Chapter Nine

IN THE MORNING, OVER BREAKFAST, Annabella asked her sister for a favour. She had been wanting to go to church. She particularly wished to hear a certain clergyman who preached at Sutton, but the journey, of course, was too great for her to undertake it on foot, and she was perfectly aware that the Leighs had not at their disposal a gig or barouche for the convenience of a guest (Annabella laughed) who wished to go twenty miles out of her way to be a little nearer to God. Even so, she had a great desire to go to Sutton. It was a point on which she could give no explanation beyond a simple repetition of the fact. It was out of the way; she wished to go. And she wondered whether Augusta might not solicit from a kindly neighbour the use of a conveyance. She could only assure her sister that she would not request it without the strictest regard for necessity. It had become, for reasons Augusta could, perhaps, appreciate, essential for her to purge her mind of certain—doubts or suspicions; and she needed, she believed, the comfort of a familiar face to inspire in her the confidence to make the completest expiation. There (another laugh), she had, after all, explained herself! It remained for her only to add that she would be doubly grateful to Augusta if, when Lord Byron came down, she could inform him merely that his wife had gone to church and was expected to spend the day in prayer.

Augusta nodded, demurely. She perfectly understood. Within the hour, a stately high-backed barouche, fitted to a pair of geldings from the stables of their neighbours, the Bassets, was waiting outside their door. Annabella was to consider it perfectly at her disposal. Colonel Leigh had much obliged Mr Basset in the past by advising him on the purchase of horses; it seemed the least he (Mr Basset) could do was to offer them to Mrs Leigh’s sister-in-law. Annabella, meanwhile, had dressed for church and wore a smart new tamboured dress and the curricle jacket she had been married in. She thanked Augusta and kissed her goodbye. Gus said, ‘I thought you should be lonely here for familiar faces. I’m afraid my brother and I are wretched company. It is the worst of family relations that, for the sake of them, one never puts on the least effect of manner or charm. I am sure you must find us very dull. A drive will do you no end of good.’

Annabella called her answer from the window, with an air of sweetness: ‘It will be a relief to you to spend a quiet civil day with your brother, as you have been used to doing. Goodbye.’

The barouche pulled out of the yard and entered swiftly the open country surrounding Six Mile Bottom. As the house disappeared behind a hedgerow, Annabella felt a great weight lifted and was somewhat astonished by what emerged beneath it. The perfect calm she had kept up all morning (without, it seemed to her, the least unnatural effort) dissolved at once, and she hugged herself and shook from side to side, grateful to the clatter of the horses for permitting her, as she afterwards put it to herself, a little clatter of her own. The motion of the gig, in time, absorbed the rhythm of her sobs; and she passed from one to the other with the gentleness of imperceptible degrees. A line came into her head (addressed to whom, she knew not) that might safely serve to describe her stay: ‘What I suffered at Colonel Leigh’s house was unimaginable.’ There was solace in the thought of a future that would allow her to speak so clearly of such a present. The day was brisk, with sudden alternations. The large hand of the wind bent back, and released, the stalks of the trees edging the farmers’ fields, and flattened, and uplifted, the meadows of grass between them. Rain fell amidst bursts of sunshine, and the clouds at times took on a luminous darkness. She stared out the window of the barouche while the hour sped by.

Out of these prospects emerged the sense that she would have to face up to things squarely—that she had not been facing up to them. She was not yet willing to convict her husband of a total failure of love, but the evidence of a partial failure was so plentiful that she hardly needed to go over the particulars. There were times when, it pained her to admit it, her presence occasioned in him the acutest distress. A corner in her character rubbed awkwardly against a corner in his. They were both a little raw with the rubbing, although Annabella was sufficiently in love to wish to remove from her nature anything that protruded uncomfortably into his own. That, at least, is what she told herself, though she recognized even then that the little brute fact of her incompatibility might not be extracted from her (the image of herself she had in mind, for this purpose, was of a plain, pleasant, weathered wall of brick) without a general tumbling down. What she would suffer in that tumbling down she dared not think. Her suffering, she supposed, had already been ample enough—enough for what, however, was just the question that she had, for the past few weeks, been putting off.

