The Ladies (9 page)

‘What troubles you, my love?'

Startled, Sarah gazed at Eleanor for a moment and then assured her it was nothing, ‘a dream, nothing more than that.'

So great was Eleanor's contentment with Sarah that she could not imagine herself as the source of Sarah's disturbance.

‘Tell me what you are thinking. Are you unhappy with me?'

‘No. Oh,
no.
Not unhappy a bit, my love.' Forced by Eleanor's doubts to explain, she confessed to her one of her persistent visions:

‘It happened to me this afternoon while I rested on the bed. I awakened to discover that the ceiling had been lowered until it stretched across me, resting on my nose and my upturned toes. The sides of the room slid towards me and touched the top of my head and the soles of my feet. I discovered that this bed on which I lay had stiffened, forming a board against my back. I was coffined,' she told Eleanor as the tears poured down her face. ‘I lay there, boxed in, my eyes open, my heart beating violently against the walls of my chest, my hands stiff and useless at my sides. Dead. No, not dead quite. Buried alive. Dead and alive at the same time,
buried,
' she told Eleanor. Now she was sobbing.

Eleanor stood behind Sarah's chair, reached down and enfolded her in her arms, her hands caressing her breasts. ‘Oh my dear love,' she said, ‘you are alive, more alive than anyone I have known in this life. Do not think of death. It was a fancy, a dream, nothing more.'

‘No. I think not. I was awake. It must have happened, truly.'

‘Tush. Tush. It never happened. It will not happen.'

That night they lay close together, Sarah's face against Eleanor's arm. ‘I have a favor to ask,' Sarah said.

‘Of course, anything, my dearest.'

‘Promise you will be sure I am dead before you allow me to be put in a coffin and into the ground.'

Eleanor laughed. But Sarah closed her eyes. Her arm thrown across Eleanor's breast stiffened in anger. ‘Please, Eleanor, promise me.'

‘I promise. I'll do even more to put your mind at rest. I have heard of a device invented by a man in County Cork. It was for a friend of his who, like you, was fearful of premature burial. A cord was to be tied to the man's thumb then brought out through a boring in his coffin and attached to a bell in his wife's chamber. Its intent was to warn his wife of any movement within the coffin, should he awaken after being confined to it. Even after burial in the ground, it was to remain attached.'

‘For how long?'

‘For a long time, I believe. A fortnight or longer.'

‘Did it … work?'

‘Of that, my love, I have no knowledge. But I promise you the same arrangement in the unlikely event that I am here when you require it. Does that relieve your mind?'

‘Yes. I thank you for it.' Sarah continued to stare ahead, her eyes fixed on Ellesmere's yellow plain. Already the trees were losing their leaves. Coarse hay stood in unruly piles awaiting the harvest.

‘What is it? Is there more?'

‘No. Yes. I do not understand how it could have happened today.'

‘But it did not happen. You dreamed—'

‘Oh yes, my love, it happened. It did.'

In Eleanor's travelbook: ‘Oswestry, Wales: Sarah begins to sleep well, to my relief. She seems free of dreams. We are told of effigies in the parish church who kneel for all eternity, but we did not walk to see them. In this town flannel, called by the inhabitants
gwlan,
in their strange tongue, is woven on winter evenings by the farmers who have sheep. We are invited to visit a family. We look in upon them when they are seated in their large kitchen. One woman is engaged in spinning. Another knitting. A young man, a cousin, we are told, carves wooden spoons for ladles. Another works upon a token to be given to his betrothed. This he calls a ‘lovespoon,' for two spoons hang side by side from a single ornamented panel fancily designed with hearts and flowers. The father, resting from his labours, reads aloud from
The Black Book of Carnarthen
in the barbaric language spoken here. A daughter is in the corner playing upon a three-stringed harp. I am delighted at the sound. I think I w
^d
like such an instrument for myself. Sarah orders a set of lovespoons to be made for us with our initials cut into the panel. The son promises to stop his work and do ours tomorrow for, once more, we are to travel on.'

Quite by accident, in Oswestry, the Ladies encountered Miss Harriet Bowdler, a spinster who claimed to remember Lady Eleanor Butler from their mutual attendance at a Rotunda Ball in Dublin. She rushed to intercept them when she saw them walking across the road to their inn.

