Annabella’s own intentions for her daughter had already been made clear in the thank-you note ‘Ada’ addressed to her grandmother on New Year’s Day 1821. Written in Annabella’s own clear hand (Ada’s sole contribution was a wobbly ‘ADA’), the letter informed Lady Noel that the sky above Hastings was grey, while the sea below was yellow and white. Expressing gratitude for the useful Christmas gift of a knife and fork, Ada sounded as though she had sprung straight from a pedant’s manual on childcare. Consciously or not, Lady Byron seemed intent upon moulding her daughter into an extremely dull little girl.
Miss Lamont’s Kirkby journal, begun on 14 May of that same year, revealed a very different child. Ada had hailed her arrival with delight. She expressed a wish to start learning at once, and about everything possible. ‘She is brim full of life, spirit and animation,’ Miss Lamont remarked with pleased relief, ‘and is most completely happy.’
Pleasure was put at a premium under the rigorous schedule upon which Ada’s mother insisted. Each lesson must last precisely fifteen minutes. Good behaviour – demonstrated by obedience, application or simply sitting still – would be rewarded by a ticket. The emphasis upon sitting still was deliberate: Ada could no more stay still than a sudden streak of sunlight. (Miss Lamont was oddly reminded of a reindeer by the way her small charge dashed about; later, up in Hampstead, the old Baillie sisters would similarly fall under the spell of the lively, rosy-cheeked child they so loved to watch racing across the garden of Branch Lodge.)
It did not take long for the governess to realise how torn Ada was between bold defiance and the sincere desire to please a mother whom she evidently revered. Challenged by Annabella over her bold claim to sing far better than Mamma, the little girl refused to recant, but she wept when Lady Byron punished her impertinence with silence. Her sobs redoubled when Mamma further showed her disapproval by departing on a promised visit to Hinckley (Ada was enchanted by the local market town) with not a word of farewell.
Two weeks into Miss Lamont’s stay at Kirkby, the young governess had failed to establish ascendancy over her pupil. Short spells of solitary confinement completely failed to bring Ada to heel. Annabella, writing to Miss Lawrence in Liverpool on 30 May, expressed frustration. What was the use of a governess, when she herself was so often obliged to take her employee’s place – ‘as if I were the teacher’? Miss Lamont had failed to instil the desired attitude in her small charge: ‘a sense of duty, combined with the hope of approbation from those she loves’. Her period of trial would not be extended.
It seems that Arabella Lawrence – for whom Lady Byron felt respect – defended her protégée. Miss Lamont was permitted to remain at Kirkby – although only until 7 July – as an increasingly uneasy witness to the ongoing battle between a forceful mother and an increasingly assertive child. Ada was stepping up her demands for independence. On 11 June, Annabella compelled her to express regret for saying that she did not want to learn about figures. (‘I was not thinking quite what I was about. The sums can be done better, if I tried, than they are.’) Four days later, the little rebel declared that she cared less about arithmetic than in being told ‘every every thing’ about the cruel practice of beating donkeys. Out of Annabella’s sight, Ada built cities of coloured bricks and turned geography lessons into flights of fantasy. (Could the waves in Norway really surge higher than her own tall house?) Ada, not her mother, had gained control when her governess was persuaded to skip dull lessons to play to her upon the piano, to come and admire how she could gallop like a horse, and to hear how heartily she could bray to entertain her old grandfather: (‘à merveille!’ exclaimed an admiring Miss Lamont).
Signs of Ada’s rebelliousness appeared in the governess’s journal as regularly as Lady Byron’s instructions for their suppression. When a housemaid was summoned to imprison Ada’s fidgety fingers within black cotton bags, the young woman was greeted with a fierce nip. Despatched to a distant corner in disgrace, Ada sank her teeth into the dado rail. Released after tea, she was allowed into the drawing room, where a forgiving Lady Byron calmed the stormy little girl with soothing poetry. (It was a few months after this scene that Byron first heard about his daughter’s violent temper.)
Exhausting though Miss Lamont’s experience of teaching Ada had been, the governess departed from Kirkby Mallory in a state of bewitchment. ‘No person can be more rational, companiable [sic] and endearing than this rare child,’ she rhapsodised, before adding that Ada would do almost anything in order to win her mother’s praise.
Lady Noel died in 1822. The following year, Ada, together with her ageing grandfather, Nurse Briggs and Mistress Puff (the Persian cat), exchanged the grandeur of Kirkby Mallory for Annabella’s rented home in Hampstead. A portrait of Sir Ralph was left behind at Kirkby; instead, Annabella carried away the portrait of Lord Byron posing as an Albanian chief. Removed from its box, the famous painting was now hung, discreetly screened by a green velvet curtain behind which Ada – as it is frankly impossible not to suppose – occasionally granted herself a daring peep.
On 19
