The four Noel sons stood halfway in age between Annabella and Ada. Tom, the eldest, now aged twenty-six, was a pleasant but irresponsible young man who liked writing poems. It was Robert, a clever, Pickwickian youth of twenty-two, whom Annabella singled out to act as trustee for his younger siblings, Charles (aged twenty) and Edward (nineteen). From 1825 on, while always taking care to consult and respect their mother’s wishes, the Noel boys would become virtual extensions of Lady Byron’s own tiny family. Writing to Robert from Italy in 1827, she addressed him as ‘Caro Fratello’, but the relationship was nearer to that of mother and son. The warmth of the relationship is apparent from the fact that Robert described Annabella in 1847 as his oldest and kindest friend. It was from conscience as much as for convenience that Annabella chose the third Noel, Charles, to act as her agent and overseer at Kirkby. It was, she reasoned, only right that a male Noel, a Wentworth grandson, should be placed in charge of a vast estate that had been under Noel ownership since the sixteenth century.
Released at last from filial duty, Annabella herself fell ill. Branch Lodge was abandoned as Lady Byron travelled from one spa to the next in her fruitless search for a cure. Ada, together with Miss Briggs, Puff and an additional fine black cat (an inky kitten had been promised to Cousin George), also found herself once again on the move.
Bifrons (originally so named because of its two contrasting façades, although the old house had long since been replaced) stood just outside Canterbury, on the Dover road. All that remains today of the house that Annabella rented for the next few years is bare land and a dwindling avenue of ancient trees. It was here, while being looked after by Mary Montgomery, one of her favourites among Annabella’s friends, that Ada decided that she, like the literary father of whose fame she was now becoming dimly aware, would become a writer. Evidence that Annabella knew of her daughter’s plan and actively set out to thwart it emerges from a curious letter that has survived, tucked away within the archive of John Murray.
On 31 March 1826, Annabella, conscious that Byron’s publisher was always anxious to placate the poet’s widow, issued Murray with a clear directive. He was to publish absolutely nothing initialled ‘AB’ that might appear to have received her authority, ‘tho from the accidental delay of a letter, my consent may have been inferred by the party in question’. And what on earth, a baffled John Murray must have wondered, did Lady Byron mean to convey to him by that strangely ambiguous defence? If an ‘accidental delay’ on her part had caused the problem, why not write again? Few letter-writers were more zealous, after all, than Byron’s widow. And why did she write to him, and not to the mysterious AB? The most likely answer seems to be that Annabella shrank from explicit censorship and chose this elaborate course as the easier route to suppression. It doubtless explains why an enchanting twenty-five-page story by Ada, carefully worked over by another hand, still lies unpublished – and seemingly unknown – within the Murray papers, held at the National Library of Scotland.*
Briefly lodged during the spring of 1826 with Miss Montgomery, at Library House in Hastings, Ada had begun to look upon Lady Byron’s old friend almost as a second mother. (Among the many reasons for Mary Montgomery’s popularity with Ada were that she played the guitar, that she had a pleasingly exotic little nephew, and that she allowed Ada to sit in her dressing room and chatter, while practising her Italian with a lady who spoke the language fluently.) It was not, then, with much gratitude for her real and absent mother’s endeavours that Ada learned that a new governess was on her way. After glumly admitting that it had been ‘quite shocking’ of her to announce she did not believe in prayers, Ada resignedly accepted that this unknown educator was God’s way of punishing her.
A pleasant surprise was due. Miss Charlotte Stamp transformed young Ada’s life. Kind, thoughtful and entertaining, she was everything that a clever, inventive and ebullient little girl could have wished for. An ‘apt scholar’ at chess, a ready partner in the quadrille, a willing collaborator in Ada’s story-writing endeavours, Miss Stamp was extolled by her pupil as ‘an enchantress’ and a treasure. Twenty years later, Ada would still regard this impeccable governess as her chosen model of perfection.
Annabella also approved. Planning the most adventurous step she had taken since leaving Byron, she included Ada and Miss Stamp in the carefully picked group who were to travel with her around Europe for fifteen months.
The Napoleonic Wars had deprived Annabella herself of any chance to visit the Continent as a child. Aged thirty-five, she had still voyaged no further than Edinburgh. Understandably – for a widow whose name remained tainted by the scandal surrounding her separation from Byron – Annabella wanted to travel within a protective circle of friends. Robert Noel, a fluent linguist, acted as her interpreter during the first months of the trip before travelling alone to Lyons, where the base was laid for Robert’s future career as one of Europe’s most eminent phrenologists. (Lady Byron had reluctantly abandoned her wish to settle him in England as a clergyman.) Along with Ada and Miss Stamp, Annabella was accompanied through various stages of the 1826–7 trip by Harriet Siddons, Mary Montgomery and Louisa Chaloner, a friend from
