A Quiet Adjustment (30 page)

‘I don't suppose,' Mary countered, ‘that I have either—I mean, a sense of her crimes. It isn't a thing one is used to measuring up. I shouldn't myself like to measure it. She has written just what a decent and sensible person
would
write in what she calls her situation. I don't think we can ignore our own part in pushing her into it. As for decent society, we all know that keeping her
out
of it is the one threat we have at our disposal. I should be sorry to make use of it.'

‘It is,' Annabella was conscious of being, in her way, at the centre of their disagreement and strove quite beautifully to make herself agreeable to both the parties to it, ‘perhaps the best letter she could have written. She shows herself sensible. She shows herself dutiful. She plays up, even, to what might be called—and I am perfectly willing to call it that—our
appetite
for the intricacy of her position. I am glad, too, of the little answering stiffness in her tone. She has seldom felt so sure of her ground.' Mary gave her a look of relief, which hardened into something else as Annabella continued. ‘Her reply has such a fine clarity, it is almost brittle. We may be confident, at least, that it will be easily broken. Women like Augusta (there is no one here, I believe, who loves her or knows her better) are never lucid two days together. She has been extremely lucid, but her good sense has never been so durable as ours. It will give way beneath it. We have only to keep up the pressure.'

‘Until she breaks, you mean,' Mary said.

‘Until we are sure of her—of her soul.' And then, for she owed her friend that much, she added: ‘I understand very well your aversion to
measuring
up
, as you say, the extent of her crimes. You may believe me when I tell you that I share it, though I have not had, as you have, the luxury of closing my eyes. You suppose whatever it is to be unspeakable, but that does not in the least make it untrue. You wish to treat it as a thing quite apart, so that it may be left alone; but it runs through—through everything. He is her great love, I can put it no plainer than that. She is his. He is mine. There you have what might be called, in mathematical terms, the inequality, which I was forced in the end to admit my despair of solving. I
have
admitted it. I have relinquished my claims to him, but forgive me if I stop short, at last, of leaving to them the remainder. I suppose you will suspect me of something worse when I tell you, I love her too well for that.'

Mary, at such an appeal, contented herself with remarking: ‘I do not suspect
you
.'

Lady Byron had promised to ‘work on' Augusta, but it was Mrs Villiers in the weeks to come who assumed the real burden of their task. Even Mary could not help but admit what a talent she had for elucidating the possibilities of that strange little verb. There were times, however, after their friend had gone home again, when Annabella would turn to Mary and confess that there was something in Mrs Villiers' efficiency that she could not quite reconcile herself to making use of. Just what Thérèse (they were all, by the end of the summer, close if not cosy enough for such familiarity) hoped for herself to achieve by such ‘good offices' was a question the two old friends were perfectly equal to discussing between themselves. ‘Mrs Villiers' Revenge' is the name Mary gave their curious project—it had no clearer title.

Thérèse, who had a position at court, was perfectly placed to keep up such pressure as the three of them chose to bear, at least while Mrs Leigh was stationed in London, in attendance on the elderly Queen Charlotte. Annabella, once, confessed herself almost jealous of Mrs Villiers for her easy proximity to the poor Goose. It was a part of their project for her to deny to Mrs Leigh the sanction of her company, but she sometimes regretted, she said to Mary, ‘just what the limit of our
limited intercourse
has entailed upon
me.
' To give up, she went on (it was a line whose repetition offered her a kind of comfort), both of the Byrons at once was something she hadn't the heart or the stomach for; and the only thing that might have persuaded her to desist from Mrs Villiers' Revenge was the consideration that it could cost her, in the end, the friendship of Mrs Leigh. ‘She has been kind to you sometimes, has she not?' was Mary's quiet reply. ‘There were times, my dear,' Annabella said, with the dignity of her candour, ‘in which she saved my life.' But before Miss Montgomery could interpose a word, she had continued: ‘It seems the least I can do in return is to bother myself a little about her soul.'

