Chapter Five

WHEN SHE EMERGED AT LAST from the cold days that followed, the vital change had been made. Annabella just managed a joke about having lately acquired, in addition to hunger and thirst, a third appetite, for legal matters. One might have supposed, from the quantities consumed, that no human appetite could have been better satisfied than her hunger for the law; and yet, as week followed week, and her opportunities for gratifying it only multiplied, she began to suspect that just what would always elude her was satiety. She had the sense, as she had once expressed it to herself, of starving for something, and was equal to the acknowledgement, in the midst of what was really her mother’s legal pursuit of the explicit, that that something was something else.

Dr Lushington, with his long, small-featured face and conspiratorial hands, had brought home to her, as nothing else might have, just how far she had already committed herself. It was, on his part, the final means of persuading her into a still greater commitment, which she duly made. The silence with which he took it in gave her the clearest vision of just how tremendous her own silence had been. What followed could only involve a kind of diminishment: her secret reverberated, after a fashion, into various noises. Her mother, predictably, began to rattle the loudest. Well, she had given it up, her last bit of cake, as she had once whimsically put it. She had made, and she felt this intensely at the time, the final break, but just what was broken in her, she discovered with a kind of relief, wasn’t everything; she had feared that it might be. It was a great deal, of course, and she was almost gratified by the scope of it, which encompassed, among other things, her passion for legal subtleties. She was willing, happily, helplessly, to let them take their course; and she crawled, as it were, battered and drenched but still breathing, from the side of that stream.

She had been staying, for the sake of her visit to Dr Lushington, at Gosford House, and was resolved afterwards not to return to her mother. London, after the quiet of Kirkby Mallory, offered her certain consolations. If her intent was really to address herself to a new life—to treat, that is, the year of her marriage as no more than an interlude—she was determined not to shy from a city that might be supposed to hold for her such unhappy recollections. One of the first visits she paid, consequently, was to Lady Caroline; and she could almost smile, as she made her way on a bright uncertain April morning past the stalls of Piccadilly to the quiet cove of Melbourne House, at the memory of an earlier appointment. It was just three years since her awkward interview with Lady Melbourne on the subject of which qualities she believed herself to require in a husband. Her current preoccupation, of course, was rather different, but there was something in the passage, as she imagined it, from expectation to disappointment for which she was not ungrateful. She was a woman, as Lord Byron himself had made painfully clear to her, who depended upon and delighted in her own superiority, but she might be allowed a little credit for the fact that she was also willing to enjoy the contrast with a former and more innocent self.

It was another contrast, however, that morning, from which she drew, as she hoped, the necessary lesson. Lady Caroline received her, as she had before, in the little study that overlooked behind her the gravelled walk. A fire burned in the grate, shading from yellow to grey in the squalls of light, of darkness, that blew in from the changeable cold sunshine. Her cousin wore, once more, as little as she decently might, and the frail pearl-coloured chiffon dress hung off her narrow shoulders in such a way that Annabella was almost tempted to try it on. Caroline herself, it whimsically struck her, was only the rack on which it hung. Her thinness now was nothing but the clearest manifestation of unhappiness. Like her bones, it showed through—which made Annabella grateful, as she thus humorously remarked on it, for the fat of concealment. She had never, at least, lost her appetite.

If she had come ‘to see for herself’, as she inwardly put it, what a life lived in the shade, in the aftermath, of Lord Byron’s love might look like, Lady Caroline offered her a most beautiful picture. Her long face had stretched into a narrowness that allowed her, it seemed, but a single muscular expression; Annabella remembered how quick and various the play of her countenance had been. It was almost the task of her visit to read into that face its abiding message. The impression she quietly took in was of a frantic force rendered desperately still: a moth, huddling beneath its wings in the death of a flame. This was the image that struck her, and to which, in time, she had her own reason for recurring. Caroline, however, proved perfectly capable of the odd nervous flap—Annabella confessed herself occasionally startled by them.

‘I should like to ask your advice,’ Lady Caroline began, after initial pleasantries, with her knees drawn up to her chin and her chair drawn up, as far as it might go, to the foot of the fire. ‘Your moral sense (you see, how freely I admit it) has always been sharper than mine—even, I believe, concerning events in which you have a personal stake. Lord Byron has confided in me that which if you merely menace him with the knowledge shall make him tremble. But I promised him solemnly, at the time, never to give him away; and I have been trying to calculate lately, in the light of your . . . situation, the force such a promise should continue to hold.’

Annabella restrained a smile. She might almost congratulate herself on how far she had come—the proof of which lay plainly in the fact that Lady Caroline presumed her still innocently ignorant of the depths to which her husband had committed himself with his sister. There was, perhaps, something unflattering in the thought that, by Caroline’s estimate, a woman as virtuous as Annabella could never have guessed the truth and remained, for so long, a party to it. Lady Byron, at least, was still innocent enough to make a pretence of it, and push her cousin into naming the deed. ‘You believe me, then,’ she said, biding her time, ‘to be in want of threats?’

