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.