Chapter Three

IF HER MOTHER HAD COMPLAINED previously of a ‘want of occupation’, Annabella was struck by how quickly Lady Milbanke recognized the rich seam of activity that her daughter had now opened up to her. First, the Gosfords were sent home under the cover of Lady Byron’s exhaustion. She had only just arrived from London. She was tired, and there is a kind of fatigue that can, of itself, produce an appearance of misery. Judy turned frankly to Lord Gosford in the doorway: she had learned in the past few months that one may make a habit of tears. Annabella, who overheard her, was persuaded for the first time of her mother’s complete recovery by the fact that she was willing, coldly, to make use of it as an example. Their delight, Lady Milbanke continued as she ushered them into the parlour, in Annabella’s company had led them to overindulge in it. What she wanted was nothing more than quiet and rest . . . Although, once the Gosfords were gone, Lady Milbanke dispatched Sir Ralph to his study and refused to allow her daughter to retire until she had heard from her ‘a full confession’. She had lately favoured her daughter with the most intimate confidences (there was a note in her voice both of reproach and self-reproach), and these perhaps had drowned out the gentler noises that Annabella had been trying to make. Had she been holding something back?

Just what a ‘full confession’ would require of her was the problem that Annabella, in the midst of her distress, was forced to confront; and she was still sufficiently the wife of Lord Byron and the sister of Augusta to keep from Judy the secret of her worst suspicions. To admit to these might, in any case, deny her the luxury of a reconsideration. Fortunately, Lord Byron’s conduct had furnished her with enough material for a reasonable account of sincerest sorrow, and that is, to the best of her ability, the account she gave. Her husband had, from the beginning, freely expressed how little he was suited to the part his vows required of him, and his subsequent behaviour had only justified these professions. He had never actually beaten her. That is, he had never done so intentionally; but their great pecuniary embarrassments, and the strains on the marriage produced by her condition and, subsequently, by the birth of their child, had reduced him to a kind of madness in which the threat of violence against her was really the least of the fears she laboured under. They had practically ceased to hold any common intercourse with each other. They communicated chiefly by notes, but his state of mind was so disordered that it announced of itself, in the most explicit manner, the chaos of his unhappiness.

She did not wish to go deeply into particulars, but she was willing to cite, as an example, the fact that during her confinement he had relieved his anxiety by breaking soda-bottles against the ceiling of his room, which lay directly under her own. She had heard them crashing beneath her; she thought they were gunshots. Annabella did not mean to suggest that his intentions towards herself had ever been murderous. It struck her on the whole as more likely that he would injure himself. His sister’s presence in their household had the effect of goading him into a kind of intimate and demonstrable confession of the viciousness of his character. His was the sort of conscience that reproached itself as deeply for what he had imagined doing as for what he had actually done. Although—to be fair to Augusta—her patience, her gentleness, her formidable common sense, more than made up for the . . . the pressure her company produced on their mutual relations. (It was throwing Augusta, just a little, in Lady Milbanke’s way. In spite of her protestations of love, Annabella could not refrain from exposing her sister-in-law to the brunt of her mother’s curiosity. She had lifted no more than the edge of that veil—who knew what would happen if the wind caught hold of it?) In the end, that pressure had grown intolerable. She could not with any certainty declare whether she had of her own free will escaped that unhappy home, or whether her husband had deliberately dismissed her from it. These were ‘the gentler noises’ which, she discovered, in spite of her reddened eyes and sore-tipped nose, it was something of a relief for her to make.

Supper brought the three of them together again. Sir Ralph was particularly subdued, and just shy enough of his wife’s more intimate knowledge to resign to the women the tenor of their table talk. Annabella had left it to her mother to lay at his feet the list of Lord Byron’s abuses—his menaces, furies, neglects and infidelities—and was surprised to find that nothing had yet been said. Only Judy showed much signs of an appetite, and Annabella retired, leaving her pudding untouched and pleading as excuse the fatigues, as she put it, of her ‘sudden display’. She had dined, she said with a brave ironic smile, on tears; and Sir Ralph, who disliked such airs, gave her an impatient look, not unmixed by the pain of his exclusion. She supposed it might drive him at last to make inquiries of her mother, and was gratified to hear him, after the necessary interval, storming through the house to find her, where she had decided to wait for him, in the tidy back parlour by the fire. She listened with a little smile of indulged love. ‘Bell,’ he was calling, opening and closing doors, ‘Bell, Bell, Bell,’ until he found her, with his large kindly face so puffed up that the unshaved hairs of his cheek stood on end.