‘I am
certain
you are Lady Eleanor Butler of Kilkenny,' she cried in a high thin voice, made even more penetrating because now, close up to the curiously clad woman, she was not sure at all. This person looked somehow different, she thought, a combination of staunch male bust for the top half, full feminine pudicity from the hips down. And the twin lady? Could this be her infamous friend?

‘I am,' said Eleanor to her, coldly. ‘I regret I do not remember—'

‘Miss Harriet Bowdler. And this is …?'

‘This is my dear friend, the Honorable Sarah Ponsonby.'

‘Of course. How do you do, Miss Ponsonby.'

After they exchanged the necessary introductory details and identifications (try as she would Eleanor could not remember this person or the ball for which Miss Bowdler seemed to have such admirable recall), Harriet invited them to her house, close by, and Sarah nodded yes before Eleanor could frame a refusal.

Miss Harriet Bowdler lived alone with the overpowering and omnipresent memory of her mother. Lady Jane Bowdler had died two years before, leaving Harriet a house and a small competence, somewhat more modest than her beloved only child had anticipated (she confessed to the Ladies) but enough, she hastened to add, to permit her to live exactly as had her mother after her husband's death.

At dinner in the small house with Harriet that last evening in Oswestry, the Ladies felt they could sense Lady Jane's presence in every move of her well-dressed, solidly built daughter. Her features were pert and shapely but too close to the centre of the perfect circle of her face. Her red hair, in matronly fashion, was bound tightly in a bun of curls. She was distinguished by her possession of a considerable amplitude of bosom, hip, and backside. Her pumpkin shape was layered in material that rustled as she walked. A portrait of her mother above the mantel betrayed how strong was Harriet's maternal genetic lineage.

‘I miss her,' Harriet confided to the Ladies, seeing Eleanor's eyes on the portrait. ‘But, living here where she lived, I feel her presence very strongly.'

Sarah looked up at the dimpled, heavy face of Lady Jane Bowdler and studied her cap of carefully painted lace and white curls. Except for the colour of the hair, Harriet might have been speaking of herself.

‘Living alone seems to age one faster,' she said, fingering the rings of flesh about her neck. ‘One's days are often wearisome. I am so glad you were able to dine with me.'

The Ladies smiled politely. Sarah seemed bemused. Eleanor followed her eyes as she inspected one after the other of the Bowdler portraits that covered the walls of the dining room. Harriet rambled on, talking of Dublin, whist games, county fairs. Sudenly Sarah was in tears. Eleanor left her place at the table, took her hand, and led her to a corner of the room. Harriet Bowdler hovered about them, horrified.

‘What have I said? What have I done?'

‘Nothing at all. Pay no heed,' Eleanor said, trying to place herself between their massive hostess and Sarah's discomposure. ‘Miss Ponsonby is very tired. We must return to our lodgings.' Harriet Bowdler, rustling noisily as she walked, led them to the door, chattering her farewells.

At the inn Sarah went to bed at once without saying anything about her spell. Eleanor did not question her. She had begun to realise that behind Sarah's charming young face there dwelled a demon that inflamed and sometimes governed her, but whose nature was unknown to her, a moving, dread spirit that drove her into caverns where Eleanor could not follow.

The next morning Eleanor asked: ‘My love, are you longing for Ireland?'

Sarah shook her head. ‘Not Ireland, my beloved, but Woodstock, I sometimes think. The gardens, the shrubberies, the great trees, the fields …'

‘But what of Sir William? Do you not recall his … importuning?'

Sarah looked at her in confusion. ‘Sir William?'

‘You must still be weary, my love. Tell me, is it a place, a home you mourn for?'

‘It must be so. Last night I thought, for no reason, of how separated we are from everyone, from every place we've ever known. I am glad, happy, to be always with you. But for that moment, as we sat surrounded by all the Bowdlers, I felt we were both homeless orphans. Disconnected persons.'

‘We are alone
together,
are we not?'

Sarah nodded, her eyes fixed on Eleanor as though she was trying to see her as a rock she could lean upon. She did not reply.

