Two days on, Byron wrote again. Annabella and he were getting along famously. She had become more talkative. Her parents were kind. He hoped (once again) she would be happy: ‘I am sure she can make & keep me so if she likes.’
A week later, Byron was at his most mercurial. Perhaps there would be no marriage. Annabella talked interminably about fine feelings, analysed everything he said and retired to bed with an unexplained ailment every third day. Once, to his alarm, she had actually made a scene almost worthy of Caroline Lamb.* Nevertheless, concluding a complaint-filled letter to Lady M with the ungallant recollection of how swiftly a kiss or two could soothe her niece (‘entre nous, it is really amusing’), and how pleasantly ‘caressable’ into good humour she was, Byron decided that Annabella’s temper was not bad, only ‘very self-tormenting – and anxious – and romantic’. Having threatened a rupture, he concluded by declaring after all that ‘if there is a break – it shall be her doing not mine’.
Lady Melbourne offered worldly advice. She herself had seen Annabella display a furious tantrum that ended in a two-day headache, but – since she always hurried to atone and he was so skilful a seducer – ‘everything is in your power – for though you are dextrous in most things, that is your forte’.
The advice proved superfluous. By the time Lady Melbourne’s letter reached Seaham, Byron had already made demonstration of his desire, frightened Annabella, angered her mother and stormed out of the house. His spirits, sullen at the northern staging post of Boroughbridge (from where Annabella learned that he felt ‘cold as Charity – Chastity or any other Virtue’), improved at the pliant Augusta’s home (from which his sister gushed forth ‘her hundred loves’). Safely back in London, he hoped that those ‘hot luncheons of salubrious memory’ had helped to brighten Annabella’s own mood.* Signing his saucy letter off in high good humour, Byron wished a tender good morning – as if across the pillow – to ‘Ma Mignonne’.
The sense of games – dangerously silly games – being played by the amorous siblings is inescapable. ‘Mignonne’ was the pet name Augusta and Byron used for little Elizabeth Medora Leigh. On 15 December 1814 (this letter was one which Annabella would later regard as clear evidence of her husband’s crime), Augusta blithely informed Byron that a visitor ‘has found out a likeness to your picture in Mignonne’ – that is, Medora – ‘who is of course very good-humoured in consequence’. On 30 November, Augusta even dared to tell Annabella that she shared all of her feelings about Byron, causing Annabella to respond – with pitiable innocence – that she expected them to form ‘a very amiable trio’.
Annabella’s obliviousness to what would later be illuminated by the glare of hindsight invites sympathy. But what is to be made of Augusta, blandly reporting to her brother on one day that racecourse bets were being laid against his marriage to Miss Milbanke, and on another that Annabella’s scholarly habits were said to be ruining her health (meaning, her looks)? Was Mrs Leigh really the goose that her young brother affectionately nicknamed her, or was she a jealous sister deliberately throwing spokes in the wheels of a marriage that, if it proved a happy one, might threaten her own secret supremacy?
Certainly, that first and long-awaited visit to Seaham by Byron had not been an unqualified success. The letters that flew after his retreating form were imploring. On 16 November (the day of his departure), Annabella entreated Byron to have faith in her love. On 17 November, she recalled the terrible quarrel that had evidently taken place when she begged him not to ‘turn me out of doors in revenge as you threatened’. Two days later, she urged him not to believe in ‘the grave didactic, deplorable person that I have appeared to you’. Hearing by the same post from an anxious Judith Milbanke that his fiancée had recovered her former good spirits, being ‘delighted and happy with her future prospects’, the bridegroom softened. On 20 November, he signed himself ‘most entirely and unalterably your attached B’. Six days later, Annabella wrote with candid passion of her desire for his embraces: ‘I wish for you, want you, Byron mine, every hour . . . Come, come, come – to my heart.’
‘Remember – I have done with doubts,’ Annabella wrote to Byron on 24 November. But had he? Unexpectedly sympathetic when she told him on the previous day of having to sack a newish maid (‘a hardened sinner’) and take back her old one, Jane Minns, Byron was incensed to hear that the bells of Sunderland Minster had been rung to proclaim his approaching nuptials. ‘Dearest A,’ he snapped on 12 December, ‘I must needs say – that your Bells are in a pestilent hurry . . . I am very glad however that I was out of their hearing – deuce take them . . .’
For Annabella, busying herself with wedding arrangements, arranging for a winter honeymoon at Halnaby and overseeing the sale of Milbanke properties (to boost her dowry and save Seaham Hall, the clifftop home that she adored), all the other problems raised by Byron (the challenges faced by his lawyer over Lord Portsmouth’s mental status; the acquiring of a marriage licence; continuing worries about Newstead’s future) appeared surmountable. All was ready, she pleaded. Her own papers were in perfect order.* Nobody objected to Byron’s request for a simple drawing-room ceremony, least of all a Unitarian bride who would take pride throughout her life in never having attended a church service.
And yet still the bridegroom delayed.
On 16 December, Annabella spoke out plainly, telling Byron that
