A Quiet Adjustment (8 page)

‘
I do not regard beauty
,' Lady Melbourne continued her recitation
, ‘but am influenced by the manners of a gentleman
.' Lord Byron unquestionably had both; and to confuse the matter further, Annabella had written, and now heard her aunt read back to her, that ‘
she was always, by nature, suspicious of any too perfect agreement between them. That is, she preferred good manners that seemed not merely the most flattering ornament to good looks.
' If Lady Melbourne was aware of having been matched for subtlety, she could console herself with the reflection that her niece had become lost in it. ‘
Genius is not in my opinion necessary
,'—she had at least come to the end of the page—‘
and, I suspect, difficult to unite with the qualities I have mentioned. Yet I am afraid that some genius is requisite to understand a fellow-creature, and a good heart is not the best proof of penetration. A good heart, however, is what I absolutely require in the character of a husband, which leaves me, I suppose, much as you found me: unwed
.'

Lady Melbourne, in whose voice the smile might be said to have hardened with the strain of preserving it, now ventured to suggest ‘that anyone who could make up the sum of these contradictions must be either a madman or an angel.' It amazed Annabella afterwards that she forbore, simply, to grin, as she directed her aunt's attention to the reverse of the page, on which a single condition had been written. This, Lady Melbourne, flustered at last, now read aloud:
‘I would not enter into a family where there was a strong tendency to
insanity
.' Annabella had feared, in the final minute, that in spite of everything she had tipped her cap too plainly at Lord Byron. She had hoped by this late addition to upset anything like certainty in her aunt's views. Lord Byron's descendence from Admiral Byron, or ‘Mad Jack', was so well known that Lady Melbourne could not doubt the object of Annabella's reference, which had the additional effect of seeming to acknowledge the character against which each of them, privately, had been testing Miss Milbanke's description. ‘Well,' Lady Melbourne said, asserting her dignity by rising first, ‘I believe we must find you an angel after all, if you're not to become incorrigibly spinsterish, like your dear friend Miss Montgomery.' Annabella was sensible of the threat in these words; it was, perhaps, the clearest note of her little triumph.

It seemed wonderful to Annabella to have put her famous aunt into a temper, especially as she had in no respect compromised the innocence of her role. Sir Ralph might be the victim of other people's bullying self-assurance, but his daughter saw no reason to give way with him. Lady Melbourne left Jennings to see her out. Annabella watched her recede into a private room, with a delicacy of womanly grace that had just begun to stiffen into brittleness.

Jennings, as it happens, had a message for Annabella, which, he advised her, was to have an immediate reply. It came from Lady Caroline—the Lambs occupied the apartments on the second floor of Melbourne House. Lady Caroline had seen Miss Milbanke come in and had guessed with whom she was closeted; now, in turn, she begged for a minute of her time. Jennings showed himself in the confidence of his mistress's daughter-in-law by guiding Annabella up the broad stairs. She was conscious of a slight pressure on her vanity induced by the attention she was receiving, at one of London's great houses, from its most glittering figures. She felt the need to spill off, a little, some of the flow of her spirits; and so she remarked, as Jennings allowed her to pass on the steps, ‘that it seemed quite a morning for little chats. She was unused to being the object of so much curiosity.'

Afterwards, she had occasion to remember his response. ‘Miss Milbanke will no doubt grow accustomed to it—as much as one may, that is.' This was, as she later reflected, the first chord sounded of what became the deafening symphony of her life. The curiosity of strangers struck her more and more as a noise in which all other sounds, including the intimations of lovers, of friends, of her own conscience, were lost. At the time, she felt only the flutter of tickled vanity at what was expected of her, at the prospects to which she must learn to inure herself.

There was no one to direct or receive her when she reached the top of the stairs, but the door was open, and she pushed against it. She found herself standing at the fringe of a long Persian carpet, unrolled down the length of a hallway. It was adorned on either side by a succession of busts, the heads, as she noted in passing, of their famous contemporaries: Canning, De Witt, Fox, Sheridan, etc. Lady Caroline's husband, as Annabella knew, harboured ministerial ambitions, but the bust that presented itself most forcefully to her inner eye was that of Lord Byron. It would, she imagined, beautifully ornament any hallway, including her own; and she considered for a minute in that light the possession of him, as one might consider the purchase of a work of art. Yes, she decided, he would do very well as a husband in marble. A series of doors stood between the heads, and she walked the length of the hall—her sense of invasion becoming acute—to determine if any of them hinted at their mistress's presence. The thought struck her that Lord Byron himself must have come this way, many times; the apartments seemed designed to keep a visitor secret. She tried at random a succession of handles. One of them turned, and the door gave way, yielding at first a view of the gravelled walk behind the house, and then the closer comforts of a study: a thick rug, the remains of a fire, a deep chair, and a table, covered with papers, pushed under the window. A door to the side opened inwards. Annabella had just stepped forwards to glance at the contents of the desk. She had little time to register the shock of surprise at finding her name at the top of one of the papers, and her writing below it, when a voice from the inner chamber called clearly, ‘You have found me out.'

