Augusta, deferent to his wife’s claims, sat very quietly where she was. It was left to Annabella to attempt a restraint. She seized him by the hand, entreating. It was only a question of waiting till morning; surely, he could wait as long as that. Mrs Leigh would hardly thank him for putting her to the trouble of getting the child to sleep again. ‘As for that, as for that,’ he repeated, inconsequently, ‘he had had enough, for one night, of the kindness of women. It was the worst thing imaginable for a child to be left in female company. God knows, he had suffered for it himself.’ In shaking her off, with the violence of impatience, he caught her a blow with the back of his hand. She fell into a chair, and he took the occasion to escape. For a minute the women sat in silence, listening. Annabella never forgot how quietly Augusta had endured this outbreak of her brother’s temper. Mrs Leigh breathed audibly through her clasped palms, less in horror, however, than calculation: she was following from the noises overhead Byron’s progress through the house, through her children’s rooms. There was a general disturbance. He did not know the bed he sought for, and then, a minute later, as he made his way downstairs, one sharp particular cry grew clearer and louder.
He was weeping himself with the weeping child in his arms when he pushed through the open door. ‘Is it Medora?’ he said to his sister. ‘I could not be sure; I believe it is.’ The child was hysterical. The blood in her face gave to her cheeks a purple translucence; the noise her lungs poured forth was enormous. Annabella felt, at any cost, the desire to silence it. She imagined closing her hand over its mouth and winced a little as, in her fancy, the child bit into it. Byron, helplessly, kissed the girl’s eyes, which were as blue as his own; their tears ran together. Augusta said only, ‘Yes, you have found Medora.’ She remained on the sofa. It surprised Annabella that she played in the scene so passive a role. For her part, she had never seen Byron so tenderly repentant. She was almost grateful for the exhibition in that it offered such a vivid reminder of her husband’s capacity for sincere remorse. At last, from a consciousness of futility, he resigned the child to its mother’s care (it had grown almost too breathless to shout). ‘Console it, console it, console it,’ he repeated and sat down himself beside her, just as Augusta was rising to return the baby to its bed. ‘I suppose you despise me?’ Lord Byron said to his wife, when they were alone together.
‘Not at all,’ Annabella said, careful as always against the noise of his violent feelings to express herself with something like exactness. ‘I pity your sufferings and pray for their relief. There is so much original goodness in your composition that your indulgences afflict no one so painfully as yourself. Only, you lack the power of regulation, which would concede to the better part of your nature the control of the worse. The violence of the contest between them is, I believe, the chief cause of your distress.’
Augusta, after an interval of ten minutes, returned to a room in which the expression of feeling had considerably dried up. No direct mention was made of the interlude preceding. Byron rose to offer them all a drink. They demurred, and he poured a glass of brandy for himself. ‘Have you ever, Gussie,’ he said, holding his wife by the cheek, ‘seen such an angel’s face? Not the prettiest angel, certainly, but without doubt the best. I have never known anyone so good; she is quite implacable with goodness. She watches her own heart as jealously as a miser his millions and counts over, from time to time, her good intentions.’ Annabella cast on her sister-in-law a glance that conveyed with unmistakable pride how much she endured. ‘There is nothing she will not forgive me,’ he continued. ‘Not even you, Gussie, could forgive so much, although you have never had the occasion. Except, perhaps, for a single particular offence, sometimes repeated, in which your part, I believe, was not entirely guiltless—even if I have suffered more for it in the end. Do you know, Gus, that on our honeymoon I practically shot at her? I was terribly provoked, though, by those letters you wrote her, with scarcely so much as a note to poor old B. Now that was not right, that was not fair, was it, my dear?’
One of the effects, Annabella found, of the siblings’ company was subtly to hush her; they had, after all, a deeper habit of conversation. In the course of his ramblings, however, Augusta endeavoured to keep up a quiet sort of under-conversation with her brother’s wife. ‘Do not imagine,’ she turned and said to her at one point, ‘that I have forgotten our first meeting. It was at a waltzing-party in Melbourne House, just at the beginning of that rage. We were all hopelessly behind-hand; I dared not dance with anyone but my brother. How the ladies admired you! You seemed to pick up the trick of it at once and put the rest of us to shame. There was a little German man, our instructor, who singled you out for praise; I blushed with envy. The Byrons, you know, are terribly shy. We cannot bear a general attention, but we long for it and fear it in equal measure. You will forgive me, my dear sister, if I hated you a little for dancing so well?’
Annabella blushed in turn, acknowledging both the compliment and the ambivalence, she believed, it had just failed to conceal. Despite their sisterly protestations, she sensed in Augusta a jealous reserve. Gus held, as it were, a hand out to each of them, to husband and wife, in order to comfort them and to keep them apart.
‘It was one of my particular conditions,’ Byron broke in, ‘that my wife should waltz. I expressed myself exactly on that point and directed Lady Melbourne to make inquiries. The answer came back, and I have since found the truth of it justified. Pip dances beautifully, as you say—quite like an elephant, by crushing.’
