I, Ada Read online

  I am not supposed to run around so freely and with such abandon, as the gardener’s sons are wont to do. I know this, but it’s not enough to stop me from doing it.

  We enter Kirkby through the kitchen door. Mamma strides down the passage – she is short, but able to propel herself forwards with tremendous speed – and I hasten after her. Just ahead of us, the parlourmaid, Lotty, is carrying a tray into the drawing room. Under the chandelier in the hall, Mamma pauses and takes hold of my hands, scanning them for vestiges of dirt. ‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘You’ll do, I suppose.’

  The drawing room door stands ajar: I can see Grandmama in her reading-chair, head bent in pleasant silence over a little book. Grandpapa is out of sight, but he may well be at his desk, looking over some correspondence to do with the estate. I am very fond of my grandparents.

  ‘Your new governess has arrived,’ says Mamma, interrupting my thoughts. ‘I want you to be a good, diligent, obedient child – when she’s teaching you, and at all other times as well. Will you, Ada?’

  She looks down at me, her expression conveying exasperation and affection in equal measure, as it so often does. I look back at her in contemplation. I do want Mamma to be pleased with me. I want it so much that I can feel it in my very veins; if you opened me up, you’d find it written large inside of me, I’m sure.

  But then there’s the other thing that I want, and it’s to do things my own way. I wish those things were reconcilable. It seems, so much of the time, that they are not; that I am not one person, but two people, who want different things.

  ‘Well, Ada?’

  She is waiting for a reply, and I give it to her. ‘Yes, Mamma,’ I say.

  A governess! I hadn’t realised that I was to have such a thing. What will she be like? I perch on the sofa, laughing at Grandpapa as he makes amusing animal-noises for my benefit, and keep a close eye on the door. Will she be strict? Serious? Young or old? What will she teach me?

  Soon enough, the door opens, and Miss Lamont is shown in. Her face has the appearance of being freshly scrubbed, but she still seems a little hot and dishevelled from her journey. She is small and neat, with fairish hair combed strictly away from a central parting, and cheeks as round and rosy as apricots. Miss Lamont takes my hand with solemnity, but a smile lurks at the corners of her mouth, hinting at a sense of humour.

  ‘Ada is in great need of intellectual discipline,’ Mamma says, pouring tea. ‘You must take a rigorous approach.’

  ‘Yes, milady,’ says Miss Lamont respectfully. Her Irish accent is soft and pleasant to hear. She darts a look in my direction, a questioning sort of look, as though she is testing the validity of Mamma’s request. I nibble at a piece of sugared fruit and listen as they organise my education: we are to do French and music and geography, and drawing too, and reading and grammar and spelling... the list seems almost endless.

  My grandmother says to my mother: ‘A fine range of subjects, Annabella.’ Turning to my new governess, she adds: ‘We made sure our daughter was just as well-educated at a similar age. It was of great importance to us.’

  ‘But we must also make sure,’ says Grandpapa, giving me a wink of solidarity, ‘that little Ada has time enough for amusements.’

  ‘Arithmetic,’ says Mamma, as though she has not heard this. ‘It is through mathematics, Miss Lamont, that I feel sure that the wildness of Ada’s nature will be successfully trammelled.’

  I do not know the meaning of the word trammelled but it sounds like the sort of thing my mother would want my nature to be: a mixture of trained and pummelled. Something meaningful and intense, like a basin full of shockingly cold water into which one must plunge one’s face.

  ‘This is a beautiful house,’ says Miss Lamont, rather hesitantly, looking out through the great bay windows. ‘And what woodland!’

  ‘I prefer my own childhood home,’ Mamma says, ‘at Seaham.’ She sighs. ‘But this place is not without its attractions. There is a tree in the park – a Lebanon cedar – that Lord Byron particularly loved. He accompanied me here – only once, before my parents inherited the estate from my uncle, but I recall he spent a full afternoon in the shade of its branches, writing verses. Alas, I cannot remember which ones.’

