What irked Lord Lovelace was Ada’s vagueness. Payments were forgotten. Books were borrowed from lending libraries and seldom returned. As many as three harps might be simultaneously ordered for trial, and none of them given back to the hard-up instrument-maker for years on end. And as for Ada’s work habits: it was extraordinary, the meticulous Lovelace lamented to a sympathetically clucking Hen, that anyone could be so neat as their brilliant Bird in the arrangement of her wardrobe and yet so chaotic in the order and dating of her notes and papers.
Writing to Lady Byron about her daughter’s proposed visit to Fyne Court, Annabella’s ‘affectionate son’ (for so a devoted Lovelace now unfailingly signed himself) was determined to be frank. He wanted his wife to visit Crosse’s unruly home as a warning of what could happen when disorder was permitted to rule. With better organisation at home, the earl was convinced that Andrew Crosse could have become a respected figure in the world of science. As it was, Crosse was perceived as a charming eccentric, an amateur experimenter whose one notorious achievement had been the product of his own ineptitude. Crosse would act as a caution to Ada.
At first, all went according to plan. Andrew Crosse paid a second visit to Ashley; Lovelace, citing illness as an excuse for not joining them, loaned his coach and coachman, John, so that Ada and Crosse could together travel back in comfort to Fyne Court.
The journey provided time for fruitful exchange. Reference was surely made to Vestiges and the Acarus crossii, but most of their time, as Ada reported to her spouse, had been occupied in outlining her great plan for a calculus of the nervous system. Mr Crosse had been impressed, especially by the quietness of her reasoning and the soundness of her premises. He did not, Ada was pleased to announce, regard her ideas as ‘mere enthusiasm’.
The success of the visit can be judged by Ada’s response to Fyne Court’s freezing temperature. This was late November: Ada’s circulation was so poor that she habitually slept, even in high summer, in a thick flannel dressing-gown worn over her nightwear. Yet, it was in a spirit of positive gaiety that she sent out her first bulletin from Andrew Crosse’s home at 9.30am, while sitting alone and breakfastless, huddled in her shawl and boa stole beside an unlit fire, within a silent and shuttered house.
Lovelace had been right about one thing. Ada readily agreed that Fyne Court was chaotic. (‘I never saw the like.’) Meals arrived by chance and ended at whim. (The Crosses had talked to her about science until one in the morning upon that memorable first night.) One room was entirely in ruins. Others had been sacrificed to Mr Crosse’s need for space in which to conduct his electrical experiments. The lantern-lit cellars looked more like a surgeon’s theatre than a wood and coal store. There was only one working lavatory in the house, off at the far end of what served as a drawing room. Often as not, the door to it was locked and the key mislaid.
Ada seemed to be describing a madhouse, one which was considerably less organised than an actual London madhouse patronised by Lady Byron and Elizabeth Fry.* Unfortunately for Lord Lovelace’s plans, Ada loved Fyne Court. Here, so she joyfully informed her husband, she was treated, not as an empty-headed peeress or – at best – as Byron’s daughter, but as a professional colleague. If she felt ill, she could simply withdraw to her room. (Ada had given Andrew Crosse advance warning of her ongoing and ‘terrible’ physical affliction and of her imperative need to be alone when battling it.) Scientific discussion was the order of the day. Never for a single moment was Lady Lovelace treated as that inferior being: a woman.
The focus of Ada’s letters home, from the very start, was less upon her host than on his eldest son. Six years older than herself, John Crosse struck Ada as being both well-read and highly intelligent. A good mathematical mind was apparently combined with a strong sense of humour and a lively relish for strenuous debate. John was planning to spend six months of the following year in Berlin, studying all that was new there in the world of German science. Meanwhile, Ada coolly proposed to her husband that the young man – she emphasised John’s great youth with deceptive care – should become her colleague and assistant. Perhaps John could come and live at Ockham, where he would be able to keep her mind up to the mark by stimulating discussions of her views. ‘This is very useful and good for me,’ Ada announced to her husband on 24 November. The Crow, delighted, reported to Lady Byron the good news that their clever Bird had at last found the support that she required for the scientific endeavours in which both her husband and mother so ardently wished her to succeed.
As the daughter of one of Europe’s most notorious rakes, it was inevitable that gossip would always hover close to Lady Lovelace. While the scandal often emerged from the hostile camp presided over by Lovelace’s resentful mother at Woburn Park, the stories which reached John Murray’s dining table in December 1844 – from whence they were reported back to Ada and her mother as ‘public news’ – had originated at Ockham. Ada, writing to Woronzow Greig about how she planned to combat these malicious tales, dismissed them as unfounded and absurd. Her mother, she told Greig, had ‘quite chuckled’ at Ada’s plan to embarrass the ‘Traitor’ by confronting him with her ‘great eyes’ and delivering his own malicious words straight back to his face.
It was soon after this that a newspaper item appeared in which it was hinted that Lady Lovelace was on over-friendly terms with a Somerset neighbour. The newspaper was behind the times: the admirer named was not John Crosse, but Frederick Knight, the genial country neighbour