His indignation could be counted on to do justice to whatever his daughter had suffered, though Annabella presumed that he would, in his accustomed manner, make of an excess of feeling an excuse not to act. In fact, nothing could have been more explicit than the avowals he demanded of her, never to return to him, never to answer his letters, never to speak to him, if she didn’t want either the blood of her father, or her husband, on her conscience. His fury brought home to her, as nothing else had, a sense of her helplessness. There was a kind of violence in the sheer fact of it. She could almost feel in the weight of each moment the irresistible gravity of events, pulling her forward; and she responded to her father’s anger with an equal passion of supplication. ‘He was mad, he was mad, he was only mad,’ she repeated, clutching at his hands, while he, strangely, attempted to fend her off. ‘He does not know himself.’ She finally managed to extract from her father a promise: that if Lord Byron was deemed, by those medically competent to judge him, to be insane, she should be allowed, in the event of his recovery, to return to him. Otherwise—and this was, privately, the vivid little phrase she allowed herself—he was lost to her for ever.

Sir Ralph retired at once to compose a letter, in which he would begin to address the question of their separation. Annabella stayed up by the fire. Mrs Clermont had put Ada to bed, and for the first time since her outburst to Lady Gosford, Annabella had a minute or two to herself—she practically counted them up. Her quick burst of feeling had offered a little relief. On the whole she confessed herself satisfied by the turn of events. She had at least restored herself to the centre of their small world; and the sense of living at the beating heart of things brought home to her, as nothing yet had done, how long she had suffered on the peripheries of Lord Byron’s stronger passions. Nothing she suffered or felt could stand up to the heat of his sufferings and feelings. She was conscious, however, as the thought crossed her mind, of having at last found an occasion that might bring out, in their brightest colours, her own quiet and enduring qualities. Then her father came in with a draft of his letter, which he read to her; and the simpler truth of what was happening to her entered and pressed, by another inch, deeper in:

Circumstances have come to my knowledge which convince me that, with your opinions, it cannot tend to your happiness to continue to live with Lady Byron. I am yet more forcibly convinced that after her dismissal from your house, and the treatment she experienced whilst in it, those on whose protection she has the strongest natural claims could not feel themselves justified in permitting her return thither . . .

Her mother joined their little conference in her nightdress and took the letter from him. It should not be sent without due consultation. ‘You mustn’t in the meantime,’ Judy added, ‘write him so much as a line. You must leave all that to me.’ She intended to make an early start on the road to London, where she would engage the services of a lawyer.

It amazed her (she told herself afterwards that she should not have been amazed) how quickly the legal element intruded upon the question. Indeed, the law had a sort of taste, of itself, which flavoured the subjects it treated, and she grew conscious, in the weeks to come, that the savour of her predicament had been almost imperceptibly altered. She was learning to count up her wrongs with a little dry irony. Annabella believed that she had a natural talent for the law. It soothed the worst of her exacerbated feelings to be able to exercise, besides the wounded faculty of her sentiment, something like her old subtlety upon the matters of her heart. She was acting, for the first time since her marriage, in confederation with her mother—who, to do her justice, had taken up the cause with all the energy stored up in her dormant years.

