Ada’s plans had begun with a wonderful fantasy of flying about in ‘the great room’ at Bifrons and astonishing her mother with her feats. Now, a disused tack room for horses at Bifrons was converted into a ‘flying room’ hung with ropes (presumably for swinging about in simulated flights). Miss Stamp’s discovery of an old saddle stand languishing in a corner led on to another bright idea. Might Ada be allowed to take up riding? Mamma had doubtless forgotten that there was the dearest little pony who was kept in the park at Bifrons: ‘very gentle . . . just a little pottering thing . . . I really think that when you come back, an arrangement might be made without any trouble or inconvenience to any one for me to ride little Shag, as I call him.’
Miss Stamp, who dryly remarked that she now featured so often in her pupil’s letters that she had best just become ‘Miss S’, decided that it was wisest to indulge her excited young pupil’s projects and boasts. (‘When you come home you shall see me ride,’ Ada swaggered to her mother. She had never yet even sat upon a horse.)
Miss Stamp was tolerant. Annabella, recovering her health, grew apprehensive. A brisk course in theorems might calm her daughter’s overexcited state. Arabella Lawrence was consulted, while William Frend and his daughter Sophia were invited to see if they could not help to restrain Miss Byron’s fancies by confining her energies to figures and logic. In vain: instead of furthering Lady Byron’s plan, Frend found himself being recast as her daughter’s pet astronomer. Lady Byron had asked for lessons in geometry. Ada requested a map of the stars. Frend surrendered. People always did, when Ada set her heart upon something. By February 1829, the elderly mathematician had become the bewitched recipient of the young girl’s confidences about her newest project. Flying had been abandoned for the creation of ‘my Planetarium’.
Overexcitement; illness; the onset of puberty; the departure of her beloved Charlotte Stamp to get married (never, sadly for Ada, to return). A combination of these things brought Ada’s year of elated dreaming to a shocking close. William Frend, writing to Lady Byron on 27 May 1829 to enquire if her daughter would be observing the course of Jupiter that June, was informed that a severe attack of measles had left Ada paralysed, semi-blind and bedridden.* It remained impossible to predict how much time might be required for her recovery.
* Annabella had agreed to Romilly’s suggestion after Augusta Leigh, in February 1816, indicated that she might personally oppose her sister-in-law’s right to keep the child. Annabella feared seeing Ada shuffled off into the Leigh household almost more than the prospect of losing her to Lord Byron.
* It says much for Byron’s underlying affection for his wife that he observed this inexplicable similarity with the keenest of pleasure. To an outsider, the description of Allegra’s features raises the intriguing possibility that she may have not been Byron’s child at all. Claire herself was dark-haired. Her daughter’s fair hair, blue eyes and high forehead were all well-observed aspects of Shelley’s delicate countenance. His paternity is not unthinkable; Claire and Shelley’s intimacy has been widely noted.
* Sarah Carr later married Annabella’s lawyer and devoted friend, Stephen Lushington. Her sister Frances (Fanny to her family) would one day become the most formidable of the three trustees of Lady Byron’s papers.
† Lady Noel went further. In 1818, she wrote to ask the Prince Regent to permit a name change for her ‘insulted and injured daughter’. Annabella was not informed and the Prince did not oblige. (JN to HRH the Prince Regent, 14 September 1818. A copy, or what may have been a draft, survives in the Lovelace Byron Papers.)
* Harriet’s own pioneering school in Scotland seemingly inspired Annabella’s lifelong interest in education, while Harriet’s personable brothers-in-law, George and Andrew Combe, introduced Lady Byron to another enduring interest: phrenology. That would-be science sought to interpret personality from the shape of a skull. George Combe, the husband of Cecilia Siddons, was its leading authority. Annabella became an ardent convert.
* ‘The Neopolitan Brothers’, completed in 1827, possibly during her time in Europe, suggests that Ada had been dipping into the ladies’ annuals which were published (in lavish editions) for the Christmas market. A gothic romance, Ada’s tale features a murder, a haunting, a vividly imagined Italian setting and unspeakable remorse. As the work of a child of eleven, it is impressive. The reviser was most likely to have been Ada’s sympathetic governess, Charlotte Stamp. (John Murray Archive, MS 43363, NLS.)
* It is unlikely that Ada’s measles was related to the paralysis. Although this has happened (most recently, in 1964), such consequences are extremely rare. At the time, a connection did seem possible. (See the appendix on Ada’s health on pp. 475–6.)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A R
AINBOW
’
S
A
RC
(1829–35)
Utterly mysterious in its origins – Annabella theorised about a latent weakness of the spine – Ada Byron’s state of semi-paralysis lasted for three years. Short periods of improvement were followed by sharp relapses. By the summer of 1830, following one of these brief respites from invalidism, 13-year-old Ada – formerly an active girl, one who had been eager to take up riding at the time of her collapse – had become chronically bedbound. Letters to her new tutor were shakily written in pencil (to avoid spattering the bedlinen with ink). Brief expeditions, when not confined to a wheelchair, were taken on crutches, with the gold-braided and wasp-waisted black jacket of a hussar that she adopted for these excursions lending a frail but resolutely cheerful Ada the look – although nobody dared to comment on it – of the dashing boy-heir for whom her father had longed. (The birth of a
