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

Puss’ must repay her father will eventually come to seem outsized, even grotesque.

But today’s four-year-old is too young to understand emotional blackmail – and too busy being excited about a forthcoming trip to the seaside. ‘My dear Grandmama, I love you very much’, she writes in mid-July. ‘We are going to the sea on Monday week, we are all very sorry you are gone away, you had better come with us to the sea, we all send you kisses.’ Impetuous and loving, this note is about as far from a duty letter as any small child could get. Its delighted recipient responds:

This Morning post brought me a Letter very prettily written indeed for a little Girl of four Years old, so pleas’d am I, that I cou’d not let the day pass without writing a few lines, to thank my Beloved Child […] I am so proud of my Letter that it shall be put in a very careful place, till my Darling pet grows up.

And Papa’s mother continues: ‘Ask Bro when I am to have a Letter from him, I hope he is a good Boy, & attends to his Book—He will never be a Man till he does—.’

Which is striving, ambitious stuff, since Ba’s little brother is only three; but also a form of affection. This is a self-made family, its style noticeably modern, and nicknames are intimate currency. Three-year-old Edward, who as eldest son confusingly bears what is also his father’s and indeed his great-grandfather’s name, will be ‘Bro’ for the rest of his life. ‘Ba’ was christened Elizabeth after Grandmama, whose own nickname is ‘Bessey’. The children’s baby sister Henrietta is ‘Addles’, and the nine siblings yet to be born will include ‘Stormie’ (Charles, who was born in a storm) and ‘Daisy’, real name Alfred (perhaps from ‘Oops a daisy’?). In their parents’ generation, Papa’s sister Sarah, dead at twelve, remains forever ‘Pinkie’, while on their mother’s side unmarried Aunt Arabella is ‘Bummy’.

It’s all mortar for the life being built at Hope End. We get a first glimpse of Ba’s new home in a letter her father sends her:

This Morng we again went to Hope-End and compleated our tour of it, besides looking thro’ the center of the Estate and examining the Cottages; We shall go tomorrow to inspect the Timber &c—The more I see of the Property the more I like it […] There is no fruit whatever this year in the Garden, but should we be fortunate enough to be here next year no doubt we shall have abundance.

Since at this point his little daughter is just three, of course he’s really addressing Mamma, who’ll be reading the letter aloud. Behind the rather sweet, fatherly gesture we catch sight of something else; something evasive, even controlling. Papa is not actually consulting his wife over this life-changing move.

In fact, the splendidly if repetitively named Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett knows perfectly well that – after almost a year first in west London and then with her mother-in-law in Surrey – his wife would prefer to go back ‘to the dear North’, where she grew up and where the couple first settled. Ba’s Mamma was born Mary Graham-Clarke in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1781, and raised, partly in the city centre and partly a couple of miles away at stately Kenton Lodge in Gosforth, the eldest child of a wealthy industrialist: John Graham-Clarke’s town house at 14 Pilgrim Street, and his many mercantile concerns including breweries, sugar refineries and a small fleet of ocean-going ships, have become city landmarks. He may share the civic pride that created the elegant Grainger Town terraces and mighty warehouses of eighteenth-century Newcastle, but his money is newer still. He has other local businesses too, including a flax mill, a colliery and a glassworks, but his international trade is built on the daily luxuries, beer and sugar, that entrepreneurs like him are now establishing at the heart of British life.

However, on the July afternoon when Ba surveys her new home, Graham-Clarke is already seventy-three. Closer to his homesick daughter’s centre of emotional gravity are her six surviving siblings and her mother Arabella, a lively woman with artistic leanings who is two decades her husband’s junior. Besides, Graham-Clarke has little leisure for playing the family man; his hands are full becoming an industrialist. Yet he’s not entirely self-made. Part of his wealth comes from his wife’s dowry and inheritance, and in his twenties he made an equally advantageous first marriage. Only recently arrived in the city, he married a wealthy widow called Elizabeth Rutter, at a stroke acquiring her late husband’s highly successful brewing business and effectively ‘marrying-in’ to her in-laws, highly respected in Newcastle for decades. And perhaps the key legacy is one he received a quarter century ago when, at the age of fifty, plain John Graham found himself able, by dint of taking the double-barrel ‘Clarke’, to inherit from an uncle who wanted his name to continue with his money.

Easy money: dirty money. Beyond the peaceful Herefordshire ‘Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist / Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills; / and cattle grazing in the watered vales’, that sequester Ba and her parents, on the other side of the Atlantic, lies another very different set of estates. At his death eight years from now, John Graham-Clarke will have interests in at least thirteen Jamaican sugar plantations, where he holds enslaved more than six hundred men and women with their children. And these ugly figures are just a snapshot. Ba’s maternal grandfather doesn’t simply ‘own’ and exploit these people, he ‘buys’ them from slavers too. By 1810 steam-driven sugar mills have been introduced in the Caribbean, but cane remains labour intensive. It takes around 350 man-hours and over thirty bullock-pair hours to plant a single hectare, and 990 man-hours to harvest one tonne. People are worked to death on the Jamaican plantations and, in the dark arithmetic of slavers, must be replaced. It’s true that by the time