A Quiet Adjustment (33 page)

‘My love,' he said, his large face reddening, ‘you have many more brilliant qualities than that. There was never any clearer proof of what that man has done to you than to hear you parade such a nonsense of modesty.'

She had never known anyone, she answered, who had taken her own measure more precisely; he need have no fears for her vanity. But he would forgive her for adding, that she had been made too intensely aware (a fact for which she was not ungrateful) of the nature of true brilliance to keep much faith in her own. During their honeymoon at Halnaby, Lord Byron had permitted her to transcribe a number of his verses, fresh from the pen, as it were; and this insight into his genius had given her the sharpest context for her own. There was nothing, it turned out, that she understood better than herself. Her thoughts depended on a very narrow range of ideas. The most that she was guilty of, perhaps, was repetition. She tended to sacrifice liveliness for the sake of correctness. The quickness, or mobility as Lord Byron sometimes called it, that made his mind as various as the world, that enabled him to see, to express, to persuade, at a single stroke, had always been lacking in her. She had, however, other qualities, which she supposed were just as good. At least they had proved more durable than brilliance might have.

The following autumn, she received her first letter in many years from Lord Byron. He was about to set off for Greece, to whose liberation he had pledged to devote his life. The scenes in which he intended to make himself useful were more isolated than those he had become accustomed to living amongst. Could he persuade her, as a rare favour, to send him a portrait of Ada's mother, to soften the effects of his reclusion? He had been very sorry to hear (the news had only just reached him) of the demise of Lady Milbanke. She had had in her possession, he believed, a miniature of her daughter painted by Hayter at the time of her coming out. It captured perfectly just how she had looked when he met her; that is, just how she had looked before she met
him
. It was entirely like Lord Byron to conceal within the tenderest appeal a few subtle barbs, but Annabella, for once, was willing to disregard her own capacity for subtlety. Sir Ralph found it for her at the back of a chest of drawers, in which he had thrown together those relics of his wife that he hadn't the heart to throw out. Annabella, without so much as a line of commentary, sent it to Byron.

Chapter Ten

THE NEWS OF HIS DEATH REACHED HER,
as a great deal of his news had done, through the press. She was staying in Beckenham with a friend of her mother's—she had lately begun to treat them quite as her own—and the papers were brought to her in bed with a pot of coffee and a pile of buttered toast. She sat up to read, aware that the woman who served her had lingered and stopped by the doorway. ‘Yes, thank you,' she said, to dismiss her, when her eye alighted on the page. ‘Lord Byron Dead', it declared in thick ink. ‘Thank you,' she repeated to the maid, ‘that will be all,' and waited till she was gone to read:

The poet Lord Byron has died at Missolonghi, on the 19th of April, of a fever. He had been sent as an emissary of the government to expedite the liberation of the local tribes from Turkish rule. William Parry, who had served his Lordship in the capacity of firemaster, reports: ‘At the very time Lord Byron died, there was one of the most awful thunderstorms I ever witnessed. The lightning was terrific. The Greeks, who are very superstitious and generally believe that such an event occurs whenever a much superior, or as they say, a supreme man, dies, immediately exclaimed, “The great man is dead!”'

She lay in bed for an hour or two; the late spring day grew bright then hazy in her window. When she arose, slowly, at last, she sat down at her writing-table and composed a short note to Augusta: ‘I have no right to be considered, but I have my feelings. I should wish to see any accounts that have come. Please pass on my interest to Hobhouse and anyone else with whom you are in contact. God bless you.'

These more personal reports began after a few days to arrive; by this time she had returned to Wilmot Street. She could not bear, she said to Miss Montgomery, the company of strangers, and Lord Byron's death had had the unaccountable effect upon her, with a few exceptions, of making even old and intimate friends appear indifferent and strange. Mary, she added, with a touching smile, was one of these exceptions: she had known them both together, after all. She should like to see Augusta again, when she was ready; she was not ready yet. In the meantime, she pored over everything that was sent to her, and though she never left the house (nor Mary's own parlour, very often), she dressed meticulously each morning in black and was careful to eat what she could. One of the first things she had done on arriving in Wilmot Street was to send for a tailor. The May weather was brilliant and blue. Day succeeded day cloudlessly, and the light fell through Mary's large windows and managed to make of Lady Byron's mourning weeds a positive colour. She looked at times, in a slant of dust, a very rich green; she looked almost verdant.