  Miss Lamont expresses surprise and interest. I too am fascinated. A tree that my father loved – here at Kirkby Mallory? It is news to me, and exciting news. It is very unlike her to mention my father at teatime; perhaps it is for the benefit of my new governess.

  ‘Where is the tree, Mamma?’ I say.

  But my mother is asking the parlourmaid for more milk and does not, I think, hear me.

  Kirkby Mallory, Leicestershire

  May 1821

  My lessons begin the following day. Each lesson is to last fifteen minutes precisely; we are to do four or five lessons before we have lunch at one o’clock, and then the same quantity of lessons in the afternoon. Miss Lamont is full of energy and enthusiasm, which in turn affects me, and the first morning passes quite quickly. I follow the motion of her hand as she writes; I nod my head, showing my understanding; I trace letters in a hand that barely wobbles. I write my name: ADA.

  Miss Lamont leans over my work with approval. ‘That’s very good, Miss Byron; very precise.’ She rewards me with a ticket; I cradle it on my lap, pleased to have been given it, although I realise that it is a meaningless square of paper. Mistress Puff appears at my ankles, oozing warmth and companionship; surreptitiously, I reach down to stroke the ridge of fur that runs vertically down her head. She mews in pleasure; Miss Lamont sees her, and smiles. ‘That’s a lovely cat.’

  ‘She’s Persian,’ I say, with importance. I do not expect that Miss Lamont has ever seen a nobler creature than mine.

  We move on to arithmetic: my governess sets me some sums – addition and subtraction, nothing that I can’t do with ease. I complete my tasks, and am given another ticket.

  Time passes. The sun swells, beating hotly through the curtains. A fly presses its wings with urgency against the window. A familiar restlessness in my limbs begins to take hold. The nursery becomes an airless prison, a trap. I wriggle and fidget; the sums don’t come out right; I know I am not taking as much care as I should, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Miss Lamont reminds me repeatedly to sit still.

  ‘Will I have to lie on the board if I cannot keep still?’ I ask her.

  Miss Lamont looks perplexed. ‘I believe you, ah, ought to,’ she says, and I hear in her tone of voice that she herself would prefer not to make me do such a thing. There is a long, wide floorboard in the centre of the nursery floor, and there have been occasions when Mamma has insisted that I lie upon it, still as a gravestone, as punishment for fidgeting. To a body that loves to exist in motion, nothing is harder to bear than forced stillness and I have always dreaded that particular penance, worse even than being shut in a cupboard – another of Mamma’s occasionally prescribed punishments.

  ‘Now, please take out your French grammar,’ says Miss Lamont, banishing the subject of the board from our conversation. She begins to talk about irregular verbs. I quite like verbs: they are learned in patterns, and I love patterns of all kinds. There are rules that you can learn, and exceptions to those rules. And then, if you try hard, you can talk in another language – a concept that I find quite thrilling.

  At first, I listen carefully to Miss Lamont. Then, after a while, my attention drifts, as it is wont to do. I can’t help but look out of the window, which gives onto the wide lawns at the back of Kirkby, with the dark smudge of woodland beyond. Did my father really come here and walk amongst those trees? How could I have never known this? There is, I suppose, so much that I do not know about him. I wish Miss Lamont were telling me fairy stories – her voice would be well-suited to it, I think – or else about volcanoes, for which I have lately developed a passion. There is so much to find out, not all of it on the pages of books, but in... well, in everything.


  ‘I fancy that you are not quite paying attention, Ada. What are you thinking about?’

  ‘The tree in the park that was my father’s favourite,’ I reply truthfully.

  Miss Lamont smiles. ‘Now, the verb savoir, again, from the first person singular, if you please—’

  ‘Je save,’ I say, faltering.

  She stops me. ‘Je sais.’

  ‘Je sais, tu sais...’

  Rather laboriously, I stumble and garble my way to the end of the paradigm. I wait for another ticket to be bestowed. Instead, Miss Lamont says: ‘I think perhaps we have done enough for the morning. Would you like to go outside?’

  I fairly fall over myself in my haste to get out of my chair. ‘Oh, yes, Miss Lamont. Yes please.’

