Enchantress of Numbers Read online

  ALSO BY JENNIFER CHIAVERINI

  Fates and Traitors

  Christmas Bells

  Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule

  Mrs. Lincoln’s Rival

  The Spymistress

  Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker

  The Giving Quilt

  Sonoma Rose

  The Wedding Quilt

  The Union Quilters

  The Aloha Quilt

  A Quilter’s Holiday

  The Lost Quilter

  The Quilter’s Kitchen

  The Winding Ways Quilt

  The New Year’s Quilt

  The Quilter’s Homecoming

  Circle of Quilters

  The Christmas Quilt

  The Sugar Camp Quilt

  The Master Quilter

  The Quilter’s Legacy

  The Runaway Quilt

  The Cross-Country Quilters

  Round Robin

  The Quilter’s Apprentice

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  Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Chiaverini

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Chiaverini, Jennifer, author.

  Title: Enchantress of numbers : a novel / Jennifer Chiaverini.

  Description: New York, New York : Dutton, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017000200 (print) | LCCN 2017005942 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101985205 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101985229 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3553.H473 E53 2017 (print) | LCC PS3553.H473 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017000200

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author’s use of names of historical figures, places, or events is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Also by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Family Tree

  Prologue | My Way Is to Begin with the Beginning

  Chapter One | Sole Daughter of My House and Heart

  Chapter Two | I Know That Thou Wilt Love Me

  Chapter Three | Dull Hate as Duty Should Be Taught

  Chapter Four | Smiles Form the Channel of a Future Tear

  Chapter Five | Wishing Each Other, Not Divorced, but Dead

  Chapter Six | Sharp Is the Knife, and Sudden Is the Stroke

  Chapter Seven | New Shores Descried Make Every Bosom Gay

  Chapter Eight | More Restless Than the Swallow in the Skies

  Chapter Nine | As a Wild-Born Falcon with Clipt Wing

  Chapter Ten | Who Would Be Free Themselves Must Strike the Blow

  Chapter Eleven | But Sweeter Still Than This, Than These, Than All, Is First and Passionate Love

  Chapter Twelve | Thus the Heart Will Break, Yet Brokenly Live On

  Chapter Thirteen | Once Kindled, Quenchless Evermore

  Chapter Fourteen | What Wondrous New Machines Have Late Been Spinning!

  Chapter Fifteen | The Commencement of Atonement Is the Sense of Its Necessity

  Chapter Sixteen | A Mind to Comprehend the Universe

  Chapter Seventeen | The Quest of Hidden Knowledge

  Chapter Eighteen | With My Knowledge Grew the Thirst of Knowledge

  Chapter Nineteen | I Could Not Tame My Nature Down

  Chapter Twenty | Links Grace and Harmony in Happiest Chain

  Chapter Twenty-one | On with the Dance! Let Joy Be Unconfined

  Chapter Twenty-two | All Who Joy Would Win Must Share It

  Chapter Twenty-three | Days Steal on Us and Steal from Us

  Chapter Twenty-four | Rumours Strange, and of Unholy Nature, Are Abroad

  Chapter Twenty-five | It Were the Deadliest Sin to Love as We Have Loved

  Chapter Twenty-six | Longings Sublime, and Aspirations High

  Chapter Twenty-seven | What Is Writ, Is Writ

  Chapter Twenty-eight | Go, Little Book, from This My Solitude

  Chapter Twenty-nine | What Deep Wounds Ever Closed Without a Scar?

  Chapter Thirty | A Noble Wreck in Ruinous Perfection

  Epilogue | Hopes Which Will Not Deceive

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To my mother, Geraldine Neidenbach, my favorite mathematician

  Prologue

  My Way Is to Begin with the Beginning

  1816

  A piteous mewling jolts Lady Annabella Byron from her melancholy contemplation of the fire fading to embers though the evening is still young. With a start she straightens in her chair, tumbling the dispiriting medical journal from her lap to the train of her pale green silk gown. Instinctively she clutches her skirts, crumpling the letter from Dr. Baillie, which she has momentarily forgotten she holds. She wishes she could forget it entirely, this dreadful missive that confirms her worst fears about her husband’s erratic behavior, his inexplicable cruelty.

  Another plaintive cry, and Annabella’s thoughts fly to her daughter, an infant scarcely seven weeks old. Images of the child’s soft cap of dark hair and sweet rosebud mouth fill her mind’s eye, and she feels her milk come down. She scrambles to gather up the fallen journal, tucks the letter inside, and sets both carefully upon her chair before hurrying down the corridor to the nursery.

  She finds the nurse already there, cradling the fretful babe in her arms, gently rocking from side to side, murmuring tender endearments that fail to appease. Annabella loosens her gown, seats herself in the rocking chair, and gestures for her daughter; Mrs. Grimes quickly places the baby in her arms, and immediately the ravenous child latches on and begins to nurse, sucking greedily.

