I, Ada Read online

  ‘The engine of the boat is powered by steam,’ I say, remembering what I have read with Miss Stamp about the inventions of Watt and Trevithick. ‘The engine turns the paddles of the boat, and this propels it forwards.’

  ‘It’s a simple idea,’ says Miss Stamp, ‘but such a powerful one. It makes you wonder what else could be accomplished with steam.’

  ‘Just you wait,’ says Robert Noel, lounging against the rail next to us. I’ve always liked Robert Noel, who is a kind of cousin of Mamma’s; he has a way of making everything sound exciting, even dull things. ‘Soon – mark my words – people will be able to travel up and down the country by steam locomotive. Letters delivered in a day! Goods carted from town to town! Imagine it!’

  I can imagine it. ‘There are other things you could do with steam,’ I say. ‘What about a giant, steam-powered music box, so big that it could be heard across a vast expanse of countryside... or steam-powered ice skates that could propel the skater incredibly fast along a frozen river?’ This is the kind of thing that I would normally say to Miss Stamp alone, but I recognise that Robert Noel is a fellow traveller, and as such may share in our conversation.

  He chuckles in an avuncular fashion. ‘What an imagination you have, Ada. Be sure it doesn’t get you into trouble, now.’

  The boat chugs and chatters, cutting a steady-paced pathway through the grey-green waves, until at last the Continent appears: a blurred sweep of distant cliffs, with a ruffle of cloud above it.

  I stare at it, awe-stricken. ‘I, Ada, have crossed an entire sea,’ I whisper, to no one.

  ‘It’s amazing to think,’ says Miss Stamp, ‘of these two countries being at war for so many years.’

  ‘And it’s cost this country dearly,’ adds Robert Noel.

  It is only as we are disembarking that I remember that my father also crossed this same stretch of water. When I do remember, it doubles my sense of adventure and magical promise.

  I don’t recall much about Calais, or the carriage journey we take thereafter, but the Dutch port of Rotterdam, which we reach within a few days’ time, is a revelation to me. I am enchanted by the houses – slimmer, for the most part, than London townhouses, but with an abundance of windows, as though every occupant is a dreamer, perching wistfully on a windowsill and looking out towards the harbour.

  ‘Even the air is different here,’ I tell Miss Stamp delightedly, as we watch the boats in the port, the gulls darting and looping overhead. Everything is different. The windmills, for example, have a character that is altogether their own; they seem more colourful than English windmills, and bolder. I adore them. There is one particular windmill that catches my imagination: De Blauwe Molen. For days, it inhabits my thoughts.

  ‘Use it in a story,’ urges Miss Stamp; I think this a very sound idea.

  Mamma, meanwhile, eats prodigiously hearty breakfasts every day, all the while poring over literature about the educational institute that we are to visit in Switzerland, and reminding me to exercise diligence with my lessons. I do try, working each morning with Miss Stamp, but I also find time to attempt my first short story, entitled ‘The Mystery of the Blue Windmill’.

  After Baden and Heidelberg, we travel to Geneva. It’s a long, tiring, dusty journey over the mountainside of Jura; Louisa Chaloner has been reading to us from Mariana Starke’s guide for travellers, and although I have grown sick of listening to her at times, there’s no denying how excited I am that I will shortly see the lake.

  ‘Geneva is a town of some thirty-thousand inhabitants,’ Louisa Chaloner intones in her dry, no-nonsense voice, as we begin to descend the mountain.

  ‘I don’t know how you can read in these conditions,’ says Mamma, whose face is pale with nausea. It is a horribly bumpy road; even Robert Noel and Miss Stamp are quiet and subdued.

  Undeterred, Louisa goes on: ‘Soon, we shall pass a villa that belonged to the philosopher Voltaire.’

  Twisting away from her, I divert my attention to the small carriage window and all that can be seen through it: a thicket of fir trees... pretty little cottages sticking like limpets to the mountainside... I note these visual treasures, keeping silent count in my head, marking them down to be remembered always. Presently I let out a squeal of joy, so loudly that Louisa stops, annoyed, in the middle of her monologue.

