Had the Lovelaces made a terrible mistake in sending their eldest son to sea? Writing back to Ockham on 15 November, Ada pleaded with her jaunty sailor-son to remember that there was no real need for him to remain on the other side of the world, ‘unless by yr own wish’. By the time her letter arrived, Lord Ockham was off in Mexico, helping Captain Fanshawe to take charge of the crates of silver bullion required by the British government from the owners of some of South America’s most brutal and dangerous mines. Granted, this was an extraordinary way of life for a young Unitarian aristocrat who otherwise would have been swotting over his classics with a tutor, but young Byron’s letters betrayed no trace of homesickness, and no evidence that he wanted to renounce his swashbuckling life at sea.
Byron Ockham’s reaction might well have been different had he known how gravely ill his mother had become by the autumn of 1851. It was harder to protect his sister from the truth. By the end of October, Ada’s daughter had returned home from a second journey to Europe with Agnes Greig and Miss Wächter. Writing to Mrs Greig just ahead of the September trip, Ada had asked that the young girl should be bought a pretty dress from Paris (‘whatever she likes best’), and that Annabella should be shielded from the news that her beloved governess was suffering from incurable cancer.
How much did Ada know about her own state when she wrote to Mrs Greig of Miss Wächter’s ‘horrible doom’? Three months later, her favourite physician, the habitually optimistic Charles Locock, reluctantly acknowledged the gravity of his patient’s case. On 25 November, a miserable William Lovelace broke a long silence to tell Lady Byron the ominous news. To the patient herself, Dr Locock spoke only of a slight improvement. On 28 November, Ada urged Annabella to pass the good news along to Papa. Whether Ada herself believed it is doubtful.
Nothing indicates Ada Lovelace’s acceptance of her fate more touchingly than her new concern for the welfare of the 14-year-old girl who was now home from her travels and living alone at Horsley Towers with her father. Lady Byron, exhausted by nursing Ralph through scarlet fever and worried about the declining health of Frederick Robertson, was in no state, at the close of 1851, to take in a second grandchild. While Ralph was despatched for a second stay at the Fellenbergs’ family home in Switzerland, Ada turned to the trusted friends who had always been quietly present in the background of the Lovelaces’ lives.
Margaretta Burr was a talented watercolour painter who had taken her sketch pad along when she and her husband travelled around the Middle East with Lord Lovelace’s Egyptologist friend, Sir John Gardner Wilkinson. At Aldermaston Court, a splendid faux-Elizabethan house standing above its own lake in Berkshire countryside (Daniel Burr had rebuilt it from scratch after a massive fire in the 1840s), the Burrs and Wilkinsons lived almost as a single family. On 21 November, Margaretta visited a wan and bedbound Ada in London to glean ideas for a great fancy-dress ball she was planning to welcome in the coming year. It was agreed that Aldermaston should become a second home to Ada’s children during this sad and difficult time. Meanwhile, discussions with Mrs Burr about young Annabella’s future encouraged Ada to adopt a new policy towards the daughter whom she now began to treat as her confidante and – as she fondly threatened ‘(unless you escape by marrying) . . . my Vice-Queen in everything’.
A vice-queen’s duties were not onerous. At Horsley, where Ada’s daughter gaily reported that dear, earnest Miss Wächter was urging her to be ‘neat as a new pig’ (with five underlinings), Annabella was instructed (on 29 November) to act as a grown-up hostess. She was to be sure to conduct guests around the earl’s beloved tower (‘You know that the Tower is decidedly Papa’s first born, & dearer to him than kith or kin or life itself’), and prepare herself to preside at the Boxing Day Hunt breakfast, when Lovelace’s new Great Hall became a sounding sea of horns, hounds and red coats. In early January (following a cosy Christmas with the Lushingtons at Ockham), Annabella was to make her grown-up debut at Mrs Burr’s great masquerade, to which Papa would accompany his daughter, wearing the ‘Albanian’ uniform in which – so a fond wife fancied – William always looked his most Byronic.
Meanwhile, behind her daughter’s back, Ada was urging her reluctant husband to play his part. Mrs Burr was counting upon him to attend the ball; Annabella could not possibly attend without an escort; William’s Egyptologist friend, Gardner Wilkinson, had already picked out a pretty Spanish costume for the dear girl. And besides, Ada weakly pleaded, surely the Crow would wish to see ‘how handsome and admired yr daughter will be!’ Pressed by all, Lovelace gave in. An excited and gravely beautiful Cinderella went to the Burrs’ great ball with her father at her side, a magnificent figure in his glittering uniform.
Relations with Ada’s mother were less easily managed. A year later (15 December 1852), Lady Byron would remind her son-in-law (while laying the blame squarely upon him) that Ada had forbidden her mother to visit their London house during the entirety of the previous February. This seems to be correct. In the correspondence, a matching gap appears between 25 January and 28 February, at which point Ada pointedly ascribed a modest sign of better health to the fact she had been allowed to rest in undisturbed solitude. Perhaps from a wish not to cause alarm to Lady Byron, she neglected to mention that her condition was nevertheless serious enough for kindly Agnes Greig and Mrs Burr to have organised a month’s rota of night care, during which one of them spent each night upon a sofa close to Ada’s bed.
On 4 March, the
