Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  I resolved to do better, and as summer faded into autumn, I amended my behavior sufficiently so that the tension in the household eased, for until then it had felt like a cord stretched between two horses pulling in opposite directions. I was not perfect, and some days were better than others, but over time I observed that my conduct, my studies, and my health were steadily progressing in the right direction.

  By late November, I had regained enough strength and balance that I was able to dispense with the crutches and move about quite well with a cane. A fortnight later, a day before my fifteenth birthday, a specially booked coach delivered a package addressed to me in a hand that seemed familiar, yet not enough so that I could identify the sender. “‘To the Honorable Miss Byron, with every kind and affectionate wish,’” I read aloud. “Oh, there is a smaller note below: ‘With Lady Byron’s permission.’”

  “It is from your aunt Augusta,” my mother said, glancing at the package as she seated herself in the chair facing mine. Both were drawn close to the fireplace to ward off the chill of that frosty morning.

  “Do I have your permission to open it?” I asked.

  “To open it, yes,” she replied, leaving unspoken the question of whether I would be allowed to keep it.

  Carefully I cut the string and unwrapped the paper. Inside I discovered an exquisite prayer book, beautifully bound, with “Ada” embossed on the cover in Old English letters. “How lovely,” I said, moved. I rarely corresponded with my aunt and saw her almost never, which made the gift as rare and meaningful as it was unexpected. “May I keep it?” I remembered to ask.

  My mother held out her hand and I placed the book in it. After opening the cover, turning the first few pages, and giving it a quick inspection from front to back, she nodded and returned it to me.

  As I paged through the prayer book alone in my bedchamber that evening, I imagined my aunt arranging for it to be bound and embossed. I grew wistful thinking how unfortunate it was that I did not get to see her, my only aunt, more frequently, and that I scarcely knew her children, my only cousins. The eldest, Georgiana, had married shortly before my mother and I had embarked on our tour of the Continent; we had not attended the ceremony, although I believe we had both been invited and my mother had sent a gift. Georgiana and her husband had moved into Bifrons soon after we had moved out, their rent paid by my generous mother, and one of her younger sisters, Medora, had recently joined them there for her sister’s confinement, as she was expecting her first child. The sisters were a few years older than I, but it was a shame that we were not friends. Perhaps they had all the friends they wanted, and they had each other and three more siblings as well, but I had almost no one—only my mother, Puff, and an ever-shifting cast of tutors and servants. I longed for siblings, and cousins were certainly close enough to satisfy me, but my mother and my aunt Augusta had become estranged, and I knew my mother would disapprove if I suddenly sought to strengthen our strained ties of kinship.

  Christmas should have been the perfect time to invite family to visit, but I dared not suggest it, and Georgiana’s delicate condition would have made travel impossible even if my mother had consented. A few of my mother’s friends joined us for the holidays instead, but as usual they were a sour, judgmental flock of old hens who evidently defined the word “celebrate” much differently than I did. Thankfully, they departed before Epiphany.

  One snowy evening, as I sat alone in the drawing room with Puff curled up in my lap, stroking her soft fur and making mental notes for a letter I owed Miss Lawrence, my mother entered carrying two books. She seated herself gracefully on the sofa nearest me and, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, said, “I thought I might study a few of Lord Byron’s poems tonight. Would you like me to read them aloud?”

  For a moment I was too dumbfounded to do anything but stare at her. “Yes, please,” I managed to say. “That would be very nice.”

  She read first the exquisite verses on Greece from The Giaour, which I found lovely, moving, and passionately expressed, and when she prompted me for my opinion, I told her so. Next she read “Fare Thee Well,” which afterward I considered an odd choice, for she must have known that my father’s lamentations about his doomed love for my mother and his anguish about his separation from me would discomfit me at the very least. I admired her, however, for reading from Don Juan, which she called only “the satire,” as if wanting to make absolutely sure that I noted the genre and remembered its conventions.

