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

draw in worshippers.) In both verse and prose, this is the era of the adjective. Poetry flirts with glamorously evocative settings, some orientalising, others historical. Elizabeth draws all these vibrating strings simultaneously tight in poems like ‘The Lay of the Brown Rosary’ where – in a perfect storm of symbolism and purple prosody – the haunted bride Onora fatally embraces her groom in a ruined chapel somewhere that’s both foreign and Roman Catholic; ethics having got muddled up with the old Barrett anti-Catholicism:

The grey owl on the ruined wall shut both his eyes to hide thee,

And ever he flapped his heavy wing all brokenly and weak,

And the long grass waved against the sky, around his gasping beak.

I sate beside thee all the night, while the moonlight lay forlorn

Strewn round us like a dead world’s shroud in ghastly fragments torn.

Elsewhere, the new poetry preaches an explicitly social morality, licensing such fantasies by tying up scenes of sensual bliss with moral closure. Until its austere conclusion that, ‘KNOWLEDGE BY SUFFERING ENTERETH, / AND LIFE IS PERFECTED BY DEATH’, Elizabeth’s own ‘A Vision of Poets’ is vividly sensual as it pictures the archetypal living poet. Sometimes, though, the moral is ‘slant’. As raw economic ‘progress’ is slowly recognised as a source of social ills, romantic nostalgic – whether it’s in Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ or in Elizabeth’s ‘The Romaunt of the Page’ – offers a comforting counter-fantasy. Precisely through its quaint mediaevalisms and far-flung settings, such poetry turns towards the changing society it serves, as even Elizabeth, writing among her plaster busts of the dead greats, is aware. After all, she is herself a daughter of the new mercantile class. And while there’s nothing like London life for keeping you in the literary swim, there’s also nothing like London for reminding you of the wider society on your doorstep.

Wimpole Street is smart, but it’s no gated community. On 13 September 1843 Crow arrives home in floods of tears from walking Flush. Trotting loose behind her in busy Mortimer Street, a few blocks from home, the little dog has been pounced on and stolen. All the maid knows is that she heard his stranger-alarm bark, and when she turned round he had vanished. Elizabeth is distraught and, while she sobs herself into a fever, the three boys still at home – Sette, Alfred and Henry – get on the case. They have ‘Missing’ notices printed up within hours, and post them up all round the neighbourhood the same day. But there’s no news, and Elizabeth passes a sleepless night.

The next day, however, the brothers make some more worldly-wise enquiries. It quickly becomes clear that they’re dealing with organised crime. Sette meets ‘dark men in dark alleys; & [derives] a fallacious hope from the ultra blackguardism of a certain Jim Green who talked pure Alsatian [a term for thieves’ slang], & was just setting out for a dog-fight to meet “lots of dogstealers”’. Having barristers in the family is useful for tracing underworld contacts, and the correct intermediary turns out to be a gunmaker in New Bond Street. William Bishop ‘is said to be “a highly respectable man”, & keeps a petition against dogstealers in general’ – something surely helpful for thieves looking for animals to steal. Nevertheless, he puts Alfred in touch with a soi-disant cobbler named Taylor. Taylor is the leader of The Fancy, a gang who kidnap the pets of the rich and ‘who make four thousand a year by the trade’. He’s already stolen ‘Mrs Chichester’s little black dog’ from next door to the Barretts, and established the going rate for ransoming ‘feelings’ is ‘five pounds down’. He even announces to Henry that his gang have been ‘two years on the watch for Flush’.

On the second evening of the emergency, Taylor arrives at number 50 while the family (apart, as usual, from Elizabeth) are sitting down to dinner. He claims to have ‘found’ Flush: for five pounds he will take Alfred to the dog. Unfortunately, Alfred knows Elizabeth has only two sovereigns to hand. Worse, Papa, overhearing the bargaining, storms into the hallway yelling that the family will ‘not give a farthing more than two sovereigns’, and that Taylor and the dog can go to hell. ‘Papa said, “Say nothing of this to Ba”—but the voices were loud.’ Upstairs in her little room, Elizabeth passes another sleepless night. But in the morning, once her father has left home on business, she sends the other three sovereigns to William Bishop’s. It’s enough to raise Taylor, who turns up again at Wimpole Street to demand a final half-sovereign and to agree a rendezvous with Henry that evening at the gun shop where, sure enough, Flush is waiting. Henry brings him home by cab.

The little dog is filthy and traumatised after two and a half days without food or water, but he turns out to have suffered no long-term ill effects. Almost as good, when Papa arrives home that evening, rather than interrogating the family about what he knows perfectly well must have happened, he is delighted. For this weak, anxious man the dual problem – of his favourite daughter losing her pet, and of having backed himself into a non-negotiable position – has been solved for him. Worldly-wise Henry had even arranged to be followed by a plain-clothed officer who would arrest Taylor the moment he had Flush; though this plan was foiled when the policeman got the time wrong. All in all, it’s a joyous reunion, and when Taylor’s gang steal Flush again, a year later, in October 1844, the Barrett siblings will swing into confident action, recovering him within forty-eight hours without letting their father know – although the ransom will have risen to seven pounds.

By then, though, the intimates of his doggy world will have changed. For in the middle of March 1844 Crow announces that she is leaving. She has married the Wimpole Street butler, William Treherne, a familiar face who’s been with the family all his life