I, Ada

by Julia Gray

  And the eyes watch me then, tracking my progress as I circle in a quadrille, or talk with other young ladies of mundane matters. The fans flap faster; another woman leans in, with another tempting morsel to offer.

  Oh, but I heard the most scandalous rumour – you’ll never guess...

  And so it goes, from one drawing room to the next.

  Why, that’s Ada Byron, you know...

  Goodness! What do you suppose is the truth behind that extraordinary tale about young Ada Byron?

  Do I imagine them, these whispers? I have too much imagination, I think, sometimes, and I can’t control it. Once I start imagining something, it’s hard to stop... my butterfly brain skitters with what-ifs, and to me those whispers are as loud and clear as racecourse announcements by the time I have finished imagining. I wonder, therefore, what the fresh-faced young men to whom I am introduced know, and what they are thinking, and whether they could possibly countenance an affiliation with the most vulgar woman in all England. I would like to share my anxieties with my mother, but it just doesn’t seem to be the kind of conversation that we could have together. I long for a friend, like Flora Davison, but she is not doing the Season.

  I have no one in whom to confide, and for all that I am busier than I’ve ever been, I have never felt lonelier.

  There is one kind of person, incidentally, who appears undeterred by malicious whispers, and that is a breed of gentleman known as The Fortune Hunter. Mamma holds forth on the subject one morning over breakfast, cautioning me to steer well clear of these objectionable types.

  ‘I don’t see how I am to avoid such people,’ I say. ‘You presented me at Court; you wanted me to have suitors.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ says Mamma, tearing impatiently at a bread roll with her small teeth. She chews, swallows and goes on: ‘Suitors, yes. Fortune hunters, no.’

  ‘How on earth is anyone to tell the difference?’

  At this, Mamma looks vague, and mutters something about ‘a particular gleam in the eye’. ‘My point is really this,’ she continues, liberally buttering another roll. ‘If you are a young woman of means, you need to marry a man of wealth so that you can be sure you are not being married for the sake of your money.’

  ‘What if he has money, but wants more?’

  ‘Ada, you are being extremely tiresome,’ says my mother. ‘You simply have to make the correct judgment; that is all.’

  ‘Is this how you felt when you were doing your London Seasons?’ I venture. ‘Was this a concern of your parents too?’

  ‘We are not talking of me,’ says my mother, in a conversation-closing tone of voice.

  Rather rashly, I decide to press the point. ‘How did my father appear, when first you met him?’

  There is no more butter to spread. Mamma lays the butter knife down so that it bisects the dish. I wait for her to change the subject, or else to return to hectoring me about fortune hunters and the like. Her hand slips, and the knife clatters to side of the dish. She retrieves it and holds it for a moment, tilting it so that it reflects shards of light. Then she says: ‘Hmm. I don’t know that I recall the precise moment of our meeting...’ The knife tilts again, and for some reason – one that I cannot fathom now, and perhaps never will – she appears to change her mind. ‘No, I do remember,’ she says. ‘It was at Lady Melbourne’s, at her house in Whitehall. Byron fairly turned the room inside out when he entered; he had a way of doing that, you know, even though he was lame in one leg and had a habit of holding onto the backs of bits of furniture, moving a little like a crab from place to place. Not a proud, bold stride into the centre of a room, as you might have expected. But he dressed quite exquisitely, and besides, he was famous. Really, extraordinarily famous. Musicians would lay down their bows. People would fall silent, just waiting to see what he would do or say.’

  ‘Were you in awe of him?’

  ‘I don’t know that “awe” would be the right word. I was... intrigued. Yes, that describes it well. We fell into conversation, although I don’t remember what we talked about. We met several times afterward, and then entered into a correspondence – a long one, of several years.’

  This is more than she has ever told me. Far more. I risk one last question. ‘Did you ever fear that he was a fortune hunter?’

  Mamma coughs; a bit of bread has slipped down the wrong way. At once, three solicitous waiters spring to her assistance and it is some time before she is recovered enough to speak. ‘Lord Byron,’ she hisses, wedging her napkin into a starched ball, ‘was never interested in my money.’

