Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “Surely I would need to mark every line,” my mother exclaimed, “and there is no certainty that he would revise his pages according to my wishes. It is far more likely that he would mock my marginalia. No. No. I shall not give him anything else to satirize. The only possible response to this outrage is silence.”

  I heard them coming toward the door then, so I quickly scampered into the room, panting as if I had only just then arrived from somewhere else. They abruptly ceased their conversation, so I was left to wonder how my mother decided to respond to my father’s offer, if she made any reply at all.

  I confess I searched for the manuscript the next time my mother traveled, but I did not find it, only the letter I described above. I had learned to read quite well by then, thanks to my endlessly changing cast of nurses, who were increasingly hired for their value as tutors. I had long ago abandoned my scheme of driving away nurses so that Mrs. Grimes would be rehired, but none of my mother’s new hires stayed for long, for sooner or later she found reason to be dissatisfied with each and every one of them. And not only my nurses suffered her wrath. Too much salt in the soup meant the dismissal of a cook, a scorch mark on a freshly pressed petticoat sent a lady’s maid packing, an annoying laugh was the downfall of a driver, a woebegone manner banished a footman from the premises. My mother went through household staff the way other ladies used up stockings.

  A series of nurses led me through a rather rigorous curriculum for a child of four: arithmetic, geography, French, music, drawing, exercise, and outdoor play. My lessons were brief, only about fifteen minutes each, with mandatory rests in between. I yearned to run and skip and dance in those intervals rather than rest—after sitting still through my lessons, lying down made me only more restless—and when I found it impossible to obey, I was made to recline on a hard wooden board, which made fidgeting painful. When I did manage to be good, I was rewarded with tickets, and when I had collected enough, I could redeem them for gifts—new building blocks, a wooden puzzle, a book on botany.

  I easily won tickets for learning my lessons, for I gobbled up knowledge as fast as it could be fed to me. Just as easily, I lost tickets for naughty behavior, for fidgeting, and for refusing to lie still during rest time. The ticket system was also employed outside of classes, if I was having an especially difficult time complying with my mother’s wishes. I remember a spring day in 1820 when I lost fourteen tickets in a single hour because I wriggled and squirmed in my chair instead of holding my pose when an artist came to Kirkby Mallory to take sketches of me. “If he didn’t persist in demanding her portrait, I would have sent the artist home and let the child run and play instead,” my mother complained to my grandmother when the exasperated artist politely requested a pause of a quarter hour so he might search for his lost patience in a walk about the grounds. “What trouble and expense to go through to make a portrait of a four-year-old child!”

  “You will be glad to have it for yourself, when it is finished,” said my grandmother, smiling. “We had your portrait made when you were nearly the same age.”

  “I was ten, as I recall, and I sat perfectly still as instructed so the artist could do his work.”

  “Yes, I’m quite certain you did,” my grandmother acknowledged.

  I didn’t know at the time who the imperious he was who required me to sit still in that chair on a beautiful spring day. I assumed my mother referred to my grandpapa, whom I loved and did not wish to offend, so when the artist returned, I held perfectly still so he could complete his sketches. I found out later that it was my father who had demanded my portrait, and that he had made numerous requests for it, persisting despite my mother’s repeated demurrals. I did not earn any tickets for sitting so perfectly still, and when I asked my mother why, she said I should not expect rewards for finally consenting to do what I should have done without complaint in the first place.

  In early 1821, a few weeks after my fifth birthday, my mother engaged a governess for me and my formal education began. It resembled in many ways the instruction I had received over the previous year, but the lessons were longer and the discipline more rigorously enforced. Unfortunately, my new governess, Miss Lamont, was as bland and uninspiring as cod in milk sauce. She was a few years younger than my mother, with none of her self-possession. She had a long, thin nose; large, startled blue eyes; and the weakest chin I had ever seen on a woman. Her hair was not blond, nor was it brown, but some indeterminate shade in between, and throughout the day, wiry locks sprang free from her chignon and trembled as she moved as if searching frantically for the exit. She was very thin and unusually tall, and she hunched her shoulders as if to apologize for her height. She had a habit of hugging books to her chest as if she feared someone might snatch them from her.

