A Mystery of Errors by Simon Hawke Read Free Book Online Page A

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