October brought a happy and newly pregnant Ada to her mother for a two-week stay. Writing to her husband, she playfully reported that the Hen would have to inform William about a ‘bad bird’, so bad that she had failed to pay her tuppence for walking along Southampton’s pier, and had gambled away four whole shillings at a charity auction ‘in exchange for a most vile basket’. Meanwhile, Ada pined for livelier company than her mother’s estimable circle of fellow reformers at the seaside. The absent William had turned from a crow into his wife’s ‘dear cock’: ‘I want my Cock at night to keep me warm.’
Ada’s sexual message is hard to miss, both here and in a later request to William not to ‘eat her up’ at their next reunion. (‘Ou won’t hurt her I think, will ou?’) Chatting to Mary Somerville’s attentive son during the 1840s about her sexual life, Ada revealed to Woronzow Greig that she and her husband always slept together, and were always naked under the sheets between which their firstborn had often been allowed to romp with his parents, just so. It’s fair to deduce that this good-looking, strong-willed and most unconventional couple were happy during their first years of matrimony.
Annabella’s pride in Ada’s marriage showed itself in her decision, following the Southampton visit, to commission an official portrait of her daughter, one that could be embarked upon before her pregnancy began to show. Ada was enthused neither by the project nor the artist, an outspoken Scotswoman called Margaret Carpenter. Writing to Mrs Somerville, the reluctant sitter assured her mentor that such trivia would never distract her from mathematics, the study of which had recently been resumed. (‘I . . . am occupied with Trigonometry in the preliminaries of Cubic and Biquadratic equations’.) Grumbling to the Hen, she complained that Mrs Carpenter had worse manners than her harp teacher; Miss d’Espourrin would never dream of stretching out on the Ockham drawing-room floor for a refreshing nap. (Ada had inherited her father’s paradoxically conventional streak; always wild herself, she wished others to behave with propriety.) Worse still, Mrs Carpenter had scraped her sitter’s bright brown hair off her face to emphasise her jaw. The result, in the view of a displeased Ada, was that she looked like ‘a crop-eared dog’.
Ada joked that the only use of owning an unusually broad jawbone was to write the word ‘mathematics’ across it. To Annabella, as to her Byron-worshipping son-in-law, the entire point of the Carpenter portrait was to maximise that feature in which Ada’s genetic heritage was most apparent. Mrs Carpenter was simply following orders. The three-quarter profile view of Lady King’s head that she produced for her full-length portrait was an exact replication of Byron’s stance in the Albanian portrait that had been long ago acquired by Lady Noel. Annabella, inspecting the result on 26 November, was delighted. The likeness to Lord Byron was declared by her to be ‘most striking’. As a mark of her approval, she sent her mother’s magnificent purchase along, cleaned and reframed, to adorn Ada’s new country home. Mrs Carpenter’s Byronic Ada received disappointingly muted praise the following summer when displayed at the Royal Academy.
The first winter of Ada’s marriage was a time of great contentment. Ada, visiting Fordhook in early December, wrote fondly to William of plans hatched by ‘the dear old Hen’ to introduce her son-in-law to the poet’s publisher, John Murray. The Somervilles and Charles Babbage spent Christmas together with Lady Byron and their hosts at Ockham Park. In February 1836, Ada invited the Somervilles’ two daughters to rejoin their lawyer half-brother, Woronzow, for a further few days at her home in Surrey. Writing to their mother, Ada teased that warnings would be sent if either Martha or Mary decided to elope, although she intended to keep the musically minded sisters occupied in accompanying, on the piano and in song, her newest pieces for the harp.
Lady Byron, meanwhile, had finally renewed acquaintanceship with her cleverest and most worldly cousin. Lady Caroline Lamb was dead and her widower had since inherited his father’s title. Meeting Prime Minister Melbourne in January 1836, after a gap of over twenty years, Annabella saw a sharp face that had softened into a poignant echo of Lord Melbourne’s Uncle Ralph, the jovial, loving father whom she had buried eleven years earlier. Plucked suddenly back into the past, she almost wept.
The two-hour meeting between the two middle-aged cousins at Windsor Castle reaped a useful reward. Two years later, when Lady Byron sought to distinguish her daughter (Lady King) from an odious mother-in-law (Lady Hester King) by giving Ada a different name, Lord Melbourne supported Annabella’s request for an upgrade. Lord and Lady King became the Earl and Countess of Lovelace.* Lady Hester’s furious protest at such a step, despatched to a baffled Lord Holland, went unanswered. (Her excessive prejudice against Ada’s husband had become well-known and was widely deplored.)
Writing a character portrait of her daughter during the early years of Ada’s marriage, a doting Lady Byron described an angel: here was a young woman who combined a singing voice ‘like the bonnie bird on the banks of
