He stood up at last. ‘Well, I will not put my hand to it.’
She sat up for several hours after Mr Eden had gone, staring at the fire. She was trying to add up her sins: she wanted to see them as clearly as Mr Eden had seen them. All that she saw, however, was the fact that where she had been blind and weak, she was at least growing stronger. ‘You must come again to Newmarket,’ he had said, taking his leave in a tone of wonderful politeness. ‘I’m sure that nothing would delight Mrs Leigh more than such a visit.’ And then, with one of his heavy deliberate smiles, ‘It would delight me, too.’ Later, when she had retired to sleep, Mary surprised Annabella in her nightcap and sat at the foot of her bed. They talked companionably enough for a few minutes before she ventured to ask, what Mr Eden had said? ‘Nothing to the point,’ she answered; and then, ‘I believe Mrs Leigh has quite taken him in.’
Mr Eden’s contribution to the cause had had at least its effect. A few days later, when she was next in town, Mrs Leigh summoned the courage to pay Lady Byron a visit. Annabella smiled to think that one of the hands she sensed on Augusta’s conscience was Mr Eden’s own. She arrived at Wilmot Street under swift autumnal skies in a grey dimity gown and bonnet and grey gloves: she was dressed, as it were, from head to foot in self-effacement. They watched her from Mary’s window. Mary said, ‘How pretty she looks, not like a mother at all. She might be a girl still, just on the verge of her coming out.’
‘You forget, Mary, that I am a mother, too. It is, I believe, no great sign of age.’
Mary smiled and stood up. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll need me. I should prefer, in fact, to return to being useless. It’s what I like best.’
Augusta showed none of Mr Eden’s resentments when Lizzy ushered her in. Lady Byron rose to shake her hand, which she hardly dared touch: she curtseyed instead and thanked Lady Byron for condescending to see her. They sat down together on either side of the fire. The beginning was somewhat awkward; it was Annabella who made it. ‘I believe we have sat by a fire together often enough to be not the least bit shy of keeping silent’—a line that produced, however, only a greater awkwardness, in the midst of which Lady Byron had her inspiration. If his opinion was to be the price of her degradation, she might as well enjoy the use of it. ‘I presume you know,’ she said, ‘that Mr Eden has called on me? He was very much concerned for you. He says that you came to see him.’
‘It’s true; I have been very low.’ And then, ‘It means a great deal, I’m sure, that you receive me. Not just for my sake but for my children’s, too. I feel’—she hesitated, and Annabella caught a glimpse, then, of the force of her pressure, which could produce in her poor friend so painful a quiver—‘I have been left (I should say, I have resigned myself) to his protection, which has been no protection at all. Or rather, worse than none. When I might all along have resigned myself to yours—when I might have trusted in you.’
It was the clearest appeal, and Lady Byron met it beautifully, almost with tears. ‘You really might, my dear. I have been waiting only for your complete confidence to act on your behalf. I hope I understand you as well as any human being can another. I think there is a similarity between our characters. We have certainly suffered enough at the same hands.’
Augusta was equal to her tears. ‘Oh, you have suffered much, much more than I have any right to.’
‘We all have a right to suffer, to suffer as much as we like; and there never was anyone so taken in by your brother as you.’ She let it sink in a minute. It marked a change in tone, and she watched Augusta receive, visibly, its effect. ‘He has been your worst friend, as you, I’m afraid, have been his.’ Lady Byron leaned forward. She had tried to tune her voice to gentleness, but her manner suggested nothing so much as the enumeration of proofs. ‘Our visit to Six Mile Bottom, even the very first night of it, will make you sensible of this. His feelings towards you have by no means been as invariably tender as it pleases his muse to declare. You have read, I am sure, his latest effusions: Lady Caroline has been showing them around. But to me, privately, he spoke of you sometimes with compassion, sometimes with bitter scorn, and sometimes with dispositions still more reprehensible.’ She paused and, in the silence that followed, saw a way to bring her pressure to bear. ‘The only time when I believe he was really on the brink of suicide was on an occasion relating to his remorse about you.’
