A Quiet Adjustment (27 page)

How quickly had Judy picked up her old motherly air of impatient and critical admiration. Annabella read over her letter and wondered, with her pen in her hand, whether or not the strictest conscience should have balked at recording her mother's compliments. She had said, more or less, just that, and Annabella had always taken comfort from the simplest prescriptions of truthfulness. ‘Proof spirits', she supposed, as a term of flattery, also carried with it a suitable threat: hers was not a character to be taken, as Judy had said, in everyday doses. And then, for it seemed proper as a means of persuasion to add this sly note of praise, Annabella continued:

Your kindness must always mean more to me than that of any other. Of myself, I can only say that I feel well enough to go through my present duties, and that is all I wish. I am content. There are subjects I am more inclined to speak of than myself—but I have resolved not to do so unnecessarily, and alas! I have nothing to suggest which can alleviate their pressure on you, my dearest Augusta. I am advised not to enclose the least word to him . . .

She saw much too sharply into her own motives to deny the warning such a letter might carry to Augusta. But it also contained, and this struck her at the time as the real sweetness of the gesture, a kind of betrayal of her mother, which she, for once, was happy to make. By breakfast the next morning, Sir Ralph had copied out fair their legal demand for a separation. Mrs Clermont, who was becoming quite invaluable, carried it personally into town to post. It was on the evening of that day, in the dead dark hours, that Annabella gave way for the first time to the full passion of her misery. She could be heard plainly throughout the house, until Mrs Clermont came in to silence and console her.

Augusta, for her part, showed herself capable of unsuspected persistence. Sir Ralph's letter to Lord Byron was duly returned—by Augusta. She had intercepted it and now pleaded passionately for more time: ‘She feared terribly the effect it might have on her brother.' Annabella was ungenerous enough to reflect that she might mean nothing more by that phrase than the effect it would have on his sister. It seemed to her, as much as she loved the poor little Goose, that no one had more to suffer from the process of law than Augusta herself. Well, the poor little Goose, as it turned out, was not entirely helpless. More and more this seemed to Annabella a game of letters, and she was taking note, with increased attention, of the tricks to be played. Sir Ralph and Judy, considerably put out—and one of the odd effects of their irritation was that a portion of it should be directed, however irrationally, at Annabella herself—simply sent it back. This one hit home, the proof of which lay in the shortest of notes from Augusta: ‘He demands to know if they have acted according to your wishes.' A line that allowed Annabella, when Sir Ralph showed it to her, the greatest indulgence in her own powers of brevity. ‘They have,' was all her reply. Silence followed, for an awful week. She presumed that her father had confiscated, if her husband had made one (and that was, with her, really the question that counted), Lord Byron's more personal response. She wondered what he might say. She wondered if he might care. They had kept each other, after all, in the dark for so long.

Illumination, when it came, was prodigious; it almost brought her back. Mrs Clermont had gone to London to prepare the ground, as Lady Milbanke put it, for Annabella's visit: she had been sent to make arrangements with Dr Lushington. In her place, a girl from the village had been briefly employed to take care of the child, and it was she who brought to its mother, one dry snow-bright morning, the letter from Mrs Leigh. Her parents were closeted in Sir Ralph's study. She could see, through the opened door, her father seated in his easy chair; Lady Milbanke stood with her hands clasped behind her. The girl from the village (her name, Annabella had particularly inquired, was Clare; Lord Byron had such an easy rough intimate manner with servants, and she had struggled, in his absence, to reproduce it) presented the letter to her on a gilt tray. It had her name on it, in her sister's hand. Annabella had begun to say that . . . that it was the custom of the house to offer to Lady Milbanke the first gleanings of the post, but her embarrassment at such a poor explanation made her stop short. She could hear the voice of her mother (rich and full, as she always imagined it, of the blood in her throat), but not what she plentifully said; and the thought, suddenly, of a chance to be snatched at nearly robbed her of breath. ‘Thank you, my dear,' was all she answered, nodding and taking the letter in hand. She was sitting in the front room, sidelong to one of the windows that overlooked the broad drive, which was patterned muddily by the curves of carriage-wheels. As if she needed only a little more light, she rose to one of the benches and sat, facing out, with her back to the open door of her father's study.

Augusta had managed to enclose a note from Lord Byron; this was, in the rushed consciousness of wrongdoing, what his wife turned to first.

