Chapter 83

The fact that the blade is eventually destined to belong to Commodore Norrington has got to hurt, too; considering that Will has to know that Governor Swann is pushing Elizabeth at him.  And Will has no reason to think that such a pairing isn’t going to happen.  After all, marrying for love in those days would have been uncommon at best, especially for someone of Elizabeth’s position.  She’d be expected to marry whomever her father wanted her to marry, and she wasn’t expected to have much of a say in the matter.  Of course, most people mostly forgot this when they wrote about the time period, and didn’t seem to understand the severity of disobeying such a decision (in that time period) would have actually had; they might make faint reference to it, but they didn’t seem to really take it all that seriously.  It wasn’t just running off with some neighbor kid and eloping, and then reasonably expecting your family to accept your decision.  It was, in fact, a good way to get disinherited.  Sure, some families, even back then accepted it with good grace and moved on without much trouble.  But, those families were probably far outweighed by families that weren’t so forgiving.  That kind of thing tore apart many a family, and caused severe damage in other ones.  Even if they did eventually accept the decision, it usually didn’t come without some price being paid, the least of which being hurt feelings.  And partial reconciliation was also a possibility, in which the family members only partially make up or only some of them do; which could easily cause more hurt feelings between those who did make up with the errant child and those who didn’t.  Some people could hold a grudge for a long time, and that sometimes extended on for generations.  There was more than one example of multi-generational feuds that he’d heard of, and some of them had to do with people who had been close before ‘the incident’ had occurred.  ’The incident’ wasn’t necessarily about a forbidden marriage, but it certainly could be, and the concept still applied even if the specifics didn’t.  One ‘bad’ decision could have long-lasting effects.  The fact that it didn’t always happen that way, in no way invalidated the fact that it did indeed happen, and that it could be catastrophic when it did.  So, he knew that if Will were a real person of that time, he’d have no expectation that Elizabeth wouldn’t end up with the Commodore.

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