off. As she went, little Stan ran across her path. She reached for him and caught him and turned him to her before I could be out to him. I saw her give him a long look, an evil look from those old yellow eyes she has. Next I know, poor Stan begins to wither away in his clothes there. Now he says nothing and hardly goes out. He droops and is so quiet and will not eat.'

‘She must be a witch,' said Eleanor positively, delighted identification ringing in her voice. ‘Tell the carpenter the tale. Mr Jones and I have discussed such matters. He'll know what to do.'

Edward Jones did. He took a pin from the child's pinafore. For nine days, mornings before sunrise and evenings after sunset, he came to The Hand, sought out little Stanley, held the pin over his head, and read a prayer of his own composition. Then he searched the village until he found the witch Shanette, who had made a shelter for herself under the far arch of the River Dee Bridge.

‘Kiss this,' he commanded the old woman. She was delighted to obey, believing that he intended to inflict the pin upon some deserving victim. So she did as she was bid. Then the carpenter murmured ‘God Bless it' nine times and returned it to the child's clothing. The next time he had occasion he knocked on the kitchen door of Plas Newydd.

‘Little Stanley Edmunds is better,' he told Mary-Caryll. ‘He is fatter now and always hungry. Please tell your mistress Lady Eleanor.' He gave Mary-Caryll all the details of his curing method.

The story was brought to Eleanor while she sat in the library bay window reading
La Nouvelle Héloise.
Sarah sat close to her, listening and netting a small purse for Mrs Tighe's birthday.

‘Edward Jones has been, and says little Stanley Edmunds is recovered in health.' She repeated the sentence twice before Eleanor looked up from her book.

‘So,' said Eleanor. The single syllable was full of pleased complaisance. ‘Thank you for bringing the news.'

Mary-Caryll went back to her butter making.

Sarah said: ‘It was the prayers.'

Eleanor smiled. ‘Perhaps. But far more powerful is a witch's kiss. And the pin.'

The day book: ‘My sweet love and I talked of Rousseau.' A few days later: ‘From 12 to 3 I read Rousseau to my Beloved.'

La Nouvelle Héloise
was translated into English after its huge success in France, where five editions were issued from 1761 until the Revolution. It came to the Ladies' library as a gift from Julia Tighe with the best of intentions: to provide Sarah, at least, with a model of true marital virtue. She could not have guessed that the Ladies would read the moral letters that composed the story in the light of their own lives. The tale of premarital love that turns into an example of marital virtue was seen by them as a rubric for their own situation, a reflection of the model society they believed they had created for themselves. In their minds, Rousseau had reinforced their illicit attachment to each other. They believed he was their author, their philosopher and guide, and that he may even have had
their
revolt against custom in mind when he created Julie d'Etange and Saint-Preur. Had they not discovered, like Rousseau, that virtue blossomed when persons dealt directly and simply with each other? Did not the young girl and her beloved tutor resemble the Ladies themselves when Julie, the redeemed sinner, lay dying because her tutor has been sent away? Was Saint-Preur not smuggled into her sickroom, where a superbly romantic and passionate reunion saved the dying girl? More than that, did the lovers not believe, indeed
know,
that they were not sinning because their love was both simple and natural, because in the eyes of God they were married? Were not their souls elevated beyond the common man's ground by the beauty of the world they had constructed around them, where every vista raised the spirits to heights of metaphysical pleasure, each moment of delighted contemplation fed on the beauties of nature? In this way the Ladies talked on and on to each other of the novel they both so loved, and of themselves.

La Nouvelle Héloise
became their text, the homily for their days, their walks, their nights together. At first, the willingness of Julie to marry her father's friend Wolmer after years of passionate love for Saint-Preur, had disturbed them. But they came to recognize that Wolmer's was a great heart and mind, his the philosophy of the will directed to the higher good, trained to the acquisition of virtue.

‘How extraordinary it is. He knows full well that Julie has loved Saint-Preur and yet he is large-spirited enough to invite him to live with them, and to tutor their children.'

‘He believes he has remade Julie, stimulated her to innate goodness. He has a great faith in her new person, has he not?'

Sarah wondered. How did Julie and Saint-Preur learn to control their passion for each other? By accepting Wolmer's theorising? By example?

She reread Julie's last letter before her death. She asked Eleanor: ‘Does it not turn it all around, so that Wolmer's lessons … are not entirely successful? Even, questionable in their ultimate effect?'

But Eleanor was quite sure of the existence of human reform: ‘She is dying, of course, a wonderful end because her death results from saving her drowning child. She has said in other letters that in every respect her life is a happy one. She asks Saint-Preur to marry Claire, her widowed cousin, who loves him.'

‘Yes. But somehow, it seems, in her last moments, that her thoughts are with Saint-Preur rather than with her husband. All Wolmer has taught her has, somehow … fallen away.'

Eleanor could not abandon her position. ‘We must understand the story in two ways. First, that true love, like Julie's for Saint-Preur, like Wolmer's for Julie and Claire's for Saint Preur, like Héloise's for Abelard … like ours, endures over all obstacles placed in its way by custom and rules. And then, that society's views of true love are stiflingly narrow, and always in terms of marriage. A union of the highest virtue, of two lovers whose minds and bodies come together simply and directly in beautiful places is not necessarily marriage. Marriage is a tired name, a legality, an announcement, little more.'

