Enchantress of Numbers

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  This question of uncertainty I delicately placed before my mother, and then I posed another, one that had been troubling me since the beginning. “I should like sometime to know how you came to suspect something so monstrous,” I wrote. “The natural intimacy and familiarity of a Brother and Sister certainly could not suggest it to any but a very depraved and vicious mind, which yours assuredly was not. I cannot help fancying that my father himself must have given you some very clear hints of this. He enjoyed taunting you with his crimes.”

  “All my life I have wanted a sibling,” I said ruefully to William as I sealed the letter, “and now my mother will accuse me of wanting to deny my sister.”

  “Under the circumstances, it is perfectly understandable why you should want to,” said William shortly. His respect and reverence for my mother had long bordered on worship, but recently he had taken to wondering aloud why she had chosen to reveal such dreadful secrets to the benefit of absolutely no one, and why now.

  I could only speculate, and none of the answers I came up with reflected well upon her.

  Regardless of how we felt about my mother, her motives, and the troubled young woman she insisted was my half sister, we were obliged to meet Medora. Our plans to travel to Paris in the first week of April proceeded apace, but in late March, William came down with influenza. Although he was soon out of danger, by the first day of April, it was evident that he would not be well enough to make the journey.

  “I dread the thought of traveling without you,” I told him as I sat on the edge of his bed, applying a cool cloth to his brow to soothe his fever.

  “Then don’t go,” he said hoarsely, interrupted by a fit of coughing. “I fail to see how meeting her will benefit you.”

  “Perhaps meeting me will benefit her,” I said, knowing that I would make the journey despite my misgivings. No excuse short of fatal illness would have satisfied my mother—and I will confess that I had become curious to meet Medora, as one is perversely compelled to push a thumb into a bruise to discover just how badly it hurts.

  I enjoyed the sea voyage across the Channel, wishing only that it could have lasted longer, both to prolong my enjoyment and to delay my arrival in Paris. When I finally arrived at the door of 22 Place Vendôme, I was fatigued from my travels and somewhat wary, which may have contributed to the confusion I felt when my mother welcomed me with open arms and kisses upon both cheeks, beaming so cheerfully that I almost did not recognize her. Bewildering me further was the absence of any sign of Medora and Marie, whom I assumed were residing with her. When I delicately inquired, my mother explained that she had settled them in an apartment in a different wing of the house, so that neither would be forced upon the other, nor would Medora encounter any of my mother’s visitors unless she had been specifically invited to meet them.

  “Would you like to meet her?” my mother asked, studying me expectantly.

  The only possible answer was yes, so I nodded, and my mother sent a maid hurrying off to fetch Medora and Marie. In the meantime she led me to a sitting room on the second floor overlooking the street, beautifully furnished in gold and white damask with watercolor landscapes of the French countryside on the walls and vases of fresh flowers everywhere. We seated ourselves, and a moment later, a tall, slender, dark-haired woman entered holding the hand of a little girl who looked to be about six years old, her brown eyes solemn, her chestnut hair held back from a sweet, heart-shaped face by a broad white ribbon and bow. Fixing her solemn gaze upon me, the little girl snatched her hand away from her mother, who made no attempt to reclaim it.

  “Come here, my dears,” my mother beckoned. Marie hurried to her and climbed up on her lap, while Medora glided sedately after her and took the armchair closest to me. My mother introduced us and we exchanged the usual perfunctory remarks, all the while fixing each other with unabashedly appraising looks. Medora was strikingly pretty, with bold features and a complexion reminiscent of Spanish gentility, and although my mother had gone on at length about her poor health, she seemed as alert and strong as anyone in the bloom of youth, albeit a trifle too thin.

  Medora politely inquired after William and the children, and after she and my mother tutted sympathetically about his influenza and nodded approvingly at my accounts of the children’s recent accomplishments, the conversation turned to my journey, my first impressions of Paris, the sights my mother and Medora were eager to show me, and what dresses I had brought and what I might want to have made up for me while I was there. Marie sang a pretty song for us in French, and when I praised her exquisite accent, Medora blushed slightly and admitted that her daughter spoke perfect French, but not a word of English.

  My mother and Medora must have arranged a discreet signal between them, for soon thereafter Medora begged us to excuse her and led Marie away, ostensibly to rest before dinner.

  When they were gone, my mother turned to me, eyes shining. “Well? What do you make of her?”

  “She seems very nice,” I said, noncommittally. “I’m glad to see her so well. I thought you said she was quite ill.”

  “She is—consumption, I believe—but she has steadily improved ever since I brought her out of that hovel in Tours.” My mother’s mouth tightened at the memory. “But did you not see the resemblance to your father? Even if you had not known the truth, I think you would have guessed it the moment you set eyes on her.”

  Briefly I wondered if that was another reason my mother had kept us apart for so many years. “I think she favors Colonel Leigh,” I said carefully, knowing that she would interpret my words as she saw fit no matter what I said or failed to say. “She certainly has his height. I think she resembles my father no more than any niece would resemble an uncle.”

