Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron

by Stephanie Barron

  “What effrontery!” she exclaimed, casting aside the sheet she had been reading. “Only look at it, Mona, and tell me whether I have not been exceedingly illused!”

  “It grows late, and I should take my leave—” I began, but Mona had already perused Byron’s words, and with a snort, thrust the page into my hands.

  A Song

  Thou art not false, but thou art fickle,

  To those thyself so fondly sought;

  The tears that thou has forc’d to trickle

  Are doubly bitter from that thought.

  “Shall we sing it together, Mona, you and I?” Lady Oxford jeered. “Or shall we cast it into the fire, as cold fuel for forgotten warmth?”

  The Countess of Swithin stared despairingly at her friend. “Indeed, I am truly sorry—he is an uncouth yokel, my dear, and unworthy of your love. He shall repent of his harshness, however, given time.”

  Lady Oxford threw back the light shawl that had covered her ankles, and got up from her settee. “I have given Lord Byron too much of my time already. I believe I shall return to London, Mona—if I set out within the hour, I might arrive in time to kiss my children goodnight; at the very least, I shall sleep in my own bed, and may awake next morning prepared to embark on all the preparations for Sardinia. Oh, to see the blue of the Mediterranean again! I am wild to pass Gibraltar! There is nothing like travel, after all, when one is brokenhearted!”

  She had cast aside the remainder of Byron’s packet with her shawl, and the pages were scattered on the floor. I bent to retrieve them.

  “Lady Oxford,” I attempted. “There is more he has written here—a further communication—”

  She glanced at the sheets I held, and her lips curled. “It is only the last of that wretched poem to his dead Leila,” she said. “I suppose he has been scribbling away at it, under the light of a single oil lamp, at Brighton Camp. Here—” she moved swiftly to the writing desk placed beneath her bedroom window, and gathered a sheaf of pages together. “Here is the entire work, fresh from the Genius’s pen. Keep it, if you like, Miss Austen—sell it, if the spirit moves you. I shall not look into The Giaour again.”

  AND SO TONIGHT, AFTER A MOST RESTFUL DINNER WITH Henry, I curled up in bed to read Lord Byron’s epic poem, of a hareem maiden drowned alive in a canvas sack, for the crime of loving another than her master.

  A revenge tale, Lady Oxford had called it, but the opening lines gave little hint of this. They were rather a paean to Greece as it must once have been, before the yoke of Turkish rule.

  Fair clime! Where every season smiles

  Benignant o’er those blessed isles,

  Which, seen from far Colonna’s height,

  Make glad the heart that hails the sight,

  And lend to loneliness delight.

  I sighed.

  There was a great deal more of such stuff, about the Tyrant’s bitter lash, and the Eden of the Eastern Waves that once was Greece, and so on. I had an idea of Byron looking about him during his travels in Attic climes, and seeing only what he could despise—a race of men far different from himself, that he might ennoble in his verse, and yet regard as undoubtedly inferior. My Naval brothers, Frank and Charles, had been sailing about the globe for most of their lives, and the excellent sense of their observations, in the letters each faithfully sent home, was greatly to be preferred to this. However—I could not imagine a roomful of young girls, only just embarked on their first London Season, swooning at the excitements of my brothers’ letters; while they should certainly suffer palpitations at:

  Though like a Demon of the night

  He passed, and vanished from my sight,

  His aspect and his air impressed

  A troubled memory on my breast,

  And long upon my startled ear

  Rung his dark courser’s hoofs of fear …

  Yes, there would be countless young girls who should take the dark courser’s hoofs of fear to bed with them, and read long into the night by their flickering candles—if Byron lived to see The Giaour published.

  I could not think it entirely certain that he would.

  “You will hardly credit it, I know,” Henry had said over dinner, “but the Regent appeared at Miss Twining’s funeral, and so far condescended as to spend a half-hour over the cold collation in the Officers’ Mess.”

