The Ladies

by Doris Grumbach

  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 yr 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.

  At Woodstock, Sarah was dangerously ill. The doctor found quinsy of the throat and a high fever. A vein in her foot was opened to relieve the pressure of hot, inflamed blood.

  Lady Betty sent word to her daughter: ‘I can’t tell you how curious it all is. No man was concerned with either of them. Their plan was, I believe, no more than a scheme of romantic friendship, no more than what was fanciful and eccentric. Miss Eleanor writes three times each day to our Sarah. I cannot in conscience relay such crazed sentiments to her in her state. Sarah asks constantly for word from Miss Eleanor. I tell her only she has written once to inquire of her health and sent to me her thanks. Sarah is in a state of anxiety. Twice she has fainted when I felt obliged to say that no other words than these were contained in Miss Butler’s letters. My dear, write her a letter of comfort and stop the ill-natured tongues of the world.’

  To herself, Sarah talks constantly: ‘Why does she write nothing of her plans for us? I fear she has given me up. She thinks I am too frail for her strenuous life, too little and shallow for her large thoughts. Surely she will give me up. I will die. I am dying. I lie, like the Duke of Ormonde in Kilkenny Church, straight in my bed, an effigy in marble, my black feet on the sleek black back of an otter. Like Eleanor’s ancestor, I will die of the bite to my neck by the oily beast, stretched to eternity atop my tomb, my nose cracked away, my fingers broken off at the joint by grave despoilers. No, not the bite of an otter, but instead the blast of a cannonball that removes my foolish head from my burning body. I will lie with my grandfather under the anonymous furze of the Slievnanon Hill we climbed yesterday on the way to Waterford. Or was it the day before? No, not of otter or of cannonball. I will die of her silence.’

  Lady Betty wrote to Mrs. Harriet Cavanaugh at Borris: ‘I wd be glad if you cd prevent Miss Butler from writing so much to our Sarah. The volumes we receive here distress us. We hear Miss Butler is to be sent to a convent in France. I cannt help but wish she had been safe in one long ago. She wd have made us all happy.’

  Margaret Cavanaugh responded to Lady Betty at once: ‘It is difficult to condone my sister’s actions. We plan for her to go to live in the convent as you have heard. Her family and friends are very angry with her. She will, I fear, feel forever the bad consequences of this rash and unaccountable action.’

  Lady Betty felt constrained to reassure Julia Tighe, who sent again and again to know: ‘Sarah, whose conduct has the appearance of imprudence is, I am sure, void of serious impropriety. There are no Gentlemen concerned. I can hardly think that the cause is known to anyone but themselves.’

  In the afternoon she wrote again: ‘No better. She talks wildly under the fever and cannt eat. In her wildness she tells me Miss Butler flew away from a convent and it is her intention to save her from Popery. She says if we knew Miss Butler we would love her as much as she does. All together it is a most extraordinary affair.’

  Eleanor appeared to accept her imprisonment at Borris. She sent letters daily to Sarah. To the convent plans she listened gravely and made no response: she knew she would never go. Eleanor placed a high value upon her own ingenuity and was certain she could outwit her parents and her sluggish, provincial sister and brother-in-law. Money for passage to Chambrai and the dowry to be bestowed on Holy Sepulchre Convent upon Eleanor’s arrival had arrived at Borris. Eleanor discovered it had been hidden among her sister’s camisoles and planned to relieve her family of the sum when the time came. Suspecting that her letters did not arrive at her beloved’s bedside, she arranged for a basket of apples and cherries from the Borris orchard to be delivered to Sarah, at the bottom of which lay a wisp of paper:

  ‘My dear, I will be there today a week. Be well, and fix a place near you for me to hide. Make only small preparations so you will not be watched too closely. For escape we shall and this time we shall succeed.’

  Eleanor left Borris on foot. She carried a small carpet bag, well furnished with her convent dowry and some light changes of linen. She wore handsome breeches, a warm shirt, and a cape, all removed secretly from her brother-in-law’s clothes press. Her heavy boots were her own, saved from her first flight. She added a man’s cap, borrowed from a servant. She felt fine, comfortable and safe as she walked the twelve miles through hill country to the river town of Inistiogue. There she stopped for food, wine, and lodging. To her delight, she was greeted as ‘Sir’ by the innkeeper.

  Early next morning she went on to Woodstock, along the roads made dangerous by the skulking presence of the Whiteboys and the notorious Freyney. She reassured herself by thinking that the Whiteboys’ targets were usually priests and tithe collectors. So determined was her gait, so confident her masculine appearance that she was not stopped. When she came to the hanging beechwood inside the entrance to Woodstock she sighed with relief: the pounds she carried in her bag would have enriched Freyney and the Whiteboys for some time.

  In the dusk of early evening, Eleanor entered the house unobserved through a hall window left open for her by Sarah’s maid. She found Sarah much recovered. They embraced, lingering in each other’s arms, relishing the absence of the chill of separation. To their besotted eyes there was no sight in the world
more welcome than the presence of the other.

  Eleanor is weary from her two days’ march. She falls asleep almost at once. Sarah lies beside her, watching her face, listening to her soft breathing. She finds herself breathing in unison with her, as though they were walking in stride. Then she dares to touch Eleanor’s arm, her damp curls, her beloved face. So it happens that frightened and long-deprived persons, in one free moment, discover the privileges of the body and the rewards of inconceivable love. In one tender motion towards the other, they rejoice in their discovery.

  For two days Eleanor remained in Sarah’s bedroom, eating bread and cheese and cake smuggled to her when Sarah returned from meals, escaping into the clothes closet at the first sound of someone approaching in the hall. Their days and nights were spent enjoying the luxury of their union.

  But the house was not large enough and the inhabitants too many to make concealment possible for very long. Sir William suspected something was amiss. Perhaps it was the absence of Sarah from her usual haunts on the stone benches at the far recesses of the garden that made him wonder. His suspicion that she was avoiding him brought him one late morning unannounced to her door. There was no time for Eleanor to enter the cupboard. They were discovered together, reading a volume of letters by Madame de Sévigné to her daughter.

  Puzzled by what to do about Lady Eleanor’s presence in her house, Lady Betty responded in the only way she knew, by inviting her to dinner. Eleanor accepted, hungry for a hot dinner, but sat at the table in stony silence, her eyes averted from the despised Sir William. He recognized her coldness by going to his study immediately after supper and writing to Lord Butler. He asked him to come and remove his daughter.