Chapter One

IT WAS LORD BYRON’S PARTICULAR WISH, expressed in the confidence of Annabella’s perfect agreement, that they be married quietly at Seaham. Cushions were all they required, for kneeling on; he was sure Lady Milbanke would be kind enough to provide them. There were to be no invitations. He had only to arrange a few of his affairs in London ‘for their mutual comfort’ before he could come north—just stopping at Newmarket on the way to take ‘a bachelor’s leave’ of his sister, before he embarked on that remarkable journey ‘from one into two’.

Annabella could hardly bear the weight of her own impatience. Two years had passed since she first refused his offer of marriage. After a period of silence, during which, as Lord Byron said, ‘he was mourning his suit’, a sort of understanding had sprung up between them. The unhappiness each had caused the other, by that offer and by that refusal, still bound them; and they looked to each other, inevitably, for certain sympathies. In time they became, as he eventually put it, ‘epistolary lovers’. It had been one of the sorest trials of her subtlety to suggest to Lord Byron in the course of a long correspondence, without exposing herself to a charge of inconsistency, that the No with which she had met his first proposal might, under the pressure of a second, split like the shell of a truth to reveal the little nut of a yes within. But her subtlety had triumphed in the end; his proposal came early in the fall of 1814, and Lord Byron himself followed it shortly after to Seaham. Annabella had been sitting in her own room, reading, when she heard his carriage in the drive. Quietly, she put out the candles in her room before descending. She found him in the drawing room, standing by the side of the chimney-piece. He did not move forwards as she approached him but took up her extended hand and kissed it. A silence followed which she could not for the life of her break. That he did was the first thing she had to be grateful for. ‘It is a long time since we met,’ he said. ‘For that, I believe,’ she answered, commanding herself, ‘I have only myself to blame.’ To escape for a moment the strain of his company, she added, ‘Let me call my parents. They are quite on fire to meet you. It is only that they don’t dare to.’

‘I am not such a gorgon as all that.’ And then, finding a way to good humour, ‘though frightful enough, I’m sure, in the relation of son. My own mother never liked to admit it.’ This brought out a smile in her. Until he continued, ‘But she’s dead, God bless her—I know I shan’t.’ It was the first note struck of a tendency she began to fear in him: to break against harmony simply for the sake of it.

Within a week she had sent him away again to attend to his affairs in London, preparatory to their marriage. As soon as his carriage disappeared between the lines of the elms, she regretted her impatience to see him go—since it was only replaced by another, to see him come back. There was a great deal in her conduct as a lover that she could not think on without blushing, and in Lord Byron’s absence she had nothing to do but think. She had been so silent with him, a silence that perplexed them both extremely, for neither knew how to break it. Her parents, of course, were charmed—he had set out to charm them. Byron talked of Kean and politics with Sir Ralph and village life with Judy, who, to be fair, had managed for the space of his visit to remain plausibly sober. It could not last, and Annabella’s fear of a lapse, as she secretly expressed it to herself, seemed to her at the time reason enough for cutting his visit short.

Besides, he had seemed to her so strange, moody and unaccountable that they rarely had a minute’s peace together. Peace, perhaps, was not the quality lacking—they had been only too quiet. In the summers when she was a girl, Sir Ralph used to take her sailing out in Seaham harbour with her cousin Sophy. Running south along the shore, they could just make out the humped shapes of the collieries through gaps in the trees on the coastline. Sophy, as the older child, more often than not handled the tiller; but when the winds were low, Sir Ralph put the sheet in Annabella’s clenched fist and told her to pull till the sail flattened. What she remembered most vividly was the awkwardness of a perfect calm: every shift required a startled readjustment. Only when the wind filled again could they relax against its steady pressure. The sense she had in Lord Byron’s company was of perfect calm. Each word or touch produced a light imbalance, and it required the lightest of words, of touches, to restore their tempers.

The analogy produced in her another fear. What was lacking was love, that was the wind that failed them. Without it, they could only keep their course by little adjustments. That she herself loved, the unhappiness of the past two years had given her ample proof. The failure was his, though when she offered (honourably, as she believed) to break off their engagement, the violence of his response shocked her into a deeper faith. He turned pale and fell into a seat; called for salts, brandy; said to her at last that there was no cruelty like virtue. He spoke unguardedly, in a tone that was new to her. Not even Lady Caroline, fiend that she was, would tease him into a proposal after two years only to spurn him again. He had staked everything; his life depended on her. Annabella, from a deep conviction of her own goodness, was colder than any coquette . . . Her tears finally calmed him. ‘It was only,’ she said, ‘that she thought he did not love her.’

