You would laugh to see and still more hear the effects of your absence in the house – Tearing up carpets, deluging staircases, knocking, rubbing, brushing!– By all these I was early awakened, for Ms Mew [sic] seems convinced that my ears and other senses have departed with you. She no longer flies like a sylph on tip-toe, but like a troop of dragoons at full gallop. The old proverb –
‘When the Cat’s away, the Mice will play –’
They shall have their holiday, but I can’t fancy it mine. Indeed indeed nau [naughty] B– is a thousand times better than no B.
I dare not write any more for fear you should be frightened at the length, and not read at all. So I shall give the rest to Goose [Augusta].
I hope you call out ‘Pip, pip, pip’ – now & then. I think I hear you – but I won’t grow lemoncholy –A—da!
The allusion to ‘nau B’ glossed the aggression to which Annabella had been exposed during the days leading up to his departure from Piccadilly Terrace for Six Mile Bottom. ‘I was very ill,’ she later recalled: ‘– he had kept me awake almost all the previous night to exercise his cruelty upon my feelings, & notwithstanding the self-command I could generally maintain, my convulsive sobs at last forced me to get up & leave the room.’ From a safe distance, however, Byron was now ready to become a devoted husband. A second letter to ‘Dearest Pip’ was filled with jokes about Fletcher’s courtship by letter of Annabella’s maid, Susan Rood, while ‘Goose’ took ‘a quill from her wing to scribble to you’. Byron’s own was signed, as Annabella’s had been, with the mysterious ‘–A—da’, raising the intriguing possibility that little Augusta Ada Byron’s second name contained some secret meaning for her parents.
Whatever grief Annabella may have been experiencing in private, she maintained before others a tranquil face. Judith, on 4 September, heard only that her daughter was ‘marvellous happy’ at the prospect of Byron’s return and that Augusta reported his having been ‘very disconsolate’ without his wife. When Judith insisted that the Byrons should relocate to Kirkby Mallory, Annabella responded with a firm refusal: ‘I wish I could see the practicality of our going to Kirkby,’ she wrote to her mother on 8 September, ‘but I do not.’ Byron was apparently willing for her to travel alone, but ‘I will not. As long as I am with him I am comparatively comfortable.’ ‘Comparatively’ was a word that tempted further questioning, but Lady Noel, yielding to a will as firm as her own, backed down. It was agreed that Annabella’s confinement would take place in town. Her choice of a reputable but unfashionable accoucheur, Dr Francis Le Mann of Soho Square, was also approved.
Money remained a subject for intense concern. Up in the north, Annabella’s parents had been hit hard by the failure of the Durham Bank. While Judith painted a shrewdly optimistic picture of the future value of country estates like Kirkby Mallory, the shortage of available cash made it difficult for the Noels to help a needy son-in-law. Annabella, during her husband’s absence in Cambridgeshire, paid hasty visits to Mr Hanson and her uncle, Sir James Bland Burges, executor of Lord Wentworth’s will. Sir Francis Doyle, reported by his sister Selina to have ‘a good deal of intercourse with people of business’, was consulted about the possibility of taking out a mortgage on Kirkby Mallory. Sadly, as Annabella wrote to her mother on 30 August, Sir Frank had dashed any hopes of raising money by that route. Or any other. Even Sir Ralph’s effort to realise some of the marriage settlement money – it had been due to Byron since May – by the sale of farms near Seaham was blocked by the ludicrous raising of a legal possibility that the 64-year-old Lady Noel might bear a second child. It was at this point that an exasperated Sir Ralph left William Hoar for a sharper firm of lawyers. Wharton & Ford would still be satisfactorily representing his descendants in 1900.
At Newstead, meanwhile, where young Captain Byron was acting as his cousin’s unpaid agent and gamekeeper, Mr Claughton continued to dither over his prospective purchase with no imminent sign of reaching a decision.
Wherever the Byrons looked, the route to financial security was barred. The poet’s creditors were reaching the end of their patience. On 8 September, in the letter explaining her decision to remain at Piccadilly Terrace, Annabella dropped the first hint of her husband’s darkest fears. If Lord Byron were presently to leave town now for more than a few days, she warned her mother, ‘some measures that are now suspended would immediately ensue’. Three days later, Annabella mentioned the possibility that Byron’s beloved library of books would be seized for sale. A month on, she observed that only the prospect of becoming a father was giving her husband a little comfort amidst ‘the very distressing circumstance to which we must look forward . . . It seems a labyrinth of difficulties.’
Writing to his friends and literary confrères during the autumn of 1815, Byron sounded his normal self. Samuel Coleridge, from whom Byron entreated a play to put on at Drury Lane, was charmed by the thoughtfulness of a younger man who took the trouble to apologise about having unconsciously lifted a couple of lines from his own unpublished ‘Christabel’ for the almost completed The Siege of Corinth, the last and possibly the best of Byron’s wildly successful Turkish tales.* Leigh Hunt was also moved by Lord Byron’s generous enthusiasm and suggestions for the poem that Hunt rightly believed would be his masterpiece: The Story of Rimini. (Annabella shared her husband’s admiration and copied out a long extract of Hunt’s poem.) At the theatre, where Byron was playing an increasingly active role in commissioning new works, his indiscreet relationship with Susan Boyce, a young
