Fordhook, Ealing
March 1835

Spring has not quite come to Fordhook, but it feels as though it might. Each morning I awaken to new strains of birdsong, and although the little buds are not yet sprouting all over the garden, I know that they will. There’s almost the smell of new earth, new beginnings; quite soon, over in the allotments, they will be turning the soil, taking out the hard bits of flint, readying the ground.

I, Ada, am feeling better every day. And every day I regret my outburst to my mother a little more deeply. Do I really think that my father hated her – and that his sister did too – just because I sometimes hate her for all the ways in which she strives to control me? But it is wrong to hate her – even a little, even sometimes – when she only thinks of my well-being. Oh, I think about it so much that it twists and tangles up like yarn in my mind, and I can’t separate the strands. And after a while the person I hate most is myself.

If only, I think... If only she’d told me more. I wouldn’t have been so deeply in the dark; I wouldn’t have had to scrabble together the little snippets that people gave me, struggle to assemble a puzzle whose picture was permanently obscured... I think of all the people I questioned, over the years: Miss Lamont, Miss Stamp, Signor Isola, Harriet Siddons, Mary Montgomery, James Hopkins... People who either knew very little or who did not feel qualified to speak freely on the subject of my father, or of my parents’ marriage. And then there were all my questions to Mamma herself – perhaps nine-tenths squashed like unwanted beetles under a grinding heel, with only one-tenth answered, and begrudgingly at that. Why couldn’t she have answered more than just one-tenth?

But there’s not much chance of that now. Mamma is delighted that I am better, of course, but there exists between us now a barrier. Perhaps it has always been there, unnoticed. I am not sure.

But I now find myself horribly concerned that I have broken something in our relationship, something that cannot be fixed.

Mamma finds me in the garden one morning after breakfast.

‘I am going back to Tunbridge Wells, Ada, for a short while,’ she says. ‘I think it best that you remain here, so that the doctors can continue to attend you.’

‘Of course.’

She doesn’t even want me to accompany her, I think; that’s how badly I have hurt her.

‘There is to be a ball at Weston House, in Warwickshire, in May,’ says Mamma. ‘Lord King will be there. I have written to Lady Phillips, who will be hosting the ball, saying that you hope also – health permitting – to be present.’

‘I don’t... Mamma, I have said that I do not want to meet this man.’

‘I know, Ada. I heard what you said. I heard everything that you said.’

This last is uttered with such a sad cadence that I feel another twist of guilt.

‘Mamma,’ I say. ‘I don’t hate you. I have never hated you.’

She doesn’t respond to this. Instead, she winces sourly, as though she has bitten the inside of her cheek. With eyes half-closed, she mutters: ‘I have left something for you on your writing-desk. But... but wait until I have departed, please, until you look at it.’

I do wait, although I can barely manage it, impatiently checking the progress of the carriage from the drawing-room windows until it has vanished from sight. Then I more or less run upstairs, aflame with curiosity – even though I know from past experiences that she has most likely left me something that is either educational or improving, something designed to make a difference to my mind or my character.

But there’s a chance – the smallest, slimmest chance – that this time she has left me something else.

And I’m right.

On my desk lies a rectangular box – made of rosewood, I believe, with tortoiseshell inlays. I have seen it before, I realise, on my hunt for the prayer-book. It looks as though it might contain jewellery, or else sewing materials, but when I lift the lid (it is unlocked, though there is a keyhole), I find neither jewels nor needles. Instead, there are letters, several stacks of them, tied with coral-coloured ribbon. One, right at the top, is loose, and addressed to me. I carry the box and its contents over to my bed and climb onto the counterpane. I lift out the stacked letters and place them carefully to one side.

Then I open the one that has my name on it.

Dear Ada,

I must confess that I was most deeply aggrieved by the way that you spoke to me on that Friday afternoon – the day that you fell ill. That you could have believed me to have been so hated by my husband – your father – and by his relations too, was so hurtful that at first I resolved simply never to speak of the matter to you again. But, on reflection, I perceived that you had come to your own conclusions – as wrong as they were – because you had not had any other means of knowing the truth. That truth is now something that I will try to share with you. It is a prospect that I have avoided all these years, and certainly I did not feel able to tell you in person. It is easier for me to write this down, and I hope that it will also be easier for you to read it. I hope too, that once you have finished, you will understand a little better.

I shall start at the beginning. I met Lord Byron in March 1812, at Lady Melbourne’s. Childe Harold had just been published, to great fanfare and acclaim. As you know, Byron was famous – more so, perhaps, than anyone of his ilk at the time. When I told you, Ada, that I was intrigued by him, that was quite accurate. Only the previous month he had made a speech in the House of Lords, in which he voiced his passionate opposition to a punitive new bill that proposed the death penalty for some poor stocking-makers who had smashed some looms in Nottinghamshire. Clearly, then, he must have had a strong desire to do good – as much as I myself did. But my cousin Lady Caroline Lamb had called him ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ – it was on everyone’s lips at one time or another – and indeed I did perceive an arrogance, a lofty pretension and a tendency to sneer at all and sundry. How, then, could these different tendencies be reconciled? It was intriguing, and I found myself wanting to learn more.

