A Quiet Adjustment (13 page)

Let my affection be the bond of peace

Which bids thy warfare with remembrance cease.

Blest solely in the blessings I impart,

I only ask to heal thy wounded heart.

On the wild thorn that spreads dark horror, there

To graft the olive branch and see it bear . . .

She turned back only when her feet grew cold. The thought of whom she was about to marry struck her afresh. She was in a position to give the first poet of the age her little tribute to their love. The fact obscurely supported her in the silent continuing argument she kept up with Mary Montgomery; and she walked home again in better spirits, feeling she had scored a point.

At the gate, she stopped to return her shawl (which was, after all, too dirty for house-use) to the hut. Just as she opened the door, she caught a glimpse of two young men at the end of the drive, setting off. One of them moved a little more slowly, resting his weight, it seemed, on his hand in the air: the stick was too thin to be seen. Without thinking, she slipped inside and waited for them. She felt her heart in her throat, beating quick. It was only, she supposed, the childish desire to surprise which rendered her childish again; that and memories of Sophy. She sat down on the bench, rather demurely—it was too low for a full-grown woman. There was no other sound but the pulsing in her neck. She touched her thumb against it, to feel its vivid agitation. The delay grew almost unbearable. She began to count the seconds: it could hardly take them more than a minute to reach the gate, but she had told a hundred before she heard their boots in the snow.

‘Can you guess which way she has gone?' It was Hobhouse speaking; his words carried very clearly in the cold air. Annabella, then, almost called out to them. She had half prepared the smile with which she would open the door but needed a moment to find her breath again. She mustn't sound flustered; it was only a game she had played. Often she noted in herself a slight hesitation to enter
his
company again: it was like dipping a foot in cold water. One needed to accustom oneself. That she was shy of him still, she considered a proof of her love.

‘It doesn't matter to me if we run into her. I suspect we shall see enough of each other in time.' This made her stop short. She bit her tongue and resolved to hear them out. The strain of keeping quiet turned her shyness into something else, into guilt, into outrage. She was not accustomed to eavesdropping, and she feared the lesson to be learned from it. Other people were always more indifferent to one than one imagined them to be: she sensed for the first time, beneath her, a cushion being removed. Lord Byron sounded brisker, less musical than usual—as if the voice he addressed to her was an instrument played, which away from her ear he handled more carelessly.

‘I suppose you must marry,' Hobhouse said.

‘I spent last summer at Hastings, with Hodgson, bathing and advocating to me, often at the same time. He calls it the most ambrosial state.'

‘Marriage, you mean—not bathing? Well, Hodgson.' And then, ‘If you must, you might as well marry
her
.'

The opening and closing of the gate provided a pause, which, in the thick of their conversation, they made use of, stopping to have the question out. Annabella, sitting with her hands between her knees to keep them warm, had lowered her head and closed her eyes to listen. She heard the foot of the gate scraping over the snow. And then, with something like the sweetness in his manner she was accustomed to hearing, Lord Byron said, ‘What do you think of her, Hobby? You needn't spare me. I know you too well to trust your opinion.'

‘I'm not such a fool.' There was a silence in which Annabella could almost feel, between the two young men, the comfort of their friendship swelling. Hobhouse was the first to break it—not with an answer, but a question of his own. ‘What should one look for in a wife, I wonder?'

‘Gentleness, I suppose.' She could hear Byron shift on his feet, thinking, rutting his stick through the snow. ‘Liveliness.
Cleanliness
.' Hobhouse laughed. After a pause: ‘A little comeliness.'