At which, Augusta, blushing, for the first time demurred. ‘It was not, quite, remorse.’ But she ventured at last into this open ground: ‘I don’t suppose any two beings could have loved each other better than we did. It seemed a sort of nonsense—I was so wrong!—to deny him anything.’ And then, for she knew quite well the penance she had come to make and, put to the test, could make it almost proudly: ‘I denied him nothing at all.’ Mrs Villiers had once complained that Augusta kept her head down; well, she was looking up now. Even Annabella was forced to admit that she had been sufficiently plain, but Augusta was determined to make herself plainer still. ‘He was angry only because I had begun to refuse him what I had not, until your marriage, refused. It was only because I was determined to honour you. You must believe that.’
She had got what she wanted, what they had worked for; still, she saw in Augusta’s confession a remnant of pride, a kind of insistence on her own point of view, which is just what Annabella had determined to stamp out. She had all but the sense, as she answered, of putting her foot down. ‘As for that, I don’t care for my honour as much as I used to do—it’s yours that concerns me. Mrs Villiers has told me that you are in communication with your brother. Your refusal, as you put it, has not gone far enough. Until it does, no decent respectable woman can be seen with you; and I have, I believe, still ample claims to both of those qualities to lament the limits they will place upon our intercourse.’
‘He is, regardless of anything else, my brother,’ Augusta said simply, which brought out in Lady Byron a softer remonstrance.
‘Forgive him, desire his welfare, but resign the pernicious hope of being his friend more nearly. Do not think me cruel. You will not be offended when I say that I think his mind too powerful for you. I could not feel secure that he would not bewilder you on any subject.’ And then, with a smile of such calculated sweetness that she could almost congratulate herself on having measured it out, she added: ‘Alas, my dear Augusta, you do not, I believe, know him.’
A shower fell slanting against the windows. The trees outside bent beneath it, and the pair looked up to watch the last of the daylight, enriched, engorged by dark cloud, cut against the line of rain. Then the cloud passed and Augusta’s face emerged from the light into a clearer shadow. ‘But what am I to do when he writes to me, such letters, too—you have never seen such letters—’
‘All the more reason,’ Annabella said, ‘to give them to me.’
The price of her penance was plain enough, though Lady Byron could never quite make out the spirit in which Augusta paid it. She did not give way to tears. She did not bluster or blush, and her fine face, just as handsome as her brother’s, though quieter—slower, that is, to express the play of her feelings—showed little but the blankness of duty as she reached into her purse and removed from it a neat bundle of letters. She had not yet perfectly recovered from her lying-in, and her hands had retained the plump awkwardness of her confinement; there was something childish in the way she offered up her prize. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you, who are so good, will find a suitable answer to make him. I never could.’ It was only after Mrs Leigh had taken her leave, and Annabella had returned to her seat by Mary’s fire and begun to read the letters, that she believed to taste in Augusta’s innocent remark just the slightest bitterness of revenge.
This is what she read:
I have recently broken through my resolution of not speaking to you of Lady Byron, but do not on that account name her to me. It is a relief, a partial relief, to me to talk of her sometimes to you, but it would be none to
hear of her. Of her you are to judge for yourself, but do not altogether forget that she has destroyed your brother. Whatever my faults might or have been, she was not the person marked out by providence to be their avenger. One day or another her conduct will recoil on her own head. She may talk, think, or act as she will, and by any process of cold reasoning and a jargon of ‘duty and acting for the best’ etc. impose upon her own feelings and those of others for a time—but woe unto her, the wretchedness she has brought upon the man to whom she has been everything evil will flow back into its fountain. I may thank the strength of my constitution that has enabled me to bear all this, but those who bear the longest and the most do not suffer the least.
What a fool I was to marry—and you not so very wise, my dear. We might have lived so single and so happy as old maids and bachelors. I shall never find any one like you, nor you (vain as it may seem) like me. We are just formed to pass our lives together, and therefore are we—at least I am, by a crowd of circumstances removed from the only being who could ever have loved me—the only being to whom I can feel unmixedly attached.
