Pleasing Ada, in the summer of 1843, meant carrying her latest missive from St James’s Square to Marylebone, waiting for Babbage to write out his response and then hastening back through the dusk to a pale, reed-thin and often breathless Ada, pondering the challenging details of one of her charts or hunched over her latest tussles with that difficult trigonometrical Note E.
Determination is the quality that shines through all of Ada’s endeavours. ‘I will have it well, & fully done; or not at all,’ she instructed Babbage on 26 June; a few days later, she was ready to boast that her husband, an admiring observer of her tables and diagrams, was ‘quite enchanted with the beauty & symmetry that they displayed’. Flirtatiously, she wrote of herself as ‘a fairy’ and made fun of her chivalrous courtship by Frederick Knight,* the Lovelaces’ closest neighbouring landowner at Ashley Combe. ‘I am anything but My Ladyship to him,’ she teased before scolding Babbage for altering her notes and revisions when (‘poor little Fairy’) she was working ‘like the Devil on his behalf’. ‘I must beg you not,’ she rebuked him on 1 August, as she finalised Note B. And, in the same letter: ‘I wish you were as accurate, as much to be relied on, as I am myself.’ Her criticisms were not groundless: on one occasion, Babbage carelessly deleted an entire paragraph of her work. ‘I suppose I must set to work to write something better, if I can, as a substitute,’ Ada sighed. ‘However, I should be decidedly inclined to swear at you, I will allow.’
Babbage’s mistake was not the only cause for curses in the late summer of 1843: ‘. . . the fact is I am plagued out of my life just now,’ Ada admitted to him on 19 July. Lovelace was fretting about the cost of his new building projects; more to the point, the unpaid Beaurepaires were growing increasingly truculent. To send a letter to Annabella emblazoned, across its envelope, ‘Lady Byron – Femme de mauvaise foi’ was bad enough, but now Nathalie had carried her tale of woe to the French embassy in London, where Ada was blamed for having originally engaged the couple in Paris under false pretences. (Medora’s status as an unmarried mother, which had been concealed by Ada and Lady Byron, would have caused any high-grade servants to reject that work as prejudicial to their own reputation.) Sighing, Ada laid aside her ‘Notes’ to pay a visit of her own to the Comtesse St Aulaire, the ambassador’s friendly wife. Lady Byron, angry and alarmed at the growing prospect of a public scandal, wanted a full report.
Nathalie had proved to be a compelling storyteller. Madame St Aulaire had apparently heard everything to do with Medora, and, alas, ‘everything else too . . .’ Naturally, the ambassador’s wife (who would become a close friend of Ada’s) was filled with ‘indignation and horror’, but not enough to stop her from listening to an hour’s worth of delightfully shocking tales. It was with some difficulty that Ada obtained her hostess’s reluctant promise of total discretion.
Written on 25 July, Ada’s long letter to Lady Byron allows us to see how delicately she had to juggle the different aspects of her life. First, she gave her mother a full and detailed account of the interview with the ambassador’s wife. Only after sympathising with the toll that ‘this horrible affair’ must be taking upon Lady Byron’s delicate health, did Ada admit that she herself was now suffering from acute and almost daily pain.
Sir Charles Locock, known as ‘The Great Deliverer’ for his services to the Queen, had been devoted to Ada ever since he attended her for the birth of her first child. Lady Lovelace’s medical symptoms baffled him. As soon as he thought he had found the answer, another variant emerged. Wanly, she joked to her mother about the ‘amusement in being so curious a riddle’; heroically, she accepted that no imminent relief from suffering was in sight. Locock had even told her that her mysterious ailments might be beyond cure. That fatalistic edict, offered when Ada was only twenty-seven and at what felt like just the beginning of her professional life, was hard to accept. It was entirely typical of Ada to turn a sentence of permanent invalidism into a chance for new opportunities. Why should not pain be connected to her intellectual progress? What if she looked upon it as a condition of – rather than an impediment to – ‘all that wonderful & available mental power which I see grounds to believe I am acquiring . . .’?
I will willingly bear anything if this be so. What would be to me dreadful, would be mind & activity impeded by health. Give me powers with pain a million times over, rather than ease with even talents (if not of the highest order).
It is easy to mock the extravagance of Ada’s valiant declarations – she wrote in this same letter of 25 July about ‘the great laboratory of my brain’ and in another that she dashed off earlier in the same month to Babbage, about the ‘almost awful energy & power [that] lie yet undevelopped [sic] in that wiry little system of mine’. She boasted, too, in that same letter to Babbage of 4 July, about how, within a decade, ‘the Devil’s in it if I haven’t sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or
