A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘Now I won’t ask you how you are,’ Mary began. ‘Everyone, I’m sure, is always asking you that, and I have long been determined, as you know, to be unlike everyone. I will call for more tea. I believe we still have a few cherry tarts.’ She lifted from the recesses of her lap a little silver bell and gave it a tinkling shake. ‘And I will try in the meantime to think what the devil I can ask you that isn’t that.’ After a pause: ‘Have you seen the new dresses at Delacourt’s?’ There was a knock at the door, and one of the maids appeared, curtseying. ‘Tea, please, Lizzy,’ Mary said, ‘and have we still any cherry tarts?’

  ‘Yes, miss. Two or three, from dinner.’

  ‘We’ll have them all.’ And then, when the girl had gone: ‘Have you been lately to Vauxhall?’

  ‘I have not,’ Lady Byron answered, smiling, ‘nor have I seen the dresses at Delacourt’s. But I have not come to you, my dear Mary, to talk of nothing. I talk of nothing all day. Except with my mother: she talks to me of the law. But between Nothing and the Law, I trust, there is still enough room for a conversation.’

  ‘May I ask you then anything?’ Mary said. ‘Shall I take your hand and kiss it and say, was it very terrible, the company of men?’

  ‘If you do, I shall answer: it was a great deal like the company of women, only lonelier and less various.’ She hesitated, to give her friend a minute to consider the possible scope of such consistency, and then, taking her courage in both hands, continued: ‘Though as for that, there were women enough, I believe, in the house of my marriage. I am sure you have heard the rumours of one in particular. No, I have come, in fact, after too long an absence to ask something of you—a favour.’

  Mary, in the pause, reached out for another stick of fir. These were stored in a basket beside the fire, and as she stooped towards it, a book fell out of the folds of her rug onto the floor between them. She pulled a branch from the cluster of branches and threw it on the flames; they watched it crackle and flare and turn black. Sparks flew up into the chimney, and the ash of the needles sighed and bent away from the wood. When it was quite burned out, Annabella glanced down at the book, which lay open at the spine. It was a copy of Childe Harold. Mary looked her frankly in the eye, with a twitch of amusement in her lips. Then, more soberly, she said, ‘You asked me once before for my advice; I gave it. I don’t believe it did you much good. I would willingly give you anything else you wanted of me, but I am rich, I believe, only in advice, which is a poor sort of thing to be rich in.’

  Lady Byron stooped to retrieve the volume and spread it across her lap. She began quietly to read. Mary, somewhat ashamed for once, held her tongue. She had not supposed herself in a position to be ‘caught out’ and was annoyed at having to admit to the role. She watched her friend turn a page. Annabella might have been reciting a passage from it, when she said at last, ‘I am told you are acquainted with a woman by the name of Thérèse de Villiers.’

  ‘Yes, I know her. She has something to do with the court and is very silly: vain as a peacock, though perfectly featherless. Ugly, I mean. She is stupid, though fancies herself clever, because she says what others daren’t—in which respect, I suppose, she is rather like me. Who told you I knew her? It isn’t a thing one would generally like to be known.’

  ‘She did. She said you would vouch for her character.’

  Mary, after a moment, was equal to the highest good humour. ‘Have I vouched?’

  Annabella met it. ‘As much, perhaps, as I require. We have begun a sort of correspondence—that is, she has been writing to me about her very dear friend Mrs Leigh. She believed that I had mistreated her. At least, she believed that my sister-in-law had suffered more in this affair than was generally admitted to, and that a word in season (I was the only one placed to make it) might have helped her to repair the damage to her character. I explained to her how reluctant I was, for reasons that I trusted were abundantly plain, to pay Augusta a visit.’ Annabella stopped and seemed to reconsider; she had an air of beginning again. ‘We were once, I confess, very close, sisters in affection as well as in name, which is why I believed that her striking resemblance to Lord Byron, and the still-living tenderness of our mutual relations, would have occasioned me in the aftermath of the separation a fresh pang. It was quite like a proposition in logic: if A, then B, and then C. But since the middle term had been proven, as I might safely put it, erroneous . . .’