Lord Byron at least had died, as Augusta put it, ‘in very good company'. It made his widow smile: she meant, Annabella joked to Miss Montgomery, that there had been no women present. Among the reports that Hobhouse passed on to her was an account by one of his old Italian friends, a man named Gamba. The poet, he testified, in his final delirium, had wandered continually between English and Italian. It seemed very strange, Annabella remarked, that he should rave in Italian, he had always raved so happily
at
the English; but then she remembered (they quietly counted it up) just how long he had been away. It was more than eight years since she had seen him, and almost as long since he had left England behind. Gamba, it seems, she added, reading on, was the brother of that woman the countess with whom Lord Byron had contracted a final liaison. There had been some talk, a few years before, of arranging for a divorce to accommodate in him a second marriage. Nothing had come of it. His first experiments in matrimony must have dissuaded him from attempting a second; but his Italian, at least, had sufficiently improved that Lady Byron was required to refer to a dictionary to puzzle out some of what she called ‘his famous last words'. ‘Io lascio cosa di caro nel mondo' she read out to her friend, taking, in spite of herself, a certain pleasure in the rich strange phrases. ‘There are things,' she said slowly, ‘which make the world dear to me.'

Mary, as the first week wore on, congratulated her friend on her decent and dignified reception of the news. ‘I have had,' Annabella answered, ‘a reasonable interval to accustom myself to his absence. Besides, a decent grief is all I feel that I have a claim to.' She was conscious, if anything, of just how little had changed. Indeed, she felt securer in what she called ‘her knowledge of her husband'. His dying struck her almost as a gesture of intimacy; it had revived old impressions, which he himself was now unlikely to contradict. When Lizzy came in one morning to announce that a man named Fletcher, of a rough mechanical appearance, had called to see her and was waiting outside, Annabella told her to send him in: it was only Lord Byron's valet. Mary, with her fine sense of deference, excused herself and left Annabella to wait, with her hands folded on her lap and a real appetite for the news she supposed Fletcher would bring. It was almost as if, she reflected, someone had come to talk to her about
herself
. Her vanity seemed obscurely flattered by the continual private application of what was, after all, a very public piece of mourning.

Fletcher himself, however, struck a wrong note. He was not quite what she had remembered him to be, or rather, his appearance aroused in her other memories less flattering to her complacence. She had known him, it could only be said, at the worst, and his hanging arms and square stubborn face wore an aspect, it almost seemed to her, of her own former misery. Nevertheless, she rose bravely to greet him and said, as much perhaps to reassure herself as him, ‘I have always thought of you with kindness.' To which he, with his head ducked to one side, from the back of his throat distinctly replied: ‘For my part, I've always remembered you with pity.' She offered him a seat, which he refused; and she rang for tea, which he also refused. Lizzy stared at him and made Annabella feel the shame of being forced to interest herself in so undistinguished a guest. He had little enough to tell, he said, and he hoped to tell that little quickly. He had only just returned from Greece, where he had ‘served' (his taste for what seemed to him a legal exactness was only sharpened by high company) ‘as a witness' to Lord Byron's death. He was willing to answer all questions respecting that event: he had got used to curiosity.

Indeed, he seemed to expect it, for he continued almost unprompted and with a certain air of rehearsal. His lordship had at the beginning of April contracted a fever, for which, since it persisted unevenly for several weeks, his doctors had proposed to bleed him. His lordship was always very stubborn; he had refused. The doctors—there was a regular crowd of them, including the Italian, Bruno, who had come on from Genoa, and an Englishman, Millingen, sent by the committee; one of them was the Pasha's own attendant, a small grubby pale sort of fellow named Vaya; another, a German gentleman from the artillery corps, a Dr Treiber, very tall and weak-chested, who complained steadily of the heat—were allowed in to see him on the condition that they held their noise. It was Fletcher's job to throw them out if they didn't. Lord Byron's hands and feet by this time were cold as stone. The doctors gave him something for his thirst (he was very thirsty) and stuck two blisters against his thighs. He wouldn't let them near his feet—‘as I believe you remember, miss,' he added. It struck Annabella for the first time just how miserable the poor man was, and that his refusal to sit or look down and his general air of delivering himself of a duty tediously prepared were his only defences against a complete and abject collapse.

