A letter was drafted, made up of their composite intentions. It showed in consequence, as Miss Montgomery put it (she contributed, in general, nothing so much as her hesitations), ‘the awkwardness of walking on so many legs’. The line recalled to Annabella —she was at the time very sensitive to reminiscence—one of Lady Melbourne’s sharper insights, uttered in the heat of a very different discussion, though it had also concerned the question of marriage and Lord Byron. Her niece, she had warned, had a tendency to rise up on stilts. Annabella was forced to concede to their hostess, who had got to her feet for once and stood staring out a window onto Wilmot Street, that they had been guilty of a certain stiffness in the style of their approach, which was inevitable, given the delicacy of the subject to be broached. But what she more privately reflected, as she moved to her friend’s side, was only that, far from having the sense as she put pen to paper of ‘rising up’, she had never so painfully felt the constriction of crawling on all fours. ‘Augusta had done nothing,’ she said at last, to quiet the scruples of her friend, ‘to wound her more hurtful in the long run than compelling her to adopt, in all their relations, so contorted a sense of being in the right, that it was almost impossible to keep it up for very long.’ This little attempt at persuasion had perhaps a greater effect than she intended. Miss Montgomery was finally moved, not only to concede the point and to agree to the sending of the letter, but even to a brief faint show of tears, which she turned on her friend with an earnestness that suggested the force of self-reproach.
This was the letter Lady Byron sent her sister:
Before your confinement I would not risk agitating you. But having the satisfaction of knowing you are recovered, I will no longer conceal from yourself that there are reasons, founded on such circumstances in your conduct as I am most anxious to bury in silence, which indispensably impose on me the duty of limiting my intercourse with you. I should more deeply lament this restriction to a relation that has at times been the spring, not only of comfort, when I needed it most, but of pleasure, when the necessity of comfort, for once, had ceased to be the first of our considerations, if your feelings towards me could give me the power of doing you any good. But you have not disguised your resentment against those who have befriended me and have countenanced the arts that have been employed to injure me. Can I then longer believe those professions of affection and even of exclusive zeal for my welfare, which I have been most reluctant to mistrust? And on this ground my conduct, if known, would be amply and obviously justified to the world. I shall still not regret having loved and trusted you so entirely . . .
That last phrase was wonderfully the invention of Mrs Villiers, who believed that there was nothing Augusta’s quick feelings responded to more vividly than the reproaches of love. She was a being formed, as she said, to shape itself to the affections of others, as a vine might be said to shape itself to the side of a wall; she was clever only in her ability to grasp, as it were, at the cracks one offered for a person to cling to. It was necessary, in consequence—and Mary, to do their new friend justice, could hardly refrain from a burst of applause—for Annabella to offer just such a crack for Mrs Leigh to reach for. To approach her, then, with a surface scored by the failures of love would act on Mrs Leigh as the clearest of invitations to stretch forth in the full cleaving tenderness of her affections.
They posted the letter after one of their Tuesday sessions and met again the next day to consider the reply, but no reply came. They had, in fact, an anxious quiet week of it, which only brought out the tensions in the ties that bound them. Really, the blustering vanities of Mrs Villiers almost made the two old friends doubt the sanctity of their mission. But on the following Monday, Annabella received her excuse to summon them to another council at Wilmot Street. Augusta, cornered, had revealed to everyone’s surprise, perhaps, but Lady Byron’s, the sharpness of her dignity. As a summer rain beat against the glass and conveyed what seemed to them the almost pleasant pressure of a world they were only just keeping at bay, it was Mary who read out, with a relish that suggested a renewed faith in the free harmless play of her ironies, the response of Mrs Leigh:
As I always mistrust the first impulses of my feelings and did not wish to write under the influence of such as your letter could not fail to produce, I would not answer it by return of post. I cannot say that I am wholly surprised at its contents. Your silence towards me during so long an interval, and when all obvious necessity for it must have ceased, formed so decided a contrast to your former kindness to me—and to what my conscience tells me my conduct towards you deserved from you—that it could not but require some explanation.
