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

Now comes the tristesse of having arrived where the couple had hoped to arrive; of being at the top of the hill and seeing over the other side. Elizabeth is only forty-seven; but she’s disproportionately aged by repeated grave illness. There are clearly going to be no more children. These will be the years when her looks fade in conventional terms, and when illness grows more risky still for her.

Yet work remains exciting. By the time they return to Casa Guidi on 10 October, Elizabeth is able to tell her brother George that her new long poem ‘is growing heavy on my hands, .. & will be considerably longer than [Tennyson’s] the “Princess” when finished. I mean it to be, beyond all question, my best work—’ She’s ambitious for it, and ‘For the sake of this poem I should prefer staying at Florence this winter’, but ‘to see Rome is a necessity’. And this too is exciting. A month later they leave for the city, where on 22 November – after calling at Perugia, Assisi and its Basilica, and Terni, famous for waterfalls – they settle in to the third floor of 43 Via Bocca di Leone, an apartment reserved for them by their new friends the Storys.

Elizabeth’s letters home claim that living high above this narrow mediaeval street is healthier than being at ground level. In fact the reservations she expresses to Emelyn Story – ‘remember unless by miraculous interposition something better (that is lower) shall offer itself we accept thankfully your third piano’ – reveal that Rome is both expensive and full-up. This small-windowed upper floor is the only affordable way to live in the fashionable English quarter ‘which is considered especially healthy’. Just round the corner from the famous Caffè Greco, once frequented by Byron and the Shelleys, this new residence is also midway between the famous shopping parades of the Corso and the Spanish Steps – opposite which the Storys are already installed at 93 Piazza di Spagna.

But what should be a happy continuation of the summer suddenly becomes the opposite. As soon as the Browning household – Elizabeth, Robert, Pen, Wilson, Ferdinando the cook, and of course Flush – arrive, the couple themselves head straight round to the Storys’. The women go for coffee, while the men check out the new apartment. Emelyn Story tells Elizabeth that her six-year-old, Joe, has gone to bed early with a slight cold; she arranges a playdate with Pen for next day. But in the morning before breakfast the Story’s nine-year-old daughter Edith arrives suddenly and dramatically at Via Bocca di Leone. She’s been sent over for safe-keeping because her little brother is seriously ill.

Robert & I, leaving Edith with Wilson & Penini, set out instantly of course to see what the evil was. Oh—Arabel, it was death’s own evil! The child had a succession of convulsions .. never recovered consciousness, & before the night had set in, was dead […] A boy six years old, & beloved by its mother above all her loves—[…] I shall not forget the destraction in which she threw herself down, beside the empty little chair.

The diagnosis is gastric flu, which the doctor assures everyone is noncontagious. But by now both the Storys’ nursemaid and, back in Via Bocca di Leone, Edith are also gravely ill. The doctor now claims that all three caught cold in a fierce tramontana two days earlier. By nightfall, the little girl is too sick to be taken home and so is carried down the stairs to the second-floor apartment that the Storys’ other friends, American artist William Page and his family, are renting:

“She may not live till morning” was the medical apprehension. So the poor mother & father quitted their own house, with the still unburied little body of their boy in it, and came here to wait & tremble before the possibility of another blow.

Though Edith does recover, much has been made since of Elizabeth’s fear, at this juncture, for her own child. ‘I look at him with a tremble at the heart! These treasures,—which at once are ours, & not ours!!’ Of course. The doctor is clearly a charlatan. Elizabeth is a loving mother, and exposing Pen to infection won’t help Edith, or her grieving parents, in any way. Yet the reason she gives for moving the feverish little girl, that ‘we had no night-room to give her’, is probably not entirely an excuse. The Brownings had camped the first night in their new home, where the furniture is all ‘just as I had pushed [it], when interrupted, in the middle of the floor’ and it’s ill-equipped and comfortless for a very sick child.

But when Elizabeth refuses to have anything to do with Joe’s dead body, this isn’t logic but visceral recoil. Unlike most of her generation, she has no experience of laying out the dead: by coincidence all her loved ones have been buried without her seeing them: her mother died away from home in Cheltenham, Sam and Uncle Sam in distant Jamaica, and Bro’s body was too far gone when it was retrieved. Her horrified exclamation now to Arabel, ‘This dust is not my beloved. I recoil from this paddling with clay’, is the other face of her spiritualist search; the same fierce need to believe that personhood can outlast the vulnerable mortal body.

Death, though it remains at one remove, has come to join Elizabeth in Italy. Yet it cedes the foreground to a number of friends soon enough. December and January see William Makepeace Thackeray make several visits, accompanied by the two daughters of whom he’s had care since his wife succumbed to postpartum psychosis. The elder girl, future writer Anne, keeps a journal that lets us glimpse the Brownings as physically tiny but effervescing with warmth. Robert appears as ‘a dark, short man, slightly, but nervously built, with […] a large mouth which opens widely when he speaks, white teeth, a dark beard and a loud voice with a slight lisp,