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A Woman Styled Bold
altogether too much of advice, virtue and piety. But she sent him news of
Ady and Frank and things he asked for too (drawing the line at the request
to hide money in a cocoa tin). What she could not do was visit. This was
his father’s obligation but not even for the end-of-year programme, which
most parents attended and the boy hoped for, did Pierce come. Later he
was removed yet again, this time to be taken with Ady to the continent
without warning and with no chance to write to his mother. Some time in
1849 Lord Shrewsbury paid his return fare to England and he joined his
father and Ady and Frank in the cottage at Albury. Then in October 1850
he was shipped off to America, ill-prepared for life in his own very different
country or for any work or profession, and his ‘kind uncle George’ gave him
a home. As to correspondence, although Mercer wrote to his mother through
Pierce, the letters were not forwarded, and Cornelia’s letters to her son were
returned.
Ady too suffered from her father’s determinations. She had a good start
because for seven years she had the family life that her brother had and for
the next four was in the care of her mother while at school with the Sacred
Heart nuns. But when she came to England in 1846, having had to go away
during Cornelia’s novitiate, Pierce then prevented her return to her mother
and took her instead with Merty to the continent. She too was then left to
herself, now aged thirteen, at a convent school in Nice. After fifteen months
the Drummonds paid for her journey back to England and she went to the
Albury cottage. Letters from Cornelia, to her as to the others, were for at
least some time returned unopened and it was many years before mother
and daughter met. Pierce’s own letters to her (two have survived from the
Nice period) were written when she was thirteen or fourteen and treat her
as if she were seven.
From Albury onwards, for thirty-five years, her life was spent as his
companion, the fate then of many an unmarried daughter, but not all of
these had been torn from a mother who had intended that her daughter
should grow up able to decide her life for herself. George Connelly sent
Pierce money for her on some regular basis, and when she was twenty-five
she went to visit him in Philadelphia. A letter shows George’s opinion of
her father’s care for her:
My dear brother
I have come on to see Adie & I confess I am greatly disappointed. At
the age of 25 instead of a dignified lady like woman with some knowledge
of the world I find a gentle affectionate ignorant child with no practical
knowledge & if suddenly left alone in the world not so capable of taking
care of herself as an infant for she would expect everyone to befriend her
and be disappointed . . . I consider you have utterly sacrificed her to your
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