On 19 January, seemingly unaware of how serious the situation had become, Augusta despatched two letters to Kirkby. Writing to Lady Noel, she supported Dr Le Mann’s proposal to keep her brother under close medical supervision in London. Writing less formally to Annabella, Augusta passed along a bizarre piece of information. Byron had arranged for a fashionable artist, John Holmes, to paint a miniature of his sister. Augusta’s likeness was to be twinned with a portrait of himself, and the pair of paintings sent ahead to Kirkby. Only think what wicked tales would be told about such a shocking coupling by Caroline Lamb, tittered Augusta, not to mention all the gossips at Melbourne House, ‘a fine affair in their imagination your absence – & my story!’
Granted, Augusta was not an especially intelligent or intuitive woman. Nevertheless, this was a strange way to write to a wife who was supposedly oblivious to the rumours of incest. While Augusta’s letter shows that Annabella was already acquainted with the gossip, it also explains why Mrs Leigh was simultaneously begging her husband to join her in London, thereby adding a tenuous veneer of respectability to Lord Byron’s depleted household. (Cousin George had now left, and Byron was living there alone with Augusta and a handful of servants.)
Augusta plainly believed that Annabella would dismiss this new cause for gossip as just that: fodder for the spiteful anecdotes that seemed to be forever swirling around the doors of Melbourne House. Augusta was right. Annabella had already considered what she would later describe as ‘intimations’ of an unnatural relationship between Byron and Augusta. Lacking any tangible proof, she had firmly dismissed the rumours from her mind. Augusta could gossip and giggle. Annabella herself intended to protect a goose-like but beloved sister by keeping quiet. She was, as her younger friend the actress Fanny Kemble would later remark, always good at holding her tongue.
Public silence, however, went hand in hand with a less heroic trait in Annabella’s character, one for which Sir Francis Doyle would scold her in a year when she found herself constantly torn between the need both for public discretion and for private declarations. Lady Byron, as Frank Doyle memorably observed, had a ‘too confiding disposition’. It was this impulse that had led Annabella, throughout the last and most agonising months of her marriage, to share all her most secret fears and apprehensions with Doyle’s sister, Selina. Writing to Annabella on 18 January 1816, Selina stated that ‘I have gone over the same ground so often with you that you will be able to fill up the chasms.’*
Selina, who herself would never marry, had been profoundly shocked by Annabella’s tales of Byron’s cruelty. Personally, she favoured the pursuit of a permanent separation. Sir Frank shared that opinion. Shortly before Annabella left Piccadilly Terrace, the Doyles had urged their friend to abandon her romantic dream of restoring a possibly mad husband to his senses, and to leave him forever.
Writing to Selina from Woburn, twelve hours or so after quitting Piccadilly Terrace, Annabella reviewed the possible consequences of taking what the Doyle siblings darkly referred to as ‘the final step’. She did not wholly oppose their counsel, she told Selina. What she requested now was a reasoned letter that stated precisely why Frank believed that she should undertake ‘that Measure, which Duty, not Timidity, now determines me to postpone for a short time’.
Annabella must have known what she was doing when she solicited that written response and asked for it to be sent to Kirkby Mallory. Her parents knew the Doyles well. Selina’s neat hand would be instantly familiar to them; letters, back in 1816, were commonly regarded as shared property within a family group. (Caroline Lamb had felt no compunction about reading and copying juicy extracts from the letters about the birth of Elizabeth Medora Leigh that passed between Byron and Lady Melbourne in 1814.) The Noels would be eager to know what dear Selina had to say – and Annabella knew that fact just as well as she knew in advance what Selina’s letter would disclose.
Selina’s prompt response reached Kirkby Mallory – a compactly handsome greystone house that commanded broad views across a Leicestershire landscape of sloping fields and scattered hamlets – on 19 January 1816. The letter was not circumspect. Reading of ‘the outrages committed one after another’ and of ‘ill treatment & every thing calculated to inspire hatred’, Lady Noel saw confirmation of all her darkest fears about her beloved daughter’s marriage. (‘I had many suspicions but . . . dreaded agitating Lady B by questions,’ she explained later that same week to a lawyer.) Sir Ralph was equally dismayed. Selina wrote that her brother believed the time had come for action. For the shocked Noels, Frank Doyle’s view was decisive.
No clear account survives of what happened during the rest of that traumatic day of revelations. Annabella wrote to Mrs Clermont in London that she had suffered ‘one wild fit’ which rendered her ‘frantic’; apparently, her mother ‘had agonised me about the child’. Ann Rood Fletcher later recalled that her mistress had been continuously low and depressed since her departure from London, and that she broke down, on certain occasions, in hysterical fits of sobbing.
Annabella was evidently conflicted. (She begged Lady Noel not to record anything she might rashly disclose in conversation.) Nevertheless, the written statement of her trials that she submitted to her mother on the evening of 19 January (she misdated it as the 18th and continued to misdate her letters throughout a long and anxious week) was both articulate and detailed. This testimony was, so Annabella informed Mrs Clermont that evening, ‘the strongest statement that I can swear to’. What she meant – although she did not say so in her letter to Mrs Clermont – was that she
