‘To say what?’ she broke out at last, after an age in which she grew conscious of just how painfully she had been holding her own.
‘Why, that’s just it,’ he answered, ‘I couldn’t be sure. He talked of Ada and wished me to send his blessing, and Mrs Leigh and her children. And he said, “You will go to Lady Byron, and say—tell her everything—you who are friends with her.”’ The personal application gave him a pause, and he continued, as if to excuse himself: ‘Which is why I have come. I have done my duty.’
‘But what did he say?’ She was on her feet now, beseeching. ‘What did he tell you to tell me?’ It was as if, she suddenly felt, a veil had been wrenched, which had decently covered his death. He was there again, vividly before her, as he had not been in years; she had all but talked him away. But he had talked himself back again, as he always could: he had practically opened his mouth.
It was Fletcher who kept his own shut. ‘What did he say?’ she repeated. She was beginning to pace and sob, but the drop in her dignity had only the effect of making him stand upon his. He offered, in fact, a face as blank as a wall; she had almost the sense that she was throwing herself against it. The violence of her feelings suggested to her stretched memory nothing so sharply as the noise of soda bottles breaking underfoot. That, at least, was the appeal he had made to her; that, it almost seemed to her now, was just what her cries amounted to. ‘What did he tell you to tell me? what did he say?’ Her sobbing, at least, robbed her of breath, and breathlessness hushed her. In the pause, he offered at last: ‘He was very far gone, very quiet and wild. Though not too far to practise his usual humour.’ He was weeping himself, flat-faced and blinking. ‘Fletcher, he said, if you do not execute every order I have given you, I will torment you hereafter if I can. That was his way, you know: he was always tormenting me. He thought me humourless, because I took him at his word. I suppose he is tormenting me now. You will go to Lady Byron, he said—and I guess you’ll allow that I’ve gone. But I did not hear him. About six o’clock, he got up to relieve himself. They had bled him another pound and given him Epsom salts. When he came back to bed, he said, I want to sleep now; and that was the last I heard.’
After Fletcher had gone, Annabella waited for Mary to come to her. She hadn’t the strength for rising herself. The day grew only brighter and fell through the window in thick squares. She was careful to sit with her face turned away from the door and out of the light: she wanted her friend to come all the way to her, to draw out of her slowly just how much she had suffered for his news. It was an expression she found difficult to keep up in its first freshness, though it occurred to her, as the muscles of her misery tired and the bloom rubbed off it, that nothing could suggest more plainly the state of her feelings than a worn-out grief. What had he meant to tell her? This was the thought that recurred with the low irresistible insistence of a cricket’s song. Fletcher’s account had almost brought him to life again. He had stepped out from behind his own tombstone to address her, with his intimate grace and soft insinuating voice. She breathed with the vision; she all but spoke for him. Do you think there is one person here who dares to look into himself? It was the first thing he had said to her, at a dance in Hanover Square. And now, with an air almost of obedience, she looked.
She considered for the first time the fact that a period had been made in her own life; she could easily spend the rest of it gazing backwards. What she saw frightened her. Her marriage had been, she supposed, too unhappy a monument for even the staunchest mourner to kneel for a lifetime comfortably at the foot of it. Yet she was willing to admit (her gaze was remarkably clear) that nothing she could ever raise up without him would be quite so grand as that monument of grief. She had never had within her (he had forced her to feel it) the capacity to live up, publicly, to her own private sense of significance. She had all but conceded that fact to him; she had conceded so much. And the greatest of her concessions had been to make do without him again. The thought struck her as hard, practically, as a blow, that she needn’t do without him any longer. There were others, perhaps, with a better right to his memory, but none of them had so strong a legal claim. She was his widow, after all; and he had bequeathed her the thing most precious to a poet, his name. It was up to her to honour it. She could make of his life the material for a tower of mourning.
Afterwards, she had no sense of how long she had sat there, waiting. The first thing she became sensible of was an appetite. The squares of light seemed to stretch with the sun to suppertime, but it was only her dinner that Mary came in, at last, to apprise her of—at which she turned on her friend the sweetest of suffering smiles.
