Lord Byron's Novel

by John Crowley

  ‘I understand that,’ Ali said, ‘and have no wish to dispute the conditions.’

  ‘I shall be frank with you,’ said his Sire, ‘as I have been in all things. The title you shall inherit from me when I lie down in that or in another vault, an eventuality I intend to avoid in any case, is nude of any property—all gone. You are without a shilling, and the rents and monies due you from your mother’s estate, which will begin to come to you upon your reaching your majority, will not be sufficient to repay even your present debts. You have mortgaged your future to pay for present needs, never wise, and now face swift ruin. I see no help for it but that you gird up your loins, travel to the populous and fashionable centres of the land, and find yourself a golden Dolly, marriage to whom will at a stroke recoup our family fortunes.’

  ‘I know not what you mean by a golden Dolly,’ said Ali.

  ‘Why, a marriageable woman with two or three thousand a year,’ said Lord Sane. ‘I do not deceive myself that you shall have the easiest shooting in that field, for no doubt all but the least eligible of the golden race will, at a minimum, prefer an Englishman for a husband, or at least a man of some more familiar nation than yours. Nevertheless there is game there that the nimble and the clever may garner. When I am returned, I shall set before you a List, and you may begin to consider where first to make your strike.’

  With that his Lordship took his horse’s bridle, and from the stone at the church-door he mounted at a leap—he was away without farewell, and without waiting upon his son—who took no particular offence at it—as he had expected no more.

  Ali had not spoken, upon that occasion, nor contradicted his parent, though he had no intention of going fortune-hunting. Insofar as he was capable of considering such a step as marriage—and to him it rather resembled in likelihood a voyage to the Moon, or an exchange of heads—he would consider but one object only, and that was Susanna. Yet he did not picture himself standing before an Altar—or negotiating for a dowry—or securing one—tho’ he knew well enough that all these things are commonly done. He knew that Nations strike Treaties, too, and Kings abdicate, and Navies engage—and these had as little to do with him, or his beloved friends. He did not know—could not have supposed!—that the gentle girl he thought upon so often could easily contemplate what he could not—though she did not presume to advance the business by any word or act. She knew as certainly as did Lord Sane what price her self and parts might command in the market, and she knew how little a bond with her might advance Ali’s fortunes, whose state she knew too (for they can make such calculations, even the purest of those souls, as well as they may play a sonata of Scarlatti’s or sing a song of Moore’s—it is very commonly among their attainments). Her brother might make a joke of their inseparability, and talk of an exchange of rings imminent, and a long married life—breakfast taken every morn amid the clamour of their graduated offspring, &c., but Ali and Susanna dismissed his drolleries, and together walk’d on, ‘in maiden meditation’, though perhaps not ‘fancy free’. Ali did not wish for time to stop, that this Eden might endure, as no Eden may: for he did not yet truly know, in his soul, that Time rolls on, and over our most precious possessions. He had no reason to suppose his state would change, for he did not desire it to change. In this is Youth eternal, the still garden from which all streams spring—and thus we remember it to be, when we are far down river of it.

  So his sands ran—to alter the figure, from water to earth—and he did not count them. He grew tall—slim as a wand—forgetting his supper, when it was not put before him, or he led to it. At Ida he learned games that his fellows had played since infancy, and excelled too, in one or another. He learned to swim, and thought that he was perhaps the first of the Ochridan race to do so, and in the cold waters of the stream that flows past Ida’s base he outdid even Corydon, who was the fleetest formerly of them all. One by one he completed his school terms, and on a certain 6th of June he performed for the last time before his fellows and the Masters and Guests foregathered—his choice a speech of Edmund the Bastard’s out of King Lear, done in the best manner of the Young Roscius, who was then triumphing on the boards in London. ‘Now Gods, Stand up for bastards!’ sang he, and all the rest of that ringing declaration—the planned undoing of his legitimate double, the taking of his brother’s lands, and the capturing of the exclusive love of his Father.

