Bruised Like Violets

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/57515629.

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Category: F/M
Fandom: Bridgerton (TV)
Relationships: Colin Bridgerton/Penelope Featherington, Eloise Bridgerton & Penelope
Featherington, Colin Bridgerton & Eloise Bridgerton
Characters: Eloise Bridgerton, Colin Bridgerton, Penelope Featherington, Genevieve
Delacroix, Charlotte zu Mecklenburg-Strelitz | Charlotte Queen of the
United Kingdom, Agatha Danbury, Violet Bridgerton, Anthony
Bridgerton, Benedict Bridgerton, Daphne Bridgerton, Gregory
Bridgerton, Hyacinth Bridgerton
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Regency Era, all the Bridgertons
are here somewhere, some details borrowed from the books,
Whistledown reveal, HEA
Language: English
Stats: Published: 2024-07-19 Completed: 2025-03-10 Words: 32,225 Chapters:
7/7
 Bruised Like Violets
by bookglue

Summary

Five years ago, the Featheringtons threw the ball of the season, and then disappeared into the
night. No one has heard from them—or, coincidentally, Lady Whistledown—since. But when
Whistledown starts printing again, Eloise Bridgerton enlists her brother to help hunt the
scribe down, throwing his life off course in the process.

Notes

All hyperfixations lead me to fic eventually, and Bridgerton is no exception. I thought I'd be
dipping my toe in with a modern AU, but apparently I just can't let go of my one true love:
canon divergence. We're splitting off right at the end of season 2, with one notable exception:
Portia agreed to flee with Cousin Jack, and she took her daughters (and Mr. Finch) along with
her. And then five years passed. Enjoy!

(Oh, and...apparently the real Queen Charlotte died in November 1818. I'm ignoring that
here. Historical accuracy is only nominally important to me when we're already playing in an
alternate universe's sandbox, and her presence felt crucial.)

See the end of the work for more notes

 tears on the letter

April, 1819

Dearest Gentle Reader,

Have you missed me?

The pamphlets arrive on a Wednesday, carried as they always were by an assortment of

young boys with quick hands and stuffed bags. They are all over the Ton by mid-day, and
everywhere there’s a pamphlet there is also a gathering of Mayfair’s finest, whispering over
its contents.

This is the first anyone has heard from Lady Whistledown in five years.

It’s Eloise Bridgerton that receives Lady Whistledown’s issue at 5 Bruton Street. It’s a rare
quiet afternoon in the Bridgerton drawing room; her mother is out calling on Lady Danbury,
her (unmarried) siblings have taken off for a promenade along the Serpentine, and Eloise has
let her tea go cold while she reads by the window. She startles when Mrs. Wilson enters,
dropping her book and letting out a small yelp, but it’s the cream paper in the housekeeper’s
hand that comes as the real shock.

“Is that a Whistledown?” Eloise asks, already reaching out her hand to take the scandal sheet.

“So it would appear.”

The paper feels familiar against her skin. Eloise has spent more time with Lady
Whistledown’s issues than most. In the early days she had been a devotee, poring over every
issue, trying to find the writer’s identity within the words, and in between them, certain that
they’d be dear friends if only Eloise could track her down.

Later, after she’d learned Lady Whistledown’s identity, she’d pored over them again. She’d
looked for every clue she’d missed that Whistledown was, in fact, her dearest friend in the
world: one Penelope Featherington.

Once she knew to look, it was as plain as day.

But all that was ages ago now. Lady Whistledown hadn’t printed an issue in five years, and
the Featherington family, Penelope included, had vanished into the night around the same
time, taking with them a considerable amount of money that Lord Featherington had
swindled from the neighbors. The Ton had missed Whistledown, but there was no love lost
for the Featheringtons, beyond a delight in spreading rumors about where they might have
gone: the continent, the Americas, Bloomsbury…anything seemed possible.
Eloise runs her finger over the familiar profile drawing at the top of the scandal sheet, unsure
if she wants to read it. The last time Whistledown printed, she dragged Eloise’s name—the
Bridgerton name—through the mud, and whatever Penelope had claimed her reasons to be,
the pain of it still throbbed deep in Eloise’s heart.

Still, Eloise must know if this is the true Whistledown, returned after all these years, or if an
imposter has stepped into Penelope’s shoes. Her eyeline dips down into the text on the page:

In these five long years since I last printed, little has changed within our Ton. Mayfair thrives
on consistency above all else: the marriage mart continues to churn out scheming mamas,
reluctant suitors, and gentle, elegant debutantes, and gossip is still the oil that keeps the
gears moving. Well here I am once more, happy to help lubricate.

Eloise snorts, and then quickly grimaces. Even alone in the drawing room, she won’t allow
herself to show any pleasure in Whistledown’s words.

