Relations with Ada’s mother were less easily managed. A year later (15 December 1852), Lady Byron would remind her son-in-law (while laying the blame squarely upon him) that Ada had forbidden her mother to visit their London house during the entirety of the previous February. This seems to be correct. In the correspondence, a matching gap appears between 25 January and 28 February, at which point Ada pointedly ascribed a modest sign of better health to the fact she had been allowed to rest in undisturbed solitude. Perhaps from a wish not to cause alarm to Lady Byron, she neglected to mention that her condition was nevertheless serious enough for kindly Agnes Greig and Mrs Burr to have organised a month’s rota of night care, during which one of them spent each night upon a sofa close to Ada’s bed.
On 4 March, the septuagenarian Stephen Lushington paid the invalid a visit at Great Cumberland Place. He was horrified by what he saw. ‘The marks of reduction & suffering were very strong,’ he reported to Lady Byron, while adding that Charles Locock (whom he knew well) seemed, nevertheless, to entertain hopes of a recovery.
Discreet, kind and deeply attached both to Lady Byron and her daughter, Lushington’s delicate commission from Annabella was to obtain a list of Ada’s debts. Expecting the worst, he was pleasantly surprised. All the same, it struck Lushington that the £450 identified by the invalid could hardly be comprehensive of Lady Lovelace’s obligations. Perhaps, further debts would be recollected at some later date?
‘I have an interest in Ada which neither time nor circumstance can ever shake off,’ the old lawyer confessed to Lady Byron on 30 April. Clearly, even in her weakened state, Ada Lovelace had been able to exert her unique charm and substantially hoodwink one of the country’s shrewdest legal minds. Not only did her debts vastly exceed the sum that she had named, but she was still using Mary Wilson to place secret bets on horses. On 4 April 1852 (eight days before Ada first admitted to her mother that she was still enmeshed in ‘pecuniary affairs’), one of the countess’s regular team of unsavoury tipsters congratulated her on a win. Lady Byron, fobbed off with pleasant assurances that Byron Ockham was reported to be becoming an ornament to his naval profession, and that Ada herself was now hard at work upon ‘an awful amount of writing’, was even informed that plans were still afoot for the Lovelaces to rent out their London house and go to Spain. Ada, by the way, had been most amused by Miss Julia Smith’s analysis of her handwriting (a sample had been sent to this decidedly amateur graphologist by an admiring Annabella). But was dear Miss Smith really prepared to discern that she, the enterprising and gleefully fanciful Ada Lovelace, lacked imagination?
‘Oh I am such a sick wretch!’ Ada suddenly burst out at the end of this long, chatty and exceptionally misleading letter to her mother. That impetuous cry, apart from a glancing mention of the worry of ‘particular circumstances’ at present, was the only hint of agitation in a letter written on the very same day that Ada was threatened with a personal visit on 21 April ‘unless I hear there is increment’ from one of the rough-mannered tipsters of whom she was becoming increasingly afraid. The hint was heard. When Stephen Lushington passed along the news that he suspected some form of blackmail was afoot, Lady Byron consulted her bank book. On 19 and 21 May, she presented Lord Lovelace with the generous sum of £2,800. Unfortunately for Ada, however, its use carried her mother’s habitually firm restrictions. The money was to cover house repairs and Ada’s medical care: nothing more. Epsom and Ascot were coming up and Lady Lovelace was desperate for cash.
It was at this point that Ada turned for help to John Padwick, a man who made his name in the racing world by fleecing young aristocrats through his moneylending arrangements. It may well have been at Padwick’s request that William Lovelace (having sworn to Lady Byron that he would oppose any further gambling on horses) now provided his wife with a confidential document that authorised her to bet without a limit. Any idea that Lovelace stood outside the gambling ring was buried by this transaction. He was in it, up to the hilt.*
On 25 May 1852, the day before a rain-sodden Derby, Mary Wilson received a tip to back Hobbie Noble ‘for a great stake’. Hobbie Noble (4/1) came in fourth. Little Harry – the favourite whom Ada had elected to back against strong advice – came nowhere.† ‘Pray let her Ladyship understand in as certain a manner as can be supposed . . .’ was the menacing opening of her tipster’s next note to Mary Wilson.