It was Mrs Villiers, however, who took on much of the bother, and she had in recompense the pleasure of making, one day in September, to their little salon in Wilmot Street a first report of her progress. The leaves were turning, and several lay matted on the windowsill. Lady Byron, who expected the conversation to demand of her a certain variety of expression, took up a position at the card-table, staring out, to avoid the necessity of living up to it. Thérèse was determined to give a full account and began with the beginning: with what she called, with heavy emphasis, her first
subsequent
meeting with Mrs Leigh. Augusta had been summoned from Six Mile Bottom to London for the Regent's fete. ‘It was, you may remember, in the very heat of July. She wrote to me to prepare a dress for her. When we first met—for the first time, I mean, since I had become intimate with her crimes; it was an interview I dreaded beyond measure—our whole conversation turned on gauzes and satins. But I was foolishly dissatisfied. I thought her looking quite stout and well, which by the bye she still does, and perfectly cool and easy. This rather provoked me, but I checked my tongue. You would, Miss Montgomery, have admired my forbearance—I know quite well that's the side of the question
you
come down on. A thing may stand firm, I reasoned, to a sudden assault, which gives way easily to a steady quiet underhand sort of pushing. That was the sort of pushing I resolved upon, and it has had, as I can now tell you, its effect.'

She paused and refreshed herself for a minute with a cup of tea. Lady Byron wondered again just what could have driven an old friend of Augusta's to so sudden and enthusiastic a conversion to their cause. She was struck, then, for the first time—and the comparison was so unflattering that she gave herself a little credit for admitting to it—by the resemblance between their friendships with Mrs Leigh, who was not only prettier than either of them, but softer and more generally formed for the conveniences of love. A sort of resentment would grow over time in the hearts of her companions at repeated proofs of such a contrast. Lady Byron began, in the really admirable indifference of her self-reflection, to consider whether a virtuous act could ever derive its motive from such resentment.

Mrs Villiers, meanwhile, had continued with her narration. ‘Well, you asked me to work on her, and I may say in all humility that I
have
worked. I have begun, at least, to be rewarded by the first results. Yesterday she dined at my house, and I declare that in all my life I never saw anything equal to her dejection, her absence. Her whole mind was evidently preoccupied and engrossed; she was apparently insensible of being in society. Mr V, who exerted himself much better than I expected to show her as much kindness as before (I have had, you may imagine, to let him in on our little secret), tells me that while I was called out of the room he could not extract an answer, even a monosyllable from her, except when he joked about the predicted destruction of the world today. You know, it has been in all the papers. He said, apropos to some arrangement our boys wanted to make: “We need not give ourselves any trouble about it, for the world will be at an end tomorrow and that will put an end to all our cares.” At which she quite exclaimed before the children, the servants, etc. “I don't know what you may all be, but I'm sure I'm not prepared for the next world, so I hope this will last.” That looks well for her mind. If the feeling can be steadily kept up, I have every expectation it will yield us whatever we want
in time
—but do not think me brutal or even unkind if I tell you the work is not done yet.'

Exactly what Mrs Villiers' method of ‘working' Augusta had been, the two old friends devoted several afternoons by Mary's fire to speculating. Thérèse herself, when asked, only smiled and adjusted her wig, and mentioned the effect one might hope to achieve by creating a
tone
. They suspected it had something to do with God and Hell-fire, with what Annabella called ‘all that Pye-House sort of talking'. That was the notion, at least, that inspired in Mary of all people a glimmer of the way forward. The closest to confession that Augusta had come was only to say that Lord Byron
had
invited her to join him for the winter on the continent. She had decided, she told Mrs Villiers, to decline him for reasons that—and this was the code she yet clung to in all such discussions—concerned what might be called, among some of their friends, the betrayal of Lady Byron that such a visit would suggest. By this time it was perfectly understood between them just what was meant by such a betrayal, but Mrs Villiers could not bring Mrs Leigh to attempt a cruder avowal. (It would strike them, they each supposed, when it came, as almost immodest.) She may have created a tone, but that was also the tone that Augusta kept to.