To general accusations I must answer in general terms. No sister ever could have the claims upon me that you had. I felt it and acted up to the feeling to the best of my judgement. We are all perhaps too much inclined to magnify our trials, yet I think I may venture to pronounce my situation to have been and to be still one of extraordinary difficulty. I have been assured that the tide of public opinion has been so turned against my brother that the least appearance of coolness on your part towards me would injure me most seriously. I am therefore for the sake of my children compelled to accept from your compassion the ‘limited intercourse’ that is all you can grant to one whom you pronounce no longer worthy of your esteem or affection!
‘Come.’ It was Mary who broke the silence her own recitation had produced. ‘It is almost as a good as a confession. It is, in fact, the clearest she could reasonably make. She says what we all know to be true in such a way that makes the plainest appeal to our decent sense of what she cannot say. I had not expected so much from her. This is discretion brought to such a pitch of subtlety it is practically a virtue in itself. It is almost noble; it is certainly humorous.’
Mrs Villiers, however, was not so easily persuaded. ‘My dear,’ she began, ‘it is easy for one who has not been practised upon as I have to believe her innocent affronted airs. But it is not a confession; I hope you will allow to me the privilege of frankly disagreeing. It is just the sort of thing she has always made. It is nothing. It is all hints and vagaries, which you trust in because you suppose her capable of dealing more plainly with her own private conscience.’ Mrs Villiers, in the heat of her eloquence, had risen to take the letter from Mary’s hands. She stood for a moment considering it in the light of a candle that burned on the mantelpiece. The windows were quite fogged up in the wet, and the room was as dark as dusk. ‘The fact is, such hints and vagaries make up the only language she knows—it is entirely the style of her private thought. I for one should like to understand what she means by acting up to her sisterly feeling etc. to the best of her judgement etc. She should never have consented to come to Piccadilly. I remember the whole affair. She asked my advice at the time, in the coyest of terms, and wanted to know whether a sister could decently intrude upon a brother’s marriage to soften for his wife the effect of his ill temper. But who was the cause of his ill temper? who continued to excite it? I don’t wonder he didn’t go mad; she did her best to drive him to it. I can’t entirely deny her good intentions. She has the sickness of the Byrons: she is the fool of her own affections and never supposes for a minute that she does any harm by acting on her instinct, which is quite unnaturally developed, to be loved. She led me to believe at the time, it was only at Lady Byron’s urgent request that she came to live with them in Piccadilly. Lady Byron has told me it was not; and I have been made, unwittingly, an accessory to her doing the very things she ought most to have avoided. What a pretty piece of indignation this is! A situation of extraordinary difficulty! Who put herself in the middle of it? The truth is, she cannot leave her brother alone. She hasn’t the least sense of the extent of her crimes, and until she does, she is lost to us—she is lost to all decent society.’
‘I don’t suppose,’ Mary countered, ‘that I have either—I mean, a sense of her crimes. It isn’t a thing one is used to measuring up. I shouldn’t myself like to mea
sure it. She has written just what a decent and sensible person would write in what she calls her situation. I don’t think we can ignore our own part in pushing her into it. As for decent society, we all know that keeping her out of it is the one threat we have at our disposal. I should be sorry to make use of it.’
‘It is,’ Annabella was conscious of being, in her way, at the centre of their disagreement and strove quite beautifully to make herself agreeable to both the parties to it, ‘perhaps the best letter she could have written. She shows herself sensible. She shows herself dutiful. She plays up, even, to what might be called—and I am perfectly willing to call it that—our appetite for the intricacy of her position. I am glad, too, of the little answering stiffness in her tone. She has seldom felt so sure of her ground.’ Mary gave her a look of relief, which hardened into something else as Annabella continued. ‘Her reply has such a fine clarity, it is almost brittle. We may be confident, at least, that it will be easily broken. Women like Augusta (there is no one here, I believe, who loves her or knows her better) are never lucid two days together. She has been extremely lucid, but her good sense has never been so durable as ours. It will give way beneath it. We have only to keep up the pressure.’
