Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “It was not meant to be kind.”

  “In that case, it was a resounding success, but I cannot understand what would have compelled a gentleman in your position to so mercilessly caricature a man like Mr. Blackett.”

  “Ah, yes.” He nodded. “Joseph Blackett, the cobbler.”

  “The poet,” she corrected him. Though a cobbler by trade, Mr. Blackett had shown superior genius that belied his humble origins. Annabella and her mother had become his patrons, providing him with a cottage on their estate and an income so that he might devote himself to composing poetry. His promise was cut short by his untimely death at the age of twenty-three, a loss Annabella still mourned.

  “The cobbler with higher aspirations,” Lord Byron corrected her in return.

  “You dismissed Mr. Blackett as a peasant and a fool,” she accused, surprised by how much the memory of his satirical barbs still stung. “Why shouldn’t a shoemaker aspire to write poetry?”

  “I intended no harm.”

  “You called him ‘the tenant of a stall’ who ‘employs a pen less pointed than his awl.’ How could that do no harm?”

  Byron shrugged, amused by her outrage. “Insightful criticism can spur a poet to improve his craft. You may recall that Mr. Blackett was not the only man I called out in that work.”

  “No, but he was certainly the lowest in rank. Unlike the great lord of Newstead Abbey, Mr. Blackett depended for his livelihood upon the generosity of patrons. It was unkind of you to push a man so far beneath you even further down, especially when he had only a year to live.”

  Byron’s sensuous mouth curved in a mocking smile. “In my defense, Miss Milbanke, I could not have known he was going to die.”

  “But you persisted in belittling him even after his death! What possible good did you hope to accomplish with that dreadful epitaph you wrote last spring?”

  He winced at the word “dreadful” but said, “Most readers, I am told, found it amusing.”

  “Readers with a spiteful sense of humor, perhaps,” she countered. “‘Poor Joe is gone, but left his all: You’ll find his relics in a stall.’ And then, ‘Yet is he happy in his hole, With verse immortal as his sole.’ Charming pun.”

  “How flattering. You learned it by heart.”

  She felt heat rise in her cheeks. “Only those phrases that most offended my sense of justice.”

  “If your Mr. Blackett wanted to be regarded as a proper poet, shouldn’t I have criticized his work as I would that of the greatest duke in the land? Wouldn’t it be more insulting to hold his verses to a lower standard solely because of his rank?”

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t criticize his work at all.”

  “A bad poem foisted upon the defenseless public deserves whatever criticism it receives. I’ve done him a favor. His fame is greater for my criticism than it ever was for his poetry.” Before she could protest, he added, “Nonetheless, you’re kind to defend his memory and legacy, just as you and your mother were very good to support Mr. Blackett in life.”

  His sudden turnabout so astonished Annabella that she was rendered speechless, but she inclined her head in acknowledgment of the compliment. It seemed sincerely meant, but she did not know him well enough to be certain.

  Intrigued in spite of herself, she set aside her indignation and twice more that week sought out his company in Society. On both occasions they discussed poetry and literature, debating which was the best novel written in the English language and whether a poem could ever evoke strong emotions from a reader if the poet himself had never experienced them. These conversations were animated and witty, and Annabella could not mistake the curious sidelong glances they drew—and no wonder, for they were an unlikely pair, the passionate, headstrong, irreverent poet and the prim young woman for whom virtue, reason, and self-control were guiding principles.

  As she came to know Byron better, Annabella gradually felt her icy disdain thawing. She decided that he was rather more handsome than she had first believed, and more modest and courteous than his reputation allowed. And he was undeniably gifted, a genius, one of the few people of her acquaintance whose intellectual powers equaled her own. Despite the troubling gossip about his character, she glimpsed flashes of true goodness behind his caustic condemnation of society and any hapless fellow who annoyed him, until at last, convinced that she had discovered a kindred spirit, she decided to bare her soul by showing him her poetry.

