Lovelace himself was beginning to crack under the strain. A water bed (a thick rubber sheet laid over a tub of water) had been installed to ease her suffering as Ada became unable even to empty her bladder without cries of agony. He spent a day arranging pots of flowers at points where she could see the bright colours from her bed, while, with her mother as scribe, Ada whispered her recollection of a happy visit she had once paid alone to Charles Dickens at Gadshill. And at last, on 26 August, ten days after Dr West had urged Lady Byron to speed her grandson’s return from Switzerland, Ralph arrived. Fearing the impact of Ada’s haggard appearance upon a susceptible 13-year-old, his grandmother had delayed his return; now, Lady Byron hurried him away to join his siblings in the country, at the welcoming home of the Burrs.
There were occasional moments when Annabella found it impossible to maintain a glacial manner towards the son-in-law whom she held responsible for Ada’s misfortunes. She noted them. Once, when the dying woman’s torments became almost unbearable to witness, Lady Byron touched Lord Lovelace upon the arm in a sign of silent sympathy. When he remarked that his pale, waterborne wife looked like the drowned Ophelia, Annabella agreed. On 31 August, Lady Byron was sitting by Ada’s bed when Lovelace tiptoed in. As he bent to kiss the dying woman’s hands, Ada pulled his head down until his mouth touched her cheek (but it was only with ‘a sort of instinct’, Lovelace wanly wrote). Joining his hands to her mother’s across the bed, she entreated them both to have mercy on her. A moment later, Ada’s flickering thoughts had swerved back into the realm of nightmare. Perhaps – it was still her greatest terror – she would be buried alive? And then, when once she was dead, what sufferings still lay in store for such a wicked woman? Could they last for a million years?
Lord Lovelace had maintained his daily record of Ada’s agonisingly slow decline for an entire month. The endeavour was breaking his heart. On 31 August, he made his final entry and closed the tiny pages up.
Perhaps the diary ended for a bleaker reason. On 1 September, following a private discussion with her mother, Ada asked to see her husband alone. She disclosed much – but far from all – about her secret relationship with John Crosse. Describing this interview at second hand to Stephen Lushington, Annabella said that the earl had called upon God to forgive his wife for her sins in a way that she personally considered downright Pharisaical. What shocked Lady Byron far more was the evidence that her son-in-law had lost his temper with his dying wife. Annabella had experienced one of Lovelace’s fearsome rages at Leamington. She saw that same fury in his face as he emerged from the sickroom. Ada acknowledged that her husband had been very bitter towards her. However indignantly protective Lady Byron may have felt, it is hard to see how Lovelace could have been anything else.
On 21 September, Lady Byron formally took up residence in the graceful crescent house on Great Cumberland Place that she had chosen for her beloved children as their London home. She noted that she had moved in only because it was her daughter’s wish.
Writing to Miss Fitzhugh six days later, Annabella ironically remarked that she believed she had the qualities necessary to govern a colony of convicts, if so required. While hardly flattering to the servants of the Lovelaces’ household, the implication was clear. Lady Byron was now in charge. Anyone who displeased her was dismissed. Outside servants were brought in to follow her directions. Lovelace did not object. Neither did the two lawyers, Greig and Lushington, whose repeated visits bore witness to the fact that the last shreds of Ada’s secret life were now being exposed to pitiless view, while urgent thought was applied to how much of the evidence should be destroyed.
‘I dread beyond anything the idea of you living far away. If I could not see you often, I should feel so lonely now.’ The words are Ada’s in a note to Lady Byron which evidently predates but poignantly represents the final harrowing phase of their relationship. Writing to Emily Fitzhugh, Annabella suggested (once again) that Ada had grown truly penitent. A mass of pencilled scrawls, executed in a faint and trembling hand, appeared to bear her out. In one, a reference to verse 8 of Psalm 17, Ada asked her mother, despite everything (‘malgré tout’), to ‘keep me as the apple of thy eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings from the wicked that oppress me . . .’
