A Mystery of Errors by Simon Hawke Read Free Book Online

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