Lady Caroline emerged now, barefooted, wearing nothing but a loose gown. She looked thin and pale. Only her lips made a plea for colour, being almost obscenely red. They suggested the slickness of fruit freshly eaten. Annabella was conscious of the way they centred one's gaze and deliberately withdrew hers—to meet the large eyes, startled and startling, of her hostess. ‘You have found me out,' she repeated and, after the usual kisses and courtesies, added, to make her meaning plain, and by way of apology, ‘Lady Melbourne presumed to show me these samples of your poetry, which I believe are delightful. I have just had them back from Lord Byron himself, who perfectly agrees. We have all been utterly charmed. What an extraordinary girl you are, he said. Who would imagine so much strength and variety of thought under your placid countenance?'

There was in her sisterly attention something to be fought off; it made claims, it called for and overcame resistance. Annabella, against her will, began to redden. She had been caught off guard. Lady Caroline offered her guest the chair and threw herself upon the low couch that ran along the wall opposite the window. Annabella's defences, already fatigued from her earlier interview, had been breached; what finally flooded in, gathering and rising in her breast, was a swell of high feeling. ‘Everyone calls me placid and thinks me cold. I presumed Lord Byron to possess greater discernment.' Caroline, sweetly smiling, offered to correct his impression. At which, after a moment's silent rehearsal, Annabella more softly remarked, ‘It is only that I may be said to suffer from vanities as other women suffer from nerves. It does me no good to have them played up to; it is like telling ghost tales to children. I feel too often, inwardly rising, a shriek.' And then, with her eyes all but closed and speaking by rote, ‘I have felt the madness of pride to such a degree that I have struck my head against my bedroom wall till I staggered back.' She yielded to this Carolinish outburst more or less wilfully. That it was true, she could not deny to herself; but she volunteered it less in confidence than rivalry. Perhaps, she later reflected, it was the air of rivalry itself that gave her away. Caroline now clapped her hands together and gave her a look above the tips. ‘My poor girl,' she said—and Annabella could not measure the extent of her irony—‘what a little volcano you are, to be sure, under all that beautiful snow.'

Annabella was conscious, from this opening exchange, of having lost ground. The fact made itself felt. It seemed to alter the angle of her view and brought into sharper comparison how level had been the gaze she had directed at Lady Melbourne. Now, towards Caroline, she was distinctly looking up—a tendency to which, strangely, Caroline's air of apology only contributed. ‘I wanted to see you,' Caroline offered at last, ‘because'—her hesitation was only a calculation of her effect—‘because I have a confession to make.' Annabella could not disguise from herself the quick fear brought on by this amiable introduction. It proved to her how much she felt she had to suffer at Caroline's hands, of exposure, if nothing worse; and exposure had often seemed to her the worst fate of all. ‘I have told Lord Byron,' Lady Caroline continued, ‘when he applied to me, that you were engaged to George Eden. I believed it to be true at the time; I have heard nothing to contradict it. But I cannot deny, as a second motive, a desire to spare you attentions that I supposed you to consider displeasing. It has lately occurred to me that perhaps I have been hasty—on both counts. I wished to do you justice and discover, from your own lips, the state of your attachments.'

Caroline's air, as she spoke these words, was all solicitude and contrition, but Annabella suspected that, in the largest sense, she was being practised upon. Indeed, she seemed to feel the closing of a door; she was being forced to choose, as it were, inside or out. Lady Caroline was attempting to push Annabella into one of two unpleasantnesses: into either a contradiction or a confession. If Lord Byron's attentions were, in fact, displeasing, then Annabella could hardly regret the mistake into which he had been led. But if she acknowledged the truth, that Mr Eden had been rejected, she invited Lady Caroline to entertain the crudest conjectures as to the other question. Annabella recognized that an outright lie, especially one so easily contradicted, was beyond her. The simple truth was, perhaps, best blindly adhered to; and blindness of a sort is just what she felt as she confessed ‘that Mr Eden and herself had formed no understanding. They were under no obligations to each other, but she considered it, in all fairness to him, a question of honour to leave the matter there.' At which, she allowed a brief shining fullness to rise to her eyes, hoping that a little cloud of tender feeling might, for a minute at least, obscure a clear view of herself.

