Free A Quiet Adjustment by Benjamin Markovits Page B

and strictly hedged about. She wished to indicate to Lord Byron how acceptable his attentions would be, without appearing to play for them. The fact that she still thought of the experiment as a kind of game suggested that she hadn’t yet taken on the full weight of her aunt’s advice. In any case, Annabella intended to win it. The idea of scoringoff Lady Melbourne was just what a daughter of Sir Ralph was practically bound, by filial duty, to delight in.
    In the event, it took her considerably longer than a minute or two. Lady Melbourne appeared, at shortening intervals, to inquire how her niece got on. Annabella waved her away, with a practised blush and a shake of the head. The fact was, as she ‘confessed’ to her aunt afterwards, that she had enjoyed the task of composing her lover from scratch. She doubted, she said, whether any man would ever exert himself as much in living up to her idea of a husband as she had in framing it. Lady Melbourne, smiling, sat down and picked up the paper to read. Miss Milbanke asked her to excuse the several blottings; she could not refrain from indulging her powers of correction. Flesh-and-blood gentlemen, she found, rarely suffered being improved upon so patiently. Her aunt said nothing; and so Annabella, after a minute, gave way to silence herself, surprised by the flutter of vanity she felt: that of an artist seeing her work examined.
    Years later she remembered the scene and was constantly struck, not so much by the subtlety of her intent or its naivety, as by what the combination of the two had produced: a kind of prescience. Yes, she was young. She had had little sense of the force that her ideas would achieve in their reality, and her tone suggested most clearly the imaginative luxury to which a spoilt daughter had become accustomed. But the contradictions in her description had been only too faithfully played out in the conflicts of fact; and though the free expression of them had not, at first, been without its ironies, it was a mistake to dismiss out of hand the sharpness of her vision. She had seen clearly what lay ahead, and her best consolation lay in the fact that she had, she believed, lived up to her sense of desert.
    Her aunt read out, selectively, her sketch of a husband. The paper lay in the flat of Lady Melbourne’s palm. She lifted a lorgnette to her eyes to scan the page and began to declaim it in the off-hand fluent rhythms that carried her own conversation along. Her voice had a kind of smile in it; it was, almost perfectly, an expression capable of being put on and kept up. ‘ That her husband was to maintain consistent principles of duty ,’ she read; ‘ that he must be possessed of strong and generous feelings . . . And pray,’ she interrupted herself suddenly, glancing up at her niece, ‘how was he to reconcile them, when these opposed each other?’
    Annabella repressed a smile: she had reckoned on a little quizzing of this sort. One could scarcely suspect Lord Byron of ‘consistent principles of duty’. She had hoped, by this opening sally, to put her aunt off the scent of what she was hunting for. But it mattered just as much to throw Lord Byron a little in her way—to hint that she might be willing to come round. No one, of course, could claim a more generous share of strong feelings than the poet himself. Paradox, then, was the note to be struck; and Annabella was conscious of the almost physical pull involved in taking with one hand what she refused with another. She hoped to require from her husband ‘ an equal tenor of affection ’, but she ventured to assert that ‘ any attachment, which has not been violently fixed, cannot steadily endure ’. Lord Byron’s capacity for, as Annabella put it, ‘violently fixing’ an attachment, the mother-in-law of Lady Caroline, and his great confidante in their affair, had little reason to suspect, but she could not answer for his