All I can say seems useless, and all I could say might be no less unavailing, yet I still cling to the wreck of my hopes before they sink for ever. Were you then never happy with me? Did you never at any time or times express yourself so? Have no marks of affection, of the warmest and most reciprocal attachment, passed between us? Or did in fact scarcely a day go down without some such on one side and generally on both?

Do not mistake me.

I have not denied my state of mind, but you know its causes. Were these deviations from calmness never followed by acknowledgement and repentance? Were not your letters kind? Had I not admitted to you all my faults and follies and assured you that some had not and would not be repeated? I do not require these questions to be answered to me, but to your own heart. The day before I received your father's letter, bidding me for a separation, I had fixed a day for rejoining you. Recollect, that all is at stake—the present—the future and even the colouring of the past. The whole of my errors, or what harsher name you choose to give them, you know; but I loved you and will not part from you without your own most express and expressed refusal to return to or receive me. Only say the word, that you are still mine at heart—and ‘I will buckler thee against a million.'

His hand, it was true, was ever careless; and in spite of the brightness of the morning, which glanced off the snow-bound yard and onto the page, she sat and picked over, with an almost passionate attention, each overwrought expression. There was guilt in the pleasure, which gave it a childish urgency. She had him, Annabella almost felt, to herself just once more, and the mere fact of the letter in her hand and the presence of her parents in the next room involved her lucidly in the pick of loyalties. No one knew better, of course, than the Byrons the little claims made by a secret kept; and she felt, indeed, that while she held so tightly to
theirs
, she could not be said entirely to have given him up. That was the hope, that was the fear, that thrilled within her.

She had once remarked of him, and the visit of the Gosfords had brought back the memory, that his was an eloquence which might be said to ‘create truth, even where none existed before'. And though there was little enough that she recognized in his portrait of their marriage, she could not help but admire and weep at the picture he tenderly held up, like a hand-mirror, for her closer inspection. Ah (this was the sigh that escaped her), so that was her face! There was nothing, she realized, that she could offer against it that would breathe with such rich life; she almost lost the will to argue the matter with him. If this was to be a contest of persuasion, she had been made forcibly to feel, there could be only one winner. Although, and this struck her too, she had never in her life had so clear a chance of standing up, as it were, for a different virtue: her own.

She sat on her bench, quietly counting over the wheel-ruts in the drive, for perhaps ten minutes. At the end of that time she rose—she was hardly aware of the moment of decision—and, bearing the letter openly in her hand, made her slow way to her father's study.

Chapter Five

WHEN SHE EMERGED AT LAST
from the cold days that followed, the vital change had been made. Annabella just managed a joke about having lately acquired, in addition to hunger and thirst, a third appetite, for legal matters. One might have supposed, from the quantities consumed, that no human appetite could have been better satisfied than her hunger for the law; and yet, as week followed week, and her opportunities for gratifying it only multiplied, she began to suspect that just what would always elude her was satiety. She had the sense, as she had once expressed it to herself, of starving for something, and was equal to the acknowledgement, in the midst of what was really her mother's legal pursuit of the explicit, that that
something
was something else.

Dr Lushington, with his long, small-featured face and conspiratorial hands, had brought home to her, as nothing else might have, just how far she had already committed herself. It was, on his part, the final means of persuading her into a still greater commitment, which she duly made. The silence with which he took it in gave her the clearest vision of just how tremendous her own silence had been. What followed could only involve a kind of diminishment: her secret reverberated, after a fashion, into various noises. Her mother, predictably, began to rattle the loudest. Well, she had given it up, her last bit of cake, as she had once whimsically put it. She had made, and she felt this intensely at the time, the final break, but just what was broken in her, she discovered with a kind of relief, wasn't everything; she had feared that it might be. It was a great deal, of course, and she was almost gratified by the scope of it, which encompassed, among other things, her passion for legal subtleties. She was willing, happily, helplessly, to let them take their course; and she crawled, as it were, battered and drenched but still breathing, from the side of that stream.

She had been staying, for the sake of her visit to Dr Lushington, at Gosford House, and was resolved afterwards not to return to her mother. London, after the quiet of Kirkby Mallory, offered her certain consolations. If her intent was really to address herself to a new life—to treat, that is, the year of her marriage as no more than an interlude—she was determined not to shy from a city that might be supposed to hold for her such unhappy recollections. One of the first visits she paid, consequently, was to Lady Caroline; and she could almost smile, as she made her way on a bright uncertain April morning past the stalls of Piccadilly to the quiet cove of Melbourne House, at the memory of an earlier appointment. It was just three years since her awkward interview with Lady Melbourne on the subject of which qualities she believed herself to require in a husband. Her current preoccupation, of course, was rather different, but there was something in the passage, as she imagined it, from expectation to disappointment for which she was not ungrateful. She was a woman, as Lord Byron himself had made painfully clear to her, who depended upon and delighted in her own superiority, but she might be allowed a little credit for the fact that she was also willing to enjoy the contrast with a former and more innocent self.

