Signs of domestic unrest behind the house’s austere façade showed up almost immediately. News had come while the Byrons were still visiting Augusta that Mrs Leigh had secured a £300 per annum appointment as a Woman of the Bedchamber to the Regent’s mother, old Queen Charlotte. Free and spacious lodging in St James’s Palace (a welcome bonus for a couple who had no London home) was not, however, to be provided until 1818. On 31 March, a mere three days after the Byrons’ traumatic stay at The Paddocks, the queen’s new court lady was invited to lodge herself – and to stay for as long as she wished – under her brother’s roof. The offer came not from Byron, but his wife.
Why did Lady Byron turn so readily to the very woman for whom her husband had recently displayed a woundingly amorous affection? Possibly, Annabella thought it would create an impression of estrangement if Augusta stayed – as she could easily have done – with Mrs Villiers, the worldly older friend who had helped secure her new royal post. (Mr Villiers was a Groom of the Bedchamber to George III.) More likely, having formed a bond of sisterly kinship under stressful conditions, Annabella felt that cheerful, sympathetic Gus was the only person with whom she could safely share her private worries and that she would – Augusta made no secret of her longing for a livelier existence than she could obtain in a Cambridgeshire village – gladly take up the proposal.
Accepting with speed, Augusta nevertheless displayed unease about the chances for success of the ménage à trois that Annabella had once blithely envisaged as ‘an amiable trio’. ‘You will perhaps be a better judge by & bye [sic] whether I shall not be a plague,’ Mrs Leigh presciently advised her ‘dearest Sis’ on 31 March ‘– & you must tell me truly if I am likely to prove so . . .’
Augusta arrived at Piccadilly Terrace on 15 April. Accompanying her were a maid and her eldest daughter, Georgiana (‘Gee’), Byron’s quiet, slow-witted godchild. The newcomers had scarcely settled in as guests before – from the debt-ridden Lord Byron’s point of view – good news arrived. Wealthy old Lord Wentworth, grief-stricken since the loss of his lively little wife in the summer of 1814, had been taken ill at his London house. Death was imminent. While Judith hurried to make her way down from Seaham, Annabella set out from Piccadilly Terrace to act as her dying uncle’s companion and comforter. Hints that the early stages of pregnancy were taxing her health appear in the anxious letter Byron sent to Lord Wentworth’s house on 13 or 14 April:
Dearest –
Now your mother is come I won’t have you worried any longer – more particularly in your present situation which is rendered very precarious by what you have already gone through. Pray – come home
Ever thine B
Lord Wentworth died on 17 April. The anger with which Byron greeted his wife upon her return home – she later recalled that he did not speak to her for four days, preferring to use Augusta as his envoy – was fuelled by a disappointment that he was ashamed to put into words. Lord Wentworth had been expected to leave his fortune to his niece, Annabella. Instead, it was to pass to her only upon the death of his one surviving sister, and with conditions. The Milbankes, in return for adopting Judith’s maiden name (Noel), became the new owners of Wentworth’s London home and of Kirkby Mallory, the Leicestershire estate at which Judith had spent her early years. Lord Wentworth’s money, of which they all stood in urgent need, remained entailed. Sir Ralph was still struggling to raise the last portion of his daughter’s £20,000 settlement (a sum on which Byron, a year after his marriage, was still receiving only the interest). For the present, however, Wentworth’s large legacy was untouchable.
Chattels offered meagre comfort to a man hounded by creditors. The sole evidence that some of these personal objects did reach Piccadilly Terrace survives in a French violin on which Lord Wentworth had enjoyed duetting with his equally musical wife. Byron’s feelings about the promised legacy can be guessed from the sour little verse scratched on to its back:
Hey diddle! diddle,
I am now Byron’s fiddle,
Pray what do you think of my shape?
You may touch me and feel me
But beware if you steal me
I may get you into a ‘Scrape!’
[Signed]: mme Muse 1815
Annabella later claimed that nursing a dying uncle had been light duty compared to the misery she was enduring at Piccadilly Terrace. Confined to her bedroom for days and sometimes weeks on end by an unexpectedly difficult pregnancy, she found herself torn between gratitude for Augusta’s efforts to act as the buffer between an increasingly estranged couple and growing discomfort about the nature of Byron’s relationship with his sister. Once again, Annabella puzzled over the significance of distant gigglings and laughter. What was taking place elsewhere in the house? How, fed with Byron’s hints about a terrible crime, one for which her original delay in agreeing to marry him was held to be mysteriously responsible, could she not wonder?
On one humiliating evening, or so Annabella recalled, a smiling
