Mary Montgomery, who had always encouraged the match, was still abroad when news of the engagement was given out. Her brother Hugh (yet another of Annabella’s suitors) seems not to have responded to a jaunty proclamation (delivered on 22 September and softened by a sympathetic note from Lady Milbanke) that ‘The Thane is found.’ Mary Gosford, treated on 6–8 October to an artlessly pompous explanation of the care that Annabella had taken to single out Byron as ‘the man most calculated to support me on my journey to Immortality’, was tactfully acquiescent.
Elation swept Annabella along for a couple of joyous weeks. Caroline Lamb managed, despite Byron’s fears of an outburst, to produce a friendly note of congratulation, together with an engagingly naive drawing of the happy couple. Augusta, writing what would be perceived three years later as ‘ingenious compositions’, smoothly apologised for the delays which still kept her brother lingering in the south. Mrs Leigh, so Byron tactlessly boasted to Annabella on 7 October, was ‘more attached to me than anyone in existence can be’. Writing to Lady Melbourne on the same day, he revealed that Augusta, increasingly terrified that scandalous reports might prevent her coveted court appointment, was ‘especially anxious’ for this marriage to take place.
Four weeks after her acceptance, and still separated from an absentee fiancé by almost three hundred miles, Annabella started to fret. Everything seemed like a dream, she confessed to Byron on 10 October, and yet doubts were creeping in. ‘God bless you . . . my own . . . my only dearest.’ Promising her three days later that his lawyer was at last setting off for Durham with the necessary papers (hard legal questions about the validity of Hanson’s daughter’s swift and strangely discreet marriage to Lord Portsmouth would preoccupy the wily lawyer until April the following year*), Byron tried to soothe his fiancée’s nerves. Indeed, he did not deserve either such happiness or her anxiously honourable explanation of the phantom lover with whom she had kept him at bay. But ‘I never doubted you –’ Byron wrote on 13 October: ‘I know you to be Truth herself.’ Augusta was urged to reassure the nervous bride-to-be. ‘I can most fully appreciate the motives for your doubts & fears of being able to make my dear Brother happy,’ she wrote to Seaham on 15 October. ‘He writes me word that he hopes very soon to see you . . .’
Four days later, Byron’s mood had darkened. Writing to Lady Melbourne on 19 October, he blamed Annabella for failing to accept him, back in 1812. Had she done so then (‘if she had even given me a distinct though distant hope’), he now believed that he would have acted upon it and pressed his suit. Augusta (always free of blame in Byron’s eyes) would thus have been spared the unhappiness and guilt for which her brother was now ready to throw all the blame upon a reluctant bride.
A cruelly unjust view had been formulated. It was one from which Byron would never again deviate.
Isolated, apprehensive and perfectly unaware of any sexual flavour in Byron’s relationship to his sister, Annabella wrote on 22 October to thank Augusta for all her kindness and to assure her that such generous warmth would not be forgotten. To Byron (his letters now dwelt with ominous repetitiveness upon his need for a wife who would control his wayward passions), she expressed her wistful hope for news of his visit. Her Uncle Wentworth, travelling up to Seaham from Leicestershire especially to meet her fiancé, was forced to return home unsatisfied. The villagers, while complimenting ‘our Miss’ on her glowing appearance, seemed puzzled by her continuing solitude.
On 29 October, pausing only for an overnight stay at Augusta’s house (it was, so he explained to Annabella, at his sister’s explicit request) and to hurl a final angry instruction at his malingering lawyer to hasten to Durham with the crucial documents, Byron finally set off for Seaham.
It was Lady Melbourne who, writing to a friend about the engagement back in September, had remarked upon the oddity of a courtship carried on entirely by correspondence. When Annabella entered the drawing room in which Byron awaited her, the couple had not even glimpsed each other for fifteen months. He, so she later remembered, fiddled with a large fob watch that dangled from his fingers. Pale and gaunt after one of his ferocious stints of dieting, he made no effort to move towards her. When she held out her hand, he bent his lips to her fingertips.
I stood on the opposite side of the fireplace. There was a silence. He broke it. ‘It is a long time since we have met’, – in an undertone. My reply was hardly articulate. I felt overpowered by the situation . . .
Joined by her parents (at their daughter’s request), Byron grew more conversational, talking about his new hero, Edmund Kean, with an unnatural excitement that Annabella ascribed to nerves. Informed – as the little party picked up their candlesticks at last and climbed Seaham’s airily graceful staircase to their bedrooms – that the family normally rose around ten, Byron kept to his room until midday. Annabella spent a disconsolate two hours in the library before setting off for a solitary stroll. Returning, she found that their guest had also walked out alone.
It was an unpromising beginning. Two days into his fortnight-long visit, on 4 November, Byron despatched the first of three bulletins to Lady Melbourne. Sir Ralph seemed entirely agreeable; Lady Milbanke was tiresomely businesslike, not at all to his taste. More worryingly,
