Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  As we drew closer and the carriage slowed, I saw that the servants were lined up outside the front entrance waiting to greet us. I was somewhat nervous, wondering how they would accept their new mistress, but everyone was kind and smiling, except for one footman, who gaped and stammered when we were introduced. I smiled kindly, assuming that he was either exceptionally shy or a new hire, but I later learned that he was a great lover of poetry, and he had been as excitable as a nervous colt from the moment he learned that his master was to wed the daughter of the great Lord Byron. It was then that I learned that even though I was now styled Lady King, I would always be “Ada!” of the third canto, sole daughter of my father’s house and heart, to those who worshipped my father’s memory.

  My husband—how strange and wonderful it felt to think of him that way!—escorted me across the threshold. My first glance took in a spacious hall that opened into grand yet comfortable rooms, as lovely and as beautifully furnished as any place I had ever called home, with the exception of Kirkby Mallory, which to my loyal heart had no equal.

  Home, I marveled. No longer would I be moved from one rented dwelling to another at my mother’s whim. At last I had a place I could truly call my own home, and what a wonderful place it was.

  Delighted, I seized William’s hand. “Give me the grand tour, lord husband,” I demanded, tugging his arm and pulling him down the hallway after me. Laughing, he obeyed, and although we did not visit every room that day, we at least paused in the doorway and glanced inside most of them. I claimed one particularly pleasant, sunny room on the first floor as my study, and further down the hall in the conservatory, I sighed over the lovely pianoforte. A moment later, when William directed my attention to the opposite corner, I cried for joy to behold a beautiful harp, intricately carved and perfectly tuned, his wedding gift to me.

  “You’re going to have a very difficult time persuading me to ever leave this room,” I told him as I plucked arpeggios, luxuriating in the sonorous tone.

  “Oh, indeed?” William said, eyebrows rising. “Do you think so?”

  “I know so.”

  With a playful growl, he swept me up into his arms, and as I laughed and shrieked with delight, he carried me off to another room, in which I was to spend even more pleasurable hours than the conservatory.

  William proved to be an eager, generous lover, and perhaps because he knew that I was no innocent, timid child, he did not restrain his ardor. Our lovemaking was passionate or playful as the mood took us, and if I did not feel the same dizzying rush of ecstasy as I had in Wills’s arms, William brought me to such heights of pleasure that even from the first, I trusted our passion would become even richer and more fulfilling with time.

  Perhaps because we passed so much time enjoying the pleasures of the marital bed, a week proved insufficient for me to explore every room of that lovely residence and each of the nearly five thousand acres of the surrounding estate. But our honeymoon cottage beckoned, and so on my seventh day as Lady King, we departed for Ashley Combe, about one hundred seventy miles to the west in Somerset, on the Bristol Channel.

  At that time the journey was formidable, requiring several long, uncomfortable, and exhausting days in a carriage, with overnight stays at inns along the way, but newlywed bliss and anticipation sustained us. William amused me by describing the history or significant geologic features of places along our route, and we also passed the time simply holding hands and enjoying companionable silence. As we ventured westward, we seemed to leave civilization behind, as the towns became smaller and more widely scattered, the wilderness we passed through denser and more vast.

  The last village we passed through was called Porlock, tucked into the rows of hills along the coast between the town of Minehead—which had nothing to do with any mine, as William told me, but was a corruption of the Welsh word mynydd, or “mountain”—and the picturesque but rugged Valley of the Rocks. I confess that I clutched William’s arm anxiously when the carriage passed through Porlock and turned onto a rough, narrow track that climbed precariously up the west side of the valley, rocking and creaking up the steep slope. When we reached the top and I beheld Porlock Common, a blessedly flat, windswept plain covered in gorse and grass, I heaved a sigh of relief so profound that William laughed and kissed my cheek.

  “The worst is behind us,” he assured me, taking my hand. “This marks the edge of our estate. Look there and tell me what you think.”

