Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (reading books for 6 year olds TXT) 📕

of Common Prayer, so she and Robert make their vows using the same words as innumerable couples before them. Spoken, the Marriage Service takes no more than half an hour. But, especially in this era when marriage is a matter of material survival as well as social identity, that half hour is life-changing.

For no one is that more true than for Elizabeth and Robert. The pews of St Marylebone, where tablet monuments are already starting to crowd the walls, are empty as they speak their lines. But the elegant neoclassical building, still barely thirty years old, is full of the sense of the particular, monied central London community it serves: and from which the new Mr and Mrs Browning are expelling themselves vow by vow. This is not Robert’s community but it is – socially, if not spiritually – Elizabeth’s. Her sense as they emerge from the church and she makes it down the porticoed steps to the waiting cab must be dizzying. A year on, she recalls:

it does make us laugh, for instance, to think of the official’s […] attitude & gesture of astonishment, as he stood at the churchdoor & saw bride & bridegroom part on the best terms possible & go off in separate flies. Robert was very generous & threw about his gold to clerk, pew openers &c &c in a way to convict us of being in a condition of incognito .. and […] “Never had he seen anything more remarkable than that, in the whole course of his practice!”

But at the time, full of ‘emotion & confusion’, it’s not funny at all. (It even looks as though Elizabeth has had to supply her own ring. Two days before the wedding, she’s asked Robert to call, ‘And then, you shall have the ring .. soon enough, and safer.’)

Now her immediate worry is that sensationalist journalists, who scan church registers looking for scandal, may ‘out’ the wedding. Still, she sends Wilson home and, as planned, directs the cab to nearby St John’s Wood, where she calls on ‘poor Mr Boyd’ in his ‘dark little room’. She’s arranged for her sisters to join her here so they’ll witness her alibi. But they seem to take forever to arrive, and Elizabeth gets in such a state that Boyd, who’s in on the truth, persuades her to drink some Cyprus wine and eat some bread and butter to keep her strength up. It’s the last time she’ll see her old friend, now sixty-five, who will die less than two years from now; this time at least, he does right by her. At last Arabella and Henrietta turn up in a panic, ‘& with such grave faces!’ – because Arabella had forgotten the arrangement. And once they have arrived the sisters prolong the agony. As the day’s holding fair, they decide to take the carriage on for a drive to Hampstead Heath.

But half past four sees Elizabeth finally back in her own room and writing to Robert as usual. Only it is no longer as usual. This time she’s writing to her husband, and from the home she has renounced by marrying him. Besides, the risks of discovery and separation still aren’t over, and won’t be till they’re out of the country. Recently, Flush was kidnapped for the third time; as her brothers and lover held back, Elizabeth herself went to Shoreditch where she saw the ‘immense female bandit’ Mrs Taylor and negotiated his release. Now the same practical determination drives her travel planning. Papa has announced Monday 21 September as moving day. Is it really possible to leave before then, getting everything done in just a week? But on Thursday, with just two days to go, the lovers agree. Since Elizabeth can’t leave the house on a Friday or Sunday, they will set out for Europe on Saturday 19 September.

Packing, in this intensely scrutinising household, is almost out of the question. Robert urges Elizabeth to bring as little as possible; she can buy clothes en route. She promises, ‘I will be docile about the books, dearest’: no mean feat for a writer, especially one whose entire waking life has relied so disproportionately on the page. In the event she and Wilson pack just two smallish bags, ‘a light box and a carpet bag’ containing only the basics, including most of her jewellery, Robert’s letters, and the manuscript of Sonnets from the Portuguese. On Friday, Wilson smuggles these out of the house and round the corner to the cab stand, where she dispatches them to the railway company’s offices ‘care of Robert Browning’.

In fact Wilson is responsible for many of these arrangements. Robert has got in such an excited muddle that he fails to realise that there are two different Channel crossing services offered by rival companies, each with their own connecting trains. The night before their departure, Elizabeth has to correct his timing for their rendezvous, reminding him that the express train leaves Vauxhall at 5pm and gets to Southampton at 8pm. As The Railway Times for 19 September records, the ‘South Western Steam Packet Company’s splendid and powerful ships’ depart from Southampton for Le Havre via Portsmouth on a scheduled twice-weekly sailing at 9pm that day.

Under the pressure of remaining practical Elizabeth’s writing slants and staggers down the page. Robert is being unreliable just when she needs to rely on him. It’s as if, believing his long wait is over, he’s taken his eye off the ball. A disproportionate amount of his energy seems to be absorbed by wording the newspaper notice of the marriage, and of joint calling cards. These matter to Elizabeth too, but for purely practical reasons: public announcement tells the world that the Brownings are legally married, not unwed lovers running away together. She’s so stressed she even snaps at Robert:

You have acted throughout too much ‘the woman’s part’, as that is considered—You loved me because I was lower than others, that you might be generous & raise me up:—[…] quite wrong for a