‘I should like to ask your advice,’ Lady Caroline began, after initial pleasantries, with her knees drawn up to her chin and her chair drawn up, as far as it might go, to the foot of the fire. ‘Your moral sense (you see, how freely I admit it) has always been sharper than mine—even, I believe, concerning events in which you have a personal stake. Lord Byron has confided in me that which if you merely menace him with the knowledge shall make him tremble. But I promised him solemnly, at the time, never to give him away; and I have been trying to calculate lately, in the light of your . . . situation, the force such a promise should continue to hold.’
Annabella restrained a smile. She might almost congratulate herself on how far she had come—the proof of which lay plainly in the fact that Lady Caroline presumed her still innocently ignorant of the depths to which her husband had committed himself with his sister. There was, perhaps, something unflattering in the thought that, by Caroline’s estimate, a woman as virtuous as Annabella could never have guessed the truth and remained, for so long, a party to it. Lady Byron, at least, was still innocent enough to make a pretence of it, and push her cousin into naming the deed. ‘You believe me, then,’ she said, biding her time, ‘to be in want of threats?’
‘Affairs with Lord Byron,’ Lady Caroline said, and Annabella felt, rising within her, the first little flare of contention at her choice of a word, ‘end always with threats, on the one hand, and indifference, on the other. I never had the luxury, as a means of keeping up relations, of a child; and I supposed you, wrongly it may be, in want of security against the chance that he might claim her.’
Annabella was equal to the simplest confession. ‘Dr Lushington has hopes, and these are the hopes I live in.’
They rarely looked at each other. Caroline, who apologized at one point for the chill in the room, fixed her eyes on the fire; and Annabella, who had perched at the end of the chaise longue, which offered likewise a view of the gravelled grounds, was moved to imitate her by a strange sort of sympathy. A quiet flame on a bright morning just suited something ghostly in her mood. She was conscious of being at the heart or centre, as it were, of a particular mode of feeling. They could almost pride themselves on being, as lovers of the famous poet, the best, most powerful illustrations of his work; and there was, in the knowledge, the intimate complicity of shared privilege.
‘I would like to help you,’ Lady Caroline offered, ‘and I’m perfectly willing to admit that my intentions in the past have never been so pure.’ Annabella sensed in this a helpless sort of boasting, regarding an earlier triumph; but she met it, humbly enough, with the private reflection that whatever Lady Caroline had to tell, she had more amply, more exquisitely, endured first-hand. Her silence was suitably expectant, and Caroline continued, ‘I wondered if you could relieve me a little of the guilt—either of staying quiet, where a word might save you, or of breaking a promise I was solemnly bound to keep.’
Annabella flattered herself that this was the sort of question on which she could exercise her wit with the greatest distinction, and she answered it with the slightly awkward sensation of being indulged in her vanities. ‘We are taught,’ she said eventually, ‘that virtue follows always a single path. Where it appears to split, we may be sure of being offered, among the alternatives, a turn for the worse. Truth has only one path, though it needs at times a sharp eye to distinguish it from the false. By making vows we bind ourselves to keep to a single road, many miles before we can guess the course it will take. Yet God allows us only, by his sanction, to commit ourselves to Truth, and where such a vow appears to prevent us from honouring that commitment, we are entitled to ask whether his sanction was ever given.’ After a pause, she added: ‘You may guess that these are questions which have occupied of late my sleepless hours, for the vows I took I called on my God to witness. But I take comfort from the thought, that He who sees everything sees just as clearly the darkness in which we look for His intentions.’
It was then Lady Caroline’s turn to smile, and Annabella drew on all of her fine propriety not to mirror her in it. She felt almost, in their delicate courtesies, the pleasant formality of a dance, which reminded her of nothing so much as the fated waltz, which Caroline had put on and where she had first met her husband. If only, and this was the thought that threatened to break out in her face, Herr Wohlkrank himself were present to guide their steps! Their tone, she was perfectly willing to suppose, was dreadful enough. She felt, although a party to it, the tiniest trace of pity, like a thread on the lips, for Lord Byron himself. He had always complained, after all, of the scruples of women, from which he had suffered both ways—in what they refused him, and in what they obliged him to accept. Oh, Byron’s women! and the sensation recurred within her of living, at a high pitch, in the very refinement of that mode of feeling which Lord Byron’s eloquence had made so brilliantly public. It rose up in her like a bright little streak of effervescence in a glass of champagne. What was really delightful was the thought that Lady Caroline, in spite of her huddled-up air, must be feeling it, too, that they were feeling it together. Their sympathies, however, had been sharpened by nothing so much as the habit of rivalry; Annabella recognized the danger of being cut.
