Back in England, Ada pined in vain for letters from her habitually uncommunicative son. In September 1849, she had been informed that the Swift was on course and that her boy was in good spirits. Then, nothing. Fears grew. In December, Lady Byron lowered Ada’s spirits by mentioning a dreadful incident in which a young boy had been kidnapped by a Portugese slaveship and drowned. Not until February 1850 did a navy-stamped package arrive to relieve the anxious mother. Lovelace, for his part, was delighted by the improvement he perceived in Ockham’s attitude towards his parents. By May that year, the complacent earl was calling at Moore Place to boast to its new inhabitant, the exiled Duchesse d’Orléans, a lady with whom he was eager to curry a friendship, that there was nothing to beat the British Navy for teaching a boy discipline.*
On 7 June 1850, the proud father received a brisk comeuppance. Ockham’s long-awaited first letter from Chile had arrived. It was addressed, not to his father – but to his 10-year-old brother, Ralph. Sharing his displeasure with a sympathetic Hen, Lovelace complained that his seafaring heir’s epistle (as ever, the inquisitive father had been unable to resist opening it) was filled with low and vulgar jokes. Was it for this that they had expended so much careful planning?
Lovelace grumbled; Ada, longing for the safe return of her favourite child, continued to believe that Ockham would astonish them all. Writing to Charles Babbage, back in November 1848, Ada had claimed that her oldest boy would prove to be the tortoise who beat the hares, only ‘by & bye’.
Byron Ockham would do so still. Ada was sure of it.
* This seems to be the earliest indication of a connection between Lady Byron and her future defender, Dr Beecher’s daughter, Harriet. It was cemented by the friendship that she formed in 1849 with Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to be listed on the UK medical register. The English-born Blackwell had become close to Lyman Beecher and his wife during the early 1840s, when she lived in Cincinnati. (In England, Annabella helpfully introduced her to the young Florence Nightingale, whose own vocation for nursing Lady Byron was discreetly supporting.)
* The Nightingales’ connection to Ada’s family dated back to the friendship between her own Milbanke grandparents and Florence’s grandfather, William Smith, an abolitionist and early convert to unitarianism. Florence’s aunt, Julia Smith, was one of Lady Byron’s chief confidantes.
* Young Annabella was becoming a voracious reader. When aged thirteen, she read both Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Dickens’s Christmas Stories. While partial to travel books, she also read that year a French course in maths, Brewster’s Martyrs of Science, a study of ozone, Lalande’s Logorhythms and Vasari’s Lives of the Painters (Wentworth Papers, British Library, BL 53817 and 54091).
* Reading Ockham’s immature but jolly letters to his brother, it’s hard to see what the fuss was about.
* Following the arrival of the deposed French king Louis Philippe and his family at Claremont House in 1849, William Lovelace had persuaded his reluctant mother-in-law (Annabella had rejoiced at the royal family’s fall) to loan the second of her two houses at Esher to Victoria’s elderly cousin, the duchesse. Possibly, the earl expected this to lead to some sort of royal favour. It didn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
T
HE
H
AND OF THE
P
AST
(1850–1)
In 1850, Ada found herself enjoying an unusually protracted spell of robust good health. Making the most of this unfamiliar sense of well-being during an autumn visit to the Lake District, the 34-year-old Lady Lovelace managed both to climb up to the 900-metre-high plateau that crowns Helvellyn and to attempt the marginally lower ridge of Skiddaw, where only bad weather forced her to halt. ‘The mountain air & mountain life does wonders,’ Ada exulted to her mother, before adding her intention of returning for further and bolder ascents.
The trip to Cumbria formed the climax to a tour that (ironically, as it turned out) was planned as a diversion from the Lovelaces’ ongoing worries about money. No investors had shown an interest in supporting the building of Charles Babbage’s pioneering but expensive machine. The plans for marketing a games-playing automaton that were discussed in Ada and Babbage’s shared ‘book’ had come to nothing. Providing Annabella with a home education was a continuing expense for which Ada had undertaken personal responsibility. A more problematic expenditure, since she could discuss it with nobody (Ada herself knew only a carefully edited version of the truth), was John Crosse’s ongoing need to provide for his secret family.
Early in December 1849, Lady Byron had made her son-in-law a welcome loan of £4,500 to assist with the purchase of 6 Great Cumberland Place. A further £1,500 was offered later that month. The loan was generous, but it was insufficient for the requirements and aspirations of a very ambitious earl. (Having been thwarted in his desire to become secretary of state, Lovelace now had his eye fixed on obtaining a post at the Admiralty.) At the beginning of