‘I don’t know what you mean by that, I’m sure,’ his sister replied.
‘You will learn.’
At ten, a clock rang out behind her. Annabella later remembered the awkwardness of their conversation by the fact of the silence that allowed her to count the chimes. Lord Byron, in whom drunkenness produced a sort of cruel watchfulness and strong ironic sympathies, began to give a voice to the whisper in her lips. ‘Seven eight nine ten,’ he said, and then: ‘you needn’t stay up on our account.’
He was sitting by Augusta on the sofa; his hand rested on his sister’s, which lay on the cushion between them. Annabella had not supposed herself capable of fresh suffering, but the thought of being sent away from them afflicted her with the most childish anxieties. ‘I am not in the least fatigued,’ she insisted, blinking back tears.
‘You have had a long journey,’ he said, ‘particularly for one in your condition.’ Augusta looked up sharply, and he continued: ‘She is too innocent to guess the cause of it, but there have been certain restrictions in our personal intercourse. A kind of resistance or awkwardness in that respect, as you and I know, my dear, often prefigures the grosser show. You can see for yourself, Gussie, how changeable her temper is, and the least kindness or cruelty sets her off.’ It was all Annabella, who hadn’t the least notion of being enceinte, could do to keep back her tears and turn on the pair of them a smiling, shining face. ‘Not at all, not at all. If I have fallen quiet, it is only out of admiration. I suffered, you know, very much in my childhood for want of a sister. It is a relation that has always had a peculiar fascination for me, and to see each of you so happy in the other’s affection does my heart good. I am guilty, I know, of slipping at times too easily into the role of observer; but I am perfectly cheerful in it, though it makes me a dull silent staring sort of companion.’
‘You say that always,’ Byron broke in, ‘with a great air of confession, as if you had not said it an hundred times before. I can never imagine anyone wanting a sister quite so much as you pretend to do. We choose not to believe you.’
‘Perhaps,’ Augusta said, with an air of true kindness, ‘you had really better retire. Your journey has been long and the best sleep is always the sleep of arrival. We have, as you say, a comfortable fortnight in which to deepen our acquaintance. I’m sure, in the course of it, you will observe more than you wish to of the little humours of a brother and sister. I’ll see that your husband follows shortl
y after.’
Byron, however, took this as just the proof of alliance he was seeking. His drunkenness had climbed over the sullen foothills into a kind of windy elation, which was no less savage. ‘Come, come, we don’t want you, my charmer. Now that I’ve got Augusta, you’ll find I can do without you in all ways.’
She must in the end give in. Annabella hardly trusted herself to utter another word. Augusta, all gentleness, lit a candle for her and promised, in the open doorway, to soften Byron into something like sobriety before she sent him to bed. As she made her way up the shadowy unfamiliar stairs, Annabella resented, as much as anything else, her own childish weakness. She had meekly obeyed those from whom she sought comfort, in spite of the fact that what she submitted to was nothing more than their desire to be free of her. In the tally she began that moment to keep, she conceded to her new sister the opening point. As she undressed, however, in the cold strange room, the misery she felt seemed both simpler and harder to measure. The bed was lumpy and smelt of children, of their peculiar sweetness gone rather pleasantly stale. She found a stray brown curl against one of her pillows and rubbed it off between her palms. What if Byron was right? Sitting at the edge of the bed with her feet hanging free, she crossed her arms and held them against her middle. It seemed a lonely sort of burden to be growing within her.
Only by lying on her back could she settle the mattress into any sort of quiet, and quiet is what she wanted. She was listening with the full still fierceness of her considerable attention to the restless silence of a large country house—from which at last emerged a low inarticulate current of conversation. They were talking together, but their voices, by the time they reached her ears, had been thickened by the floorboards between them into hums and ahs. What she heard was a language reduced to its simplest sound and repeated; what it conveyed, eloquently, was only the fact of comfort, of intimacy. He had rested his hand against the back of hers on the cushion between them. Her face was the mirror of his, only softened, it seemed, by a dullness (almost silvery) in the reflection. From time to time a burst of laughter startled in Annabella the sense of lying awake. It sounded all the sweeter for the muffling of distance. ‘I only want a woman to laugh,’ Byron had said to her. ‘I can make Augusta laugh at anything.’ Laughter, she reflected, is just what one cannot, with the best will in the world, put on. A great shame: she trusted in nothing so much as her strength of will. But the laughter dried up, and she struggled in the darkness to keep track of the time that had passed—could it have been as long as an hour? had she fallen asleep?—before she heard her husband’s uncertain footstep on the stairs.
Chapter Eight
IN THEIR COURTSHIP—and Annabella could consider the facts of it whenever she liked, consisting as it did mainly in an exchange of letters, which she carried with her in a large blue calf-skin album—Lord Byron had presented himself to her as a man bearing the burden of a terrible secret. It had been at the time a positive pleasure for her, one of those rare occasions in the correspondence when she felt sure of the ground beneath her feet, to offer to relieve him of that burden as best she might. Her conscience was pure and light; she had plenty of strength left to support a few more sins. Now, in the face of his variable and violent moods, she saw it as her duty to honour that promise—if only for the sake of their common peace. The fact was (and she could acknowledge this truth almost with an inward smile) that he did behave towards her like a man with a burden to bear. He played, in other words, his part; and she felt now keenly the obligation to live up to hers.