So what is it that I’ve failed to report in the intervening years? The Queen has named five
Diamonds, each lovelier than the last, and not a one has married a suitor of the Queen’s
choosing. Last year’s incomparable, Miss Smythe-Smith—now Mrs. Barrow—married
outside society entirely! Her new husband is a merchant, a shocking scandal only to those
who couldn’t see the depth of love that bloomed between them in a chance meeting last
winter.

The Dowager Viscountess Bridgerton has kept herself busy these last years as well, though
with somewhat more success than the Queen. Four of her eight alphabetical off-spring are
now wed, love matches all, for the Bridgertons continue to excel in that arena, almost as
though it’s hereditary. Bridgertons C and E remain on the marriage mart, with G and H
waiting in the wings, not yet of age. But halfway through her brood, Lady Bridgerton must be
feeling some relief, as surely do the Viscount’s accounts.

Eloise stops to run the tip of her finger over her initial on the page. If these are, in fact,
Penelope’s words—and she suspects they might be—this is a gentle take on the Bridgertons.
She makes no mention of Benedict’s scandalous marriage to her lady’s maid (nor the fact that
Sophie was nearly deported to Australia in the process), nor of the rakish reputation Colin has
picked up over the years as he galivants across the Continent, nor of Francesca’s grief as a
new widow, having lost her husband only a few months ago. It’s a tame recounting of what
everyone already knows: Lady Bridgerton wants her children wed, and happily.

She keeps reading, skimming through a paragraph about Lord Cho’s disastrous marriage, and
another on Lord Fife’s behavior towards his rumored by-blow in the country. It’s all fairly
standard Whistledown fair, or what would have been Whistledown fair five years ago, and
there’s a pang somewhere in Eloise’s chest.

There have been all manner of scandals while I’ve been gone, far more than I can report in a
single issue, each of them flaring up and dying out in precisely the way scandals are wont to
do, and I see no reason to drudge them all back up. Let sleeping scandals lie, because a fresh
one is sure to arrive at any moment, and I shall be here once more to report it.

Yours,
Lady Whistledown

Eloise reads through the issue twice more, parsing every word, trying to find Penelope within
them.

If Penelope really has returned to London, well, Eloise isn’t quite sure how to feel about it.
Their last meeting was a bitter argument, and Eloise has kept her anger well stoked ever
since, but she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t worried about what fate might have befallen
Penelope in the intervening years. The Featheringtons disappeared so quickly, and left so
much behind, that Eloise often imagines the worst, when she allows herself to think about it
at all.

But if this Whistledown is, in fact, Penelope, how is she getting her stories? In the past she
may have been able to float, all but invisible, at the edge of every ballroom, but surely she
hasn’t infiltrated society again. She was a flower on the wall, not a fly, and if nothing else her
bright red curls stand out in a crowd. So either she’s being fed stories some other way, or she
isn’t Penelope at all. Perhaps someone else saw an opportunity and took up the mantle.

But whomever it is, Eloise needs to know.

In theory, Colin Bridgerton and his mother have an agreement: he spends much of the year—
every year—wandering the world, getting to know cities and islands, languages and cultures,
mountains and seas, all of them as far from Grosvenor Square as he can manage, and then
every spring when the season starts up he returns to London to pretend that this might be the
year he takes a wife.

Colin doesn’t mind the season, really. He has no intention of actually taking a wife, but he’s
an amiable gentleman, always has been, and he enjoys a ball, or a night at his club, or a
musicale (so long as it’s not the annual Smythe-Smith musicale). He usually eats better at his
mother’s house than he does during his travels, unless his travels have taken him to the
Mediterranean, and everyone who knows Colin Bridgerton knows the importance of food in
his life. Perhaps most of all, he appreciates the time with his youngest siblings. Gregory and
Hyacinth are nearly of age now, and if he doesn’t spend a few months with them each year
he’ll miss the opportunity to watch them mature into proper young adults.

Not that there’s anything mature about Gregory or Hyacinth now.

He’s taken the two of them out with him on a promenade through Hyde Park. Gregory has
shot up in the past year, graduating from Eton nearly as tall as Colin, but he’s skinny and
coltish and more than a bit dreamy. Hyacinth is just as excitable as she’s always been, and
she’s grown to be as striking as her older sisters. (Colin has watched more than one
gentleman’s eyes pass over her as they’ve followed the Serpentine through the park, and each
time he feels his blood pulse in his veins. She hasn’t even made her debut!) But the two of
them still bicker and taunt the way they have since they were in the nursery, and they drag
him in and out of their petty squabbles as they wind their way through the park. It’s an
altogether pleasant way to pass the morning.
They are just at the point of turning around and heading for home when the commotion starts.
Dozens of paperboys are making their way through the crowd, each clutching a stack of
familiar cream pamphlets, with more spilling out of the bags at their hips.

For a moment, Colin freezes. The sight sends a shot of white hot anger coursing through his
bloodstream—anger he thought he’d put aside years ago—and it takes him a moment to
regain his equilibrium. By the time he does, Hyacinth has already squealed “Whistledown!”
and taken off running, Gregory at her heels and her hand inside her reticule, digging for pin
money. She returns with three copies, pressing one into his hand while she huddles over her
own.