  She enlisted Lady Caroline Lamb as her intermediary, for she doubted her cousin William would be willing. Soon thereafter, when they met at a dinner party, Lady Caroline seized her arm and led her off to an empty salon and withdrew a letter from her reticule. “Byron’s response,” she announced with a curious gleam in her eye as she unfolded it.

  The broken seal told Annabella that Lady Caroline had already read it. “What does he say?” she asked, suddenly anxious.

  “I’ll tell you. ‘I have read over the few poems of Miss Milbanke with attention.’ That’s good. ‘They display fancy, feeling, and a little practice would very soon induce facility of expression.’”

  Her heart sank. “He does not think I have that already?”

  “Apparently not. Let me give you the best bits. ‘I like the lines on Dermody so much that I wish they were in rhyme. . . . The line in the cave at Seaham had a turn of thought which I cannot sufficiently commend. . . . The first stanza is very good indeed, and the others with a few slight alterations might be rendered equally excellent. The last are smooth and pretty.’ High praise indeed from a man disinclined to give it.”

  Annabella felt a thrill of pride. “Does he say anything more?”

  “He seems sorry that you did not have anything more to show him. Then he writes, ‘She certainly is a very extraordinary girl; who would imagine so much strength and variety of thought under that placid countenance?’ Then he says—oh, dear.”

  Her heart thumped. “What’s wrong?”

  “I hope this won’t upset you, but he showed your poems to a friend.”

  “Why? What friend?”

  “He doesn’t give his name but says only that he is an author fifty years old. Ah, but the friend was ‘much more enthusiastic in his praises than I have been. He thinks them beautiful; I shall content myself with observing that they are much better than anything of Miss M’s protégé Blackett.’”

  It was unnecessary to slight Mr. Blackett, but Annabella would forgive Byron this time. “Let me read the whole of it myself,” she said, reaching for the letter.

  Quickly Lady Caroline snatched it out of reach. “No, no, my dear. Byron said I should share with you only as much as I think proper, and I have done that.”

  “But I want to know what else he wrote.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Lady Caroline emphatically, shaking her head as she folded the letter and tucked it out of sight down her bodice.

  Annabella cajoled and teased, but Lady Caroline laughingly refused to divulge anything more, so Annabella thanked her and contented herself with Byron’s praise and Lady Caroline’s promises to tell her immediately if he offered any more.

  Thus she was quite taken aback a few weeks later when Lady Caroline wrote to urge her to avoid Byron at her peril. In a letter so disjointed and rambling that Annabella suspected it had been written under the influence of alcohol, Lady Caroline warned that Annabella was in grave danger from the corrupting influence of London society, of whom Byron was its most sinister and dangerous representative. “You must shun friendships with those whose practice ill accords with your Principles,” Lady Caroline insisted, urging her not to be tempted by Christian charity to tolerate evil in those she loved. “At all costs avoid befriending & protecting those falling angels”—it was obvious she meant Byron—“who are ever too happy to twine themselves round the young Saplings they can reach—but if they are falling you cannot save them—depend on that.”

 
It was a strange and unsettling letter, and although Annabella scoffed at the image of herself as an imperiled shrubbery and Byron as a predatory, choking vine, Lady Caroline’s words nonetheless took root. Annabella knew Byron had a reputation for depravity, which, along with madness, seemed to be the Byron family misfortune, passed from one generation to the next like land, debt, and title. These warnings cooled her admiration, and when Byron left London for his ancestral estate in Nottinghamshire, she was relieved to see him go. In September, when he wrote to halfheartedly propose marriage, she gently refused. He almost too happily promised never to raise the subject again, although he hoped they would remain friends.

  That should have been the end of it. If only she had heeded Lady Caroline’s warnings, that would have been the end of it.