  When the baby’s hunger is sated, Annabella gently passes her, already half-asleep, into Mrs. Grimes’s capable embrace. After whispering a few instructions, she inhales deeply, straightens her gown, and steps out into the corridor to confront what can no longer be avoided.

  As she descends the stairs, her small, delicate hand grasping the banister for support, laughter drifts upward from her husband’s quarters—his own voice, rich and rolling, and his half sister’s, light and happy and eager. Augusta, whom Annabella once considered a friend and ally in the management of her fractious, impetuous husband, has proven to be a rival for his affections instead. Although Byron and Augusta grew up in separate households, the offspring of Captain John “Mad Jack” Byron by his two consecutive wives, and they did not meet until they were quite grown, they share a bond of intense affection that Annabella, an only child, knows she cannot fathom.

  She reaches her husband’s chamber and raises her hand to knock upon the door, but she cannot quite bring herself to d
o it, and at the sound of their voices—impassioned, intertwining, harmonious—her hand falls to her side. Remorse takes her breath away. She loved Byron devotedly, loves him still, but a fierce schism has torn them apart, and for all her vaunted reason and powers of calculation, she cannot figure out how to rectify it. Nor indeed should she, as Dr. Baillie has confirmed.

  If only she could take her younger self in hand and convince her to pay attention to the signs all around her, the sudden tempests and long absences and misunderstandings that revealed with all the subtly of a thunderclap that Byron would make a very poor husband. But even if she could, she knows her words would be a waste of breath. From the earliest days of their courtship, caught up in the heady intoxication of a blossoming romance with the greatest poet of the age, that self-possessed, precociously intellectual heiress had willfully ignored anything that warned of impending doom.

  And there had been many such warnings.

  • • •

  She first observed George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron, in March 1812, at a party given by Lady Caroline Lamb, the beautiful, erratic daughter-in-law of her aunt Lady Melbourne. Within days of embarking upon her first London Season, Annabella had learned that Byron was the most sought after guest at any gathering thanks to the sudden, excessive fame that had followed the unprecedented success of his poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, two brilliant cantos published with the tantalizing hint that he might compose more if they were well received. All eyes followed him when he entered a room, and murmurs of anticipation swept along in his wake. He was a genius, some whispered in awe. He was a libertine, said others, looking scandalized, but often no less admiring.

  Annabella observed all this commotion with the same studious detachment she applied to any natural science. She was quite the fashion herself that spring, graceful and pretty at nineteen, with long, glossy brown hair, clear blue eyes, creamy fair skin, and a petite, well-shaped figure. She had received an excellent classical education, and in mathematics, science, and languages she was regarded as a prodigy, and not only by her doting parents, who cherished her as an only daughter born long after they had given up hope of children. In her manner she was frank and articulate, without any of the flighty airs other young ladies assumed, and she was known for being calm, strong-minded, pious, and concerned about the plight of the working poor. The fact that she was descended from Henry VII and stood to inherit a substantial fortune only added to her charms, and she was not surprised to find herself attracting the attention of many worthy suitors.

  That fateful morning at Melbourne House, Annabella studied Lord Byron from across the drawing room as one would examine any wild, exotic, and possibly dangerous beast, but she did not seek out his acquaintance. “I felt no need to make an offering at the shrine of Childe Harold,” she told her mother afterward, her voice rippling with disdain for the silly young ladies who flung themselves into his path.

  But it was not only the ladies who venerated him. Young gentlemen glowered, tousled their hair, knotted their neck handkerchiefs at their throats, and left their shirt collars unbuttoned in imitation of their idol. In conversation, when they lacked clever observations of their own, they quoted Byron’s evocative phrases, nodded sagely, and exchanged significant glances as if in agreement that nothing more needed to be said. Some who Annabella knew could not tell the difference between an iamb and a dactyl went about with ink-stained fingers and a distracted air as if privately conversing with their poetical muse. Byron ignored them, which seemed only to intensify their admiration.

  Annabella, who had composed verses long before she had ever heard the name Byron, became so annoyed and disgusted with the way they carried on that when she returned home she took pen in hand and let her feelings burst forth in a poem. “The Byromania” was both a rebuke and a lament, chiding those who went about “smiling, sighing, o’er his face / In hopes to imitate each strange grimace,” and mocking “his magic sway” which “Compels all hearts to love him and obey.” Very satisfied with her work, she read the poem aloud to her most trusted friends, but although they giggled and praised her and begged her to let them copy it, she refused. She dared not risk letting the poem fall into Byron’s hands. Although she might disparage him in secret, she did not want him to dislike her.

  One might have expected a young lady so determined not to succumb to Byromania to avoid him at all costs, but as the Season progressed, Annabella instead took advantage of every occasion to study him. “There passes the comet of the year, shining with his customary glory,” she murmured acidly into an acquaintance’s ear as he walked by at a party without glancing their way, his deformed foot rendering his gait awkward.

