Whatever Lady Byron may have thought about this revelation, she could not bear the thought of exposing frail, unhappy Ada to her husband’s wrath. Having extracted the broker’s details, she arranged for the jewels to be discreetly retrieved (the sum involved was £900, inclusive of interest) and restored to a woman who would clearly never be in a position to wear them again. Lord Lovelace was not informed.
On 23 July, John Crosse paid one of a series of covert visits to Ada’s London home. On that same day at Horsley, Woronzow Greig told Lord Lovelace that a little private detective work had led him to the startling conclusion that Mr Crosse was no bachelor, but a married man, one with children and with a secret home in Reigate. Lovelace, still unaware of any special significance in the friendship between Crosse and his own wife, promised to further the investigations with an interview of his own.
Secret marriages and hidden mistresses were far from rare in mid-Victorian England. Ludicrous though Crosse’s improbable alibi of housing the secret family of a naughty uncle had sounded to Greig, the earl himself was in no mood to challenge the tale that Crosse set before him. Worried about money, miserable about his unreconciled feud with his mother-in-law and heartbroken at the prospect of his wife’s approaching death (let alone the ongoing spectacle of her appalling sufferings), Lord Lovelace had almost reached the end of his tether. The elaborate fabrications of John Crosse were beyond his interest. Having briskly interviewed the young man and drawn up a statement of his considered opinion (that Crosse’s alibi was indeed untruthful), Lovelace dismissed what he considered to be a subject of minor significance from his mind.
The intensity of Lovelace’s sadness is apparent from the record of Ada’s deterioration which he began on 29 July 1852, intending to monitor his wife’s last moments as a memorial gift to his mother-in-law. The previous day, William had been advised of a new hard swelling in Ada’s uterus; Lady Byron was simultaneously informed by Dr Locock that her daughter would be dead within two months.
Lovelace’s medical journal – written in a book small enough to sit within the palm of his hand – opened at the time when his daughter was paying a week’s visit from the Lushingtons’ home at Ockham to her parents’ London house. Anxious not to frighten the girl too much, Ada forced herself to assume the semblance of a normal routine. Each day, Lady Lovelace emerged fully dressed from the large bow-windowed room at the back of the first floor. Slowly, she dragged herself down the curving staircase to the hall. Seated at the dining-room table, she picked at morsels of a midday meal that neither she nor William had the appetite to eat. Henry Phillips, whose father had represented Lord Byron in all the glory of his Albanian attire, came in to paint a profile of Lady Lovelace, wan as a starved sparrow, her emaciated hands resting like claws upon the piano keys. On 3 August, Annabella wrote to her brother Ralph out in Switzerland that Mamma was still just able to play duets with her. Their mother seemed quite different nowadays: ‘so gentle and kind . . . like what I should imagine an angel to be.’
If not quite yet reformed, Ada had persuaded her mother that she did now genuinely repent for all her sins. Writing to thank the intensely religious Agnes Greig for all her acts of kindness, Lady Byron entreated the sympathetic Scotswoman to console Ada and to tell her – her words offer an appalling insight into Lady Byron’s mind – that these sufferings were God’s way of ministering to his erring child: ‘a Father’s love to bring her to Christ’. Florence Nightingale was simultaneously asked for advice about setting up a cottage hospital in Kirkby, seemingly at Lady Lovelace’s request.* Lady Byron’s own gift to her daughter of a book of sermons was accompanied by a much admired new life of Margaret Fuller, whose sole manuscript of her masterpiece (a study of the new Italy that was coming into being under Garibaldi’s fiery leadership) vanished forever in 1850 when Fuller, her child and her young husband drowned in a shipwreck that took place just off the coast of New York. (Fuller was returning to her homeland from Italy, in order to preside over the American birth of her book.) It’s true that Ada was passionately interested in America; nevertheless, it’s difficult to suppose that the story of Fuller’s lost masterpiece offered much solace to a young woman whose own ambitions remained so unfulfilled.
Neither young Annabella’s wishes nor Lady Byron’s pious endeavours would ever make an angel out of Ada. On 3 August, Lord Lovelace recorded that his wife and he held ‘sad talks’ about Greig’s revelations concerning John Crosse. Three days later, Ada secretly received her lover. Once again handing over the diamonds her mother had retrieved, the dying countess sent Crosse straight back to the same pawnbroker’s on the Strand. She also – seemingly of her own free will – handed Crosse an invaluable document for possible future use to blackmail her husband. This was the ‘limitless’ letter of credit that Lovelace had rashly provided to his wife in order to cover her final season of racing bets.
John Crosse’s visit excited old passions in Ada. During that same week, writing with a savagery that takes one’s breath away, the countess told her mother that she longed for Lovelace to go away and let her alone. Contemptuously, she compared her unfortunate husband to a needy dog, one who could not leave his master. The spectacle of his grief disgusted her.
So it was one day; with the next, Ada’s mercurial mind shifted into an altered set of opinions. She was consistent only in the dauntless courage with which she bore the pain, the sickness, the sleeplessness and the fear of grey oblivion that had become her daily attendants.
Only the children remained a source of real
