by Julia Gray
I, Ada, am stronger every day.
Oh, the delight of being in my body again, able to move again, after so long! I take a couple of little shuffling dance-steps into the sea for good measure, enjoying the icy thrill of the water between my toes. A high-pitched peal of glee whistles from my throat, unbidden, as I look out across the Channel, relishing the extent of it, its possibilities, its freedoms. A young man passes me, a Dalmatian at his heels, and for a brief moment I catch his eye, before returning to my watery dance of independence.
Those days of illness were dark ones – literally dark, because I was, at times, half-blind. It started with measles, but turned into something that the doctors did not understand. I was almost completely bedridden, and only sometimes able to scribble a short, shaky letter in pencil to Cousin George or Flora Davison, or be carried downstairs to sit in the garden. Mamma wondered if I had some kind of spinal weakness – something akin to Mary Montgomery’s condition, perhaps. But nobody really knew anything at all. My illness took on a timeless quality: the hours melted like rancid butter, and I stewed in a lonely, aimless haze, punctuated only by the visits of doctors and their clockwork rotation of prescribed treatments.
Dark days indeed.
But two good things came out of those suffocating, nocturnal times. I can see that now. The first was that I was given the freedom to read as I chose. Although I wasn’t always clear-eyed enough to enjoy it, and I certainly couldn’t call it Gobblebook (I wasn’t fast enough to gobble a thing), I read widely, not limiting myself to any particular avenue. Books on astronomy proved especially valuable; perhaps, in my introverted state, I relished something that would make me think of the stars. My own body was letting me down: why not turn to celestial bodies instead? German fables, French verses, my old atlas... I picked up each book as I chose, when I wanted to, without worrying too much about what I hoped to achieve by doing so.
The second thing was also to do with reading. One evening, Mamma came and sat by my bedside. We were living now in Fordhook Manor, in the village of Ealing, just west of London. The house had belonged to a writer named Henry Fielding; Mamma had chosen it because Ealing was where she wished to set up her school. It would follow the principles set out by Dr Fellenberg, with whom she had established a fast-paced and copious correspondence. The enterprise seemed to exhaust and revive her in equal measure; I had never seen her so absorbed, so devoted to any one cause, and Mary Montgomery had told me that Mamma was making excellent progress.
But on the night that she came to see me – it was just past my fourteenth birthday – she seemed neither enlivened nor exhausted; just rather intense, and with a sense of something she very much wanted to say.
‘Ada,’ she said, ‘I think it’s about time that I gave you this.’
I confess, I was expecting the Collected Works of Pythagoras (or some other Ancient Greek purveyor of theorems), and not what she now held out in front of me: a red, leather-bound book that said only, in embossed letters of gold, BYRON.
‘I have— I’ve wanted to read his work for a long time now,’ I said.
‘I know you have. And I think, now, you are old enough.’
She left me then, which was nice of her – there are some things, like going to see the villa my father rented by Lake Geneva, that we could do together, but other things that we might each prefer to do alone. Oddly enough, I did not read the book at all that night; I slid it under my pillow for safe-keeping, and waited until I had something better than an oil-lamp to read by. Then, over the course of perhaps a week or two, I began to read my father’s poems. The experience was an extraordinary one; I had the sensation of tugging back a green-velvet curtain, once again; but this time I was unveiling entire continents of thought and feeling, not just a painted portrait... I met each poem as though I were being introduced to a succession of dinner guests, and evaluated, wondered at, and delighted in each in turn. I hadn’t expected the poems to be so funny – I’d imagined romance, of course, and tragedy, but not the kind of direct, easy-to-understand narratives that seemed to dance off the page, loud as fanfare. I laughed at some, and cried at others, and was puzzled by many. Sometimes, I would take from the silk-lined box that sat silently on my dressing table the talismanic ring that my father had given me when I was an infant, and hold it in my hand as I read until it grew hot against my skin. One poem in particular, ‘Darkness’, spoke to me in my own darkness, reaching out across the margin between life and death, between the time of his writing it and the time of my reading it, and I read it over and over, and it comforted me.
