In Byron's Wake

by Miranda Seymour

  * Medora was planning to draw out an advance against the deed. The £3,000 gifted by Augusta to her granddaughter was contingent upon the death of Lady Byron.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A CUCKOO IN THE NEST

  (1841–3)

  But if you knew one half the harum-scarum extraordinary things I do, you would certainly incline to the idea that I have a Spell of some sort about me. I am positive that no She-Creature of my years could possibly attempt many of my everyday performances, with any impunity.

  ADA LOVELACE TO WORONZOW GREIG,

  31 DECEMBER 1841

  During the year of 1840, Ada Lovelace and her husband began to be drawn apart, not by any lack of affection, but by their consuming and divided interests. Ada, while pursuing the elusive quarry of finite differences that brought her ever closer to understanding the intricate workings of Charles Babbage’s unbuilt Analytical Engine, remained deeply committed to music.

  The year 1840 was when Ada decided, out of her own modestly lined pocket, to sponsor the education at the Royal Academy of Music of a 14-year-old Welsh harpist, John Thomas. (Thomas, who went on to become Queen Victoria’s harpist, gratefully named his daughter after his first patron.) Harp-playing occupied as much as half of every day for the young countess herself. Every new musical event was a must-do in a busy London calendar during a period when Lady Lovelace was dabbling in mesmerism (Anton Mesmer believed in a mysterious bodily fluid enabling the hypnotism of one person by another) while also acting as her mother’s scout for new areas in which to invest. On 11 March 1841, Ada was a thrilled observer of the brand-new atmospheric railway, in which Lady Byron had expressed an interest.*

  William Lovelace, handsomely funded by the doting Hen’s judicious sales from the vast Wentworth estates (of which she held sole ownership), was meanwhile embarking on a lavish programme of architectural development in Surrey, Somerset and London. In 1840, while still living at Ockham, William bought East Horsley Place, the Barry-designed house owned by his Surrey neighbour William Currie. (Currie moved down the road to occupy his preferred second home at West Horsley.) In London, the Lovelaces’ elegant home in St James’s Square underwent a facelift major enough for Ada to have to move out into nearby lodgings during the early summer of 1842. During this same period, Lord Lovelace oversaw the ongoing transformation of his father’s simple woodland hunting box in north Somerset. Ashley Lodge was converted into Ashley Combe, a fairytale palace perched between two wooded flanks of cliffside that climb up to Exmoor’s heathland from the sweeping inlet of Hurlstone Bay. Inspired, it seems, by one of Byron’s favourite poems (Coleridge’s dreamlike Kubla Khan was written while the poet was exploring this ravishing corner of north Somerset), Ada’s favourite of all her husband’s architectural fantasies featured hanging gardens, balustraded terraces, winding tunnels and concealed bridges. It was – and remains, despite ruined gardens and a vanished house – a ravishing setting.

  The news that arrived from Place Vendôme in the spring of 1841 shook a congenially independent marriage to its foundations, sparking what Ada described the following year as ‘a frightful crisis in my existence . . . Heaven knows what intense suffering & agony I have gone thro’; & how mad & how reckless & how desperate I have at times felt.’

  The first bulletin, sent towards the end of the month, revealed what Ada now felt licensed to speak to her mother about as ‘the fact’ of her father’s incest. ‘I am not in the least astonished,’ she informed the disconcerted Hen on 27 February. ‘In fact you merely confirm what I have for years & years felt scarcely a doubt about, but should have considered it most improper in me to hint to you that I in any way suspected.’ Asked for the source of her knowledge, Ada grew evasive. ‘Perhaps I may some day [remember],’ she teased on 3 March. Quite possibly, it was Lady Byron herself who had made the revelation; Annabella seldom recollected just what she had said in private, or to whom.

  The bombshell for Ada Lovelace was the news that Medora Leigh was the product of that incestuous relationship, and thus Ada’s own half-sister. ‘I should tell you that I did not suspect the daughter as being the result of it [the incest],’ Ada responded. Evidently discomfited by the idea, she challenged it. How could her mother have come to such a monstrous conclusion? ‘The natural intimacy & familiarity of a Brother & Sister certainly could not suggest it, to any but a very depraved & vicious mind . . .’