Caroline began to address herself to the fire in a low tone. From the time of Mrs Leigh’s arrival in Bennet Street, in the year 1813, Lord Byron had given her various intimations of a criminal intercourse between them, from which he had, at several stages, attempted to desist. These intimations had broken at last into an open avowal, which he had offered Caroline in a hope not unkind of blasting at the root that affection for his person, which had swelled on occasion (and still continued to surge) into an ungovernable obsession, and from which they had both violently, separately, suffered. But the overwhelming force (and this was, Annabella flattered herself, Lady Caroline’s best attempt at a little thrust) of his brotherly affection prevented him from giving up the only relation in which he had found, with an equal ease, his passions sated and his heart consoled. There was a pause; and Annabella felt obliged, for the sake of her own pretended innocence, to fill it with a suitable measure of horror. Just what that measure should be, it struck her for the first time (with a shiver of the real thing), she was no longer, in fact, innocent enough to gauge; but she wished, in any case, to make a display of repugnance that would still give a point to what was really her larger experience of her husband’s delinquencies.
‘The truth of this (and the only hope of its suppression, if it is true, is that such depravity must be faced before it can be proved) would expose Lord Byron and, which is still more to be feared, Mrs Leigh, to a condemnation so severe that its taint might reach, I dread to think it, even to me. I fancy, my dear Caroline,’ she had decided to admit to what she could not conceal, ‘that you had counted on, perhaps, a less calculated aversion; but the fact is, my relations with Lord Byron have taught me, if nothing else, never to be shocked.’
Lady Caroline looked up at her guest. Annabella’s last words might really have struck her as nothing more than a challenge to be met, for she continued: ‘There were worse crimes. He confessed to me once, in that sickness of his own sins which always inspired in him a run of talk, that from his boyhood he had been in the practice of unnatural crime. The boy Rushton, by whom he had been attended as a page, was one of those whom he had corrupted—for the sake of an appetite which, as you have no doubt heard, I was guilty in my desperation of playing up to, in the mistaken belief that a more natural outlet for those passions might suspend in him the unnatural desire to satisfy them. I do not believe that he has committed this crime since returning to England, though he indulged in it unrestrictedly in Turkey. His own horror of the act still appeared to be so great that he several times turned quite faint and sick in alluding to the subject; and the worst to be feared, from an impersonal view of his separation, is that it might push him to return to those scenes in which he had so little proved himself capable of self-restraint.’
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Annabella was almost gratified to find, in the course of this speech, her powers of disgust renewed. They were as fresh and strong as ever, although she was prevented from making a show of her feelings by a little twist of the knife, in whose use Lady Caroline remained so beautifully proficient. ‘I confess,’ Caroline continued, ‘that I have always shrunk from the contemplation of an act which is not only repugnant in itself, but whose practice is sufficiently vague that one might be said to regard its specific details with a horror that approaches incomprehension.’ This was, in the first faint glimmer of understanding, the reflection that brought a hot sudden blush to Annabella’s cheeks. She had wondered once, after the shock of her suspicions of Augusta, just what, if the worst were true, the effect of it might be on her own steady virtue—in the falter of which (she hardly dared, even now, to give a name or a thought to what they had done together) she believed at the time to have found the sharpest answer. She had hoped, indeed, to keep that secret, if only by virtue of the fact that it was just so unspeakable. What struck her most forcefully in her cousin’s last remark (it was about as cold and vivid as a bucket of water) was the sense that Caroline had managed, almost, to give it a voice. Annabella began to see, as if the low grey land were spreading around her, just how exposed in the general dawn of their separation her own private self might become.
