Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  In the end, it was decided that my father would be buried in the Byron family vault at the church in Hucknall Torkard, not far from Newstead Abbey.

  The Florida reached the Thames Estuary on 29 June, and a few days later, my father’s closest friend, Sir John Hobhouse, arrived to escort his remains on the final stage of the journey. Many years later, Hobhouse told me that the sight of the ship struck him like a physical blow, his grief rendered all the more painful by the sight of my father’s beloved dogs playing on the ship’s deck. When he claimed my father’s coffin, he requested that the lid be raised so that he might gaze one last time upon his dear friend’s face, but thankfully, he spared me the description of what he beheld.

  My father’s body lay in state in London for several days at the home of Sir George Edward Knatchbull in Great George Street, Westminster, where vast throngs of mourners came to pay their respects. Afterward, the coffin and the two urns holding his brain and heart were placed onto a gleaming black hearse for the journey to his final resting place. The cortege passed Westminster Abbey, where no memorial but the slow tolling of its deep bell was offered him, up Whitehall and Tottenham Court Road and through the city, an astonishing procession of forty-seven carriages following slowly behind. At the tollbooth leading to the Great North Road, the carriages halted and the hearse proceeded northward toward Nottingham alone—but not quite alone, for crowds of the common folk had gathered along both sides of the road to witness its process, and bells tolled in every village it passed, and every night when the hearse paused on its route, great multitudes gathered to mourn and honor him.

  On 12 July, thousands of people rose early and lined the streets of Nottingham to meet the hearse when it arrived at five o’clock in the morning. It halted at the Blackamoor’s Head Inn, where the coffin and urns were carried inside to a room draped in black fabric, adorned with the Byron coat of arms, and illuminated by six tall pillar candles. From dawn until midafternoon, thousands of mourners were admitted in groups of twenty to file past the coffin, lost in thought, murmuring prayers, many openly weeping. Thousands more, determined to pay their respects, anxious that the body of their hero would be taken away before their turns came, struggled with the constables assigned the task of keeping the crowd in orderly queues.

  Later the coffin was returned to the hearse, which carried my father the last eight miles he would ever travel. Clad in mourning black, a great number of people followed on foot, while others stood by the side of the road to watch the funeral cortege go by, the procession swelling as it passed through each village along the way. When it at last reached Hucknall Torkard, the church was already packed with tearful, somber onlookers who had arrived hours before the funeral began at half past three o’clock, to be sure of gaining entrance for the last act of Byron’s brief but brilliant life.

  Hobhouse was there, and Fletcher, and others my father had called great friends, but my mother and I did not attend. Her health was too fragile to hazard the ordeal, my mother said. Tearfully I begged her to allow Miss Noble to take me instead, but she said it would not be appropriate for me to go without her. “Everyone would stare at you,” she warned when I protested.

  I quaked at the thought of so many pairs of mournful eyes fixed upon me searchingly, hungrily, and I immediately acquiesced. And so we marked the sorrowful day at home, in quiet reflection.

  In the days that followed, I opened the precious golden locket my father had sent me and touched his dark brown curl so often that it is a wonder I did not damage them both. This precious relic was all that I would ever have of my father that was just for me. His poetry was a greater artifact of his life, but his words belonged to the world. The locket and the curl it protected were mine alone.

  Except for the ring that I would receive later, he had left me no other bequest—not a single book, portrait, memento, nothing. All went to my aunt Augusta, as he had decided before I was born. That included his personal wealth of about one hundred thousand pounds, but not Newstead Abbey, as it had been sold, and not his title, for that went to his closest male relative, his cousin Captain George Anson Byron, now the seventh Baron Byron. In another act of selfless generosity, my mother immediately bestowed upon the new Lord Byron her marriage juncture of two thousand pounds per annum, providing him and his family with a living they badly needed.

  A cynic would say that my mother, now a wealthy widow, could well afford to make that gift, but she was under no obligation to provide for her husband’s successor. I firmly believe that most people would have kept the money for themselves and spent the windfall improving their own estates or buying themselves land, horses, and finery in abundance. I have always been proud of my mother for her generosity, even as I regretted that she had not offered it more frequently to me.

  With my father’s death, my mother had become financially independent, empowered to live exactly as she wished without deferring to any man, a situation known to very few women of the time. It was little wonder that she never for a moment considered remarrying. She could not enjoy her new freedom, however, thanks to the press, who twisted their lamentations for the great poet into torment for his widow. She was subjected to slander and ridicule, her actions preceding the Separation dragged out and aired before the public once more, her every word parsed, her every decision regarding my upbringing questioned, her absence from his funeral rites condemned. Even her generosity to Captain Byron was misrepresented as parsimonious and grudgingly given.

