by Julia Gray
But I peer onto the darkened landing just after eleven o’clock and find no cause for alarm. The house is asleep: Furies and servants and all. I am unsure what I should wear. It seems overly familiar to wear my nightgown – as though we are married! – but I have every intention of being familiar, or at least every hope, and it would be highly suspicious to be caught wandering around the house fully-dressed.
I think about climbing out of the window – this would be romantic – but think better of it. The servants’ staircase will do perfectly well. Just as I’m leaving the room, I catch sight of myself in the looking glass: a girl in a long, white, high-collared nightgown, her hair in a loose cloud around her head, rather than rigidly parted and secured. For once, I look just the way I feel – I can’t quite explain why this is the case, but I know it to be true. I am the girl in the mirror far more than I am other Adas.
I never fully appreciated my mother’s decision to set up an academy within walking distance of Fordhook Manor until I had to walk there in the middle of the night. In my thick hooded cloak and boots, I feel different again as I steal down the driveway and along the lane, keeping towards the hedgerow and holding a gaslight in front of me. I am Ada the Adventuress, exploring the unknown terrain of nocturnal Ealing. I am not afraid of the secret sounds of the undergrowth, the rat-like chirrups, the hoots of night birds. I am going to meet my lover – for surely that is a word that I can use when I describe him – and I am quite fearless. Only when I hear the sounds of drunken revelry, and spot a party of young men – they have the look of officers – staggering towards me on the other side of the road, do I panic, shrinking behind a tree and waiting until they are gone.
Once I reach the allotments, I feel emboldened again. I mustn’t be late; what if I am, and he has arrived already, but doesn’t wait for me? I can’t bear the thought of some Romeo and Juliet-style tragedy; James Hopkins and I are not under any circumstances to be parted. I run down the central pathway, passing the shapes that I have known quite well by daylight, that are rendered ghostly and strange by moonlight. (For there is moonlight, a great gleaming belt of it, and I am glad of its presence.)
The shed looks deserted; no light gleams from its single window. I unlatch the door cautiously, my lamp aloft. Darkness, and the smell of damp and cut grass, and then a form, human-like, looms out of the shadows and I cannot stop myself from making a small noise of alarm: a whistling gasp, like air let out of a balloon.
‘Oh, James,’ I whisper. ‘You startled me!’
‘But you were expecting me,’ says my shorthand tutor. ‘Weren’t you?’
‘I hadn’t any doubt.’
I sound confident, but I don’t feel it; I am suddenly shy, not sure what to do next. He moves closer towards me, presses his body against mine, takes hold of my hands.
‘This is definitely not Good Behaviour,’ I mutter.
‘I’m, er, afraid not,’ says James.
‘Oh, well,’ I say. ‘I never cared much for it.’
He kisses me, and it’s a different kiss: less the tentative flicker of two butterflies whose wings fleetingly touch, and more the magnetic meeting of entities: water and stone; paper and flame. Extraordinary words go through my head, as his hands steal inside my cloak, finding my waist. James, I think. Ada. Kindling. Darkness. Home. It is most curious: my Ada-brain seems somehow separate from my body; it is as though I am floating above myself, dissociated, observing, and yet I am more closely aware of everything going on inside me than I have ever been before. It is though my body has its own kind of brain – hard to explain, I know, but true.
It is like a silent dance, this Ada–James pairing in the shadow-dark shed. There is no music but the tides of our breathing, the scuffle of feet on floorboards, the distant calls of owls; there are no set patterns to follow, and yet we seem to know how to move, as though some long-ago teaching, deeply ingrained, resonates in our bones. A nudge, a curve, a dip, a slope, an invitation, an acceptance... Yes. It is like a dance, and I want never to forget it. I don’t know how we advance (or decline?) from vertical to horizontal, but we do; now I am lying on the floor of the shed, on a woollen rug with scratchy filaments that I would find, in any other circumstances, quite aggravating... I am still clad in my cloak, but James is without his greatcoat, and we neither of us is wearing boots, though I do not remember removing mine. I have never felt the weight of another person before, so close to me. Now I rejoice in it: the warmth of him, his breath on my neck, the feel of his shoulders.