  He inclined his head to the window, and I edged closer and peered outside—and drew in a slow breath, awestruck by the stunning view of the wide Bristol Channel, the rolling, forested hills of Exmoor to the south, the green shores of Wales to the north. “This vista is worth the precipitous climb,” I said, an easier assertion to make now that the steep slope was behind us.

  But my apprehensions returned as the road crossed the plateau and plunged into a dense forest. After the carriage descended a gentle slope, it wound through a series of sharp, heart-stopping turns as it began a steep descent to the sea. The road followed alongside a rushing stream, which cascaded over split boulders and tumbled rocks that looked alarmingly bare of moss and soil, as if they had only recently fallen from the hillside. Just when I was tempted to tell William that I would walk the rest of the way regardless of the distance, the carriage turned onto a level, relatively smooth path and halted before a gate.

  “We’re almost there,” William reassured me as the coachman jumped down, opened the gate, led the horses through, and closed the gate behind us before resuming his seat. We moved on through a deep, tranquil wood, the stillness broken only by the sound of the horses’ hooves on the level earthen trail, the rustling of the leaves high overhead as the wind moved through the boughs, the twittering of songbirds, and the cascading rush of the stream, which I could no longer see but guessed to be not far away.

  We turned a corner and came upon a clearing, and there, seemingly built upon a deep ledge cut into the hillside, was a three-story stone house, elegantly rustic, as if it had grown out of the natural rock and had been perfected by an artisan’s hand. It was surrounded by stone terraces filled with lush cedar, bay, cork, and oak trees, which lightly tossed their branches in the gentle winds, benevolently shading the house from the bright sunshine.

  “You said it was a cork-burner’s cottage,” I gasped, my eyes fixed on the enchanting residence.

  William smiled. “It was, once.”

  “That’s like calling Saint James’s Palace a scullery maid’s house because one happens to live there,” I scolded, my smile betraying my delight. Admiring the irregular structure, so unlike the symmetrical order of Ockham Park, as well as the elaborate arches and patterned brickwork, I almost could have believed myself back on the shores of Lac Léman, or in Switzerland in the foothills of Mont Blanc.

  “I’m constructing a clock tower over there,” William said, waving to indicate a location on the hillside; I craned my neck but saw no sign of it. “I’m also building a water garden in a shady spot in the heights above it, which will be fed by a nearby lake. I might have to cut some irrigation channels—not quite sure yet. We’ll see.”

  “I thought you were removing a few trees and plastering walls,” I said as the carriage halted before the front door, and a man and a woman, likely a housekeeper and a footman, hurried out and stood ready to welcome us. “This is a major architectural project.”

  “It’s a labor of love,” he said, bounding down from the carriage and holding out his hand to help me descend. “Another gift for my beautiful bride.”

  Tears of joy sprang into my eyes. I had never felt more adored, more wanted, more loved.

  After we met the few servants, William offered me his arm and led me on a tour of the residence. Inside all was spacious and airy, with the scent of new plaster and paint lingering faintly in the air, but the diamond-paned windows were open to welcome the freshening breeze and after a moment I did not notice the od
or. The rooms were comfortably and handsomely furnished in dark woods, wools, and leather, with a minimum of adornment and clutter, which I thought suited the natural setting very well.

  The bedchamber we would share was on the second story at the back of the house, secluded and quiet, overlooking a lush flower garden. With the windows flung open to welcome the soft, cool air, I heard a stream burbling merrily somewhere unseen but not too distant, perhaps sweeping down the hillside to join the larger stream that followed the road.