  Later on, I find myself dwelling on this exchange, pressing at the edges of it, scanning for cracks. James Hopkins told me that my father was hugely in debt when he left for the Continent. Was he in debt before he married Mamma? And in which case, why did he remain so – since Mamma, I know, was then a woman of considerable means? Did money lie at the root of their troubles, or was there some other reason?

  I have puzzled and puzzled for so long that every time I come up with a hypothesis, I struggle to reconcile what I know to be true with what I imagine to be possible. But my theory is that my mother’s behaviour while they were married was somehow so abhorrent to my father that he was forced to leave – first the marriage, and then the country. The debts must have figured too in the situation. But that is the best that I can come up with. (For all her flaws, I do not consider my mother capable of actually incurring debts.)

  Yes, I think she tried to do all those things that she tries to do to me: to ‘trammel’ his mind; to curb his natural tendencies; to subject him to constant scrutiny, mindful of moral deviance. And if I, a young woman, find it almost too much to bear, then what must Lord Byron have thought? As a poet – a man for whom the flow of words must have been as crucial as lifeblood – he must surely have felt stifled by her indefatigable desire for control. How many times have I heard the word ‘reform’ upon my mother’s lips? My poor father: I can just picture her attempts to reform his nature – perhaps, each time he lifted a glass of wine to his lips, she urged him to set it down untasted... perhaps she proposed that he peruse one of her long religious tracts, in the hope that he would better himself... And, of course, the great tragedy would have been that there was nothing really so wrong about him or his character; it was simply that my mother likes so much to try and make people better.

  Vainly, I try to imagine myself there: a mouse scuttling along the skirting-boards, witnessing that first conversation. What is Mamma like? I picture her serious face with its rosebud mouth and prim brows. Does she smile, laugh at his jokes? No: I think she asks him a question, a searching one. She is perfectly sombre, while he is all gaiety and light-hearted wit. Perhaps he is interested by that, by the fact that she, Anne Isabella Milbanke, is different. But what a distance from that point to a point of an actual proposal of marriage: honestly, it’s as absorbing as the trickiest of algebraic conundrums.

  Sometimes, therefore, when I’m attending a party, it is not of myself that I am thinking at all. Nor am I thinking of whatever the bright-eyed, rouge-cheeked women might be muttering behind fanned fingers.

  I think instead about my parents, and what they might have said to each other at those dances, nearly twenty years ago.

  London

  June 1833

  There are moments, aren’t there, when everything changes...

  Those moments are often most clearly definable with hindsight. At the time, we don’t realise what is happening; it’s only later that we look back and appreciate that we have witnessed something of importance. Sometimes, however, we do realise. Take, for example, the first time I saw my father’s portrait. I was only young, but even then, I knew that it marked a stepping stone along the path to finding out more about him – since, at the time, I knew so little. There are other examples: my first glimpse of Lake Geneva; the moment I saw the poor, dead crow and knew that one day someone would surely find a way
to design a flying machine... and, perhaps, the moment I looked down from an upstairs window and saw the tailcoated figure of my shorthand tutor, and knew that he was a person I would want to know better.

  Yes: life is full of such moments, if you keep watch for them.

  At a party that is otherwise indistinguishable from so many similar parties – a mixture of the usual dukes and dignitaries – I meet, for the first time, Mr Charles Babbage. I believe that I hear his voice first of all – gruff, a little lion-like – occupying a register all of its own. He is talking, as far as I can make out, about the benefits of silence – an odd conversational choice for a crowded gathering. Looking for the speaker, I see him, in the middle of an attendant cluster: broad-chested, thick-necked – yes, really rather like a lion.

  ‘That is Mr Babbage,’ says Mamma. ‘I have lately been reading his book, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England. He proposes a more formal attitude towards research, and laments the lack of funding for science from the government and the Royal Society. It was most interesting.’

