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

as many family members as she can persuade her father to part with. But as 1838 turns into 1839 Elizabeth’s coughing continues to interrupt every activity, its convulsive rhythm forming the soundtrack to thought, so that putting together lines of poetry – even without Dr Barry’s permission – feels almost impossible. At night coughing destroys the very sleep that might give the body a chance to heal; propped on pillows, Elizabeth hacks her way through the insomniac small hours.

Not till early summer does some good news interrupt this dour routine. On 18 May 1839, ‘RB’ – Richard Barrett, the distant cousin who has been hounding the family through Chancery – dies suddenly at the age of fifty, ‘after only one hour & a half’s illness caused by a fit of Apoplexy’, leaving the years-long dispute unsettled but putting a de facto end to his personal campaign. But in September death crosses Elizabeth’s own threshold. Dr Barry – by now her ‘able & most kind physician who for above a year has attended me almost every day’ – is taken ill with what seems at first to be ‘rheumatic & nervous fever’. He rallies, relapses, rallies and relapses a second time, and dies before the end of the month. The patient is left with survivor’s guilt that, once again, takes somatic form – ‘the physician was taken & the patient left—& left of course deeply affected & shaken’ – exacerbated by the three weeks without medical care that follow. She suffers ‘my old attack of fever & imperviousness to sleep’.

Having to move house on 1 October, after a year’s tenancy at number 3, adds to the stress. Number 1 Beacon Terrace, three doors down, is a plainer, larger and, crucially, a cheaper house. It’s here that Dr Barry’s successor, Dr Scully, ‘comes to see her every day not only medically it appears, but to chat, he seldom leaves her under an hour & tells her all the news & the scandal of the neighbourhood.’ Despite these ministrations, by the end of the year Elizabeth is still bedbound, ‘not any thinner, altho’ perhaps not fatter’ and is ‘carried to her sofa for a short time every day, but her Coming into the drawing room has not been thought of yet’, as Henrietta confides to Sam, who’s been back in Jamaica for the last half year.

Late summer saw Arabella arrive in Torquay, and as 1839 gives way to 1840 the siblings settle in around Elizabeth’s invalid routines. But in April a letter arrives with shocking news that changes everything. Their brother Sam has died. He contracted what’s probably (mosquito-borne) Yellow Fever – so called because it can trigger jaundice – and died two months ago, on 17 February 1840. He had also fallen ill during his first Jamaican trip; but this time he knew he was dying, dictated his will, and asked for the last rites, which were refused him by Hope Waddell, a preacher whose ministry the family have enabled, in a fit of self-righteous Revivalism. During the young man’s earlier stay on the island, Waddell had denounced him for sleeping around – and with enslaved women at that. Now he decided that Sam was saying he had ‘never taken the sacrament’ and – though lack of confirmation into the Anglican Church is no barrier to Nonconformist communion – refused the twenty-eight-year-old’s dying request, choosing instead comfortlessly to read him the Bible.

In short, it’s as bitter a death as possible and, though the family may not be aware of every detail, they understand the loneliness of it. In the grief that follows, everyone worries especially about the effect on Elizabeth. Sure enough, she’s poleaxed: ‘It was a heavy blow for all of us—and I, being weak you see, was struck down as by a bodily blow, in a moment, without having time for tears.’ Just as at the death of her mother, she seems unable to cry. Once again, as when Uncle Sam died, her mourning is psychosomatic. ‘Too weak to hold a pen’, she goes into such a serious decline that Papa hurries to Torquay.

Of course, he’s terrified of losing another child. But the prolonged emergency of Elizabeth’s health seems to paralyse him. Late June sees him writing to Sette, back in town, that:

it is a monstrous time since I left you, and I am wanted very much in London, but how to leave my beloved Ba, I know not, I fear the very mention of it, for she is indeed lamentably weak, & yet it is absolutely necessary I should go; I really know not how to act.

Such vacillation is hardly reassuring for a teenager who might prefer paternal confidence to confidences. At eighteen, Sette has effectively been left in charge at Wimpole Street, while his elder brother Alfred studies at the newly founded University College London and the younger Octavius continues at home with a tutor. (Left in charge, too, in preference to the family’s rebel, twenty-two-year-old world traveller and wannabe commissioned officer Henry, who seems unable to pick an ‘occupation which is not insurmountably objectionable to Papa’.)

But for once Papa has chosen well. Sette has always been one of his father’s favourites, ‘both my right & left hand’, the child who slept in his bed and from whom he couldn’t be parted during the move from Hope End. This seventh son has developed a precocious confidence the family boast fondly about to each other; they particularly love his ‘assurance in costuming himself in a long tailed coat belonging to his elder brother’ to gatecrash an Oxford University presentation to the Queen on her marriage. Now this same filial maturity allows Papa to remain at Elizabeth’s bedside till the end of the year.

Despite their father’s presence, it seems that in this period of grief and anxiety both Bro and Arabella manage, astonishingly, to seize the day and conduct romances. Arabella’s scrape sounds as though it may involve a beloved pony rather than a young man: Elizabeth may be able