‘Miss Byron – oh, Ada. I—’
‘What’s that?’ I say, sitting up, patting the cotton folds of my nightgown, exposed where my cloak has fallen open. There’s a sudden wetness spreading over my leg; something like water, or...
‘My ink bottle. It was in my pocket,’ says my tutor.
For some reason, both of us find this incredibly funny. Perhaps it is because he has told me – on many occasions – how fond he is of the particular brand that he uses. In any other circumstances, this tragic loss of ink might be viewed as a real calamity.
It’s not until the next morning, when I wake up – feeling like a different person – that I wonder how I am going to explain the fact that my nightgown is covered in ink. In the end, I decide that the best thing to do is to hide the offending garment behind my washstand. I have plenty of other nightgowns; I am sure that no one will notice. When Nanny Briggs – not the most perceptive of people, but one who is deeply attuned to all matters domestic in a way that I, Ada, never shall be – does ask me where it is, I feign ignorance. ‘Why, Nurse, I don’t remember the last time I wore it,’ I say. ‘Didn’t you take it away for darning?’
Gullible as she is, my poor nurse goes away, shaking her head, and no doubt chastising herself for her poor memory.
For a while, at least, the shed, built so beautifully for purpose, finds another purpose altogether, and offers shelter to two people whose interests lie somewhat outside of the usual allotment pursuits. These dull strips of land become an unlikely location for Paradise: a veritable Eden, indeed. And Eden is an appropriate comparison, because there is bliss – more than I ever could have imagined – but there is also transgression. Each time we meet, my awareness of the fact that it is wrong becomes slightly more acute – rather to my annoyance. Catullus, I realise, was not quite right: one can give a thousand kisses, and then perhaps a thousand more, but ultimately the kisses must be replaced with a question, and the question is one that I put to my shorthand tutor, on the night of our third encounter.
‘James,’ I say.
‘Yes, Ada, my dear?’
‘I want to know what happens next.’
I know his face so intimately that I can imagine, rather than see (it’s terribly dark, and our lamps are low) his face – eyebrows raised, a half-smile, an earnest blink. ‘We agreed,’ he says delicately, ‘that we ought not to... go any further.’
A blush of heat smoulders beneath my eyes. ‘I know,’ I say quickly. (We did agree this – in a strange, breathless conversation where each unfinished phrase carried a kind of wordless urgency – and I am glad we did. I may be prepared to transgress – midnight assignations with my tutor are precisely the kind of moral deviance that Mamma has sought to prevent – but there are boundaries to those transgressions; boundaries that I only realised I had in the moment of our discussion, and I am glad that we did discuss it. Certain garments, in other words, have gone unremoved.)
‘What I mean is,’ I say carefully, ‘is... well, I am wondering if you love me?’
At this, he laughs – surprise and affection, and a touch of exasperation, as though I have asked an awkward question. ‘Ada, you funny little thing. Yes – yes! Of course; of course I do.’
‘And I love you,’ I reply in a whisper. The words hold such sudden import that I am almost afraid of them. It means more to me than I had thought it would, somehow, to hear that he loves me; I feel someth
ing open up inside me at the words – a kind of yawning hunger. Now that I have heard those words, I want to hear them again and again. I did not realise how much I wanted to be loved. For the first time, I feel honestly known to another human being – not as Ada Byron, a figure to point out in the street, but as a girl in a nightgown who is somewhere she shouldn’t be but is all the happier for it. And as I say those same words – those heavy-soft syllables – I know that they are true: I do love him. I am the trail of light that follows a comet; what he teaches, I will learn; and where he goes, I will follow.
‘Do you think I would make you a good wife?’ I say.
‘You would make an exceptionally interesting one. I should never be bored.’
‘Is that all I am – interesting?’
‘Oh, no indeed. You are all kinds of things: amusing, intelligent, determined. You... you do what you say you will do. Not many people are like that, Ada.’