  “As I understand it, His Royal Highness is the very last man to forgo a meal,” I retorted, “however melancholy the occasion. Did he have anything intelligent to say on the tragedy?”

  “Only to assure the General that Justice should be served as soon as may be, and the scoundrel Byron punished for his sins.”

  “—Lest he cast a shadow of murderous doubt over the sanctity of the Pavilion, and its unmentionable tunnels. So Lord Byron is to be assumed guilty until proven innocent, in the best English tradition. And General Twining?” I enquired keenly. “How did he appear?”

  My brother hesitated. “I must suppose that grief takes each of us in different ways—and that it is impossible for any man to judge another’s heart—but he looked very oddly, Jane. Cold, and severe, and as tho’ he stood in judgement upon the remains of the poor creature going into the earth before him. One might have thought he blamed Catherine for having been murdered—that the manner of her death embarrassed, rather than destroyed him.”

  “I should have expected little else.”

  “He almost hurried the attendant company out of the churchyard when poor old Smalls had done—the man fairly sobbed his way through the service—and seemed impatient the full hour he was required to converse with the mourners at the collation.”

  “How dreadful,” I mused, “to be the sort of man to take consolation solely in his pride. All else may be sacrificed—human warmth, love, compassion in the face of weakness. I begin to think we were very fortune in our father, Henry. However little of wealth or station George Austen may have possessed—he did not set himself up as God over others; and there must be a good deal of temptation in that way, for a clergyman.”

  Later, as I read Byron’s verse by candlelight, I found The Giaour had much to say on the matter of Judgement, and playing at God; and as I had not yet come to Leila, and was growing sleepy, I determined to push on. It had been a shockingly wearisome day.

  —And here was a description of the poet’s jaded heart. Had Lady Oxford read it? I wondered. And was it meant for her—or Caro Lamb—or Catherine Twining?

  The lovely toy so fiercely sought

  Hath lost its charm by being caught,

  For every touch that wooed its stay

  Hath brushed its brightest hues away,

  Till charm and hue, and beauty gone,

  ’Tis left to fly or fall alone.

  All that I had read thus far had been written long before the events of the past week—the description of Hassan’s court, and the scented gardens with their plashing fountains where Leila reposed; the flight of the brooding Giaour, whom Leila had loved at her peril—

  For she was flown her master’s rage

  In likeness of a Georgian page,

  And far beyond the Moslem’s power

  Had wronged him with the faithless Giaour …

  Yes, there would be innumerable mammas forbidding their daughters to read anything remotely penned by Byron in the coming winter, lest the rage for dressing up as a young boy should overcome an entire generation.…

  And here was the murder.

  Sullen it plunged, and slowly sank,

  The calm wave rippled to the bank;

  __________

  I gazed, till vanishing from view,

  Like lessening pebble it withdrew;

  ________

  And all its hidden secrets sleep,

  Known but to Genii of the deep …

  I shuddered, and closed my eyes. Byron had certainly written these lines before Catherine Twining was murdered. Unlike the scraps Lady Oxford had shown me a few days before, or the ones lately delivered to her boudoir, these pages were p
enned in fair copy, without correction, and thus must represent finished verse. He had written it, and then the drowned girl had been delivered, in her sack, like Leila to his bed.…

  The conviction grew stronger within me that the revenge tragedy was not of Byron’s seeking; it had been visited upon him, by one who hated him profoundly—or, hated, perhaps, the victim….

  I turned over the successive verses. There were more than a thousand lines, by my estimation, most penned in black ink. But here, at the bottom of the pile, were words less neatly scrawled—lines penned at random, in the discomfort of a gaol, with much crossing out and revision, written in blue ink … and on the very last page, the word emphatically placed:

  FINIS

  He had finished it, then, on the day of Leila’s funeral.

