A Quiet Adjustment

by Benjamin Markovits

  His indignation could be counted on to do justice to whatever his daughter had suffered, though Annabella presumed that he would, in his accustomed manner, make of an excess of feeling an excuse not to act. In fact, nothing could have been more explicit than the avowals he demanded of her, never to return to him, never to answer his letters, never to speak to him, if she didn’t want either the blood of her father, or her husband, on her conscience. His fury brought home to her, as nothing else had, a sense of her helplessness. There was a kind of violence in the sheer fact of it. She could almost feel in the weight of each moment the irresistible gravity of events, pulling her forward; and she responded to her father’s anger with an equal passion of supplication. ‘He was mad, he was mad, he was only mad,’ she repeated, clutching at his hands, while he, strangely, attempted to fend her off. ‘He does not know himself.’ She finally managed to extract from her father a promise: that if Lord Byron was deemed, by those medically competent to judge him, to be insane, she should be allowed, in the event of his recovery, to return to him. Otherwise—and this was, privately, the vivid little phrase she allowed herself—he was lost to her for ever.

  Sir Ralph retired at once to compose a letter, in which he would begin to address the question of their separation. Annabella stayed up by the fire. Mrs Clermont had put Ada to bed, and for the first time since her outburst to Lady Gosford, Annabella had a minute or two to herself—she practically counted them up. Her quick burst of feeling had offered a little relief. On the whole she confessed herself satisfied by the turn of events. She had at least restored herself to the centre of their small world; and the sense of living at the beating heart of things brought home to her, as nothing yet had done, how long she had suffered on the peripheries of Lord Byron’s stronger passions. Nothing she suffered or felt could stand up to the heat of his sufferings and feelings. She was conscious, however, as the thought crossed her mind, of having at last found an occasion that might bring out, in their brightest colours, her own quiet and enduring qualities. Then her father came in with a draft of his letter, which he read to her; and the simpler truth of what was happening to her entered and pressed, by another inch, deeper in:

  Circumstances have come to my knowledge which convince me that, with your opinions, it cannot tend to your happiness to continue to live with Lady Byron. I am yet more forcibly convinced that after her dismissal from your house, and the treatment she experienced whilst in it, those on whose protection she has the strongest natural claims could not feel themselves justified in permitting her return thither . . .

  Her mother joined their little conference in her nightdress and took the letter from him. It should not be sent without due consultation. ‘You mustn’t in the meantime,’ Judy added, ‘write him so much as a line. You must leave all that to me.’ She intended to make an early start on the road to London, where she would engage the services of a lawyer.

  It amazed her (she told herself afterwards that she should not have been amazed) how quickly the legal element intruded upon the question. Indeed, the law had a sort of taste, of itself, which flavoured the subjects it treated, and she grew conscious, in the weeks to come, that the savour of her predicament had been almost imperceptibly altered. She was learning to count up her wrongs with a little dry irony. Annabella believed that she had a natural talent for the law. It soothed the worst of her exacerbated feelings to be able to exercise, besides the wounded faculty of her sentiment, something like her old subtlety upon the matters of her heart. She was acting, for the first time since her marriage, in confederation with her mother—who, to do her justice, had taken up the cause with all the energy stored up in her dormant years.

  Judy reported almost daily from London, addressing herself to Sir Ralph; what Annabella heard was only the echo of these letters. Reverberations, she supposed, rang out both ways, and she caught, from a postscript that her father read out to her, the low sound of those reports which Ralph must have sent back to Judy, regarding herself. ‘Let me entreat you to calm your mind. Don’t look for imaginary bugbears, Annabella, when so many real ones exist.’ Nor could her mother, in the headlong rush of her newfound purpose and under the guise of a kind of reassurance, resist the odd humble boast: ‘I assure you I have never been saner. My brains are particularly clear.’ Their letter to Lord Byron had been submitted for legal adjustment. Judy would return when she could with the corrected text, which Sir Ralph was to copy in his own hand and sign himself. Nothing—she presumed that her daughter might take some consolation from the delay—could be formally undertaken until she had rejoined them. In the meantime, however, she had consulted a number of doctors on the strength of the testimony of Mrs Leigh (who seemed to Lady Milbanke a shy foolish calculating bundle of pieties), regarding the state of Lord Byron’s health. There seemed little hope that his treatment of Annabella could be the unhappy effect of a mental malaise. At least, if it were, the medical opinion, with one voice, despaired of finding a cure. She must proceed, then, as if all parties to the issue had proceeded, in their common affairs, in their proper minds and had acted on their soberest intentions. It would be wise, accordingly—and this was her mother’s own strange phrase, which Sir Ralph duly repeated with the letter in hand—for Annabella, henceforth, to conduct herself ‘in the best legal fashion’.

