Chapter 14
If he hadn’t been the subject on everyone’s tongue, Dominic certainly was now because the marriage announcement of himself to Miss Celia Briarwood had rattled through London like an out-of-control coach. It was a cacophony of gossip, conversation, and, in some cases, outrage.
He was surprised at the intensity of some people’s beliefs that she was too old. Thirty-three, in his mind, was surely just the beginning, but he’d come to understand in the last days, much to his irritation, that many people saw her as on-the-shelf and unmarriageable.
She was, it seemed, to society, a dangerous bet.
To him, she was the epitome of what a woman should be, well-read, engaged in critical thought, interesting, empowered, capable, and willing to tell him exactly what she thought.
Her saucy banter with him was the most pleasing thing he had known in his whole life.
She knew how to bring him out of the mire just when he was beginning to settle into it.
Her ability to take life without too much darkness was the antidote to everything in his bloodline, at least that’s what he was certain of.
So, to every person who had brought him news of her unsuitability or had hinted that she might not be the best for him, he’d given them a dangerous stare and then started to laugh. It worked wonders.
She was superior to every person he knew, and at her invitation, he now truly understood why. It wasn’t just her family or her wealth.
It was the crucible in which she chose to fling herself, body and soul, every day for the last twenty years. She had apparently been coming to the East End since she was a girl to assist her father.
Witnessing her work in such dire conditions and not feel agonized was a lesson in mastery of self.
He was able to help people by separating himself, by creating a boundary, by making certain he did not get too attached to anything. Over the years, he’d forced himself to live with grandiosity and generosity and laughter, but he was careful never to get in too deep.
Truth be told, he was frightened that he was getting in too deep with her, but surely not so very deep. Just deep enough. He could stop at any point before he’d gone so far that he was at risk.
But after several days accompanying her, he realized just how much her work shaped her life. A week at the Shakespeare school was eye-opening.
Yes, he was extremely busy with Parliament and wooing other lords and businessmen to his cause, but he felt it very important that he understand exactly what his future wife’s passion required.
Oh, he’d already understood to some degree, but he wanted actual practical knowledge.
So every day, he sat in the back of her classrooms, which were not at all like the classrooms of his youth, and watched and listened as she had spoken of Shakespeare, as she had listened to the hurts of the children, as she had taught the language and how it was used.
And, most importantly, how to use Shakespeare to soothe hurts and make sense of a nonsensical and brutal world.
Much to his amazement, some of the children could not read at all, which shocked him considering that this was a school.
But this was no normal school, he realized with every day that he spent here, because children sometimes came and went.
They were not here every day. Sometimes they had to go and work to help their families or take care of their parents who were ill or too drunk or wounded from their work.
Sometimes they had younger siblings they had to look after, and he was astonished to find her patience with all of this.
Most teachers he knew would have been critical of the children who could not attend every day, who did not have shoes, who could not make their sounds. But when they could not read, he discovered that she taught them by an entirely different method. She taught them through oration.
And the children seemed to thrive. Through repetition, through a variety of emotions and movement, through connecting the meaning of the words to the actual words themselves, they learned the complex texts.
Now, this day, the children were excited because they were making costumes.
Hamlet was to be produced in two weeks’ time, and he could not wait to come and see it. He knew the entire Briarwood family would come as well.
Celia was picking a beautiful burgundy sash to put on Ophelia’s costume when he spotted the young boy, Michael Baker, who was going to play Hamlet, studying a sword. A sword he’d use for the final scene in the infamous duel with Horatio.
“Do you like sword play?” Dominic asked.
The boy cocked his head to the side, his jaggedly shorn hair sticking up, and said in a rather strong accent, “Of course I do. Who doesn’t like the idea of defeating one’s enemies?”
The words sounded dramatic and not at all the sort you’d expect to hear from an urchin. It was clear Celia and Emilia’s tutelage had expanded the young man’s vocabulary.
“Do you have many enemies?” he asked.
The boy laughed, looking at Dominic as if he was an idiot despite his dukedom. “Of course I do, in every street. You never know who’s going to come at you.”
“That sounds rather risky,” he replied.
“It is.” The boy gave the sword a flick, as if facing one of those enemies. “Life is risky, don’t you think?”
