A Mystery of Errors (Shakespeare & Smythe 1)

“A proper lady should be well accomplished, Henry…” Edwina Darcie began tentatively, but her husband was in no mood to listen and simply went on as if she hadn’t spoken.

“Music, yes, I can see music, I suppose,” Darcie went on, working himself up into a fine state of pontifical righteousness. “A woman ought to know how to play upon the lute or the harp or the virginals, so that she can properly entertain her husband and his guests. And embroidery, aye, that is a useful craft, and dancing, I suppose, has much to recommend it as a skill, but… reading? ‘Tis a thing for idlers. The only reading that is useful and fitting for anyone is the Book of Common Prayer. What value is to be found in your foreign Greeks and Romans, your windbag philosophers, or your absurd ballads and your penny broadsheets for the lower classes to while away their time with instead of doing something more productive? What waste! What utter nonsense! You see the sort of thing that comes of it! I tell you, giving an education to a woman makes about as much sense as giving an education to a horse!”

“The queen is a woman,” Elizabeth said, hesitantly, invoking her royal namesake as the color came rising to her cheeks. She knew that she was being impertinent past all bearing, but she could not help herself. “And she is well educated and speaks several tongues. And reads and writes in Latin, too. Would you compare her to a horse, Father?”

Henry Darcie’s eyes grew wide with outrage. “Silence! What monumental impudence! The queen is different. She is not an ordinary woman. She is the queen. She has, by virtue of her birth and divine right, given herself in marriage to the realm and thereof she has always done her duty. As you, young woman, are going to do yours and there’s the end of it! ‘Tis done! The matter is settled! I shall say no more!”

He stabbed his forefinger in the air to emphasize his point, then quickly turned and left the room, effectively bringing an end to the discussion. Not that it had been much of a discussion in the first place, Elizabeth thought. He wasn’t the least bit interested in what she felt or had to say.

“ ‘Tis not fair,” she said to her mother, fighting back the tears.

“ ‘Tis how things are done, my dear,” her mother replied, in a tone of resigned sympathy. “I, too, was betrothed to your father before I ever really knew him. But I came to love him… in time.”

“Yes, and I see how well he loves you, Mother,” Elizabeth said, sadly. “He does not listen to you any more than he listens to me.”

“That is not so, Bess!” her mother responded defensively. “Your father listens. In his own way.”

“Which is to say, only when he so chooses,” Elizabeth said, bitterly. “Where is the fault in me that he should treat me so? What have I done that was so wrong? Where have I failed to please him? How have I offended? Why does he wish to punish me?”

“Bess, you must try to understand,” her mother replied, patiently. “This marriage is not meant as punishment for you at all. That was never your father’s intention. The arrangement was made to benefit both families, to unite the two estates so as to make both stronger. ‘Tis the way these things are done. ‘Twas ever so.”

“And what of love, Mother? What of a woman’s feelings? What of a woman’s heart?” Elizabeth asked, blinking back tears. “Or is that considered of no import?”

Her mother sighed. “Bess, ‘tis not only women who have their marriages arranged for them, you know. ‘Tis common practice among the gentry and men of the nobility, much for the same reasons. ‘Tis only the poor, lowly, working-class folk who marry for love, for all the good it does them, the poor souls. Does it improve their lot in life? Does it secure a better future for their children? Does it allow th

eir parents to be cared for in their dotage, and in turn, for them to be cared for in their own advancing years? Nay, such things require more practical considerations, such as estates with income, land and holdings, things in which love plays no part at all, unless it be the sort of love a husband and a wife grow into with the fullness of time. And such a love is a contented, settled love, mature in its composition and refinement. The sort of love of which the romantic poets write is truly a mere thing of fancy, naught but a brief fluttering of the heart, a momentary aching in the loins, a transitory desire which, if one gives into it, can only lead to sin and degradation. For a woman, more often than not, it leads to a belly swollen with an unwanted, bastard child and a bleak future of utter ruin and hopeless deprivation. Your father and I did not wish that for you.”

