Kirkby Mallory, Leicestershire
May 1821

My lessons begin the following day. Each lesson is to last fifteen minutes precisely; we are to do four or five lessons before we have lunch at one o’clock, and then the same quantity of lessons in the afternoon. Miss Lamont is full of energy and enthusiasm, which in turn affects me, and the first morning passes quite quickly. I follow the motion of her hand as she writes; I nod my head, showing my understanding; I trace letters in a hand that barely wobbles. I write my name: ADA.

Miss Lamont leans over my work with approval. ‘That’s very good, Miss Byron; very precise.’ She rewards me with a ticket; I cradle it on my lap, pleased to have been given it, although I realise that it is a meaningless square of paper. Mistress Puff appears at my ankles, oozing warmth and companionship; surreptitiously, I reach down to stroke the ridge of fur that runs vertically down her head. She mews in pleasure; Miss Lamont sees her, and smiles. ‘That’s a lovely cat.’

‘She’s Persian,’ I say, with importance. I do not expect that Miss Lamont has ever seen a nobler creature than mine.

We move on to arithmetic: my governess sets me some sums – addition and subtraction, nothing that I can’t do with ease. I complete my tasks, and am given another ticket.

Time passes. The sun swells, beating hotly through the curtains. A fly presses its wings with urgency against the window. A familiar restlessness in my limbs begins to take hold. The nursery becomes an airless prison, a trap. I wriggle and fidget; the sums don’t come out right; I know I am not taking as much care as I should, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Miss Lamont reminds me repeatedly to sit still.

‘Will I have to lie on the board if I cannot keep still?’ I ask her.

Miss Lamont looks perplexed. ‘I believe you, ah, ought to,’ she says, and I hear in her tone of voice that she herself would prefer not to make me do such a thing. There is a long, wide floorboard in the centre of the nursery floor, and there have been occasions when Mamma has insisted that I lie upon it, still as a gravestone, as punishment for fidgeting. To a body that loves to exist in motion, nothing is harder to bear than forced stillness and I have always dreaded that particular penance, worse even than being shut in a cupboard – another of Mamma’s occasionally prescribed punishments.

‘Now, please take out your French grammar,’ says Miss Lamont, banishing the subject of the board from our conversation. She begins to talk about irregular verbs. I quite like verbs: they are learned in patterns, and I love patterns of all kinds. There are rules that you can learn, and exceptions to those rules. And then, if you try hard, you can talk in another language – a concept that I find quite thrilling.

At first, I listen carefully to Miss Lamont. Then, after a while, my attention drifts, as it is wont to do. I can’t help but look out of the window, which gives onto the wide lawns at the back of Kirkby, with the dark smudge of woodland beyond. Did my father really come here and walk amongst those trees? How could I have never known this? There is, I suppose, so much that I do not know about him. I wish Miss Lamont were telling me fairy stories – her voice would be well-suited to it, I think – or else about volcanoes, for which I have lately developed a passion. There is so much to find out, not all of it on the pages of books, but in... well, in everything.

‘I fancy that you are not quite paying attention, Ada. What are you thinking about?’

‘The tree in the park that was my father’s favourite,’ I reply truthfully.

Miss Lamont smiles. ‘Now, the verb savoir, again, from the first person singular, if you please—’

‘Je save,’ I say, faltering.

She stops me. ‘Je sais.’

‘Je sais, tu sais...’

Rather laboriously, I stumble and garble my way to the end of the paradigm. I wait for another ticket to be bestowed. Instead, Miss Lamont says: ‘I think perhaps we have done enough for the morning. Would you like to go outside?’

I fairly fall over myself in my haste to get out of my chair. ‘Oh, yes, Miss Lamont. Yes please.’

‘Good: then we shall go. I have not yet explored the grounds, and they seem quite magnificent.’

We have no need of outer garments, the morning being dry and fine, but we put on sturdier shoes outside the scullery before taking the back door out into the kitchen gardens. I make a point of showing Miss Lamont everything – the leafy dell where I suspect the cabbage-fairies hide; the miniature strawberry plants, whose fruits are blissfully tart and will soon be in season.

‘Miss Lamont,’ I say. ‘Do you know what a Lebanon cedar looks like?’

‘Why, yes,’ she replies, after some thought. ‘I believe I do.’

‘I would like to find the tree that Mamma says my father loved so much. I want to know where it is. I want to see it for myself.’

‘If that is what you want to do, Miss Byron, then that is what we shall do.’

It is at this moment that I decide that I very much like my new governess.

Now we are making our way through the park. My governess exclaims with delight as two deer – a mother and her fawn – lope gracefully across our path, not seeing us. It’s a beautiful morning; birds call to each other above our heads, and twigs rattle under our feet as we pass. We are not quite sure where we are going, but Miss Lamont promises me that she will know a Lebanon cedar when she sees it, and I am bound to believe her.

‘Do you know much of my father’s work, Miss Lamont?’