It was not a reproach. She had not intended a reproach, but he took it as such and gave one bitterly back: that she stared at him so silently. He could hardly make love to a statue.

She stared at him now, but at least she managed to interrupt her silence. ‘She wished only to please him; she could not find the words. Consequently, she said nothing at all. And he was so peculiar with her.’

The word restored his humour—how often, in their relations, the temper of it depended on such a piece of luck, either good or bad. ‘He should like to be a great deal more peculiar,’ he said. She had been standing over him, and he now took her into his lap, which she submitted to, while he began to kiss her neck and cheek and temple. ‘Sweet little round face,’ he said, ‘my little apple.’ Annabella, quite ashamed of herself, silently endured these attentions, until he began to kiss her mouth—they had never kissed—which startled her into an equal greed that had left them both quite breathless by the time a foot on the stairs recalled them to their sense of place.

For the rest of that long week, whenever their tempers seemed misaligned, Lord Byron attempted a similar ‘process of adjustment’. ‘You are quite caressable into a good humour,’ he said to her once. ‘I think we shall get along very well.’ She had taken him on her favourite walk over the cliffs. A late October sun had a low scurfy bank of cloud to keep the heat in. Their faces were bothered by flies, as he with difficulty clambered over the rocks, taking her hand from time to time or resting on her shoulder. The breeze on top of the cliffs was fitful, but the long sweep of the waves, flatly repeated, tirelessly arriving, suggested out to sea a steadier blow; and they had the sense of catching at the fragments, gratefully enough in that autumnal haze, of a much larger force. She had brought with her an apple and a purse of cashews, and they stopped once to sit with their backs against a rock and eat them. After a while, the extent of what she was capable of desiring began to frighten her. She made them go home again, each in a surly and childish mood, which was not unloving: they were turned, as it were, towards each other in sullen frustration. The waves and the shore. That evening she asked him to leave. The sooner they were married the better; she could not trust herself. He should ‘arrange his affairs’ in London as quickly as possible, and then come back to her when these were settled for what they both desired, a quiet wedding.

As the year 1814 drew to a close, she passed her twenty-first Christmas stuck at home, the precocious daughter of her parents’ affections. These had begun to chafe; it was time she grew up. Lord Byron complained bitterly of the ‘law’s delay’ (Hamlet, indeed, was the text on which they both drew for material), but nothing, save her most particular command, could persuade him to marry without having settled his debts. Newstead Abbey, his ancestral home, much as it pained him, must be sold, but the buyer was proving as indecisive as, by force of that indecision, Lord Byron himself must appear to her. Sir Ralph could not help remarking that in spite of Lord Byron’s injunction to invite no one, they had better, after all, invite the groom himself; it would be a sad sort of wedding without one. Annabella, at last, commanded.

Lord Byron appeared, unannounced, in the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. He had a friend with him, a young man, whose large straight nose cast a shadow over his chin. Annabella heard their carriage running over the gravel of the drive and watched them from her bedroom window. Still, she did not come down. She had a sense of his arrival that the mere physical fact of it couldn’t live up to. Two months had passed since she had seen him, and she had spent the time attempting to discover what the awkwardness in her manner was that had produced its echo in him. She wanted to prepare herself—she wanted, internally, to meet him, her idea of him. Or rather, she needed a moment to enter into what she conceived to be his idea of her. She was conscious, of course, of the play between these two ideas, and of the fact that Lord Byron himself was quite likely to ‘break up the game’. This was, as she put it to herself, just what she needed him for, the man himself: to break up the game. Still, she waited and listened to Dawlish, the butler, showing them to their rooms at the back of the house. It pained her that neither Sir Ralph nor Judy had moved to greet them—out of pique, no doubt, at his endless delays. She must learn to disregard their pleasure, to attend to his.

After a few minutes (she had not moved from the window), she heard the carefulness of his step, descending. One two, one two, on every stair. No other sounds; his friend must have stayed behind to change. If she hurried now, she might just catch Lord Byron alone. A glance in her bedroom mirror gave back to her an image of outward calm: she seemed fairly smothered up, from top to toe, or rather, from neck to ankle, in a long dress of green muslin that brought out the pink in her round cheeks. You strange quiet girl, she thought, is there nothing inside you? She counted to herself—one two, one two—sighed deeply and emerged into the corridor. It was only when she reached the bottom, from being out of breath, that she guessed she had been running—down the stairs helter-skelter to the library door. But she could not wait any more. She could not wait and pushed in. Lord Byron stood by the fire with his back to her. He was fatter than she remembered him, a fact just brought out by the pinch of his black waistcoat against his hips. Perhaps he had been unhappy, this struck her at once—and then: that he was still unhappy. She had seen him only two months before, but he changed shape lightly. It was a kind of nimbleness in him, the way he fattened, and peculiarly expressive in the largest sense of mood, of temper. With one foot over the other, he stooped to the heat. He turned to see who it was—saw it was she—stretched out his hand to her. For a second she hesitated, then ran across the room and flung herself sobbing into his arms. ‘My lord, my lord.’