I am rather enchanted by this, although I feel bound by honesty to inform him that I do not always succeed in my endeavours. ‘Once,’ I tell him, ‘I thought I could invent a flying machine – powered by steam, you know, and in the shape of a horse.’
‘What an extraordinary idea!’
‘I was so delighted by it,’ I say, remembering those feverish experiments in the tack room at Bifrons; the pages I covered in sketches and hypotheses. ‘But I fell ill in the midst of it all, and by the time I was better again, I realised that I couldn’t do it. Not really.’
I couldn’t do it... It is a secret hithertofore never revealed to another living soul, and I think I love James all the more, for being the one to whom I have told it. I nestle into the hollow of his neck, silent for a moment, content to listen to the sound of his heartbeat. This is our usual position, on the rug (which we have moved in order to hide the ink-stain on the floorboards), and beneath the moonlit square of window. A swatch of moonlight glows on my tutor’s wrist, and I outline the shape – a polygon of sorts – with my finger.
‘We’d have to run away, though,’ says James.
‘To... to get married?’
‘Yes. We’d have to go to Gretna Green.’
I try to imagine my mother’s face, were she to receive a letter from me explaining that I had eloped. I am not convinced that she would be best pleased.
‘Would your mother be surprised?’ my tutor asks.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps. Then again, she does tend to expect the worst of me. She asked the Furies to watch over me, after all,’ I say.
James Hopkins points out that Mamma might want to employ other friends to do the same office in future, since the Furies have quite notably failed in their charges.
‘She quite specifically said that she didn’t want me to turn out like my father,’ I continue, remembering now the conversation I overheard from the tree.
‘Do you know what she meant by the remark?’ James asks.
‘Hush! I can hear something,’ I say, half rising to look out of the window. ‘No... no. It’s only a fox, I think. What she meant, I suppose, was that my father’s morals were those of a genius, an artist, and as such perhaps were unconventional.’
I realise, as I’m speaking, that I don’t really understand; I am simply paraphrasing Signor Isola, with whom I discussed my father in Genoa – and I was fairly sure that Signor Isola had not known Lord Byron nearly as well as he claimed to. ‘What do you know about my father?’ I say.
‘He was one of the most famous poets of our time.’
‘Everyone knows that. What about his personality? His character?’
‘Why, Ada, I don’t know that I feel qualified to comment on his character. I didn’t know him.’
‘That doesn’t seem to stop people from commenting.’
‘Indeed: the newspapers make commentators of us all. I suppose everyone thought they knew him, in a way – through his work, if not his reputation.’
‘Was he morally deviant?’ I say, getting the impression that James knows more than he is saying; that he is selecting what to say, as a dandy might muse over his choice of cravat.
‘I... well, Ada, did you never – did you never hear any of the rumours, the stories? I suppose you wouldn’t have. I was quite young myself; you were even younger, and shielded besides, presumably. Lord Byron certainly lived an eccentric, extravagant lifestyle. He had a caged squirrel, I believe, and a number of other exotic pets. I believe he even had a pet bear when he was at university.’
I am quite thrilled by this: not everyone, surely, has a father who would have thought of such an unusual pet.
James goes on: ‘He was – by all accounts – a man of extreme habits: dieting one day, gorging himself the next. He spent a lot of money.’
‘He was rich,’ I say, not sure whether I am asking a question or making a statement, and realising as I say the words that I don’t actually know how rich my father was. My mother is rich, certainly; but was my father?
‘I believe he was rich, initially. But I think that when he left England he was in considerable debt.’
‘Oh!’ I say, digesting this. But how little, how little I know; I can see that now. The childish visions of desks and servants, castles by the sea, float in a kind of bitter cloud around my head, and then slowly dissolve. ‘I... I had always thought that he... just wanted to live abroad.’
‘I think that he was fleeing his creditors,’ says James softly.
In the dusty gloom of the shed, I can only see James’ face in indistinct profile, but his voice tells me that he is not comfortable telling me things that I had not previously known about my father. Echoing my own thoughts, he says: ‘Ada, I don’t know... it doesn’t seem appropriate for me to tell you all this.’
