Aged eleven, Ralph was beginning to make his own complex personality felt. Ada, writing to her mother in December 1850, following a happy reunion with the Greigs and her daughter at their London home, reported that Ralph’s new tutor, Mr Kensett, was taking a firm line with his stroppy little pupil, and that she approved.
While Lord Lovelace pondered his chances of getting into the Admiralty (Ada agreed with Lushington that her husband was too touchy and impractical for such a post), his wife’s private thoughts dwelt continuously upon how to lay hands on the money of which both she and the earl increasingly stood in dire need. Going abroad was a popular move back then, both to escape debts and to improve poor health. Mrs Somerville had done it. So had the Brownings. Perhaps the Lovelaces should follow suit? Lady Byron (despite the inevitable sacrifice of Ada’s company) favoured this course. By 23 December 1850, Ada was ready to pursue it.
I think we shall let our house in May, & go to the Pyrenees,
I am not joking. I reflected on yr suggestion, & soon got accustomed to it. It frightened me at first . . . It would set me up for years (& set our purses up too).
The idea was not abandoned; Ada mentioned it again on 21 April 1851 as a project for the following month – ‘but nothing is yet settled’. By May, however, Ada’s health was too seriously impaired for a journey abroad to be considered. She had, besides, embarked at full tilt upon an entirely different enterprise, the nature of which her mother was to learn in full only after its catastrophic failure.
By January 1851, Ada had set up her ring of fellow gamblers and was ready to beat the bookies at their own game. John Crosse was involved, while Babbage was evidently aware of what was going on. A certain William Nightingale, identified as the father of two sons, may have been connected to Florence’s family. Almost nothing is known about Mr Fleming, but it is likely that he was a friend of the Zetlands’ physician, Doctor Malcolm, since the two names are often mentioned in conjunction. Malcolm himself was a man of modest means who, like Ada, was struggling to live on £300 a year. Richard Ford was another matter.
Sir Richard Ford was a gentleman of means. The author of Murray’s celebrated Handbook to Spain was a brilliant art historian (he introduced Velázquez’s paintings to their English audience), and a close friend of George Borrow. An ardent traveller in post-Napoleonic Europe, Ford had returned to England in the 1830s to create Heavitree House, a Spanish-style reconstruction of an Elizabethan cob cottage, perched on a hilltop just outside the city of Exeter. Ford had been at Trinity College, Cambridge, ten years before William Lovelace. Like William, he was a self-taught architect. The two men knew each other well. In 1835, Ford was one of the first to hear about his friend’s young bride and to share with a mutual acquaintance William’s enthusiastic account of her.
From the Baron’s account she [Miss Ada Byron] must be perfection . . . highly simple, hateth the city and gay world, and will not be likely to turn up her nose at you and me, the respectable aged friends of her lord.
In 1849, Sir Richard Ford had lost both his mother and his wife. (His second marriage to Mary Molesworth, sister to the owner of the Westminster Review, would not take place until the summer of 1851.) In the winter of 1850–1, then, Sir Richard Ford was a lonely widower. It is clear that his main contact in the racing ring was Ada herself, it is also incontrovertibly apparent from Ford’s involvement that William Lovelace must have known something about what was going on. While it remains impossible to establish just how much William was personally involved in the booking and laying of bets, but the presence of his friend in Ada’s ring makes it clear that Lord Lovelace was never an innocent bystander.
It was Ada, however, who led the way and her elderly ring were awed by the (initially) elaborate nature of her strategies. On 13 January, a respectful Richard Ford told Ada that he and Nightingale (Ford referred to him as ‘the sportive Nightingale’) were planning to meet in London ‘to talk over the wonderful combinations in your letter’. A financial innocent himself, Ford frankly stated that he would never want to bet more than £5 and that he imagined ‘making a book’ to be like ‘living at the brink of a precipice’ (27 January). Nevertheless, Ada’s confidence was infectious. ‘£3,000 this year!’ Ford exclaimed in another undated letter. ‘How my mouth waters at such draughts. But by what magic is such a sum to be obtained & how is Chiles [Samuel Chiles was a Vauxhall-based bookmaker, seemingly recommended by Dr Malcolm] become so suddenly consumed into the depositing of thousands from not having a halfpenny?’
