Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “Then—” My thoughts raced. “If I cannot marry Wills, and I am unfit to marry anyone else, what will become of me?”

  “We must keep this sordid business quiet and hope the secret never comes out.”

  The edge to her voice and the set to her jaw told me she had already taken measures to make this so. That must have been how she had spent her morning, while I had paced overhead and clung to vain hopes that I might yet be reunited with Wills.

  One last chance remained, and I seized it. “And if the secret does come out?”

  For a moment I dared hope that I had her, that she would admit that in that case, she would have no choice but to let me marry Wills.

  But she brushed aside my challenge with a graceful wave of her hand. “Why, then, you would not marry. You would still have your fortune, although I would mourn the loss of your heirs that will never be. As for how you would live, you would follow the excellent example provided for you by my friends.”

  I recoiled as if I had been struck. She meant the Furies. She expected me to accept their fate as my own and to become as miserable, condemning, and bitter as they were, begrudging other people their happiness because they had not found any for themselves.

  “I will never be like your friends,” I said, my voice shaking. “I would rather die.”

  She regarded me coolly. “Then you had better pray we find someone willing to overlook your shortcomings and marry you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Thus the Heart Will Break, Yet Brokenly Live On

  March–May 1833

  Later I learned that my mother had paid Wills his salary for the rest of the spring and had written him an acceptable reference, which he used to secure a new situation with a family in Suffolk. It was understood that this generosity would purchase his silence, and he must never ask for more.

  While I was confined to my bedroom, Wills’s sister came to collect the papers and payment, for Wills had been warned that he must not attempt to communicate with me. If he ever set foot on the Fordhook grounds, or on any property belonging to my mother, he would be arrested, and she would do everything in her considerable power to ensure that he was imprisoned for life or transported to Australia.

  Though I understood well the severity of the consequences Wills would face, at first I dared hope that he would come for me regardless. We could elope to the Continent and marry; we could find work as tutors with sophisticated French or Swiss families who did not fear my mother’s wrath; we would be poor but happy and in love. When I was allowed to leave my room for exercise escorted by a Fury, I invented reasons to visit the greenhouse to see if he had left a message for me, a token of his affection, a letter explaining where and when to meet him so we could run off together. In vain I looked and returned another day and looked again, but there was never anything to be found.

  Reluctantly I concluded that Wills could not come to Fordhook, yet I still held out hope that he would send word to me. I did not expect him to send me a letter through the post, because, of course, my mother would intercept it. Nor did I think he would bribe a servant, because everyone in the household was fiercely loyal to their mistress. I did think that he might persuade a sympathetic deliveryman to smuggle me a message, or enlist the help of a daring child from the village with the promise of a coin, but still he sent no word.

  I could not blame him for his reluctance to defy my mother, and yet I wished he would. Every day he failed to do so proved that his fear of my mother exceeded his love for me. Though I was deeply saddened and disappointed, I forgave him, and I even convinced myself that he had made the right decision. If I truly loved him, I could not ask him to throw away his prospects and his dream of becoming a professor of literature just for me, especially if it would bring scandal crashing down upon his head and doom him to exile. What else could I do? In my heart, I bade him a sorrowful good-bye and wished him well.

  I never saw him again. I did not know that then, of course, and for years thereafter, whenever I traveled through Suffolk, I looked for him. My heartbeat quickened at the glimpse of hair in a particular shade of gold, of a familiar stride, of a certain curving line between steady shoulders and tapered waist. These vain hopes faded as the years passed, although I confess they never left me entirely.

  I hope that wherever Wills is now, he is well and content.

  In the aftermath of my thwarted elopement, my relationship with my mother changed irrevocably. All my life my mother had worked tirelessly to rid me of the influence of my Byron blood, but in loving Wills, I had confirmed her worst fears—I lacked self-control, craved independence, was contemptuous of authority, and heedlessly indulged my passions. But if her understanding of me had altered, so, too, had my feelings for her. I knew I ought to love, revere, and respect my mother, but what I felt for her then was more akin to awe and admiration than love and affection.

  I sank into melancholy as deep and as painful as if I were mourning a death. Listless and quiet, I could find no comfort in my books or studies or horses. My appetite fled, and I lost more than a stone, which at first pleased my mother, who thought I was too plump, but she grew alarmed as my weight continued to drop. She summoned her most trusted doctors, who examined me and agreed that leeches and cuppings were required, but after their treatments, I felt more fragile and lethargic than before.

  You might blame my mother for causing my misery—I certainly did—but to her credit, she did more than anyone else to draw me out of it. She ordered the cook to make my favorite dishes and she cajoled me to eat. She took me to a spa in Brighton to give me a change of scenery and to put color in my cheeks. When we returned home, she reminded me that our poor horses suffered from my neglect, and so out of guilt more than any expectation of pleasure, I resumed riding.

  As for my spiritual needs, my mother enlisted the services of Dr. William King, the devout Unitarian who, along with his wife, had guided my moral education while we were at Hanger Hill. Dr. King escorted me on long walks around the Fordhook estate, during which he urged me to rigorously scrutinize my recent behavior, examining what I had done in the cold, clear light of reason rather than through the rosy glow of infatuation. “The imagination is a dangerous asset,” he asserted, his brow furrowed in earnest concern. “It is essential that you learn to control it and not allow treacherous thoughts to wander about your mind unrestrained. You must rule your emotions, not allow them to rule you.”