What puzzled her still was the extent of Augusta’s complicity. Her kindness had been so constant and particular, it was difficult not to trace in it the effect of guilt. Annabella was mindful, however, of reading into her sister’s behaviour only the motives in her own conscience that might produce such behaviour in herself. In fact, Gus’s open show of misery at her brother’s treatment appeared to be the most natural expression of a clear heart. By contrast, her own awkward attempt at dignity—the way she stood on it, as it were, and attempted to make off with it—seemed evidence of duplicity. Surely, if the worst were true, Gus would never have indulged her brother in such a kissing-contest. If the worst continued to be true. (Wasn’t that, after all, the question that counted?) And what could be sweeter in a sister than her little confession of attachment? ‘Think of these only as wedding-tears.’ The phrase, unhappily, called to mind Lord Byron’s own: his wedding shoes, the wedding breakfast, the wedding sneeze, his wedding chill. No, Augusta herself was not what worried her most. It was only what might be inferred from her behaviour, about her brother’s, that mattered—a reflection that brought home to Annabella for the first time how much she was willing to accept. Her powers of forgiveness seemed to her extraordinary: there was nothing in their past she need stop short at. Nothing, not the darkest stain of sin, would appal her, so long as she could persuade herself of his determination to reform, which she depended on as a proof not so much of his compunction as of his love.

It occurred to her, with a burst of simplicity, that the question she must put to herself was only this: how little of that could she live on? She was reminded suddenly of the lecture at which, for the second time, she had diverted herself by staring at Lord Byron (or rather, at the back of his head). Mr Campbell had spoken of ‘the Sinking Fund of the Imagination on which a poet could rely as he grew older’, and she had afterwards complained to her mother that the noble art had been reduced to nothing more romantic than the task of making mayonnaise. ‘It was only a question of the quantity that could be got out of the smallest expenditure of eggs.’ Annabella had become used (she was relieved at being able to give the problem so comical an aspect) to getting by on very little indeed. She congratulated herself, without any false pride, on the fact that such economies depended on just those virtues which she had always striven to cultivate. She did need, however, a little love, after all. By the time she arrived at the church, she was even equal to a smile: she needed at least one egg.

The coachman left her at the broken steps of the cemetery; he promised to wait for her afterwards in the drive leading up to the poor-houses. Annabella, whose tranquillity was always improved by the necessity of keeping up a public face, thanked him and made her way on the dry gravelled path that ran between the gravestones. The air was cooler in the porch of the church, and she sat down for a minute on one of the stone benches that lined the walls. His voice emerged from the rumble of noises that escaped to her through the half-opened door. Mr Eden was preaching his sermon, and the sound of it awoke in her such a sense of familiarity that she smiled at the idea of having heard his sermons before. It struck her that she might really have been sitting within, on a quiet Sunday morning in Sutton, had she accepted his proposal; and she imagined, waiting for her, a Mrs George Eden, who would turn towards her with a composed, superior, unafflicted look and welcome her in. The thought fell across her like a shadow; she quickly rose and stepped inside.

The nave was narrow and high and drew the eye instantly upwards. The light of day, of cloudy brightness and cloudy darkness mixed, had been softened by the church windows into a fine-grained grey that seemed to filter like slow sand through the air. Everywhere an echo of his voice came back to her, so distinctly that she was almost surprised, looking down, to find how small a figure he cut at the foot of the pulpit. She could just make out at that distance the scope of his high forehead and the slight excess of flesh at the end of his strong, straight nose. She ducked into a seat and stared at the backs of his congregation, in whom she believed to trace, by the modesty of their attendance, a quiet respectable piety. Country-best was the manner of their attire; there couldn’t have been more than two dozen congregants scattered irregularly among the lines of pews. She supposed them to make up just such a sum of reverence as Mr Eden, at least as he appeared in her memory of their brief acquaintance, decent, moderate, assured, would have comfortably counted on to honour his debt to God.

