Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron

by Stephanie Barron

  Mona’s eyes narrowed, and she leaned towards us all conspiratorially. “Caro would have it she wished to warn the dear child against Lord Byron—that his lordship was mad, bad, and dangerous to know, as she put it. You may imagine the sensation her words produced!”

  “I wonder he was not taken in charge immediately!” I observed. “But did Lady Caroline state at what hour Miss Twining arrived at the Pavilion?”

  “She could not be certain—never looks at clocks—does not keep a timepiece by her—thought it was close to one o’clock, but should never swear to the hour—and in general, suggested such ennui at the question that one wonders how she kept from falling into a doze—or so my sources assure me. As to the manner of Miss Twining’s departure—I am told that Lady Caroline was shockingly vague. She supposed the girl was shown out by a footman. She supposed a chair was found for her. At that juncture a lackey from the stables stood up to claim that he had seen a young lady, dark-haired and dressed in white muslin, hastening towards the Steyne alone, in the middle of the night. He could not immediately swear to the time, but when urged by the coroner to consider the matter, thought it was perhaps a few minutes after the Regent’s great stable clock chimed the three-quarter-hour.”

  “And Byron reached his friend Davies’s house, in the company of two witnesses—the selfsame friend and a valet—at a quarter to two,” I observed. “They must have just missed Catherine Twining on the paving!”

  “But you forget, Miss Austen,” the Earl interjected. “Whatever may have been her intention of crossing the Steyne, she did not meet her death there. Something—or someone—persuaded her to turn back towards the shingle, where she was undoubtedly drowned.”

  I had a sudden idea of Catherine in the night—weary, bewildered, and quite alone—catching sight of the gentleman she most feared, Lord Byron, striding along the paving opposite the Steyne. And cowering back into the shadows of the Marine Pavilion’s grounds, from a dread of meeting him at such an hour …

  “What do you make of Lady Caroline’s behaviour?” Henry asked curiously.

  Mona shrugged. “Not even the murder of an acquaintance, it would seem, may penetrate her absorption in herself. She is the most selfish creature ever born, you know; the entire world might suffer violent death, and she should go on existing in one of her fevered dreams.”

  “Does she wish Lord Byron to hang?—Her words suggest calumny, at the very least, if not a desire to sway the jury against him,” I said.

  “Her object was perjury.” Lord Swithin stretched his long legs before him, one beautifully polished boot crossed over the other. “Having disposed of Miss Twining by the happy expedients of imaginary footmen and chairs, Caro would insist, in an elevated accent, that Lord Byron was in her rooms at the Pavilion for the remainder of the night in question—and that she would die rather than alter a word of her testimony, tho’ the sacrifice to her reputation must be complete.”

  I raised my brows. “Then either she or Mr. Davies is lying. Let us hope, for Byron’s sake, that Lady Caroline may not be believed. Did the magistrate credit the idea of his lordship passing Miss Twining on her way out the Pavilion door, he might certainly find an opportunity to prove Byron drowned the child, as a sort of Attic sacrifice to Lady Caro!”

  “I do not think Sir Harding Cross credited her ladyship’s assertions. He thanked her for her testimony, then quietly ordered her withdrawn from the room. She went, I am told, rather as Anne Boleyn went to the axe, with her head high and her arms grasped by two bashful constables.”

  “It is all a sort of play to Caro,” Desdemona said; “it comes from growing up among the Devonshire House Set; they could none of them be serious. But tell me, Jane: What do you propose to do in this matter? How shall you set about your researches? How may Swithin and I be of service?”

  “Lady Oxford is even now on her road to Brighton?” I asked.

  “We expect her by four o’clock. Should you like to dine with us?”

  “Far better, before she is arrived in Brighton, to speak to Byron himself.” I glanced at the Earl of Swithin. “Can it be managed, sir, do you think?”

  He threw me an engaging smile. “Nothing could be easier, my dear Miss Austen. If I know Byron, he went directly from the inquest to Scrope Davies’s rooms, to drown his sorrows in brandy! Davies has long been an acquaintance of mine—we may certainly pay him a call!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Poet

  WEDNESDAY, 12 MAY 1813

  BRIGHTON, CONT.