Each time I met Byron, I found something new to interest and enchant me; he was, I suspected, the type who suffered from changeable moods and fits of temper; I also thought that he was rather proud. But beneath those fits of temper was concealed a shyness, and I was convinced, as I have said, that he was a good person. I began to realise that I was in love with him. Other suitors – and there were plenty – I dismissed with haste.

In September of 1812, Byron proposed – not in person, but through my aunt, Lady Melbourne. And here, Ada, I made a dreadful mistake, for I refused him. Yes, I thought myself in love, but I had certain reservations, not the least of which being that I was aware (for he had written so) that he thought me perfect. I couldn’t bear to witness his disenchantment on learning that I was far from perfection. I refused, again through my aunt, and offered friendship instead.

Now, here is something that I did not know at the time. Lady Melbourne was not only my chaperone but also a close correspondent with Byron himself. The interest she showed in my burgeoning affection for Lord Byron was due in part to her own wish to put a stop to the affair that was taking place between Byron and her daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline, who was married to her son William. It pains me to remember my innocence – the evenings I spent in Caroline’s company, not knowing how infatuated she was with the man I was so naively discussing. (You met her once, at the theatre – you were quite young, perhaps nine or ten.) The affair was, it goes without saying, the height of unsuitability, and would have caused a scandal had it gone on much longer. A woman with a curious lack of moral restraint, Lady Caroline would – apparently – dress up in the uniform of post-boy in order to gain access to his rooms, and slashed her wrist with scissors in an attempt to regain his affections. But of all this I knew nothing.

I thought often of Lord Byron. Almost half a year after the proposal, I saw him again at a ball. I was relieved to meet him and hoped very much that we would now be able to forge for ourselves a friendship. He was unattached (an affair, again of which I knew nothing, with Lady Oxford, who was married, had recently ended) and was spending a good deal of time with his half-sister Augusta, who had come to stay with him.

In August of 1813, I took it upon myself to write to him myself, rather than use my aunt as a go-between. I asked only that we could be friends. We wrote to each other often. And what letters they were! Whatever my pretences were – to both Byron and to my own self – the reality was that I was even more in love than ever after only a few months. I was very young, Ada, and very naïve. I did not know how I might elicit from him a second proposal of marriage, having rashly rejected the first. In the end, I did something out of character and invited him, in April 1814, to stay with my family at Seaham. No answer came. I waited in an agony of emotion. Finally, in a rare fury, I wrote to him, saying that he and I were in no way compatible as characters. This, for some strange reason, worked wonders. Byron proposed. At last! My friends and family approved whole-heartedly of the match, although it is true that some had reservations. I also received a letter from Byron’s half-sister Augusta, offering her congratulations.

When I saw him – when he finally arrived at Seaham – I had not seen him for over a year. I observed that his manner was distinctly odd; I took it for shyness. It was a difficult two-week visit, but by the end of it I was hopeful for the future, and excited to become his wife.

We were married three months later at Seaham. I have told you a little of the simple ceremony. I did not tell you how Byron behaved as soon as we were alone together in the carriage on the way to Halnaby, where we would spend our honeymoon.

‘You ought to have married another,’ he said, between bouts of fitful, toneless singing.

He later pretended that this was a joke, but I did not think it a good one.

At Halnaby, he insisted on sleeping alone. (Forgive me, Ada, if this is a picture too rich in detail, but now I have begun to tell the story, I feel I should not omit such detail.) On one occasion, I did join him, and he cried out, in the middle of the night, that he was surely in Hell. I had never known a person so changeable: sweet-natured one moment, frighteningly morose the next. He alluded to ‘evils’ in his past; several times, he told me that we should never have married. My maid saw that I was unhappy, and urged me to return to my parents. I could do no such thing. My loyalty was now to my husband. And besides, there were times – plenty of times – when we were quite content together. I was determined to make a success of the marriage. And, Ada, I loved him.

Our visit to Six Mile Bottom was very much at my own instigation: I wanted to get to know the half-sister of whom my ‘B’ was so fond. But as soon as we had reached the house, not far from Newmarket, I realised I had made yet another mistake. The pendulum of his moods had swung back again – inexorable as ever – and he was at his most contemptuous, his most disdainful. I felt that I both bored and antagonised him; nothing I could say pleased him, and at the same time I felt that I was being all the things that would irritate him most – righteous, didactic, all the things that you, Ada, dislike too – and yet was unable to stop myself.

Byron made it quite clear that he preferred the company of his sister. I was desperately unhappy. Not long after, I realised that I was pregnant.

