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

assorted party of five travellers, plus dog, arrive in Orléans. It’s here that, next day, Elizabeth reads her family’s responses to her departure: ‘my “death warrant” I called it at the time […]. Robert brought in a great packet of letters .. & I held them in my hands, not able to open one, & growing paler & colder every moment.’

In the event, it’s both better and worse than she’d feared. Her sisters’ reactions to both her marriage and the secrecy it entailed are joyfully supportive. But her brothers are furious. ‘They were very hard letters […] I thought it hard, I confess, that [George] should […] use his love for me to half break my heart with such a letter—Only he wrote in excitement & in ignorance.’ Papa’s reaction is exactly the extreme she predicted to Robert two days after their marriage: ‘He will wish […] that I had died years ago!’ He writes that he considers her dead.

This is heartbreaking for Elizabeth, who has spent forty years being a compliant, often adoring daughter. Yet in the same bundle are letters of congratulation from friends. Sarianna Browning sends her new sister-in-law a portable writing desk. There are congratulations from Nelly Bordman, Elizabeth’s doctor Mr Jago, Miss Mitford, and John Kenyon, who writes that ‘the very peculiar circumstances of your case have transmuted what might have been otherwise called “Imprudence” into “Prudence,” […] if the thing had been asked of me I should have advised it.’ A month from now, mail sent poste restante to Pisa will bring more congratulations, from literary friends in particular. ‘We hear everyday kind speeches & messages from people .. such as Mr Chorley of the Athenæum who “has tears in his eyes” .. Mon[c]kton Milnes, Barry Cornwall & other friends of my husband’s .. but who only know me by my books,’ as Elizabeth tells Julia Martin, back in a Herefordshire that must seem increasingly remote. This is all excellent as far as it goes, but not quite comforting enough: ‘I want the love & sympathy of those who love me & whom I love.’ And so a pattern is set. Literary and artistic contemporaries, and readers in the decades to come, will welcome, and even romanticise, the marriage. But even while they embrace this public version, the couple themselves will have to struggle for years to recreate normal family relationships.

Now, whether vindicated or condemned, they need to keep moving south ahead of the weather. At Bourges they admire the cathedral’s thirteenth-century stained glass. In the middle of a rainstorm they travel down the Rhone from Lyon to Avignon, where Elizabeth misses seeing the Palais des Papes but joins a trip to Petrarch’s Fontaine de Vaucluse. Despite objections from Robert – and Flush – she clambers across slippery stones in the ‘boiling water’ to sit on a rock midstream, enjoying the spray. ‘R. said “Ba, are you losing your senses?”’ but ‘The change of air appeared to act on me like a charm.’ And she’s not the only one thriving. She’s able to reassure Miss Mitford that, ‘Nearly as much attention has been paid to Flush as to me from the beginning, so that he is perfectly reconciled, & would be happy, if the people at the railroads were not barbarians & immoveable in their evil designs of shutting him up in a box when we travel that way.’

On to Aix-en-Provence, and then ‘glittering, roaring Marseilles .. coloured even down into its puddles’, from where, on 11 October, the party sail to Genoa. They leave in hot sun, but pass a stormy night. Everyone is seasick. But the next morning, wrapped in a warm cloak – and quickly joined by Robert – Elizabeth takes her famously strong sea legs up alone on deck for her first look at Italy. It is love at first sight:

a thousand mountains & their rocks leapt up against the morning-sun, & [I] counted the little Italian towns one after another. […] The ship was near enough to shore for us to see the green blinds to the windows of the houses […] In one place, I counted six mountains (such mountains!) one behind another, colour behind colour, from black, or the most gorgeous purple, to that spectral white which the crowding of the olives gives. […] & sometimes fragments of cloud hung on the rocks, shining as if the sun himself had broken it. It was all glorious, & past speaking of.

The enchantment continues at Genoa, where the lovers sleep in the frescoed chamber of a dilapidated palazzo. ‘Beautiful Genoa—what a vision it is!—& our first sight of Italy beside.’ At last, after one more stormy night in the steamer, they arrive at Livorno on 14 October 1846.

‘And now this is Pisa—beautiful Pisa! […] All tranquil & grand.’ Here the travellers part: Anna and Gerardine are going on to Rome. After three nights in the Hotel Tre Donzelli, Robert and Elizabeth rent a furnished three-bedroom apartment in the sixteenth-century Collegio Di Ferdinando, one short block from the Duomo, the Baptistery and the Leaning Tower, and with a good view of all three. They’re the only tenants of this stuccoed Renaissance palazzo in ‘the very “most eligible situation in Pisa”’, which boasts a ‘grand marble entrance, marble steps & pillars’ restored by Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives introduced generations of Europeans like the Brownings to Italy’s Renaissance artists. Better still, it has hot water thrown in with the rent, which Elizabeth and Robert believe is cheap – though it turns out to be above the going rate.

But after all they’re a new couple, and there’s going to be as much play as seriousness as they embark on their first, quixotic tries at married life:

You would certainly smile to see how we set about housekeeping. R. brought home white sugar in his pocket—[…] & our general councils with Wilson .. “What is a pound? what is an ounce?” .. would amuse you if you could hear them.

Impracticality settles into joyous pattern as