  She was spared, however, from completing her thought; Lizzy entered with a tray, which she set down on the table beside her mistress’s chair. Mary dismissed her and began to pour the tea. That was the noise against which Annabella continued her little confession. ‘I had decided in any case, for the sake of my own happiness, to detach myself from the affairs of that family. Rumours, of course, had begun to circulate about them, and I positively assured Mrs Villiers that not one of the reports now current had been sanctioned or encouraged by me, or by my family, or by my friends. I could not, in consequence, consider myself in any degree responsible for them.’

  Miss Montgomery, with a quizzical look, offered a cup to her friend. ‘I presume the matter rested there.’

  Annabella lifted it to her face and blew against it. ‘I have recently been given grounds for reconsidering my position. Lord Byron, I am told, once his household is established, intends for his sister to join him. It has always, I believe, been one of his fondest hopes to set up a home with her. I have been guilty, perhaps, in the past few months, of an occasional indifference to the plight of my sister; but I am not cruel. I should never like it to be said that I was cruel, and I am determined not to stand idly by while Augusta, in all the waywardness of her affectionate nature, consigns herself to ruin.’ She collected her thoughts. Her voice had grown somewhat heated, and she more softly said, ‘I have been searching lately for a suitable purpose. My time had been so busily occupied, in the year preceding, with being miserable. I was married to misery; that, as I like to think of it, was the marriage that failed. And the worst of my unhappiness was that it has made me selfish. I wish to devote myself—it is really a question of finding my feet again and looking around—for the space of a day, or a week together, to somebody other than poor Lady B. I believe I could devote myself to Augusta. I believe she needs it.’ When Mary continued silent, Annabella added, ‘You have not asked me about the nature of these reports.’

  But Miss Montgomery still hesitated. ‘What is she like?’ she said at last.

  ‘I owe her a great deal.’

  It was not an answer to her question, and Mary let the silence that followed give a point to the fact. Eventually, Lady Byron continued: ‘I was very much in love with my husband. You have not, from a tact, Mary, that is quite unlike you, questioned my feelings about him. If in the reckoning of our married love we came up just shy of the required sum, then the dearth lay all on his side. It is not necessary to think ill of his heart in general, but to me it was hard and impenetrable enough that my own must have broken before his had been touched. As long as I live, my chief difficulty will probably be not to remember him too kindly.’ She bit into a cherry tart and brushed the crumbs from her lips; her complacence was just as formidable a display as the wildest courage. ‘Augusta, who was in so many ways his sister, failed just in that respect to live up to the family character. There was something in her capacity as a receiving vessel that was not quite passive. She is almost made for love, and I am perfectly conscious of the implication carried by that phrase and the extent to which my own poor feeling nature might be said to fall short of such a description. The channel of my affections, which had on the whole been thwarted by my husband’s coldness, turned gratefully into her open heart; and there were times when one of her kind words or touches made the difference for me between life and death.’

  Annabella guessed that the credulity of her friend would never stretch to such high drama. It was the taint of the Byrons, Mary might easily suspect, to colour everythin
g so richly; and Annabella began, carefully, to defend herself against the charge of exaggeration. ‘You know, my dear, how little I like to be dependent, and you may well imagine that I was capable of loving her only upon the condition of my own advantage. I had no doubt of my superiority in many respects, in virtue and understanding, though I could not with confidence build upon my sister-in-law’s stupidity. You asked me what she is like. I will tell you. Gus, at least, is pretty enough not to be counted at first glance among the clever. (I am honest enough to admit that my own reputation proves on just which side of that equation my attractions lie.) There is an archness in her face and manner that suggests not so much self-consciousness as the ready wit of a shy, lovely girl who is used to attracting the good humour of men. Self-consciousness, in fact, is just the quantity in Augusta that baffles measurement. She possesses either a very great deal of it or none at all. As our friendship deepened, I inclined to the latter view. Her innocence was so delightful a phenomenon that it was a positive comfort to believe in it—especially since it might be supposed to allow to one the privilege of a guiding role. That, for her sake, is the privilege I intend to take up.’