Colin reads through the scandal sheet quickly, paying more attention to the paragraph on his
own family than any other. It’s not anything new—the Ton doesn’t need Whistledown to keep
track of eligible Bridgertons—nor is it harsh. Not like the last time Whistledown picked up
her pen.

His first thought is of Eloise, at home with her book. Surely someone will have delivered an
issue to the house, and he worries about how she might receive it.

The pain of Whistledown’s last report has lingered with his sister longer than he ever would
have expected. Certainly the scandal had been tough on Eloise, but the Ton had moved on far
faster than she had. In the wake of her debut season, Colin had watched Eloise withdraw into
herself.

She participated in society only as much as their mother required, seeming to float at the edge
of every ballroom, her back against the wall. She spent her days reading, or scribbling letters
to no one knew who, and she rarely socialized outside the family. The outspoken rebel was
long gone, and as irritating as she could be, Colin found he missed her desperately.

And he was sure Penelope was a factor, too.

Penelope Featherington had been a dear friend to both of them over the years, but she’d
vanished in the middle of the night not long after Lady Whistledown tarnished Eloise’s
reputation in print.

Colin had found the loss devastating, and surely Eloise did, too, though she’d never wanted
to discuss it. In addition to being great fun during the season, Penelope had been his constant
travel companion for years, always the first to respond to a letter, to keep him apprised of
events in London and the country. She wrote to him about who she had seen recently, and
what she had been reading, and she had always shared petty gossip as well, about everyone
from country neighbors to the Featherington’s cook. She asked questions about where he’d
been and where he was going, maintaining an interest in the details of his travels far longer
than any of his family could pretend to care. He looked forward to her letters—longed for
them when mail delays meant waiting two or three weeks to hear from her—and kept every
one, tied with a string at the bottom of his traveling trunk.

And then suddenly she was gone.

And Colin blamed himself.

“Shall we make our way home?” Colin asks Gregory and Hyacinth, crushing the scandal
sheet in his hand. “I’m sure Eloise is wondering where we are.”

“Eloise prefers her peace and quiet,” Hyacinth says, although she turns with Colin to start
making their way back.

“I wonder if Eloise has read Whistledown.” Gregory pushes his way into the space between
them on the path.

“I’m sure she has.”

“I can’t believe I’ve been mentioned in her first issue back,” Hyacinth crows. “Before I’ve
even made my debut!”

Colin knows that Hyacinth and Gregory have not yet felt the ill-effects of having their names
maligned in a gossip column, and to them Whistledown is a delightful diversion, a window
into the world they are still too young to access, but he must admit Hyacinth’s glee stings a
bit.

“It’s no great feat to be named in Whistledown, Hy,” Colin says. “The consequences can be
severe.”

Hyacinth wrinkles her nose at him. “She said little more about me than that I exist, and
nothing cruel about our family.”

“She trades on our name, but hasn’t the nerve to reveal her own.”

“It’s just gossip, Colin.”

“I pray you’ll never have to learn just how dangerous gossip can be.”

That shuts Hyacinth up, though he suspects it’s more his tone than his words. It’s true that he
hopes she’ll never be faced with the consequences of a sharp quill, but he needs her to
understand the risks, especially as she approaches her debut. He can’t watch another sister get
enmeshed in a scandal. Can’t bear the thought of seeing Hyacinth’s bright light go out.

Hyacinth and Gregory bicker for most of the walk back to Bruton Street, but Colin doesn’t
participate. He has too much on his mind.

Eloise is still in the drawing room when her siblings return from their promenade. She has the
new Whistledown in front of her, as well as a stack of old issues and the journal she usually
keeps in the desk in her bedroom, and she’s engaged in a close reading of the new text. She’s
so absorbed that she barely notices Colin standing over her table at first.

“You’ve seen it then,” he asks, and she jumps, her shoulders popping up around her ears.

She gives him a curt nod, and then turns back to the paper in her hand. “I have.”
“And how are you…”

He fades off mid-sentence, but she knows what he’s trying to ask. Her siblings have learned
not to ask after her emotions. They know she’s unlikely to share.

“I’m well,” she says. “I’ve taken on a new project.”

She watches Colin’s gaze pass across the table, taking in all the old Whistledowns. “And that
would be?”

“I’m going to find the scribe.”

“Hardly a new project, then,” Colin says. He drops into the chair across from her. “Didn’t
you waste considerable energy on this very task back when she first started writing?”

Eloise nods. “I merely wish to understand if it’s the same woman, or if someone else has
taken up her pen.”

“Why should it matter? A scandal sheet is a scandal sheet. So long as she’s hiding behind
anonymity, Lady Whistledown could be the Queen herself and I’d feel just the same about
her.”

“I hardly think the Queen is behind Whistledown, although it would certainly make for an
interesting twist in the hunt.”