There comes a pause. ‘I know a little; perhaps not as much as I ought.’

We have come to a clearing, beyond which the ground rises up into a soft slope. There, at the edge of the clearing, is a tree, quite immense in stature. It crowns its peers by a good ten feet, like a watchful and kindly god, looking down from a great height. Its leaves burst from its branches in a kind of cloud-formation, as though they are desperate to fly away. At the base of the tree is a little hollow, where a person could lie and look up, content.

‘It is a Lebanon cedar, Miss Lamont?’

My governess assures me of her certainty in this regard.

‘Then—’ I am so delighted that I can barely articulate the words. ‘Then this is the tree!’

Stumbling in my excitement, I race through the swathes of grass. Oh, I can picture him now (even though I do not actually know what he looks like) – my father, long legs carelessly crossed and arms spread out towards the canopy above, head tilted back against the leathery bark. He is deep in thought: verses come to him, swimming through silence, syllables jostling for position like washing on a line... He is calm. He lets the words shuffle and reform. The poem grows like the tree itself: branches sprout from the trunk; shoots and buds bloom brightly, each greener and more alive than the last...

Reaching the hollow, I throw myself down, with a little more force than perhaps was necessary, because I tear a stocking quite badly. I curl, wriggle, uncurl, the way Puff might do when she wants to make herself comfortable in a chair. Miss Lamont is keeping a tactful distance. Never, never for a minute do I think that this might be the wrong tree. Some knowledge cannot be known, only felt, but it is none the weaker for it. The opposite, in fact. The cedar exudes a smell of impossible richness – a dark-green, smoky perfume, so powerful that one might almost be able to see it wreathing the leaves.

‘Do mind your clothes,’ says my governess.

‘I shall now compose a poem,’ I tell her, feeling quite giddy at the thought.

‘Very well, Ada. Have you need of a pencil?’

‘I shall compose it in my head, and we shall write it down later.’

It must be something fittingly grand: something my father might have thought of writing. Oh, I wish that I knew his work! His books – Mamma has everything he has written to date, I believe – are kept on a shelf in the library that I have not been able to reach. I know that he wrote a good deal about love. Well, I too can write about love. Immediately, I think of Puff, who is very much an object of my affection, although I was very cross with her earlier today on account of her vomiting up something grey and distasteful all over my coverlet. But we won’t worry about her minor indiscretions now. Carefully, eyes tight shut, I begin:

‘A sweeter cat there never was

And nevermore will be.

All silky ears and spiky claws

And...’

It is actually harder than I thought. Perhaps I have started wrong. I am just thinking about what I might reasonably change in my composition in order that the final line might hold a satisfying resolution, when a rather unwelcome sound breaks the peace of my thoughts.

‘Ada! Miss Lamont! What is the meaning of this?’

I open my eyes, Puff and her associated verses dispersed. Wheezing, puce-cheeked, and quite furious-looking, my mother is pacing through the clearing towards us. I hasten to my feet. Miss Lamont brushes the twists of moss from my dress. I have a sense that she is just as trepidatious at this moment as I am, of what is to come.

‘Did she run away from you, Miss Lamont?’

‘No, Lady Byron. No, she – we—’

‘Yes, I did,’ I say, determined that my new governess should not be thought badly of so early on in her employment.

My mother turns towards me, her eyes full of wrathful perplexity. (She has a rather round face, like a doll’s, but you should not for a moment imagine that her expression is doll-like. Dolls are placid and unquestioning. Mamma is not.)

‘I wanted to see my father’s tree,’ I tell her.

At this, Mamma blinks, looks doubtful, and then casts the sort of glance at the cedar as, perhaps, the King might do to an unwanted subject that he wishes to dismiss hastily from Court.

Then she says: ‘Arithmetic, and French, and letters, and geography.’ She speaks with such loudness, such deliberate clarity that I fancy any deer who have not been scared away by her appearance will surely remember those words for evermore. ‘At no point in the morning’s schedule were you supposed to go gallivanting off into the woodland. Remember that, please, in the future, Miss Lamont. Ada is a woefully headstrong girl whose passions are difficult to tame. That, however, is your charge. When you return to the nursery, Ada, you will lie quite still on the board in penance. Miss Lamont, you will see to it that she does not move.’

The sad, shamed procession begins to weave its way joylessly back to the house. Mamma leads, as stiff as the board on which I am to lie. Miss Lamont is looking quite woeful – as though it is she, not I, who will be punished. At the edge of the lawn, I cast a final look back at the Lebanon cedar, and promise that I shall return – one day when Mamma is far out of reach, perhaps at Leamington Spa, a place to which she is fond of going – and finish my poem. And just as I am doing this, I realise that my mother is doing the same. She stares at the tree, love and longing written all over her face. There is a tenderness in her expression now that was not there before.

I am only five, but I know that it is a tenderness that she wishes to keep a secret, for reasons best known to herself.