Lady Elizabeth Cathcart came to live at Tewin Water House about the year 1714… I went to live with her as under gardener about 15 years of age in 1743 and lived with her until she was taken away to Ireland...
John Carrington’s Diary
I’m walking in the garden at Tewin Water House. The scent of late-flowering roses drifts to meet me. ‘Lady Elizabeth!’ It’s the gardener’s lad, running up the path with a basket of freshly-picked apricots. I take one and bite into its golden glow. It is sweet and warm…
I wake.
I am not at home. In a shaft of moonlight, I can see my breath cloud in the chill air.
What do you do with a woman who has buried three husbands?
Bury her. Alive.
I was a good girl. I did as my Papa told me and married James Fleet. He brought me to Tewin Water House and left it to me when he died.
The first, then, was to please my parents. The second for money, the third for rank. And the fourth for love. My mistake.
It was my third husband, Charles, who made me Lady Cathcart. When he died I was ready to fill Tewin Water House with music and dancing and enjoy my widowhood. However, the mind might envisage comfort and serenity in later life but the heart has other desires. After 40 years of sensible decisions, my heart was ready for the Devil and along came Hugh Macguire, wickedly charming, with a colonel’s rank, he said, and a castle in Ireland, he said.
I was looking forward to fun in the bedroom, this having been somewhat lacking with my previous husbands. My lusty Irishman began well, though he was prone to a weakness for port. Nevertheless, I wasn’t complaining.
Then the wheedling began, which became a nagging. When would I make a new will, in his favour? Why wouldn’t I sign over the deeds of the house to him, my lawful husband and new master of Tewin Water?
Well, my heart might have been giddy but my head was sound. Tewin Water did not need a new master. Furthermore, the very morning after our wedding night, he had borrowed money from me to pay an inconvenient gambling debt, so I kept my will unchanged and locked away the deeds in a secret place.
My firmness angered him and he began to stay away from me, coming back from time to time to swear at me and, once, to wave a pistol in my face.
The servants told me to take care. Colonel Macguire wished me ill, they said. Colonel Macguire’s groom had promised my cook he would take her to Ireland with him when Colonel Macguire carried me there.
I had no intention of being carried to Ireland. I had my lady’s maid sew a few jewels into my petticoats and some into my wig.
Macguire had stayed home for a few nights, kept off the port wine and was in a much better temper so I agreed to his suggestion that we make a visit to Brocket Hall. When after half an hour, we had not arrived at Brocket Hall but appeared to be travelling north as fast as the horses would go, I became suspicious, but by then it was too late.
We stopped when it was dark and I was ready to get out and protest to the innkeeper but Hugh held me tight with his hand over my mouth as a lady entered the carriage.
When I say a lady, of course I mean she wasn’t.
‘Who are you madam?’ I said, when Hugh had released his grimy hand.
She laughed. ‘Why madam, I’m you. Can’t you see?’
I saw that she was wearing the exact same clothes as me.
She looked nothing like me, of course. Well, perhaps a little like me when I was 20 years younger.
It was the last I saw as my fiendish husband bound my hands behind my back, pulled a black bag over my head and shoved me to the floor of the carriage. The scuffles and moans I could hear told me what Hugh and his whore were up to while I lay helpless at their feet.
Wherever we stopped she pretended to be Lady Elizabeth, happily travelling to Ireland of her own free will. We crossed the sea but I remember little.
I wake in the dark, to the sound of rain. There is no glass in the window of this room. I am open to the elements.
I am lying on a straw-filled mattress. A woman approaches me with a candle. I am about to fly at her, thinking it is Macguire’s whore, but she is an old woman, with cracked hands and a lined face.
She brings me water and a chunk of coarse bread on a plate. The plate is pewter, with the initial M engraved on it; the water is surprisingly sweet to my tongue.
After a while in comes Hugh, brandishing pen and paper, the whore hovering behind him in the shadows. I am furious and if I had my strength I would beat both of them black and blue. ‘How dare you bring me here as a prisoner?’ I cry. ‘Release me at once and give me a carriage and horses so that I may return to England immediately.’ My voice sounds thin and I can hear the whore sniggering.
‘You will remain here until you learn to behave like a wife,’ Hugh says. ‘Give me control over your affairs and we can make this a proper marriage.’ The whore is still sniggering.
