In Byron's Wake Page 6

  enters into a clandestine correspondence with a personage generally presumed a great Roué – & drags her aged parents into this secret treaty – it is I believe not usual for single ladies to risk such brilliant adventures – but this comes of infallibility . . .

  Ominously, Byron added his opinion that Annabella was doing ‘a foolish thing’ by corresponding with him at all.

  Byron’s bravado may have been more of a pose than he himself knew. Ten days later, he failed to disguise his discomfiture when Lady Melbourne revealed that Annabella, while writing to him with all the considerable gravity that she could muster, was meanwhile displaying the gayest of spirits in the letters she despatched to Melbourne House. Was she indeed? – ‘the little demure Nonjuror!’ Byron burst out on 8 October.

  He had revealed too much, and it seems that he knew it. Before the end of the month, Lady Melbourne was being untruthfully informed (by Byron himself) that his correspondence with her niece was at an end.

  By the close of 1813, so far as her aunt knew, Annabella Milbanke had passed out of her former suitor’s thoughts. On 6 February 1814, Byron mischievously reminded Lady Melbourne of the doomed proposal (‘that brilliant negociation with the Princess of Parallellograms’) he had once persuaded her to make on his behalf. Now, back in London from a long and secluded Christmas at Newstead with the pregnant Augusta and her children, Byron asked his favourite mentor to find him some docile, trouble-free consort: ‘What I want is a companion – a friend rather than a sentimentalist.’

  Lady Melbourne knew better than to trust Byron’s shimmering impulses. Annabella was more easily deceived. Bewitched by her correspondence with the most dangerously seductive letter-writer of the age, it took just three months for austere vows of friendship to change into ardent hopes of a requited love. On 26 November 1813, she confessed to Mary Gosford her secret dream of becoming Byron’s wife: ‘a thought too dear to be indulged’. The following day, Annabella set out to charm Byron with a letter in which, shyly angling for a romantic response, she asked whether their closer acquaintanceship might have caused him to like her – less?

  The tactic almost worked. Responding on 29 November, Byron sounded both serious and tender. Annabella wronged herself, he told her, both in fearing that ‘the charm’ had been broken by correspondence and in imagining that she had overstepped a mark through her question. ‘No one can assume or presume less than you do,’ he reassured her. As for love, none could supplant her. It was simply the case – she had told him so herself – that ‘the only woman to whom I ever seriously pretended as a wife – had disposed of her heart already . . .’

  November 1813 was the month in which Byron first began to keep a journal. On the last day of the month, just after writing that affectionate response to Annabella’s ‘very pretty’ letter, he sat down at his desk in Bennet Street to assess their relationship.

  What an odd situation and friendship is ours! – without one spark of love on either side, and produced by circumstances which in general end in coldness on one side, and aversion on the other. She is a very superior woman, and very little spoiled, which is strange in an heiress – a girl of twenty – a peeress that is to be, in her own right – an only child, and a savante, who has always had her own way. She is a poetess – a mathematician – a metaphysician, and yet, withal, very kind, generous, and gentle, with very little pretension. Any other head would be turned with half her acquisitions, and a tenth of her advantages.

  Byron had done his homework. Always in debt himself, he was evidently attracted by (it was a charge he would later vigorously deny) Annabella’s position as an only child – and future peeress – who was due to inherit her uncle’s fortune. Overall, nevertheless, the most striking aspect of Byron’s private journal entry was that his exalted respect for Annabella – for all his initial denial of any such implication – came curiously close to love.

  Close, but he was not yet ready to be caught. Annabella, by late November 1813, found herself in torment over her own folly. Three times now, she wailed to Lady Gosford, Byron had mentioned her unidentified lover as his sole reason not to propose. How could she now signal her availability without admitting that she had lied – and risk losing his respect? ‘He has never yet suspected me,’ she sighed. Mary Gosford, while sympathetic, could offer no solution.

