A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  After dinner, they staged a mock-marriage in the drawing room. Hobhouse was given away as the bride. Sir Ralph was in fine spirits and acted the part of reverend. Dawlish was the father, and Lady Milbanke played a limping Lord Byron—a joke at which Annabella noticed the poet wince. The lovers themselves sat side by side on the music bench and watched. Dawlish decided to look for the epithalamium, which his master had spent the several months’ delay in carefully rewriting. It was discovered eventually on the music stand of the harpsichord and read out to a very mixed reception. Lord Byron managed to revenge his humour upon it. Sir Ralph blushed. Hobhouse was more judicial. Only Annabella kept quiet—she could think of nothing to say. It struck her as almost blasphemous, the mockery that was made of the ceremony on which she had pinned her hopes of a new life. But her begrudging reticence shamed her just as much, and she turned at last to face the harpsichord and play a wedding march as her own tongue-tied contribution to the entertainment. The music somehow sobered them all to silence. The tune was wrong, too mournful and grand, and they sat and dutifully attended to her. It was all she could do to keep on playing without breaking into tears. In the smattering of applause that followed, she managed to rub away the softness in her eyes with the flat of her palms. At eleven o’clock, Dawlish brought in a bowl of champagne-punch, which kept them lively till midnight, when they shook hands together and listened to the bells of St Mary’s ringing in the New Year. Judy, red-faced, had fallen asleep in her chair.

  It snowed through the night. Lord Byron had asked her, before going to bed, when she liked to appear in the morning. Ten o’clock, Annabella had said; she was very fond of a walk at breakfast. If he liked to join her, she would be glad of his company. And in spite of their late night she came down at ten, if only to live up to her word. If only to get him for an hour to herself, for she felt they had come to an understanding—the first of their intended marriage. She waited for him in the drawing room; it was the morning of New Year’s Day. She had a secretive nature and decided to class it among the thrills of love that it expanded the scope of privacy: from ‘one’, as Lord Byron had put it, into ‘two’.

  One felt all through the house the effect of the snow. It threw ghosts of itself against the walls, against the rugs on the floor. It reminded Annabella of a high repeated note on the harpsichord. There was a kind of sweet insistence in it from which one eventually began to wish to avert one’s sense. And yet there was, in spite of the chill of the house, a new softness in the air that seemed a little like warmth. The fires had only just been laid and burned more brightly than hotly; Annabella, as the morning grew older, watched them settle in the grate. Her mother had for several months been accustomed to taking her breakfast in bed. Sir Ralph slept poorly, especially after a night of drinking, and tended to rise early and work in the library and sleep there. Annabella believed she had heard him, shifting his easy chair to be nearer the fire. She waited for Lord Byron to come down till the clock struck eleven, then she put on her boots and went out into the world on her own.

  A low snowy sky hung over the elms of the drive. But the air was grey and spotless; the falling had stopped. A layer of white brought out the irregularities in the ground, in the gravel and grass—a thin crust like toast, she thought to herself absurdly, as she stepped upon it. She took a quiet satisfaction from making her mark on the road. After the gate, which she opened herself, was a small hut, intended once for a gatekeeper. Sophy and she used to hide in it as children and spy on the carriages, which in Sir Ralph’s electioneering days often thronged the drive. Now it stored mostly a collection of sticks, boots, shawls. One was always forgetting things; one hated going back to the house. A small round window by the door let a little light in. There was still the bench inside that the children had brought there to stand on: they could not see out of it otherwise. Annabella, feeling the air on her neck, decided to wrap herself in another shawl. The smell of the hut, of mud and leather mixed, of enduring cold, brought on—she was very sensitive to recollections—a flood of sentiment. She had hidden there to watch Sophy drive out to be married; Annabella had refused to come in her carriage. ‘What shall I do without you?’ she remembered saying to her cousin. ‘What shall I do with them?’

  ‘Marry,’ Sophy had said, laughing.

  Marry, she repeated now to herself. Yes, it was time.

