Byron in Love (11 page)

When Byron and Annabella moved into 13 Piccadilly Terrace, a house rented from the Duchess of Devonshire, Byron's two burning objectives were deliverance from that marriage and funds to go abroad. In a letter to Hobhouse while on his honeymoon, appealing to him to ‘fix' on the useless Mr Hanson, Byron outlined his financial ruin–

Annabella's dowry proved more theoretical than actual, as the main inheritance would come only at the death of her uncle Lord Wentworth, but Byron feared the said Baronet was eternal, the Viscount was immortal and both men were cutting a second set of teeth. The thousand pounds per year, £700 for him and £300 for her towards her pin money, merely covered the rent. Then there were horses, a carriage and coachman, numerous servants, drinking, gaming and his box at Drury Lane Theatre to which Annabella was not invited. He had begun to dress completely in black, to emphasise both his ravaged spirit and the nobility of his lineage. Meeting with Walter Scott in John Murray's office, the older author was struck by Byron's noble character and melancholy vein. The two men swapped gifts, though the dagger, mounted on gold, which Scott gave him, was hardly ideal for a man who kept a sword and loaded pistols beside his bed, Fletcher having the onerous task of ensuring that they were not used. Byron's return gift to Scott was a large funerary urn in silver, filled with bones and bearing an inscription from Juvenal.

For a while, all the outside niceties were maintained. Annabella, in her white satin, paid her ‘wedding visits', was a guest at Queen Charlotte's ‘teas' and shown off to his influential friends, politicians, poets and bankers. To her father she wrote arch descriptions of their visits, the salmon not quite fresh, the sheep's wool still on the mutton fat, amiability masking the ‘varnish of vice'.

His letters to friends closed with a customary flourish–‘Lady Byron is very well and desires her compliments…'–but indoors a gothic nightmare was unfolding, her air of virtue, her sense of infallibility, her incarnate conscience were driving him mad and eventually, as he would tell Hobhouse, he felt himself to be ‘bereaved of reason'. What servants would witness in Piccadilly Terrace hardly befitted the actions of a peer, Byron wrecking furniture, grinding his gold watch to pieces, then flinging it in the ashes, determined to spread misery on all those around him, but especially on his wife.

Augusta's visit in April, which he warned Annabella against, exacerbated the tensions. Intimacy, baby talk and late-night canoodling between brother and sister were resumed and in Annabella's graphic account of it one wishes that she had taken the path of a poet and not been given to liturgical epistles–‘I used to lay awake watching for that footstep by which my hopes and fears were decided…it was always expressive of the mood that had the ascendancy. It was either the stride of passion, which seemed to print its traces on the ground with terrific energy', or the animal spirits and laughter that confirmed his satisfaction. Pacing in the room above and charged by ‘the continual excitement of horrible ideas', the thought crossed her mind to pick up one of Byron's daggers and plunge it through her rival's heart. After a stay of two months, Augusta was asked to leave.

The ‘sweets and sours' of married life was how she had described things in the early and tolerable months, but as things worsened she had to suppress her jealousy and throw herself at the mercy of Augusta, ‘her only friend', asking how long more she could bear it. Bailiffs had installed themselves in the downstairs hall, poised to repossess their furniture, Byron's library and the very beds they slept on. According to Annabella, one of the bailiffs became ‘the subject of her husband's romance', upon learning that he had camped in the house of Richard Brinsley Sheridan for an entire year. Annabella wrote wretchedly to her father about their distressing circumstances, but Sir Ralph wrote back to say he could not raise mortgages on his properties and had narrowly missed jail himself. The hue of opulence was going, as was the hue of her hopes. In a poem that she wrote at that time, she describes her husband's tread at which she used to rejoice now filling her with mortal fear.

Yet to others, at that very same time, Byron could summon all his old gallantry and generosity of spirit. When Mr Murray learnt that Byron was obliged to sell his library because of his increased expenses and the new mode of his life, he sent a letter with an enclosure of £1,500 and the assurance that another sum of that same amount should be at his service in a few weeks. Byron replied almost immediately–

But for Annabella the situation was becoming more hideous and she told herself that his treatment of her was due to his being temporarily mad. She would consult medical journals to diagnose his condition and secretly met with Dr Baillie, who had known Byron since his Harrow days, to talk of any earlier telling symptoms. Subsequently she consulted her own physician, Francis Le Mann, and with her governess Mrs Clermont, whom Byron loathed, watched for signs of his escalating eccentricities. When they saw that he took to lowering his head, then gazing from under his eyebrows, they saw it as resembling the King's caprices before his descent into madness.

It was said of Byron that he had never let imagination usurp the place of reason, but in those few months before her accouchement his reason failed him, his hatred of Annabella spiralling, describing her as ‘a nice little sullen nucleus of concentrated savageness'. The situation became so unbearable that she invited Augusta to be with her, deciding now that he loved and hated them together. The end of the marriage might in Goethe's estimate be ‘poetical and in keeping with Byron's genius', but to those in Piccadilly Terrace it was inexorable nightmare; the servants including Fletcher in terror and Augusta no longer able to restrain him, had to ask their cousin Captain George Byron to come as their protector.

