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

‘My Robert—My heavens, my beloved’. ‘Our lives are held by God’, she tells him. He lifts her and she kisses him repeatedly; when he moves his face away, she kisses her hands towards him, saying ‘Beautiful… beautiful…’ A few moments later, she has stopped breathing. It is, perhaps, an ideal death. Immensely moving and intensely intimate, it is also and essentially the death of a lover. Elizabeth, raised on the doctrine of family love and prepared to lose everything for romantic love, has ended her life with love’s avowal.

At least, that’s according to her lover himself. But perhaps he isn’t absolutely the most reliable narrator. Sometimes we believe that what should be true really was. Could this ideal deathbed be even slightly idealised? For Robert, the catastrophic loss of the person on whom his life is built runs the risk, like the loss of his mother in 1849, of destroying not just a way of life, but his own sense of self. He needs desperately to hold onto his foundation myth, the story of twin poetic souls finding each other and building their own idyllic home together.

Still, what he says about these last moments in his letters home rings true in many ways. At great moments, people do often become their most loving selves; since ‘what will survive of us is love’ is much more wholly true than Philip Larkin asserts in that famous poem. The tiny, frail Elizabeth of 1861, her face drawn and crumpled by long illness, certainly seems physically ready to slip quickly away from life.

And something else. This quiet unmooring is not the desperate struggle of a fatal asthma attack, nor the agonised drowning in infected fluid of a burst abscess. It most resembles a breath-shallowing, heart-stopping morphine overdose. Combine the high doses that result from Elizabeth’s lifetime dependency on the drug with the panicky human desire to relieve suffering and this is not inconceivable. And who’s to say that it would not even be a kind of pragmatic, if unconscious, compassion?

Love takes many forms; and of course Elizabeth had another love besides Robert. Twelve-year-old Pen still sports the long curls and fancy clothes that have been his mother’s whim. Three years ago Nathaniel Hawthorne found him ‘slender, fragile, and spirit-like […] as if he had little or nothing to do with human flesh and blood’. Since then, a rather solitary childhood, as the only offspring of parents whose migratory lifestyle means he acquires no close friends his own age, has given him an enjoyment of solitary amusements; sketching and riding his pony. Though sociable since birth, his reliance on his mother has been as great as any boy’s. Wilson, in effect his nanny, has been gone for a couple of years. Where is he during this trance-like deathbed scene? What does he see or overhear – what does he understand has happened?

In the morning light Isa Blagden returns to Casa Guidi and takes Pen off to Villa Brichieri, her home in nearby Bellosguardo, an exclusive, wooded hill district. The next day but one, 1 July 1861, Pen is brought back into town for his mother’s funeral. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is regarded as a heroine of Italian reunification, and all the shops near Casa Guidi have been closed in her honour. Indeed the whole city, hung with the black of official mourning for Cavour, seems to be grieving for her. This is not entirely an illusion. Next week a prominent government minister, Simone Luigi Peruzzi, will call at Casa Guidi to express the hopes of ‘all Italians’ that Robert and Pen will remain in Tuscany; within a couple of years ‘grateful Florence’ will erect a tablet on the house wall to memorialise Elizabeth ‘whose poems forged a gold ring / Between Italy and England’. And today her coffin, crowned with white blossoms and laurel wreaths, is carried on a special ceremonial route allowed only to public figures through the city to the Protestant Cemetery.

At the graveside Pen’s father reads from his mother’s poem ‘The Sleep’:

And, friends, dear friends,—when it shall be

That this low breath is gone from me,

And round my bier ye come to weep,

Let One, most loving of you all,

Say, ‘Not a tear must o’er her fall;

He giveth His belovèd, sleep.’

That night, he joins Pen at Isa Blagden’s luxurious villa.

Now changes happen in quick succession. In less than a week, by 5 July, the boy has been shorn of his long hair and princeling style. ‘Pen, the golden curls and fantastic dress, is gone just as Ba is gone’, Robert tells Sarianna, and ‘is a common boy all at once’. This is practical, making it possible to do without Annunziata living in (which would be scandalous now that theirs is an all-male household), but it also draws a line under the life that Elizabeth led. Even Casa Guidi is to be abandoned. Robert commissions a photographer to create a record of the household’s extraordinary way of life, but, in the rooms darkened by the church wall immediately opposite, the daguerreotype process doesn’t take. So instead the painter George Mignaty is commissioned to enshrine the drawing room just as Elizabeth ‘disposed it and left it’, and on 1 August Robert and Pen leave Florence – as it turns out, for good.

He’s a boy who can never go home. His immediate future holds a month in Paris, then five weeks with his father, Aunt Sarianna and grandfather in Brittany. Perhaps one small comfort and continuity in this headlong transition is that he’s allowed to keep his little Giara mare, Stella. But all too soon Pen and his father – and Stella – are in London, and he is being enrolled with a tutor as the first stage of a years-long, ultimately unsuccessful struggle to cram him through an Oxford degree.

By next May, his father will be settled at 19 Warwick Crescent, where he’ll stay for the next quarter century as he manages the legacy of those sixteen miraculous years of marriage, and as his reputation grows and