Byron in Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

at once dashed off another letter full of umbrage towards Hanson for having charged him with that very same condition. The tone of his letters henceforth to his solicitor was peremptory and defiant. Mr Hanson was to keep Mrs Byron from ever appearing at Trinity and if that were to happen he would quit, even though rustication or expulsion might be the consequence. Most unfairly of all, he blamed that selfsame mother for his depravity, saying she had had an obligation to protect, cherish and instruct her young offspring but had failed in her duties and her perversion of temper had led to a corruption of his. He also wished it known that university was a waste for a man of his rank.
    In the midst of all this dissipation, something beautiful and stirring and possibly frightening occurred. First it was the voice, silver and soaring like the skylark, the voice of a fifteen-year-old choirboy in Trinity Chapel, then the face, seen in candlelight, chiselled and beautiful. John Edleston, two years younger than Byron and an orphan of low birth, was one for whom he formed the purest and most intense passion, a mystic thread joining them both. Edleston had been recruited to Cambridge and given a stipend of one and a half shillings a term along with his board and education. In that rarefied environment, their friendship flourished, like Juno’s swans, inseparable. There were glances, trysts and never a single tiresome moment between them. They went moonlighting, swam in the river below Grantchester, a secret wooded haunt that came to be called ‘Byron’s pool’. He showered his protégé with gifts. At the Christmas recess Edleston gave him a cornelian ring in the shape of a heart, mounted on a thin gold band, which he wore on his little finger. This ‘toy of blushing hue’ he celebrated in a verse, ‘Pignus Amoris–The Colour of Love’, in which the inexpensive jewel attests to the love of the giver, the stone, it seemed to him, emitting a tear of emotion. Neither time nor distance, he believed, could alter it, except that time, distance, caution and self-preservation brought it to a ruthless end.
    Heading for London, he took lodgings with a Mrs Massingberd in Piccadilly, a room for himself and another for Fletcher, his valet. Now in the metropolis, his quarterly allowance from Chancery not payable until the New Year, he urgently needed funds. It was then and ongoingly that he put himself in the clutches of the moneylenders, the ‘tribe of Levi’. ‘Jew King’ was the reigning moneylender of the time, whose name Byron found in a newspaper advertisement. Being a minor he wrote to his half-sister Augusta in the most ‘inviolable secrecy’, asking her to go as guarantor for him, adding boastfully that his property was worth one hundred times the sum he needed to raise, referring to riches that would soon be forthcoming. This surge of optimism was prompted by Mr Hanson, the perfect prototype for the dilatory and prevaricating lawyers which Dickens depicted in Bleak House . Without any real foundation, Mr Hanson assured him that the lawsuit to regain the Rochdale property and its lucrative collieries was progressing apace. This proved to be a figment, since it staggered on for years.
    Byron asked Augusta that his request be kept secret from that ‘grandee’ Lord Carlisle or ‘the chattering puppy, Hanson’. Augusta, wary at the thought of moneylenders, offered the few hundred pounds from her own allowance, which Byron on point of honour declined, saying he would not accept her money even if he was in danger of starvation. In her dilemma, she told Lord Carlisle and Hanson, and Byron severed relations with her, refusing to answer her pleading and contrite letters. It was Mrs Massingberd in the end who went guarantor and set Byron on the long punitive relationship with the ‘sordid bloodsuckers’. Happy with his new-found, albeit indentured wealth, he wrote to