Had you been a nun, and I a monk—that we might have talked through a grate instead of across the sea. No matter. My voice and my heart are
ever thine
B
She had got what she wanted, the thought recurred to her, and Lady Byron was willing to admit, she had only herself to blame if she didn’t like it. What if she threw the little bundle on the fire? Such a relief it might be to answer his eloquence, as it seemed to her, so completely. But something in the hurry of his penmanship, which sloped and dwindled across the page, made her stop short. They had loved each other well enough, she remembered, in their letters; and this was, in its way, the first from her husband that Annabella had been permitted to see in almost a year. The sun had set, and in the darkened room, her hands surprised her into the strangest gesture: she reached the letter to her lips and kissed it. It smelt of Augusta. Annabella could almost persuade herself that what most upset her was not the acrimony Lord Byron had showed towards her but the fact that she had never been granted so easy a relation as a sister: someone to whom she could feel ‘unmixedly attached’. That she was jealous, not of her, but of him. She had always wanted a sister. And as the rains continued to fall (she watched a young gentleman with a stick in his hand wait under a tree for a gap in the weather), she considered the fact of her solitude—which could only grow deeper, if solitude deepened, or stronger with time, depending—until, with a smile, she acknowledged the comfort a stray thought reminded her of. She had Augusta now.
Chapter Nine
IF INVALIDISM HAD GIVEN her old friend Miss Montgomery a defence against change, Lady Byron in the years to come drew from her vigour a similar protection. Strangers approached her, again and again, to catch a glimpse of Lord Byron’s wife; and she found consolation in the fact that the profile she turned to avoid their prurient stares had scarcely been touched by time. She had once, in her twentieth year, sat to have her miniature taken by a man named Hayter. He had asked her to lift her chin and look into the light, and the portrait had suggested almost too brightly an angel glancing wistfully back at heaven. The pose, at least, had hidden the fat of her chin and the length of her nose; it brought out what was really her best feature, her large clear eyes. She prided herself now on having kept up so faithfully such looks as she possessed. Her moon-face, as Lord Byron used to call it, had neither waxed nor waned, and her complexion was just as pale and pure as the image called up by such gentle teasing. She had retained, as she put it to herself, a sufficient moral vanity to make of the question of her looks a matter of curiosity: nothing that reflected, however dimly, her spiritual state could fail to interest her. Yet she was conscious, too, increasingly so, of the deeper change that her state of preservation only too crudely implied. She looked, as her mother now looked, all but unsexed; and the gossip that dimly reached her ears, from the strangers who recognized her, concerned mostly the wonder that so famous a libertine could ever have fallen in love with that face.
News of Lord Byron still reached her from time to time, through several channels. Augusta, of course, continued to send her his letters, and Annabella often smiled to see the lengths to which his restlessness could take him. It was almost always away from her. He wrote from Ostend, from Geneva, from Venice, from Ravenna and Greece. What struck her as especially humorous was the way her own restlessness humbly mirrored her husband’s. She could never settle anywhere for long and shifted from Kirkby to Wilmot Street, from Seaham to a small house in Frognal, every few months. Ada accompanied her whenever there was space for the household entailed by a child; otherwise, she stayed at Kirkby with her grandmother. Lady Milbanke, to persuade her once into a longer visit home, accused Annabella of being ‘an unnatural mother’, a charge that had, predictably, the opposite of its intended effect. ‘I have quarrelled with my mother for ever!’ she declared to Miss Montgomery, on arriving at Wilmot Street one afternoon without Ada—a line that brought out, in her memory, an odd sort of echo. It was up to Mary, in the end, to remember its source: she had once overheard Lord Byron, many years before, making just that remark. Annabella blushed at the recollection, which chastened her into a kind of justification. ‘Ada,’ she said, ‘loves me as well as I wish—and better than I had expected. I had a strange prepossession, you see, that she would never be fond of me. Well, she is fond enough, and grows old and wise without me. She is, after all, her father’s daughter.’
