Annabella was almost disarmed. She had believed to trace in her new sister the conscious airs of a rival. Perhaps, it occurred to her at last, the air she moved in was really her own. She had, in truth, no one else to blame for finding the proofs of rivalry so generally prevalent in her acquaintance. The ‘play of manner’, which Annabella had imputed to Augusta on their first encounter, she now assigned a simpler source: the efficient grace of perfect innocence. But then, the idea of ‘innocence’ hardly did justice to the particular quality of Byron’s sister. Augusta seemed to possess, truly, helplessly, the virtues of gentleness, of sympathy, of honesty. One found in her so little the effects of regulation only because the materials of which she was composed so little required it. And yet there was in her unwitting goodness a real indifference to her own virtues, which might just as easily, Annabella presumed, allow to the darkest and most sinful desires their free expression.
Each night the pattern of their arrival was repeated. After supper, her husband sent Annabella up to bed, where she lay listening, as best she could, and drifting in and out of sleep. Their laughter, she was relieved to hear, broke out as the week wore on more rarely than at first; and Byron, when he came up at last, seemed anything but happy. He took up less and less (it was a phrase she echoed back at him) his conjugal subscription—a fact that Annabella could attribute, if she liked, to that awkwardness or restriction which he had complained of in their personal intercourse. Still, she offered to do what she could to please him. She placed herself entirely in his hands, on the one condition, that he trusted himself freely to hers. There was nothing, she bravely gave him to understand, they need stop short at, and among the duties she promised willingly to perform was the part of his confessor. It had occurred to her, as if for the first time, that Lord Byron was suffering not in show only but from the real burden of a secret sin; that the pressure she applied against him to trust in her might finally persuade him to confide it; and that she might not much like the truth of his confession. She had been proceeding in marriage with the air of a swimmer who closes her eyes against the torrent, to stave off the more painful blindness that would afflict her if she opened them too soon. But she must open her eyes at last, and the courage to see, to feel, to understand, was just what she had always counted on to make up for the absence in her character of gentler and more feminine virtues. Really, she could almost laugh: Lord Byron could not have chosen for himself a wife more different from his sister.
Even so, the full extent of what his confession might stretch to nearly took her breath away. A few mornings after their arrival, Augusta received a parcel in the post; Lord Byron was particularly anxious to watch her open it. It seemed to put him in the best, most mischievous of spirits. He had reached the stage in which Annabella was grateful even to those good humours that exercised themselves at her expense. Augusta, with the unforced excitement of a child, tore off the string and wrapping. There were two brooches inside, of simple gold and marked with little crosses. They each contained a strand of woven hair and differed from each other only in the letter inscribed upon them, an A and a B. ‘Do they please you?’ Lord Byron said to his sister, with real gentleness, and pinning to her breast the second of these. ‘Are they pretty? The hair, of course, belongs to both of us, though I can’t distinguish yours from mine. We are so much alike. Do you think Pip can guess what the crosses signify?’ Augusta blushed at this, though Annabella could not be sure that it wasn’t only from the pleasure of adjusting the brooch on her dress and observing the effect of it in the hall-mirror. Afterwards, Byron asked his sister to pin the other brooch, inscribed with her initial, against his coat-pocket. ‘You remember,’ he said, while she was fussing under his chin, ‘of course, how we passed our time at Newstead?’
For the rest of the fortnight, Augusta never appeared without that mark of Byron’s affection: the little gold pin etched with crosses and containing a braid of their hair. It began to haunt Annabella and suggested to her imagination the most horrible intimacies, of a type from which her own poor relation of wife could only exclude her. She watched for it with a jealous eye and walked distractedly down to breakfast every morning, lost in the most absurd speculations. Had Augusta forgotten, perhaps, to wear it? or to what piece of her dress had she chosen to attach it that day? Her obsession with that testament to her husband’s brotherly feeling grew into a source of real shame. She supposed herself, at times, to be going mad, and she hardly dared to explore the scope of her suspicions for fear that the symbol she had fixed on, as the proof of them, would seem to a stranger’s eye so slight and innocent. Only once, on one of their walks, was she emboldened to raise the subject with her sister, in the belief that Augusta herself had introduced it.