  It happened that, upon that very day, Ali’s own real, or physical, Father was in retreat from London, in consequence of a scheme gone wrong.

  It has been noted that there was little, or nothing, that ‘Satan’ Porteus would stop at in pursuit of the objects of his desires—and yet his soul was such that, had he spent however long on the evolving of some scheme of crime or extortion, he was well able in a moment of rage or pride to spoil it. The tale was told in the City (Ali would later hear it, and not once only, or from one informant) how he had once raised up an impecunious adventurer to impersonate the lost heir to a fortune—drilled and schooled the fellow in his part for months—busied himself in the laying down of the necessary forgeries and evidences—then, just as the scheme is about to succeed—he falls into a passion with his creature over some trivial matter—an impertinence perceiv’d—the turn of a card, or of a drab—and, forthwith, they draw, and Sane slays the fellow where he stands, knowing full well the fortune’s lost to him: and yet those who were present marked the horrid delight that rose then in his eyes to do this deed—it chilled their blood so that it would not warm thereafter—as though he delighted as much in the wreckage of his own prospects as in the wreckage of others’—as though nothing delighted him so much as wreckage itself. Here, said his henchmen to one another—even as they laboured, at his command, to conceal the crime—here was Satan himself, Nay-sayer absolute!

  Whatever well- or ill-laid plans had, in the present instance, failed to mature, Lord Sane was now on progress to the distant North, to his lair. But first his coach arrived at Ida, there to bring away his son. He found him among the Scholars, who were still attired as the characters whom they had portrayed in the day’s festivities, and distributed about the green lawns like immortals in Elysium—a strange sight, which yet seemed entirely unseen by the Lord. There stood his son, in his costume as Edmund, and with him Lord Corydon, who had taken no part that day, and Susanna—and upon them in the bright day fell the long shadow of Lord Sane. To him Ali with strange reluctance introduced his friends, who made response without any sign of the darkness Ali felt had come upon them—and Sane in turn took their hands with a merry interest that Ali felt to be all the more chilling. ‘Let us be gone,’ said he then to his son. ‘Doff these mummeries, and put on clothes for a journey. We have much to discuss along the way.’

  THOUGH HE HAD evinced but slight interest in Ali’s companions when introduced to them, it was not long after his coach was upon the North-ward road that Sane inquired musingly about the family.

  ‘Lord Corydon has not yet reached his majority,’ said Ali. ‘His sister Susanna is but seventeen.’ Susanna! To speak her name, here beside his father, seemed to Ali to risk much, though what he could not say.

  ‘Corydon,’ said Sane then, with an air of one drawing from a deep well. ‘His father was the fifth Lord.’

  ‘I know not his number,’ said Ali.

  ‘I partly knew the man. He had money in the Funds, and in Irish mortgages, quite safely; but he took bad advice, and put his fortune—nearly the whole of it—in West Indian shares, and was quickly ruined. He died by mischance not long since. Is this he?’

  ‘I am ignorant of his business dealings,’ said Ali, ‘but yes, this was he.’

  ‘Why, the house is declined almost to nothing,’ said Sane. ‘They are poor as church-mice; the girl will have not a shilling. No, it is absurd. I have expressed to you plainly that she upon whom you turn your attention must bring in some considerable Fortune, or else you must look elsewhere. I need not repeat myself upon the subject.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Ali in a low ton
e. ‘But there is no point in pursuing these considerations. I will have none of them. I will make no choice from your List.’

  Lord Sane inquired, in as low a tone as his son’s, ‘Why he should be so certain of this, and had he a choice of his own?’ Ali professed that he did not, and turned his gaze upon the passing scene. He could not dispute the plain truth his father stated—Susanna would bring no fortune to his house—but she would bring what was worth more—she would bring light, and gaiety, and goodness, enough even to sweep away the heaviness that brooded over the Abbey and its grounds and messuages—to shake out, as from a dusty rug, the gloom that the centuries had there accumulated.