  Ada’s reaction was understandable in a young woman who suddenly saw her own position – that of the treasured and sole product of an exceptional marriage – under threat. When no answer came from Paris, she took counsel with William. The news from France was worrying and unwelcome. Nevertheless, both husband and wife knew how obstinate Lady Byron could be. Like it or not, Medora Leigh (or the widow Madame St Aubin, as she was being described in Paris to cover the awkward presence of little Marie) must be accepted, not as a cuckoo in the nest, but as part of the family.

  Evidence of the furious anger that Ada was forcing herself to suppress would only emerge two years later. By March 1843, when time had brought about a considerable change both in Lady Byron’s feelings, and those of her demanding protégée, Ada would be ready to speak out and unmask her true feelings. But back in the spring of 1841, as she prepared to join the Paris household, she remarked only upon the fact that her mother had grown nervously solicitous. Urging her habitually informal daughter to pack at least one good dress for a court presentation, an almost supplicant Lady Byron promised to clothe her sweet Bird in the finest of Parisian plumage, to purchase whatever type of harp Ada might wish to play, and to leave plenty of time for Ada’s own amusements.

  ‘You hold out great temptations,’ Ada dryly responded on 12 March. Nevertheless, she stated that her visit would be brief, while ill health made it unlikely that her husband (he was being nursed by his sisters) would come at all. Irritated at being obliged to defer her mathematics lessons, Ada promised the De Morgans that nothing would cause her to abandon her studies.

  Indeed the last fortnight is rather a convincing proof that nothing can. I have been out either to the Opera, German Opera, or somewhere or other, every night. I have had music lessons every morning, & practised my Harp too, for an hour or two, & I have been on horseback nearly every day also. I might add many sundries & et-ceteras to this list.

  I must however maintain that Differential Calculus is king of the company – & may it ever be so!

  Ada’s unfaltering interest in Babbage’s unbuilt machine, as much as the seriousness of her friendship with the ageing and frustrated inventor, is well illustrated by the fact that one of Ada’s first visits in Paris was to the home of the great mathematician Jean Arago. Head of the Paris Observatory, Arago had been Babbage’s facilitator in obtaining the silk portrait of Jacquard for his 1840 visit to Turin and it was Babbage who now provided Ada with the introduction to a man of whom she stood in some awe. Back at Place Vendôme with her mother and their old friend, Mary Montgomery, Ada found herself reluctantly surrendering to the persuasive charm of her newfound sister.

  Graceful in her manner and tall in stature (a doting Annabella nicknamed Elizabeth Medora ‘Lanky Doodle’, while permitting her niece – and no one else – to address her by Byron’s old pet name of ‘Pip’), ‘Madame St Aubin’ seemed content with an arrangement that kept her in a private suite of rooms, ones from which little Marie and her mother had no rights of access into Lady Byron’s home without prior invitation. ‘I therefore go there whenever I choose,’ Ada wrote to her husband on 8 April, adding that her initial feelings about Medora were ‘very favourable . . . She impresses me with the idea of principle very strongly.’

  Ada, like Miss Montgomery and Annabella, swallowed the stories that Medora told without a blink. ‘How comes it my Mother is not dead, mad or depraved?’ Ada asked William:

  A new language is requisite to furnish terms strong enough to express my horror & amazement at the appalling facts! – That viper Mrs L[eigh] – crowned all by suppressing letters of my mot
her’s to my father when he was abroad after the separation, & forging others in their place. She-monster!*

  Adding to the bitterness of a lengthy letter that Ada would write to Medora two years later was the sense of how much she herself had fallen under the spell of a persuasive liar. Out in Paris, while her mother arranged to exchange her expired ten-year leasehold of Fordhook for a similar arrangement with two adjoining houses near Esher (conveniently close to Ockham), it was Ada who gave the hardest thought to how Medora could most decorously be housed in the smaller of the two. Following her own formal presentation to the French King, Louis Philippe, Lady Lovelace spoke to Madame de Talleyrand about two former employees, Nathalie and Victor Beaurepaire, who might suitably serve as Madame St Aubin’s private servants at Esher, enabling her to live like a lady of means. (And so, until the money ran out and the Beaurepaires took to blackmail, indeed they did.)

