Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Sighing, my mother let the curtain fall and settled us down to breakfast, her face bearing a slight frown that showed she was thinking intently. When we finished eating—she swallowed barely a mouthful herself—she summoned the innkeeper and announced the plan she had devised: She would send out her maid, Merle, to board the carriage, cloaked to conceal her identity and carrying a bundle about the size of a large, healthy baby. After the carriage sped her away and the crowd dispersed, my mother, my nurse, and I, similarly cloaked and disguised, would depart the inn in a borrowed carriage and meet our own parked at a designated spot out of sight a half mile down the road.

  The plan worked perfectly, and soon we were seated comfortably in our own carriage on our way to the next destination on our itinerary. Unfortunately, our carriage attracted a swarm of impertinent sightseers at our inn at Peterborough too, and several eager folk hurried after us into the lobby. One apple-cheeked matron rushed forward, arms outstretched, begging to give “poor fatherless Augusta Ada” a wee kiss. A young gentleman, declaring himself an aspiring poet, requested a lock of my hair “for luck,” calling it a relic of my genius parent. As Mrs. Grimes sheltered me in her arms and turned her back to the crowd, Lady Byron bristled, drew herself up, and beckoned to the innkeeper. Her haughty frowns kept the would-be well-wishers at bay until a pair of footmen could escort us to safety.

  We stayed two days in Peterborough, calling on the young Marquess of Exeter at Burghley House and strolling along the river Nene. The next day we moved on to Bury, where we paid our respects to the Earl of Derby and toured the gardens of Knowsley Hall. We were strolling along the water gardens when suddenly a woman, perhaps thirty years old and clad in plain but respectable attire, approached us. “This is for you, my lady,” the woman said, thrusting something small and rectangular at my mother. When she did not take it, the woman came forward in a rush and pressed it into her hands. “You must read it. Read it for the sake of little Augusta Ada. If you do, even your frozen, unforgiving heart must melt.”

  Stunned by the stranger’s nerve, my mother stared at her wordlessly.

  “Get along with you,” Merle ordered, incredulous. “Who do you think you are, accosting her ladyship so impertinently? Leave us alone before we call the authorities.” The maid swept forward and waved the strange woman away, and only after she ran off in the opposite direction from the house did Merle return to my mother’s side, breathless. “What did she give you?” she asked, gesturing to the object in my mother’s grasp.

  “A book.” My mother opened the cover and read the title page aloud. “Lord Byron’s Farewell to England; with Three Other Poems, viz. Ode to St. Helena, To My Daughter, on the Morning of Her Birth— Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Impatiently, she passed the book to Merle. “The nonsense I must suffer courtesy of his loyal readers.”

  “What shall I do with it?” Merle asked, pinching the book between her thumb and forefinger and holding it at arm’s length as if she carried a dead rat.

  “Throw it in the pond. Burn it. I don’t care.”

  Merle and Mrs. Grimes exchanged a look as my mother stalked away, frowning with great intensity as she studied the lilies and water reeds. It was evident that neither servant thought it would be wise to destroy something their mistress might want to examine later.

  Sure enough, when we were safely ensconced at our inn, my mother did indeed request the book and sat near the window reading it while Mrs. Grimes and Merle worked quietly, keeping me amused or sewing. “This is a fraud,” my mother finally said, tossing the book on a nearby table. “Lord Byron did not write this trash. This did not come from his pen, or from John Murray’s publishing house. This is the work of some barely literate charlatan who hopes to profit from the Separation, from our unhappiness. Put it on the fire.”

  This time Merle obeyed, and poems the strange woman had hoped would reconcile my parents turned to ash and smoke.

  If my mother needed more evidence that the drama of the Separation still held the nation in its thrall, she certainly had it then. These unpleasant encounters ruined the trip for her, and that evening, from the blessed solitude of our rooms, she wrote to my grandparents to announce that we would be moving on from Peterborough earlier than expected. “Everywhere we go, we are stared at as fearsome, exotic beasts,” she complained wearily, “like lionesses.” It was impossible for her to travel incognito with me, she noted, adding that from now on I was to be called Ada, only Ada. She underlined the name with a dark, emphatic stroke so there could be no misunderstanding.