This seemed to make Hobhouse's way easier, for he ventured his opinion at last. ‘I think you've done well.' Byron must have looked up, to prompt elaboration, for after a moment Hobhouse hesitantly gave it. ‘Her feet and ankles are excellent. The upper part of her face is very good—expressive, if not exactly handsome. She seems very . . .
clean
.' He was ashamed, perhaps, of descending to mockery, for he continued more earnestly, ‘She gains by inspection.' And then, with greater assurance: ‘I believe she dotes on you.' There was a clear small clang as the gate shut, but Annabella thought she could just make out Lord Byron's answer. ‘A little silently, for my taste.' As their voices began to retreat again, he added, ‘I like them to talk, because then they think less.' Annabella, as quietly as she could, stood up on the bench and pressed her nose against the window. She might have been ten years old; it might have been only a game. Lord Byron was an inch or two taller than his friend. They walked arm in arm and seemed in no hurry at all. She felt a needle of envy working in her heart, at the ease of male companionship. They descended between the trees, and just as their heads dropped below the line of the snow, Annabella heard herself: gaping for air, sucking and shaking, dry-eyed. She had in the end to close her hands over her mouth, as if in prayer, to soften her sobbing—at the thought of what she had put herself at the mercy of.

The coldness of a loveless eye: she had never seen herself through one before. She followed their footsteps back into the house, an exercise which, at least, restored to her the face of calm. Sir Ralph met her in the hall. Lord Byron had just gone out; he had hoped to find her. No matter, she said, she must have just passed them in the woods. And then: ‘I suspect we shall see enough of each other in time.' Her coolness puzzled him somewhat, which she knew—a fact that helped to relieve the worst of her feelings. Her father, however, had begun already to resign the rights of his paternal curiosity. He was not the kind of man to pull at the tender root of a secret. For that, she relied on Judy—or used to rely. Annabella's most pressing, most selfish concern, was that her mother had lost the strength to check her. She might have been inclined to put a stop to the business in hand; Judy had once had that power.

Annabella retired to her room. At her dressing table, in front of the mirror, she stared into her own eyes, unblinking. It was Hobhouse's words, at first, that ran through her thoughts: ‘the upper part of her face', etc. The force of the specific seemed very painful to her. It reduced one to scale, and a sense of scale is just what, as she put it to herself, the soul can bear very little of. But then, her humour reviving somewhat, she considered her feet and ankles, ‘excellent' both. And there was consolation to be had, on several fronts, from Lord Byron's character of a wife, which suggested only too shameful a contrast with her own paradoxical account of a husband to Lady Melbourne. Gentleness, liveliness, cleanliness, a little comeliness. Surely, her modesty could demand no more of his good opinion. And it was, she decided, among the benefits to be expected from her marriage that she could rely on her husband for such grace and sense. Simplicity, indeed, was just the margin she looked for, and if the confinement of marriage could teach it to her, she need not resent her cage. If only, as Lord Byron said, she could unlearn a little of her silence—and she came down to lunch with her equanimity somewhat restored and a resolution to cling to.

They were married the next day, in the drawing room. Lord Byron, as the hour approached, was summoned and found at last in the garden; his wedding-shoes, as he came in, still dripping from the snow. It was a game they had been playing together, perhaps the most intimate of the day: to append the word to anything. The wedding breakfast; a wedding sneeze. The wedding snow. He complained, in a voice a little shaking with humour, of having caught in the outside air a ‘wedding chill'. The vicar of Seaham was the son of old family friends—a surprisingly young man with fat ruddy silken cheeks and a cheerful stammer. ‘He was only very cold-tongued,' he said at the beginning. ‘He needed a minute, a minute, a minute, before the fire, to warm up.' A Mr Wallace. Hobhouse looked very upright and splendid in full dress and white gloves. Annabella, feeling strangely composed, found time to make a compliment on his appearance, which he gallantly returned. Simplicity, she said, considering herself in the mirror above the fire, had been the effect she aimed at. She wore a muslin gown trimmed with lace at the bottom and a white muslin curricle jacket and nothing on her head.