  “It’s very amusing and cleverly written,” I said when she had finished, and then, because I knew she needed to hear it, I added, “but Donna Inez doesn’t resemble you in the slightest. Are you sure he didn’t mean to portray Miss Sophia Frend instead?”

  An involuntary laugh escaped her. “No, Ada, dear. Lord Byron never knew Miss Frend.”

  “Oh. I suppose not, then.” I frowned thoughtfully, then shrugged. “Well, it is poetry, after all, not biography.”

  She smiled, relieved and gratified. “Yes,” she said. “That’s so.”

  She set aside the books then, and we chatted about other things with an ease and amiability that rarely graced our conversations in those days. I could not know if we would ever again read my father’s poems together, but her willingness to do so that night gave me hope that perhaps she did not despise my father as much as she seemed to. Maybe she loved me and my Byron blood more than I had realized.

  Chapter Ten

  Who Would Be Free Themselves Must Strike the Blow

  January–December 1831

  How I wish I could say that after that night, my mother and I achieved a new understanding and we became the dearest of friends and best of companions, but that was not so. I was a precocious, lonely, excitable fifteen-year-old girl, and she was the wise and virtuous Lady Annabella Noel Byron. Conflict between us was inevitable.

  I willingly accept responsibility for most of our quarrels and the pervasive mood of discord, for I was certainly no model of filial respect and obedience. While the cane was a vast improvement over the crutches, I felt frustrated and constrained by my lingering physical limitations, and instead of enduring them with courage and patience, I waged war against them, and when I lost one battle after another, I became ill-tempered and bitter.

  “I would be more comfortable at Kirkby Mallory,” I complained one morning when I had woken up to discover my legs unexpectedly aching and stiff, so difficult to move without pain that my mother had come to help the maid dress me. “The corridors are wider and the air more healthful. I’m sure I would be restored to full health much faster if I could convalesce there.”

  “You will convalesce here,” my mother said firmly, and when I continued to grumble under my breath, she sighed dramatically and left the maid to finish the task of dressing me.

  “Why do you continue to plague her about returning to Kirkby Mallory?” the maid rebuked me as she took up the comb and began running it through my dark curls, none too gently. “Don’t you care about the welfare of your Noel cousins? Not even Robert? You seemed fond of him once.”

  “I am fond of him still,” I said, “but what do the Noel cousins have to do with this?”

  “Everything,” she said, incredulous. “Your mother has given them the living of the estate.”

  My heart plummeted. “Why would she do that?”

  “Because she is generous and kindhearted, and Kirkby Mallory ought to be theirs anyway.” She resumed combing my hair, tugging painfully when the tines caught on a tangle. “The Reverend Thomas Noel is Lord Wentworth’s illegitimate son. Your grandmother, Lady Noel, rest her soul, prevented her brother from marrying the mother. If she had not objected, and they had wed, Lord Wentworth’s estate would have gone to his son rather than his sister.”

  “You mean to say,” I said, stunned, “that my mother inherited an estate that should have gone to Robert Noel and his brothers?”

  “Of course that
’s not what I mean,” she scolded. “The very idea! As a natural son Thomas Noel had no legal claim to the estate. Your grandmother inherited it rightfully, and your benevolent mother has chosen to provide for her Noel cousins. That includes making her cousin Charles Noel her agent for Kirkby Mallory, and buying her cousin Edward that estate in Greece, and paying for her cousins Robert and Thomas to be educated. You know all this, or you should, for you’ll have to decide what to do with Kirkby Mallory when it comes to you, pray God that’s a long time off.”

  I understood it in only the vaguest sense, and no wonder, for my mother would not have entrusted to me the secret of a family scandal. I was stunned to learn that Robert’s father was a natural child, and I felt foolish for not figuring that out long ago, or at least questioning how the Noel cousins were related to us. I was relieved to know that Robert and his brother would be provided for, and I should have been proud of my mother for looking out for them, but as if I were determined to be contrary, I resented her for giving my childhood home to someone else. Her childhood home was Seaham, of course, so she did not cherish Kirby Mallory as I did.

