Chapter Six

THEY HAD BEEN STOPPING AT SEAHAM until a house in London could be fitted up for them. Lord Byron had been for several weeks on his best public behaviour in front of Annabella’s parents—with one notable exception, which was just strange enough to be passed off as a joke and which, consequently, had hardly upset the genial illusion of their domestic harmony. (He had lifted, in the midst of a drunken parlour game, the wig from Lady Milbanke’s hair.) The cost, however, of this show of gentlemanliness had been, from the wife’s point of view, that he presented to her in private an utterly blank face—the reverse of the card, as it were. And she was honest enough to admit to herself a preference for this state of affairs, except on those evenings when, with scarcely a word spoken and a countenance of stone, he insisted on taking up, as he called it in the morning, his ‘conjugal subscription’.

At last, through Lady Melbourne’s intervention, a house was arranged: a little large, perhaps, for the needs of their establishment, but pleasantly situated and with a view of Green Park. Lord Byron anxiously anticipated their return to London. His financial affairs remained considerably unsettled, and his business agent, Mr Hansen, was more inclined to consider his duty than to act upon it—he was not a man to be left to his own initiative. Besides, spring in London was not a season to be thoughtlessly missed. ‘Only think, Annabella: a London spring.’ The theatres like rivers were swelling; the fashions were blooming. Tom Moore and Hobhouse and Dougie Kinnaird were shooting ‘new leaves’. The tone he took persuading her to return, its hackneyed enthusiasm, reminded her with a sudden vividness of the airs he used to adopt in their courting days, when he played the gentleman for her. She marvelled now, with a kind of nostalgie, that she had ever mistaken the role for the man. And then he surprised her again by stepping out of it. He freely confessed that he had been at times an awkward sort of brute. The fact was, which he admitted in the teeth of his poetical proclamations, that he could never for very long endure the confinement of women. He preferred women in the company of men: they set them off to such advantage. Annabella, by this stage, was sufficiently patient or inured to abuse to draw a little consolation from the prospect of his reform—even if it came at the cost of being lumped together, in her husband’s view, with the generality of her sex.

The only question remaining was whether, on their way to London, they should stop at his sister’s house at Six Mile Bottom for a week or two. She was determined to make Augusta’s acquaintance, or rather, to seal in common intercourse the friendship they had already pledged each other in correspondence. Lord Byron had deeply opposed the plan, and it struck Annabella as the first sign of her successful influence that she managed to override his opposition. Indeed, Augusta herself, as the prospect of their visit approached, appeared suddenly reluctant. Her husband had decided at the last minute to put off a shooting-party with some friends in Northumberland. He had just bought a horse from a stabler in Newmarket. It wanted breaking, and he didn’t trust anyone but himself to do it properly. Added to which, her aunt, Miss Sophia Byron, had proposed a visit, which had been promised for several months, and which she could not hospitably defer. In short, much as she regretted the fact, if Lord and Lady Byron chose to descend upon her now, Augusta would not ‘have a hole to put them in’.

It struck Annabella as curious, the disinclination with which brother and sister (who, after all, made such a show of their affections for each other) treated the possibility of a reunion. She wrote to Augusta directly, accepting of course though not without a taint of suspicion ‘her sister’s word for the necessity of a postponement. Yet she bitterly regretted any delay that would prevent her from claiming, in person, a relation she had decided to cherish above all others—with the exception, of course, of the marriage-bond itself.’ This marked, in its way, her first hesitant insistence on her rights as Lord Byron’s wife, and she was puzzled, afterwards, by the taste of irony these modest phrases left on her tongue. Her own sincerity was never among the things she had been taught to question. What surprised her, really, was only the pleasure she managed to take from having, as it were, acquired another lens through which to regard herself.

She was rewarded at last with the news that Augusta’s husband, Colonel Leigh, had decided, in view of her aunt’s visit, to accept his invitation to the shooting-party after all; and that Miss Sophia herself had been frightened off coming by the very bad beginning of spring and the state of the roads. If Annabella felt equal to them, she was welcome to pay them a visit, though the house, as Lord B would tell her, was too large to be kept warm and too much the product of ill-thought-out renovations and additions to be made as comfortable ‘for a young bride as she could wish.’ In short, ‘the coast was clear,’ Augusta wrote, with a strangely resigned air, ‘and they might as well come now as later.’

