I, Ada

by Julia Gray

  Mamma is staring at me, face drained of its rosiness. ‘I have never – oh, Ada, be reasonable...’

  But I do not feel reasonable, because this is not a reasonable proposition. I stamp my foot, on the verge of tears. ‘You never wanted me to turn out like my father, but now that a suitor has appeared who worships him you are all enthusiasm! It is baffling, Mamma. Oh, I have never understood your attitude towards him – never! Nostalgic one moment, and buttoned-up like an oyster the next... he must have found you as maddening as I do. Why, I have an aunt you’ve never let me meet – who sent me a prayer-book that you wouldn’t let me have...’

  She looks quite astonished by this.

  I go on, reaching blindly for words: ‘And... and cousins besides. Do they hate you too? As much as he must have done? For he went an awfully long way to get away from you, didn’t he?’

  ‘Don’t... don’t speak to me like that, Ada,’ says Mamma. She is very pale now; she looks angry, but there’s something else in her face that I am struggling to read.

  ‘I have always been convinced of it: you drove my father away,’ I say, very quietly, knowing at the same time that I have surely gone too far.

  We stand facing each other. I am taller than she is, now. I never noticed that before.

  I say, more quietly but with all the conviction that I can summon: ‘I will not meet Lord King, and let that be the end of it.’

  Then I walk past her and out of the room, heart thundering against my ribs so loudly that I’m sure she can hear it, and leave her standing there, robbed of speech, the letter dangling helplessly from her fingers.

  Chelsea, London

  November 1834

  For the first time in the history of our acquaintance, I do not want to visit Mary Somerville: not after this news of a possible husband. But I cannot undo the arrangement we have made without seeming rude, and so, feeling a despondence that I do not usually associate with our time together, I arrive at her house in Chelsea just as it is growing dark.

  ‘Oh, Ada, did your mother tell you?’ says Mrs Somerville, greeting me at the door.

  ‘She told me,’ I say, rather woodenly.

  ‘It is very exciting news,’ says Mary, looking at my face. ‘No, Ada, it is. You need a husband. Someone who will look after you.’

  ‘As though I am incapable of looking after myself!’ I burst out.

  ‘It is not that you are incapable,’ says Mary Somerville. ‘Don’t be so melodramatic. You and Lord King are an excellent match; I am convinced of it.’

  To my relief, however, we move on to other matters. I have brought with me Mr Babbage’s plans. ‘I want to consult with you about these diagrams,’ I say to Mrs Somerville. We are sitting side by side at the small parlour table. ‘Mr Babbage has written some notes here, and here, in the margin, and I would like to ask you about them.’

  Mrs Somerville calls for a servant to attend to the lights, and when more lamps are lit in the damp little room and the fire built up into a diminutive furnace, I show her the notes. ‘Look,’ I say. ‘Babbage has identified two parts of the new machine, which he calls the “mill” and the “store”. These terms fascinate me. He is clearly referring to the cloth industry, is he not?’

  Mary Somerville frowns. ‘Ye-es,’ she says. ‘Yes, I think he must be. But I don’t quite see... It is a little fanciful, is it not?’

  ‘I don’t think he is being fanciful,’ I say. ‘It is just a metaphor – a comparison. He is using one system to describe another – quite a useful thing to do, since the new system – the one he is designing – does not yet exist.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ says Mary, squinting at the page. ‘The mill is where the actual work is done.’

  ‘That’s right. The computations, if you will,’ I say, speaking rather slowly, though my heart seems to be beating unnaturally fast. ‘The store, meanwhile, is where the materials are kept. Babbage is proposing to separate the actions of the machine in order to facilitate its working.’

  ‘I don’t know that he is even sure what he is about, you know,’ interjects Mrs Somerville. She still seems doubtful.

  ‘And this large barrel here, he refers to as the “drum”,’ I say, pointing to the centre of one of the diagrams.

  ‘Yes: this is the bit he is struggling with. It would turn very much as a drum in a music box would, but in order to be able to control so many operations it would have to be a barrel of incredible size.’

