Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  And so at the end of August, turning her back on literary London and her unfolding success as a poet, Elizabeth leaves for Devon where (after the usual tortuous decision-making) her father has allowed her to overwinter. She’s too unwell to manage the 200-mile journey by carriage, but 25 August sees her at the docks boarding the Saturday breakfast-time sailing for Plymouth. There she connects with the packet, a fast, stopping mail boat, which arrives in Torquay on the evening of 27 August 1838.

  For all her frailty, Elizabeth is a good traveller, ‘the only lady on board who did not suffer from seasickness’. Besides, she hasn’t made the journey alone. She’s accompanied by Bro and George; and by Henrietta, who’s by now desperate to escape the heavily supervised domestic round at Wimpole Street. Henrietta’s memories of the ‘gay’ months she spent with Bro at Torquay five years ago mix with guilt at leaving Arabella ‘sisterless’ in Wimpole Street; but Arabel, as family often call her, does have the Revd Hunter’s by now teenaged daughter Mary for company, and she and Henrietta have agreed to swap places at the turn of the year.

  At first the siblings stay with their ‘aunt and uncle Hedley who have resided at Torquay for the last two or three years under Dr Chambers’s jurisdiction, on account of my uncle’s being affected in some similar way to myself’. (Hedley, an uncle only by marriage, offers no clue to genetic predisposition; besides, he will go on to a long, healthy life, dying in his seventies.) But awkwardly, their house is too far from the sea for Elizabeth, who’s by now confined to an invalid chair. It is also rather cold. So it’s agreed that from 1 October she will take a terraced house on the seafront. The rent, at £180 per annum, is high: poor health represents good business for these south Devon towns, famed for their mild climate and unpolluted sea air. But Elizabeth pays, and agrees to share the financial and legal responsibility with Bummy, who is now closing up her own home in rural Frocester, Gloucestershire to resume the care of her eldest niece.

  However the heavy lifting, literal as well as metaphorical, will be done by Elizabeth’s new maid, a country girl from Lincolnshire called Elizabeth Crow. Just before they left London her predecessor, who had worked for the family for a couple of years, ‘& had professed her willingness to go anywhere with me’, announced that she wasn’t well enough to come to Devon. Elizabeth, who like all members of her class tends to treat servants as invisible necessities, manages briefly to make sympathetic noises – ‘and indeed she is not well, poor thing, nor does she look so!’ – that are conspicuously muted compared with, for example, the terms in which she worries over Miss Mitford’s dog Dash. Although perhaps this is a symptom of scepticism: ‘We have some reason for suspecting fear of the sea-voyage to have had a little to do with the change.’

  Elizabeth Crow is altogether more robust. She is in her early twenties, strong and energetic, with a northerner’s brisk manner. She’s also intelligent, as her mistress gradually realises: ‘She is an excellent young woman—intelligent bright-tempered & feeling-hearted,—more to me than a mere servant; since her heart works more than her hand in all she does for me! And her delight in [Miss Mitford’s book] Village which I gave her to read, was as true a thing as ever was that of readers of higher degree.’ But even Crow, as the Barretts call her, will be overruled by Elizabeth’s new physician. Dr Barry of Torquay is ‘a young man—full of energy—with a countenance seeming to look towards life—devoted to his profession & rising rapidly into professional eminence—a young man with a young wife & child, & baby unborn.’ An advocate of fresh air and early rising, he’s initially certain his methods are working for Elizabeth; a month after her arrival, he declares that ‘the respiration is clearer on the affected side.’

  In fact his regime leaves the patient ‘haunted throughout by weakness, an oppressive sense of weakness, & […] such lowness of spirits, that I could have cried all day if there were no exertion in crying! For Dr Barry forbids her ‘London habit (very useful in enabling an invalid to get thro’ a good deal of writing without fatigue) of lying in bed until two’, and forces Elizabeth out daily in the invalid chair; with the result that she ‘seldom failed to come back quite exhausted & fit for nothing better than reading nonsense.’ Worse:

  On the occasion of my writing case being accidentally visible—‘Have you been writing today Miss Barrett’. ‘No’—‘Did you write yesterday?’ ‘Yes’. ‘You will be so good as not to do so any more’!!—And again—‘You have observed my directions & been idle lately Miss Barrett?’ ‘Yes’. ‘And within these last three weeks you have never written any poetry? […] if you please to do this, neither I nor anyone else can do anything for you’.