  The snow had thickened even over the beach, except where the waves had washed it away, leaving a rim of ice. There was little wind. The rollers seemed, more out of duty than desire, to repeat their advances on the shore. In the low-hung cloud, the horizon looked very near, almost palpable—looming and vague at once. Annabella imagined how quickly the land behind her would disappear from view if she sailed out to it: a prospect which, she supposed, would awake in Lord Byron the simplest of yearnings. She herself had never left England before. Well, she must learn to reconcile him to quietness. That, she suspected, would prove the task of her marriage. She walked down the middle of the sand, to keep clear of the waves, and began, as she used to, composing verses in her thoughts. As much as anything else, it was a test of her memory. ‘Let my affection’ was the phrase she had been mulling over. The last word suddenly acquired a crispness, a clarity, brought out by the sound of dry snow compacting under her steps. ‘Let my affection be the . . . the bond of peace . . .’ And then, as they sometimes did, the lines came almost unbidden, which seemed to her at the time the best evidence of their beauty, of her sincerity.

  Let my affection be the bond of peace

  Which bids thy warfare with remembrance cease.

  Blest solely in the blessings I impart,

  I only ask to heal thy wounded heart.

  On the wild thorn that spreads dark horror, there

  To graft the olive branch and see it bear . . .

  She turned back only when her feet grew cold. The thought of whom she was about to marry struck her afresh. She was in a position to give the first poet of the age her little tribute to their love. The fact obscurely supported her in the silent continuing argument she kept up with Mary Montgomery; and she walked home again in better spirits, feeling she had scored a point.

  At the gate, she stopped to return her shawl (which was, after all, too dirty for house-use) to the hut. Just as she opened the door, she caught a glimpse of two young men at the end of the drive, setting off. One of them moved a little more slowly, resting his weight, it seemed, on his hand in the air: the stick was too thin to be seen. Without thinking, she slipped inside and waited for them. She felt her heart in her throat, beating quick. It was only, she supposed, the childish desire to surprise which rendered her childish again; that and memories of Sophy. She sat down on the bench, rather demurely—it was too low for a full-grown woman. There was no other sound but the pulsing in her neck. She touched her thumb against it, to feel its vivid agitation. The delay grew almost unbearable. She began to count the seconds: it could hardly take them more than a minute to reach the gate, but she had told a hundred before she heard their boots in the snow.

  ‘Can you guess which way she has gone?’ It was Hobhouse speaking; his words carried very clearly in the cold air. Annabella, then, almost called out to them. She had half prepared the smile with which she would open the door but needed a moment to find her breath again. She mustn’t sound flustered; it was only a game she had played. Often she noted in herself a slight hesitation to enter his company again: it was like dipping a foot in cold water. One needed to accustom oneself. That she was shy of him still, she considered a proof of her love.

  ‘It doesn’t matter to me if we run into her. I suspect we shall see enough of each other in time.’ This made her stop short. She bit her tongue and resolved to hear them out. The strain of keeping quiet turned her shyness into something else, into guilt, into outrage. She was not accustomed to eavesdropping, and she feared the lesson to be learned from it. Other people were always more indifferent to one than one imagined them
to be: she sensed for the first time, beneath her, a cushion being removed. Lord Byron sounded brisker, less musical than usual—as if the voice he addressed to her was an instrument played, which away from her ear he handled more carelessly.

  ‘I suppose you must marry,’ Hobhouse said.

  ‘I spent last summer at Hastings, with Hodgson, bathing and advocating to me, often at the same time. He calls it the most ambrosial state.’

  ‘Marriage, you mean—not bathing? Well, Hodgson.’ And then, ‘If you must, you might as well marry her.’

  The opening and closing of the gate provided a pause, which, in the thick of their conversation, they made use of, stopping to have the question out. Annabella, sitting with her hands between her knees to keep them warm, had lowered her head and closed her eyes to listen. She heard the foot of the gate scraping over the snow. And then, with something like the sweetness in his manner she was accustomed to hearing, Lord Byron said, ‘What do you think of her, Hobby? You needn’t spare me. I know you too well to trust your opinion.’

  ‘I’m not such a fool.’ There was a silence in which Annabella could almost feel, between the two young men, the comfort of their friendship swelling. Hobhouse was the first to break it—not with an answer, but a question of his own. ‘What should one look for in a wife, I wonder?’

  ‘Gentleness, I suppose.’ She could hear Byron shift on his feet, thinking, rutting his stick through the snow. ‘Liveliness. Cleanliness.’ Hobhouse laughed. After a pause: ‘A little comeliness.’

