Ada, who had been playfully writing to Mrs Somerville in the summer of 1836 about her hopes of producing ‘a mathematical child’, was relieved by the painlessness of little Byron’s arrival into the world. The hard part came later. Hester King, William’s sister, gladly obeyed a summons to come and act as a companion and nursemaid to the convalescing young mother. Visiting Lady Byron in Brighton three months after giving birth, Ada could still only walk with the help of a cane and her gentle sister-in-law’s supportive arm. Every evening, the two young women visited Annabella in her own seaside lodgings, where they took turns to read aloud to Lady Byron from her favoured diet of scientific and educational papers. But when Ada accidentally locked herself into her bedroom and had to be rescued by means of a ladder, Hester grew as hysterical with mirth as the prisoner herself. ‘Hester and I are very happy together,’ Ada told William, ‘and it is a real comfort to me to have such a sister.’
It was a comfort for young Hester, too. At Woburn Park, things had been going from bad to worse following Locke King’s marriage to Louisa Hoare, a commanding heiress from Northamptonshire. Sidelined by the new arrangements and angered by Locke’s request that his sisters should display deference to his wife, the girls were making increasingly determined efforts to achieve an independent life. The helping hands of Ada and her mother were evident in the appearance of the two young women that autumn at several of Babbage’s soirées. It was at one of these occasions that Hester fell disastrously in love.
By the summer of 1837, Hester’s calamitous love affair was over and her mother was issuing dire warnings from Woburn of the punishments due to be meted out to neglectful daughters. On 11 June, a sick and pregnant Ada tried to transform an increasingly bitter dispute into an opportunity for peace. Could a truce be called, now that Hester’s love affair was over? Would William’s mother consider paying a visit to Ockham – it was a mere seven-mile drive from Woburn Park – for a few days? ‘You will however I trust remember that if either at present or at any future time, you should feel inclined to prefer inviting us, it would be most welcome,’ a wistful Ada pleaded.
Predictably, Ada’s generous suggestion was rebuffed by silence.
In the early autumn of 1837, when Byron’s baby sister was born, Ada’s sister-in-law once again offered her services as a nurse and companion. The birth process was unexpectedly painful and protracted (which might help to explain Ada’s early animosity to her daughter). She had scarcely begun to recover when a serious attack of cholera – a deadly illness at that time – struck her down. Illness and disappointment – she had made no secret of her hopes for a second boy – contributed to the debilitating combination of frailty and nervousness that Ada would struggle against throughout her adult life. Little Annabella’s birth also marked the onset of Ada’s enduring obsession with weight. She began to starve herself. Her husband – William harboured a curious horror of heavily built people of either sex – approved. Lady Byron’s anxious protests (she told friends that Ada was starting to adopt her late father’s odd eating habits) were ignored.
More troubling than dietary fads, to Hester’s gentle eyes, was Ada’s insouciant attitude to motherhood. And yet, Hester loved her sister-in-law’s wild enthusiasms. She readily joined in with a ‘shilling’ experiment by which a suspended coin chimed out the hours on the side of a glass, while causing heated sensations to the brain. (A thrilled Ada asked Mrs Somerville to alert that wizard of the electrical world, Michael Faraday, to the results of their trial.) While it sometimes worried a conventional young woman that Ada seemed to care more about science than her children, it was to Ada that Hester would still turn for her own salvation.
By the end of the year 1837, matters at Woburn Park had reached such a pass for Charlotte and Hester that the sisters fled to Ockham, vowing never to return. A new and appalling row broke out. Terrible things were said by the mistress of Woburn until Ada, beloved by everyone for her exceptional good nature and her cheerful optimism, thought that she had glimpsed a haughtily extended olive branch. Perhaps, Ada wrote to her mother-in-law on 12 February 1838, Lady Hester did not appreciate the pain she was inflicting and how sad it made Ada herself feel. ‘No matter . . . The occurrence of last week will of course now be blotted out from the record of events.’*
No record survives of what the mysterious ‘occurrence’ was, but Ada’s conciliatory words would be thrown back in her teeth by the venomous Lady Hester eight years later, as offering clear proof that the fault lay all on Ada’s side. On this later occasion, Ada rebelled. The fault was theirs, she wrote fiercely back to Lady Hester’s brother on 23 June 1846. (All direct contact with Lady Hester
