Medora was not dying, but the doctor whom Lady Byron despatched to Brittany to assess her situation confirmed that the young woman was indeed in dire straits. Requests had been sent to her mother for the deed to a £3,000 gift that Augusta Leigh had – with unusual prudence – put in trust for her unseen little granddaughter, Marie.* But Augusta (possibly conscious that Henry Trevanion was hovering close enough to seize upon any unexpected windfall) had refused to part with the requisite papers. How could a mother possibly be more heartless to her own neglected and penniless child?
Such a story – as Medora was shrewd enough to intuit – rang like music in the ears of her Aunt Annabella. The always inexplicable affection between two incompatible sisters-in-law had long ago withered into mutual distrust. By 1840, even the levelheaded Mary Montgomery was willing to view Mrs Leigh as ‘one of the wickedest woman ever born’, a sister who had actually continued to sleep with her brother during his marriage. (Mary’s source for this account was a woman whose inviolate truthfulness she would never question: Annabella herself.)
Here, then, was the dawning of a golden opportunity for Lady Byron to lay claim to the high ground. She herself would rescue Medora Leigh, the unhappy product of a relationship in which Augusta, by her own admission, had always led the way. Annabella had never doubted the paternity to which Byron had alluded in his letters to Lady Melbourne – and of which it seems clear that he boasted in private to his credulous wife. Annabella was simply doing her duty, as Byron himself would have wished her to do, for his own unfortunate daughter.
Strengthened by this virtuous self-image, and perhaps a little excited by the adventure upon which she had embarked, Lady Byron prepared for action. Summoning Medora to meet her clandestinely at Tours, an out-of-the-way medieval town set on the Loire (and a testing 300-mile journey from Pontivy), Annabella instructed her niece to protect her respectability (and that of her aunt) by posing as a widowed mother, a certain Madame St Aubin.
Welcomed at Tours, the prodigal completed her redemption at Fontainebleau where, nursing her exhausted aunt through one of Annabella’s most serious collapses, the sinning Elizabeth became the sinned-against Medora. It was there – or that is how she later chose to tell the tale – that Medora first learned the incredible truth about her parentage. By the time the pair of women left Fontainebleau for Paris in the mid-autumn of 1840, Medora’s role as a newly adopted daughter and beloved protégée was secure. Settled into her own handsome suite of rooms on Place Vendôme as Madame St Aubin – Lady Byron’s honoured guest – Medora Leigh could congratulate herself on having brought off the most impressive coup of a hitherto erratic career. Henry Trevanion himself would have applauded.
Slender, dark-eyed and outrageously charming (her similarity to Ada was often remarked upon), Medora was also a compulsive liar. Quick to appreciate how profoundly her patroness had come to dislike her mother, Medora was still nursing her patient at Fontainebleau when she began to create her poisonous posy of scandalous tales. Every one of them related to Augusta and each became more shocking than the last.
Publicly, Lady Byron was honoured during her lifetime for her almost superhuman discretion. Privately, Annabella leaked secrets like a bucket with a hole in it. By Christmas 1840, most visitors to her elegant new home on Place Vendôme (one of Paris’s most fashionable addresses) were conscious of Medora’s history. Back in England, Anna Jameson gasped at the horrors that were being unfolded by her respected friend. Had Mrs Leigh actually played a knowing part in the downfall of her daughter?
I can believe – alas! that I should confess it – even to you – any excess of wickedness in my own sex – even that a mother should conspire against the virtue & chastity of her own child; that she should corrupt one & sell the other – this even I know to be possible . . . or have I mistook – have I fearfully exaggerated the purport of what you tell me?
No, she was not mistaken, and it says much for Medora’s skill in storytelling that her preposterous tales were believed by women as intelligent as Anna Jameson and Mary Montgomery, who heard most of them first-hand while visiting Paris.
Fuelled by the wine that Lady Byron herself never touched, Medora recalled how she had been drugged and pinned to the floor by her sister and her mother, while Trevanion raped her. An obsessed Augusta had tried to lure Henry Trevanion into her bed by offering him the use of Emily (Annabella’s god-daughter and the youngest of the Leigh children). All this was merely the beginning.
Lady Byron was gullible (as Byron had discovered), but she was not a fool. On one level, in the early days, she knew that she was being manipulated by a skilful trickster. Writing to young Olivia Acheson on the brink of moving from Fontainebleau to Paris, Annabella offered a bittersweet account of how judiciously ‘your personified Bon-bon’ was being sweetened with hints and half-truths and outright lies.
She [Medora] knows that the throat of my conscience is small, and she adapts the sweet sin to the size of it, with wonderful precision . . . One more edifying instance – if you can’t tell a downright falsehood, tell that half of it which will convey the other half inaudibly to the mind of the receiver.
Six weeks later, however, Medora’s compelling tales had swept all Annabella’s caution away, leaving only a sense of excited outrage. Answering a meek enquiry from Mrs Leigh about her daughter’s health, an almost hysterical Annabella ordered the unfortunate woman to hold her tongue. ‘I would save you, if it be not too late, from adding the guilt of her death to that of her birth. Leave her in peace!’ Mrs Villiers, striving to