  Though our talks unfolded beneath azure skies amid the fragrant spring blossoms of the Fordhook gardens, as we followed the circuitous paths again and again and wore away at the gravel beneath our feet, so too were my pride and certainty ground into dust beneath our constant, unflinching scrutiny. Gradually he helped me to realize how reckless I had been and how close I had come to bringing catastrophic ignominy upon myself. Another young woman, even one nobly born, might have been able to elope and live out her days in anonymous, genteel poverty in some foreign land with the man she loved, but not so the daughter of Lord Byron, who would be relentlessly pursued and gleefully harassed by the same newspapermen and gossipmongers who had persecuted him. The public, greedy for scandal, envious of unearned fame, would never have allowed Wills and me to live in peace. If we had eloped, I would have destroyed us both.

  This new understanding dealt me a staggering blow. I had always prided myself—undeservedly, the Furies would say—on my intellect and perception, and yet I had entirely failed to foresee the inevitable outcome of the reckless course I had charted. For the first time in my life, I began to fear that something was very wrong with me, some inherent perversity that no amount of prayer or deep reflection could expunge. I brooded over my bad Byron blood, and the mysterious covered portrait, and the unspeakable “facts utterly unknown” that had forced my mother to separate from my father. Now I had a terrible secret of my own to conceal, the secret of my near ruin, which, if discovered, would condemn me to shame and loneliness.

 
; More leeches and cuppings, my mother’s panacea, afforded me no relief. I became anxious and timid, jumping at sudden noises and cowering in my room during thunderstorms. “Her sense of guilt rivals a Papist’s,” I overheard my mother tell the Furies one evening as they observed me through the open doorway to my bedroom while I feigned sleep to avoid another sermon.

  “A little shame will do her good,” said Miss Montgomery.

  “A little, perhaps,” my mother conceded, “but this is excessive, and the Season will begin soon. I cannot take her to London in this condition, and if I leave her behind, people will grow suspicious and begin asking dangerous questions.”

  And thus I had a new worry. I must get better, and I must be quick about it.

  I went riding nearly every day, because the vigorous exercise and the excitement of daring velocities brought me as close to happiness as I ever expected to be again. With Dr. King’s encouragement, I resumed my studies, and when they seemed to bring me solace and distraction, I threw myself into them with a vengeance. Eventually my pervasive sense of dread receded, but a trace of nervousness remained, and I experienced a slight recurrence of my old symptoms of weakness and paralysis, so that on particularly bad days I was obliged to lean upon my cane.

  I knew that a spark of my old spirit had returned when, after Miss Doyle berated me for using my “gentleman-like stick” instead of a more feminine parasol, I replied, “I appreciate the suggestion, but if I wanted fashion advice from a dowdy old hen, I would have consulted Miss Carr.” That remark earned me a rebuke from my mother, but I felt immensely better for having made it.

  This improvement came just in time, too, for my mother and I were preparing to move to London for the start of the Season within the week. In an act of true mercy for which I silently and irreverently thanked all the gods that ever were, she did not invite the Furies to accompany us.

  My mother had arranged comfortable and gracious lodgings for us in a fashionable neighborhood, and the moment we crossed the threshold she launched us into a frenzy of last-minute preparations for my presentation at court. An excellent dressmaker had been toiling over my gown for weeks, but I had grown very slim in my melancholy, and after I was measured the bodice had to be refitted, nearly every seam plucked out and sewn again. The gown was a lovely confection of white tulle with a broad white satin sash and a low, curving neckline, the design entirely my mother’s and the dressmaker’s since I had no sense for fashion. The appropriate slippers, jewels, and fan were selected, as was the requisite headdress, an elaborate creation with a profusion of white ostrich feathers and an ethereal veil long enough to cascade to the train of my gown. It was the most beautiful dress I had ever worn, and I was torn between delight for its beauty and regret that Wills would never see me wear it. He would not have recognized me.

  In the drawing room and the longest hall of our London residence, my mother made me practice walking in this ensemble, forward and backward in a perfect, smooth, graceful glide. I also rehearsed my curtsey, no ordinary dip but a full court curtsey in which one had to bend the knee until it nearly touched the floor and rise again without toppling over, tripping over one’s gown or train, or allowing one’s headdress to tumble off one’s coiffure. All this was to be completed with elegance and grace, evidence of one’s good breeding and proper upbringing.

  If I had been obliged to use my cane, I cannot imagine how I would have accomplished it, but I was anxious not to make a mistake, so I obediently practiced walking, curtseying, and backing out of a room as my mother commanded. Only once, when we had rehearsed so long that my knees and neck and shoulders ached, did a complaint escape my lips.