He gently disengaged himself from her embrace, but keeping her hand in his, he kissed it, cold-lipped. She was conscious of the fluster in her hurry, the smudge of tears around her eyes, and pressed her fists to them. ‘I told myself that you would come today, that you must come. I knew that you would, you see, and yet, when you did, it was no less a shock.’ She was expressing herself very badly, she knew, and thought of poor Mr Eden.

‘I did not mean to upset you,’ he said.

‘No, that’s not it at all. Only this time, you see, I know what to expect. More than before. I know you—’ And then, breaking off, she smiled, too hopefully perhaps, ‘I’m afraid I can’t make myself clear.’ But there was no answering smile; and she began to suspect that something had happened since she had seen him last. He had not in the least, as she put it to herself, attempted to enter into her idea of him—that was the fact that struck her. The fault, no doubt, lay in her own idea. She wondered if, for her part, she had failed his.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a dull Christmas at my sister’s. Her husband, a very pretty piece of foolishness, was at home, and the children screamed at him, and the dogs barked at the children, and the servants beat the dogs. I have,’ he added, ‘a particular horror of children.’

For the first time, she looked at him with something like detachment. (It relieved Annabella, after the foolish rush of her greeting, that she could return to it.) His hair was curlier than she had remembered it, his aspect altogether more boyish. Plumpness had rounded his cheeks and thickened his neck. His shirt was open, with a cravat tucked into it; his chest, broad and firm (she had felt her head against it), suggested a simplicity of character, of honesty, she knew him to be far from possessing. His face was a little pale, except here or there where the heat from the fire had reddened it. There was something in his attentions, as she remembered them, so feminine, which had been still more fully developed in the spirit of his letters, that the plain masculine effect of his presence came as a shock. It was not what she had counted on. The fear of giving her life to a man—to this man—renewed itself in her. She was conscious of desiring allies. Her parents had again proved tardy in their welcome, and she was turning to the door to say, ‘I will just call out to my parents’, when the door opened and the unfamiliar young gentleman with the strong-shadowed nose came in. The hair around his ears was shiny and wet from a hasty wash. This was one of the recollections that stayed with her.

The scene in general left its deep print on her mind: the restlessness of the fire in its grate; the sunshine of a muffled winter’s day, the colour of bone-china, lying in pieces on the Persian rug at their feet; the intricate leathery gloom of stacked books. The library wasn’t a room of which she was used to having the run. A bust of Thomas Gray stood on its pedestal by the door. He was a favourite of Sir Ralph’s and had always impressed upon her a sense of adult ponderousness. She was frightened, as a child, of knocking him over, of being crushed. Perhaps that old fear contributed to a new one. For an instant, the sensation of being trapped between these two strangers in her home almost overwhelmed her. She stood on the rug between them: one by the fire, the other by the door. There seemed no escape, but she had collected herself by the time introductions were made. John Hobhouse was his name, a college friend of Lord B’s, and a former travelling companion. Reaching out a hand, she welcomed him to Seaham Hall.

Her parents came down at last to dinner. Sir Ralph, himself by now embarrassed at their delay, did his awkward best to charm—it was the awkwardness itself that had its effect. The dining room was perhaps the worst room in the house; he apologized for it. One sat miserably close to the fire—one was, oneself, quite cooked. He had nothing much to praise his own cook for, but he would say this, he would just say this, she knew what to do with a fish. He had a particular horror of seeing a good fish spoiled, and the best, perhaps, he could say of Mrs Tewkesbury, is that she did not spoil it. ‘She let the fish alone, thank God, she did not worry it with too much sauce.’ He could never stomach too much sauce; and then, as if the idea had put him in mind of it, he confessed that he had not read Childe Harold. At this Annabella began to blush. His tastes were old-fashioned—but he had promised to do so, if Annabella promised to explain it to him. An attempt had been made. They had been so long waiting for Lord Byron to appear that Sir Ralph had decided at last to dip into his book. Only he could not agree to Annabella’s explanations. It was quite hopeless. He had his own opinions, he could not help it, and began to insist on them. The experiment was broken off.