  Nor were her tormentors limited to newspapermen, whose words were damaging but ephemeral. Even before my father was buried, advertisements appeared for a spurious “memoir” allegedly based upon the manuscript my father had sent to his publisher in 1820, which was said to contain “the private correspondence of Lord Byron.” That the author was a distant relative of my father’s, shamefully exploiting their acquaintance, appalled my mother and outraged my grandfather. Hobhouse, my father’s executor, successfully obtained an injunction to halt its publication, but after much legal wrangling in the English courts, the unscrupulous author simply had the book published in France. My father’s loyal friend also fought the publication of a biography written by the poet Thomas Medwin, a cousin of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who introduced him to my father in 1821 during their sojourn in Pisa. Hobhouse lost that battle, and in October, six months after my father’s death, Medwin’s Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron, Noted During a Residence with His Lordship at Pisa in the Years 1821 and 1822 cluttered the bookshops. Although the publisher prefaced the volume with a disclaimer, both Hobhouse and my father’s publisher, John Murray, threatened to sue. My aunt Augusta begged my mother to join her in a public denunciation of “that Vile Book,” but my mother demurred, asserting that it would be wiser to appear as if they had never read it.

  Beneath this ongoing assault, it is little wonder that my mother’s health suffered. She lost weight, could not sleep, and suffered headaches and ailments of the stomach her physician could not explain. Restlessness overtook her again, as it had years before when the full burden of the Separation had settled heavily upon her shoulders. As before, she traveled from the home of one friend to that of another, from seaside resort to tranquil spa town, as if she could outpace her heartache. I wished she had taken me with her, but she could not regain her strength and vitality with me around to distract her, so I remained at Kirkby Mallory Hall with my grandfather and governess. I wrote my mother many letters, endeavoring to be cheerful, assuring her of my progress in my studies, hoping that she would conclude that I had improved myself enough to be good company, so that she would return to me.

  In September, Miss Noble took me to London to see the Florida, which had remained in port since carrying my father’s remains home from Greece. She was a fine, reassuringly strong ship, with a look that promised swiftness, and it comforted me to think that my father would have had a safe and comfortable passage on his last journey upon the sea. My eyes filled with tears at the si
ght of it, but I was brave and did not let them fall. I knew somehow that this was the closest I would come to visiting my father’s grave until I was a woman grown and, like my mother, could decide for myself.

  As the months passed and my loneliness continued unabated, and as I consumed reams of paper in letters chasing after my mother, I surely had suffered all the losses a little girl could be expected to endure in such a brief span of time. And yet less than a year after my father died, on 15 March 1825, my beloved grandfather also passed away. In his last weeks, when his doctors confirmed that his health was precipitously declining, my mother had rushed home from her travels and had cared for him tenderly until the end.

  Now Grandpapa, too, was gone. Only my mother was left to me, and her health was ever fragile, or so she said. A terrible fear seized me then, and never relented, that at any moment Death would come to claim her as well, leaving me utterly alone in the world, unloved and unprotected.

  Chapter Seven

  New Shores Descried Make Every Bosom Gay

  March 1826–November 1827

  Relentless travel did not quell my mother’s wanderlust, and in early 1826 she decided to uproot our entire household from Kirkby Mallory and decamp to Bifrons House near Canterbury in Kent. The estate grounds were quite pretty, with green, gently rolling hills that overlooked picturesque farmlands, but the house was smaller, darker, and draftier than home, and no matter how well the housemaids scrubbed and swept, to me it always smelled faintly of dust, wet boots, and old cheese.

  When my mother announced that she had leased Bifrons House for a year with an option to renew, my heart plummeted. Kirkby Mallory was my home, and even though it echoed with the absence of my beloved grandparents, I longed to return. Still, I held out hope that having chosen this particular residence herself, my mother would be willing to settle here with me for a while. To my great disappointment, as soon as she discovered that she was no happier there than anywhere else, she departed for an extended visit with her friend Lady Gosford at Worlingham Hall in Suffolk.

  I had scarcely become accustomed to my new surroundings when Miss Noble, too, left me. She left quite suddenly, without giving notice. On her last day with us, she came to my room quite early in the morning and stroked my hair until I woke. “Take care of yourself, sweetheart,” she said, smiling wistfully. “Keep to your maths and your science, but let some poetry in now and then too. A little wonder and imagination never hurt anyone.” She bent to kiss my cheek, told me good-bye, and left the room. Bemused, I went back to sleep, and it was not until morning that I learned she had gone for good, affronting nearly everyone. Astonishment fueled speculation that she disliked the retiring country life and had found a more amenable situation in London, or that she had run off to America with a handsome doctor she had no intention of marrying. I had become very fond of Miss Noble and I protested whenever I heard such slander, and out of loyalty I did not tell them that she had come to my room before dawn to say good-bye, or that she had encouraged me to use my imagination, which my mother claimed would lead to my utter destruction—a truth I believed less and less with each passing year.

  My mother was greatly displeased that Miss Noble’s sudden departure required her to return to Bifrons to interview prospective replacements. She was more displeased still to find me unhappy, lonely, clingy, and demanding. “Your letters are lively and cheerful,” she said, and she made a strange, involuntary gesture as if she were brushing my disgraceful neediness off her sleeves like dust.

  Of course my letters were cheerful. I wanted her to come home, and wasn’t she more likely to return to a pleasant daughter than a resentful one?