On the morning of the 18th, Lord Byron began to give way to fits of delirium. In his calmer moments, when he could be heard, they just made out an expression that he was willing to be bled at last, and Dr Bruno applied the leeches. What they took out was two pounds of blood, but it was too late. He was talking a great deal, though not much to the point: a lot of Italian gibberish, as Fletcher put it, though some of it English. He thought he was leading a battle charge sometimes and cried out, ‘Forwards—forwards. Courage—don't be afraid . . .' There was also an old witch, he imagined, in the neighbourhood, who was giving him the evil eye; he wanted her to be brought to him. He supposed, as he said, ‘he would out-stare her yet'. Annabella could not help but reflect uncomfortably on the possibility of an allusion; Fletcher, however, distinguished his story with no sort of pause. Between bouts of bleeding, they offered him purgatives, and he was continually relieving himself: the air in the room was very sour, and thick with people besides. There were the doctors, Bruno, Millingen, Vaya and Treiber, and the young Greek gentleman with the long name, who was called the Prince. There were Gamba and Parry, the fire-master, and Tita, his manservant, and no women at all, only Luca, who was just ‘one of his lordship's boys' and very bored. He had to be bribed by sweet things to stay by his master's bed, for Byron doted on him. But it was Easter Sunday, and he was wanting to see the parade. The Prince at one point left to lead the soldiers out into the hills; he didn't want the master to be disturbed by their salutes. Nobody slept; nobody ate. His lordship was talking steadily, most of it nonsense, but they all crowded round to hear, which is just, in a way, what he had come to see
her
about. His master, Fletcher said, during what he called ‘one of his quieter ravings', had particularly wished him to say to Lady Byron—and at that point for the first time he stopped for breath.

‘To say what?' she broke out at last, after an age in which she grew conscious of just how painfully she had been holding her own.

‘Why, that's just it,' he answered, ‘I couldn't be sure. He talked of Ada and wished me to send his blessing, and Mrs Leigh and her children. And he said, “You will go to Lady Byron, and say—tell her everything—you who are friends with her.”' The personal application gave him a pause, and he continued, as if to excuse himself: ‘Which is why I have come. I have done my duty.'

‘But what did he say?' She was on her feet now, beseeching. ‘What did he tell you to tell me?' It was as if, she suddenly felt, a veil had been wrenched, which had decently covered his death. He was there again, vividly before her, as he had not been in years; she had all but talked him away. But he had talked himself back again, as he always could: he had practically opened his mouth.

It was Fletcher who kept his own shut. ‘What did he say?' she repeated. She was beginning to pace and sob, but the drop in her dignity had only the effect of making him stand upon his. He offered, in fact, a face as blank as a wall; she had almost the sense that she was throwing herself against it. The violence of her feelings suggested to her stretched memory nothing so sharply as the noise of soda bottles breaking underfoot. That, at least, was the appeal
he
had made to her; that, it almost seemed to her now, was just what her cries amounted to. ‘What did he tell you to tell me? what did he say?' Her sobbing, at least, robbed her of breath, and breathlessness hushed her. In the pause, he offered at last: ‘He was very far gone, very quiet and wild. Though not too far to practise his usual humour.' He was weeping himself, flat-faced and blinking. ‘
Fletcher
, he said
, if you do not execute every order I have given you, I will torment you hereafter if I can
. That was his way, you know: he was always tormenting me. He thought me humourless, because I took him at his word. I suppose he is tormenting me now.
You will go to Lady Byron
, he said—and I guess you'll allow that I've gone. But I did not hear him. About six o'clock, he got up to relieve himself. They had bled him another pound and given him Epsom salts. When he came back to bed, he said,
I want to sleep no
w
; and that was the last I heard.'

After Fletcher had gone, Annabella waited for Mary to come to her. She hadn't the strength for rising herself. The day grew only brighter and fell through the window in thick squares. She was careful to sit with her face turned away from the door and out of the light: she wanted her friend to come all the way to her, to draw out of her slowly just how much she had suffered for his news. It was an expression she found difficult to keep up in its first freshness, though it occurred to her, as the muscles of her misery tired and the bloom rubbed off it, that nothing could suggest more plainly the state of her feelings than a worn-out grief. What had he meant to tell her? This was the thought that recurred with the low irresistible insistence of a cricket's song. Fletcher's account had almost brought him to life again. He had stepped out from behind his own tombstone to address her, with his intimate grace and soft insinuating voice. She breathed with the vision; she all but spoke for him.
Do you think there is one person here who dares to look into himself?
It was the first thing he had said to her, at a dance in Hanover Square. And now, with an air almost of obedience, she looked.