  MR. SCROPE DAVIES, I AM TOLD, IS POSSESSED OF A complex character. Indeed, if I may believe the Earl of Swithin, who knows Davies best, he is singularly equipped to serve as Lord Byron’s intimate, being possessed of a mind brilliant enough to win him a scholarship at King’s College, Cambridge—but too indolent to long remain there. It was at Cambridge he formed his acquaintance with Byron; and being, like Byron, of impoverished background, the two were continually borrowing money of each other. Davies is a gambler, and a familiar among the denizens of Crockford’s and White’s; a dandy who counts Mr. Beau Brummell among his friends, he is known for his immaculate dress and his existence on a pecuniary knife’s-edge.

  “I had heard, from sources I should judge unimpeachable,” said our own particular banker, Henry, as we quitted the Castle, “that Davies stood surety for a significant loan—nearly five thousand pounds—when Byron was but a minor; which sum was not repaid for nearly six years. The duns so hounded Davies he was said to contemplate suicide; he was subject to arrest, and petitioned for the arrears in interest; and all the while, his lordship was abroad—enjoying the exotic climes that should inspire him to write Childe Harold. In this we find the measure of the gentleman’s loyalty—poor Davies has every reason to hate Lord Byron; and yet the two remain friends.”

  There it was again; the word hate. If one were intent upon exonerating the poet, one might well begin by examining those who should wish to see him hanged. Cuckolded husbands, ladies spurned, and friends upon whom he presumed too much. “Mr. Davies was not arrested for debt, however?”

  It was the Earl who answered me. “Byron mortgaged his birthright—Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire—last year; perhaps then he discharged his debt to poor Davies. The gentleman has been patience itself; not even the destruction of his peace may diminish his regard for Byron. He is even named as one of the Executors of his lordship’s Estate.”

  It was not until we were arrived at Mr. Davies’s door that I understood he lived in Church Street—and, moreover, had taken a house directly opposite General Twining’s, where we had let down Catherine only a few days previous. The sudden knowledge of Byron’s proximity to his alleged victim brought me up short—any sort of meeting, in the dead of night, should have been possible. The poet might have been watching Catherine for weeks past, under the cover of his friendship for Mr. Davies! He might have stood, in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, at an upper-storey window and observed the poor girl’s solitary progress towards her home. He might have intercepted her. Avowals of time and place, the witness of friends, were as nothing, once the position of both households was observed. I must pay a call of condolence soon on General Twining—and learn what I could of that fatal night.

  Henry, I am certain, was alive to the possibilities in Mr. Davies chusing to live in Church Street; he gave me a significant look as the Earl pulled his friend’s bell.

  Davies’s man opened the door, and would have denied his master to our party, but that Swithin commanded the fellow to convey his card within. A few moments of uneasiness followed; and then the man reappeared, to usher us blandly upstairs.

  We found a mingled party of gentlemen: Mr. Scrope Davies, tall and lean and impeccably dressed, his cravat a marvel of neat complexity; his forehead broad, his hairline receding, and his countenance mottled as befitted a hard drinker. I judged him to be in his late twenties, older than Byron but younger than some of the company that had repaired to his house. The gentleman named Hodge—last me
t at the Countess of Swithin’s the previous evening—was bent over a table with his inevitable pair of dice; but on this occasion he cast against an actual partner, a harsh-featured and sandy-haired fellow in his fifth decade, I should judge, who stared at Desdemona and me with pugnacious contempt. In him I recognised the Bow Street Runner glimpsed on the box of the constables’ carriage; Byron’s personal guard. A fourth fellow leaned against a bookshelf, tenderly tuning the strings of a violin; he did not so much as glance at us as we entered the room, but persisted in humming a scrap of Beethoven to himself.

  Sprawled on the sopha, his dark locks disarranged, his waistcoat loosened, and his cravat untied—was George Gordon, Lord Byron.