He eyed the boy with his sandy brown hair, his dark eyes, his hollowed cheeks. He knew they fed the children here at the school, but he had a feeling that this boy had been hungry for a very long time.
“You’re right, of course,” he agreed, wishing it wasn’t so. Wishing that children didn’t have to be forged in the fire of pain. “Life is quite risky.”
The boy lifted his hand and took on a fencing stance, moving back and forth.
“Do you like Hamlet?” Dominic then asked.
“What a silly question. Do you specialize in silly questions?” the boy asked as he lunged forward. “Hamlet? He’s not a hero.”
He felt as if he sensed Celia in the boy’s answer. And he loved that the young man wasn’t cowed by a duke.
Dominic ignored the potential insult, eager to hear Michael’s opinion. “Is he not?” he asked.
“No, he’s just like anyone, like us,” Michael said before he paused, lowered his sword, then chewed his lower lip as he gathered his thoughts. “I mean, he happens to be the son of someone very important, but he has his fears and he loves and he gets obsessed, and that obsession kills him.”
Dominic blinked. His obsession kills him? He’d never really considered this. The dowager duchess had suggested something similar when he’d done Hamlet’s speech for the Briarwoods. He cleared his throat and asked, “He whines a fair bit, doesn’t he?”
The boy laughed, his eyes sparking. “He does, but that’s just ’cause he’s trapped in his own head. He can’t see that if he just stopped obsessing over the death of his father that his life would get a lot better.”
Dominic frowned. “You don’t think it matters, him seeking revenge for the death of his father?”
“Well, master Shakespeare does this thing, you know? We’re not really supposed to trust the ghost.”
“What?” Dominic asked with an exaggerated gasp. He was familiar with the theory. But he wanted to hear the boy’s thoughts.
“The ghost,” Michael began firmly. “Miss Celia explained it to me. In Shakespeare’s time, things that came from the other word, especially a fiery place, which Hamlet’s does, are not really to be trusted.
He could be a demon trying to mislead Hamlet.
So we shouldn’t actually trust Hamlet’s father outright.
Something else might be going on. Maybe Hamlet’s father doesn’t even exist when he appears as a ghost. Maybe it’s just in Hamlet’s head.
Maybe…” The boy grinned, then shrugged. “Well, who knows? But the whole point is that Hamlet has to go through this journey, and he makes a lot of terrible choices, and he doesn’t trust anyone.
He isolates himself until he ends up dead in the end. ”
“Just about everyone in the play ends up dead in the end,” Dominic pointed out.
Michael pursed his lips. “Yes. Look what happens when somebody makes terrible choices and wants to be alone. Look at what he did to his friends.”
Dominic tilted his head to the side. “You mean Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?”
The boy nodded, tossed the sword from hand to hand, clearly loving the conversation. “Exactly.”
Dominic decided to push back, feeling oddly defensive of poor Hamlet. “You could argue that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spied on him and betrayed him.”
“Nah,” the boy said with a swift decisive shake of his head.
“That’s not how it is. They were looking after him.
Hamlet was their friend. They wanted to help him to make sure he was right in the head.
Hamlet’s mama had come to those two and asked them to help her son, so they did.
Hamlet takes it all wrong. All these people are trying to help him, but he turns them into the villain.
” Michael shudders. “What he does to Ophelia is really terrible, you know?”
Dominic tsked, though he agreed with the boy. “Yet some would say Hamlet believes that Ophelia is spying on him. And she is. For her father.”
Michael snorted. “Yes, but again, she’s trying to help him because he’s acting mad. He’s a very suspicious character, is Hamlet, but I do understand how he gets there.”
“Do you?” Dominic asked, amazed by the boy. Much to his shock, he found his throat tightening, for without the school, this boy’s sharp mind would have been left to dull.
“Suffering,” Micheal replied simply. “Suffering makes it impossible to see the good if one’s not careful.”
“How the bloody hell did you get so wise, boy?”
The boy laughed. “Well, I’d like to say it was suffering, but that’s not true because I know a lot of people who suffer and who aren’t nice at all. They’ve learned nothing from their own pain. They’ll hurt you as fast as look at you.”