  Together, we puzzle over the designs, teacher and pupil, while the darkness grows beyond the window and mists gather outside that are so thick that I know I would not be able to see my own hand in front of me, if I were to venture outside. But inside it’s as warm as a fur-lined cloak – so much so that I find myself feeling dozy, dreamy, almost drifting off to sleep sometimes. Mary gets up once to fetch a book from a shelf, and then again to put more coal on the fire. I prop my head on my hands, feeling the ridge of my cheekbone, and allow my eyes to close...

  At first, I see those round white stones on the dream-beach where I met my father. They are less like soup plates now. Their edges are ridged. They darken; now they are neither plates, nor stones, but wheels. Cogwheels, interlaced, and set in a circular shape around a central barrel – a drum – that continuously turns, slowly but with great regularity. It is the Analytical Engine at work – I know this, even though I cannot see every part of the machine clearly. It is like a gigantic music box: the sound that comes from it is harp music initially, before it turns into the kind of jaunty brass-band tune that one might hear at the seaside. I walk closer, and see that something is coming out of the machine – it looks like paper, but it is thicker; perhaps canvas, or... no. It is woven silk, in one of the most exquisitely coloured compositions that I have ever seen: calculations, and equations are written upon it, and, at the centre, in letters the colours of the rainbow, one word: imagination. This is not a machine that will simply calculate figures; it will be able to create too...

  ‘Ada! Ada, my goodness – Ada!’

  Mary Somerville seizes me by the shoulders just as my head falls forward; her touch startles me, pulling me out of my reverie. Suddenly I am back in the small, damp room, aware of the fire grumbling in the grate, the scratch of the upholstered chair against my legs.

  ‘The loom,’ I whisper. ‘It is like Mr Jacquard’s loom.’

  ‘No, don’t talk,’ says Mary, fussing her hands about my face, my hair. ‘Come – come and lie down.’ She manoeuvres me over to the chaise longue; I protest, but she won’t hear any of it. ‘We’ll wait for Somerville. He’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Mr Babbage,’ I say hoarsely. ‘I must speak to him. I saw... I saw something, Mary... his machine, the Analytical Engine... it could be used for music, you know, and – oh, even the creation of pictures and words and poems... magical potential... they are not just numbers, you see...’

  ‘Not numbers? Ada, what are you talking about? I can’t understand you.’

  ‘They are not just numbers,’ I say again. ‘The numbers represent – oh, anything, anything at all... but he must use his knowledge of the loom. That is how it will work.’ I dissolve into a fit of weak coughing.

  ‘You are not making any sense, my dear,’ says Mary Somerville. ‘Try not to talk now, until Somerville arrives.’

  ‘Oh, Mary, I saw it...’

  But she has gone from the room.

  ‘Her eyes were fairly staring out of her head,’ I hear her saying to Dr Somerville, out in the hall, when at last he arrives. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. She’s really not herself; she must go home at once, and I am going to write to Lady Noel Byron to recommend an immediate stop to her studies. No; she is not herself at all.’

  Not myself: it’s the last thing I think about; that I, Ada – according to Mary, at least – have ceased to become Ada.

  If not my Ada-self, with my Ada-brain, who am I?

&nb
sp; When Dr Somerville enters the room, with Mary fluttering at his side, I sit up and ask him exactly that.

  I lie in bed for a week, two weeks, four. I am quite unable to do anything else.

  Mamma stays by my bedside most days, although we do not say much to each other. Sometimes I feign sleep, not wanting, or not able, to talk to her. She reaches for my hand occasionally, and I allow her to hold it, wishing that I had not said as much as I did to her, the last time that we actually spoke. I hear her draw in her breath, with the sharpness of one who has just had some kind of unpleasant realisation. I wonder if she is going to speak, but she never does.

  My nineteenth birthday comes unnoticed, and Christmas too, and the New Year thereafter. We return to Ealing, and I barely register this change of scenery, although Nanny Briggs will tell me afterward that Mamma felt that the country air would suit me better, and she was probably right.

  I prefer my bedroom at Fordhook to the low-ceilinged Wimpole Street chamber. I think that I do breathe more easily. Doctors come and go; I hear them muttering instructions to Nanny Briggs, and to Mamma. I hear occasional snippets: nervous exhaustion... mustn’t trouble herself further with intellectual pursuits, not for a long time...

