A token and a tone, even from thy father’s mould.
The idea that my father had thought of me more often and more deeply than anyone else had, including the loving family that had cared for me so devotedly throughout my first year, did not sit well with my mother. My grandmother was even more indignant, and she rebuked him in absentia for abandoning me, never mind that it was my mother who had left my father, and that neither she nor my mother and grandfather wanted him anywhere near me.
Unmoved were they by my father’s tangible longing to see me again, which my family dismissed as poetic artifice meant to arouse the sympathy of the public and the courts. “‘To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee,’” my grandmother read aloud, with unusual bitterness, “‘And print on thy soft cheek a parent’s kiss— / This, it should seem, was not reserved for me.’ And whose fault is that, I ask you?”
“Mother, please,” said my mother wearily, rubbing the headache out of her temples. “Read no more, I beg you.”
My grandmother pursed her mouth. “Oh, yes, we must not hear again the most offensive lines—”
“Indeed we must not—”
“‘Yet, though dull Hate as duty should be taught, / I know that thou wilt love me.’”
“And so we shall hear the lines regardless,” my mother said acidly, to no one in particular.
My grandmother gestured to the pages littering the sofa between her and my mother. “This is highly offensive. I shall speak to my lawyers about this—this slander, these bold, outrageous lies. We are not teaching Ada to hate her father. We scarcely speak of him.”
“Although how Byron believes Ada will learn to love him when they are separated by hundreds of miles . . .” From his favorite armchair near the fireplace, my grandfather frowned at the pages and shook his head with genuine regret. “Well, I daresay he hopes in vain.”
“And how dare he slander you, Annabella, with this title he bestows upon your daughter—‘The Child of Love—though born in bitterness, / And nurtured in Convulsion.’” My grandmother’s eyes sparked with righteous indignation. “How dare he? Ada was born into a mother’s loving embrace, and has been nurtured here, with us, her family, we who cherish her and care for her with most tender affection. ‘Convulsion’ indeed!”
“Makes a man want to thrash him,” my grandfather muttered. “I’ll show him a convulsion.”
“Mother, Father, please calm yourselves,” my mother commanded. “None of this does us any good. It certainly does no good for Ada.” She gathered up the poem, folded the pages crisply, and tucked them into the book she had been reading, Francis Bacon’s treatise The Advancement of Learning. “Let me be perfectly clear: Ada shall not read Byron’s poems when she is able, they shall not be read to her, and they will not be discussed in front of her. It’s obvious that her father’s words upset her, and little wonder.”
My grandparents glanced to where I sat on the floor surrounded by my favorite wooden blocks—watching them, trembling with anxious bewilderment, my play forgotten. They let the matter drop, then and thereafter, at least in my presence, but a shadow hung over our Christmas merriment in the weeks that followed. Once I caught my grandmother glaring up at the covered portrait hanging in the smoking and billiards room as if she would rather set fire to it than allow it to grace the chimneypiece one day more.
Even though Lady Noel was outraged for my mother, not at her, my mother still found her complaints and constant indignation unbearable. Although I’m sure my grandmother did not intend it that way, perhaps my mother heard implicit criticism in her mother’s bitter words, as if Lady Noel were berating her for choosing from among her many suitors the one least likely to bring her happiness. In any case, my mother decided that even a mansion as spacious as Kirkby Mallory was too small for both her and my grandmother, and so she told my grandparents that her fragile health obliged her to move to a place where she could find more restful sleep and good fresh air to improve her strength and vitality. She decided to take a house in Frognal, Hampstead, and I was to go with her, as would her maid and my nurse. On the day of our departure, the first of April, my grandmother hugged me tightly and wept, and as our carriage pulled away and I waved good-bye through the window, it looked to me as if her heart had truly broken.
