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

Admittedly, the newsy letters Elizabeth sends Julia Martin also tend to start with apologies for tardiness, suggesting that they are ever so slightly dutiful. She also writes to Maria Commeline, an unmarried young lady whom, typically, she got to know through her classicist father, the Revd James Commeline: ‘Very amusing sensible sharp-minded people, – and as they don’t spare their pricks in making remarks on their neighbours, they are considered not altogether as good-natured as they might be.’ A third Herefordshire correspondent is Lady Margaret Cocks who, though she’s the same age as Julia Martin, is unmarried and lives with her father, Elizabeth’s old nemesis Lord Somers, at Eastnor Castle: letters to her are busy with literary fireworks and family chatter.

She’s learning discretion, however. In mid-December she tells Julia Martin, ‘Mr Boyd arrived here three days ago, & is going to settle himself close to us. […] You may suppose how astonished I was to hear of their arrival: not having an idea of its probability.’ Which is disingenuous since she’s been pushing for precisely this for over a month. Indeed Boyd has broken a lease and must pay double rents as a result. Small wonder if, the following May, it’s with a touch of complacency that she tells Lady Margaret how she and Boyd ‘read & talk together as in old days’.

By which time everyone seemed to be settling in to Devon life. The family have stayed on at Rafarel House. Those seaside holidays with Grandmama have taught Elizabeth to enjoy the ocean, ‘sublimest object in nature’, and in this aftermath of Romanticism, society accultures young women to handle emotion by projecting it onto the natural world. This isn’t just the literary device that, later in the century, John Ruskin will label the Pathetic Fallacy, but social convention in an increasingly unconfessional age.

As Sidmouth’s tides enter Elizabeth’s imagination, she’ll poeticise human experience as ‘a footstep on the sand / The morning after springtide’. But the endlessly watchable seaside, ozone-scented and creating its own special light, is also a playground that entices her away from her books and out for donkey rides and fishing trips:

I don’t know when I have been so long well as I have been lately […] in spite of our fishing and boating and getting wet three times a day. There is good trout-fishing at the Otter, & the noble river Sid […] My love of water concentrates itself in the boat.

However, despite its perfect location facing right onto the water, the house is turning out to be too small for the numerous Barretts crowded into it. As Arabella tells Annie Boyd, ‘We are all squeezed in little rooms, two in a bed’: something Elizabeth’s amour propre has prevented her from revealing. Besides, this slice of what’s known as Fortfield Terrace stands in an exposed position, and it’s draughty. Should they stay or should they go? After a year of trying to make the house work, in September 1833 they move 200 yards inland, a sideways shift that’s the culmination of a typical period of prevarication by Papa. After all now that, as Elizabeth will put it, the family have ‘no ties to draw us or to bind us elsewhere’, Sidmouth will do as well as anywhere.

To Lady Margaret Cocks she gives their new home a rather romantic spin:

a pretty villa or rather cottage, with thatch and a viranda and a garden, and the viranda’s due proportion of ivy & rose trees—about a quarter of a mile from the sea. The view of the sea is rather too indistinct to please me […] but I am consoled by hearing it roaring, & by a genuine Devonshire lane with ‘hedgerow elms,’ bounding our garden.

Contemporary prints show that Belle Vue is very much more a villa than a cottage. Unlike Fortfield Terrace, it overlooks ‘the little town & the church steeple’. But the family remain cut off from Sidmouth proper. ‘We hear that the place is extremely full, & gay; but this is of course only an on dit to us.’ The appointment of a drawing master, ‘Mr Williams’, is very welcome, but hardly compensates for continued exclusion from a social whirl which is almost within earshot. The girls feel it particularly: opportunities to meet young men and make lives of their own are narrowing. As they move into this newest home, Elizabeth is already twenty-seven, Henrietta twenty-four, and Arabella has just turned twenty.

A year into their stay at Belle Vue, Sidmouth remains, ‘Very full: but our cottage stands away from everybody almost—and so do we.’ Yet while his daughters’ domestic lives are increasingly restricted, Papa has begun sending his sons out into the world, dispatching the third and fourth boys, Stormie and George, to study at the University of Glasgow: which unlike Oxbridge is open to Nonconformists. George will graduate in 1835 as he turns nineteen and be called to the Bar in the Inner Temple in 1838: he clearly shares some of Elizabeth’s precocious braininess. But Stormie, though older by eighteen months, simply listens in on lectures because of a severe speech impediment, which is now starting to shape his life. His destiny is a life of family service looking after the Barretts’ Caribbean estates.

For now though, it is Bro who, as eldest son, is dispatched to Jamaica. Charged with an heir’s responsibilities he may be, but the way his father lands him with the role is characteristically disempowering. ‘Papa took him to London about a fortnight ago on supply business,’ EBB tells Lady Margaret Cocks in November 1833, ‘—and we thought of seeing them both again in a few days. But it was otherwise willed by God,—and dearest Bro sailed from Gravesend two days ago.’ Possibly this was a paternal strategy to avoid tearful scenes – or even to prevent himself from being dissuaded by them; Papa may be aware of his own weakness in decision-making. Choosing this time of year for the Atlantic crossing certainly seems like a poor decision. But