The Ladies (4 page)

Sunk into her vision, Sarah waits to be discovered by her uncle. ‘He now has my letter. He must be very angry with me,' she tells herself. She is confused by his seeming presence beside her a moment ago and now his absence. She does not understand why, of all afternoons, this day he chooses to exempt her from his attentions. She picks up
Clarissa,
finds her place in its pages and continues to stare at the same lines. Her relief at being alone is shortlived. Shadows cross the long lengths of the lawn; she stands up to see card tables being laid under the trees nearest the house. Dinner is to be served there, as it often is on warm afternoons. She must make her way to it, to Mary-Caryll's kind but unspoken sympathy at her increasing peril, to Lady Betty's suffering reserve, to Sir William, his wig slipped down over his perspiring forehead to his eyebrows, his leg resting on a chair, his eyes in hot pursuit of her.

Their daily lives are composed of small scandals. Women, always only women, come to call. Sometimes, they arrive just after luncheon, in time to be invited to ceremonial cake and tea. They talk in low voices above noises of spoons and forks on china. Sarah cuts squares of quince cake and offers the plates. This day, mother, daughters, grand-aunts, and grandmother of the Wigman family come to report little discoveries while they are still fresh in their minds. Their coach has come directly from a visit to Kilbride, and before that to Dublin. They come freshly provided with tempting little tidbits for quick consumption. Today, they have brought word of the Warden's youngest daughter, who, they've just learned, at fifteen is sent to the old nursery for her meals because she has grown so excessively fat at her middle. Can it be?… No, they agree, of course it must mean that she is being kept from temptation at the family table.

Annoyed at not having succeeded in making his escape before the ladies' arrival, Sir William stands in the corner draining his teacup. He harrumphs, coughs, and then rolls phlegm around in his mouth, his cheeks puffed out. He sends a brown stream into the corner of the room. He looks at Sarah and smiles, his stippled nose pointed towards her chest, his eyes very small, bright, hungry. Sarah turns away in her chair to watch Lady Betty refill the cups, feeling Sir William's eyes on her back. Suddenly she seems to lose the balance between her hands, and her piece of quince cake slides to the floor. Mary-Caryll crosses the room from the corner where she has been wiping up the Squire's expectoration and sweeps up the crumbles of cake in her hands. Her fingers are stained brown, Sarah sees, when Mary-Caryll places a fresh piece of cake on her plate. Grandaunt Mrs Wigman narrates the scandalous behaviour of the Warden's parlour maid, who failed to return home until midnight from a dance at Inistiogue. When she finally appeared, she was without her hat or shoes, losses she insisted were due to a high wind.

Sarah feels queasy. She thinks her stays are too tight. Before her eyes she sees Mary-Caryll's stained fingers restoring the cake. She excuses herself, goes quickly into the garden, and is sick into the broken fountain. She covers her vomit with leaves, wipes her forehead and chin with her petticoat, goes in at the back kitchen entry and up the stairs to her room. She tells herself she must remember to tell the gardener about the fountain.

Sarah Ponsonby could recall only a vague, foglike sense of loss when her own mother died, exhausted by Chambré Brabazon Ponsonby's abnormal jealousy of his beautiful young second wife and by the terrible isolation in which he had incarcerated her. Sarah was four. Three years later her father died when his horse failed to stop at a barn and crushed him against the closed half-door at the top.

All she was ever able to remember about her father was a story he had told her of his father, Henry Ponsonby, a general at the Battle of Flanders and then, at Dettingen. In 1745, her grandfather and his company were stationed high on a hill between the enemy-infested Barry Woods and the fortified town of Fontenoy. Sarah's father, Chambré, was the general's aide-de-camp, still almost a boy, whose service to his father was not unlike that of a body valet. During a furious exchange of gunfire, the general handed his son his watch and ring, for what reason Chambré was never afterwards able to ascertain: was it because he felt more capable of loading his musket without the burden of timepiece and signet? Or had he been granted a curious foreknowledge and so entrusted his belongings to his son for safekeeping? Chambré lay down to avoid the too-close-for-comfort cannon balls tearing through the air from the direction of the Woods. His father paused to take from his pocket his enameled box and insert into each nostril a pinch of snuff. As he returned the box to his pocket, his head was blown off and away, at such a distance and in such condition that his shocked son could not retrieve it.

