Tom Moore, seeking advice from Byron – of all people! – on the stockmarket, received a letter on 31 October which indicated that his friend was still anxiously awaiting the promised marriage payment from Sir Ralph. Annabella was rather coolly described as ‘in full progress’ towards the production of a son. (Always referred to as ‘Pip’ by his mother and as ‘Byron’ by the rest of the family, the baby’s sex remained a foregone conclusion.) The main substance of Byron’s letter to Moore, a drinking crony, concerned the first of a series of dinners that Annabella would learn to dread.
As described by one of the world’s most enchanting correspondents, the occasion sounded hilarious. The theatre crowd (it included the ageing and always convivial playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Byron’s close friend, Douglas Kinnaird) had foregathered for an evening of hard drinking in an upstairs dining room. Here, the party rapidly progressed from being ‘silent’ to ‘talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk’. Kinnaird and Byron, between them, had managed to guide an intoxicated Sheridan down ‘a damned corkscrew staircase, which had certainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors’. All had ended in ‘hiccup and happiness’.
What sounded so delightful in Byron’s chatty account marked the beginning of the end for his marriage. That largely liquid supper was one of several gatherings at which Byron and Kinnaird settled their disputes about how to run the Drury Lane Theatre over copious amounts of brandy. Kinnaird was a hardened drinker; Byron had the will, but not the constitution. The effect – as Augusta had previously warned Annabella – was terrifying. Byron, when in his cups – especially when the cups were filled with gin or brandy – was mad, bad and a danger to anybody who happened to cross his path. Sober again, he would recollect none of it.
The Noels, as usual, were kept in the dark. Judith, suffering from a serious ailment that autumn, confined herself to her bed at Mivart’s Hotel in Brook Street (now Claridge’s) just behind Piccadilly. Sir Ralph’s anxiety was lulled by his daughter’s playful account of a visit to Piccadilly Terrace by the woman everybody wished the late Lord Wentworth had married in the first place instead of taking a mistress into his house. Lady Anne (Lindsay) Barnard, a well-travelled Scotswoman of exceptional brilliance and charm, came as chaperone to a group of young ladies who sought to impress Byron with tasteful accounts of the beauty of a Scottish autumn. Byron responded by expressing his personal admiration for the lovelier tint of a good malt whisky. ‘In short,’ wrote Annabella, ‘they yelped and he snapped.’
On 1 November, the day after the drinking banquet described by Byron to Moore, Annabella still felt hopeful enough to draw up one of her earnest projects for Byron’s reform: ‘Wicked people have, for a time, induced him to act on wrong motives, by discrediting his right ones . . . on the contrary, by insisting on the right ones, we may rouse him to do them justice . . .’ She concluded with a scolding for Byron’s ‘indulgence of foibles beyond the Christian temper of forbearance & forgiveness’.
Paper resolutions were all very fine, but the moment for marital reforming had passed. The arrival of a live-in bailiff on the premises meant no more to Annabella than the welcome addition of a much-needed male protective presence in the house. To a man who had been as poor – and who had grown as proud – as Byron, a resident debt-collector became the ultimate humiliation. ‘God knows what I suffered yesterday & am suffering from B’s distraction,’ Annabella confided to Augusta on 9 November, specifying this new ‘distraction’ as ‘of the very worst kind’. The combination of a bailiff and brandy, together with the rising terror – if he did not flee the country first – of bankruptcy and thus of a debtors’ prison, had tipped her husband’s behaviour from the unreasonable into the irrational. ‘I have thought that since last Saturday [the night of Byron’s first drinking dinner with Kinnaird] his head has never been right,’ Annabella wrote, predicting in this same letter that she feared he would add ‘more and more to the cause’. It was the first hint that Annabella had found a new explanation for her husband’s strange behaviour. Byron was not consciously malevolent. He was going insane.
On 11 November, Annabella wrote once again to Mrs Leigh. This time, she issued a direct and urgent appeal. Augusta must come back to London, and soon.
Don’t be afraid for my Carcase – it will do very well. Of the rest I scarcely know what to think – I have many fears.
Let me see you the middle of next week – at latest . . . You will do good I think – if any can be done.
By the time that Annabella despatched her letter to Cambridgeshire, Byron had already informed his wife, with much circumstantial detail (his boast of toying with two naked women at once was a detail that would stay in the mind of Annabella’s straitlaced lawyer for the rest of his days), of his relationship with Susan Boyce. On 15 November, the day that an apprehensive Augusta arrived at Piccadilly Terrace, a grim-faced Byron greeted her with the same information, while adding that he was tired of indulging his expensive young mistress’s whims. A search was currently afoot for a new brooch that Susan had managed to drop in the Byron carriage. For the time, at least, Byron himself dropped Miss Boyce.
A break-up with Susan Boyce was small beer compared to the dismaying change that Augusta instantly perceived in her brother’s behaviour. Both Byron’s valet and Annabella’s maid told Mrs Leigh that they were worried about the safety of Lady Byron and her unborn child. Summoning Mrs Clermont to join the household (with Annabella’s approval),
