In Byron's Wake Page 5

  And yet.

  It was the issue of her declared perfection that remained the sticking point. Painfully conscious of her faults, and in particular, of the hot temper which she was still struggling to subdue, Annabella could not bear (or so she wrote to Lady Gosford) the prospect of witnessing his disillusion.

  He speaks of my character as the only female one which could have secured his devoted affection and respect. Were there no other objection, his theoretical idea of my perfection which could not be fulfilled by the trial would suffice to make me decline a connection that must end in his disappointment.

  A decision had been reached. Having loaned her aunt the character sketch of Byron (of which she was evidently proud), Annabella retreated to her parents’ house at Richmond, before despatching a letter informing Aunt Melbourne that she did not love the noble gentleman enough to marry him. That blunt piece of news was sent on to Byron at Cheltenham, together with a copy of the character sketch. Also transmitted by her aunt was Annabella’s habitual sweetener: the offer of a dignified continuation of friendship, with no reference to the past.

  Annabella’s aunt was displeased. Byron’s own chagrin was so well hidden as to pass for relief. Writing back to Lady Melbourne on 17 October, he asked her to reassure Miss Milbanke that discretion would be maintained. A second letter (it was written the following day) began by praising the character sketch of himself as ‘very exact’ in parts, although ‘much too indulgent, overall’. A graceful allusion to Annabella as the ‘Princess of Parallelograms’ (a tribute to her mathematical skill) signalled his own comfortable retreat: ‘we are two parallel lines prolonged to infinity side by side but never to meet’. By 20 October, he had drawn a line under the proceedings. Miss Milbanke was to be informed (second-hand, as always), that ‘I am more proud of her rejection than I can ever be of another’s acceptance.’

  Two weeks later, Byron hinted at new interests; by 14 November, he was off again, making love to the lusciously available and safely married Lady Oxford. Weary of behaving like the hero of a sentimental novel, he now adopted a tone of brutal honesty. Annabella’s delicacy was all very nice, Lady Melbourne heard from her self-adopted nephew, but ‘I prefer hot suppers.’

  Neither Lord Byron nor Annabella had reckoned with the determination of their jointly appointed go-between: the intelligent and blushlessly treacherous Lady Melbourne. Annabella’s rejection – a decided setback in the ongoing battle to extricate Byron from the tenacious grasp of Caroline Lamb – might yet be overcome. And so, having complimented Miss Milbanke on 21 October for the dignity with which she had conducted herself, and having offered assurance that Byron was ‘much touch’d’ by her confidence in his future good conduct, Lady Melbourne summoned her niece back from Richmond for a second interview.

  Very sweetly, Lady Melbourne now asked to be told just what dear Annabella did want from a man in order to marry him; very demurely, Annabella presented her written shopping list. Calm, equable, pleasant-looking and of good birth (a title was not required), the ideal husband would consult, but not rely upon, his wife, displaying an attachment that was balanced, never excessive. No emotional displays or ill humour would be permitted at any time, lest they should affect her. ‘I am never sulky,’ she added in an explanatory aside, ‘but my spirits are easily depressed, particularly by seeing anybody unhappy.’

  If Annabella was slyly poking fun at her aunt’s blatant determination to marry her off, Lady Melbourne, a woman whose wit was sharper than her sense of humour, failed to see the joke. The wish list was, by and large, granted to her niece; the absurd request for a husband who would always control his feelings in order not to irritate those of his wife was angrily dismissed. Overall, Miss Milbanke was recommended to climb down from her ‘stilts’ and expect a great deal less from any man who was willing to marry her. On the subject of ill temper, she was advised to study self-control: ‘till you can attain this power over Yourself never boast of your command over yr passions, – and till you can practise it – you have no right to require it in others.’

  Annabella’s answer was engagingly frank. She had not meant to suggest that she hungered after a righteous prig: ‘I am always repelled by people of that description.’ As to her aunt’s advice against seeking an impossible ideal, surely a young lady might be allowed to hope? And now, ‘After so full an explanation you will perhaps take off my stilts, and allow that I am only on tiptoe.’

