As Annabella went into labour, Byron was shooting the tops of soda bottles in the pantry. When first shown the child, a girl, he said to the squalling infant, ‘Oh! what an implement of torture I have acquired in you!’
Hobhouse told me, between ponderous lines, that Byron attempted to sodomise Annabella after the baby was born. Hobhouse could never bring himself to address this issue in clear words in any language. In fact, even before he told me, I had already guessed. We women, in the end, have the more physical grasp of the world.
Poor Annabella! Worse than his affront to her person, Byron must have also violated her intellectual innocence. As he raged around the bed where she lay recovering from the birth, I am sure that he subjected her to the same shocking revelations that Caro Lamb had heard, including, no doubt, the crime of which good women could know nothing. Annabella no longer wished to know, but that was no reason to spare her. She had dared to trap him in marriage. Byron was taking his revenge. He laughed at her tears.
Caroline wrote, just in case Byron had withheld anything:
Deeds of guilt concealed from other eyes, he now dwelt upon to Calantha with horrid pleasure. ‘Shrink not, start not,’ he exclaimed, when she trembled at each new confession. ‘Proud, even of my crimes, shall thou become, poor victim of thy mad infatuation …’
‘Oh must I become as hardened as wicked,’ she said, bursting into tears. He pressed her mournfully to his bosom.
‘Weep,’ he replied, ‘I like to see your tears; they are the last tears of expiring virtue …’
Shortly after the birth of the baby, christened Augusta Ada, Annabella left Byron.
There were convulsions in the English and even the Italian press. Annabella fuelled them. She was once again at the centre of attention. The journalists feasted on the story. Even in Venice I was able to read intimate ‘eye-witness accounts’ of the unspeakable sufferings of poor young Lady Byron, and put together the story as I knew it would have happened.
Annabella announced to all that he was insane.
‘Byron? Rejected? … How …?’ I would ask Hobhouse. It seemed to me unlikely that he could swallow this concept, in fact or thought, he thought. Hobhouse told me, ‘You are right, Cecilia. He was devastated.’
‘Did he try to get her back?’
‘Briefly. His life was spinning out of control, and Annabella had seemed a safe haven. Even in moments of worst abuse, he had trusted her to stand by him. In a fair world, of course, he should expect her to expose him, but he was used to living a blessed life. Even with Caroline he had got away with it. Or he thought he had. Of course, he did not know about Glenarvon yet.
‘And there was another thing. His debts were terrifying.’
‘How did he manage?’
‘He went back to Augusta, who at least loved him. And he started to accept money from his publisher, John Murray. It was a moment of the deepest shame for him.’
I understood very well. Byron had become a species of courtesan: paid for giving pleasure to people he despised. I could picture him, full of self-loathing, still penniless, besieged, taking comfort with Augusta. I knew already that he had vented his anger in the written word. Accounts of his verbal fireworks were widely available. Byron wrote insultingly of his wife and in-laws, in memorable phrases that were repeated everywhere. He invariably referred to his wedding day as his funeral.
I could well understand that Byron’s ‘domestic destruction’ had opened him to the world, making him vulnerable, an object of derision, a person who had been rejected. He would never forgive Annabella for that. It would be possible for him to construct in his mind a scenario whereby she stood guilty of everything he did afterwards – everything wicked, cruel or violent, that is. He no longer had a reputation to defend, thanks to Annabella. He would go to the dogs. Let his peers, and worse, the public, whisper behind their hands, he was now free to do what he wished. He had declared war on the world.
Somehow people must have scented his dangerous attitude. The scandals of Annabella and Augusta were bad enough, but what was worse was that Byron did not seem to be ashamed. The sensation was appalling. Rooms emptied when he and Augusta entered them. The fall from grace was absolute. It was time to leave England again.
‘I shall go to Venice,’ said Byron, and a thousand miles away, the sea wall of my studio lurched. Gondolas shivered in the disturbed water.
Chapter 11
I monti xe monti senza bisogno d’essar monti.
