The effort seemed to drain her remaining strength, and after the New Year, she rarely left her bedchamber. I was only rarely allowed to visit her there out of fear that my youthful exuberance would exhaust her. On days she felt particularly strong she would ask for me, and she liked to lie quietly while I read to her from the newspaper or from Maria Edgeworth’s Early Lessons.
Such occasions became fewer and farther between as that cold, bleak month stretched on, and in the afternoon of 22 January, my beloved grandmother slipped away, quietly and peacefully, with the same dignity and grace that had distinguished her life for more than seventy years.
Chapter Six
Sharp Is the Knife, and Sudden Is the Stroke
January 1822–March 1825
In the aftermath of my grandmother’s death, I was heartbroken, devastated, utterly bereft. Not even the losses of Mrs. Grimes and Miss Thorne and the perpetual absence of my father had adequately prepared me for this, the worst deprivation I had ever known. Yes, my grandfather loved me, and my mother, too, but my grandmother had been a constant, unwavering source of unconditional love, the kind of sustaining love no other person had ever offered me before, or has provided since, in all the years that have followed.
With my grandmother’s passing, the Wentworth estate descended to my mother. She—and my father—were legally required to adopt the surname Noel, but Kirkby Mallory and its one hundred sixty acres of oak woodland, hunting grounds, and gardens were my mother’s alone. Her annual income increased from five hundred pounds to four thousand five hundred pounds, with another four thousand pounds per annum going to my father. I suppose she could have accepted the title of Lady Noel too, or Baroness Wentworth, but for reasons she never explained to me, she retained the name Lady Byron.
One of her first acts as mistress of Kirkby Mallory Hall was to send to my aunt Augusta game from the estate, with a kind note assuring her that she and her children should expect to grow quite fat on venison in the years to come. The Leigh family had struggled with pecuniary difficulties ever since Colonel Leigh had lost his position as equerry to the Prince of Wales after cheating him in the sale of a horse and using regimental funds to cover his gambling debts, and so I’m sure my mother’s gifts were gratefully received.
This was not the first time my mother had shown remarkable, unexpected generosity toward her sister-in-law. Most notably, a few months before I was born, my mother had consented when my father declared his intention to name Augusta and her children the beneficiaries of his will, rather than my mother and me. My grandmother had been appalled that he would leave his son and heir—for I might have been a boy, for all they knew then—only a title and none of his personal wealth, but my mother had known that she could rely on her forthcoming inheritance, while Augusta had nothing, and certainly could expect nothing from Colonel Leigh but more debt and grief. Still, Byron’s apparent preference for his sister over herself must have stung, and I can certainly understand my grandmother’s point of view.
But now my beloved grandmother was gone, and without her, I became profoundly lonely. My mother traveled often to visit friends and to take the waters at various spas, and my grandfather loved me, but as one might expect, a gentleman of nearly seventy-five years was not an ideal playmate for a six-year-old girl. My only companions were my governess, the servants, and a few of my mother’s most loyal friends, mostly spinsters and widows, who came to live with us from time to time.
Though my grandfather usually distanced himself from the womanly business of raising me, I was grateful to him for insisting that I could not be at my books day and night, and that I must be allowed to make friends my own age. Accordingly, a small, select group was assembled, the children of my mother’s most distinguished friends and relations. I became very strongly attached to George Byron, the son of my father’s cousin and presumptive heir, Captain George Anson Byron. Although I was older than young George by two and a half years, I resolved that he would be my dearest friend and confidant. As I had always wanted a sibling, I decreed him my honorary brother and wrote him many heartfelt letters, confessing my most ardent hopes and feelings and dreams. I can only imagine what his mother thought of my girlish passions, for it was she who responded on George’s behalf, at least in the first years of our acquaintance, as he could not yet read or write. Another new friend who could write to me entirely on her own was Fanny Smith, the niece of Colonel Francis Doyle, one of my mother’s most trusted advisors. She was clever and unfailingly cheerful, and she sent me the most amusing tales of the mischief she and her cousins got into, usually at their stingy, disagreeable housekeeper’s expense. If my mother realized how mischievous Fanny was, I doubt she would have let our correspondence continue.