  The Paris party returned to England in May 1841. The new houses at Moore Place were in need of considerable refurbishment before they could be inhabited. Ada, living between Ockham and St James’s Square during that part of the year, was reluctant to provide houseroom for a sister who, she probably surmised, might never leave. Instead, Medora was temporarily lodged in London with relatives of Sophia De Morgan. Meanwhile, Anna Jameson arranged for little Marie to attend a school in the pleasant West London hamlet of Notting Hill. By August, Mrs Jameson was among that small group of Annabella’s friends who were willing to declare of Medora that ‘it is impossible to know her without loving her – or to look into her mind without respecting all she has done.’ Writing to her beloved confidante, Harriet Siddons, up in Edinburgh, at the beginning of that month, Annabella confessed that the presentation of her protégée was nevertheless causing friction among her friends. Only Harriet, she sighed, seemed willing to look at things ‘in the unrefracted light of truth – and to know the truth it brings’. The truth, as Lady Byron’s closest friends were ruefully aware, meant accepting Annabella’s own judgement to be infallible. Harriet Siddons remained prudently quiet on the subject of a young woman she had never met.

  The immediate effect of Medora’s introduction as her rival and half-sister upon Ada was to make her take up the challenge to show herself, uniquely, as the heir to Byron. Writing to her mother after the first revelation of incest, Lady Lovelace had declared her intention of surpassing her father’s achievements: ‘I think he has bequeathed this task to me! . . . I have a duty to perform towards him.’ What that duty might be, she remained unsure. For a time, Ada considered becoming a poet. Writing to Mary Somerville’s son, Woronzow Greig, on the final day of 1841, she represented herself as a swashbuckling breaker of convention.

  You know I am a d—d odd animal! And as my mother often says, she never has quite yet made up her mind whether it [be] Devil or Angel that watches peculiarly over me; only that it is one or the other, without doubt! – (And for my part, I am quite indifferent which) –

  For a couple of high summer months, Lady Lovelace played the daredevil. William, busy supervising his grand building projects, raised no objections to behaviour that caused one admirer to describe his wife as an elusive ‘will o’the whisp’, forever eluding capture as she sped along her way. In America, however, the New York Times had harsh words to say of a woman who rode about in fashionable Hyde Park with married men. Ada’s riding companions were Sir William Molesworth, owner of the respected Westminster Review, and Frederick Knight, a Somerset landowner who had newly returned from Italy. Today, such behaviour seems almost laughably tame; back in 1841, when a woman was still forbidden to watch parliamentary proceedings without a husband planted at her side, such a bold wife – and Byron’s daughter, to boot – attracted censure.

  Mathematics was never far from Ada’s mind. In June 1841, she confessed to Augustus De Morgan that her studies had been neglected during her stay in Paris. She wished to resume work: ‘I am quite in a fuss about my mathematics, for I am much in want of a lift at the moment’ suggests that abstract thinking offered Ada a welcome refuge from her confused emotions.

  The new link to William Molesworth (his wife would become one of Ada’s closest friends) was connected both to this wealthy and scientifically minded gentleman’s interest in Babbage’s unbuilt machine and Ada’s own persistent wish to help that mechanical monster into existence. She kept up a regular correspondence with Babbage throughout the summer, while making increasingly frequent reference to Charles Wheatstone, the rotund and quietly charming inventor of the first electric telegraph, with whom Ada regularly discussed her scientific projects. By August 1841, Ada was addressing both Babbage and Wheatstone by their surnames alone. In an age that frowned upon gender equality, this marked a rare level of egalitarian professionalism.

  Ada had kept faith with Augustus De Morgan throughout her hectic summer. An almost daily correspondence between them was maintained from August to late November, during which Lady Lovelace strove to narrow the gap between her deficiencies and her aspirations. On the one hand, she now felt confident enough to recommend and send Gabriel Lamé’s Cours de Physique to her tutor; on the other, she was still struggling to apply differential and integral calculus to the subject of accelerated velocity (‘It has interested me beyond anything.’).* On 15 August 1841, conscious that she would never lure De Morgan away from the metropolis, she arranged to come up to London from Ockham for a lesson at Gower Street, before her family beat their annual two-month retreat to remote Ashley Combe. By 14 November, while still at Ashley, Ada was so deeply immersed in mathematics that a pleased Hen, writing to William Lovelace, joked that he should send ‘love to the Bird when you can insinuate it between two problems’.