‘It is a father’s right,’ Lord Byron intervened, ‘to disagree with his daughter. I should not, for myself, presume to attempt it.’

‘Yes, well.’ The interruption had broken his flow, but, catching at a chance of wit, he said, ‘And yet, and yet, you would not take No for an answer.’

‘Father!’ Annabella cried, but Lord Byron spoke over her, ‘It was only a disagreement over the irregular verb to love, but Miss Milbanke has finally taught me the proper conjugation: I did not, I do not, I will. I should rather, I confess, have stopped short at I do two years ago but have resigned myself to the charms of the future perfect.’

Annabella could not decide whether the sting in his wit was intended, but she was too good a grammarian to pass up this chance at correction; and then surprised herself by the confession it teased her into. ‘I hope you do not mean to say that you will have loved me. It would break my heart. I mean for myself always to love you.’

He bowed at her. ‘We shall attempt our own construction, to be called the perfect eternal. And shall love each other all our lives, I’m sure, as much as if we had never been married at all.’ Lady Milbanke, at last, rewarded him with a little smile, just flattening her cheeks to raise the edges of her lips; and Sir Ralph himself gave out a snort. But Annabella could not read him. He frightened her into a wakening sense of the force of other people. Yet it was just this awakening, she bravely told herself, that had persuaded her in the end to accept him. She meant for the first time in her life to be taken along—as it were, by hand. In any case, she could not have stopped at home another year without going mad. There were so many days to be filled, and she had lately begun to entertain the notion that she could fill no more, not with books or music or mathematics. She might just stick inside one, a Tuesday afternoon perhaps, without the means inside her to reach to Wednesday. And yet the years had slipped by quickly enough. ‘I am so glad you have come,’ she said suddenly to Lord Byron. ‘Each day I waited for you, thinking, I could not wait another day. It seemed impossible; and yet, just as impossible to me, that you should ever arrive and sit here, to be looked at or talked to.’

Lord Byron turned on her his large grey eyes, with love or pity in them, but said nothing.

Hobhouse she greatly took to. He had, after an initial shyness, much of the talking to himself. His father was a Whig MP, and John was in the first bloom of his own parliamentary ambitions. He had come from London full of stories of the House. Sir Ralph, in the middle of dinner, broke into one of these with, ‘Tell me your name again, sir? I am sure I have heard it before. Would you spell it out?’ It so happened he knew Hobhouse’s father well. They had opposed each other on several questions with a very good grace. He thought it always a sign of character when a man could ‘disagree agreeably’, and they often sought each other out, after a fractious vote, and ate a good dinner and never said a word about it. Yes, a perfect gentleman; it was a pleasure to meet his son. The final test of a man’s character was, of course, the character of his son. Sir Ralph was glad to see it ‘lived up to’.

The fish was followed by minced pies, left over from Christmas, indifferent Stilton, and very good port. Lord Byron inquired after Lady Milbanke’s health. He had heard she was ill; he hoped she was better. Annabella froze. Judy’s fondness for a drink had in the past two years taken on a more public quality, or rather, her mother’s privacy was no longer large enough to contain the whole of her appetite. The effect on her character had been a gradual diminishment of force; and though Annabella at first rejoiced shamefully in her own comparative powers, she had lately, as her wedding approached, begun to mourn the loss of an example. One had the sense, observing Lady Milbanke, of a tremendous underwater struggle, in which all her old strength was being brought violently to bear—though one received now only the muffled report of it, a few small waves, rather than, as before, its full immediate weight. She had sat very still through dinner, hardly trusting herself to say a word, and drinking steadily. She was very well, she thanked Lord Byron, only it had been a cold winter. Her circulation was not what it should be; one had only to look at her face to see how she suffered for it. It was a terribly draughty house. She had not felt warm, properly warm, since September. Her hands and feet seemed not to belong to her, she’d grown so clumsy with them. Her only recourse—but here Sir Ralph interrupted her to say that he had heard ‘something odd that day from Dawlish, who had heard it from the cook, when she sent for the fish. An Irishman has been inquiring in the village for Seaham Hall; he claims to be Lord Byron, on his way to be married to the daughter of the house. Mrs Tewkesbury, who saw him herself wandering around the harbour and talking to the fishermen, said he couldn’t have been any younger than fifty; he wore a long thin grey beard and a dirty grey coat. Even so, Dawlish has been cleaning my fowlers all afternoon. One can’t tell, he says, what an impostor will stop short at.’

