Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  I feel as if, however, it ought to belong to me; and I am altogether horribly low and melancholy. All is like death round one; and I seem to be in the Mausoleum of my race. What is the good of living, when thus all passes away and leaves only cold stone behind it? There is no life here, but cold dreary death only, and everywhere— The death of everything that was!

  I am glad to see the home of my ancestors, but I shall not be sorry to escape from the grave. I see my own future continuing visibly around me. They were! I am, but shall not be. Alas! Well, so it is, and will be, world without end.

  We ought to have been happy, rich, and great. But one thing after another has sent us to the four winds of Heaven. The Civil Wars destroyed the estates and fortune, which were immense till the Roundheads seized it all. Only a very small part was restored to the Byrons afterwards.

  They tell such tales here of “the Wicked Lord” as he was called commonly;—my father’s predecessor and great-uncle, the one who killed his cousin.

  I have not yet seen my father’s rooms. No one is here but the Hamilton Greys, and we are perfectly quiet.

  Only I feel as if I had become a stone monument myself. I am petrifying fast.

  —

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, THE COLONEL showed us my father’s bedroom, which had been preserved unchanged, so that he might have walked out only moments before; afterward, he and Mrs. Wildman escorted us around the more distant parts of the grounds. We walked for hours through the enchanting forest, and the sunshine, the green foliage dancing in the breeze overhead, and the cheerful yellow gorse brightening the landscape did much to soothe my troubled spirits. The lakes were wonderfully soft and deep and clear, but the waters were forbiddingly cold.

  The colonel again gallantly endeavored to engage me in conversation, and he had evidently studied for the occasion, for he introduced several topics of scientific interest. I was touched that he had gone to such lengths to prepare, and I tried to chat cordially with him, but I could not shake off my sorrowful mood despite the natural beauty all around us. At dinner I was no better, and as the men withdrew, I observed Colonel Wildman speaking earnestly to William, and William making what seemed to be apologies in return. I felt deeply embarrassed, for no hosts could have been kinder or more agreeable than the Wildmans had been, and they were surely concerned that I seemed to be having a miserable time.

  I resolved to do better.

  On Monday, the six of us rode out together to Annesley, the former home of Mary Chaworth, the granddaughter of the man whom the Wicked Lord had murdered. As a boy my father had adored her, but although they played together and were as close as siblings, his love for her was unrequited, and eventually she married another, breaking my father’s young heart. Annesley, too, was strangely familiar to me, for my father had drawn it into his poem “The Dream.” Mrs. Chaworth-Musters, as she became after her marriage, had died eight years before, so we met with her daughter instead. After we departed, the Wildmans assured us that she was strikingly like her mother, lovely, gentle, and well mannered.

  “Perhaps you should avoid mentioning this excursion when you next write to your mother,” William suggested in an undertone as we returned to the coach afterward.

  “Excellent advice,” I murmured back. “I intend to follow it.”

  From Annesley we rode out to Hucknall Torkard to pay our respects at my father’s grave.

  I expected to feel profound sorrow and regret upon viewing his tomb for the first time. What I did not expect, and what overwhelmed and moved me, was the sense of peace and love I felt near my father’s final resting place. The family vault itself was in no way beautiful or profound, and yet standing there surrounded by the memorials to my father and so many other Byrons, I felt a strange sensation of welcome, of acceptance, of reconciliation. I said nothing to my husband, but I could imagine no better place for my own eternal rest than here, beside my father.

  I was quiet and pensive as we returned to Newstead Abbey, but it was a different silence than before, contemplative rather than mournful, although I suppose the distinction was imperceptible to anyone else.

  On the morning of 10 September, I rose early and decided to stroll through the gardens, cool and fragrant in the mist. I inhaled deeply, taking in grass and earth and late-summer blossoms, and I imagined my father here as a young man full of hope and impatience and ambition, breathing in and breathing out, grinning as he envisioned how magnificent the estate he had inherited would be after he restored it to its former glory.

  I smiled too, wistful, as I turned away from the garden and plunged into a thick grove of ancient trees. This was called the Devil’s Wood, planted by the Wicked Lord and strewn with statues of fauns and satyrs. This forest alone he had spared from the axe and the torch, and it had become dark and overgrown, and the colonel had told me that my father had loved to explore it. I followed the path to the fishpond, soothed by the music of songbirds flitting through the boughs above as I imagined placing my soft boots into my father’s own footprints, long since erased by wind and rain and time.

  I had heard that in the center of the wood grew an unusual elm tree, two trunks springing from the same root. I recognized it from a distance and carefully made my way off the path and through the underbrush until I reached it. Side by side the two trunks stretched upward to the sky, separate but unified, their branches growing, intertwining, to form a single leafy green canopy. I lay my hand upon the tree and walked around it, the bark rough against my palm, searching for another memorial my father was said to have left behind. Then I saw it, and my heart ached with regret and compassion. Here, on a farewell visit to their ancestral estate before it was sold, my father and my aunt Augusta had carved their names into the bark, uniting them in the seclusion of the wood as they never could be out in the world.