Although I at last had children I could name as friends, Fanny, George, and the others were rarely with me, and so my loneliness and isolation persisted. I think my unhappiness took its toll on my health, for in the autumn of 1823, when I was not quite eight years old, I fell desperately ill. I experienced sharp, throbbing, debilitating headaches that affected my vision so seriously that my physician ordered my education to cease, which meant, of course, that Miss Lamont was promptly sacked. Two experts were consulted, a Dr. Warner and a Dr. Mayo, and they concluded that I suffered from a fullness of the vessels of the head. My mother prescribed her favorite remedy for her own headaches, the “perpetual leech”—the continuous application of a leech to the scalp, a fresh worm being applied immediately after its predecessor was removed. I found this very unpleasant and not at all effective; a disgusting little worm sucking on my head was a constant distraction and prevented me from achieving the quietude of mind and body that I instinctively knew I required.
Once, recalling that dreadful conversation I had overheard between my mother and grandfather in late spring of the previous year, I asked one of my doctors if a particularly astute leech could be trained to drain only the bad blood from me and leave the rest. The doctor looked at me oddly and said, “Leeches cannot be trained. They can only take blood, breed, and die, in their time. They are good for nothing else.”
This discouraged me from any further conversation about leeches.
My mother had mentioned my illness to my aunt Augusta, and she informed my father, who was in Greece at that time, having gone there to fight with the Greeks in their struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. It was not until much later that I learned he was quite frantic with worry about my condition—so upset, indeed, that for several months he could not write in his journal, not until he received word from my mother that I was out of danger. My mother did not write to him directly, of course. He submitted his questions to my aunt Augusta, she dutifully transcribed them in a letter to my mother, my mother addressed her replies to Augusta, and Augusta passed along her letters to my father. I imagine this slowed the delivery of news in both directions, which, given the distance between England and Greece, would not have been swift even if they had been on friendly terms, but having Aunt Augusta act as their translator prevented hostile words from turning into bitter arguments.
In October of 1823—although I did not learn of it until many years later—my father asked Augusta to obtain from my mother an account of my “disposition, habits, studies, moral tendencies, and temper,” as well as my personal appearance. He was very curious whether I was “social or solitary, taciturn or talkative, fond of reading or otherwise.” He wondered, too, what my own unique “tic,” or foible, was, and I thought it generous of him to assume I had only one. Concluding his letter on a note that could have been wry or apprehensive, or perhaps both, he wrote, “I hope the gods have made her anything save poetical—it is enough to have one such fool in the family.”
My mother enjoyed writing up people’s “characters,” lengthy, detailed descriptions of their traits, tastes, aptitudes, and weaknesses. In fact, she found composing these meticulous reports such a pleasant pastime that she often created them for people she had only ju
st met and about whom she knew quite little. She knew me as well as anyone could, of course, and she readily took up her pen to tell Augusta—because, of course, she would not acknowledge that my father was the real audience—all there was worth knowing about me.
“Ada’s prevailing characteristic is Cheerfulness,” my mother wrote, and it was evident even when I was suffering through the worst of my recent illness. Observation was the best developed of my intellectual powers, and the pertinency of my remarks and accuracy of my descriptions were quite advanced for my years. I was not devoid of imagination—here she did not mention her efforts to suppress it—but at present that faculty was devoted to the mechanical, especially the manufacture of little boats and ships of my own design. I particularly enjoyed reading, and now that my vision had been completely restored, I seemed to be making up for the long time I had been deprived of it. I preferred prose to poetry, and I demonstrated some proficiency in music and art. My temper was “open and ingenuous,” although my mother noted, “at an earlier age it threatened to be impetuous, but is now sufficiently under control.” As for my appearance, my form was “tall and robust,” my features “not regular,” my countenance “animated.” She certainly did not make me sound very pretty, but I suppose I was not.