In the mornings, Byron slept late, and Augusta and she had the freedom of his absence in which to establish their friendship. The children, at last, were properly introduced to their new aunt. Georgiana was the oldest, at six years, and conscious of that honour, the best behaved, though dirty. She was proud of her reading, and Annabella encouraged her in it, believing her to possess a character that might, with a little regulation, shape itself into propriety. Augusta Charlotte resembled her mother most, with sharp blue eyes and a face that had already begun to suffer the lengthening and rounding that would soften it into a perfect oval. She was pretty and silent and perfectly indifferent to instruction, which she endured and then ignored. George was the only boy, and Gus’s great favourite: he was just beginning to speak, and his mother adopted with him such childish barbarisms that Annabella could not quite restrain a show of disapproval. Augusta took so happily to the cooing of children that she seemed to prefer it to ordinary speech, and what appalled Annabella was the air Mrs Leigh had afterwards, when reverting to conversation, of adjusting, however fluently, to a foreign tongue. Her most natural expression seemed to be the comforting, meaningless sighs of motherhood. Annabella, with some jealousy, suspected Lord Byron himself of reposing in their relations on his sister’s simplest sympathies.
Byron was also jealous of the children, of the attention they demanded from Augusta, and his wife discovered that any interest she showed in them served to reinforce his sense of exclusion. It was a relief, indeed, to find him jealous of Georgiana, for sitting on her aunt’s lap and reading to her. His appetite for affection was so great that he could mind any loss of it, and Annabella consoled herself, in playing up to it, with the reflection that there could be nothing sinful in teasing kindness from him. He had little real interest in his nephews and nieces, however, with the exception of Medora; and he grew tired, even, of his own jealousy. Spaces opened up around the babies for Augusta and Annabella to get along in. When he was drunk, they learned to be grateful to the children for inspiring in their uncle the gentleness of indifference. Despairing, he retired to the library—they heard him sometimes reading aloud to himself to attract their notice. Medora alone awoke in him his talent for attachment. ‘I should like,’ Annabella said to Gus, ‘to have him painted when he is looking at Medora. The tenderness of his expression is remarkable.’ Byron overheard her. ‘You did not suppose, on the strength of our marriage, that I was incapable of love?’
The sisters, increasingly, took comfort in each other. The grounds at Six Mile Bottom had been carelessly maintained, but there was one dry path running through it, past a grove of fir trees, which obscured from the house a view of the farms behind. Whenever the weather was fine, the pair of them, arm in arm, seized the chance of escaping the glooms of the drawing room. Nature would, regardless of man’s neglect, refresh and beautify itself, and the first primroses as the fortnight wore on began to appear. The thick of their leaves flushed darkly in the gusts of spring. They were both, in spite of their new-found relation to each other, grateful enough for female company that they managed to keep up, on the surface of their intercourse, an easy intimacy; and it amazed Annabella how often it allowed them, almost painlessly, to touch on the deeper questions that afflicted them.
Augusta puzzled her more the better she knew her. The jealousy or ambivalence, to which she had at first attributed her sister-in-law’s reserve, struck her perhaps as merely the effect of shyness. There was in her manner an artlessness which Annabella seized on, from the beginning, as the means of that ascendancy she hoped to establish over her. Annabella herself, whatever her other virtues, could never aspire to artlessness. She had observed since childhood with great curiosity the growing divide between her real thoughts and their expression. The measure of her virtue, of the strict accounts she kept, was only the care with which she attempted to adapt one to the other. Yet she could find in her sister no sign of that care, no sign of such a divide. Augusta seemed unashamedly devoted to Annabella. The strangest effect of that devotion, and the really charming naivety with which she gave it a voice, was to silence for a time in Annabella just those reservations on which her sense of superiority usually relied.
‘I think I never saw or heard or read of a more perfect being in mortal mould,’ Augusta confessed on one of these walks, ‘than you appear to be.’ Even in that ‘appear’, Annabella, flattered in spite of herself, observed the ingenuousness of her good
intentions. ‘I have been raised, you know, in London as the indulged dependant of very grand relations. For all their kindnesses, I was never presented with a model of true female conduct and was forced to rely as best I could on my own nature, such as it is. What I wanted, in short,’ she added, ‘was a guide, a philosopher, and a friend; and I’m afraid my brother, loving as he is, was never suited to the role. I am delighted to call you sister, but what I long to call you, above everything else, is friend.’ Then, in a lower voice, she continued: ‘You know how much my brother and I are attached to each other, and I had feared that, by his marriage, I should be asked to give up a precious share of that attachment. And yet even in the friendship of a brother and a sister certain affections might be said to run their course, and I have found, in fact, by your addition, that my sisterly feelings have been renewed and strengthened, and diverted more properly to their object. To you, my dear.’
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