‘It’s a form of madness,’ Lord Byron said, ‘I am only too well acquainted with.’ Annabella, whenever he spoke, attended him so closely that she could scarcely make out the words. There was a public character to his charm she could read very little into. He seemed to be playing a part—himself. The intention itself made up a kind of mask, which hid him none the less for being framed to suit his face. Occasionally, in a moment’s shyness, in his stutter, she believed to catch a glimpse of the push involved—she sensed a boyish reluctance in him to perform a duty. The scale of the task staggered her conceptions: what concentration it must require to hit always upon one’s characteristic response! His moment of hesitation, his stutter, was where she hoped to prise open a space for herself, for her companionship. ‘My misanthropy, which is more poetical than personal,’ he continued, ‘is so generally believed in that the most wretched men attach themselves to it, as beggars sometimes dress themselves in cast-off clothes, to look like gentlemen. I’m afraid the borrowing does no honour to either of us. Should you like to make sure of me, however,’ he added, smiling, ‘you are welcome to inspect my foot. It is the too hasty signature of my Maker and serves me as a proof of authenticity.’

After dinner, they staged a mock-marriage in the drawing room. Hobhouse was given away as the bride. Sir Ralph was in fine spirits and acted the part of reverend. Dawlish was the father, and Lady Milbanke played a limping Lord Byron—a joke at which Annabella noticed the poet wince. The lovers themselves sat side by side on the music bench and watched. Dawlish decided to look for the epithalamium, which his master had spent the several months’ delay in carefully rewriting. It was discovered eventually on the music stand of the harpsichord and read out to a very mixed reception. Lord Byron managed to revenge his humour upon it. Sir Ralph blushed. Hobhouse was more judicial. Only Annabella kept quiet—she could think of nothing to say. It struck her as almost blasphemous, the mockery that was made of the ceremony on which she had pinned her hopes of a new life. But her begrudging reticence shamed her just as much, and she turned at last to face the harpsichord and play a wedding march as her own tongue-tied contribution to the entertainment. The music somehow sobered them all to silence. The tune was wrong, too mournful and grand, and they sat and dutifully attended to her. It was all she could do to keep on playing without breaking into tears. In the smattering of applause that followed, she managed to rub away the softness in her eyes with the flat of her palms. At eleven o’clock, Dawlish brought in a bowl of champagne-punch, which kept them lively till midnight, when they shook hands together and listened to the bells of St Mary’s ringing in the New Year. Judy, red-faced, had fallen asleep in her chair.

It snowed through the night. Lord Byron had asked her, before going to bed, when she liked to appear in the morning. Ten o’clock, Annabella had said; she was very fond of a walk at breakfast. If he liked to join her, she would be glad of his company. And in spite of their late night she came down at ten, if only to live up to her word. If only to get him for an hour to herself, for she felt they had come to an understanding—the first of their intended marriage. She waited for him in the drawing room; it was the morning of New Year’s Day. She had a secretive nature and decided to class it among the thrills of love that it expanded the scope of privacy: from ‘one’, as Lord Byron had put it, into ‘two’.

One felt all through the house the effect of the snow. It threw ghosts of itself against the walls, against the rugs on the floor. It reminded Annabella of a high repeated note on the harpsichord. There was a kind of sweet insistence in it from which one eventually began to wish to avert one’s sense. And yet there was, in spite of the chill of the house, a new softness in the air that seemed a little like warmth. The fires had only just been laid and burned more brightly than hotly; Annabella, as the morning grew older, watched them settle in the grate. Her mother had for several months been accustomed to taking her breakfast in bed. Sir Ralph slept poorly, especially after a night of drinking, and tended to rise early and work in the library and sleep there. Annabella believed she had heard him, shifting his easy chair to be nearer the fire. She waited for Lord Byron to come down till the clock struck eleven, then she put on her boots and went out into the world on her own.

A low snowy sky hung over the elms of the drive. But the air was grey and spotless; the falling had stopped. A layer of white brought out the irregularities in the ground, in the gravel and grass—a thin crust like toast, she thought to herself absurdly, as she stepped upon it. She took a quiet satisfaction from making her mark on the road. After the gate, which she opened herself, was a small hut, intended once for a gatekeeper. Sophy and she used to hide in it as children and spy on the carriages, which in Sir Ralph’s electioneering days often thronged the drive. Now it stored mostly a collection of sticks, boots, shawls. One was always forgetting things; one hated going back to the house. A small round window by the door let a little light in. There was still the bench inside that the children had brought there to stand on: they could not see out of it otherwise. Annabella, feeling the air on her neck, decided to wrap herself in another shawl. The smell of the hut, of mud and leather mixed, of enduring cold, brought on—she was very sensitive to recollections—a flood of sentiment. She had hidden there to watch Sophy drive out to be married; Annabella had refused to come in her carriage. ‘What shall I do without you?’ she remembered saying to her cousin. ‘What shall I do with them?’

