November 1813 was the month in which Byron first began to keep a journal. On the last day of the month, just after writing that affectionate response to Annabella’s ‘very pretty’ letter, he sat down at his desk in Bennet Street to assess their relationship.
What an odd situation and friendship is ours! – without one spark of love on either side, and produced by circumstances which in general end in coldness on one side, and aversion on the other. She is a very superior woman, and very little spoiled, which is strange in an heiress – a girl of twenty – a peeress that is to be, in her own right – an only child, and a savante, who has always had her own way. She is a poetess – a mathematician – a metaphysician, and yet, withal, very kind, generous, and gentle, with very little pretension. Any other head would be turned with half her acquisitions, and a tenth of her advantages.
Byron had done his homework. Always in debt himself, he was evidently attracted by (it was a charge he would later vigorously deny) Annabella’s position as an only child – and future peeress – who was due to inherit her uncle’s fortune. Overall, nevertheless, the most striking aspect of Byron’s private journal entry was that his exalted respect for Annabella – for all his initial denial of any such implication – came curiously close to love.
Close, but he was not yet ready to be caught. Annabella, by late November 1813, found herself in torment over her own folly. Three times now, she wailed to Lady Gosford, Byron had mentioned her unidentified lover as his sole reason not to propose. How could she now signal her availability without admitting that she had lied – and risk losing his respect? ‘He has never yet suspected me,’ she sighed. Mary Gosford, while sympathetic, could offer no solution.
A deeper question, one that Annabella had perhaps not paused to examine, was whether Byron actually wished to know that his dear friend’s heart was free? In February 1814, Miss Milbanke launched herself upon the impossible mission of acknowledging the deception she had practised without compromising her own lofty integrity. So baffling was her explanation that Byron quoted one sentence back to her with a request for its elucidation. ‘I cannot by total silence acquiese [sic] in that which if supported when its delusion is known to myself would become deception.’ What exactly did she mean by those elaborate words, he asked, before torturing her with the reminder (he had just returned from a private holiday with Augusta at Newstead) of the circumscribed role to which she herself had so strictly confined him: ‘the moment I sunk into your friend . . . you never did – never for an instant – trifle with me nor amuse me with what is called encouragement . . .’
Extracted from its context, this reminder that they were friends – and nothing more – offered scant cause for hope. However, Byron’s long letter (his often matched Annabella’s own voluminous epistles in length) also included expressions of regret that ill-health would keep her from London (Annabella had been ailing for some weeks), flattering comments about some verses that she had thoughtfully sent him, pleasure at her generous tribute to The Corsair (Byron’s most recent eastern romance was enjoying a massive success) and a tender farewell: ‘God bless you.’ Enough emotion was on show here for Annabella to try once more. On 17 February, she again signalled her availability. Byron promptly thanked her for indicating the exact opposite and thereby saving them both a deal of trouble: ‘& so adieu to the subject,’ he wrote with airy dismissiveness, before inquiring her age and revealing that he, at twenty-six, felt ‘six hundred in heart and in head & pursuits about six.’
Annabella’s best chance, as she was too innocent to realise, was in keeping her distance. In March, a month when Byron presided over a cynical alliance – the hastily arranged marriage of Mary Anne Hanson, the toughly sexy daughter of his own unscrupulous lawyer, to the mentally deficient and extremely rich Earl of Portsmouth, whom Hanson also represented – Byron confided to Annabella that religion, advocated by her as a source of comfort, offered no solace to his all too sensitive spirit.* Writing back with complete sincerity that she nevertheless hoped the best for him, as she had always done, Miss Milbanke won his heart. ‘I shall be in love with her again, if I don’t take care,’ Byron warned himself on 15 March. Addressing Annabella directly on the same day, he spoke of his desire for her company.
It was the enticing sentence ‘You do not know how much I wish to see you’ that inspired Annabella to venture one further cautious step. On 13 April, she asked if she had correctly understood that Lord Byron might be willing to visit her at Seaham? This was bold. Byron had expressed no such wish. For a bachelor to invite himself to stay at the house of a young unmarried woman with whom he had been in regular correspondence was tantamount to asking for her hand. How, then, would he answer? The response, written a week later from Byron’s new London lodging at Albany (a bachelor’s set of rooms off Piccadilly that he had inherited from the recently married Lord Althorp), was encouraging. He would visit Seaham Hall with pleasure, requesting only not to intrude upon her studies: ‘you will do as you please – only let it be as you please . . .’ Distance, he added airily of a five-day journey by stagecoach from London, was of no consequence in the matter.
Annabella’s complete ignorance of what was taking place in Byron’s life during the period of her negotiations for a visit helps to explain the extreme distress with which – two years later – she would belatedly unravel the intrigue that had formed the background to Byron’s capricious courtship of herself:
