Free Byron in Love by Edna O’Brien Page B

answer him. What can he have said? His ‘underlook’, as it was called, excited them, as indeed did the rumours that he was an infidel and dreadfully perverted. His lameness, while evoking pity, also quickened desire. The combination of genius and Satanism was irresistible, all thirsting for an introduction if only to receive a lash of his bitter tongue or maybe, maybe, to feature ‘in his lays’. The Duchess of Devonshire, writing to her son Augustus Foster in Washington, described the enthusiasm and curiosity that surrounded him dwarfing any mention of the war in Spain or Portugal, flattered and praised wherever he appeared. One lady, Annabella Milbanke, sighting him in that intoxicating season of his fame, found him ‘wanting in the calm benevolence that would touch [her] heart’, though she would go on to fall in love with him.
    In the daytime, to offset the hazards of nightly revels, he boxed with Gentleman Jackson, fenced with Henry Angelo and had Fletcher rub him down with liniments in order that he could reappear that same evening with the air of ‘cool languor’ that he cultivated.
    In his dark clothes, exuding an air of mystery, his whole appearance was a testimony to the cureless wound within. Even women barred by class and by circumstance from these gilded salons sought to introduce themselves to Byron and he was inundated with declarations of love. Oh yes, their motives, they each insisted, were totally honourable, they wished only to reach the poetic soul of Childe Harold, whom Byron himself deemed ‘a repulsive personage’.
    â€˜You whom everybody loves or wishes to love’ the courtesan Harriette Wilson wrote, asking if they might meet alone, her letters bearing the seal of a cupid. She knew he was clever, she knew he was unhappy, but whatever his faults or defects, her honest heart was prepared to love him. He was Poet, Devil and God, attributes that appealed to every woman, but especially her, pleading that she might once hope to kiss him before he died. Henrietta d’Ussieres, receiving no reply to her effusions on gilt-edged notepaper tied with blue ribbon, said that if he wished her not to continue writing to him, he had only to send his servant to the ‘penny post office in Mount Street’ to tell the clerk that he wished no more correspondence from her, but that if he kept silent, then she would go on writing to him. She too believed she was his Thyrza. Touching on a future scenario, she cast herself as ‘the sister whom he love[d]’ but did not realise it. True to his unpredictability, Byron did put pen to paper and reading it, Henrietta yielded to ‘breathless palpitations’, she was ready to bare her soul. She was a mountain girl with a touch of the savage in her, had had a fraught upbringing, had been married at a young age to a superannuated rake and claimed to have met Napoleon in Lausanne, who spoke ‘soothing words’ to her after she was almost trampled on by the horse of his aide-de-camp. She imagined herself in his rooms, moving about on tiptoe, arranging his papers while he wrote his ‘angelic verses’. However, when they did meet, her fluster was great, having encountered Byron the man, rather than Byron the poet, and all illusion was shattered.

TEN
    From 1812 to 1814, at the peak of his fame, Byron’s heart, as he said, was always alighting on the nearest perch and there were many perches at his disposal.
    The fugue of women involved with him included Lady Melbourne, his tactique confidante and co-conspirator; Lady Caroline Lamb, her daughter-in-law; Lady Oxford, his half-sister Augusta Leigh, Lady Frances Webster and Annabella Milbanke. To Lady Melbourne he wrote three and four times a day, enclosing copies of all the love letters he was receiving, flattering her, adding that if she were younger she would turn his head as she had indeed turned his heart; and to Annabella Milbanke, her niece and his