‘What
will
we call what we have then?'

‘Natural love, my dearest. In Rousseau's words.'

Sarah turned her head away so Eleanor would not see the tears that rushed to her eyes. The splendour of their mutual desires, the sweetness of their companionship, the way the unimaginable had become ‘natural': Sarah's throat closed at the thought. Her tears flowed freely down her cheeks.

They debated the implications of the novel as they walked their scrupulously raked stone paths, leaning together on each other's arms, like two elderly theologians engaged in exegesis upon a sacred text. Briefly they rested on a bench placed strategically to afford a view of the brook on one side, and beyond that, their huge potato garden on the other.

Mrs Tighe included in her letter to Sarah a detailed history of her neighbour, Mrs Long, who had been discovered by her husband to have been unfaithful with the minister of the local church. Sarah's indignation could not be contained, ‘I think,' she wrote to Mrs Tighe, ‘that a lady guilty of adultery should be branded with a great
A
on her forehead.'

Eleanor told Sarah to add: ‘It is my opinion that such a woman should have her ring finger cut off.'

Always they said yes to the requests for temporary haven from aristocrats escaping the retributive injustices of the rebelling French peasantry. Madame de Genlis and Mile d'Orleans stayed overnight at Plas Newydd, entertaining the Ladies at dinner with gruesome tales of trials by ruffians and imprisonment of their kin in the Bastille in the company of syphilitic prostitutes and street villains. Eleanor told the French ladies about the recent Dublin uprising that she thought might have been set off by the example of the revolution abroad. She was assured there was no comparison in brutality, viciousness, bloodshed, and terror.

Invited to stay on, Madame de Genlis refused. She had been driven to distraction, as she lay abed attempting to sleep on the first night, by the eerie moans of a harp, so successfully hidden from view that she could not find it to silence it. It twanged and sighed throughout the house the entire night. Next morning she packed her portmanteau and left for a village inn.

In her fortnightly letter to Mrs. Tighe, Sarah wrote: ‘It is Democratic and French Principles alone—which began with removing their God and their King—from whence such Diabolical Acts can proceed.'

Eleanor, the more conscious prose stylist of the Ladies, recorded her observations about rebellions in the two hemispheres: ‘Fatally spreads the pestilential taint of insubordinate principles.'

When Anna Seward appeared at their door with no prior announcement of her intent to call, Eleanor sent Mary-Caryll to turn her away. So Miss Seward proceeded on to Lichfield, like Harriet Bowdler heartened by what she had glimpsed through the half-opened door: white-haired figures standing shoulder to shoulder peering from a side window. She was determined to return. By the next post she sent the Ladies a copy of
Louisa: a Poetical Novel,
her popular book now in its fourth edition. To the new edition had been added a frontispiece—a portrait of herself by George Romney. The tall, handsome, stern-faced woman the Ladies had glimpsed from the window had been metamorphosized by the romantic painter into a rosy, ringletted nubile young creature of sunny smiles and girlish countenance.

Dutifully, the Ladies read
Louisa
and determined that it was indeed poetical. They marvelled that a woman, writing under the guise of a man, could achieve so high-minded and extravagantly romantic a novel. Penitent, Eleanor sent a thank-you letter to Miss Seward, acknowledging the receipt of ‘the beautiful story.' Miss Seward responded by mentioning she would be leaving Edinburgh after a spring visit and returning for her summer stop in Bath. A somewhat circuitous path might bring her to Llangollen.

‘She must be wealthy,' observed Eleanor. ‘All that traveling.' And then she added, not so much a
sequitur
as a sudden idea: ‘Shall we invite her to visit?'

‘To stay the night, do you think?' Sarah asked.

‘All right. To stay the night.' It was the grand concession.

At three in the morning the three women were still in the landing sitting room, talking. For once Eleanor had not activated her aeolian harp, whose keening usually made visitors fearful that nocturnal spirits were howling for entry at the windows. A beneficent quiet in the house, the servants and animals long since bedded down, the dogs asleep at Sarah's feet, Anna Seward told the Ladies of her life.

She was born in the house in which she still resided, in Lichfield Close, a Tudor home of generous spaces and age-old gardens, a gift to her parents by the bishop at that time, her father's distant cousin. Until this year she had occupied the same nursery quarters that were hers, and her sister's, and foster sister's, as children. Upon her father's death (her mother had gone to her ‘eternal rest' five years earlier) she had moved into her parents' wing of the house, thus taking on ‘the feeling,' as she expressed it, with a smile, ‘of being my own mother and father.' In those elegant rooms she wrote her poetry and fiction, and read widely in books such as John Hawkesworth's
Almoran and Hamet
(‘What a beautiful story, how sublime its moral!' she told the Ladies). Many of her poems, she said, trying to suppress her evident pride, had been published in English newspapers and periodicals. At Lichfield Close she was thought to be a genius and was called ‘The Swan of Lichfield.'

‘And what of your sisters?' asked Eleanor.

‘My sister, also named Sarah, was my beloved. We shared everything and planned to spend our lives together, much as you have been fortunate enough to do.'

Eleanor interrupted the narrative to say: ‘We have
made
our fortune.'

‘But my heart was broken when my father announced she would marry a Mr Porter, a nondescript, pallid fellow who is the late Samuel Johnson's stepson. And poor Sarah
agreed.
'