  “Just ignore him if he vexes you so much,” the young lady whispered back, her gaze fixed on the poet so ardently that Annabella knew she was not inclined to ignore him herself.

  Annabella prided herself on her indifference to his masculine beauty, his strong jaw and flashing dark eyes, and she whispered little jokes to her friends about how his hair seemed perpetually windswept, as if he had just finished racing a horse across the moors instead of perambulating from the hall to the drawing room. “He must arrange it that way on purpose,” she said, evoking shocked giggles from her friends. “What an affectation! He must think himself the hero of one of his own poems.”

  Then, in April, at a party given by her friend Lady Gosford, her curiosity and exasperation finally got the better of her. She could not simply ignore Byron, as her smitten acquaintance advised, just as one could not ignore a sharp pebble in one’s shoe. It was time to shake him out and be done with him.

  She resigned herself to contriving an introduction, and when she crossed paths with her cousin William Lamb in the hall, she decided to get it over with. “My dear cousin,” she greeted him, smiling. “How good it is to see you.”

  “Annabella,” he exclaimed, taking her hand and kissing her on the cheek. At thirty-three, he was tall, dark-haired, and strikingly handsome. “How lovely you look. How are my aunt and uncle? Is your father feeling better?”

  “He’s much recovered, thank you. He’ll be pleased that you asked.” She glanced about for his wife. “Is Lady Caroline here?”

  His smile faded. “No. I regret that she is . . . indisposed.”

  “Oh, dear. Nothing serious, I hope.”

  “Just Caro being Caro.”

  “I see.” She knew he meant that Lady Caroline had had one of her infamous rows, either with her husband or with his imperious mother, Lady Melbourne. “A pity. I had hoped to ask her to introduce me to Lord Byron.”

  “Why would you want to meet him?” her cousin asked sharply. “Why would you think Caro should make the introduction?”

  “I don’t want to meet him, but I think I should,” Annabella replied, taken aback. “Lady Caroline told me that they were quite intimate friends, so naturally I thought of her when I decided the deed must be done. She does know him, does she not? Or was she merely boasting?”

  “She knows him, but I don’t think you should. I beg your pardon”—he offered her a quick, abrupt bow—“if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Cousin?” said Annabella, bewildered, but it was too late. He had hurried off down the hall.

  “Men and their jealousies,” a woman remarked behind her. Turning, Annabella discovered her aunt Lady Melbourne—tall and regal, elegantly attired in a gown of rich mauve silk, her brown hair adorned with strings of pearls and elaborately arranged to add several inches to her stature.

  “William is jealous of Lord Byron?” Annabella’s cousin had served as a member of Parliament for seven years and he stood to inherit a substantial fortune as well as the title of Viscount Melbourne. By all accounts he had a brilliant political career ahead of him. Why should he be jealous of a poet who possessed literary laurels, a title, and fame, but no fortune to speak of except a decrepit ancestral estate? At least that was what the rumors said. “William doesn’t wish to wr
ite poetry, does he?”

  “Certainly not,” said Lady Melbourne, laughing dryly. “Never mind him, or Lady Caroline. I’ll introduce you to Lord Byron myself.”

  Annabella’s heart thumped, but before she could demur, Lady Melbourne took her arm and steered her down the hall and into a small salon made to seem even smaller by the dark paper hangings on the walls, a pattern of gold ogees and flowers on a vermillion ground. The crowd gathered around Lord Byron added to the claustrophobic atmosphere, but as Lady Melbourne sailed toward him, the throng parted and dispersed like a flock of startled gulls before a schooner.

  In a voice touched with a hint of amused irony, Lady Melbourne introduced Annabella and Lord Byron, and after exchanging a few perfunctory inquiries with the poet about the health of various mutual acquaintances, she sailed off again, leaving Annabella somehow both pleased and inwardly fuming.

  “I found much to admire in your Childe Harold,” Annabella told Byron when they were alone, almost indifferently, so he would not mistake her for one of his fawning fanatics. “In particular, its deep feeling, and its call for the liberation of enslaved nations. On the whole, it was quite good.”

  “I thank you.” He inclined his head courteously, but his penetrating gray eyes never left hers, and the corners of his mouth curved in a way that made a curious shiver of anticipation run up her spine. “Until you said so, I wasn’t quite sure.”

  She almost smiled, but she realized just in time that he was mocking her. “I’m sure your next work will be much improved for the practice,” she said sweetly, hiding her indignation.

  “Improved or not, better or worse, it will still be vastly superior to anything else published this year,” he said darkly, casting a challenging glare about the room as if confronting a host of mediocre poets. “At least it will say something. At least it will be new.”

  She understood implicitly that this was not a boast so much as a lamentation over the state of English poetry, and she bristled. “Indeed, your opinion of your fellow poets precedes you,” she said, a trifle sharply. “I’ve read your English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. It was quite scathing, one might even say unkind.”