  Before long she hired a new governess, a Miss Stamp, whose name I impudently ran together in my mind to signify that she had stamped something badly—misspeak, mistake, mis-stamp. Her business at home complete, my mother was off again, this time to Seaham to check in on the Infant School. I was so annoyed with my mother for leaving so soon to visit with children other than myself that I admit I did not make my new governess’s first weeks at Bifrons very pleasant, and it is a wonder that she stayed on. Miss Stamp must have made some complaint or warning about my behavior, however, because when my mother next returned, she called me into her study. “I understand that you have been rather lonely here,” she said, a trace of disapproval in her voice.

  “Yes, Mama,” I cautiously replied, wondering if a punishment was in store.

  To my surprise, she smiled. “I believe I have a solution.”

  My heart soared, and for a moment I thought she was going to either promise to stop traveling so often or offer to bring me along, but instead she turned her head toward the door. “Come in now, John,” she called.

  In walked one of the footmen carrying a tiny basket, from which came a tiny mewling sound. “Oh!” I cried, bounding out of my chair and rushing over to see. Curled up in the basket was a little bundle of dark gray fur, with a pattern of black fur almost resembling stripes. The kitten’s four paws and the tip of her tail were white, and her tiny claws were fine and needle sharp.

  “This new friend will keep you company when I’m away,” my mother said.

  “Thank you, Mama,” I exclaimed in a hushed voice so that I would not frighten the kitten. My mother disliked keeping animals in the house, so I understood what a very great gift this was indeed. “May I hold her?”

  “You’d better. She’s yours to love and care for, your responsibility.”

  Gently, I lifted the soft bundle of fur from the basket, sat down cross-legged on the floor, and cradled the darling little creature in my lap. She mewled and yawned, making me giggle, and I gently touched my fingertip to each little paw, as soft and snowy white as thistledown.

  “I’m going to call you Puff,” I declared, and I bent to kiss the top of her head between her ears.

  In the months that followed, Puff and I became great friends. Even as I discovered in her a delightful playmate, Miss Stamp found an effective tool for enforcing my good behavior. If I finished a lesson promptly and well, I might have five extra minutes to play with Puff afterward. If I fidgeted through a lecture or spoke impertinently, I could not cuddle Puff during my rest time. I had never been more obedient, and thenceforth when my mother traveled, instead of sending her wistful pleas to come home, I filled my letters with enthusiastic reports of Puff’s antics and habits and growth.

  In early June, when my mother went to London on a matter of business, she left me in the care of Miss Stamp and Miss Louisa Chaloner, one of her spinster friends. I had finished my lessons for the afternoon, having earned effusive praise for flawlessly reciting my multiplication tables, and I was happily romping with Puff in the drawing room, pretending not to hear Miss Chaloner’s requests that I come wash my hands, brush my hair, and go down for my dinner. Suddenly I realized that I was very hungry, and I cried, “I don’t need to wash and brush. I want to have dinner now.”

  “Nonsense, my dear girl,” protested Miss Chaloner. “Someone with your looks must always make the extra effort to be tidy.”

  That brought me up short, as if she had seized me by the scruff of my neck. “What do you mean, someone with my looks?”

  “I only mean that you shall never be pretty, but that should never prevent you from being clean and tidy.” She drew herself up and regarded me officiously down the length of her long nose. “You might always have a good countenance and be good-looking, but you must know that you shall never be pretty.”

  I swallowed hard. “I didn’t know that I never shall be,” I said, feigning indifference, pretending that I was well aware of the sorry state of my looks, although in truth, I was hearing it for the first time. “I had hoped I might improve as I grow up.”

  “Perhaps you shall,” she said, nodding indulgently, but I knew she didn’t mean it.

  After that I did not have much of an appetite, and when Miss Stamp accused me of sulking—she had not witnessed t
he exchange in the drawing room—I made an effort to nibble a piece of bread. All day long I mulled over Miss Chaloner’s words, and later that evening, I took up pen and paper and wrote down my reflections in a letter to my mother, the imperfections of my handwriting betraying my emotion. I repeated what her friend had said about my looks, but not wanting to seem a tattletale, I said that she had spoken “by accident.” “I cannot but say that I feel a little regret,” I admitted. “On the other hand there are advantages. There are many, many people who are very much liked and loved who are not pretty. Then too there are many people who are very beautiful and very vain—as I should be, I am sure, if I were pretty—and in consequence, they are very much disliked. And after all, of what consequence is it? None. Then why should we care for it?”

  I went on at length about the dangers of vanity, and as I sealed the letter, I hoped my mother would be proud of me for my dignified acceptance of my fate never to be pretty. I sent a second letter to my friend Fanny Smith, who promptly replied that she was certain I would be a great beauty when I was grown, and that “the wicked beast Chaloner” would have an apoplexy from jealousy. This cheered me up quite a lot. Although I could not tell my mother, I also found comfort in the fairy tales Miss Thorne had told me. The heroines of her stories triumphed not because they were pretty but because they were kind, clever, and brave. Thus I might still live happily ever after.