  At first, Miss Lamont and I got along well enough. She was quite impressed with my proficiency in mathematics, which was considered highly unusual for a girl, even the daughter of Lady Byron, and she praised me for how swiftly and accurately I added up columns of numbers and how perfectly I drew parallel lines. “I know quite a lot about related figures that shall never meet,” I told her innocently, and she blinked at me for a long moment, trying to figure out if I meant to be cheeky. I did.

  I loved geometry, the way different shapes could be combined or divided to make others in seemingly limitless permutations, and at first Miss Lamont indulged my passion for it, encouraging me to draw shapes and to arrange my wooden blocks into cubes and rectangular prisms. When I went too far and began calling the prisms houses and towers and arranged them into towns and cities, she reprimanded me and took away two tickets. She had evidently been informed about the existing system of rewards and punishments as well as the necessity of suppressing my imagination.

  I enjoyed reading on my own and being read to, but when Miss Lamont lectured in geography or French, the minutes seemed to drag by at half the usual rate. As if of their own accord, my hands sought out whatever small items were within reach—pencils, a hair ribbon, pretty acorns I had found on our daily nature walks—and tapped them on the table to make interesting sounds or spun them about to see how long they would revolve.

  “Don’t fidget,” Miss Lamont ordered me over and over, but although I tried, I could not refrain for long. Eventually she began tying muslin bags around my hands to enforce my obedience. When my restlessness then expressed itself in kicking the table leg or drumming my heels on the rung of my chair, Miss Lamont took all of my hard-won tickets away, and when I expressed my outrage by kicking and drumming with redoubled vigor, she resorted to locking me in a small closet beneath the staircase. During a particularly disastrous French lesson, in which I laughed outright at Miss Lamont’s hapless inability to force me to do as she commanded, she planted her hands on my shoulders, marched me into the corner, and ordered me to stand there, silent and facing the wall, until she said I might return to my studies. As soon as she released my shoulders and returned to her chair, I snarled and took a bite out of the dado rail above the wainscot.

  Miss Lamont spluttered and nearly burst into tears. My mother swept into the room—in recent weeks, my governess’s emotional upsets had obliged her to take over my lessons more and more frequently—and ordered me to my room. Miss Lamont was given a two days’ holiday while I atoned for my crime, but although I said I was sorry, in truth, I felt strangely exhilarated when I discovered my perfect little teeth marks in the rail. Later, I bubbled up with mirth when I overheard my grandfather chortling about the incident. “We ought to put a gilded frame around those marks to preserve them as a memento of swiftly fleeting youth,” he said. “We’ve all done just as bad in our time.”

  “Not all of us have,” my mother replied levelly, and no one could contradict her—not I, because I had not witnessed a moment of her childhood, and not my grandparents, because apparently my mother had never given in to a single moment of youthful mischief.

  On the morning my studies with Miss Lamont were to res
ume, my mother settled me firmly in a chair, regarded me sternly, and told me that it was disrespectful to waste my governess’s time with my antics and sinful to waste my family’s money on lessons I did not diligently undertake. “And your behavior upsets Grandmama,” she added, when the first two charges did not seem to bother my conscience. “You make her worry about how you will ever grow up to be the sort of accomplished, educated young lady she may be proud of. Is that what you want?”

  “No, Mama,” said I, mortified. Grandmama had been terribly ill throughout that spring, and although she seemed to be recovering, the thought that I had given her even a moment’s concern made me feel ashamed. After that, I did my very best to behave like a good little girl ought, but although there were no more incidents of the wainscot-biting variety, I forfeited tickets, had my hands tied up in muslin bags, and endured lonely hours locked in the closet, though less frequently than before.