‘My fortune is my own and I will never sign it over to a drunken spendthrift,’ I say.
He starts shouting. ‘Then you will die a prisoner here in Castle Macguire!’
‘Nonsense. My kinsmen will come to fetch me and you shall be hanged,’ I say.
But he laughs. ‘You are not some fairy tale princess to be rescued. This is wild Fermanagh and no news of you will reach England. Do what I say woman and sign over the deeds of the house to me or you will never see Tewin Water again.’
I refuse. If I do sign, I will never see Tewin Water again. He has not thought this through, the idiot.
He leaves me alone. The door is locked and my only diversion is to look out of the window at the rain.
So much for the castle. It is not much more than a big hall, and a tower built of massive blocks of stone. My room is at the top of this tower, where I am kept like Rapunzel unable to let down my hair. I still have, however, my wig. The serving woman watches me like a witch.
I cannot tell how many days I have been here, nor can I sometimes distinguish day from night. I try to maintain a civilised order, get up and dress when it appears to be light, but I am not allowed to mark Sundays by going to church. I do not even know if there is one, the people of this place being heathen Catholics.
Hugh returns and starts again with the shouting and the threats. ‘I will leave you here to wither and die unless you sign these papers!’ My head is whirling and I am almost on the point of signing, desperate to put an end to the darkness and the rain and the shouting. But this time my heart does not let me down. I will not give up the house I love.
I refuse. He lurches off, swearing.
I feel somewhat better. The rain stops.
One day I wake to find the air is different and the serving woman tells me that my husband (and the whore) have left for England. I ask if I can walk around the house. She agrees, accompanying me all the while. I take it she is my gaoler, in his absence.
The house is cold and furnished with nothing more than worm-eaten tables and benches, a few greying tapestries on the walls and a small case of books.
The woman’s name is Fionuala. I say it is a musical name and she says alas, she is not musical, but hopes to sing before she dies. ‘So do I, and dance too,’ I say.
I tell her about my life in England and inform her that, at this very moment, my family will be searching for me and if they encounter my husband they will have him clapped in prison until he releases me.
‘Release does not come easily,’ Fionuala says. She has a mournful turn of thought and that is what comes of living in a peat bog. I do not let her discover my jewels.
After some time – I cannot tell how long – my husband returns, alone. I suspect the whore has left him for someone more rewarding. I hear him roaring and crashing around the hall and then he comes up to my room.
‘This has gone on long enough woman!’ he shouts. ‘I must have your money. A mere thousand guineas! A thousand guineas and I will let you go.’
‘Do I look like a woman who has a thousand guineas on her?’ I say. ‘All my wealth is back in Hertfordshire, as you very well know. Take me back to England if you want me to pay your debts.’
But he can’t take me back. He is in a bind of his own making.
Outside my glassless window the house martins are building a nest.
‘Did they not do this last year?’ I ask Fionuala. ‘And the year before?’
‘No doubt,’ she says.
A blackness clouds my eyes and I feel weak. I have been in a fog, a dream in which I was Lady Elizabeth Cathcart, a woman of fortune, with powerful kin and friends who would muster themselves to rescue me. But no-one has ever come. I am not that woman. Rich, popular Lady Elizabeth has disappeared and been forgotten.
I start to shiver, then burn. Fionuala catches me as I fall.
How many months, how many years, I have lain on this straw-filled bed, every breath painful, I cannot tell.
‘I am dying,’ I say to Fionuala.
‘Not yet,’ she whispers. ‘Not yet.’
Hugh comes storming in. His shouts rack my body with pain. ‘See what comes of defying me?’ he yells.
I can think of nothing else but that I do not want to die in this tower. Striving to get off my mattress, I fall on my knees on the stone flags in front of him like a beggar-woman.
‘Have pity on me Hugh. Let me go. My death will not profit you. Please, husband, please. Let me live.’
I have lost everything. I almost tell him about the jewels but my tongue cannot move.
He laughs and kicks me in the chest. A thin pile of bones as I am, I fall and crack my head on the flags.
Fionuala tells me later that he flees then, cursing, but I know nothing. All is oblivion and I sink towards death.
Outside my glassless window the house martins are building a nest.
‘Did they not do this last year?’ I ask Fionuala. ‘And the year before?’
‘No doubt,’ she says.