“Eloise,” Colin says, “are you sure you wish to do this? It seems to me that you’d be better
off—happier—keeping your distance from Whistledown.”

“It’s not about what I wish, Colin. I must do this.”

“Why?”

She looks up at him, letting the morning’s issue drop to the table. Colin is singularly focused
on her, with his elbows on the table between them and his chin propped up on one hand.

“I simply…I must…I must speak to her, Colin,” she says, struggling to put exactly what it is
that she wants into words. “I must…I have so very many questions, and she’s the only one
with the answers.”

He blinks at her. “What questions do you have, El?”

“I just…Penelope—”

Colin starts. “Pen?” he asks, and the name seems to scratch across his throat from disuse.
“What has she to do with this?”

Eloise swallows.

She’s not sure why it is, exactly, that she’s kept Penelope’s secret all these years. Perhaps it’s
misguided loyalty to the friend who betrayed her, or maybe embarrassment at having had
Lady Whistledown right beside her for so long and failing to notice. Maybe it’s a
combination of both. Still, even now, Eloise isn’t sure that she can tell Colin the truth. Not
when he still holds Penelope in such esteem.

“I me—I merely hope Lady Whistledown might know what’s become of Penelope. That she
might have some answers.”

Colin’s adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “Would she not have printed it in her sheet if she
did?”

“I don’t know.” Eloise sighs, her gaze falling to the column once again. “But I must ask.”

Colin is silent a beat, before he says, “I’ll help you, then.”

Eloise looks back up. Colin’s face is clouded, and his voice sounds thick.

“I seek answers to all the same questions you do,” he says. “It haunts me, not knowing what’s
become of Penelope.”

Eloise nods. Angry though she is, it haunts her, too. “We might not like the answers we find,”
she says. He certainly won’t like it if they find Penelope at the other end of the pen, she
knows.

“We must still ask. We must know, Eloise.”

And that’s how it begins: the Bridgertons’ hunt for Lady Whistledown.
 took the battle underground
Chapter Summary

A hunt, some introspection, and a shock.

Chapter Notes

I love commas. Maybe someday I'll even learn how to use them properly. Until that day
comes, please enjoy all the unnecessary ones that are probably included here.

The night of the Featherington Ball had been so thrilling.

Colin had known that there was something suspicious about the new Lord Featherington,
known that whatever he was up to could put Penelope at risk, along with her mother and
sisters, but he had sniffed the scheme out. He’d been the hero, stepping in to protect his
friend from her cousin’s crimes. He’d been nearly flying with joy after he’d faced off with
Jack and demanded that he leave town.

The next morning, however, he’d gone to call on Penelope, to make sure that Lord
Featherington was gone, and instead he’d found an empty house. Not even Mrs. Varley was
there to greet him at the door.

By the end of the day, even without the help of Lady Whistledown, who hadn’t published in
over a week now, the news was all over the ton: the Featheringtons—even Phillipa and Mr.
Finch—had fled London the night of their ball. No one knew where they’d gone.

And Colin knew he was the one to blame.

After all, it was Colin who had required their departure when he’d insisted that Lord
Featherington leave town immediately. He had meant only Lord Featherington, had not
intended for the Baron to take the whole family with him. He had meant to protect Pen, not
banish her.

He waited weeks for some word from Penelope, delaying his departure for a planned trip to
Greece again and again so that he wouldn’t miss her letter. Surely Penelope would write to
him—she always had before—and then he’d at least know she was alright. Surely she
wouldn’t leave him (or, for that matter, Eloise, who floated through Bridgerton House like a
ghost now, her skin pale and clammy) to worry after her.
But word never came. Summer faded into autumn, and then winter. 1814 ticked over into
1815. And the Featheringtons faded away, like a bad memory.

Whistledown was the primary topic of conversation over family dinner that night, as it surely
was in houses all over the ton, and Eloise and Colin sat quietly while the rest of the resident
Bridgertons—plus their brothers Anthony and Benedict, and their respective wives—
discussed the topic at length. Where had Lady Whistledown been these last five years? Why
had she returned now? What would she say next?

“I must say, I was relieved that she put her pen down before we decided to marry,” Anthony’s
wife, Kate, had said over dinner. “We were already courting so much scandal.”

“I’d always rather hoped to be mentioned in Whistledown,” Benedict’s wife Sophie had
admitted.

“Better not to be,” Lady Bridgerton had assured her. “Her pen could be poison.”

“I always thought she was good for a laugh,” Benedict had said. “But then she never had
anything to say about me on the page that the rest of the ton wasn’t happy to say to my face.”

That was when the table seemed to remember Eloise.

“Don’t clam up on my account,” Eloise had insisted, though she’d rather hoped they would.
“I’m familiar with the pleasures of a gossip sheet when one is not the subject.”

But after that the Bridgertons had thought better of the topic, and moved on to discussing an
upcoming ball the Mondriches were hosting.

