The Ladies (6 page)

Mary-Caryll had served in the Fownes household since her dismissal from Sheepshead Inn at Inistiogue, where she both tended to the bar and kept the peace. She was a woman built like an oak tree, almost thirteen stone, and three inches more than six feet tall. During an altercation at closing time one night she threw a lethal candlestick at an unruly patron who had reached into the dress of a young barmaid and then been told to leave by Molly, the Bruiser, as Mary-Caryll was called in the pub. After the funeral she appealed to Sir William and was given a chambermaid's berth at Woodstock: Lady Betty was touched by the towering woman's quick defense of virtue.

Mary-Caryll had no family, so her move to Woodstock was easily accomplished. Her arms were as broad and strong as a ploughman's. Her chambermaid's duties seemed too light, too easy to her. But she went about them willingly and was especially devoted to the care of the person and room of small, quiet Sarah Ponsonby, whose plight in the house she sensed was not unlike that of the barmaid she had so staunchly defended. Her fidelities had always been simple, direct, and on behalf of the weak: a deserted cat, her overworked mother, who died in her arms after a fire that destroyed their cottage, the homeless thirteen-year-old barmaid who slept on a shelf behind the bar of the Sheepshead Inn, and now the orphaned and threatened Miss Ponsonby.

It was a cold wet evening early in April in the year 1778, in the same year that British soldiers in another hemisphere began to taste the bitter food of foreign defeat. Sarah Ponsonby said goodbye to Mary-Caryll, pressed upon her a small purse of coins, and then stepped out of a downstairs window into a flower bed. Mary-Caryll handed out Sarah's portmanteau and basket containing Frisk, his muzzle bound up with a silk scarf. They whispered farewell, waved; Sarah put Frisk under one arm, her bag in her hand, and set off in the half light down the road towards Waterford.

It was a hazardous way of departure, but Sarah feared the giveaway noises of the great front door and preferred to risk a twisted ankle. Outside the high hawthorn hedge, she met a labourer with a lantern whom Mary-Caryll had hired. He relieved her of her portmanteau. Together they set out to cover the three miles south to the old barn, deserted since the Chippery family had moved to Tipperary to try their fortunes with sheep. A thin steady rain fell. By the time they reached the place, Sarah's cape was sodden. The rain had run down her neck to soak the worsted shirt Mary-Caryll had removed without permission from a houseman's trunk. Her long skirt, one of Mary-Caryll's own, was in danger of falling down, so wet was it, so insufficient the cord belt Mary-Caryll had devised. The labourer held the door open for her. She gave him a gold piece and thanked him for his services, and he went on his way to his home near Thomastown.

Eleanor was not there. Sarah huddled in a corner and lit the candle Mary-Caryll had wisely sent with her. She took out the loaded pistol obtained by the provident maid from Sir William's study and placed it beside her. She took off her wet cap, another Mary-Caryll borrowing that covered her hair, but she was too cold, too weary to remove her wet cape. She lay back against the truss of old, acrid hay, hoping it would absorb some of the moisture. Was Eleanor waylaid? Had she fallen as she rode? Had she been prevented from leaving the castle? Where
was
she? Would she come at all? Sarah's fears and doubts multiplied. She clung to her little dog though his frail, furless body offered small protection. The sounds overhead, and beyond the barn door, were strange to her. They rang with menace: retainers of Sir William? A band of curious and hungry foxes? Owls? Robbers?

Where was Eleanor? Tired by waiting, huddled with Frisk against the cold, Sarah dozed and did not hear hoof-beats approaching. But she started up at the sound of the barn door pushed aside. The candle went out. In the small light of the quarter moon she thought she saw the outline of a man. She screamed, stood up, and grabbed the pistol.

‘Don't be frightened, my love. It is I, Eleanor. For the love of God, don't shoot me.'

Sarah fell to her knees before Eleanor, sobbing. Eleanor knelt down and took her in her arms. They clung to each other, Sarah shaking from fright, relief, and chill, Eleanor attempting to calm and warm her.

‘We'll stay the night here and wait for morning to see if the road is clear,' Eleanor told Sarah. She relit the candle and went to find her horse. He munched happily on the hay she provided and then she tethered him in a dry corner of the barn. She latched the barn door and lay down beside Sarah. They put their arms about each other, ignoring the wet discomforts of their clothes, seeking to dry themselves in the heat of their creature love. Sarah shook with chill, Eleanor's nerves quivered, but to Sarah she appeared to be a tower of calm, a secure, comforting, and warm presence, a gallant rescuer from all peril, a goddess of love and safety. For hours they could not sleep. The rough men's clothes rubbed their backs and arms against the hay mattress. Like orphaned strays, like fairytale children, they lay together and slept at last in the first light of dawn, two runaway women of quality in an abandoned barn, escaped from the protection of great houses and powerful men into a singular enterprise.

