Ada’s account was shocking. (She spared her mother nothing when relating the daily dramas of her life.) But why had the Lovelaces risked their lives by careering through narrow combes and twisting lanes on a dark December night in that most precarious of vehicles, a rickety high-wheeled phaeton? Had they quarrelled? Had the driver been drunk? Whose hands had held the reins?
Although no explanation was forthcoming (the incident was never again mentioned), it is tempting to speculate that the thirty-year-old countess was guiding the horses herself when her thoughts drifted off, whirling her away into that hidden and feverish drama of a life that was beginning to spiral out of control.
By December 1846, Ada’s beloved John Crosse was involved with another woman. Five months later, he married Susan Bowman. Their child (the first of three) was born, but not registered, in March 1848. Crosse himself, when in London, resided at Park Street, near Grosvenor Square. His secret wife was despatched to live at Reigate, a quiet little town in Surrey. Nobody, even in Reigate itself, had the faintest idea that John Crosse was Bowman’s husband. The reasons for this curious act of subterfuge remain obscure.
Even in December 1846, when the carriage accident occurred, Ada must have suspected that something odd was going on from the fact that her lover had started to press her for financial assistance. Seemingly, Crosse told Ada only that he needed to buy and furnish a house in Reigate. How much more – if anything – he may have disclosed remains unclear: all incriminating correspondence on both sides was destroyed in the 1850s.
What Ada did know by December 1846, the month of the carriage accident, was that Crosse wanted money and that she had agreed to provide it. The question of precisely how a wife living on a miserly allowance of £300 a year was to lay her hands on ready cash without arousing the suspicions of her husband and a fiercely prudent mother was the problem that now began to dominate Ada Lovelace’s turbulent existence.
* Visiting Rouen asylum – supposedly a model of its kind – in 1838, a shocked Annabella compared the use of permanent leg chains to kindly Hanwell, where mentally disturbed inmates were encouraged to garden and practise handicrafts, and where solitary confinement ended as soon as the patient felt willing to socialise. In 1834, she made Hanwell the subject of a laudatory poem. Orderliness, in Annabella’s methodical view, was crucially connected to mental stability. She would have been appalled by Fyne Court.
* The little that has been identified of Ada’s published writings outside the Menabrea ‘Notes’ and contributions to her husband’s occasional articles about the science of agriculture is frankly disappointing. In 1842, she reviewed a novel called Morley Einstein, three volumes of tosh in the silver-fork genre that was popular at the time. The author was the prolific George Payne Rainsford James. Ada’s claim to have admired its stance on penal reform and the arts and sciences makes one wonder how closely she had read a book which says so little upon these topics. Frequent references in her letters to her mother about papers on which she was working suggest that she planned to write many more reviews and articles. The only other one that seems to have survived, again written in collaboration with John Crosse, was of the pioneering experiments in mesmerism being carried out in Germany by Baron von Reichenbach. The unpublished review, which contains early observations about photography, suggests that Crosse himself was no feminist. Reading Ada’s own approving comment on the Baron’s use of experiments that could be undertaken by amateurs of both sexes, he excised it.
* There was always a striking contrast between what Lady Byron preached and what she practised. Writing to Ada on 30 August 1848, while Ralph was still in his grandmother’s care, she announced that moral obedience should be obtained by ‘physical obedience . . . obedience resulting from fear’. There is no hint in the family memoirs that such tyranny was ever employed.
* Nevertheless, both Ada and her mother had supported Byron’s right to a place in the abbey. The rejected statue was finally granted a place in the Wren Library at Trinity by its new master, William Whewell. Byron would not be granted a memorial in the abbey until 1969.
CHAPTER TWENTY
V
ANITY
F
AIR
(1847–50)
Although William Thackeray wrote his finest novel during the mid-1840s, he set his savagely witty lesson in the art of survival – the survival of the toughest, not the best – thirty years earlier, in the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Becky Sharp carved her road to social success through an England in which a shocked young Percy Shelley saw starving, homeless families crying by the roadside. In 1812, Ada’s father spoke out for the rights of the machine-smashing weavers of the Midlands; these were people whose existences, so the well-travelled Byron claimed, were more wretched than those he had observed in any part of Eastern Europe.
Ada Lovelace, who would always prefer reading facts to fictions, may not have followed the serial parts in which Thackeray’s novel first appeared in 1847. But by 1847, she herself was a participant in the devastating social divide that his book covertly portrayed. The Hungry Forties were the years of revolution and famine, the years when great fortunes were made and lost. In Ireland, potato blight was starving a million people to death. A further million emigrated, never to return. Out in Rome, that exceptionally resilient Irish invalid Miss Mary