  “Nonsense,” my mother said, astonished. “She looks more like your father than you do.”

  “Do you think so?” I inquired, deliberately leaning forward and resting my very Byronic chin on my hand.

  “Perhaps not so much in the face as in her movement and manners. Medora has his bearing, his piercing looks, his particular way of turning his head when he hears a sudden noise.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I suppose not.” My mother’s gaze lingered on the door through which Medora and Marie had departed, a faint, fond smile on her lips. It faded as she turned to face me. “You asked how I first learned about your father’s affair with his sister. Mrs. Leigh herself confessed the truth to me, but that was not until much later. The signs were present all around me from the moment I first met your father, but I was too innocent, too trusting, too very much in love to interpret them correctly.”

  Then, in a steady voice that only rarely betrayed a quaver of emotion, my mother told me of their courtship and marriage, my father’s strange outbursts and erratic behavior, the unsettling clues in his poetry that I myself had discovered—much, but not all, of the fraught history with which I opened this narrative.

  It was a great deal to take in, and after my mother finished, I sat still and silent, my thoughts in a tangle, my head aching, and my heart too. Even if I doubted my mother’s evidence—which was circumstantial, though emotionally damning—I could not doubt that my father had committed incest if my aunt herself had admitted it. But that did not prove that Medora was my father’s child.

  In the days that followed, it became evident that my mother wanted me to think of Medora as my sister, even in the absence of proof, and I decided that it would be ungenerous of me not to try. As I learned more of her tragic tale, my sympathies were more deeply provoked, and as we spent more time together, I came to like her quite a lot. Still, there was a grasping shrewdness about her that I found distasteful, and though I tried, I could never think of her as more than my cousin. Hester felt like a sister, but Medora did not. Perhaps, unbeknownst even to myself, the cogs and wheels of my mind had been turning, calculating the infinite difference of how Medora had betrayed Georgiana, and I had dec
ided that she was not the sort of sister I wanted.

  I was happier when my mother and I were alone together, just the two of us, with Medora out of sight and as far out of mind as I could put her. My mother would take me to the theatre or on long, pleasant strolls along the Champs-Élysées, companions drawn closer by our shared secrets. She bought me lovely new gowns in the Parisian style, and after William recovered from his illness and joined us, she arranged for us to be presented at the French court. William was courteous and kind to Medora on the few occasions when we were brought together at my mother’s home, but one night as we were undressing for bed after a long day, he wearily reminded me that we would not be able to receive her openly at home, not because of her parentage, but because of her moral lapses.

  “We needn’t worry about that,” I said, taken aback. “Surely Medora realizes that she can never return to England. Here in France she can live in some comfort and respectability as the widow Madame Aubin. In England she is known and the scandal would be too outrageous. She would be shunned, and anyone who took her in would be ruined with her.”

  “Let us hope your mother remembers that,” he replied curtly.

  I studied him for a moment before he put out the light and darkness engulfed us. I was tempted to ask him if he regretted marrying the daughter of the great poet Lord Byron, the only tie that bound him up in this tangle of familial discord and impropriety, but I was afraid of the answer.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Longings Sublime, and Aspirations High

  May 1841–February 1843

  In late May, William and I returned to England exhausted and disconcerted. We reunited with our children at Ockham Park and soon settled the family in our London residence, where we picked up the threads of our lives, which Medora had unraveled and tangled with a careless wave of her hand. William returned to his improvements to the estates and, with less enthusiasm, to his political career. I returned to my maternal duties, my social engagements, and my mathematical studies.

  But always in the back of my mind was the hard, bitter knowledge of my father’s sins. At odd moments throughout the day I found myself brooding over my bad Byron blood, and when the children misbehaved, I imagined it flowing through their veins as well. I now recognized my father in his most tormented poetic dramatis personae—Manfred and Childe Harold, Selim and Don Juan—and I wondered how I could have missed the signs of his own anguish so vividly drawn in his characters’ struggles and distress.

  I had told my mother that I believed my father had sinned with his half sister not because he loved the sin, but because he reveled in defying convention, in rebelling against Society, in flouting the rules that bound ordinary people. That same tendency had compelled and tormented me all my life, but when I reflected upon the shattered hearts and ruined lives my father had left in his wake, I resolved that I would not follow after him. If it was my nature to be defiant, then I would harness that power to defy my fate. I would save myself and redeem my lost father.

  I resolved to become as great a mathematician as my father had been a poet, so that I could in some way compensate for his misused genius. If he had passed on to me any portion of that genius, I would use it to bring out great truths and principles. I felt very strongly that he had bequeathed this task to me, and I felt a surge of confidence and satisfaction when I thought that I was performing a sacred, redemptive duty on his behalf.

  So I resolved, such was my ambition, but I was thwarted almost before I could begin by my longtime adversary, illness. None of my old, trusted remedies brought me any relief this time, so I searched for new treatments, finding some relief in mesmerism and, under the advice of Dr. Locock, in laudanum. Even now I smile when I recall the soft bliss those precious drops bestowed upon me, the warm, enveloping sense of comfort, the cessation of pain and care. Sometimes the treatments upset my stomach or made it difficult to focus on my studies, but when the medicine held me in its embrace, I did not care.

