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

discover the reason that Elizabeth’s annual ‘ship money’ has been delayed: the David Lyon has only generated one quarter its usual profit. This shortfall puts an abrupt end to further sightseeing. They take the quickest, cheapest route to Paris, where they arrive on 30 June, and, as on their honeymoon journey, take rooms in the Hôtel aux Armes de la Ville de Paris.

A highlight of their three-week stopover in the French capital is meeting the Tennysons. Alfred already knows Robert, though neither he nor his wife Emily has met Elizabeth. Now the couples meet up three times in quick succession, getting on so well that Alfred even offers the use of his Twickenham home. But Robert has suddenly got cold feet about crossing the Channel. Apparently he remains his mother’s boy, still more concerned by his own grief than the needs of his widowed father, sister or wife:

The idea of taking his wife & child to New Cross & putting them into the place of his mother, was haunting him day & night, & I was afraid to think how it might end. As soon as we had decided not to go, the imagination became quieted & he was better at once. Then, […] suddenly ‘he could’nt bear to disappoint Arabel’, and ‘he would go to a lodging in London near her, &, so, visit his own home by himself & get it over’.

The couple finally arrive in London on 23 July, and take a rental at 26 Devonshire Street, less than five minutes on foot from 50 Wimpole Street. It’s so very close, yet not quite home. ‘It is a position on a thickset hedge—I cant make a movement to right or left without pain’, as Elizabeth puts it. The two months here will be a time of emotional struggle for both her and Robert, who goes almost immediately to New Cross to see his family. ‘Thank God it is not to be looked forward to anymore. He is himself again’, Elizabeth records.

The decision made with such difficulty proves a good one. Soon, exciting plans are being laid. Henrietta brings her husband and first child up by train from Taunton to spend the beginning of August in Bentinck Street, equally close to Wimpole Street and Arabella. Of the brothers, ‘Henry has been very kind in coming not infrequently,—he has a kind, good heart. Occy, too, I have seen three or four times—Alfred & Sette, once’. Meanwhile, ‘dear George […] was very good & kind & feeling to me at last—it has made me really happier’. Only Papa remains obdurate, refusing to see even his first grandchild, writing ‘a very violent and unsparing letter’ in response to Robert’s overture. Indeed he returns Elizabeth’s letters ‘all with their unbroken seals testifying to the sealed up heart which refused to be opened by me’. ‘It is so very disastrous & hopeless’, his daughter grieves.

But by contrast, artistic and literary London embraces the couple. They see old friends like Mary Russell Mitford and John Kenyon. Through the American artist Thomas Buchanan Read they befriend Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Moreover:

Mr Arnauld [sic] the chancery barrister, has begged us to go and live <in his> town house—! […] Mrs Fanny Kemble called on us & left us tickets for her Shakespeare reading—[…] Mr Forster of the Examiner gave us a magnificent dinner at Thames Ditton in sight of the swans, & we breakfast on saturday with Mr Rogers. Then we have seen the Literary Guild actors at the Hanover Square rooms,—& we have passed an evening with Carlyle […] It’s a great dazzling heap of things new & strange. Barry Cornwall (Mr Procter) came to see us every day, till business swept him out of town, & dear Mrs Jameson left her Madonna for us in despite of the printers. Such kindness, on all sides.

Still, now it’s Elizabeth’s turn to falter. ‘There’s kindness in England after all. Yet I grew cold to the heart as I set foot on the ground of it, & wished myself away.’ As well as griefs that remain too immediate – she can’t bear to visit Julia Martin in Herefordshire, which reminds her of Bro – she’s falling ill. It’s still summer, but London is a polluted city, set in a basin nearly at sea level where dust and industrial dirt hang in the air and in the lungs. ‘The quality of the air does not agree with me .. that’s evident. For nearly five years I have had no such cough nor difficulty of breathing, & […] I get so much paler every day.’ And so, ‘We pass this winter in Paris, in the hope of my being able to bear the climate—for indeed Italy is too far. And if the winter does not disagree with me too much we mean to take a house & settle in Paris, so as to be close.’

Low-lying, northern European Paris has a climate not much better than London’s, and even this compromise will prove unworkable. Nevertheless, it seems the couple’s best hope of a life among friends and loved ones. They cut short their London stay and leave for France on 25 September, travelling this time with Thomas Carlyle. After a rough crossing and a night in Dieppe, they’re back at the Hôtel aux Armes, where they rest for a fortnight before moving into a second-floor apartment, ‘flooded with sunshine’, at 138 Avenue des Champs-Élysées: ample reward for Robert’s ‘miseries in house-hunting’. The ‘pretty cheerful, carpeted rooms’ comprise ‘a drawing room, a dressing & writing room for Robert, a small dining room, two comfortable bedrooms & a third bedroom up stairs for the femme de service,—kitchen &c—for two hundred francs a month’. The address is gloriously fashionable too, and they’ll remain here till they return to London next July. In fact, they like it so much that, in spring 1853, Robert’s father and sister will move in.

One shortcoming seems obvious: there’s no writing room for Elizabeth. But within two days of moving in,