The omission was prudent. Armed with her daughter’s statement, a furious, red-faced and wigless Lady Noel (Judith was still suffering from erysipelas, the vicious skin ailment that had plagued her throughout the previous autumn) hurried off for a week of fierce activity in London. Lawyers were visited, while Mrs Clermont was briefed to act as a recording scribe. Both Augusta and George Byron proved willing to declare that Annabella’s life would be in danger if she returned to Piccadilly Terrace. Byron, still (astonishingly) oblivious to what was going on, assumed – or so Augusta reported to Annabella – that Lady Noel was enraged because her son-in-law had not yet gone to Kirkby.
Augusta wrote this on 23 January. It was on the same day that Lady Noel reported to Sir Ralph and Annabella that both Sir Samuel Romilly and their legal friend Sergeant Heywood agreed with Frank Doyle: Byron must from now on be kept away from his wife. Dr Le Mann, Judith added almost as an afterthought, had been unable to find any conclusive proof of insanity. Lord Byron was judged to be – and, more significantly, to have been throughout his abusive marriage – in full possession of the rational forces of his mind. He knew what he was doing.
Lady Noel was clearly relishing her moment of power. Annabella, always afraid of her mother’s terrible loquacity, entreated her to be discreet. ‘I hope you will keep my Mother sober,’ she wrote to Mrs Clermont, one of the few people capable of subduing Lady Noel’s temper. ‘She will break my heart if she takes up the thing in bitterness against him. The more I think of the whole conduct on his part, the more unaccountable it all is. I cannot believe him all bad.’
Judith Noel, amidst her bustling and rushing and rage, had been compelled to confront a disquieting possibility. Sir Samuel Romilly, one of England’s most eminent legal figures (and a personal friend of the Noels), did not think Lord Byron would wish to end the marriage voluntarily. To leave his wife – as Byron had upon occasion told both Hobhouse and Cousin George that he intended to do – was one thing. For Byron himself to be left by his young spouse – with all the humiliation that such an act implied – was quite another. A nuanced approach was required. Romilly knew just the man to undertake it.
In 1816, Stephen Lushington, the first man later to be offered (and twice to refuse) a life peerage for his services to the law, was thirty-four years old. Handsome, reserved and coolly intelligent, Lushington was a Fellow of All Souls, a passionate opponent to the Slave Trade and a rising star in the world of civil law. On 23 January 1816, Lady Noel showed Lushington her daughter’s statement about the marriage (and doubtless added a great many comments of her own). ‘I would not but have seen Lushington for the World,’ Judith wrote to Annabella with unguarded satisfaction: ‘he seems the most gentlemanlike, clear headed and clever Man I ever met with – and agrees with all others that a proposal should be sent by Your Father for a quiet adjustment.’
Lushington had told Lady Noel only what he sensed that she wished to hear. Writing to Annabella fourteen years later, he confirmed that her mother’s voluble account of a husband’s threats, his keeping of a mistress and of Byron’s cruel aversion to his wife’s company rendered separation ‘justifiable’, but not ‘indispensable’. While prepared to supervise and edit the declaration of intent that Sir Ralph (so all the lawyers agreed) must now despatch to Lord Byron, Lushington felt uneasy about the process. Based upon what he had so far heard, the lawyer had privately ‘deemed a reconciliation with Lord Byron practicable, and felt most sincerely a wish towards effecting it’.
Annabella herself, when not seeking release from unhappiness in reckless rides across the frost-bound fields surrounding Kirkby Mallory, remained divided. She feared the scandalmongers would blame poor Augusta for her own departure (‘a cruel injustice’, so Lady Byron told her mother on 26 January). She wept at the thought of all the love she had expended upon her husband, seemingly to no avail. ‘It is worth the sadness if it brings anything good to him,’ Annabella wrote in an earnest little memorandum which set out her determination to maintain loyalty and goodwill. For the present, she struggled to remain calm. The visible and daily failure of that daily attempt was daily witnessed by Mrs Fletcher, her observant maid.
On 28 January, following the arrival at Kirkby of Lady Noel, Mrs Clermont and Selina Doyle, Sir Ralph drew up and took to town for Dr Lushington’s approval a letter in which he told Byron the reasons for his daughter’s decision to leave. Augusta, recognising the untidy handwriting and guessing what Sir Ralph would have to say, sent his letter back unopened. On 30 January, the newly married Captain Byron, who was househunting in Leicestershire for a future marital home, visited Kirkby Mallory to comfort Annabella. He sent a report to London. Judith, writing to her husband at Mivart’s Hotel in London, passed along to him George’s belief that their daughter’s actions had merely pre-empted Byron’s own. Had Annabella not left him, George Byron declared, her husband would certainly have left her. In fact, he could now disclose that Byron had talked about going abroad alone ever since the birth of the couple’s daughter.
It cannot have been a coincidence that Byron chose Friday, 2 February – the very day that he received Sir Ralph’s re-sent letter – to make hasty preparations for a visit to Leicestershire. Annabella had heard nothing from him since she left. On 3 and again on 5 February, her husband belatedly attempted to fill up the gap. Striving for nonchalance, Byron sounded apprehensive. At first, he suggested that Sir Ralph must have written without Bell’s approval. Two days later, he announced that