It was another contrast, however, that morning, from which she drew, as she hoped, the necessary lesson. Lady Caroline received her, as she had before, in the little study that overlooked behind her the gravelled walk. A fire burned in the grate, shading from yellow to grey in the squalls of light, of darkness, that blew in from the changeable cold sunshine. Her cousin wore, once more, as little as she decently might, and the frail pearl-coloured chiffon dress hung off her narrow shoulders in such a way that Annabella was almost tempted to try it on. Caroline herself, it whimsically struck her, was only the rack on which it hung. Her thinness now was nothing but the clearest manifestation of unhappiness. Like her bones, it showed through—which made Annabella grateful, as she thus humorously remarked on it, for the fat of concealment. She had never, at least, lost her appetite.

If she had come ‘to see for herself', as she inwardly put it, what a life lived in the shade, in the aftermath, of Lord Byron's love might look like, Lady Caroline offered her a most beautiful picture. Her long face had stretched into a narrowness that allowed her, it seemed, but a single muscular expression; Annabella remembered how quick and various the play of her countenance had been. It was almost the task of her visit to read into that face its abiding message. The impression she quietly took in was of a frantic force rendered desperately still: a moth, huddling beneath its wings in the death of a flame. This was the image that struck her, and to which, in time, she had her own reason for recurring. Caroline, however, proved perfectly capable of the odd nervous flap—Annabella confessed herself occasionally startled by them.

‘I should like to ask your advice,' Lady Caroline began, after initial pleasantries, with her knees drawn up to her chin and her chair drawn up, as far as it might go, to the foot of the fire. ‘Your moral sense (you see, how freely I admit it) has always been sharper than mine—even, I believe, concerning events in which you have a personal stake. Lord Byron has confided in me
that
which if you merely menace him with the knowledge shall make him tremble. But I promised him solemnly, at the time, never to give him away; and I have been trying to calculate lately, in the light of your . . . situation, the force such a promise should continue to hold.'

Annabella restrained a smile. She might almost congratulate herself on how far she had come—the proof of which lay plainly in the fact that Lady Caroline presumed her still innocently ignorant of the depths to which her husband had committed himself with his sister. There was, perhaps, something unflattering in the thought that, by Caroline's estimate, a woman as virtuous as Annabella could never have guessed the truth and remained, for so long, a party to it. Lady Byron, at least, was still innocent enough to make a pretence of it, and push her cousin into naming the deed. ‘You believe me, then,' she said, biding her time, ‘to be in want of threats?'

‘Affairs with Lord Byron,' Lady Caroline said, and Annabella felt, rising within her, the first little flare of contention at her choice of a word, ‘end always with threats, on the one hand, and indifference, on the other. I never had the luxury, as a means of keeping up relations, of a child; and I supposed you, wrongly it may be, in want of security against the chance that he might claim her.'

Annabella was equal to the simplest confession. ‘Dr Lushington has hopes, and these are the hopes I live in.'

They rarely looked at each other. Caroline, who apologized at one point for the chill in the room, fixed her eyes on the fire; and Annabella, who had perched at the end of the chaise longue, which offered likewise a view of the gravelled grounds, was moved to imitate her by a strange sort of sympathy. A quiet flame on a bright morning just suited something ghostly in her mood. She was conscious of being at the heart or centre, as it were, of a particular mode of feeling. They could almost pride themselves on being, as lovers of the famous poet, the best, most powerful illustrations of his work; and there was, in the knowledge, the intimate complicity of shared privilege.

‘I would like to help you,' Lady Caroline offered, ‘and I'm perfectly willing to admit that my intentions in the past have never been so pure.' Annabella sensed in this a helpless sort of boasting, regarding an earlier triumph; but she met it, humbly enough, with the private reflection that whatever Lady Caroline had to tell, she had more amply, more exquisitely, endured first-hand. Her silence was suitably expectant, and Caroline continued, ‘I wondered if you could relieve me a little of the guilt—either of staying quiet, where a word might save you, or of breaking a promise I was solemnly bound to keep.'

