Waiting, it’s true, she almost smiled at her mother’s percipience, was really all that she had. Well, she was good at waiting. Ada slept in the lap of the chair beside her; her cheeks were besmirched with pimples, which clustered around the depression of her nose, beneath her eyes. Mrs Clermont, when she came in to relieve her, could be trusted to wash the child’s face. It was just after breakfast, and a part of Annabella’s thoughts were occupied by the apple-dumplings that had been promised them for lunch that day. She had never been so hungry in her life.
Still, there was a great deal in Lady Milbanke’s account to occupy a woman who had thus far consented to cut herself off from the source of original news: her husband’s letters. She had to admit that the threat of losing her daughter struck her with a less thrilling fear than the thought, thus delicately put by Dr Lushington, that Lord Byron could insist on the restoration of his conjugal rights. There had been nothing, certainly, in Augusta’s communications to suggest the least possibility that Lord Byron might come to Kirkby; and she wondered whether he had been, to her father, more eager to propose a conciliation. Lord Byron had written at least three letters since Annabella’s flight from Piccadilly. Sir Ralph had seized them all. They sat, under a stone on which, in her childhood, his daughter had painted a red turtle, on the desk in his study. Annabella could see them, whenever the door was open, as she passed by it on the way to the warmer fire in the back parlour. Certainly, if Augusta hoped to keep him to herself (and it would, Annabella reasonably enough supposed, in spite of her jealousy, be the most natural thing in the world for a sister to attempt it), Gus could do no better than presenting him, as she had done, as the indifferent victim of his own wilfulness. ‘I don’t know whether,’ she had written, ‘I should say, he is miserable for you, or for himself, or whether he is miserable at all. I suspect, my dear sister, it might be best for your sake that he wasn’t at all? He is, of course, a little, and might be more; only, he has resumed, out of what you will, the worst of his bachelor habits, and is nightly drunk with the very men a wife should keep him from.’
Annabella could not conceal from herself that she had, at this, the most important crisis of her life, willingly resigned to anyone who would accept it the burden of her decisions; and the fact was brought home to her when the woman who had taken on the greatest part of them returned from London. Lady Milbanke had never looked better. Her colour was entirely restored, and she moved, from the ledge of the coach to the house, with the fresh vigour of a woman who had lately been given the largest licence to make herself useful. Annabella, watching her from her bedroom window, confessed inwardly to a sinking heart at the thought of what she might be capable of conceding to Lady Milbanke’s persuasion. The peace she had occasionally enjoyed in her mother’s absence was only the calm of postponement. Her return, at least, signalled the beginning of the grand event. A ‘quiet adjustment’, indeed! Her mother had a talent for compressing, in the most innocent phrase, such violent quantities. If the contest for her future was to be played out between Mrs Leigh and Lady Milbanke, Annabella began to fear what the defeat, which she considered almost inevitable, of her sister’s views might eventually bring down (it was sure to be a great heap) upon Augusta’s own head.
It was almost by way of apology that Annabella, that night, recounted for her sister’s sake the shock of her mother’s arrival.
I almost fainted when she first came in, and looked paler than usual when I meant to look better. I don’t know that my heart has done beating yet. I found her in the sitting room with a mouth full of buttered bread. She was terribly hungry after her journey, but the note of apology in her voice, for putting me off, was perfectly calculated, as you may guess, to make me anxious. I waited for her to finish, and she showed herself every bit willing to take her time. At last I could bear it no longer and said, ‘Is there any news from London?’ To which she replied, with every appearance of sympathy, ‘I believe the news is all on your end. Have you made up your mind?’ I scarcely dared answer, ‘To what?’ before she continued, ‘To come to London. You must, by this stage, have received my last letter. Dr. Lushington wishes to meet with you. He is the most dry, consoling man; it is quite like putting your hand on a book. But he cannot act, he says, without the fullest information. Believe me, I tried to spare you and offered to supply it myself, but he, all gentleness, maintained that you alone were in a position to render a full account.’ Well, my dear, you may guess how this made my heart jump and the blood rush. It was all I could do to nod away my blushes and say, ‘I should not myself desire to lift a hand against him,’ before giving in to tears. Which she, with a touch of impatience, thus met: ‘Your character is like proof spirits—not fit for common use. I could almost wish the tone of it lowered nearer the level of us everyday people. I have not slept on a bed of roses through my life. I have had afflictions and serious ones, though none so severe as the present. But in my sixty-fifth year I have endeavoured to rally—and shall rally, if you do. There are troubles that must be faced up to oneself. Now, my love, here is a Sunday’s sermon for you, and here it shall end; for I am mucky with travel and in need of a bath.’
How quickly had Judy picked up her old motherly air of impatient and critical admiration. Annabella read over her letter and wondered, with her pen in her hand, whether or not the strictest conscience should have balked at recording her mother’s compliments. She had said, more or less, just that, and Annabella had always taken comfort from the simplest prescriptions of truthfulness. ‘Proof spirits’, she supposed, as a term of flattery, also carried with it a suitable threat: hers was not a character to be taken, as Judy had said, in everyday doses. And then, for it seemed proper as a means of persuasion to add this sly note of praise, Annabella continued:
Your kindness must always mean more to me than that of any other. Of myself, I can only say that I feel well enough to go through my present duties, and that is all I wish. I am content. There are subjects I am more inclined to speak of than myself—but I have resolved not to do so unnecessarily, and alas! I have nothing to suggest which can alleviate their pressure on you, my dearest Augusta. I am advised not to enclose the least word to him . . .