There seemed to her afterwards no clearer measure of just how great, as she privately put it, her emergence had been than the fact that Caroline’s words struck her so entirely as a challenge to be met. ‘I see, my dear,’ she managed to get out, when her hot little blush had grown cooler, ‘just the necessity you felt of breaking your promise. It isn’t, of course, for my sake that I thank you. The most hardened wretch would not have consigned my own poor girl to the education she would likely receive at the hands of her father. And neither of us, I believe,’ she added, with what was really, in the circumstances, the sweetest of smiles, ‘is a hardened wretch.’
That was the phrase on which their interview ended, though it hung in the air and seemed, as she rose to take her leave, rather to swell than recede. It gave them both a colour and, perversely, brightened them by the contrast it suggested: as a dark frame might bring to life a portrait of rosy cheeks. What things those two quiet and frail examples of the feminine had proved capable of considering, in the whitest light of their curiosity—considering, and enduring, and plotting to adapt to their own advantage. They were certainly hardened, and one of them, at least, was wretched enough. Caroline had remained, as Annabella turned in the door, huddled palely in the light of the fire, at which she continued to stare. Hers, it seemed, was the kind of loneliness that had begun to grow, at its edges, quietly permeable. It spilled out even in company; she returned to it almost before she had lifted her cheek to receive the quick kiss of farewell.
Annabella stopped then, for a moment, in the space her retraction offered, to consider her cousin. Here was a fine fractious restless powerful nature, and this is what had become of it. She had compressed herself, remarkably, to the expression of a single theme. One practically winced, taking her in, at the repetition of that high thin note: no child had ever amused itself at the piano with so stubborn a finger. Annabella was determined to give to the music of her own suffering a larger harmony; she was confident, at least, of drowning out every competing noise. The lesson, really, was that if a life could be spent in mourning what was lost, then the least that might make it acceptable was a kind of pre-eminence. She was living, once more, to win. This was the thought that offered, as soon as the door shut behind her, its own consolation. As she strode the length of the corridor, the sole soft quick living thing amid the procession of statues that lined its ochred walls, she indulged in the whimsy of one day taking her place among them. Lady Byron, at least, was a title that no one could take from her; it would look very fine on a bust.
At the bottom of the stairs, in the tiled, echoing hall of Melbourne House, Annabella was startled by the sudden entrance of her aunt. Lady Melbourne swayed against the frame of the door, which led to her own apartments. ‘I hope you know what you are about,’ she said. The pallor of her countenance was almost ghostly. It was like a vision of her father, long-faced, with the little thickening aged bruise of bone under her eyes, and the dishevelment of loose hair and too much powder. ‘Lord Byron will never suffer for you as you suffer for him. Caroline can tell you, it’s a thankless task.’ And then, inconsequently: ‘Remember, it’s a very long life.’ She had the staring interrupted air of instant waking; perhaps she had been listening out for Annabella’s step. ‘I hope you know exactly what you are about,’ she repeated. Annabella was so surprised by her appearance, its urgent disordered sincerity, that she could only back away from her aunt, bowing and offering respects, as Jennings held for her, against the changeable spring winds, the opened door.
Chapter Six
WHAT SHE WAS ABOUT BECAME, in the next few weeks, mercifully clearer to Annabella. Lady Caroline’s secret was safely confided to Dr Lushington, who promised to make the force of it felt by a canny suppression. He held out great hopes of what he called a ‘complete satisfaction’. That, of course, was beyond his power to secure; but Lord Byron himself had given, within days, a generous off-hand assurance that he had no designs on the child. It was his intention to go abroad again, and the life he planned to pursue, though large in scope, was not sufficiently immense to include within it the encumbrance either of a wife or of a child. On April the 21st (the onset of spring, to Annabella, carried always a heavy burden of recollection; it suggested to her only the renewal of old griefs), he signed the separation papers, and within a few days he was gone. Dr Lushington, who had sent to Dover what he called a ‘professional witness’, wrote at last to Annabella these consoling words. ‘Lord Byron, as promised, has departed these shores amidst a general hubbub made up of the curiosity to see him—which was so great at the inn where he had resided, that many ladies accoutred themselves as chambermaids for the purpose of obtaining, under that disguise, a nearer inspection of what they supposed might become, as one of them put it to the agent I had sent to make sure of him, a “famous farewell”.’