It was a bright morning after a wet night. The breeze, though cool, had the expansion, the lightness, of a warmer wind, and had tempted them into the open air from the fire of the drawing room—where they had been waiting, awkwardly enough, for Lord Byron to descend. ‘I am sorry to say,’ it was Augusta who broke the silence, once they were safely away from the house, ‘that his nerves and spirits are very far from what we could wish them. One mustn’t, of course, breathe a word of this to him on any account.’ After a pause, she continued: ‘He has every blessing this world can bestow. I have been, among all your other virtues, admiring your forbearance. You very judiciously abstain from—pressing him at the present moment. He would likely, if pushed, give away a great deal more than the truth.’ Annabella was honest enough and vain enough to take pleasure from such praise, though she knew quite well that a little pressing, on various points, was just what she had decided to permit herself. It occurred to her, of course, that Augusta had only been dressing up a piece of advice as admiration. But she believed her sister-in-law to be one of those women who acted, as it were, from cause alone; Augusta seemed incapable of calculating, to such a degree, her effects.
They had been walking through the darkness of the grove of firs. A noisy gust scattered upon them a few drops of wet, and then they emerged, happily, into the wide green space of fields. Augusta had been relieved to find, she added, stopping and taking her sister’s hands, that Annabella didn’t mind too much his little insinuations. It was only his confessional instinct, which was very strong. He could never bear to keep a thought to himself and ‘suggests all sorts of doleful things, which have no reality but in the fervency of his imagination.’ Still, he could not help believing them to be (and Annabella never forgot this phrase) ‘as bad as if they were true. One is only playing up to the worst of his famous melancholy by taking him at his word.’ A little laughter, she had found (adapting her brother’s meaning), could shake off a great deal of misery. He was only unhappy by conviction; luckily, his convictions were neither deep nor steady. ‘It was perhaps the duty of his wife not to trust in him. He is easily managed, so long as one doesn’t mind what he says.’ Augusta had set between them the very question that had occupied Annabella—what, exactly, had Lord Byron been saying?—though whether it was with an air of putting the matter to rest or taking it up at last, Annabella could not determine. She was tempted, indeed, to take it up, but it seemed at the time too decided a step. Lying out, then, and unremarked upon is where she left it.
Afterwards, she had occasion to reflect that her confidence of assuming in their relations the decisive role had suffered something of a blow. Consolation lay, perhaps, in the fact of her youth: she was not yet twenty-three, and Augusta had, for all her naivety, the benefit of seven long years of motherhood behind her. There was also the simple fact of Annabella’s loneliness. She had entered by marriage a family of strangers, and she could not condemn herself too severely for deferring to their sense of her position. After a silence, which Augusta had allowed her to fill, Lady Byron only observed that ‘it was a relief, after the wilful confusions of the picturesque, to stare out at the long level prospect of working land.’ Gus, however, was not to be put off, and Annabella felt, by her insistence, duly chast
ened. ‘The fact is,’ she said, with one of her bursts into clarity and candour, ‘he hopes by these games to set us against each other. I am quite determined not to be pushed. You mustn’t be either, my dear.’
‘You mean,’ Annabella offered at last, ‘by the brooches?’
But it was the wrong note. ‘Oh, the brooches . . .’ Augusta made a gesture with her hand. ‘You’ve seen for yourself, I’m sure, how generous he is.’
The game of setting the sisters against each other began that night in earnest: Augusta’s warning, it seemed, had ushered in the event. It was as if her brother had set out especially to make her meaning clear.
After supper at Six Mile Bottom, it was their habit to retire together to the drawing room, where Augusta would join them again after kissing her children goodnight. Lord Byron drank brandy and fell asleep over a book, and his young wife used to occupy herself more soberly at the desk in the third window, answering letters. She was a dutiful correspondent and marked the receipt and reciprocation of each letter in a diary she reserved for the purpose. She also recorded the subject of the exchange, along with any personal reflections it had inspired in her. Annabella had been used, in the course of their honeymoon, to read to her husband extracts from their protracted epistolary affair. She had hoped to remind him—trusting, with reasonable presumption, to the effect on the poet of something like literary proof—of his love for her. The diary allowed her, if she liked, quickly to find, amidst the mass of her correspondence, a certain line or sentiment. She had often referred to it before selecting a passage from their letters, whose tone and substance, she supposed, would be most soothing to his exacerbated feelings.