The game was up. Noting nervously that her mother was now determined to ‘extract all furies’, the countess agreed to a pre-lunch meeting at which to seek a favour that she had hitherto hesitated to request. A deal was being negotiated. Ada was ready to confess, but only if her mother produced more funds.
Tracking the sequence and guessing the content of Ada Lovelace’s multiple undated confessions is like peeling the layers away from an invisible onion. What we do know about this particular revelation is that Ada, writing about it the following morning, expressed relief. She had unburdened herself of what she called ‘the Dragon’. Having done so, Ada was impatient to see her mother again as soon as possible, in order ‘that I may be finally satisfied you won’t devour me’.
More information emerges from the meticulously detailed letters which Lady Byron now began despatching to Emily Fitzhugh, a trusted old friend from the Siddons family circle. (As requested, Miss Fitzhugh restored the entire cache to the sender after Ada’s death.) To Emily, Annabella wrote on 9 June that firmness had been used and a confession forced, although ‘tenderness in a measure neutralised my own influence & suffered a worse one to prevail’. By ‘a worse one’, Lady Byron could have been alluding to John Crosse, for whose continued visits to his ailing patient Charles Locock innocently petitioned to Lovelace in August, on the grounds that they were ‘such a source of comfort and happiness’. Probably, Ada’s confession to Lady Byron concerned her racing losses. More certainly, it included a truly shocking and unlookedfor admission.
Frantic for money, both to support the needs of a greedy lover and to cover losses suffered by herself and the ring, Ada had descended to fraud. She had arranged with Crosse to pawn her husband’s most treasured heirloom: the Lovelace diamonds. In their place, doubtless with Crosse’s assistance, she had substituted paste replicas. Lord Lovelace, she assured her mother, knew nothing about it. But if he did discover her crime . . . Ada made it clear that she was terrified of the consequences.
Whatever Lady Byron may have thought about this revelation, she could not bear the thought of exposing frail, unhappy Ada to her husband’s wrath. Having extracted the broker’s details, she arranged for the jewels to be discreetly retrieved (the sum involved was £900, inclusive of interest) and restored to a woman who would clearly never be in a position to wear them again. Lord Lovelace was not informed.
On 23 July, John Crosse paid one of a series of covert visits to Ada’s London home. On that same day at Horsley, Woronzow Greig told Lord Lovelace that a little private detective work had led him to the startling conclusion that Mr Crosse was no bachelor, but a married man, one with children and with a secret home in Reigate. Lovelace, still unaware of any special significance in the friendship between Crosse and his own wife, promised to further the investigations with an interview of his own.
Secret marriages and hidden mistresses were far from rare in mid-Victorian England. Ludicrous though Crosse’s improbable alibi of housing the secret family of a naughty uncle had sounded to Greig, the earl himself was in no mood to challenge the tale that Crosse set before him. Worried about money, miserable about his unreconciled feud with his mother-in-law and heartbroken at the prospect of his wife’s approaching death (let alone the ongoing spectacle of her appalling sufferings), Lord Lovelace had almost reached the end of his tether. The elaborate fabrications of John Crosse were beyond his interest. Having briskly interviewed the young man and drawn up a statement of his considered opinion (that Crosse’s alibi was indeed untruthful), Lovelace dismissed what he considered to be a subject of minor significance from his mind.
The intensity
of Lovelace’s sadness is apparent from the record of Ada’s deterioration which he began on 29 July 1852, intending to monitor his wife’s last moments as a memorial gift to his mother-in-law. The previous day, William had been advised of a new hard swelling in Ada’s uterus; Lady Byron was simultaneously informed by Dr Locock that her daughter would be dead within two months.
Lovelace’s medical journal – written in a book small enough to sit within the palm of his hand – opened at the time when his daughter was paying a week’s visit from the Lushingtons’ home at Ockham to her parents’ London house. Anxious not to frighten the girl too much, Ada forced herself to assume the semblance of a normal routine. Each day, Lady Lovelace emerged fully dressed from the large bow-windowed room at the back of the first floor. Slowly, she dragged herself down the curving staircase to the hall. Seated at the dining-room table, she picked at morsels of a midday meal that neither she nor William had the appetite to eat. Henry Phillips, whose father had represented Lord Byron in all the glory of his Albanian attire, came in to paint a profile of Lady Lovelace, wan as a starved sparrow, her emaciated hands resting like claws upon the piano keys. On 3 August, Annabella wrote to her brother Ralph out in Switzerland that Mamma was still just able to play duets with her. Their mother seemed quite different nowadays: ‘so gentle and kind . . . like what I should imagine an angel to be.’