Ford’s willingness to be drawn into Ada’s net of speculators reminds us of just how dangerously alluring Byron’s daughter could be. By March 1851, Sir Richard himself was paying regular visits to bookmakers to negotiate terms and deals about which he patently had not the faintest degree of understanding. Between times, he advised Ada about her plans for the Pyrenees, paid visits to Horsley Towers, arranged jolly dinner parties for the ring (but only when his daughters were out of the way) and even blithely reported that he was off to dine in ‘The Enemy’s Camp’ with Lord Eglinton, the owner of Voltigeur’s greatest challenger, The Flying Dutchman.
How good was Ada at bookmaking (or more accurately, at gambling on horses)? The fact that her ring stuck with her through at least one full racing season suggests that she must have had some degree of success. Nevertheless, the few scraps of notes and papers that survive from the bookmakers themselves suggest that the excited countess was doing little more than following tips – for which she paid quite handsomely – and making judgements based on the odds that were being laid. Occasionally, a kindly tipster warned ‘Her Ladyship’ away from an impulsive choice. Ada, blithe as a lark despite her increasing ill health and the fact that she was now seldom able to walk for more than a few yards without pain, ignored them all.
Disaster sprang upon her like a beast from the jungle. On 1 May 1851, in what has ever since been known as The Great Match, Lord Eglinton’s Flying Dutchman challenged Voltigeur (‘The Flyer’ and ‘Volti’ by now, to their adoring fans) to an eagerly anticipated rematch at York, running on the old Knavesmire course. (It was where Dick Turpin, one of the most infamous horsemen of all time, had been hanged in 1739.) The crowds were immense, since both the champions were Yorkshire bred. Many of the 130,000 people present had walked fifty miles to watch the event. Ada’s ring, led by herself, had backed the Zetlands’ colt.
Ada was not present in person (she was too ill to leave her bedroom at this time) to learn the catastrophic news that Lord Eglinton’s horse had beaten the prodigious Voltigeur by a length. Ten days later, Teddington won at Epsom. The odds on the Derby’s confidently predicted winner were 3/1. Ada, who had persuaded Lovelace to loan the impecunious Dr Malcolm £1,800 to bet against Teddington, had now in total suffered losses of £3,200, while also bearing full financial responsibility for the losses of her disappointed ring.
It remains unknowable to what extent either John Crosse or Charles Babbage were directly involved at this point in Ada’s ring. It is known that Ada was personally responsible during this time for obtaining the living at Ockham for Andrew Crosse’s eldest son, Robert, and that Robert’s father expressed his gratitude for her assistance at a time when his son (who had a young family to support) had been seriously ill. Equally apparent from the friendly letters that Robert and Andrew Crosse wrote to Ada in 1851 is the fact that they knew nothing about either a racing or a romantic connection between Lady Lovelace and Robert’s older brother, John.
Charles Babbage falls under more suspicion than Crosse because of the incontrovertible fact that his former servant, Mary Wilson, ran bet-placing errands and allowed her name to be regularly invoked in the covert dealings of the ring. But did this mean that Babbage himself was involved? The long and mysterious correspondence with Ada about a shared ‘book’, while it clearly predates her activity in the racing world, has helped to muddy the waters. Thus, when Babbage suddenly again mentions ‘a book’ to Ada on 13 January 1851, it sounds intriguing. Babbage’s letter reco
mmends that when ‘the book’ arrives, Ada herself should read out Sir James South’s instructions to her maid, ‘in order for your influence in causing them to be followed’. While it is tempting to construe South as the ‘medical friend’ Ada had previously mentioned with such curious emphasis, Sir James was no doctor, but an eminent astronomer. The likelihood is that Mary Wilson was simply being instructed about the sighting of stars on certain nights, an activity that had always enthralled Ada. Nevertheless, her earlier reference to Babbage’s unnamed ‘medical friend’ remains a puzzle.