Lord Byron consented to Augusta’s offer of hospitality, such as it was, with an ill grace, and as they set off in the carriage for their four-day journey, he permitted himself a great display of unwillingness. The weather had turned, but only the skies had the beauty of it, sharp and cloudless and blue. The roads and the woods surrounding them had begun the painful transformations of a thaw. A few shoots and shrubs nosed brownly out of the slops and muds; even the tough young buds of the trees had the appearance rather of a cancer or a general deformation than of the natural and vigorous onset of the spring. ‘Take care of Annabella,’ Lady Milbanke had called after them, as the carriage descended the drive.

Byron frowned, with the quickness of someone looking for an irritant, and muttered, ‘Whatever does she mean by that?’ Annabella, with an effort of will, bit her lip. She had turned, in any case, and stretched to look out the window. Her father and mother stood against the steps of the house with their arms at their sides. Sir Ralph stooped a little at the neck: his pale long face vividly suggested dolour. Judy was motionless, compact with disapproval. Annabella hoped they might wave or rest on each other affectionately, and she watched them, for a minute, until they disappeared behind the columns of the gate.

It struck her that the face she had been presenting to her parents’ gaze had been as blank, even in their private interviews, as a strict regard for filial decorum could make it—if only to keep from them a sense of how unhappy she was. It was as blank as the face Lord Byron presented to her. These reflections dovetailed into a single fantasy, which she elaborated during the long silence of the road into a vision almost as definite as a comic print: mother and father, husband and wife, seated around a table and playing a hand of whist with faceless cards. It was the wilful perversity of their good manners, as much as anything else, that amused her. This, as she now considered it, was the first gift she had given her husband: to conceal from her parents how unhappy they were. For proof of success, she needed to look no further than her mother’s parting words. Judy had addressed herself to Lord Byron, as if any approach to her own daughter must, from this point forward, be made through her daughter’s husband. Nor had they waved farewell. Her last cool sight of home might have given her little sympathy for a man on the road to visit his sister; but she had steeled herself by now to the prospect of facing alone the task of supporting, as pleasantly as she could, their intimate relations. ‘Come now,’ Annabella chided him, hoping to mother him out of his mood, ‘why do you look so gloomy?’

‘I feel as if I was going to be married,’ he said.

It was a sign, perhaps, of how far she had come that she managed to laugh at that, and the laughter effected what nothing else could have—‘to make him,’ as Augusta had once advised her in a letter, ‘a little less disagreeable.’ Even so, as the days passed in the tedium of confinement, in a steady repetition of bad meals and dirty beds, amid the fitfulness of continuous sleep, his reluctance to arrive began to express itself in a more painful and less conscious gloom. He was as restless as a cat before a storm and stretched himself anxiously, as often as not, in the direction of his wife’s comfort for a little caressing. She had never known him so sweetly dependent and felt again a validation of the firm line she had decided to take: restricting him, among other things, to three bottles of wine for each day’s journey, a total that included anything he hoped to drink at luncheon or supper.

They stopped for the night at Sutton on the eve of their arrival—a very pretty respectable prosperous sort of a town, with a Norman church at one end of the high street and a graveyard at its feet that seemed, as B remarked, ‘no bigger than a picnic cloth’. Annabella remembered that Sutton was where Mr Eden had taken up the promise of an incumbency; and she coyly remarked to her husband that evening as they dressed for bed her curiosity to attend a service in the morning, which was a Sunday. ‘She believed she knew the vicar, a Mr Eden, who was said to be a decent and gentlemanly person. His sermons, at least, were rumoured to be very enlightening.’ The confusion over Mr Eden’s proposal and the obligations it was supposed to have put her under were over two years old, and Annabella had counted, or so she told herself, on being able to mention his name, innocently enough, without awakening any ridiculous suspicions. Lord Byron only grunted a response. Later, though, as they lay in bed on Sunday morning, he grew ‘greedy’ for just such attentions as might have been calculated to put off a young bride from appearing too hastily dressed at church. He asked afterwards (it was his first allusion to the subject), ‘if she had had occasions to regret the patience with which they had waited and teased from each other their confessions of interest and love?’ He lay at that moment with his head against the angle of her neck; her hand rested on his brow. She answered, with a directness that surprised and exhilarated her, that she had a far greater fund of patience still remaining, that she intended to continue waiting, that she would even, if his reluctance demanded it, continue to tease him, until she was perfectly satisfied with his protestations of love. ‘I believe you will, too, Pip,’ he said. And then, turning over to look at her, he said, ‘Well then, I think I am in love with you. Are you satisfied now?’ he added, as an afterthought.

‘Not yet, not yet,’ she answered, smiling through tears.

