A Mystery Of Errors

7

When he came home to discover that his daughter had gone somewhere to meet with her intended, Henry Darcie was very much displeased. For one thing, he had no idea where she had gone, and he did not like not knowing things or not being in control. For another, he knew his daughter all too well, and knew she had inherited his willfulness and stubbornness, two qualities which had served him well in achieving his success, but which, he felt, were unfortunate and highly undesirable in women. And when Elizabeth came home later that night, delivered to her door by a coach that pulled away as soon as she stepped down, Henry Darcie became absolutely furious.

His worst fears were realized when he discovered that Elizabeth had done precisely what he had been afraid she’d try to do, given the opportunity. She had somehow managed to convince Anthony Gresham that she was utterly unsuitable. In just a matter of hours, Henry Darcie saw all the work that he had done in trying to arrange the match coming undone right before his eyes. The problem was, he was not sure what, if anything, he could do to remedy the situation.

“You are a miserable, ungrateful, spiteful little wench!” he shouted at his daughter, when she had told him how she spent her evening. “How could you do this? Do you have any idea what you have done? You have ruined your future!”

“I have done no such thing!” Elizabeth protested. “Anthony Gresham made his own decision.”

“Made upon seeing your behavior, no doubt, which must have been disgraceful!”

“There was nothing wrong with my behavior, but a great deal wrong with his,” she said, following the story they’d agreed upon. She kept her voice very calm, as if struggling to do so despite great inner turmoil. “I accepted his ill-timed and presumptuous invitation-much to Mother’s dismay, I might add-because I believed you would have wished for me to do so. And having already displeased you, I did not wish to further anger you.”

“That is true,” her mother said, nodding emphatically. “I was very much against it, but believed you would have wanted Bess to go.”

“Indeed? How good of you both to consider my feelings for a change,” her father said, sarcastically. “And Bess had no feelings of her own in this regard, I take it?”

“I have told you before that I wish to love the man that I would marry,” said Elizabeth, “but in Mr. Gresham’s case, that would be utterly impossible. He is an ill-mannered, loutish boor who found me unsuitable in all respects, from the moment that he first laid eyes upon me. He had his mind made up before I even spoke a word.” That much, she thought with some amusement, was actually true. “He found me unbecoming and had the lack of grace to say so.”

“ What! You mean he said so to your face?“ her father replied, astonished.

“He said it plainly. I was not at all to his taste.” “He truly said so? Just like that?”

Elizabeth decided that there was no harm in embellishing a bit. After all, it was what they had agreed to, more or less, and since they would, in all likelihood, not be seeing Mr. Anthony Gresham again, there seemed to be no reason not to embroider a bit more, purely for effect.

“He said I was too skinny,” she said, “and that my bosoms were too small.”

“Good God!” Her father looked aghast.

“And he thought I was a bit too horse-faced for his liking.”

“Horse-faced!” His jaw dropped.

Her mother gasped.

Elizabeth wondered if this was, perhaps, going a bit too far. She knew that she was pretty, and bore a strong resemblance to her mother. It would not be immodest to suppose that it would be a stretch in anyone’s estimation to call her horse-faced, but the very idea of his daughter being so horribly insulted made her father apoplectic, especially since, given the resemblance between mother and daughter, it was an insult to his wife, as well. His face turned bright red and he sputtered with outrage. Her mother, meanwhile, had turned as pale as a ghost.

“Horse-faced!” he repeated, with stunned disbelief. “ Elizabeth…” He reached out and took her by the shoulders, looking her straight in the eyes. “ Elizabeth, are you quite certain you are telling me the truth?”

She had expected this and she was ready. She widened her eyes, as if with shock that he should question her veracity after what she had been through, and allowed her lower lip to quiver slightly. “Oh, Father!” she cried. “Oh! How could you?“

She pulled away from him and ran out of the room, sobbing.

