Byron’s caution about continental travel was well-founded. The Shelleys’ own baby daughter (another Clara) died of dysentery at Venice in September 1818. Their son William died of malaria in Rome the following summer. Clara Allegra – a child whose extraordinary resemblance to (of all people) Annabella was immediately noticed both by Byron and his valet, Fletcher – died of malaria or typhus in an Italian convent in 1822.* She was five years old.
Byron, from afar, expressed an erratic but fatherly interest in his legitimate child. His parting gift to Ada had been one of his talismanic rings. Further small gifts were despatched while off upon his alpine travels in the summer of 1816, followed in due course by a locket, inscribed, in Italian: ‘Blood is thicker than water.’ He asked for his daughter to be taught music (in which neither parent had any skill) and Italian (a language for which Annabella shared her husband’s deep love).
A taste for poetry, however, was to be discouraged in the child of the greatest poet of the age. Arriving in Greece in the autumn of 1823, and about to embark upon what would prove to be his last adventure, Byron made his feelings clear in a letter that entreated his wife (via Augusta) to provide him with a full report of their daughter, now almost seven years old.
Is the Girl imaginative? . . . Is she social or solitary – taciturn or talkative – fond of reading or otherwise? and what is her tic? I mean her foible – is she passionate? I hope that the Gods have made her anything save poetical – it is enough to have one such fool in a family.
Annabella delayed her response, possibly because Ada at the time was experiencing her first serious illness and her mother did not want to raise alarm. On 1 December, six weeks after her husband’s enquiry, Lady Byron sent him a miniature (the artist prided herself on having captured a perfect likeness of Ada’s profile), together with the details he required.
Her prevailing characteristic is cheerfulness and good-temper. Observation. Not devoid of imagination, but it is chiefly exercised in connection with her mechanical ingenuity – the manufacture of ships and boats etc. Prefers prose to verse . . . Not very persevering. Draws well. Tall and robust.
Annabella was never to receive Byron’s grateful response for a letter he described as her first kind action since the seemingly tender address to ‘dearest Duck’ that she had written even as she left him, back in 1816. The letter in which he expressed his gratitude – while fondly noting the similarities to his own boyish self in his wife’s account of little Ada – was still lying, unsent, on the poet’s desk at Missolonghi at the time that he died.
Possibly, Lord Byron’s very last thoughts were of his unseen daughter. William Fletcher, conveying the news of his master’s death to John Murray on 21 April 1824, was anxious to stress that Byron’s ‘pertickeler wish’ had been that his valet should carry a message to his wife and child. Lady Byron, so Fletcher later noted, had broken down in sobs during that harrowing visit, weeping until her whole body shook as she begged him – vainly – to recall what her husband’s final message to her had been. By the end of her own life, Annabella had convinced herself that some ‘unuttered’ tender words had been thought, even if they had not been spoken.
The cheerful docility mentioned by Annabella in 1823 marked the emergence of an endearing trait in Ada’s nature. Squabbles lay ahead, especially with a mother whose authority she often opposed, but Ada, throughout her life, would win affection by her good humour, her kindness and – unlike either of her parents – her quickness to forgive.
Ada had not always been so equable. Back in November 1821, when Lord Byron was renting a palace in Pisa, he heard that his 6-year-old daughter was thought to be ‘a fine child’, but one who possessed ‘a violent temper’. The news troubled him less than it did a mother who had witnessed her husband’s own ungovernable rages. What Byron began to fret about in Pisa was Ada’s isolation. Listing the members of her family who lacked siblings, he reached a disconcerting result. There were his own mother, Augusta’s mother, Augusta, he himself, Annabella and now young Ada: ‘Such a complication of only children . . . looks like fatality almost’, he brooded in his journal. Pride returned to comfort him. After all, ‘the fiercest Animals have the rarest number in their litters – as Lions – tigers – and even Elephants,’ Byron could not help adding, ‘which are mild in comparison.’
Initially, once Ada was weaned, she served only to remind her unhappy mother of the final weeks of a disastrous marriage. ‘My Child! Forgive the seeming wrong / The heart with-held from thee’, Annabella wrote in a private poem dated 16 December 1819 and guiltily entitled ‘The Unnatural Mother’. A month earlier, Annabella confessed that the first real evidence of Ada’s affection had come as a huge relief: ‘I had a strange prepossession that she would never be fond of me.’
The commencement of Lady Byron’s relationship with her daughter was not made easier by the first of many breakdowns in Annabella’s health. Back in 1816, following the tremendous strain imposed by her marital separation, she became nervous, unhappy and ill. It was a relief, then, after taking Ada off to Lowestoft to meet up with Mary Gosford and her own little girls during that summer, to bequeath her daughter to the care of Nurse Grimes and Lady Noel at Kirkby. Meanwhile, Annabella went to London to seek an independent abode in Hampstead, close to the sympathetic Baillie sisters and the intelligent, motherless daughters of their neighbour, a prosperous and pious Mr Carr. In the summer of 1817, Annabella