Annabella flattered herself that this was the sort of question on which she could exercise her wit with the greatest distinction, and she answered it with the slightly awkward sensation of being indulged in her vanities. ‘We are taught,' she said eventually, ‘that virtue follows always a single path. Where it appears to split, we may be sure of being offered, among the alternatives, a turn for the worse. Truth has only one path, though it needs at times a sharp eye to distinguish it from the false. By making vows we bind ourselves to keep to a single road, many miles before we can guess the course it will take. Yet God allows us only, by his sanction, to commit ourselves to Truth, and where such a vow appears to prevent us from honouring that commitment, we are entitled to ask whether his sanction was ever given.' After a pause, she added: ‘You may guess that these are questions which have occupied of late my sleepless hours, for the vows I took I called on my God to witness. But I take comfort from the thought, that He who sees everything sees just as clearly the darkness in which we look for His intentions.'

It was then Lady Caroline's turn to smile, and Annabella drew on all of her fine propriety not to mirror her in it. She felt almost, in their delicate courtesies, the pleasant formality of a dance, which reminded her of nothing so much as the fated waltz, which Caroline had put on and where she had first met her husband. If only, and this was the thought that threatened to break out in her face, Herr Wohlkrank himself were present to guide their steps! Their tone, she was perfectly willing to suppose, was dreadful enough. She felt, although a party to it, the tiniest trace of pity, like a thread on the lips, for Lord Byron himself. He had always complained, after all, of the scruples of women, from which he had suffered both ways—in what they refused him, and in what they obliged him to accept. Oh, Byron's women! and the sensation recurred within her of living, at a high pitch, in the very refinement of that mode of feeling which Lord Byron's eloquence had made so brilliantly public. It rose up in her like a bright little streak of effervescence in a glass of champagne. What was really delightful was the thought that Lady Caroline, in spite of her huddled-up air, must be feeling it, too, that they were feeling it together. Their sympathies, however, had been sharpened by nothing so much as the habit of rivalry; Annabella recognized the danger of being cut.

Caroline began to address herself to the fire in a low tone. From the time of Mrs Leigh's arrival in Bennet Street, in the year 1813, Lord Byron had given her various intimations of a criminal intercourse between them, from which he had, at several stages, attempted to desist. These intimations had broken at last into an open avowal, which he had offered Caroline in a hope not unkind of blasting at the root that affection for his person, which had swelled on occasion (and still continued to surge) into an ungovernable obsession, and from which they had both violently, separately, suffered. But the overwhelming force (and this was, Annabella flattered herself, Lady Caroline's best attempt at a little thrust) of his brotherly affection prevented him from giving up the only relation in which he had found, with an equal ease, his passions sated and his heart consoled. There was a pause; and Annabella felt obliged, for the sake of her own pretended innocence, to fill it with a suitable measure of horror. Just what that measure should be, it struck her for the first time (with a shiver of the real thing), she was no longer, in fact, innocent enough to gauge; but she wished, in any case, to make a display of repugnance that would still give a point to what was really her larger experience of her husband's delinquencies.

‘The truth of this (and the only hope of its suppression, if it is true, is that such depravity must be
faced
before it can be proved) would expose Lord Byron and, which is still more to be feared, Mrs Leigh, to a condemnation so severe that its taint might reach, I dread to think it, even to me. I fancy, my dear Caroline,' she had decided to admit to what she could not conceal, ‘that you had counted on, perhaps, a less calculated aversion; but the fact is, my relations with Lord Byron have taught me, if nothing else, never to be shocked.'

Lady Caroline looked up at her guest. Annabella's last words might really have struck her as nothing more than a challenge to be met, for she continued: ‘There were worse crimes. He confessed to me once, in that sickness of his own sins which always inspired in him a run of talk, that from his boyhood he had been in the practice of unnatural crime. The boy Rushton, by whom he had been attended as a page, was one of those whom he had corrupted—for the sake of an appetite which, as you have no doubt heard, I was guilty in my desperation of playing up to, in the mistaken belief that a more natural outlet for those passions might suspend in him the unnatural desire to satisfy them. I do not believe that he has committed this crime since returning to England, though he indulged in it unrestrictedly in Turkey. His own horror of the act still appeared to be so great that he several times turned quite faint and sick in alluding to the subject; and the worst to be feared, from an impersonal view of his separation, is that it might push him to return to those scenes in which he had so little proved himself capable of self-restraint.'