  Sane now wished to know what the young Corydon, whom he termed, with an air of cold amusement, the present Lord, intended now to do. Would he go up to University? Ali thought he would not—that his ambitions had turned to the Army, where several of his family had made their careers, and where his prospects were good. Sane thereupon said nothing more, until Ali thought him fallen asleep where he sat—and was startled then to hear him ask, ‘Whether Ali had himself had made a choice of University, between the two?’ Ali said he had given it no thought, for he had not supposed it to be his father’s wish that he go up—indeed, it seemed to him quite otherwise, and that he too would be sent to the Army, as his father had been, and his father’s father too, who had earned credit by his service that his son had not entirely squandered away.

  ‘Ah no,’ said the Lord. ‘When the expected profit is great, we do not spare expense. A sound education is an Investment. A better one than shares upon ’Change. Take a Degree, and it will improve your prospects in many ways.’ With this it seemed he smiled upon his son, though in the case of ‘Satan’ Porteus that commonest of all human expressions had a cast unlike the common, and had not the common effect upon those toward whom it was directed. Nevertheless he said no more, and closed his great hands upon his waistcoat, and slept indeed.

  NOTES FOR THE 4TH CHAPTER

  Viola and Sebastian: In Shake-speare’s comedy Twelfth Night, the brother and sister shipwrecked on the sea-coast of Illyria, which is oddly a part of Albania, though surely the Bard knew nothing of that. Ld. B.’s knowledge of Shakespeare was wide if not deep, and his habit of quoting (or partly quoting) his lines was persistent in his letters, though it may seem a fault in his fiction.

  Lady Sane’s last days: To prove that the present manuscript represents an initial draft, it is sufficient to point out that this lady, whose death is here reported, is described on the first page of the story as alive, though sequestered and mad, on the night of her husband’s murder. Ld. B. is commonly conceived as a rapid and even as a careless writer, but a mere glance back at his initial pages would have shown him this glaring solecism—and therefore it would seem he did not look back. Yet he did write thoughtfully, however quickly. The many corrections, markings-out, interpolations &c. in the original MS have not been preserved in my fair copy—but I have otherwise altered nothing, not even his grammar when it is wrong.

  a small and ancient church: The Byrons are laid in the vault of Hucknall church, nearby to Newstead. Ld. B. here exaggerates it to describe it as an agglomeration of flints, but the church is indeed in bad repair and without much to recommend it. I descended as Ld. B.’s hero did, to see his ancestors and mine laid cheek by jowl in dimness. I put my hand upon him, or the container of his earthly part. I have never feared death, nor did he.

  nude of any property: It is an unfortunate thing—Ld. B. was not the only who felt it to be so—to receive an ancient title, without the means to keep it up. The present Lord Byron, Admiral and Lord-in-Waiting to her Majesty, received nothing from my father’s estate, all of which went to my mother and to his half-sister Mrs Leigh; and all the property was gone long before. As a young girl I was grateful for the present Lord’s hospitality; my mother, in her frequent illnesses, could not always attend to my needs, and he was one who gave generously of his time and solicitude. He exhibits no trace of his ancestors’ characters—neither of his cousin, my father, nor of my father’s father, ‘Mad Jack’ Byron.

  a golden Dolly: It is generally believed that my father attempted to repair his fortunes and settle his affairs, which were in a bad state, by a coldly calculated marriage with my mother, who was in possession of a small fortune, and had prospects. However, if my own investigations into the matter be reliable, I should rather state that Ld. B. believed himself the richer of the pair, for he thought he would sell Newstead Abbey for a hundred thousand pounds or more, and bring a considerable sum to his marriage with the then Miss Milbanke. Only later, when the Newstead sale disappointed, and inheritances from Lady Byron’s mother upon that lady’s death were divided between them, did Ld. B. see a great advance in his situation from his marriage. His reasons for making that marriage were otherwise—though I am at a loss to explain what they were.