  I suppose I ought to pause at this moment to record my impressions of so celebrated a man; and so I have paused, and lifted my pen from the page of this journal as I sit writing tonight in my bedchamber at the Castle. I have allowed my eyes to stare at the candle-flame, wavering in the draughts from the sea. I stared so long that my vision blurred, and cast phantasms on the walls; I shook my head to clear it. I would prefer to be able to dismiss Lord Byron as an ill-mannered and disreputable pup, a spoiled boy possessed of more arrogance than wit, an insolent darling of the haut ton unworthy of any respectable woman’s notice. But I cannot. Our tête-à-tête worked upon me strangely, and I have yet to reconcile my warring opinions of him. Perhaps the interval of reflection—a thorough consideration of my interview with the poet—will bring welcome clarity. The mere summoning of his person to mind is enough to cause tumult in the breast—an inward clamour, tho’ the Castle is peaceful enough this evening.

  Most of the inn’s occupants are abed; being a Wednesday, the town was not very lively this evening, given over to card parties and boxes at the theatre in New Road—tho’ I have an idea that the better part of the populace was gathered privately, in a multitude of salons, to talk over the scandalous news of murder. But to return to the scene in Scrope Davies’s drawing-room—

  Lord Byron was drinking claret as he lay on the sopha, nursing a bottle to himself. His bloodshot eyes moved dully over our party, but at his friend Davies coming forward to bow to the Earl and Countess—clearly astounded that Swithin had not come alone, as his card had suggested, but had actually brought his wife, not to mention a pair of strangers—Byron forced himself upright, and set the bottle between his feet.

  I tried not to stare at these; one, his right, was perceptibly deformed. His lordship is said to be morbidly anxious on the subject of lameness.

  “Our intimate friends,” the Earl said to Scrope Davies carelessly, “Mr. and Miss Austen.”

  “Pleasure,” Davies murmured, looking about him with a wild air, as tho’ we four had stumbled upon an orgy. “Countess, I had no notion—beg you will forgive the general air of disorder—I live as a bachelor, as you no doubt know—believe you are acquainted with Mr. Hodge.…”

  Upon hearing his name, this gentleman shot our uncertain group a sharp look and said, “Mona, your servant. Miss Austen,” and went back to throwing his dice. The sandy-haired Runner who cast against him swore loudly and fluently, without a thought for ourselves, and slammed his free hand upon the table. “That’s seven pounds you’ve stolen from me!” he cried. “I shall have to sell me pistols.”

  “I would not have you do so for the world,” Hodge replied in a bored tone, “for then Byron should be killed; and there would be no end to the women laying blame at my door. Let’s throw again—Luck’s the very Devil, but it changes as swift as affection.”

  The Earl of Swithin, meanwhile, had bowed to the dissipated figure on the sopha. “My felicitations, George. You came out of the morning’s affair rather well. Have you any notion of when you may be released from your obligations to the Law, and return to London?”

  “None,” the gentleman said curtly. “The magistrate is a fool. Mona, have you had a letter from Lady Oxford?”

  “We expect her every hour,” the Countess said. “Pray dine with us this evening; there shall be no one but yourselves.”

  “She means to stay with you, then?”

  “So I understand.”

  “Bloody hell,” Byron said heavily. “I wish she had not got it into her head to come here. She shall be subject to every sort of insult—and from that I would preserve her at any cost. The rabble of Brighton are nothing, you know, to its haut ton. They may freeze the blood of Satan’s imp at a single glance; and my poor Jane shall be held in abhorrence, being known for an enemy of the Regent’s. The office of maîtresse to a murderer is as nothing to it. Well, we have given them something to chatter about, at least! Society is now one polished horde / Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and / Bored.”

  “Byron, I believe you’re foxed,” Swithin observed.

  “What’s drinking, quoth he? A mere pause from thinking. And why should I not be drunk?” his lordship demanded belligerently. “It is of a piece with all the rest. Do you not know me for a hellhound? Is that Miss Austen, did’ye say? Miss Jane Austen?”

  “That is my Christian name,” I returned calmly, “but how you are in possession of it, I know not.”

  “I am by way of being a collector of Janes,” Byron replied coolly. He reached for his bottle and drank deeply of claret. “Augustas, Annabelles, Ara … Ara … bellas; such a multitude of vowels as women employ! Give me plain Jane any day.”

  “Or … Catherine, perhaps?”

  The poet lifted sodden eyes to mine. “She declined to be collected. As you yourself observed. We last met, I believe, in a stable yard in Cuckfield—tho’ I should not call it so much as a bowing acquaintance.”

  “And yet, you know my name.”

