At Hastings, taking advice from William Frend, Annabella set up a co-operative institute in George Street. In London, she conducted discussions with Robert Owen about methods of schooling for the underprivileged whose chances in life she was determined to improve. (A shocking 90 per cent of all children received neither formal education nor apprenticeship training in early nineteenth-century England.) At Liverpool, she talked with Arabella Lawrence about Miss Lawrence’s own successful school for the city’s poor. At Brighton, Annabella formed a new and enduring friendship with zealous Dr King, founder of that town’s own first co-operative. Annabella’s reaction of dislike to Robert Owen, whom she swiftly judged to be both complacent and autocratic, was soon forgotten in her wholehearted enthusiasm for the modest, religious – and most obligingly compliant – William King.
In the early autumn of 1829, Augusta Leigh took it upon herself to criticise Byron’s executor, Douglas Kinnaird, causing him to resign. A new trustee was required. Augusta put forward a Leigh family supporter, Colonel George D’Aguilar. Annabella, who had been exchanging friendly notes with Augusta about the injustice of denying Lord Byron a monument in Westminster Abbey, now suggested that the more experienced Dr Lushington might offer better service. Lushington had acted as her own lawyer for the past twelve years. His wife Sarah Carr, handpicked by Annabella, was one of her closest friends. Nobody could be more suitable.
By the end of November, the discussion between the two ladies had turned quarrelsome. Annabella was insistent; Augusta refused to back down. Mrs Leigh’s reason was transparent; the cultured and agreeable Colonel D’Aguilar was ready to do just as she pleased. Lushington, who held as low an opinion of Augusta’s prudence as of her morals, would sanction nothing without careful consideration. (In fact, Lushington strove to help the Leighs, a family whose attitude to money remained alarmingly close to that of Mr Micawber’s.) By 1 December, Annabella was feeling angry enough to identify Lushington to young Lizzie Siddons as ‘my protector when injury (I speak the language of the world for I know no injuries) was designed by the very person I was seeking to serve!’ By January 1830, the two ladies were quivering with mutual resentment and indignation.
The voices that speak out from ancient, tissue-thin letters still vibrate with animosity and distrust, but it was Augusta’s offer of forgiveness that finally tipped the balance for a furious Lady Byron.
Augusta Leigh (undated, but probably 16 January 1830):
I can forgive and do forgive freely, all and everything that has antagonised and I may say almost destroyed me. I can believe that you have been actuated throughout by a principle which you thought a right one, but my own self-respect will never allow me to acknowledge an obligation where none has been originally conferred . . .
Writing her response from Ealing (where she was renting a second home close to a projected school) on 17 January 1830, Annabella was at her chilliest and most implacable:
From your representations and the conclusions you draw, it is evident to me that your mind is not in a state to admit the truth – I must therefore decline any further discussion of facts which are already as well known to you as to me.
Believe me, ever faithfully yours
A I Noel Byron
The deliberate use by Lady Byron of her formal name was indicative of her rage. The employment of that innocuous word ‘faithfully’ conveyed a stinging reminder of the promise she had been compelled to make to her late husband. The Leigh family might drive Annabella up the wall, but they would never be deprived of what Byron’s wife recognised to be their rightful due.
Augusta’s refusal to acknowledge any obligation to a patient and on the whole generous benefactor was absurd, but it was the use of that awful word ‘forgiveness’ that had caused such anger. ‘I can never pass over her insolence,’ Lady Byron informed Sarah Lushington on 27 February 1830. She meant it. Augusta’s decorous gift of a prayer-book for Ada’s fourteenth birthday in December 1830 produced no response. Silence was an insult that Mrs Leigh did not forget. Relations between the two women, for the entirety of a fierce decade, would become nearly non-existent.
Augusta was evidently unconscious of any particular reason why such characteristic behaviour on her own part (voluminous lamentations about Mrs Leigh’s sufferings and her shortage of money habitually followed Lady Byron around the country like a Greek chorus) had provoked such unreasonable wrath. A reason existed, however, and it was not a pretty one.
It was during the autumn of the ongoing dispute about trusteeship that Annabella had received disquieting news from George and Mary Byron. (That kind and cheerful couple’s loyalty to Annabella since 1816 had been rewarded in 1824, when Lady Byron put them in receipt of an annual £2,000, having learned that her husband had disinherited his cousin: this was Byron’s punishment for siding against himself during the separation.) George, now 7th Lord Byron, had recently been approached by William Eden, the vicar of a church not far from Bifrons. Eden’s parishioners reported tales of dreadful goings-on at Lady Byron’s home since the Trevanions and Miss Leigh had moved into it that spring. Young Miss Leigh was now visibly pregnant. The Bifrons workforce spread the news that Henry Trevanion was responsible.
Annabella’s first shocked thought was that the past had repeated itself, under her own roof, seemingly with her own approbation. On 4 December 1829, Lady Byron wrote