‘But who else is there to tell me?’ I say, slightly shrill, forgetting to whisper, rising up onto one elbow and putting my hand on his wrist. ‘Mamma won’t say anything. I don’t have an older sister, or an aunt... well, I suppose I do have Aunt Augusta, but I can hardly—’
At this, James begins to cough uncontrollably. He sits up. ‘We should go.’
‘But there’s so much more I want to ask,’ I say. I am torn suddenly – I have made the person to whom I feel closest grow distant, and that is something that I never want to do again. But James has revealed to me things that I’ve never known about my father, and – in spite of the nature of his disclosures, for clearly my father was a character of somewhat loose morals – I feel closer to my father because of this, and want so much to enquire further.
It is a curious dilemma.
Fordhook, Ealing
April 1833
Disaster strikes like an unforecasted storm on the morning of our eleventh lesson.
James is reading aloud from a pamphlet that he has brought, penned no doubt by the indefatigable Mr Lewis: ‘The brilliant accomplishment of good writing is as sterling gold, whose intrinsic value will remain unalterable through all the vicissitudes of life,’he is saying, as the library door creaks open. Fury the Second is on duty today; we are so used to her heavy-footed tread as she circles us that neither of us looks up. Then I become aware of a changed energy in the room – I am peculiarly sensitive to the moods of my mother, and I know before seeing her that it is she who is standing there. Her entire body is rigid with fury; here is Fury personified, and far more frightening and dreadful, for all that she is rather short.
James gets to his feet at once.
‘Mr Hopkins,’ says Mamma. ‘That sounded like an interesting piece that you were reading.’
He bows. ‘Yes, milady.’
‘You hold the accomplishment of writing in high regard.’
‘I do indeed.’
‘Which is, of course, why I hired you to tutor my daughter. Is it, or is it not the case, that you use a particular kind of ink, Mr Hopkins?’
‘Of... of ink, milady?’
‘I believ
e that you have claimed as much. Indelible blue-black writing ink, from a company called Stephens.’
James nods, defeated. Mamma continues, each word placed for maximum dramatic effect (she takes particular care over the word indelible). ‘Not many people use this ink, I believe. It is expensive, and has only relatively recently been made available.’
‘That is so.’
‘Then perhaps you will explain to me, Mr Hopkins, why it is that not only has an extensive spillage of this particular blue-black ink been discovered staining the wooden floorboards of one of the allotment buildings, but also a nightgown belonging to my daughter, that she ingeniously, but not ingeniously enough, hid behind her washstand?’
She is just too clever, my mother. Nothing escapes her; I realise now that my greatest sin – greater by far than whatever carnalities I have indulged in – has been presumption. I assumed that because Mamma wasn’t often actually here, because she tasked an array of Furies with watching over me while she herself alternated between rest cures and continued plans for social reform that, somehow, she wasn’t aware of what I was doing. I was wrong. I am guilty of presumption, and laziness besides; I should have visited the shed by daylight and washed away the ink, instead of moving the rug into a different place, hiding the stain, and hoping no one would notice.
My mother, gifted mathematician that she is, has put two and two together, and made four.
‘I have made enquiries,’ Mamma goes on. ‘The housemaid says that on at least two occasions she has noticed that Ada’s outdoor things were damp in the early morning. One of the teachers at the Academy recalls looking out of his window, late at night, and seeing what he thought was a candle somewhere in the grounds. ‘You should consider yourselves fortunate that you weren’t discovered on the spot by Mr Atlee.’ At this, she half closes her eyes and bites her lip, as though uttering a silent prayer.
‘N-n-nothing happened, milady, I assure you,’ stammers my tutor. I don’t look at him; I don’t look at either of them. In spite of the evidence, which is considerable, I wouldn’t have done what he has just done – admit guilt. I’d have come up with a story, something to explain the ink on my nightgown; I’d have denied all knowledge of the shed. But it’s too late now, and Mamma seems not at all pacified by James’ promise.