Afterwards, on her way home—Annabella's recovery had been quick; a softening of temper seemed the only enduring effect of her show of tears—she began to puzzle over her latest encounter. How little, it seemed, Lord Byron's mistress had to gain from the confession that one of her rivals was free to accept him. She felt for the first time the hand of true fear resting on her. It occurred to her that Caroline's cozy intervention had not been outside the scope of Lady Melbourne's design, that the pair had approached her in concert. And she began to detect, even in her own impulses, the pattern of a larger orchestration. The game they intended to play was still beyond her, but as a proof of its progress she had only to consult her own conscious feeling of exercised tact. She was living to win, and a manner both joyous and indifferent had crept into her conduct of relationships formerly sacred: with her mother, her friend, her suitor. This was new to her, and either the first mark of incipient adulthood, or something more troubling still. Though whether, in the event, it would matter so much if she
did
win, Annabella was not yet in a position to say. What victory itself would look like was perhaps the first of the questions demanding her answer.

Chapter Seven

AN ANSWER, THEN, WAS JUST
what Annabella was soon required to make. Within two weeks she had received a letter from Lady Melbourne. She took it after breakfast into the garden to read. The weather was the very best of October. The light, in yellows and reds, played across the fall of plane-tree leaves on the Gosfords' square of lawn, and a pleasant friction between the two colours produced, it seemed, a glow of heat at the edges. The stone bench placed at the bottom of the garden was perfectly dry, and she had only to brush a handful of fat leaves from the surface of it to secure for herself a seat that she could adopt, and keep to, for as long as her purpose lasted, without fear of damp. She broke the seal of the envelope and emptied its contents on her lap. What seemed to be two distinct notes lay before her, composed on different paper and in different hands. She recognized in the first her aunt's writing, and though her breath quickened at the sight of the second (Annabella always enjoyed the constraint and deferral of pleasures), she decided to begin with the former.

Lady Melbourne (in what Sir Ralph called his sister's best ‘harum-scarum' style) entered at once upon an explanation of their ‘recent conference'. She had had at the time already in her possession the note which she now saw fit to dispatch to her niece, after a deal of soul-searching in which she had attempted to weigh and rank, if not to reconcile, the distinct duties of which she was severally possessed: to her brother, to her own son, to Lord Byron, and ‘of course, to yourself, my dear Annabella'. She had hoped ‘by a closer inquisition' into her niece's feelings to spare herself the need for ‘playing any further part in the affair'. Had she been perfectly persuaded that Annabella could never, on any account, reciprocate the sentiments of which Lord Byron had entrusted to herself the communication, she would gladly ‘have given the matter up, and let it rest, at once'. But she found she could not so persuade herself. Annabella's responses had been sufficiently obscure and uncertain as to admit the possibility that she might, given time and a better acquaintance with her own feelings and their object, learn to resolve the paradox of her desires in such a fashion as to allow to one, who consistently satisfied at least half of her contradictory demands, the favour of her choice. The proper period of that acquaintance she had at length decided to anticipate ‘in consideration towards
him
, whose anxiety to know his fate seemed to preclude the patience which might be necessary to attain it.'

And so, such as it was, she laid the question in her niece's hands and trusted to her own judgement the resolution of her own doubts. She begged for his sake, however, that Annabella would consider well the extent to which she might feel free ‘to canvas a general opinion' to help her to a decision. Lady Melbourne believed it to be her duty to remark that she had not, as far as that went, mentioned the matter to Sir Ralph. She hesitated—this was added in a postscript, which seemed to indicate a second sitting and a development of mood and tone—to presume to direct her niece's deliberations, but she felt it might not be improper to advise that Annabella had better ‘take off the stilts on which she had been mounted' in their previous interview before she came to a decision. She knew from her own experience that such questions might easily be said to possess ‘an imaginary quality' which obtruded on their proper consideration; it was best to address them with one's feet on firm ground. One wasn't, after all, playing games.

A game, however, was just what Annabella, briefly, felt the elation of having won. She could even, fondly, condescend to smile at her aunt's little gibe about stilts. Annabella's feet had never before felt so lightly the pull of ‘firm ground'. Every circumstance, large and small, seemed to contribute to her happiness. The unusual, almost personable, warmth of autumnal air, the light mixing on her lap, and the expectation of what awaited her indoors (that little flurry of self-interested activity; what a blessing it was, being already engaged to Mary Montgomery for tea!) combined with her sense of holding in her own hands, not only her own fate, but that of the most celebrated poet of the age. She was young; the world was expanding around her, but she seemed to remain, however it grew, at its centre. Her faith in her own deserving had at last been met, and beautifully, grandly, at that. She was on the verge of a choice, but it was lightened by just enough uncertainty to spare her the burden of the full, particular weight of a
yes
or a
no
. Even so, she could not delay for ever, in the sunshine, her reading of the second note. She must, in the end, turn to it; and as she did, her heart began to race with no simple consciousness of joy.

