The Ladies by Doris Grumbach Page B

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.
    â€˜Lie still. I have ordered a gig.’
    â€˜A gig ? For Milford Haven?’
    â€˜No, my dearest. To take us back. Until you have recovered. Then we will come away again.’
    â€˜Oh no. No. Not back.’
    â€˜For a little while.’
    â€˜Do you think we have been missed?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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