But often Gus would slip down from the operator’s swivel chair, leaving her open books before the consoles, and simply sit cross-legged on the floor-tiles, staring at the rows and rows of black and grey boxes. And listening.
For at night, discs whisper their secrets to those with ears to hear.
Susurration. A breathing, a soft chaotic overlay of nearly-words, of almost-conversation, as if she eavesdropped upon a salon-full of ghosts from centuries gone by: with everything to gossip of, but no breath to speak.
Sometimes, they moaned.
But mostly the indeterminate sounds formed overlapping whispers from beyond, whose words would never coalesce into meaning, yet whose message would haunt Gus-who-grew-into-Augusta forever.
Upon the wall, a gaslight hisses, incandescent. Ada lies back upon the chaise-longue, dabbing a dampened cloth on her too-pale forehead. On the dainty table beside her lies a small pile of notes scribbled in black ink, with loops and scrawls surrounding the strange equations, and scraps of verse-forbidden verse!-in her scratchy handwriting.
And, on one of those sheets, something new: an ink-drawn table with numbered, imperative steps of logic. Slow, for a person to work through those iterative commands: yet in her mind, burning with fever, it is Babbage’s gleaming Engine which is alive with the pseudo-thoughts she has created; it is polished cogs and shining rods which click and spin more surely than too-weak mortal flesh, undermined by moral frailty or feminine weakness.
The Pattern beneath the world…
Is she mad? Can she, a mere woman, be the first to have deduced the true possibilities of Babbage’s calculating engines? Can she, for all her disadvantages, her cursed beginnings, truly perceive the power of mechanical minds?
For she has written the devil’s code, logical steps which will execute within the power-realm of brass and steel, in stately sequence as exact and elegant as an evening’s programme at a debutante’s ball.
“But I am the Silver Lady… ” Her whispered voice trembles.
For the laudanum’s magic is upon her.
In her vision, she herself is Babbage’s automaton: the scandalous Silver Lady with which he entertains his rich and famous guests. That Silver Lady of which “Lady M” complained in an open public letter: an artificial woman whose garments were too diaphanous for polite society.
But in Ada’s dreams, it is she who is semi-clothed, with Babbage’s rough hands upon her.
O, my father! It is your Dark Nature which calls to me…
For all that her mother tried to whip the influence from Ada, Lord Byron’s spirit is within her core, tempted by all that is lascivious and compelling.
Then a voice penetrates the heavy dream-“O, my beloved Beauty”-and for a moment she thinks it is William, her too-tame ingenuous husband. But no, he is away in London; it is her dear friend, John Crosse, who takes her hand and presses it to his lips.
“Sweet, my prince…”
His hands are within her garments.
But her mind’s eye is filled with other sights: coils and bubbling vessels, the strange electromagnetic experiments of Crosse and Faraday, the very real mysteries they have explored. And this man, in whose arms she moans, is the son of Faust: for his father Andrew has generated life from electricity. Society is ablaze with the news. After leaving his electrolytic apparatus bubbling for three weeks, he has found tiny animalcules on one of the electrodes. Life, from base inanimate matter.
And Faraday, her other hero in this scientific age, has Ada’s portrait hanging prominently on his wall. Does she inspire him, even as his rough-hewn manner and sparkling intellect fire her imagination?
Inside, she burns.
Crosse moves upon her-“My darling, my Queen of Engines, Enchantress of Numbers”-repeating the title which Babbage gave her, and has now become their own.
She cries out with pleasure, not caring if the servants overhear.
“My good Doctor, creator of Life, bearer of Fire-”
A dark-blue glass bottle, lying on its side upon the rug, has become unstoppered. Precious drops of liquid escape, evaporate. Their heady vapour incenses the wild, drugged atmosphere which already pervades the drawing-room.
The Pattern…
Yet there is unease beneath her happy, chaotic delirium, as though Ada already senses the new life quickening inside her.
But she is captivated by logical symbols, drawn in fire within her mind, enraptured by the notion that she- Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, eternally cursed daughter of mad, bad, dangerous-to-know Lord Byron (whose incestuous liaison with his own sister Augusta, after whom Ada in all innocence was christened, is the scandal which drove him finally from England)-has been vouchsafed a vision both divine and mad, of gleaming polished power beyond the strict confining world, and she cries out as she pulls her scientific lover to her sinful bosom once more.
At the age of nine, Gus was still too young to travel to the library by herself-“Not in these godforsaken days,” as Mrs. Arrowsmith who lived next door would say-although, once they were there, Mother would let Gus roam among the bookshelves without supervision.
Sometimes, if Mother was very tired, they would walk from home out to the Park amp; Ride car park, where they could pretend they had left their car (the one they didn’t own, that didn’t exist) so that they could ride the bus for free. (Was there some kind of ticket Mother should have shown? Gus would wonder later, when she was older, whether there had been a particular, charitable driver.) Most times, though, they caught the normal bus or simply walked.
Once in the library, Mother would stay in the reading-room, among the reference books and periodicals, and sit drowsing in the warm surroundings.
One October night, she regarded the pale fog thickening outside the windows-it was 4 p.m. on a Saturday, and she was not working tonight: there was no place to go-and thought about home, of sun-drenched hills and the clamour of noisy, cheerful neighbours, and wondered again why she had ever come to this cold country.
In front of her, this week’s New Scientist was open. She flicked through it, barely understanding what she read. Sometimes she tried to read Nature, a real scientific journal which the library dutifully stocked. None of it made sense, and yet if she half-drowsed, a strangely relaxing sensation of wonder settled over her like a blanket.
This night, she craned her head to catch sight of her daughter-there, lost in a world of her own, wandering among books. Gus would pick enough to fill the limit on both their library cards.
If only I had more time-
But the Catherine Cookson would do her, Louisa, for a few weeks. She barely had the energy to read a page or two, last thing at night, before turning out the light and sliding into sleep in her narrow, lonely bed.
Sometimes, Louisa glanced over the titles which Gus had picked. Once, she had tried to read a book by someone called George Eliot-knowing that the writer had been a woman, writing when only men could call professions their own-but the convoluted 19th-century English was difficult. There was a man in the story, who was talented and successful, but eventually strayed in society as he was overtaken by irrational desires for a Jewess, finally taking the socially disastrous step of converting to her religion. But, it turned out, the man’s mother (though she had appeared “true English”) had been a Jewish actress, and the burning desires were his blood’s true nature coming out-
She had thrown the hideous book aside, disturbed for more reasons than she could name, and considered hiding the book where Gus could not read it. But then, Gus was sensible enough not to be swayed by the half- rationalized bigotry of another century.
There were Italian novels, and some Spanish ones-easy enough to read-but Louisa steered clear of them. They