What is certain is that Babbage wrote to Ada on 13 May 1851, the day of the Epsom Derby, in a way that shows he knew this was a special day for her. Had she passed a good night? What were her commands for the day? She must not exert herself with writing: ‘a visit from your own Lady-Bird will be sufficient’. The degree of attentiveness being shown here, on this particular date, is highly suggestive, although (once again), nothing can be confirmed.
Even today, our understanding of the connection between mind and body remains frustratingly theoretical. However, it’s hard to dismiss the sudden decline in Ada’s health following her major losses at Epsom and York. Enough concern was felt for Charles Locock to summon Sir James Clark, Prince Albert’s personal physician, to diagnose one of Locock’s own favourite patients. Clark’s interest in the case was doubtless heightened by the fact that the patient in question was Lord Byron’s daughter.
Examinations were made of the painful and intimate kind to which Ada Lovelace was now obliged to subject herself on a regular basis. A sheet masked Ada’s genitalia from view as the middle-aged gentleman probed cold instruments – or even inquisitive fingers – towards her womb, searching for an explanation of the irregular bleeding and continuous pain that the 35-year-old patient endured with a courage and good humour that commanded their awed respect.
On 15 June, Charles Locock submitted their findings to the earl. For himself, while acknowledging the presence of extensive ulceration in the cervix, he was ready to describe the young countess’s large internal ‘sore’ as ‘healthy’ and to pronounce that it was curable – with prudent care. Sir James Clark, long since recovered from the stain to his reputation of a misdiagnosed court pregnancy in 1839 (poor Lady Flora Hastings was in fact dying of a cancerous tumour that distended her belly), offered a grimmer diagnosis. Cancer was clearly present, he stated. Nothing could now be done to restrain it. Lady Lovelace’s days were numbered.
Clark’s verdict was bleak and it could not be ignored. Understandably, at the time of terrible racing losses of which he was at the very least partially aware, Lord Lovelace shrank from breaking such black news to his fragile and suffering wife. Four days later, however, the earl could restrain himself no longer. Who better to confide in than the compassionate, maternal and understanding Hen?
A few hours after despatching a long and anguished letter to his mother-in-law (he had mentioned money problems and debts, as well as the gravity of Ada’s condition), Lovelace regretted the impulse. It was now that he took one of the worst decisions of his life. Instead of waiting for a response, he bolted off across the country to Leamington Spa, where Annabella was spending a few restorative days after paying a business-related visit to the nearby Kirkby Mallory estates. There, in a darkened town of immense gentility, an astonished Lady Byron opened her front door an hour before midnight, and found herself overwhelmed by a distraught, frightened and – in his present emotional state – alarmingly vehement son-in-law.
The location for Lovelace’s impromptu confessional visit was as ill chosen as his timing. Leamington was a town that was filled with Wentworth properties and connections. Edward Noel was living nearby. (His wife Fanny had died here in 1847.) Charles and Mary Anne Noel frequently stayed with Annabella at Leamington during visits of the official kind that she had just been paying to her estate. Miss Montgomery, too, was a regular visitor. For Lord Lovelace to show up in the middle of the sleeping spa, emerging from his private coach at dead of night, was to set tongues wagging – and there was nothing that Lady Byron feared more in this particular part of the world than gossip.
It has never been clear just what was said during what Annabella later described as ‘that hour of agony’. We know from a bitter letter that Lovelace wrote eighteen months later (17 December 1852) that the earl felt that his mother-in-law had been ‘slightingly’ dismissive about the severity of Ada’s illness. We know from the document Annabella drew up with the assistance of Stephen Lushington at Ockham on 1 July, two weeks after the Leamington meeting, that she believed William Lovelace had betrayed his clearly understood duty to protect a wife who knew no more about money (let alone professional horse-racing) than an untutored child. Lovelace had not stood up to Ada. Instead, fearing the turbulence of his wife’s powerful impulses and emotions, he had allowed her to do as she wished. He had, above all, been unforgivably irresponsible in allowing Lady Lovelace to go without him to Doncaster racecourse and thereafter, to mix with ‘low & unprincipled associates’.
