Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (jenna bush book club txt) 📗

leave Malvern. It’s an odd reaction, one that should sound warning bells to any parent. In practice, perhaps because Mamma is so unwell, it does the opposite. The public nature of the encounter, combined with Boyd’s expression of social displeasure, bounces Elizabeth and Papa into arranging for her to visit him without delay. Just four days later, Bro drives Elizabeth, Henrietta and Arabella over the hills to Boyd’s home in Malvern Wells. Unfortunately, misjudging the steep descent from the Wyche pass, the siblings don’t set the drag chain (a kind of brake). The downhill momentum of the heavy carriage makes the pony panic, gallop, and overturn them. The result is a second awkward encounter with the Boyds in the road. This time Elizabeth introduces herself, only to be ‘awed […] by Mr Boyd’s silence—At last he said “I cannot help thinking that I was the cause—I was the cause.”’

Odder still, one might think. As are the ‘uncopiable compliments’ which follow in his next letter. Yet still no one intervenes. At this key moment in Elizabeth’s otherwise exceptionally sheltered young life she is left as utterly exposed as if she were already an orphan. John Kenyon’s affection is familial, protective and proud. Sir Uvedale’s respect for the young woman is exceptional given her age and gender; but it’s the generosity of a man near the end of a long, successful life, for whom the phenomenally able daughter of old friends is pure bonus. He’s the intellectual mentor Elizabeth has lacked, and wants nothing in return but the odd burst of brainy sparring.

Hugh Stuart Boyd is a very different. A restless soul who carts his womenfolk from place to place, he has never worked. The official tragedy of his life is that fifteen years ago he began to lose his sight and has become completely blind. Despite being now unable to read or write, he sees himself as both a scholar of Greek, and a poet. Plucky indeed – even Miltonian – which is certainly how those around him view it. But the degrees of separation that blindness can create have not so much opened up imaginative mental space as reinforced a native dogmatism. Boyd is locked in an obsession with a particular method of Greek scansion that – luckily or perhaps unluckily for Elizabeth – happens to be the same one Sir Uvedale advocates. Yet the unintentionally comic dead hand of his verse makes clear how very little he understands about poetry. In a verse about walkers killed by lightning, for example:

Awhile they sailed on pleasure’s golden tide—

A storm arose; the lightning came: they died—

If upon them Heaven’s dart unsparing flew,

Think that the next dread shaft may light on you.

Elizabeth, usually so quick to joke about bad verse, is courteous in response, praising Boyd’s ‘smoothness of versification’. But there’s no getting around it. This is a lesser talent. Boyd is no Sir Uvedale. Yet, far from developing a reciprocity, he expects to criticise Elizabeth – and to receive only praise from her. Perhaps he finds reciprocity difficult in general. Or he doesn’t like joining in: even though he seems to have enjoyed studying under a personal tutor, he left Oxford without a degree. Elizabeth has been raised in sympathy with independent-mindedness; but her father’s solitariness differs from this. Unlike Papa, Boyd has never tried to put down roots; he hasn’t created a home of his own, and his only child was born six years into what is perhaps not a terribly successful marriage.

In February 1827, when Boyd writes his first fishing letter to Elizabeth, Anne Lowry Boyd has less than ten years left to live. Her husband, by contrast, still has plenty of twinkle; Elizabeth describes him as ‘rather young looking than otherwise’. He is ‘moderately tall, and slightly formed. His features are good […] His voice is very harmonious and gentle and low.’ It soon transpires that her new friend needs an amanuensis to help with his correspondence and to read aloud in both English and ancient Greek, and he seems to find that young women fulfil this role particularly well. As Aunt Bummy will comment tartly, ‘Really all the young ladies in the neighbourhood seem to me to be in the habit of going to see that poor man.’

To be fair to Boyd, he’s no Humbert Humbert. The many young women he invites into his home are not chronologically children. Yet, as he must be aware, socially imposed innocence has kept them naïve and vulnerable to manipulation. And, while they may initially be drawn in by a feminine sense of ‘doing good works’, the bitchiness with which they compete for Boyd’s favour makes it clear where the power lies. ‘Eliza told me that Miss Steers walks out with Mr Boyd whenever she can. So […] he is not afraid of disgracing her by his “slovenly appearance”!!’, Elizabeth bursts out petulantly, before recording with shock – and envy? – that Boyd has advised Eliza to read Henry Fielding’s risqué, picaresque novel Tom Jones.

Although she sounds like a teenager, Elizabeth is by now in her early twenties, and not without admirers of her own. In 1829 she receives a Valentine ode under the pseudonym of Italian dramatist Alfieri, which hints heavily that its author knew her as a child:

Immortal B—t! […]

Tis thine to call ‘the days of childhood’ back,

And, with thy sounds of magic minstrelsy,

Recal the memory of past times to me.

[…]

Years have rolled on—oh, there are memories

Of blasted hopes—and mine is one of these.

The period 1829–30 also sees her involved in an extensive correspondence with classicist and lexicographer Edmund Henry Barker. Yet she remains a desperately inexperienced young woman, and by 1831 her emotions and desires have been kettled inside family life for years. She’s twenty-five: an age at which her own mother was the married mistress of Coxhoe Hall, and had given birth to Elizabeth herself. In this fugue state of inauthenticity and repression, greatly exacerbated by raw but unspoken bereavement when Mamma dies unexpectedly in late 1828, it’s