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

could imagine her by now sitting down. She just doesn’t know it yet.

But she does absorb the lesson of the surrounding inequality. Half a century from now, she’ll indict the false promise of rural beauty created by exploitation:

And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,

Confused with smell of orchards. ‘See,’ I said,

[…]

‘Who says there’s nothing for the poor and vile

Save poverty and wickedness? Behold!’

[…]

But we indeed who call things good and fair,

The evil is upon us while we speak.

In July 1810 the view from Hope End is indeed ‘good and fair’ with orchards and hop yards that will later earn a local MP the sobriquet Member for Cider. Arable yields are high. Red-flanked, white-faced Hereford cattle dot the countryside like toys. But these model landscapes tell a kind of lie. Despite a good climate and rich, loamy soil, this is a poor county. Herefordshire’s farm labourers are the majority population, and most earn less than they need to survive. Like other forms of wealth, agricultural profits flow up, not down, the social scale. Besides, the region’s remote. The shallow, seasonal River Wye, hardly even a glint from the Hope End viewpoint, can’t compete with the industrial arteries constructed during the recent ‘canal mania’. Turnpike roads are excellent for the new Post Routes but too expensive for agricultural transport, and so old drovers’ tracks still crisscross the county, their green lanes crowding with up to four hundred beasts at a time.

But mostly it’s not drover’s cries but the tap-tapping of building works that float up to Ba’s summer vantage point. In the valley below her, an ostentatious new mansion is under construction. Work started almost as soon as the family arrived last autumn. Already, she and her lucky siblings have the run of:

a lawn in front, with a fine sheet of water stored with fish, fed by springs, cascade etc. […] extensive gravelled walks, through a shrubbery ornamented with magnificent timber trees, thriving evergreens, shrubs and flower borders; […] a productive walled garden, clothed with choice fruit trees […] grapery &c. […] and upwards of four hundred and seventy acres of excellent grass and meadow, arable, woodland, hop ground and plantation.

By her own account she becomes a tomboy, who:

could run rapidly & leap high,—and […] had very strong wrists. […] She cd. climb too pretty well up trees—[…] And she liked fishing, though she did not often catch anything. And best of all, though she cared for bows & arrows, & squirts & popguns—best of all, did she like riding … galloping till the trees raced past her & the cloud were shot over her head.

So rambunctious is she that by the time she turns eleven Grandmama worries about her modesty:

I have sent you six slips to wear under your frocks, you are now too big to go without them […] Now My darling Child you must allow me to say I think you are too BIG to attempt fighting with BRO […] I have seen him very rude & boisterous with you & Harry He is now a big Boy fit only to associate with Boys NOT GIRLS.

But this outdoor life is conspicuously healthier, particularly for the girls, than the conventional alternative; besides, Hope End is far enough from even the nearest cities, Hereford and Gloucester, to escape the dangerous infections bred by overcrowding or dirty water. So the death of one of the children is met with appalled dismay. When four-year-old Mary dies suddenly in March 1814, ten days after Ba’s eighth birthday, the family are stunned. Papa even lets them all make a rare, extended trip north to recover. They visit his brother, Ba’s Uncle Sam, in Yorkshire for a month, and go on to his parents-in-law in Newcastle for another three. After this period of shocked mourning the subject is closed and the family continue to thrive. But it’s the first cold draught from outside the hothouse.

Ba is eleven when that hothouse, Hope End mansion, is completed. Family portraits from this time show a tumbling flock of children, all sporting identical, gender-neutral page-boy haircuts, and dressed alike in shift frocks with empire waistlines. The effect is of the freedom and benign mischief of putti; there’s even a poodle playmate called Havannah. Only Ba already has her characteristically rounded cheeks and chin, her pout, and somewhat darker hair.

By the time she’s twelve, the expression captured by the well-known portraitist William Artaud has become meltingly sweet. It’s a good look with which to disarm critics of female precocity. Though he’s accustomed to spending time with distinguished and highly able members of the establishment, Artaud certainly falls for it. He tells a friend that Ba:

possess[es] an extraordinary genius. She has a command of language and ideas that is quite marvellous and her versyfication is sufficiently varied and harmonious. She absorbs the learned languages as freely and as rapidly as chalk does water […]. She has all the engenuous simplicity and airy volatility of spirits of the most sprightly of her age and sex. […] She is idolized by her parents and yet such is the excellence of her disposition that I think she is not in the least danger of being spoilt.

Perhaps the girl on the edge of puberty wears her precocity lightly because she’s used to it. With her mother’s guidance, since she was eight she has been reading big-scale texts full of ethical argument: Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad, Shakespeare’s Othello and The Tempest, passages from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. She was also eight when she received a ‘ten shilling note’ to reward ‘some lines on virtue’ written for her father. His delighted response addressed her as ‘Poet-Laureat of Hope-End’; she took this compliment seriously, as only a little girl who adores her Papa can, and resolved that she would be a proper Laureate, producing odes for every domestic occasion.

Unlike most eight-year-olds though, Ba kept her resolution. She wrote a second poem to her father just three days later. The next month saw verses for her mother’s birthday and for Henrietta