Even now, Ada’s submission was not absolute. There was nothing penitent in the fierce allusion to herself as Christ to which one note now drew attention: ‘You have condemned, you have killed the righteous man . . .’
Lady Byron had become the chatelaine, but her son-in-law seldom left the house. On 7 October, however, the earl prepared an official note to state that he would be away for a few days (probably at Aldermaston with the children) and that, during his absence, ‘Lady Byron should be considered in every respect as the mistress of my house’.
The timing is significant. Four days later, while the earl was still away, Annabella recorded for the eyes of Lushington – but not for those of the absent Lovelace – her dismaying discovery that Ada had allowed John Crosse to pawn her jewels a second time over at the beginning of August. This had only just emerged. Once again, Lady Byron covered the cost of the diamonds’ discreet redemption. On this occasion, however, she did not restore the jewels to Ada’s care.
Ada’s long concealment of this second pawning was gallantly ascribed by a loyal parent to a prolonged loss of memory that could have been caused by a stroke or seizure. In fact, this was the dreadful moment at which Lady Byron was forced to accept that she could no longer trust her daughter in any respect. What she could and would still do, with passion, was to defend and exalt her. Nobody, not even well-meaning Anna Jameson, who imprudently criticised Ada for denying her a final deathbed visit, was permitted to say a single word against Lady Lovelace. (It was that unrecorded but evidently harsh comment about Ada – together with the discovery that Mrs Jameson had been a secret provider of funds to her daughter – that severed this closest of all Lady Byron’s female friendships.)
On the evening of 21 October, Byron Ockham arrived to see his mother for a last time before he returned to sea, newly commissioned as an officer. Watching him as he peeped in at Ada through a half-open door – the doctors had advised against any emotional farewells – his grandmother caught a glimpse of the wretchedness in the young man’s eyes before he turned and tiptoed back down the stairs. Ockham’s adoring sister came into Lady Byron’s room in tears that night.
It should already have been clear from Ockham’s rough manner (if not the tattoos he bore upon his hands) that such a youth would never accept the elevated rank that had been imposed upon him. (Lovelace, using every connection he knew of to secure his son an officer’s rank, had even procured a glowing reference from Lord Zetland’s brother, Admiral Dundas.)
Directly after leaving his mother’s home, Byron stuffed the hated new uniform into a carpet bag, posted it back to Horsley Towers – and vanished. Charles Noel, who had always been more attached to this wild, affectionate boy than his own hardworking son and namesake, volunteered to track the runaway down. A discreet advertisement (no identifying name was given, but reference was made to lightly tattooed hands, a deep slow voice and a seaman’s gait) enabled a detective to run the fugitive to earth at a Liverpool inn for sailors. Here, after initially denying his identity, Lord Ockham gave himself up on 9 November.
A month later, Ada’s eldest son was sulkily aboard again, serving on Lord Nelson’s own old flagship, the Victory. The posting was no sinecure (the battered old ship had been converted into a depot store that was permanently lodged at Portsmouth), but it meant that a watchful eye could be kept on the rebellious young man while decisions were taken about his future role. Helped by Greig’s and Lushington’s excellent naval connections, Byron Ockham was despatched in 1853 to the Malta station in the Mediterranean, soon to become a naval hub point for the Crimean War. It must have pleased Annabella to think that the boy was following in his grandfather’s hallowed wake. (Byron, during his youthful travels, had spent three weeks at Malta.)
&
nbsp; Ada knew nothing about Ockham’s defection. Little active consciousness remained in the twilight world that now offered Lady Lovelace only intermittent release from pain. She spoke in riddles, calling her illness a good bargain and claiming that treacherous conspirators wanted to separate her from the mother to whom she now clung. She imagined shadows into looming figures who blotted out the light from the doorway. Terrified of what lay in store for her, she nevertheless longed for death.