If not quite yet reformed, Ada had persuaded her mother that she did now genuinely repent for all her sins. Writing to thank the intensely religious Agnes Greig for all her acts of kindness, Lady Byron entreated the sympathetic Scotswoman to console Ada and to tell her – her words offer an appalling insight into Lady Byron’s mind – that these sufferings were God’s way of ministering to his erring child: ‘a Father’s love to bring her to Christ’. Florence Nightingale was simultaneously asked for advice about setting up a cottage hospital in Kirkby, seemingly at Lady Lovelace’s request.* Lady Byron’s own gift to her daughter of a book of sermons was accompanied by a much admired new life of Margaret Fuller, whose sole manuscript of her masterpiece (a study of the new Italy that was coming into being under Garibaldi’s fiery leadership) vanished forever in 1850 when Fuller, her child and her young husband drowned in a shipwreck that took place just off the coast of New York. (Fuller was returning to her homeland from Italy, in order to preside over the American birth of her book.) It’s true that Ada was passionately interested in America; nevertheless, it’s difficult to suppose that the story of Fuller’s lost masterpiece offered much solace to a young woman whose own ambitions remained so unfulfilled.
Neither young Annabella’s wishes nor Lady Byron’s pious endeavours would ever make an angel out of Ada. On 3 August, Lord Lovelace recorded that his wife and he held ‘sad talks’ about Greig’s revelations concerning John Crosse. Three days later, Ada secretly received her lover. Once again handing over the diamonds her mother had retrieved, the dying countess sent Crosse straight back to the same pawnbroker’s on the Strand. She also – seemingly of her own free will – handed Crosse an invaluable document for possible future use to blackmail her husband. This was the ‘limitless’ letter of credit that Lovelace had rashly provided to his wife in order to cover her final season of racing bets.
John Crosse’s visit excited old passions in Ada. During that same week, writing with a savagery that takes one’s breath away, the countess told her mother that she longed for Lovelace to go away and let her alone. Contemptuously, she compared her unfortunate husband to a needy dog, one who could not leave his master. The spectacle of his grief disgusted her.
So it was one day; with the next, Ada’s mercurial mind shifted into an altered set of opinions. She was consistent only in the dauntless courage with which she bore the pain, the sickness, the sleeplessness and the fear of grey oblivion that had become her daily attendants.
Only the children remained a source of real happiness. Young Annabella provided continual pleasure with a series of lively letters adorned with her own graceful pen and ink images. (An entire aviary of birds arrived, followed by comic sketches from everyday life, landscapes – it seemed there was nothing that this talented fifteen-year-old could not represent.) And then, five days after Crosse’s visit, a strapping youth with bronzed cheeks and a seaman’s rolling gait sauntered into his mother’s room. Ada had warned her son in advance of what he would see. For herself, she was overjoyed by the tenderness of Ockham’s manner and the handsomeness of his face. There was no want of feeling in him now, she rejoiced to her mother that day. ‘Quite the contrary.’ Down at Aldermaston, the muscular young viscount took the Burr boys out to sail on the lake in a washtub that he had rigged up with a sail. His sister meanwhile wrote to tell Ada (with seeming innocence) about a toy racing game that she had found in a box. ‘It is very amusing for some people are so indescribably unlucky with their horses,’ Annabella remarked to her mother on 18 August. Was the comment innocuous, or had an unusually observant girl learned more than was intended during her week-long stay at Great Cumberland Place?