She listened, afterward, from the other room, as her father shouted, paced and blustered, expressing his outrage and threatening to demand satisfaction, though Elizabeth was fairly certain that was nothing but a bluff, merely idle threats to soothe his injured pride. For of course, it was his pride that was injured and not hers. He cared less about her feelings than about the fact that it was his daughter who had been called horse-faced and unsuitable, thereby impugning not only his abilities to raise a daughter properly, but even his very humors, which had produced her. It was the seed of his loins that had been found defective and he took it as a personal insult. Elizabeth went to bed content and secure in the knowledge that there would be no marriage now. At least not with Anthony Gresham.

She was, therefore, caught completely unprepared when Gresham came calling the very next day, bringing with him a bottle of fine Portuguese wine for her father, a handsome gold brooch for her mother, and a lovely bouquet of red roses for her.

Her father was at work when Gresham arrived, but her mother was at home and when she summoned Elizabeth, sending one of the servants to tell her that she had a caller, Elizabeth had absolutely no idea who it might be. When she came in and saw that it was Gresham, she was absolutely stunned.

“Bess, dear, look who has come to see you!” said her mother, beaming. “Mr. Gresham, may I present my daughter, Elizabeth?”

For a moment, Elizabeth was simply too taken aback to speak. Her mother was introducing her to Gresham as if they had never even met. Gresham rose to his feet and came toward her, smiling charmingly.

“Miss Darcie,” he said, holding his hand out to her. She gave him her hand, numbly and without even thinking. He bent over it and brushed it gently with his lips. “How delightful to meet you, at last. I was told that you were very beautiful, but in all honesty, I must confess that the reports I had received simply had not done you proper justice.”

“Is he not utterly charming?” said her mother, with a smile Elizabeth could have sworn had a malicious touch. “So well spoken, and so handsome, too! Is he not everything you could have hoped for?”

Utterly confused, Elizabeth looked from her mother to Gresham and back again. “Mother, you speak as if Mr. Gresham and I had never met.”

“Oh, do I?” her mother replied, innocently. “You mean to say you have?”

“I am quite certain I would have remembered, madame,” Gresham said, with a smile.

Elizabeth frowned. This was not making any sense at all. She could not understand why her mother was acting as if the events of the previous day had never happened. Or why Gresham was acting that way, for that matter. She had no idea what he was up to, but she was not going to have any of it.

“Then you must have an exceedingly short memory, Mr. Gresham,” she replied, stiffly.

Now Gresham frowned, infuriatingly. “I beg your pardon,” he replied. “I am fairly certain that we have never met. Perhaps you have mistaken me for someone else?”

She stared at him with disbelief. “We were at the Theatre only yesterday,” she said. “Could you have forgotten that already?”

Gresham stared at her with incomprehension. He glanced at her mother, as if seeking confirmation of Elizabeth ’s assertion.

“ Elizabeth is having her little jest,” Edwina Darcie said, with a smile.

“Ah,” said Gresham, as if he understood, though clearly, he did not understand at all. He still looked faintly puzzled.

“Jest?” said Elizabeth. “Mother, whatever do you mean? There is no jest. You were right here when Mr. Gresham’s invitation arrived yesterday by messenger!”

Now Gresham looked thoroughly confused. “Invitation? Messenger?” He shook his head, looking bewildered. “Am I missing something? I sent no messenger, nor invitation.”

Elizabeth ’s mouth opened, but no sounds would come out. She was simply too stunned to speak.

“Now, you see, Elizabeth?” her mother said, with a smug tone. “This is what happens when you dissemble. You have been caught out. As the saying goes, oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

“I fear that I do not understand any of this at all,” said Gresham, looking lost.

“ Elizabeth concocted a bit of a tale for us yesterday,” her mother said. “A drama, as it were. And a most complex little enterprise it was, too, even to the hiring of a messenger and coach! My goodness! Such an elaborate deception! Her father will be quite taken aback when he finds out. It seems he was completely taken in. As, indeed, was I. You see, she was having a bit of fun with her parents, Mr. Gresham. Her very gullible parents.”

Elizabeth caught her breath. “Mother! You think that I…?” She could not even go on.