  Lady Melbourne had been beaten back, but the topic of Byron could never be long avoided. In Richmond, where Mary Montgomery arrived to spend two autumn months, his name was warmly praised by a friend who persisted in seeing the unlikely couple as a perfect match. Reunited with her faithful journal, Annabella approvingly noted that Lord Byron never allowed religion to be mocked at his table and that he had generously given away John Murray’s payment for Childe Harold to Robert Dallas, an impoverished friend. (Dallas had helped to secure the poem’s publication.) Warned against becoming too friendly with Lady Melbourne by Dr Fenwick up in Durham (the canny old practitioner was full of stories about that estimable lady’s deceiving ways), Annabella declined to admit that her aunt’s chief value was as the last remaining line of communication to Lord Byron. Within the privacy of an increasingly wistful Miss Milbanke’s mind her rejected suitor remained firmly to the fore.

  In February 1813, newly arrived in London from visiting the Wentworths and then Cousin Sophy, Annabella made the only kind of overture that was now open to her. Lady Melbourne was requested to ask Lord Byron if they could now meet without awkwardness. His response was prompt, but disappointingly casual. Miss Milbanke might be informed that ‘if she does not misunderstand me nor my views – we shall be very good friends – & “live happy ever after” – in that state of life to which “it may please God to call us”.’

  Poor Annabella. What was she to make of a man grown heartless enough to add that he had actually smiled at her rejection? Even aloof Mr Darcy (whose character she greatly admired when reading Pride and Prejudice during a second winter visit to Cousin Sophy’s home) would have shown more feeling.

  Annabella’s journal reveals little about her thoughts during her final summer on the London marriage market. Arriving in London on 7 May 1813 (following her third stay of the year with Sophy Tamworth), Annabella attended a ball. It was the first occasion of the year at which she set eyes on Byron – but only from a distance. He was present at another party three days later, but there was no chance to speak with him. Nine days later, her private journal expressed disgust at the envy Samuel Rogers – a poet whom Byron rated only just below Walter Scott – betrayed of his literary confrère. The warmth of Annabella’s own feelings is clear in her indignant private comment: ‘I always thought Rogers mean, but I did not think him capable of such petty artifices as he used on this occasion to blast a rival’s name.’

  No further mention of Byron’s name appears in the journal. In her private ‘Auto-Description’ of 1831, however, Annabella recalled Byron’s exceptional pallor when she gave him her hand at their first May meeting, and how that betrayal of feeling had given her hope. (‘Perhaps, unconscious as I was, the engagement was then formed on my part.’) Several further such encounters had apparently taken place, ‘but every time I felt more pain, & at last I shunned the occasions’.

  Lord Byron, who had been toying with the idea of travelling abroad with his new mistress, the lovely Lady Oxford, overstepped a line when he flirtatiously presented her 11-year-old daughter with some trinkets he had recently retrieved from Caroline Lamb. The Oxfords indicated their displeasure by leaving Byron behind when they went abroad at the end of June 1813. It was at a party given around this time that Annabella observed her former suitor seated on a sofa beside a woman whose pleasant face, framed in corkscrews of brown ringlets, was new to her. Enquiries revealed that the brown-haired lady was Byron’s older and married half-sister, the Honourable Augusta Leigh.

  Augusta Leigh was always short of money. She was especially so when she ar
rived in London at the end of June 1813 (just as the Oxfords set off for the Continent). Colonel Leigh was away, as was his habit, at the races. Their three small children – the eldest, Georgiana, was Byron’s god-daughter – had been left in the care of a nurse at The Paddocks in Six Mile Bottom. (The Leighs’ home suited the sporting Colonel’s wish to live close to the thoroughbred mecca of Newmarket.) Augusta’s choice of city lodgings was a giveaway of her hard-up state. Beginning at the noisily inelegant abode of Byron’s grasping lawyer, John Hanson, she moved on to lodge with Theresa Villiers, a loyal friend whose excellent connections to the royal circle might be worked upon to advantage.

  Augusta arrived in town at the very moment when Byron was unattached. Comic, easygoing, delightfully unreproachful and unfailingly affectionate, Augusta’s unhesitating readiness to become Byron’s favourite companion may have been related to the fact that her half-brother – of whose own financial woes she was at best dimly aware – appeared to be a source of wealth.