Four months later, in February, my aunt Augusta wrote my mother to say that my father had been elated with this report, and also with my silhouette, which my mother had kindly enclosed with it. At that time he was in Missolonghi in western Greece, where the rebels had triumphed against a fierce siege by the Turks in 1822. With the Ottoman forces threatening a renewed attack, my father had gone to join the Greek rebels at their stronghold there. My father had proudly shown my silhouette to the men of his garrison and spoke often of his high hopes for me.
“He truly does believe himself to be the hero of one of his own poems,” I overheard my mother scoff to her friend Miss Montgomery as she folded the letter and left it on the mantel, but a faint tremor in her voice betrayed her apprehension. Until that moment, I had imagined his travels in Greece to be one great adventure, oblivious to the dangers he could encounter.
I hid my fears and tried to forget them, since I could tell no one. My mother had no idea that I knew half the things I did. She should have included my remarkable skill at eavesdropping in the character she had created about me—but I suppose the omission proves how very skilled I was, since she was unaware of it.
I had fully recovered from my illness by then and had been relieved of the perpetual leech. My doctors decreed that it was safe for me to resume my studies, and I did so with alacrity, under the watchful eye of a new governess, Miss Noble. She was tall, red-haired, and robust, and she was very well traveled and knowledgeable about history. Sometimes she would astonish me with brash, witty asides she thought I either did not hear or would not understand, and occasionally I caught her with a dazed, disconcerted look on her face as if she were quite perplexed as to how she had come to be at Kirkby Mallory as governess to a precocious, lonely little girl. I overheard the housekeeper telling the butler that rumor had it she had been left at the altar when her scoundrel of a fiancé ran off with a foreign heiress. “She is too bold by half and does not know her place,” the housekeeper complained, but I rather liked Miss Noble for that.
One April afternoon, I was studying French pronouns in the nursery, impatient to finish so that I might be permitted to go outside and play in the fresh spring breezes and sunshine. Suddenly I heard a carriage approaching the house, and the bustling of the footmen signaled that an unexpected guest had arrived.
“May I go see who it is?” I asked my governess, and without waiting for an answer, I darted from the room. When Miss Noble called sternly after me, I halted at a particular spot where I could observe part of the foyer if I peered between the balusters. “It’s Captain Byron,” I exclaimed, just as he was escorted out of sight. My heart sank when I realized that he was alone and he had not brought his son George, my honorary brother.
I asked if I might go and welcome him, but Miss Noble steered me back to the nursery. By the time I finished my lessons, the captain had departed, and I was sent out to the garden with strict orders not to disturb my mother in her study. Crestfallen, I went outside to play, alone. Maybe the captain will have brought me a letter from George, I thought, as I swung from a low branch of my favorite oak, and I brightened considerably.
I had not been playing long when a maid brought word that my mother wanted to see me at once. I found her sitting alone in her study, but before I could ask what had become of Captain Byron, she gestured to the chair nearest to hers and said, “Sit down, darling.” Her voice was preternaturally calm, but her face was pale, her eyes red rimmed.
I obeyed, my heart pounding. I clasped my hands together in my lap and waited.
“Ada.” She paused and cleared her throat. “It is my sad duty to inform you that your father is dead.”
“No, he isn’t,” I replied in a very small voice. “He’s in Greece.”
“Yes, Ada, he was in Greece, and it is there that he died.”
For a moment I couldn’t breathe. I stared at her and swallowed hard. “Did a Turk kill him?”
“No. It was a fever, a very sudden and dangerous fever.”
It did not seem possible. “Are you sure? Maybe there’s been a mistake. Maybe it was another Englishman who died, and the Greeks mistook him for my papa.”
My mother’s shoulders slumped almost imperceptibly, and as she uttered a wordless sigh, the impassioned light in her eyes declared that no one could ever mistake Lord Byron for any other Englishman. “I am sure,” she said steadily. “Captain Byron brought me the news himself.”
