In Byron's Wake

happiness. Young Annabella provided continual pleasure with a series of lively letters adorned with her own graceful pen and ink images. (An entire aviary of birds arrived, followed by comic sketches from everyday life, landscapes – it seemed there was nothing that this talented fifteen-year-old could not represent.) And then, five days after Crosse’s visit, a strapping youth with bronzed cheeks and a seaman’s rolling gait sauntered into his mother’s room. Ada had warned her son in advance of what he would see. For herself, she was overjoyed by the tenderness of Ockham’s manner and the handsomeness of his face. There was no want of feeling in him now, she rejoiced to her mother that day. ‘Quite the contrary.’ Down at Aldermaston, the muscular young viscount took the Burr boys out to sail on the lake in a washtub that he had rigged up with a sail. His sister meanwhile wrote to tell Ada (with seeming innocence) about a toy racing game that she had found in a box. ‘It is very amusing for some people are so indescribably unlucky with their horses,’ Annabella remarked to her mother on 18 August. Was the comment innocuous, or had an unusually observant girl learned more than was intended during her week-long stay at Great Cumberland Place?

Slowly, hidden truths were beginning to emerge into the light. One day earlier, a horrified Lady Byron told Lushington that she had learned from Greig of a previous and hitherto unmentioned pawning of the family diamonds, one of which Lovelace himself had been aware. What hurt her most, so she wrote, was the realisation that Ada had lied to her. ‘I cannot forget that the motive made use of to move me, was the dread of his ever knowing of such a circumstance . . .’ Advised by Lushington, Annabella suppressed the urge to challenge her son-in-law. Instead, gritting her teeth, she wrote to offer peace. With it, came her wish that the two of them might learn to stop putting ‘the worst construction on each other’s motives’. Quoting these sentiments back to Greig on 20 August, Lovelace presciently remarked that he doubted her ability to stick to such a resolution. ‘Yet my heart yearns towards Lady Byron.’

Ada, meanwhile, was still struggling to conceal her tracks from the gaze of an increasingly suspicious and tenacious mother. On 12 August, Charles Babbage was summoned and given a draft of Ada’s will. Instructions included the obtaining (somehow) of £600 from Lady Byron, to be distributed just as Babbage had been ‘privately’ directed in another (lost) note. Babbage was also asked to look through certain papers that Ada gave him, and to destroy what he judged unfit to preserve.

Given that Ada would surely not have wished any of her scientific work to be destroyed, it’s fair to assume that the papers in question related to her secret racing life. Any surviving connection between Babbage himself and the racecourse appears only in the inventor’s continuing loyalty to Mary Wilson, the woman whose name was most frequently employed in the tipsters’ notes.

The fear of impending death was growing strong. ‘I want Ralph back,’ Ada pleaded to her mother on 15 August. On the same day, William was asked to remind Colonel Wildman of his promise that Lady Lovelace should be buried beside her father. Ada was to lie within the Byron vault ‘at her own desire’, Lady Byron informed Mrs Villiers on 7 September. Privately, Annabella resolved to erect her own monument to Ada, discreetly tucked away in the old family churchyard of Kirkby Mallory.

On 19 August, the least savoury of Ada’s racing colleagues paid a visit to Great Cumberland Place. Mr Fleming had come to discuss a life insurance policy that the countess had been persuaded to take out prior to the diagnosis of a fatal disease. Its value was £600. When he left, Fleming had pocketed a signed note assigning him the entire £600, in exchange for the ten shillings he had just placed in Lady Lovelace’s hand.

Did Ada know what she was doing? Or had she been frightened into doing as Fleming asked? Increasingly, as the cancer took its hold, Lady Lovelace spoke of sinister men who were trying to gain access to her room. It’s likely that Mr Fleming’s possible return with further demands was preying on her fearful mind.

The pains were becoming unbearable. On one occasion, Lady Byron was summoned from her nearby residence at two in the morning. Together with Lovelace, she tried to soothe his writhing, screaming wife as Ada arched and scrabbled and crouched upon all fours, fighting against a pain that neither mesmerism (Annabella’s contribution) nor drugs could now alleviate. Still, there were moments of respite. Ada herself could no longer even attempt to pick out the old airs and waltzes which Lovelace remembered having once charmed him so much. But she could still listen with pleasure when Fanny Kemble’s graceful sister, Adelaide Sartoris, came in to sing to her. Towards the end of August, Ada asked if Charles Dickens would come and read to her about little Paul Dombey, gliding into death with the peace that poor Ada craved and could not find. Three years earlier, invited to visit her home in Brighton, Dickens had teased Byron’s charmingly imperious daughter that he felt like Aladdin being summoned into the Princess Badroulbadour’s bathhouse. Seeing her at Great Cumberland Place on this final occasion, Dickens was (so Lovelace recorded in his diary) ‘wonderfully struck with her courage and calmness’.

On 22 August, Annabella and Byron Ockham were allowed to pay another brief visit to their mother. Tenderly, they helped their father to bathe Ada’s hands – the only action that could still bring a little relief from pain – while she talked dreamily about returning to the Lake District and how happy they might all be. That evening, Dr West, the quietly efficient doctor who was now also living in the house, reported an alarming deterioration in his patient’s condition. Mattresses were hastily laid