  It doesn’t take her long to arrange an introduction. We move a little way away from the rest of the party, where the noise is rather less intense, and for some time I say little, preferring to observe the exchanges between Mamma and Mr Babbage – two people of repute making what they will of each other. Typical formulaic phrases and pleasantries are exchanged, but in Mr Babbage I get the impression almost at once of a man who cares little for formulae. There is a fascinating energy about him; I watch the way his eyes dart this way and that, following whatever flickers of light or movement might momentarily entice him; he rolls sometimes onto his heels, and rocks a little back and forth before settling himself once more upon the ground; his hands play patterns against his sides, as though an invisible piano is concealed somewhere about his person. He has an interesting way of speaking: he is brusque and excitable, like a child in anticipation of presents, and sometimes interrupts himself mid-sentence.

  ‘The Difference Engine, my dear lady,’ he is saying. ‘It is rather a preoccupation of mine, and has been – yes, it has been for some time. Tell me, Lady Byron – what do you understand by the term “counting machine”?’

  Mamma pauses for thought; I know that she will not want to sound ignorant. ‘A mechanical device for calculation,’ she replies carefully. ‘Pascal created one, did he not?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ says Mr Babbage. ‘The “Pascaline”, as it was known – Pascal invented it in order to assist his father with tax calculations. It was a small machine. Used a wheel mechanism. Then there was Leibniz – all this was a hundred and fifty years ago, perhaps more, mind you – his machine could add, subtract, multiply and divide – more than Pascal’s could do. Couldn’t advance from nine hundred and ninety-nine to a thousand, though.’

  Mamma nods.

  ‘Neither machine amounted to anything much,’ says Mr Babbage. ‘Now, when I was in Paris – twelve, thirteen years ago – and you must recall, dear lady, that on the Continent they really do give scientific thinking the importance that it deserves... I heard tell of an “arithmometer” – all of France was talking about it, or so it seemed. The designer was one Charles de Colmar. His was a machine along the lines of Leibniz’s model. It could perform all the operations – although subtraction was done using complements, of course – simply by turning a handle. Oh, very pretty indeed, some people thought – something to have in your drawing room, a clever little showpiece for one’s guests! But no: no, it was so much more than that. On that visit to Paris all those years ago, I realised how essential such a device would be. Think to yourself, dear lady – if anyone, working in any field, from science to commerce to accountancy to navigation to astronomy, required a particular mathematical figure, what would they do? Why, they would need to look it up in a handwritten chart. Now, there are plenty of those, done by human hand – clergymen, schoolteachers with a bit of time to spare. But what do you think the issue might be with such a chart?’

  ‘Errors,’ I say, at once.

  Mr Babbage beams at me. ‘Yes, Miss Byron, just so! The charts are riddled with discrepancies – I have tested this hypothesis and I can assure you that it is true. The human brain, after all, is not a machine. But imagine – just imagine – a world in which these calculations are performed automatically – perfectly – with no errors. My dear friend Herschel very nearly died in a shipwreck in 1819; would that shipwreck have happened at all if the navigator had been able to calculate longitude and lunar distances with faultless accuracy? I think not! No; it is not an exaggeration to assert that lives will be saved by automatic calculation – by my Difference Engine, indeed.’

  Now that I have grown more accustomed to the stop-start patterns of Mr Babbage’s speech, I can see that he is an illuminating speaker. In just a few minutes, he has persuaded me – and Mamma too, I am sure – of the importance of such a machine.

  ‘And you are in the process of building this Difference Engine?’ asks Mamma.

  ‘Indeed I am... that most certainly is my intention. Yes. But it’ll need money. A good deal of it.’

  ‘Have you received much funding from the government?’

  ‘Quite a bit, yes – but not enough.’

  They are both speaking quite fast; Mr Babbage refers to Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, and to the Duke of Wellington, our Prime Minister. Sums are mentioned. As they talk, I try to imagine a counting machine such as Mr Babbage says that he is trying to build. What would it look like? A steam-powered abacus floats into my head, its beads glinting with metallic promise. I want more than anything to see it for myself: this physical realisation of Mr Babbage’s ideas.