  By the middle of June, my mother had settled our party in a charming little cottage in Lowestoft, a lovely resort town on the North Sea coast in Suffolk. Happily I played with Mrs. Grimes on the broad sandy beaches, I watched the gulls soar and keen high above the pier, and I took eager, toddling steps on the shore just out of reach of the waves, my arms raised above my head, each hand holding fast to one of my mother’s. Here we may have been recognized, but we were left to ourselves. Here, more than one hundred miles northeast of London, no one disturbed our holiday with bold stares or demands for kisses and locks of hair.

  Those were lovely days, but my restless mother could not linger, and so we eventually moved on. From Lowestoft we returned to Kirkby Mallory to visit my grandparents, but my mother did not enjoy my grandmother’s company as much as I did, so we were soon off again, this time to London. My mother settled us in lodgings somewhere between Knightsbridge and Green Street and was quickly caught up in such a whirlwind of social gatherings, lectures, and business that I scarcely saw her. “Lady B might as well have left the bairn at Kirkby rather than drag her from pillar to post only to ignore her once we got there,” Mrs. Grimes said with a sniff to my mother’s maid, but Merle was loyal to her mistress and my nurse found no sympathy there.

  One event in particular stands out in my memory of those weeks, although perhaps it is only the retelling of the event that I recall. It was autumn, I know, for the trees in the back garden had begun to turn, and on this notable day, my mother had instructed Mrs. Grimes to put me in my warm dress of soft blue wool and my cloak with a hood, for we were going out to meet someone.

  I could tell by the firm set to my mother’s mouth that this was an errand she undertook out of duty rather than affection. She said little as the coach took us through the city to a neighborhood less fashionable than our own, and through the front door of a residence that, while comfortable and tastefully furnished, was a trifle worn and faded compared to our rented rooms. A doll and a wooden ship had been propped up and forgotten against one wall of the foyer, and I heard the busy hum of children’s voices somewhere overhead. Although I craned my neck and reached both hands toward the stairs, I was carried instead into a parlor, where a plumply pretty, dark-haired woman sat on the edge of the sofa watching the doorway.

  My mother led the way into the room, and Mrs. Grimes followed close behind with me in her arms. A quick intake of breath and a slight straightening of the strange woman’s spine betrayed the intensity of her emotion, and I knew it took every ounce of her will to refrain from bounding out of her chair to embrace us. “Is this she?” the woman said, a tremor in her voice.

  “Of course,” said Lady Byron, somewhat curtly. “Who else would she be?”

  The woman uttered a small, apologetic laugh as she rose and met us in the center of the room. “She could be no one else,” the woman said, gazing into my face almost reverently. “She has her father’s eyes, and his chin. Does she show any signs of my brother’s poetical genius?”

  “She’s only a baby,” my mother replied, a frosty rebuff to the woman’s warm enthusiasm.

  “Yes, yes, of course.” The woman smiled down upon me, and as I smiled tentatively back, her eyes glistened. “Oh, if only he could be here now! He speaks so tenderly of her in his letters, if only—” She broke off, quite overcome, as tears spilled down her cheeks.

  “Augusta, do contain yourself,”
my mother ordered. “You’ll upset the child.”

  The woman nodded, squeezed her eyes shut, and raised a handkerchief to her mouth. In a moment, she had regained her composure enough to smile at me again. “I am your auntie and namesake, dear Augusta Ada,” she said, and my mother kindly did not correct her regarding my new designation. “I am your father’s elder sister, and I love you very, very much, as does he.” She glanced to my mother. “May I hold her?”

  My mother hesitated before agreeing, but as soon as Augusta took me in her arms, a sob escaped her throat, and she began trembling from the effort to contain her weeping. At a gesture from my mother, Mrs. Grimes took me back again.

