There’s no doubting the sincerity of Lady Chichester’s words. Clearly, she was recalling the unpleasant drama of Medora. It’s likely that she was also remembering how promptly Annabella had paid the bills and offered to cover the cost of all that was required for comfort when Augusta, just six months after the Reigate meeting, lay at death’s door. Possibly, Lady Chichester had also learned from Emily Leigh of Lady Byron’s final moment of humanity, a written wish that Emily might whisper to her mother ‘from me the words Dearest Augusta – I can’t think they could hurt her’.
On 5 October 1851, Emily reported that she had done as requested. Her mother seemed much pleased and affected. She had made a lengthy response. Only – alas for a hungry Annabella, still yearning for that unreceived confession – Mrs Leigh had lost her voice. ‘I could not hear distinctly,’ Emily wrote. ‘– I dare say she will mention the subject again.’
She never did. On 12 October 1851, Augusta Leigh died in faded dignity, attended by her daughter and a physician, in the rooms at St James’s Palace that she had inhabited for thirty-three years. On 16 October, Annabella, who had been lingering at a London hotel in the vain hope of a last-minute summons, wrote on black-edged paper to ask if she might be allowed to visit her god-daughter, to hear a private confidence that would never be shared. That Emily had none to offer was, perhaps, as well. Augusta’s secrets, if indeed she had any to disclose, would assuredly not have gone untold.
None of Byron’s family attended Mrs Leigh’s interment at Kensal Rise. On 2 July 1852, however, Annabella wrote to inform Emily that, despite appearances, she had always been her mother’s truest friend. ‘Mine is not a nature in which affection can pass away,’ Lady Byron announced: ‘nearly forty years have shown this in regard to her’.
There is no doubt that Annabella herself believed this remarkable statement to be no less than the truth.
The Lovelace children once again spent the Christmas of 1850 in separate places. Lord Ockham remained in Chile under the supervision of the Greigs’ friend, Captain Fanshawe. Annabella had been shifted from Lady Byron’s home, to the Greigs, and on to Ockham, where old Stephen Lushington treated her as a cherished grandchild of his own. (A glimpse of their affectionate relationship peeps through accounts of afternoon games of billiards and the lawyer’s teasing comments about Annabella’s salamander-like love of a blazing fire.) Meanwhile, Ada’s younger son, Ralph, remained in fog-drenched London with his mother, where Ada herself – between paying snugly wrapped visits with Babbage to the semi-completed and ice-cold ‘Glass House’ in Hyde Park – scolded the boy for his sulks about the absence of Ockham’s promised tales of his nautical adventures. (If any such letters did arrive, we might suspect that Lord Lovelace saw fit to confiscate them.)
Aged eleven, Ralph was beginning to make his own complex personality felt. Ada, writing to her mother in December 1850, following a happy reunion with the Greigs and her daughter at their London home, reported that Ralph’s new tutor, Mr Kensett, was taking a firm line with his stroppy little pupil, and that she approved.
While Lord Lovelace pondered his chances of getting into the Admiralty (Ada agreed with Lushington that her husband was too touchy and impractical for such a post), his wife’s private thoughts dwelt continuously upon how to lay hands on the money of which both she and the earl increasingly stood in dire need. Going abroad was a popular move back then, both to escape debts and to improve poor health. Mrs Somerville had done it. So had the Brownings. Perhaps the Lovelaces should follow suit? Lady Byron (despite the inevitable sacrifice of Ada’s company) favoured this course. By 23 December 1850, Ada was ready to pursue it.
I think we shall let our house in May, & go to the Pyrenees,
I am not joking. I reflected on yr suggestion, & soon got accustomed to it. It frightened me at first . . . It would set me up for years (& set our purses up too).
The idea was not abandoned; Ada mentioned it again on 21 April 1851 as a project for the following month – ‘but nothing is yet settled’. By May, however, Ada’s health was too seriously impaired for a journey abroad to be considered. She had, besides, embarked at full tilt upon an entirely different enterprise, the nature of which her mother was to learn in full only after its catastrophic failure.
By January 1851, Ada had set up her ring of fellow gamblers and was ready to beat the bookies at their own game. John Crosse was involved, while Babbage was evidently aware of what was going on. A certain William Nightingale, identified as the father of two sons, may have been connected to Florence’s family. Almost nothing is known about Mr Fleming, but it is likely that he was a friend of the Zetlands’ physician, Doctor Malcolm, since the two names are often mentioned in conjunction. Malcolm himself was a man of modest means who, like Ada, was struggling to live on £300 a year. Richard Ford was another matter.
Sir Richard Ford was a gentleman of means. The author of Murray’s celebrated Handbook to Spain was a brilliant art historian (he introduced Velázquez’s paintings to their English audience), and a close friend of George Borrow. An ardent traveller in post-Napoleonic Europe, Ford had returned to England in the 1830s to create Heavitree House, a Spanish-style reconstruction of an Elizabethan cob cottage, perched on a hilltop just outside the city of Exeter. Ford had been at Trinity College, Cambridge, ten years before William Lovelace. Like William, he was a self-taught architect. The two men knew each other well. In 1835, Ford was one