  Annabella’s seemingly light-hearted message arrived at the end of a series of cryptic bulletins despatched from Ashley Combe to De Morgan, during which Ada informed her tutor of sudden and private plans to visit London.

  My intended journey to Town is only on particular business. And by the bye it is not to be known that I am going. My mother even has no idea of it; and I do not wish that she should.

  The first visit, announced on 27 October, was deferred; on 10 November, it was reset for the following day, ‘in consequence of letters unexpectedly received’. Again, Ada enjoined discretion to De Morgan (‘I do not wish my journey to be known’). Once again the trip was delayed.

  On 14 November, a hasty visit to London was rescheduled for the third time. Writing to her mother from Somerset on the same day, Ada made no mention of her travel plans. Instead, she confined herself to talk of Byron Ockham (‘a true scion of the Parent Stock’) and her son’s vivid wish (aged five) to become a workman rather than a lord of leisure. Such an ambition, at a time when the local workforce was helping to reconstruct Ashley Combe as a palatial residence, was unsurprising; the Porlock bricklayers and masons must have appeared like gods to a small and often neglected boy who welcomed their friendly company.

  Ada adored her oldest son. Quite deliberately, she recounted to her mother in this same letter that William, celebrating 5 November at home with the family, had let a firecracker off ‘intentionally, almost in B[yron’s] face, by way of fun’. She added that Miss Boutell, the young governess who witnessed the scene, had been astonished by the child’s pluck. (He ‘never winced even’.) Still, it was a curious tale to pass on to a doting grandmother. Was Ada alerting her mother to a darker side of Lord Lovelace’s nature? (There would be several later references to the Crow’s black temper and even to a flight that the Bird had taken from home until her husband had calmed down.) Or was Ada merely trying to distract attention from a London visit, one about which she was peculiarly anxious that her mother should not know?

  Lady Byron’s careful pruning of the family archive makes speculation difficult. It’s likely that Ada’s secret visits had to do with Charlotte King’s marriage that autumn to a divinity student called Demetrius Calliphronas. It is also possible that Ada’s discreet visit to London was connected to Dr James Kay.

  On 21 O
ctober, James Kay, doctor, educational reformer and general good egg, had sent Ada the equivalent to a love letter. Seemingly bewitched by the ‘waywardness, beauty & intangibility’ of Lord Byron’s daughter, he compared Ada to a fairylike mirage, always flitting from view or plunging him ‘into some bog, while I am gazing at you half in admiration, somewhat in apprehension and altogether in kindness’. It’s rash, without knowing more detail, to read too much into this flowery tribute. Annabella, who was herself an admiring friend and work colleague of Dr Kay’s, read the good doctor’s letter years later and agreed with his description of her daughter’s elusive charm; one of Ada’s chosen alter egos was that of a benevolent, if capricious, fairy.

  Certainly, Dr Kay grew close to Ada during the summer of 1841. Recruited in his medical capacity as a supplier of laudanum to ‘a naughty sick Bird’, Dr James Kay became a regular attendant of the mesmeric sessions which were hosted by the Lovelaces during the summer of 1841.

  Mesmerism in England during the 1840s was uneasily poised between charlatanism (France’s leading mesmerist, Charles Lafontaine, drew huge audiences when he mesmerised a lion at London Zoo) and medical science. (Mesmerism aimed to spare patients from the pain of surgery in the years before the introduction of ether and chloroform.) A serious purpose behind the simple experiments performed at the Lovelaces’ home by the country’s best-known mesmerist, John Elliotson, might be argued from the fact that meetings were attended not only by Hester and the newly engaged Charlotte King, but by Dr Kay, Charles Wheatstone and William Lovelace’s good friend, Britain’s first Egyptologist, Sir John Gardner Wilkinson. The results, judging by Dr Kay’s unpublished journal, were mildly silly. Charlotte King and an unnamed housemaid fell into a trance in which they responded only to the soothing voice of the mesmerist. Ada believed that the process had caused her head to heat up and tingle. Kay himself remained more intrigued by his hostess than by Elliotson’s demonstrations of his hypnotic powers.