I missed my grandparents terribly, but my mother was relieved to be free of their constant worry and unceasing scrutiny, and that pleased her, which in turn pleased me. Soon after our arrival, though, my mother received an official document declaring that although she would retain sole custody of me, due to the ongoing dispute, I had been named a ward in chancery. From afar my father was asserting his rights under English law, and apparently he still feared that my mother would take me abroad and settle in a foreign land where he would be allowed no parental rights. In January a letter came from my father, through the usual intermediary, my aunt Augusta. “I require an explicit answer that Ada shall not be taken out of the country on any pretext whatever,” he wrote to his sister. “I repeat that I have no desire to take the child from her, while she remains in England, but I demand that the infant shall not be removed.” My mother had no desire to take me abroad at that time, but my father’s demands, which she deemed “needless interference,” affronted her greatly. If not for the legal ruling that granted him his request, I think my mother might have taken me across the Channel for a holiday in France just to spite him.
My mother did not know then, and I would not discover for many years afterward, that it was in this same month that my father’s illegitimate daughter was born in Bath, about one hundred twenty-five miles west of our lodgings in Hampstead. Called Allegra Byron, she was the daughter of Claire Clairmont, the stepsister of Mary Godwin Shelley. Mrs. Shelley, of course, was the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the daughter of the writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher William Godwin, and the author of a remarkable novel, Frankenstein, which would be published the following year. I am unaware of any of Miss Clairmont’s accomplishments, and I never did meet her daughter, my half sister, who died in Italy of an illness when she was only five years old. Throughout my childhood I always longed for a sibling. Perhaps somehow I sensed that I had lost a sister and unwittingly grieved.
Hampstead was pleasant and pretty, and our house was cozy and comfortable. We had all the fresh country air my mother required, and we often went for long rambles, or so they seemed to me, my stout little legs working at a quick march so I would not fall behind my swift, graceful mother. Sadly, there were no little children for me to play with, for I was not permitted to consort with just any youngsters, but my mother steadily built herself a coterie of friends. Though her rank and wealth assured her a place among the most elite ladies and gentlemen of the aristocracy, she chose her companions not for their status in Society but for their accomplishments—intellectual, artistic, or spiritual. She preferred the company of reverends and vicars, Dissenters and reformers, the spinster playwright Joanna Baillie and the celebrated actress Sarah Siddons. A few of her friends clearly liked children and were kind to me, but most were too preoccupied with serious matters and important ideas to waste precious time playing pat-a-cake with a precocious little girl. They came to tea and dinner parties to impress Lady Byron and to be impressed by her, and since she was invariably the highest-ranking lady at these gatherings, everyone deferred to her in all things, an arrangement I trust she quite enjoyed.
Whenever I beheld my mother holding court with her circle of friends, I felt my own loneliness more keenly, and when suitable playmates failed to appear, I asked my mother if I might have a puppy instead.
“Certainly not,” my mother said. “I could not bear the noise and the mess. Hounds I can tolerate, because they are necessary for the hunt and they remain outside, but I will permit no beasts to crowd my hearth and soil my carpets.”
“Could I have a kitten? They’re much quieter.”
“But no less destructive, with their claw
s and their mess. Certainly not.”
“Maybe a bunny—”
“No, Ada,” my mother said firmly. “I cannot abide animals in the house.”
Or anywhere else, I thought glumly. She forbade me to ask her again, but she could not prevent me from imagining how lovely it would be to have a pet to cuddle and love and whisper my secrets to. The scenes I envisioned were so delightful that I soon began to pretend that I had a puppy all my own, a brown-and-white springer spaniel I called Freddy. What a charming companion he was too, always eager to play and to accompany me on my rambles around the garden. If it was not quite as wonderful as having a real puppy, that was not Freddy’s fault.
One spring afternoon, my mother and her friend Miss Montgomery came upon me and Mrs. Grimes in the garden, where I was amusing myself by pretending to teach Freddy how to roll over and shake hands. “To whom are you speaking?” my mother asked sharply, while Miss Montgomery glanced around suspiciously as if expecting to discover a black-cloaked villain crouched behind a pear tree.
“Nobody,” I replied.