  And just as I am thinking this, Mr Babbage says abruptly: ‘I’ve a demonstration piece at home, Lady Byron. I would dearly like to show it to you.’

  ‘And we,’ says Mamma, making sure that I am very much a part of her pronoun by indicating me with a sweep of her arm, ‘would be charmed to see it.’

  Dorset Street, London

  June 1833

  And so we are going to visit Mr Babbage, and his mythical-sounding machine.

  The evening is warm; there’s a feeling in the air of possibility, movement. The carriage rattles through Manchester Square; people are strolling along the pavements, beautifully dressed, full of leisurely intent. My mother’s doll-like profile is perfectly still. One shoe taps a subtle tattoo on the carriage floor: a sign that she is looking forward to whatever the evening has in store.

  It is not the first time that Mamma has taken me to look at machinery: I remember (dimly) our visit to the North of England where we examined the workings of the glass factory; and there were, I’m sure, other trips besides that I don’t recall. Mamma derives a kind of sincere satisfaction from these excursions; she wants to understand how the machines work, and she wants me to understand how they work, and then, somehow, all will be right with the world for a while if both of these things take place.

  ‘Now, Ada,’ she says, interrupting my thoughts. ‘You must be sure to ask pertinent questions.’

  To this, I don’t respond, giving her instead a look that says that I have never asked a question of anyone that was not pertinent. The carriage slows to a halt. We climb out, Mamma first, me following; then, taking my elbow, Mamma steers me along the pavement, as though I am a circus creature. Gently, but firmly, I shake my sleeve from her grip. I do not require steering. She settles for a hand between my shoulder blades instead. ‘Come, Ada. Don’t dawdle.’

  As we approach Mr Babbage’s house, I think about what it might mean to lose a beloved spouse, as I’ve learned he did a little over five years ago. I found my mother’s reaction to the death of my father curious, and have continued to find it so, all these years – and it is almost ten years now, a fact which I decide is rather astonishing. I think of those bittersweet tears in the Hampstead library, as bright and sharp as a clatter of jewels; and the way she looked
at the Villa Diodati, and the fact that our continental trip bore so many signs of a pilgrimage. But she cannot talk freely of him – never could – and while she might sometimes bring up some brief memory of him in conversation, she is just as likely to call an immediate halt to any such discussion, as though for fear of what might be said. Did she love him? I don’t know; I still don’t know. She can be so glacially cold sometimes that I find it hard to believe that she could ever have loved anyone. Not the way that I have felt love... I think of James Hopkins once again; my mind drifts into a kind of memorial pleasure garden, a landscape studded with kisses, and whispered sweet-nothings, and a shed at midnight, and a telltale pool of blue-black ink.

  ‘Yes,’ Mamma is saying now. ‘I think we shall enjoy making Babbage’s acquaintance properly. Many were offended by his criticisms of the Royal Society, but I for one am a firm believer that enterprises such as his should be fully supported. His machine is the talk of London, you know.’

  Upon our arrival, a servant leads us up the stairs and into the drawing room on the first floor, and there Babbage receives us – he seems even taller, somehow, in his own setting, and no less exuberant, despite the fact that we are the only guests. He has the look, I think, of one who enjoys the act of creation: of twisting things to his whims, of designing.

  He says with great warmth, ‘It is wonderful that you have come.’

  Drinks are offered, and then, without further ado, he leads us to a low table in the centre of the room. There it is: the machine that so much of London is discussing. Mamma is as collected as ever, but I find myself suddenly quite breathless with anticipation, and do my best to hide it. The demonstration piece is made of bronze and steel, perhaps two and a half feet high, and highly polished. Three columns of stacked cogwheels are interlaced with arms in a helical arrangement. The numbers from zero to nine appear above each wheel. Clever lighting lends the machine an alluring glow.

  ‘What is the relation in size between this piece and a fully-operating model?’ my mother enquires, strolling first this way and then that around the table, inspecting the machine from all angles.