Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  I gave him a sharp look, and he shrugged, all wide-eyed innocence. “What am I to do?” I lamented. “I can’t have her there. It’s going to be a very small affair in the drawing room at Fordhook, with only family in attendance.”

  “She believes otherwise,” said Mr. Babbage, and for the first time, a small, satisfied smile played in the corners of his mouth. “She thinks that she will lose herself in the crowd of well-wishers and observe you unnoticed. It’s a reasonable assumption, I suppose, that the daughter of Byron would have a very grand and very public wedding ceremony.”

  As his smile grew, I became increasingly suspicious. “Is it possible that she was somehow guided to this assumption?”

  He shrugged and feigned ignorance—I was certain it was feigned. “I wouldn’t want to speculate, but I believe she is under the impression that you and Lord King are going to marry on July eighth before a large assembly at Saint George’s Church in Hanover Square.”

  “She has the date right—”

  “But only the date.” Mr. Babbage regarded me with affectionate sympathy. “My dear Miss Byron, I wouldn’t have burdened you with this nonsense but for the fear that you might run into her at some dance or dinner. The thought of you being caught unaware by the irrepressible contessa, swept up in an embrace of lace, perfume, and swift, effusive, dialectal Italian—” He shook his head. “I simply could not allow that to happen.”

  I thanked him fervently, my imagination spilling over with the appalling scenes that might have unfolded if I had not been forewarned. Now I needed only to prevent the correct location from leaking to the press—and keep my mother from learning that la contessa was in England. My wedding was little more than a week away. Surely I could forestall disaster a few days more.

  That was what I told myself as I escorted Mr. Babbage to the door and hurried off for paper and pen to write to Lord King and warn him about our determined would-be guest.

  A few days later, my mother returned to London, her work with the Ealing Grove school set aside for the moment so that she could assist me with some last-minute details in Town before taking me home to Fordhook for the wedding. The moment she crossed the threshold, her expression told me that she bore a heavy burden of worry. At once I assumed that she had heard about the contessa, and I was in the midst of choosing words that would best comfort her when she asked me to join her in her study.

  I had done nothing wrong, so her abrupt tone did not trouble me for my own sake as I obediently followed her down the hall and sank into my usual chair facing her desk. My mother seated herself behind it and studied me over the mahogany expanse for a long moment in silence, all regal grace. “After much careful thought and prayer,” she said, “I have decided that you must inform Lord King of your imprudence with Mr. Turner.”

  My heart plummeted so swiftly that I thought I would be sick. “You can’t mean it.”

  “I most sincerely do.”

  “But . . . why? You have always said it must remain a secret, that no one must know—”

  “I am motivated by a stern sense of justice and right,” my mother interrupted, her expression stony. “Secrets were kept from me before my marriage, truths that, if revealed to me in time, would have changed the course of my life. I cannot perpetrate that same injustice upon anyone, particularly not a gentleman as good and honest as Lord King.”

  My vision blurred with tears. “You have said that no one would marry me if—”

  “If you and Lord King marry, you must marry into truth.”

  If we marry, she said. If. The room seemed to spin slowly to the right, and I closed my eyes, fighting back nausea. “I cannot tell him,” I choked out. “I cannot.” I pictured myself standing before him in shame, the sordid tale tumbling from my lips, the warmth fading from his smile, disappointment and disgust clouding his eyes, the face I already cherished turning away from me in cold contempt. “Please don’t make me do this. What can I say to convince you that this is a terrible mistake?”

  “The mistake was yours, when you heedlessly ran off in the night to your tutor,” my mother snapped. More calmly, she added, “You should tell him yourself, to show proper remorse and penitence, but if you cannot do that, you could write him a letter.”

  “I cannot do either.”

  “Then I shall write to him.”

  “Good God, no,” I exclaimed. I had read the characters she had written about me from the time I was a small child. I knew how she described me in letters to her friends. My mother’s condemning account of my indiscretion would ruin any chance I might have of obtaining Lord King’s forgiveness.

  My mother interlaced her fingers and rested them on her desk. “You won’t tell him, you won’t write to him, you say I shall not write to him. What is the alternative?”

  My mind raced. “Woronzow,” I said at last, defeated. “He knows, and he is Lord King’s closest friend. He would do this for me, if you insist that it must be done.”

  “Woronzow Greig knows of your disgrace?”

  “Yes,” I said brittlely, tempted to declare that he knew, and he did not consider me ruined. “I told him before he introduced me to Lord King.”

  “So you admit you understood, even then, that you should be honest about your indiscretion.”

  I felt weak, utterly drained of hope. “Woronzow should be the one to tell him,” I said dully. With great effort, I hauled myself out of the chair and walked unsteadily to the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To write to Woronzow,” I said, biting out each word.

  My letter was brief because he already knew the tale. All I did was tersely report my mother’s orders to inform Lord King.

  I signed the letter, sealed it, and sent it on its way—and then there was nothing to do but wait. I scarcely spoke to my mother all that day and the next, but listlessly wandered the rooms, gazing out windows, picking up books and setting them down unread. Although before my mother had returned from Fordhook I had been happily bustling about, attending to last-minute wedding preparations and ticking tasks off my list, after posting my letter, I abandoned my work. Why prepare for a wedding that might not happen?

