Byron in Love by Edna O’Brien

George Leigh, former equerry of the Prince of Wales, a man of the turf, an habitué of the gaming tables, charming to women and overbearing to subordinates, is mired in debt. Arriving in London in April 1813, she had to leave her house at Six Mile Bottom near Newmarket in Cambridgeshire to escape the bailiffs, her three children elsewhere and her husband on an extended visit to his racing friends.
    Byron, though still smarting from Lady Oxford’s defection, is pleased at the announcement of her arrival and has asked Lady Melbourne to get him a ‘she-voucher’ for Almack’s Dancing Palace in King Street, a hundred-foot assembly room to which only the privileged were admitted. Augusta is in his rooms in Bennett Street, his books and his sabres along the walls, rooms where women were rarely admitted, tired from the coach journey, somewhat dowdy, given to blushing and shy as a hare, like Byron himself. She is to stay with her cousin, the Hon. Theresa Villiers, in nearby Berkeley Street and already Byron is promising to watch over her as if she were an unmarried woman. Her presence is soon a delight, that softening influence that he always sought in women, Augusta making the short journey each day to be with him, chatty, pliant and silly with her large grey eyes and her baby talk, she seems to understand him as no woman previously had. It’s crinkum and crankum and laughter, pulling him out of his grumps, and the lame foot that he had so determinedly hidden from all others, not hidden from her and christened by them ‘the little foot’. And so it is Guss and Goose and Baby Byron and foolery and giggles, Augusta wearing the new dresses and silk shawls he has bought for her, the thrill of showing her off to the acerbic hostesses, home in his carriage at five or six in the morning, gabbling, mimicking the hoi polloi and somehow it happened, the transition from affection to something untoward. Never, he said, ‘was seduction so easy’. They are besotted, they are in love, they are confused, travelling from London to Six Mile Bottom, then back to London again, making irrational plans to go abroad. Soon there are hints to his friends, Lady Melbourne informed of the Gordian knot tied too close to his heart, and to Tom Moore he writes, ‘I am, at this moment, in a far more serious and entirely new scrape than any of the last twelvemonths, and that is saying a great deal.’
    To himself he admits that this love is a mixture of good and diabolical as all passions are. He gives Colonel Leigh £1,000, cancels a passage that he was to make alone on a ship and prepares to elope with Augusta, possibly to Sicily. Augusta wishes to bring one of her daughters with her, but Byron detests children and says anyhow a child can be conceived on the spot. Confiding in her few friends, Augusta is told to recall her mother’s madness at leaving a husband for Mad Jack and precipitating her own death. Lady Melbourne, her suspicions founded, tells him, ‘If you do not retreat, you are lost forever, it is a crime for which there is no forgiveness in this world or in the next.’ The plans to travel begin to falter. There is a plague across Europe, there is their mounting trepidation and the condemnation of the world waiting to fall upon them. He resolves to go away anyhow, to cut himself off from her, a passage in any ship, Cadiz, St Petersburg, Italy, anywhere. Deeply in debt, horrified at casting up his moral accounts, he nevertheless prepares for this flight by ordering swords, guns, mahogany dressing boxes, writing desks, uniforms, umpteen pairs of nankeen trousers, scarlet officers’ coats, gold epaulettes, snuff boxes, telescopes and precious gifts for Mussulman nobles.
    Lady Melbourne warns him never to return to Six Mile Bottom, he does anyhow, leaves after twenty-four hours, he and Scrope Davies that night consuming six bottles of claret and burgundy in Cambridge. He returned to London a