  My only saving grace was that I excelled in my lessons, especially mathematics and the study of anything mechanical—interests that another, less intellectual, less progressive family would have encouraged in a son but disapproved of in a daughter. I delighted in taking apart clocks and musical snuffboxes, and my grandparents indulged my fascination because I always reassembled the tiny mechanical pieces into perfect working order again. My emerging brilliance pleased my mother and mollified her righteous anger, but her frustration and worry lingered, for she saw something sinister and dreadful in my bursts of passion. “The Byron blood is to blame for her wickedness, I know it,” I overheard my mother confiding to my grandfather late one night when I was supposed to be asleep.

  “Ada is a good girl at heart,” my grandfather said, his voice a soothing rumble. “You worry too much about ordinary childish capers.”

  “There’s nothing ordinary about them. I simply don’t understand why she is transforming into him when his influence over her is so strictly limited, and when she has my example of virtue, restraint, and piety right before her to emulate.” I heard my mother pacing, as she did when she was most anxious. “I’m terribly afraid that we’re witnessing the earliest signs of the Byron in her emerging, and no amount of discipline will forestall the inevitable.”

  Suddenly terrified, I muffled a gasp and scampered back to bed, expecting any moment to transform into a rough, burly man, to feel bristly hairs bursting through my tender skin, to feel thick muscles bloating and distorting my lithe, slender frame. Instinctively I understood that the terrible transformations my mother dreaded were connected to the covered portrait that had disappeared from my grandfather’s smoking and billiards room.

  She had spoken of my Byron blood as the source of my wickedness. My mother believed in cupping and leeches, and she frequently instructed her physician to bleed her to rid her of unhealthful humors and vapors. When I was safely under the covers once more, I tried to say my prayers, but my thoughts wandered, and I began to think that perhaps the doctor could find a very special leech for me, one carefully trained to drain the bad Byron blood from me and leave the rest. I fell asleep wondering how one would train a leech, because they seemed like little mindless things, not like dogs or cats that would come when you called or do tricks for a tasty reward.

  I tried so hard to be good, or rather, not to be bad, but sometimes I was naughty unwittingly. Though I was precocious and bright, I was only five years old, and I was often confused about the composition of my family, and how the father of whom I had no conscious memory fit into it, and why my family did not resemble anyone else’s.

  I had given these puzzling questions a great deal of thought. One sunny afternoon in July as my mother and I strolled through Kirkby Wood, enjoying the cool shade and admiring the vivid greens of the tree boughs dancing in the breeze overhead, I asked, “Mama, is a grandpapa the same as a papa?”

  “No, Ada,” my mother replied, moving her skirt out of the way of a fallen branch as we passed it. “A grandfather is the father of one’s mother or father. Your grandpapa, Sir Ralph, is my father. That is what makes him your grandfather.”

  “But if Grandpapa isn’t my papa, who is my papa? How is it that other little girls have papas and I have none?”

  She quickened her pace, and I had to hurry to keep up with her. “You do have a father,” she said tightly. “Your papa is George Gordon, Lord Byron—my husband. You know that. How could you ask such a stupid question?”

  “I—” I trembled, shamed by my ignorance. “I—I’m sorry, Mama—”

  “Not another word. We shall discuss this subject when you’re older, when I decide the time is right.”

  Wordlessly I nodded. Tears filled my eyes as my mother seized my hand and strode back to the house with me trotting alongside, struggling to keep up. She left for Seaham early the next morning without telling me about her trip, without saying good-bye or telling me when she would return. It was one of her favorite and most effective forms of punishment.

  I still do not know how I could have heard so much talk about Lord Byron the poet who tormented my mother from abroad with his satire and demands and assertion of parental rights, and how I could have studied the covered portrait above the fireplace before it disappeared, and how I could have heard my mother called Lady Byron, and still have not made the connection that poet and tormenter and father were all the same man. Perhaps I had really meant to ask not why I had no papa, but why my papa was absent. I don’t know. It is very curious how children’s minds work, the disparate events they believe are connected and the obvious connections they fail to see.