  This seemed to make Hobhouse’s way easier, for he ventured his opinion at last. ‘I think you’ve done well.’ Byron must have looked up, to prompt elaboration, for after a moment Hobhouse hesitantly gave it. ‘Her feet and ankles are excellent. The upper part of her face is very good—expressive, if not exactly handsome. She seems very . . . clean.’ He was ashamed, perhaps, of descending to mockery, for he continued more earnestly, ‘She gains by inspection.’ And then, with greater assurance: ‘I believe she dotes on you.’ There was a clear small clang as the gate shut, but Annabella thought she could just make out Lord Byron’s answer. ‘A little silently, for my taste.’ As their voices began to retreat again, he added, ‘I like them to talk, because then they think less.’ Annabella, as quietly as she could, stood up on the bench and pressed her nose against the window. She might have been ten years old; it might have been only a game. Lord Byron was an inch or two taller than his friend. They walked arm in arm and seemed in no hurry at all. She felt a needle of envy working in her heart, at the ease of male companionship. They descended between the trees, and just as their heads dropped below the line of the snow, Annabella heard herself: gaping for air, sucking and shaking, dry-eyed. She had in the end to close her hands over her mouth, as if in prayer, to soften her sobbing—at the thought of what she had put herself at the mercy of.

  The coldness of a loveless eye: she had never seen herself through one before. She followed their footsteps back into the house, an exercise which, at least, restored to her the face of calm. Sir Ralph met her in the hall. Lord Byron had just gone out; he had hoped to find her. No matter, she said, she must have just passed them in the woods. And then: ‘I suspect we shall see enough of each other in time.’ Her coolness puzzled him somewhat, which she knew—a fact that helped to relieve the worst of her feelings. Her father, however, had begun already to resign the rights of his paternal curiosity. He was not the kind of man to pull at the tender root of a secret. For that, she relied on Judy—or used to rely. Annabella’s most pressing, most selfish concern, was that her mother had lost the strength to check her. She might have been inclined to put a stop to the business in hand; Judy had once had that power.

  Annabella retired to her room. At her dressing table, in front of the mirror, she stared into her own eyes, unblinking. It was Hobhouse’s words, at first, that ran through her thoughts: ‘the upper part of her face’, etc. The force of the specific seemed very painful to her. It reduced one to scale, and a sense of scale is just what, as she put it to herself, the soul can bear very little of. But then, her humour reviving somewhat, she considered her feet and ankles, ‘excellent’ both. And there was consolation to be had, on several fronts, from Lord Byron’s character of a wife, which suggested only too shameful a contrast with her own paradoxical account of a husband to Lady Melbourne. Gentleness, liveliness, cleanliness, a little comeliness. Surely, her modesty could demand no more of his good opinion. And it was, she decided, among the benefits to be expected from her marriage that she could rely on her husband for such grace and sense. Simplicity, indeed, was just the margin she looked for, and if the confinement of marriage could teach it to her, she need not resent her cage. If only, as Lord Byron said, she could unlearn a little of her silence—and she came down to lunch with her equanimity somewhat restored and a resolution to cling to.

  They were married the next day, in the drawing room. Lord Byron, as the hour approached, was summoned and found at last in the garden; his wedding-shoes, as he came in, still dripping from the snow. It was a game they had been playing together, perhaps the most intimate of the day: to append the word to anything. The wedding breakfast; a wedding sneeze. The wedding snow. He complained, in a voice a little shaking with humour, of having caught in the outside air a ‘wedding chill’. The vicar of Seaham was the son of old family friends—a surprisingly young man with fat ruddy silken cheeks and a cheerful stammer. ‘He was only very cold-tongued,’ he said at the beginning. ‘He needed a minute, a minute, a minute, before the fire, to warm up.’ A Mr Wallace. Hobhouse looked very upright and splendid in full dress and white gloves. Annabella, feeling strangely composed, found time to make a compliment on his appearance, which he gallantly returned. Simplicity, she said, considering herself in the mirror above the fire, had been the effect she aimed at. She wore a muslin gown trimmed with lace at the bottom and a white muslin curricle jacket and nothing on her head.