My dear Lady M.—or, dare I write it?—Aunt,

I have always openly professed my admiration of your niece and have ever been anxious to cultivate her acquaintance, but C told me she was engaged to E. So did several others, all being generally convinced that E would make the best husband in the world. Under these circumstances I withdrew and wished not to hazard my heart with a woman I was so extremely inclined to love but at the same time sure could be nothing to me. The case is now different—as your daughter-in-law herself has tenderly ‘put it' to me. I have trusted you to my secret and am entirely in your power. I do not care about her fortune and should be happy if the floating capital of which I am now master could by some arrangements turn out to be advantageous to both. Does Miss M. waltz?—it is an odd question—but a very essential point with me. I wish I had any hopes that it should be possible for me to make myself agreeable to her, but my fears predominate, and will I am sure give me a very awkward appearance. I wish you would undertake to say a few words for me. Could you not say that I wish to propose, but I have great doubts of her, etc.

Excuse my asking this favour, but you have always been so kind to me in every crise de Coeur that I trust to your being my friend in this case. Everything rests with A.M. herself, for my earnest wish is to devote my whole life to her.

Yours ever,
B

There was, no doubt, a great deal in this to please a young lady, but enough to trouble her, too. That presumptive ‘aunt' suggested how snugly Lord Byron supposed himself to be ‘in' with one branch, at least, of the family to which he aspired to attach his name. It spoke, if nothing else, of his confidence in her answer, but the reference also revived in Annabella her suspicions of acting, as she had put it to herself, in a larger concert—which isn't to say that she had ever paid heed to the rumours occasionally floated about the poet and her aunt. Lady Melbourne was, after all, nearly four decades his senior, and her charms, such as they may have been, had certainly aged into the wintry end of autumnal. Annabella herself, milkily complected, could hardly repress on occasion a tender abhorrence from kissing her aunt's papery cheek. The lengths to which a lover's attraction might reasonably be expected to go produced in her a shiver of disgust. But the breath of that disgust was drawn in fear, and her own distaste struck her—as she entered, almost unwillingly, this avenue of her curiosity—as perhaps the clearest proof of her naivety in these matters. She did not trust herself to guess the enticements a young man counted on in such relations. She was far from confident of possessing them in any useful measure. Lord Byron's appetites, it was generally understood, were well seasoned; and Annabella was perfectly aware that she could not, in the event of her accepting him, presume to satisfy only his sense of her virtue. There were other senses that demanded their due, and she was conscious, in her own life, of having starved them.

Her eye tended to stop, too, as she reread the letter, on that pretty piece of vagueness which Lord Byron himself had casually accented. Her aunt's daughter-in-law was, of course, Lady Caroline, but just what was meant by the way in which she had ‘tenderly put' the ‘case of Miss M.' to the poet was a subject that began to occupy Annabella's jealousies. The rumour of their affair was well established; its truth could be little doubted. What her interest might be in proving Miss Milbanke free to bestow her hand, Annabella had already questioned—bafflement had been her only answer. She had supposed herself too innocent to enter into any sympathy with the motives or appetites of that spoilt creature. But Annabella's curiosity, now excited, knew neither bounds nor bars and ventured forth in every direction. The worst imaginings began to appal her thoughts, in a manner that first and foremost convinced her of the depths of her own corrupting fancy. She was not, she discovered, above being involved herself in the scenes that her darkest fears luridly conjured up.

But there were other, simpler, reflections to upset her, which she turned to almost for the relief of her deeper anxieties. That business about the waltz: she would have liked to believe him capable of merely teasing her, quietly, through the medium of her aunt. Surely a man who had pledged to devote his life to her happiness could not so quickly have forgotten the circumstances of their first meeting? True, they had not spoken, but Annabella had played so prominent a part in directing the steps of the ladies that only a gentleman blind to their charms or madly in love with one of them could have failed to perceive her. Unless, indeed—and this was a more comfortable line of thought—he had been so occupied by his sister that he had no attention to spare for flirtations. A fact, if true, which spoke well not only of Lord Byron's sense of brotherly
tendresse
but of his general indifference to the world of beauty where there was one particular relation at hand to claim his solicitude. And, if he was teasing her, Annabella was too well aware of her tendency ‘to mount herself on stilts', in her aunt's phrase, to resent for long the gallantry of a gentleman who discreetly tapped against them, by way of reminder. Finally, there was that off-hand business of the ‘etc.', which she read over and over again, till she could make nothing of it but her instinctive dislike of abbreviation.