Ada adored her oldest son. Quite deliberately, she recounted to her mother in this same letter that William, celebrating 5 November at home with the family, had let a firecracker off ‘intentionally, almost in B[yron’s] face, by way of fun’. She added that Miss Boutell, the young governess who witnessed the scene, had been astonished by the child’s pluck. (He ‘never winced even’.) Still, it was a curious tale to pass on to a doting grandmother. Was Ada alerting her mother to a darker side of Lord Lovelace’s nature? (There would be several later references to the Crow’s black temper and even to a flight that the Bird had taken from home until her husband had calmed down.) Or was Ada merely trying to distract attention from a London visit, one about which she was peculiarly anxious that her mother should not know?
Lady Byron’s careful pruning of the family archive makes speculation difficult. It’s likely that Ada’s secret visits had to do with Charlotte King’s marriage that autumn to a divinity student called Demetrius Calliphronas. It is also possible that Ada’s discreet visit to London was connected to Dr James Kay.
On 21 October, James Kay, doctor, educational reformer and general good egg, had sent Ada the equivalent to a love letter. Seemingly bewitched by the ‘waywardness, beauty & intangibility’ of Lord Byron’s daughter, he compared Ada to a fairylike mirage, always flitting from view or plunging him ‘into some bog, while I am gazing at you half in admiration, somewhat in apprehension and altogether in kindness’. It’s rash, without knowing more detail, to read too much into this flowery tribute. Annabella, who was herself an admiring friend and work colleague of Dr Kay’s, read the good doctor’s letter years later and agreed with his description of her daughter’s elusive charm; one of Ada’s chosen alter egos was that of a benevolent, if capricious, fairy.
Certainly, Dr Kay grew close to Ada during the summer of 1841. Recruited in his medical capacity as a supplier of laudanum to ‘a naughty sick Bird’, Dr James Kay became a regular attendant of the mesmeric sessions which were hosted by the Lovelaces during the summer of 1841.
Mesmerism in England during the 1840s was uneasily poised between charlatanism (France’s leading mesmerist, Charles Lafontaine, drew huge audiences when he mesmerised a lion at London Zoo) and medical science. (Mesmerism aimed to spare patients from the pain of surgery in the years before the introduction of ether and chloroform.) A serious purpose behind the simple experiments performed at the Lovelaces’ home by the country’s best-known mesmerist, John Elliotson, might be argued from the fact that meetings were attended not only by Hester and the newly engaged Charlotte King, but by Dr Kay, Charles Wheatstone and William Lovelace’s good friend, Britain’s first Egyptologist, Sir John Gardner Wilkinson. The results, judging by Dr Kay’s unpublished journal, were mildly silly. Charlotte King and an unnamed housemaid fell into a trance in which they responded only to the soothing voice of the mesmerist. Ada believed that the process had caused her head to heat up and tingle. Kay himself remained more intrigued by his hostess than by Elliotson’s demonstrations of his hypnotic powers.
Four months after writing his love letter to Ada, Dr Kay married a Yorkshire heiress and changed his name to Kay-Shuttleworth. Might the news that her admirer was courting Janet Shuttleworth have given rise to Ada’s boasts of wild behaviour, and have caused her subsequent collapse? (She suffered a breakdown at the end of the year 1841.) Probably not. Listing the candidates for a colony of her favourite people the following July, Ada teasingly informed her husband that she would include both Dr Kay and himself (‘tho really what use an old Crow would be to me I know not’.) In February 1843, Dr Kay was one of a very select group invited to Ockham, in order to celebrate Hester King’s marriage to Sir George Crauford. (It was a marriage which Ada had been most anxious to bring about.)
A far more likely cause than Dr Kay’s marriage for the despair which Ada confessed to Woronzow Greig on 31 December 1841 (in the same letter that boasted of her ‘harum-scarum’ ways and indifference to convention) was the continuing sense that Medora Leigh had usurped her right to feel that she was Lord Byron’s unique heir. Writing to a concerned Greig from her London home, Ada begged the newly married barrister not to worry about her: ‘I am doing very well indeed: – as well as possible. And I have no notion whatever of either taking myself out of the world, or being a useless invalid in it. So be easy.’ Nevertheless, and to the considerable dismay of the Crow, the Hen and the Greigs (Woronzow’s wife, Agnes, had swiftly joined the inner circle of Ada’s friends), Lady Lovelace suddenly announced her need for a change. Maths was dropped for six months in favour of plays, operas – and new plans for a singing career.
In the spring of 1842, Ada’s letters sound as though she has suddenly vaulted into our times. Her energy appears to be boundless. She writes of taking her meals on the run at a ‘nice respectable shop in Oxford Street’ where breakfast, dinner and supper can be obtained, ‘at a moment’s notice’. She loans the elegant Lovelace carriage to carry ‘that nice old gentleman the Hen’ off to visit the 7th Lord Byron’s home in Belgravia, before dashing off herself for a two-hour chat about science with Charles Wheatstone. Between times, she attends a lecture, inspects another railway, takes a singing lesson and then finds the energy to spend ‘4 or 5 hours at least’ playing her harp. And this, in the spring and early summer of 1842, was just an average day.
Throughout this hectic period