It seemed best, then, for Eloise and Colin to conduct their hunt quietly, away from the
attentions of the rest of the family. After dinner, they agreed to wait until the family went to
bed before meeting.

“Where shall we start?” Colin asks, now that the hour is late and they’re set up at a small
table in the library, a couple of candlesticks, Eloise’s Whistledowns, and her journal laid out
in front of them.

Eloise bites into her lip, before handing him her journal, turned to a specific page. “I think we
start with her old printer.”

“You know her printer?” Colin leans close to the book, trying to read the tiny scratches of her
writing.

Eloise nods. “I found him five years ago. I can’t say if she’ll be using the same one now, but
it seems worthy of investigation.”

“If you had her printer’s name why on earth did you stop searching? Surely you must have
been close to an answer.”
Eloise looks away from him, afraid he’ll see more in her eyes than she’s ready to share. “It
was a busy time, Colin,” she says, shuffling the stack of old Whistledowns between her
fingers. The last issue rises to the top of the stack. “And the printer….the printer was…” She
sets the pile down and looks into her brother’s eyes. “I met the so-called ‘political radicals’
through the print shop,” she says. “That is how Lady Whistledown found out. I believe she
was trying to scare me off.”

Colin’s face clouds over. “And you want to visit this print shop again?”

“I merely think it is our best chance. Although I rather think we should go now—we’re less
likely to be seen late at night.”

Colin shakes his head. “Are you mad?”

“I’m quite sane, brother. I’ve thought it through thoroughly, and in fact, having you with me
will be a great advantage. I took considerable risks visiting the printer unchaperoned, risks I
would not consider now, but your presence will make all the difference.”

“No, Eloise.” Colin pushes back his chair so he can stand. Farther away from their candles,
his face is mapped in shadows, and she can’t read the expression in his eyes. “If Lady
Whistledown was retaliating against you…I’m not sure if this enterprise is the best idea.”

“This enterprise is the only idea, Colin.”

“Not if we let it go.”

Eloise stands too, advancing on her brother with a finger pointed at his chest. “I thought you
wanted answers,” she says. “You wanted to know what became of Penelope.”

“Perhaps there is another way.”

“We’ve not found one in the last five years.”

“I can’t see you embroiled in scandal again, Eloise. You barely survived it the last time.”

“I survived just fine.”

Colin shakes his head. “Not truly,” he says. “You may still be here, but you’re not the same as
you were.” His voice softens. “We all see it, El.”

She knows that her family worries; she’s not blind to their glances, or deaf to their questions.
She’s let them go on believing that Lady Whistledown was responsible for the changes
because it’s the easier answer. Easier than dragging up the combination of betrayal and grief
that hit her in a single night.

“I know I’m not the same as I was, brother,” she says, finally backing off and letting her
hands drop to her sides. “But you must believe me: if ever something were going to fix this—
to fix me—it would be finding Lady Whistledown.”
Colin’s face is too shadowed, she can’t tell what is happening inside his head, but then he
steps forward. He reaches out to hold her shoulders in his hands, and look her in the eye. “I
shall call for the carriage,” he says.

A smile, the first in a long while, breaks across her face.

They take a hack to Bloomsbury, not wanting to alert anyone in the house to their activities. It
is a bumpy ride, which Colin occupies by worrying about his sister and Penelope in turn.

Neither is a new concern, though he is perhaps more aware of both tonight. His worry over
Eloise lives with him daily, a low-level hum at the back of his mind, but at least he knows
she’s physically well. His fears for Penelope are the kind that jolt him out of a deep sleep in
the middle of the night, his heart racing, his brow soaked with sweat. Often, he fears the
worst, because why else would she not have written to him, or at least to El.

Another bump jostles the carriage, sending Colin careening into Eloise, and Eloise knocking
against the door.

“Nevermind the risk of the print shop,” Eloise mutters. “This carriage will do us both in
first.”

“Could you not make a joke of this?” Colin asks. “I already fear for what our mother will say
if she ever finds out I’ve brought you to Bloomsbury well after midnight.”

“She’ll never know,” Eloise assures him. “We’ll be home long before she wakes.”

He grunts. “Tell me of this printer, then,” he says, eager for the distraction. “How is it that
you became involved with radicals?”

Eloise opens her mouth, then closes it again. She takes a deep breath. “It wasn’t the printer,”
she says. “It was his apprentice. I was…distracted.”

It’s a shocking revelation. “Distracted by a man?” Colin asks. “You?”

“Yes, me.” Eloise shakes her head. “He was…bright and fascinating and he made me think in
a way so few do. We became friends and…and he may have wanted more from me, if I had
been prepared to give it, but I ran scared.”

“It is for the best,” Colin says, aiming for tenderness. “A printer’s apprentice—”

“It’s no different than Benedict and Sophie.”

“It is quite different from Benedict and Sophie, and you know it.”

