Kirkby Mallory, Leicestershire
May 1821

I am in the vegetable garden of my grandparents’ estate, hunting for fairies. Hunting is the wrong word, because I do not intend to kill and eat the fairies – I would simply like to observe their gossamer-winged ways, and perhaps, if I can, to be friends with them. My suspicion is that these particular fairies live beneath cabbage leaves, and so that is where I am looking when I see the spider’s web. Strung like a silvery scarf between the plants, it could have been wrought by the fairies themselves. I’ve never seen one so close. I stretch out one finger – not to touch, just to get a better sense of it, so intricately woven, so slight and yet so strong – when I hear Mamma.

‘Ada, where are you? Ada!’

Obeying the summons, I scramble up via a wheelbarrow onto the low garden wall. I intend to jump off the wall in one neat movement, but the hem of my dress catches on something, and I end up tumbling off it like Humpty Dumpty and into the arms of my mother.

‘What in heaven’s name were you doing, Ada?’ she says, as she sets me down upright and pats the earth from my skirts.

‘Looking for fairies. They’re quick, you know – so quick that I can’t quite catch them. But I mean to, one day—’

She makes a loud, impatient sound with her teeth as she drags me back along the path towards the house. ‘Fairies! I never heard such foolishness. Why must you tear about so?’

‘Stillness is for statues,’ I protest. ‘You wouldn’t want me to be motionless all the time, would you, as though I were a horrid, sad, dead thing?’

‘Really, Ada,’ she mutters. ‘Your father asks for evidence of your development. I’ve no intention of reporting that you spend your time haring about the grounds like a wild creature.’

In mentioning my father, she has won the point. I am mindful of what she writes to him – she is a prolific, passionate letter-writer – and I want her to tell him good things. (She does not write to him directly, but through someone else, for reasons that I do not quite understand.) I think of him often, this Lord Byron whose name I bear. I would like to see him, but I know that he doesn’t live in this country. I do not know why. He sends me gifts – a locket, a ring; items that I treasure – and writes letters to Mamma, in which he demands news of my progress. I have, of course, read nothing of his work. But I know that he writes poems. He is famous for them. I know that he is somewhere in Europe, a place I have never been. I imagine that he lives in a castle on a high cliff overlooking a vast, grey-green sea. He sits at a desk from where the waves are visible, and he dips his pen with a flourish, words of great beauty on his lips as he writes. Servants wait at a respectful distance in case he should have need of anything. It’s a hot place, populated by strange insects, unfamiliar scents; these things weave themselves into his poems, adding colour and light. Just sometimes, they weave themselves into my dreams as well.

I am occasionally so spellbound by this vision that I struggle to detach myself from it, earning myself a sharp telling-off from Mamma, or from Nanny Briggs. ‘Don’t daydream, Ada,’ they say, in the same urgent tone of voice that they might use to warn me of an incoming tide or unfriendly dog. But I can’t help myself. Other people don’t understand how easy it is for me to slip into the unbordered realms of the imagination.

For perhaps four months of each year, we live here in Leicestershire, at a place called Kirkby Mallory Hall. Not far from the market town of Hinckley, Kirkby Mallory is a beautiful, broad, cream-coloured house, whose front windows I love to count (there are seventeen) each time I approach it. Inside, there are cool, high-ceilinged rooms, and secret passageways that I explore with all the vigour of an intrepid voyager, scuffing my knees as I crawl alongside skirting boards with my cat Puff in search of mouse-trails or hiding places for my dolls. There are outbuildings full of promise and delight: a bakehouse, a cheese house, a beer cellar. The parkland is populated with deer, creatures of magic and myth; I tell myself that Hercules’ hind is among them, and spend long hours looking for a telltale flash of gold.

I am not supposed to run around so freely and with such abandon, as the gardener’s sons are wont to do. I know this, but it’s not enough to stop me from doing it.