You have asked me about your birth, and I believe – for you are as observant and sensitive a young person as I could ever have hoped for – that you have noticed that I am often sad on your birthday. Well, perhaps when I tell you of the circumstances of that birth you will understand why. By the time of my confinement, your father was most grievously in debt – he could seldom control his spending. His health was not good (he was taking regular doses of both laudanum and calomel, neither of which agreed with him) and his moods were most terrifying in their mutability. One night, I sat up in bed, alert to the sound of shots being fired! Tiptoeing down to investigate, I found my husband smashing soda bottles with a poker. When you were born, his first question was whether or not you had been born dead. I began to convince myself that Byron was mad; that he was not responsible for his actions. But responsible or not, he was beginning to cause me to fear for my life – and for yours too. And so, I left him, on the morning of the 15^th of January. You were six weeks old.

At the time, I still believed that he was mad, and that – with care, and in time – he could be nursed back to health. Iwanted so much for this to be the case, for the alternative – a separation, and all the outcry that such a thing would entail – was worse. But the doctor found no evidence to suggest madness. And then I learned something about my husband that I had not known previously. Not only had there been several affairs during the short course of our marriage – with theatre actresses, mainly; but Lady Caroline Lamb also told me – not without a certain amount of malicious glee – that Byron’s affections towards his sister, Augusta, might well be more than mere fraternal feeling...

I hesitate, Ada, as I write this now, for I can hardly bear for you to think the worst of him, even as I seek to set things out for you as plainly as I can. Could it possibly be true? Byron often told me he had committed some kind of grievous act, but I had never known to what matter this alluded. Could the private jokes and close connection that he and Augusta shared mean something more than the bond of siblinghood? There were rumours too that he meant to have you kidnapped, and brought up by Augusta. Those rumours terrified me.

I have always been a woman of somewhat rigid ideas; that is one thing that I understand quite clearly about myself. I had married Byron – for better or worse – and marriage is a bond that is not to be severed. And yet, Ada, in the face of everything that I now feared to be true, I made a decision. There would be a proper separation – a difficult thing, yes, but, as far as I knew, the right thing for all concerned. The lawyer I saw, and to whom I revealed much more than Iallowed my parents to know, agreed with me. I resolved to say nothing in public – to hold my head high – and to survive the scandal of our separation.

And there was a scandal indeed.

Now do you see why I reacted so strongly to the events of two years ago? I have lived through it. Idle whispers leave long traces. The public, though fickle, seldom forgets. I sought to distance myself – and you – from the attention that Byron seemed to attract with every move he made. As for myself, I would try to do some good in the world; I would give you the best education that I could procure, and hope that neither of us would be tarnished by an association to England’s more famous – and most notorious – poet.

You may ask why I have continued to love and to speak well of him, as I have done, all these years. Firstly, Ada, I have done so for you: you were the product of a union that was not as successful as I had hoped that it would be, but that was not ever your fault. Secondly, he had good qualities too, so many of them – and it was those qualities – his talent, his humour, his vivacity – that I longed to preserve in my memory. It is possible to love someone who has caused one pain. And when he died – when I was no longer afraid of fresh scandal, or that he might arrange to have you kidnapped, or slander me – it was easier still to remember only the good things. As for Augusta, I promised Byron that I would do my best to protect her and her reputation. That I have tried to do, although the thought of you getting to know her, as you asked to do, was more than I could bear.

I know that at times you have found me cold, unforgiving, and overly controlling. If I were to make a list of my own characteristics, good and bad, I would not hesitate to list such attributes. But you must know how deeply I love you, Ada. Everything I have done has been for your own protection.

Your very loving,

Mamma

It is dark by the time I close the lid for the last time, and set the rosewood box on my bookcase, out of sight, where I will guard it until she comes home. The other letters I will leave until later. They will serve as corroboration, I know that; but in a way, I don’t require any proof. What she’s told me is enough, because my mother is not a liar, and what it will have cost her to set down this history in such detail for me to read is unimaginable. There’s a bloody dent in my lower lip; I must have been constantly biting it as I was reading, without being aware of it. I am also very cold.

Fully clothed, I climb into bed, my mind – as always – full of pictures. The lean, lame poet, on his face a sneer that my mother interprets as a facade. Mamma at her writing-desk, noting down her thoughts and impressions of Lord Byron; composing verses that she hopes will please him; writing letters that betray her growing desire. A cry of anguish (remorse?) in a marriage bed. The pretty, plump face of Augusta Leigh. The sound of soda bottles shattering as my mother lies awake, so close to the time of her confinement. A bitter-white morning; Mamma stealing out, frost crunching beneath her boots, with me wrapped in a blanket in her arms.

Why did she never tell me all this? But even as I’m framing the question, I know the answer.

The last thing I think before I go to sleep is how much I do love my mother.

And if she really wishes for me to meet Lord King, then I will do as she asks, and meet him.