While they slept well into the morning, Lord Butler's searchers passed the Chippery barn on their way to Waterford to find the missing Lady Eleanor. At noon a chaise rolled past the barn in the same direction, bearing messengers of the distressed Lady Betty in search of the missing niece whose dog and clothes were gone, and whose bed had not been slept in.

Lord Butler arrived at Woodstock in the early afternoon to inquire if Lady Eleanor was there.

‘She is not,' said a disturbed Sir William, who had consoled himself with a number of black-cherry whiskeys. His perturbation was great, for he feared that the escaped Sarah would not remember the promise of discretion in her letter to him.

‘And what is more, our Sarah is gone off.'

Lord Butler was not concerned. ‘Lord Kilbriggin has been hanging about her,' he said, more to himself than to Sir William. ‘It must be him. They've run off together. That bastard cur …'

‘But …'

‘There is nothing to do but send to Dublin and to Waterford.' Lord Butler was in his carriage before Sir William could say anything more.

To the families it was inconceivable that Sarah and Eleanor had absconded—Sir William's word for Sarah's act. How? Why? Where to? The answers to questions about the extraordinary event awaited the results of the chase. While men rode about the countryside, searching everywhere for the runaways, Eleanor and Sarah slept on in the windowless, freezing barn, Eleanor sunk in dreamless content, Sarah engulfed by dreams of riderless horses, soft-breasted flower beds, nights of mud and blackness, great bellies encased in brocade, tea-stained spittle. She roamed the paths of Woodstock pursued by furred black and white owls that dove at her head and grabbed at her hair with yellow claws. The women woke in the afternoon in each other's arms, at first exultant at the extraordinary fortune that had brought them so far to this unlikely union.

Sarah was breathing heavily. She was feverish and still weary after their long sleep. Eleanor decided they must remain in the barn another day and night to allow Sarah's illness to subside. Sarah felt too sick to protest. While she slept, Eleanor watched and worried about their future. How would they live on the little they had brought with them? Would their families relent and send them support once they had removed themselves from Irish scandal? Would society in England, or Wales, or Scotland, or wherever they could find lodgings,
have
them, accept them as they wished to be: two loving women
married
in each other's eyes, determined without the shadow of a doubt to live with no one except each other for the rest of their lives.

In the morning Sarah was still sluggish and hot. Eleanor sent her horse back along the road to Kilkenny, trusting his instinct to find his master. They moved on, walking quickly through the market towns of Kilmacow and Mullinavat. They climbed over the mountain into Inistiogue, where they paused only to rent a hackney carriage to take them on to Waterford. Settled into it, they talked gently of money, destination, the often stormy passage to Milford Haven, the hope of baths and clean clothes in Waterford. Frisk slept beside them in his basket.

Lady Betty wrote to her daughter Julia: ‘I am in utmost distress. My dear Sarah has leapt out of the window and is gone off. We surmise that Miss Butler of the castle is with her. Mr Butler had been to inquire for his daughter. He tells that Miss Butler left the castle just as the family went into supper and was not missed for three hours.'

They might have succeeded, had not Sarah, out of her head with fever, dropped her shirt ruffle as they left the barn. A searcher from the castle found it, thought it to be Lady Eleanor's, and surmised from it the runaways' direction. Still it might have worked, they might have reached the harbour town of Waterford as they had planned, and made their escape by boat, had they not missed the English packet that travelled between Waterford and Milford Haven and been forced to wait for the next day in a room they rented for the night in an inn near the quai.

Eleanor ate her dinner alone in the back of the pub and brought up soup and fresh baker's bread to Sarah, who dozed, woke to drink a few mouthfuls of the broth, and slept again at once. Eleanor sat listening to her difficult breathing for some time, and then resolved: ‘I must take her back. She is too sick for a journey over water. I am defeated, she is defeated, but not by the damnable Fownes and Butlers. We are defeated by this sickness. God help us now.'

A neighbour who had heard news of Sarah's disappearance (as who in the countryside had not by now?) sent a note to Lady Betty in the late afternoon: ‘I pas't two Ladies in a Carr in men's clouths near W't'fd.' By then Lady Betty had left Woodstock to travel in that direction, passing the messenger bearing the note.

