The Ladies (19 page)

At one in the morning an unidentifiable cacophony awakened them. Eleanor thought she had forgotten to take down the harp. But then they realized it was the cows. They heard the heavy sounds of Mary-Caryll walking about downstairs and then her excited voice, full of the old Irish accents:

‘Something is on fire!'

Sarah helped Eleanor out of bed and covered her night dress with her cloak. In their bare feet they went downstairs.

‘Where is it? What is it?' cried Eleanor, angered by her inability to see out into the black night.

The sounds of high, bellowing grief reached them. They knew then what it was, where it was: the dairy was on fire. Sarah, the spryest of the three, put on her boots and started to run. Mary-Caryll helped Eleanor with hers and then took her elbow to guide her over the gravel path. Now the sky to the west was lit with yellow flame and the cold night air filled with the smell of sour, mortal smoke and the sounds of high terrified moans.

‘Margaret. Dear Margaret. Let us hurry, Mary.'

Sarah, running ahead, was almost knocked from the path by the new cow, Julia, rushing, blackened and crying, her head raised with terror. ‘Wait. Wait,' Sarah called to her, but Julia raced on, out into the field before the house.

The three women stood as close to the dairy as they could, held back by the heat and the smoke. The crying had stopped; the air was thick with the heavy odor of burnt hide. Sarah sobbed as she looked into the remains of the doorway. Eleanor's clouded eyes filled with tears. Mary-Caryll had fallen on her knees, crossed herself, and was saying the rosary to herself. But Sarah did not join her in prayer: Eleanor's scorn of such weakness had eaten away at her faith. As the fire died away the Ladies still stood, staring into the black remains of the three cows.

‘They are gone,' Sarah told Eleanor.

‘Dear Margaret too?'

‘Yes. She must not have been able to rise to her feet. She lies just where we last saw her when we visited this evening, her head resting on the barley we left for her.'

‘Poor, dear Margaret,' said Eleanor.

‘May her soul rest in peace,' said Mary-Caryll, struggling to her feet. Sarah gestured to Mary-Caryll, her fingers on her lips as she shook her head. Mary-Caryll understood her intent. Neither of them would tell Eleanor that the fire had consumed Margaret. There was nothing left of her except ash and bones, and burned hide, shrivelled, black and curled away to one side, like a stored carpet. Her great brown eyeballs had survived the holocaust in the dairy and rolled together near the door, two large marbles, close together and staring ahead towards the grove of beeches beyond the dairy door.

The Ladies mourned Margaret's passing for months. The Vicar of St. Collen's, who came weekly to teach them Italian, was asked to remember her in his prayers from the altar. They neglected to tell him that ‘Margaret Ponsonby' (Eleanor stopped short at appending
her
family name to the cow's given name) was not a close relative of Sarah's. The new cow, Julia, was returned to them by a neighbour and housed in a shed, temporarily, until the dairy could be rebuilt. But her fright was so great that she never again gave milk and had to be kept on, out of sentiment, as a pensioner rather than a producer. Mr Lewis raked up the site of the dairy, shovelling ‘the remains' into a deep pit he had dug. Before he covered the hole with soil, he added to it a flat brown hat with a wide brim he had found in the bush beside the dairy's back door. It was now scorched and rendered useless to anyone, he decided, by the thick layer of soot that covered it.

John Edwards came to the back door to inform the Ladies of his father's death and, almost in the next sentence, to tell them he wished to raise their rent three pence a quarter, bringing the total paid him each year to £12, 5s 9p.

Eleanor was horrified. ‘He has seen all the improvements we have made. Do you think if we refuse he will terminate our lease?'

Sarah reassured her that his father had always been fair to them and she believed the son would be too. ‘Let us pay it. Do not worry, my love.'

Edwards was a young man, and patient. He expected the acclaimed Place they had created would soon be his. Were they not old women, especially the Lady? He confirmed their lease at the higher rental and agreed it would not change in the following ten years. Then he settled back to wait.

Others came to call. As Eleanor's sight failed, she enjoyed conversation more and more. But she stubbornly maintained her criteria for admission: manners and title. Sometime after the turn of the century a gentleman dressed in comfortable country walking breeches caught up with them as they made their way across the Dee to picnic at Castell Dinas Bran.