She had expected to feel, at once, a sense of relief at the prospect of confession, of condolence, he presented to her. In fact, she felt with the sharpness of a kind of homesickness the irritable mild impatience he had always inspired in her. His sermon, on Jacob’s seven-year struggle for Rachel, when she attended to it, seemed sensible; only it was a little long. He had an air of hardly trusting himself to be understood without the nicest, most complete explanation, and she imagined, impiously, that Mr Eden would in the presence of his Maker insist on confessing his sins with a strict legal regard for exactitude. Her nostalgia lay in the contrast he made—that is, in the consciousness of it he awoke in her—with the man who was now her husband. ‘Now there is a good man, a handsome man, an honourable man, a most inoffensive man, a well informed man, and a dull man . . .’ Mr Eden reminded her of just those tendencies in herself she had hoped in her choice of husband to resist. For a minute, she considered slipping out of her seat again and into the open air, and bidding the coachman to return her, as quick as the horses would trot, to the marriage from whose unhappiness she had so desperately sought relief.

It was only then it occurred to her, with a blush of shame or pleasure, she could not be sure which, that Mr Eden had seen her; that he was watching her with his large clear eye; that he hoped to keep her there, in his presence, in his sight, for as long as he could; that his sermon was, in some measure, addressed to her and protracted for her sake. She felt herself beginning to tremble, she scarcely knew why, and bowed her head and listened to him (to his voice, to its patient, careful modulations, and not his words) with her eyes closed until by the sound of shuffling around her, of rising and gathering about, she guessed that communion was at hand. Rising herself, she waited demurely her turn. Approaching him and summoning courage, she looked him in the face. He looked in hers, but the duties of the benediction left him no room for a personal remark, and she tasted the wine and bread in subdued agitation, which made a difficulty of swallowing. Then she was ushered away again.

Afterwards, she kept her seat. As the congregation filed into the bright, uncertain light of an early spring Sunday (the opened door cast a long shadow, as it were, of sunshine down the aisle of the church), she waited for Mr Eden, who was caught up in conversation with his parishioners, to come back to her. She heard his step at last but did not turn around. ‘Lady Byron,’ he said, ‘what a great pleasure it is, what an honour it is. You cannot imagine what a surprise it was, what a delightful surprise, when I saw you approach to take communion. I had heard indeed,’ he was facing her now, ‘I had heard that you and your husband were staying with his sister at Six Mile Bottom, but I did not dream . . .’ There was in this, in the urgent jumble of his sentiments, if not in the sentiments themselves, just enough flutter to satisfy Annabella’s vanity—at least, it seemed to her that the best way to begin was by appealing to his.

‘You mean, I suppose, that I have come a long way to see you. Yes, it was you I came to see, and the journey was really longer than you imagine.’ She rose and claimed the privilege of his arm. ‘Is there somewhere we could quietly talk?’

His humour, for once, was equal to the suggestion. ‘Do you mean the confessional?’ He smiled, and she was touched by the large simple decency of the man. ‘No: I think, between old friends such as ourselves, a little walk, perhaps, if it isn’t wet, among the peaceful dead, is really the best inspiration.’

‘Do you know, a confessional is almost what I had in mind.’

He stooped a little, emerging from the arch of the door into the open air. In the light of day, she could see more clearly what the effect of two years (not to mention the rigours of his vocation) had been upon her friend. His face had taken on a countrified complexion. The thin line of his mouth had settled into an expression of professional kindliness, both vague and durable. Looking down, she saw that his shoes were caked around the sole with mud; blades of grass had become entangled in the laces. She remembered the promise he had once made her, of an income sufficient to meet the expense of a residence in town, and presumed that the narrow round of his duties had kept him from seizing his opportunity. He would hardly dare to appear in the best society in such a condition. She smiled at the thought of calculating from the state of his shoes a larger picture of the manners with which he might present himself. He had an air, generally, of retraction: as if he had learned to survive on worse food and company, on poorer ambitions, and on fewer thoughts than he was wont to do.

