The Ladies (3 page)

The tutor hired away from a Dublin family, Theo O'Phelan, was a serious and delicate young man. His arms were long and very thin, his wrists and hands protruding from his coat as though dangled from strings. His face looked perpetually frostbitten. In his inadequate clothes, he seemed never to have experienced bodily warmth. His boots were too tight, so he walked with a curiously extended gait, his feet thrown out at variance to each other. Eleanor sometimes amused herself by shadowing him. She imitated his walk by extending her hands and feet at incongruous angles. Always irreverent, she called him Theodore, a name he disliked. But he was so in awe of the Butlers, even of their fourteen-year-old daughter, and the general aura of Kilkenny Castle, that he never reproved her. A theology student at Trinity College in Dublin, he paid his tuition with the money he earned by tutoring. His belief in God was intense: His Name appeared in some part of speech in many of his sentences, his seemingly disembodied hands appeared to be invoking His Presence in the air.

Eleanor hated the idea of being tutored, most particularly by Theo O'Phelan. He was too much like a girl, too soft, quiet, easily bent and swayed, too physically awkward. Her fingers were more dextrous than his, and she easily outran him the few times she had been able to persuade him to race with her. Once, in mid-race, he stumbled and fell over the root of a tree. She returned to offer him her hand, feeling strong and manly, and he took it. But he was well-educated, he taught her to recite Burns and Wordsworth and Cowper and Donne, to read French, to conjugate Latin verbs. They started to study Greek, but she balked at the long list of irregular verbs, so he surrendered on this point. Once lessons were over, however, Eleanor could not persuade the tutor to go further from the house than the stone porch. He disliked everything about the outdoors and would accompany her only on formal, stated afternoon walks if the weather was exceptionally fine. She believed he felt threatened by the overgrown hedgerows.

‘You are a true baby,' she told him.

He denied this, but there was some truth in Eleanor's conviction about his fear of the great towering ash and beech trees that arched towards each other along Kilkenny Castle roads. They terrified him, as much as a bird rising quickly out of a grassy hollow. He would not walk at the back of the castle where laurel and hawthorn hedges grew thick and broad, preferring to follow the edges of meadows and greens. All his life he had lived in a Dublin row house, a low, narrow structure comfortably supported on both sides by another house just like itself. Such snug buildings, their facades facing honestly to the street with no intervening greenery between them and the brick street, their rear ends aligned similarly in communal sameness with a bit of green as big as a square of paper behind them, and all without sides or obscure entries or exits, made him feel entirely safe.

Most of all, Theo O'Phelan hated the loud noises peculiar to the countryside. Fowlers' guns sounding in the game preserves startled him, causing his head and hands to tremble. With each succeeding explosion his tremors grew stronger until it seemed as though his whole body were possessed. On these occasions, Eleanor was cruel, calling him Saint O'Vitus, and laughing while he shook. If he was not able to stop, she grew quickly bored by the cowardly spectacle and went off without him to her own pursuits. When they met again, at supper, she would lecture him, to the amusement of her parents or guests, on the arts of hunting, fishing, and fowling, hoping he would reproduce his bizarre behaviour at table at the very suggestion of guns exploding.

Eleanor would have liked to have her lessons outdoors in fine weather, but O'Phelan would not hear of it. He insisted they study in the dark panelled library, surrounded by heavy oak tables, portraits of the dukes of Ormonde already almost blackened beyond identification by the huge fire built in the library, and walls hung with tapestries to hide cracks and crevices. Here O'Phelan felt secure; here Eleanor felt closeted and bound in. She learned her lessons as quickly as possible in order to escape outside. Prepared to make a quick departure, she lounged in a cushioned library chair in her rough stable boy's clothing, her boots resting on the table, while O'Phelan sat behind a small desk asking questions to which she replied scornfully but always correctly. Freed from the four hours' confinement, the time allotted to languages, mathematics, and literature, she left without a word. Outside, she plotted every sort of revenge upon the fearful tutor, elaborate tricks to show what a goose-livered girl he was, what a courageous man she was becoming. Oddly it was her mother, hardly aware of the tutor's existence, who, without intention, effected Eleanor's freedom from the theology student. In this way:

One late afternoon in the coldest month of that year 1755, Lord Butler sat at the head of a long dining table at which the local gentry as well as guests from some distance from Kilkenny were assembled. Once or twice a year such hospitality was offered at the castle. At that time all its heavy but splendid furnishings were displayed, a footman in livery placed behind every chair, a feast of meats and fish and puddings and fruit served, with a constant supply of wines of every variety. Still suffering under the illegality of his title and the degradation of his loss of ancient rank, Lord Butler (as he called himself always) sat enthroned in his cushioned chair at the head of the table. Because Lady Adelaide was not up to her duties as hostess that evening, sixteen-year-old Eleanor, in one of her mother's old, stiff, richly brocaded gowns, occupied the foot. In a rare moment of thoughtfulness, Lady Adelaide had invited the tutor to be present. Theo sat huddled into himself, looking to neither side, his eyes fixed on his downturned glass. For he did not drink, knowing the effects of liquor on his weak nervous system.

To the tutor's left was Beauchamp Bagenal, Member of Parliament for bordering County Carlow. Bagenal was a man of generous proportions and more than generous appetite. He ate and drank so steadily that he had little time to talk at table. Downing a generous mouthful of wine after every swallow of food, Bagenal paid no attention to the conversation, which, this evening, centered about the rumored escape to a convent of a duchess. Her husband and other indignant noblemen had broken into its locked confines to retrieve, not the duchess, but her property. The tutor was appalled at the roars of approving laughter that greeted this irreverent story. He fixed his indignant stare lower to the table. So he failed to notice that Beauchamp Bagenal had placed a brace of pistols beside his plate. When dinner was finally over, the ladies retired, all but Eleanor, who did not consider herself one of them and exercised the hostess's privilege of remaining seated. Milligan entered the dining room with a new cask of claret.

‘Over here, oul' man,' the Member of Parliament called at Milligan, who circled the table to deposit the cask before Bagenal. With a gesture so wide that his elbow grazed the oblivious tutor's head, Bagenal picked up a pistol in his left hand, aimed it precisely at the side of the cask, and tapped it with a bullet. Milligan, seemingly well-prepared for the guest's gross act, quickly held a glass to the flow, but not before a blood-red puddle had filled the table in front of the marksman and the tutor. So startled was O'Phelan that he brought up his trembling hands to try to stop the flow of wine into his lap.

Flushed with pleasure at the success of his colourful uncapping, the fevered Bagenal spun the other pistol in his right hand and aimed it at the hesitant partakers. It came to rest on the tutor.

‘Come on now, my fellow, drink up,' he roared at the shaking tutor. O'Phelan was hypnotized by the red stains on his fawn-coloured trousers. He made no sound, he could not move, indeed, he did not see the pistol aimed at his ear until the Member of Parliament tucked the point of the barrel playfully into his neck. Terrified, the tutor screamed, and stood up so quickly that glasses and plates scattered around him to the floor. He ran to the door, knocking into two footmen as he careened past them. Laughter at the table, led by the tutor's pupil, Eleanor, was raucous. The M.P. restored his pistols to their case and fell back into his chair, delighted by his success, downed a full goblet of claret, and promptly joined Lord Butler in sleep, his head resting on the table on the edge of the claret pool. No one paid any attention, so intent were the still-awake guests to hear Lady Eleanor's detailed philippic against her tutor's unseemly cowardice, womanly nerves, and general ineptitude.

The next morning Theo O'Phelan was gone, having packed his clothes and books and set out on foot to Kilkenny to join the stagecoach to Dublin before the household was awake.

An elegant, grey Georgian house called Woodstock stands on a hill facing towards the town of Inistiogue twelve miles distant. It ‘commands the village,' Sir William Fownes, the Squire, says, when the name of the house is mentioned. The grounds on every side are well kept, ringed by an ancient planting of great oaks. Scattered here and there among them, unclothed statues of Greek maidens hug their marble flesh against the Irish damp. Thick woods beyond the oaks and yews shelter pied goats who periodically make themselves useful in the sunny patches of the day by cropping the lawns. In places where the goats have been left too long, the grass is yellow and limp, fogged over and full of sprets. Far back of the house the grass grows full and heavy, surrounded and laced with arbutus in which a muster of Lady Betty Fownes' peacocks stalk periodically.

The house appears to sit firmly, settled and perfectly balanced like a steamer on calm seas. The stolid effect is due to the precise arrangement of windows—eight on each floor symmetrically arranged around and above the great central door. In the late afternoon the windows turn a many-eyed vision upon the driveway that curves up to, and then away from, the door. At sunset, on a day that has been sunny, the windows seem to become overly bright and then blind and incapable any longer of spying on hopeful arrivals or disgruntled departures.