  I hear Mamma say: ‘The fault, if there is any fault, must be mine.’

  Sometimes I dream: the shapes of Babbage’s engines form in my head with all the transparency of ghosts; I see scenes from my childhood, and from recent years. . . pebbly beaches, and spa towns with their iron-rich waters... carriage journeys and roadside inns... conversations with Mamma over a hundred brioche-laden breakfasts... and dance-cards, and unsuitable suitors who care for nothing but my fortune... People whispering in corners of crowded rooms.

  ‘That’s Ada Byron, my dear. Oh, but she has grown so pale and ill.’

  ‘Whatever can the matter be?’

  I think of my father. Strains of his verses come to me with all the suddenness of rainbows that burst out unpredicted from cloudy skyscapes. I see him: slightly lame, loose-trousered, shouldering his caged squirrel or scrawling a letter at his desk. I think of him on his deathbed too, sending me his blessings.

  Sometimes I cry, and they are not the harsh, hollow tears that I wept when I watched the Palace of Westminster burning – more a muted dribble of tears that leave patches of moisture on my sheets to surprise me, later, as I sleep. For I do sleep; I sleep more than I have ever slept in all my life.

  Sometimes I do not dream at all.

  Fordhook, Ealing

  March 1835

  Spring has not quite come to Fordhook, but it feels as though it might. Each morning I awaken to new strains of birdsong, and although the little buds are not yet sprouting all over the garden, I know that they will. There’s almost the smell of new earth, new beginnings; quite soon, over in the allotments, they will be turning the soil, taking out the hard bits of flint, readying the ground.

  I, Ada, am feeling better every day. And every day I regret my outburst to my mother a little more deeply. Do I really think that my father hated her – and that his sister did too – just because I sometimes hate her for all the ways in which she strives to control me? But it is wrong to hate her – even a little, even sometimes – when she only thinks of my well-being. Oh, I think about it so much that it twists and tangles up like yarn in my mind, and I can’t separate the strands. And after a while the person I hate most is myself.

  If only, I think... If only she’d told me more. I wouldn’t have been so deeply in the dark; I wouldn’t have had to scrabble together the little snippets that people gave me, struggle to assemble a puzzle whose picture was permanently obscured... I think of all the people I questioned, over the years: Miss Lamont, Miss Stamp, Signor Isola, Harriet Siddons, Mary Montgomery, James Hopkins... People who either knew very little or who did not feel qualified to speak freely on the subject of my father, or of my parents’ marriage. And then there were all my questions to Mamma herself – perhaps nine-tenths squashed like unwanted beetles under a grinding heel, with only one-tenth answered, and begrudgingly at that. Why couldn’t she have answered more than just one-tenth?

  But there’s not much chance of that now. Mamma is delighted that I am better, of course, but there exists between us now a barrier. Perhaps it has always been there, unnoticed. I am not sure.

  But I now find myself horribly concerned that I have broken something in our relationship, something that cannot be fixed.

  Mamma finds me in the garden one morning after breakfast.

  ‘I am going back to Tunbridge Wells, Ada, for a short while,’ she says. ‘I think it best that you remain here, so that the doctors can continue to attend you.’

  ‘Of course.’

  She doesn’t even want me to accompany her, I think; that’s how badly I have hurt her.

  ‘There is to be a ball at Weston House, in Warwickshire, in May,’ says Mamma. ‘Lord King will be there. I have written to Lady Phillips, who will be hosting the ball, saying that you hope also – health permitting – to be present.’

  ‘I don’t... Mamma, I have said that I do not want to meet this man.’

  ‘I know, Ada. I heard what you said. I heard everything that you said.’

  This last is uttered with such a sad cadence that I feel another twist of guilt.

  ‘Mamma,’ I say. ‘I don’t hate you. I have never hated you.’

  She doesn’t respond to this. Instead, she winces sourly, as though she has bitten the inside of her cheek. With eyes half-closed, she mutters: ‘I have left something for you on your writing-desk. But... but wait until I have departed, please, until you look at it.’

