Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  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 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 Portugue
se. 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 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 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 portab
le 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.’