Sarah was orphaned and left to the mercies of her stepmother and a nastily playful stepbrother who enjoyed tying the little girl to trees or fenceposts in the course of the outlaw games he devised. Her stepmother referred to her, in company, as ‘a slattern of a girl.' When her stepmother was carried off by a sudden, lethal infection brought on by quaffing, by herself, what she called ‘a sober quart of claret,' the twelve-year-old girl felt nothing but relief. Sarah was an earnest, slight, pretty, often sad girl, closer to womanhood than her years would suggest. She had lived a life of practised self-protection against her family and against the Fates. At her stepmother's funeral, Sarah, who had little experience in arranging her life, who was indeed too sensitive and retiring, too often melancholic and silent, to try, who had drifted from the care of one uncaring adult to the next, spoke shyly to her Aunt Betty Fownes, her own mother's somewhat elderly cousin, inquiring if it were possible there might be a place for her to live at Woodstock. Lady Betty's sweet, placid face dissolved in sympathy for the homelessness of the young orphan. Her own daughter being married and gone away at some distance, the kindly matron agreed at once that there was indeed room for her. She would be pleased, she said, for Sarah's company.

So it was that Sarah came to live with Lady Betty and fat, proud, lascivious, gouted Sir William Fownes, who hoped, in his heartless way, to convince his wife of her terminal ill health in order to free him for another marriage. To her every symptom (and she was troubled by many), he attributed a terrible affliction that he considered might materialize, with persuasion and iteration, into something mortal.

Lady Betty, on the other hand, was only too well acquainted with her husband's weaknesses. She understood his unsavoury ambition for her, and was grateful that gout prevented him from serious pursuit of chambermaids, pub girls, and (for shame, she recalled) their own daughter, Julia, who had escaped her father's attentions by marrying Harry Tighe when she was fifteen and moving to Kilbride. If Lady Betty was distant with Sarah it was not out of unkindness, for she loved her cousin's daughter and was strongly engrained with family feeling, but for fear that any special notice of her niece would cause Sir William to become aware of her growing beauty.

Lady Betty was a good woman, so good that the story told about her at teas and suppers in the County was this:

There lurked along the wet, rutted, sometimes impassable Kilkenny county roads, a robber named Freyney, a native of Inistiogue, who had been a servant at Woodstock until Sir William dismissed him for insubordination. Freyney's huge black head, giant body, grasping hands, and loaded musket terrified passersby whom he robbed but then allowed to go on unharmed. Sir William had been held up by Freyney a number of times, even when he was accompanied by armed retainers who turned out to be too slow for the skilled highwayman. In fact, Freyney appeared to be especially vindictive about the Squire of Woodstock. It was learned later that Freyney's favourite uncle had worked on the restoration of the Fownes's house, Winter Lodge, near Dublin, investing in his work two years of fine carpentry and many costly materials. Upon its completion, and before he had paid the luckless uncle, Sir William sold the house at good profit, transferring his debt to the new proprietor, who promptly disowned it. The uncle was ruined and died soon after, having bled to death from a saw cut on his wrist. His nephew vowed to avenge his death, and did so, periodically, each time he pushed Sir William into a muddy ditch after relieving him of his purse and his travelling breeches.

But Lady Betty (she is the heroine of this widely told tale) passed on the same dangerous roads without accident. Freyney, it was said, would spot her coach or would be informed about its approach in advance by friends on the household staff, the same informants who kept him apprised of Sir William's movements. So great was his respect for her, perhaps for her well-known suffering under Sir William's callous treatment, that he lay down in a ditch beside the road to allow Lady Betty to pass unalarmed even by the sight of him.

Lady Betty decided that it might be wise to send Sarah away to school, less to provide her with an education (for girls required very little of that to occupy a worthy place in Irish society) than to insure the pretty young girl's safety from Sir William's wandering eye. Miss Parke's Academy for Young Ladies in Kilkenny was chosen for the thirteen-year-old Sarah more for its location, twenty-five miles from Woodstock, and its cost, twelve guineas the year, than for its reputation for learning. Sarah was sent off in a coach accompanied by Lady Betty rather than Sir William, guaranteeing her safe passage on the hazardous roads north.