  “You have no idea how easy young ladies have it today,” my mother admonished me. “When I was presented to the court of King George and Queen Charlotte, the queen insisted upon the court dress of the previous century and required the young ladies to wear cumbersome, wide hoops. Climbing in and out of a carriage was an ordeal one could not accomplish unassisted, and simply navigating a room taxed one’s endurance and agility almost to the limit. In comparison, you have nothing to complain about.”

  I had less to complain about, but still a rather long list of grievances, I thought, though I did not say so aloud. My mother was my only ally in this mission, and I was grateful for her help. I suspected I required it far more than most girls my age, who had not squandered precious preparatory years confined to a sickbed.

  I was to be presented at Saint James’s Palace at the fourth Drawing Room of the Season, and as the occasion approached, I practiced diligently, my excitement and trepidation rising as my mother received word of the illustrious guests who were expected to attend—various dukes, a host of other nobles, and many visiting foreign dignitaries. Although my mother never explicitly said so, perhaps because she did not wish to terrify me, I understood that even among this august gathering and as only one of dozens of young ladies making their debuts, as Lord Byron’s daughter, I should expect to attract a great deal of notice. “This might inspire some jealousy among the other girls,” my mother warned me.

  “I want them to like me,” I protested. “I want friends. I don’t want attention simply because of my father.”

  “You’ll have it whether you want it or not,” she said, “so take care to acquit yourself well.”

  She turned away to fuss with the lace on the sleeves of her gown, and as I studied her, I realized that she was almost as anxious as I. If I failed in any manner of my deportment or appearance, I would ruin not only my own reputation and prospects, but my mother’s as well.

  I imagined other young ladies looked forward to their presentations with excitement and anticipation, but I could not wait to have it over and done. Although Dr. King would not have approved, in my nervousness I found some illicit comfort in my memory of Wills’s affection. He had found me lovely and charming, so perhaps others would too.

  The momentous occasion arrived at long last on 10 May 1833. Although the actual ceremony would not begin until two o’clock, we were up early to eat—it would be a long day, and my mother had a terror of me fainting from hunger into a pile of tulle and silk at the king’s feet—and to attend to my toilette and to dress. A maid helped me with my gown as my mother escorted me into the carriage, which carried us swiftly through the city toward Pall Mall until we turned onto Piccadilly Street and joined the long procession of carriages bringing other young ladies to the palace.

  I was fairly confident that I had studied and prepared well, and my mother was in good spirits, so I was feeling quite hopeful and happy as we passed through the main entrance of the redbrick Tudor palace. Guided by palace attendants, we merged into the parade of young ladies in white gowns and proud, watchful sponsors who were shown into a salon to await the announcement of our names.

  “I will try to find you a chair so you may rest,” my mother said, glancing about. The room was elegantly appointed, the walls covered in gold damask that seemed to glow in the light of the chandeliers, but it seemed that most chairs had been removed to make room for more ladies and sponsors to stand. “Don’t move from this spot.”

  I nodded, my mouth suddenly dry. While I waited for her to return, I smiled and nodded politely to any young lady who glanced my way, silently willing my mother to hurry. I exchanged a few pleasantries with the friendlier girls who deigned to speak to me, but I recognized no one and felt quite alone. From the conversations I overheard, I gathered that I had little in common with most of them. In a discussion of the sublime beauty of the Pythagorean theorem I would have outshone them all, but since old Pythagoras was not an unmarried lord with four thousand a year, I suspected that these young ladies neither knew him nor cared to.

  My mother had not yet returned by the time we were instructed to line up and await the announcement of our names, and my heart sank with dismay when I realized the escorts had themselves been escorted into the drawing room to await us there. I had hoped for s
ome parting word of encouragement from my mother before the moment came, but it seemed I would not get it.

  I was silently assuring myself that all would be well, and mostly believing it, when the young lady in front of me turned around, gave me an appraising look, and smiled in recognition, although I was certain we had never met. “My goodness, isn’t this terrifying?” she said cheerfully, although she seemed not a bit afraid. Her silken blond hair seemed to have been spun from gold, her eyes were the blue of an early summer sky, and her gown was of white silk exquisitely embellished with lace and pearls. Her face looked as if it had been created to inspire love and poetry, and her figure was so graceful and elegant that she could have been a model for an artist’s rendering of Aphrodite or Helen of Troy.

  “Exciting, yes, but not terrifying,” I said, smiling tentatively at this extraordinary creature, who was surely the most beautiful young lady in the room. “Thousands of other girls have been presented before this, and they have all survived.”

  “Not all of them,” she said darkly, and my eyes must have widened, because she quickly amended, “Oh, they all lived, as far as I know, but some departed with their reputations in tatters.” Drawing closer, she murmured, “Every year there is always one girl who collapses, or flees from the salon to be sick before her name is called, or babbles nonsense when the queen questions her. No one ever forgets her. Whatever else we do today, we must take care not to be that girl.”

  “No,” I said faintly. “I certainly wouldn’t want to be.”

  “Nor I.” She fixed me with a look of imperative warning. “Whatever you do, you must not think of being sick. Don’t think of all those strangers staring at you. And especially, don’t ever think about how humiliated your family will be if you fail. Think of something pleasant instead, such as . . .” She put her head to one side, considering. “Kittens. Do you like kittens?”