  I traced the letters with my fingertips and wished my father and my aunt had been granted more peace and happiness than they had known in life. There was still hope for Augusta, but to me it seemed but a faint, flickering light, too easily extinguished.

  I lay my cheek against the tree for a moment, a gesture of farewell, and then I retraced my steps until I found the narrow path back to the gardens. I had almost reached the fishpond when a shadow shifted in front of me. I gasped and halted in my tracks as the shadow solidified into the figure of a man.

  “Lady Lovelace?” said Colonel Wildman, emerging into a shaft of light that broke through the boughs overhead. “Are you lost?”

  “No, not at all,” I said, relieved. “Merely exploring. I was on my way back to the house.”

  “Shall I accompany you?”

  “Please do.”

  He offered me his arm, and I took it. We strolled along in silence for a while, but whenever the path narrowed, I was obliged to release his arm so we could walk single file. The darkness thinned, more sunlight broke through, and then we emerged into the gardens. The morning sun had burned off the mist, and trees and flowers and hedgerows appeared before us in harmonious order.

  “Lady Lovelace,” said Colonel Wildman, “forgive me, but I must speak. Are you displeased with the changes I’ve made to Newstead Abbey?”

  “Not at all,” I said, surprised. “Everything has been wonderfully restored. No Byron could have done better. I even wrote to tell my mother so.”

  My praise seemed to please him, and yet his brow was furrowed, his expression pensive. “Then may I ask why you have been so silent and unhappy during your stay? Have we done something, or failed to do something?”

  “Oh, dear me, no,” I exclaimed, dismayed. “You and Mrs. Wildman have been lovely and gracious hosts. I beg you to forgive my reticence, but I have been overwhelmed by the feelings this extraordinary place evokes in me. If I had come here as a child, if I had always known it, I’m sure I would not feel so, so—” I inhaled deeply to steady myself. “So disconcerted, so much at home and yet so much a stranger. I confess that th
e sadness and loss I feel upon seeing so many memorials to my father, a father I don’t even remember, have quite overwhelmed me.” My voice quavered, and I struggled to compose myself. “Then, too, I have felt oppressed by the necessity to keep my feelings hidden.”

  “Lady Byron is not here to observe you,” he said gently. “You don’t have to pretend you feel nothing for your father, not here.”

  I managed a shaky laugh. “It has become a habit.”

  “Perhaps it’s time you broke it. Come.” He offered me his arm again. “Let’s stroll around the garden for a while. I think you’ve had enough stories about Lord Byron. Let me tell you about George Gordon, the boy he was, the boy I knew.”

  As we walked, he shared with me his own memories of my father, as well as confidences my father had shared with him—his difficult childhood with an unreliable mother given to violent tempers, his shame and disgust for his deformed foot, his early passion for literature, his love for the Scottish Highlands, his initial academic struggles at Harrow, his outrage at the horrid treatment he received there.

  For the rest of our visit, Colonel Wildman generously reminisced for me, until for the first time in my life I felt that I knew my father—not the poet who had astonished the world with his genius, not the husband who had wronged my mother, but the boy he was and the man he became. And with every story the colonel told, Newstead Abbey became more dear to me.

  When the time came for William and me to continue our tour, I was truly sorry to go, but I was heartened by Colonel Wildman’s assurance that I was welcome to return anytime. I hoped I would soon.

  I had been so overwhelmed by all that I had observed and discovered at Newstead Abbey that I had not found time to write to my mother since I had had recorded my first gloomy impressions on our second night there. It was not until a week after sending that letter that I was able to write another, from Radbourne in Derbyshire.

  Yours of the 14th received this morning. We came here last evening after a most delightful and successful tour of three days to see all the Beauties of Derbyshire. A completely nomadic life suits me wonderfully.

  My first and very melancholy impressions at Newstead gradually changed to quite an affection for the place before I left it. I began to feel as if it were an old home, and I left it with regret and reluctance, and feel that I must go back to it before a year is over.

  Colonel Wildman is a man of talent, feeling, and good taste. There is no profession in him, but he acts and lives in devotion to my father and my race. He knew my father only in his very young days, Col W’s profession as a Soldier entirely withdrawing him afterwards.

  It has been the salvation of Newstead, that he has had it. No one else in the world would have resuscitated it, and all its best reminiscences, as he has done. And no Byron could have afforded even to preserve the edifice from actually tumbling down. The outlay requisite has been enormous.

  There is an old prophecy that the place was to pass out of the family when it did, and which further adds that it is to come back in the present generation!

  Altogether it is an epoch in my life, my visit there. I have lost my monumental and desolate feeling respecting it. It seemed like descending into the grave, but I have had a resurrection. I do love the venerable old place and all my wicked forefathers!

  —

  AFTER RADBOURNE, WILLIAM AND I parted company for a few days, as he went off to Lincolnshire to learn about the latest advances in agriculture and animal husbandry, and I returned to Lord and Lady Zetland at Aske Hall in Yorkshire. The Zetlands had invited me to accompany them to Doncaster, where their horse Voltigeur would compete against Flying Dutchman for the Doncaster Cup, the most illustrious of all races. William missed the first day of the tournament, so he did not see Voltigeur sail to a first-place finish in his early race, but he joined us the next day in time to cheer on Voltigeur as he challenged Flying Dutchman, who was said to have no equal.