She is teaching me to knit while I regain my strength. Now that Hugh is not here, she has the run of the kitchen and concocts tasty broths for me. Fionuala knows many things. How old is she? Sometimes I feel she is older than me, sometimes younger.
From the tower we can see for miles and she names the hills and lakes for me. We can see Lough Erne, which she says reaches almost to the sea and is home to the wild swans in winter.
Fionuala is full of stories and as we knit she tells me of Oisin, the son of the great warrior Finn MacCool. Oisin’s gift for poetry was so wondrous that the Princess of the Land of Youth came to take him to her beautiful fairyland country, where there was neither cruelty nor greed. After a few weeks, Oisin missed his family and wanted to visit them. But when he rode back out of the Land of Youth and set foot on Irish soil, he became a withered old man with white hair, too feeble to move. ‘I am Oisin, son of Finn, chief of the Fianna,’ he said. But the people told him: ‘You are dreaming. There have been no Fianna in Ireland for over three hundred years. They are gone and live only in songs and stories.’
I begin to weep. It is as if I too have set foot on Irish soil and discover that I am an old woman; I have spent more years in this tower than I can count and my life is flowing away from me like a river.
‘If I ever return to Tewin Water I shall be an old crone,’ I grieve. ‘No-one will recognise me and they will not believe my tale. I might as well die here.’ For the first time since I was brought here, I cannot stop weeping. Fionuala comforts me. ‘Come,’ she says. ‘Do not think this is you. After all, Castle Macguire is not fairyland, is it?’
And it is not. I feel better.
Macguire is back. I notice how much older he looks, with a pot belly on him and his clothes stained and greasy. Drunk, he fell against the fireplace, burned his hand and knocked out his front teeth. He has no back ones and can now eat little more than porridge. It is just as well as there is almost no food in the kitchens.
I worry for our prospects and decide to take Fionuala into my confidence. ‘In my petticoat, the one I always wash myself…’
‘The one with the jewels sewn in?’ she says.
‘That one. Take some jewels and hide them carefully for I believe soon we will need them, to escape or merely to feed ourselves. I fear that one day my husband will come up here in a drunken rage and beat them out of me.’
‘He might indeed beat them out of your wig,’ she says.
My diamond necklace she hides in an old house martin’s nest.
Hugh is lonely and allows me out of my room to dine with him in the hall. He starts on a rambling story about his exploits fighting the Spanish. This is complete fiction as far as I know and I laugh, which is a mistake. He hauls me out of my chair and puts his knife to my throat.
‘I come from a race of warriors!’ he rants. ‘I was destined for greatness but I’ve been brought low by women!’ He spits out the last word and presses the blade against my skin. In this deranged state he can slit my gorge and there is no-one to save me.
He lurches back. ‘You’re not worth killing,’ he says. ‘I’m leaving here for ever and locking the door. They will find you in a hundred years’ time, a heap of bones and dust.’
He dashes out and I hear him ride off.
He has been gone many weeks. Months perhaps. The swans have come flying in to Loch Erne and the days are cold. I’m beginning to think he has left for ever and he did indeed lock the door, though Fionuala says she has the key.
We hear the galloping hooves first and then shouting. Three men rush into the hall carrying my husband. They lay him out on the table. His shirt is stained with dark, dry blood.
‘He is dead madam,’ one of them says. They take off their hats.
Hugh groans: ‘Elizabeth…’. I bend my ear to his mouth.
‘I am killed Elizabeth,’ he says. For once he speaks the truth.
He says nothing more. We stand there for a while before the men agree he is definitely dead. I fetch the last bottle of port for them and they tell me he quarrelled with a young hothead and was fatally wounded in the ensuing duel. ‘He died a warrior,’ one of them says solemnly. Hugh’s friends were always as foolish as himself.
I wake the next morning with fear in my throat and tiptoe downstairs. There is my husband, still on the table, still dead. I fall to my knees and give a prayer of thanks.
Fionuala helps me up. ‘Quick,’ she says. ‘I have horses.’ It is a long and uncomfortable ride to the sea but Fionuala is skilled at bartering my smaller bracelets for food and lodging. At Dundalk my gold chains secure me a passage to Liverpool. ‘Keep the diamonds for England,’ Fionuala counsels. ‘Things are more expensive there.’