  Laudanum certainly softened the frustration, anxiety, and jealousy I experienced when my mother returned from Paris, not alone, but with Medora and Marie in tow. “I have come to think of her as an adopted daughter,” my mother had written to me before they set sail, and she asked if my sister and niece might stay with us until she found them a suitable residence. William was greatly displeased, but he was too good a man to refuse shelter to any relative, even if we could not determine the precise nature of the relationship. Even so, he insisted that Medora come to us in the guise of the widowed Madame Aubin.

  We kept their arrival as quiet as we could, but Medora was baffled and insulted by our desire for secrecy, and she made her displeasure known with scowls and acid remarks. My mother had not warned me about this aspect of my half sister’s character. My heart went out to the poor child, Marie, who had never set foot in her native country and spoke not a word of the language, and for her sake I was willing to let them remain with us as long as they liked. Nonetheless, I felt great relief when my mother found a large, elegant home for them at Moore Place, an estate in Esher about seven miles northeast of Ockham Park. To my astonishment, my mother moved in with them, explaining that someone was needed to keep the peace between the mother and daughter, who, as it turned out, absolutely despised each other. Over time, Medora’s spitefulness and constant complaints became too much for my mother, so she arranged for Marie to live with trusted friends, a pair of doting spinster sisters who saw to her education, while she herself fled home to Fordhook.

  Moore Place remained Medora’s home and the military headquarters for their vengeful campaign against my aunt Augusta, who remained at a distance, linked to her resentful daughter only by post. With my mother’s staunch support, Medora had filed suit against her mother for the deed, but it was not until the following May that the matter was finally resolved. On the day my aunt would have been brought before the court, she surrendered the document, and at last Medora had her source of income in hand. Perversely, instead of thanking my mother for all that had been done on her behalf, Medora complained that the three thousand pounds she stood to earn from the deed would not suffice. She had wanted a trial because she had wanted to expose her mother’s ill treatment of her before the public.

  Now she would be prevented from making the public denunciation, which she apparently did not care would have tarnished my mother, and me, and William by association. Bitterly disappointed, Medora turned on my mother full of rage and spite, shocking her with the violence and fury of her invective. “No one has treated me so vilely since I lived with your father,” my mother told me shakily when I hurried to Fordhook in response to her urgent summons. “I never should have accepted her expressions of confidence and affection. I will endeavor to forget them. It is enough for me that I know I was her friend and guardian. I have never asked for anything in return.”

  She had not needed to ask, I realized, for Medora had willingly given what my mother had wanted most: the means to exact revenge against Augusta. I finally understood that my mother’s generosity had never been prompted by kindness and mercy, but by vengeance. It was little wonder that a scheme born of contempt and anger had ended badly for everyone involved.

  “Your mother should have left the wretched woman in Paris,” William grumbled, and I heartily agreed. Although she had won her suit, Medora refused to leave England until she had the justice—and the additional funds from her mother—she argued were rightfully hers. My mother wanted nothing more to do with her, so I felt as if I had no choice but to intervene in her place. Eventually I convinced Medora to return to France with a French maid as her companion, whom I hired and whose wages William paid. The sacrifice would be well worth it. We would all breathe easier with Medora on the other side of the Channel.

  At last, in July, I was able to write to my mother with good news. “I have no doubt that Medora’s ship sailed last night,” I announced. “Today would be beautiful for the passage. There’s a good strong wind to spee
d her to the opposite shore, the very thing we all desire. I am glad for all of us that this business is concluded. The last half hour I spent with her yesterday evening, she subjected me to a discourse on the bitterness of dependence, and she threatened to throw herself at the first man she might persuade to marry her. May she find more happiness with this scheme than the last.”

  With tremendous relief, I turned my attention to Hester, whom I truly thought of as a sister, and who was much more deserving of a champion in her time of need. She had fallen in love with Sir George William Craufurd of Burgh Hall, the third baronet and the rector of Scremby, Lincolnshire, a bachelor forty-five years of age. They wanted to marry, but William was adamantly opposed, and for the most ridiculous of reasons: Sir George was unfortunately very stout, and my husband had an irrational hatred of fat. He was always first to let me know when I had put on weight, which hurt my feelings even though I could not deny that his caustic remarks encouraged me to remain slim. Still, his prejudice seemed a very stupid reason to forbid his sister to marry a man who was kind and adored her and had excellent prospects. I promised Hester to do all I could to make William see reason, but secretly I feared that I had little power to influence him. Once, years ago, I had felt that we were united, standing side by side, hands clasped, our faces turned toward the same distant horizon. Now it seemed that we stood at an angle, our backs slightly turned upon each other, my hands holding a book, his arms folded across his chest. It was not only for Hester’s sake that I worried about the growing distance between us.