  ‘Good: then we shall go. I have not yet explored the grounds, and they seem quite magnificent.’

  We have no need of outer garments, the morning being dry and fine, but we put on sturdier shoes outside the scullery before taking the back door out into the kitchen gardens. I make a point of showing Miss Lamont everything – the leafy dell where I suspect the cabbage-fairies hide; the miniature strawberry plants, whose fruits are blissfully tart and will soon be in season.

  ‘Miss Lamont,’ I say. ‘Do you know what a Lebanon cedar looks like?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ she replies, after some thought. ‘I believe I do.’

  ‘I would like to find the tree that Mamma says my father loved so much. I want to know where it is. I want to see it for myself.’

  ‘If that is what you want to do, Miss Byron, then that is what we shall do.’

  It is at this moment that I decide that I very much like my new governess.

  Now we are making our way through the park. My governess exclaims with delight as two deer – a mother and her fawn – lope gracefully across our path, not seeing us. It’s a beautiful morning; birds call to each other above our heads, and twigs rattle under our feet as we pass. We are not quite sure where we are going, but Miss Lamont promises me that she will know a Lebanon cedar when she sees it, and I am bound to believe her.

  ‘Do you know much of my father’s work, Miss Lamont?’

  There comes a pause. ‘I know a little; perhaps not as much as I ought.’

  We have come to a clearing, beyond which the ground rises up into a soft slope. There, at the edge of the clearing, is a tree, quite immense in stature. It crowns its peers by a good ten feet, like a watchful and kindly god, looking down from a great height. Its leaves burst from its branches in a kind of cloud-formation, as though they are desperate to fly away. At the base of the tree is a little hollow, where a person could lie and look up, content.

  ‘It is a Lebanon cedar, Miss Lamont?’

  My governess assures me of her certainty in this regard.

  ‘Then—’ I am so delighted that I can barely articulate the words. ‘Then this is the tree!’

  Stumbling in my excitement, I race through the swathes of grass. Oh, I can picture him now (even though I do not actually know what he looks like) – my father, long legs carelessly crossed and arms spread out towards the canopy above, head tilted back against the leathery bark. He is deep in thought: verses come to him, swimming through silence, syllables jostling for position like washing on a line... He is calm. He lets the words shuffle and reform. The poem grows like the tree itself: branches sprout from the trunk; shoots and buds bloom brightly, each greener and more alive than the last...

  Reaching the hollow, I throw myself down, with a little more force than perhaps was necessary, because I tear a stocking quite badly. I curl, wriggle, uncurl, the way Puff might do when she wants to make herself comfortable in a chair. Miss Lamont is keeping a tactful distance. Never, never for a minute do I think that this might be the wrong tree. Some knowledge cannot be known, only felt, but it is none the weaker for it. The opposite, in fact. The cedar exudes a smell of impossible richness – a dark-green, smoky perfume, so powerful that one might almost be able to see it wreathing the leaves.

  ‘Do mind your clothes,’ says my governess.

  ‘I shall now compose a poem,’ I tell her, feeling quite giddy at the thought.

  ‘Very well, Ada. Have you need of a pencil?’

  ‘I shall compose it in my head, and we shall write it down later.’

  It must be something fittingly grand: something my father might have thought of writing. Oh, I wish that I knew his work! His books – Mamma has everything he has written to date, I believe – are kept on a shelf in the library that I have not been able to reach. I know that he wrote a good deal about love. Well, I too can write about love. Immediately, I think of Puff, who is very much an object of my affection, although I was very cross with her earlier today on account of her vomiting up something grey and distasteful all over my coverlet. But we won’t worry about her minor indiscretions now. Carefully, eyes tight shut, I begin:

  ‘A sweeter cat there never was

  And nevermore will be.

  All silky ears and spiky claws

  And...’

  It is actually harder than I thought. Perhaps I have started wrong. I am just thinking about what I might reasonably change in my composition in order that the final line might hold a satisfying resolution, when a rather unwelcome sound breaks the peace of my thoughts.

