A Quiet Adjustment (2012)
“He woke before dawn and, too restless to recompose himself, would crawl out of bed and begin, as she once put it to him in the morning, ‘to haunt the corridors’. He complained of noises in the night. It was a big empty house; he feared intrusions. The only sounds Annabella heard were the creak of his steps in the halls as he paced up and down them—sometimes, as she learned, when he retired again to bed, by the gleam of it, with a dagger in his hand. The hint of excess in his unhappiness she was... not too in love with her husband to overlook. He dressed himself in it as one might in rich clothes, and she saw it as her duty to teach him a simpler habit. That she was in love with Lord Byron her own urgent desire to console him made perfectly plain. One night as he returned to her, worn out from his vigil, she moved to lay her head against his breast. She wanted him to feel her warmth, but he only said, more gently than he was used to, ‘You should have a softer pillow than my heart.’ He talked a great deal of his sister and once, in a happier mood, compared Annabella to her: they had the same round face and shy, perplexing manners, though he had ‘unpuzzled Augusta’ and hoped to do the same for his wife in time.MoreLess
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