They reached Six Mile Bottom in the afternoon of an uncomfortable, chilly, humid and windy day. The house, Annabella saw as they approached it, was indeed rather large than distinguished—it looked like a farmhouse that had grown on to a barn. The yard, in which their carriage drew up, was dirty and wet. A three-legged dog undipped his head from the horses’ trough and stared at them, before bending to drink again. Smoke from the chimneys settled around them; Annabella, nervously, coughed. Byron said to her, ‘I will go in and prepare Gus,’ and limped out, leaving her sitting there.

She had felt his unease for the past hour. He had been pretending to sleep, and she had watched him closely to see how long he was willing to keep up the pretence. At last she had said, in a perfectly clear and ordinary voice, ‘I believe I saw your sister once at one of those morning waltzes Lady Caroline delighted in bullying us into. In the drawing room of Melbourne House. We were not introduced. I was very young, and you were dancing with her, exclusively, and had attracted a considerable share of the general interest. I believe I was shy—that is, I considered it beneath my dignity to play up to the fashion for you. I had a deal of dignity then; at least, I discovered there to be a great many things that were beneath it.’

She had added, when Lord Byron continued silent, ‘I recall she was very pretty,’ at which he opened his eyes.

‘She looks like her brother.’

Byron himself now broke her train of thought, emerging from the house alone. He needed, perhaps, half a minute to cross the yard; she watched him coldly. ‘She was not downstairs,’ he said, approaching, and gave her his hand. She stepped down. Together they walked back the way he had come—Annabella checked her eager stride to keep pace beside him.

In the hall, which was dark and awkwardly proportioned, being wide rather than square, Byron began to look through the post, collected on a table beside the stairs. Annabella noticed Mrs Leigh at the top of them; she had rested a moment against the balustrade and now descended. Her features were soft and regular, her neck was good, and her figure, though not tall, was elegant. She wore a muslin dress, simply embroidered, which fell around her ankles—the only element in her appearance that suggested the effects of age and motherhood. (Annabella remembered Hobhouse’s praise of her own, conscious of playing the miser, of counting over the pounds and pence of pride.) A pale-blue headdress brought out, with modest assurance, the colour in her face: she had the Byrons’ complexion, a bright pallor with a high finish and touched with pink. Annabella, unsure of herself and whether to go to her sister, waited at the foot of the stairs, where Mrs Leigh met her, reaching out a hand. She did not stoop to offer Annabella a kiss, and Annabella could hardly rise to insist on one.

Lord Byron meanwhile had opened a letter and begun to read from it, without looking up. Nor did Augusta glance at her brother. She said, instead, how happy she was to meet ‘her new sister’. Her voice, like Byron’s, was low and musical, an effect brought out in part by nerves, which gave to its tone a deepening uncertainty. What surprised Annabella, whose faith in Augusta’s good intentions was by no means complete, was the rush of real sisterly feeling the introduction inspired. Gus offered to lead Annabella to her rooms; she was sure the journey must have fatigued her. Her brother, she knew, being an inveterate traveller, had only the dimmest sense of what a woman suffered in the squalor of a public house. Byron at this looked up from the letter he was reading. ‘Nonsense, Gussie,’ he said, ‘you’ll soon find that Lady Byron is perfectly indestructible. I have put her to every test.’

Annabella followed her hostess to the top of the stairs and along a dark corridor to the door at the end of it. Her room, at least, was clean and bright, though it overlooked the stables. Against the odour of which and the restless noise, Augusta now shut the window—an act of modest kindness that drew from her sister-in-law a sudden kiss. ‘It was the kiss,’ Annabella said, not without a touch of reproach, ‘she had meant to bestow upon her new sister on sight.’ She had guessed at possibilities: that Mrs Leigh might offer her an outlet for those feelings her brother so irregularly reciprocated. A sister, in fact, from her earliest childhood, had been the highest dream of escape from that solitude which Annabella had practically come to believe was her natural state. And what pleased her especially was that she felt already, rising in her, the confidence to assume in their relations the part of the elder and wiser. This, in truth, is what her insistence on kissing Augusta was supposed to seal. Gus only said, ‘I should see to my brother now,’ and added, by way of apology, ‘he can be very awkward in company, especially with his sister! and dislikes particularly greetings and farewells. He becomes very abrupt and seems rude without the least intention of it, only we have been so used, you know, to being on our own.’

Having washed and dressed, Annabella descended to the drawing room. There was silence within. She listened at the door for a moment before entering, to find her husband inside, limping along in pain behind the sofa, back and forth, while Augusta sat with her back to him and her head bowed. He tended to suffer afterwards for the forced repose of a long coach-journey. The sun had set and the curtains were drawn against the night; a fire burned damply in the fireplace. The house was neither cold nor warm but a something in between—one was just as likely to sweat as shiver.

