In all, Smythe knew that he had nothing to complain about.
There were many men and women in London who were jammed together in absolutely squalid quarters, a dozen to a room or more, barely able to eke out an existence by picking up odd jobs, or begging, or stealing, or selling themselves upon the streets. For many, their dreams of making a new life for themselves in the city would end up on the gibbet, or in prison, or perhaps worse still, in Bedlam, among the screaming lunatics. Yet, at odd moments, Smythe wondered what his life would have been like if he had remained in his small village in the Midlands and followed the trade to which he had been apprenticed.
He would have continued to work together with his Uncle Thomas at his forge, spending his days with the man who was more of a father to him than his own father ever was, and he would have pursued a trade at which he had some skill. Smythe knew he was a good smith, an excellent farrier, thanks to his natural way with horses, and he had a serviceable talent as a forger of blades which, under the skilled and gifted tutelage of his uncle, he could have developed into a separate trade of his own. In time, perhaps, he would have met a girl and married, and then had children and a home of his own. It would have been a good life, undoubtedly, better than most. From any practical standpoint, leaving home and coming instead to London to pursue a life in the theatre had been foolish beyond measure.
Yet, it had always been his dream. It was all he had wanted to do ever since he had seen his first play performed by the Queen’s Men upon a makeshift stage in the courtyard of a village inn. Now, he had joined that very company, and was embarking upon his very first tour. True, the beginnings of the tour were certainly far from auspicious, and the players were already speaking with trepidation of the tour being ill-omened, but Smythe nevertheless felt buoyed by the knowledge that he was living out his dream.
Even the present circumstances could not dampen his enthusiasm. He was on the road with the Queen’s Men and he was having an adventure. He could feel sympathy for Godfrey Middleton, and he certainly felt sorry for what had happened to his daughter, but then, he had never known her. It was not his tragedy and he could feel no grief. There was really only one dark cloud on his horizon… the possibility that Elizabeth had found somebody else.
Perhaps he was wrong for feeling jealous. After all, it was not as if Elizabeth were his lover. They had never been intimate; they did not have any sort of understanding between them and, indeed, they could not. Shakespeare was right when he pointed out that she was much too far above him. Her father was a wealthy man, a principal investor in the Burbage Theatre, and if Henry Darcie was not quite yet a member of the landed gentry, then the tide of “gentleman” was certainly not very far beyond his reach. Henry Darcie often purchased dresses for his daughter that cost more than Smythe could make in several months. The thought that he could ever hope to meet with her on equal terms was ludicrous. Her father tolerated their friendship-rather grudgingly, it seemed-because of the service Smythe had rendered to his family, and because he knew that Sir William Worley had taken Smythe under his wing, but at the same time, Smythe knew it was a tolerance that would not bear much testing. Darcie still hoped to make a good, advantageous marriage for his daughter. He would not stand idly by and watch some randy young ostler spoil his plans.
Smythe knew and understood that, but still could not help the way he felt. And until recently, he had been certain that Elizabeth had felt something for him, too, something more than friendship. Now, he was no longer certain. Since the day they had argued in St. Paul ’s, Elizabeth had been avoiding him. She had barely even spoken to him, and the one time that she had, she had put him off. Granted, she had promised him that they would speak, and under the circumstances, it would have been the height of selfishness if he had expected her to put his needs above those of a grieving father, especially when the daughter he was grieving for had been Elizabeth ’s close friend. Smythe very much wanted to believe that was all it was. Yet, there was still the troublesome riddle of what Elizabeth had been doing in the garden maze that night.
It worried him throughout the funeral ceremony, which was mercifully short, doubtless because Godfrey Middleton would have found it unbearable to draw it out into an elaborate ritual, as he had intended to do with Catherine’s wedding. The musicians who had been engaged to play for the wedding now played for the funeral instead, offering up sweet and solemn tunes which they played upon lutes, recorders, citterns, sackbutts, harps and psaltries, coaxing more than a few tears from the assembled guests, especially the women, many of whom joined in to sing several psalms for the procession to the family vault.
As it was a newly built estate, the vault was new as well, a small yet stately stone mausoleum which contained but one coffin, that of Catherine’s mother. Now Catherine would sleep beside her, laid out in her wedding dress upon the slab until her own coffin could be prepared. It would doubtless be speedily arranged upon the morrow, if Middleton or, more likely, his steward did not already have a carpenter at the estate busily engaged upon the task. The procession gathered in the front courtyard of the house and then slowly and solemnly made its way across the grounds, in the opposite direction from the fair’s pavillions, down a path that led along the riverside and through the woods to where the vault stood in a small clearing, surrounded by a stone wall with an iron gate set into it. It would, thought Smythe, be a very peaceful place to rest.
His thoughts and his attention were less upon the funeral, however, than upon those in attendance, in particular a certain few who had been the subject of discussion earlier between Godfrey Middle-ton, Sir William, and himself. Because of what he had overheard, their discussion had centered upon Blanche Middleton’s suitors, in particular those who were not well known to either Middleton or Worley. Given that Blanche was quite a sultry beauty, and with a very wealthy father, there seemed to be no shortage of eager suitors for her hand in marriage. However, a good number of them were easily eliminated from consideration as suspects due to either Middleton or Worley being well acquainted with their families, if not with the young men themselves. That still left three or four who seemed quite worthy of suspicion.
One such was young Andrew Braithwaite, a baron’s son who hailed from Lancashire. Or so he claimed. Middleton knew nothing of him and Worley had no knowledge of him, either. However, that did not necessarily mean Braithwaite was not who he said he was. Not all the members of England ’s nobility were regulars at court or sat among their peers in the House of Lords; some never even came to London. Consequently, they did not necessarily all know one another. Sir William had explained, primarily for Smythe’s benefit, that presently there were three degrees of nobility in England, those of baron, viscount, and earl, in descending order. A duke would have been above a baron, of course, but at present, no one held that tide.
As a country commoner with little formal education, Smythe did not know a great deal about the nobility, nor had he learned very much more since he came to London. He knew that a noble was created by the sovereign through a patent bearing the Great Seal of England and the title of that noble was thereupon passed down through the eldest son. He also knew that bishops, equal to the nobility in rank, were likewise appointed by the sovereign, and their offices were not hereditary. Below them were knights and gentlemen, with knighthood bestowed for special service or as a mark of favor by either the sovereign or a deputy empowered to act in the sovereign’s name, such as a general or an admiral in time of war. As with a bishopric, a knighthood was not hereditary, and a gentleman could only properly call himself a gentleman when the College of Heralds saw fit to award him with a coat of arms. And that, essentially, was the limit of Smythe’s knowledge.