Aristocrats (42 page)

Louisa had mentioned Ogilvie only rarely in her letters to England. But on 21 January 1774 she wrote to Sarah: ‘I quite dote upon Mr. Ogilvie. He is such a good sort of man, and very pleasant to us, from entering into all our ways, and if I can’t be with my sister, I frequently leave my directions with him to make my sister do what is good for her and he does it. Only think what a blessing it is to have such a man take care of the boys. In her present situation, what a distress it would be to her to know what to do with her sons. But she may be perfectly easy while they are in his care.’ Ogilvie was filling Louisa’s thoughts and she decided the time had come to introduce him to the rest of the family. Louisa had watched Emily and Ogilvie fall in love at Black Rock from the vantage point of her cottage next door. She may even have known that they were having an affair. But she did not know about Lord
George Simon’s possible parentage and she refused to recognise the depths of Emily’s involvement. Mr Ogilvie as an embodiment of Saint Preux, as Rousseau come to life, was romantic and just about tolerable. But Louisa was unable to countenance anything more. Emily’s open flouting of convention after the Duke’s death stunned her.

In the winter and spring of 1773–74 Emily, Ogilvie and the children moved between Carton and Black Rock depending upon whim and weather. Emily had always been determined and she had always got what she wanted. None the less the gossip immediately began. The Earl of Bellamont, who was engaged to Emily’s eldest daughter, began to make trouble about the marriage settlement and delayed the wedding, so banking up the fires of speculation about a troop of bastards and a secret marriage between the Duchess and the tutor.

Emily was not immune to gossip, but she allowed others to fight for her reputation and, while they did so, she resolutely went her own way. Once she was settled with Ogilvie and the children, Emily grew ‘better’ as Louisa put it to Sarah. Her most pressing worry was not the dark undercurrent of scandal but the indomitable and obvious performance of her own body. If, or when, she got pregnant again, her child would have no ducal covering for its illegitimacy.

By mid-January 1774, Emily had decided to go abroad, taking Ogilvie with her and offering her children’s health as an explanation. She wrote to Caroline describing the plan, but missing out any mention of Ogilvie. Caroline replied to her sister’s letter with a short sad note dated 29 January 1774. ‘Pray go sweet siss, and God Almighty send you success in an undertaking so worthy of your good sense.… Lord Holland bids me tell you he loves you dearly and approves your scheme; I’m sure, dearest sister I’m totally disinterested in so doing, for my gloomy situation of mind makes me think we shall never meet again.’ ‘Adieu dear sister,’ Caroline added, as if she knew that these were the last words she would ever send to Emily, ‘Adieu. I’m tired with writing. Yours ever. C. H.’
At Castletown, Louisa had received ‘a terrible account’ of Caroline’s health from the Duke of Richmond. This and Caroline’s own letter convinced Emily that if she went abroad immediately she would never see her sister alive again. So instead of starting out on a new life herself, Emily decided to go to London with Louisa and to be with Caroline on the last lonely journey from life into death.

The Duke of Richmond had given few hopes for Caroline’s life. She was emaciated and shrunken, racked with pain that shuddered down her back. She retched and vomited continually, unable to keep down any nourishment. The doctors who plied the wings and galleries of Holland House were divided in their diagnoses. Some thought she had cancer, others not; some said she could recover, others that she could not last long. Caroline confused the doctors she had once placed so much trust in because she fought and controlled her pain, concentrating on her illness all the obstinacy she had shown towards those who had fallen foul of her sense of justice or her wishes. She had much to live for; her ailing husband and sisters, her sons and grandchildren, books and friends, the towers and gardens of Holland House and the happy retirement she had promised herself there.

Forgetting the anger and the quarrels of earlier years, Caroline directed her will inwards. When she heard of her sisters’ departure from Ireland she began to rally. Louisa and Emily arrived in London at the end of February and were surprised to find Caroline ‘better’ and talk of cure in the air. But Caroline’s animation was spasmodic. Emily and Louisa could see that the eyes that filled with tears on their arrival, and again and again in the days that followed, glittered too fiercely, that Caroline’s cheeks were hollow, and that, for all her nimbleness, she stood still for long seconds, fighting the pain that surged through her body. None the less, Louisa told Sarah, ‘her spirits are wonderfully good when she is tolerably easy.’ Holland House was full of visitors and Caroline was still playing the role of hostess. Dinner passed without her, but
after dinner she roused herself and stayed with her guests as long as she could. In the evenings after visitors had gone, Louisa and Emily sat with her gossiping and distracting her from pain with ‘chit-chat’ as Louisa described it in one of her daily bulletins to Sarah.