Annabella and Augusta were both pregnant, swollen bodies which Byron loathed, comparing them with the sylph-like figure of his mistress, the actress Susan Boyce, whom he was threatening to bring to live under the same roof. In the last week of Annabella's confinement, Byron said that he hoped that both mother and infant would die and as she went into labour he left for the theatre. Returning at a late hour he sat in the room beneath, striking the necks of soda water bottles with the butt of his pistol, the impact of the glass pinging on the ceiling as Annabella laboured in the room above. On 10 December 1815, ‘the winged creature' that he had imagined as being a son was a daughter, and looking at her his first words were said to be ‘Oh! What an implement of torture I have acquired in you'.

But it was for Annabella that his greatest tortures were reserved. Two days later he burst into her bedroom, dismissed the servants and locking the door, he insisted on his conjugal rights, the dark and deviant demands evidenced in sworn statements to her lawyer, speaking of his untoward abuse of her, and the subsequent legalistic warning–‘A woman has no right to complain if her husband does not beat or confine her–and you will
remember
that I have neither
beaten
nor
confined
you. I have never done an act that would bring me under the law–at least on this side of the water.'

On 6 January 1816 Annabella received her ultimatum from him in a letter delivered by Augusta–‘When you are disposed to leave London it would be convenient that a day should be fixed and if possible not a very remote one for that purpose. Of my opinion upon that subject you are sufficiently in possession and of the circumstances which have led to it, as also to my plans or rather intentions for the future.' Bowing to his authority, she replied the next morning, ‘I shall obey your wishes and fix the earliest day that circumstances will admit for leaving London.' Very early on the morning of 15 January, with her maid and the infant Augusta Ada, the carriage already waiting, she left the house. Passing Byron's bedroom, she noted the large mat on which his Newfoundland dog was to lie and for a moment was tempted to throw herself on it and await all hazards, but it was only for a moment.

Surprisingly, she wrote two friendly letters on the journey to Kirkby Mallory in Leicestershire, where her parents now resided, since the demise of Lord Wentworth. She hoped that he was remembering her medical prayers and injunctions and not giving himself up to what he had called ‘the abominable trade of versifying' and refraining from the brandy. From Kirkby, she addressed him as ‘dearest duck', saying that both her father and mother were eager to have the family party completed and that there was ‘a sulking room' to which he could retire. Later she would say that she had written these letters on medical advice and that it was not to revive ‘diseased associations' with him. Within twenty days she would metamorphose from accommodating wife to avenging Fury, as the quotidian nightmare of her marriage was brought home to her. Ann Rood, her maid and the future Mrs Fletcher, described her riding her horse wildly along the sands to ‘stun her sconce' and at other times gave a picture of her rolling around the floor of her bedroom in paroxysms of grief. Meanwhile, in Piccadilly Terrace, Dr Le Mann could discover nothing like ‘settled lunacy' in Byron, irritability yes, weeping, the shakes, spells of grandiosity, pains in the hip, pains in the loins, a torpid liver, but not settled lunacy. Augusta was ‘in an agony of nerves', receiving irate summonses from her
sposo
to come home, trying to restrain Byron from drinking with Hobhouse, whom she wished dead, and most of all wishing for Annabella's return in order to avoid the shocking revelations that were bound to ensue.

Lady Judith wore her nightcap to dinner because the pressure of her wig was too great as she set about the rigorous interrogation of her daughter and was to hear, with hesitation, the ordeal of the thirteen months. Having consulted a young lawyer, Stephen Lushington, she hurried to London, bringing with her a memo written by Annabella, documenting some of the wrongs and grievances she had endured. From Mivart's Hotel she enlisted the services of Sir Samuel Romilly, a barrister in Chancery, whom Byron called a monster of perfidy, and even in exile, hearing of Romilly's suicide, hoped that in his annihilation he felt a portion of the pain he had inflicted on others. The Milbanke team of litigants would prove to be jackals in comparison with Byron's dilatory and more anarchic crew. When Stephen Lushington suggested to Hanson that he should interrogate his client a little more stringently with regard to the several accusations against him, Hanson foolishly replied that Byron's memories were ‘very treacherous'.

On 29 January, a letter addressed to Byron from Sir Ralph, drafted by Lushington, was delivered to Piccadilly Terrace. Augusta, guessing its contents, returned it unopened to Annabella, saying that for once in her life she ventured to act according to her own judgement, warning of a host of evils if Annabella did not return. When Byron himself finally received the letter a few days later, he was, as Hobhouse said, ‘completely knocked up by it': ‘Circumstances have come to my knowledge which convince me that with your opinions, it cannot tend to your happiness to continue to live with Lady Byron. I am yet more forcibly convinced that her return to you after her dismissal from your house and the treatment she experienced while in it is not consistent with her comfort, or, I regret to add, personal safety.' Sir Ralph proposed that each party should appoint a lawyer to discuss the terms of separation. Byron fumed. Replying haughtily, he said that as to the vague and general charges against him, he was at a loss to answer them and would anyhow confine himself to the tangible fact, which was that Sir Ralph's daughter was his wife, the mother of his child, and it was with her he would communicate.

He spent hours in his room, the doors locked, firing his pistols intermittently and writing a slew of letters to Annabella that veered from affectionate to righteous to desperate. He admitted to his phases of gloom, to his ‘deviations from calm', but assured her that he would not be parted from her without her express and expressed refusal, their hearts still belonged to one another and she had only to say so and like Petruchio he would ‘buckler his Kate against a million'. The twenty days since she left, had, as he said, poisoned her better feelings, but with each passing day those poisons would be magnified. Annabella was compiling her deadly narrative, which would make him regret the boast of sticking to tangible facts.