Annabella felt the general oppression of accumulated life. Paintings and prints, mostly of horses or hunting scenes, had been added haphazardly to the walls. There was, in that preference for subject, a general neglect of the subtler art of arrangement. Annabella discovered, in the course of her stay, a Romney hidden away in a corner of the chimney-breast, while a large sketched print of a mutton-legged English setter was given conspicuous prominence. One sensed in these appointments the insistence of Colonel Leigh; nevertheless, Augusta inhabited the house with so comfortable an indifference that Annabella could not help but admire her for it. She had yet to make herself at home in her husband’s tastes. Occasionally, perhaps, the equine passion was taken a little far: a child’s rocking horse, draped with a lady’s shawl, stood in place of a stool at the pianoforte. One had the sense of arriving at any empty seat just in time. Annabella sat down on a low-backed chair covered in green baize, having removed from the cushion an unfinished piece of embroidery and set it on a card-table nearby.

A decanter of spirits was open on the tantalus. Lord Byron disengaged the spring and poured himself a glass. When he saw his wife, he stopped, with pointed attention, and offered her the drink. On her refusal, he drank it down and continued his parade. Augusta began with an apology. ‘My dear sister, you’ll find us very dull here, I’m afraid.’

‘Gus and I are used to amusing ourselves,’ Byron added.

‘What he means is only that the children adore him. He plays the part, very happily, of uncle and slips quite noiselessly into family life. We haven’t, I fear, the advantages of a town. Our days are mostly taken up with a great deal of bustle in a very narrow round. I confess I have got used, simply, to chasing after the children, and B is often good enough to join me in that thankless task.’ She laughed. Annabella was surprised to see her sister-in-law capable of so much manner—she had the first real inkling, not of fear exactly, but of that responding pride which measures itself against the confidence of others. Augusta seemed hardly so shy as she at first appeared.

‘I should like very much to see the children,’ Annabella sweetly replied. ‘My husband and I have been constrained, since our marriage, to make do with each other. It is something of a relief to be forced to make do with other people.’ And Annabella herself was equal to a laugh.

‘You forget, my dear, the entertainment we enjoyed at Seaham at your parents’ house. Your father, in particular, diverted us with variations on a speech he had given at Durham the fortnight preceding, concerning certain enclosures and the provisions necessary to implement them. Such games we had, too; it was quite like Christmas.’

The irony in his tone created a silence, which Augusta at last ventured to break. ‘I have never laughed so much as I did on hearing how my little brother plucked the wig from Lady Milbanke’s head. You kept yourselves very well amused, I believe. I was quite astonished to discover how many occupations he had acquired: walking, dining, playing draughts with your mamma. Though I am vain enough to think he did not entirely forget his Gus.’

‘He was a perfect little child,’ Annabella replied, not to be outdone. ‘He has a child’s gift, too, which never fails to charm, of declaring his wants in such a way that it is quite a pleasure to satisfy them. Poor little B, he grew in the habit of saying—wants this, wants that. We all doted on him.’

‘I am so glad. You have hit on, at once, just the way to manage him. Never mind what he says and see that he eats enough. He has a terrible passion for starving himself, which must be resisted. One suffers much more oneself for his hungry humours.’

Byron, meanwhile, who hated ordinarily to be caught out on his feet, continued to pace behind the sofa. Annabella heard the rustle of the curtain against his leg as he brushed it aside, again and again. ‘Shall we call the children in?’ he said at last. ‘There is one among them, Pip, I should particularly like you to meet; she is a great favourite with me. It is said, though I am no judge, that she takes after her uncle. I believe that any imputed resemblance is more flattering than plausible. Medora is reckoned very beautiful.’

‘They have just been got to sleep,’ Augusta said, ‘and I should like first to have a quiet minute with my sister—’

‘You have nothing to say to each other,’ Byron interrupted her, raising his voice; he rested his hands on the sofa behind her neck. ‘This is intolerable. To be smothered like this in female kindnesses. I will not be managed!’

Augusta flinched, with a stiffness that suggested how rigidly she had been holding herself—she closed her eyes as if the blow had been real. His sister’s excess of manner had been, Annabella supposed, only the careful containment of a woman on the verge of tears. His wife, she reflected, not without pride, was more accustomed to such outbursts. She picked up the piece of embroidery and held it against the light, to see how much remained. Grateful, for once, to be allowed to disregard his anger. ‘You may do as you like, my dear.’ It was left to Augusta to answer him. ‘You always do.’