  The dining room and the drawing room on the first floor were bright and sunny and boasted breathtaking views of the Bristol Channel, and down the hall in the room beneath our bedchamber, I discovered a large library that would have been a credit to any gracious home in London. Perusing the shelves, I discovered fine editions of works by the greatest writers and philosophers of England and of the world, including the Essay Concerning Human Understanding by William’s ancestor John Locke; numerous historical novels of Sir Walter Scott; and several volumes of poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had written his fantastical poem Kubla Khan at Withycombe Farm near Culbone, the parish church for William’s estate. Perhaps I should say only that Mr. Coleridge had begun the poem there, for as he had written afterward, a hapless visitor from Porlock had rapped upon his door when he was in the midst of feverish composition. When he had returned to his desk after the interruption, he had discovered that his poetical inspiration had faded, and “with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the image on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.”

  “A poet ought to be able to expect uninterrupted solitude in which to write in such a remote place as this,” I was musing aloud to William just as my gaze fell upon several leather-bound volumes given pride of place upon their own shelf in the center of one long wall of bookcases. I drew closer, and with a pang of something—surprise or wariness, or an unsettling mixture of both—I discovered the finest editions of my father’s poetry, what surely must have been every poem he had ever written.

  “I did not know you were such a devoted reader of Lord Byron,” I said, keeping my voice light. “You rarely speak of his work.”

  He put an arm around my shoulders and gave me a rueful, sidelong smile. “You always seem reluctant to discuss it.”

  “Only because I’ve read so little of it,” I admitted. “A few years ago, when I had just turned fifteen, my mother read aloud to me selections from some of his works, but she grew agitated when I asked for more, and it was always understood that I was never to read them on my own.”

  “You and I shall have a different understanding.” William turned me so that together we took in the entire room with all of its literary treasures. “You’re welcome to read any book you find here, including, and especially, your father’s poetry.”

  I thanked him with a kiss, and I selected a beautifully bound edition of Don Juan to read later.

  Never before had I been offered unrestricted access to my father’s work, and once I began to indulge in his sublime imagery, his provocative humor, his wicked satire, my appetite for his poetry became insatiable. After Don Juan I turned to The Prisoner of Chillon, in remembrance of my sojourn at Lac Léman, and then to a volume of beautiful lyric poems.

  I confess I found some of my father’s verses unsettling, and not only because all of his poetry carried an air of the forbidden, as I knew my mother would disapprove of my devouring it in such great portions. A strange apprehension stirred in me as I read how the hero of Manfred, tormented by the memory of an unnamed “half-maddening sin,” confesses to the Witch of the Alps his love for the deceased Astarte, who

  was like me in lineaments—her eyes,

  Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone

  Even of her voice, they said were like to mine.

  This anguish of passion he wrote of, this love that burned and seethed and tormented, was nothing like what I felt for William, and it both intrigued and frightened me. I confess there were moments when I hastily closed a book upon verses that provoked dark and curious imaginings, only to return to them later, feeling somehow as if I were trespassing upon my parents’ fraught and fractious history in a way I could not quite define.

  Although the library offered innumerable diversions, the sublime beauty and dramatic vistas of the hillsides and forests always beckoned. Exulting in my freedom, every day I explored the natural wonders of the estate, sometimes setting off on foot along narrow, winding trails through the densest part of the wood, feeling like a woodland fairy as I made my way through dense stands of ash, birch, hazel, and oak and slipped past thickets of bramble and whortleberry. I collected samples of velvety lichen and rare, vivid yellow reindeer moss, and I delighted in glimpses of deer, fox, badger, and pheasant as well as the music of the ubiquitous songbirds.

  Often I rode off alone on the back of a Forester mare, ranging over dales, valleys, moors, and downs, up into the hills or down along the shore. Sometimes William accompanied me, but often he was occupied with the business of the estate, so he would see me off with a kiss in the morning and welcome me back with another in the afternoon. On other occasions, while he and his small team of workers built stone walls or cleared underbrush for the water garden, I would spread a soft blanket beneath a nearby tree and recline in the shade, writing letters, reading poetry, or studying mathematics, glancing up from my books and papers now and then to note the men’s progress and to admire my husband, who would pause to catch his breath, wipe his brow, and grin cheerfully back at me.

