3
“BUT Father, I don’t want to marry him!” Elizabeth Darcie stamped her foot in exasperation, gritting her teeth with anger and frustration. She turned away to hide the tears that suddenly welled up in her eyes.
“Want? Want? Good God, girl, who in blazes asked you what you want?“ Her father stared at her with open-mouthed astonishment. “What does what you want have to do with anything? You shall do as you are told!”
“I shall not!“ In her exasperation, Elizabeth spoke before she thought and she caught her breath as soon as the words were out. She had never spoken back to her father in such a manner before, and was shocked at her own boldness.
Her father was no less astonished. “You bloody well shall, girl, or I shall take my crop to you, so help me!”
“But Father, please! I do not love him! I do not even know him!”
“Love? Who the devil spoke of love? We were speaking of marriage!“ He turned with indignation to his wife. “This is what comes of your silly notions about education! ‘She ought to read,’ you said. ‘She ought to know how to keep household accounts! She ought to have a tutor!’ A tutor! God’s wounds! That silly, mincing fop just filled her head with foolishness, if you ask me! Love poems and sonnets and romances… what does any of that have to do with the practical matters of life? A tutor, indeed! What a monstrous waste of money!”
“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 their 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.