Byron in Love by Edna O’Brien Page A

distraught man. Bizarrely, he resumes a correspondence with Annabella Milbanke, saying that on the score of friendship he cannot trust himself as he could not help but love her. His doctor, unsurprisingly, diagnoses an awryness of mind and body, emotions out of compass, which he ascribes to a life of prodigal excesses. To vanquish his ‘demon’, which is to say the conquering of his love for Augusta, he accepts an invitation from his Cambridge friend, ‘that fool of fools’, Sir Wedderburn Webster.

TWELVE
    Sir Wedderburn, that ‘glorious object for cuckoldom’, recently married to Lady Frances, daughter of the Earl of Mountnorris, invited Byron to visit them at Aston Hall, near Rotherham in Yorkshire. Augusta, at Byron’s request, has also been invited, but she declines, now finding herself pregnant and therefore queasy and also guessing that she might be a wallflower in that company. Accepting, Byron requests that he be excused from going to the races at Doncaster and also from dining with them, as he does not dine at all.
    The ensuing farcical goings-on, what with misplaced passion and clandestine glances, could easily have been penned by the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whom Byron greatly admired.
    Lady Frances proves to be pretty and pleasing, but in delicate health and according to Byron, ‘close to decline’. Webster, ‘jealous to jaundice’, gives orations on his wife’s beauty, kisses her hand several times at table, overtures which she receives with a noticeable lifelessness. The other guests are frightful, facetious and frivolous. Byron, despite his earlier demur, does attend dinners, Webster droning on about his wife’s virtues and high principles, comparing her morals to Christ, at which Byron, fortified with claret, laughs so exceedingly that his host is outraged and harmony only restored because as Byron said the devil himself thought it proper to do so. Daily missives are dispatched to Lady Melbourne and for secrecy’s sake the denomination of ‘Ph’ is given to Lady Frances, whose virtue must be preserved.
    Webster warns Byron that ‘femme’ must not see Byron’s copies of Dante or Alfieri, which would do her infinite damage. Yet ‘femme’ is beginning to show a certain interest in Byron, evidenced by her eyes, her change of colour, a trembling hand and a devotional attitude. Meanwhile, Webster, the Othello monopolist, who in his leisure time writes pamphlets, expounds at table on what he would do to any man who gazed too long at his wife or sought to compromise her–he would exterminate such a brute. Byron concludes to Lady Melbourne that his throat might soon be cut, but vows to retaliate with a ‘roughing’ and with shaming Webster by citing the country wenches that he has been pursuing.
    Augusta’s frantic letters go unanswered, as Byron has found another perch.
    The topography of the house however is not ideal for the putative but by now more manifest lovers. In the billiards room, ‘amidst the clashing of billiard balls and the barking Nettle’, a poodle which the Websters have given Byron as a present, a declaration is made. Ph asks Byron how a woman who liked a man could inform him of it. Imprudently, as he tells Lady Melbourne and ‘in tender and tolerably turned prose’, he risks all by writing a letter. He hands it to Ph in the billiards room, when, to their consternation, ‘Marito’, whom Byron wished at the bottom of the Red Sea, enters, but the Lady with great presence of mind deposits the letter inside her gown and close to her heart. So begins another amatory correspondence under Webster’s roof, Byron also writing to Annabella Milbanke, addressing her as ‘My dear friend’. For Byron, Ph’s letters, which he leaves on the desk in his bedroom, reek too much of virtue and the soul, but then again she is a woman who takes prayers morning and night