And now that I am well, and strong, and able to live my life again, I feel that I know my father far better. My puzzle has additional pieces, although many still are missing. My childish dreams of the poet beside the sea are gone, replaced by my memories of Geneva, and Genoa, and the soft lines and shapes of the portrait by Thomas Phillips, and now, too, my father’s verses. And I have learned something from his poetry that I had always known anyway, simply by instinct: Byron really did love the sea.
Voices, carried on the salt-sprayed breeze, pull me out of my reverie.
‘Just look at that young woman walking along without her shoes!’
‘My dear, don’t you know who that is?’
‘Why, of course – but I barely recognised her! Goodness, Ada Byron is grown so plump and pale!’
I look up at the promenade, guiltily startled, and see a trio of sharp-nosed, elderly women in extravagantly-trimmed silk bonnets peering down at me. Before I can stop myself, I raise a hand in a kind of military salute and give them a cheerful grin, although inside I am furious. Now it is their turn to be guiltily startled – clearly, they had not expected me to hear them, and they scurry away like the three blind mice. My triumph is blighted by gloom; I put on my stockings and walk Locket back to retrieve my boots – only slightly scuffed – and we return to the hotel.
‘Why is it that I must persistently be stared at and commented on, everywhere I go?’ I say to Mamma over lunch. She is doing justice to a plate of mutton – it looks like far too much food for one person, but this is unlikely to deter her, and I have always admired the robustness of her appetite. She lays down the letter that she is reading and gives me her full attention.
‘What has happened now, Ada?’
Omitting the detail of the drawers and boots, I tell her of the conversation I overheard, and she is pleasingly outraged on my behalf. ‘A person who has been as ill as you were might reasonably be both plump and pale, but there was no need for them to make personal remarks,’ she says. ‘Your father had a tendency to put on fat too. He would attempt the most outrageous diets – nothing but soda water and biscuits, or a plate of crushed potatoes with vinegar – but really, he couldn’t maintain any kind of regime. And besides, it would make him terribly morose.’
I look thoughtfully at my plate. Lack of food makes me morose too; is this a way in which I resemble my father?
‘As long as your dresses still fit you in a seemly fashion, Ada, I see no reason for you to mind what they say,’ says Mamma cheerfully, as I pick up my fork and knife.
‘It’s not just the personal remarks,’ I tell her, eating my breast of partridge (quite delicious it is too). ‘It’s being known at all, when I am not famous in my own right, just famous for being someone’s daughter.’
Mamma says: ‘That’s why we used to come to Hastings and not Brighton; it was quieter there, and more private. I did my best to protect you from scrutiny when you were young. People would point, and stare, and it was quite hideous.’
‘You used to say that we were proud lionesses,’ I say, remembering. ‘Queens of the Jungle, nobler beasts than they were, and not to take any notice.’
We say the last phrase together, and laugh out loud.
Mamma picks up the letter again. ‘I’ve secured a new tutor for you, Ada – a James Hopkins. He comes highly recommended and is very intellig
ent, they say. His family lives close to us in Ealing. He is engaged elsewhere until Christmas, so we may expect him thereafter.’
‘What will he teach me?’
‘Shorthand – so that you can attend lectures, you know. It will be of great use to you, I’m sure, in addition to your other subjects.’
This news is only mildly welcome. My tutors and governesses have, over the years, waxed and waned like scholarly moons. Sometimes Mamma might pay over two hundred pounds a year to some magnificently-referenced instructor, only to tire of them within weeks. (I think sadly of Miss Lamont.) During the dark days of illness, I was not tutored much at all, and certainly not with the intensity of previous years. I corresponded with three people. The first was William Frend, that kindly old man who would write to me about astronomy, advising me to sketch the moons of Jupiter, or keep a look-out for an eclipse. Then there was Dr King, Mamma’s physician, who had brought the cooperative movement to Brighton. And there was also a lady named Arabella Lawrence, an acquaintance of Mamma’s, who is very interested in education. To all three I wrote letters, when I was well enough to do so, and they would write back, suggesting things that I might want to read.