This diary was his abhorrence. He particularly resented the way she recorded in it and reflected upon those letters from his sister, which she had been receiving almost daily during their stay at Halnaby and afterwards at Seaham. Her remarks on Augusta’s style and penmanship were not always flattering, especially at first. And as he had been observing, with a jealous eye, the increase of intimacy their relations had enjoyed from the habit of daily intercourse at Six Mile Bottom, it occurred to him to expose to his sister what he believed to be the real character of his wife’s affections, by reading out to Augusta the quiet ironic commentary Annabella had made upon their correspondence. One evening, Augusta came down from the darkened quiet of her children’s bedrooms to find Lord Byron, it seemed, being assaulted by his wife. He stood laughing in front of the fire with his arm raised above his head, while Annabella, at his back, clung to his shoulder and attempted to reach the book he was holding in his hand.
The sight of her sister-in-law persuaded Annabella to desist. She disliked, above all, any show of disharmony in their married life—or rather, any show of her own deeply felt resentment at his treatment. So long, she believed, as she could seem not to mind him, there might really appear to be nothing to mind. Byron, released, sat down in one of the easy chairs by the hearth and began to read quietly. Annabella, with a forced laugh, complained that her husband ‘was being terribly provoking. She had never known what it was to have a brother, and now she was almost glad of the fact. They contributed very little to one’s peace.’ Augusta could only smile at that, with a grave little smile; she wanted to see what Byron was reading. After a minute, he gave them a specimen of it, in an off-hand manner that suggested he had just come across something amusing. ‘Her penmanship is fluent rather than strict. It is the writing of a child too soon thrust into the duties of womanhood, with her character hardly yet fixed. One feels, almost plaintively, the appeal of her innocence. She is as supple as a child and wriggles from one feeling to the next without any concern for consistency, just as they suit her purpose. I should not exactly like to call it innocence myself—and yet I am almost grateful for it and feel, instinctively, the superior strength of regulation. There is something, indeed, in the tone she takes in relation to her brother, an overripe sweetness, an air of too much certainty, that suggests our intercourse will take the form of a contest of loves . . .’
At this point, Annabella, who had not yet sat down, made a fierce little rush at him and, with a cry, rescued the diary from his hands. Augusta said nothing, and Lord Byron, who, after all, had offered scant resistance, seemed pleased enough with the progress of his experiment to permit its momentary interruption. In fact, he spent the rest of the evening in the best of spirits and kissed Annabella into something like quietude again, leaving her only to resent that her husband’s good humour was instantly persuasive while, with the best intentions, her own high spirits struggled to awake in him any sympathetic response. Augusta and she never once referred to the matter. Their growing intimacy, in fact, was marked, like the leaf of a blighted tree, with little spots or blemishes of silence. These seemed to be everywhere multiplying, so that the sisters found, in spite of their increased familiarity, less and less to communicate to each other as the fortnight wore on—a consequence, no doubt, in keeping with Lord Byron’s intention.
The evenings are what Annabella learned particularly to dread. Lord Byron, who rose late, spent the afternoons in a state of slothfulness more or less pleasant. The first effect of drink on him (and he drank steadily: a flask of brandy stood by his bed to relieve not only his bouts of insomnia but the shock of daybreak) was cheerful enough; only the nights brought out his savagery. After supper the next day, he took it into his head to amuse his wife and sister by reading to them extracts from his own correspondence with Augusta. Byron had discovered the box in which she kept their letters, somewhat jumbled together. He had spent a very pleasant afternoon, he said, reading them through, tidying them into sequence, and selecting, from the crowd of trivial affections, a few ‘choice bits’. Annabella had given him the idea. He flattered himself, he added, that she would be interested to hear the details of a relationship that had been the refuge of his youth (confined, as he had been, to the company of an ill-bred, ugly, violently doting mother) and the consolation of his manhood, after the effects of sudden fame had thrust upon him, as it were, an uncomplimentary view of the decency and good sense of her sex. He wanted her to see, above all, what it was he had given up for her—that she was not the only one in their marriage who had relinquished for the sake of it what he called ‘the comforts of home’.
