Her correspondence reflected the change that had taken place. Arriving at Newstead, Ada had confided to her mother on 8 September a feeling of overpowering sadness. (‘All is like death around one; & I seem to be in the Mausoleum of my race.’) William, meanwhile, sent the Hen dismissive accounts of a dreary village filled with poachers and stocking-makers. Newstead itself was nothing compared to Horsley Towers. Wildman’s interiors were overdone. As for the miserable little church at nearby Hucknall Torkard, where Byron was buried: ‘The tablet I need not describe.’
It’s evident that William Lovelace had not yet registered the shift in his wife’s feelings. (Before she left Newstead, Ada told Wildman that she wished to be buried there, and to lie at her father’s side.) On 15 September, while snugly lodged at Radbourne Hall, the elegant Derbyshire family home of Captain Byron’s mother, Ada informed her own mother about her change of heart. If visiting Newstead had begun as a descent into the grave, a resurrection had taken place. ‘I do love the venerable old place & all my wicked forefathers,’ Ada declared. An ancient prophecy was mentioned, predicting that the Byrons would leave the house at the very time that her father sold it, and ‘that it is to come back [two heavy underlinings] in the present generation’.
Ada gave no thought to what the impact of such a bold declaration on her mother was likely to be. For herself, thoughts of Newstead – and indeed, her mother – were swept aside a couple of weeks later when her hosts at Aske Hall, the Zetlands, invited Lady Lovelace to accompany them to Doncaster, to see how their Derby-winning colt would fare in two of the last big events of the flat-racing season. William, off to investigate new agricultural methods in Lincolnshire, agreed to rejoin the party on the third day.
Doncaster Races took place, as they still do, on a pear-shaped track. Unlike today, there were then no stands and no barriers. No rules of etiquette kept separate classes of racegoers apart. The sense of communion on a mud-spattered field was close to that of an old-fashioned point-to-point: informal, boisterous and electrically intimate. As at Epsom, crowds of the Zetlands’ employees and tenants had come along to bet and cheer their ‘Volti’ on to triumph in the St Leger, before collecting the prize money (no horse appeared to compete against him) in the Scarborough Handicap.
Lord Lovelace arrived at Doncaster in time to see their friends’ athletic colt beat his greatest rival of the age, Lord Eglinton’s The Flying Dutchman, in a hair-raising tie-breaker for the Doncaster Gold Cup. (The two horses were the only runners and Eglinton’s jockey had been drinking hard before the race.) Writing to his mother-in-law, Lovelace observed that his clever wife was being admired by all for her skill in picking out the best points of a horse, while he – poor chap – had succeeded only in having a few pounds picked from his pockets. Ada’s maid had apparently turned a little profit on her bets, but their silly coachman had lost 18 shillings – not enough to stop him from trying his luck again. As for Ada:
I am threatened with proofs by an eager ardent avis, that this
business is profitable – much more so than the training them . . .
Nobody knows what conversations and encounters had taken place at Doncaster prior to William’s arrival, but it was here that Ada took the fateful decision to retrieve the Lovelace fortunes by making a new kind of book.
Arriving back at Aske in time to share the celebrations, Ada collapsed and had to take to her bed, where (so she assured an alarmed mother on 26 September) she was miraculously restored to health by the Zetlands’ wonderful physician. His name was Dr Malcolm and – as Ada prudently failed to add – he took a keen interest in his captivating patient’s explanations of how she could use her mathematical skills to outwit experienced bookmakers on the turf. Ada’s problem was that she – as Byron’s somewhat notorious daughter – could never allow her own name to be used for placing bets. But if Lady Lovelace could find a few obliging friends to help, friends who might like to make a little money themselves by the use of her computations . . .
Dr Malcolm encouraged her. Working for the Zetlands, the doctor had plenty of contacts in the bookmaking world. Why should Lady Lovelace not rally up a circle of discreet enthusiasts like himself and form her own private ring? He had the names. She had the brains. How could she – how could they – lose?
Writing to her mother at this momentous time, Ada demurely reported how much she liked the Zetland’s prizewinning colt. Voltigeur was both quiet and amiable: ‘a most earnest, conscientious sort of horse’. She could as well have been talking of Tam o’Shanter and Zigzag, the horses on which she loved to ride out across Exmoor. About her thoughts for a racing future, there was not a word.
Evidence that Ada’s enterprising mind had alighted upon a new interest continued to surface through the rest of the autumn. A puzzled but dutiful daughter, back from her educational tour of Germany, and visiting her grandmother, was asked to hurry over to Horsley and despatch to Ada the doubling dice that she would find there, lodged within a backgammon board. Meanwhile, Charles Babbage received a message on 1 November about the usefulness of ‘Erasmus Wilson’ in helping her mistress to a new cure and