Eleanor put down her tea cup and took Sarah's face between her hands, moving her fingers over her soft cheeks. ‘Sarah, my love, we shall soon have a place, a home. I promise you. We'll live together as married persons do. We'll live and love as they do. Love has no sex, my dearest. We'll live in our own cottage when we find one. You are not orphaned; you are mine. You belong to me. I am yours. Don't you see that?'

Sarah cried. Then she said: ‘Yes. Yes. I see that.'

Eleanor recognised the painful truth: their wanderings must cease at once. They would have to settle quickly in some quiet, isolated place, where they could be safe, near people who knew nothing of their history, where they could be whatever it was they were, without question or challenge.

‘Oswestry: 172 miles from London,' Eleanor put down in her book.

They planned the thirty-mile journey the next day, from Ellesmere north and west across the River Dee and into the valley village of Llangollen, intending to ‘make' Holyhead, a distance of more than one hundred and sixty miles, before Christmas. Holyhead protruded like a tortoise head from Holy Island, a spit of land directly across from Dublin. Sarah, as she admitted to Eleanor, longed for Ireland, for the ordered and settled paths of Woodstock, the familiar flowers and shrubberies around its gardens. It was she who wished to push on to Holyhead. She told Eleanor that a homesick Irish maid at the Queen's Inn in Oswestry where they lodged for some weeks had told her that if one stood on the very tip of Caergybi and peered across the South Irish Sea one might see the outskirts of Baile Atha Cliath.

‘Of
where?
' Sarah had asked her.

The maid had replied, with some scorn in her voice, ‘Of Dublin.'

‘Do you believe it is possible, Eleanor?'

‘I do not. Those are rough seas, rarely without their fog and heavy mists. And the distance must be fifty miles.'

The last night at the inn in Ellesmere they made their pact. In their ultimate account of their history, it came to be a time and place in which their lives were shaped. They spoke of it as Moses may have recalled Pisgah, a high point from which they saw their future home without knowing it was so close, so assured.

Before going to bed they packed their clothes for early departure. Then they sat in straight chairs opposite each other, their knees touching, leaning forwards so their hands could be clasped. The heavy musk of their woollen habits hung in the air between them, uniting them in a single bodily miasma. Their postures were the same. Still, the heavy seriousness of Eleanor's countenance, the sixteen years she had beyond Sarah's youth made her seem a school mistress and Sarah her sweet-faced, smiling, compliant pupil.

Except for the monetary cloud that followed them everywhere, Eleanor's happiness was complete. She possessed Sarah, in a way and to a depth she did not herself fully comprehend. During her forty years she had felt yearnings that kept her away from the well-marked pathways of marriage. But where she walked, her unique path, was a mystery to her. Repelled by the characters and the flesh of men, she was still not open to the suggestion, as were her parents, of a sterile existence in conventual celibacy. There was settled on her chest, boring deep into the core of herself, an ache that her legs could not walk off, a burning about the bones that seemed to sear the hinges of her skeleton, as though her layers of skin and flesh were protecting a mysterious fire she could not extinguish or explain to herself. She loved. She wanted to be loved. Who? By whom? Until she saw the schoolgirl Sarah Ponsonby, she did not associate her yearning with another person, except to know where it could not rest: on her parents or sister, on the pursuant Lord Kilbriggin. Her childhood preference in clothing and hair dressing suggested nothing to her except the convenience of a boy's fortunate freedom. She had always wondered why she wished to resemble in her dress a sex she could not love.

But Sarah: in her she found the object she had desired, not knowing what it was she sought. Seeing Sarah she knew at once that here was the subject of her daydreaming. Now there was a form, a sex, to the shadowy figure. She was content, as though her life required nothing more than this positive identification.

For Sarah there was greater confusion. Her doubts shaped her nightmares and her waking fantasies. Was she a freak of nature without human precedent? Was this love into which she had entered so greedily a frightful and debauched Thing, a gorgon of desire and satiety? Were she and Eleanor curiosities? Could it be that their union was contrived by the Devil to punish those who ran from the attentions of the Sir Williams of the world? Her love for Eleanor filled her life and the early moments of her sleep before her terrors took over. Yet there were times when she felt strangely alone and set apart even from Eleanor. Was their unparalleled union a work of art or a witches' brew? The action of a vindictive hag against the errant human race? She knew no answers to her questions and no place to look for them, no one she could ask.