‘Affairs with Lord Byron,’ Lady Caroline said, and Annabella felt, rising within her, the first little flare of contention at her choice of a word, ‘end always with threats, on the one hand, and indifference, on the other. I never had the luxury, as a means of keeping up relations, of a child; and I supposed you, wrongly it may be, in want of security against the chance that he might claim her.’

Annabella was equal to the simplest confession. ‘Dr Lushington has hopes, and these are the hopes I live in.’

They rarely looked at each other. Caroline, who apologized at one point for the chill in the room, fixed her eyes on the fire; and Annabella, who had perched at the end of the chaise longue, which offered likewise a view of the gravelled grounds, was moved to imitate her by a strange sort of sympathy. A quiet flame on a bright morning just suited something ghostly in her mood. She was conscious of being at the heart or centre, as it were, of a particular mode of feeling. They could almost pride themselves on being, as lovers of the famous poet, the best, most powerful illustrations of his work; and there was, in the knowledge, the intimate complicity of shared privilege.

‘I would like to help you,’ Lady Caroline offered, ‘and I’m perfectly willing to admit that my intentions in the past have never been so pure.’ Annabella sensed in this a helpless sort of boasting, regarding an earlier triumph; but she met it, humbly enough, with the private reflection that whatever Lady Caroline had to tell, she had more amply, more exquisitely, endured first-hand. Her silence was suitably expectant, and Caroline continued, ‘I wondered if you could relieve me a little of the guilt—either of staying quiet, where a word might save you, or of breaking a promise I was solemnly bound to keep.’

Annabella flattered herself that this was the sort of question on which she could exercise her wit with the greatest distinction, and she answered it with the slightly awkward sensation of being indulged in her vanities. ‘We are taught,’ she said eventually, ‘that virtue follows always a single path. Where it appears to split, we may be sure of being offered, among the alternatives, a turn for the worse. Truth has only one path, though it needs at times a sharp eye to distinguish it from the false. By making vows we bind ourselves to keep to a single road, many miles before we can guess the course it will take. Yet God allows us only, by his sanction, to commit ourselves to Truth, and where such a vow appears to prevent us from honouring that commitment, we are entitled to ask whether his sanction was ever given.’ After a pause, she added: ‘You may guess that these are questions which have occupied of late my sleepless hours, for the vows I took I called on my God to witness. But I take comfort from the thought, that He who sees everything sees just as clearly the darkness in which we look for His intentions.’

It was then Lady Caroline’s turn to smile, and Annabella drew on all of her fine propriety not to mirror her in it. She felt almost, in their delicate courtesies, the pleasant formality of a dance, which reminded her of nothing so much as the fated waltz, which Caroline had put on and where she had first met her husband. If only, and this was the thought that threatened to break out in her face, Herr Wohlkrank himself were present to guide their steps! Their tone, she was perfectly willing to suppose, was dreadful enough. She felt, although a party to it, the tiniest trace of pity, like a thread on the lips, for Lord Byron himself. He had always complained, after all, of the scruples of women, from which he had suffered both ways—in what they refused him, and in what they obliged him to accept. Oh, Byron’s women! and the sensation recurred within her of living, at a high pitch, in the very refinement of that mode of feeling which Lord Byron’s eloquence had made so brilliantly public. It rose up in her like a bright little streak of effervescence in a glass of champagne. What was really delightful was the thought that Lady Caroline, in spite of her huddled-up air, must be feeling it, too, that they were feeling it together. Their sympathies, however, had been sharpened by nothing so much as the habit of rivalry; Annabella recognized the danger of being cut.

Caroline began to address herself to the fire in a low tone. From the time of Mrs Leigh’s arrival in Bennet Street, in the year 1813, Lord Byron had given her various intimations of a criminal intercourse between them, from which he had, at several stages, attempted to desist. These intimations had broken at last into an open avowal, which he had offered Caroline in a hope not unkind of blasting at the root that affection for his person, which had swelled on occasion (and still continued to surge) into an ungovernable obsession, and from which they had both violently, separately, suffered. But the overwhelming force (and this was, Annabella flattered herself, Lady Caroline’s best attempt at a little thrust) of his brotherly affection prevented him from giving up the only relation in which he had found, with an equal ease, his passions sated and his heart consoled. There was a pause; and Annabella felt obliged, for the sake of her own pretended innocence, to fill it with a suitable measure of horror. Just what that measure should be, it struck her for the first time (with a shiver of the real thing), she was no longer, in fact, innocent enough to gauge; but she wished, in any case, to make a display of repugnance that would still give a point to what was really her larger experience of her husband’s delinquencies.

‘The truth of this (and the only hope of its suppression, if it is true, is that such depravity must be faced before it can be proved) would expose Lord Byron and, which is still more to be feared, Mrs Leigh, to a condemnation so severe that its taint might reach, I dread to think it, even to me. I fancy, my dear Caroline,’ she had decided to admit to what she could not conceal, ‘that you had counted on, perhaps, a less calculated aversion; but the fact is, my relations with Lord Byron have taught me, if nothing else, never to be shocked.’

