Inheritance

I write this in my thirty-seventh year — which is to say, in the year my father did not live to complete; for he stopped at thirty-six, at Missolonghi, in a fever and a marsh, and I have lately arrived at the very same number from the other side of the ledger, counting downward rather than up. The physic has not done its work — or it has done it too well, and I cannot now tell which. The room is kept dim for my eyes, and there are hours when the laudanum sets the ceiling breathing. But the mind is clear — clearer, I think, than it has been in years — and a clear mind lodged in a failing body is a strange, almost a cruel possession; like a lamp left burning in a house that is being taken down about it. So I shall set down what I know, while the lamp holds. I begin, as one must, with what was given me before ever I could refuse it.

The first thing I inherited was a name — and the name was an act of provocation.

I was born on the tenth of December, in the year 1815, at thirteen Piccadilly Terrace, in a house already loosening at its joints, though I could not know it. Augusta Ada Byron. The Augusta was my father's half-sister; and to bestow it upon his lawful daughter was — this I have understood only as a woman, never as a child — a thing said aloud in a quarrel, a colour run up where it would most wound. I do not write that to wound in my turn. I write it because it is the plain truth of my christening: that I was named into the centre of a storm, and that the household must have looked from the infant to one another and known precisely what weather was coming. A child is the most innocent of documents — and yet she may be inscribed, before she can read, with the whole history of her parents' griefs.

I have no memory of the house in Piccadilly. I have only the date, and the architecture I have raised about the date. My mother carried me out of it on the sixteenth of January — I was five weeks old, a parcel of flannel and noise borne into a London winter. The deed that severed them was signed in the April following, the one-and-twentieth; and on or about the five-and-twentieth of that same month my father went down to the coast and took ship and left England, and did not come back, and never once in this life set his eyes upon my face. I have turned that sequence over so many times that it has worn smooth, like a coin handled past its image. Five weeks of him. That is the whole of our acquaintance — five weeks in which I cannot have been to him more than warmth and weight and a small creature crying, and he cannot have been to me more than a voice in a room I do not remember.

And yet — he addressed me. That is the part the world knows, and the part I have least known what to do with. He went out into Europe, and stood, I am told, upon a field of slaughter and among the cold heights, and there he wrote to me — to the infant he had abandoned — and named me sole daughter of my house and heart. He set it among his verses, where all of England might read it before I could lisp my own name. I have read those lines so often that they have ceased to be ink; they are nearer to a sound I was born already hearing. There is a grandeur in it I will not pretend does not move me. But consider the position it makes for a daughter: to be loved in public, and in verse, by a man who would not cross a street to look upon her — to be a figure in a poem rather than a child in a room. He gave me the only thing he had to give, which was language; he withheld the only thing I wanted, which was the man. I have spent a life learning to tell the gift from the giver, and I am not certain, even now, that I have mastered the distinction.

There was a portrait of him in my mother's house, and it was kept veiled. A green cloth, or some such, hung over it through the whole of my childhood; I was not to lift it, and for a great while I did not so much as know that it was he beneath the cloth — only that there was a covered thing upon the wall, near which the grown people went quiet. I have thought since that this was the exactest emblem of my entire girlhood: a father present as a shape and absent as a face; a thing one was forbidden to see, and yet could not help but feel hanging there — as one feels a window at one's back. I did not look upon his features until I was a woman grown. By then he was long in his grave, and the unveiling was no longer a transgression but a permission; and somehow that made it the worse — to be at last allowed the face, and to find it only paint.

He died when I was eight years old. The word came from Greece in the spring of '24: that Lord Byron was dead of a fever at Missolonghi, among the people he had gone to set free. Eight is an age at which one comprehends death imperfectly, and grandeur not at all. I did not weep for a father, for I had never had one to weep for; I think I wept — in so far as I wept — for the sudden closing of a door I had always supposed might, one day, open: the door through which, in the unlikeliest hours, I had fancied he might yet come. Children are great calculators of possibility, and a living father at a distance is a possibility, however small; a dead one is a sum already settled. I have come round now to that same number — his number, the six-and-thirty — and I find that I can at last grieve him as one grieves an equal: one mortal of a certain span looking back upon another of the same. We have, he and I, the identical allotment. I had not expected that to be the thing we should most plainly share.

Now I must speak of my mother — for the whole design of me was hers, and she laid it down in deliberate opposition to him.

My mother is a woman of system — of rectitude carried to the pitch of an art. My father, in the early days, when he could still be fond of her, called her his Princess of Parallelograms — meaning it half in love and half in mockery, for she had the mathematical turn that ladies are not supposed to own, and she held to her reason as other women hold to their devotions. When he was gone, and the scandal of him lay over us like the green cloth over his picture, she formed a resolution that has governed the whole of my life: that whatever fire was in the Byron blood should be banked in me — smothered under good plain coal. I was to be schooled in Number, in logic, in the orderly sciences — not because she held that a girl ought to know such things for their own glory, but because she believed them a cure. Geometry was to be my preventive against poetry. The straight line was to keep me back from the precipice.

She set watchers over me — grave older women, friends of hers, who reported upon my conduct and my humours; I called them the Furies, in the privacy of my own heart, and the name was not kind, but neither was their office. I do not say my mother was wrong to fear what she feared. She had seen, at close quarters, what an ungoverned brilliance can do — how it may illumine a continent and burn down a single house. She was labouring, by her own lights, and with a real love beneath the iron, to save her daughter from her daughter's own father. I have been a mother myself, three times over, and I know a little now of how terror will disguise itself as discipline.

But here is the thing she could not have foreseen, and which I have come to hold for the central fact of my nature — the equation, if you will, that every later chapter of this life is but an attempt to solve. She gave me the wrong instrument to do the right work. She thought the calculus and the Numbers would render me her opposite — her safe and rational creature, the antidote to the poet. Instead they gave my imagination its proper engine. I did not grow less my father's child by the study of analysis; I grew more wholly myself — for it proved, in the end, that the fire and the discipline were never two inheritances at war within one body, as everyone supposed, but a single faculty awaiting its name. The world, when it comes to read it, will perhaps see this most clearly in what I made of Mr. Babbage's engine and its cards; but the truth of the matter was settled long before — in the nursery, between a veiled portrait and a slate of sums.

I carry both houses, then. The poet who would not look at me, and the geometer who would not look away. They quarrelled across my cradle, and they quarrel within me yet; and out of that long quarrel I have drawn, I do believe, something that is wholly mine, and answerable to neither of them. That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal — I have said as much, and meant it; and the saying of it would have appalled my mother and amused my father, which is perhaps the surest token that it is true. As time will show.

The lamp holds still. I shall write on while it does.