Mountains are mountains without needing to be mountains.
VENETIAN PROVERB
Hobhouse was summoned. They were on the road again. ‘I was to meet up with him later, but of course he needed my help with the practicalities. He was too busy in his domestic drama to have a care for such trivialities as passports and tickets.’
Byron was not too busy to deepen his debts. Not the least of the final extravagances was a travelling coach, a replica of Napoleon’s. Byron had acquired the family name Noel through his marriage to Annabella, so the doors were decorated with the initials N. B., those of his French hero. The coach was fitted with every conceivable luxury including a bed, a small library and a dinner service.
It was the end of April 1816. Byron left home, his separation papers in hand. He was taking his manservant Fletcher and a young doctor, John William Polidori. Hobhouse could not bear Doctor Polly-dolly, who was full of himself in the diary that John Murray had commissioned him to write about Byron’s new life. ‘He was a cretin,’ said Hobhouse. ‘A clown.’
As they left, the bailiffs moved in, seizing everything they could. ‘They even took Byron’s tame squirrel, which he had abandoned in a bedroom,’ Hobhouse told me.
Curiosity at Dover was peaking ... It was reported in the English papers that a number of well-born ladies disguised themselves as chambermaids so they could watch Byron limp down the passages of the inn.
‘Was he sad to leave England, at the last minute?’ I asked Hobhouse.
‘Who can tell? All I can tell you is that Byron left England with a stupendous hangover. He boarded the boat, like a condemned man, and waved to us on the shore until he was invisible among the waves. He seemed to be calm, but I for one was choked with emotion at what felt to be a final farewell.’
I pictured Byron on the deck, pale and vulnerable, hatred, bile and wine swilling together in his stomach. Byron was Childe Harold again, though this time embittered and older, and in search of the second half of his story. If his own poems were to be believed, it was certain to end in excesses of every kind and the misery of women.
But as the English shores receded, the new exile improved in spirit and health, and within hours had shrugged off any last remaining English restraint. Polidori recorded in his diary that when the party reached their hotel at Ostend, Byron fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid.
Polidori spied intimately. There were other spies close on his heels. The English papers followed him, reporting all his new misdoings. Byron’s every act seemed to show that he was indeed an enemy of everything English. He insisted on sightseeing at Waterloo, where his hero Napoleon had been vanquished, much to the poet’s regret. Byron galloped over the field in an imaginary cavalry charge. He carved his name in the chapel at Hougoumont.
They stopped at Dejean’s hotel at Sécheron. He entered his name in the guest book, and his age, ‘100’.
Within a few days I knew all these things. A whole new breed of journalist seemed to have been spawned to feed off the depravities of George Gordon, Lord Byron. He could not lift a glass of wine to his lips, it seemed, without someone finding something to insinuate about the act. He may have left England behind, but he was still selling newspapers for them, so they would not let him out of their grasp – not now, or ever.
However, for the following part of Byron’s story, I have the most scrupulous of witnesses. I have never known what it is to have a female friend, but the closest I ever came to such a thing was with Mary Shelley, who was to spend the next few months wit
h Byron.
While Byron raged around the battlefields, by the shores of Lake Geneva a previous London innamorata, plump, pretty, silly Claire Claremont, was already waiting for him, plying him with letters offering consolations of various kinds. A more interesting offer of intellectual entertainment came from Claire’s hosts, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Claire was Mary’s step-sister. She had come with them to the Lakes to pursue Byron.
When I met Shelley later, I found him beautiful but shy, and clearly consumptive. He was high-born, but entirely without Byron’s excessive pride in his birth. Shelley was more purely political, more purely idealistic. He had deserted his first wife, Harriet, and two children to elope with Mary. Thereafter Shelley found himself the object of intense hatred. Like Byron, debts and scandal had forced him into Continental exile. Harriet would later drown herself. Like Byron, Shelley stood in danger of losing his children as a result of his unrespectable life. But London society had counted for nothing with Shelley, who lived for more abstract and intellectual pursuits.