The skies had cleared a little. A patch of blue had spread itself like a picnic cloth (she was perfectly aware, to whom she owed the fancy) over the trees of the cemetery; and the lanes between the graves were just dry enough, away from the long-haired grass that grew around the stones, to permit a lady to pass. ‘I must congratulate you,’ she had left it to him to begin, ‘on your marriage to Lord Byron. I heard of it only recently, as a piece of those rumours that brought the news of your residence in Six Mile Bottom. I have become, I’m afraid, something of a gossip.’ He looked at her and laughed. ‘It is one of the sins of the church, though you would be flattered to know, I’m sure, the part you play in such tattle. Lady Byron has attracted a great deal of interest and admiration. She is said to be very beautiful and clever. He is said to be very—well matched.’

‘I imagine,’ she had found, she believed, her opening, ‘the rumours say more than that.’

The kindly look he gave her suggested his willingness on such subjects to keep quiet. Annabella was fair-minded enough to acknowledge that the impatience he aroused in her had less to do with his tact than with her own awkward urge ‘to confess everything’—a total that might become clear to her for the first time as she attempted to ‘add it up’. She was forced, in the silence that followed, to turn her questioning on him. He gathered his thoughts for a minute into something like succinctness: he was very happy, he said; he was very busy, and quiet, too. Perhaps he had—shrunk in scope, which was just as well, he believed, as he was perfectly aware of the tendency his profession had to stretch out, if nothing else, one’s speeches. But—he smiled, suddenly, and broke off to say, that he should for once attend his own sermon and take his own advice to heart.

Annabella had guessed the nature of the speech he might have launched himself into, and she was starved enough for flattery to attempt to draw him out. She begged him to continue. She had acquired since he had seen her last a sharper appetite for good advice, if only because she believed herself to be so greatly in need of it. He answered her deprecation with another little smile, which proved to Annabella at once, in her anxious impatience, that he was still refusing to take her at her word. He said he had only stopped short for fear that the sentiment he wished to deliver himself of, though perfectly complimentary, required nevertheless a delicacy of expression which he no longer trusted himself, with his country manners, to keep up. He wished to say only that he had, since . . . since he had seen her last, acquired a still greater admiration for Miss Milbanke’s, he begged her pardon, for Lady Byron’s good sense. He was not one of those men who, from a duty of modesty, rate themselves below their deserts; but he was willing to admit that her—and he hesitated, not over the word, but over the propriety of addressing her with it—that her genius would never have found a suitable expression in the life he had proposed she share with him. Though he had had at the time his reservations over Lord Byron’s character, he had none whatsoever over . . . over Annabella’s ability to deserve the scope of ambition she would enjoy as his wife. And the fact that she had chosen to accept him in marriage had proved to him that she was confident of being able to repair and to regulate a disposition which, apart from the defects of his youth, of his upbringing, of his too early taste of fame, had such a generous nobility to recommend it. In short—but here Annabella, with a sudden and desperate break in the tone of their discourse, interrupted him.

‘I cannot repair him; I cannot regulate him. He is ungovernable. He is impossible.’

He stopped at last to stare at her. His face showed that he had taken in her appeal, and guiding her by the hand, he led her to a bench, which, situated in the shadow of the church’s western wall, had escaped for the most part the brief showers of the day. They sat down. Mr Eden put his hands together and raised them to his lips. ‘You must know that in my professional capacity I am often called upon to listen to confessions in which I have a personal stake. I admit, without pride, that there is in my temper a peculiar willingness to detach itself from such considerations. It is, perhaps, the virtue of the clergyman and the curse of the gentleman that I lack what is thought of as the common touch. I believe it is the effect only of the fact that my sympathies, which, I flatter myself, are reasonably developed, remain proof against their own self interest.’