The end, so cruelly slow to arrive, came suddenly on the evening of 27 November. The two lawyers were paying one of their visits to sort through Ada’s papers. Annabella, worn out by a long day of watching by Ada’s side, had nodded off in her room when Lovelace and Greig rapped on her door. It was half-past nine. The two men gave her the news she had both dreaded and longed for. Her beautiful, eccentric, brilliant child, aged only thirty-six – the age at which her husband, too, had gone – was dead.
Accompanying the soberly dressed men to Ada’s room, Annabella found herself unable to register what she had been told. How could her daughter have slipped away during one of the rare moments when she herself was not keeping watch beside her child? Could she in truth be dead? Bending over the bed, Lady Byron held her candle close to Ada’s parted lips and waited, watching for a breath that would cause the flame to waver. She raised the candle higher. Ada’s eyes did not open. Once again, she brought the flickering candle back to catch a breath from the pale mouth.
About to repeat the process, Annabella found herself being gently ushered out. Back in her room, Lady Byron sat at her desk, thinking. Had they only given her time, she could have shown those blundering intruders that Ada had in fact waited to die until a beloved mother was stood at her side. Picking up her pen, Lady Byron recorded in a firm hand that Ada had died at ten o’clock, while in her parent’s presence. That was how it should have been. Her record would make it so.
Later, when the house was silent, Annabella went to sit beside her daughter’s body. Alone, she watched the slow hardening of the haggard features that she herself had carefully sketched almost three months earlier. Too late, she regretted having agreed with Lovelace that the children – her granddaughter was actually present, fast asleep in a different part of the house – should see their mother once more, before the burial box enclosed her for the last long journey to Newstead. To remember the extraordinary, passionate Ada in all the radiant glow of her vitality: surely that was the kinder way?
Down in his study, Lord Lovelace was also awake, writing letters in a strong, steady hand that belied his own exhaustion. The burden of each was the same. Addressing Lady Hester (she had written just once, and briefly, to enquire how long Ada had left to live), he pointedly dwelt upon the exceptional humanity of his mother-in-law. ‘It is fortunate that Lady Byron has been domiciled with us during this time,’ Lovelace told his mother: ‘. . . her gentleness & presence of mind have been the main support of her suffering daughter as well as me’.
There is no doubt that Lord Lovelace meant what he said, and yet there was an almost obsessive note in his endless repetition, in every letter he wrote that night, of that particular mantra. Paying tribute over and again to the Hen’s gentle practicality, he seemed to hope that he might yet earn her forgiveness.
* * *
* Brewster invented the kaleidoscope in 1816 and the stereoscope, a hugely popular early form of 3D photographic viewing, in 1851. He enjoyed the company of clever women; in 1851, he escorted Charlotte Brontë around the Great Exhibition – and doubtless showed off his stereoscope during the tour.
* Previously, biographers have assumed that Lovelace’s letter related to Ada’s betting at Doncaster. The later 1852 date adds more weight to Lady Byron’s bitter sense that her son-in-law had betrayed her trust in him. At Leamington, Lovelace had promised to oppose any future attempts at gambling by his wife.
† John Padwick’s notorious talent as a moneylender was not matched by his skill on the course. A month before the Derby, he sold his own horse, Little Joe. It won the race.
* Florence suggested that Lady Lovelace’s village hospital might follow the layout and system of Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein, a German training school for nurses where she had studied in 1851 (FN to AINB, n.d. 1852, Dep. Lovelace Byron 94, fols. 88–92).
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
LIFE AFTER ADA
(1852–3)
‘The Rainbow’
Bow down in hope, in thanks, all ye who mourn
Where e’en that peerless arch of radiant hues
Surpassing earthly tints, the storm subdued.
Of nature’s strife and tears. ’Tis heaven-born
To soothe the sad, the sinning and the forlorn.
A lovely loving token; to infuse
The hope, the faith that Pow’r divine endures
With latent good the woes by which we’re torn
’Tis like sweet repentance of the skies,
To beckon all by the sense of sin opprest,
Revealing harmony from tears and sighs;
A pledge, that deep implanted in the breast
A hidden light may burn that never dies,
But burst thro’ storms in purest hues exprest.