There was only one little unpleasantness. As the room was being arranged, Sir Ralph—to keep, as he said, the conversation afloat—mentioned something Dawlish had told him that morning on coming back from the village. The conclusion to his story about that Irish impostor. No one could discover his real name, which had become a material concern, since he was found last night in the straggle of bushes outside the gate to the harbour, quite dead. There wasn't a sign of violence upon his person, though he stank of laudanum. A copy of
The Bride of Abydos
, signed, it seemed, in Lord Byron's own hand, lay inside his jacket-pocket. Lord Byron was observed to turn very pale at this. He had inherited, he said, from his Scottish side, a foolish streak of superstition. He was persuaded to sit down; brandy was brought. (Annabella, almost glad of the chance to exhibit her tenderest concerns, thought she heard him muttering something to Hobhouse, who answered with a shame-faced smile.) But the real awkwardness was to come. Lady Judy, who had been keeping carefully quiet, turned on Sir Ralph. It was just like him, she said, to be spreading such distasteful gossip on his daughter's wedding day. He lacked all decorum and would sacrifice every fine-feeling for the sake of one of his ‘stories'. Sir Ralph looked duly chastened; the egg of his head seemed to tremble. He had lately begun to express his uncertainties, his hesitations, physically; one almost felt the
vibrato
in him and took from it a kind of musical effect. ‘My dear man,' he kept repeating, ‘I never dreamed it would upset you. It was only some wretched mick.' Though even this incident had its consoling force: Annabella was glad to see her mother insisting on the old relations. Judy looked pale that morning, almost drained of blood, but steadier than she had in months. Perfectly composed, only a little stiff, which suited the occasion.

The rest of the ceremony passed off well enough. Brandy brought a touch of colour to Lord Byron's cheeks. He praised Lady Milbanke for the wedding-cushions, or rather, the two small squares of woven matt that she had provided for them to kneel on. ‘One shouldn't,' he said, ‘expect too many comforts in setting forth on such a journey.' Annabella couldn't quite make out the object of his irony, but Judy offered him a little smile. Mr Wallace had a rough amiable manner and an air of inconsequence, which greatly lightened the formality of the wedding-service. Annabella spoke her part distinctly well. She had been accustomed, ever since childhood, to acting out small scenes in the drawing room for the benefit of her parents and their friends. Lord Byron seemed more affected, although when he came to the line ‘with all my worldly goods I thee endow', he cast a wry look at Hobhouse. By eleven o'clock, they were married; the bells of St Mary's rang an extra peal for them, and they kissed and shook hands all round.

Annabella retired shortly after to change. She could see from her bedroom window the carriage waiting for them below; Dawlish was loading their cases in it. Her uncle Lord Wentworth had lent them Halnaby Hall for the honeymoon. It was forty miles away on winter roads. The phrase of the previous morning recurred to her, that she had scored a point, only ‘this time,' she supposed, summoning an image of her friend Mary, ‘it was the match-winner.' There was almost a kind of anger in her throat as she thought of the words, a kind of ache. She returned in a few minutes, dressed for travelling in a dove-coloured pelisse. ‘I believe it did vastly well,' Lord Byron said quietly to her, leaving his hand for a moment against her side. A taste, she imagined, of the contact that awaited her.

Dawlish opened the front door for them, at which Hobhouse appeared to present her with a copy of Lord Byron's poems, bound in yellow morocco. ‘A wedding gift.' And then, to lighten the mood, he added, ‘I believe you have lately acquired the original.' She nodded but in a sudden agitation could not think what to do with it, or how to thank him. She held it for a moment thickly clasped across her waist, until the young man took pity on her and relieved her of the book, to deposit it himself in the rear of the carriage. Her mother seized her now by the arm; she seemed on the verge of tears herself. ‘Did I not behave well?' Judy kept repeating. ‘Did I not behave well?' Annabella kissed her passionately; she was conscious of tearing herself away. It seemed as if someone was pulling her from behind. Sir Ralph kept shy of her. He had a word with the coachman instead. ‘Keep off the Durham road,' she heard him saying. ‘It's very bad in the snow.' As they took their seats, Hobhouse reappeared in the window; he was holding Lord Byron's hand. ‘I wish you every happiness,' he said, turning to Annabella.

