Free The Queen and Lord M by Jean Plaidy Page B

Prime Minister. She had not thought it incongruous to consider that he would attain this goal, and had the utmost confidence that one day he would be the leader of the Whigs.
    ‘Dear Mamma,’ he murmured. ‘Right as usual.’
    And after that disastrous scene of Caroline’s attempted suicide he had taken her to Ireland and sought to calm her. Surprisingly, she had seemed tolerably happy there. He had always wanted a son and he had one, although two other children had died in infancy. When was it he had first been forced to admit that Augustus was not normal? The boy was only six years old at the time of Caroline’s attempted public suicide. ‘He’s a little backward,’ they had said. ‘Some children are.’ But of course later he knew that Augustus would go through life with the mind of a child.
    What tragedy, people said, for William Lamb! A mad wife, his only child mentally deficient and his political career in ruins. But his charming indifference had made him as outstanding as their dynamic energy did most men.
    Caroline had continued to fret for Byron and Lady Melbourne had decided it would be useful if the fascinating poet were married, so with characteristic verve she produced a wife for him – her own niece Annabella Milbanke – and rather to everyone’s astonishment Byron agreed to the match.
    Caroline had been overtaken by melancholy when the marriage took place; she shut herself away in her rooms and did not emerge for days; it transpired later how she had occupied herself and in the meantime Lady Melbourne made William see that he must agree to a separation from his wife if he were to continue with his career. So he had agreed; and the deeds of separation had been drawn up. How Caroline had wept and thrown herself at his feet and clung to him and demanded to know what she would do without him! She was fascinated by Lord Byron, she declared; she was ready to die when he deserted her, and would have done so if she had not been prevented. But if William Lamb deserted her she would surely die. She was wild; she was mad; but he knew that she meant what she said. The loss of Byron had filled her with passionate rage; the loss of William Lamb would fill her with melancholy; and the latter was the more dangerous of the two.
    He had tried to reason with her, but who had ever reasoned with Caroline? She was his creature; he had sought to mould her; he had failed; but he could not forget her as he had seen her at thirteen and later when they had married – slim, boyish, with the short golden hair and the enormous wild eyes; she exasperated but she enchanted. She was a tragedy to herself and to him; but he supposed he could never be unmoved by her.
    So he had capitulated and when the lawyers had come with the papers for him to sign they had found them together, she laughing, insisting on feeding him with thin slices of bread and butter.
    ‘The papers are ready for your signature,’ he had been told, and she had watched him, puckish, impudent and pleading all at once.
    ‘Take them away,’ he had said. ‘We have no need of them now.’
    Then she had danced and flung her arms about his neck and had been passionate and gay – and mad of course, always mad.
    But when it transpired that during those nights she had shut herself away she had been writing a novel, this was too much even for him to forgive. For the book told the story of herself, her husband and Lord Byron, highly exaggerated and romanticised. How could she have done this? It seemed as though she had deliberately sought ways and means of humiliating him and destroying them both. He had only learned of the book’s existence when it was on the point of being published and he went to her at once. ‘It can’t be true,’ he had cried. ‘You could not be so foolish.’
    She had given him that puckish look as she retorted: ‘Haven’t you yet learned that there is no end to my foolishness?’
    ‘I have stood by you through great difficulties,’ he had