The school in 1768 (it was to last only ten more years and then decline for lack of funds into a less pretentious working-girls' place for instruction in lace making) was housed in a dingy, stiff, spiritless town building. The instructions mistress, Miss Parke herself, a vinegary spinster, believed in teaching domestic and practical arts. No time was wasted on studies that might culminate in dangerous ideas or independent thought. Her pupils, fourteen young girls of good families, were taught to do fine embroidery and make neat, if somewhat inaccurate, maps of the County, the country, the British Isles, and even the continent to which it was thought they were sure to travel some day. The girls were also instructed in the rudiments of the French language (to serve the same ultimate purpose as the maps) and trained to have an elegant, elaborate, spidery hand. Whist playing was offered; it was elected by everyone and practised assiduously by the girls in the evenings for halfpenny the point. There was a good cook attached to the school but no chamber help, so the girls did their own ‘besom-business,' as they privately called it, sweeping dust balls from beneath one bed to the next.

At Miss Parke's, Sarah was lonely and isolated. She quickly became proficient at the ladylike labours assigned to her and played a good hand at cards, but she made no real friends among her twittery, featherheaded classmates, who thought her too serious and always very sad.

Lady Betty made one kindly provision for the girl in her exile. She wrote to Mrs Adelaide Butler of Kilkenny Castle (whom she had known in Dublin in her girlhood) and told her of her niece's stay nearby, expressing the hope that it might be possible for little Sarah to visit the Butlers, perhaps during one of the school holidays, because (this she did not add) she feared the girl's return to the dangers of Woodstock. Inadvertently, Lady Betty almost ruined the prospective invitation for Sarah by addressing her old acquaintance as Mrs Walter Butler rather than by her assumed title. Lady Adelaide chose to overlook this country ignorance and invited Sarah to spend the two weeks surrounding Easter at Kilkenny Castle.

Sarah in her best dress and bonnet sat sedately in the uncomfortable fiddle-backed chair Milligan had pointed her to. Then he said:

‘Lady Butler asked would you be good enough to wait here. Her daughter will be with you directly.'

Sarah waited. She inspected the austere browning portraits, assuming that the persons seated stiffly in them must be dukes of Ormonde. She studied the inhospitable French chairs with Orpheus harps built into their backs that were dwarfed by the immense size of the drawing room, the tapestries into which dogs of uncertain breed and grey mythical animals had been woven among beds of vague flowers and the remains of grottoes.

No one came. Sarah walked to the long windows opening upon a stone porch and a military-looking parapet. Beyond was a great meadowlike area bordered by cherry trees. She watched a sturdy man come quickly through a path in the tall grass and approach the house. It must be Mr Walter Butler, she thought, noting how determinedly, surefootedly, his booted legs cut through the grass. As he came closer she saw a head of short red curls and what appeared to be a knife-sharp nose and pointed chin. Not Mr Butler, clearly: a son? or younger brother?

She returned to her assigned chair to await his arrival. Anything is better than a return to Miss Parke's deserted halls, she thought. The young man's footsteps could be heard on the porch, the doors opened. A setter puppy ran across the carpet and put his muddy front paws on Sarah's dress, my
only
company dress, she thought.

‘O dear,' she said, and tried to push him down.

‘I
am
sorry,' said the young man, who had entered immediately behind the ebullient dog. ‘Here, let me take her. Down, Lento.' He reached to Sarah's lap, scooped up the wriggling dog, and strode with him to the door, which he closed quickly behind him, and returned, pulling a chair to Sarah's side.

‘Rude of me to be so late. Please excuse me.' The young man had a pleasantly low voice and an open, free manner that seemed to Sarah to sound unusually sincere.

‘Not at all. I've enjoyed looking about. I'm Sarah Ponsonby. Mrs Butler was good enough to invite me to visit during the recess of my school.'

‘Yes, of course, I know all about you. You're very welcome. I'm Eleanor Butler, Lady Adelaide's daughter.'

Their friendship grew rapidly. Sarah adjusted to the transformation of the young man become Lady Eleanor. Eleanor was delighted to have a ready companion for her outdoor life. Sarah shared her pleasure. On rain-soaked afternoons, just before the descent of dusk, when they felt incarcerated too long in the castle, they walked through back paths, as far from the house as they could progress without leaving the desmesne. Eleanor often went a little ahead, her booted feet covering the rough places more securely than Sarah's more decorous steps. On overcast days, when the chairs they had occupied all day seemed hard and the confines of their rooms oppressive, they set out for what Eleanor called a ramble. She told Sarah she wanted to show her the north end of the property.