A Quiet Adjustment (19 page)

Chapter Eight

IN THEIR COURTSHIP
—and Annabella could consider the facts of it whenever she liked, consisting as it did mainly in an exchange of letters, which she carried with her in a large blue calf-skin album—Lord Byron had presented himself to her as a man bearing the burden of a terrible secret. It had been at the time a positive pleasure for her, one of those rare occasions in the correspondence when she felt sure of the ground beneath her feet, to offer to relieve him of that burden as best she might. Her conscience was pure and light; she had plenty of strength left to support a few more sins. Now, in the face of his variable and violent moods, she saw it as her duty to honour that promise—if only for the sake of their common peace. The fact was (and she could acknowledge this truth almost with an inward smile) that he
did
behave towards her like a man with a burden to bear. He played, in other words, his part; and she felt now keenly the obligation to live up to hers.

In the mornings, Byron slept late, and Augusta and she had the freedom of his absence in which to establish their friendship. The children, at last, were properly introduced to their new aunt. Georgiana was the oldest, at six years, and conscious of that honour, the best behaved, though dirty. She was proud of her reading, and Annabella encouraged her in it, believing her to possess a character that might, with a little regulation, shape itself into propriety. Augusta Charlotte resembled her mother most, with sharp blue eyes and a face that had already begun to suffer the lengthening and rounding that would soften it into a perfect oval. She was pretty and silent and perfectly indifferent to instruction, which she endured and then ignored. George was the only boy, and Gus's great favourite: he was just beginning to speak, and his mother adopted with him such childish barbarisms that Annabella could not quite restrain a show of disapproval. Augusta took so happily to the cooing of children that she seemed to prefer it to ordinary speech, and what appalled Annabella was the air Mrs Leigh had afterwards, when reverting to conversation, of adjusting, however fluently, to a foreign tongue. Her most natural expression seemed to be the comforting, meaningless sighs of motherhood. Annabella, with some jealousy, suspected Lord Byron himself of reposing in their relations on his sister's simplest sympathies.

Byron was also jealous of the children, of the attention they demanded from Augusta, and his wife discovered that any interest she showed in them served to reinforce his sense of exclusion. It was a relief, indeed, to find him jealous of Georgiana, for sitting on her aunt's lap and reading to her. His appetite for affection was so great that he could mind any loss of it, and Annabella consoled herself, in playing up to it, with the reflection that there could be nothing sinful in teasing kindness from him. He had little real interest in his nephews and nieces, however, with the exception of Medora; and he grew tired, even, of his own jealousy. Spaces opened up around the babies for Augusta and Annabella to get along in. When he was drunk, they learned to be grateful to the children for inspiring in their uncle the gentleness of indifference. Despairing, he retired to the library—they heard him sometimes reading aloud to himself to attract their notice. Medora alone awoke in him his talent for attachment. ‘I should like,' Annabella said to Gus, ‘to have him painted when he is looking at Medora. The tenderness of his expression is remarkable.' Byron overheard her. ‘You did not suppose, on the strength of our marriage, that I was incapable of love?'

The sisters, increasingly, took comfort in each other. The grounds at Six Mile Bottom had been carelessly maintained, but there was one dry path running through it, past a grove of fir trees, which obscured from the house a view of the farms behind. Whenever the weather was fine, the pair of them, arm in arm, seized the chance of escaping the glooms of the drawing room. Nature would, regardless of man's neglect, refresh and beautify itself, and the first primroses as the fortnight wore on began to appear. The thick of their leaves flushed darkly in the gusts of spring. They were both, in spite of their new-found relation to each other, grateful enough for female company that they managed to keep up, on the surface of their intercourse, an easy intimacy; and it amazed Annabella how often it allowed them, almost painlessly, to touch on the deeper questions that afflicted them.

