The Ladies (16 page)

Eleanor sat down to her desk and wrote with many angry flourishes for a few moments. She cancelled their subscription to the
Post
‘for essential reasons,' as she put it.

She wrote a second letter to their new acquaintance, Edmund Burke: ‘My dear Sir: Tell us, please, by return post, how we may clear our reputations of these calumnies. Think of our families' feelings on reading these innuendos. What will those who are charged with forming the Pensions List believe of us? Can this wretched writer, who intruded upon our property and our privity, be brought to law? If we should instigate a legal action, would this be a costly procedure for us?'

Sarah read the two letters and made no comment. She handed them back to Eleanor, whose eyes, she noticed, were now half shut. Eleanor pressed her temples with her fists. Sarah recognised the signs of approaching migraine and knew it was now hopeless to prevent the sick unpleasantness of the next few days. She sighed deeply.

‘Why do you sigh? Is there something not right in the letter to Mr Burke?'

‘I am wondering … If we bring the newspaper to book for printing this … this story, will we not be drawing further attention to ourselves?'

Eleanor coughed, a deep catarrhal rumble sounding in her throat. She started towards the stairs.

‘My head is very bad, my dearest. I must go to bed.'

Sarah sighed again, this time suppressing the sound. ‘I will come with you.'

Having made Eleanor as comfortable as she could, setting her nightcap securely about her ears, placing a cool cloth across her forehead and eyes, and darkening the room, Sarah came into the bed beside her and placed her arm gently under Eleanor's neck. Eleanor did not stir. She seemed paralysed and blinded with pain.

‘My beloved,' said Sarah, almost in a whisper. ‘It is not a matter of great moment. But before we think of appearing before an English court, should we not consider …'

Sarah hesitated. Eleanor could not summon the strength to question her.

‘Consider that while we wish it had not been said in the paper …'

Eleanor grunted, a deep anonymous sound.

Sarah went on softly: ‘Even so, my love, most of it …' Again she hesitated. Eleanor made a low throat sound and then coughed. Sarah reached for the pewter bowl and held it close to Eleanor's mouth as she vomited into it. Despite Eleanor's pressing physical needs, and even despite the evident pain she was in, Sarah felt compelled to continue.

‘Most of it … is true.'

She waited for Eleanor's wrath. She could not see her eyes under the cloth. She watched her heavy, soft breasts moving beneath her night dress. There was no sound except for Eleanor's laboured breathing. She was asleep. Sarah went on speaking to herself: ‘“Extraordinary Female Affection.” “Her particular friend and companion, Miss Ponsonby.” “A fresh elopement.”' Then she smiled, remembering “fair and beautiful.” Moving closer, she stretched her body along the length of Eleanor's. The warm, still firm flesh melded to her and she felt herself descending into sleep. Beautiful, she thought, that at least is not the truth, and then joined Eleanor in oblivion.

Mr Edmund Burke concurred with Sarah's doubts. A sophisticated and sensitive man, more literary than legalistic, he still wrote as a lawyer to the Ladies, telling them of his belief that the law would not censor the press on such a matter, as it surely well deserved. He wrote that he felt indignant at the clear injustice the article had done them. But he was careful to add that he thought it would be very difficult to get redress from the courts.

‘Your consolation must be that you suffer only by the baseness of the age you live in, that you suffer from the violence of calumny for the virtues that entitle you to the esteem of all who know how to esteem honour, friendship, principle, and dignity of thinking.'

As they circled their Place one late morning during a cool August the Ladies read Mr Burke's letter. Sarah was secretly relieved that the matter was now at an end. Eleanor's cough had grown worse and Sarah was more concerned for her beloved's health than for the world's good opinion. As they walked, the catarrh in Eleanor's chest seemed to hamper her breathing. They walked at a slower pace to allow her to take short breaths. The cough had forced her voice into a deeper register than it usually occupied.

‘So Mr Burke despairs of the law for us. It means that in his heart, beneath his professed sympathy and indignation, there resides the belief that we have
not
been maligned. Of course. That is what the letter means.'