Eloise’s mouth snaps shut. Sophie may have been her lady’s maid, once upon a time, but
she’d been raised as the ward of an Earl—she was his daughter, in fact, though he’d never
acknowledged her as such—and while their match had not been completely without scandal,
it had certainly not drawn the sort of attention a printer’s apprentice might—especially a
radical printer’s apprentice. Surely Eloise must know that.

“It does not matter,” Eloise says. “I rejected him when the time came, and I’ve not seen him
since.”

Colin watches her face go in and out of shadow and moonlight as the carriage bounces
towards their destination, but she is unreadable. He is struck by how little he truly knows his
sister.

They stop with a bump and a jolt. Colin thinks to insist that Eloise wait for him here, but
before he can open his mouth to say it she’s out the door, and he must clamber down after
her. The street is dark, but warm yellow light spills from the windows of the print shop, and a
tall man in a heavy apron comes to the door when Colin knocks.

He starts to greet Colin, but his eyes catch on Eloise, standing a foot behind him. “You,” the
printer says.

“Me,” Eloise replies.

The printer grunts. “Shoulda known you’d be back. Sharpe’s not here you know—he moved
on.”

Colin turns to see Eloise’s eyebrows rise, and her arms tighten where they’re crossed against
her chest. “It’s not Mr. Sharpe I’m looking for,” she says.

Colin turns back to the printer. “We were hoping you might be able to help us find—”

“Aye, Whistledown. I know,” the printer finishes. “And the answer’s no.”

He starts to pull the door closed, but Eloise pushes past Colin and reaches to stop it. “No you
can’t help us or no you won’t?” she asks. “I know she printed here before.”

“That was years ago.”

“And last night?”

He grimaces, but he doesn’t rip the door from her hands.

“I merely wish to know if it’s the same author,” Eloise says, “or if someone else has taken up
her pen.”

He doesn’t respond at first, and Colin thinks maybe he’s just going to wait Eloise out, but
then he says, “I don’t know.”

“How is that possible?”

The man shrugs. “I printed it, sure, but I didn’t see the lady. It was delivered to me, with
specific instructions.”
“Was it in the same hand?” Eloise asks. “Might we see the original copy?”

He shakes his head. “I burned it after. That was one of the instructions.”

“And the delivery method?”

“It was waiting on the table for me last night. Must’ve snuck in and left it while I was out
having my supper.”

“Let’s go, El,” Colin says, placing a hand on his sister’s shoulder.

She doesn’t respond to him. “What do you think?” she asks the printer instead. “Do you think
it’s her? The true Whistledown?”

The man shrugs again. “If she’s not, she’s got the same sense of what’s fair, near as I can tell.
Insisted on a wage increase for the boys, and increased my cut for the last minute print.”

“Do you know who she was?” Colin asks him. “The old Whistledown, I mean.”

The man never takes his eyes off Eloise, just shakes his head. “Never gave me a name.”

“But you met her?”

“Just her agents. Delivery boys, a maid. Never the lady herself.”

Eloise lets go of the door, her hands dropping to her side. “Thank you,” she tells the printer.

He nods at her, then Colin, and then closes the door with a firm click.

The ride home feels short after the anticipation of the ride there. Eloise has scarcely had the
chance to replay the conversation in her head before Colin is helping her down from the hack
outside their mother’s house.

He whispers a good night to her at the door to her chambers, with a promise to take up the
search again in the morning, and then sets off down the hall towards his own, but Eloise is
not the least bit tired.

It wasn’t as though she’d believed she’d find Penelope there, waiting for her in the print
shop, and she supposes she hadn’t really expected the printer to be forthcoming with
information either. It wasn’t in his interest to out Whistledown.

But still, she had hoped to come away tonight with more than just guesses and maybes. To at
least know if it really was Penelope, even if she didn’t know where to find her.

It was a strange thing, Eloise thought, to be at once so very angry with her friend, and so
concerned for her. It did not surprise Eloise that Penelope had never written to her, not after
the fight they’d had that night, but she thought surely, if Penelope were well, she would have
written to Colin—they had always been such great correspondents. Word never came,
though, not for either of them, and every day and then week, month and then year that went
by without a word, Eloise became more afraid that something terrible had befallen her.

It was hard to stoke her anger when she didn’t even know if Penelope was alive somewhere.
If she was well. She couldn’t rage against a ghost. The more time that passed, the further
removed Eloise felt from her own ire, as if it was behind a door she could not unlock.

But if she can find Penelope now—if Penelope is, in fact, well, and has returned to London—
then perhaps she can let that anger flood back in. Perhaps she can move through it, and
maybe even let go of it.

Perhaps.

But first she must find Penelope.

After breakfast, the drawing room at 5 Bruton Street is crowded with Bridgertons.

In addition to Violet, Gregory, and Hyacinth, their sister Daphne has come to call with all
three of her small children in tow, and Benedict and Sophie arrive not long after that with
their one. The noise is tremendous, but it does make it easier, when Eloise sidles up to Colin
at the far end of the room, to carry on a somewhat private conversation.