  But by the early days of the 1813 Season, Annabella’s thoughts lingered upon the celebrated poet with disconcerting frequency. At parties, her cheeks flushed and she remained silent when other young ladies gossiped about his latest sexual conquests, confessed their longing to take him to bed themselves, and whispered rumors that he was extraordinarily well-endowed. On another occasion, her heart beat in sympathy for his pained frankness when she overheard him ask a circle of admirers, “Do you think there is one person here who dares look into himself?” Soon thereafter, he declared, “I have not a friend in the world.”

  His listeners talked over one another in their eagerness to contradict him, but he glowered and brushed them aside. Annabella knew what he meant. Sycophants and awestruck admirers surrounded him, attracted like dull, fluttering moths to the flame of his talent. She yearned to be the true friend he longed for and clearly needed—his true, devoted friend and nothing more. But when she tried to exorcise her rekindled affections by writing down all the reasons why she must not marry Byron, she found herself composing a long list of all there was to admire about him instead.

  As spring passed into summer, Annabella and Byron crossed paths as they made their rounds of the London Season, but they did not speak. She received another proposal of marriage from Frederick Douglas, the heir of Lord Glenbervie and member of Parliament for Banbury in Oxfordshire, which she summarily rejected. As if to prove that Fate had a wicked sense of humor, it was at a party hosted by Lady Glenbervie, mother of her most recently spurned suitor, where she turned a corner and discovered Byron with a pretty, dark-haired woman on his arm.

  Silently Annabella withdrew before they noticed her, but not before taking in the woman’s rosy cheeks and shining eyes, her soft, merry laugh and her gaze of unabashed affection. Nor did she miss Byron’s utterly rapt expression, or the unfamiliar gentleness in his smile, or his obvious delight with whatever his companion was murmuring in his ear. As she stole quietly away, Annabella felt a sting of jealousy so acute that she was obliged to admit that absence had made her much fonder of him. And the relief she felt later that evening upon learning that the woman whom Byron regarded with such tender affection was not a new sweetheart but his half sister, Mrs. Augusta Byron Leigh, convinced Annabella that she was, in all probability, thoroughly in love with him.

  It was a delicate matter to renew their acquaintance, but Annabella found an excuse to write to him, and before long they were corresponding regularly. Confessing none of her new feelings, she offered to be Byron’s friend, a strong moral influence to guide him away from vice and toward redemption. His reply was slow in coming and irreverent: He considered himself incorrigible, devoted to passion, sensation, levity, and imagination, but she was welcome to try.

  In the letters that flew back and forth between them, she argued the merits of logic and reason, he the sublime beauty and thrilling power of imagination. She quoted great philosophers like Locke and Bacon; he refuted almost every line with quotes from the great poets. When she insisted that rational thought offered the path to salvation, he fired back, “I care very little for logic and arithmetic. If you tell me that two and two make four, you merely provoke me to find a way to make them five. I am a poet, and poetry has little to do with reason. It is rather the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.”

  His tempestuous words, her increasing sense of him as an overpowering, uncontrollable force of nature, made her pulse race and her head grow light. Sometimes the physical stirrings his letters provoked obliged her to set the pages aside and go for a brisk walk in the garden until the unfamiliar sensations receded. But she was determined to redeem him, for the sake of his soul, his genius, and his core of goodness and generosity, which he only occasionally allowed her to see, precious glimpses of the better man she knew he could become with her moral guidance.

  Once, after complimenting her on her most recent, “very pretty” letter, he remarked, “What an odd situation and friendship is ours!—without one spark of love on either side, and produced by circumstances which in general lead to coldness on one side, and aversion on the other.”

  In her reply she agreed that their friendship was indeed rather unusual, but she would not say that she felt no spark.

  “You are a very superior woman,” he told her warmly a few weeks later, “and very little spoiled, which is strange in an heiress—a girl of twenty—a peeress that is to be, in your own right—an only child, and a savante, who has always had her own way.”