  I do wait, although I can barely manage it, impatiently checking the progress of the carriage from the drawing-room windows until it has vanished from sight. Then I more or less run upstairs, aflame with curiosity – even though I know from past experiences that she has most likely left me something that is either educational or improving, something designed to make a difference to my mind or my character.

  But there’s a chance – the smallest, slimmest chance – that this time she has left me something else.

  And I’m right.

  On my desk lies a rectangular box – made of rosewood, I believe, with tortoiseshell inlays. I have seen it before, I realise, on my hunt for the prayer-book. It looks as though it might contain jewellery, or else sewing materials, but when I lift the lid (it is unlocked, though there is a keyhole), I find neither jewels nor needles. Instead, there are letters, several stacks of them, tied with coral-coloured ribbon. One, right at the top, is loose, and addressed to me. I carry the box and its contents over to my bed and climb onto the counterpane. I lift out the stacked letters and place them carefully to one side.

  Then I open the one that has my name on it.

  Dear Ada,

  I must confess that I was most deeply aggrieved by the way that you spoke to me on that Friday afternoon – the day that you fell ill. That you could have believed me to have been so hated by my husband – your father – and by his relations too, was so hurtful that at first I resolved simply never to speak of the matter to you again. But, on reflection, I perceived that you had come to your own conclusions – as wrong as they were – because you had not had any other means of knowing the truth. That truth is now something that I will try to share with you. It is a prospect that I have avoided all these years, and certainly I did not feel able to tell you in person. It is easier for me to write this down, and I hope that it will also be easier for you to read it. I hope too, that once you have finished, you will understand a little better.

  I shall start at the beginning. I met Lord Byron in March 1812, at Lady Melbourne’s. Childe Harold had just been published, to great fanfare and acclaim. As you know, Byron was famous – more so, perhaps, than anyone of his ilk at the time. When I told you, Ada, that I was intrigued by him, that was quite accurate. Only the previous month he
had made a speech in the House of Lords, in which he voiced his passionate opposition to a punitive new bill that proposed the death penalty for some poor stocking-makers who had smashed some looms in Nottinghamshire. Clearly, then, he must have had a strong desire to do good – as much as I myself did. But my cousin Lady Caroline Lamb had called him ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ – it was on everyone’s lips at one time or another – and indeed I did perceive an arrogance, a lofty pretension and a tendency to sneer at all and sundry. How, then, could these different tendencies be reconciled? It was intriguing, and I found myself wanting to learn more.

  Each time I met Byron, I found something new to interest and enchant me; he was, I suspected, the type who suffered from changeable moods and fits of temper; I also thought that he was rather proud. But beneath those fits of temper was concealed a shyness, and I was convinced, as I have said, that he was a good person. I began to realise that I was in love with him. Other suitors – and there were plenty – I dismissed with haste.

  In September of 1812, Byron proposed – not in person, but through my aunt, Lady Melbourne. And here, Ada, I made a dreadful mistake, for I refused him. Yes, I thought myself in love, but I had certain reservations, not the least of which being that I was aware (for he had written so) that he thought me perfect. I couldn’t bear to witness his disenchantment on learning that I was far from perfection. I refused, again through my aunt, and offered friendship instead.

  Now, here is something that I did not know at the time. Lady Melbourne was not only my chaperone but also a close correspondent with Byron himself. The interest she showed in my burgeoning affection for Lord Byron was due in part to her own wish to put a stop to the affair that was taking place between Byron and her daughter-in-law, Lady Caroline, who was married to her son William. It pains me to remember my innocence – the evenings I spent in Caroline’s company, not knowing how infatuated she was with the man I was so naively discussing. (You met her once, at the theatre – you were quite young, perhaps nine or ten.) The affair was, it goes without saying, the height of unsuitability, and would have caused a scandal had it gone on much longer. A woman with a curious lack of moral restraint, Lady Caroline would – apparently – dress up in the uniform of post-boy in order to gain access to his rooms, and slashed her wrist with scissors in an attempt to regain his affections. But of all this I knew nothing.