  ‘Ada! Miss Lamont! What is the meaning of this?’

  I open my eyes, Puff and her associated verses dispersed. Wheezing, puce-cheeked, and quite furious-looking, my mother is pacing through the clearing towards us. I hasten to my feet. Miss Lamont brushes the twists of moss from my dress. I have a sense that she is just as trepidatious at this moment as I am, of what is to come.

  ‘Did she run away from you, Miss Lamont?’

  ‘No, Lady Byron. No, she – we—’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ I say, determined that my new governess should not be thought badly of so early on in her employment.

  My mother turns towards me, her eyes full of wrathful perplexity. (She has a rather round face, like a doll’s, but you should not for a moment imagine that her expression is doll-like. Dolls are placid and unquestioning. Mamma is not.)

  ‘I wanted to see my father’s tree,’ I tell her.

  At this, Mamma blinks, looks doubtful, and then casts the sort of glance at the cedar as, perhaps, the King might do to an unwanted subject that he wishes to dismiss hastily from Court.

  Then she says: ‘Arithmetic, and French, and letters, and geography.’ She speaks with such loudness, such deliberate clarity that I fancy any deer who have not been scared away by her appearance will surely remember those words for evermore. ‘At no point in the morning’s schedule were you supposed to go gallivanting off into the woodland. Remember that, please, in the future, Miss Lamont. Ada is a woefully headstrong girl whose passions are difficult to tame. That, however, is your charge. When you return to the nursery, Ada, you will lie quite still on the board in penance. Miss Lamont, you will see to it that she does not move.’

  The sad, shamed procession begins to weave its way joylessly back to the house. Mamma leads, as stiff as the board on which I am to lie. Miss Lamont is looking quite woeful – as though it is she, not I, who will be punished. At the edge of the lawn, I cast a final look back at the Lebanon cedar, and promise that I shall return – one day when Mamma is far out of reach, perhaps at Leamington Spa, a place to which she is fond of going – and finish my poem. And just as I am doing this, I realise that my mother is doing the same. She stares at the tree, love and longing written all over her face. There is a tenderness in her expression now that was not there before.

  I am only five, but I know that it is a tenderness that she wishes to keep a secret, for reasons best known to herself.

  Branch Lodge, Hampstead

  May 1824

  Mistress Puff undulates down the stairs, one leg at a time, and I am trying my hardest to copy her
; to become a cat as best I can, with all the feline grace that an eight-year-old can summon on a dull May afternoon.

  We are living in Hampstead, in a mansion that my mother has rented called Branch Lodge. We came here after my grandmother died – Mamma and Nanny Briggs and Puff and Grandpapa and I. I like it well enough, especially our vantage point, perched as we are over London. But I miss the wide-open spaces of Kirkby Mallory; the garden here is nothing in comparison to the deer-filled park. I miss my grandmother more than I can say. When I was very young, Mamma would go away quite a lot – for rest cures, usually – and it was Grandmama who looked after me. She was almost a second mother. It’s hard to imagine that I will never see her again.

  I also miss having a governess. For all her good intentions, Miss Lamont did not stay long – after a few months, she was gone. Mamma concluded, on the basis of a number of misdemeanours on my part (one episode in particular stands out, in which I bit the housemaid), that my young governess was not able to control me in the manner she had hoped for. I was sad when Miss Lamont left, for I liked her, and I believe that she liked me.

  ‘Why is it, Mamma, that I have no governess?’ I asked her at breakfast, not long ago.

  Mamma looked at me rather reflectively over her Bath cake. (Her appetite is exceptionally good.) ‘Why, Mary Montgomery lets you talk in Italian to her quite often,’ she said, ‘and we do your letters and sums most days, as we have always done.’

  ‘But Mary Montgomery is your friend,’ I persisted. ‘I mean, why is there no one in sole charge of my learning?’

  ‘I am always in charge of your learning,’ she said. ‘Besides, the doctor said that it would be a good idea to halt your education, for a time, and I agreed with him. Your health is poor, Ada, as you know.’