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In declining to describe her most intimate moments, Isabella was adhering to a well-worn literary convention. The newly betrothed heroine of Fanny Burney’s novel
Evelina
(1778) protests: ‘I cannot write the scene that followed, though every word is engraved in my heart.’ The formula implied that there were acts and feelings too sacred – or indelicate – to be committed to paper; it elided sensuality and propriety, performing a kind of trick whereby the coy heroine was enabled by silence to be at once passionate and polite – jealous of her own and her lover’s privacy, respectful of her reader’s finer feelings.

Isabella and Edward ‘rose soon more composed and cheerful’, and went back to the house ‘quickly, fearful of being too late’. Over dinner, Isabella again avoided conversation with Edward: ‘I talked all I could to Lady Drysdale, for there were few persons present, and turned from him, leaving him to talk to Miss T—.’ Afterwards, she took ‘a nice long ride’ with Edward in a carriage to the abandoned abbey at Waverley, the Brown sisters both sitting behind.

‘We talked with the utmost confidence, but somewhat more calmly,’ wrote Isabella. ‘I entreated him to believe that since my marriage I had never before once in the smallest degree transgressed. He consoled me for what I had done now, and conjured me to forgive myself. He said he had always liked me, and had thought with pity of my being thrown away, as my husband was evidently unsuited to me, and was, as he could plainly see, violent tempered and unamiable.’

Edward reminded Isabella of the vulnerability of his own position: ‘we spoke of his early age, thirty-one, the sweet unsuspicious character of his wife, rather than pain whom he would cut off his right hand.’ They were moving on to the subject of Isabella’s unhappiness – ‘my often bitter misery and wish for death’ – when Lady Drysdale and Mary Lane appeared. They had come to ask Isabella if she wanted them to book a fly to take her to the railway station. The doctor’s wife and motherin-law were as warm and trusting as ever: ‘they kindly received my determination to go away about 7, and went off again without one cold or displeased look, and yet we were walking arm-in-arm through those lonely woods and talking how earnestly’.

At seven o’clock that evening, Isabella set out with Edward for Ash station in a covered cab drawn by a single horse: she and Edward sat inside the narrow carriage, and Alfred perched with the driver on top. Her younger boys were not with them – they may have gone ahead with their nurse.

‘I never spent so blessed an hour as the one that followed,’ wrote Isabella, ‘full of such bliss that I could willingly have died not to wake out of it again. I shall not relate ALL that passed, suffice it to say I leaned back at last in silent joy in those arms I had so often dreamed of and kissed the curls and smooth face, so radiant with beauty, that had dazzled my outward and inward vision since the first interview, November 15, 1850.’ Edward seemed as he kissed her to melt into a dazzle of soft curls and skin, the flesh-and-blood man merging with the idol of her dreams.

Between kisses, they confided in one another. ‘All former times were adverted to and explained,’ Isabella wrote. Edward told her that he had hidden his true feelings, ‘from prudential motives’, and that the suppression had caused him ‘much pain’. Isabella reminded him of some lines from the French novel
Paul and Virginia
that she had read out to the guests at Moor Park, and confessed to having chosen them as a message to him. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel of 1787 described a great love between a girl and boy brought up together on the island of Mauritius, one of whom dies of grief at the death of the other.

Edward ‘had always known I had liked him,’ continued Isabella, ‘but not the full extent of the feeling, and owned it had never been indelicately expressed. This relieved me. Heaven itself could not be more blessed than those moments. While life itself shall endure their remembrance shall not pass away from a memory charged with much suffering and little bliss; how gentle, how gentlemanly he was – how little selfish!’

As Isabella sat demurely writing up these scenes in her diary, perhaps in plain view of her children or her husband, none could guess at the images swarming through her head and the journal’s pages. By recording her encounters in her secret book, she recreated the thrill of transgression, of pleasures sharpened by the danger of discovery.

More than 7,000 British people lived in Boulogne, a quarter of the total population, and another 100,000 crossed from Folkestone on visits each year. By comparison with other towns in northern France, Boulogne was lively, even cosmopolitan, and the cost of living on the Continent was lower than it was in England. The height of the season was the autumn, when the sky seemed bluer on this side of the Channel. There were two English chapels in Boulogne, two English clubs (with billiard and card tables and British newspapers) and two English reading rooms and circulating libraries. Some of the British visitors were raffish types, intent on escaping debt or scandal; some came to recuperate from illness. By moving his family here while the new house in Berkshire was completed, Henry Robinson could hope to see an improvement in his wife’s wellbeing, his sons’ education and his own finances.

Charles Dickens was staying in Boulogne in the month before the Robinsons arrived. He explained the resort’s appeal in his magazine
Household Words
in November. ‘It is a bright, airy, pleasant cheerful town; and if you were to walk down either of its three well-paved main streets, towards five o’clock in the afternoon, when delicate odours of cookery fill the air, and its hotel windows (it is full of hotels) give glimpses of long tables set out for dinner, and made to look sumptuous by the aid of napkins folded fan-wise, you would rightly judge it to be an uncommonly good town to eat and drink in.’ On the esplanade, visitors peered through telescopes at the chalky English cliffs across the water. When the weather was fine, they were wheeled out to sea from the beach in wooden bathing machines. Dickens was charmed by Boulogne’s fishing quarter, ‘hung with great brown nets across the narrow up-hill streets’. Seagulls cried on the rooftops and the smell of fish gusted up the lanes.

The Robinsons’ street climbed to the old, walled town on the hilltop, which Dickens compared to a fairytale castle, the surrounding houses rooted in the deep streets like beanstalks. The place seemed full of children, he observed: ‘English children, with governesses reading novels as they walk down the shady lanes of trees, or nursemaids interchanging gossip on the seats; French children with their smiling
bonnes
in snow-white caps.’ Alfred, Otway and Stanley joined their ranks.

That November a series of storms battered the coast of northern France, marking the start of a bitter winter. Henry returned to England, where he spent most of the next few months supervising the business in London and the construction of the house in Caversham. The weather was even crueller on that side of the Channel: the Thames froze over, and the frosts in Berkshire slowed progress on the house. When Henry visited Boulogne for a few days in February 1855, he told his wife that their new home would not be ready to move into until June.

She apologised for her bleakness: ‘dear Mr Combe, I must entreat your pardon for all this. I think you will tell me that I am ill – & am therefore, an indifferent judge of these things; – or, that other minds, better constituted, feel not as I feel.’ But she had no one else to ask for help: ‘it is from you alone that I seek information, or reproof’.

Combe wrote back promptly: ‘Is your physical health sound?’ he asked. ‘An eye under the influence of jaundice sees all objects yellow, and a low-toned organism finds all creation dark & unconsolatory. This affects the orthodox believer as well as you. You may read in their diaries how, in this state of health, they despair of salvation; & become more miserable than you, for hell then yawns for them; &
its gates
at least, in your case are closed.’ Combe insisted that the believer’s fear of Hell was worse than her dread of the ‘land of annihilation’. He recommended that she stop thinking so much: ‘intellect alone does not fill up the vacuum of unsatisfied desire’. Pragmatically, if piously, he recommended that she sublimate her energies in charity work. To divert herself, he said, she must do something useful – like the nuns who worked in hospitals. ‘To be happy, we must love disinterestedly, and we must act out our love in good deeds.’