  Three days after my mother’s staggering decree, Woronzow called. My mother was upstairs indisposed, so I seized his hand and pulled him into the sitting room. I felt faint; blood rushed in my ears; I groped for the edge of the sofa and nearly collapsed upon it. “What did he say?” I murmured, my throat constricting, bracing myself for the worst.

  Woronzow sat beside me and took my hand. “Lord King knows everything,” he said gently, “and he remains most anxious for the marriage.”

  A sob escaped my throat, and I fell into my friend’s embrace, weeping. I realized then that Lord King must have truly loved me.

  And then, amid my relief and gratitude, I discovered a tiny, cold ember of rage. My mother had been willing to jeopardize all my hopes and happiness because of some lingering resentment about her own marriage, some hatred she still clung to although my father had been cold in his grave eleven years. Or was there more to it? Could she not bear to see me happily married to a good, kind, forgiving man, since she had not enjoyed such happiness? Did she really envy her disgraced, unworthy daughter enough to snatch away the good fortune that she thought I did not deserve?

  Soon she could no longer command me, I thought bitterly as I dried my tears. Soon I would no longer be Ada Byron, daughter of Lady Byron, but Lady King, beloved wife of William, Lord King, eighth Baron of Ockham, and my mother’s pawn no longer.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  On with the Dance! Let Joy Be Unconfined

  June–September 1835

  To be fair, my mother was not wrong.

  I question her methods, and I suspect her motives, but she was not wrong to discourage me from marrying Lord King with a guilty secret poised to drive a wedge between us. If he had broken off
our engagement after learning my secret, I never would have forgiven her, but in hindsight, I see that it was better that he knew before we married. If the truth had come out later, it could have poisoned our marriage or led to our divorce. Instead I had learned that my bridegroom was an eminently just, reasonable, and forgiving man, and he learned that I was imperfect but striving for goodness. We had faced our first test and had passed it. Was it not better that way?

  Eventually, I decided that it was, but I did not come to this conclusion until much later. At the time, I burned with resentment and counted the days until I could marry Lord King and escape my judgmental, imperious, domineering mother once and for all.

  But I could not be free of her quite yet. The marriage settlement still had to be negotiated, and once my mother was certain that the wedding would proceed, she promptly summoned her lawyers and got down to business.

  Because there were substantial sums of money and large properties to consider, my settlement would be more complicated than most. My mother did not discover until then that Lord King was not as exceptionally wealthy as we had thought; although he owned two impressive estates and a house in London and had excellent prospects of rising in politics, in comparison to other peers he enjoyed only modest wealth, for his estates had to support several members of his extended family. My mother resolved to compensate for this relative deficiency and to use her significant resources to promote his career.

  When my grandparents had negotiated my mother’s marriage settlement with my father, they had provided sixteen thousand pounds “for the issue of the marriage,” and these funds essentially became my dowry. My mother contributed an additional fourteen thousand pounds of her own, which meant that upon marrying me, Lord King would receive the staggering sum of thirty thousand pounds, along with the near certainty of inheriting the considerable Wentworth estate sometime in the distant future. Astounded by her generosity, Lord King immediately directed his lawyers to accept the arrangement, as soon as he and my mother agreed upon my pin money.

  I still cannot think of this part of the settlement without resentment, gritting my teeth at the injustice and humiliation of their meager provision for me. Because, of course, as a mere woman, a wife, I would never own any of that wealth and property, though it would descend from my mother. Instead, as my husband, Lord King would control every penny and every square inch of land. I would receive an annual income, my “pin money,” which I was to use for my own expenses, such as clothing and other feminine necessities.

  My mother and Lord King quickly settled upon the sum of three hundred pounds per annum, which they both agreed would be more than sufficient for my needs. “It is what I received when I married your father,” my mother said when I objected to the paltry sum.

  “Yes,” I retorted, “twenty years ago. Three hundred pounds will not be enough when you consider the cost of books, and ball gowns, and—”

  “In that case,” she interrupted, “you will simply have to ask Lord King for more as your needs require. He has already proven to be generous. I’m sure he will deny you no reasonable request.”

  He probably would not, but I resented the very concept of pin money, of the obligation to go to him, head bowed in submission, and humbly petition him to pay my debts. It was evident that marriage would not bring me the independence I craved but would simply transfer me from my mother’s control to my husband’s. I could only trust that after marriage I would live under a more benevolent regime.

  With the settlement drawn up, signed, and witnessed, there came a mad scramble to finish the preparations for the wedding, the honeymoon, and my first months of married life. Lord King worked from dawn to dusk at Ashley Combe, taking care of last-minute repairs and furnishing the rooms. At Fordhook and 10 Wimpole Street, the trickle of letters of congratulations and good wishes swelled into a stream, signifying that the word was out. And then, a week before the wedding, my heart thumped when I discovered my own name in the “Saturday Night” column of The Examiner:

  It is said that the Hon. Miss Byron, “Ada, sole daughter of my house and race,” is about to be united in marriage to Lord King. The bride will be twenty in next December; his lordship was thirty in February last.

