Discreet, kind and deeply attached both to Lady Byron and her daughter, Lushington’s delicate commission from Annabella was to obtain a list of Ada’s debts. Expecting the worst, he was pleasantly surprised. All the same, it struck Lushington that the £450 identified by the invalid could hardly be comprehensive of Lady Lovelace’s obligations. Perhaps, further debts would be recollected at some later date?
‘I have an interest in Ada which neither time nor circumstance can ever shake off,’ the old lawyer confessed to Lady Byron on 30 April. Clearly, even in her weakened state, Ada Lovelace had been able to exert her unique charm and substantially hoodwink one of the country’s shrewdest legal minds. Not only did her debts vastly exceed the sum that she had named, but she was still using Mary Wilson to place secret bets on horses. On 4 April 1852 (eight days before Ada first admitted to her mother that she was still enmeshed in ‘pecuniary affairs’), one of the countess’s regular team of unsavoury tipsters congratulated her on a win. Lady Byron, fobbed off with pleasant assurances that Byron Ockham was reported to be becoming an ornament to his naval profession, and that Ada herself was now hard at work upon ‘an awful amount of writing’, was even informed that plans were still afoot for the Lovelaces to rent out their London house and go to Spain. Ada, by the way, had been most amused by Miss Julia Smith’s analysis of her handwriting (a sample had been sent to this decidedly amateur graphologist by an admiring Annabella). But was dear Miss Smith really prepared to discern that she, the enterprising and gleefully fanciful Ada Lovelace, lacked imagination?
‘Oh I am such a sick wretch!’ Ada suddenly burst out at the end of this long, chatty and exceptionally misleading letter to her mother. That impetuous cry, apart from a glancing mention of the worry of ‘particular circumstances’ at present, was the only hint of agitation in a letter written on the very same day that Ada was threatened with a personal visit on 21 April ‘unless I hear there is increment’ from one of the rough-mannered tipsters of whom she was becoming increasingly afraid. The hint was heard. When Stephen Lushington passed along the news that he suspected some form of blackmail was afoot, Lady Byron consulted her bank book. On 19 and 21 May, she presented Lord Lovelace with the generous sum of £2,800. Unfortunately for Ada, however, its use carried her mother’s habitually firm restrictions. The money was to cover house repairs and Ada’s medical care: nothing more. Epsom and Ascot were coming up and Lady Lovelace was desperate for cash.
It was at this point that Ada turned for help to John Padwick, a man who made his name in the racing world by fleecing young aristocrats through his moneylending arrangements. It may well have been at Padwick’s request that William Lovelace (having sworn to Lady Byron that he would oppose any further gambling on horses) now provided his wife with a confidential document that authorised her to bet without a limit. Any idea that Lovelace stood outside the gambling ring was buried by this transaction. He was in it, up to the hilt.*
On 25 May 1852, the day before a rain-sodden Derby, Mary Wilson received a tip to back Hobbie Noble ‘for a great stake’. Hobbie Noble (4/1) came in fourth. Little Harry – the favourite whom Ada had elected to back against strong advice – came nowhere.† ‘Pray let her Ladyship understand in as certain a manner as can be supposed . . .’ was the menacing opening of her tipster’s next note to Mary Wilson.
The game was up. Noting nervously that her mother was now determined to ‘extract all furies’, the countess agreed to a pre-lunch meeting at which to seek a favour that she had hitherto hesitated to request. A deal was being negotiated. Ada was ready to confess, but only if her mother produced more funds.
Tracking the sequence and guessing the content of Ada Lovelace’s multiple undated confessions is like peeling the layers away from an invisible onion. What we do know about this particular revelation is that Ada, writing about it the following morning, expressed relief. She had unburdened herself of what she called ‘the Dragon’. Having done so, Ada was impatient to see her mother again as soon as possible, in order ‘that I may be finally satisfied you won’t devour me’.
More information emerges from the meticulously detailed letters which Lady Byron now began despatching to Emily Fitzhugh, a trusted old friend from the Siddons family circle. (As requested, Miss Fitzhugh restored the entire cache to the sender after Ada’s death.) To Emily, Annabella wrote on 9 June that firmness had been used and a confession forced, although ‘tenderness in a measure neutralised my own influence & suffered a worse one to prevail’. By ‘a worse one’, Lady Byron could have been alluding to John Crosse, for whose continued visits to his ailing patient Charles Locock innocently petitioned to Lovelace in August, on the grounds that they were ‘such a source of comfort and happiness’. Probably, Ada’s confession to Lady Byron concerned her racing losses. More certainly, it included a truly shocking and unlookedfor admission.
Frantic for money, both to support the needs of a greedy lover and to cover losses suffered by herself and the ring, Ada had descended to fraud. She had arranged with Crosse to pawn her husband’s most treasured heirloom: the Lovelace diamonds. In their place, doubtless with Crosse’s assistance, she had substituted paste replicas. Lord Lovelace, she assured her mother, knew nothing about it. But if he did discover her crime . . . Ada made it clear that she was terrified