  Life has got stuck once again: it’s as if she had never escaped from Gloucester. To be exiled in Torquay, away from her newly flourishing literary life and many of the people she loves, is bad enough. ‘These partings are dyings’, she tells Arabella on the eve of George’s departure for London; and she means it literally, since despite the doctor’s assurances it’s not certain that she’ll live to see absent friends and family again. But to be forbidden to write is to be denied what is by now the central purpose of her life, as well as her habitual coping mechanism.

  Barry is just another in the long line of medics who ban writing women from the one activity that probably makes them feel better and stronger than any other. His idea that writing is over-stimulating for the female, but not the male, system isn’t new; nor is it about to vanish. Seven years from now, Elizabeth will manage to be funny as well as furious about this:

  I had a doctor once who thought he had done everything because he had carried the inkstand out of the room—[…] He gravely thought poetry a sort of disease .. a sort of fungus of the brain—& held as a serious opinion, that nobody could be properly well who exercised it as an art—which was true (he maintained) even of men—[…] for women, it was a mortal malady & incompatible with any common show of health under any circumstances.

  But at the moment it’s simply depressing. She had hoped, ‘Encouraged by Dr C’s permission, to manage here without medical visits, & to trust simply to God’s sun & air’. However, far from taking the patient off drugs, Barry has upped her dose of digitalis, and added ‘the blister &c applied without any particular call for it’, and inhalations of ‘what, Dr Barry WONT tell me for I asked him twice & was answered each time by an evasion’. Things seem to be getting worse instead of better.

  The only bright spot in the autumnal gloom is that Papa has given permission for Bro to stay on in Devon, even though both men would prefer he returned to London. Father and daughter share not only the tendency to hole up, but a desire to keep their loved ones holed up with them. Keeping ‘Brozie’ in Torquay with nothing to do except chaperone his sister prevents his having to return to Jamaica, but it must also ‘quench the energies of his life’, to paraphrase Elizabeth’s own perceptive phrase. Of course, there are compensations. Sheltered by ‘the slant woods of Beacon hill’, the siblings’ new home at 3 Beacon Terrace stands ‘immediately upon the lovely bay—a few paces dividing our door from its waves—& nothing but the “sweet south” & congenial west wind can reach us’. A handsome Regency mid-terrace, its frontage dressed with a wrought-iron balcony and double-height ornamental pilasters, it’s roomy enough for as many family members as she can persuade her father to part with. But as 1838 turns into 1839 Elizabeth’s coughing continues to interrupt every activity, its convulsive rhythm forming the soundtrack to thought, so that putting together lines of poetry – even without Dr Barry’s permission – feels almost impossible. At night coughing destroys the very sleep that might give the body a chance to heal; propped on pillows, Elizabeth hacks her way through the insomniac small hours.

  Not till early summer does some good news interrupt this dour routine. On 18 May 1839, ‘RB’ – Richard Barrett, the distant cousin who has been hounding the family through Chancery – dies suddenly at the age of fifty, ‘after only one hour & a half’s illness caused by a fit of Apoplexy’, leaving the years-long dispute uns
ettled but putting a de facto end to his personal campaign. But in September death crosses Elizabeth’s own threshold. Dr Barry – by now her ‘able & most kind physician who for above a year has attended me almost every day’ – is taken ill with what seems at first to be ‘rheumatic & nervous fever’. He rallies, relapses, rallies and relapses a second time, and dies before the end of the month. The patient is left with survivor’s guilt that, once again, takes somatic form – ‘the physician was taken & the patient left—& left of course deeply affected & shaken’ – exacerbated by the three weeks without medical care that follow. She suffers ‘my old attack of fever & imperviousness to sleep’.