‘Come with me,’ I say. ‘You will be happy at Tewin Water.’ But she says she cannot leave Ireland. I weep to lose my dear companion, and press my heavier bracelets on her. I wave to Fionuala from the deck of the ship. She waves back, standing young and straight, her red-gold hair flowing down.
Twenty years in a tower is not my humiliation. My humiliation is seeing the look on people’s faces as they take in my lined face and withered body. I go to my family in London: they have not forgotten me, but do not wish to remember that they did not save me. At least one cousin tried to have me declared dead.
The look of horror on the wigmaker’s face is the worst of all. ‘My lady…’ he gasps, staring at my trusty wig. ‘No-one has worn anything like this since the days of King George! Not the new King George but the old King George. Or even the King George before that!’
But the people of Tewin have not forgotten me. When my carriage reaches Barnet there is a great crowd of Tewin villagers. They insist on uncoupling the horses and pulling the carriage themselves all the way to Tewin Water, where there are yet more people, cheering, to greet me.
For some years after, Hugh would come in the darkness to taunt me. ‘You believe you escaped my tower alive but you are wrong,’ he would jeer. ‘I took your life and left you a worthless husk, hollowed out by time.’
I would wake up believing I was dead, but Fionuala’s voice told me that I was not. ‘Time is a fairy tale,’ she would say.
I ordered Hugh to get back to Hades, where he belongs.
Now I am not afraid to face the woman in the looking glass as I fasten my diamond necklace. We have guests this evening. I can hear the musicians starting up. I have a spray of lilac which a young man brought to me earlier. ‘You may not remember me, my lady, but I used to be the gardener’s lad here.’ John is his name. He seems to be making something of himself.
At night, I dream I am a wild swan, flying through the years over the bogs of Fermanagh to land on Lough Erne. I wake content.
Lady Elizabeth Cathcart, née Malyn, died in 1789 aged 93 and is buried in St Peter’s church, Tewin. The story of her abduction and return is told by John Carrington (The Diary of John Carrington, Farmer of Bramfield, vol 1 1798-1804, ed. Susan Flood, Hertfordshire Record Publications vol.26).
With thanks to Elizabeth Barber, ‘Four Husbands and an Heiress’, in ‘Reflections…’, Hertford Writers’ Circle Anthology 2007.
John Carrington’s Diary
I’m walking in the garden at Tewin Water House. The scent of late-flowering roses drifts to meet me. ‘Lady Elizabeth!’ It’s the gardener’s lad, running up the path with a basket of freshly-picked apricots. I take one and bite into its golden glow. It is sweet and warm…
I wake.
I am not at home. In a shaft of moonlight, I can see my breath cloud in the chill air.
What do you do with a woman who has buried three husbands?
Bury her. Alive.
I was a good girl. I did as my Papa told me and married James Fleet. He brought me to Tewin Water House and left it to me when he died.
The first, then, was to please my parents. The second for money, the third for rank. And the fourth for love. My mistake.
It was my third husband, Charles, who made me Lady Cathcart. When he died I was ready to fill Tewin Water House with music and dancing and enjoy my widowhood. However, the mind might envisage comfort and serenity in later life but the heart has other desires. After 40 years of sensible decisions, my heart was ready for the Devil and along came Hugh Macguire, wickedly charming, with a colonel’s rank, he said, and a castle in Ireland, he said.
I was looking forward to fun in the bedroom, this having been somewhat lacking with my previous husbands. My lusty Irishman began well, though he was prone to a weakness for port. Nevertheless, I wasn’t complaining.
Then the wheedling began, which became a nagging. When would I make a new will, in his favour? Why wouldn’t I sign over the deeds of the house to him, my lawful husband and new master of Tewin Water?
Well, my heart might have been giddy but my head was sound. Tewin Water did not need a new master. Furthermore, the very morning after our wedding night, he had borrowed money from me to pay an inconvenient gambling debt, so I kept my will unchanged and locked away the deeds in a secret place.
My firmness angered him and he began to stay away from me, coming back from time to time to swear at me and, once, to wave a pistol in my face.
The servants told me to take care. Colonel Macguire wished me ill, they said. Colonel Macguire’s groom had promised my cook he would take her to Ireland with him when Colonel Macguire carried me there.
I had no intention of being carried to Ireland. I had my lady’s maid sew a few jewels into my petticoats and some into my wig.