The exiles huddled together. The Shelleys rented a little cottage by the lake, and Byron took the charming Villa Diodati nearby. Mary told me that the two households merged most days. She observed, ‘It suited him. Byron had Claire at his disposal when he wanted a certain kind of comfort, or someone to make a fair copy of a manuscript. He ignored her when he did not.’
At the villa late-night discussions turned to talks of ghosts. Byron declaimed from Coleridge’s Christabel: a description of the witch’s hideous pallid breast. Shelley succumbed to the dramatic performance, and ran screaming from the room. He fainted, and when revived with cold water, told of a vision of a woman with eyes where her nipples should be. ‘My poor Shelley never completely escaped that vision afterwards,’ said Mary, narrowing her eyes. She blamed Byron.
Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. He himself tired after a few pages, but, using his idea, Polidori wrote The Vampyre, which was eventually published (and did well on the false rumour that it was Byron’s. When I read it, I could see that he had written it in Byron’s company or under his influence). But Mary Shelley, herself over-stimulated in the candlelight, suffered the waking nightmare that turned into her first novel Frankenstein.
It seems that the three-month idyll exerted a profound influence on Byron, who, though he could never emulate it, found charming and touching Shelley’s single-minded devotion to the imagination and simplicity. ‘With Shelley,’ Mary explained, ‘Byron did not flounce or sulk or behave badly. There was no point. Shelley would not be shocked or impressed, he would not notice, except as a strange irrelevant distraction from the serious matters of life and art. His great concern was to interest Byron in the higher ethics of poetry. Byron listened, but in the end he would not be bothered with the higher ground. Poetry? – I don’t think it was in him. He would always confine himself to verse.’
In the presence of the Shelleys, Byron continued to write, ‘sometimes on the walls,’ Mary said pointedly, ‘but also in his manuscripts.’ Byron carved his name upon the wall in Chateau Chillon, the stone fortress beside the Lake, where the sixteenth-century adventurer Bonivard had been confined. After seeing the picturesque dungeon, Byron was moved to write The Prisoner of Chillon, a dramatic monologue about the adventurer Bonivard who languished hopeless years inside it. Mary observed, ‘He told us he could well understand Bonivard’s misery after being married to Annabella for a year.’
He was also finishing the third canto of Childe Harold. ‘You could not stop him scribbling,’ said Mary. ‘I think he was writing in order to escape the desolation he really felt. It was one thing to be Childe Harold, a romantic traveller, another thing to be rejected and hated, the object of gossip, and penniless. He looked at the implacable purity of the mountains and the lakes as an escape from the delinquencies for which he felt himself so violently punished.’
Then came the news that Caro Lamb had actually published Glenarvon. London convulsed. It flew out of the shops as if – as if it were an original Byron. Society husbands and wives stayed at home in the evenings to read it. People stood on street corners talking about it. Now everyone thought they knew everything about Byron. Caroline Lamb had known Byron intimately, after all.
‘Was he horrified?’ I asked Mary.
‘Not really. It was attention. But he took the opportunity to say some terrible things about Caroline, and to throw cold water on the idea that their love-affair had been of any importance or duration. He compared it to a portrait, and told everyone that the likeness could not be very good because he did not sit for it long enough.’
I flinched at this. Poor Caroline! With me, of course, it had been the same. In fact, my time with him had been even briefer than hers.
‘Did he read it?’ I asked.
‘He pretended not to, but he did. Madame de Stäel lent it to him. I saw a copy of it at the Villa Diodati and the spine was creased. I read it myself, of course. It just took a day or so – really, the woman writes like a guttersnipe. I can see that it would not have distressed him too much. You see, it scarcely harmed his reputation as a dangerously attractive, melancholy villainous hero.’
‘What did Annabella think?’
‘Oh, she was vengeful as ever, Annabella. She thought Caroline had been too kind. Apparently, she told everyone. that Glenarvon was over-indulgent.’
My sources double at this point.