The curiosity of visitors, as it happens, proved to be a new and not unwelcome addition to life on Wilmot Street. Friends were always stopping by with a piece of news or a rumour of Lord Byron’s last days. Sometimes they came only to relieve a little of what Mary had called ‘the tedium of staying mournful’. It was Mary who felt it most, and Annabella sensed in the joke, as she was no doubt intended to, the softest of reproaches: she had slipped, after all, so easily into her widow’s weeds. But Lady Byron was almost beyond reproach now. She had taken a line, and it kept her from looking too much to either side.
She needed all of her strength of purpose when her husband’s old friend, Tom Moore, stopped by to make his appeal. Mr Moore was a small bright officious ingratiating gentleman, who had been accustomed, as a matter almost of duty, to flirting with her in the days of her marriage. Whatever was lovely in her, she knew, had been stamped out since those days by something that looked in her face like the absence of doubt. Still, she was surprised to find just how little his manner suggested the attention it had once pleased him to show her. He had an air of great business, and the sympathy he attempted to awake drew on what he supposed to be their confederate grief. She resisted instinctively what seemed to her his claim to an equal right.
Lord Byron, he said, had left to him a memoir of his life, which had been written a few years before his death and described, among other subjects, it was useless to deny it, the period of their marriage. There had been since his death a movement afoot to destroy it: Hobhouse, Murray, Kinnaird were all against him. Mrs Leigh herself was wavering; she was too persuadable. Of course, he did have at stake a financial interest in its publication. He was also willing to admit that any posthumous association with so famous a poet might lend to a humble scribbler, such as himself, a few rays of Lord Byron’s reflected glory. But he had never been taught—and Lady Byron, he guessed, would comprehend his plight—to shirk a sacred duty simply because it might tend to his advantage. And there could be no duty more sacred than the one he had been charged with. To preserve, for the sake of posterity as well as his dear dead friend’s, what might properly be thought of, in a writer, as his real life’s blood: the hard-wrung ink of his pen. He had read the memoir and was willing to attest, that it was frank, it was forceful, and that it was utterly in keeping with the genius of the man whom they had both, he supposed, once loved. It need scarcely be said, that Lord Byron had turned upon his own erring spirit as strong a light as any he had cast on the world. A word from his widow to sanction the publication would be almost unanswerable. It would be seen, moreover, as the largest, most generous gesture of selflessness from a woman who had always been held up as the standard of that difficult virtue.
If Fletcher’s testimony had suggested to her the poet’s opened mouth, she could not have imagined, at the time, that quite such volumes would threaten to pour out of it. She answered, to make a pause for thought, that she had learned to depend since their marriage on a different set of virtues than those she had been used to upholding. The old ones hadn’t served her so very well. He smiled at that, without opening his lips: an expression that brought out nothing so clearly as the strain of his impatience. There was a great deal to be done, he seemed to feel, and the worst of his duties was the necessity of keeping up, for the sake of their execution, the custom
ary exchange of sentiments. Well, she was perfectly willing to do without sentiments, too. The thought of her husband’s memoir had haunted her, like a household ghost, for several years; it was almost a relief in the end to come upon it, as she had, in broad daylight. She had only to prove capable of staring it down. It struck her, suddenly, as the last of his ghosts that she would have to face.
He could not, she said at last, if he had read her husband’s memoir—if it was anything like as frank and forceful as he described it—have remained in any doubt as to the true grounds for their separation, which had been the source at the time of so much painful gossip. There was no one, she believed, who stood to benefit so much from their disclosure as she did. This was exactly the reason that she could not, in all conscience, be seen publicly to support a publication. Mrs Leigh had remained a great friend of hers. Her brother’s memoirs could only serve to damage irreparably her already precarious position in society. To give them the sanction of her blessing would be seen, in many circles, as little better than casting the first stone. He must appreciate the delicacy of her position; she was fenced in on all sides by scruples. The last thing she wished was to appear to preside over her husband’s memory. Nothing was dearer to her than that memory, but she supposed it inevitable that a public by no means accustomed to taking her side would consider her least intervention as a proof of the worst.