“I distinctly heard your voice.” She looked to Mrs. Grimes, who had hastily risen from her seat on a nearby bench, still clutching her knitting needless and a skein of yarn. “It was a strange tone indeed with which to address your nurse.”
“She was only playing, Lady Byron,” said Mrs. Grimes. “She likes to pretend she has a puppy for a playmate. It’s only a game.”
“He’s brown and white and has the softest fur,” I chimed in, smiling.
A strange apprehension filled my mother’s eyes as she swiftly approached, startling me into silence. “You see a dog here, now?” she asked, kneeling beside me and snatching up my hand.
I shrank beneath her penetrating gaze. “I don’t see him. He’s not real—but sometimes he seems real—”
When she recoiled in horror, I knew I had said the wrong thing. “How often do you see this dog? Do you see other things too?”
“I—” I glanced helplessly to Mrs. Grimes, but my mother shifted to block her from my view. “I hear you, and Mrs. Grimes, and—”
“It’s just a child’s game,” said my nurse. “I thought it harmless—”
“You forget who her father is,” my mother said curtly. Abruptly she released my hand and stood, but her eyes never left my face. “Ada, if you ever see animals or people who aren’t there, or hear voices when no one else is in the room, you must tell me or your nurse immediately. Do you understand?”
Frightened, I gulped and nodded.
Mrs. Grimes hurried to me and rested her hands on my shoulders. “It’s nothing, really, my lady. It was all in fun.”
I had seen grown men grow pale beneath the frigid look my mother fixed upon Mrs. Grimes at that. “I have told you before, and I will not warn you a second time. You endanger this child’s life and sanity when you indulge her imagination. Do not let it happen again.”
As Mrs. Grimes bobbed a curtsey and murmured apologies and promises, my mother threw me one last look of warning before she strode off toward the house, with Miss Montgomery scurrying to keep up with her.
“I’m sorry,” I told Mrs. Grimes, fighting back tears.
“It’s all right, little one.”
“Does this mean—” I took a deep breath. “Does this mean I can’t play with Freddy anymore?”
Her only reply was to sigh and kiss the top of my head. In my mind’s eye I watched Freddy bound away with a stick in his mouth, far away and out of sight.
A stray thought came to me then, the vague awareness that my father loved dogs, especially Newfoundlands. If he had raised me, surely I would have been permitted to keep as many dogs as I wished. A faint anger like a wisp of smoke rising from embers unfurled in my heart, and I wondered how else my life might have been different had my father absconded with me to the Continent as my mother and grandparents had feared.
—
IN THE SUMMER OF 1817 my mother wanted to travel with her friend Miss Frances Carr to Scotland, and since Miss Carr was not encumbered with young children, my mother decided to set down her own young burden at Kirkby Mallory. My grandparents were thrilled to have me back, and although I missed my mother more than I had at any previous parting, my grandmother and my nurse swiftly filled the sudden emptiness of my days with play and songs and hugs, and filled my tummy with sweet delicacies from the kitchen that my mother denied herself and thus never allowed on our own table.
I considered Kirkby Mallory my home, and I adored its spacious halls and well-lit galleries, and the way it smelled of fresh-cut flowers in spring and summer, well-tended fireplaces in autumn and winters, and warm oak, clean linen, and old books in every season. The exception was the kitchen, which smelled exactly as you would hope the domain of a generous, bustling cook who loved to stew, roast, and bake would smell. Even so, the longer I stayed away while traveling with my mother, the more time I needed upon my return to feel as if I were truly at home and not merely visiting. I had been home almost a fortnight before I felt bold enough to steal away to the smoking and billiards room, where I intended to test my bravery by staring up at the mysterious covered portrait and reflecting upon what terrors the curtain might conceal.