  In practice this meant that she was once more forbidden from writing to her husband—an injunction that brought out in her the shameful confession of the intimate tender playful letter she had sent him upon her arrival at Kirkby Mallory. Had she a copy of it? She had, and was forced to stand idly by while her father read it, leaning lightly against the mantelpiece, warming his coat-tails in the fire. There was nothing in it, she supposed, for which a young wife need reproach herself, although she regretted now the dry little reference to ‘mothers-in-law and babies’. But what embarrassed her most was just its tone, which seemed natural and affectionate. She winced particularly, as she imagined his progress through the lines, over that silly loving nonsense of her signature: Pippin . . . Pip-ip. When he was finished, he looked up at her; and she was duly alerted to the increase in her filial respect by the difficulty she inwardly admitted to in returning his stare. ‘This does not read,’ he began, kindly enough, ‘like the letter of a woman . . .’

  ‘No,’ she interrupted him, blushing. ‘Only, you must understand the fears we all had for his sanity—for our safety.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘I mean, Augusta and I. We had acquired a sort of habit of kindliness towards him, if only because we tended to suffer more when it was broken.’ She was moved by her own account, which was, after all, nothing less than the truth. It seemed to her then that the fullest confession might really exonerate her, so she attempted to make it. ‘You must understand the particular form his . . . malady takes. He rather swells with his own unhappiness and grows expansive on it, just where others (among them, I believe myself) are inclined to contract. Everything, you see, the least word said, touches him nearly. One learns to give him the largest berth and to approach him, if at all, only with the—gentlest hands. You see by my letter the . . . gentleness he has taught me, which I practised, it must be said, willingly enough, for my own sake as well as his.’ She was equal, at that, to the largest admission—and, feeling it rising within her, she made it. ‘You see, I love him, still. I have always loved him; I always will love him.’

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ he said, taking her cheek in his hand. (She had lifted her chin, bravely, to look up at him.) But he could not resist asking, as much from the simplest curiosity as from a father’s desire to correct in his daughter her unhappy illusions: ‘And did he ever love you?’

  ‘If I leave him,’ she promptly replied, ‘perhaps we may find out.’ He had never admired her more. Her curiosity, it seemed, was still greater than his, but before he could give a voice to his admiration, she had continued, in just the same sensible considering tone. ‘Is it very bad? I mean, my letter. Does it—a
ffect our case?’

  ‘I’m afraid it may. Your mother has consulted Sir Samuel Romilly, a very eminent lawyer, who has proposed another, a civilian, by the name of Lushington. She has written to say that the least suggestion on your part of a willingness to make it up could be interpreted by the courts as grounds for refusing a separation. If it comes to the worst.’

  ‘Oh, if it comes to the worst,’ she felt for the first time a temptation to give up her secret to them and almost yielded to it, regarding her father with a significant eye, ‘I believe we can meet him, squarely.’

  Chapter Four

  LADY MILBANKE WAS TO SPEND the week in town, to see to the legal side of their affairs, and Annabella, who had always enjoyed the mild weather of her father’s moods, passed the days pleasantly in his company. Ada, in their relations, made a congenial third. Her grandfather grew more comfortable with the child as she fattened and learned to smile, and Annabella was supported in her affliction by the illusion of keeping up, with Sir Ralph, a sort of conjugal arrangement. It was broken only by the child herself, who introduced at times, with a sudden fierceness, the note of her own absent father.

  Annabella had never till then given much attention to what might be called the little feathers of character her daughter had revealed. These were still hidden, as it were, under her wings; they would grow out eventually to the full bright plumage. But missing the girl’s father, perversely, as Annabella had begun to do, even the quick living unhappiness he brought out in her (which had been succeeded, in her parents’ house, by a pace of grief for the most part slower and duller), she learned to take a greater interest in his child. It was, after all, the only piece of Lord Byron that Augusta had no share in—she was almost willing to put it as plainly as this. Ada slept and fed, and her bouts of more violent complaint were rare enough that one could almost suspect the poor girl of calculations, by which her supply of useful and choleric protest was husbanded and meted out. She was, in short, a very good quiet kind of a baby, if a little reserved, which was just what her mother had been, Sir Ralph remarked, at the child’s age. He leapt, whenever they offered themselves, at comparisons—out of shyness, perhaps, unless they seemed to him merely a painless and natural occasion for pressing his case. How could she not be quiet, her mother did not say, when her father had been so loud. Ada’s eyes had lately begun to meet and blackly answer a curious stare; and Lady Byron was grateful for the excuse it gave her to avert her own from Sir Ralph’s more intimate glances. She could almost feel, from his gentle hand, the stones dropped within her. They were sounding her out, and she wondered, indeed, how many she was supposed to endure, painfully reverberating, before they might grow sick of hearing the reports.

