Annabella’s answer was engagingly frank. She had not meant to suggest that she hungered after a righteous prig: ‘I am always repelled by people of that description.’ As to her aunt’s advice against seeking an impossible ideal, surely a young lady might be allowed to hope? And now, ‘After so full an explanation you will perhaps take off my stilts, and allow that I am only on tiptoe.’
Lady Melbourne had been beaten back, but the topic of Byron could never be long avoided. In Richmond, where Mary Montgomery arrived to spend two autumn months, his name was warmly praised by a friend who persisted in seeing the unlikely couple as a perfect match. Reunited with her faithful journal, Annabella approvingly noted that Lord Byron never allowed religion to be mocked at his table and that he had generously given away John Murray’s payment for Childe Harold to Robert Dallas, an impoverished friend. (Dallas had helped to secure the poem’s publication.) Warned against becoming too friendly with Lady Melbourne by Dr Fenwick up in Durham (the canny old practitioner was full of stories about that estimable lady’s deceiving ways), Annabella declined to admit that her aunt’s chief value was as the last remaining line of communication to Lord Byron. Within the privacy of an increasingly wistful Miss Milbanke’s mind her rejected suitor remained firmly to the fore.
In February 1813, newly arrived in London from visiting the Wentworths and then Cousin Sophy, Annabella made the only kind of overture that was now open to her. Lady Melbourne was requested to ask Lord Byron if they could now meet without awkwardness. His response was prompt, but disappointingly casual. Miss Milbanke might be informed that ‘if she does not misunderstand me nor my views – we shall be very good friends – & “live happy ever after” – in that state of life to which “it may please God to call us”.’
Poor Annabella. What was she to make of a man grown heartless enough to add that he had actually smiled at her rejection? Even aloof Mr Darcy (whose character she greatly admired when reading Pride and Prejudice during a second winter visit to Cousin Sophy’s home) would have shown more feeling.
Annabella’s journal reveals little about her thoughts during her final summer on the London marriage market. Arriving in London on 7 May 1813 (following her third stay of the year with Sophy Tamworth), Annabella attended a ball. It was the first occasion of the year at which she set eyes on Byron – but only from a distance. He was present at another party three days later, but there was no chance to speak with him. Nine days later, her private journal expressed disgust at the envy Samuel Rogers – a poet whom Byron rated only just below Walter Scott – betrayed of his literary confrère. The warmth of Annabella’s own feelings is clear in her indignant private comment: ‘I always thought Rogers mean, but I did not think him capable of such petty artifices as he used on this occasion to blast a rival’s name.’
No further mention of Byron’s name appears in the journal. In her private ‘Auto-Description’ of 1831, however, Annabella recalled Byron’s exceptional pallor when she gave him her hand at their first May meeting, and how that betrayal of feeling had given her hope. (‘Perhaps, unconscious as I was, the engagement was then formed on my part.’) Several further such encounters had apparently taken place, ‘but every time I felt more pain, & at last I shunned the occasions’.
Lord Byron, who had been toying with the idea of travelling abroad with his new mistress, the lovely Lady Oxford, overstepped a line when he flirtatiously presented her 11-year-old daughter with some trinkets he had recently retrieved from Caroline Lamb. The Oxfords indicated their displeasure by leaving Byron behind when they went abroad at the end of June 1813. It was at a party given around this time that Annabella observed her former suitor seated on a sofa beside a woman whose pleasant face, framed in corkscrews of brown ringlets, was new to her. Enquiries revealed that the brown-haired lady was Byron’s older and married half-sister, the Honourable Augusta Leigh.
Augusta Leigh was always short of money. She was especially so when she arrived in London at the end of June 1813 (just as the Oxfords set off for the Continent). Colonel Leigh was away, as was his habit, at the races. Their three small children – the eldest, Georgiana, was Byron’s god-daughter – had been left in the care of a nurse at The Paddocks in Six Mile Bottom. (The Leighs’ home suited the sporting Colonel’s wish to live close to the thoroughbred mecca of Newmarket.) Augusta’s choice of city lodgings was a giveaway of her hard-up state. Beginning at the noisily inelegant abode of Byron’s grasping lawyer, John Hanson, she moved on to lodge with Theresa Villiers, a loyal friend whose excellent connections to the royal circle might be worked upon to advantage.
Augusta arrived in town at the very moment when Byron was unattached. Comic, easygoing, delightfully unreproachful and unfailingly affectionate, Augusta’s unhesitating readiness to become Byron’s favourite companion may have been related to the fact that her half-brother – of whose own financial woes she was at best dimly aware – appeared to be a source of wealth.
Few, in the late summer of 1813, saw anything unusual in Byron’s loving reunion with an older sister to whom he had become almost a stranger. Caroline Lamb was merely signalling a frenzied wish to recapture her lost