  I worked through these final pages, struggling to pick the sense from the alterations—the true words from the discarded—the rhythm and flow of poetry from amidst the lumber-room of Byron’s mind. For a writer such as myself, accustomed to reading pages that were fitful starts at best, before the typesetter’s art gave a neater appearance to my prose, it did not prove too taxing; but my eyes were growing tired in the poor light of the single candle.

  And then, about line seven hundred and sixty-five, as best I might judge, I stopped dead—and reread the verse, my heart pounding.

  I had not mistaken; it was there, buried in the middle of The Giaour, as Byron had shaped it in his gaol—an accusation of murder. In his poem, he had all but named Catherine Twining’s killer.

  I stared at the lines, wavering in the candle-flame, and felt a cold dread. Then I began, unthinkingly, to bundle the pages together—as tho’ by squaring the edges I might make sense of them. It was well after midnight; would Henry be asleep? Or if I braved the draughty passage of the inn, would he open his bedchamber door? I had a decided need for human conversation—and the counsel of my brother.

  Outside, in the darkened street below, there was a sudden chaos of shouting, and the cantering of a horse—unusual for Brighton of a Friday, when no Assembly was held and most of the world established at card tables or private parties. Obeying instinct rather than reason, I hastened to the window and threw up the sash.

  “Murderer!” the messenger on horseback was shouting as he galloped towards the Marine Pavilion. “Byron the murderer has escaped!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Poetic Justice

  SATURDAY, 15 MAY 1813

  BRIGHTON, CONT.

  “HENRY!”

  I stood in the private parlour that divided my bedchamber from my brother’s, holding aloft a fresh candle—the one I had employed for reading being almost guttered—and knocked at his door. “Henry!”

  After an interval, he peered out, looking rather absurd, as I thought, in his nightcap and silk robe. I should rather it had been flannel, tho’ in general I despise the stuff—there is something profoundly comforting and home-like about flannel.

  “Did you hear the messenger?”

  “What messenger?”

  He groped towards one of the parlour’s chairs, eyes still blinded with sleep; he had not wasted so much time as to light a candle.

  “In the street below. A mounted rider—from Brighton Camp, as I presume, and bound for the Regent’s people. Byron has escaped!”

  “Oh, Lord.” Henry rubbed ineffectually at his head, loosing the cap and raking his grey hair into tufts. “He’ll have the whole country roused against him now! Men on foot with torches and dogs, constabulary horsed—and Byron cannot even run! What is the fool about, to be limping towards liberty?”

  “I only hope that he did not employ Mona’s pen-knife in his escape,” I fretted, “for she should never forgive herself.”

  “Mona’s pen—? No, do not explain—I should rather remain in ignorance,” Henry said. “But consider, Jane, how ill-advised—Flight cannot impress the magistrate with his lordship’s innocence!”

  “I think it may be guilt Byron prefers,” I said frantically. “A murderous aspect—particularly when it is assumed in the name of Justice—appears so much more romantic than a helpless one.”

  “What are you talking of, Jane?”

  “I know where Lord Byron will have gone.”

  “If he has any sense, he’ll have stolen a horse and raced up the London road by now.”

  “That is exactly where he shall not go. He means to avenge Catherine Twining’s murder—like the Giaour of his poem.”

  “The what?” Henry demanded blankly.

  “Never mind.” I thrust the telling sheet of paper into Henry’s hands. “Read this—and be so good as to put on your clothes. I mean to thwart his lordship, and I cannot go out in the dead of night alone.”

  MORE THAN OURSELVES WERE ABROAD BY THE TIME MY brother roused the Castle’s porter, and pled with the bewildered fellow to unbolt the door. The lackey would not promise to wait up for our return, until Henry informed him sternly that it was a matter of life and death—and pressed a guinea into his hand. Then we were out into the night.

  A party of horsemen were collecting on the Steyne; and as predicted, torches flamed about them, casting a livid glow upon cheek and brow. Rising behind them, the bulk of the Marine Pavilion showed lights in many windows, and the riding stables were also illuminated; was Caro Lamb aware of what had occurred? There was much hallooing and barking of orders from the assembling search party; and some of the common Brighton folk had gathered on foot to observe the bustle. I glimpsed the undergroom, Jem, with his arm about the shoulders of my chambermaid, Betsy—both looking watchful and expectant.

