The Ladies (2 page)

She has never been on a horse before.

The couple, alone in the vastness of Kilkenny Castle, had waited years for the arrival of an heir. In despair, Lady Adelaide fell into a nondescript illness and took to her bed. For the first time since their betrothal it became possible for Lord Walter to visit her in her chamber in the early hours of the afternoon when his vital energies were still his to summon and before his resort to the supper port, claret, and brandy debilitated him. The outcome was heartening to them both: Lady Adelaide found she was pregnant.

Eleanor was told her father had actually smiled when his wife informed him of the news. His smile came so rarely that the two deep ruts between his eyes never smoothed out, the descending lines at the sides of his mouth were almost permanent.

‘We have great need of a son,' he said, smiling at his wife.

She understood. His effort to restore his Ormonde title had been his life's main concern. She too yearned for a boy, understanding the salutary effect of a hereditary male presence upon households such as theirs, upon the keepers of the preserves, the tenants. Knowing how ineffectual was her lazy, tun-shaped husband, Lady Adelaide idealised a slim, strong young body energetically pursuing his parents' affairs, a curly haired, judicious head, a bright, compassionate spirit who would assure protection to her aging person (for surely her wheezing, goutish husband would ‘go' before her). Hers would be the final comforts of a son's mother-love. She thought of the pleasures of childbearing in religious terms. Her Catholicism was firm and sentimental: at long last she would fulfill the blessed example of the fruitful Holy Mother and bear a son.

From her mother, Eleanor came to believe that Lady Adelaide's lying-in was the happiest time the Butler family was ever to know. His Lordship managed to turn his attention from the ancient wrongs done his family by George the First (James Butler's title, the Duke of Ormonde, had been summarily removed, his honours extinguished, his estates forfeited, for a nameless act of high treason). Freed of this concern for the moment, Walter Butler was able to manage a modicum of solicitude for his wife's condition. On one occasion, he brought a cushioned chair close to the fire for her use. He took care to carve thin mutton slices to save her the exertion of using her knife. Frequently, he buttered her scones. He went so far as to allow her to precede him to table, disguising his normal gluttony in a cloak of paternal concern and anticipation.

‘He will make our days a great pleasure,' Lady Adelaide told her husband at table.

His Lordship grunted his agreement without ceasing to chew. His eagerness for the coming event took no verbal form. Under ordinary conditions, he spoke rarely to anyone but the cook, his valet, his manager, and then only in an adjuratory tone. But his purchases in the months before the event were evidence of his secret delight: a pair of small brogues, a miniature gun with chased-silver barrel and stock, a curly coated grey pony. Lady Adelaide showed her delight by ordering from Sheffield of London two silver porridge bowls and a crooked-necked silver spoon, the letters
SON
to be embossed upon the handle.

On the night of the expected birthing, after two aged but skilled midwives had arrived from Dublin, the castle's gates were locked and all the doors barred. These were extraordinary measures, taken to protect the precious heir. They remained closed for two days while poor Lady Adelaide, now in her thirtieth year, struggled feebly to rid herself of the reluctant baby she had so joyfully awaited. Her agonized cries could be heard by maids in the distant pantries. In sympathy, they covered their ears with hands sour from pan scouring. Wet sheets and bloodied cloths were carried in basins from her chamber past Lord Butler seated heavily in a chair in the hall before his rooms. His brows contracted at the sight of them. Hearing his wife's high, gasping cries, his head sank over his brandy glass.

‘Can nothing be done to hasten matters?' he asked the midwife when she passed through the hall on her way to the kitchen for her belated supper, bearing with her a basin of foul-smelling liquid.

‘Soon. Soon, m'lord.' She did not stop to allay the poor husband's anguish. Her business was with the suffering woman, she believed, not with the self-indulgent pleasure-seeking cause of it all. Lord Butler sank back in his chair. He had convinced himself that the rooms full of women attending his wife were paying far too little attention to the welfare of his still unborn son. He muttered to himself: ‘All those women using up the air in there,' without being aware that his poor labouring wife was included in the usurptive sorority.