  ‘But why have you come to me?’ Mary could not keep out of her voice a kind of distaste.

  Annabella met it with her most charming smile. ‘You may imagine that I have grown a little tired of acting on my own behalf.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you are asking me to act on anyone else’s.’ Lady Byron felt for the first time in her friend the sheer front of opposition. It gave her something to press against, and the effect of such a meeting was practically an embrace of just what was hardest, least loving, most truthful in each of them. They had both at that moment in their minds the last piece of advice Mary had given her, three years before. I only wonder whether your sins stretch quite as far as you fear, whether loving-kindness and patience and charity are not predominant in you . . . I do believe you wish to be a little less perfect than you are. Mary, after all this time, looked sufficiently answered. She said: ‘What do you propose we should do?’

  ‘She must be stopped,’ Annabella broke out, with renewed heat. ‘She must be made to confess.’

  ‘To confess what?’

  ‘My dear, have you really not heard?’

  In the silence that followed, Lady Byron could almost trace in her friend the slow painful action of persuasion. The fire had sunk, but neither had the heart to build it up again; their tea had grown cold, but Annabella, at least, poured herself a fresh cold cup. Mary looked at her, and what emerged at last in her face was the strangest pity. It seemed to afflict her like a kind of pain. Lady Byron had opened again the book on her lap and held it out to Mary with her finger on the page. ‘Augusta,’ she said, while her friend read. She watched the murmur in Mary’s lips and repeated the name: ‘Augusta, Augusta, Augusta.’

  ‘Has she never confessed to you?’

  ‘We had a kind of understanding. But she never confessed, and now the understanding is gone; she plans to rejoin him. She must be stopped,’ she repeated. And then: ‘I will not be a party to her ruin. I will not stand idly by . . .’ Against the echoes of her own shrill outburst, Annabella offered at last a quieter assurance: ‘I could not be so cruel.’

  There was a pause, the longest yet, and Mary closed her eyes against it. Perhaps she had aged. Annabella had been accustomed to treating her tiredness as a kind of ornament, the proper dress, as it were, to her character, in which the modesty of Mary’s virtues, her patience, her curiosity, her capacity for amusement, showed to best effect. But she appeared now rather exposed in the light of fatigue, almost undressed by it. There was a comfort to be felt in her own superior energies, and Annabella was honest enough to admit to it. Her appetite for life was undiminished; she had the strength yet to satisfy it. Lizzy returned to remove their tea. She swept up into a little silver pan the crumbs that had scattered, and only when she was gone and the door had shut softly behind her did Miss Montgomery lift her head. ‘But what can we do?’ she said. ‘What can Mrs Villiers and you and I hope to do?’

  Lady Byron had her answer ready. ‘We can work on her.’

  Chapter Seven

  MRS VILLIERS WAS THE FIRST to be ‘worked on’, and she gave way with such alacrity to their persuasion that they almost regretted employing, for the sake of their purpose, so unsteady a prop. She was a small plump bustling woman of forty years, with pretensions, as Mary had said, to a youth and beauty that she had never had claims to possessing. Thin red clumps of hair crept out from under her wig; her pockmarked face truly suggested nothing so much as the violence of plucked feathers. She made a great show at first of supporting her friend. Miss Montgomery had invited the pair of them to take tea in her room, and Wilmot Street became, by a kind of tradition, the scene of their councils. But a word in her ear was enough (it was Mary who uttered it, in an elaborate hush that proved to her friend she had managed to draw, from their distasteful secrecy, her usual dose of amusement) to turn her quite the other way; and she directed at Mrs Leigh’s reform the energies she had prepared to use in her defence. Annabella, for a moment, felt something like pity for poor Augusta—to see her surrounded on all sides by such good intentions.

