There is no doubt that Lord Lovelace meant what he said, and yet there was an almost obsessive note in his endless repetition, in every letter he wrote that night, of that particular mantra. Paying tribute over and again to the Hen’s gentle practicality, he seemed to hope that he might yet earn her forgiveness.
* Brewster invented the kaleidoscope in 1816 and the stereoscope, a hugely popular early form of 3D photographic viewing, in 1851. He enjoyed the company of clever women; in 1851, he escorted Charlotte Brontë around the Great Exhibition – and doubtless showed off his stereoscope during the tour.
* Previously, biographers have assumed that Lovelace’s letter related to Ada’s betting at Doncaster. The later 1852 date adds more weight to Lady Byron’s bitter sense that her son-in-law had betrayed her trust in him. At Leamington, Lovelace had promised to oppose any future attempts at gambling by his wife.
† John Padwick’s notorious talent as a moneylender was not matched by his skill on the course. A month before the Derby, he sold his own horse, Little Joe. It won the race.
* Florence suggested that Lady Lovelace’s village hospital might follow the layout and system of Kaiserswerth-am-Rhein, a German training school for nurses where she had studied in 1851 (FN to AINB, n.d. 1852, Dep. Lovelace Byron 94, fols. 88–92).
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
L
IFE AFTER
A
DA
(1852–3)
‘The Rainbow’
Bow down in hope, in thanks, all ye who mourn
Where e’en that peerless arch of radiant hues
Surpassing earthly tints, the storm subdued.
Of nature’s strife and tears. ’Tis heaven-born
To soothe the sad, the sinning and the forlorn.
A lovely loving token; to infuse
The hope, the faith that Pow’r divine endures
With latent good the woes by which we’re torn
’Tis like sweet repentance of the skies,
To beckon all by the sense of sin opprest,
Revealing harmony from tears and sighs;
A pledge, that deep implanted in the breast
A hidden light may burn that never dies,
But burst thro’ storms in purest hues exprest.
AAL
On 28 November 1852, the morning after her daughter’s death, Lady Byron moved into Brown’s, the Dover Street hotel that had been set up in 1837 (with her own financial support) by James Brown, one of Lord Byron’s former valets, and his wife, Sarah Willis, who had briefly served as Annabella’s maid at Piccadilly Terrace.* The Browns respected their guest’s need for discretion. When a neatly bonneted Florence Nightingale called at the hotel the following day to offer her condolences to the woman she revered and admired above almost any other, she was informed that Lady Byron was unable to receive callers.
Thwarted in her original plan, Florence set off instead to inspect what she soulfully referred to as ‘the poor house itself’. Young Annabella was still in residence, but did not appear. Lord Lovelace had accompanied the coffin (placed inside a private carriage) on the Midland railway line to Worksop, near Newstead.
And why on earth, an inquisitive Miss Nightingale pondered, would the family seek to draw attention to their link with Lord Byron, of whose incestuous relationship with Augusta Leigh all the Nightingale family had long since been informed by his widow? It did not occur to her that the hapless Lady Lovelace had chosen her own burial place.
I thought of the words ‘conceived in sin’ and what an account that man, her father, has to render, from whose excesses her dreadful sufferings must date, and wondered they should like to bring her near him in her death.
Florence’s long letter has never before been looked at in connection with Ada’s death. Revealing both of Florence’s own attitude to emotion (‘She never lost her self command,’ Miss Nightingale remarked admiringly of Lady Byron’s care for her dying daughter) and of her nosiness (Lady Byron’s personal maid had been coaxed into volunteering that it was ‘a very good thing that poor Lady Lovelace was dead’), the real interest lies in the collateral detail that Florence’s letter provides.
The woman who welcomed Miss Nightingale into 6 Great Cumberland Place on 29 November was none other than her own Mrs Clark, the no-nonsense housekeeper who would later travel out with her to Scutari in the Crimea. It was during discussions about Ada’s apparent desire for a village hospital to be established at Kirkby Mallory that Florence had offered to loan Mrs Clark to Lady Byron as a capable (and above all, discreet) assistant. Mrs Clark’s role at Cumberland Place had probably taken the form of turning and lifting the dying patient, emptying bedpans and carrying trays. It was only during the last days that Mrs Clark had been given a more delicate commission, one of which Florence now became aware. ‘I am sure,’ Miss Nightingale wrote to her sister:
they may be most thankful they have Mrs Clark there to depend on. She has burnt everything, all the dreadful letters which would have broken their hearts to know of. Mrs Clark is not going to stay, she says she cannot bear it – but has consented to remain as long as they want her so much.*
Miss Nightingale’s letter helps to explain why both Dr Lushington and Woronzow Greig were visiting Great Cumberland Place on the evening that Ada Lovelace died. Evidently, this pair of trusted lawyers were still assessing what to suppress and what to preserve in order to protect the family from scandal. They did their best. The preserved family papers do not reveal Mrs Clark’s presence or what the ‘dreadful letters’ were that she had been instructed to destroy. When Parthenope Nightingale, many years later, obligingly searched the Nightingale