‘Until she breaks, you mean,’ Mary said.
‘Until we are sure of her—of her soul.’ And then, for she owed her friend that much, she added: ‘I understand very well your aversion to measuring up, as you say, the extent of her crimes. You may believe me when I tell you that I share it, though I have not had, as you have, the luxury of closing my eyes. You suppose whatever it is to be unspeakable, but that does not in the least make it untrue. You wish to treat it as a thing quite apart, so that it may be left alone; but it runs through—through everything. He is her great love, I can put it no plainer than that. She is his. He is mine. There you have what might be called, in mathematical terms, the inequality, which I was forced in the end to admit my despair of solving. I have admitted it. I have relinquished my claims to him, but forgive me if I stop short, at last, of leaving to them the remainder. I suppose you will suspect me of something worse when I tell you, I love her too well for that.’
Mary, at such an appeal, contented herself with remarking: ‘I do not suspect you.’
Lady Byron had promised to ‘work on’ Augusta, but it was Mrs Villiers in the weeks to come who assumed the real burden of their task. Even Mary could not help but admit what a talent she had for elucidating the possibilities of that strange little verb. There were times, however, after their friend had gone home again, when Annabella would turn to Mary and confess that there was something in Mrs Villiers’ efficiency that she could not quite reconcile herself to making use of. Just what Thérèse (they were all, by the end of the summer, close if not cosy enough for such familiarity) hoped for herself to achieve by such ‘good offices’ was a question the two old friends were perfectly equal to discussing between themselves. ‘Mrs Villiers’ Revenge’ is the name Mary gave their curious project—it had no clearer title.
Thérèse, who had a position at court, was perfectly placed to keep up such pressure as the three of them chose to bear, at least while Mrs Leigh was stationed in London, in attendance on the elderly Queen Charlotte. Annabella, once, confessed herself almost jealous of Mrs Villiers for her easy proximity to the poor Goose. It was a part of their project for her to deny to Mrs Leigh the sanction of her company, but she sometimes regretted, she said to Mary, ‘just what the limit of our limited intercourse has entailed upon me.’ To give up, she went on (it was a line whose repetition offered her a kind of comfort), both of the Byrons at once was something she hadn’t the heart or the stomach for; and the only thing that might have persuaded her to desist from Mrs Villiers’ Revenge was the consideration that it could cost her, in the end, the friendship of Mrs Leigh. ‘She has been kind to you sometimes, has she not?’ was Mary’s quiet reply. ‘There were times, my dear,’ Annabella said, with the dignity of her candour, ‘in which she saved my life.’ But before Miss Montgomery could interpose a word, she had continued: ‘It seems the least I can do in return is to bother myself a little about her soul.’
It was Mrs Villiers, however, who took on much of the bother, and she had in recompense the pleasure of making, one day in September, to their little salon in Wilmot Street a first report of her progress. The leaves were turning, and several lay matted on the windowsill. Lady Byron, who expected the conversation to demand of her a certain variety of expression, took up a position at the card-table, staring out, to avoid the necessity of living up to it. Thérèse was determined to give a full account and began with the beginning: with what she called, with heavy emphasis, her first subsequent meeting with Mrs Leigh. Augusta had been summoned from Six Mile Bottom to London for the Regent’s fete. ‘It was, you may remember, in the very heat of July. She wrote to me to prepare a dress for her. When we first met—for the first time, I mean, since I had become intimate with her crimes; it was an interview I dreaded beyond measure—our whole conversation turned on gauzes and satins. But I was foolishly dissatisfied. I thought her looking quite stout and well, which by the bye she still does, and perfectly cool and easy. This rather provoked me, but I checked my tongue. You would, Miss Montgomery, have admired my forbearance—I know quite well that’s the side of the question you come down on. A thing may stand firm, I reasoned, to a sudden assault, which gives way easily to a steady quiet underhand sort of pushing. That was the sort of pushing I resolved upon, and it has had, as I can now tell you, its effect.’