‘If I am not happy, it will be my own fault.'

He only let go when the carriage moved away.

Chapter Two

THEY WERE ALONE TOGETHER,
almost for the first time, but until they passed the gates Lord Byron continued, from a sense perhaps of being still in eye-shot, to stare straight ahead of him at the underside of the carriage roof. The line of his profile was vividly distinct against the white background. How well I know it, she reflected lovingly, then remembered having seen it, for years, on his frontispiece. The thought struck her: I have married a famous man. As they were turning into the road, a violent crack of sound erupted behind them. It startled Annabella into breathing; she had half been holding her breath and now leaned her head out the window to look back. The servants, in a ragged line at the front of the house, stood darkly, holding muskets to their shoulders. They had just fired off a volley. Annabella, in a surge of high spirits, laughed, at the—she could hardly have put it into words herself. At the
show
of it, for such a quiet virtuous studious country girl. Lord Byron, determining to break their silence, found only something to recite. ‘Such a sight as this,' he said, ‘becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.'

‘I'm sure my father,' she began to say—very eager, if nothing else, to placate him, until she noticed he was smiling, faintly. She smiled more broadly at him, indifferent for once to the fact that smiles only made her round face rounder. Then he took her hands in his. ‘You should have married me two years ago,' he said. For a moment she thought he meant only a kind of whimsy, a regret that the happiness they now shared had been put off, needlessly, for so long. And she wanted an endearment to respond in kind.

‘What shall I call you, sir?' she said. ‘I can scarcely call you, however much I might think of you as,
my lord
.'

‘I suppose we'll find names for each other in time.'

Again, his manner puzzled her, but she took his remark as a corrective, the first of their marriage, from his larger store of experience
in such matters
. (‘My love', ‘my sweet', she had wanted to say.) And Annabella found that she was willing, to an extent that surprised her, to be guided by him. She felt herself pushing a little, impatiently, at Lord Byron, a fact gently brought home to her by a certain pressure on her own affections. It could only be caused, however innocently, by his rebuff. They had time, he seemed to be saying, as much as they could want. She was hurrying him. The coachman, she noted in passing, had ignored her father's advice and taken the road to Durham after all—a disobedience which, in its way, duly comforted her. She was travelling outside a sphere of influence that she had been accustomed to thinking of as
the world itself
. To escape it had been, in many ways, the object of her marriage. She had escaped.

The snow, which had held off in the morning, now began, lightly as spiders, to descend. On landing, the new flakes, many-footed, stood resting on the old. The road was still passable, though they encountered little traffic in the course of the day. Everyone, it seemed, had decided to stop at home, and this only contributed to Annabella's sense of venturing forth, of embarking. Trees to either side of them broke darkly against the muffled sunshine, which was of that charged oppressive whiteness that suggests the imminence of a thunderclap. It seemed to Annabella not the least of her anxieties, drawn out over the length of that endless journey, that no thunder came—that the heavens continued to thicken silently, while the snow softened underfoot. That cushioning, above and below, rendered their voices (on those rare occasions when they spoke) and the knock of the horses' hooves and the cries of their driver both quiet and curiously distinct. Only the light changed, as the day wore on and the pallor of the horizon took on a deepening yellow stain.

At Durham, as they trotted through it, the bells rang out. Lord Byron at last broke his silence. ‘Ringing for our happiness, I presume?' She could not read his tone. Was he asking for corroboration? Of what? The fact of the intention, to honour their wedding day—or the fact of their happiness? She decided to understand him simply. ‘I expect we have been looked-out for.'

He smiled at that. ‘I expect we have.'

