The unexpected result of Byron’s perverse behaviour was to drive the two women (literally, some would suggest) into each other’s arms. Confidences had already been exchanged about Byron’s boasts of an incestuous relationship. Watching Augusta closely throughout the visit, an anxious Annabella noted that Mrs Leigh ‘submitted to his [Byron’s] affection, but never appeared gratified by it’. True, Augusta made a point of wearing her monogrammed brooch containing a lock of hair (Byron had ordered one for his sister and one for himself back at Seaham, when he anticipated staying alone under her roof), but she did so under his instruction. True, Augusta read out painful passages from letters, but it was always at Byron’s insistence. Also true, and less forgivably, Mrs Leigh never protested when her guest was sent off early to bed. (One of Annabella’s most wretched memories of her stay in Cambridgeshire was the sound of Byron and his beloved, merry ‘Gus’ laughing together behind closed doors.)
Superficially, the new sisters-in-law had little in common. Annabella was cautious, rational, intellectual; Augusta was impulsive, illogical and happy to accept Byron’s affectionate description of herself as ‘a ninny’. What drew the two women together was the callousness with which Byron sought to manipulate their feelings. His success was qualified. Gus – chestnut-haired, hazel-eyed, softly rounded as a damaged peach and nervous as a hunted hare – was awed by the calm dignity with which the younger woman endured her husband’s manic goading. ‘I think I never saw nor heard of a more perfect being in mortal mould than she appears to be,’ Augusta wrote of Annabella in a letter to Francis Hodgson, on 18 March. On 1 April, she wrote to Hodgson again, to announce that her poor brother’s debts had plunged him into despair.
And throughout all of this, what did Annabella think? ‘She [Augusta] was always devotedly kind to me and consulted my wishes on every occasion,’ Lady Byron firmly stated a year later, and added: ‘I cannot think how feelingly [Augusta acted] without emotions of gratitude.’ Nevertheless, leaving the Leighs’ cluttered and claustrophobic home for London on 28 March, Annabella experienced profound relief. Augusta had seemed equally thankful for the visit’s end. Recalling their departure in her legal statement the following year, Annabella simply noted that she ‘did not wish to detain us’.
* Thomas and Catherine Noel were the parents of two girls (Mary and Anna) and four boys (Tom Jr, Robert, Charles and Edward).
* The words ‘bereaved of reason’ were underlined later by John Hobhouse, not by Byron himself.
* What was the ‘mischief’ involving Annabella’s self-acknowledged ‘ruling passion’? Flagellation? Or is it possible that Byron had introduced his wife to oral and/or anal sex, and that Annabella found that she enjoyed it? At least one later defendant of Lady Byron (John Fox, writing in 1869–71 and seeming to cite Annabella’s lawyer as his authority) hinted that sodomy, rather than incest, was the embarrassing charge of which no proof could be offered to a court.
* Recently reborn as Swynford Manor, a wedding venue.
CHAPTER SEVEN
U
NLUCKY FOR
S
OME
: 13 P
ICCADILLY
T
ERRACE
(1815–16)
The house which Lady Melbourne had picked out for her niece’s future abode was the London home of Augustus Foster’s mother. (The widowed Duchess of Devonshire – Georgiana’s successor – was solacing herself in Rome.) Built in the 1760s in the neoclassical style, 13 Piccadilly Terrace* looked across the fields of Green Park from the western and airier end of a palatial row of Georgian mansions, beneath the tall windows of which – much to the delight of the late 4th Duke of Queensberry, one of the terrace’s most famously lecherous inhabitants – available ladies marketed their wares. ‘Old Q’ had become quite a feature of the street himself, ogling the passing traffic from a balcony, and then, from an armchair drawn up within a specially designed bay window. The Byrons, to the relief of their neighbours, would prove more reticent.
An assortment of pets, a long-suffering valet (William Fletcher was helped out by an occasional understudy, James Brown), an eccentric old cleaning lady called Mrs Mule and a formidable wardrobe: these were Lord Byron’s contributions to setting up the household, plus the rent he had agreed to pay of £700 per annum (around £28,000 today). A semi-tame squirrel was installed, together with a bad-tempered parrot – it once bit Annabella’s finger, whereupon Byron hurled it, cage and all, out of the window, only to rush downstairs to save the bird from death – and a mastiff. The dog guarded its master’s door, not from a wife who regularly shared his bed, but from the menace of a swelling band of creditors.
Annabella’s miserable experiences at Augusta’s Cambridgeshire home were briefly forgotten in the task of setting up a sixteen-bedroom house which, while adequately furnished by the duchess, possessed not one scrap of linen, glass or cutlery. By 5 April, all was orderly enough for John Murray, Byron’s publisher, to be invited in to show off a new bookplate print of the poet (Annabella agreed with her husband that its unflattering predecessor was unusable), a portrait of Byron as he had appeared to visitors at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1814: a glorious figure in Albanian costume, represented to the sitter’s own entire satisfaction by the well-known artist Thomas Phillips. (The painting so enchanted Byron’s proud mother-in-law that she purchased it for herself.)
Byron was not
