But these are all, has she no others? She certainly is a very extraordinary girl, who would imagine so much strength & variety of thought under that placid countenance? . . . You will say as much of this to Miss M. as you think proper. I say all this very sincerely. I have no desire to be better acquainted with Miss Milbank [sic]; she is too good for a fallen spirit to know, and I should like her more if she were less perfect.
Although hardly the missive that Caroline had hoped for, Byron’s response offered enough fuel to serve her purpose. On 2 May, Annabella received a morning summons to visit her cousin’s wife in the suite of upper rooms at Melbourne House which Caroline shared with her husband and their lovable, mentally handicapped young son, Augustus.
Caroline kept no record of the encounter; Annabella, with uncharacteristic terseness, noted that she had received Lord Byron’s written opinion of her verses, answered Cousin Caroline’s questions with ‘a painful acknowledgement’ and that she had then – this was most unlike her – returned home to dine alone.
Annabella’s handwritten copy of the letter with which Lady Caroline presented her visitor (it survives within the Lovelace Byron Papers) omitted that final sentence about her own discouraging perfection. There can be little doubt, however, that the letter in its entirety was read aloud to the guest – and taken to heart. Over the next two years, the single fear consistently expressed by Annabella was that Byron would be disillusioned when he discovered her flaws.
And the ‘painful acknowledgement’? An admission that Annabella had already refused George Eden – he remained her most regular escort – is ruled out by Caroline’s insistent assertions, from May on, that Mr Eden was Miss Milbanke’s preferred suitor and that Byron himself stood no chance. More probably, Caroline extracted and then mocked her young cousin’s wistful dream of reforming Byron. Either way, Annabella left Melbourne House in low spirits.
Caroline’s own obsession with Byron found its way into one of Annabella’s rare attempts at comic verse. In ‘Byromania’, an undated satirical poem that seemingly emerged from that spring, she poked fun at her cousin’s wife for ‘smiling, sighing o’er his face’. Fortunately for her own peace of mind, Annabella remained unaware of the extremes to which Caroline was prepared to go in pursuit of the desired object (snippets of her pubic hair were hand-delivered to Byron’s rooms towards the end of the summer) or of the easy duplicity with which Byron himself – while assuring Lady Melbourne that he was doing everything to escape from Caroline’s clutches – continued to dally with a woman he fondly addressed as ‘the cleverest most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing dangerous fascinating little being that lives’.
While Byron never presumed to call Annabella ‘a fascinating little being’, observers noted his interest and evident respect. Byron liked the idea of Miss Milbanke, Augustus Foster’s mother shrewdly informed her absent son during the summer of 1812, not as a mistress, but as a wife. Caroline, meanwhile, despatched a warning to Annabella to forget all about the salvation of ‘Falling Angels’. Filing this letter of 22 May away for future reference, Annabella pencilled a terse underlined comment on the envelope: ‘Very remarkable’.
By 22 May, Annabella’s parents had been in town for three weeks. It was the mother, so Byron convinced himself, who was responsible for an unwelcome alteration in Miss Milbanke’s manner. Friends with a vested interest hastened to produce other reasons for her coolness: ‘C[aroline] told me she was engaged to Eden, so did several others. Mrs [George] L[amb] her great friend, was of opinion (& upon my honour I believed her) that she neither did could nor ought to like me . . . was I to hazard my heart with a woman I was very much inclined to like, but at the same time sure could be nothing to me . . .?’
It is not necessary to suppose that Byron was being devious in this letter, addressed to Lady Melbourne on 28 September. (She had asked about his intentions towards her niece.) While passion was the keynote of his affair with the married Lady Caroline, an entirely different quality emerged in his search for a perfect wife. The Byron whom Annabella was getting to know was thoughtful, kind, friendly and courteous. ‘I have met with much evidence of his goodness,’ she had informed her mother on 13 April, after only two meetings with Byron. If only – as she continued to wish without results – her new friend would not show quite such respect, and even awe. A pedestal offered a lonely perch for a young lady with a romantic heart.
Outwardly calm, Annabella betrayed her growing feelings for Byron to her journal. On 20 June, she sat near enough to him at a lecture to see that what discomforted him was not Thomas Campbell’s allusion to religion, but the way the audience turned to watch Lord Byron’s reaction. (He was, she was beginning to perceive, intensely shy.) On 14 July, a week after enjoying a friendly chat with Byron at an evening hosted by Sarah Siddons, Annabella met him again at a party given by vivacious old Lady Cork. At this encounter, however, Byron wanted only to know whether she shared his high opinion of Miss Bessy Rawdon, the likeable and well-travelled niece of Lord Moira (later Lord Hastings).
Annabella’s discomfort was increased by her rigorous sense of fair play. Much though she wished it, she could not find a single bad word to say about the admirable Miss Rawdon. Going on from Lady Cork’s soirée to a party given that same night by Lady Melbourne’s married daughter, she felt puzzled by her own unhappiness. Cousin Emily’s evenings were
