In September, following another hasty visit from her daughter, Judith Noel decided it was time to tweak her maternal conscience. Ada was declared to be missing her mamma. ‘She looked round the Bed and on the Bed, and then into the Closet – seemed disappointed and said “gone-gone”!’
The prod worked. Annabella returned home, to be rewarded with a scolding. Lady Noel possessed a notoriously sharp tongue, and it was one that Judith had not restrained on this occasion. Where would her daughter have been without Lady Noel’s support in her time of need? Did she ever pause to consider the pain her separation had caused, or the social embarrassment which had compelled Judith to remove from public view Phillips’s magnificently showy portrait of Lord Byron in order to nail it up in a box designated for the attic?† Her mother’s reproaches struck home. Filled with remorse, Annabella vowed to change her ways. It had become, so she guiltily wrote to Sarah Siddons’s widowed daughter-in-law, Harriet, her ‘dearest wish to prove a better child than she [Lady Noel] has yet found me’.
Most biographers and historians have adopted a stern view of Annabella’s behaviour during the first years after her separation from Byron. A fondness for mutton (‘divine mutton!’) has been cited by Doris Langley Moore as evidence, not only of her gluttony, but of her heartless greed. Her ever-increasing dependence on doctors – often while visiting agreeable spas – has been ascribed to self-indulgent hypochondria. More seriously, Lady Byron stands reproached, not simply of being an absent mother, but also of being a neglectful and ungrateful daughter.
The indictments are unjust. Through 1818 until Lady Noel’s death in 1822, Annabella spent at least a third of every year living with her parents at the isolated Leicestershire estate where Ada, spoiled by adoring grandparents and an indulgent household of servants, enjoyed a cherished country childhood. For Annabella, however, imprisoned at Kirkby, the life of a dutiful daughter offered little solace beyond the admiring company of the vicar’s daughter (rudely referred to by Lady Noel as ‘the Anna’).
Anna Jones offered a sympathetic audience to a frustrated young woman who was eager to be of use in the world beyond Kirkby’s confining walls. Escaping briefly to Seaham in the summer of 1818, and enjoying the company of Harriet Siddons’s young daughter, Lizzie, as her guest, Annabella rushed through her pet project for a much-needed local school, modelled after one that Harriet had successfully established in Edinburgh.* Back at Kirkby, and at her mother’s mercy, she was powerless. Driving out in her carriage with Miss Jones, an ardent young social reformer, she noticed evidence everywhere of the need for enlightened philanthropy. Several of the villages on the Wentworth estate were entirely dependent upon weaving for a living. The weavers were the people for whom Byron had spoken out in his first political speech, and now they were starving, put out of work by the thriving new mills of Derbyshire and of the North. Here, surely, was a way to bury her sadness through offering help to others while – it was always important to Annabella – undertaking something of which Byron would approve. But the estate belonged to Judith, and Lady Noel had grown too old and self-absorbed to concern herself with good works. Lady Byron, like her father, was Lady Noel’s dependent. Until her mother’s death, Annabella’s hands were tied.
Only an infrequent departure by Judith for an occasional health cure at Leamington Spa or Tunbridge Wells could open up a rare window of freedom. In January 1820, Annabella briefly joined the friendly Carrs and Baillies in Hampstead and, while there, found herself a future home: Branch Lodge. In May, she took Ada to Hastings, where the now intensely religious Mary Gosford was spending a quiet summer by the sea. ‘Hastings will be good for me,’ Annabella wrote to Harriet Siddons, before wistfully revealing her reason. ‘The place will be retired.’ Brighton, not Hastings, was where smart society spent its summer months. Four years after the separation, Lady Byron still shrank from placing herself anywhere that she might be noticed.
Towards the end of that year, Judith gradually declined into senility. Physically, however, she remained strong. By May 1821, Annabella had resigned herself to what threatened to become a lifetime of duty as a nurse-companion. But it was the news that her beloved Seaham was to be sold that seemed to break her heart. Writing to the always sympathetic Harriet Siddons, Annabella sounded near to tears. No more visits to help keep her little school in order; no more nostalgic strolls along that beloved beach; no more connection to the only place in which she and Byron had been, however briefly, alone and happy together. Contemplating the dreary years ahead of enacting ‘a calm performance of duty’ towards a decrepit parent, Annabella preserved just enough humour to smile at the doleful image she had conjured up of herself. While resolved to turn herself into a model of ‘sober-minded’ devotion, she feared it was too late for ‘a probability of complete success’.
Diversion offered itself in the form of Ada’s education. In the summer of 1821, Annabella’s daughter was five years old. Up in the Kirkby nursery, she was now cared for by a kindly and outspoken nanny named Eliza Briggs, who took a pleasing interest in Ada’s newest acquisition, a Persian kitten called Puff. Puff was a gift from her mother and – to judge from Ada’s adoring tales of Mistress Puff’s exploits and fairylike beauty – a much beloved one. Miss Lamont – fresh from Ireland and equipped with excellent references from an impressive young educationalist called Arabella Lawrence – was viewed with excitement by her pupil as a link to the larger world beyond her nursery’s iron-barred windows. Perhaps – who could tell? – Miss Lamont might even become a friend.
Arriving at a
