Singing was the antidote to illness, or so Lady Lovelace chose to persuade herself. (She told Wheatstone in 1842 that she thought mathematics made her feel worse.) In singing, she had found her true vocation. The courteous words of teachers (one said she had ‘a wonderful facility’, while another artfully suggested that such genius ‘must not be lost to my friends and Society’) were all that Ada needed to convince herself of her rare talent. William, who like the Hen and the Greigs, longed for his wife to return to mathematics, heard instead about the ways Ada now planned to dazzle their guests at Ockham. She would sing arias from the newly fashionable Norma to an audience gathered in their library. How proud he would be of her! Everybody admired her innate sense of theatre:
. . . and the more scope I have in prospect for it, the more settled, calm & happy, does my mind become . . . Think how merrily & joyously evenings would go: how delightful when we have company, to be able to improve them a little, as I know I could through song . . . For there is a mysterious kind of Mesmerism in such expressions as I am likely to be able to give, which ennobles the hearts of those who listen . . .
The quotation is taken from the torrent of exuberant letters in which Ada swamped a distant William – busy with his building projects at Ashley Combe – during her short-lived love affair with the stage. With each fresh epistle, Ada’s horizon expanded. Singing was just the start: poetry might well be her true destiny. ‘And if so, it will be poetry of a unique kind – far more philosophical & higher in its nature than aught the world has perhaps yet seen.’
One thing was clear. Ada Lovelace would not be stopped. Her ‘undevelopped [sic] power’ must find expression, she wrote in the same letter. It could do so only by the provision of ‘very powerful, & continually-acting stimulants’, and for these, money was required. Vague about the stimulants, she was clear about her urgent need of funds. ‘Money,’ Ada informed her husband, ‘is the rub.’ Threats followed: ‘it will be the very Devils’ own work, if the wants of this case cannot be supplied’. But then she became alarmed that William might ask her mother for the cash that he himself lacked. Not a word to the Hen, she instructed him: all plans would be discussed with her by ‘myself only at present’.
Ada was always a little apprehensive of her mother’s uncompromising personality. Fortunately for her, Lady Byron was far too distracted by her protégée’s erratic behaviour in the summer of 1842 to focus on that of her daughter.
Nothing could have been more calculated to provoke Elizabeth Medora Leigh, now viewing herself as Ada’s co-heir and social equal, than to see Byron’s more brilliant child free, at liberty to enjoy a life of adventurous independence of the kind that she herself – now imprisoned within a sedate mansion situated on the fringes of the quiet English village of Esher – now craved. In April, a disillusioned Anna Jameson predicted troubles to come. In May, following Augusta’s unexpected relinquishing of the coveted financial deed and Annabella’s prudent decision to place it in the care of her own solicitors, Medora erupted. Annabella, the object of her fury, was forced to admit that she had never – not even from Lord Byron at his wildest – seen the like of Medora’s rage. Fleeing from Moore Place and its screechingly aggressive inhabitant, Annabella took refuge with the sympathetic George Byrons in London, at their home on Eaton Place. There, having regained her composure, Annabella drew up a list of observations on her niece and sealed them up in an envelope she temptingly inscribed: ‘Not to be opened without my leave.’
It has naturally been opened long since. What the document reveals is that, even at this late stage, Annabella was trying to mitigate her protégée’s behaviour. Medora’s anger had been pure drama, not deeply felt. Her obsession with money had by now become unavoidably apparent, but it was not the poor young woman’s fault. All could be blamed on the way Medora’s character had been shaped by her dissolute and neglectful mother. Nevertheless, mindful of her past promise to Byron, Annabella added a memo to herself. While declining to name her reasons, she noted that she must try to protect ‘the mother’ by some future arrangement. Relations between the two sisters-in-law had seemingly reached their nadir when Lady Byron could not bring herself to identify by name Augusta Leigh.
Family issues of a happier nature had provided Ada with a welcome break from trying to soothe the tantrums of an importunate and increasingly temperamental sister. Visiting Cambridge in the high summer of 1842 (Ada wanted to be on hand for the birth of Charlotte King’s first child, while her husband completed a Cambridge degree in divinity), Lady Lovelace discovered that a new and promising romance was budding. Ada, who looked upon Hester as the true sister of her heart, was determined to help.
Lord Lovelace doted on his younger sisters. He had been perturbed when Charlotte married a penniless seminarian. Sir George Crauford was a vastly more eligible candidate. An old friend of Demetrius Calliphronas, Sir George was a large, shy baronet with an enormous head and a heart to match it. Recently returned from years in India and possessed of a splendid new mansion (Burgh Hall in Lincolnshire), Sir George, having fallen deeply in love with Hester King, planned to install the impoverished Calliphronases in a wing at Burgh and to allow Hester, until such time as he could marry her, to live with them there. Sir George’s one wish, so Ada reported to William from Cambridge in early July,