  I knew then that I would never again call Kirkby Mallory home.

  In my unhappiness and isolation, I developed odd habits, which I now look back upon with embarrassment interwoven with sympathetic amusement for my younger self. I would not sleep in my bed, preferring to wrap myself up in a blanket or rug and curl up on the floor. When visitors called and I was obliged to greet them, I refused to embrace anyone, even when prompted. I would kiss no one but my mother, and even she would receive no more than a grudging peck on the cheek. I developed peculiar routines when it came to meals, eating far too much one day, rejecting anything but water the next.

  “You get this from your father,” my mother declared one evening at dinner, after I had pushed aside a plate of perfectly roasted duck. “He always vacillated between fat and slim, and he would adopt the most restrictive diets when he wished to lose a few stone.”

  “I don’t get it only from my father,” I mumbled sullenly, but when she shot me a sharp look, I said no more. Thanks to my many months of inactivity, I had grown quite plump, and I was determined to become slim again and do all I could to thwart Miss Chaloner’s dire prediction that I would never be pretty. This, I thought, was an admirable goal, and my mother of all people should not criticize me for it. Perhaps she was unaware that everyone in the household knew about her own peculiar habit of gorging herself on mutton, her favorite food, and then going out onto the lake or the sea in a small boat until the rocking motion sickened her enough so that it all came back up again. Compared to that, my refusal of meals now and then seemed well above reproach.

  Eventually my mother became so exasperated with me that she took me to a phrenologist. I was somewhat skeptical of this new science, although I was intrigued by the underlying theory that the brain was composed, like the rest of the body, of different organs, each associated with a particular faculty even as the eyes were for sight and the lungs were for breath. It seemed plausible that just as a laborer would develop broad shoulders and bulging arms by strengthening his muscles, exercising certain aspects of the mind would alter the shape of the skull. Phrenologists claimed they could measure the development of the organs by studying the subject’s head, noting the bulges that signified the relatively well-developed organs, and the dips over those that were less developed. Thus it would be possible to discover a person’s character by examining his head by touch, noting the locations of bumps and dips, and comparing these to a “phrenological map,” a porcelain model of a head with the regions of the brain’s organs drawn and labeled on the scalp.

  My mother arranged for a consultation with Dr. James De Ville, the most prominent practical phrenologist and maker of phrenological casts in London. I would have agreed to the examination if only for the diversion of an outing, but by the time we set out for Town, I had become quite curious as to what the doctor might find.

  I adored London, perhaps because I did not know it as well then as I do now, and because my visits were a rare treat in those days, when I relied upon my mother to take me and I still struggled with my awkward gait and my cane. I did not care if my lingering infirmity attracted curious glances, but my mother’s frowns betrayed her embarrassment at my imperfections. That did bother me, but not enough to compel me to stay at home and out of sight.

  The city had undergone astonishing growth since I had lived at Piccadilly Terrace as an infant, with new residences and industrial buildings spreading past Greenwich Park, and the gleaming steel rails of the London and Greenwich railway line slicing through the district of Bermondsey. As we approached, I glimpsed the tall masts of a hundred ships rising above the bustling wharfs, the scattering of chimneys in all directions, the church steeples in the City and the East End reaching higher yet, and rising above it all, the magnificent white dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the paired columns of the West Front flanking the classical portico. All this I observed through a dense cloud of smoke and coal dust, which seemed particularly thick and choking compared to the fresh country air of Richmond upon Thames.

  The streets swarmed with carriages and wagons, oxen and sheep, men on horseback and people on foot, children darting here and there and courting danger with every step, apprentices hurrying off on important business for their masters, aristocrats in the fashionable boroughs and working men and women everywhere else, their attire announcing their professions—a drover here, a washerwoman there. The smell of sewage, manure, and rot was oppressive, but with the aid of a handkerchief pressed to my nose and mouth, I endured it.