There was in Mr Eden’s manner something that reminded Annabella so vividly of her own, or rather, of her own old manner, that she considered for a moment how well they might have suited each other. Yet the impatience he continued to awake in her suggested how greatly she had stood in need of a corrective—a reflection that recalled her to a sense of her position. It was owing to the violence of that corrective that she now sought relief from Mr Eden. Still, it was with a little contrary effort of the will that she began her confession; and she retained to the end the right to stop short at the fullest disclosure, if only because she supposed that the horror it would inspire in him would be too much like the horror she would have felt before her marriage at the situation in which she found herself. What she would miss in him was the benefit of her own experience. She was not quite as innocent as she believed him still to be, and Annabella discovered to her surprise a kind of pride in her own fall that made her hesitate to implicate herself in the outrage with which he might respond to the facts of it. Yet wasn’t it really for that—to arouse such outrage, to witness it, to judge its force and relevance—that she had come to him? In any case, by the time Annabella answered him, she had decently recomposed herself.

‘The question I have been putting to myself,’ this was how she began, ‘is why, after all, did he marry me? I don’t mean to say that there weren’t in the beginning certain testaments of his affection. His temper is variable, and I learned, as his wife, to regard what mathematicians would call the mean and not the range of his dispositions. But he has of late—and I am perfectly aware of the tenure of our marriage, and the sorrow that might be suggested by the need I feel to distinguish between its beginning and its present course—so little favoured me with the extraordinary grace of his affections, that I have wondered whether some change in circumstance, some failure in my own—’

Here Mr Eden showed himself capable of the largest simplicity; perhaps he had learned a little more in his professional duties than she had given him credit for. ‘Has he been violent?’

The sense of her suffering renewed itself in her. Annabella bowed her head; she felt the prick of tears. ‘It isn’t his violence that I fear. It is his—indifference.’

‘How long, then, has he been—indifferent to you?’

‘It isn’t even his indifference. His sister, in whose house we are staying, makes great claims upon his affection. At least, I believe he feels them; she may, after all, be innocent. And—’

‘Innocent of what?’

A pigeon in the church eaves cooed hollowly and then, with a flap, resettled on the grass beside their feet. Mr Eden, idly, lifted his foot, and it flew away. The word had been on the tip of her tongue; but the moment, the quiet necessary to a confession, was almost spoilt. She hadn’t after all the strength to say it aloud, and she leaned towards him on the bench and whispered something in his ear. For a minute, he hardly shifted. She expected to feel the instancy of relief, but really what she felt was only the sudden fear, or rather, the hope, that what she had said had not put her beyond the possibility of a retreat. She hadn’t guessed till then how much she relied upon the chance of that.

What he repeated, in the end, wasn’t quite what she had whispered to him. He had come, perhaps, in his own fashion, a long way from the practical innocence with which he had once professed his love to her. ‘You think there has been—something horrible between them?’

She nodded.

‘And you think that—it has been continuing in your presence?’

Afterwards, on the journey home again, and in the years that followed, she remembered her answer to him. There was a great deal she might have still been spared, but she had seen in his eyes the chance of her evasion. Mr Eden, by asking the question for her, had acknowledged its significance. Between the worst that she knew and the worst that she could imagine, there was a great gulf fixed; and his strict sense of the difference left her a little room to live in hope. Hope, in fact, her half-lie made clear to her, was very much the element in which she moved. She wasn’t yet willing to resign to Mr Eden, for all his decency and dignity, her claim to the less modest virtues of Lord Byron. She came home, in fact, with a clear sense of the contrast between the two men; and the occasional impatience she had felt with one of them explained to her in part the resentment she was capable of arousing in the other. She would never have believed it possible on setting forth, but she returned to her husband after her ‘church-excursion’, as he came to call it, supported by a stiff new resolution: to devote herself to married life with a freedom, as Mary Montgomery had put it to her, that gave to her desires the privilege she had once accorded her sense of virtue.

‘No,’ she had said to Mr Eden. ‘Not in my presence; I am sure of it.’

