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

open on a sort of balcony-terrace […] which is built out from the house, giving it an antique & picturesque appearance to the exterior—And you may suppose what a pleasure it is to have such a place to walk up & down in, when we are not inclined to go into the streets. Opposite is the grey wall of a church, San Felice, and we walk on the balcony listening to the organ & choir—

They fall into a happy routine. ‘At about eight in the evening we walk in the comparative cool .. stand on the bridge of Santa Trinita, & go eat an ice at Dony’s .. then return to supper, & dont sit up three m[inutes] afterwards’. Elizabeth develops a delight in clothes, ‘the green plaid which is Robert’s favorite & which I just begin to wear every day […] the silk shot, [the] blue barége, [the] prettiest of possible slippers, which Henrietta has made for me!’ Wilson, freed from the heavy duties of travel – and by the ‘donna di faccenda’ Annunziata, who has followed them across town – is once again a proper lady’s maid, busy sewing Elizabeth:

little front-caps […] very prettily of net in the old fashion, but with a worsted edge, as slight as possible to be embroidered at all—[…] & very pretty, at the expense of a few pennies—[…] Robert likes them so, that I scarcely wear anything else, & have them in various colours, blue, green, lilac, purple, with my hair done in the old Grecian plait behind, which Wilson sighs in the doing of.

Only Flush is not quite his usual self. Like his mistress, he finds the heat hard to sleep through. Like Wilson, he suffers from stomach upsets and constipation. These troubles pass; but it’s plain he needs worming: ‘He is in great spirits & as full of caprices as ever .. only thin. Why shd he be thin, I wonder.’

Now the little household takes its front-row seats for the drama of Italian Republicanism. They’ve arrived on the peninsula at almost the tipping point of the Risorgimento, the cultural and political ‘resurgence’ that will eventually culminate in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. The three decades since the 1815 Congress of Vienna reimposed Habsburg Austria’s control of the fractured territory – especially through its rule of the northern Italian states – have seen guerrilla action and sporadic insurrections, and the foundation of the secretive Carboneria in the south and of La Giovine Italia north of the border in Marseille. On 12 September, their first wedding anniversary, Elizabeth and Robert watch and wave as ‘for above three hours an infinite procession’ of citizens and ‘forty thousand […] inhabitants of the different Tuscan states, deputations and companies of various kinds [pass] under our windows with all their various flags & symbols, into the Piazza Pitti where the Duke & his family stood in tears at the window to receive the thanks of his people’. By granting the right to form a civic guard, Austrian Grand Duke Leopold II seems to have taken a first step towards offering Tuscan independence from the Habsburg empire.

The excitement is contagious:

The windows dropping down their glittering draperies, seemed to grow larger with the multitude of pretty heads, & of hands which threw out flowers & waved white handkerchiefs—There was not an inch of wall, not alive, if the eye might judge—Clouds of flowers & laurel leaves came fluttering down on the advancing procession—and the clapping of hands, & the frenetic shouting, and the music which came in gushes […] and the exulting faces, and the kisses given for very exultation.

Even Flush gets carried away, and goes missing while being walked. Robert, who has a nasty cold, spends the anniversary evening searching for him; only for the little dog to return next day none the worse for wear. But the couple don’t forget their own celebration in all the excitement. As an anniversary thank-you they give Wilson a turquoise brooch, bought the night before on the Ponte Vecchio; in return, she makes Yorkshire Knead Cakes for tea.

Next February, when Leopold grants Tuscany its own constitution, Elizabeth and Robert will have a still closer view of his triumphant arrival at the Pitti Palace ‘in the midst of a “milky way” of waxen torchlights—you wd have thought that all the stars out of Heaven had fallen into the piazza’. By then they will have left Palazzo Guidi, where the rent doubles in high season. Here it’s not winter that’s cheap but summer, with its risk of cholera and typhoid, its almost unmanageable heat. After much agonising, on 19 October they move just up Via Maggio, to rooms so cold and uncomfortable that they almost immediately move again to a ‘little baby-house’ actually on the Piazza de’ Pitti. And here, from the double windows of their cramped new drawing room, they share a grandstand view of history with numerous visitors: ‘In came Wilson to announce Count & Countess Cottrell, Mr Tulk, Mr & Mrs Ley: Mrs Ley’s nurse & two children, & Dr Allnutt [sic], .. all come to crowd into our little drawingroom to see the “festa” in the piazza.’

Sometimes this is just all a bit too much. February 1848 sees both Brownings preoccupied. Robert worries about paying two rents, which has made leaving Palazzo Guidi a false economy. Elizabeth is busy writing a long, political poem and is also pregnant again, full of hopeful anticipation despite continuing to have periods: ‘I have had my usual health, as regularly as possible […] I have both laughed & cried, in one or another crisis of this fatal uncertainty.’ Although she knows that ‘the habit of miscarriages is hard to break’, she can’t resist dropping a hint about morning sickness to Henrietta: ‘Very well I am […] The exception is a sickness in the morning, which is’nt the pleasantest thing in the world, on first getting up.’

But the habit of miscarriages is indeed hard to break. A fortnight after