  Our carriage took us through the busy streets to Dr. De Ville’s establishment at 367 Strand in Westminster. A butler received us, but the phrenologist himself joined us almost as soon as we crossed the threshold. He was a square, solid man, with curly light brown hair, a small, neat mustache, and the broad, strong hands of a bricklayer, not that I had known many bricklayers.

  “Lady Byron, Miss Byron, welcome,” he greeted us, bowing. “Your visit is truly an honor.”

  He escorted us to a drawing room, where he invited me to sit in a comfortable leather chair with a low back. I seated myself and set my cane within reach upon the floor, suddenly nervous. I grew even more anxious when he put his face close to mine and subjected me to intense scrutiny, as if he were studying an object rather than a girl. He circled the chair, peering at my head from all angles, and when he paused to take notes, a surreptitious glance told me that he was evaluating the overall shape of my head.

  “Now, Miss Byron,” he addressed me suddenly, the first he had spoken since the examination began, except for the occasional “Hmm” or “Right, then.” “At this point, I’m obliged to feel your scalp. You might find it an unfamiliar and unsettling sensation, but your mother will be right here, and if you ever feel too uncomfortable to continue, say the word and I’ll stop.”

  “Very well, Doctor,” I said in a small voice. He had an unusual way of speaking, unlike any other doctor I had met. I could not quite place his accent, but he spoke more like a workingman than a gentleman. I rather liked him for that.

  “I must also warn you,” he continued gravely, “that I will almost certainly disarrange your hair.”

  I muffled a laugh. “That’s fine. I don’t care about my hair.”

  My mother gave a little sniff, and I knew she was thinking that she wished I cared much more about my hair than I did—my hair, and my attire, and the pleasant feminine ways that I neglected to cultivate, since they would go to waste in my sickroom.

  Dr. De Ville rubbed his palms together to warm his hands. “Miss Byron, if I may.”

  I nodded.

  He placed his fingertips upon my scalp, and I sat very still as he explored the geography of my skull. His touch was gentle and pleasant, and not at all intrusive, and I wondered if this was how Puff felt when I stroked her fur. From time to time I stole glances at
his face, which was a study in focus and concentration, but nothing I glimpsed there gave me any indication of what he might be learning about my character, qualities that perhaps even I was unaware of.

  After a time, he lifted his hands from my head, thanked me with a courteous nod, and returned to his desk, where he wiped his hands on a handkerchief and began writing down his observations. I threw a questioning look over my shoulder to my mother, but her gaze was fixed on the phrenologist. In her pale face and furrowed brow, I saw that whereas I awaited the results with cheerful curiosity, my mother felt only apprehension.

  Soon the doctor set his pen aside, straightened, nodded to my mother, and gestured to the chair where I sat. “Lady Byron, if you will?”

  I reached for my cane and rose, but as I went to exchange places with my mother, she frowned at me briefly and looked to the phrenologist. “Dr. De Ville, would it be possible for my daughter to wait elsewhere during my examination?”

  “Certainly.” He bowed, left the room, and returned moments later with a woman I assumed was his housekeeper. “Miss Byron, Mrs. Halsey would be happy to offer you a cup of tea in the dining room, if you’d like.”

  “Thank you.” I could hardly refuse such an obvious dismissal. I nodded to the doctor and my mother and followed the housekeeper from the room.

  Mrs. Halsey made me an excellent cup of tea, offered me a biscuit, and kindly kept me company while I waited. We had a very nice chat about cats, and before long the doctor appeared and invited me back to the drawing room to hear the results of my examination.

  My mother was seated on the sofa, and when she smiled brightly and beckoned me to sit beside her, I knew that she had already heard her own results and was very pleased with them. My stomach lurched slightly as I braced myself on my cane and sat down, eyeing the doctor warily as he reviewed his notes, the pages spread out before him on the desk near the porcelain phrenological map.