It was Augusta’s turn to be horrified. She came down after supper to discover Lord Byron in his easy chair, with the box on the floor supporting a glass of sherry, and a heap of letters on his lap. ‘I am sure,’ she said, wringing her hands together, ‘there is nothing of interest in them to anyone but ourselves. I am such a bad hand; you always complain of it to me. You’ll strain your eyes.’
‘Nonsense, Gussie,’ he said. But she would not sit down, and as he began to read, she stood by his shoulder with her back to the fire, looking unhappily on. The flatness in the jointure of her nose and forehead had a stubborn, childish persistence. If this was her protest, Annabella considered, she could be made to endure a great deal quietly. Lord Byron took no notice and managed to put into his voice something of his sister’s most gossipy manner. ‘I wonder, my dear, if you know Miss Elphinstone. She is reckoned very beautiful, though shy. At least, she hasn’t any of those practised airs you often complain of in women. She eats with great appetite; she rides five times a week; and she scarcely puts seven words together from one afternoon to the next. She has become a great favourite of mine. When we walk out together in St James’s, or go promenading through the park, all the men stare at her and listen to me; which, I believe, is much the best way round. Her father, they say, is rich as Croesus. I know for a fact that he buys a new horse once a month. In short, I recommend her to you in the character of wife, which article, I am told, you have been shopping for. You might be pushed to get more than one word out of her—though that, I believe, is as much as you need.’
‘Come,’ Augusta said quietly, ‘put them away. For my sake, if not hers.’
Byron, ignoring her, picked up anot
her letter. ‘Well (he writes in reply), you have lined them up very prettily, only they won’t stand still long enough for me to take a sight of them. As Krausnitz said, outside the walls of Vestograd, “I’m dammed if I’ll shoot at them, when they won’t keep their heads up.” I wonder at your diligence, which makes me glad, I am sorry to say, of your own priceless piece of foolishness. Colonel Leigh has spared me, at least, the trouble of finding an imbecile for you. Much as I love you, I should not like to perform a similar service, my dear. But, as you say, I can “judge for myself” and a pretty piece of judgement it is. You shall hear. Last night at Earl Grey’s, or rather this morning (about two by the account of the said Aurora), in one of the cooler rooms, sitting in the corner of a great chair, I observed Mr Rogers not far off colloquizing with your friend, Miss Elphinstone. What seized me I know not, but I desired him to introduce me, at which he expressed much good humour. To my astonishment, after a minute or so, up comes Rogers with your Miss E at the pas de charge of introduction. The bow was made, the curtsey returned, and so far “excellent well”, all except the disappearance of the said Rogers, who immediately marched off, leaving us in the middle of a huge apartment with about twenty scattered pairs all employed in their own concerns. While I was thinking of nothing to say, the Lady began—“A friend of mine—a great friend of yours”—and stopped. I wondered, heavy-hearted, if she meant my Carolinian, for there was something in her tone that suggested an indiscretion, as if she were putting between us the name of a lover. But then I remembered your letter and ventured, “Perhaps you mean a relation.” “Oh yes, a relation,” she said and stopped again. Finding this would never do, and being myself beginning to break down into shyness, I uttered your respectable name and prattled I know not what syllables. We went on for about three minutes, until we parted in a cloud of courtesies, for never did two people seem to know less what they said or did. Afterwards, I was surprised to find a real melancholy descending, for though I never much liked talking nonsense, I wasn’t used to feeling it so painfully. On reflection, the cause of it struck me as simple enough. What strange parts I play, my dear sister, to please you—or rather, to satisfy your respectable sense of what will do me good, though I have always much preferred your disrespectable senses . . .’
A Quiet Adjustment Page 18
