Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “Home is wherever we make it, and you’ll like the villa,” my mother replied, which did not answer my question but would have to suffice since nothing else was forthcoming. The villa was a significant improvement over Bifrons, but it was not home, not to me, and I thought it was inexplicably ridiculous that my mother should continue to rent temporary lodgings for us when she was the mistress of the spacious, comfortable, elegant, and very dear Kirkby Mallory Hall. Since my mother was so often away, wasn’t it only fair that I should choose where we lived?

  Unfortunately, my opinion was not sought.

  As we settled into our new lodgings, I awaited with some trepidation to be introduced to my new governess. To my surprise, my mother informed me that she had decided not to hire one. Instead she had recruited a few of her most intellectual, Nonconformist friends to direct my education. Unlike many of my nurses and governesses, they admired her excessively and could be trusted to do as she bade without question.

  The first, Mr. William Frend, was a mathematician and former clergyman of the Church of England who had converted to Unitarianism, which had resulted in his dismissal from Cambridge. Later he was prosecuted for publishing a tract denouncing abuses in the Church of England and condemning much of its liturgy, earning my mother’s approval and admiration with his austere doctrine and the courage and dignity he had shown throughout his trials. His daughter, Miss Sophia Frend, one of my mother’s closest and most trusted friends, was another of my new educational advisors. She disliked me intensely—I have no idea why—but I was unaware of this at the time, as she craved my mother’s friendship so much that she hid her true feelings. Dr. William King, another devout Unitarian, and his wife, Mary, were enlisted to watch over my moral development, while Miss Arabella Lawrence, director of a school in Liverpool, supervised other subjects.

  Since they were not all living with us at Hanger Hill—even now the very idea makes me shudder—most of our lessons were conducted by correspondence, meaning that I studied mostly on my own, wrote them long letters about my progress, and awaited their advice and criticism in their replies. There were many aspects of this system I enjoyed—a refreshing sense of independence, for one—but I often thought wistfully of my lessons with Miss Stamp and Miss Thorne, the companionship, the conversations, the more immediate responses to my many questions. I soon grew accustomed to the new arrangements, however, and I worked very hard, not only to please my teachers and my mother, but also to satisfy my own insatiable curiosity.

  My education was cruelly interrupted in early 1829 when I contracted a terrible case of measles, which soon worsened dramatically, attacking my limbs and my sight. I suffered vicious convulsions and sudden, stabbing pains so agonizing that they took my breath away. Wretched, feverish, and helpless, I lay in my sickbed utterly powerless to resist as I became paralyzed and almost completely blind.

  The fear and grief I felt as my world slowly went dark is greater than I can describe. I could no longer see my mother’s face, but her worry and fear were evident in the strain in her voice as she consulted with my physicians and in her forced cheer as she read aloud to me from a chair pulled close to my bedside. I could not forget that she had stayed away when I was afflicted with chicken pox years before, but she had hurried home to nurse and comfort my grandfather on his deathbed. Even in my fevered state, I was more than capable of analyzing this evidence and drawing one bleak, terrifying conclusion.

  For weeks I lingered close to death, but gradually the worst of my symptoms eased and my doctors concluded that I was out of immediate danger. Little by little my vision returned—an answer to my most ardent, desperate prayers—and I regained the use of my arms and hands, although the muscles were weak and reluctant to obey my commands. My legs were much slower to recover, rendering me bedridden for months. Autumn came before I could stand unassisted, and even then I could not walk on my own. I had to be carried up and down stairs, so rather than continuously trouble the footmen, for most of those endless days I remained isolated in my room, with Puff as my only companion. By day I gazed longingly out my window at the gardens I had once strolled through without appreciating the privilege. At night I dreamed of my long rambles through Kirkby Wood, of my climb in the foothills of Mont Blanc, and I woke with tears in my eyes.