She saw much too sharply into her own motives to deny the warning such a letter might carry to Augusta. But it also contained, and this struck her at the time as the real sweetness of the gesture, a kind of betrayal of her mother, which she, for once, was happy to make. By breakfast the next morning, Sir Ralph had copied out fair their legal demand for a separation. Mrs Clermont, who was becoming quite invaluable, carried it personally into town to post. It was on the evening of that day, in the dead dark hours, that Annabella gave way for the first time to the full passion of her misery. She could be heard plainly throughout the house, until Mrs Clermont came in to silence and console her.
Augusta, for her part, showed herself capable of unsuspected persistence. Sir Ralph’s letter to Lord Byron was duly returned—by Augusta. She had intercepted it and now pleaded passionately for more time: ‘She feared terribly the effect it might have on her brother.’ Annabella was ungenerous enough to reflect that she might mean nothing more by that phrase than the effect it would have on his sister. It seemed to her, as much as she loved the poor little Goose, that no one had more to suffer from the process of law than Augusta herself. Well, the poor little Goose, as it turned out, was not entirely helpless. More and more this seemed to Annabella a game of letters, and she was taking note, with increased attention, of the tricks to be played. Sir Ralph and Judy, considerably put out—and one of the odd effects of their irritation was that a portion of it should be directed, however irrationally, at Annabella herself—simply sent it back. This one hit home, the proof of which lay in the shortest of notes from Augusta: ‘He demands to know if they have acted according to your wishes.’ A line that allowed Annabella, when Sir Ralph showed it to her, the greatest indulgence in her own powers of brevity. ‘They have,’ was all her reply. Silence follow
ed, for an awful week. She presumed that her father had confiscated, if her husband had made one (and that was, with her, really the question that counted), Lord Byron’s more personal response. She wondered what he might say. She wondered if he might care. They had kept each other, after all, in the dark for so long.
Illumination, when it came, was prodigious; it almost brought her back. Mrs Clermont had gone to London to prepare the ground, as Lady Milbanke put it, for Annabella’s visit: she had been sent to make arrangements with Dr Lushington. In her place, a girl from the village had been briefly employed to take care of the child, and it was she who brought to its mother, one dry snow-bright morning, the letter from Mrs Leigh. Her parents were closeted in Sir Ralph’s study. She could see, through the opened door, her father seated in his easy chair; Lady Milbanke stood with her hands clasped behind her. The girl from the village (her name, Annabella had particularly inquired, was Clare; Lord Byron had such an easy rough intimate manner with servants, and she had struggled, in his absence, to reproduce it) presented the letter to her on a gilt tray. It had her name on it, in her sister’s hand. Annabella had begun to say that . . . that it was the custom of the house to offer to Lady Milbanke the first gleanings of the post, but her embarrassment at such a poor explanation made her stop short. She could hear the voice of her mother (rich and full, as she always imagined it, of the blood in her throat), but not what she plentifully said; and the thought, suddenly, of a chance to be snatched at nearly robbed her of breath. ‘Thank you, my dear,’ was all she answered, nodding and taking the letter in hand. She was sitting in the front room, sidelong to one of the windows that overlooked the broad drive, which was patterned muddily by the curves of carriage-wheels. As if she needed only a little more light, she rose to one of the benches and sat, facing out, with her back to the open door of her father’s study.
Augusta had managed to enclose a note from Lord Byron; this was, in the rushed consciousness of wrongdoing, what his wife turned to first.
All I can say seems useless, and all I could say might be no less unavailing, yet I still cling to the wreck of my hopes before they sink for ever. Were you then never happy with me? Did you never at any time or times express yourself so? Have no marks of affection, of the warmest and most reciprocal attachment, passed between us? Or did in fact scarcely a day go down without some such on one side and generally on both?
Do not mistake me.
I have not denied my state of mind, but you know its causes. Were these deviations from calmness never followed by acknowledgement and repentance? Were not your letters kind? Had I not admitted to you all my faults and follies and assured you that some had not and would not be repeated? I do not require these questions to be answered to me, but to your own heart. The day before I received your father’s letter, bidding me for a separation, I had fixed a day for rejoining you. Recollect, that all is at stake—the present—the future and even the colouring of the past. The whole of my errors, or what harsher name you choose to give them, you know; but I loved you and will not part from you without your own most express and expressed refusal to return to or receive me. Only say the word, that you are still mine at heart—and ‘I will buckler thee against a million.’