  When she protested that he scattered slander amid his praise, for she was not at all spoiled and certainly had not always had her own way, his reply suggested that she had provoked his amusement—but also unexpected tenderness. “You are a poetess—a mathematician—a metaphysician, and yet, withal, very kind, generous, and gentle, with very little pretension,” he wrote, bringing a blush to her cheeks. “Any other head would be turned with half your acquisitions, and a tenth of your advantages.”

  But her head had been turned, although for far different reasons.

  The months passed, but even as Annabella argued the case for religion, rationality, and restraint, she found herself struggling to convince Byron that she was not without feeling, that she was not as somber and didactic as her letters suggested, that there was more to her than virtue and piety. Had he not inferred as much from her poems, through which she had revealed her innermost self to him? “Come and visit me at Seaham,” she invited, scarcely believing her audacity. “You will find new inspiration in our windswept shores, the craggy bluffs overlooking the North Sea. I will introduce you to my parents, and I will reveal all to you.”

  She was disappointed when he laughingly replied that whatever she might say, he knew her to be fonder of numbers and geometry than passion and poems. She was more disappointed yet when he evaded not only that first invitation to visit Seaham, but several others she sent after it. But that was nothing compared to how absolutely crushed she felt when a friend shared a rumor that Byron was about to be engaged to another lady.

  Rumors were not betrothals, but there it was. Then, just as Annabella resigned herself to losing Byron forever, she received his fervent letter asking for her hand in marriage.

  Bewildered and overjoyed in equal measure, she promptly accepted, sending a cascade of astonishment throughout England. Ignoring speculation that Byron had proposed to her only after the other lady had refused him, Annabella set herself to the task of convincing her astonished friends that she had not made a terrible mistake. Byron made that task all the more difficult by finding one reason after another not to come to Seaham to meet her parents, but since his letters were as warm and affectionate as ever, she convinced herself that his delay was nothing to worry about. “I am very much in love,” he wrote reassuringly, “and as silly as all single gentlemen must be in that sentimental situation.”

  They had been engaged for almost two months when Byron at long last made the journey from London to County Durham. By that time Annabella’s mother had worked herself into such a state of nerves that when her future son-in-law arrived, she was too overcome with anxiety to leave her room to meet him.

  La
dy Judith emerged the next morning and was introduced to her famous future son-in-law, but the damage was done, and the entire visit was fraught with tension and uncomfortable silences. Yet it was not all unmitigated misery. Byron got along well with her genial, unpretentious father, Sir Ralph Milbanke, and in stolen private moments Byron introduced Annabella to the pleasure of kisses and caresses, evoking thrilling sensations that she had never dreamed possible—but otherwise he was restless and taciturn, she uncertain, hesitant, and overwrought.

  “You seem neither silly nor sentimental,” she observed as they took a stroll around the garden one afternoon. She dared not add that he did not seem very much in love, either. “Have I offended you?”

  “Darling, your only fault is that you are a great deal too good for me,” he replied lightly, “and that I must pardon, if nobody else should. I must, of course, reform thoroughly.”

  “See that you do,” she teased, smiling up at him, but his gaze was fixed on the path ahead of them, and he replied with a somber nod.

  One evening, after she had spent hours in forlorn contemplation in a solitary walk along the seashore, Annabella waited until she could catch him alone, then summoned up her courage. “My dearest, have your feelings about our marriage changed?” she asked tentatively. “Because if they have, as your true friend—which is what I have always wanted most to be—I am prepared to break off our engagement if that is what you want.”

  He stared at her. “What I want?” he echoed, his face mottled with emotion. “My God, Annabella.” Trembling, he staggered to the sofa, and to her horror, he fainted upon it.

  With a gasp, she snatched up a handkerchief, dipped it in a pitcher of water, and hurried to his side to lay the cool cloth upon his brow. Her heart thudded as she watched the color drain from his face, and she considered calling for help, but soon his eyelashes fluttered and he stared balefully up at her.