  When it became evident that I would not die, my mother decided that my lengthy convalescence afforded me an excellent opportunity to focus on my studies. I seized upon this plan like a rope thrown to one drowning, and as soon as my vision recovered enough to permit reading, I took up my books with a defiant, determined zeal. My correspondence with Miss Lawrence resumed, and every few weeks she came to Hanger Hill to tutor me in person. As my mother was often away seeking cures for her own ailments at her favorite spas, I welcomed Miss Lawrence’s visits with an overabundance of gratitude that must have seemed very pitiable. I certainly pitied myself.

  The sluggish pace of my recovery frustrated me to no end, and when my mother’s most esteemed doctors acknowledged that they could contrive no diagnosis to explain the persistence of my illness, I began to despair that I might remain an invalid for the rest of my life. Compounding my distress, on several occasions I overheard the physicians telling my mother that in the absence of an obvious physical cause, they suspected my lingering paralysis had a hysterical origin. This utter nonsense infuriated me. Just before the onset of my affliction, I had been devastated when I was denied the chance to fly. Why would I willingly also relinquish the ability to walk and run and ride?

  In early spring of 1830, my mother surmised that a change of scene might do my health some good, so she moved us to another rented residence, Mortlake Terrace, a redbrick Georgian mansion on seven acres in the borough of Richmond upon Thames. “Why can we not return to Kirkby Mallory?” I asked petulantly as I was conveyed out the front door on an air mattress, the only remotely comfortable way I could travel.

  “Mortlake Terrace is very pleasant and exceptionally healthful,” my mother said, as always offering an unsatisfying, oblique reply to my persistent question. “Your room offers a splendid view of the river, and there are several footpaths on the shore above, ideal for a stroll in fair weather.”

  “What good are footpaths to me?” I retorted crossly as I was loaded into the coach, mattress and all, and my crutches were passed in after me. “I will not be strolling anywhere anytime soon.”

  My mother did not dignify my complaint with a reply, but finished supervising our departure while I reclined in the coach, silently fuming.

  How impatient I had become in my infirmity, how demanding, how fractious! Not for me was the grateful stoicism of a long-suffering heroine of romance. I wanted to be strong, to run, to dance, not to languish in a sickbed, with lessons my only distraction and Puff’s antics my only amusement. I was well aware that other young ladies my age were preparing to enter Society by learning dance, fashion, manners, and the sorts of accomplishments that would emphasize their refinement.

  I knew, too, that the point of all this was not self-improvement, my mother’s highest ambition, but to prepare them to entice and secure a husband, at the proper time and season. I, too, was expected to marry someday, but in my infirmity, the only feminine accomplishment I could pursue was music. My mother arranged for me to have lessons in singing and in playing the harp, which I took to readily, not only because I had remarkable natural talent, but also because I had little else to do but practice.

  I was ambivalent about marriage, as it had certainly not worked out well for either of my parents, and looked upon it as a duty I would be expected to perform sometime in the blessedly distant future. Even so, when my few approved friends—Fanny Smith and the other daughters and nieces of my mother’s acquaintances whom in my longing and loneliness I resolutely claimed as friends though we rarely met—wrote about their dance lessons and new dresses, I felt as if they were leaving me behind.

  But since the allegedly healthful air of Mortlake
and the views of the river Thames, which I grudgingly admitted were splendid, had not yet worked their healing magic upon my uncooperative limbs, I remained bedridden. Since I had nothing else to do, I studied, and my lessons advanced apace. I excelled at geometry and delighted in solving problems, which were to me entertaining little puzzles, and I was fascinated by a subject newly undertaken, astronomy. German and Latin were also added to my curriculum, and I delved into them with great enjoyment.

  In time I began to walk about indoors on crutches, but since my doctors admonished me not to overtire myself, most of my exercise was undertaken in secret. Choosing hours when I knew the rest of the household would be preoccupied with other duties, I would hobble from my room as stealthily as I could and set off to explore our new lodgings.

