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

she told Henrietta, ‘I shall try nothing more—[…] It is absolutely useless—& it is irritating on one side & painful on the other.’ But emotions run deeper than understanding: ‘Yet when it came, it seemed insufferable as if unforseen.’ This is ‘closure’ of the wrong kind, as Elizabeth writes to Arabella: ‘Without a word, without a sign—Its like slamming a door on me as he went out—’

There are consolations. Julia Martin tells her that Papa had written of ‘forgiving’ Elizabeth, Henrietta and Alfred, his married, disinherited children. Stormie, who as the oldest surviving son is his father’s heir, makes over a total of £15,000 out of his inheritance to the trio. And maybe the long wait for resolution of any kind has muted the intensity of Elizabeth’s feeling, or allowed her to grieve already. For though in the first days after her father’s death she can’t even write a letter, Robert is surprised how well she bears up. Unlike at earlier bereavements there is no physical collapse; instead she even manages to weep.

But still the losses aren’t done. This summer, a month into their stay at Bagni di Lucca, Wilson’s second pregnancy starts to go wrong. Premature labour or miscarriage threaten and she’s ordered to bed. Once a replacement is found she has to go back to Florence; she will never return to work for the Brownings, though Ferdinando stays in their service. Instead, with a loan from the Brownings, she rents a lodging house right by Casa Guidi, where she can stay in touch with the household, keep an eye on Ferdinando – and make more money than she did as a maid. Later, she’ll move to better accommodation still, as Robert arranges for the elderly Walter Savage Landor, now suffering from dementia, to become a paying guest when his confusion and violence cause Mrs Landor to throw him out. Though this is perhaps a mixed blessing, it’s this extra income that will allow Wilson to pay for Orestes to join her in Italy.

In mid-September 1857, Wilson’s place with the family at Bagni di Lucca is taken by Annunziata Lena, a local woman of just under thirty, who has experience in working for the very particular constituency of Englishwomen. Robert and Elizabeth remain at the spa town until the second week in October, but this summer is haunted by a gastric fever that Robert Bulwer-Lytton brought with him from Florence in early August; Annunziata falls ill with it almost immediately. Worse, Pen is ill for much of the second half of September. All three recover, but on top of new bereavement this mortal maternal terror is almost too much for Elizabeth: ‘When I wanted repose to recover from a great shock, I could’nt get it […]—& Peni’s illness ended by breaking me to pieces when I was peculiarly brittle—.’

It’s all driving her closer to a new friend, an amateur medium called Sophie Eckley. By now spiritualism divides the Brownings. In London last summer they attended a séance in Ealing at which the famous Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home ‘manifested’ Robert’s ‘dead infant son’ – which turned out to be Home’s bare foot. (One can see why Robert would seize on such ‘evidence’ with fury, with its niggling implication of an earlier child, abandonment, and infidelity added to sheer clumsy cheek.) Famously, in 1864’s Dramatis Personae Robert will make his feelings clear with the excoriating poem ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’. Now he suspects Mrs Eckley of manipulating his wife. Yet he doesn’t resist when more distinguished visitors turn to the subject, for example on the June evening at Casa Guidi when they’re joined by the American poet William Cullen Bryant, Robert’s old friend the poet Fanny Haworth, and Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne.

Hawthorne will record that he finds this visit haunting in another way: his hostess is kind, but so small and frail she seems ‘scarcely embodied at all’. As Elizabeth tells Arabella:

A bad winter have I had? In some ways, but not with my chest. […] Altogether I am not as strong as usual […] I have a horrible vibrating body—If I am uneasy in mind for half an hour, I am unwell,—& then, being unwell makes one uneasy again. It acts, & reacts.

At fifty-two, she’s probably coping with the wear and tear of menopausal symptoms on top of her usual weakness. But even Robert, who’s bought a skeleton and a chest of homeopathic remedies, seems newly preoccupied by the body and its ills.

Altogether it’s a subdued party that leaves Casa Guidi for France on 1 July 1858. This year they’ll spend just two weeks in Paris catching up with old friends: Anna Jameson, ‘Father Prout’, and Lady Elgin, now horribly disabled by a series of strokes. On 19 July they move out to the Normandy port of Le Havre. The idea is to take a halfway house for a family summer. In many ways this works. Sarianna and Robert Senior house-share, Arabella, George and Henry (with his new wife Amelia) cross the Channel to visit, and Robert’s best friend Joseph Milsand comes to stay. And it’s at the end of this busy stay that Elizabeth sits for Cyrus Macaire for the photograph that will become Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s famous portrait. But ‘hideous’ 2 rue du Perrey, destined to disappear under twentieth-century apartment blocks, is a quite astonishingly bad choice for all this activity. Le Havre, by the 1870s confirmed as the European capital for tuberculosis deaths, is already being mapped street by street for infection rates, and it’s the low-lying harbour-side areas like this that are worst affected. Do Robert and Elizabeth not notice that, despite the handsome eighteenth-century houses, the neighbourhood is poor and unsanitary? Are they simply blinded by the English dogma of healthy sea air? There will be no radical symptomatic changes in Elizabeth’s subsequent health to suggest that she does get infected. But it’s a foolish place to stay for any invalid, particularly one already suffering from respiratory disease.

The very day after Elizabeth’s photographic session