  Few, in the late summer of 1813, saw anything unusual in Byron’s loving reunion with an older sister to whom he had become almost a stranger. Caroline Lamb was merely signalling a frenzied wish to recapture her lost lover’s interest when, on 5 July, she used the occasion of a waltzing party to cut herself with a broken glass before slashing her wrists (not deeply enough, according to an exasperated Lady Melbourne) with a pair of pocket scissors. Hostesses were quick to spread the tale of Lady Caroline’s theatrical stunt, but no eyebrows were raised when Byron requested to bring Augusta to their houses. His own half-sister: what could be more innocently respectable?

  Annabella Milbanke was thinking only of how to renew a friendship that she valued and feared she had forever lost – Byron was reported to be departing for the Continent, perhaps never to return – when she wrote once again to Lady Melbourne from Seaham on 18 July. A newspaper had reported that day on Lord Byron’s purported use of legal trickery to enforce the sale of Newstead. Annabella begged her aunt to pass along the fact that she herself knew Lord Byron to be incapable of such base behaviour. Her more ardent message followed.

  As I shall not have an opportunity of seeing him again I should be glad if you would tell him that however long his absence may be, I shall always have pleasure in hearing that he is happy, and if my esteem can afford him any satisfaction, he may rely on my not adopting the opinions of those who wrong him.

  The newspaper had got its facts wrong. Byron had indeed agreed to sell his crumbling family estate in Nottinghamshire for £140,000 (close to £5 million in today’s terms), back in 1812. Over a year later, he had still received only £5,000. The prospective buyer, a lawyer called Thomas Claughton, was now belatedly questioning the originally agreed price. Responding on 18 July to Lady Melbourne’s letter with an explanation (Byron himself had already seen the article and angrily ordered John Hanson to take corrective action), Byron saved Annabella for his postscript. Miss Milbanke could be told – whatever it pleased her aunt to say: ‘I have not the skill – you are an adept – you may defend me if it amuses you.’ (Lady Melbourne’s envoy to her niece, if she ever wrote one, has not survived.)

  The Milbankes had little personal knowledge of Lord Byron – Sir Ralph had met him only once – but they were growing anxious about Annabella.

  Evidence of parental concern, rather than of any cunning strategy for their daughter’s future, showed up in their prompt support for Annabella’s decision, on 22 August, to write directly, for the first time in her life, to Lord Byron. Informing him of her parents’ approval, she imposed only one condition upon the epistolary friendship that she wished to initiate: ‘In particular I would not have it known to Ly Melbourne . . . she is perhaps too much accustomed to look for design, to understand the plainness of my intentions . . .’

  * * *

  * Byron’s second speech, given on 21 April 1812, objected to Britain’s ongoing discrimination against Catholics.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AN EPISTOLARY COURTSHIP

  (1813–14)

  Not tell Lady Melbourne! How little Annabella knew Byron, or indeed, her aunt. How could she have guessed that – within a fortnight of her own resolutely secret suit to Byron – Lady Melbourne would be sending him (although for what mischievous purpose, it is hard to conjecture) the private list of husbandly requirements that she herself had persuaded Annabella to draw up a year earlier?

  Returning that curious document to his favourite correspondent on 5 September 1813, Byron expressed concern that Miss Milbanke’s faith in her own infallibility ‘may lead her into some egregious blunder’. The blunder that he evidently had in mind lay in soliciting the friendship of himself, a rejected suitor. So far, however, Lady Melbourne knew only that he had embarked upon a sentimental correspondence with somebody referred to as ‘X.Y.Z.’. By 7 September, however, Annabella’s aunt had been enlightened. Doubtless, she hoped that this high-minded friendship with her niece might steer a young man she adored away from a far more dangerous relationship: his newly discovered passion for Augusta Leigh.

  Byron had entered the month of August 1813 with the intention of running away to Europe accompanied by the latest object of his desire. (Mrs Leigh, he told a horrified Lady Melbourne on 5 August, was even keener than himself on the elopement plan.) By the end of the month, he was having second thoughts. Augusta, for her part, had returned to the ramshackle, debt-ridden house at Six Mile Bottom that she shared with her husband and their three young children. Byron, while dropping enticing hints to his friend Tom Moore on 22 August about having landed himself in a ‘far more serious – and entirely new – scrape’, was by now pondering how best to dig himself out.