Louisa was surprised that Holland House was functioning in its time-honoured way and astonished that Caroline still dressed and walked about. She had expected to find her sister resigned to death and she imagined a swift and dignified departure with solemn leave-takings and uplifting sermons. But Caroline was spurning death. Her face was turned towards the living; she eagerly drank in stories of love affairs, drawing-room news, political hubbub. After a lifetime decrying politics and the world, they were now what she wanted. Gossip was a sign of an involvement in life, and Caroline still wanted to live. She rejected any religious disquisitions: God, she seemed to imply, was for the dying. ‘She has never at any time talked to either my sister or me upon any serious subject whatever,’ Louisa told Sarah, bewildered that Caroline dismissed any thought of the afterlife.

Caroline was comforted by her sisters’ presence, by the sense of physical unity and the reminder of past happiness that they brought. She asked little of them, happy just to have them by her. But she could soon no longer disguise her pain. In the second week of April her nausea and vomiting became worse and the pain in her back and abdomen grew incessant. Grains of opium, carefully measured by the score, numbed the agony and Caroline fought on. In mid-April Harry Fox arrived from Paris,
en route
for Boston, where the regiment he was joining was stationed. He stayed a week saying goodbye, but Caroline seemed in too much pain to regret his departure.

Still she clung on to life. The doctors, unused to such tenacity, began to doubt their earlier diagnosis of cancer. Hunter, the famous surgeon, carefully hedged his bets, saying that Caroline’s pulse was not ‘that of a dying person’ and concluded that ‘the progress of her disorder’, whatever it was,
would be ‘slow’. After two months in London Emily decided to go back to Ireland. She was exhausted and worried by her separation from Ogilvie and the children. Caroline was saddened by the news, but buoyed up by Louisa’s promise to stay another fortnight.

Before Emily set off, Louisa changed her mind, suddenly anxious about being away from Conolly any longer. Caroline was too fragile to accept Louisa’s change of heart easily but she had strength enough to let her sister know it, as Louisa told Sarah. ‘It seemed a disappointment to her, she said it would have been such a comfort to her and wanted to contrive my not going, but ended with saying I had been very good to her and she was only sorry I had hinted it as she had thought a great deal about it.’

Louisa and Emily left for Ireland at the beginning of May 1774. After their departure both Caroline and Lord Holland continued on their inexorable journey, he with something like melancholy enjoyment, she trying furiously to grip and hold the things and people she held dear as she passed them one by one on the descent. Lord Holland’s slide was gradual, but sometime in the spring he slipped into a kind of unconsciousness. Lying in his chamber, almost insensible to his surroundings, he seemed sunk within himself, inhabiting an underground inner world, unruffled by medicines, bedpans and the heaving servants who lifted and turned him in his bed. His swarthy cheeks were drooping and slack. The energy that had tightened his body and driven his ambitions had drained away and his hands lay gently flattened on the counterpane.

Lord Holland was dying a good death. Somewhere, deep down, cynicism, and the mischievousness that had tempered it, still simmered. Instead of fighting death, Lord Holland sneered and mocked at it, hoarding his wit for one last display. One day, George Selwyn left his card. The footman, hardly expecting a reply from his almost unconscious master, but nervous in the circumstances about Selwyn’s reputation for necrophilia, asked if he should send Selwyn up next time
he called. From the depths of himself, as if he had been keeping the words for a suitable moment, Holland unexpectedly spoke up. ‘If I am alive,’ he said, ‘I will be delighted to see him; and if I am dead, he would like to see me.’

In the weeks that followed, Lord Holland said little more. He was reconciled with his sons, forgetting the dissipation of his fortune, happy that each evening they came and sat with him. Ste Fox’s wife, Mary, lived at Holland House, moving between its sick inhabitants with patience and composure. By the end of June Lord Holland had sunk deeper into death. He seemed to be unaware of his family and his breathing slowed to loud snores. He died as he wanted, without struggling, on 1 July.