“You see, Mr. Gresham,” her mother continued, “ Elizabeth is quite a clever girl, with a most sprightly, irrepressible, and independent spirit.” Her mother, to Elizabeth ’s chagrin, actually simpered. “She gets it from her mother, I suppose. Oh, the apple truly does not fall far from the tree, as they say. She had some foolish notion that she did not wish to subject herself to the most honorable and eminently sensible tradition of an arranged marriage, you see. In this regard, I must accept part of the blame, I fear, in that I… out of all the best intentions, you understand… had prevailed upon her father to engage for Elizabeth a tutor to instruct her in the finer points of appreciation of the arts. The young man we had engaged seemed most erudite and capable, but apparently he somewhat exceeded his commission and filled our daughter’s head with all sorts of romantic nonsense from the sensualist poets… why, I blush even to say it!”

“I quite understand, madame,” Gresham replied, nodding. “I know the sort of thing of which you speak. These poets are quite the fashion now amongst the glittering gentlemen at court. They all go about enraptured over their productions. ‘Tis rubbish, really. Utter rubbish.”

“I see that you are a discerning gentleman, Mr. Gresham,” Edwina Darcie said. “So then, perhaps you will understand how, being young and impressionable, Elizabeth came away from her instruction with the notion that a proper marriage was not one in which the practical considerations of estate and family and mutual suitability prevailed, but one in which the woman was swept away by the passions of romantic love! And so, when she discovered that our families had agreed upon a match of eminent sensibility and benefit for all concerned, she devised, it seems, a little stratagem to make her father and myself believe that you, her prospective husband, did not desire the marriage to take place, because you had found her totally unsuitable! Can you imagine such a thing?”

“Mother!” Elizabeth said, with shock. “Are you accusing me of having made the whole thing up?”

“Well, now, Elizabeth, ‘tis pointless to keep up the pretence,” her mother said. “We have Mr. Gresham here to testify to what he did or did not do, and to what he did or did not say. I mean, really, Elizabeth, ‘tis one thing to have a man see that his wife-to-be possesses wit, imagination, and resourcefulness, but ‘tis quite another to have him believe that she is foolish, willful, and stubborn!”

Elizabeth was speechless. She stared at Gresham, who gazed back at her with seeming innocence, and she could not believe he had the nerve to stand there duplicitously and pretend that their meeting had never taken place. It was unconscionable! She did not know how to respond or even what to think. His presence was not only inexplicable, after everything that he had told her, but he was, by failing to admit the truth, essentially making her out to be a liar. And… to what end? What could his motives be?

“A beautiful young woman with her whole life before her certainly cannot be faulted for feeling some trepidation under such circumstances,” Gresham said, in an oily, placating, condescending tone. “After all, we had never met. I could easily have been some monstrously appalling fellow, ill formed and of a hideous aspect, unschooled in the proper social graces, and intemperate by disposition. I trust, however, that I shall be able to dispel any such concerns and ease her mind on these accounts.”

He smiled at Elizabeth and gave her a slight bow, and in that moment, she wanted nothing quite so much as to kill him. Except she could not, of course, and saw that any further insistence on her version of the story would be fruitless. Her own mother did not believe her and her father certainly would not. He would be furious beyond all reason at the thought that his own daughter had deceived him and had so very nearly upset all of his plans.

What was she going to do? It was unbelievable that such a thing could happen to her. Gresham was a monster. What in God’s name did he intend by this? Now there would be no way she could convince her parents that it was he who was the liar and not she. She had no proof. Only her word against his.

And suddenly, it came to her.

“Drummond!” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” Gresham replied.

“Your servant, Drummond! You do have a servant named Drummond, do you not?” Elizabeth said. “Or was that also something I imagined?”

“Drummond,” Gresham said. “Aye, he is my servant. What of it?”

“Ha! How could I have known that?” said Elizabeth, triumphantly.

“ Elizabeth, really…” said her mother, with a sigh.

“I am not sure what you mean,” said Gresham. “ ‘Tis no secret that Drummond is my man. I would be lost without him. I depend on him for a great deal. Everyone who knows me knows Drummond.”

“I see,” Elizabeth replied. “Well, ‘twas Drummond who met me at the Theatre yesterday and escorted me up to your private box. He saw me there!”

Gresham frowned. He walked over to the door, opened it and called out, “Drummond! Come in here a moment, will you?”

His servant, who had been waiting with the carriage, came running in response. He bowed as he came in and took his hat off. “Aye, sir?”