“There is something else we could try,” Eloise says as Daphne’s youngest, Caroline, screams
in her mother’s arms.

Colin raises his eyebrow at her.

“The printer’s apprentice,” she says, though she doesn’t look at him while she says it, “—Mr.
Sharpe. He told me once that Whistledown’s columns were delivered via silks.”

“Silks?”

“Such as the modiste would have.”

The further they get in their investigation, the more Colin is realizing that Eloise knows much
more about Lady Whistledown—the original Lady Whistledown, at least—than she’s let on.

“Are you saying you think Madame Delacroix may be Lady Whistledown?”

Eloise shakes her head. “I did once, but no. When I confronted her on the subject it became
quite clear—”

Colin struggles to keep his voice low. “You confronted the modiste?”

Eloise sighs. “Keep up, brother, this was years ago. Madame Delacroix was not Lady
Whistledown, but I believe she was an accomplice. Maybe she is still.”
Colin has to think about that. “It’s rather brilliant, actually,” he says, setting down the copy of
the Times he’d been pretending to read. “She must have packages going in and out of her
shop all day long.”

“Precisely,” Eloise agrees. “And every lady of the ton frequents the establishment. Any one
of us could stop in at any time without raising the slightest suspicion.”

“You know I’ll never forgive Whistledown for the things she did to you, or to Miss—to Lady
Crane,” he says, “but I must admit I do, on occasion, find her impressive.”

“Quite,” Eloise sighs.

“So are you proposing a midnight trip to see the modiste this time?”

“Not at all. I’ll visit her this afternoon.”

“On your own?”

“It’s the modiste, brother. She is right here in Mayfair.”

Colin must admit that’s true, Eloise will likely be fine in the modiste’s shop, especially if
she’s confronted the woman before. Still, he doesn’t like the idea of her striking out on her
own, leaving him out of the investigation. Not when it’s clear she’s already keeping things
from him.

“You cannot come with me, Colin,” Eloise says, reading his mind. “Your presence in her
shop would surely draw attention. I promise I shall tell you everything I learn.”

Eloise does not tell him everything she learns.

The shop is quite busy when Eloise arrives. It’s only the second week of the season, after all,
and the demand for new dresses is high. Eloise spends a great deal of time pretending that the
selection of ribbons is of interest to her, waiting for the crowd to dwindle, and by the time it
does Madame Delacroix is well aware of her presence. When the last customer leaves, she
flips the lock on the door, and Eloise turns away from the display.

“You ‘ave something to ask me, Miss Bridgerton?” Her French accent is thick, and her voice
is arch—meant to intimidate.

Eloise swallows and nods. “I do.”

“Go on, zen.”

For all the time she’s had to think about it, Eloise isn’t quite sure where to start. “Lady
Whistledown,” she finally says, and Madame Delacroix does not so much as blink. “I must
know if she’s back.”

“I received her column yesterday, just zee same as you.”

“You did not collude with her to get it printed, then?”

The modiste’s face clouds over.

“I am not—” Eloise shakes her head. “I don’t mean to accuse.”

“So what is it you do mean?”

She takes a deep breath .“I wish…I wish to know if she is alright.” Her voice sounds foreign
in her ears, choked with emotion. “I need to know if Penelope—”

At the name, Madame Delacroix startles, and Eloise gasps.

“You were working with her, then,” Eloise says. It’s not a question—not anymore. “You
knew her true identity all along.”

“I—”

“I cannot believe it.”

“She did not tell me you—”

She shakes her head. “I learned it only hours before she disappeared.”

Madame Delacroix drops into a chair.

“I did not know it all along.” It’s Eloise’s turn to startle. Madame Delacroix’s voice—her
accent—is completely different. Completely not French. “It was after you accused me that I
learned the truth.”

“And you agreed to keep her secret? To help her.”

The modiste shakes her head. “It is not easy, you know, for a woman to build something of
her own in this world.”

“I am quite aware.”

“What Miss Penelope did—she achieved it all on her own.”

“She hurt many along the way.”

“Yes.” She nods. “She did.”

“She hurt me.”

Madame Delacroix stands and brushes out the wrinkles in her skirt. “She was in agony, you
know. Trying to find a way to protect you from the Queen.”

“She should have found a better one.”

“Perhaps.”
Eloise’s temper flares up and then stutters. Her fight is with Penelope, not the modiste. “Has
she returned?” she asks again. “Is it Penelope?”

Madame Delacroix shrugs. “I have not seen her.”

“And did she ever write to you, after she left London? Do you know if she’s—if she’s—”

The modiste’s expression is sad, and she walks over to place a hand on Eloise’s arm. “She
wrote to me only once. Years ago. She told me she’d gone to America, with her family.”

A bubble of a sob rises in Eloise’s throat. “America?”

“Her letter…she believed there was nothing for her here. I don’t know that she would choose
to make the journey back.”

“But she’s alive?”

“She is alive.”

