Mad, Bad, Impossible to Know - Page 5

Even more than the debacle de Caro, this one had the attraction of danger. Byron fancied himself something of a connoisseur of sin, and with Augusta he killed two birds with one stone: adultery and incest. Conscience intervened somewhere in the second act, as Byron, as if to save himself from his own impulses, sought out Annabella a second time. This time she said yes, but it was too late. Even as Byron flung himself into marriage with her, he couldn't purge Augusta from his brain. After the wedding, the groom told the bride she had made the worst mistake of her life, and that if she had only said yes the first time she could have saved him. Waking up that night, seeing the red cloth of the canopy illumined by a candle, he shrieked: "Good God I am surely in hell!"

It was a hell the three principals would never escape. Not only did Byron not hide his attraction to his half-sister, he endlessly taunted his new wife with it. That wasn't all; Byron apparently also tried giving Annabella a few harsh lessons in anal sex, which — according to which story you believe — either horrified her or gave her so much guilty pleasure that it only underscored her lifelong bitterness toward him. After a year with him, she took their young daughter — whom he had insisted on naming Augusta Ada — and split, threatening him with a divorce full of allegations both nasty and fatal: not just incest, but homosexuality, which was then punishable by death. Caro reentered the scene to provide Caro with all the inside details of Byron's taste for boys.

The threat of scandal, according to MacCarthy, is what would force Byron into exile from England. David Crane's The Kindness of Sisters takes it a step further: Byron had outgrown England, and found a reason to leave. The country had long since begun to bore him, and he had "needed the the emotional and mental restraints of marriage to give the physical and claustrophobic urgency to his dissatisfaction necessary to propel him into action." Like Joyce and Ireland a century later, he required a strong decisive break with his homeland.

What really drives Crane's fascinating story, though, isn't Byron so much as the legacy of his exes and their adult children. After Byron's death, Augusta found herself financially dependent on Annabella, who reinvented herself as an evangelical shrew bent on ridding England of the curse of Byronism. Annabella made sure Augusta never stopped paying for her sins. Her ultimate revenge came through Augusta's daughter Medora, who may or may not have been sired by Byron. When Medora got knocked up by her brother-in-law, she turned in destitution to Annabella for help; Annabella welcomed the chance not only to help the poor girl, but to let her know that she was actually the product of incest, thus turning her against her mother forever. To her credit, Medora would eventually spurn Annabella too — as would Annabella's own daughter. Augusta Ada, who inherited both her mother's love of mathematics and her father's sense of risk, had an early grasp of the principles of Sir Thomas Babbage's "analytical machine," the forerunner of the computer. Had she not been waylaid by a gambling addiction and uterine cancer, which would kill her at the same age as her father, she might have contributed more than a little literature on the subject. Quite against Annabella's wishes, Ada became both more aware and more sympathetic to her heritage, and chose to be buried by her father's side. She received some measure of immortality in 1981, when the U.S. Department of Defense developed the ADA computer language.

Article Author: Rodney Welch

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