  On that same day (22 August), Annabella had posted off from Seaham her laboriously prolix request to become Lord Byron’s special penfriend. Love formed no part of her suit: fearful of raising false expectations or – which seems more likely – anxious to save her face, she alluded to another secret and unrequited passion. ‘I signified the existence of an attachment in my mind,’ she would admit to Mary Gosford on 3 December, mournfully adding that she had been betrayed into this uncharacteristic act of deception by her own imprudent enthusiasm.

  Annabella’s intentions were sincere; her indication of unavailability acted like catnip upon a man accustomed to reducing ladies to a state of prostrate compliance. But here, incredibly, was one – the only one who had dared to refuse him – calmly announcing that she preferred another man. When Byron wrote back (25 August) to say that he himself ‘still’ preferred her to all others and that friendship was impossible (‘I doubt whether I could help loving you’), Annabella scored another point by retreating. If friendship was not on offer, she announced, ‘I will trouble you no more . . . God bless you.’

  Unavailable still? Such coolness was irresistible! On 31 August, an increasingly intrigued Byron wrote back to announce that – despite having once aspired to be her husband – he accepted Miss Milbanke’s newly imposed conditions. Friendship it should be, and he was ready to obey commands: ‘if you will mark out the limits of our future correspondence & intercourse they shall not be infringed. – Believe me with the most profound respect – ever gratefully yrs. Byron.’

  And so it all began.

  Byron’s letters to Annabella during that autumn, when read alongside the opinions that he was simultaneously expressing to her aunt, might cause an impartial reader to gasp at such insouciant betrayal of a friendship. But Byron’s left hand was seldom aware of what his right was doing. Inconsistency was as instinctive to him as wit. ‘If I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to one’s self than to anyone else),’ he would admit to his journal on 6 November, ‘every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor.’

  Writing to his self-appointed friend (so conveniently remote in her northern fastness), Byron became earnest, sincere and gratifyingly deferential. He told her (when asked) about his childhood introduction by a Scottish nurse to the grim doctrine of Calvinism and a venge
ful God, a deity far removed from Annabella’s own forgiving Maker. He chastised her view of his solemnity. (‘Nobody laughs more . . .’) He acquainted her with his notion of the purpose of life (‘The great object of life is Sensation – to feel that we exist even though in pain – it is this “craving void” which drives us to Gaming – to Battle – to Travel . . .’), but expressed warm approval when Miss Milbanke disagreed. He teased her about rumours of a newly rejected lover (Stratford Canning, a cousin of the Whig politician)* and asked her to be kind to his little cousin Eliza Byron, about to go away to school up in the remote north of England. He informed Miss Milbanke that she herself wrote ‘remarkably well’, sulked when Annabella did not respond at once to his own letters, wondered when she next would be in town, and (on 26 September, a month after their correspondence began) humbly sought permission to address her as ‘My dear friend’.

  So far, so promising. Writing to Annabella in that same late September letter, Byron asked her (in a tone that sounded agreeably filial) to convey his ‘invariable’ respects to Miss Milbanke’s parents. Of Augusta Leigh, of the always-returning Caroline Lamb and of his new love interest, a certain Lady Frances (the flirtatious wife of his friend, Sir Godfrey Wedderburn Webster), Lord Byron mentioned not one word.* Annabella was to be his mentor, not his confidante. The most that he would allow her to know – driven by a pride that matched her own – was that he did not languish uncomforted.

  Writing simultaneously to Lady Melbourne throughout that same autumn of 1813, Byron used an entirely different tone. On 28 September, just two days after requesting the honour of addressing Annabella as his own dear friend, he groaned to her aunt about the persevering epistles of ‘your mathematician’ and mocked the earnestness of such a prim little virgin – ‘the strictest of St Ursula’s 11000 what do you call ’ems’ – who, nevertheless, chose to write letters to a rake. Annabella was unchivalrously categorised behind her back as the kind of young woman who