Slowly, hidden truths were beginning to emerge into the light. One day earlier, a horrified Lady Byron told Lushington that she had learned from Greig of a previous and hitherto unmentioned pawning of the family diamonds, one of which Lovelace himself had been aware. What hurt her most, so she wrote, was the realisation that Ada had lied to her. ‘I cannot forget that the motive made use of to move me, was the dread of his ever knowing of such a circumstance . . .’ Advised by Lushington, Annabella suppressed the urge to challenge her son-in-law. Instead, gritting her teeth, she wrote to offer peace. With it, came her wish that the two of them might learn to stop putting ‘the worst construction on each other’s motives’. Quoting these sentiments back to Greig on 20 August, Lovelace presciently remarked that he doubted her ability to stick to such a resolution. ‘Yet my heart yearns towards Lady Byron.’
Ada, meanwhile, was still struggling to conceal her tracks from the gaze of an increasingly suspicious and tenacious mother. On 12 August, Charles Babbage was summoned and given a draft of Ada’s will. Instructions included the obtaining (somehow) of £600 from Lady Byron, to be distributed just as Babbage had been ‘privately’ directed in another (lost) note. Babbage was also asked to look through certain papers that Ada gave him, and to destroy what he judged unfit to preserve.
Given that Ada would surely not have wished any of her scientific work to be destroyed, it’s fair to assume that the papers in question related to her secret racing life. Any surviving connection between Babbage himself and the racecourse appears only in the inventor’s continuing loyalty to Mary Wilson, the woman whose name was most frequently employed in the tipsters’ notes.
The fear of impending death was growing strong. ‘I want Ralph back,’ Ada pleaded to her mother on 15 August. On the same day, William was asked to remind Colonel Wildman of his promise that Lady Lovelace should be buried beside her father. Ada was to lie within the Byron vault ‘at her own desire’, Lady Byron informed Mrs Villiers on 7 September. Privately, Annabella resolved to erect her own monument to Ada, discreetly tucked away in the old family churchyard of Kirkby Mallory.
On 19 August, the least savoury of Ada’s racing colleagues paid a visit to Great Cumberland Place. Mr Fleming had come to discuss a life insurance policy that the countess had been persuaded to take out prior to the diagnosis of a fatal disease. Its value was £600. When he left, Fleming had pocketed a signed note assigning him the entire £600, in exchange for the ten shillings he had just placed in Lady Lovelace’s hand.
Did Ada know what she was doing? Or had she been frightened into doing as Fleming asked? Increasingly, as the cancer took its hold, Lady Lovelace spoke of sinister men who were trying to gain access to her room. It’s likely that Mr Fleming’s possible return with further demands was preying on her fearful mind.
The pains were becoming unbearable. On one occasion, Lady Byron was summoned from her nearby residence at two in the morning. Together with Lovelace, she tried to soothe his writhing, scre
aming wife as Ada arched and scrabbled and crouched upon all fours, fighting against a pain that neither mesmerism (Annabella’s contribution) nor drugs could now alleviate. Still, there were moments of respite. Ada herself could no longer even attempt to pick out the old airs and waltzes which Lovelace remembered having once charmed him so much. But she could still listen with pleasure when Fanny Kemble’s graceful sister, Adelaide Sartoris, came in to sing to her. Towards the end of August, Ada asked if Charles Dickens would come and read to her about little Paul Dombey, gliding into death with the peace that poor Ada craved and could not find. Three years earlier, invited to visit her home in Brighton, Dickens had teased Byron’s charmingly imperious daughter that he felt like Aladdin being summoned into the Princess Badroulbadour’s bathhouse. Seeing her at Great Cumberland Place on this final occasion, Dickens was (so Lovelace recorded in his diary) ‘wonderfully struck with her courage and calmness’.
On 22 August, Annabella and Byron Ockham were allowed to pay another brief visit to their mother. Tenderly, they helped their father to bathe Ada’s hands – the only action that could still bring a little relief from pain – while she talked dreamily about returning to the Lake District and how happy they might all be. That evening, Dr West, the quietly efficient doctor who was now also living in the house, reported an alarming deterioration in his patient’s condition. Mattresses were hastily laid across the floorboards and propped against the walls, in order to prevent Ada from harming herself as she lashed out. ‘Her energy was something very awful,’ Lovelace noted in his tiny journal the next day, and yet, as Ada swept about the room, throwing aside the restraining arms of her mother and her husband, her expression had been ‘wonderful’.
In Byron's Wake Page 41