  He smiled secretly to himself, the leer of a successful Cupid. “I can get anything from the mouths of ladies, my sweet; they fall over themselves to offer me confidences. Eliza was one of those.”

  Startled, I stared at him narrowly. Could it be possible he spoke of my late sister?

  “Did they not inform you I’ve a taste for older women? Married, where possible, but I have been known to violate my principles. Indeed, I only hold principles that they might be violated.”

  “Sir!” Henry said through his teeth. “Consider what you say!”

  Byron allowed his glittering gaze to drift over my brother. “I do not like your face,” he said. “It suggests stupidity, without the redemptive air of Fashion. Indeed, Mr. Austen, in you I smell the shop. With your wife it was otherwise. Stiled herself a comtesse, did she not? I wonder what Mona has to say to that.”

  Henry stiffened, but the Earl grasped his sleeve with a strong hand. “Do not regard him,” he said in a lowered tone. “He is far too well to live, at present. I shall urge Davies to wrest the bottle from him presently, and put him to bed.”

  “Miss Austen,” Byron sang out from his sopha-throne, “I should like to speak with you, for all you look so melancholy. Do you go in mourning for your life—all its hope of love long since lost—or for some nearer being? Come, sit beside me. I do not reek of spirits yet; I promise I shall not drown you.”

  I had a strong impulse to slap him, man of five-and-twenty tho’ he was; yet a burning spark in his eye and a dangerous throb of feeling beneath the rude words piqued my interest. This was the man who had bound Catherine Twining with a cravat; this the man who had sailed on, regardless, as Caro Lamb foundered in the sea. What impulse of destruction rode him like a monkey? What would he not risk, of the lives of others—and why did danger draw him like strong drink? Was he capable of seeking the final proof of his violent impulses—capable, even, of murder?

  “Let us go, Jane,” Henry urged in a lowered tone. “I do not like this fellow. I do not like him at all.”

  “You should do me the greatest service, my dear,” I murmured, “if you would but cultivate Scrope Davies. He is too plausible a foil for his lordship by half. Learn what you can of him. And leave Byron to me.”

  Before he could protest, I gathered my skirts and glided towards the listing figure of th
e poet, whose delicate fingers—quite beautiful—caressed the neck of his wine bottle.

  “Tell me how you know my name,” I demanded quietly as I adopted a position beside him on the sopha.

  “The ambitious must always know their rivals.” It might have been a cherished aphorism, so swiftly did the phrase fall from his lips; and then he glanced up, to hold my gaze with his own. The dark intensity of that look, the unnerving penetration—the impression immediately received, that I alone existed for this man, that he breathed for me and me entirely—was almost overpowering. It was as tho’ a swift magnetic bond had formed between us, dragging me within his orbit, a bond I was incapable of breaking. The room and its several occupants slid effortlessly away; I heard the distant chatter as through a roaring in my ears; I might have been falling into the dark pools of those eyes, and all they promised of passionate annihilation. I was aware, as I had not been a few moments previous, of the rapidity of my pulse, the wave of heat rising in my frame, the sudden parting of my lips to protest or plead—all involuntary, all ungovernable. It was impossible that my body should thus betray me—should throw me into the power of one I despised, indeed! And yet, each fibre of my rebellious being strained towards that pale countenance, that burning gaze.

  I apprehended in an instant how a Caro Lamb might crave such thralldom; how to enter a room Byron owned was to breathe a more electric air. How, my reeling mind stuttered, had Catherine Twining been proof against such a man? What better angel had sustained her? Impossible to ignore Byron’s will!

  A faint smile formed at his lips; he was waiting for my reply. What was it he had said?—That the ambitious always knew their rivals?

  “I do not understand you,” I gasped.

  The smile widened. “Was there ever so fickle a tongue as that of woman? You understand me too well, I suspect. Nothing has been so praised or sought as Pride and Prejudice since Scott last cast his wretched verses upon the adoring public; and therefore it was imperative in me to pierce the veil of A Lady.—Is that not your captious name, my Jane? For shame, for shame, to disavow it! How could you deny your own child, and at birth? I call it missish, a sort of prudery and deceit that will not be borne! If you will write, then proclaim your words to the World! Let the avid ghouls of Bond Street and Pall Mall know to whom they owe the mirror of Mrs. Bennet, in all her mercenary glory!”