Elizabeth shut her eyes tightly. She wanted to scream. Not so much with anger as with desperation, because she saw that there was nowhere left to turn. It was as if the walls of her own home were closing in on her and sealing her inside a box from which there would be no escape. She felt as if she were suffocating. She felt a pressure in her chest that did not come from the constricting whalebone stiffeners in her embroidered bodice or the tight, hard stomacher that extended down below her hips, squeezing her body into the idealized figure of the fashionable woman, the adult clothing in which her parents had started dressing her when she was still a child of five or six, as if to create a grown woman in miniature, like the tiny portraits of well-known lords and ladies sold in the artist’s stalls down by St. Paul’s, an advertisement for the marketable goods she would become. See? Look, you can see already how well this flower will bloom, how plump the fruit shall be! But not too plump, for we must look wide only in some places and properly narrow in the others, padded here and stiffened there just so, according to the dictates of the latest fashions.

The so-called “lowly working-class folk” whom her mother so disparaged and despised seemed as unrestricted in their mode of dress as they were in their mode of marriage. And though it was their lot to curtsy or else bow and tug their forelocks when confronted with a lady or a gentleman, by contrast, at least in some respects, they seemed so much more free than she was. A common serving wench employed in some tavern would work long hours and labor hard at tasks that I would never have to do, Elizabeth thought, morosely, but at the same time, she could wear simple clothing that would not restrict her movements and would let her breathe without feeling faint on a hot and muggy summer’s day. And if she fell in love with some poor cook or tavernkeeper or apprentice, why then, no one would tell her that her love had naught to do with marriage and that her deepest feelings were but a momentary fancy brought on by too much indulgence in romances, and that she should take as husband someone who had been selected for her by those who knew much better, someone whom she had never even seen.

“If my belly were to be swollen with a child, even if it were a bastard, then I would sooner it were put there by a man I chose to love, rather than by one who had been chosen for me,” she said.

“ Elizabeth! Really! You forget yourself!” Her mother stiffened and the color rose to her cheeks. “I cannot imagine where you get such outrageous notions! I can scarcely believe that tutor was responsible for putting such ideas in your head, but if he was at fault, then he should be whipped! Honestly! If you were to speak so in your father’s presence, I shudder to think what he would do!”

“What would he do, then? Whip me? Disown me? Turn me out? How could that be any worse than what he already proposes to do?”

“Oh, Bess, I simply do not know what has gotten into you! This is sheer folly! You needn’t act as if ‘twere such an awful thing! Anthony Gresham is, by all accounts, an excellent young gentleman! He comes of a good family and there has been talk of a peerage for his father, for his service to the Crown, which would certainly assure your future and the future of your children! I simply do not know why you bridle so at such an excellent prospect. Why, most girls your age would gladly trade places with you in an instant and consider themselves fortune’s darlings!”

So there it was again, Elizabeth thought, bleakly, as her mother huffed out of the room in indignation. The Parthian shot. The same old, tired refrain. Most girls her age. Nineteen years old and still unwed. Soon twenty and a spinster. Unwanted, a burden to her parents. A girl her age could not afford to put on airs or be so choosy. A girl her age would be fortunate to find any sort of match at all, much less one that was so eminently suitable. A girl her age should be grateful that anyone would have her, when she was past her prime and there were plenty of fresh, young, wellborn girls for eligible suitors to choose from. She had heard every possible variation on the theme. Just the words “your age” were enough to set her teeth on edge.

They acted as if it were her fault to begin with, and that simply wasn’t so. At twelve or thirteen, she could easily have been married off to any of a dozen suitors. There had surely been no shortage. She was young and pretty and the promise of the beauty that would come with more maturity had already been quite evident. Even then, her long, flaxen blonde hair, high cheekbones, deep blue eyes, and soft, creamy, nearly translucent skin had attracted plenty of suitors. But no one had been suitable enough. Each prospective husband was found wanting in some area, and each time it had been something different, but the truth, as Elizabeth now knew, was that none of them had been of the right class.