His hand, it was true, was ever careless; and in spite of the brightness of the morning, which glanced off the snow-bound yard and onto the page, she sat and picked over, with an almost passionate attention, each overwrought expression. There was guilt in the pleasure, which gave it a childish urgency. She had him, Annabella almost felt, to herself just once more, and the mere fact of the letter in her hand and the presence of her parents in the next room involved her lucidly in the pick of loyalties. No one knew better, of course, than the Byrons the little claims made by a secret kept; and she felt, indeed, that while she held so tightly to theirs, she could not be said entirely to have given him up. That was the hope, that was the fear, that thrilled within her.
She had once remarked of him, and the visit of the Gosfords had brought back the memory, that his was an eloquence which might be said to ‘create truth, even where none existed before’. And though there was little enough that she recognized in his portrait of their marriage, she could not help but admire and weep at the picture he tenderly held up, like a hand-mirror, for her closer inspection. Ah (this was the sigh that escaped her), so that was her face! There was nothing, she realized, that she could offer against it that would breathe with such rich life; she almost lost the will to argue the matter with him. If this was to be a contest of persuasion, she had been made forcibly to feel, there could be only one winner. Although, and this struck her too, she had never in her life had so clear a chance of standing up, as it were, for a different virtue: her own.
She sat on her bench, quietly counting over the wheel-ruts in the drive, for perhaps ten minutes. At the end of that time she rose—she was hardly aware of the moment of decision—and, bearing the letter openly in her hand, made her slow way to her father’s study.
Chapter Five
WHEN SHE EMERGED AT LAST from the cold days that followed, the vital change had been made. Annabella just managed a joke about having lately acquired, in addition to hunger and thirst, a third appetite, for legal matters. One might have supposed, from the quantities consumed, that no human appetite could have been better satisfied than her hunger for the law; and yet, as week followed week, and her opportunities for gratifying it only multiplied, she began to suspect that just what would always elude her was satiety. She had the sense, as she had once expressed it to herself, of starving for something, and was equal to the acknowledgement, in the midst of what was really her mother’s legal pursuit of the explicit, that that something was something else.
Dr Lushington, with his long, small-featured face and conspiratorial hands, had brought home to her, as nothing else might have, just how far she had already committed herself. It was, on his part, the final means of persuading her into a still greater commitment, which she duly made. The silence with which he took it in gave her the clearest vision of just how tremendous her own silence had been. What followed could only involve a kind of diminishment: her secret reverberated, after a fashion, into various noises. Her mother, predictably, began to rattle the loudest. Well, she had given it up, her last bit of cake, as she had once whimsically put it. She had made, and she felt this intensely at the time, the final break, but just what was broken in her, she discovered with a kind of relief, wasn’t everything; she had feared that it might be. It was a great deal, of course, and she was almost gratified by the scope of it, which encompassed, among other things, her passion for legal subtleties. She was willing, happily, helplessly, to let them take their course; and she crawled, as it were, battered and drenched but still breathing, from the side of that stream.
She had been staying, for the sake of her visit to Dr Lushington, at Gosford House, and was resolved afterwards not to return to her mother. London, after the quiet of Kirkby Mallory, offered her certain consolations. If her intent was really to address herself to a new life—to treat, that is, the year of her marriage as no more than an interlude—she was determined not to shy from a city that might be supposed to hold for her such unhappy recollections. One of the first visits she paid, consequently, was to Lady Caroline; and she could almost smile, as she made her way on a bright uncertain April morning past the stalls of Piccadilly to the quiet cove of Melbourne House, at the memory of an earlier appointment. It was just three years since her awkward interview with Lady Melbourne on the subject of which qualities she believed herself to require in a husband. Her current preoccupation, of course, was rather different, but there was something in the passage, as she imagined it, from expectation to disappointment for which she was not ungrateful. She was a woman, as Lord Byron himself had made painfully clear to her, who depended upon and delighted in her own superiority, but she might be allowed a little credit for the fact that she was also willing to enjoy the contrast with a former and more
innocent self.
It was another contrast, however, that morning, from which she drew, as she hoped, the necessary lesson. Lady Caroline received her, as she had before, in the little study that overlooked behind her the gravelled walk. A fire burned in the grate, shading from yellow to grey in the squalls of light, of darkness, that blew in from the changeable cold sunshine. Her cousin wore, once more, as little as she decently might, and the frail pearl-coloured chiffon dress hung off her narrow shoulders in such a way that Annabella was almost tempted to try it on. Caroline herself, it whimsically struck her, was only the rack on which it hung. Her thinness now was nothing but the clearest manifestation of unhappiness. Like her bones, it showed through—which made Annabella grateful, as she thus humorously remarked on it, for the fat of concealment. She had never, at least, lost her appetite.
If she had come ‘to see for herself’, as she inwardly put it, what a life lived in the shade, in the aftermath, of Lord Byron’s love might look like, Lady Caroline offered her a most beautiful picture. Her long face had stretched into a narrowness that allowed her, it seemed, but a single muscular expression; Annabella remembered how quick and various the play of her countenance had been. It was almost the task of her visit to read into that face its abiding message. The impression she quietly took in was of a frantic force rendered desperately still: a moth, huddling beneath its wings in the death of a flame. This was the image that struck her, and to which, in time, she had her own reason for recurring. Caroline, however, proved perfectly capable of the odd nervous flap—Annabella confessed herself occasionally startled by them.
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