I began to tremble and then to sob. My mother raised a graceful hand and beckoned, and Miss Noble rushed in to console me so quickly that she must have been waiting just outside the doorway. She led me off to the nursery, but I broke away and ran to my bedroom, where I threw myself upon the coverlet and sobbed.
Despite the estrangement between my parents, when word of my father’s death reached us, Kirkby Mallory plunged into mourning, ceremonial yet deeply felt. Lord Byron deserved certain tributes and honors by virtue of his rank, and as his widow, my mother would ensure that every proper service was performed. To those who would sneer that she fulfilled her duties only to make a favorable show for the public—and I know there were many—I assure you, her grief was real.
So was mine, although my mother did not understand it. “Ada shed many tears when I broke the news to her,” I overheard her tell a friend, herself a widow, who had come to offer condolences. “I believe she wept more from the sight of my agitation, and from the thought that she might someday lose me too, than from any other cause. She knows almost nothing of her father, and a child like her cannot have any real feelings for someone she has never known. It is a great comfort to me that she does not feel any real grief for him.”
But my grief was as real as her own, and I felt it keenly. I mourned the father whom I knew only from glimpses and gleanings, and I mourned what I now realized I could never have—the chance to know him better.
The story of my father’s death filled newspaper columns throughout England and around the world, but my mother and grandfather shielded me as best they could from the lurid details. It was not until later that I learned how he had suffered on his deathbed in Missolonghi, how frantic and disbelieving were the doctors who fought desperately to save his life. According to his loyal valet, Fletcher, who visited my mother in early July, in the fevered delirium of his deathbed, my father had spoken of his wife and child.
“He said, ‘Oh, my poor child! My dear Ada! My God, could I but have seen her!’” Fletcher reported, hat in his hands, his gaze turned respectfully downward. “And then he said, ‘Give her my blessing, and my dear sister, and her children.’”
“Was that all?” my mother cried. “Was there no more?”
“No
, my lady. He then said, ‘Go to Lady Byron, go to her and say— Tell her everything—’ And he went on and on, full near twenty minutes it was, but I couldn’t make out his words.”
“Oh, do try, try,” my mother implored. “What did he want you to tell me?”
“I beg your pardon, my lady. Truly sorry, but I don’t know.” Fletcher hesitated. “He did say one more thing, at the very end.”
“Tell me!”
“He looked at me and said, ‘I want to sleep now.’ Then he rolled onto his back, closed his eyes, and died.”
Soon after his demise, his doctors performed an autopsy, not to determine the cause of death but to discover how a man of such genius differed from other men. They noted that his lungs were extraordinarily capacious and strong, and that his skull was remarkably thick, but they found nothing else unusual that might explain his poetical gifts. They removed his heart, brain, and intestines and placed them in separate containers. Afterward, his remains were placed in a coffin and taken aboard the ship Florida, which set sail on 24 May to carry him home to England.
While the Florida was en route, a fierce debate raged about where my father should be put to rest. He had fled England overshadowed by dark clouds of scandal and debt, but during his self-imposed exile he had become a hero to the Greek people and had redeemed himself in the eyes of many of his own countrymen. Furthermore, it could not be denied that the gifts of his genius, his poetry, had immeasurably enriched the nation. Should Lord Byron, spurned by English society in life, be forgiven and welcomed back with open arms and grief-stricken hearts in death?
The common people, who loved and admired my father despite his irreverence and iniquities, demanded that he be granted a state funeral and interment at Westminster Abbey. My mother, too, publicly expressed her hopes that at the very least he would be honored with a memorial in Poets’ Corner, and when the movement encountered resistance, she composed a poem protesting his exclusion from the ranks of the great men buried there. But her dignified pleas did not move the resolute dean of the abbey, who declared that Lord Byron’s sins were so egregious that neither his remains nor a memorial would be countenanced in Poets’ Corner or any other sanctified place under his jurisdiction.
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