Well, she had made her own farewell, some months before, and without the recourse to any disguise whatsoever. She must learn to accustom herself, henceforth, to the way women ‘threw themselves’ at the man who was still, as far as her title to him was concerned, her husband. Annabella was sufficiently acquainted with Lord Byron’s habits and appetites to admit that the truth of ‘his relations’ was at least as rich and various as the rumours to which they gave rise. There was one rumour, however, in particular, that touched her much more closely. It was all she could do, in fact, not to squirm at the pressure, and the only relief she discovered was to make of her great discomfort a sharp occasion for acting. Lord Byron, it was said, intended, once he had established himself on the continent (at Geneva, in all probability: he was supposed to have taken a fancy to the prospect of boating, placidly enough, on an inland sea), to send for Augusta.
Lady Byron decided to call on her old friend Mary Montgomery. She had seen her, perhaps, once or twice since her marriage as they made the rounds of the London scene together, but the presence of her husband had seemed, in Mary’s eyes, to make of her friend’s perfection a significant difference. Annabella, who had always been pretty and clever and good, had become famous, too; and it was a part of Mary’s modesty—though Annabella felt it at the time, painfully enough, as a kind of reproach—to hesitate to approach her in the dazzle of Lord Byron’s reflected brilliance. Miss Montgomery, of course, had never married, and Annabella had been conscious of indulging, as a balm to her wounded feelings, a sweet tooth for pity at the prospects of her invalid friend. The recollection of this, in the aftermath of her separation, sufficiently shamed her—although she was honest enough to admit that where the sense of shame was so general, it was difficult to be particular about its cause—that she had failed since her
return to London to pay a visit to the broad pleasant house on Wilmot Street.
Miss Montgomery had not changed: that was the truth the sight of her gave instantly back. Annabella was shown on her arrival into the little front room on the first floor, where Mary sat, with a chair for her feet, by the fire. It was a grey watery changeless sort of a day, rather dark than cold. Lady Byron, who had walked all the way from Cumberland Place, blushed in the close air of Mary’s apartment, which smelt entirely, and sweetly, of her friend: of buttered cakes and books and the branches of fir she scattered from time to time across the fire, where they smoked and glinted. Mary shifted the rug from her knees and swung her feet to the floor and just rose up, not from her seat, but on tiptoes, to offer a hand to her friend. ‘Sit here, my dear,’ she said, pulling a fold of the rug from the empty chair with an intimate insistent manner that almost brought a tear to Annabella’s eyes, at its easy resumption. ‘I have been stretched out all morning till I am perfectly roasted. And I want you near to me today, very near.’ It was her quiet little mention of ‘today’—quite as if she had been coming every morning for weeks—that peculiarly touched Annabella. It suggested that even in absentia their friendship had grown and demanded the freshness of variety.
Mary herself, however, was just what she had been. It was almost as if, Annabella reflected, invalidism in her friend was nothing more than the language of constancy. She looked frail, pale, and cheerful in a deep-red dress with puffed sleeves that showed to delicate advantage her slender arms. She looked gently declining, though wasting away seemed to involve her only in the ease of a downward slope. She looked tidy and careful, well-layered in a cashmere shawl, and politely amused: she looked, in fact, utterly unchanged. Three years had passed since the pair of them had sat in that room comparing the virtues of Lord Byron and Mr Eden, and for the first time in months Annabella was grateful for what had been so eventful a passage. She could congratulate herself, at least, on having picked up along the way an accumulation—of what, she wouldn’t have liked to say, except that she felt in the presence of her old friend by contrast a kind of addition. She was not what she had been, and the difference might also be counted as an increase in force. Mary, she remembered, had been used in their friendship to exercise the superior ironies of her detachment. These, she presumed, had been unblunted by time, but Annabella grew conscious in the course of their interview of the still keener edge of her own experience. It was a pleasure, almost, to feel the weight of it bear.
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