Byron in Love Read Free Page A

become different within and acquit himself like a lord. For his mother also it was a dizzying ascent into a new world, the move down to England would be dislocating, her new friends would be Byron relatives and in time she would become her son’s minion and a tenant in her son’s house.
    Her first appearance at the Abbey did not impress the toll mistress, who thought her slovenly and also thought that the boy was far too plump to be sitting on the lap of his nurse, May Gray. Catherine had had to sell her furniture to help towards the funeral of the Wicked Lord, who lay for weeks in the Abbey as creditors seized whatever they could. Her effects yielded £74 17s 6d and her one somewhat lofty request was that the Newstead servants wear black at the funeral. When by the end of August 1798 she had accrued enough money, she set out for the 377-mile journey, on the public stagecoach, with Byron and May Gray; the three-day journey entailed stops at the very unprepossessing inns that her meagre funds would allow.

THREE
    Scotch plaids, Scotch snoods, the Scottish burr, blue hills and deep-black salmon streams were no more. Instead an ancestral seat, the twelfth-century monastery flanked by buildings from later centuries, some ramshackle and open to the sky, yet the effect can only have been that of wonder to such a susceptible trio, mother and son shedding (as they would have thought) the gloom and stigma of rented rooms for such inestimable grandeur. Newstead Abbey, a massive structure of grey granite, with Gothic arches and Gothic windows, the scene of orgies and rituals, and was said to be presided over by the ghost of a black-hooded monk who stalked the empty galleries at night, avenging the crime of its being converted from a place of worship to a place of hedonism.
    Inside, haunted rooms, vaulted passages, a cloister and an armoire, where some of the Wicked Lord’s pistols had escaped the clutches of the creditors. In the main bedroom, which Byron promptly assigned to himself, hung the iron sword with which the Wicked Lord had slain his cousin and the family arms depicting a mermaid flanked by two chestnut horses and bearing the motto ‘Crede Byron’. Never mind that it was a ruin, one wing open to the sky, the refectory serving as a hayshed, cattle in the cloisters, it was his magic Castle. Joe Murray, the old truculent servant who had been used to the madman’s ways, resented the presence of the hot-tempered mother, who complained about the dirt and disorder, and of the precocious son with his airs. Byron’s conduct was that of musts, insisting that he be waited upon, that he be allowed to do pistol shooting, even indoors if he felt like it, and that he be allowed to carry loaded pistols in his waistcoat pockets, a habit which he adopted for life. Furious that the forest had been felled, he planted an acorn and said, somewhat loftily, ‘As it prospers, so I shall prosper.’
    Annesley Hall, the home of the slain Viscount Chaworth, was joined to Newstead by a long avenue of oaks, known as the Bridal Path, since the third Lord Byron had married Elizabeth, daughter of the Viscount. Mr Hanson, the family lawyer who was to administer the estate, had come from London to welcome them and noting Byron’s precociousness, remarked that there lived there a very pretty young cousin called Mary Ann, whom Byron might marry. The crisp rejoinder was–‘What. Mr Hanson? The Capulets and the Montagues intermarry?’ Mary Ann would be another of those etherealised beings for whom he would fall into an ‘ebullition of passion’, except that her sighs were for a Mr Musters, a foxhunting gentleman, rumoured to be the illegitimate son of the Prince Regent, but according to Mary Ann’s parents ‘a monster of profligacy and depravity’.
    He would meet cousins, aunts, great-aunts and by being the only boy among them he was duly spoilt. The first letter that Byron, aged eleven,