Diligently searching – the request had come from her niece – for a rentable London property large enough to suit Byron’s extravagant taste (but cheap enough to satisfy his prudent wife), Lady Melbourne took comfort from Byron’s announcement in this same letter of 2 February 1815 that – moon apart – ‘Bell & I are as lunatic as heretofore – she does as she likes – and don’t bore me . . .’ Familiar with Lord Byron’s capricious moods, Elizabeth Melbourne remained cautiously optimistic. Governing him, and doing so with kindness and affection: this delicate skill, as she never ceased to remind her niece, was the key to a successful marriage.
Augusta, meanwhile, grew alarmed at hearing that Byron frequently proclaimed his preference for his sister over his wife, introducing mentions of his ‘Gus’ in a way that she unhappily agreed with Annabella was ‘very mal-a-propos’. She took hope, nevertheless, from Lady Byron’s hints at sexual pleasure and – as the chilly days at Seaham lengthened into weeks – signs of a growing companiability.
Returning alone to Seaham three years later, Annabella would walk down the cliff path to the shore. Here, and out on the moors where she and Byron had once set off on a day-long ‘ramble-scramble-tumble-cum-jumble’ that ended with them floundering, laughing, into a bog, she had merrily followed Byron’s lead. In company, and even in private (as she noticed by his discomfort when they encountered country folk out on the lonely roads around Seaham), her halt-footed husband was always conscious of the painful deformity that a ruthless God had personally condemned him to endure. Alone with her, Byron grew unselfconscious and boyish, ‘jumping & squeaking on the sands’ or scrambling ahead of his wife up to the crag of the Featherbed Rocks where, side by side, the two of them gazed tranquilly out across the white crests of a grey and wintry sea. These small and modest recollections evoked happy memories. When preparing her legal depositions of a wretched marriage, Lady Byron resolved to omit such scenes.
Annabella’s maid, Jane Minns, concerned by her mistress’s evident sadness during the lonely weeks at Halnaby, had urged her to confide in her father, kind Sir Ralph. Pride forbade it. Augusta, that warmly reassuring unknown sister, was clearly the person who knew Byron best and who was thus most able to advise a wife on how to handle him. True, Byron had dropped mysterious hints of a forbidden relationship with his sister, but there was no serious reason to believe him. Two months of marriage had taught Annabella that Lord Byron was at any moment capable of saying whatever popped into his head, especially after a generous swig from the brandy bottle that was always on hand at hospitable Seaham Hall. (Augusta, knowing him better, futilely entreated Annabella to hide the brandy away.)
That Byron loved Augusta was beyond doubt; that he might love her more than he should cast only a faint shadow across the unsuspecting mind of his wife. It is likely that Annabella’s firm refusal to stay alone at Seaham while her husband travelled to London – via another visit to The Paddocks* at Six Mile Bottom – was based simply upon an eager desire to meet for herself the charmingly demonstrative Mrs Leigh. Augusta, justifiably fearful of her brother’s intentions, began by opposing any visit by either party, proceeded to the suggestion that the couple should take over some nearby house and ended, joylessly, by acquiescing to Lady Byron’s request to stay under her roof. (Colonel Leigh was not in residence.)
Byron’s anger at his wife’s wilful insistence upon accompanying him to the Leighs’ Cambridgeshire home evaporated in the face of unexpected good news. The elusive Thomas Claughton was once again considering the purchase of Newstead Abbey and the Duchess of Devonshire’s grand London house in Piccadilly was available for the Byrons to rent. Household arrangements were to be settled between Annabella and Lady Melbourne, who instantly despatched floor maps, inventories and screeds of helpful recommendations. Byron, meanwhile, now informed Tom Moore that he had ‘vastly’ enjoyed his stay at Seaham Hall, where his wife was in ‘unvaried good-humour and behavior [sic].’ A reference to Annabella as being ‘in health’ hinted at a better reason for good cheer than either news about houses or of Milbankian hospitality. Lady Byron believed that she was pregnant. Byron never doubted that their child would be a boy.
‘What I suffered at Six Mile Bottom was indescribable,’ Annabella later recalled. As always, the darkest elements came to the fore in quasi-legal statements that required a tale of unmitigated horror. For once, however, she included a moment of unexpected joy. Shortly after leaving Seaham on 9 March, Byron turned to his wife in the carriage and told her that she had succeeded in making him a happy man. Kissed and caressed in front of her own maid, Annabella grew embarrassed; nevertheless, the declaration was truly tender. It made up for the coldness and the ‘sort of unrelenting pity’ she had been subjected to at Halnaby.
That moment of affection stood out in Annabella’s mind because it contrasted so painfully with what followed. The newly-weds spent three long March weeks under Augusta’s roof. Byron, throughout that period, behaved as if he wished that he had never met his wife. Thwarted by Augusta’s unexpected resistance to his sexual overtures, he reacted with all the considerable malice of which, when denied his wishes, Byron was always capable. His target became Annabella.
The portrait of life at the Leighs’ isolated house that Lady Byron later painted to her lawyer was unyieldingly grim. Sent early to bed (‘We can amuse ourselves without you my dear’), and greeted by a shriek of ‘Don’t touch me!’ when once she reached towards her husband for comfort in the night, Annabella was meanwhile informed – however absurd she then believed the announcement to be – that little Elizabeth Medora Leigh was Byron’s own child. Instructed to listen