Henry Darcie had worked hard all his life and had succeeded in becoming a very prosperous merchant. But although he had changed his fortune, the one thing he could not change was that he had been born as common as a dirt clod. Elizabeth knew that he wanted, more than anything, to be a gentleman and gain admittance to the ranks of polite society. The problem was, as things stood, his application to the Heralds’ College for a coat of arms would, of necessity, be based upon the thinnest of claims, claims that were mere, transparent fiction. However, an alliance by marriage to a family of rank and long-standing position could go a long way toward ensuring more favorable consideration by the heralds and, more importantly, acceptance by the upper classes. Or at least, so her father felt.

Elizabeth, for her part, had always felt as if she were less cherished as a daughter than as an expedient means to an end and nothing more, a Judas goat staked out as bait to attract the right sort of suitor. And like a huntsman sweeping through the forest with his beaters, her father had relentlessly pursued the cultivation of an ever-widening social circle, the better to increase the odds that the right sort of husband might be flushed and driven to the bait.

From the time that she was twelve, he had regularly attended the entertainments at the Paris Garden, not so much for his enjoyment of the bear baiting itself as to widen his circle of influential acquaintances, especially among the better class of people. Despite her protests, he had brought her along on several occasions, dressed in her finest clothing, to parade her before the gentry and the aristocracy. In her largest and most elaborate linen and lace ruffs, embroidered with gold and silver and sprinkled with a dusting of little moons and stars, and her widest, stiffest farthingales with waist frills and brocade skirts, and her best and most revealing stiff-pointed, padded bodices with slashed leg-of-mutton sleeves sewn liberally with jewels, she had felt awkward and uncomfortable, as if she were some gaudy ornament put on display. Worse still, the grim and brutal sight of the savage, ravening mastiffs tearing at a maddened bear or panic-stricken ape chained down in the arena was more than she could stand. The blood and the noise and the awful smells had made her ill and her father soon stopped taking her, realizing that even the prettiest and best dressed of daughters lost a considerable degree of her appeal while she was retching on her dress.

Still, there were other avenues of social contact that were open to him, many of which did not necessitate her being present, and he had pursued them with a vengeance. He had participated in investment ventures with various projectors, often losing money, but occasionally turning a profit. However, he had measured his ga

ins in such investments not so much in financial terms, but social ones. Shared gains were often not so useful as shared losses, when commiseration could lead, under the right circumstances, to the offer of a loan to help surmount some unexpected and, of course, temporary reverses. There was nothing quite so useful as a social superior who was inconveniently short of funds… and therefore more than willing to grant favors. Especially if such requests were couched in soothing, diplomatic terms.

Among the ventures that her father had invested in through several such contacts was a playhouse called The Theater, constructed by a man named Burbage. Some of the money that had been raised for the construction had come from Henry Darcie, and he had also financed several of the productions. He was not the sole investor who had been involved, and so the risk was spread out somewhat, and in this case, there seemed a better than average chance of making a profit, for the playhouse proved to be quite popular.

There was competition from the Rose Theatre, where the Admiral’s Men held court, and some of the other companies who mounted their productions at the inns, and then there was the children’s company at Blackfriers, which was proving to be quite a draw and had the advantage of being fashionable because it was an indoor venue. On the other hand, The Theatre could accommodate a larger audience and had, overall, higher standards of production. Here, Henry Darcie could bring his daughter to show her off before whatever members of the gentry were in attendance without fear of having her get sick and ruin the effect of the expensive clothing he had bought for her by vomiting upon them. And it was the one venue for her display to which Elizabeth did not object. Indeed, she looked forward eagerly to going.

From her seat up in the galleries, Elizabeth could look down upon the teeming groundlings in the yard, jostling one another and boisterously calling to the vendors as they waited for the play to start. The early arrivals would have already heard the first fanfare of the trumpets, and as the rest of the audience came streaming into the theatre, Elizabeth would revel in the energetic, cacophonous spectacle, allowing herself to get caught up in it so that she would forget that, as far as her father was concerned, she was on exhibit for everybody else, and not the other way around. She would gape at the ostentatious fashions that were on display up in the galleries around her as the members of the gentry attempted to outdo one another in their finery.