‘I am Mr Wordsworth of London, visiting with the Reverend Thomas Jones now retired from Oxfordshire to Llangollen. My wife and daughter are with him, walking ahead there. I am most honoured to encounter the famed Ladies of the Vale.' He offered his hand.

Eleanor did not notice it. She looked closely at him. ‘Are you by any chance the poet William Wordsworth?'

‘Madam, I am.'

Eleanor tipped her hat solemnly towards him. ‘
We
are honoured. We have read your poetry together, often, in the evenings. Will you and your family come to luncheon tomorrow?'

‘Sadly, Lady Eleanor, we are travelling south early tomorrow morning.'

Eleanor hesitated. ‘Well, then, today.' Rarely did she change an invitation to suit the convenience of a prospective caller. But a poet …

They all sat under the largest tree before the front door of Plas Newydd. To the tree was attached a painted board decorated with small daisies and violets. It read:
Ecco! Caro Albergo.
All around them, smaller trees bore other mottoes in Italian. Mr Wordsworth laughed a little with the Reverend Jones, who considered he too had been invited, at the elaborate sentimentality of the sayings. The poet promised the Ladies he would compose a sonnet for them after he departed. Perhaps they would be able to find phrases in it to transfer to their signs.

Mr Jones was plump, his cheeks very ruddy, and he smiled constantly. Tufts of grey hair departed from his red skull at erratic angles. Eleanor was in a jovial mood and joked with Sarah about Mr Jones's healthy appearance, ‘hardly suitable for one known as The Hermit of the Vale of Meditation.' For so he had been introduced to them by Mr Wordsworth. Gentlemen both, they refrained from pointing out that the same might be said of corpulent Eleanor living in well-advertised ‘gentle poverty.'

From Ruthin, William Wordsworth mailed the sonnet he had written. It was titled “To the Lady E.B. and the Hon. Miss Ponsonby”:

A stream,
to mingle with your favourite Dee
,

Along the
Vale of Meditation
flows;

So styled by those fierce Britons, pleased to see

In Nature's face the expression of repose;

Or haply there some pious hermit chose

To live and die, the peace of heaven his aim;

To whom the wild sequestered region owes

At this late day, its sanctifying name.

Glyn Cafaillgaroch,
in the Cambrian tongue
,

In ours, the
Vale of Friendship,
let this spot

Be named; where, faithful to a low-roofed Cot

On Deva's banks, ye have abode so long;

Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb,

Even on this earth, above the reach of Time!

Sarah thought it quite beautiful. Eleanor was furious when Sarah read it to her. ‘To call our house “a low-roofed cot!” Insulting. Inaccurate!'

Sarah said: ‘It was for the rhyme, I believe, my dear one. The rest is very complimentary in the reference to my beloved Saint Collen, “the Vale of Friendship,” “Sisters in love”—I think that is lovely.'

Eleanor muttered ‘low-roofed cot,' and then said nothing else.

The poet returned to Llangollen a number of times but never again managed to gain entrance to Lady Eleanor Butler.

The Queen's potter had no difficulty gaining an audience. For his gift, Josiah Wedgewood brought an Egyptian-black fruit bowl with elegant white cameos embossed on the sides. He limped along after the Ladies to explore all the exotic beauties of Plas Newydd. He explained he had been lame since a boyhood affliction of small pox. His father had died soon after, and so his son became a potter at that age. As he departed, he pleased the Ladies by asking them to visit his factory in Etruria, an invitation he extended to very few, he told them. They collected such invitations from important persons: Eleanor listed them at the back of her day book with directions about how to reach places. Of course, they never went.

The gift pleased them more than anything. Eleanor had formed the habit of putting such presents on the long refectory table in the library. For each successive guest, the table was a stopping place on the tour of the house. Sarah, the guide since Eleanor had become uncertain of her footing, identified each one with the name of the donor, the occasion, the time of the visit. The Ladies had observed that the custom of displaying elaborate and expensive house presents generated more such offerings.

Their incomes had increased. Mrs Tighe died of tuberculosis, leaving a substantial sum to Sarah, and Eleanor's sister, killed in a carriage accident, increased her yearly gifts in her legacy. Their pensions were now paid regularly. At last they had become prosperous. Nonetheless, Eleanor's fear of poverty grew with affluence. Her judgments on her guests depended on the generosity of their gifts; she had increased her admittance criteria to three.