  The voice that was silent, of course, was Lord Byron’s own, though she imagined her father had had the privilege of hearing his views. Her father, she knew perfectly well, was reading her letters, on no less eminent an authority than Sir Samuel Romilly’s; but no one had yet extended the freedom to her of reading theirs. What she absolutely refused to do—it was the one thing on which ‘she had put her foot down’—was to give up her communication with Augusta. It seemed, on the one hand, too generous a concession to leave the field, and she knew quite well whom she meant by that word, entirely to Gus. On the other, she could not quite resign herself, at a single stroke, to giving up both of the Byrons. One at a time was surely enough; and there was, in the secret she harboured deep within her, a power of hurting poor Gus that inspired in her already the anxious loving desire to be forgiven. ‘I have wronged you,’ she wrote, ‘and you have never wronged me. It makes me feel I have no claim to what you give.’ Her wrongs thus far had been slight enough, but she knew quite well her power of adding to them. What she was testing, really, was whether or not an admission, however vague, of the worst had prepared in her the ground for attempting it. How much was her conscience strong enough to bear? She was, if nothing else, giving it a steady exercise; and the feeling, as she stretched it out tentatively in every direction, reminded her of nothing so much as the first few weeks of her marriage. She had been forced on their honeymoon to admit, at her husband’s insistence, just what she was capable of. There was little at the time she had stopped short at—a proof of her character that gave her every reason to fear for Augusta now.

  Even so, she knew herself well enough to recognize that when she was threatened, she retreated into her conscience; and she was just as willing to acknowledge where the gravest threat to her lay. She was giving up love, for her parents’ sake, as well as her own. By clinging to Augusta she hoped to salvage, from the wreck of it, a plank on which to float. Her temper was such, she had always congratulated herself, that she could make out of any trial the food of health. Consequently, she was surprised to find herself, during a long cold month at Kirkby Mallory, being starved of something. And what she was starved of his sister might learn to supply. Augusta, she supposed, if she did her duty, might be her little reward—she was hoping to keep her, that is, as a sort of memento, all to herself. She had something of her brother’s look; she had something of his manner and lightness of touch, and still more, after all, of what was really his distinctive quality, a willingness to be loved. But Augusta was useless to her while she lived with him—a reflection that had everything to do with the fact (and this, as the weeks passed, was the note that grew only louder and more painfully insistent) that she was unspeakably jealous of both of them for continuing to live with each other in Piccadilly, in what was, after all, the house of her marriage. Jealousy was always the sin to which her virtuous nature was most likely to surrender. And there were times, at night, in the confinement of her room, when she clung to Ada so tightly, as the last living relic of those relations, that Mrs Clermont herself, at hearing the child’s cries, was forced to intervene, to rescue the girl from the clutch of her mother’s arms, and to leave the mother herself on the floor of her room, beating her fists against the back of her head.

  It was these paroxysms (she could hardly, in a house as echoing as Kirkby Mallory, keep them quiet) that suggested to her parents, after her mother had returned from London, the possibility that Annabella was holding something back. She could see them, with every word she spoke, counting up her miseries; and they could not conceal from their daughter, miserable as she appeared, that they were coming up short. How quickly, how lightly, indeed, had Annabella accepted their intervention—their meddling, she might otherwise have called it. She had met them halfway, and that fact alone pointed to a fall more deep than any she had yet revealed to them. It wasn’t so much that they doubted her. Only, they seemed to recognize, in the show of her continuing submission, a kind of excess. In spite of their gentleness, they had the air of people determined, in accounting for their involvement in Annabella’s affairs, that everything should add up: even though that total, as they knew quite well, was composed of nothing less than the sum of their daughter’s unhappiness.

  She might have taken a greater offence at the tone of calculation, which her mother especially could not keep out of her sympathies, if Annabella hadn’t so completely inherited the tone herself. She was also vividly conscious of withholding just such a secret of her husband’s cruelty as might be expected to square even Lady Milbanke’s most extravagant claims for her daughter’s redress. For the moment, at least, she was confident of putting her off; and she rejoiced in the fact, as a testament to her powers of healing, that she could still indulge herself in the vanity of such a possession. It seemed to her sometimes that she had kept back, at a general feast, the last precious cake for herself; and she was waiting for everyone to grow hungry again, before she could, with the greatest credit to her generosity, begin to share it around. She knew, however—this was one of the thoughts she was wrestling with—that she might have kept her rich little secret too long, to take only credit for preserving it so well. Just what the fact might suggest about her own complicity in the passionate guilt of the Byrons, she couldn’t yet judge
herself coldly enough to admit to.

  The law, at least, offered some consolation. It gave her, if nothing else, something to talk to her mother about. ‘I would not but have seen Lushington for the world’—this was, in the end, the report that brought Lady Milbanke home again.

  He seems the most gentlemanlike, clear-headed and clever man I ever met with, and agrees with all others that a proposal should be sent by your father for a quiet adjustment. But observe that he insists on Lord B not being allowed to remain an instant at Kirkby, should he go there, and he says you must not see him on any account—and that your father should remain in the room with you. If you see him voluntarily or if he is suffered to remain, you are wholly in his power, and he may apply to the Spiritual Court for a restoration of conjugal rights, as they term it, and oblige you to return. The law, I’m afraid, is against the wives. But a great deal, he says, may be done with a public man by the fear of exposure, which we need not, I presume, fear at all? He is confident, in your case, of coming to terms, though less so of saving your daughter. He insists, again, on what we have already told you—that you must not answer his letters—and was surprised to find that I had given this advice before I left Kirkby. He said it was the best possible. He wants to meet you: there are questions only he can ask. I am coming, my love; you have only to wait for me.