Given this bizarre background scenario, it is not surprising that Annabella rejected Augusta’s offer of forgiveness. Quite possibly, Lady Byron relished a moment of justifiable scorn. What kind of mother could conceivably have placed her 15-year-old daughter in such a compromising situation? How different was her own devoted care for poor, fragile Ada!
Annabella’s indignation would have justifiably increased, had she been informed of what happened next. Slipping quietly back into England during the following summer (1830), the Trevanions lodged at a family house in Chelsea, from which Henry paid regular visits to his unabashed young mistress, demurely lodged at her mother’s apartment in St James’s Palace. In February 1831, Trevanion informed an appalled Mrs Leigh that he and her younger daughter were expecting a child. (No mention was made of the previous pregnancy, or of Lady Byron’s assistance.)
Augusta’s response was hysterical. To Henry, she despatched a plaintive squawk of command: ‘You will comfort me! I need not point out the means! Your own heart will dictate them – and as you are dear! MOST dear! Much, MUCH is in your power!’ Elizabeth Medora, meanwhile, was apprised by Mrs Leigh of the agonies she had inflicted upon a mother’s tortured soul: ‘I have suffered much – long (neither you or ANY human Being knows how much) but – I never knew sorrow like this . . . I was not prepared for this wretchedness – Spare! Oh spare me, Dearest!’ The greatest of all Augusta’s sorrows, so it appeared from an interminably theatrical lament, was that her cherished daughter would not now be able to complete her religious education. (‘You know that I confidently hoped and intended you to be confirmed this Easter! I suppose it is now hopeless – consult your own heart and wishes!’) As was aptly observed in 1929 by Ethel Mayne, first biographer of Lady Byron: ‘The pitiful absurdity of these letters paralyses the judgement.’
Plainly, little help for Henry and his victim (this was the role that Miss Leigh adopted, and maintained) was to be expected at this juncture from an agonised mother; Annabella, who supposed the trio still to be safely lodged (at her own expense) in France, was equally unlikely to prove sympathetic. Retiring to a village near Bath, the Trevanions and Elizabeth Medora decided to lie low. This was the point at which – informed at last by Henry Wyndham of what had been hidden from view for two full years – a distraught Colonel Leigh intervened. Never the brightest of men, George Leigh’s solution was to abduct his unmarried and once again pregnant child and lock naughty Libby up within a discreet abode in north London. Following suit with the support of an eagerly collaborative Georgiana and (it is conjectured) funded by the ever-gullible Augusta – Henry Trevanion now ‘liberated’ a most co-operative young mistress and carried Medora (as we will from now on, for convenience, name Elizabeth Medora Leigh) off to live with him in France.
Nothing improved. In England, a husbandless Georgiana struggled to bring up three small children on her own. In France, in 1836, a penniless Trevanion set about raising funds against his abandoned wife’s marriage settlement in order to buy himself – but not Medora – a home. Back in England, John Hanson (Byron’s unsavoury lawyer had by now been publicly disgraced for his exploitation of the lunatic Lord Portsmouth) piously opined that ‘poor Mrs Leigh and all connected with her are mad’. In 1838, Medora, still in France, was striving to obtain the title deed to a £3,000 settlement extravagantly promised by Augusta to Marie, Medora’s illegitimate 4-year-old child.* (Henry Trevanion was, once again, the father.)
Trevanion remained the nemesis to whom Medora always returned. It was he – or he and Georgiana – who had first informed her that she was Byron’s daughter.† In 1840, that alleged parentage would be used to clinch Medora’s hold over Lord Byron’s always wistful and conscience-stricken wife.
By the spring of 1830, while the Trevanions and Medora were still living at Calais, illness had muted Ada’s vibrant, quirky voice for almost a year. In March, the kindly old Baillie sisters expressed a hope that their young friend might soon be well enough to venture outside the house. Three months later, at Mortlake, Ada admitted to her correspondence tutor, Arabella Lawrence, that she was often in too much pain even to sit upright. Chair rides (or an occasional stumbling walk) along the terrace above the Thames to watch the boats and river birds now represented her entire external life. Within the seclusion of The Limes and with her closest girlfriend, Flora Davison,* for an audience, Ada – on her good days – endeavoured to practise the piano (‘I especially love the waltz’), and – with characteristic gallantry – attempted little jokes. Selina Doyle and she were struggling to read German together, she told Robert Noel, a fluent speaker of the language who was himself now out in Dresden studying phrenology: ‘und wie der Lahme und der Blinde helfen wir uns einander’ (‘and are as much use to each other as the lame and the blind’).
One of Ada’s greatest resources was an absolute refusal to repress her feelings, in marked contrast to the self-control that Annabella had determinedly acquired. Writing to Miss Lawrence in Liverpool from her Mortlake sickroom, the pupil made no secret of
