What is certain is that Babbage wrote to Ada on 13 May 1851, the day of the Epsom Derby, in a way that shows he knew this was a special day for her. Had she passed a good night? What were her commands for the day? She must not exert herself with writing: ‘a visit from your own Lady-Bird will be sufficient’. The degree of attentiveness being shown here, on this particular date, is highly suggestive, although (once again), nothing can be confirmed.
Even today, our understanding of the connection between mind and body remains frustratingly theoretical. However, it’s hard to dismiss the sudden decline in Ada’s health following her major losses at Epsom and York. Enough concern was felt for Charles Locock to summon Sir James Clark, Prince Albert’s personal physician, to diagnose one of Locock’s own favourite patients. Clark’s interest in the case was doubtless heightened by the fact that the patient in question was Lord Byron’s daughter.
Examinations were made of the painful and intimate kind to which Ada Lovelace was now obliged to subject herself on a regular basis. A sheet masked Ada’s genitalia from view as the middle-aged gentleman probed cold instruments – or even inquisitive fingers – towards her womb, searching for an explanation of the irregular bleeding and continuous pain that the 35-year-old patient endured with a courage and good humour that commanded their awed respect.
On 15 June, Charles Locock submitted their findings to the earl. For himself, while acknowledging the presence of extensive ulceration in the cervix, he was ready to describe the young countess’s large internal ‘sore’ as ‘healthy’ and to pronounce that it was curable – with prudent care. Sir James Clark, long since recovered from the stain to his reputation of a misdiagnosed court pregnancy in 1839 (poor Lady Flora Hastings was in fact dying of a cancerous tumour that distended her belly), offered a grimmer diagnosis. Cancer was clearly present, he stated. Nothing could now be done to restrain it. Lady Lovelace’s days were numbered.
Clark’s verdict was bleak and it could not be ignored. Understandably, at the time of terrible racing losses of which he was at the very least partially aware, Lord Lovelace shrank from breaking such black news to his fragile and suffering wife. Four days later, however, the earl could restrain himself no longer. Who better to confide in than the compassionate, maternal and understanding Hen?
A few hours after despatching a long and anguished letter to his mother-in-law (he had mentioned money problems and debts, as well as the gravity of Ada’s condition), Lovelace regretted the impulse. It was now that he took one of the worst decisions of his life. Instead of waiting for a response, he bolted off across the country to Leamington Spa, where Annabella was spending a few restorative days after paying a business-related visit to the nearby Kirkby Mallory estates. There, in a darkened town of immense gentility, an astonished Lady Byron opened her front door an hour before midnight, and found herself overwhelmed by a distraught, frightened and – in his present emotional state – alarmingly vehement son-in-law.
The location for Lovelace’s impromptu confessional visit was as ill chosen as his timing. Leamington was a town that was filled with Wentworth properties and connections. Edward Noel was living nearby. (His wife Fanny had died here in 1847.) Charles and Mary Anne Noel frequently stayed with Annabella at Leamington during visits of the official kind that she had just been paying to her estate. Miss Montgomery, too, was a regular visitor. For Lord Lovelace to show up in the middle of the sleeping spa, emerging from his private coach at dead of night, was to set tongues wagging – and there was nothing that Lady Byron feared more in this particular part of the world than gossip.
It has never been clear just what was said during what Annabella later described as ‘that hour of agony’. We know from a bitter letter that Lovelace wrote eighteen months later (17 December 1852) that the earl felt that his mother-in-law had been ‘slightingly’ dismissive about the severity of Ada’s illness. We know from the document Annabella drew up with the assistance of Stephen Lushington at Ockham on 1 July, two weeks after the Leamington meeting, that she believed William Lovelace had betrayed his clearly understood duty to protect a wife who knew no more about money (let alone professional horse-racing) than an untutored child. Lovelace had not stood up to Ada. Instead, fearing the turbulence of his wife’s powerful impulses and emotions, he had allowed her to do as she wished. He had, above all, been unforgivably irresponsible in allowing Lady Lovelace to go without him to Doncaster racecourse and thereafter, to mix with ‘low & unprincipled associates’.
Writing to Lovelace a full nineteen months later (9 January 1853) about their fateful interview, in one of a series of savagely recriminatory letters, Lady Byron accused her son-in-law of having ‘unconsciously’ disclosed to her that dreadful night at Leamington a prospect so appalling that ‘disease itself was to be looked upon as a blessing to my daughter’. That prospect was not Ada’s death. It was that Lord Lovelace had allowed his headstrong and (in the view of a stern mother) financially irresponsible young wife to gamble.
Grudgingly, Annabella would eventually concede that her son-in-law appeared not to share her personal horror of speculation. ‘You did not, you do not, view these things as I do,’ she granted in the same chilling letter of reproach that she wrote to Lovelace on 9 January 1853. Acknowledgement of that crucial difference of view was made. Forgiveness was implacably withheld.
A month earlier, on 11