To my astonishment, I discovered that the portrait was gone, curtain and all. Several smaller portraits filled the space upon the chimneypiece, one of Lord Wentworth, my grandmother’s brother, who had died unmarried and had left her Kirkby Mallory Hall; another of my grandmother herself as a young woman before her marriage; and a few more of my mother’s aunts, as bright and fresh as spring blossoms. The family portraits had a fixed, complacent look, as if they had always been there and could not imagine their pride of place ever belonging to another. For an unsettling moment, I wondered if I had only imagined the large cloaked portrait that had hung there in shrouded solitude before, but I quickly seized my imagination in a firm grip and reassured myself that I was not mistaken.
My father’s portrait had been taken down, but why, and what had become of it? I longed to know, but I understood that I must not ask.
The summer months passed happily, interrupted by sudden, sharp, painful bouts of loneliness and longing for my mother. A few playmates my own age would have been a great consolation, but the only potential friends were the servants’ offspring or children from the village, and they had been deemed unsuitable companions for Lady Byron’s daughter.
Although I saw other children only very rarely, and usually from a distance, in August I somehow managed to contract that most ordinary of childhood ailments, chicken pox. It was a misery. I itched and cried and burned with fever. I begged for my mother, and she and my grandmother exchanged frequent letters, so I knew that she was aware of my illness, but still she did not appear.
“When is Mama coming?” I asked my grandmother one night as she tucked me into bed, thoroughly miserable, feverish and uncomfortable, and feeling utterly abandoned. “Did you not tell her I need her?”
“I’m sorry, my little love,” said my grandmother, smoothing my sweaty hair off my brow. “Your mother thinks that it would be imprudent for her to return at this time, while there is any chance of her taking the pox. We would not want your mother to fall ill too, would we?”
“No,” I said in a small voice. I had not thought of the danger to my mother at all, which surely proved that I was a very wicked and selfish child.
I don’t know what I thought my mother could have done for me that my grandmother and nurse were not already doing. Even the best of children can be little tyrants, believing themselves absolutely entitled to every bit of the love and servitude bestowed upon them by the adults entrusted with their care, and I was certainly not the best of children. Even so, Mrs. Grimes was so tireless in her efforts to ease my suffering—going without sleep, barely pausing to eat or drink, leaving the sickroom only reluctantly—that I was deeply moved. Her impetus was not duty but true affec
tion, and I was so thunderstruck by this astonishing realization that once, as she bent over me to refresh the cloth upon my brow, I seized her hand, pulled her close, and flung my arms around her neck. “I love you, Mrs. Grimes,” I said, with every ounce of feeling in my fever-wracked body.
“I love you too, my precious little lamb.” Mrs. Grimes eased me back upon my pillow, smiled, and kissed my forehead. “Now, you must be a good little girl and sleep, so you can get well, and we can play in the garden again. Will you do that for me?”
I nodded and obediently closed my eyes, my heart full, and I soon fell deeply asleep.
After that, I got better little by little, day by day, until at last my fever cooled and my angry red rash faded. In late September, assured that the danger of contagion had passed, my mother at last returned to Kirkby Mallory. As delighted as I was to see her again, I could not help noticing that she seemed different—sadder, quieter, more apprehensive about the future. At first I assumed, with a child’s certainty of residing in the center of the universe, that my illness had frightened her, that she feared it might yet return to claim me. Perhaps I had been closer to death than anyone had let me believe.
I was much mistaken, as I learned when I overheard my mother confiding in my grandmother one evening when they paused outside my doorway on their way to their own bedchambers. Knowing that they would be displeased to find me still awake, I had feigned sleep, and I heard my mother sigh heavily. When my grandmother asked the reason for her melancholy, she confessed that the grim reality of the Separation had only recently dawned upon her. “At first I was so relieved to be free that I did not think of the loneliness that would follow,” she told my grandmother, her voice so low that I almost could not make out her words. “Then I was preoccupied with securing custody of Ada, and that struggle allowed no time for introspection or brooding over the future. It has only been since midsummer that the burden of my solitude has begun to weigh heavily upon my shoulders. I feel as if I am crossing a desert in the dark, loaded down with anger and disappointment and sorrow, and I do not like to face this journey alone.”
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