Judy reported almost daily from London, addressing herself to Sir Ralph; what Annabella heard was only the echo of these letters. Reverberations, she supposed, rang out both ways, and she caught, from a postscript that her father read out to her, the low sound of those reports which Ralph must have sent back to Judy, regarding herself. ‘Let me entreat you to calm your mind. Don’t look for imaginary bugbears, Annabella, when so many real ones exist.’ Nor could her mother, in the headlong rush of her newfound purpose and under the guise of a kind of reassurance, resist the odd humble boast: ‘I assure you I have never been saner. My brains are particularly clear.’ Their letter to Lord Byron had been submitted for legal adjustment. Judy would return when she could with the corrected text, which Sir Ralph was to copy in his own hand and sign himself. Nothing—she presumed that her daughter might take some consolation from the delay—could be formally undertaken until she had rejoined them. In the meantime, however, she had consulted a number of doctors on the strength of the testimony of Mrs Leigh (who seemed to Lady Milbanke a shy foolish calculating bundle of pieties), regarding the state of Lord Byron’s health. There seemed little hope that his treatment of Annabella could be the unhappy effect of a mental malaise. At least, if it were, the medical opinion, with one voice, despaired of finding a cure. She must proceed, then, as if all parties to the issue had proceeded, in their common affairs, in their proper minds and had acted on their soberest intentions. It would be wise, accordingly—and this was her mother’s own strange phrase, which Sir Ralph duly repeated with the letter in hand—for Annabella, henceforth, to conduct herself ‘in the best legal fashion’.

In practice this meant that she was once more forbidden from writing to her husband—an injunction that brought out in her the shameful confession of the intimate tender playful letter she had sent him upon her arrival at Kirkby Mallory. Had she a copy of it? She had, and was forced to stand idly by while her father read it, leaning lightly against the mantelpiece, warming his coat-tails in the fire. There was nothing in it, she supposed, for which a young wife need reproach herself, although she regretted now the dry little reference to ‘mothers-in-law and babies’. But what embarrassed her most was just its tone, which seemed natural and affectionate. She winced particularly, as she imagined his progress through the lines, over that silly loving nonsense of her signature: Pippin . . . Pip-ip. When he was finished, he looked up at her; and she was duly alerted to the increase in her filial respect by the difficulty she inwardly admitted to in returning his stare. ‘This does not read,’ he began, kindly enough, ‘like the letter of a woman . . .’

‘No,’ she interrupted him, blushing. ‘Only, you must understand the fears we all had for his sanity—for our safety.’

‘We?’

‘I mean, Augusta and I. We had acquired a sort of habit of kindliness towards him, if only because we tended to suffer more when it was broken.’ She was moved by her own account, which was, after all, nothing less than the truth. It seemed to her then that the fullest confession might really exonerate her, so she attempted to make it. ‘You must understand the particular form his . . . malady takes. He rather swells with his own unhappiness and grows expansive on it, just where others (among them, I believe myself) are inclined to contract. Everything, you see, the least word said, touches him nearly. One learns to give him the largest berth and to approach him, if at all, only with the—gentlest hands. You see by my letter the . . . gentleness he has taught me, which I practised, it must be said, willingly enough, for my own sake as well as his.’ She was equal, at that, to the largest admission—and, feeling it rising within her, she made it. ‘You see, I love him, still. I have always loved him; I always will love him.’

‘Oh, my dear,’ he said, taking her cheek in his hand. (She had lifted her chin, bravely, to look up at him.) But he could not resist asking, as much from the simplest curiosity as from a father’s desire to correct in his daughter her unhappy illusions: ‘And did he ever love you?’

‘If I leave him,’ she promptly replied, ‘perhaps we may find out.’ He had never admired her more. Her curiosity, it seemed, was still greater than his, but before he could give a voice to his admiration, she had continued, in just the same sensible considering tone. ‘Is it very bad? I mean, my letter. Does it—affect our case?’

‘I’m afraid it may. Your mother has consulted Sir Samuel Romilly, a very eminent lawyer, who has proposed another, a civilian, by the name of Lushington. She has written to say that the least suggestion on your part of a willingness to make it up could be interpreted by the courts as grounds for refusing a separation. If it comes to the worst.’

‘Oh, if it comes to the worst,’ she felt for the first time a temptation to give up her secret to them and almost yielded to it, regarding her father with a significant eye, ‘I believe we can meet him, squarely.’