‘Marry,’ Sophy had said, laughing.

Marry, she repeated now to herself. Yes, it was time.

The snow had thickened even over the beach, except where the waves had washed it away, leaving a rim of ice. There was little wind. The rollers seemed, more out of duty than desire, to repeat their advances on the shore. In the low-hung cloud, the horizon looked very near, almost palpable—looming and vague at once. Annabella imagined how quickly the land behind her would disappear from view if she sailed out to it: a prospect which, she supposed, would awake in Lord Byron the simplest of yearnings. She herself had never left England before. Well, she must learn to reconcile him to quietness. That, she suspected, would prove the task of her marriage. She walked down the middle of the sand, to keep clear of the waves, and began, as she used to, composing verses in her thoughts. As much as anything else, it was a test of her memory. ‘Let my affection’ was the phrase she had been mulling over. The last word suddenly acquired a crispness, a clarity, brought out by the sound of dry snow compacting under her steps. ‘Let my affection be the . . . the bond of peace . . .’ And then, as they sometimes did, the lines came almost unbidden, which seemed to her at the time the best evidence of their beauty, of her sincerity.

Let my affection be the bond of peace

Which bids thy warfare with remembrance cease.

Blest solely in the blessings I impart,

I only ask to heal thy wounded heart.

On the wild thorn that spreads dark horror, there

To graft the olive branch and see it bear . . .

She turned back only when her feet grew cold. The thought of whom she was about to marry struck her afresh. She was in a position to give the first poet of the age her little tribute to their love. The fact obscurely supported her in the silent continuing argument she kept up with Mary Montgomery; and she walked home again in better spirits, feeling she had scored a point.

At the gate, she stopped to return her shawl (which was, after all, too dirty for house-use) to the hut. Just as she opened the door, she caught a glimpse of two young men at the end of the drive, setting off. One of them moved a little more slowly, resting his weight, it seemed, on his hand in the air: the stick was too thin to be seen. Without thinking, she slipped inside and waited for them. She felt her heart in her throat, beating quick. It was only, she supposed, the childish desire to surprise which rendered her childish again; that and memories of Sophy. She sat down on the bench, rather demurely—it was too low for a full-grown woman. There was no other sound but the pulsing in her neck. She touched her thumb against it, to feel its vivid agitation. The delay grew almost unbearable. She began to count the seconds: it could hardly take them more than a minute to reach the gate, but she had told a hundred before she heard their boots in the snow.

‘Can you guess which way she has gone?’ It was Hobhouse speaking; his words carried very clearly in the cold air. Annabella, then, almost called out to them. She had half prepared the smile with which she would open the door but needed a moment to find her breath again. She mustn’t sound flustered; it was only a game she had played. Often she noted in herself a slight hesitation to enter his company again: it was like dipping a foot in cold water. One needed to accustom oneself. That she was shy of him still, she considered a proof of her love.

‘It doesn’t matter to me if we run into her. I suspect we shall see enough of each other in time.’ This made her stop short. She bit her tongue and resolved to hear them out. The strain of keeping quiet turned her shyness into something else, into guilt, into outrage. She was not accustomed to eavesdropping, and she feared the lesson to be learned from it. Other people were always more indifferent to one than one imagined them to be: she sensed for the first time, beneath her, a cushion being removed. Lord Byron sounded brisker, less musical than usual—as if the voice he addressed to her was an instrument played, which away from her ear he handled more carelessly.

‘I suppose you must marry,’ Hobhouse said.

‘I spent last summer at Hastings, with Hodgson, bathing and advocating to me, often at the same time. He calls it the most ambrosial state.’

‘Marriage, you mean—not bathing? Well, Hodgson.’ And then, ‘If you must, you might as well marry her.’

The opening and closing of the gate provided a pause, which, in the thick of their conversation, they made use of, stopping to have the question out. Annabella, sitting with her hands between her knees to keep them warm, had lowered her head and closed her eyes to listen. She heard the foot of the gate scraping over the snow. And then, with something like the sweetness in his manner she was accustomed to hearing, Lord Byron said, ‘What do you think of her, Hobby? You needn’t spare me. I know you too well to trust your opinion.’