Augusta puzzled her more the better she knew her. The jealousy or ambivalence, to which she had at first attributed her sister-in-law's reserve, struck her perhaps as merely the effect of shyness. There was in her manner an artlessness which Annabella seized on, from the beginning, as the means of that ascendancy she hoped to establish over her. Annabella herself, whatever her other virtues, could never aspire to artlessness. She had observed since childhood with great curiosity the growing divide between her real thoughts and their expression. The measure of her virtue, of the strict accounts she kept, was only the care with which she attempted to adapt one to the other. Yet she could find in her sister no sign of that care, no sign of such a divide. Augusta seemed unashamedly devoted to Annabella. The strangest effect of that devotion, and the really charming naivety with which she gave it a voice, was to silence for a time in Annabella just those reservations on which her sense of superiority usually relied.

‘I think I never saw or heard or read of a more perfect being in mortal mould,' Augusta confessed on one of these walks, ‘than you appear to be.' Even in that ‘appear', Annabella, flattered in spite of herself, observed the ingenuousness of her good intentions. ‘I have been raised, you know, in London as the indulged dependant of very grand relations. For all their kindnesses, I was never presented with a model of true female conduct and was forced to rely as best I could on my own nature, such as it is. What I wanted, in short,' she added, ‘was a guide, a philosopher, and a friend; and I'm afraid my brother, loving as he is, was never suited to the role. I am delighted to call you sister, but what I long to call you, above everything else, is friend.' Then, in a lower voice, she continued: ‘You know how much my brother and I are attached to each other, and I had feared that, by his marriage, I should be asked to give up a precious share of that attachment. And yet even in the friendship of a brother and a sister certain affections might be said to run their course, and I have found, in fact, by your addition, that my sisterly feelings have been renewed and strengthened, and diverted more properly to their object. To you, my dear.'

Annabella was almost disarmed. She had believed to trace in her new sister the conscious airs of a rival. Perhaps, it occurred to her at last, the air she moved in was really her own. She had, in truth, no one else to blame for finding the proofs of rivalry so generally prevalent in her acquaintance. The ‘play of manner', which Annabella had imputed to Augusta on their first encounter, she now assigned a simpler source: the efficient grace of perfect innocence. But then, the idea of ‘innocence' hardly did justice to the particular quality of Byron's sister. Augusta seemed to possess, truly, helplessly, the virtues of gentleness, of sympathy, of honesty. One found in her so little the effects of regulation only because the materials of which she was composed so little required it. And yet there was in her unwitting goodness a real indifference to her own virtues, which might just as easily, Annabella presumed, allow to the darkest and most sinful desires their free expression.

Each night the pattern of their arrival was repeated. After supper, her husband sent Annabella up to bed, where she lay listening, as best she could, and drifting in and out of sleep. Their laughter, she was relieved to hear, broke out as the week wore on more rarely than at first; and Byron, when he came up at last, seemed anything but happy. He took up less and less (it was a phrase she echoed back at him) his conjugal subscription—a fact that Annabella could attribute, if she liked, to that awkwardness or restriction which he had complained of in their personal intercourse. Still, she offered to do what she could to please him. She placed herself entirely in his hands, on the one condition, that he trusted himself freely to hers. There was nothing, she bravely gave him to understand, they need stop short at, and among the duties she promised willingly to perform was the part of his confessor. It had occurred to her, as if for the first time, that Lord Byron was suffering not in show only but from the real burden of a secret sin; that the pressure she applied against him to trust in her might finally persuade him to confide it; and that she might not much like the truth of his confession. She had been proceeding in marriage with the air of a swimmer who closes her eyes against the torrent, to stave off the more painful blindness that would afflict her if she opened them too soon. But she must open her eyes at last, and the courage to see, to feel, to understand, was just what she had always counted on to make up for the absence in her character of gentler and more feminine virtues. Really, she could almost laugh: Lord Byron could not have chosen for himself a wife more different from his sister.

