Lovelace himself was beginning to crack under the strain. A water bed (a thick rubber sheet laid over a tub of water) had been installed to ease her suffering as Ada became unable even to empty her bladder without cries of agony. He spent a day arranging pots of flowers at points where she could see the bright colours from her bed, while, with her mother as scribe, Ada whispered her recollection of a happy visit she had once paid alone to Charles Dickens at Gadshill. And at last, on 26 August, ten days after Dr West had urged Lady Byron to speed her grandson’s return from Switzerland, Ralph arrived. Fearing the impact of Ada’s haggard appearance upon a susceptible 13-year-old, his grandmother had delayed his return; now, Lady Byron hurried him away to join his siblings in the country, at the welcoming home of the Burrs.
There were occasional moments when Annabella found it impossible to maintain a glacial manner towards the son-in-law whom she held responsible for Ada’s misfortunes. She noted them. Once, when the dying woman’s torments became almost unbearable to witness, Lady Byron touched Lord Lovelace upon the arm in a sign of silent sympathy. When he remarked that his pale, waterborne wife looked like the drowned Ophelia, Annabella agreed. On 31 August, Lady Byron was sitting by Ada’s bed when Lovelace tiptoed in. As he bent to kiss the dying woman’s hands, Ada pulled his head down until his mouth touched her cheek (but it was only with ‘a sort of instinct’, Lovelace wanly wrote). Joining his hands to her mother’s across the bed, she entreated them both to have mercy on her. A moment later, Ada’s flickering thoughts had swerved back into the realm of nightmare. Perhaps – it was still her greatest terror – she would be buried alive? And then, when once she was dead, what sufferings still lay in store for such a wicked woman? Could they last for a million years?
Lord Lovelace had maintained his daily record of Ada’s agonisingly slow decline for an entire month. The endeavour was breaking his heart. On 31 August, he made his final entry and closed the tiny pages up.
Perhaps the diary ended for a bleaker reason. On 1 September, following a private discussion with her mother, Ada asked to see her husband alone. She disclosed much – but far from all – about her secret relationship with John Crosse. Describing this interview at second hand to Stephen Lushington, Annabella said that the earl had called upon God to forgive his wife for her sins in a way that she personally considered downright Pharisaical. What shocked Lady Byron far more was the evidence that her son-in-law had lost his temper with his dying wife. Annabella had experienced one of Lovelace’s fearsome rages at Leamington. She saw that same fury in his face as he emerged from the sickroom. Ada acknowledged that her husband had been very bitter towards her. However indignantly protective Lady Byron may have felt, it is hard to see how Lovelace could have been anything else.
On 21 September, Lady Byron formally took up residence in the graceful crescent house on Great Cumberland Place that she had chosen for her beloved children as their London home. She noted that she had moved in only because it was her daughter’s wish.
Writing to Miss Fitzhugh six days later, Annabella ironically remarked that she believed she had the qualities necessary to govern a colony of convicts, if so required. While hardly flattering to the servants of the Lovelaces’ household, the implication was clear. Lady Byron was now in charge. Anyone who displeased her was dismissed. Outside servants were brought in to follow her directions. Lovelace did not object. Neither did the two lawyers, Greig and Lushington, whose repeated visits bore witness to the fact that the last shreds of Ada’s secret life were now being exposed to pitiless view, while urgent thought was applied to how much of the evidence should be destroyed.
‘I dread beyond anything the idea of you living far away. If I could not see you often, I should feel so lonely now.’ The words are Ada’s in a note to Lady Byron which evidently predates but poignantly represents the final harrowing phase of their relationship. Writing to Emily Fitzhugh, Annabella suggested (once again) that Ada had grown truly penitent. A mass of pencilled scrawls, executed in a faint and trembling hand, appeared to bear her out. In one, a reference to verse 8 of Psalm 17, Ada asked her mother, despite everything (‘malgré tout’), to ‘keep me as the apple of thy eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings from the wicked that oppress me . . .’
Even now, Ada’s submission was not absolute. There was nothing penitent in the fierce allusion to herself as Christ to which one note now drew attention: ‘You have condemned, you have killed the righteous man . . .’
Lady Byron had become the chatelaine, but her son-in-law seldom left the house. On 7 October, however, the earl prepared an official note to state that he would be away for a few days (probably at Aldermaston with the children) and that, during his absence, ‘Lady Byron should be considered in every respect as the mistress of my house’.
The timing is significant. Four days later, while the earl was still away, Annabella recorded for the eyes of Lushington – but not for those of the absent Lovelace – her dismaying discovery that Ada had allowed John Crosse to pawn her jewels a second time over at the beginning of August. This had only just emerged. Once again, Lady Byron covered the cost of the