She was beginning to tire from the strain of his presence. There was a moment, as the shuttered shops sped by, when she thought of stopping the carriage and getting out. They were running along the High Street and passed the millinery store, above whose bright-red shop-front Mrs Clermont lived. She was an old friend of the Milbankes and had been Annabella's governess for many years. Annabella considered it a kindness to visit; she sometimes journeyed to Durham only to take her a cake and a bag of tea and sit for an hour with her. It seemed to her the most natural thing in the world to knock against the roof of the coach and descend, leaving Lord Byron to proceed to Halnaby alone. To talk with Mrs Clermont in her little room overlooking the street. Annabella had, after all, a great deal to gossip about. The most natural thing—not nearly so strange as the other. But she did not knock, and the carriage continued regardless, and the houses of Durham grew scarcer on either side of the road, then disappeared altogether on the ascent towards Crook. They drove for a space along the river. It somewhat consoled her to see its current flowing thickly the other way, back to Seaham and the sea.

Once, to relieve the silence perhaps, Lord Byron broke into a kind of song. Annabella could not make out the words. It had an Eastern ring and reminded her of just those poems through which she had first come to know him. ‘Will you teach it me?' she interrupted at last. He started, as if he had forgotten her, and said roughly, ‘You wouldn't much like to know what you were singing.' She bowed her head at this, humbly and hurt, and he, seeming to repent, took her hand in his and kissed it. He left his lips on her skin, looking up at her, and then, with growing fervour, began to kiss her palm, dropping it as suddenly again. ‘You might have saved me once,' he said. ‘Now it is too late. I fear very much you will find out you have married a devil.' Annabella endured all this silently, but no explanation followed, and she hadn't the heart to require one. She had the sense of waiting him out.

What
she was waiting for, not just in name but in shape and force, oppressed her thoughts. His too, perhaps; and she hopefully supposed it the source of the awkwardness between them, just as it might prove the solution to it. Her first tastes of passion, such as they were, had surprised an appetite she little suspected herself of possessing. She had proved, as Lord Byron said to her, ‘quite caressable into good humour'. Just what else she might be caressable into began to occupy her more and more as they left Durham behind. There was nothing he couldn't do to her; there was nothing, she guessed, she would not let him do. She was conscious, even then, of reserving for herself a passive part. The burden of anticipation, the task of supporting it, seemed to her active enough.

There were in the course of a long journey several mute exchanges that seemed, as Annabella put it to herself, to ‘bear upon the question'. Lord Byron had kissed her hand; she had observed him, feeling heat rise to her face. Once, the coachman taking too quickly a bend in the road, she had found herself resting her head against him while he kept quiet and still. In the act of righting herself, Annabella put her hand against his thigh. As she gathered her weight, the carriage lurched again. Lord Byron, curiously inert, supported her shoulder and head upon his breast; and closing her eyes, she for a moment remained recumbent upon him by a forced inaction. The seconds passed. Neither stirred, until the carriage, turning the opposite way, by its own speed released her from his involuntary embrace. Nothing was said, but the silence itself persuaded her that whatever she felt, of uneasiness, of attraction, was shared by him.

At the inn in Rushyford, they changed horses. Stepping out briefly into the snowy air, she observed him wince. ‘I hate the cold,' he said. And she, rising at once to meet him in sympathy, replied, ‘It must be very painful for your . . .' until he stared her out of the end of her sentence. She didn't yet dare. They spent a few minutes inside, warming their hands together at the fire with their backs to the room. She wanted at least to make a show of conversation; it was their wedding day, after all. There were people about. ‘How much longer to Halnaby is it, do you suppose?' To which he repeated, ‘You should have married me when I first proposed.'

She, at a push, found something to smile at this time. ‘I think you mean that it can't be as long as two years.' And then, when he did not look up, she added, ‘Surely
now
there's no need to regret the past. We have time enough.' But the coachman then returning, Lord Byron was spared an answer and preceded his bride briskly into the carriage.