  “Wait a moment, Jane,” my brother said. “It would be as well to learn the latest intelligence.”

  He crossed swiftly to one of the mounted constables, and conversed with the man briefly; then, with a shrug of his shoulders and a faint laugh, turned back to me.

  “It seems his lordship was aided in his escape by a page from the Pavilion, who rode up to the gaol dressed in the Regent’s blue and buff livery,” Henry explained hurriedly. “The boy claimed to bear a reprieve for Byron, direct from His Royal Highness—and the sentries, upon reading it, released his lordship immediately. It was only once the Camp Commandant learnt what had occurred, and demanded to see the paper, that the Regent’s signature was perceived to be a forgery. By that time, of course, the two had cantered away.”

  “Caro Lamb!” I exclaimed. “That is entirely like her! She should commit every crime in the Kingdom to save her Genius—and never give two snaps of her fingers for what the Law might say.”

  “But to forge the Regent’s signature,” Henry returned in tones of shock, “must be a treasonous offence.”

  “She should argue, with complete sang-froid, that to do anything less should be traitorous to the dictates of her heart—and might even win clemency from a Prince who saw fit to marry two women bigamously. But enough about Caro—We must hurry, Henry, or it shall be too late.”

  As we achieved Church Street, I observed Scrope Davies’s lodgings to be as well-lit as tho’ for a ball. That would be, no doubt, where the little page in blue and buff would be regaling her court with her adventures. No doubt Caro had expected a flight by water, in Byron’s yacht, perhaps—the two of them sailing romantically out into the darkened sea, their destination Greece or Turkey. It had not turned out like that; but then, Caro’s plans rarely bore fruit, and never corresponded to the elaborate phantasies she spun. She would be busy already, I guessed, at spinning another—

  We were bound for a different abode, one that stood still shuttered in darkness, but for the faint glow emanating from a side window, that suggested one was awake, and keeping vigil at the house’s rear—

  Henry strode up the path to General Twining’s door, and pounded on the oak. To our surprize, it gave way with a reverberating shudder—it had been ajar, and trembled on its hinges. My brother glanced at me wordlessly; I nodded, and he stepped across the threshold. The entry hall was in darkness.

  “General Twi
ning!” Henry called.

  “Suddley?” I attempted.

  No answering voice came. But there were footfalls—a curious, sickening, dragging gait that betrayed the club foot. It was approaching us.

  I clutched at Henry’s sleeve.

  He groped, in turn, for a taper that ought to lie on the entry hall table. But there was no way to light it.

  A dark head, faintly backlit by the pale glow spilling over the threshold of the rear room, appeared suddenly before us; I was reminded of General Twining’s habit of materialising at the far end of the passage. That must be where his book room lay.

  “The General will receive you now,” Byron said with a bow, “but do not expect to speak with him overmuch; he is unequal to all explanation.”

  I could not make out his countenance or read his looks in the darkness of the passage; but in the throb of his voice, in the very current of suppressed violence his still form conveyed, I read the truth. Every pore of my being was alive to his; that was Byron’s inimitable power. “Dear God,” I whispered. “You have killed him, then. We are too late.”

  Byron advanced towards us silently; Henry raised the taper as tho’ it were a weapon. His lordship stopped perhaps a yard from where we stood. At last I could see his eyes glittering in the faint light, and the pallid gleam of his countenance.

  “Killed him?” he repeated contemptuously. “He did not die by my hand. That was unnecessary; there are such men on earth, Miss Austen, who are mortal to themselves.” He stepped closer, all the intensity of his look fixed upon mine, and my rebellious pulse quickened. “But how did you come here?” he demanded. “What unknown seraph whispered my truth into your ears?”