Hobhouse arrived at the Villa Diodati bringing fresh news of the demonising going on in England. He had actually been to see Caroline, who responded to his admonitions by showing him some bawdy sketches she had made of Byron. She threatened to expose them to a public clamorous for more Byron abominations. He had persuaded her against it.
‘What were they saying about him?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, the usual mixture of truth and malice. He was supposed to be enjoying himself in the arms of not just Claire and Mary Shelley but also those of young Robert Rushton, his page. When we told him, Byron just nodded impatiently. He held out his hand for a letter from Augusta. I had none, so he turned away from us, and picked up his book. He was reading Faust and writing Manfred.’
I repeated from memory three lines, about the love of Manfred’s life:
She was like me in lineaments – her eye –
Her hair – her features – all, to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine.
‘So you know already?’ Hobhouse said.
‘Of course. I have read Manfred. So has everyone in Venice. But why did he hear nothing from Augusta?’
‘I am afraid the reasons were most wounding. You see Annabella had got Augusta in her clutches. Augusta was sweet and weak. Annabella was cunning and subtle. And of course she thought she had God’s will on her side. Byron had been gone only a few months before Annabella had extracted some kind of confession from Augusta and made her promise to hand over all the letters she received from Byron.’
‘But why didn’t Augusta write to him herself?’
‘I think she was shamed into silence. When she did write, it was always in a strange, oblique style, as if she was writing to a stranger. It drove him mad. But he kept writing to her. Without her, he was telling her, he was doomed to wander the earth alone. And, imagine, Annabella was reading every word!’
At the end of September, Byron and Hobhouse left the Villa Diodati to travel to Milan by way of the Simplon. In Milan Byron was delighted by the Ambrosiana Library, and the letters of Lucrezia Borgia and Cardinal Bembo. He found a lock of Lucrezia’s hair – so long and fair, and the letters so beautiful, that he said it made him feel wretched not to have been born sooner and at least to have seen her.
‘Of course,’ said Hobhouse, ‘he turned it all into a pretty letter to Augusta. He could not resist mentioning a rumoured whiff of incest around the lovely Lucrezia. There was some story about her father, Pope Alexander, and her brother Cesare Borgia. Think what Annabella made of that! Byron learnt some of the Borgia let
ters by heart, and stole a single hair as a relic.’
‘He stole Lucrezia Borgia’s hair? From a library?’
‘Remember, he thought he was a dangerous outlaw. In any case, he just took a single hair, which he wrapped around his finger.’
At the beginning of November, Byron and Hobhouse set off for Venice, via Brescia and Verona. Byron was in a feverish state, grey and giddy. Hobhouse remembered, ‘He kept writing to Augusta, but her responses were so strange. Or course, we know why now, but at the time it was incomprehensible. Trying to fathom her words, Byron said to me, “I feel as if my head is decaying. I only wish my memory would …”’
In a night of rain, they arrived in Mestre and embarked in a gondola. Swaddled inside the black felze they drowsed, as the beak of the gondola sliced through the snakeskin water. They did not wake until they reached Cannaregio. They stirred and roused themselves as the gondola slipped past the Palazzo Labia and into the Grand Canal.
I can picture it. It would have been a soft, rocking awakening, amid the reflections of dim haloed lights, blooming fungally with vitreous petals, and the tapping of soft footsteps overhead. The echo of the oars would have told them that they were under another bridge. ‘The Rialto,’ their gondolier would have answered their question. Byron would have repeated ‘Rialto’ softly, memorising every nuance of the Venetian intonation.
They disembarked at Hotel de la Grande Bretagne, and were shown up a splendid staircase to rooms of chipped gilding and painted silks. It was seedy, and it was magnificent: it was theatre. The city and the dwelling, that first night, must have spoken to them of happy people in happier times, of mouldy sensuality and slow, delicious corruption. Byron must have passed gently from waking dreams to sleeping dreams that first night on the Grand Canal, half a mile from my studio in the Palazzo Balbi Valier.
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