  I was too afraid of infuriating my mother to question her again about my absent father, but about a month after I provoked her to anger in Kirkby Wood, she summoned me to her study. Her expression when I entered the room was inscrutable, and I instinctively slowed my pace as I approached her.

  She gestured to a chair and invited me to sit. I obeyed, and after a moment she told me to hold out my hand, and when I did, she placed something cool and smooth within it. It was a beautiful gold locket on a golden chain, gleaming in the sunlight that streamed through the open window. There was an inscription around the center engraving, but although I recognized the letters, I did not know the words. They were neither English nor Latin, but seemed to resemble both.

  “It is Italian,” my mother said, correctly interpreting my silence. “The words say, ‘Il sangue non è mai acqua.’ The meaning, as we would express it in English, is ‘Blood is thicker than water.’”

  I studied the words and murmured them under my breath. Glancing tentatively up at my mother, I asked, “May I open it?”

  She waved her hand to say that I could. Releasing the clasp, I discovered a thick, dark brown curl inside—and a thrill of fear and hope and amazement raced through me when I realized whose it must be.

  “It is your father’s,” my mother answered the question I was too afraid to ask. “He has sent it to you, and I do not object to your keeping it. He would like a lock of your hair, if you would agree to send him one.”

  I did not know what to say. I was happy and excited to have a lock of my father’s hair, even happier that he wanted one of mine in exchange, but I worried that if I consented, I would infuriate my mother.

  “I think,” I said carefully, “that since he’s my father, I ought to be obedient and send him what he has asked for. It’s my duty as his daughter, isn’t it?”

  She raised her eyebrows, and I knew even before she spoke that I had not fooled her. “How encouraging it is that you’re learning the meaning of duty and obedience at long last.”

  I flushed and lowered my gaze, closing the locket and slipping it into my pocket. My mother beckoned me closer and produced her shears, and with a quick, careful snip she trimmed a small curl from the nape of my neck, where it would not be missed.

  As soon as my mother dismissed me, I scampered off to show my new treasure to my grandmother. Although it was only midafternoon, I found
her in bed. She had never fully recovered from the illness that had threatened her life earlier that year, and she tired easily. She sat up in bed and smiled when I darted into the room, and as her maid arranged her pillows to support her, she beckoned me to join her in bed.

  “Look what my papa sent me,” I said, taking the locket from my pocket and holding it out on my open palm.

  “Oh, how lovely,” my grandmother said, picking it up by the chain and holding it high so it shone in a beam of sunlight peeking through her curtains, which were nearly closed. The windows, too, were shut tight against the mild autumn breezes, for the slightest draft wracked her thin frame as if it were deepest midwinter.

  “There’s a lock of his hair inside,” I said, and when she fumbled with the clasp, I opened it for her.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, nodding as she examined the curl. “It is exactly as I remember.”

  “You knew my papa?”

  “Of course, child.” She closed the locket and returned it to me. “This has come all the way from Italy, from his home to yours. Take very good care of it.”

  I nodded somberly, slipped the chain over my neck, and touched the precious relic to my heart. “Grandmama, do you think I shall ever meet my papa?”

  She hesitated, pondering the question. “I know he wishes to see you,” she said carefully, the faint pursing of her mouth suggesting that as for herself, she did not wish to see him. “He has said so in his letters. God willing, you shall meet again when the time is right.”

  I knew better than to ask when that time would come, for it surely depended upon my mother’s goodwill, which must be earned.

  “You should run along and let Lady Noel rest now,” my grandmother’s maid suggested, and when I observed how wearily she sank back against her pillows, I nodded, kissed her soft, papery cheek, and tiptoed away as if she had already fallen asleep.

  As that warm, brilliant, vivid autumn slipped into winter, my grandmother more often remained in her bed throughout the day, although in December she roused herself to join the family to celebrate my sixth birthday on the tenth and Christmas a fortnight later.