  “I’m sorry,” Augusta said tremulously. “In her sweet face I glimpse my brother, and I miss him so terribly—”

  “You must control yourself in front of the child,” my mother said, reaching out to stroke my back, although I was not at all upset, merely a little bewildered.

  “I will.” Augusta took a deep, shaky breath. “I will be calm hereafter, I promise you.”

  What my mother said to that I do not recall, but I remember stilted conversation, more tears from my aunt, more firm reproofs from my mother to compose herself. We did not linger long, departing before tea could be served, before I could meet the children—my cousins, surely—I had heard playing upstairs.

  “Mrs. Leigh is too flighty, too easily upset,” my mother said to Mrs. Grimes as we rode home. “Who knows what she might say in front of the child, what untruths and exaggerations she might blurt out in a moment of distress?”

  “She does seem somewhat fragile,” my nurse agreed.

  “Ada must never be left alone with her.”

  “Yes, Lady Byron. I’ll see to it.”

  My mother nodded and fell into a pensive silence, studying the scenes of London passing by outside her window. “Mrs. Leigh hopes that Ada will inherit her father’s genius,” she murmured, as if thinking aloud. “What a terrible fate to wish on an innocent child.” Suddenly she fixed my nurse with a sharp, commanding look. “Nothing of the poetical must be permitted to take root in Ada’s mind or character. She must be brought up with structure and discipline, with rigorous attention to developing her faculties for logic and reason.”

  Mrs. Grimes shifted me in her arms, dubious. “Do you mean that I should not allow her to play, Lady Byron?”

  “Not at all. She shall play, but with suitable toys in well-regulated games. Blocks and such, for learning geometry. Balls, also for geometry, and to study motion.” My mother nodded, warming to her idea. “She must never be exposed to Lord Byron’s poetry—little danger of that at Kirkby Mallory, as Lady Noel has disposed of all her copies of his books—and absolutely no fairy stories.”

  My nurse’s brow furrowed. “None at all? But children love fairy stories.”

  “Children often love what is not good for them. Adults do also, more’s the pity.” For a moment her gaze turned inward, but the moment swiftly passed. “No fairy stories, no poetry. She has too much of the Byron blood in her, and it may lead to her ruin as it has to his. Her salvation depends upon developing her moral and intellectual powers and suppressing everything of the imagination.”

  My nurse murmured agreement, undoubtedly relieved that when my formal education began, a governess would take over those duties. It would be difficult enough to forgo fairy stories without taking responsibility for entirely subduing a bright, active little girl’s imagination.

  The interview with my aunt Augusta so vexed my mother that soon afterward she took me back to Kirkby Mallory Hall. A few days in her mother’s company inspired her to set out for Bath, taking her maid as her only companion. My mother and I had spent so much time together that summer and fall that, unlike before, her absence left me feeling bereft, and I did not need to kiss her portrait at bedtime to remind myself that I loved and missed her.

  And yet I was happy to be home, embraced by the warmth of my grandparents’ boundless affection. My grandmother often excused Mrs. Grimes for the day so that we could spend the hours together—bright, happy mornings followed by long, tranquil afternoons. I took my first careful steps alone in their spacious library, and despite the pervasive fear that my father might send masked marauders to breach the walls and make off with me, I felt a sense of belonging and contentment that I never knew at any of the lovely places my mother took me in our peripatetic season. I had free run of the place, cherished by my grandparents, indulged by the servants, denied only my parents’ presence—and imagination.

  Only one room in Kirkby Mallory Hall seemed to me to lie ever in shadow.

  On the ground floor my grandfather kept a smoking and billiards room for the amusement of himself and his gentlemen friends. The smell of whiskey and cigar smoke made me wrinkle my nose in distaste, but what transfixed me with curiosity and apprehension was the great portrait that hung above the chimneypiece. A dark green curtain shrouded it and was never drawn back, nor was its presence acknowledged by anyone in the room. From my grandmother’s disparaging comments and servants’ gossip, I had learned that the portrait was a famous and quite valuable painting of my father.