  ‘Oh, Mamma, the lake!’

  It has suddenly appeared beneath us – crystalline, tranquil, exquisite – surrounded by glaciers so tall and graceful that they almost defy belief. Robert Noel asks in French for the coachman to stop. We get out, unsteady on our legs, and a moment of silence enshrouds our little group.

  ‘Can it be real?’ I say.

  ‘Of course it is real,’ says Mamma. ‘The evidence of your own eyes should suffice to convince you of that. Don’t make fanciful remarks, Ada.’

  But it is the almost-unrealness that I find so spellbinding, as I stand on the mountainside, with its carpet of tiny flowers, and gaze at the lake. If only I could paint well, I think – or write symphonies, or words of extraordinary beauty; if only I could do something, make something,achieve something that could come close to the majesty of this body of water...

  I nudge my governess. ‘This is why people write poetry, isn’t it?’ I whisper, so that Mamma will not overhear (for I am not sure that she will share my opinion). ‘To try to capture a feeling... like this.’

  Miss Stamp gives me a beauteous smile.

  Louisa Chaloner interrupts my thoughts. ‘Geneva itself,’ she says, still reading aloud, ‘is divided by the river RhÔne. On entering the city, we shall cross over two bridges...’

  Throughout our stay in Geneva, I try, when I can, to work on my story. The Blue Windmill is now situated, naturally, beside a lake of great size and wonder, visited by hundreds of birds, and home to all manner of freshwater fish. But in spite of my ambition, I struggle with the writing. Sometimes the words come easily to me, and I am pleased by the fluency of my ideas; at other times I feel as stale as old Bath cakes, and find myself indulging in frenzies of revising and crossings-out that leave me exhausted at the end of my efforts, and with nothing to show for them but an ache that spreads sharply across my hand, as though I have taxed its bones too greatly.

  One Tuesday morning – it’s a sultry day with a sticky heat that make my undergarments cling unpleasantly to my legs – Mamma and Miss Stamp and I go to visit Geneva’s public library. There’s a silver Roman shield on display; we are drawn to it as bees might be to a particularly prominent sunflower, and hover around it in silence.

  ‘How are you finding Ada’s thoughts, Miss Stamp?’ Mamma says, with customary abruptness, as though I am not there.

  Miss Stamp seems temporarily at a loss for words. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I don’t know if I can speak for Ada about her own thoughts, but those thoughts of hers to which I am privy seem to me to be of great interest and originality.’

  ‘But what about the arrangement of her thoughts?’ Mamma persists. ‘Witnessing my daughter, it seems to me that she veers from exclamations on the prettiness of the view to a meditation on some question of arithmetic, pausing to sing a scale or draw an outline of a chimney in chalk, and then declaring that she might, perhaps, like to learn a new instrument or two!’

  ‘Indeed,’ says Miss Stamp cautiously. It’s true, I do behave like this, and she can’t really deny it.

  Mamma carries on: ‘It seems to me, in short, that Ada’s mind is most worryingly disorganised.’

  At this, she squints furiously at the Roman shield, and then at me, as though comparing us both, and finding me wanting by contrast. There is a pause. Rather morosely, I gaze at the shield. It is a handsome, shiny, heavy-looking thing – exactly what I’d expect the Romans to have made. Someone has beaten away at it for hours, I see, marking it with tiny, identical indentations. In just the same way does Mamma wish my mind to be moulded. It is entirely clear.

&n
bsp; What is Miss Stamp going to say to Mamma? I’ve always thought of her as an ally; someone who will come to my defence – to shield me, even – if I need it. And, sure enough, Miss Stamp tells Mamma, very prettily, that my mind has no shortcomings insofar as its organisation is concerned.

  ‘Well, Miss Stamp,’ says Mamma. ‘You do satisfy me with this response, although it remains my strong conviction that my daughter’s time would be better employed in mathematical pursuits than, for example, in writing romantic and fanciful stories.’