‘I’m not such a fool.’ There was a silence in which Annabella could almost feel, between the two young men, the comfort of their friendship swelling. Hobhouse was the first to break it—not with an answer, but a question of his own. ‘What should one look for in a wife, I wonder?’

‘Gentleness, I suppose.’ She could hear Byron shift on his feet, thinking, rutting his stick through the snow. ‘Liveliness. Cleanliness.’ Hobhouse laughed. After a pause: ‘A little comeliness.’

This seemed to make Hobhouse’s way easier, for he ventured his opinion at last. ‘I think you’ve done well.’ Byron must have looked up, to prompt elaboration, for after a moment Hobhouse hesitantly gave it. ‘Her feet and ankles are excellent. The upper part of her face is very good—expressive, if not exactly handsome. She seems very . . . clean.’ He was ashamed, perhaps, of descending to mockery, for he continued more earnestly, ‘She gains by inspection.’ And then, with greater assurance: ‘I believe she dotes on you.’ There was a clear small clang as the gate shut, but Annabella thought she could just make out Lord Byron’s answer. ‘A little silently, for my taste.’ As their voices began to retreat again, he added, ‘I like them to talk, because then they think less.’ Annabella, as quietly as she could, stood up on the bench and pressed her nose against the window. She might have been ten years old; it might have been only a game. Lord Byron was an inch or two taller than his friend. They walked arm in arm and seemed in no hurry at all. She felt a needle of envy working in her heart, at the ease of male companionship. They descended between the trees, and just as their heads dropped below the line of the snow, Annabella heard herself: gaping for air, sucking and shaking, dry-eyed. She had in the end to close her hands over her mouth, as if in prayer, to soften her sobbing—at the thought of what she had put herself at the mercy of.

The coldness of a loveless eye: she had never seen herself through one before. She followed their footsteps back into the house, an exercise which, at least, restored to her the face of calm. Sir Ralph met her in the hall. Lord Byron had just gone out; he had hoped to find her. No matter, she said, she must have just passed them in the woods. And then: ‘I suspect we shall see enough of each other in time.’ Her coolness puzzled him somewhat, which she knew—a fact that helped to relieve the worst of her feelings. Her father, however, had begun already to resign the rights of his paternal curiosity. He was not the kind of man to pull at the tender root of a secret. For that, she relied on Judy—or used to rely. Annabella’s most pressing, most selfish concern, was that her mother had lost the strength to check her. She might have been inclined to put a stop to the business in hand; Judy had once had that power.

Annabella retired to her room. At her dressing table, in front of the mirror, she stared into her own eyes, unblinking. It was Hobhouse’s words, at first, that ran through her thoughts: ‘the upper part of her face’, etc. The force of the specific seemed very painful to her. It reduced one to scale, and a sense of scale is just what, as she put it to herself, the soul can bear very little of. But then, her humour reviving somewhat, she considered her feet and ankles, ‘excellent’ both. And there was consolation to be had, on several fronts, from Lord Byron’s character of a wife, which suggested only too shameful a contrast with her own paradoxical account of a husband to Lady Melbourne. Gentleness, liveliness, cleanliness, a little comeliness. Surely, her modesty could demand no more of his good opinion. And it was, she decided, among the benefits to be expected from her marriage that she could rely on her husband for such grace and sense. Simplicity, indeed, was just the margin she looked for, and if the confinement of marriage could teach it to her, she need not resent her cage. If only, as Lord Byron said, she could unlearn a little of her silence—and she came down to lunch with her equanimity somewhat restored and a resolution to cling to.

They were married the next day, in the drawing room. Lord Byron, as the hour approached, was summoned and found at last in the garden; his wedding-shoes, as he came in, still dripping from the snow. It was a game they had been playing together, perhaps the most intimate of the day: to append the word to anything. The wedding breakfast; a wedding sneeze. The wedding snow. He complained, in a voice a little shaking with humour, of having caught in the outside air a ‘wedding chill’. The vicar of Seaham was the son of old family friends—a surprisingly young man with fat ruddy silken cheeks and a cheerful stammer. ‘He was only very cold-tongued,’ he said at the beginning. ‘He needed a minute, a minute, a minute, before the fire, to warm up.’ A Mr Wallace. Hobhouse looked very upright and splendid in full dress and white gloves. Annabella, feeling strangely composed, found time to make a compliment on his appearance, which he gallantly returned. Simplicity, she said, considering herself in the mirror above the fire, had been the effect she aimed at. She wore a muslin gown trimmed with lace at the bottom and a white muslin curricle jacket and nothing on her head.