AAL
On 28 November 1852, the morning after her daughter’s death, Lady Byron moved into Brown’s, the Dover Street hotel that had been set up in 1837 (with her own financial support) by James Brown, one of Lord Byron’s former valets, and his wife, Sarah Willis, who had briefly served as Annabella’s maid at Piccadilly Terrace.* The Browns respected their guest’s need for discretion. When a neatly bonneted Florence Nightingale called at the hotel the following day to offer her condolences to the woman she revered and admired above almost any other, she was informed that Lady Byron was unable to receive callers.
Thwarted in her original plan, Florence set off instead to inspect what she soulfully referred to as ‘the poor house itself’. Young Annabella was still in residence, but did not appear. Lord Lovelace had accompanied the coffin (placed inside a private carriage) on the Midland railway line to Worksop, near Newstead.
And why on earth, an inquisitive Miss Nightingale pondered, would the family seek to draw attention to their link with Lord Byron, of whose incestuous relationship with Augusta Leigh all the Nightingale family had long since been informed by his widow? It did not occur to her that the hapless Lady Lovelace had chosen her own burial place.
I thought of the words ‘conceived in sin’ and what an account that man, her father, has to render, from whose excesses her dreadful sufferings must date, and wondered they should like to bring her near him in her death.
Florence’s long letter has never before been looked at in connection with Ada’s death. Revealing both of Florence’s own attitude to emotion (‘She never lost her self command,’ Miss Nightingale remarked admiringly of Lady Byron’s care for her dying daughter) and of her nosiness (Lady Byron’s personal maid had been coaxed into volunteering that it was ‘a very good thing that poor Lady Lovelace was dead’), the real interest lies in the collateral detail that Florence’s letter provides.
The woman who welcomed Miss Nightingale into 6 Great Cumberland Place on 29 November was none other than her own Mrs Clark, the no-nonsense housekeeper who would later travel out with her to Scutari in the Crimea. It was during discussions about Ada’s apparent desire for a village hospital to be established at Kirkby Mallory that Florence had offered to loan Mrs Clark to Lady Byron as a capable (and above all, discreet) assistant. Mrs Clark’s role at Cumberland Place had probably taken the form of turning and lifting the dying patient, emptying bedpans and carrying trays. It was only during the last days that Mrs Clark had been given a more delicate commission, one of which Florence now became aware. ‘I am sure,’ Miss Nightingale wrote to her sister:
they may be most thankful they have Mrs Clark there to depend on. She has burnt everything, all the dreadful letters which would have broken their hearts to know of. Mrs Clark is not going to stay, she says she cannot b
ear it – but has consented to remain as long as they want her so much.*
Miss Nightingale’s letter helps to explain why both Dr Lushington and Woronzow Greig were visiting Great Cumberland Place on the evening that Ada Lovelace died. Evidently, this pair of trusted lawyers were still assessing what to suppress and what to preserve in order to protect the family from scandal. They did their best. The preserved family papers do not reveal Mrs Clark’s presence or what the ‘dreadful letters’ were that she had been instructed to destroy. When Parthenope Nightingale, many years later, obligingly searched the Nightingale family’s archives for any letters that might interest Ada’s son, Ralph, she reported that none had been found. Of the copious and seemingly confidential correspondence between Lady Byron and her close friend, Julia Smith (Julia was Florence and Parthenope’s unmarried aunt), not one trace survives.
On 3 December 1852, Ada’s coffin – her husband had made sure that it was a handsome one (silver-handled, mounted with the Lovelace coat of arms and mantled in violet-coloured velvet) – was conveyed from Newstead to nearby Hucknall Torkard, to be laid in the crowded Byron vault alongside her father and beneath the plaque on which Augusta Leigh, naming herself as the donor, had created a last enduring link to the brother she adored. Ada’s own plaque, by her specific request, carried only the dates of her birth and death, together with the information that she was Byron’s daughter and Lord Lovelace’s wife.
In Byron's Wake Page 42