She did, on the other hand, show Mrs Villiers one of Lord Byron's letters. The poor woman could hardly, in relating the tenor of it to her two friends, keep out of her voice the short fierce breath of delight. She held up her first real piece of evidence as brightly as a flag and shook it out for everyone to see. ‘It was practically a love-letter,' she all but sighed. By this point, the distaste aroused by her enthusiasms had become for Mary and Annabella the subject of frequent confidential exchanges. Thérèse, however, was by no means as stupid or insensitive as she appeared. She possessed the kind of cunning that sees nothing so sharply as intended slights. Lady Byron began to suspect that the term Mrs Villiers' Revenge should by no means be limited to the persecution of Augusta. It was a task that afforded Thérèse, along the way, the chance to strike out in a number of little directions.

‘Lord Byron has practically declared,' Mrs Villiers insisted on reading out from Augusta's letter, which she had persuaded her to give up, the more scandalous bits, ‘that he never loved anyone but Augusta, and that only Augusta could ever love
him
. He says:
Do not be uneasy, and do not hate yourself
. That is very striking, I think; almost an admission. He says:
If you hate either, let it be me
. And then he thinks better of such just remorse and adds:
But do not; it would kill me
. And so on. And then—here we come to it at last.
She, or rather the separation
, he says (a very significant distinction, I believe)
has broken my heart
. And then:
I feel as if an elephant had trodden on it
. Hardly the word of a gentleman, but that is not the line I meant. No, here it is:
I always loved you better
, he says,
than any earthly existence, and I always shall, unless I go mad
. That is very clear, I believe, quite unequivocal. You should see how poor Mrs Leigh hangs her head at that, hangs her head and says nothing. It is the saying, I suppose, we must bring her to at last. It will make all the difference.'

Annabella could scarcely, at such disclosures, refrain from considering their personal allusion, though the letter also inspired in her strange sympathies for Augusta. Her own correspondence with Lord Byron had been forcibly exposed to her mother's inspection and suspended. Nothing, in its way, had been more painful to her than the forfeit of her right to communicate with him. She had got, almost in spite of herself, into the habit of tenderness he had instilled in her; and to give up her dose of expressed affection had had the effect on her of breaking the habit. It struck her then that this was, in its way, just the effect they were seeking. There could be no clearer proof, she supposed, of the strength of her spirit than the willingness she showed to make use of the lesson in suffering she had had at their hands. That, at least, was the lesson she sought to apply; and she offered at last, to their little salon, a suitable object for the delicate difficult duty they had undertaken to fulfil. They must persuade Augusta to resign to herself the conduct of her correspondence with Lord Byron. Annabella was willing, she said, for the sake of Augusta's character, to accept a responsibility that would involve her so often in revisiting old wounds.

Just what would bring Augusta to give up her rights as his sister was still the question, and here it was that Mary herself proved, in answering it, unexpectedly resourceful. There had been, as she afterwards admitted to Annabella just before bed, over a cup of green tea, a not unselfish motive behind her little inspiration: she had wished to enlist in their cause a figure that might lend it the unimpeachable sanctity of his reputation. She was well aware, she said, of the resemblance they might suggest in the public eye to a ‘coven of women'; there was nothing they could do to dispel it so simple as accepting the good offices of a man. The right man, indeed, almost instantly came to mind. No one was better placed to administer to the conscience of Mrs Leigh than their old friend and her vicar, Mr Eden. She had mentioned his name with a cautious sidelong glance, but Lady Byron met it with a bright generous measure of her own unblinking gaze. She was willing, she said (just mindful of the repetition), for the sake of Augusta, to expose to one who might be said to possess the most painful scrutiny the sad brief history of her marriage. She confessed that he was not unacquainted with certain details, and they might expect of him the really remarkable sympathies of his understanding. She supposed that he could, almost as a matter of professional pride, bring to bear upon Augusta a moral pressure that—