Sarah did not reply. Eleanor coughed, bringing up into her mouth a ball of phlegm. She turned her head and rid herself of it into the garden border. Sarah felt faint. Before her eyes rose the picture of the soiled Woodstock fountain and then the stained corner of the sitting room and Sir William.… She swallowed with difficulty. Then she said: ‘Oh my love,
not
in the laburnum bed.'

Of such small remonstrances are the silences made that batter at the walls of human relationships. Eleanor said nothing then or throughout their supper. She spent more time than was customary with her accounts and the day book, in which she was careful to note the receipt of Mr Burke's epistle. She followed that with a memorandum: ‘Permit few visits and no stopovers.'

In bed that night they did not indulge in their customary talking out of ‘sweet sorrows' but lay side by side separated by a significant inch of paillasse, by thoughts of Mr Burke's desertion, by Eleanor's defilement of Sarah's sacred weeding place, by ordinary occurrences that gradually work their way into all unions, like termites, sometimes making them vulnerable later, to larger, more damaging assaults. In every respect, theirs was a true marriage.

Sarah had found a staunch shield against her lifelong tendency to sadnesses, a new sphere for fantasy that occupied much of her reading and thoughts: Methodism. Her Protestant spirit had always been stronger than Eleanor's long abandoned Catholic principles. Sarah cherished her letters from churchy Julia Tighe. Her responses to them were filled with references to God, morality, faith and works, and Methodist theology. In turn, Mrs Tighe ventured to wonder if it would be convenient for Mr John Wesley to call upon the Ladies.

Eleanor would have nothing to do with John Wesley. When Sarah opened her prayer book Eleanor moved to a chair at the other end of the room, as though aware of a noxious aura of religion surrounding all such objects and the words within them. To her, prayer was an admission of weakness, a denial of the camaraderie between them, a confession of cowardice, an acknowledgement of the failure of sacred human will. She saw Sarah's faith as an abdication of personal, private power to an unseen, mythical figure whose worth, whose very existence, she argued with poor Sarah. During Eleanor's secular diatribes Sarah remained silent. Her Christianity had few sectarian bounds: she searched at Valle Crucis for the pieces of the True Cross said to be embedded in one of its ruined walls and was hurt when Eleanor ridiculed her efforts.

Each Sunday, Eleanor accompanied Sarah as far as the door of the Church of St. Collen in the village. While Sarah worshipped, Eleanor walked the stark fields behind the village in all directions, returning in haste if she spied a bull in the next field—or even if there was the possibility of the presence of a bull—while Sarah prayed, offering her sins to the mercies of St. Collen, once Abbot of Glastonbury, a noble Briton who, in his youth, killed a pagan knight in defense of his faith.

Eleanor waited at the door of the church, wearing her royal blue velvet habit and silk top hat, her only acknowledgement of the day. For the occasion, Sarah wore a gown, a bonnet, and shawl, although she knew Eleanor considered this an unworthy concession to parochial custom, a defection from their agreed-upon costume.

Walking home together, Sarah attempted what she considered an appropriate topic for Sunday conversation: ‘I learned today that St. Collen never recovered from his guilt at having killed a man, even though his victim was a pagan. He resigned his post as abbot because more than anything he desired to attain the full peace of a recluse.'

Eleanor celebrated the end of the weekly hour of their separation by being conciliatory. She was willing to listen.

‘We both understand that desire. We have felt it ourselves. Except these days we seem to achieve it less and less.'

Sarah pressed on to complete her lesson in hagiology. She never gave up hope of finding a weak spot in Eleanor's defense against the God that seemed so real and present to her.

‘He found a cave not far from here, the minister told us this morning, in a bank of the Dee. Now, no doubt, it is long since washed away and disappeared, carried off by the fast-flowing river.'

Eleanor wanted the holy legend to be finished before they arrived at Plas Newydd and the chicken boiled in broth that Mary-Caryll had promised for their dinner. ‘And then?' she asked, suggesting some urgency.

‘It is said he lived the rest of his life in that cave, many, many years. It was there that he wrestled with the Devil, the Power of Darkness, the awesome Lord of the Unknown.'

‘Did he win?'