  I inhaled deeply, relieved that it said little that was not already public knowledge. I steeled myself before searching the other morning papers, but although I found a nearly verbatim announcement in The Morning Post, neither the location of the ceremony nor the date was revealed.

  “There was only a slight notice of our wedding in the papers today,” I wrote to Lord King later that afternoon, “nothing that need annoy us, although they did misquote Childe Harold, which I imagine will vex my late father’s legions of fanatical readers. May they bury the editors in letters of complaint.” I knew the third canto by heart, of course, having heard it recited to me more times than I could possibly count.

  Lord King and I had exchanged several letters since Woronzow had played the solicitor between us, but neither of us mentioned my past indiscretions. Twice I hesitantly mentioned how grateful I was for his forgiveness, but since he never addressed those remarks in his replies, I concluded that we were never to speak of the matter again.

  A few days before the wedding, my mother and I returned to Fordhook with all my wedding accoutrements and my trousseau. That same afternoon Lord King’s family joined us there, including the brother and sister he did not get along with and his chilly, distant mother. She was equally cool to me and my mother, but I promised myself I would do all I could to bring William and his estranged relations together. A few of my mother’s friends and some of my own completed our retinue, which was small, exactly as I wished. My mother had been obliged to obtain a special license from the archbishop of Canterbury so that Lord King and I could be wed in the drawing room at Fordhook, but we all agreed that our solitude was well worth the inconvenience.

  Despite the friction among the Kings, and the barely contained astonishment at my “unlikely match” among my mother’s friends, we were a merry company. At least most of us were, most of the time. At supper that first night, when Lord King’s uncle innocently asked my mother if my nuptials resembled her own wedding to Lord Byron, she gave him a stony look and said, “Except for the small size of the gathering, and the fact that my daughter will be married in a drawing room, there is no resemblance whatsoever.” The poor old gentleman had no idea what he had said to offend her, and my mother did not acknowledge his flustered apologies.

  On the morning of Wednesday, 8 July, I woke early, excited and happy for the day to begin. My gown was the same confection of white tulle and silk I had worn for my presentation at court, with some alterations to make the style fashionably au courant, and I wore a long, elegant veil instead of the hat trimmed in ostrich feathers. Lady Gosford’s daughter Olivia was my maid of honor, radiant in a dress of rose satin, and my dear bridegroom was wonderfully handsome in his blue silk jacket, snug trousers, and embroidered waistcoat.

  I was so overcome by blissful excitement that I scarcely remember processing into the drawing room and joining Lord King before the minister. The brief ceremony was over before I knew it. There were prayers and exhortations, and we recited our vows and kissed, and then we were man and wife, lord and lady. A joyful throng of friends and family surrounded us, offering us embraces, congratulations, and good wishes in abundance. My mother looked as if she might swoon from happiness—and relief, too, no doubt, that it had all come off as planned. I was astonished and touched to glimpse tears in her eyes, for they were so rarely found there.

  As we all filed into the dining room to enjoy a delicious wedding luncheon, I suddenly thought of Contessa Teresa Guiccioli, wandering forlornly through the empty, echoing nave of Saint George’s Church in Hanover Square, wondering where everyone had gotten to. How grateful I was to Mr. Babbage for diverting her so that she would not spoil our happy day!

  After luncheon, William and I—for I wo
uld call him William now, and he would call me Ada—departed Fordhook amid another flurry of embraces and good wishes. I had intended to bid farewell to my mother last of all, but when the moment came, she was standing at the back of the crowd chatting with Lady Gosford, the only two of all the company with their eyes turned anywhere but upon the bride and groom. Concealing my disappointment, I gave my parting kiss to Olivia instead.

  “Well, Lady King?” William inquired when we were settled in the carriage, taking my hand, “did you have a good morning?”

  “The most wonderful morning of my life,” said I, delighted to hear my new name on his lips.

  We first went to Ockham Park, William’s family seat in Surrey about thirty miles southwest of Fordhook, so that I could meet the servants and tour the magnificent estate of which I was now mistress. As our carriage approached the elegant, brown-and-red brick Italianate mansion, I glimpsed a hipped, plain-tiled roof partially obscured by parapets, a striking front entrance with pilaster piers, and several bays. Although I could not see them all, William said there were fourteen bays in total, seven on one side of the two-story residence, and seven on the other.

  William also told me that Ockham Park had been built nearly two hundred years earlier as a manor house, but when Peter King, the lord chancellor and first Baron King, had purchased it nearly one hundred years later, he had altered it according to plans by Nicholas Hawksmoor, the famous architect of the English Baroque style. “My father completed the next significant renovation only five years ago,” William told me as I peered eagerly through the carriage window at my new home. “It was he who extended the house and fashioned it in the Italian style.” He put one arm around my shoulders, and with his other hand, he indicated where the additions had been made, and also where the orangery, stables, and kitchen wing could be found. He himself had supervised construction of the lone tower beyond the house, barely visible through the tall cypress trees and hedgerows lining the drive.