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

man, as again & again I used to signify to you, Robert—but you went on & did it all the same. And now, you still go on—[…] You are to do everything I like, instead of my doing what you like, .. and to ‘honour & obey’ me, in spite of what was in the vows last Saturday.

Never again will she be as vulnerable as she is during these last hours alone at Wimpole Street, surrounded by everything she’s giving up. Robert’s delighted family share his sense that the romance is on the home straight, and send loving messages. But her own are very different, and in these final moments she must write the letters she will leave for them: confession, explanation, messages of farewell. Overwhelmed in advance by homesickness and loneliness, she pleads with her siblings and father to write poste restante to Orléans, where the couple plan to stop on their way south. The tone of her surviving letter to her old ally is heartbreaking:

My dearest George I throw myself on your affection for me & beseech of God that it may hold under the weight—[…] I bless you, I love you—I am your Ba—.

Hardly thinking straight, she alludes only in passing to the parental prohibition that’s impelled her deception: ‘I knew, & you know, what the consequence of that application [for Papa’s permission] would have been—we should have been separated from that moment.’

At last, leaving the house between half part three and four ‘precisely’ while her father and siblings are eating, Elizabeth, Wilson and Flush make their way round the corner to Hodgson’s British and Foreign Subscription Library, at what is now 45 New Cavendish Street; where behind the smart ionic columns of the façade Robert is waiting in the Reading Room.

The following morning they’re in France, and there’s suddenly no more need for secrecy, adrenaline or headlong flight. But it’s as if nothing feels quite real yet. Elizabeth sets an unrealistic pace, as she will admit to Arabel:

After the Havre passage which was a miserable thing in all ways […] We were all three of us exhausted either by the sea or the sorrow, & Wilson & I lay down for a few hours, & had coffee & what else we could take—this, till nine oclock in the evening when the diligence set out for Rouen.

The railway line is only open beyond Rouen, so this dream-like progress continues by diligence:

now five horses, now seven .. all looking wild & loosely harnessed, .. some of them white, some brown, some black, with the manes leaping as they gallopped, & the white reins dripping down over their heads .. such a fantastic scene it was in the moonlight!—& I who was a little feverish […] began to see it all as in a vision & to doubt whether I was in or out of the body.

But at Rouen they come abruptly back to earth. There’s a mix-up with the luggage, which has been already been loaded onto the overnight train and so:

I prevailed over all the fears [and] after a rest of twenty minutes at the Rouen Hotel .. coffee & the breaking of bread […] Robert in his infinite tenderness would insist on carrying me, between the lines of strange foreign faces & in the travellers’ room, .. back again to the coupè of the diligence which was placed on the railway, .. & so we rolled on towards Paris.

At the terminus, the following morning:

we were deposited in the Messagerie Hotel, in a great noisy court—taking & not choosing that Hotel .. […] Still we had good coffee, & everything was clean, & everybody courteous to the top of courtesy—& while I lay resting, Robert went to speak to Mrs Jameson [… ] She was not at home. He left a note […By now] he was so thoroughly worn out with the anxiety, agitation, fatigue, & effect of the sea voyage together with that of having scarcely eaten anything for three weeks, that he quite staggered.

This makes good sense. Anna Jameson is an old friend and woman of the world. Robert’s note, ‘Come & see your friend & my wife EBB—’, asks her to continue the interplay of friendship and social nicety that creates the texture of normal life. And she is the right person to ask. Sure enough, that very evening:

She came with her hands stretched out, & eyes opened as wide as Flush’s .. ‘Can it be possible? is it possible? You wild, dear creature! You dear, abominable poets! Why what a ménage you will make!—[…] But he is a wise man .. in choosing so .. & you are a wise woman, let the world say as it pleases!’

Better still, their much-travelled friend is used to looking after herself, and is as practical as she is intellectual. She moves the Brownings to the much more comfortable Hôtel aux Armes de la Ville de Paris, where she and a seventeen-year-old travelling companion, her orphaned niece Gerardine Bate, are staying. Having settled them in, she persuades the couple to spend a week in Paris gathering their strength; meanwhile she uses personal contacts to sort out a problem with their passport. Best of all, she arranges to accompany them on their onward journey.

In truth, this may be partly self-interest. Gerardine isn’t the most scintillating company for the sophisticated art historian:

just a pretty accomplished, gentle little girl […] thinking how to please herself, and loving ‘aunt Nina’ in a sort of indolent fashion, (enough to wish to please her too, if it could be done without much exertion) .. but who was no more fitted to be what Mrs Jameson desired, a laborious artist, than to fly up to heaven like a lark. For ever & ever there were discussions about Gerardine’s indolence, who had been besought to do this drawing or that, instead of which she lay in bed in the morning & played with Flush at night.

But whatever Anna Jameson’s reasons, on 28 September the oddly