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

spring of 1841 life does resume. Arabella, by now twenty-seven and full of energy, gets involved in charitable work with the local school. She organises ‘Tea & cake & a run in the grass’ for the children, just like the old days at Hope End. Henrietta, now turning thirty-two, disapproves because the clergyman involved is High Church. Still, she herself escapes the sickroom as often as she can: her own grief, for her own intimate Sam as much as for Bro, goes relatively unacknowledged, and even a walk around the block must offer some relief from constantly ministering to Elizabeth’s health and feelings. Friendship would be more restorative still. ‘Henrietta had a luncheon party here today. She goes out a good deal’, Elizabeth confides to George in April, ‘But one heart can’t judge for another.’ Indeed. She herself is not so stricken that she cannot sit for her portrait, though she enjoins her brother, ‘Say nothing of this—nor indeed of any thing else spoken by me today.’

‘Any thing else’ is Papa’s latest scheme to buy sight unseen an estate ‘reigning alone at the top of a mountain’, across the Herefordshire border in the Black Mountains of Wales, rather than free up assets to establish his sons in their own lives. Such a hilltop exile would be ‘the knell of […] perpetual exile’ for Elizabeth too: cut off from ‘medical advice’ and, perhaps even more importantly, literary London. Luckily the moment passes. So does a threatened worst of all worlds compromise by which she would forfeit Devonshire’s healthy air yet remain in provincial exile at Clifton on the edge of Bristol.

Exile matters particularly because, encouraged by her literary friends, Elizabeth is starting to write again. She’s missed the deadline for contributing to Miss Mitford’s 1840 Findens’ Tableaux, but now she acquires a new author-correspondent who also provokes her to put pen to paper. Richard Hengist Horne, just three years her senior, has lived an absurdly adventurous life. Having failed to get into the East India Company, he joined the Mexican Navy in his early twenties, survived shipwreck, mutiny and on-board fire, and managed to break two ribs while swimming at Niagara Falls. Back in London, he writes all this up for magazines, then parlays it into a literary career, producing fiction, drama, history and epic verse, and editing periodicals. It’s all a far cry from Elizabeth’s seaside sickroom; yet the two develop a flourishing if mismatched friendship. It was a former Hope End governess, Mrs Orme, who put them in touch, forwarding a letter to Horne from Elizabeth; possibly she painted an alluring portrait of the invalid – or else stressed ‘the straightness of [her] prison’. But by now Elizabeth is widely published: peers like Horne are interested in what she’s doing anyway.

In 1841 the two even try to collaborate on a verse-drama, Psyche Apocalypté, though this project loses momentum in the aftermath of Bro’s death. Nevertheless, Horne is a typically rackety literary male, and the friendship worries Miss Mitford. Responding to what may be either pure protectiveness or just a touch of jealousy, Elizabeth justifies it to her older friend in ways that strikingly prefigure how she’ll frame her relationship with Robert Browning:

What claim had I in my solitude & sadness & helpless hopeless sickness, such as he believed it to be, upon a literary man overwhelmed with occupation & surrounded by friends & fitnesses of all sorts in London? Nevertheless from the first kind little note which he sent to me […] to ask me to allow him to help in amusing me, he has never forgotten or seemed to forget me.

Miss Mitford is happier with – indeed she’s the instigator of – another new relationship; one of the most enduring of Elizabeth’s life, and a real turning point in her recovery. In December 1840 she offers the invalid a six-month-old spaniel from a litter sired by her own pet Flush. Elizabeth, who’s just as capable of havering self-sabotage as her father, does her characteristic one step forward and two steps back of shyness and renunciation: the puppy, bred ‘for sporting purposes’ would be ‘exposed to a martyrdom, whether in this room, or hereafter, in […] the London Streets prison’. And yet … and yet. She’s already taking advice from the local coaching inn:

Send him by the railroad to Basingstoke, with a direction on the card .. ‘to be forwarded by the first Exeter coach’—& the coachman both there & at Exeter will be commissioned to feed him & see to his comfort generally. There is no danger […]—that is, if he is packed carefully in a hamper.

Which is modern indeed of her – the narrow-gauge Basingstoke line is a primitive affair, barely eighteen months old – but also impractical, since there is as yet no station at Reading.

Not surprisingly, when he finally arrives in Torquay at the start of 1841, Flush junior seems shaken by his journey. Additionally, a local panic about mad dogs makes it dangerous to let him out. So he starts by messing round the house. But soon:

A shawl thrown upon a chair by my fireside, is his favorite place—& there he sits most of the day .. coming down occasionally to be patted or enjoy a round of leaps. Such a quiet, loving intelligent little dog—& so very very pretty!

Spaniels of all breeds are highly strung. But Flush, cutely long-eared, with a white blazon on his chest and a mismatched head too dark for his ears, seems surprisingly docile. He will end up as one of the most widely travelled dogs of the nineteenth century, and by April is already becoming a domestic personality:

He wants to lie on my bed—& most particularly objects to being shut up at night all by himself in the dark. […] & whenever a door down stairs has happened to be left unclosed, up he comes to this door in the middle of the night, shaking the handle with his two paws until Arabel, who sleeps on a sofa