She paused and refreshed herself for a minute with a cup of tea. Lady Byron wondered again just what could have driven an old friend of Augusta’s to so sudden and enthusiastic a conversion to their cause. She was struck, then, for the first time—and the comparison was so unflattering that she gave herself a little credit for admitting to it—by the resemblance between their friendships with Mrs Leigh, who was not only prettier than either of them, but softer and more generally formed for the conveniences of love. A sort of resentment would grow over time in the hearts of her companions at repeated proofs of such a contrast. Lady Byron began, in the really admirable indifference of her self-reflection, to consider whether a virtuous act could ever derive its motive from such resentment.
Mrs Villiers, meanwhile, had continued with her narration. ‘Well, you asked me to work on her, and I may say in all humility that I have worked. I have begun, at least, to be rewarded by the first results. Yesterday she dined at my house, and I declare that in all my life I never saw anything equal to her dejection, her absence. Her whole mind was evidently preoccupied and engrossed; she was apparently insensible of being in society. Mr V, who exerted himself much better than I expected to show her as much kindness as before (I have had, you may imagine, to let him in on our little secret), tells me that while I was called out of the room he could not extract an answer, even a monosyllable from her, except when he joked about the predicted destruction of the world today. You know, it has been in all the papers. He said, apropos to some arrangement our boys wanted to make: “We need not give ourselves any trouble about it, for the world will be at an end tomorrow and that will put an end to all our cares.” At which she quite exclaimed before the children, the servants, etc. “I don’t know what you may all be, but I’m sure I’m not prepared for the next world, so I hope this will last.” That looks well for her mind. If the feeling can be steadily kept up, I have every expectation it will yield us whatever we want in time—but do not think me brutal or even unkind if I tell you the work is not done yet.’
Exactly what Mrs Villiers’ method of ‘working’ Augusta had been, the two old friends devoted several afternoons by Mary’s fire to speculating. Thérèse herself, when asked, only smiled and adjusted her wig, and mentioned the effect one might hope to achieve by creating a tone. They suspected it had something to do with God and Hell-fire, with what Annabella called ‘all that Pye-House sort of talking’. That was the notion, at least, that
inspired in Mary of all people a glimmer of the way forward. The closest to confession that Augusta had come was only to say that Lord Byron had invited her to join him for the winter on the continent. She had decided, she told Mrs Villiers, to decline him for reasons that—and this was the code she yet clung to in all such discussions—concerned what might be called, among some of their friends, the betrayal of Lady Byron that such a visit would suggest. By this time it was perfectly understood between them just what was meant by such a betrayal, but Mrs Villiers could not bring Mrs Leigh to attempt a cruder avowal. (It would strike them, they each supposed, when it came, as almost immodest.) She may have created a tone, but that was also the tone that Augusta kept to.
She did, on the other hand, show Mrs Villiers one of Lord Byron’s letters. The poor woman could hardly, in relating the tenor of it to her two friends, keep out of her voice the short fierce breath of delight. She held up her first real piece of evidence as brightly as a flag and shook it out for everyone to see. ‘It was practically a love-letter,’ she all but sighed. By this point, the distaste aroused by her enthusiasms had become for Mary and Annabella the subject of frequent confidential exchanges. Thérèse, however, was by no means as stupid or insensitive as she appeared. She possessed the kind of cunning that sees nothing so sharply as intended slights. Lady Byron began to suspect that the term Mrs Villiers’ Revenge should by no means be limited to the persecution of Augusta. It was a task that afforded Thérèse, along the way, the chance to strike out in a number of little directions.
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