The answer may have lain in Lady Byron’s growing awareness of her son-in-law’s chief weakness: a fierce family pride that, with time, would encase him like a suit of armour. William Lovelace was already smarting from the news that the country would not welcome his services as secretary of state. (He had put his name forward in 1840.) A humbled Crow, it is fair to guess, would have brooked no Hennish interference. Annabella wanted no scenes, but Ada’s lack of money, combined with her husband’s flair for spending it, would become increasingly problematic as the decade wore on.
It was not money worries but the increasingly bizarre behaviour of Medora Leigh, out in France, that offered the severest challenge to Ada’s concentration as she worked to complete her seven notes to Menabrea’s Memoir. Passionately loyal to her mother and furious at the way that Lady Byron’s generosity had been abused, Ada found it impossible to remain detached during the final stages of her mother’s ill-judged attempt to offer maternal care to an increasingly aggressive young woman.
By March 1843, word had reached London that Medora was seeking legal support for her rights as Lady Byron’s adopted daughter from Pierre Berryer, one of France’s foremost lawyers. Delegated to act as Annabella’s representatives, Selina Doyle and her sister Adelaide reported from their own Paris lodgings that Miss Leigh was living at an expensive hotel on Place Vendôme, claiming that it befitted her rank. She had taken the story of how she had been brutally cast aside by Lady Byron to the ear of a sympathetic Henry Bulwer (brother of the more famous novelist) at the British embassy.
It was at this point that Ada revealed her own pent-up feelings. Again and again, in a letter scrawled across many tightly written pages, ‘Elizabeth’ (Medora no longer) was invited to remember the poverty from which she had been rescued by ‘my mother . . . She, on whom of all people in the world you have the least natural claim’. Had Miss Leigh forgotten all that she owed to them? ‘Remember what you were at Paris – grateful for any countenance from me. You had scarcely dared to hope it . . .’
You have but one course to pursue – submission to your benefactress; and if you have one spark of good feeling or of prudence, you will at once hasten to acknowledge your rash and ungrateful conduct and regret for it.
Ada’s letter was of little help in resolving an increasingly rancorous dispute, but by April, out in Paris, a new avenue of possibility had opened. Selina Doyle had heard Victor Beaurepaire speaking in a curious way about Miss Leigh. Commenting upon one of her rare moments of tranquillity, he remarked that it made her easier to handle. (‘Elle est plus tranquille aujourd’hui et prête a faire tout ce qu’on veut.’)
Was Medora perhaps mad? The juvenile educationalist Louisa Barwell, requested by Lady Byron to set down her recollections of a memorably uneasy stay at Moore Place in 1842, readily confirmed that Miss Leigh had appeared to her to be deranged. (‘I think I then told you that I believed her reason was not sound, and whenever I have since reflected upon her conduct, I have always come to the same conclusion, that she was insane – and this has been in my own mind a melancholy excuse for all the sad & distressing conduct I then witnessed.’)
On 24 April, Annabella despatched her old friend Dr King to Paris with a letter of ultimatum. Either Medora could accept Lady Byron’s orders, or she could face being completely cut off. Seeing what might be coming her way – Dr King had recently opened a genteel asylum in Brighton – Medora turned upon her visitor. An offer (one that Lady Byron had not authorised Dr King to make) to increase her allowance from £150 to £300 – the same sum that was annually paid to Ada by her husband – was scornfully rejected. Reviewing the visit in her hand-scrawled memoir, Medora recorded that the meek and somewhat bewitched Dr King had been both intimidating and abusive.
Fixed at the forefront of Medora’s mind was the fact that the £3,000 deed yielded up in 1842 by Mrs Leigh now belonged by rights to herself. It seemed to her that Lady Byron, who had lodged the document with her own solicitors precisely in order to prevent Medora from cashing it in, had actually stolen her property. (That the £3,000 gift could only be validated by Lady Byron’s death was not the kind of detail to interest a destitute young woman who believed that the world had wronged her.)
It was the quest for the deed – and further funding – that brought Nathalie Beaurepaire, swiftly followed by Medora, little Marie and a kindly admirer called Captain Barrallier, back into Ada’s life.
By June 1843, when Medora arrived in England on the arm of her new chevalier (she did have a perfect genius for finding them), Ada had reached the final stages of writing up her notes to Menabrea’s article. It was that month in which she decided to make use of the Bernoulli numbers to demonstrate the superiority of the Analytical Engine over all earlier designs. By the beginning of July, Ada was ready for Lovelace to ink in the pencilled numbers on her laboriously calculated chart.
Sadly, none of the correspondence between Babbage and his interpreter has survived from the earlier months of Ada’s endeavours. By June, however, an agreeably collegiate relationship had been established: it was one that entitled Ada to describe herself to Robert Noel, on 9 August, as ‘a completely professional person’. Dates, especially on Ada’s side, frequently went by the board as she dashed off a flood