There was only one little unpleasantness. As the room was being arranged, Sir Ralph—to keep, as he said, the conversation afloat—mentioned something Dawlish had told him that morning on coming back from the village. The conclusion to his story about that Irish impostor. No one could discover his real name, which had become a material concern, since he was found last night in the straggle of bushes outside the gate to the harbour, quite dead. There wasn’t a sign of violence upon his person, though he stank of laudanum. A copy of The Bride of Abydos, signed, it seemed, in Lord Byron’s own hand, lay inside his jacket-pocket. Lord Byron was observed to turn very pale at this. He had inherited, he said, from his Scottish side, a foolish streak of superstition. He was persuaded to sit down; brandy was brought. (Annabella, almost glad of the chance to exhibit her tenderest concerns, thought she heard him muttering something to Hobhouse, who answered with a shame-faced smile.) But the real awkwardness was to come. Lady Judy, who had been keeping carefully quiet, turned on Sir Ralph. It was just like him, she said, to be spreading such distasteful gossip on his daughter’s wedding day. He lacked all decorum and would sacrifice every fine-feeling for the sake of one of his ‘stories’. Sir Ralph looked duly chastened; the egg of his head seemed to tremble. He had lately begun to express his uncertainties, his hesitations, physically; one almost felt the vibrato in him and took from it a kind of musical effect. ‘My dear man,’ he kept repeating, ‘I never dreamed it would upset you. It was only some wretched mick.’ Though even this incident had its consoling force: Annabella was glad to see her mother insisting on the old relations. Judy looked pale that morning, almost drained of blood, but steadier than she had in months. Perfectly composed, only a little stiff, which suited the occasion.

The rest of the ceremony passed off well enough. Brandy brought a touch of colour to Lord Byron’s cheeks. He praised Lady Milbanke for the wedding-cushions, or rather, the two small squares of woven matt that she had provided for them to kneel on. ‘One shouldn’t,’ he said, ‘expect too many comforts in setting forth on such a journey.’ Annabella couldn’t quite make out the object of his irony, but Judy offered him a little smile. Mr Wallace had a rough amiable manner and an air of inconsequence, which greatly lightened the formality of the wedding-service. Annabella spoke her part distinctly well. She had been accustomed, ever since childhood, to acting out small scenes in the drawing room for the benefit of her parents and their friends. Lord Byron seemed more affected, although when he came to the line ‘with all my worldly goods I thee endow’, he cast a wry look at Hobhouse. By eleven o’clock, they were married; the bells of St Mary’s rang an extra peal for them, and they kissed and shook hands all round.

Annabella retired shortly after to change. She could see from her bedroom window the carriage waiting for them below; Dawlish was loading their cases in it. Her uncle Lord Wentworth had lent them Halnaby Hall for the honeymoon. It was forty miles away on winter roads. The phrase of the previous morning recurred to her, that she had scored a point, only ‘this time,’ she supposed, summoning an image of her friend Mary, ‘it was the match-winner.’ There was almost a kind of anger in her throat as she thought of the words, a kind of ache. She returned in a few minutes, dressed for travelling in a dove-coloured pelisse. ‘I believe it did vastly well,’ Lord Byron said quietly to her, leaving his hand for a moment against her side. A taste, she imagined, of the contact that awaited her.

Dawlish opened the front door for them, at which Hobhouse appeared to present her with a copy of Lord Byron’s poems, bound in yellow morocco. ‘A wedding gift.’ And then, to lighten the mood, he added, ‘I believe you have lately acquired the original.’ She nodded but in a sudden agitation could not think what to do with it, or how to thank him. She held it for a moment thickly clasped across her waist, until the young man took pity on her and relieved her of the book, to deposit it himself in the rear of the carriage. Her mother seized her now by the arm; she seemed on the verge of tears herself. ‘Did I not behave well?’ Judy kept repeating. ‘Did I not behave well?’ Annabella kissed her passionately; she was conscious of tearing herself away. It seemed as if someone was pulling her from behind. Sir Ralph kept shy of her. He had a word with the coachman instead. ‘Keep off the Durham road,’ she heard him saying. ‘It’s very bad in the snow.’ As they took their seats, Hobhouse reappeared in the window; he was holding Lord Byron’s hand. ‘I wish you every happiness,’ he said, turning to Annabella.

‘If I am not happy, it will be my own fault.’

He only let go when the carriage moved away.