Reading the tender letters that the Lovelaces exchanged during this time, it becomes clear that, despite their many spats and disagreements, Ada and her husband remained powerfully attached to each other. Lovelace had been infuriated by Dr Carpenter’s suggestion that Ada was an unfeeling wife. But it was always easier for a diffident and reclusive man to demonstrate emotion through his fanciful buildings than in words. In the Great Hall of the newly transformed Horsley Towers, Crede Byron was proudly chiselled into one of the mighty beams that William himself had engineered (Brunel was pleasingly complimentary). Fretting about the absent Ada’s health – he was alone down at Ashley Combe in the summer of 1844 – Lovelace set out to create a new sea pool and elaborate grotto for a wife who now placed her faith in swimming to cure her ailments. Visiting Brighton that summer, while the children went to Somerset and Carpenter took time off for his own career, Ada lodged herself at 38 Bedford Square, adjoining the seafront. Taking dutiful daily immersions from a bathing machine in a daring black one-piece, rounded off with a pair of stout leather boots, the novice sea nymph was soon envisaging herself as ‘an independent & skilful swimmer . . . Perseverance will do the business, I feel no doubt.’
Exercise was the solution, or so a hopeful Ada now persuaded herself. In between despatching instructions about the proper strength and length of gymnastic ropes to be installed in their various homes, she diverted William with accounts of her visit to a travelling circus (where the appearance of an elephant was an exciting novelty) and Brighton’s zoo, where an adventurous monkey ripped through her sleeve and drew blood. ‘This is my year of accidents,’ poor Ada sighed, having already managed to break her nose and undergo ‘some hours’ of dental surgery.
Exercise did not mean that Ada had weaned herself off the combination of claret and drugs prescribed by her favourite doctor. Ada’s mother – Annabella had a horror of opiates – argued for the safer route of mental control. Harriet Martineau, a woman for whose industry and intelligence Lady Byron had considerable respect, attributed her recovery from uterine cancer entirely to the power of mesmerism. The letters about her unconventional cure were published the following year, but in 1844, they were already being shared and widely discussed among Martineau’s friends. Here, surely, was the answer to Ada’s predicament, one that would protect her uncommon and precious mind from being needlessly addled by stimulants?
Used to having her way, Lady Byron found herself on this occasion in the minority. Neither Dr Locock, nor his medical colleagues, nor even the opinionated William Carpenter believed that mesmerism could cure physical illness. Moreover, as Ada sharply informed her mother on 10 October 1844, the doctors believed that the experiments with mesmerism that she had voluntarily undergone back in the summer of 1841 might even have caused her current ills. It wouldn’t do. In fact, Miss Martineau might herself benefit from the advice of a young lady who now wrote with brimming confidence of ‘my advancing studies on the nervous system’ and of ways that the world might yet benefit from her suffering.
And with that, Ada was off, overpowering her mother with a verbal extravaganza of all the thoughts and schemes that coursed unchecked through her shifting, skimming mind. She wrote of the authority with which she had learned to discipline Annabella’s small namesake. (‘Gentle as I am in general, yet when she is naughty, I am well aware that I give no quarter . . . I am a changed being at once.’) Ada went on to predict her personal destiny. She would become either a sun or a vagrant star. (‘Solemn decree’.) The Sun, perhaps. And what planets should she permit to orbit her solar self?
Oh! I must arrange some Comets too, by & bye. No complete planetary system without. Heavens! How shall I get any comets? I think I must myself be the chief Comet & not merely one of the Planets. Yes – that will do.
At least I am an amusing Bird, if not a very wise one, with my repentances, my Suns, Planets, Comets, &c, &c, &c.
I really believe that you hatched me simply for the entertainment of your old age, that you might not be ennuyée.
In part, Ada was simply playing with ideas and seeking to entertain a mother who she knew was going through sad times. To whom else, she sweetly asked, could she rattle on in such a lunatic vein, and yet be understood? ‘I grow so fond of my old Hen, who understands all I can say & think so much better than any one.’
Annabella was in need of consolation. The summer of 1844 had been blighted by a bitter quarrel with Edward and Fanny, her favourites among all the Noels, when they jointly attacked Lady Byron for undervaluing Edward’s skills as an educationalist.* (Ada had acted as the peacemaking go-between, but without success.) And then, within a single month, death robbed Annabella of Harriet Siddons, of a beloved godson, Hugo de Fellenberg Montgomery, and of the Swiss school reformer for whom the late Mr Montgomery had been named. Advising Hugo’s young widow, while comforting Mrs Siddons’s bereaved daughter, Annabella wore herself out.