  William was fortunate indeed that he had come, for together we witnessed history. How thrilling it was to see Voltigeur speeding down the homestretch and crossing the finish line ahead of all challengers, including the invincible Flying Dutchman! It was the greatest triumph ever in racing, a magnificent struggle between these two greatest of champions, like single combat between two gallant knights of olden times. How delighted I was to have witnessed what would surely go down in history as the greatest of all races!

  We returned to Aske Hall exultant in victory, especially our hosts, who were justifiably proud of their champion. Eventually, however, I noticed that William’s joviality seemed somewhat forced, but I attributed that to his displeasure to see me gambling more than I should have. I had won handsomely, so he had no cause to complain, and so I put it out of my thoughts.

  The next day when we were alone after breakfast, I discovered the real cause of his displeasure. “I hesitate to show you this,” he said, frowning, as he handed me a letter. “Your mother sent it to me first, with a letter instructing me to give it to you after I had read it.”

  “Oh, dear. What now?” I muttered, but I unfolded the letter and began to read.

  Even from my mother’s pen, it was an astonishing diatribe, a vicious rebuke for entertaining mythical ideas about my father spread by “the partisans of Byron” among whom I had been living. “They consider me as having taken a hostile position towards him,” she wrote. “You must not be infected with an error resulting from their ignorance and his mystifications. I was his best friend, not only in feeling, but in fact, after the Separation, and saved him from involving himself in what would have injured his private character and reputation still further.”

  I knew the injurious act she alluded to, for I had heard her boast to her friends that she had saved my father from eloping with my aunt Augusta, which would have ruined him utterly. She never explained exactly how she had accomplished this, at least not in my hearing, and I was not quite sure that she had prevented anything. If my father had truly intended to elope with his sister, why had he not taken her along when he went into exile?

  My mother continued on in the same shrilly furious manner, defending herself, condemning my father’s wicked friends for deceiving me, condemning me for being deceived. Then, in a breathtaking maneuver that I can only imagine was meant to frighten me into submission, she threatened to cut off all contact with my children if I chose to remain friends with those who despised and maligned her. “It would be better for my grandchildren not to have known me,” she declared, “if they are allowed to adopt the unfounded popular notion of my having abandoned my husband from want of devotedness and entire sympathy—or if they suppose me to have been under the influence, at any time, of cold, calculating, and unforgiving feelings.”

  On and on she went—or so she might have done, except she reached the end of the page and had to conclude, which she did with the curt invitation, “Write to me what you think and feel openly.”

  Of course she did not mean that; she never did. She did not want to know what I truly thought and felt unless my views perfectly aligned with her own; she did not want to hear me speak unless my words expressed perfect adoration of her perfection. She could not permit anyone to perceive any fault in her, or rather, she could not accept that she possessed any faults. My father, for all of his mistakes and bad choices, at least had been willing to acknowledge that he was a flawed human being, striving for goodness and greatness, but too often falling short of the sublime ideal.

  I would have given anything for my mother to have possessed an ounce of such insight and humility.

  I hardly knew how to respond to her letter. How could one address such an astonishing array of baffling accusations? And the threats to withdraw her love, attention, and support from my children if I did not repent my defiance—what sort of grandmother would do such a thing?

  The same sort of woman she had always been, I realized, from the moment she had carried me away from my
father and had insisted that I repudiate him. She could have brought me up to view him with compassionate understanding, regretting his sins but loving the good in him. I had had to learn that on my own—with the help of kind, honest people she now wanted me to renounce.

  But I was no longer a little girl she could order her proxies to lock in a closet.

  I took a day to compose my thoughts, to reflect upon all that had passed between us. Then I responded, as kindly and respectfully as I knew how.

  I feel some difficulty in replying to your enclosure of yesterday—because it seems to me as if addressed to a Phantom of something that does not exist.

  No feeling or opinion respecting my father’s moral character, or your relations toward him could be altered by my visit to Newstead, or by any tone assumed by any parties whatever.

  I am confident, however, that no tone of the kind you conceive exists with the Wildmans. One may feel the deepest interest in persons and characters whom one cannot (morally speaking) admire.

  Nothing passed while I was there which could, directly or indirectly, bear the slightest relation to his matrimonial history, or to any of the indefensible points of his life. I am persuaded that there is nothing of the Partisan about Col. Wildman, and if all my father’s friends had been of Col. Wildman’s sort it would have been well for him. But after school days they lost sight of each other.

  Mrs. Leigh and her children are no favorites at Newstead. Indeed it is some years since she has been there. I heard a good deal about that.

  So far from having a mythical veneration for my father, I cannot (to adhere only to personal considerations) forget his conduct as regards my own self.

  I write this all off hand and in a hurry. Probably I shall write again and more fully on the subject.

  That would be entirely up to my mother, and how she responded to my refusal to cower before her threats, to accept as right what was so obviously wrong.