Lady Caroline looked up at her guest. Annabella’s last words might really have struck her as nothing more than a challenge to be met, for she continued: ‘There were worse crimes. He confessed to me once, in that sickness of his own sins which always inspired in him a run of talk, that from his boyhood he had been in the practice of unnatural crime. The boy Rushton, by whom he had been attended as a page, was one of those whom he had corrupted—for the sake of an appetite which, as you have no doubt heard, I was guilty in my desperation of playing up to, in the mistaken belief that a more natural outlet for those passions might suspend in him the unnatural desire to satisfy them. I do not believe that he has committed this crime since returning to England, though he indulged in it unrestrictedly in Turkey. His own horror of the act still appeared to be so great that he several times turned quite faint and sick in alluding to the subject; and the worst to be feared, from an impersonal view of his separation, is that it might push him to return to those scenes in which he had so little proved himself capable of self-restraint.’

Annabella was almost gratified to find, in the course of this speech, her powers of disgust renewed. They were as fresh and strong as ever, although she was prevented from making a show of her feelings by a little twist of the knife, in whose use Lady Caroline remained so beautifully proficient. ‘I confess,’ Caroline continued, ‘that I have always shrunk from the contemplation of an act which is not only repugnant in itself, but whose practice is sufficiently vague that one might be said to regard its specific details with a horror that approaches incomprehension.’ This was, in the first faint glimmer of understanding, the reflection that brought a hot sudden blush to Annabella’s cheeks. She had wondered once, after the shock of her suspicions of Augusta, just what, if the worst were true, the effect of it might be on her own steady virtue—in the falter of which (she hardly dared, even now, to give a name or a thought to what they had done together) she believed at the time to have found the sharpest answer. She had hoped, indeed, to keep that secret, if only by virtue of the fact that it was just so unspeakable. What struck her most forcefully in her cousin’s last remark (it was about as cold and vivid as a bucket of water) was the sense that Caroline had managed, almost, to give it a voice. Annabella began to see, as if the low grey land were spreading around her, just how exposed in the general dawn of their separation her own private self might become.

There seemed to her afterwards no clearer measure of just how great, as she privately put it, her emergence had been than the fact that Caroline’s words struck her so entirely as a challenge to be met. ‘I see, my dear,’ she managed to get out, when her hot little blush had grown cooler, ‘just the necessity you felt of breaking your promise. It isn’t, of course, for my sake that I thank you. The most hardened wretch would not have consigned my own poor girl to the education she would likely receive at the hands of her father. And neither of us, I believe,’ she added, with what was really, in the circumstances, the sweetest of smiles, ‘is a hardened wretch.’

That was the phrase on which their interview ended, though it hung in the air and seemed, as she rose to take her leave, rather to swell than recede. It gave them both a colour and, perversely, brightened them by the contrast it suggested: as a dark frame might bring to life a portrait of rosy cheeks. What things those two quiet and frail examples of the feminine had proved capable of considering, in the whitest light of their curiosity—considering, and enduring, and plotting to adapt to their own advantage. They were certainly hardened, and one of them, at least, was wretched enough. Caroline had remained, as Annabella turned in the door, huddled palely in the light of the fire, at which she continued to stare. Hers, it seemed, was the kind of loneliness that had begun to grow, at its edges, quietly permeable. It spilled out even in company; she returned to it almost before she had lifted her cheek to receive the quick kiss of farewell.

Annabella stopped then, for a moment, in the space her retraction offered, to consider her cousin. Here was a fine fractious restless powerful nature, and this is what had become of it. She had compressed herself, remarkably, to the expression of a single theme. One practically winced, taking her in, at the repetition of that high thin note: no child had ever amused itself at the piano with so stubborn a finger. Annabella was determined to give to the music of her own suffering a larger harmony; she was confident, at least, of drowning out every competing noise. The lesson, really, was that if a life could be spent in mourning what was lost, then the least that might make it acceptable was a kind of pre-eminence. She was living, once more, to win. This was the thought that offered, as soon as the door shut behind her, its own consolation. As she strode the length of the corridor, the sole soft quick living thing amid the procession of statues that lined its ochred walls, she indulged in the whimsy of one day taking her place among them. Lady Byron, at least, was a title that no one could take from her; it would look very fine on a bust.

At the bottom of the stairs, in the tiled, echoing hall of Melbourne House, Annabella was startled by the sudden entrance of her aunt. Lady Melbourne swayed against the frame of the door, which led to her own apartments. ‘I hope you know what you are about,’ she said. The pallor of her countenance was almost ghostly. It was like a vision of her father, long-faced, with the little thickening aged bruise of bone under her eyes, and the dishevelment of loose hair and too much powder. ‘Lord Byron will never suffer for you as you suffer for him. Caroline can tell you, it’s a thankless task.’ And then, inconsequently: ‘Remember, it’s a very long life.’ She had the staring interrupted air of instant waking; perhaps she had been listening out for Annabella’s step. ‘I hope you know exactly what you are about,’ she repeated. Annabella was so surprised by her appearance, its urgent disordered sincerity, that she could only back away from her aunt, bowing and offering respects, as Jennings held for her, against the changeable spring winds, the opened door.