Now that I am better, Mamma’s interest in my education has, of course, properly resumed. I had hoped that she might have extended some of her newfound philosophical principles (education by action and perception and so forth) to me, her child, but alas, she reserved such pedagogic developments for the pupils at the planned academy. Nevertheless, I am glad to hear that the new tutor is male.
‘At least your letter does not bring news of a Fourth Fury,’ I say, half under my breath; at this, Mamma looks up sharply.
‘What’s that, Ada? Oh, come now; you must stop calling them that.’
‘But they are Furies.’
‘They are simply good friends of mine who seek to oversee your moral development,’ says Mamma, in a tone of great reasonableness, although what she has said is in no way reasonable. She lays her fork and knife together so that they bisect her plate neatly at its diameter. My partridge finished, I do likewise.
‘There is nothing wrong with my morals,’ I say to Mamma.
‘There is nothing wrong with exercising caution nonetheless,’ she counters in her annoyingly unflappable way. ‘Especially when you are – as you have yourself pointed out – “talked about”. No matter what you do, Ada... you must always be sure to keep straight.’
My own fork and knife are askew. Leaning over, she adjusts them, so that they are exactly parallel.
Fordhook, Ealing
August 1832
Mamma and all three Furies are taking tea in the garden, under the sycamore tree. Mamma might not think of them as Furies, but I personally cannot think of them as anything else, and truly I cannot stand them. They hang around the house like horse-flies, creeping down corridors, waiting to pounce on any perceived wrongdoing.
When the Furies first arrived at Fordhook, about three months ago, I thought they were house guests. I did not imagine myself to be under their watch; this realisation came upon me gradually. I was out in the garden, not long after their arrival, conversing with a boy who had come to attend to the yew hedges, when Fury the First – Frances Carr – happened upon us like a witch descending from a storm cloud on a broomstick and hauled me away, squawking all the while about propriety.
‘Why shouldn’t I talk to him?’ I demanded.
Rendered inarticulate by her haste, the Fury merely squawked again, dragging me along as though I were a puppy in need of training.
On another occasion, I was in the library, writing in my commonplace book. I moved away to fetch a German dictionary, wanting to translate a line of Goethe’s; I looked back towards the table to see Fury the Second – Selina Doyle – leaning over my notebook, attempting to decipher my writing. From then on, I adopted a kind of code to mitigate against such attempts: a feverish scramble of swapped letters and dog-eared Latin, as hard for me to understand as it would be – hopefully – to anyone else.
And then there was the incident with the Spanish Count, who so kindly gave me lessons on the guitar during our stay in Brighton. Alfonso Galiano had a rich collection of family histories that he recounted to me in thrilling detail – his brother was a renowned cartographer and explorer – and in me he recognised both an ardent listener and a willing pupil. I strove to match the tricks of his flickering fingers as they danced over the fretboard, and practised each scale and chord he gave me with brow-bent diligence. I thought it deeply unfair when the Furies pooled their investigative sensibilities and told Mamma that the Count and I were exchanging ‘looks of a perceptibly loving nature’. Only one Fury was even in Brighton at the time! I protested to Mamma that they were making up lies and nonsense, but the lessons were abruptly stopped.
(As for the loving looks: I, Ada Byron, have not yet experienced love. If I had, I’d have put up more of a protest at the termination of my guitar lessons. But there was something interesting in the way the Count would lay his long, elegant fingers on my wrist as he repositioned my hand, and he did like to look into my eyes for longer, perhaps, than was necessary, as he explained the constituent notes in the chord of D minor. I would find myself gazing into his eyes too, and thinking that it was something not unlike the gravitational pull between planets – two moons locked into mutual orbit, neither quite able to pull itself away.)