  Whenever I was feeling especially brave, I would steal into the room alone and gaze up at the covered portrait, wondering what lay behind the dark green curtain. What did my father look like? Of course I did not remember, although in later years it brought me some comfort to think that I had seen him, and he had seen me, though I had no memory of our brief time together. Was he handsome? Was he malformed? There must be something truly terrible about his appearance or my grandmother would not have hidden him from view. He must be very important or she would have gotten rid of the portrait altogether. In my imagination—that wicked, persistent faculty—he became a chimera of the magnificent and the monstrous. I could not gaze upon his covered portrait without a stirring of apprehension about my father, certain that he was sinister, dangerous, and malformed, and that since I was his child, something sinister and dangerous lurked within me too.

  In November my mother returned to Kirkby Mallory Hall for my christening, but she neglected to inform my aunt Augusta that the solemn event had taken place, or that my grandmother had replaced her as my godmother. Nor was Augusta invited for the party on 10 December my grandparents arranged to mark my first birthday, perhaps because it was an appropriately modest affair, just my mother, my grandparents, and the household staff. We had a pudding and a few gifts, and I wore a new yellow dress.

  Much later I discovered that my first birthday was a melancholy occasion for my mother, as she recorded in a poem she titled, “To Ada.” The poem began,

  Thine is the smile and thine the bloom

  When Hope might image ripened Charms

  But mine is fraught with memory’s gloom

  Thou art not in a Father’s arms!

  Three stanzas later, she lamented,

  Thou Dove! who may’st not find a rest

  Save in one frail and shattered bark!

  A lonely Mother’s bleeding breast—

  May Heaven provide a surer ark!

  My mother must have thought well of her poem, for soon thereafter, she sent a copy to her friend Theresa Villiers. “It has occurred to me,” she mused in an accompanying note, “that the verses may be misunderstood, as if they expressed a wish that she were with her father, such as he is; when on the contrary, I consider her as fatherless.”

  I suppose I might as well have been, for all that I was allowed to know of him.

  My father was in Venice at the time, and I know not whether he marked my birthday in verse or fond remembrance. I like to think that I crossed his mind as he was poled along a canal in a gondola, beneath an arched bridge, past an open window through which he heard someone singing bel canto.

  Chapter Three

  Dull Hate as Duty Should Be Taught

  December 1816–September 1817

 
In that same season, the publisher John Murray produced irrefutable evidence that my father had thought of me, if not on my first birthday, then at other times throughout the preceding year. In November, my father’s sublime third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was published to great acclaim and tremendous sales. If my father had not thought it unbecoming a gentleman to accept money for his poetry, I have no doubt that his financial troubles would have been resolved immediately.

  Since my mother and grandparents refused to seek out news of the poem’s reception, it took a few weeks for word to wend its way to Kirkby Mallory. When it finally did come, it struck with such force that one might have supposed the very stones of Mallory Hall trembled from the impact. Naturally my mother and grandparents could not resist obtaining a copy of the poem to see for themselves if the whispers were true, and that Byron had addressed his personal affairs in this poem just as he had in “Fare Thee Well” and “A Sketch from Private Life.” To their chagrin, just as my mother had dreaded, my father had again used his poetry, which he must have known would be read throughout the country and in many foreign lands, to express his feelings about the Separation, and about me.

  I have told you how the canto began, with Byron’s wistful musings about the infant daughter he had left behind in England. After narrating Childe Harold’s travels from Dover to Waterloo and along the Rhine into Switzerland for one hundred fourteen stanzas, the narrator returns to me in the one hundred fifteenth.

  My Daughter! with thy name this song begun—

  My Daughter! with thy name thus much shall end—

  I see thee not—I hear thee not—but None

  Can be so wrapt in thee; Thou art the Friend

  To whom the Shadows of far years extend:

  Albeit my brow thou never should’st behold,

  My voice shall with thy future visions blend,

  And reach into thy heart—when mine is cold—