That night she had her first chance to test her resolution. Her visit to Mr Eden (Annabella, after the fact, made no secret of the object of her ‘church-excursion’) had put Lord Byron in one of his most loving humours. It was his disposition, as she expressed it to herself, to deem that whatever he had was worthless. Only the threat of losing them brought home to him the value of his possessions—she was almost eager, by this stage, to lump herself among them. Indeed, she saw it as a measure of the difference between them that he answered such threats with what she had described to Mr Eden as the ‘grace of his affections’. Jealousy, Annabella knew, inspired in herself really the worst of her vanities. After dinner, he asked her to play for them and instead of occupying himself with his sister on the settee, he stood over Annabella’s shoulder and turned for her the pages of the songbook. ‘Who could resist you, singing,’ he said, when she, at last, complained of fatigue and faced him. He added, with that simple honesty which even the most watchful soul sometimes slips into: ‘It is only the stiffness of one of your dignities that makes me bristle.’

‘I had never supposed,’ she began, ‘that dignity was something to be objected to.’

But he had, for once, enough good humour to laugh her out of it. ‘No, my dear, only you’ll admit, it can be a little uncomfortable for us poor sinners’—she wondered, for a moment, whether this was a class that included his sister and felt a pang of envy at her exclusion from it, until he continued—‘for us poor sinners, who dream of resting on you.’

She took his hands at this; she was almost in tears. ‘Rest against me. There is nothing I should like better. You—you mustn’t believe that my dignities are any more comfortable to me than to you.’ They looked at each other, and to apologize for her show of feeling, she added, letting go of him and wiping her eyes: ‘You see, I am sure, how easily I am managed. The least kindness unbends me.’ She feared, as she said it, that a note of unintended reproach had crept into her voice, but he was equal to the justice of her correction. ‘I can be kind or loving,’ he said, ‘only upon inspiration, which dries up. I am sorry for that.’ He continued, with the patient curiosity of famous men, regarding their own characters, in which the interest, they confidently presume, is sufficiently general: ‘My temper, luckily, is vicious on the same condition. I always dry up, Pip. You can count on that, at least.’ It was a kind of apology, Annabella supposed—at least, it was the only one he made for what she had suffered at his sister’s house. And it struck her, then, as a proof of how little she did count on, that she was willing to take comfort from it.

They were leaving for London in the morning, and that night, for the first time, Lord Byron came up with his wife to bed. It was a sign (she quietly exulted in it) of her triumph over Augusta: she would win in the end. Hers was really the permanent relation, the one he must live with. And the fact that he felt the force of that necessity was made plain by the new note he attempted to strike in their relations. He was trying to find a way to love her—that was the desperation by which she excused, in the first pain of the aftermath, the violence done her. She was dressing for bed with her back towards him. She could feel him watching her, for once; his voice seemed to grow out of that feeling.

He said that he had become accustomed, in his travels through the East, to some of the local customs or practices, which had the reputation among the English as the worst of those vices against which a foreigner must, as it were, shut his eyes, if he is to keep up with the natives the pretence of civility. Well, he laughed, he had not shut his eyes, and without, as it happens, the least sacrifice of civility. It was only the pretence of it that one relinquished. He remembered that his friend Hobhouse used to complain in Turkey that he had no notion of comfort because he could sleep where none but a brute could—and certainly where none but brutes did. Thus they lived, one day in the palace of the Pasha (who had taken a particular fancy to him) and the next in the most miserable hut of the mountains. The hospitality they received was consistent, at least, in this respect: that Hobhouse refused from certain scruples to enjoy the full extent of it, wherever they were. Well, he had had no scruples, and he frankly confessed that he had enjoyed himself.

There was something in his manner that suggested to Annabella a forced good humour. He was embarrassed, and she felt she could play her part no better than by putting him at his ease. She turned to face him, and he, more quietly, more sombrely, reminded her that she had offered to do what she could to please him; that she had placed herself entirely in his hands; that there was nothing they need stop short at. This was, as she saw it, the first test of her resolution to give herself to him in love. And she found the duty of answering her husband made easier by the fact that she perceived in him something of the same intent. Yes—it was her look that said it; yes.