  A deeper question, one that Annabella had perhaps not paused to examine, was whether Byron actually wished to know that his dear friend’s heart was free? In February 1814, Miss Milbanke launched herself upon the impossible mission of acknowledging the deception she had practised without compromising her own lofty integrity. So baffling was her explanation that Byron quoted one sentence back to her with a request for its elucidation. ‘I cannot by total silence acquiese [sic] in that which if supported when its delusion is known to myself would become deception.’ What exactly did she mean by those elaborate words, he asked, before torturing her with the reminder (he had just returned from a private holiday with Augusta at Newstead) of the circumscribed role to which she herself had so strictly confined him: ‘the moment I sunk into your friend . . . you never did – never for an instant – trifle with me nor amuse me with what is called encouragement . . .’

  Extracted from its context, this reminder that they were friends – and nothing more – offered scant cause for hope. However, Byron’s long letter (his often matched Annabella’s own voluminous epistles in length) also included expressions of regret that ill-health would keep her from London (Annabella had been ailing for some weeks), flattering comments about some verses that she had thoughtfully sent him, pleasure at her generous tribute to The Corsair (Byron’s most recent eastern romance was enjoying a massive success) and a tender farewell: ‘God bless you.’ Enough emotion was on show here for Annabella to try once more. On 17 February, she again signalled her availability. Byron promptly thanked her for indicating the exact opposite and thereby saving them both a deal of trouble: ‘& so adieu to the subject,’ he wrote with airy dismissiveness, before inquiring her age and revealing that he, at twenty-six, felt ‘six hundred in heart and in head & pursuits about six.’

  Annabella’s best chance, as she was too innocent to realise, was in keeping her distance. In March, a month when Byron presided over a cynical alliance – the hastily arranged marriage of Mary Anne Hanson, the toughly sexy daughter of his own unscrupulous lawyer, to the mentally deficient and extremely rich Earl of Portsmouth, whom Hanson also represented – Byron confided to Annabella that religion, advocated by her as a source of comfort, offered no solace to his all too sensitive spirit.* Writing back with complete sincerity that she nevertheless hoped the best for him, as she had always done, Miss Milbanke won his heart. ‘I shall be in love with her again, if I don’t take care,’ Byron warned himself on 15 March. Addressing Annabella directly on the same day, he spoke of his desire for her company.

  It was the enticing sentence ‘You do not know how much I wish to see you’ that inspired Annabella to venture one further cautious step. On 13 April, she asked if she had correctly understood that Lord Byron might be willing to visit her at Seaham? This was bold. Byron had expressed no such wish. For a bachelor to invite himself to stay at the house of a young unmarried woman with whom he had been in regular correspondence was tantamount to asking for her hand. How, then, would he answer? The response, written a week later from Byron’s new London lodging at Albany (a bachelor’s set of rooms off Piccadilly that he had inherited from the recently married Lord Althorp), was encouraging. He would visit Seaham Hall with pleasure, requesting only not to intrude upon her studies: ‘you will do as you please – only let it be as you please . . .’ Distance, he added airily of a five-day journey by stagecoach from London, was of no consequence in the matter.

  Annabella’s complete ignorance of what was taking place in Byron’s life during the period of her negotiations for a visit helps to explain the extreme distress with which – two years later – she would belatedly unravel the intrigue that had formed the backgro
und to Byron’s capricious courtship of herself: a woman whose intelligence and virtuous high-mindedness he had respected almost too much to exploit. Almost, however, was not quite enough.

  Byron, at the time he answered Annabella’s timid request, had just learned of the birth (on 15 April) of Augusta Leigh’s fourth child, christened Elizabeth Medora and always known to her family as Elizabeth or Libby. Conception had taken place in July 1813, the month during which Augusta and Byron had first consummated their love. Never supposing that his half-sister might also still be sleeping with her husband (as was the case), the guilty lover assumed from the start that the child was his.

  Incapable of keeping a secret, Byron allowed his pen to betray what his lips were forbidden to utter. The Bride of Abydos (November 1813) approached a public confession of his passion, close enough for Byron to hesitate about sending an early copy of his poem to Annabella, while almost begging Lady Melbourne to connect its narrative to his earlier hints of an incestuous love. (The poem’s original version presented the besotted and garrulous Selim as Zuleika’s brother, rather than as her cousin.)