Macguire had stayed home for a few nights, kept off the port wine and was in a much better temper so I agreed to his suggestion that we make a visit to Brocket Hall. When after half an hour, we had not arrived at Brocket Hall but appeared to be travelling north as fast as the horses would go, I became suspicious, but by then it was too late.
We stopped when it was dark and I was ready to get out and protest to the innkeeper but Hugh held me tight with his hand over my mouth as a lady entered the carriage.
When I say a lady, of course I mean she wasn’t.
‘Who are you madam?’ I said, when Hugh had released his grimy hand.
She laughed. ‘Why madam, I’m you. Can’t you see?’
I saw that she was wearing the exact same clothes as me.
She looked nothing like me, of course. Well, perhaps a little like me when I was 20 years younger.
It was the last I saw as my fiendish husband bound my hands behind my back, pulled a black bag over my head and shoved me to the floor of the carriage. The scuffles and moans I could hear told me what Hugh and his whore were up to while I lay helpless at their feet.
Wherever we stopped she pretended to be Lady Elizabeth, happily travelling to Ireland of her own free will. We crossed the sea but I remember little.
I wake in the dark, to the sound of rain. There is no glass in the window of this room. I am open to the elements.
I am lying on a straw-filled mattress. A woman approaches me with a candle. I am about to fly at her, thinking it is Macguire’s whore, but she is an old woman, with cracked hands and a lined face.
She brings me water and a chunk of coarse bread on a plate. The plate is pewter, with the initial M engraved on it; the water is surprisingly sweet to my tongue.
After a while in comes Hugh, brandishing pen and paper, the whore hovering behind him in the shadows. I am furious and if I had my strength I would beat both of them black and blue. ‘How dare you bring me here as a prisoner?’ I cry. ‘Release me at once and give me a carriage and horses so that I may return to England immediately.’ My voice sounds thin and I can hear the whore sniggering.
‘You will remain here until you learn to behave like a wife,’ Hugh says. ‘Give me control over your affairs and we can make this a proper marriage.’ The whore is still sniggering.
‘My fortune is my own and I will never sign it over to a drunken spendthrift,’ I say.
He starts shouting. ‘Then you will die a prisoner here in Castle Macguire!’
‘Nonsense. My kinsmen will come to fetch me and you shall be hanged,’ I say.
But he laughs. ‘You are not some fairy tale princess to be rescued. This is wild Fermanagh and no news of you will reach England. Do what I say woman and sign over the deeds of the house to me or you will never see Tewin Water again.’
I refuse. If I do sign, I will never see Tewin Water again. He has not thought this through, the idiot.
He leaves me alone. The door is locked and my only diversion is to look out of the window at the rain.
So much for the castle. It is not much more than a big hall, and a tower built of massive blocks of stone. My room is at the top of this tower, where I am kept like Rapunzel unable to let down my hair. I still have, however, my wig. The serving woman watches me like a witch.
I cannot tell how many days I have been here, nor can I sometimes distinguish day from night. I try to maintain a civilised order, get up and dress when it appears to be light, but I am not allowed to mark Sundays by going to church. I do not even know if there is one, the people of this place being heathen Catholics.
Hugh returns and starts again with the shouting and the threats. ‘I will leave you here to wither and die unless you sign these papers!’ My head is whirling and I am almost on the point of signing, desperate to put an end to the darkness and the rain and the shouting. But this time my heart does not let me down. I will not give up the house I love.
I refuse. He lurches off, swearing.
I feel somewhat better. The rain stops.
One day I wake to find the air is different and the serving woman tells me that my husband (and the whore) have left for England. I ask if I can walk around the house. She agrees, accompanying me all the while. I take it she is my gaoler, in his absence.
The house is cold and furnished with nothing more than worm-eaten tables and benches, a few greying tapestries on the walls and a small case of books.
The woman’s name is Fionuala. I say it is a musical name and she says alas, she is not musical, but hopes to sing before she dies. ‘So do I, and dance too,’ I say.
I tell her about my life in England and inform her that, at this very moment, my family will be searching for me and if they encounter my husband they will have him clapped in prison until he releases me.
‘Release does not come easily,’ Fionuala says. She has a mournful turn of thought and that is what comes of living in a peat bog. I do not let her discover my jewels.