  At no point has she asked me what I think about my own mind, but that doesn’t surprise me; she is paying my governess to educate me, and therefore she can regard my intellect as a purchase, a possession, of her own. But if she were to ask me whether I agree – what would I say? In a way, I consider her observations of the way my mind flits from place to place to be quite accurate. But what she calls disorganisation, I call something different: the feeling of allowing my thoughts to fly from one passion to another, not allowing themselves to be tied down by doubt, or digression, or ideas about rules – well, that, to me, feels more like freedom.

  Mamma has not upset me, and I tell myself that I will not worry about what she thinks about my mind – but, somehow, her comments in the public library work their way a little more deeply under my skin than I would like. I work on my story for another few days, and then – without mentioning it to Miss Stamp – fold the pages in half, tear them twice, and throw them away.

  Geneva

  September 1826

  One day, a week or so before we are due to depart from Geneva, Mamma summons me to her sitting room. ‘I think that it is now time for you to engage formally with the principles of geometry,’ she says.

  I don’t know what has prompted this; perhaps she has been thinking further about my mind, and how best to trammel it, or else perhaps she has always meant to give me the book, which she is holding out to me now, at around this point in our journey.

  The book is called The Elements of Euclid. I open it to its first section, entitled ‘Definitions’.

  I. A point is that which hath no parts, or which hath no magnitude.

  II. A line is length without breadth.

  I look up. Mamma is watching me, almost hungrily; she wants a reaction from me, a declaration of sorts. It feels like a test. Either I will be drawn to Euclid and his writing, or I won’t be; if I am, it will be a victory for her, and if I am not, a failure – on my part as well as hers. But I am thinking so much about what she is thinking that I am forgetting to read on.

  III. The extremities of a line are points.

  IV. A straight line is that which lies evenly between its extreme points.

  The definitions continue, develop, running into pages and pages, deepening in complexity. I turn to another section, mouthing words to myself, absorbing it. This is nothing like fellowship and alligation and the Rule of Three – these are not problems of money and quantity; men mowing acres and boys eating apples. This is... pure, somehow. Unassailable. The fundamental truth of shapes.

  ‘When was this written?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, hundreds of years ago. Thousands,’ says Mamma.

  The thought of this fills me with an inexplicable feeling – a sense of time passing and triangles and squares and pentagons remaining fixed, immutable, dependable. Inventions change the world and how it works, but the mathematical truths that underlie those changes stay the same.

  ‘What do you think, Ada?’ says Mamma.

  ‘It’s... like poetry,’ I say quietly.

  Mamma sniffs. ‘It is not in the least like poetry. These are rules,’ she says.

  ‘What I mean is... I mean that reading this gives me the same sense of something beautiful and constant, such as I would get from reading a passage of Milton,’ I explain.

  At this, Mamma nods very slightly. I think she does understand. She herself writes a good deal of poetry, not that I have read much of it. It’s not poetry that she dislikes; it’s more behaviour that she might describe as ‘poetical’ – having a disorganised mind, for example, or behaving in an unpredictable way. In Mamma’s mind, there exists, I think, a certain separation between the notions of poetry and poetical behaviour; this is certainly true in her own case. It may be less true as far as my father is concerned, for I have not yet been allowed to read anything that he wrote.

  ‘But do you like it?’ she persists, gesturing to the page.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘I like it very much.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she says.

  I have long been an observer of my mother’s desire to ‘do good’; she is by nature a reformer, one who wishes people and projects to adhere to rigid guidelines. She is unsettled by change, or rather, by change that she has not herself anticipated. On the ferry crossing, for example, she thought that the weather would be fine, and the waves unthreatening; when the opposite turned out to be true, she was very ill indeed, from seasickness of course, but also from the fact that things had not happened quite as she had imagined they would. When a roadside inn that had been recommended to her was full, and we had to find lodgings at another, she found it impossible to be happy there, even for a short time, although our accommodation was perfectly agreeable. If Mamma thinks that my mind is disorganised, I believe that the reverse holds true for her: her mind is too organised.

  But Euclid provides something on which we can both agree. And now she and I spend our afternoons puzzling over the nature of circles and spheres, circumferences and intersections, and I come to realise that mathematics is a language that we share.

