Two-Way Mirror, Fiona Sampson [children's ebooks online .txt] 📗

At last, bounced into action by the completed mansion sale, he takes Rafarel House, part of a smart regency terrace at the western end of Sid-mouth seafront. ‘The drawing room’s four windows all look to the sea’, which is ‘about a hundred & fifty yards’ away; right next door is Fort Field, where local gentlemen play cricket. Perhaps this is what helps decide him: after all, he has eight sons living at home, three of whom are by now young adults with time hanging heavy on their hands. Besides, cricket is something he and his boys do together. Learnt in childhood – maybe even in his earliest years in Jamaica – it’s one of few remaining constants in his vertiginously changing life. Indeed, on the family’s ‘very last evening’ at Hope End, they go out into the grounds for a game.

It’s painful to picture that final match among the valley’s lengthening shadows. Henrietta has a sketch from the schoolroom window which shows woods massed on the hillside, behind a game in progress on the grass, and a church spire pricking the skyline like an eye-catcher. But this final game is also an improvised ceremony of farewell. The late August evening must feel like the end of summer in every way; when dusk falls shortly after seven there isn’t even a moon to light the lawns.

Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett has become a reflective, even a brooding man, secretive and deeply religious, certainly capable of seeing this as the end of his own life’s ‘summer’. He’s forty-seven: no great age – and plenty young enough to play cricket – but old enough to experience a midlife crisis as everything seems to crumble around him. In the last three years he has lost the two women he depended on most in the world, the death of his wife followed a couple of years later by that of his mother, who had for so long been effectively his only parent. On top of this, his fortune has dwindled. Papa is still a very wealthy man. But he’s been forced to sell the magnum opus which, like all builders of mansions, he must have imagined passing down through future generations. Perhaps it had even helped him picture, with an echo of the old Barrett imposter syndrome, eventual ennoblement and entry into the heart of the British Establishment. He loves Hope End so much that, when he dies, he’ll turn out never to have relinquished the estate woodlands. In short, he sees himself as ‘a broken down man’. To rebuild elsewhere – starting in the skimpy seaside terrace that he’s rented for just one month – would require tremendous willpower; never his strong point. And while it’s hard for us to feel sympathy for someone who continues to profit from slavery, for the man himself a strongly religious sense of obligation ratchets up the stress of feeling responsible for supporting a large number of family and servants.

The family leave Hope End in two parties. Papa, Bro and seventh son Septimus, or Sette, stay on till the house has been completely packed up. For the main group, a palindromic departure date of 23/8/1832 has been set: perhaps a superstitious choice? Setting out, they pass through the streets of Ledbury and on through familiar countryside. ‘I cannot dwell upon the pain of that first hour of our journey—but […b]efore the first day’s journey was at an end, we felt inexpressibly relieved—relieved from the restlessness & anxiety which have so long oppressed us’, Elizabeth admits to Julia Martin, a friend who lives at Old Colwall, the next estate to Hope End.

Grief, yes; but is there humiliation too? Julia, an Anglican vicar’s daughter from the Irish Midlands, married into local gentry when Elizabeth was a susceptible thirteen. Along with Daniel McSwiney and Hugh Stuart Boyd, she’s among the noticeable number of Irish acquaintances in Elizabeth’s tiny social circle; one of those subtle indicators of the Barretts’ level on the complex barometer of the English class system. But it’s only now that real friendship develops between the women, touched into life by Julia’s kindness in writing straight away to Elizabeth in Sidmouth. While they were actually neighbours, the awkward age gap of fourteen years combined with Elizabeth’s intellectual snobbery to make the younger woman prefer the company of Mrs Martin’s glamorously well-travelled husband James. Throughout her early twenties Elizabeth has displayed an embarrassing tendency to admire and befriend men rather than women. Over the last five years, Mr Boyd has fulfilled her need for a confidant, often in the nastiest ways, but she’s beginning to feel the need for female friendships; and they are an art she must learn. At home too, though Bro and Sam are now back from school, the siblings’ activities are increasingly segregated by gender, and her sisters Henrietta and Arabella have become her closest companions.

All the same, in the first weeks after Boyd’s departure her letters to him are wildly inappropriate. Things she may formerly have said face to face in private now spill onto pages that must be read aloud to him; most probably by his wife or daughter, about whom she writes with presumptuous cattiness: ‘I never could apprehend that a person with such breadth of chest & with so little tendency to becoming thin, was of a consumptive habit.’ These rather shaming, often transparently manipulative missives are spaced out by the relatively slow responses they receive: Elizabeth evidently hasn’t understood that Boyd’s first letter after he left Worcestershire, ‘looking back with pleasure to our past intercourse’ and apologising for occasions on which he may have ‘spoken to me crossly or peevishly’, is a ‘Dear Joanna’, trying to draw a line under the addictive tangle of their relationship. In leaving Colwall for the environs of Bath, he was in every sense moving on. Now it’s Elizabeth’s turn to try, however clumsily, to wind him back in, though even she apprehends dimly that there are limits, and peppers