The sun set before them in a muffle of cloud, though for a bright half hour they squinted against the pervading whiteness. It was an eight-hour journey to Halnaby from Seaham, but through the long day she looked at him perhaps a dozen times: he so insistently stared in front. Annabella had not known what to expect of their enforced solitude. It had not been this—this electric silence. She had supposed herself rather in danger of too readily complying to his greed for her (that was her phrase for it) and had wasted her anxieties in composing, ahead of time, a number of subjects on which they might calmly discourse. None of them now, as she counted them over in her head, seemed appropriate. She could almost smile, with the wisdom of a wife, at the girl she had been. Of course, Lord Byron was right. Such silence was just what would suit them. It had the tendency, in her at least, to arouse her own greed for him, though as the dark set around them, that greed appeared to her in its plainest form: she was terribly lonely and cold. She wanted, more than anything, a word of comfort from him, a little warmth.

Nightfall, it seemed, had its own effect upon him. In the darkness she ventured to examine her husband more closely. Curly hair partly obscured his high forehead and the peculiar fineness of his ears, which were harp-like, distinctly shaped. His blunt, masculine nose and square cleft chin suggested the soldier or the statesman more than the poet. But his lips and large eyes were almost indecently soft and boyish, eloquent of vanities and sympathies and enthusiasms—to say nothing of a painful susceptibility to his own changing temper. There was bitterness, too, written in the lines between his brows and around his mouth. Feeling her gaze upon him, he burst out, ‘This is intolerable!' And when she shrank, at the edge of tears, into her corner of the carriage, he turned towards her for the first time in an hour with an urgency of manner that was not ungentle: ‘I wonder how much longer I shall be able to keep up the part I have been playing.'

It was all she could do to summon a little voice. ‘Have you been playing a part, my lord? I wish you would not. I should not have thought we needed parts to play.'

‘Come now,' he said, ‘you have only been pretending to love me. You cannot love me as I am.'

And then, in her highest tone (which she for the first time suspected of priggishness), Annabella replied, ‘That is what I have vowed to do.'

‘Brave girl!'

His face in deep shadow was almost unreadable—was he mocking her? She finally took her courage in both hands. ‘Have you been only pretending to love me?' Her voice, as she asked it, was perfectly steady and clear; there was not the tremor of an appeal. They had come to the point, but only then did Annabella guess how awkwardly she had felt it intruding, regardless of the way she wriggled—ever since his first proposal, throughout their protracted engagement and that long day's silent journey. Afterwards, she remembered the question and marvelled at how simply she had faced it.

‘How can you ask me that?' he said, at his wits' end.

Her nerve failed her then; Annabella decided to take this as reassurance enough. There were tears on both sides, which he caressed them out of, kissing them off her chin, her cheeks, the line above her lip. She put her palms to his face and with her fingers rubbed the wet out of his eyes: she had never touched his face. His hand, with the force almost of anger, ran down her neck and the length of her spine. He began to grip her thigh from behind her, and she felt for the first time the indifference to everything else of the appetite he had awakened. There was nothing like sentiment in it, very little like love, and she waited with shut eyes to feel what else he might do to her, when the coach slowed to a halt and the coachman knocked his fist against the roof. Halnaby Hall had appeared, in its own light: eight splendid windows in two rows, casting a mullioned glitter. The servants (a half dozen of them) stood on the balcony above the drive to greet the happy couple.

Lord Byron barely gave them a glance as he hobbled inside. Annabella, still breathless, managed to compose herself before she stepped out into the snow. Wondering a little: what had she done to displease him? And she began to blame herself for putting on, at the coachman's knock, too quickly a public face. Perhaps she had even
looked
her relief. They had in their communications always been sensitive to slights and misunderstandings, and she was conscious of having entered an arena in which the least gesture was liable to misinterpretation, if only because her grasp of the language was still very weak. The butler, who had been hovering on the steps, now introduced himself—a Mr Payne, a large-headed, large-handed, slack-jawed, somewhat ageless young man, whose manner communicated cheerfulness and hesitation in equal measure. He took upon ‘himself the duty of welcoming Lord and Lady—I mean, Lady Byron, to Halnaby Hall' and wished them a pleasant stay, which he would do everything in his power to ensure. He was perfectly at their disposal; they were to consider him ‘quite their own'.