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

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СКАЧАТЬ as a young girl, or seen the drawing that Sir George Hayter had done of her in her late twenties, would have recognised her. She might never have been in any conventional sense a beauty, but there had been a charm and elasticity about her that had long since gone, the woman Hayter so wonderfully captured worn away to the faded creature for whom every anxious step seemed an act of atonement to the world around her.

      There was even something in the way she carried herself, her long, black shawl pulled tight around her as though she might disappear into it, that suggested the same air of surrender. For most of her lifetime she had struggled with whatever resources she could muster to keep a hostile world at bay, but just two months past her sixty-eighth birthday, and with ‘death in her face’⁸⁹, the Hon. Mrs Augusta Leigh had at last nothing more to give or ask than to die in peace.

      She had only travelled once before on the railway, but even for someone less nervous and sick, the prospect from her window would have been a bewildering one. As the train swung southwards and left the Greenwich line and the teeming slums of Bermondsey behind, the soaring glass house of the Great Exhibition visible in the distance, it began to cross a city that was changing by the week and almost by the day, spreading and growing with the railways that were transforming it, sprouting new villas and settlements, degrading suburbs into slums and villages into suburbs in a thrusting dialectic of population, railway and building that had left any world Augusta had known far behind.

      It was a new age that Augusta instinctively and rightly feared, but as the train gathered speed and finally escaped the tentacular spread of London, moving through a landscape still relatively unchanged from her youth, it was this older world that threatened most danger. For more than twenty years she had looked forward to this journey with all the optimism and placatory desire to accommodate that had characterised her youth, but as the train slowed across the common land and farms near Reigate, coming to a standstill at the heart of what one contemporary guide called England’s ‘forgotten Eden’, this older, less resilient Augusta must have known that for the last representative of a ‘serpent race’⁹⁰ there was little mercy to be expected.

      If there had been any doubts about that, the letter she had received, sent from Brighton on 11 February, would have ended them. ‘Since the cessation of our personal intercourse’, she had read in a neat, firm hand she had not seen in two decades,

      you have more than once asked me to see you. If you still feel that wish, I will comply with it. We may not long have it in our power, Augusta, to meet again in this life, and to do so might be the means of leaving to both of us a remembrance of deep though sad thankfulness. But this could not be the effect unless every worldly interest were absolutely excluded from our conversation, and there were the most entire and mutual truthfulness. No other expectations must be entertained by you for a moment. On any other terms I cannot see you again, unless summoned to your Death-bed.⁹¹

      She had, too, her instructions. A fly would be waiting at the station to take her to the White Hart. When the train stopped she remained sitting where she was, a dowdily dressed figure from a previous age, waiting like some sacrificial victim at the altar of Victorian self-justification and moral rectitude to which she had been brought. After a short while a servant in drab livery carrying a visiting card appeared at her window. On the card was a name: Lady Byron.

       II

       THE MEETING

      Tuesday, 8 April, 1851. The White Hart, Reigate. A large room decorated in an oppressive clutter of different periods and styles, an amalgam of the Georgian coaching age and Victorian, the walls sombre maroon relieved only by the glint of frames, the woodwork dark, the scattered chairs covered in chintzes. A door, ajar, opens into the left wall, against which is a long, black, horse-hair sofa. On the opposite side of the room a wood fire burns low in an open grate. Under a glass dome on the mantel is an elaborate ivory-faced clock, its pendulum swinging with an insistent, audible ticking. Above, a mirror; on either side, open bookcases. In the left foreground a heavy square legged mahogany serving table, with a cut glass vase of dried flowers, papers scattered across it, a small travelling case with its lid open, outdoor bonnet, gloves etc. Back right, a window opens onto the garden beyond, which drops away and rises again to a skyline of still bare beech trees, and a cold, grey sky. Back left a large corner cupboard, and between them a regency pier table, with a gilded, finialled bird cage. Above it, incongruously flanked on either side by sporting prints, hangs a large framed print of Manfred on the Jungfrau, the face of Manfred contorted by suffering, his fist raised in one last gesture of defiance.

      In front of the picture, a woman in her late fifties, in a lavender coloured dress stands staring silently up, her arms folded across her chest, the fists clenching and unclenching in a compulsive gesture. She can be no more than a little over five feet in height, with an unusually high forehead, the habitual pallor of her face slightly flushed with agitation, hard blue eyes, sharp features, pursed mouth, silver hair under a widow’s cap of transparent material.

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