Mrs Tighe, whose memory of inconceivable girlhood events had been successfully buried, wrote to her mother: ‘Of course I know well that more was imagin'd by y
^r
Sarah than was ever intended by my dear Father.'

Sarah woke, hot, and in tears. ‘Oh love, what can I do?' As she spoke, Frisk barked and leaped onto the bed.

‘Lie still. I have ordered a gig.'

‘A
gig
? For Milford Haven?'

‘No, my dearest. To take us back. Until you have recovered. Then we will come away again.'

‘Oh no. No. Not back.'

‘For a little while.'

‘Do you think we have been missed?'

‘I can't tell. Rest a bit yet.'

Almost at once, they knew the answer to Sarah's question. Led to the inn, and then the room, by the familiar high yipping of Sarah's greyhound, Lady Betty's manservant knocked on their door. Without waiting for a reply, he entered their room, calling over his shoulder: ‘I have found them.' Sarah was in bed, Eleanor seated beside her, a basin of cool water in her lap, her hands filled with cloths. Startled by the intrusion, she overturned the basin, spilling water onto the bed, and stood up to shield Sarah from the sight of the manservant.

‘Out, out,' she said, pushing at him with her strong hands, her face crimson with anger.

The man backed away, almost colliding with Lady Betty.

‘Oh my dears, my dears,' she said when she saw the two women. Sarah started to cry at the sight of her aunt. Eleanor stood still, stony-faced, and made no effort to greet her.

Settled into the chaise, and awaiting the arrival of the driver, the three women were immobilised in front of the inn when Lord Butler's men, accompanied now by Morton Cavanaugh, Eleanor's brother-in-law, opened the door to their vehicle and demanded that Eleanor accompany them to Borris where the Cavanaughs had their house. Eleanor appealed to Lady Betty, who told the men Miss Eleanor, at her own request, was returning to Woodstock with them. Sarah leaned back against the leather upholstery, too sick to make any protest, her eyes shut against what appeared in her fever to be a parade of unknown persons pushing and pulling each other in some wild tug-of-war game. No longer was she able to recognise anyone about her, including Eleanor and Lady Betty. Out of her head, she wandered in a world of black practices, covens preparing a broth of peacock eyes and red cocks to be sacrificed to a strange black man. A stick-thin witch named Alice Kyteler, dressed in her black devil's girdle and nothing else, her breasts resembling Eleanor's somehow, stirred a magic soup in the black skull of a criminal and then gave it to her. She served it to Sir William by pouring it slowly through a black hole in his monstrously swollen toe.

Eleanor refused to leave the carriage. Morton Cavanaugh and a manservant reached into it and pulled her out. Suddenly she lost the control that had steeled her throughout the dark ride on the black horse and the three dark days and nights. She screamed at the men that she wanted one half-hour alone with Sarah. But Lady Betty would not permit it, fearful of leaving her niece with the phrensied Eleanor. Left for a moment without the men's restraining hands, Eleanor climbed back into the carriage. Once more she was dragged out by her brother-in-law. Lady Betty bid Eleanor a tearful farewell, the driver mounted to his board, Eleanor was loaded into the Cavanaugh coach, and the two conveyances set off north, one behind the other, each bearing one of the runaway pair.

At Woodstock's gate Sarah awoke, undone by her sickness and her delirium. She thought Eleanor was beside her and cried out: ‘My love, coven Alice Kyteler is to be flogged eight times for her cooking. We must save her,' and fell back unconscious.

Eleanor was now hysterical. The men held her arms behind her and pinned her to the seat as the coach bore them along the road to Borris.

Morton Cavanaugh wanted Eleanor to tell him the story of her sudden flight. When she was calm enough to speak, she would only say that their flight had
not
been sudden. For some time they had planned to go to England, to find a house and, for the rest of their lives, to live together. Cavanaugh made no reply to this madness. A burly, belligerent young man whose sweet, delicate wife Margaret leaned upon him for every need of her life and her person, he was revolted by the sight of his sister-in-law in dirty men's clothes, a woman grown uncontrollably wild when separated from that young person Sarah Ponsonby. What kind of crossed beast was his wife's sister? What reversal in the womb of the normal order of things could produce this … this monster, this weeping, violent satyr? He stared ahead as he told her Lord Butler's instructions: to convey her to Borris, and to hold her there until plans could be completed for her passage to Chambrai.