Free Byron's Child by Carola Dunn Page A

red-rimmed with fatigue. “But I won’t disturb you, I’ll just sit quietly. Can I get into your bed? My feet are cold.”
    “No, you cannot.” He spoke quietly but with determination. “You must be mad. What if someone has heard you moving about, seen you come in here? I know we are supposed to be half-brother and -sister, but considering what Charles has told me of the scandal flying about his friend Byron, that would be no protection for you whatsoever.”
    “Charlotte and Emily would not tell tales.”
    “No, but it would distress them. The servants would most certainly gossip, and Roland would throw us out on our ears.”
    “Oh, all right.” Jodie felt disconsolate but knew she sounded petulant. “What are you doing?”
    “I’m trying to get my theories in order for Dr. Brown tomorrow.”
    “Damn Dr. Brown. Can’t you think of anyone else?” Tears pricking her eyelids, she turned and flung out of the room, scarcely remembering to move quietly. All she wanted was a bit of comfort, and all he could think of was his damned physics. And Dr. Brown.
    Determinedly she blinked the tears away and lit her candle from the lamp with a spill. More than ever she needed the distraction of a good book.
    Ada Byron’s life absorbed her: the bright, sickly child, growing up with only her dogs and her horse for affection; the bitter, self-righteous mother, often absent, exacting love as well as obedience from the daughter who feared her; the mysterious, never-revealed portrait of the father behind its velvet curtain, and the volumes of his poetry, proudly displayed but never to be read.
    Lady Byron’s friends had dinned into Ada that she owed an unpayable debt to her suffering mother, that the slightest disobedience might be the cause of Annabella’s death. Instead, it was her famous and infamous father who died, in exile, when Ada was eight, his last words not of the fight he had led for Greek independence but of his little daughter, long lost to him.
    Then Ada at seventeen, in London for her first Season, met Charles Babbage, mathematician and brilliant inventor. Jodie fell asleep over a description of his Analytical Engine.
    ~ ~ ~
    “Have you ever heard of Charles Babbage?” she asked Giles at breakfast, her pique long forgotten. Only Emily was present; Roland insisted that Charlotte break her fast in bed and this morning had joined her in their chamber.
    “Babbage? Yes, of course. His Difference Engine is—will be in the Science Museum in Kensington, still in working order. If he’d ever completed his Analytical Engine it would have been the first real computer. Good lord, is that the Ada you keep talking about? I didn’t think her name was Byron, though.”
    “She marries Lord Lovelace, but I haven’t reached that part of the book yet.”
    “Ada Lovelace? That’s it. There’s a computer language named after her, an international standard for certain applications. She’s generally regarded as the first computer programmer. She foresaw all sorts of possibilities that Babbage’s mechanical machine probably would never have been able to carry out, even if he’d had the support to finish building it.”
    “She really was—will be brilliant then? She certainly intended to make her mark, though she wasn’t sure if it would be in math or music. She wanted to equal her father’s fame.”
    “You mean Lord Byron?” asked Emily. “He really is famous in the future?”
    “For his poetry, mostly, but he’s also going to inspire half of Europe to throw the Turks out of Greece,” Jodie explained. “I suppose in a way it’s just as well he has to leave England.”
    “I find it difficult to imagine him as a hero when all the world considers him a villain. It is a very odd feeling to hear all this before it happens.”
    Giles apologized. “It’s not fair of us to talk about it in your presence. I’m amazed at how you have adjusted to our peculiar circumstances. We’d have been well and truly stuck without