  There was only one little unpleasantness. As the room was being arranged, Sir Ralph—to keep, as he said, the conversation afloat—mentioned something Dawlish had told him that morning on coming back from the village. The conclusion to his story about that Irish impostor. No one could discover his real name, which had become a material concern, since he was found last night in the straggle of bushes outside the gate to the harbour, quite dead. There wasn’t a sign of violence upon his person, though he stank of laudanum. A copy of The Bride of Abydos, signed, it seemed, in Lord Byron’s own hand, lay inside his jacket-pocket. Lord Byron was observed to turn very pale at this. He had inherited, he said, from his Scottish side, a foolish streak of superstition. He was persuaded to sit down; brandy was brought. (Annabella, almost glad of the chance to exhibit her tenderest concerns, thought she heard him muttering something to Hobhouse, who answered with a shame-faced smile.) But the real awkwardness was to come. Lady Judy, who had been keeping carefully quiet, turned on Sir Ralph. It was just like him, she said, to be spreading such distasteful gossip on his daughter’s wedding day. He lacked all decorum and would sacrifice every fine-feeling for the sake of one of his ‘stories’. Sir Ralph looked duly chastened; the egg of his head seemed to tremble. He had lately begun to express his uncertainties, his hesitations, physically; one almost felt the vibrato in him and took from it a kind of musical effect. ‘My dear man,’ he kept repeating, ‘I never dreamed it would upset you. It was only some wretched mick.’ Though even this incident had its consoling force: Annabella was glad to see her mother insisting on the old relations. Judy looked pale that morning, almost drained of blood, but steadier than she had in months. Perfectly composed, only a little stiff, which suited the occasion.

  The rest of the ceremony passed off well enough. Brandy brought a touch of colour to Lord Byron’s cheeks. He praised Lady Milbanke for the wedding-cushions, or rather, the two small squares of woven matt that she had provided for them to kneel on. ‘One shouldn’t,’ he said, ‘expect too many comforts in setting fort
h on such a journey.’ Annabella couldn’t quite make out the object of his irony, but Judy offered him a little smile. Mr Wallace had a rough amiable manner and an air of inconsequence, which greatly lightened the formality of the wedding-service. Annabella spoke her part distinctly well. She had been accustomed, ever since childhood, to acting out small scenes in the drawing room for the benefit of her parents and their friends. Lord Byron seemed more affected, although when he came to the line ‘with all my worldly goods I thee endow’, he cast a wry look at Hobhouse. By eleven o’clock, they were married; the bells of St Mary’s rang an extra peal for them, and they kissed and shook hands all round.

  Annabella retired shortly after to change. She could see from her bedroom window the carriage waiting for them below; Dawlish was loading their cases in it. Her uncle Lord Wentworth had lent them Halnaby Hall for the honeymoon. It was forty miles away on winter roads. The phrase of the previous morning recurred to her, that she had scored a point, only ‘this time,’ she supposed, summoning an image of her friend Mary, ‘it was the match-winner.’ There was almost a kind of anger in her throat as she thought of the words, a kind of ache. She returned in a few minutes, dressed for travelling in a dove-coloured pelisse. ‘I believe it did vastly well,’ Lord Byron said quietly to her, leaving his hand for a moment against her side. A taste, she imagined, of the contact that awaited her.

  Dawlish opened the front door for them, at which Hobhouse appeared to present her with a copy of Lord Byron’s poems, bound in yellow morocco. ‘A wedding gift.’ And then, to lighten the mood, he added, ‘I believe you have lately acquired the original.’ She nodded but in a sudden agitation could not think what to do with it, or how to thank him. She held it for a moment thickly clasped across her waist, until the young man took pity on her and relieved her of the book, to deposit it himself in the rear of the carriage. Her mother seized her now by the arm; she seemed on the verge of tears herself. ‘Did I not behave well?’ Judy kept repeating. ‘Did I not behave well?’ Annabella kissed her passionately; she was conscious of tearing herself away. It seemed as if someone was pulling her from behind. Sir Ralph kept shy of her. He had a word with the coachman instead. ‘Keep off the Durham road,’ she heard him saying. ‘It’s very bad in the snow.’ As they took their seats, Hobhouse reappeared in the window; he was holding Lord Byron’s hand. ‘I wish you every happiness,’ he said, turning to Annabella.