The Ladies (21 page)

It was the anticipated passage of the Holyhead Road through their village to which the Ladies objected. The new turnpike would, they wrote in their long letter to the
Times
of London, ‘crowd their streets and make noisy progress across the historic bridge over the Dee, still considered one of the seven wonders of Cymru. Our valley w
^d
be overrun with London-Dublin travellers who will not stop here to view the beauties that are here but will race through on fast and clattersome horses and chaises.'

The Holyhead Road, carrying Royal Mail coaches, became a reality, moving closer each year to Llangollen. The new weaver, Mr Cuddy, Mr Parkes of The Lion's, and other tradespeople to whom the Ladies were often in debt, came in a group to explain to Lady Eleanor and Miss Sarah the advantages of the road. A number of friends, among them Arthur Wellesley, Sir Walter Scott, Mrs Paulet, a painter in London, and the English actor Charles Matthews, wrote to tell them how much they looked forward to travelling to them when the new road reached their vale.

For the first time in recent history, Eleanor changed her mind. To the Telford Road Construction Fund, established in each county that might be benefitted by the road, she sent a contribution of one pound.

Mary-Caryll took sick during the haying season. Sarah sent one of the field men to the village for a messenger to be sent to the doctor in Wrexham. It was almost a week before one was able to come. By then it was too late. In the last months of her life Mary-Caryll was unable to walk, for she was afflicted with a crippling rheumatism. The big stalwart Molly was reduced to a joint-locked cripple. She remained in bed, on Eleanor's theory that rest might ease her frozen joints. When the doctor arrived, her lungs had filled with liquid. Sarah stood at the door to her small room watching her struggle against drowning. When the doctor lowered her wrist to the bed and covered her face with a sheet, Sarah sobbed loudly. She touched the still warm hand with its swollen knotty places as though to comfort her during her journey away from them. Then she went to tell Eleanor, who sat in the sunny New window, mumbling angrily about ‘the idle, drunken gardener, Richard,' whose absence from the little piece of garden she was able to see could only be explained, to her mind, in most denigratory terms.

‘Oh my love, she has left us. Our dearest friend is gone.'

They sat together, comforting each other in their loss. Eleanor's eyes, full of hot and painful tears, were fixed on the empty kitchen. Sarah cried copiously, her head on Eleanor's shoulder. Miss Mary's passing was mourned by the whole village. The Vicar of St. Collen's agreed to hold the service for her funeral in his church, although he could not offer her the proper rites of her Church.

Sarah and Eleanor followed the coffin, carried by The Lion's wagon and driven by Mr Parkes, to the church. Then they stood at the graveside within the close of the church while the body of their friend was lowered into the grave by four of the farm help. The square plot of ground in which she lay had been purchased by the Ladies. Some day they would there be with her.

The young Duke of Gloucester, the King's nephew, was waiting on their doorstep when they arrived home from the funeral. Always before, he had been granted admission at any time of the day or night that he happened to be stopping in the neighbourhood or passing through to London. This time, they told him, they had no heart for company and turned him away. The duke expressed his sympathy and said he understood entirely and would call again.

Inside the house, sounds of movement in the kitchen startled the Ladies. Sarah went to the back and found two acquaintances from the village, the two Hughes sisters, Anna and Helen, preparing their dinner.

‘How good of you,' said Sarah. ‘We had not thought of dinner, but how kind of you to think of it.'

The sisters smiled and went on with their cooking. Despite their grief the Ladies were able to eat heartily of the well-prepared dinner. With no prospects of their own, the Hughes sisters stayed on to take over Mary-Caryll's duties.

A month later, a bank officer from Aberystwyth called on the Ladies and presented them with an envelope. It contained bank notes, with heads of cattle printed upon them, in the amount of five thousand pounds: Mary-Caryll's life savings. She had left everything she had so arduously saved to ‘my beloved Ladies, to make them both as safe as they have made me.'

Saddened, astonished by the generous spirit from the grave of their friend, they believed they knew Mary-Caryll's wish, without her having had to specify it. They sent Anna Hughes to fetch one of the Edwards. John came, looking very seedy and tired. His wife Jane ailed and was due to go to Bath for the ‘treatment of the waters,' he said.

Eleanor had no time for amenities or sympathy. Her eagerness was barely disguised. ‘Will you sell Plas Newydd to us?' she asked, in a tone more commanding than interrogating.

After many patient years, John Edwards was now ready to admit that the Ladies had outlived his expectations. Besides, there was the money to be raised for his wife's cure and travel expenses.…

‘I will, m'lady.'

‘What price, Mr Edwards, will you demand of us?'

