Two-Way Mirror Fiona Sampson (best romance ebooks .txt) 📖

now or never. If the lovers really are to sail south, and Elizabeth to escape another London winter, they must do so before the weather closes in. Something has to change. And suddenly, on 9 September, it does. As if to force their hand, Papa announces, with characteristic lack of consultation, that he’s moving the entire family out to the countryside because, he says, Wimpole Street needs to be refurbished. Less than a fortnight later, on 21 September, the Barretts have relocated to the small Surrey village of Little Bookham.

But Elizabeth isn’t with them. ‘Therefore decide!’ she challenges Robert when she gets the news. ‘It seems quite too soon & too sudden for us to set out on our Italian adventure now—.’ But her lover is tired of waiting. He understands quite well that if Elizabeth goes off to the countryside now, the window for European escape will close for another year. And maybe forever. Even if she does survive the winter cold, a relationship can only endure stasis for so long before it becomes fixed in unreality. So he takes her at her word, and decides: ‘If you do go on Monday, our marriage will be impossible for another year—the misery! You see what we have gained by waiting. We must be married directly and go to Italy—I will go for a licence today and we can be married on Saturday.’

It’s not entirely out of the blue. In recent weeks things have been getting increasingly practical. On 5 August Elizabeth detailed her money. The interest on her nest egg of £8,000 produces an annual income of around £160 to £180, which her father doles out to her quarterly; the shares Uncle Sam left her in the David Lyon generate another £200 per annum. The next day, she discovered that she has around a third more than this to play with. Papa has been keeping back around £120 of her interest every year:

Stormie told me this morning, in answer to an enquiry of mine, that certainly I did not receive the whole interest of the fund-money, .. could not .. making ever so much allowance for the income-tax. And now, upon consideration, I seem to see that I cannot have done so—[…] Stormie said ‘There must be three hundred a year of interest from the fund-money—even at the low rate of interest paid there.’

It will be enough to live on. Even so, Robert borrows £100 from his father to meet the cost of the journey. He has finally told his parents the plan, which is to be scrupulously honourable. The lovers won’t elope, which would bring scandal on their families, but will marry first and only then travel abroad as a respectably married couple – albeit secretly. Their secrecy will also protect siblings and friends from being punished by Elizabeth’s father for any complicity. One reason Elizabeth now decides to travel with her maid is indeed that she needs lots of practical help. She’s never even learnt to do her own hair: those barley curls! But it’s also a way to protect Elizabeth Wilson from the consequences of her connivance. ‘If I left her behind she would be turned into the street before sunset’, Elizabeth tells Robert – while at the same time noting shrewdly that, ‘She is an expensive servant—she has sixteen pounds a year’.

Shrewd or no, there’s real affection between Elizabeth and Wilson, who ‘has professed herself willing “to go anywhere in the world with me”,’ and whose loyalty now proves indispensable. Just three days after Papa’s announcement about the country move, Robert and Elizabeth are indeed ‘married on Saturday’, at eleven o’clock on the morning of 12 September 1846. The witnesses are Robert’s cousin James Silverthorne and, taking a huge risk, Elizabeth Wilson. She has only Elizabeth’s loyalty to protect her from the consequences of disobeying her powerful employer. ‘Remember to thank Wilson for me,’ Robert injuncts his new bride that evening and again the next day, ‘It was kind, very kind of Wilson.’

However quiet the actual ceremony, it takes place in the smart Regency parish church of St Marylebone, which, with its impressive pediment and broad flight of steps giving right onto the Marylebone Road, could hardly be less discreet. The couple are in a sense hiding in plain sight. They’re also taking care to shield the community of Nonconformist Padding-ton Chapel, their natural spiritual home and the more obvious place for them to marry. Its minister, the Revd James Stratten, is a Congregational appointment who, unlike the Anglican clergy of St Marylebone, could be driven out by a furious Barrett paterfamilias. Besides, the Chapel is a lifeline they mustn’t endanger for the by now deeply religious Arabella.

The logistics of the day itself are delicate. Elizabeth can only leave home unchallenged between ten and five, when the men are out and about. Today she waits discreetly till half past ten. That leaves her and Wilson only half an hour to get to St Marylebone Church. It’s a distance of just a third of a mile, no more than ten minutes at a normal stroll. But Elizabeth isn’t a strong walker at the best of times and this morning, having not slept all night, she’s in such a state that she nearly faints. In her fluster she’s left home without smelling salts; but she has the presence of mind to go into a chemist’s to buy some. She revives, and with Wilson’s help makes it to the cab rank on Marylebone High Street, where she takes a fly to the church.

This is going the long way round. Church and fly stand are roughly equidistant from 50 Wimpole Street. But the fly is a crucial alibi, because last night Elizabeth told Arabella she would be taking one to call on Mr Boyd. The ride to St Marylebone is short indeed, a matter of two or three minutes, but worth the cabbie’s while because Elizabeth retains him to wait outside the church. These are the days of the Book