  Having to move house on 1 October, after a year’s tenancy at number 3, adds to the stress. Number 1 Beacon Terrace, three doors down, is a plainer, larger and, crucially, a cheaper house. It’s here that Dr Barry’s successor, Dr Scully, ‘comes to see her every day not only medically it appears, but to chat, he seldom leaves her under an hour & tells her all the news & the scandal of the neighbourhood.’ Despite these ministrations, by the end of the year Elizabeth is still bedbound, ‘not any thinner, altho’ perhaps not fatter’ and is ‘carried to her sofa for a short time every day, but her Coming into the drawing room has not been thought of yet’, as Henrietta confides to Sam, who’s been back in Jamaica for the last half year.

  Late summer saw Arabella arrive in Torquay, and as 1839 gives way to 1840 the siblings settle in around Elizabeth’s invalid routines. But in April a letter arrives with shocking news that changes everything. Their brother Sam has died. He contracted what’s probably (mosquito-borne) Yellow Fever – so called because it can trigger jaundice – and died two months ago, on 17 February 1840. He had also fallen ill during his first Jamaican trip; but this time he knew he was dying, dictated his will, and asked for the last rites, which were refused him by Hope Waddell, a preacher whose ministry the family have enabled, in a fit of self-righteous Revivalism. During the young man’s earlier stay on the island, Waddell had denounced him for sleeping around – and with enslaved women at that. Now he decided that Sam was saying he had ‘never taken the sacrament’ and – though lack of confirmation into the Anglican Church is no barrier to Nonconformist communion – refused the twenty-eight-year-old’s dying request, choosing instead comfortlessly to read him the Bible.

  In short, it’s as bitter a death as possible and, though the family may not be aware of every detail, they understand the loneliness of it. In the grief that follows, everyone worries especially about the effect on Elizabeth. Sure enough, she’s poleaxed: ‘It was a heavy blow for all of us—and I, being weak you see, was struck down as by a bodily blow, in a moment, without having time for tears.’ Just as at the death of her mother, she seems unable to cry. Once again, as when Uncle Sam died, her mourning is psychosomatic. ‘Too weak to hold a pen’, she goes into such a serious decline that Papa hurries to Torquay.

  Of course, he’s terrified of losing another child. But the prolonged emergency of Elizabeth’s health seems to paralyse him. Late June sees him writing to Sette, back in town, that:

  it is a monstrous time since I left you, and I am wanted very much in London, but how to leave my beloved Ba, I know not, I fear the very mention of it, for she is indeed lamentably weak, & yet it is absolutely necessary I should go; I really know not how to act.

  Such vacillation is hardly reassuring for a teenager who might prefer paternal confidence to confidences. At eighteen, Sette has effectively been left in charge at Wimpole Street, while his elder brother Alfred studies at the newly founded University College London and the younger Octavius continues at home with a tutor. (Left in charge, too, in preference to the family’s rebel, twenty-two-year-old world traveller and wannabe commissioned officer Henry, who seems unable to pick an ‘occupation which is not insurmountably objectionable to Papa’.)

  But for once Papa has chosen well. Sette has always been one of his father’s favourites, ‘both my right & left hand’, the child who slept in his bed and from whom he couldn’t be parted during the move from Hope End. This seventh son has developed a precocious confidence the family boast fondly about to each other; they particularly love his ‘assurance in costuming himself in a long tailed coat belonging to his elder brother’ to gatecrash an Oxford University presentation to the Queen on her marriage. Now this same filial maturity allows Papa to remain at Elizabeth’s bedside till the end of the year.

  Despite their father’s presence, it seems that in this period of grief and anxiety both Bro and Arabella manage, astonishingly, to seize the day and conduct romances. Arabella’s scrape sounds as though it may involve a beloved pony rather than a young man: Elizabeth may be able to afford new riding habits, like the one she buys Henrietta, but actual mounts must be borrowed and relinquished when friends move away. ‘Poor dearest Bella’ seems to have gone on a wild expedition; she receives a ‘scolding after the perils!—& […] the real thorough fatigue of half running nearly eight miles!’ But Bro’s love affair appears to be the real thing. Last July he was frankly mooning; Henrietta reported that he spent his time ‘between drawing, fishing & smoking […] His hair remains as long and lanky as ever—there is no hope for it now, since [Monti] [Miss] Garden expressed her approbation of it—she is very anxious to return to Torquay, but not more so I suspect than Bro is to see her.’ By June 1840 the moment seems to be passing. Elizabeth notes that her brother has stopped keeping his blind drawn, ‘& indeed ventures to show his whole face out of doors by twilight instead of waiting for the very pitch dark’. For all the sisters’ teasing, though, Elizabeth will later imply that this love affair was so serious that she had wanted to settle money on her favourite brother so he could marry.