Tom Moore blinked at her, like a man staring against the wind. The case was simple enough, he supposed; he could not entirely see his way into her sense of the complications. Lord Byron was the greatest poet of his age; he had written an account of his life; he had died. It was their duty to see that the memoir was published. Posterity would never forgive them if they failed to, and there were readers enough, he imagined, in the present day, with a sufficient interest in the honour of their country’s literature, to condemn any attempt to suppress the posthumous glory of its brightest star. There was no one who stood to receive a greater share of that condemnation than the poet’s widow. She had mentioned a concern for appearances. It struck him that she must, above all, from purely selfish motives (he had hoped, in her case, never to appeal to them) be seen to act on behalf of publication.
He must forgive her, Lady Byron replied, if she insisted on her own sense of the difficulties of her position, but she was willing to do this much for him. She would have a word with Mrs Leigh, who, having the most to suffer, had likewise the greatest occasion for what he called a gesture of selflessness. If Augusta was persuadable, Lady Byron promised to persuade her; she could offer no more.
Tom Moore bowed. There was a stiff dignity in his little formalities. He was exactly, as Annabella remarked to Mary afterwards, like a toy gentleman: one wanted to wind him up. Well, Lady Byron had managed to wind him. He had said to her, as he took his leave, that Lord Byron, shortly before his marriage, had dined with him one night in Piccadilly. The poet was suffering both from a violent hangover and the usual hesitations; and to cheer him up, he had joked that Miss Milbanke was sure to make a respectable gentleman out of him at last. To which Lord Byron replied, that he had understood the process to be exceedingly painful. He only hoped it wouldn’t kill him in the end. Well, he was dead now, but the process, as he called it, was far from complete. Mr Moore supposed that it had gone far enough.
The next day, true to her word, Annabella sent a note to Mrs Leigh, who was staying in town at St. James’s. That afternoon she called on her at Wilmot Street. The low grey summer’s day was far from cool and brought out, in Augusta, an awkward sweat. She had always been a creature of appetites; it was terrible, in the end, to see which of them she had given in to. She was red as a beet on arrival, if only from mounting the stairs, and the small pale hairs of her skin stood out angrily, it seemed, against the blood of her face. Lady Byron congratulated herself on having preserved, if not the softness, then the shape of her girlish figure. Augusta had grown, as she expressed it herself, as fat as a hen.
This put her in mind, curiously enough, of little Ada; and Mrs Leigh inquired, how Lord Byron’s daughter had received the news of her father’s death. They had been staying, Annabella said, at Beckenham with friends of her mother’s. Somebody had asked her (it must have been one of the servants) if she had wept at all since her father had died—at which the poor dear child, who was hardly eight, had wept indeed and cried out that no one had told her he was dead. She was meant to be staying with him next week at her home in Kirkby. It came out, of course, that she meant Sir Ralph. Annabella explained to her that Sir Ralph was her own father, which made him Ada’s grandfather. Did she have a father, too? she asked. Yes, Annabella said. His name is Lord Byron. And is he dead? Ada asked. Yes, she answered; he died of a fever in Greece. At which the girl stopped to consider. ‘Why have you a father,’ she said at last, ‘when I have none? Have you given me yours?’ It seemed the least I could do, after all this time, was to tell her, yes.
Lady Byron concluded this little story with a look that seemed to her unequivocally sweet, but Mrs Leigh received it blankly. She had had by contrast, she said, to console those among her own children who had known their uncle. It was quite a point of contention between them, who had loved him best and suffered now the most for news of his death. This was the first sign she had given in several years of an act of resistance, which is what it amounted to; Annabella, in her sister’s tone, could all but feel a kind of resentful bristle. You might have supposed, Augusta continued, that they had forgotten him, and perhaps they had. But they had watched their mother weep and liked to claim a share of anything she felt herself. It was almost the worst of motherhood to feel your despair reflected and multiplied in the eyes of your children. It had quite, she said, put her on her guard against too violent an expression of grief; she was thankful, indeed, to let it down now.