  Lady Melbourne remained, as Annabella had become aware, her suitor’s closest confidante. While Annabella herself was writing wistful letters to her aunt throughout the spring of 1814 about a life of studious isolation, Byron was confessing to the unshockable Lady M that he was embarked upon the most enjoyable love affair of his life. ‘However I will positively reform,’ he told her on 25 April:

  – you must however allow – that it is utterly impossible I can ever be half as well liked elsewhere – and I have been all my life trying to make someone love me – & never got the sort that I preferred before. – But positively she & I will grow good – & all that – & so we are now and shall be these three weeks & more too . . .*

  Byron did not reserve his shocking tales for Lady Melbourne alone. ‘Frightful suspicions’, noted his friend John Cam Hobhouse after visiting the Drury Lane Theatre with Byron on 19 May. Horrors ‘not to be conceived’ were revealed on 24 June to a suddenly prudish Caroline Lamb. Lady Melbourne, however, was not only his confidante but his mentor. In between swaggering about his dreadful wickedness, Byron sought her views about the wisdom of his going to Seaham. By 24 April, the date on which Annabella disclosed that she had herself informed Aunt Melbourne of his proposed visit (of which ‘I think she will be very glad to learn’), Lady Melbourne had thrown icy water upon the project. ‘Credo di No!’ Byron scrawled to the side of Annabella’s words, before underlining his negation. Miss Milbanke’s letter went unanswered.

  Hopeful and oblivious, Annabella sailed on towards her destiny. On 29 April, she reminded Byron that her parents still awaited confirmation of his visit. No confirmation arrived.

  On 30 April, however, while pleading for Augusta (‘not aware of her own peril – till it was too late’) to Lady Melbourne, Byron began to wonder if marriage to a quietly respectable woman like Annabella might encourage him ‘to sever all other pursuits’. Lady Melbourne, advising him on that same day, had independently reached the same conclusion, but from a more cynical motive. Such a respectable young woman could provide the perfect camouflage for the adulterous siblings, and dear Annabella was far too naive to be suspicious of what was going on: ‘she will understandably make a friend (a female one) of any person you may point out – & all friends is very much to be wished . . .’

  Up at Seaham, time crawled. Temporarily deprived of her favourite confidante – Mary Montgomery had gone abroad for her health – Annabella had nobody with whom to share the anxiety she felt about her dismayingly reticent correspondent. She wrote to praise Byron’s ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’. (In Seaham village, a bonfire had been lit to celebrate the emperor’s abdication.) Its author did not respond. Lady Melbourne, writing to Miss Milbanke on 25 May as if Byron was a perfect stranger to her niece, airily declared that Annabella was certain to enjoy the poet’s company when he visited her parents’ northern home. Byron himself said nothing at all.

  On 19 June, while Judith Milbanke went to Kirkby Mallory to visit her heartbroken brother – comforting him through Lady Wentworth’s final days – Annabella plucked up the courage to make one final appeal. ‘Pray write to me,’ she pleaded, pathetically adding that she knew Lord Byron would never mean to hurt her. ‘Prim and pretty as usual’ comprised Byron’s tart comment to her aunt. Three days later, writing to Annabella on 24 June, he explained that he was still trying to fix a date for his visit. His sign-off was a little warmer than before: ‘ever yrs most sincerely’ had progressed into ‘very affectly & truly yrs’. From this, Annabella could take her crumb of comfort.

  Byron wrote nothing more to Annabella until 1 August. Between times, he had been asking Augusta to scout out his chances for marrying her pretty young friend, Lady Charlotte Leveson-Gower. By August, he, Augusta, her children, Byron’s college friend Francis Hodgson and his naval cousin George Byron were all off enjoying a beachside summer holiday at Hastings. Colonel Leigh, as usual, was absent from the party.