Louisa arrived back at Holland House on the day Lord Holland died, summoned from Ireland once again by desperate reports of Caroline’s health. This time Conolly was with her and she was determined to stay to the end. Almost as soon as she arrived Louisa had to go with Mary Fox to Caroline’s room and tell her that her husband was dead. They broke the news in stages, making it easier for everyone to manage. Caroline did not mourn Henry. Her emotions were concentrated on herself. Besides, the wit, energy and sensuality – all the things she had loved in him – had died already. Louisa told Sarah, ‘she says she can’t feel as if it had happened now, but as if it had happened a great while ago.’ In spite of her acceptance of his death, Caroline could not imagine life without her husband. She asked Louisa over and over again what would become of her, begging her sister to do her business and take care of her.

Caroline’s refusal to accept death called for constant delicacy. Louisa wrote to Emily on 4 July: ‘she distressed me vastly last night by asking me if they thought her case hopeless. I was obliged to deceive her, which grieved me, as I should take it so excessively ill to be treated in the same manner. But having always heard it was her wish to be deceived, I did it.’ Louisa was particularly worried because Lord Holland
had left so much in Caroline’s power in his will that she had to make a will of her own if his was to be properly executed. Caroline was very disturbed by Louisa’s gentle suggestion that she make a will, rightly understanding it as a verdict on her own situation. Although she said nothing to her sister, Caroline knew then that she was dying, and told her maids that she would not live for many days. Even after her will was drawn up and signed she kept silent speaking her mind only obliquely in the ‘dreadful nervous horrors’ that accompanied her bouts of pain, when her tormented mind wandered between the past and the future and looked forward with terror to extinction. In spite of her pain and Henry’s death, Caroline still did not give up. She was frightened and angry but unreconciled to death.

Caroline’s body finally failed her spirit. By 8 July it began to swell, feet first and then her hands and face. Her mind, though, was still clear and still rebellious. On the night of the tenth of July, as Louisa and Mary were leaning over her, wondering if she were still breathing, Caroline said quite audibly, ‘I am very sorry that I must go and leave you all, but I find it must be. However, I will hope to the last, because people are sometimes so ill in my disorder.’ The next day she lay down at last, overcome by nausea and pain, giving in to the anguish. Louisa noticed that her sister was like a woman in labour, ‘dozing between the pains’. The dosage of laudanum was increased drop by drop, and when it failed to dent the pain the doctors mixed hemlock with it, which acted as a powerful sedative. By 16 July Caroline’s body had given out. The stench of faeces was added to the aroma of hemlock in her room. Relatives and friends had all said goodbye. Only Louisa and Mary stayed, watching Caroline fight her way out of life as she had been born, on convulsions of agony. But when the end came Caroline needed neither God nor guidance. She met death angrily, head on, only giving up her life when it was snatched from her, awake and in agony until her last hours. On 19 July Caroline developed a hiccup; her
breathing failed slowly over the next few days and on 24 July, with Louisa by her bedside, she died.

Louisa arrived back in Ireland at the end of July 1774. She found Emily at Black Rock with Ogilvie and the children. William, now second Duke, was installed at Carton. Carton had been left to Emily for life, provided she remained a widow and stayed in Ireland. But by the time Louisa returned, Emily and Ogilvie had bartered the great house away, swapping it for the unfinished cluster of buildings at Black Rock, the promise of some money (which rumour put at £40,000) and, most important, a sense of obligation. William was grateful to his mother: as the new Duke he needed Carton to sustain his pre-eminent position amongst the aristocracy and to offer any bride of his own a suitable country house. Gossips in Dublin saw the transaction in a different light. Glossed by the terms of the Duke’s will, Emily’s willingness in handing Carton over was seen as proof of her marriage. Lord Bellamont, who had grandiose ambitions and was anxious for advancement within the Protestant élite, began to regret his engagement to Emily Fitzgerald. Instead of social standing and political influence he seemed to be getting an alliance with a family who countenanced and concealed a connection with a schoolmaster. Bellamont tried to withdraw from the marriage contract. He strode up and down the Dublin streets denouncing Ogilvie and Emily to all his acquaintances. Finally he sat down and wrote a letter to William at Carton, renouncing Emily Fitzgerald and demanding to know the truth behind the persistent rumours.