Writing to Lovelace a full nineteen months later (9 January 1853) about their fateful interview, in one of a series of savagely recriminatory letters, Lady Byron accused her son-in-law of having ‘unconsciously’ disclosed to her that dreadful night at Leamington a prospect so appalling that ‘disease itself was to be looked upon as a blessing to my daughter’. That prospect was not Ada’s death. It was that Lord Lovelace had allowed his headstrong and (in the view of a stern mother) financially irresponsible young wife to gamble.
Grudgingly, Annabella would eventually concede that her son-in-law appeared not to share her personal horror of speculation. ‘You did not, you do not, view these things as I do,’ she granted in the same chilling letter of reproach that she wrote to Lovelace on 9 January 1853. Acknowledgement of that crucial difference of view was made. Forgiveness was implacably withheld.
A month earlier, on 11 December 1852, during another of these bitter exchanges (they dragged on over a period of almost two years), Annabella reminded Lovelace once again of his behaviour at Leamington. It was his fault and his alone, she wrote then, that a devoted mother had subsequently become estranged from her only child: ‘your conduct with regard to me since June 19 1851, affected my daughter most lamentably, & so long deprive[d] me of intercourse with her.’
It had not been so simple as that. On 3 July 1851, while obstinately refusing to disclose precisely what had so disturbed her during the Leamington interview, Annabella told her daughter how gladly she would have solved any financial problems, had she only been asked. The following day (tactfully omitting to point out that Lady Byron had recently begrudged loaning her daughter a few hundred pounds), poor Ada did her best to clear the air. She promised to visit her mother’s Brighton home, both to see her 12-year-old son, and to discuss what she carefully referred to as ‘recent occurrences’. Anxious not to have a quarrel, she mentioned the potential danger to her own delicate health of ‘agitating influences’.
No settled plan was made, possibly because Ada was too ill to travel. Ten days later, Lady Byron noted that she herself had resorted to her sad practice, in times of extreme despair, of going out alone in an open boat in order to vomit up her anguish, safely out of reach of public view.
Four weeks went by.
On 8 August, a frail Ada took a train to Brighton. What was said there remains unknown, but Lady Byron did not relent. Having bidden her mother farewell two days later, Ada wrote one of her most wistfully elusive notes: ‘I never remember to have quitted you with so much regret. Why, I cannot say: althou’ I have some vague idea about the whys of the case.’
If Ada believed that peace could be restored, she deceived herself. Enduring war had been declared by the Hen upon the Crow. William Lovelace, until the end of his days, would never comprehend what he had done to merit such unyielding wrath.
On 10 April 1852, eight months on, Ada wrote to her mother to express regret that ‘that interview’ (William’s visit to Leamington) had ever
taken place. She now wished she had taken a sterner line during her August visit to Brighton. ‘I never felt so tempted to step out of all the usual bounds of filial propriety,’ she wrote. But what would have been the use of pleading William’s cause?
Pray do not be angry at my having the idea (never likely to be practically attempted) of ever persuading you to anything! It is only an idea, a wish!
‘I am,’ Ada added with a sudden burst of candour, ‘rather unhappy about it all.’
Illness was nothing new to Ada. She had spent most of her short life battling invalidism, proving over and again that the ‘wiry little system’ in which she took such pride would enable her to battle her way back to health. The battle continued through the months that followed William’s dash to Leamington. By the late summer of 1851, it was only the frail, tormented body that could no longer keep up with Ada’s passion for achievement and her absolute refusal to give up hope. ‘Life is so difficult,’ she wrote to her mother on 15 October, underlining every word; a sentence or two later, she was willing to believe that she might yet have another thirty years to enjoy before – so she hoped – a quick and gentle death.
It seems clear that Ada – however valiant her attitude – was at least partly conscious that the end was near. Her health was already failing when she split her energies into the pursuit of her two consuming passions. By the summer of 1851, she had become fatally addicted to the gambling mania which – as she was perfectly aware since the Newstead encounter with her father’s ancestry – was an obsession that ran in her blood. Since then, Ada’s attachment to her Byron lineage had grown steadily more pronounced.* But Lady Lovelace was also and always her mother’s child and, above all, Ada longed to please Lady Byron by making her individual mark in science.
In Byron's Wake Page 39