The world, as it happens (at least, that portion of society whose opinions filled the papers and reviews), began over time to soften towards her husband’s point of view. He expressed it publicly so often; he was very persuasive. In poem after poem, their marriage reappeared—dressed up, she once complained, giggling, in clothes no decent woman would dare to be seen in. In harems, on hilltops, in convents, and camps, they fought out their battles; and it was the peculiar trick of his eloquence to grant to the lady in the case each unhappy victory. The worst of it was, the feelings he showed himself capable of reviving, almost at will, in her. ‘You must defend yourself,’ her mother declared during one of their reconciliations, and added, unaware of the inconsistency, ‘you must make them forget you.’ Manfred, his latest publication, lay spread out between them on the lawn; they were sitting on a rug at Kirkby on a calm sunshiny late summer’s day in 1817. Ada was picking daisies and laying them out carefully beside each other. ‘How is it possible,’ Annabella answered, ‘when Lord Byron continually reminds them in a medium much more powerful than I can command? Surely this must appear to any dispassionate person. Besides,’ she added (they had been eating currants and spitting the seeds in the grass), ‘I am sick, quite sick, of taking my own part. The worst consequence to my feelings has been the opposition between my own views and those of some of my friends.’ She was mindful, too, of keeping up the battles with her mother that other women had become used to contesting with their husbands. She was growing ageless, and she resisted, as much as anything, her childish dependence on Judy’s good opinion.
Mrs Leigh, at least, allowed her to exert an influence of her own, though Lady Byron grew increasingly saddened by what appeared to be its continuing effect on her sister’s character. Where Augusta had been playful, she had become shrill; where she had been shy, she had grown foolish; where she had been helpless, she had become absurd. There seemed to be no greater proof to Annabella of her own strength of will than the utter abjection of Augusta’s, and she shrank, sometimes, from too strict a contemplation of what she had proved capable of. Even so, the threat, occasionally repeated, of Lord Byron’s return to England, or of Augusta’s escape to the continent, persuaded her against the possibility of, as she once put it to Mrs Villiers, ‘relaxing her grip’. Annabella had suffered too much from the exclusion entailed by their sibling relations (just as he now suffered from the exclusion entailed by their own) to relinquish to Lord Byron again the right to resume them. She was honest enou
gh to acknowledge that he had the better claim to her, but selfless enough, too, to maintain that Augusta suffered a little less under her own care than she had under her brother’s.
Not that he had lost the power of harming her. The worst of each renewed ‘assault’, as he once called his poesies, ‘on the public patience’ was the effect that they palpably had on his sister’s position. It was only Annabella’s continued kindness that offered her any protection at all. There were people (Lady Byron was rather obliged to them) who would extend to Mrs Leigh an invitation only on the understanding that her sister-in-law agreed to accompany her. Another source of disagreement with her mother. ‘If I know anything of human nature,’ Lady Milbanke declared, ‘then Augusta must hate you. People dislike those whom they have injured, especially when they have reason to be grateful to them.’
‘On the contrary,’ Annabella could never resist an argument with Judy when she knew herself to be in the right, ‘she is, if anything, too grateful. It is her gratitude, as the saying goes, that leaves me to mourn. I should like to see her show, occasionally, a greater spirit of resistance. She is entirely too pliable.’
When Lord Byron threatened to publish a memoir of their marriage, Annabella informed his sister. She had been offered, she wrote, the privilege of contradicting whatever she wished to, but there were things she could neither decently admit to nor contradict. What should she do? Augusta appeared at Annabella’s door—she was living in Frognal at the time—in so vivid a state that Lady Byron dismissed the servants and admitted her sister to her private dressing room. ‘He cannot feel for me,’ Augusta cried; her shrillness gave to the long Byron face a very shrewish appearance. ‘He cannot feel for my children. God knows he might, at least for one of them.’ Lady Byron always found her heavy hints distasteful. She had tried to cure Augusta of the habit. ‘He must be mad,’ his sister continued. And then, showing a little of that spirit of resistance which Annabella had found wanting in her, she cried: ‘Let him publish. If he is not ashamed, then I, certainly, have nothing to fear.’ It was left to Lady Byron to work against him with the chill of her formidable propriety. ‘I received your letter of January 1st,’ she wrote, ‘offering to my perusal a memoir of part of your life. I decline to inspect it. I consider the publication or circulation of such a composition at any time as prejudicial to Augusta’s future happiness. For my own sake I have no reason to shrink from publicity, but notwithstanding the injuries which I have suffered, I should lament some of the consequences.’
A Quiet Adjustment Page 30
