The Countess

There is a particular silence that settles over a great house in the hour before the guests arrive — the silver laid, the fires drawing, the servants gone soft-footed to the edges of things — and into that silence a woman is expected to step as the answer to a question no one has troubled to put to her. I learned that silence by heart. I lie now in a far smaller room, the curtains drawn against my eyes and the medicine making the minutes pool and slide, and yet I can summon a drawing-room at Ashley Combe with such exactness that I half look to hear the gravel speak beneath a carriage wheel. Memory, I have found, is the one estate that does not pass to the heir.

I was married on the eighth of July, in the year 1835, to William King — then Baron King, and a steadier man than ever I deserved, or, in my wilder humours, supposed I wanted. I was nineteen. The thing was arranged with the smooth dispatch of a sum that comes out even: a suitable man, a suitable settlement, a suitable end to a girl who had been watched and physicked and steered so long that marriage seemed less a beginning than a discharge from a sentence. I do not write this bitterly; I write it as a fact of the operation — that I passed from one set of cards to another, and that the second, at the least, were dealt by a kinder hand.

William. How shall I be fair to him, who was so unfailingly fair to me? He had none of the lightning I had been taught to dread in myself and to crave in secret. He was a builder — of terraces and tunnels and walled gardens, of a whole hillside above the Bristol Channel that he carved and planted into the place we called Ashley Combe, with its Italianate towers and its arched walks down to the sea. He liked a thing to hold. And I think now that he saw in me a structure he could not quite survey — full of vaults he had not built and could not enter — and that he loved me without once being granted the plan of the building. That is a lonely office for a husband. He bore it with a constancy I did not always repay.

In the year 1838 he was raised to the earldom, and I became Countess of Lovelace — the name, as it has fallen out, by which the world will know me, if the world should trouble to know me at all. I remember the strangeness of writing it the first time: Ada Lovelace, in my own hand, the loops of it unfamiliar as a foreign tongue. I had been Byron's daughter, that dangerous freight of a name; I had been Miss Byron, and Lady King; and now I was a Countess, with a coronet to my paper and a rank that entered a room a half-pace ahead of me. My mother was gratified. The world was satisfied. And I stood within the new name as one stands within a well-cut coat that is, for all that, not one's own skin — grateful for the warmth, conscious always of the seams.

For there is a peculiar arithmetic to rank. It adds to a woman — adds consequence, adds deference, adds the long galleries of duty down which she must process smiling — and, by adding so much to the outside, it quietly subtracts from within, until she is all title and no self: a sum with a great total and nothing whatever left over for her own keeping. I determined, almost from the first, that I should keep something over. I did not say so. One does not proclaim such resolutions; one merely begins, in the margins, to reserve.

The children came as children come — quickly, and with a tenderness and a terror that no calculus prepares one for. My son Byron was born in the May of 1836, and I confess the name was a flag run up a mast: my father's name, given to my father's grandson, by the daughter he never saw. Annabella followed in the September of 1837, named for my mother — so that I carried in my two eldest the very names of the two who had made and unmade one another before ever I could walk. And Ralph came in the July of 1839, and with him the line was, as the world likes to say, secured.

Three confinements in a little more than three years. I do not think those who speak so airily of a lady's confinement have ever once weighed the word. To be confined — to be made small, made still, made to lie in a curtained room while the body labours at its enormous, involuntary algebra; and then to rise, and be told one is restored, and to do it again, and again. I loved my children with a fierceness that frightened me; I would bend over the cradle and feel something in me go molten that no proposition had ever touched. And yet — and here is the truth I have never set down so plainly — I felt the years closing over my head like water, each child a beloved weight, and beneath the love a small cold voice that said: the mind is going under, and not a soul will so much as remark that it has drowned.

I have heard it said that a mother's love and a thinker's ambition cannot lodge in one breast — that to want the one is to be unfit for the other. I have lived the refutation. The two ran in me side by side, like the two great motions of the engine I was afterward to understand so well: the one that holds, and the one that works upon — the Store and the Mill. My children were my Store, all that I treasured and kept and would not part with. But the Mill was turning too, in the dark, upon nothing yet, idle but never still — and I knew, with a certainty I could not have defended to a single soul of my acquaintance, that it had been made to act upon some material the world had not yet put into my hands.

So I built the second life inside the first, as William built his tunnels inside his hill. Above, the Countess: the dinners, the tenants, the calls returned, the long correspondence of an estate, the smiling management of a husband's pride and a mother's surveillance. Beneath — in the early hours, in the hours stolen from rest, in the close correspondence I kept up with Mrs Somerville and, a little later, with Mr De Morgan, who set me problems by the post as one might smuggle bread to a prisoner — the other labour. I would sit with a sheet of symbols when the house was at last asleep, and feel my whole being quicken and fall into line, as iron filings spring into figure when the magnet is brought near. That was when I was most entirely myself. I have wondered since whether I was a faithless wife to my rank and an indifferent mother to my hours — or whether I was, more simply, a creature of two natures, the poet's and the analyst's, and could no more renounce the one than strike off a limb and call myself whole.

My mother would have had me believe the mathematics the cure and the imagination the disease; she had dosed me with reason from the nursery to drive out the Byronic taint she feared in my blood. But I had come, by the time I was a wife and a Countess, to read it otherwise — to suspect that the imagination and the analysis were not physician and patient at all, but the Store and the Mill of a single mind; and that the very accomplishment for which I was being groomed in a drawing-room was the thing that would starve the best part of me, if once I let it. I would not let it. That was the resolve that hardened in those years, quietly, beneath the coronet and the cradle-songs: that wifehood and rank, dear as they were and bound to me as they were, should not be the whole sum of me. There was a remainder. I meant to claim it.

What shape it would take I did not yet know. The great evening with Mr Babbage's engine lay already behind me — that I have told — but the work itself, the work that would let me set my initials to a thing and say this I made, was still some years off in the dark. I lived toward it without power to name it, as one feels the tide turn in the night by some pressure on the sleeping body, long before the water reaches the foot of the cliff. I think William felt me leaning toward that unseen sea and did not understand it, and loved me notwithstanding, and let the tunnels of his great house stand for all that he could not say. I am sorry, now, for the half of me I kept from him. A man deserves the whole plan of the house he has married.

But I could not give it, not possessing it yet myself. I held only the conviction — extravagant, unbecoming in a young wife, and, as it has proved, correct — that there was more in me than the years were asking for, and that one day the asking would come. Lying here, with the name Lovelace on every paper about my bed, and the children grown beyond the cradles I once bent over, I find I am not ashamed of that conviction. It kept a fire banked in the cellar of a very respectable house. And when at last the material came — the cards, the operations, the whole far country I had only sensed through the wall — I was ready, because some stubborn unmarried portion of my soul had refused, through every confinement and every dinner and every flourish of the new title, to be entirely given away.

I was a Countess. I was a wife, and a mother three times over. And I was, all the while and in secret, something more — as I would shortly set myself to show.