Maternity bored Ada and she made no secret of the fact. Five years into her marriage, Lady Lovelace finally admitted to her mother that she would never have chosen to bear a child. She did not quite dare to voice the thought that had perhaps passed through her exiled father’s mind as he contemplated the sale of Newstead, that she had most especially never desired to have a girl.
The acquisition of a new title had no noticeable effect upon Ada. For William, however, his earldom was a righting of all those wrongs inflicted by his mother. Felt as an act of justice, the title conferred a new sense of self-importance upon an insecure man. Invited to become Lord Lieutenant of Surrey, he eyed the neighbours whose homes were being built in the new baronial mode; William’s impulse to outdo both them and his usurper of a younger brother took root. Why should the Earl of Lovelace be outshone by mere bankers like William Currie of East Horsley and Henry Drummond of Albury?
As William became increasingly involved both in the redesigning of his homes and the duties and ritual appropriate to his new rank, Ada remained loyal to the mother who had taught her always to rate intellectual achievement above social position. Back in the autumn of 1835, it was to Lady Byron that Ada had first turned for scientific advice about the refraction of sunlight. Two years later, it was to her mother that she boasted of her victory over a visiting clergyman who queried her belief that Isaac Newton had been a Unitarian: ‘to say the truth I do not think Mr H. Fellows knows much about the Trinity or the Unity either’.
Increasingly, Ada spoke to Lady Byron, not as a parent, but as a colleague and equal. Annabella, too, was growing more relaxed. Her easy communion with Ada was seldom more apparent than in the light-hearted reports she sent home from Germany in the summer of 1838.
Annabella had undertaken this journey abroad as honeymoon companion and purse-carrier to Edward Noel (by now running his Fellenberg-style school on her island estate in Greece) and his bride, the former Fanny Smith. The couple had met at Fordhook the previous year when Edward returned from Euboea to convalesce from a serious illness. Nursing him back to health, Selina Doyle’s pretty niece fell in love. It was a match of which Annabella heartily approved. Her favourite of the Noel boys happily married to her own sweet ‘Fan’ (a young woman to whom Lady Byron sometimes fondly signed herself ‘Your Bag o’Bones’!) What could be better?
It was in the same playful tone as in her letters to Fanny that Annabella wrote to Ada from Germany. Staying at a hotel in Wiesbaden, she merrily reported how – the culprit was seated, all unaware, at a neighbouring breakfast table – a former curate from Ealing had reported upon that village’s best-known inhabitant. Lady Byron was, he bellowed (as if for one and all to hear), a drab little woman, quite undistinguished: ‘very short, of a swarthy complexion . . . looks as if she could never smile’. Edward and Fanny had been outraged. Annabella thought the incident hilarious. ‘I shall get some rouge and a brown wig to make myself captivating,’ she promised Ada. ‘I ought to get stilts too, it seems.’
For four happy years, Ada had enjoyed the rewarding experience of having two formidably intelligent female mentors. While Annabella would always urge her daughter towards science, Mary Somerville sympathised with the passion for music that often drew her away from it. Mrs Somerville’s main role, nevertheless, was to assist Ada with her mathematics. Seeking to scale the abstract slopes of spherical trigonometry in the same year that her eldest son was born, Ada had asked Mary to help her to obtain a full set – ‘all that are used’ – of solid wooden models. That request was made on 2 December 1836. Cooing over her mother’s Christmas present to her of a telescope a week later, Ada’s delight was heightened by learning that it was kind Mrs Somerville who had personally selected the gift. Meekly, she asked Mary’s advice on how best to use this essential instrument for exploring the heavens.
That humble request was symptomatic of Ada’s unassuming attitude towards a woman she wholeheartedly revered. Just occasionally, she forgot herself. In June 1837, Ada fired off an opinionated letter to Mrs Somerville about Charles Babbage’s new contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises (Babbage had attacked William Whewell’s more orthodox view of the universe). Mr Babbage’s work was so careless, so fragmentary and unconnected, Ada announced before going on to deplore the waste of his fine mind on producing such ‘crude outlines . . . I fear the work will be underrated.’ But then Ada remembered to whom she was writing. It would not be well for Mrs Somerville to discover the truth, that Ada was simply quoting her mother’s opinion, not having bothered to read Babbage’s Treatise for herself. A little more candour was in order. ‘I think when I have read it . . . I shall probably give my opinion to Mr Babbage himself,’ Ada declared before another pause, and a further step down. What was Mrs Somerville’s own honest opinion? Would such behaviour be a bit ‘presumptuous, do you think?’
The greatest lesson Mrs Somerville provided was not in mathematics itself, but in how to approach its study. When Ada told Babbage in 1839 that she had acquired ‘a peculiar way of learning’, what she meant was that Mrs Somerville had approved of Dr King’s emphasis upon the discipline of perfectly memorising each new step until it could instantly be recalled, and without conscious effort. That careful approach offered no dazzling leaps, only a slow, tenacious struggle towards what Ada wistfully described to Babbage (in this same 1839 letter) as ‘a very bright light a good way farther on’. Anathema to a young woman of Ada’s mercurial character, this lesson in patience was practised (sporadically)