  maiden meditation: Shake-speare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. See the note above on the subject. It is possible that the presence of other of the Bard’s lines has escaped me, and still others are so familiar as to seem not worth annotating.

  slim as a wand: Lord Byron, it is related by several who knew him well, had a tendency to fat, and a horror of it too, and used by strenuous fasting and abnegation to combat his natural condition—salads of cold vegetables doused in vinegar, small wines mixed with soda-water, &c. Many a maiden of our day, with the same object in view, would not have the strength to bear his regimen.

  excelled: I have heard that, despite his lameness, Lord Byron once played with Harrow’s eleven against Eton at Lord’s cricket grounds, and gave a good account of himself. Of his swimming nothing need here be added to popular report—he is the most famous swimmer since Leander, whose feat at the Hellespont he imitated. I cannot swim a stroke, and would be gone like Ophelia if ever by mischance I fell in; but on top of the water I can skate, when the same stream is in a different physical state, as well as the best.

  Young Roscius: William Betty, the child actor (in truth an adolescent) whose beauty and power so enthralled our grandparents, was said to have resembled my father—tho’ upon attending a performance of his in London, Ld. B. declared himself unmoved. Lord Byron no doubt comported himself well in the famous Speech Day exercises at Harrow School. It may be said that he performed all his life as himself, and no one could have played the part better—tho’ many have tried since.

  From: “Smith”

  To: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  Subject: No novel

  Lee:

  Well, bad news. There’s no novel, not anymore.

  It seems (why do people say that, when they have news, especially bad news? “It seems,” when they mean it just is? “It seems your father is dead.” “It seems you’ve lost.” But it’s in old jokes too, right? “It seems this lion went into a bar.” Okay forget this) it seems that when she was dying Ada just gave up, and turned everything over to her mother. And it looks like, from a letter I turned up in the Lovelace archive, that it was then that the novel got burned. I’ve scanned the letter for you to read; the handwriting’s hard but be patient, and see if you think it means what I think.

  S

  Attached: ada12.tif

  My beloved Hen I can no longer write with pen and ink I shall use pencil your loving eyes will read what I have written tho no one else can. O my dear I have resisted so foolishly and for so long and now I can resist no longer nor shd I. You say you will not believe me if you do not see the thing burnt yourself but will you believe William. I will ask him to be present. He too has suffer’d because of my obsession and I am sorry and not for that alone. I know now it is the right thing and you are right to demand ask it of me. You have not read it nor shd you and there is nothing in it that the future need know and I suppose much that it shd not O I am so tired and I hurt so dreadfully My resistance to all the goodness you have pressed upon me is gone trust me it is gone You say that all my suffering has a purpose and the purpose
is that I may not regret the loss of all that is a part of this life and not a part of the next. I know not if that be the reason it has been given unto me but O Hen I can no longer think of any other reason and I shall finally and humbly accept yours. Only I wd think that by now I have learned my lesson and I ought to be released

  From: lnovak@metrognome.net.au

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: RE:No novel

  I think it means what you think it does: that Ada burned the manuscript of the novel because her mother wanted it burned. Hen was what she called her mother. She and her mother and her husband (William, named in the letter) called one another by these bird names when they were feeling sweet. Ada as you know died of a cervical cancer and apparently suffered atrociously. I can well believe her mother told her that her suffering was all for her soul’s good. I don’t know what to say. I can hope it was nothing solid really, just a few odd pages. Though the notes of Ada’s that you sent me, if I read them right, suggest something pretty substantial. I feel like a child has been stillborn.

  Lee

  From: “Smith”

  To: lnovak@metrognome.com

  Subject: RE:Re:No novel

  Lee—

  It seems to me from the letter that Ada’s mother never even read the book. Right? Could she have asked Ada to burn it if she’d never even read it? How did she know it wasn’t harmless? It wasn’t hers. Maybe we’re wrong. Ada said that her mother wouldn’t believe it was burned unless she saw it burned for herself, so she suspected that Ada would hide it. Maybe she did.