  One afternoon when I was feeling particularly rebellious, I invaded the sanctity of the room my mother had claimed as her study. The housemaids had sorted her papers and books efficiently and neatly. I would have been astonished had they not, since her frequent moves had given them many opportunities to practice. Even so, several items lay strewn about the desk in a less orderly fashion, as if my mother had been examining them before her departure and the maids had moved nothing when they cleaned rather than disarrange whatever indiscernible order she might have imposed.

  Curious, I hobbled closer to the desk, and after glancing warily at the doorway, I let my gaze fall to the top of the desk. I could not be accused of prying if I happened to see something lying in plain sight.

  The object that first drew my attention was a book produced by my father’s publisher, John Murray of Albemarle Street, very recently from the pristine look of it. “Life of Lord Byron, with His Letters and Journals, Volume One,” I read aloud, and at once I recalled fragments of a conversation I had overheard between my mother and one of her lawyers. She and my father’s best friend, Sir John Cam Hobhouse, had long fought against the publication of biographies of my father, for they would assuredly be filled with scandalous anecdotes, half-truths, and utter fabrications. In the absence of an official account of his life, however, spurious works sprang up like mushrooms after a rain. Eventually Hobhouse and Murray agreed to allow Thomas Moore to produce a biography, if only to undermine the success of a competing work they both knew would be outrageously offensive.

  Balancing on one crutch, I took the leather-bound volume in hand and examined the title page and frontispiece, an engraving of what presumably was meant to be my father and two companions gazing across a lake at a view of Constantinople. I was tempted to settle into the armchair and read, but I would surely be discovered if I lingered there, and I could not take the book with me without setting off a frantic search. Reluctantly I set it down exactly where I had found it.

  To the left of the books were several letters, all with the seals broken, some lying open and easily inspected, enough to tell me that my mother and my aunt Augusta were engaged in some new legal altercation about my father’s marriage settlement. Their ongoing disputes bored and exasperated me, so I left the letters alone and spared not even a glance for the documents stacked beneath them.

  My gaze fell next upon a small, neat pile of pamphlets in the center of the desk, and the title was enough to make me nearly tumble off my crutches—“Remarks Occasioned by Mr. Moore’s Notices of Lord Byron’s Life.” My mother had written, and had apparently arranged to be privately published, a response to Mr. Moore’s biography of my father.

  I simply did not have the power to resist reading it, but in my condition I could hardly make a swift escape if someone came upon me unexpectedly. I sized up the height of the pile: How many pamphlets were there? Had my mother counted them and would she remember the number? I quickly decided that there were enough that a single pamphlet would not be missed, and so I snatched one, tucked it into my pocket, and made my awkward way from the room, thoughts racing. What had possessed my mother to respond publicly to Mr. Moore’s biography, when for as long as I could remember, she had resolutely followed a policy of dignified, righteous silence, allowing her lawyers to speak for her while she remained above the fray?

  In the solitude of my bedchamber, I settled into an armchair near the window, breathless from exertion, but when I retrieved the pamphlet from my pocket and began to read, my pulse only quickened. In response to whatever Mr. Moore had alleged, my mother had composed a detailed account of the events that had led to the Separation. “Domestic details ought not to be intruded on the public attention,” she began, sounding very much like the Lady Byron I knew. “If, however, they are so intruded, the persons affected by them have a right to refute injurious charges.”

  She proceeded to do exactly that, describing my father’s erratic behavior, her consultations with physicians, the unbearable circumstances that finally compelled her to flee Piccadilly Terrace with her infant daughter. She defended my grandparents against charges that she had parted from her husband “in perfect harmony,” and that it was not until they turned her against him that she had sought a formal separation. On the contrary, until she arrived at Kirkby Mallory on the night of 15 January, Lord and Lady Noel had had been “unacquainted with the existence of any causes likely to destroy my prospects of happiness; and when I communicated to them the opinion which had been formed concerning Lord Byron’s state of mind, they were most anxious to promote his restoration by every means in their power.”

