It had not been so simple as that. On 3 July 1851, while obstinately refusing to disclose precisely what had so disturbed her during the Leamington interview, Annabella told her daughter how gladly she would have solved any financial problems, had she only been asked. The following day (tactfully omitting to point out that Lady Byron had recently begrudged loaning her daughter a few hundred pounds), poor Ada did her best to clear the air. She promised to visit her mother’s Brighton home, both to see her 12-year-old son, and to discuss what she carefully referred to as ‘recent occurrences’. Anxious not to have a quarrel, she mentioned the potential danger to her own delicate health of ‘agitating influences’.
No settled plan was made, possibly because Ada was too ill to travel. Ten days later, Lady Byron noted that she herself had resorted to her sad practice, in times of extreme despair, of going out alone in an open boat in order to vomit up her anguish, safely out of reach of public view.
Four weeks went by.
On 8 August, a frail Ada took a train to Brighton. What was said there remains unknown, but Lady Byron did not relent. Having bidden her mother farewell two days later, Ada wrote one of her most wistfully elusive notes: ‘I never remember to have quitted you with so much regret. Why, I cannot say: althou’ I have some vague idea about the whys of the case.’
If Ada believed that peace could be restored, she deceived herself. Enduring war had been declared by the Hen upon the Crow. William Lovelace, until the end of his days, would never comprehend what he had done to merit such unyielding wrath.
On 10 April 1852, eight months on, Ada wrote to her mother to express regret that ‘that interview’ (William’s visit to Leamington) had ever taken place. She now wished she had taken a sterner line during her August visit to Brighton. ‘I never felt so tempted to step out of all the usual bounds of filial propriety,’ she wrote. But what would have been the use of pleading William’s cause?
Pray do not be angry at my having the idea (never likely to be practically attempted) of ever persuading you to anything! It is only an idea, a wish!
‘I am,’ Ada added with a sudden burst of candour, ‘rather unhappy about it all.’
Illness was nothing new to Ada. She had spent most of her short life battling invalidism, proving over and again that the ‘wiry little system’ in which she took such pride would enable her to battle her way back to health. The battle continued through the months that followed William’s dash to Leamington. By the late summer of 1851, it was only the frail, tormented body that could no longer keep up with Ada’s passion for achievement and her absolute refusal to give up hope. ‘Life is so difficult,’ she wrote to her mother on 15 October, underlining every word; a sentence or two later, she was willing to believe that she might yet have another thirty years to enjoy before – so she hoped – a quick and gentle death.
It seems clear that Ada – however valiant her attitude – was at least partly conscious that the end was near. Her health was already failing when she split her energies into the pursuit of her two consuming passions. By the summer of 1851, she had become fatally addicted to the gambling mania which – as she was perfectly aware since the Newstead encounter with her father’s ancestry – was an obsession that ran in her blood. Since then, Ada’s attachment to her Byron lineage had grown steadily more pronounced.* But Lady Lovelace was also and always her mother’s child and, above all, Ada longed to please Lady Byron by making her individual mark in science.
* Tempting though it is to correct the date here to the opening of the Great Exhibition (1851), Ada needed no special permission to view the gems when all was open to the public. More likely, she was hoping for an advance private inspection of the celebrated Koh-i-Noor diamond, which the 13-year-old Duleep Singh brought over from India in July 1850 as part of the Treaty of Lahore negotiated by Lord Dalhousie after the conquest of the Punjab. Babbage was preparing a guide for the 1851 Exhibition, which probably gave him special access rights.
* The Knebworth archive contains three letters from Edward Bulwer-Lytton to his young daughter Emily written in June 1847, when EBL hoped the Lovelaces might soon visit his home. Emily, living alone at Knebworth in unhappy circumstances, feared Ada’s ‘disastrous influences’, but her father thought the young countess might prove ‘a good friend’ to his nervous and intelligent daughter. Three days earlier, he had described Ada to Emily as ‘a very remarkable person, extremely original – but too prononcée for my taste, womanly in mienne [sic] but masculine in mind’ (Letters of 16 and 19 June 1847, Knebworth Archive, Box 88).
* Visiting the abbey in 1857 as part of a tourist jaunt, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne heard the tale of Ada’s visit and her change in manner from their voluble landlady at a nearby inn. Sophia, a great admirer of Lord Byron (Nathaniel was said to resemble the poet), recorded the story in her journal. Washington Irving popularised the anecdote in Bracebridge Hall, a book which included his own visit to the iconic Newstead.
* It would be easier to interpret Ada’s puzzling letter to Babbage as being concerned (as it purports to be)
