Branch Lodge, Hampstead
May 1824

Mistress Puff undulates down the stairs, one leg at a time, and I am trying my hardest to copy her; to become a cat as best I can, with all the feline grace that an eight-year-old can summon on a dull May afternoon.

We are living in Hampstead, in a mansion that my mother has rented called Branch Lodge. We came here after my grandmother died – Mamma and Nanny Briggs and Puff and Grandpapa and I. I like it well enough, especially our vantage point, perched as we are over London. But I miss the wide-open spaces of Kirkby Mallory; the garden here is nothing in comparison to the deer-filled park. I miss my grandmother more than I can say. When I was very young, Mamma would go away quite a lot – for rest cures, usually – and it was Grandmama who looked after me. She was almost a second mother. It’s hard to imagine that I will never see her again.

I also miss having a governess. For all her good intentions, Miss Lamont did not stay long – after a few months, she was gone. Mamma concluded, on the basis of a number of misdemeanours on my part (one episode in particular stands out, in which I bit the housemaid), that my young governess was not able to control me in the manner she had hoped for. I was sad when Miss Lamont left, for I liked her, and I believe that she liked me.

‘Why is it, Mamma, that I have no governess?’ I asked her at breakfast, not long ago.

Mamma looked at me rather reflectively over her Bath cake. (Her appetite is exceptionally good.) ‘Why, Mary Montgomery lets you talk in Italian to her quite often,’ she said, ‘and we do your letters and sums most days, as we have always done.’

‘But Mary Montgomery is your friend,’ I persisted. ‘I mean, why is there no one in sole charge of my learning?’

‘I am always in charge of your learning,’ she said. ‘Besides, the doctor said that it would be a good idea to halt your education, for a time, and I agreed with him. Your health is poor, Ada, as you know.’

But I don’t know that my health is poor; this is simply something that I am told, and while it is true that sometimes things do ail me, when I am feeling well in myself, I forget that there was ever a time when I was not well. It’s also true that since we came to Hampstead, I have fallen prey to a number of colds, and many headaches, some of which were so pernicious and unpleasant that they caused me to be unable to read my grammar book as fluently as I’d have liked. After the worst such episode, Mamma sent word to my father and told him that I was not well, and although she said nothing to me of his response, I later heard her telling one of her friends that Lord Byron had professed himself unable to work until he had been informed of my recovery. This made me feel very strange inside – a little proud, and a little mystified also. Could my father really love me so much that news of my illness could incapacitate him completely? It didn’t seem possible, and yet I saw no reason why anyone concerned should have been lying. In any case, I was doubly relieved when I recovered from that particular period of ill-health.

Puff and I have just reached the landing when we hear a strange, otherworldly wailing from the library on the ground floor. It is like no sound that I have ever heard before. It’s a ghostly sort of wail, like the cry of some disembodied spirit drifting over a windswept moor.

‘Puff, what in heaven’s name is happening?’ I whisper.

My Persian cat looks thoughtfully at her paws. A minute passes; the wail continues, rising in volume and pitch, and only then do I realise that we are listening to my mother. There is someone with her, a man, talking in gentle, hesitant, conciliatory tones. It is Grandpapa. Mamma is distraught, and he is doing his best to console her. I want to run down the remaining stairs as fast as my feet can carry me; I want to see her, to see what troubles her, and to find out if I can help.

I am just about to do exactly this, when I hear my own name.

‘He spoke only of Ada, I’m told, and left no other message.’

‘My dearest Anne,’ says my grandfather. (He often calls her Anne, though most other people know her as Annabella.) ‘I am sure that he—’

‘Oh, I can scarcely put into words the feeling – the sudden, vast desolation... It was a fever, they say. He couldn’t be saved.’

Curiouser, I take a step or two towards the hallway. What is my mother talking about? Who spoke only of me, and why does it matter? Why is her tone so altered? I cannot remember the last time I saw my mother cry; she simply isn’t that kind of person. Puff lets out a delicate mew, and the voices, alerted to our presence, change at once. Footsteps resound on a polished floor, and then the oak door of the library opens and Grandpapa emerges. ‘Ada, come down. Your mother wishes to speak to you.’

Now my concern for my mother shifts into something closer to alarm. ‘Is Mamma cross with me?’ I ask Grandpapa, although I cannot think why this would be the case, and know that it surely cannot be.

‘Goodness, no; she isn’t cross with you. Come, Ada, quickly, and leave the cat.’

Mamma is standing by a bookcase, staring unseeingly at the unlit fire. As we enter, she looks up, and then comes over to me – almost dancing, despite the reddened patch on each cheek that implies recent tears – and takes hold of both my hands. She clasps them so tightly that it is painful.

‘Oh, Ada. Oh, my child.’

‘What’s the matter, Mamma? What has happened?’

‘England has lost a very fine poet,’ she says. ‘But we have lost something far dearer than that – although, of course, you never truly had him at all. When you were a young child, I always thought of you as... as fatherless... and now...’

She is babbling, incoherent, as unlike her as I’ve ever known. I don’t know what she is saying, or how to make sense of it. Grandpapa coughs softly, and this is enough to bring her to her senses. Mamma holds herself a little straighter, and breathes with more purpose and control.

‘Dearest Ada, your father has died.’

The news is quite shocking, by which I mean that I feel struck by it as though by lightning. For a good two minutes, I am unable to move or speak. I do not feel anything because I do not know how, or what, I am supposed to feel. Certainly, I cannot cry as she seems to have been doing. I would like to, I think, but I cannot. Instead, I say the words in my head, over and over again – my father is dead – and wait for something else to happen inside of me.

‘You said he spoke of me,’ I venture, at last.

Mamma nods. ‘He said: “Give her my blessing”, or words to that effect.’

Little by little, the high colour is fading from her cheeks. She is regaining control of herself. I try to take in what she has said: that my father, in his last living moments, thought of me, and sent me his blessing.

‘Where will he be buried?’ I ask. ‘When will the funeral be?’

But it is clear that the conversation is over, and I have asked too many questions. Mamma only shakes her head, and then leans down to give me a kiss and tells me to run away. And run away I do, going outside to the long narrowish garden that borders the back of the house, whose beds are thick with roses. At the very bottom of the garden lies my Enchanted City, built from wooden blocks of all colours – not just brick-shaped blocks, but cylindrical and triangular ones too – and now I sit down beside it, comforted by its magnificence, and play quietly for quite some time, while everything that I have learned over the past hour circulates in my head, settling in my thoughts. I build a tower here, an archway there, losing myself in the possibilities. I think of my cousin George, who is two years younger than I, and how much I hope to be able to see him soon. Having no brother of my own, I find that I do occasionally want one, and George seems in many ways the likeliest candidate. The thought comes to me abruptly that George’s father (also named George) is the new Lord Byron, now that my father, who was once Lord Byron, is dead.

The afternoon wears on; it’s a dull, cloudy kind of day, with not much sun to speak of, but I have a sense of it anyway, dipping down towards the horizon. Then, at last, in the act of fashioning a chimneypiece for a red-and-yellow roof, I feel a wave of sadness – a kind of lost, helpless sadness, because I am sad for a father I never knew, rather than one that I knew well – and I lay the blocks down on the grass and start to cry.