“Drummond, do you see this lady here?” said Gresham, indicating Elizabeth. “Aye, sir.”

“Do you know who she is?” “Mistress Elizabeth Darcie, sir.” “Aha!” Elizabeth said.

“And how do you know that, Drummond?” Gresham asked. “Why… you told me so, sir. You said that you were coming here to see her.”

“So I did. And what about last night?” “Last night, sir?”

“Aye, last night. When you saw her.” “Sir?”

“Did you not see Miss Darcie last night?” “Last night, sir?”

“Aye, are you deaf? Did you see her last night?” Drummond, looking confused, shook his head emphatically. “Sir, I… No, sir. I never saw her before in my life, sir.” “You liar!” Elizabeth cried out.

“ Elizabeth!” her mother exclaimed with shock. “Mr. Gresham, I am quite simply at a loss to explain my daughter’s behavior! Honestly, I do not know what has gotten into her!”

“Mother, they are both lying!” said Elizabeth.

“ Elizabeth, go to your room, this instant!”

“But, Mother…”

“I said go to your room! Immediately! We shall discuss this when your father returns home. Please forgive me, Mr. Gresham…”

Elizabeth ran out of the room in tears. She was furious with her mother, furious with Gresham and his servant, and furious with herself for crying. Drummond had lied, of course, because Gresham had told him to. That was the obvious explanation. The man was a servant; he simply did as he was told. She told herself that she should not really be angry with him. But Gresham…

She had never hated anyone so much in her entire life. The man was an utter villain! What possible reason could he have for making her out to be conniving and deceitful? Worse than that, a fool. He had seemed so earnest and sincere when he had said he loved somebody else. Was it all a lie? apparently, it was. But why? She could make no sense of it.

Nobody would believe her. If her own mother did not credit her story, her father certainly would not. Especially after she had told him that Gresham said she was unsuitable. Too small bosomed and horse-faced. She never should have added that last part. But then, the whole thing had been his idea in the first place. Now, her father would know that she had made that up, and would, of course, believe that she had made all the rest of it up, as well.

Perhaps that was precisely what Gresham had intended, she thought, as she lay in bed and fought back tears of rage and helplessness. If he had wanted to create a rift between herself and her parents, he could not have succeeded more admirably. They already believed their daughter was too willful and too stubborn, now they would believe she was a liar, too. A spiteful, deceitful, and conniving shrew, she thought. That was what he had made her out to be. And now it would appear as if he were being magnanimous in taking her off her parents’ hands. That might well allow him to turn the terms of the marriage more to his advantage, she thought. Much like a clever bargain hunter in the market, negotiating a cheaper price for a bolt of cloth because he had found a blemish in it. She gritted her teeth. What an utterly loathsome scoundrel he was!

And this, unless she could think of something absolutely brilliant to prevent it, would be the man to whom she would be married! It was unthinkable. It was simply monstrous. There had to be some way to escape this, to expose him…

Surely, someone must have seen her at the Theatre. She had been there with her father dozens of times; he was one of the principal investors, people knew him there, and they knew her… but no. She could not recall running into anyone she knew when she arrived. Most of the audience had already been seated in the galleries, and she would not know anyone among the groundlings, obviously, so nobody had seen her when Drummond had conducted her to Gresham ’s private box. And the box had been screened off, of course, so that no one could have seen her in there unless, perhaps, one of the actors on the stage had recognized her, though she did not really know any of them, had never spoken to them, so there was really no one who… The ostler!

She sat bolt upright in bed. That handsome young ostler had seen her! They had exchanged words! More than words, they’d flirted. Surely, he would remember her! But who was he? What was his name?

Wait, he had told her. What was it? She racked her brain. Something rather common, and yet uncommon. It tripped rather fetchingly off the tongue, as she recalled. But what was it? Smythe! That was it! Something Smythe… Something Smythe… Symington! Symington Smythe!

She had a witness. A witness who could corroborate that she’d been at the Theatre that night. And that she had met Drummond! She had to find him. And as soon as possible. He was her only chance to prove that she had told the truth. She got up and quickly started to change her clothes.