At dusk of the third day it was all over. Attendants poured out of the chamber, jostling each other in their efforts to be the first to inform Lord Butler of the happy news, the arrival of a fine, sturdy, healthy baby. Lady Adelaide lay inert in their great bed, still flooding it with blood. So great was the excitement of those surrounding the screaming baby, very large and long and equipped with a head of spiky black hair, that Lady Adelaide was left to herself for the first minutes of the baby's life. The noise in the alcove where the baby now lay was deafening. Lord Butler joined the celebrating group and tried to ask his pressing question, to no avail. Above the sounds of footsteps coming and going, rustling skirts, exclamations of admiration and delight from the crowding women-attendants, the high resentful cry of the newborn child rose, shrill and strong.

Excitement spread. In celebration, the guns of gameskeepers and fowlers were fired at the edge of the park. The bewildered father and his bleeding wife alone seemed untouched, he overwhelmed by the confusion around him, she exhausted by the brutal birthing. When the attendants finally departed, the baby quieted, Lord Butler was able to bring himself to approach his wife's bedside. He found her spent but awake. He stood at a little distance, fearful of the sight of her pain.

‘Is our son well?' she whispered.

‘I think so,' he whispered, bending towards her, looking over his shoulder at the mammoth, lace-draped cradle in the distant alcove. No sound came from it.

‘See,' she managed to command, with her last energy. Then she dozed off.

The baby lay still, tired out by its first violent protests at the indignities of birth, its large head on a satin pillow, whirls of lace above and tufted white quilting over its plump body. Lord Butler's need overcame his fear of the unfamiliar, curious creature. He reached deep within the folds of blue coverings, removing layer after layer of the soft stuff that encased the sleeping child until he reached its raw, flaking flesh. He saw a still-bleeding stump protruding from its belly, and then the small, neat seam between its fat thighs. Lord Butler's cheeks reddened dangerously. He looked ready to burst into flame. Roughly he pushed the garments and coverlets back into place.

‘No!' he shouted. The expelled monosyllable sounded like a small explosion. ‘No!' he said again. He backed away from the cradle. Lady Adelaide awakened in fright. He saw her swollen, blackened, questioning eyes, but he could not prepare an answer. Instead, he turned and rushed from the room without saying anything to her, leaving her immobile and terrified among the wet bedclothes, wondering what she had done, whether he was angered by her long travail, which must have occupied the entire attention of everyone at Kilkenny to the disruption of his usual routine, or—the unthinkable for her at this moment—whether the baby was deformed in some way. Worn out and confused, she fell back to sleep.

Outside, Lord Butler stood facing the standing hall mirror, recognising his coarse, red features as enlargements of the baby's. He concentrated on bringing his shaking flesh and clenched, shocked hands under control. Seated again in the chair he had occupied for most of the past three days, he held his head in his hands. In his mouth was the burning, acid taste of the terrible feminine common noun: a
girl.

On her seventh birthday Eleanor learned from her nurse, Miss Colum, that she was a girl. For years Lord Butler's disappointment with her sex had been somewhat appeased by the child's absence from his sight, and her deceptive appearance on the rare occasions when he did catch a glimpse of her. She ran after balls or rode beside the nurse in the pony cart, dressed in Irish woollen knickers and vest, a white linen shirt, and miniature cravat. The boy's clothes, and the glow of her close-cropped red curls, helped to mollify his choler. If she were not a boy, to him she was at least a credible semblance of one. Her slim, wiry athletic body in its boy's accoutrements advanced the illusion for her father. As for Eleanor, she did not require the illusion. She never doubted she was male.

‘I will explain it to you once again,' Miss Colum said. ‘There
is
a difference.'

‘What is it then? What is the difference?'

Miss Colum's stern grey face revealed her Irish puritanism, which prevented her from offering a detailed explanation, and certainly not a description. She thought a moment and then said, ‘Girls have long hair, wear gowns and petticoats, slippers and sashes and hair ribbons. And,' she hesitated, ‘are made differently.'

‘In what way? Where?'

‘On their chests—and between their legs.' Miss Colum's discomfort at the questions showed in the spots that appeared on her cheeks. Pushed to definition, the end of her nose became cherry-coloured, her eyelids and chin an unaccustomed ruddy hue.