After some time – I cannot tell how long – my husband returns, alone. I suspect the whore has left him for someone more rewarding. I hear him roaring and crashing around the hall and then he comes up to my room.
‘This has gone on long enough woman!’ he shouts. ‘I must have your money. A mere thousand guineas! A thousand guineas and I will let you go.’
‘Do I look like a woman who has a thousand guineas on her?’ I say. ‘All my wealth is back in Hertfordshire, as you very well know. Take me back to England if you want me to pay your debts.’
But he can’t take me back. He is in a bind of his own making.
Outside my glassless window the house martins are building a nest.
‘Did they not do this last year?’ I ask Fionuala. ‘And the year before?’
‘No doubt,’ she says.
A blackness clouds my eyes and I feel weak. I have been in a fog, a dream in which I was Lady Elizabeth Cathcart, a woman of fortune, with powerful kin and friends who would muster themselves to rescue me. But no-one has ever come. I am not that woman. Rich, popular Lady Elizabeth has disappeared and been forgotten.
I start to shiver, then burn. Fionuala catches me as I fall.
How many months, how many years, I have lain on this straw-filled bed, every breath painful, I cannot tell.
‘I am dying,’ I say to Fionuala.
‘Not yet,’ she whispers. ‘Not yet.’
Hugh comes storming in. His shouts rack my body with pain. ‘See what comes of defying me?’ he yells.
I can think of nothing else but that I do not want to die in this tower. Striving to get off my mattress, I fall on my knees on the stone flags in front of him like a beggar-woman.
‘Have pity on me Hugh. Let me go. My death will not profit you. Please, husband, please. Let me live.’
I have lost everything. I almost tell him about the jewels but my tongue cannot move.
He laughs and kicks me in the chest. A thin pile of bones as I am, I fall and crack my head on the flags.
Fionuala tells me later that he flees then, cursing, but I know nothing. All is oblivion and I sink towards death.
Outside my glassless window the house martins are building a nest.
‘Did they not do this last year?’ I ask Fionuala. ‘And the year before?’
‘No doubt,’ she says.
She is teaching me to knit while I regain my strength. Now that Hugh is not here, she has the run of the kitchen and concocts tasty broths for me. Fionuala knows many things. How old is she? Sometimes I feel she is older than me, sometimes younger.
From the tower we can see for miles and she names the hills and lakes for me. We can see Lough Erne, which she says reaches almost to the sea and is home to the wild swans in winter.
Fionuala is full of stories and as we knit she tells me of Oisin, the son of the great warrior Finn MacCool. Oisin’s gift for poetry was so wondrous that the Princess of the Land of Youth came to take him to her beautiful fairyland country, where there was neither cruelty nor greed. After a few weeks, Oisin missed his family and wanted to visit them. But when he rode back out of the Land of Youth and set foot on Irish soil, he became a withered old man with white hair, too feeble to move. ‘I am Oisin, son of Finn, chief of the Fianna,’ he said. But the people told him: ‘You are dreaming. There have been no Fianna in Ireland for over three hundred years. They are gone and live only in songs and stories.’
I begin to weep. It is as if I too have set foot on Irish soil and discover that I am an old woman; I have spent more years in this tower than I can count and my life is flowing away from me like a river.
‘If I ever return to Tewin Water I shall be an old crone,’ I grieve. ‘No-one will recognise me and they will not believe my tale. I might as well die here.’ For the first time since I was brought here, I cannot stop weeping. Fionuala comforts me. ‘Come,’ she says. ‘Do not think this is you. After all, Castle Macguire is not fairyland, is it?’
And it is not. I feel better.
Macguire is back. I notice how much older he looks, with a pot belly on him and his clothes stained and greasy. Drunk, he fell against the fireplace, burned his hand and knocked out his front teeth. He has no back ones and can now eat little more than porridge. It is just as well as there is almost no food in the kitchens.
I worry for our prospects and decide to take Fionuala into my confidence. ‘In my petticoat, the one I always wash myself…’
‘The one with the jewels sewn in?’ she says.
‘That one. Take some jewels and hide them carefully for I believe soon we will need them, to escape or merely to feed ourselves. I fear that one day my husband will come up here in a drunken rage and beat them out of me.’
‘He might indeed beat them out of your wig,’ she says.
My diamond necklace she hides in an old house martin’s nest.