The ordeal of the long morning and somnolent afternoon is almost over. Sarah Ponsonby sits on a stone bench, mercifully, she thinks, hidden from the eyes of the house by the high box hedge that surrounds what Lady Betty calls her ‘improved' garden. Sarah's eyes are on a copy of
Clarissa,
but she is not reading. She passes over the lines of close print with no effort at comprehension, trying to establish the fact of her total absorption in the novel for anyone, especially Sir William, should he chance to come upon her.

It has been a trying day. The weariness Sarah feels stems from the number of moves she has been compelled to make to keep herself out of her uncle's path and to avoid Lady Betty's sad eyes. It is not easy. From the time of Sir William's early morning trip to the village to his return, there is a safe respite. Then, close to the time for his supper, he rushes in muddy boots through the halls to his office at the rear of the house. When Sarah is foolish enough to remain indoors, or when the weather is too unpleasant to allow her the haven of the gardens, she will hear him at her door, knocking, sometimes pounding. She remains very still and does not respond to his angry ‘Come on now, girl, open up!' When she remains silent, he leaves, swearing. At his office, ill-tempered and impatient, he receives the petitions of his tenants and his manager's many complaints about the tenants. Today, from her stone bench, Sarah hears his horse's hoofbeats and surmises he has come home early for some reason. From that moment she begins to plan her desperate strategy of hide-and-be-sought among the bushes, behind the curved hedges, in the high places that shield the kitchen garden from the stables, but not, if she can manage it, in her room, where she fears she may be trapped by his unavoidable bulk and rude demands.

From where she sits, Sarah can see the chimneys and the upper windows of Woodstock. She regards the strict orderliness of its architecture, the carefully balanced progresses of the paths, gardens, and hedges as deceptive, outward denials of the inner chaos of her home. She knows the lives within are permeated with passion, suppressed anger, explosive language. Her own spirit has always been fearful and depressed, an orphan presence among highborn kinfolk who are obliged to keep her. The resentment they must feel, she believes, may be seen in Lady Betty's cool uncaring. In her aunt's pointed withdrawal from her, Sarah recognizes a repetition of her own mother's willful desertion of her by death when Sarah was four. And Sir William: his frightening spurts of aggressive energy against her are surely signs that he regards her presence in his house as intrusive. There are viscounts and major generals in the Fownes and Ponsonby lineage, of whom Sarah Ponsonby is quietly proud, and so she is familiar with the alliance between high birth, gout, and bad temper. But she cannot understand Sir William's red-faced accosting of her in places where, despite all her strategies, he finds her alone. What can she make of the terrible bloodshot fury in his eyes, the oppression of his great stomach pushed against her, his heavy hands imprisoning hers against a brick wall, or the crimson wainscoting, or a prickly hedge?

She thinks she hears him now, walking back and forth over the pebbles of the walk near her seat, back and forth, as though he is unable to settle upon a direction. Can he be reviewing the harsh words in her note delivered to him this morning upon his departure for the village by her maid Mary-Caryll? Is he deciding upon the shape of his answer, his revenge?

Then he came upon her, his feet trodding down the delicate weeds in the pathway, dislocating settled pebbles. He sat beside her, pushing her to the edge of the bench and then pulling her to him. Her book fell to the ground. With a rough slash, he pushed down her pelisse and dug with his fat fingers into her breast. The blue veins in his neck rose like a tangle of angered snakes: the brocade of her dress protested under his tugs. His swollen legs and feet pained him even as he caressed her: he muttered about the pain and tried to rest his leg on her lap. She pushed his old leg away. Old? Yes. She had heard he is about to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. The closely planted beech trees beyond the hedge leaned in protectively, trying to shield her, save her, from him. Perhaps, in their compassionate zeal, they will bend too far and fall in upon them, their soft foliage separating her from her hateful uncle. Yes, here they came. He was startled by the intrusion, fearing a branch would land across his gouted feet and gross legs, pinning him forever to the stone bench. But she was relieved, saved. She parted the beneficent leaves gently and started up from the bench, the charitable beeches holding him long enough for her to make her escape and disappear. She believed the trees had effected her revenge upon Sir William (he who was to her more goat than ‘most honourable man,' a designation her aunt always gave him), cementing him for all eternity to the cold stone until his legs petrified
.