  I confess I fell in love with Ashley Combe even more swiftly than I had with its master.

  As isolated and rugged as the estate was, my rapturous letters to friends and family extolling its tranquility and sublime beauty proved too alluring, and we had been there less than a fortnight before we welcomed our first visitors. Dr. and Mrs. King stayed three days with us, which offered them ample opportunity to admire Ashley Combe and to scrutinize me—preparing a report for my mother, no doubt.

  On the eve of their departure, Mrs. King took me aside and warned me that my mother was seriously ill, her tone and look reproving me for my selfish absence. A panic of guilt and worry seized me, and as soon as I could speak to William alone, I tearfully told him what Mrs. King had reported. My anxiety subsided somewhat when he reminded me that in her letters, which came nearly every day and were invariably cheerful, my mother had complained of only mild symptoms and nothing new, nothing she had not complained about for years.

  “If Lady Byron’s condition was as dire as Mrs. King claims,” William said, “she would have told us herself, for she never shies away from such admissions, or she would have been too frail to write at all.”

  Somewhat reassured, I did my best not to worry, but as our honeymoon drew to a close, the joy of Ashley Combe diminished beneath the urgent pressure to return to Fordhook and see for myself that my mother was not languishing on her deathbed.

  I wrote to assure her we were on our way, but on the morning of our departure, I received a letter informing us that she would not be at Fordhook to receive us and would visit us at Ockham upon our return instead. Bewildered, I decided to take that as a good sign that she was recovering, although I was beginning to suspect that Mrs. King had exaggerated, who knew why. Perhaps upon seeing me and William together, she decided that I was inordinately happy and ought to be brought down to earth. She had certainly accomplished that.

  The journey back to Ockham Park was as long and rugged as our westward travels had been, but William’s affectionate companionship and my anticipation for my new harp helped to keep me in good spirits despite the close quarters and the jolting of the carriage wheels. We had barely settled in when my mother arrived for her promised visit, and not only was her health quite satisfactory, but she was in astonishingly good spirits. She was obviously delighted to have acquired such a perfect son-in-law, and he
r approval of William somehow had raised me in her esteem as well. Whereas once she had dreaded my ruin and suspected latent madness thanks to my bad Byron blood, suddenly all her misgivings had vanished and she was as affectionate to me as if I had ever been the good, pious, dutiful, and brilliant daughter she had always wanted.

  “I have discovered,” she confided as we strolled arm in arm through the lovely gardens of Ockham Park, “that in consequence of your marriage, I am become amiable, affable, and all sorts of pretty epithets, in the opinion of those people who never thought me so before.”

  “It’s wonderful to see you so happy,” I ventured, not wanting to admit to being one of those people.

  My mother remained with us only a few days, but from Fordhook and London and wherever else she traveled afterward, she sent us frequent letters, praising William, expressing her joy in our marriage, and addressing me with fond endearments that she had never before employed. “Dear little canary bird,” she cooed in a note included with a gift of sheet music, “may your new cage be gladdened by the notes of your voice and harp.”

  “Which is meant to be the cage,” I asked William archly, “Ockham Park or marriage itself?”

  “Don’t be unkind,” he said, smiling to take the sting out of his rebuke. “She doesn’t mean to imply that you’re a prisoner, only that you’re protected and cared for.”

  “Of course that’s what she means,” I said, forcing a smile, although I would have preferred to let out an exasperated sigh. William, I had learned, revered my “formidable and accomplished” mother and nearly always took her part whenever I found fault. In fact, their mutual admiration was so fervent and strong that I often felt somewhat set apart, as if William were my mother’s son and I her daughter-in-law. But regardless of my own feelings about canaries and cages and the various metaphors they implied, my mother’s phrasing commenced what would become our playful practice of addressing one another with ornithological nicknames—“Bird,” “Thrush,” or “Avis” for me; “Cock” or “Crow” for William, the latter for his piercing eyes; and “Hen” for my mother.