We enter Kirkby through the kitchen door. Mamma strides down the passage – she is short, but able to propel herself forwards with tremendous speed – and I hasten after her. Just ahead of us, the parlourmaid, Lotty, is carrying a tray into the drawing room. Under the chandelier in the hall, Mamma pauses and takes hold of my hands, scanning them for vestiges of dirt. ‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘You’ll do, I suppose.’

The drawing room door stands ajar: I can see Grandmama in her reading-chair, head bent in pleasant silence over a little book. Grandpapa is out of sight, but he may well be at his desk, looking over some correspondence to do with the estate. I am very fond of my grandparents.

‘Your new governess has arrived,’ says Mamma, interrupting my thoughts. ‘I want you to be a good, diligent, obedient child – when she’s teaching you, and at all other times as well. Will you, Ada?’

She looks down at me, her expression conveying exasperation and affection in equal measure, as it so often does. I look back at her in contemplation. I do want Mamma to be pleased with me. I want it so much that I can feel it in my very veins; if you opened me up, you’d find it written large inside of me, I’m sure.

But then there’s the other thing that I want, and it’s to do things my own way. I wish those things were reconcilable. It seems, so much of the time, that they are not; that I am not one person, but two people, who want different things.

‘Well, Ada?’

She is waiting for a reply, and I give it to her. ‘Yes, Mamma,’ I say.

A governess! I hadn’t realised that I was to have such a thing. What will she be like? I perch on the sofa, laughing at Grandpapa as he makes amusing animal-noises for my benefit, and keep a close eye on the door. Will she be strict? Serious? Young or old? What will she teach me?

Soon enough, the door opens, and Miss Lamont is shown in. Her face has the appearance of being freshly scrubbed, but she still seems a little hot and dishevelled from her journey. She is small and neat, with fairish hair combed strictly away from a central parting, and cheeks as round and rosy as apricots. Miss Lamont takes my hand with solemnity, but a smile lurks at the corners of her mouth, hinting at a sense of humour.

‘Ada is in great need of intellectual discipline,’ Mamma says, pouring tea. ‘You must take a rigorous approach.’

‘Yes, milady,’ says Miss Lamont respectfully. Her Irish accent is soft and pleasant to hear. She darts a look in my direction, a questioning sort of look, as though she is testing the validity of Mamma’s request. I nibble at a piece of sugared fruit and listen as they organise my education: we are to do French and music and geography, and drawing too, and reading and grammar and spelling... the list seems almost endless.

My grandmother says to my mother: ‘A fine range of subjects, Annabella.’ Turning to my new governess, she adds: ‘We made sure our daughter was just as well-educated at a similar age. It was of great importance to us.’

‘But we must also make sure,’ says Grandpapa, giving me a wink of solidarity, ‘that little Ada has time enough for amusements.’

‘Arithmetic,’ says Mamma, as though she has not heard this. ‘It is through mathematics, Miss Lamont, that I feel sure that the wildness of Ada’s nature will be successfully trammelled.’

I do not know the meaning of the word trammelled but it sounds like the sort of thing my mother would want my nature to be: a mixture of trained and pummelled. Something meaningful and intense, like a basin full of shockingly cold water into which one must plunge one’s face.

‘This is a beautiful house,’ says Miss Lamont, rather hesitantly, looking out through the great bay windows. ‘And what woodland!’

‘I prefer my own childhood home,’ Mamma says, ‘at Seaham.’ She sighs. ‘But this place is not without its attractions. There is a tree in the park – a Lebanon cedar – that Lord Byron particularly loved. He accompanied me here – only once, before my parents inherited the estate from my uncle, but I recall he spent a full afternoon in the shade of its branches, writing verses. Alas, I cannot remember which ones.’

Miss Lamont expresses surprise and interest. I too am fascinated. A tree that my father loved – here at Kirkby Mallory? It is news to me, and exciting news. It is very unlike her to mention my father at teatime; perhaps it is for the benefit of my new governess.

‘Where is the tree, Mamma?’ I say.

But my mother is asking the parlourmaid for more milk and does not, I think, hear me.