Lady Byron, in these remarks, felt the challenge implicit to her own claims and rose to meet it. ‘Whoever has once in life,’ she said, ‘seen a desert spread before him will recognize the feeling in another mind. It may be lived through, but how much of faith is required to believe this! and we seldom take the right way. Ever since his death, I have had the sensation of passing through the dark alone. What a comfort it is (only you can guess how great) to communicate these feelings to another soul condemned to share them.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Augusta said. She was determined, it seemed, to stop short at her sister’s subtleties; and her next remark, when it came, was painfully clear. ‘I thought you hated him.’
Annabella all but stared. She had seldom felt so vividly the obligation of speaking plainly, but there was nothing, she believed, that could do less justice to her case than the simplest account of it. She paused, as it were, to rummage around and was rewarded at last by the discovery, it seemed little less, of a sentiment that might really answer all of the demands that had been placed upon it. It was practically a relief to utter it—it tasted so richly of the truth. The low grey clouds had given way to the softest of rains, which fell, wetly and silently, against Mary’s windows. She waited a moment, and when the shower had passed, she said: ‘I feel I have been reaching towards him all my life, without the warmth of his affection, the cold hand of love.’
Augusta, for once, was equal to her lucidity, which had had its effect. Her bristles were all, it seemed to Annabella, smoothed down. Her plump red face looked grey in the shadow of the rain and her eyes rather bulged; they brimmed for the first time with tears. ‘I fear,’ she said (her tone was beautiful), ‘you may have rested it too long on me.’
There was a sense, Annabella had it wonderfully, of something lived up to, and they both for a moment shared the comfort of a perfect equilibrium. But as the mood, inevitably, began to slip, she determined not to fall with it and struggled to reclaim the higher ground. ‘Tom Moore has approached me,’ she said. ‘I have little doubt that he has already made his appeal to you. His motives are plain enough. There is no one who stands to gain more from pu
blication than himself, and in the crudest terms: Lord Byron has bequeathed to him the value of the copyright. Unless you consider, after all these years, the degree to which the baldest statement of the facts (I suppose your brother has made it) would contribute to my own justification. Nothing, however, would pain me more than to see you suffer on my own behalf. We have both suffered, I believe, long enough on his. Of course, what might be called the peculiar state of our relations at the time of my husband’s death prevents me from involving myself in the question of his posterity. I can myself give no appearance of approval to any kind of suppression. On the part of a wife, it would suggest to an unfeeling heart (and who can have felt what we have?) only the bitterness of revenge.’ She paused on that note to consider just how explicit she needed to make herself; it struck her at last that she had still stopped short. ‘I can trust, I believe, to your own self-interest to see that the memoirs are burned?’
‘Well,’ Augusta said, ‘he is dead now. I don’t care what becomes of me, or the rest of us.’
A few days later, Lady Byron received her assurances—though at some cost to her reputation, as her husband had once expressed it, for being ‘Truth itself’. Augusta had not been present at what she referred to as ‘the ceremony’, though Mr Moore had called on her both before and after the fateful event. He had begged her in the morning to lend her voice to his cause. It was not too late; it would be like watching him die again to see his memoir destroyed by those with only the narrowest concern for his reputation. They were acting, he said, out of the very prejudice that had driven Lord Byron into exile, and which he had spent the best part of his literary life in resisting. Had Lady Byron done nothing to persuade her to take their part? Lady Byron, Augusta had been forced to confess, had expressed her conviction quite the other way. At which Mr Moore, succumbing at last to the general will, remarked only, that it seemed a terrible pity that a great man’s remains must be left to the care of his envious friends. A few hours later, he had returned from Murray’s office on Albemarle Street to report that the memoir was burned. They had torn it up a few pages at a time and fed it to the fire. How they crowded round! while he kept up, to the last scribbled leaf, a steady stream of protest. ‘Well,’ he had said to her, stopping just long enough for a cup of tea, and liking his own wit, ‘the moth has quenched the flame.’ The phrase seemed to offer him a little comfort, for he continued to repeat it, she said, until he took his leave, without the least attempt at explanation.
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