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

chairs crimson, with white & gold frames, & the carpet mixes up all colours. The ceiling has a good deal of gilding in Italian fashion, .. and the little sittingroom at the end of the suite, a very pretty room, has a cloud full of angels looking down on you […]. Of course you are to understand that our furniture is not new—but it is in good taste & characteristic.

But this is also Elizabeth’s first opportunity to nest-build:

we wanted linen & plate, & then our rooms being immense, yearned for more & more filling—& then again, we grew ambitious, & instead of four legs to every chair we looked to gilding & spring seats, .. & so, we have passed sixty pounds & still want curtains.

Six months on, the pleasure – and expenditure – are unabated:

The bedrooms & Wilson’s room […] are to have the curtains altogether of white muslin, checked in rather a large pattern—two to each window, very full. And the bed in my room is hung with the same […] there’s a new carpet laid down in my bedroom—I wanted a drugget, but the carpet was as cheap, & very thick & rich looking it is. […] we had bought for that room a beautiful chest of drawers […] Robert bought the other day a companion-chest, infinitely more beautiful—in fact far too good for any bedroom—ebony & ivory inlaid, with the curiosest gilt handles […] & he gave two pounds for it.

Furnishings can be resold, but they represent a considerable investment of money and imagination, especially given the ‘panic’ of war nearby – about the dangers of which Elizabeth seems strangely relaxed. But then her emotional reactions have always been somewhat disassociated. Around her, much of Europe is being shaken by the fear and promise of revolution, and there have been democratic uprisings in Vienna and Berlin as well as in Paris. In March, King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia had declared his intention to unite divided Italy under the Pope. He built on a local revolt against Habsburg rule in Lombardy-Venetia by attacking the Austrians’ military headquarters in the Quadrilatero, a set of four city fortresses centred on Verona and Mantua and just 125 miles from Florence. Joined by papal, Tuscan and Sicilian forces, for a while his campaign went well: two fortresses fell. But in May the Pope, Pius IX, became nervous about challenging the mighty Austrian Empire (which is also Catholic) and withdrew his support, as did Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies. Austrian Field Marshal Count Radetzky will finally defeat the Italian forces in August, after a three-month siege of Venice, and become Viceroy of Lombardy-Venetia for almost a decade.

These are bloody battles, not just street demonstrations, and it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Elizabeth’s determination to build a new life willy-nilly in such a time and place is not just wilful, but irrational. For there’s another fly in the ointment: Robert isn’t writing. For him, marriage has exchanged an extended adolescence, at his writing desk day and night, for adult, practical – even if not financial – household responsibilities. Also, neither Browning is under any illusion that he’s currently the more distinguished partner and, while it’s exciting to be adored by the author of poems you love with all your heart, it’s altogether different to make a life as the lesser writer. Robert is, in effect, playing The Partner, that conflicted role to which, traditionally, artistic and literary partnerships relegate the women.

But however unorthodox the couple’s domestic roles, bodies are still bodies. In June 1848, just after their return to Palazzo Guidi, Elizabeth falls pregnant again. Once again she feels so well that she carries on as usual. In mid-July, she and Robert escape the city on ‘un bel giro’ alone together, first to the coast at Fano and then, when that proves altogether dreary, south down the Adriatic coast to Ancona. Here they stay for a week, and Robert at last writes a poem. But even this signals that all is not well. The depressive narrator of ‘The Guardian Angel: A picture at Fano’ is accompanied, like Robert himself, by a lover. Despite this he identifies with Guercino the ‘Little Squinter’, painter of a sentimental seventeenth-century altarpiece in the town, and prays for the angelic guardianship it portrays. Eight stanzas conclude by breaking the ‘fourth wall’ of fictional conceit to appeal to someone from real life, the long-lashed, baby-faced Alfred Domett, who was Robert’s pal about (literary) town before emigrating to New Zealand in 1842:

Where are you, dear old friend?

How rolls the Wairoa at your world’s far end?

This is Ancona, yonder is the sea.

So what’s going on here? In later years Domett will publish a verse epic, Ranolf and Amohia, celebrating Maori culture, but his real skill is in public office. He has the restless, slightly misfit energy that does well in new enterprises, and will become New Zealand’s fourth premier in 1862–63. When he retires to England, more than two decades from now, the old friends will reunite after an emotional message from Robert: ‘I never could bear to answer the letter you sent me years ago, though I carried it always about with me.’ Feelings which turn out to have been deep-seated. When Domett left England Robert declared:

I cannot well say nothing of my constant thoughts about you, most pleasant remembrances of you, earnest desires for you—yet I will […] write freely what, I dare say, I said niggardly enough—my real love for you—better love than I had supposed I was fit for: […] There! And now, let that lie, till we meet again.

Even though Domett didn’t respond for a year and a half, Robert continued to send long, affectionate missives whose intensity only abated after he met Elizabeth. Which would matter little by 1848; except that another figure from Robert’s bachelor days is about to enter Elizabeth’s life and, for a while, ‘turn her evenings to ashes’.

The Fano poem may well be triggered by post-viral depression. Robert hasn’t