  When Mamma organises a sailing trip on Lake Geneva on the last day of our stay there, I imagine that she means it as a reward for my hard work. It’s a windy afternoon; the surface of the lake is not as mirror-smooth as it was when we first glimpsed it from the Jura mountainside. Miss Stamp has gone sight-seeing alone, and so it’s just the two of us, Mamma and I, and our guide, a tall young man named Franz, who speaks English in a slow, careful, heavily-accented voice.

  ‘How big is the lake?’ I ask, as we climb aboard the little boat.

  ‘Nineteen leagues in length, and perhaps three and a half in breadth at the widest part, miss,’ he replies.

  The lake feels as big as an ocean, hemmed by prim houses on one side and statuesque mountains on the other – and our boat as small as a dust-speck in a soup tureen. I enjoy how strangely unstable it is; the feeling of seesawing.

  For a while, Mamma and I don’t say much, and I wonder what she is thinking about. The boat circumnavigates the lake, slowly. Then Mamma says: ‘As you know, we are to leave Geneva shortly and travel to Hofwyl. Perhaps it would be useful for you to hear some of its history.’

  Overhead, the cornflower sky is scuffed with clouds; I tilt my head upwards, counting them, and half close my eyes to listen as she talks. Mamma isn’t a natural storyteller, but this is a story that she knows exceptionally well; her voice, often a little stiff and halting, flows smoothly as she tells it.

  ‘It began at the end of the last century,’ she says, ‘when Switzerland was invaded by the French army. Men and women fought bravely and died, and a good many orphan children were left behind, utterly destitute. In Canton Unterwalden, a philanthropist called Henry Pestalozzi provided shelter for the orphans, and there he set up a little school. His methods were quite unusual: he gave the most intelligent children jobs as his assistants, and enlisted their help in running the school – preparing food, mending garments, and cultivating the plot of land that surrounded them. His endeavours attracted the notice and praise of other philanthropists, and eventually the government offered him the Castle of Burgdorff, in Canton Berne, in which to set up his Educational Institution.

  ‘Now, Pestalozzi had an acquaintance by the name of Philipp Emanuel de Fellenberg, and this young man, who had long paid heed to the phrase: “The rich have always helpers enough, help thou the poor”, was a
n ardent follower of Pestalozzi’s ideas. Deeply affected by the principles of the French Revolution, and full of ideas for ways in which the world could change, Dr Fellenberg became Pestalozzi’s neighbour when his father purchased the estate of Hofwyl, just a few miles from Burgdorff. Although there were matters on which the pair did not agree, Pestalozzi arranged to hand over the institute to Dr Fellenberg. And so, twenty years ago, a little cottage was built at Hofwyl. The teachers slept on the upper floor, while the ground floor was used as the school room. Lessons took place all morning; the afternoon was spent working in the garden, while in the evening the teachers would prepare the vegetables for the following day.’

  ‘Is it a little cottage still?’ I say.

  ‘I believe it has grown somewhat,’ says Mamma.

  ‘I like the idea of... of changing the way that the world works,’ I say.

  ‘So do I,’ says Mamma. ‘The phrase he clung to – the rich have always helpers enough, help thou the poor – is close to my own heart too. When you think, Ada, of the squalor, the cramped living spaces, the lack of opportunity that is the reality for so many in England – why, our lives are charmed by comparison. It’s not enough simply to muddle through the daily haze of one’s own existence, is it? When there is so much to be done.’

  She looks at me, eyes bright, and I see someone different, suddenly, on the wooden seat next to me, to the person I used to know. Then, abruptly, she flinches, as though stung by a hidden bee. She looks across the water, scanning the shoreline, frowning as she does so. I follow her gaze. From the edge of the lake, the hills slope up sharply; there, above a plantation of vineyards, upon a ridge, sits a large, square, white villa with a reddish roof.

  ‘There lies the suburb of Cologny,’ says Franz. ‘And that is the Villa Diodati.’

  At this, Mamma catches her breath sharply; watching her hand on the rail, I see how white her knuckles have become. But her voice, when she speaks, is quite level. ‘That is the house.’