Mr Edwards thought of the largest sum he could imagine, thinking of the cottage near him that had recently been sold for a thousand pounds and some.

‘Three thousand pounds, m'lady. Not a shilling less.'

1819. So. After almost forty years, Plas Newydd was theirs. They wept when the paper was brought to them, cried in each others' arms for the achievement of their dream to be secure and independent in their own Place. They wept for Miss Mary who had made it possible, and for themselves: who would be next to go, and how would the other survive the decimation?

When Walter Scott visited in the early twenties, he found the Ladies much changed. Eleanor was very heavy and almost blind. Sarah had grown dropsical. To her waist she was gaunt, her neck full of strings, her arms thin as broomsticks. But below her waist a great swelling had grown, so wide, so thick, that her skirts had to be gusseted in each side by one of the Miss Hughes. Her legs were not subject to the swelling that afflicted her abdomen. But their greatest pleasure, walking, was now difficult for them. Sarah's balance was affected; Eleanor's eyesight was uncertain. Always now, Eleanor walked leaning upon a cane, which she moved a little above the ground now and then to be able to detect obstacles. Still, arduous as it was for them, they were to be seen by visitors and villagers moving slowly over the Pengwern foothills or picking their way carefully along the outskirts of their demesne, or seated on the bench that girdled the great trunk of an elm, resting in preparation for walking again.

By 1821 Eleanor's writing in her day book had become almost illegible. Doctor Lewes in Wrexham examined her eyes, and told her the cataract formed over the left eye should be cut.

‘Shall we have it done, my love?' she asked Sarah, as though the operation involved a mutual eye. Sarah thought if there were a chance that sight might be restored, it should be.

Eleanor told Dr Lewes she would submit to his knife. The day came, a bright, sunny, warm, late-spring day. Mr Parkes came for them and they set out in his chaise, dressed as they continued to be, even when their figures no longer suited the costume, in their riding habits, their cropped hair, still powdered despite their own white color, pushing out from beneath their well-worn, brushed beaver hats. During the long drive, Sarah held Eleanor's hand tightly and prayed to herself: ‘Let nothing bad happen to my beloved, please, God.' With her suppressed prayer, she formed a deep resolution: to do everything she could to survive Eleanor. Without her, she knew, Eleanor would be unbearably unhappy.

The cataract cutting was brutal. Sarah sat outside waiting, covering her ears against the screams of pain. When it was over she led the shaking, bandaged Eleanor to the chaise and held her head to keep the eye from being jarred as they drove the miles to home. Eleanor went directly to bed and stayed supine for a week. Much of the time, Sarah stayed with her in bed, reading aloud and talking to her, easing her pain with cold cloths, whispering to her of the promise of full sight.

When Eleanor could be up and walking the paths again, or sitting in the library window to feel the sun on her face, she refused to wear the blue eye shield recommended by Doctor Lewes. Instead she dressed as usual, pulling the short brim of her beaver hat down over her forehead to keep the light from her left eye. Outdoors she surrendered and covered her cut eye with a bandage against the bruising noon light.

Two months after the operation the Ladies were compelled to make another trip to the surgeon, this time to question why the other eye had become strangely inflamed and painful. His examination confirmed Sarah's fears. Her prayers had failed. Much sight in the cut eye was gone and, because of Eleanor's age and the inflammation, there was little chance of saving the other.

Leeches might be effective, the doctor thought, or if not, a second cutting. Returned to home, and Eleanor back in their bed, Sarah applied leeches to Eleanor's temple, wiping away the blood that escaped the thirsty sucking of the insects. But under the treatment, the pain increased until Eleanor asked to be driven back to Wrexham. The second operation was worse—longer and more painful—than the first. Her convalescence extended into spring, preventing, for the first time in forty years, the celebration of their anniversary walk. But when she recovered and tried to walk the Home Circuit, when the perennial gardens began to flower and the grass was high enough to scythe and the orchard trees beginning to bud, it was found that Eleanor was totally blind.

William Wordsworth stopped to visit. Sarah was afraid to agitate Eleanor by the knowledge of his presence. Sarah and the poet walked to the farm building and the New bird cote, which he asked especially to see, while Eleanor sat in the library. Sarah permitted him to leave with nothing more than the brave sight of her beloved, glimpsed through the bay window, seated and comfortable, lifting her sightless face towards the sun. On the left side of her jacket Wordsworth was able to see that she wore her Croix de St. Louis, now a part of her daily dress, Sarah told him, sent to her by the French king in recognition of her ardent support of the Bourbon regime. Beside it she wore a large, gleaming fleur-de-lis, a present from Madame de Genlis before that lady had sat down to write her
Memoirs.

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: ‘Rec
^d
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.'