The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons. David Crane

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СКАЧАТЬ gambling debts, and although financial troubles over Newstead left Byron in no position to help, his answer emphasises the sad hollowness she alone would fill. The ‘estate is still on my hands’, he began a long list of complaints, ‘& your brother not less embarrassed …

      I have but one relative & her I never see – I have no connections to domesticate with & for marriage I have neither the talent nor the inclination – I cannot fortune-hunt nor afford to marry without a fortune … I am thus wasting the best part of my life daily repenting and never amending … I am very well in health – but not happy nor even comfortable – but I will not bore you with complaints – I am a fool & deserve all the ills I have met or may meet with.⁶²

      There was something prophetic in that last line, because almost from the moment she arrived in London, Byron seems to have been bent on disaster. If ‘form’ is anything to go by, he would inevitably have turned to someone on the rebound from Caroline and Lady Oxford, but if anyone might have done, Augusta seemed to offer everything, the excitement of novelty and the comfort of familiarity, the danger of the forbidden with the guarantee of safety implicit in her name.

      Because above all she was a Byron, and for someone so self-absorbed and yet utterly lacking in self-love as her brother that was an irresistible attraction. In the years since their childhoods he had formed some of the most intense friendships of his life, but it was only with a more attractive version of himself, as he now saw Augusta, a woman with so many of the same mannerisms and the same shyness, that he found his deepest, almost platonic desire for completion realised. ‘For thee, my own sweet sister’, he addressed her,

       in thy heart

      I know myself secure, as thou in mine;

      We were and are – I am, even as thou art –

      Beings who ne’er each other can resign;

      It is the same, together or apart,

      From life’s commencement to its slow decline

      We are entwined – let death come slow or fast,

      The tie which bound the first endures the last!⁶³

      With her endless good-humour and sense of fun, her charm and talent for nonsense – her ‘damn’d crinkum-crankum’⁶⁴ as he called it – Augusta also represented a simple release from the tensions of London life. Almost immediately she became an integral part of his routines, included in his invitations and plans, the novel half of a double-act that was part spontaneous and part calculation. ‘If you like to go with me to ye. Lady Davy’s tonight’, he wrote in a note that nicely captures the blend of pride and vanity with which he looked on her,

      I have an invitation for you – There will be the Stael – some people whom you know – & me whom you do not know & you can talk to which you please – & I will watch over you as if you were unmarried & in danger of always being so … I think our being together before 3d. people will be a new sensation to both.⁶⁵

      With anyone except Augusta this might have led nowhere, but with her chronic habit of subservience, it was only a matter of time before affection and familiarity slid into something more perilous. It is impossible to know with any absolute certainty when brother and sister became lovers, but if the malicious gossip of Caroline Lamb – or Byron’s own boast to Tom Moore that her seduction had cost him little trouble – has any substance it was probably only a matter of weeks or even days.

      The mere use of the word ‘seduction’ in this context however – Byron at his coarsest – wilfully trivialises and misrepresents a relationship that he would always more honestly recognise as the most important of his life. If these things can ever be judged from the outside, it would seem that sex was always of secondary significance in their affair, on Augusta’s side to a limitless capacity for self-surrender, and on Byron’s to the expression of a kindness and generosity that was at the core of his personality.

      And yet when that is said, his letters and verse make it clear that he inspired in the twenty-nine-year-old mother of three a passion that surprised them both with its violence and abandon. In the best known celebrations of their love it is always a platonic ideal of union that Byron is anxious to stress, but in Zuleika’s language in The Bride of Abydos we are almost certainly taken closer to the earthier reality of its early days. ‘To see thee, hear thee, near thee stay,’ Zuleika tells the man she believes to be her brother, in a passage which unconsciously echoes the startled self-discovery of Shakespeare’s Perdita in the great fourth act of A Winter’s Tale

      And hate the night I know not why,

      Save that we meet not but by day,

      With thee to live, with thee to die,

      I dare not my hope deny:

      Thy cheek, thine eyes, thy lips to kiss,

      Like this – and this – no more than this;

      For, Allah! Sure thy lips are flame:

      What fever in thy veins is flushing?

      My own have nearly caught the same,

      At least I feel my cheek, too, blushing.⁶⁶

      Even when this is recognised, however, the seamless, almost inevitable transition from sister to lover was for Augusta only one stage in a more complete annihilation of self. ‘Partager tous vos sentiments,’ she wrote to him in November 1813, enclosing with the note a lock of her hair: ‘Ne voir que par vos yeux’ – ‘to share in your feelings, to see only with your eyes, to act only on your advice, to live only for you, that is my only desire, my plan, the only destiny that could make me happy.’⁶⁷ ‘To soothe thy sickness,’ Zuleika continues in the same vein in the Bride,

      watch thy health,

      Partake, but never waste thy wealth,

      Or stand with smiles unmurmuring by,

      And lighten half thy poverty;

      Do all but close thy dying eye,

      For that I could not live to try;

      For these alone my thoughts aspire:

      More can I do, or thou require?⁶⁸

      The tragedy for Augusta, however, was that Byron did require more, because for him the affair was more complex and guilt-ridden than her simple devotion could comprehend. In reckless moments he might publicly ridicule the moral parochialism of an incest taboo, but at other times it could disturb him with a fear that stopped him naming Augusta even in the privacy of his journal. ‘Dear sacred name, rest ever unreveal’d,’ he quoted from Pope’s Eloisa in his November 1813 journal, adding his own gloss: ‘At least even here, my hand would tremble to write it.’⁶⁹

      Somewhere behind this fear lies the legacy of his Calvinist childhood, and yet as his deathbed shows, Byron was too intellectually and morally courageous to be СКАЧАТЬ