  But all such hopes and intrigues are in vain, for the following month Bro goes sailing with friends of a Saturday, and never returns. ‘Boating’ is a Barrett family pleasure, one at which Bro is an old hand, and the weather on 11 July is fine. He goes out, as he has before, with ‘two of his friends Mr Vanneck & Captn Clarke’, both also experienced sailors, on Vanneck’s well-equipped vessel the La Belle Sauvage, where they’re aided by a professional crewman. All three ‘gentlemen’ can swim, and nothing is amiss with the weather. So what happens next is a shocking mystery. As Papa writes to Wimpole Street:

  They left at a little of the 12 o’clock it seems, & up to this time 11 o’clock Monday Night, they have not been heard of, further than that on Saturday afternoon about 1/2 after 3 o’clock, a Gentleman in his Catch, about 4 miles to the East of Teingmouth [sic], saw a Boat exactly corresponding to the one they went in […] about a mile from him, when he observed it go down; He set sail immediately to the spot, which he says he reached in 4 or 5 minutes, but nothing whatever could he see belo[n]ging to her or the Party in her […] altho he remained about the place for nearly four hours—& what is extraordinary it does not appear that she upset, for he saw the point of her mast above the water last so that I cannot understand, how some one did not keep upon the surface.

  The weekend drags on without either reassurance or confirmation of their worst fears. ‘Henrietta, I think, scarcely can believe it, but weeps, Arabel does, & weeps, but her faith bears her up well’ while:

  On Sunday afternoon, Mrs Vanneck & two others went over to Teingmouth [sic] & there they heard that a Boat containing two Ladies & I think two Men or Boys […] had been lost off Dawlish now it is supposed that two of dear Bro’s party may have taken their Coats off, & hence from their shirt sleaves supposing they were taken for women. Up to the arrival of the Mail we caught as a straw at the possibility of their having gone to the Land Ship near Lyme or to Weymouth, where Mr Vanneck the day before talked of going.

  By Tuesday, Henrietta does believe the worst, and she has hysterics. Elizabeth has from the outset been neither optimistic nor consoled by faith. Her last words to her favourite brother were petulant; now that momentary irritation will remain with her forever. Once again her health collapses under the shock. ‘Scarcely conscious, her mind wanders.�
� She comes even closer to dying than she did at the news of Sam’s death. Love and grief lodge in the body, making the immune system, the hormones, buckle and rev. As Papa says, ‘It is a wonder to me that she lives, for her love for [Bro] was truely great, & […] uninterrupted, it began in infancy & has gone on growing with their growth—He was always the adytum of all her secrets & plans.’

  The family are left hanging for three weeks until at last, on 4 August, Bro’s body is washed up at nearby Babbacombe, along with the remains of Captain Clarke and of the sailor. Cruelly decomposed, all three are hastily buried just two days later in the local parish churchyard. The whole thing is both horrifying and uncanny. Until they had Bro’s body, the family couldn’t be absolutely certain he was dead, whatever common sense told them. But even once it is returned to them by the water they don’t in a sense have it, because it’s too destroyed to be viewed. And in the coming months Elizabeth must live on constantly in earshot of the sea that killed her brother. Now the breakers outside her window sound less like breathing than fighting for breath. In October she tells Miss Mitford, ‘These walls—& the sound of what is very fearful a few yards from them—that perpetual dashing sound, have preyed on me. I have been crushed trodden down.’

  Not till December does her father feel that she’s well enough for him to leave her and resume his London responsibilities: the meetings with bankers, lawyers, middlemen and dealers that make up a life of international trade. Yet what she herself wants is for everyone just to go away and leave her alone: ‘She cannot hear of any one coming near her, indeed she would have us all to leave her, as she associates in her mind every one & every thing with her loss.’ As continuing ill-health, intensified now by grief, forces her to overwinter once more in ‘this dreadful place’, ‘Months roll over months. I know it is for good—but very hard to bear.’