Even so, the full extent of what his confession might stretch to nearly took her breath away. A few mornings after their arrival, Augusta received a parcel in the post; Lord Byron was particularly anxious to watch her open it. It seemed to put him in the best, most mischievous of spirits. He had reached the stage in which Annabella was grateful even to those good humours that exercised themselves at her expense. Augusta, with the unforced excitement of a child, tore off the string and wrapping. There were two brooches inside, of simple gold and marked with little crosses. They each contained a strand of woven hair and differed from each other only in the letter inscribed upon them, an A and a B. ‘Do they please you?' Lord Byron said to his sister, with real gentleness, and pinning to her breast the second of these. ‘Are they pretty? The hair, of course, belongs to both of us, though I can't distinguish yours from mine. We are so much alike. Do you think Pip can guess what the crosses signify?' Augusta blushed at this, though Annabella could not be sure that it wasn't only from the pleasure of adjusting the brooch on her dress and observing the effect of it in the hall-mirror. Afterwards, Byron asked his sister to pin the other brooch, inscribed with her initial, against his coat-pocket. ‘You remember,' he said, while she was fussing under his chin, ‘of course, how we passed our time at Newstead?'

For the rest of the fortnight, Augusta never appeared without that mark of Byron's affection: the little gold pin etched with crosses and containing a braid of their hair. It began to haunt Annabella and suggested to her imagination the most horrible intimacies, of a type from which her own poor relation of wife could only exclude her. She watched for it with a jealous eye and walked distractedly down to breakfast every morning, lost in the most absurd speculations. Had Augusta forgotten, perhaps, to wear it? or to what piece of her dress had she chosen to attach it that day? Her obsession with that testament to her husband's brotherly feeling grew into a source of real shame. She supposed herself, at times, to be going mad, and she hardly dared to explore the scope of her suspicions for fear that the symbol she had fixed on, as the proof of them, would seem to a stranger's eye so slight and innocent. Only once, on one of their walks, was she emboldened to raise the subject with her sister, in the belief that Augusta herself had introduced it.

It was a bright morning after a wet night. The breeze, though cool, had the expansion, the lightness, of a warmer wind, and had tempted them into the open air from the fire of the drawing room—where they had been waiting, awkwardly enough, for Lord Byron to descend. ‘I am sorry to say,' it was Augusta who broke the silence, once they were safely away from the house, ‘that his nerves and spirits are very far from what we could wish them. One mustn't, of course, breathe a word of this to him on any account.' After a pause, she continued: ‘He has every blessing this world can bestow. I have been, among all your other virtues, admiring your forbearance. You very judiciously abstain from—pressing him at the present moment. He would likely, if pushed, give away a great deal more than the truth.' Annabella was honest enough and vain enough to take pleasure from such praise, though she knew quite well that a little pressing, on various points, was just what she had decided to permit herself. It occurred to her, of course, that Augusta had only been dressing up a piece of advice as admiration. But she believed her sister-in-law to be one of those women who acted, as it were, from cause alone; Augusta seemed incapable of calculating, to such a degree, her effects.

They had been walking through the darkness of the grove of firs. A noisy gust scattered upon them a few drops of wet, and then they emerged, happily, into the wide green space of fields. Augusta had been relieved to find, she added, stopping and taking her sister's hands, that Annabella didn't mind too much his little insinuations. It was only his confessional instinct, which was very strong. He could never bear to keep a thought to himself and ‘suggests all sorts of doleful things, which have no reality but in the fervency of his imagination.' Still, he could not help believing them to be (and Annabella never forgot this phrase) ‘as bad as if they were true. One is only playing up to the worst of his famous melancholy by taking him at his word.' A little laughter, she had found (adapting her brother's meaning), could shake off a great deal of misery. He was only unhappy by conviction; luckily, his convictions were neither deep nor steady. ‘It was perhaps the duty of his wife
not
to trust in him. He is easily managed, so long as one doesn't mind what he says.' Augusta had set between them the very question that had occupied Annabella—what, exactly, had Lord Byron been saying?—though whether it was with an air of putting the matter to rest or taking it up at last, Annabella could not determine. She was tempted, indeed, to take it up, but it seemed at the time too decided a step. Lying out, then, and unremarked upon is where she left it.