  Later, after they became close friends, Captain Byron would tell Annabella that Augusta made use of the Hastings summer vacation to urge her brother to press for a marriage to Miss Milbanke. If she did so, it was without success. Annabella had written to Byron at the end of July to hint once more at her availability, while entreating a fixed date for his long-promised visit to Seaham. Responding from Hastings, Byron wilfully misunderstood her. Of course, he knew that she remained committed to another man, he wrote. No need, then, for her to worry that he – blessed with an excellent memory of that unfortunate fact – would intrude upon their happy trysts. Trapped, Annabella could only repeat that his rival had been dispatched (‘nothing could now induce me to marry him’) and ask, wrapping the most transparent of hopes in the most obscurely elaborate language at her disposal, where Byron now stood?

  My doubt then is – and I ask a solution – whether you are in any danger of that attachment to me which might interfere with your peace of mind . . . Next, on the supposition of a reply unfavourable to my wishes, I would ask you to consider by what course the danger may be avoided . . .

  On 10 August, briefly back at his Albany rooms, Byron replied with something that came thrillingly close to a declaration. ‘I will answer your question as openly as I can,’ he wrote. ‘I did, do, and always shall love you –’ From here, however, he perversely proceeded to remind her that she had already turned him down once and – given the chance – would doubtless do so again. Since she had tendered no offer of affection, he did not intend to sue for pity.

  At this point, Annabella lost her temper. Enraged by Byron’s obdurate failure to understand her, she now announced (on 13 August) that her own feelings about him were and always had been limited by the knowledge that she and he were thoroughly incompatible. ‘Not, believe me, that I depreciate your capacity for the domestic virtues . . . Nevertheless you do not appear to be the person whom I ought to select as my guide, my support, my example upon earth . . .’

  The: So there! was almost audible. Two formidable personalities had clashed with as much spirit as Petruchio and his shrew; unexpectedly, Byron took his hit on the chin. ‘Very well – now we can talk of something else,’ he responded nonchalantly on the 16th. A short and extremely proper exchange of letters about literature followed on, with Byron’s cancellation of his promised visit softened by his sending (at Annabella’s meek request) his list of recommendations for her reading course. He suggested Sismondi, Hume and Gibbon with the promised loan of his own dual-language Tacitus. Climbing down from her stilts, the scholarly Annabella graciously agreed to give Gibbon a second chance.

  At the end of August, Byron and Augusta travelled to Newstead, following the final withdrawal of the Abbey’s dilatory purchaser, Thomas Claughton. There, having learned that the beguiling Lady Charlotte Leveson-Gower had rejected the proposal made by Augusta on her brother’s behalf, the couple fell back on their original plan. Terrified by the prospect of a scandal which would je
opardise her social position (Mrs Villiers was helping to smooth the way to a place at court and free lodgings for life), Augusta was desperate to see her brother respectably married. Wealthy, affectionate and seemingly unaware of the scandalous tales that were beginning to be whispered in London, Miss Milbanke eminently fitted the bill.

  On 9 September, in a letter which he hesitated a full day before finally despatching, Annabella’s laggardly suitor referred to the petulant August epistle in which Annabella announced that she would never be his because their characters were ‘ill adapted to each other’. Now, Byron humbly asked if that meant all was lost. ‘Are the “objections” – to which you alluded – insuperable?’ And if so, ‘is there any line or change of conduct which could possibly remove them?’ In short, he was finally ready to propose marriage.

  On 18 September, Byron was dining alone at Newstead with Augusta and the local apothecary (liver problems had plagued the young poet since his return to England in 1811) when a gardener brought in the late Mrs Byron’s wedding ring. Mysteriously disinterred from a Newstead flower bed just before Miss Milbanke’s prompt consent (she wrote back on the very day that his proposal arrived), ring and letter together were laid upon the breakfast table. It may have been the odd coincidence that caused the intensely superstitious Byron to turn ashen white. Later, and with extraordinary spite, Augusta would add another detail for Annabella’s benefit. Byron’s only response to the news of her acceptance, so she said, had been to comment: ‘It never rains but it pours.’