Hugh is lonely and allows me out of my room to dine with him in the hall. He starts on a rambling story about his exploits fighting the Spanish. This is complete fiction as far as I know and I laugh, which is a mistake. He hauls me out of my chair and puts his knife to my throat.
‘I come from a race of warriors!’ he rants. ‘I was destined for greatness but I’ve been brought low by women!’ He spits out the last word and presses the blade against my skin. In this deranged state he can slit my gorge and there is no-one to save me.
He lurches back. ‘You’re not worth killing,’ he says. ‘I’m leaving here for ever and locking the door. They will find you in a hundred years’ time, a heap of bones and dust.’
He dashes out and I hear him ride off.
He has been gone many weeks. Months perhaps. The swans have come flying in to Loch Erne and the days are cold. I’m beginning to think he has left for ever and he did indeed lock the door, though Fionuala says she has the key.
We hear the galloping hooves first and then shouting. Three men rush into the hall carrying my husband. They lay him out on the table. His shirt is stained with dark, dry blood.
‘He is dead madam,’ one of them says. They take off their hats.
Hugh groans: ‘Elizabeth…’. I bend my ear to his mouth.
‘I am killed Elizabeth,’ he says. For once he speaks the truth.
He says nothing more. We stand there for a while before the men agree he is definitely dead. I fetch the last bottle of port for them and they tell me he quarrelled with a young hothead and was fatally wounded in the ensuing duel. ‘He died a warrior,’ one of them says solemnly. Hugh’s friends were always as foolish as himself.
I wake the next morning with fear in my throat and tiptoe downstairs. There is my husband, still on the table, still dead. I fall to my knees and give a prayer of thanks.
Fionuala helps me up. ‘Quick,’ she says. ‘I have horses.’ It is a long and uncomfortable ride to the sea but Fionuala is skilled at bartering my smaller bracelets for food and lodging. At Dundalk my gold chains secure me a passage to Liverpool. ‘Keep the diamonds for England,’ Fionuala counsels. ‘Things are more expensive there.’
‘Come with me,’ I say. ‘You will be happy at Tewin Water.’ But she says she cannot leave Ireland. I weep to lose my dear companion, and press my heavier bracelets on her. I wave to Fionuala from the deck of the ship. She waves back, standing young and straight, her red-gold hair flowing down.
Twenty years in a tower is not my humiliation. My humiliation is seeing the look on people’s faces as they take in my lined face and withered body. I go to my family in London: they have not forgotten me, but do not wish to remember that they did not save me. At least one cousin tried to have me declared dead.
The look of horror on the wigmaker’s face is the worst of all. ‘My lady…’ he gasps, staring at my trusty wig. ‘No-one has worn anything like this since the days of King George! Not the new King George but the old King George. Or even the King George before that!’
But the people of Tewin have not forgotten me. When my carriage reaches Barnet there is a great crowd of Tewin villagers. They insist on uncoupling the horses and pulling the carriage themselves all the way to Tewin Water, where there are yet more people, cheering, to greet me.
For some years after, Hugh would come in the darkness to taunt me. ‘You believe you escaped my tower alive but you are wrong,’ he would jeer. ‘I took your life and left you a worthless husk, hollowed out by time.’
I would wake up believing I was dead, but Fionuala’s voice told me that I was not. ‘Time is a fairy tale,’ she would say.
I ordered Hugh to get back to Hades, where he belongs.
Now I am not afraid to face the woman in the looking glass as I fasten my diamond necklace. We have guests this evening. I can hear the musicians starting up. I have a spray of lilac which a young man brought to me earlier. ‘You may not remember me, my lady, but I used to be the gardener’s lad here.’ John is his name. He seems to be making something of himself.
At night, I dream I am a wild swan, flying through the years over the bogs of Fermanagh to land on Lough Erne. I wake content.
Lady Elizabeth Cathcart, née Malyn, died in 1789 aged 93 and is buried in St Peter’s church, Tewin. The story of her abduction and return is told by John Carrington (The Diary of John Carrington, Farmer of Bramfield, vol 1 1798-1804, ed. Susan Flood, Hertfordshire Record Publications vol.26).
With thanks to Elizabeth Barber, ‘Four Husbands and an Heiress’, in ‘Reflections…’, Hertford Writers’ Circle Anthology 2007.