Some of the gifts: Lt. Colonel Arthur Wellesley, aide-de-camp to Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, brought magnificent book ends carved in bronze. Walter Scott (‘a lovely man,' as Sarah described him in a letter, ‘who writes novels') left a stuffed and mounted fox, killed during a hunt at his beloved Abbotford. It was distinguished by a handsome grey tail, erect and regal. Horace Walpole placed on their table a tooled-leather copy of his
The Castle of Otranto,
suitably inscribed to his hostesses. The sculptor Anne Damer donated a study for a head of her grandfather, Lord Milton, and a small drawing by Cruikshank, the master under whom she had studied art.

A letter comes from Anna Seward, now in her fifties, and, as usual, full of revealing autobiography: ‘I have found a beloved friend. I resist the idea because I remember how terrible it was when Honora Sneyd married. I may have told you, perhaps not, but once she was wooed by Major John Andre, who died so bravely in the Colonies' War. How deeply was I a sufferer with Major André upon her marriage. We both lost her forever! My new attachment is a beautiful young woman who favours musk perfume, not unlike yours, my beloved Sarah. She is Elizabeth Cornwallis, whom I call Clarissa. Her parents are hard at work to persuade her to marry. But she refuses. Like my dear Vale friends, she despises society, loves reading, and favours the joys of solitude with me! Our friendship was inspired solely by my publications. Ours is a deep and loving friendship, although her parents forbid her my house. Our correspondence must be clandestine. I have not been too well this winter, the doctors are puzzled by my many symptoms and suggest it may be some form of scorbutic disorder. No doubt it will soon pass. I enclose with this letter a copy, made for me by Clarissa, of the fine review of my
Poems and Other Utterances
in
Fortnightly
and, so you may laugh, a vicious one by Horace Walpole, who says my poems contain “thoughts and phrases like my gowns, old remnants cut and turned.” Did you know that effeminate fop is related to the glorious and talented Anne Darner, who is now travelling Europe with Mrs Piozzi? I send my ardent love to my most precious friends in their sweet and Blessed Vale.'

A letter comes from Harriet Bowdler, from Bath, addressed to Sarah as ‘My Dearest Angel!' It concludes: ‘O that I c
^d
shelter you in my arms and guard you from every danger. Fire. Wild villagers. Invaders into your privity. My peerless one, I feel for you even in your sacred Friendship. How terrible!' Sarah shudders and destroys the letter before Eleanor can see it and ask that it be read to her.

Servant problems plagued them. Early one September Eleanor persuaded Sarah to discharge the kitchen maid Betsy Haynes ‘for Idleness, dirt and Such a Tongue!' The footman Edward Parry was sent away for making too free with the kitchen sherry. The gardener, Moses Jones, a source of irritation to Eleanor because he appeared to her to follow Sarah too closely as she directed him in his chores, was dismissed. In his place, Eleanor engaged a man-of-all-work, Simon, at a reduced wage, nine shillings the week. Now they had a worker who promised to do everything well, and failed to satisfy Eleanor in anything. Fourteen labourers now worked the farm, assisted with haymaking on the newly rented land, and tended the gardens. But these too were a transient source of help as Eleanor's temper flared at the sight of a man resting or stopping to take a drink of water from the well. She would send Mary-Caryll to threaten him with dismissal, and then discharge him if she saw him resting again. The growing staff was expensive. Eleanor records in the day book: ‘Taxes on house, servants, dogs: £ 6, 6s. Income tax: £ 21, 6s. and 8p. Such an amount for the renegade Sir William Pitt to demand of two poor Ladies!'

Prince Puckler Muskaus leaves his carriage at the Lion and comes on foot to call. When Eleanor hears his trade has gone to the inn she so dislikes, for no reason that Sarah has ever understood, she cuts the call short, and turns the confused prince out after an abbreviated walk about the vegetable garden. Then, a few months later, Mrs Edmunds sends her coachman to present the yearly bill for the Ladies' use of her coach. Eleanor thinks it is excessive. She refuses to pay and sends the coachman away. Now the long relationship with Mrs Edmunds is over. Eleanor does not attend the funeral of her son Stanley, who has at last succumbed to a long series of mysterious illnesses. When the Ladies wish to travel abroad—very seldom now—they rent a chaise from a hostler at a new inn, The King's.