‘Who can know? Only God, I believe, keeps account of those mortal battles.'

‘I suspect that, like most human battles, he may have been soundly defeated. Why else is the world so filled with misery and pain?'

‘I don't know. But he is called a saint, which must signify that ultimately he won his private war against Satan.'

‘Perhaps. Did Mary-Caryll mention what greens she was preparing for dinner?'

Sarah had grown used to Eleanor's abrupt change of subject when the discusion was related to God. It no longer angered her. She went valiantly on, trying to complete today's lesson to Eleanor: ‘We live here, in a village named for St. Collen. Llangollen means the land that surrounds the church of St. Collen, I believe. So his struggles may well be destined to be repeated in the lives of everyone living on his ground. Even on our small portion of it.'

‘Perhaps. But I don't believe it is so.… Well, then. It might be asparagus. Yes,' Eleanor said as she opened the gate and stepped back to allow Sarah passage ahead of her, ‘I remember now. She
did
say asparagus in butter sauce.'

The odd thing about the delicate matter of belief that hung between the Ladies like a spider web, hardly tangible but still visible to them both, was Eleanor's own set of convictions. The older she grew—she was now in her late fifties—the more she trusted the efficacy of magic. For the amelioration of her terrible headaches she believed in elephant's hair laid upon her brow. Dried tiger's feet, she thought, placed over the placenta, removed stomach ache. From a dealer in Edinburgh she ordered samples of exotic teeth: walrus, whale and seal dents, which she kept in a camphorated box and removed on the occasions of toothache. She had read that one or another of these, placed on the tongue, would communicate the great power of their beast to the sufferer's pain.

When Sarah turned to John Wesley's theology, Eleanor countered with a dedication to Gothic matters. For some time she gave serious thought to the need of a tunnel under the full length of the house. At first it was a romantic concept. The possession of an underground passage gripped her imagination.

‘We can go from the library to the herb garden without once being seen.'

‘Why should we wish to?' Sarah inquired.

Eleanor had no ready reply. She abandoned her plan to have Mr Lewis and Mr Jones collaborate on digging and construction. Later on, during the blood-letting on the continent, when aristocrats were suffering violent fates, and Eleanor feared revolutionaries in the British Isles would catch the fires of rebellion, she again raised the subject of an underground tunnel. This time Sarah's sympathy for the project was engaged. The two women often lay awake expecting the arrival of the French and Irish rabble at their door. An underground tunnel now appeared to be a necessity, a place in which they might escape the democrats intent on rape, pillage, and arson.

But the idea of a passage, compelling as it was, fell before the estimate of its cost. Mr Jones said it was beyond his skills to accomplish, and Mr Lewis, who knew very well
he
could not make a tunnel, placed an impossible price, forty guineas, upon its accomplishment. Reluctantly Eleanor abandoned the plan.

More: Eleanor ordered from her booksellers in France, in Scotland, in England, every volume they had on witchcraft and sorcery, on ghosts and haunted places. Each week, from first page to last, she read the
Times,
searching for stories of the occult and the supernatural. From that paper she cut a story of one Mr Weed, who retired to the Tower of Ludworth Castle in order to rid himself of the evil in him. Here, Eleanor decided with evidence provided her by other books on the subject, he might have offered sacrifices to the Devil, flagellated himself, and then collected the blood from his torn skin, which, during the ritual he performed each evening, he drank mixed with vinegar. It was, she had read, the form of a Red Mass.

‘If you are right, it is the Devil he is communicating with,' said Sarah.

‘Perhaps so. But the newspaper says that after a few months in residence in the Tower he locked its door and threw the key from a window to the ground below.'

‘And then?'

‘When the door was opened by his servitors to rescue him, he was not there.'

‘Not there? Gone,
all
of him?'

‘Everything. No one has explained it. My suspicion is his body was taken away by spirits conjured up during his Mass.'

‘Oh love, do you really believe that?'

‘Does it seem impossible to you?'

‘Yes.'

‘My beloved, you have said you believe that Jesus was removed from his tomb by angels. Is that not more impossible?'

Or:

‘I see here that a Sussex woman purports to lay eggs.'