Eleanor asked nothing further. She saw no problem in the whole matter. It was clear now to her: ‘If I do not allow my hair to grow I will never be a girl,' she told herself. ‘If I refuse to wear dresses as ladies do, I will always be a boy.' As for the other, less well-defined differences, her fine flat chest and the bare opening between her legs for her necessary occasions: surely these places could make no difference. They would be well hidden from public view by her shirts and knickers. She would be a boy, and then a man. She saw no difficulty at all.

In her room, left to herself when Miss Colum went off for visits to the servant's quarters, and after a long day of play and pretending, she cut her hair close to her head. For this purpose she used the hunting knife she had found in the stables and kept from Miss Colum's eyes under the toy chest. The curls she cut off were saved in a tin box. To her mind they served as talisman against the sex she had abnegated. Preserved in this way, her curls could be controlled and would not reattach themselves, she believed, especially since she took care to keep the tin box tightly closed. Regular shearing would prevent excessive growth, she believed, and would guarantee her chosen sex.

It is hard to know if the girl-child born to Lord and Lady Butler and named, in the fourth week of her life, Eleanor, would have demanded boy's clothes and cropped hair had they not been first accorded her by her deeply disappointed parents. No effort was made to replace the wardrobe and toys prepared for their son before her birth. Lady Adelaide's frail health kept her from influencing her daughter's wardrobe even had she wished to. As it was, she desired only to be freed of responsibility for her so that she might concentrate her whole attention on her own uncertain health and her private devotions to the Holy Mother and Her Blessed Son. She hardly noticed Eleanor's clothes when she was brought to table to say goodnight at the start of supper, dressed carefully in velvet knickers, Eton spencer, a sparkling white shirt, and linen stock.

As Eleanor grew older, Miss Colum complained to the cook, she was given ‘the run of the place.' She stayed away from the castle for hours, exploring the demesnes and the hills beyond, running through the fields of furze, the meadows filled with foxglove and buttercup, returning only for meals and to sleep.

Until she was eleven, Eleanor was that oddity among children, a contented solitary. She grew tall, her shoulders broadened, her waist thickened, her legs formed straight and thick. To her delight, her breasts remained rudimentary, and her hands and flat sturdy feet were larger than most boys'. Outdoors, far from the sight of those in the castle, she donned her ‘play' costume, heavy leathern boots and cut-down breeches left from her father's riding days. She wound a thick cashmere scarf about her throat and covered her hair with a woolen tam. Otherwise, she made no concession to the wild, cold Irish wind. Miss Colum was lethargic, short-legged, flat-footed, and did not attempt to follow her charge on her excursions. Eleanor never discussed the contents of her solitary games with her, or with anyone, for that matter. Where she went, what she did was known only to herself. Her pursuits were full and sustaining, enough to make her happy and occupy an essential part of her days. When she finally appeared at half after three before her nurse to be made presentable for her appearance at supper she would be muddy and weary, but exultant.

‘Ride, harder,' she told the gaunt stone lion, one of a pair that guarded the farthest gate near the old stables. Her knees numb from the cold (for she always removed her breeches) she rode him hard, rocking forward and back on his broad boney back, leaning out perilously from his sides, feeling him move under her. The pleasures of her ride rose up in her until, at their height, she screamed. Her delight filled her whole body. When her ride was over (a journey she took two or three times a day in all weather), she climbed down slowly and whispered her gratitude into the lion's stone ear. She rescued her breeches from her secret hiding place between his haunches and put them on. Lovingly, she moved her hand over his back.

‘You are all wet,' she said to him, convincing herself he was capable of furious sweat, never allowing herself to believe that in her ecstasy it was she who had dampened his granite back.

When Eleanor was twelve another daughter was born to Lady and Lord Butler. This time there was no disappointment, for the couple had been afraid to hope. The baby was named Margaret. She grew up adoring Eleanor but too distant in years and too different in nature to be influenced by her sister's boyish posturings. Margaret was small, blonde, and nervous, afraid of the garden snakes that seemed to stalk her during outdoor games while ignoring her sthenic sister, who liked to catch the slippery creatures and hold them before her little sister's skittish eyes. Except to frighten and to tease her, Eleanor left the child entirely alone. Soon after Margaret's second birthday Miss Colum was transferred to her care, to the nurse's disguised delight: little Margaret was pretty and biddable, undemanding and dull. Her parents had decided it was time to have Eleanor instructed by someone possessed of more than the elementary capacities of the governess.