  They had decided—it was really delightful to gather each week in Mary’s pleasant room, with such confederate purpose and such good cakes—to approach Mrs Leigh, in her difficult position, with what Annabella had called the threat ‘of withdrawing her favour’. Lord Byron himself lent his hand to their enterprise. In the first few months of his self-proclaimed exile, he produced a series of letters and poems that bore not only on ‘the separation question’ but also, more particularly, on the peculiar and tender offices of the sister who had stood, it seemed, so firmly beside them both. It mattered not in the slightest whether they were published or not, so great was the private appetite among fashionable circles for the least effusion of his pen. Annabella (and she suffered, in fact, no sharper pang) was forced to endure, as the London summer wore on, the general exposure of his own fine fanciful view of their relations; and the worst of it was, that no one emerged more beautifully loving and clear from the wreck of their marriage than Augusta herself. She was painted, it practically seemed, in the pink of dawn and seated on the ocean-borne shell of his bright muse. There were times, indeed, as Mrs Villiers read out, too loudly, perhaps, for the comfort of their little salon, the latest of his brotherly professions, that Annabella almost regretted her decision to share amid such company so delicate a duty. It surprised her to find that she had not yet moved beyond the reach of pain, that there was something in her pride as his wife that she yet clung to. Rumours, meanwhile, of every description were flying; and Lord Byron’s pen had at least the effect of making Augusta utterly dependent, for her continued station in high society, on the sanction of her sister-in-law’s friendship. That was the dependency they counted on; that was the sanction they threatened to withdraw.

  Mrs Leigh, however, was pregnant, and Miss Montgomery considered it a matter of what she called, with a conscious smile, ‘expedient decency’ to suspend their ‘assault’ until the end of her confinement. This had the advantage of giving them (which was really the opportunity that Mrs Villiers and Lady Byron took up with greatest gusto) the leisure to consider just what the object of their attempt at persuasion should be. Every Tuesday, at about four o’clock, the three of them gathered in the cosy front room at Wilmot Street and discussed, with a distinction that flattered Mrs Villiers’ sense of being ‘in the know’, their own more pressing version of the separation question. How could they be certain that Augusta was saved? This was the worry that drew from Annabella the richest, most selfless vein of her curiosity. How should her sin be expiated? Of just what miracles of reformation was the human heart capable? Or was there a taint so deep that nothing, short of death, could clear the blood of it? If Augusta denied her intention of joining Lord Byron abroad, Miss Montgomery suggested, then she for one wa
s willing to let the matter rest. The past was awful enough; they might be allowed to confine their duties to the present and future. Lady Byron, however, contended that if any common avowal or casual intention could have kept them apart, it should have done so already; at which Mrs Villiers broke in, that Mrs Leigh would never be free of her sin and the desire it entailed unless she confessed to it. Confession, she continued, a full open unequivocal confession in the presence of witnesses, was the least of the assurances Augusta could give of her sincere remorse. Just, however, what the most might run to was the quantity that Lady Byron considered in the strong light of an intelligence not unacquainted with the frailty even of remorse.

  Nothing would satisfy her, and, for a different reason, nothing would satisfy Miss Montgomery. In the course of their debate on the nature of the pledge or promise they might be persuaded to accept from Mrs Leigh, she remained, as Lady Byron was moved finally to describe it, ‘stubbornly ironic’. And so they proceeded (when they did at last, in Mary’s phrase, begin their ‘assault’) on a pale breezy afternoon in June, the scents of which blew into the opened windows of the parlour on Wilmot Street, with an object that remained to them as much in the dark as the means of attaining it were. Still, they contented themselves with the strength that one might, it was reasonable to suppose, accrue from ‘first steps’. Augusta had so far given the key to the tone they would take by letting it be known publicly, on behalf of her brother, how greatly she resented the intermeddling of certain third parties in the conduct of his and his wife’s affairs. She had in mind, one presumed, not only the active involving spirit of Lady Milbanke but also the zeal of her supernumeraries, men no less distinguished than Dr Lushington. It would have taken, however, in the three women, a sum of blind confidence far greater than that possessed by at least one of the little party at Wilmot Street not to see in Augusta’s remarks the thrust of a personal allusion.