Brought back to London from Missolonghi on the Florida, the poet’s body was laid out for a week in the room that a grief-stricken John Hobhouse had hired in order that final respects could be paid to his lost friend. The crowds who gathered in Westminster on the final two days, when public tickets were sold, were immense. They gathered again on 12 July, when the funeral cortège left Westminster, and they were present at every staging post along the poet’s three-day journey to rejoin his ancestors in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard in Nottinghamshire. At Newstead, the artist Cornelius Varley added a note to his new sketch of the abbey’s ruined arch that it had been executed during the year of Lord Byron’s death.
Annabella, informed of her husband’s death on 12 May by the new Lord Byron, reserved any visible signs of distress for the occasion of William Fletcher’s later visit, bringing no final tender message from her late husband. Byron had apparently spoken of Ada, but it was evidently on Annabella’s instructions that as little as possible was said about her father’s death to the little girl. Taken to inspect the Florida, Ada wrote about ‘Papa’s ship’ in a way that suggests she conceived him to have been the ship’s brave captain. Confusion was understandable, especially in a year when her mother’s good friend, who now held the Byron title, sailed for the Sandwich Islands in command of HMS Blonde.
At Hampstead, where she was taken into a church for the first time, Ada was more disturbed by the sense of imprisonment that she felt within a high-walled box pew than by regrets for a father she had never known. She yawned throughout the sermons and sighed for her lack of playmates. Other than the sedate Misses Carr and the ageing Baillie sisters, the most regular visitors to Branch Lodge were the briskly intelligent group of women who had been acquainted with Annabella since her youth. True, Ada had young Flora Davison (‘ma chère Flore’) upon whom to practise her epistolary skills, but Flora lived outside London. True, Miss Montgomery brought along a nice little nephew, Hugo, who had a nurse of his own, and whose shiny brown hair matched the fur trim of his Russian-style tunic. But what Ada wanted was a proper brother of her own. She lit upon the perfect candidate in the new Lord Byron’s son. Her own mysteriously absent father was now dead, while George Byron’s was sailing across some faraway ocean. George, too, must need an ally, a sister to comfort him. Besides, didn’t the two of them even share a name?
Young George had little chance to argue once his forceful cousin had determined upon him as her choice. On 9 September 1824, Ada offered her undying affection and sincere consolation to ‘my sweet George’ for his father’s absence, while reaffirming her own loyal devotion: ‘but no more about this at present for should your death take you from me though I do not feel it much now I should when it happened’. Undeterred by her cousin’s resounding silence, she tried again. Perhaps George would like to know her thoughts about love? (George was six; Ada almost eight.) Ada was eager to share her ideas. ‘I think the greatest happiness is in loving and being loved I dare say my love you will feel that.’
Ada was already displaying signs of having inherited her late father’s mesmerising volatility. After broaching (9 September) the subject of her sturdy little cousin’s possibly imminent death, she moved along without a blink on that same day to telling her mother about her recent enjoyment of a tasty meal of ‘fryed fish’, before again switching to the latest hunting exploits of the adventurous Mistress Puff. Ada had also invented a new word to describe her own passion for intensive reading: ‘gobblebook’.
‘Gobblebook’ signalled a marked change in Ada. She had become not only an eager reader, but a voracious learner. Although unequipped with a formal governess during her three years at Branch Lodge, it’s likely that Ada was being informally tutored by the clever ladies whose visits filled her letters at the time. If so, they did well by her. Ada started to ask probing questions about arithmetic, while trying her hand at writing in French. A letter addressed to Cousin George’s mother, now also known as Lady Byron, proudly announced her near perfect command of Spanish and Italian. Emotionally, too, Ada was making progress. She could understand her mother’s enduring affection for gentle Sophy Tamworth (‘Lady Tam’) well enough to connect it to her own sisterly devotion to little George.
The Baillie sisters would later remember Ada as a cheerful, energetic little girl, full of life and affection. Neither they nor her mother were surprised when she announced her plan to raise money (by making plaster casts of gems) to finance the painting of a portrait of her grandfather. The project was still in progress in the summer of 1825, when Sir Ralph died. Having dozed his last months placidly away at Branch Lodge, he was buried beside Judith in the windswept churchyard of their lost, but beloved, Seaham estate.
Sir Ralph’s death marked the last stage in his daughter’s transformation into Lady Noel Byron, a woman of thirty-three who was determined to make good use of the immense wealth and vast estates that she now possessed through Uncle Wentworth’s legacy.
A great injustice had occurred, however. It was one that Annabella acted swiftly to