  My heart thudded hollowly in my chest. My grandparents had wanted my mother and father to reconcile? My mother had believed he could be cured or redeemed? Never once had they given me any indication of this—but, of course, they had rarely spoken of my father in my presence, not if it could be avoided.

  I read on, learning of my mother’s uncertainty regarding whether my father’s behavior sprang from mental derangement or from moral deficiency, for if the latter were the cause, “nothing could induce me to return to him.” When Lord Byron rejected her father’s letter requesting an amicable separation, Lady Noel had consulted the lawyer Dr. Stephen Lushington, who reviewed the facts as my grandmother presented them and concluded that while a separation would be justified, the circumstances “were not of that aggravated description as to render such a measure indispensable.” After my mother had visited him a fortnight later, however, Dr. Lushington “was, for the first time, informed by Lady Byron of facts utterly unknown, as I have no doubt, to Sir Ralph and Lady Noel. On receiving this additional information, my opinion was entirely changed: I considered a reconciliation impossible.” Not only that, but if a reconciliation were attempted, he could not, “professionally or otherwise, take any part toward effecting it.”

  “‘Facts utterly unknown’?” I murmured. What were these facts? What could my mother have confided to the lawyer that would have caused him to entirely reverse his opinion? What could my father have done to make the idea of reuniting him and my mother so abhorrent?

  My thoughts flew to the portrait that had once hung in my grandfather’s smoking and billiards room, of the heavy curtain that had concealed my father from my sight, of my mother’s fears of the bad Byron and Gordon blood that flowed through my veins just as it had flowed through his. What had he done? I knew he had been unfaithful, but he must have done something infinitely worse, something unimaginable—

  I realized that my cheeks were wet with tears, and I could not say when I had begun to weep. Hands trembling, I hastily wiped my face with my fingertips, folded the pamphlet, and hauled myself across the room to hide it in my wardrobe. I wanted to know, and yet I dreaded to know, so it was just as well that I could never confront my mother about these dreadful facts utterly unknown.

  I could say nothing about what I had learned, nor could I ask the questions tormenting me, but the turmoil I fought to suppress manifested itself in other ways, in disobedience, impertinence, and argumentation. With my mother I was withdrawn and quick-tempered, either remaining indifferent and stubbornly mute in her presence, or arguing about nearly every w
ord she spoke. Finally, her serenity shattered. “Your prevailing, indeed, your besetting fault at this time is a disposition to conversational litigation,” she exclaimed over breakfast one morning when I contested her remark that poached eggs were more delicious than hard-boiled.

  “What is ‘conversational litigation’?” I asked scornfully, casting my gaze heavenward as if praying for deliverance from such an insufferable parent.

  “I can give it no other name,” she replied, her eyes snapping with anger and indignation. “You go to law with me more frequently than with anyone else. It is very necessary that this habit should be checked, for it is both disagreeable and inconsistent with the respect owed to me.”

  “There are certain facts utterly unknown that might explain why I disagree with you,” I retorted, hardly believing my recklessness even as I spoke. But she missed the allusion, declaring that I disagreed with her only to be disagreeable. I would have been lying if I had denied it.

  As the summer passed, I began to regret my impudence. I could not deny that in recent weeks I had sought out argument for argument’s sake, but only with my mother. My first inclination was to blame the pamphlet, but when I forced myself to reflect unflinchingly upon my behavior, I realized that whenever I took up any issue, I spoke about it with as much anxiety and vehemence as if the fate of the nation depended upon my words.

  For this, I blamed my illness. Throughout my lengthy convalescence, I had lived a quiet and unvaried life for the sake of my health, with so little stimulation and activity that every small matter—and except for the pamphlet they had all been small matters—took on an increased significance, so that the most minor of incidents became to me issues as important as the French Revolution had been to Charles X. I could not expect anyone else to understand why I argued about what were to them the merest trifles but were to me equivalent to the loss of a kingdom.