They had no other need of explanation. Indeed, Byron’s meaning was perfectly made plain by the act itself, and it occurred to her afterwards that there are things that can only be done unsaid. Her silence had the effect of veiling, even in her memories of that night, the extent to which she had been complicit. Annabella could not, of course, have agreed to what she could not imagine, but neither could she have refused the unimaginable. What that was struck her, when it became clear, as sufficiently unspeakable; and she could come no nearer to admitting to it, in her thoughts, than by supposing it to be the answer to a question she had just stopped short of asking Mr Eden. What, after all, she had wanted to say (she had got no further than imagining the laugh with which she might have said it), if the worst were true, could the effect of it be on herself, on the security of her own virtue? Surely theirs was not the kind of degradation one could oneself begin to suffer from. Well, as her husband slept beside her, resting on her as she had begged him to, Annabella had the leisure of sleeplessness to reflect on how wrong she had been. Wasn’t that, in its way, just what she had suffered from? Wasn’t she now just as degraded as they?

In the morning, however, the first flush of pain had receded, and she could more calmly attempt an answer to these questions. If she would no longer pride herself on being better than her husband, at least she was no worse. An equality of sins, she reasoned, as well as virtues, is what the harmony of a marriage depended on. There were freedoms to be got by stooping as well as rising, and wasn’t the best she could hope for to learn to enjoy them? It is true, she was no longer confident of being able to present to her mother, for example, the strictest account. But the consequence was that she had already ceased to make it, in the constant unwritten confession that gave shape to her thoughts. Really, she was almost relieved, at what her husband had decided to call ‘the last breakfast’, by the new internal stillness. She had been dutiful, she had been loving, but she had also been counting over her wrongs; it was the noise of the tally, perhaps, that had most oppressed her. She vowed, henceforth, to keep quiet—it was almost thrilling, to taste on her lips the power of her own resolution.

Augusta had permitted the children to breakfast en famille. Byron, for once, had risen in time to join them. His reluctance to leave was palpable; it took, in fact, the form of Medora, whom he held on his lap and fed with a tenderness that Annabella publicly remarked on. ‘Yes, he spoils them all,’ Augusta said. ‘It will do them good, I believe, to get used to their father again.’

‘Oh, they are used enough,’ Byron said. When Medora began to cry, Augusta attempted to remove her from him. There was an awkward gentle sort of tussle. Byron clung on, and Augusta, with the first real sign of impatience, gave way at last—she was ready for them to go. Byron held Medora’s soft head in his hands and covered it in kisses; the girl continued to cry. Hers seemed the voice of a larger, more general unhappiness, and the women were both relieved when the coachman arrived to signal the readiness of the horses.

Augusta saw them into the yard. It was a fine bright cold spring day. The sun was almost pale enough to look at and cast a vivid colourless light that picked out the beams of the house and threw fierce little shadows. Annabella was surprised to feel, in their parting embrace, a surge of sisterly feeling. ‘I wish you would not,’ she said, smiling through tears, ‘leave me alone with him.’

‘If you should ever want me,’ she said, ‘you’ve only to send. I’ll come at once.’

There was, however, something in Augusta’s answer, an earnestness, that struck in Annabella’s ear the wrong note. It made of her own sweet words too significant an appeal. It quite brought the surge of feeling low, and the best she could do, to give a point to her displeasure, was only to say, ‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll come more than that.’

She waited in the coach for Byron to take his leave. After a minute he entered, a little flushed, but calm enough. ‘Well, Pip,’ he said, ‘what do you think of her?’ She was spared, at least, the need of an answer. As the horses began to shoulder their burden, he leaned out the window and waved; she left to him the privilege of last looks. It occurred to her that if she had wanted a proof of his love, she need search no further than her own conscious feeling of complicity in the state of their several relations, in the sins of that house. They were involved, all three of them, in a struggle for something: was it absurd to imagine that something as Byron’s love? She could almost, in the light of that thought, pity him—it wasn’t a quantity, she supposed, one took pleasure in seeing divided and counted up. What a relief it was, after all, to get away from that place! She could only be sure they had passed out of sight when he turned back in.