Now, as the Furies crowd around the wrought-iron tea-table, I, who have managed to my delight to climb up into the heart of the sycamore (I am getting stronger and stronger and stronger), peer down through the green-loaded branches and eavesdrop without remorse on their conversation. Since they are putting me under surveillance, I see no reason why I should not do the same to them. Intent as they are on their victuals, none of them has noticed me. Only Betty, the parlourmaid, glances up fleetingly in my direction from her position behind Mamma’s chair; but I don’t think that Betty looks especially kindly on the Furies, who are exacting and petulant, and I doubt that she will give me away.
‘It is my sincerest wish,’ Mamma is saying, ‘that Ada should not become... like her father.’
The Furies make clucking-sounds of agreement. ‘Why, yes, dear,’ they chorus, as unoriginal as braying donkeys. ‘Of course you must wish that.’
‘That is why I am so grateful for your vigilance,’ Mamma says. ‘Especially when my own health is not good,’ she adds forlornly, helping herself to some cake.
At this, I snort. I have come to the conclusion that there isn’t really very much wrong with Mamma’s health. She eats like an ox; her digestion is sound; she is a solid sleeper. She could walk a marathon if she wanted to with that fierce, fine energy that she can summon at a moment’s notice. She simply likes the attention of doctors, such as her physician, Dr King. Their attention warms her, as a lizard might be heated up in the sunlight. She also enjoys retreating to spa towns in order to take the waters there, and focus on the rituals of healing. For these reasons, she persists that her health is not good.
Fury the Third, Sophia Frend, looks up sharply. ‘What’s that?’
I freeze, solidifying the breath in my lungs, hugging the trunk of the tree.
‘Oh, a squirrel, perhaps. The woods around here are full of them,’ says Mamma, who has not looked up. ‘The fact is that we must all be on the look-out for any signs of moral deviance on Ada’s part,’ she goes on. ‘She is at that age, now, when one might reasonably expect such strains to emerge in her temperament.’
The Furies make wise noises, and it is all that I can do not to fall out of the tree with indignation. How dare she accuse me of... of moral deviance – or of having the potential to show such a thing? What have I ever done to make her think this might even be possible?
Later on, in my bedroom, I turn to my father’s verses for the answer. Is there moral deviance contained within these pages? Perhaps, yes, you could say so. I scan the pages almos
t at random, looking for particular details that I remember from previous readings of behaviour that my mother would find questionable. In Don Juan – an epic collection of sixteen cantos – I find more than enough examples of things that would send my mother’s eyebrows skywards, not least the proclivities of the hero. And then there is Manfred, a tortured soul who has committed some unspeakable wrongdoing by indulging in an illicit affair with Astarte. The more I read, the more I find. But why should my father be judged on the basis of the character of his creations? (For that, I am convinced, is what Mamma has done.) She ought to realise that the poet and his work are not the same. And furthermore, she does not realise that by alerting the Furies – and me, as well – to my potential moral deviance, she is only encouraging me, I think, to experiment with those boundaries. Yes: Mamma might view the prospect of my turning out like my father with horror and anxiety, but I, for my part, feel no such trepidation.
For would it not be a matter of considerable pride to follow in the footsteps of one of England’s greatest poets?
Fordhook, Ealing
October 1832
Ever since we first visited Dr Fellenberg at the institute at Hofwyl, the idea of setting up a school of her own has remained fixed in my mother’s mind.
‘I am more resolute than ever, Ada,’ she says, as the carriage sets out to the Church of St Mary, about fifteen or twenty minutes away from Fordhook. It’s a chill-winded, drizzly autumn morning and Mamma’s eyes are marble-bright with purpose. ‘As you know, my first attempt at a school was unsuccessful,’ she is saying. ‘I had not at the time the requisite deep understanding of Dr Fellenberg’s methods. The children fought like wild beasts and did not seem to thrive under my programme of baking, arithmetic and music. Now I know better.’