The sob escapes into Eloise’s mouth, and she presses a hand to her lips. She cannot name
every emotion that passes over her, though she knows there’s relief there, mixed in with the
anger and fear. There is even, perhaps, a small amount of joy. Madame Delacroix holds her
tight, letting Eloise cry into her shoulder. She thinks it should be strange, hugging the modiste
of all people, but it’s a comfort.

“It has not served you well, chasing after Whistledown.”

Eloise shakes her head.

“Perhaps you should let this go.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

Eloise pulls away, brushing the last of her tears from where they cling to her lashes and then
folding her arms across her chest. “If it is her, if Penelope has come back, then I have much
to say to her, and much to ask her.”

“And if it’s not her?”

Eloise’s arms tighten. “Then at least I will know.”

His sister returns home late in the afternoon and slips by him without a word. She won’t meet
his eye over dinner, surrounds herself with Gregory and Hyacinth in the drawing room after
the meal, and then vanishes up to bed while his back is turned.
Colin is beginning to think he will never learn what happened at the modiste, but just after
midnight there’s a quiet tap on his door and he finds El on the other side.

“And?” he asks her, ushering her into the room. “What have you learned?”

“Little,” Eloise tells him. “She was not involved in the printing of the latest issue.”

Colin groans. He had hoped they were onto something. “What about before?” he asks. “Was
she involved then?”

Eloise nods. “She was.”

“Then surely she must know Lady Whistledown’s identity?”

Something he can’t identify rolls across Eloise’s face. “She did not give me the name,” she
says.

The disappointment stings.

The afternoon felt like torture, waiting for word from Eloise. He did not like sitting back and
waiting for answers, rather than going out and getting them himself, and he did not like the
feeling that Eloise knew more about the situation than he did. And now, after all that waiting,
to discover that they’re no better off than they were at the start of their search—it is beyond
frustrating.

“Perhaps if we watch Madame Delacroix the scribe will turn up,” he suggests, scrambling for
a path forward.

“And how will we know it is her amongst all the other women of the ton?”

He hasn’t got an answer for that. “You’re not proposing we give up the search?”

“I am not.”

“Then what shall we do?”

Eloise shakes her head. “I need to think on it,” she says. “We both should. We can discuss it
in the morning.”

She seems sad, Colin thinks. The Eloise of the last couple of days had been a return to form,
but tonight she has retreated inwards again, shuttered herself from view. Colin is certain
something more must have happened at the modiste than she is willing to share with him, but
he lets her slip back out of the room without pushing.

And then he slips out himself.

By his third night at it, Colin believes that Eloise is right—watching the modiste is not going
to lead them to Lady Whistledown.
Eloise hasn’t come up with any better ideas, though, and Colin can’t bear to sit around
waiting for her, especially once a second issue of Whistledown has arrived, so he crouches,
once again, in the shadows across from Madame Delacroix’s business, and he watches.

The street is particularly quiet tonight. The Mondriches are hosting their annual ball—the
social event of the season since their son inherited a title four years back—and while
ordinarily he would be there to support his friends, he can’t seem to tear himself away from
his perch. There is light in the shop, somewhere at the back, and so long as Madame
Delacroix is there he plans to wait.

And wait.

And wait.

He’s nearly nodded off—so many late nights in a row have taken a toll on him—when a hack
stops at the end of the street. The sound jolts him up, and he shuffles in the shadows, trying to
make sure he can’t be seen, while the door to the carriage opens.

The figure that emerges is quite short—certainly a woman—and when she steps into a bit of
moonlight he can’t see anything but the rough green fabric of her cloak. A maid, he thinks.
Probably running an errand for her mistress.

He watches as she makes her way down the street, moving quickly, until she stops directly in
front of the modiste, where she pauses. He’s standing straight now, all his attention focused
on the woman who has come to see Madame Delacroix—he doesn’t even breathe. Surely,
surely, this must be her?

The woman stands quite still, her hands tucked tight inside her cloak. He wonders what’s
keeping her—why she doesn’t just knock—but then, after over a minute has passed, she
thrusts one fist out and raps on the glass.

Colin shifts forward. He’s not sure what he plans to do, exactly, except that he can’t let this
woman get away without learning her identity. He rolls up onto the balls of his feet, and
stands tense. Through the window, he can see movement in the shop, and then the door
cracks open.

Colin is already moving when the woman takes down her hood. He’s out of the shadows
immediately, boots pounding into the street, heading straight for the shop. Blood is pulsing in
his ears, but he can see moonlight bouncing off of a cloud of red curls, and Madame
Delacroix’s shock as she says what he thinks must be “Mr. Bridgerton!,” and then the woman
is turning around—turning towards him—and he stops, so suddenly he nearly falls over.

It’s been five years, and he’s sure time has changed them both, but there’s no doubt about it:

The woman that’s come to see Madame Delacroix—the woman who must by Lady
Whistledown—is as familiar to him as his own family.

It’s Penelope.
 vowed not to cry anymore
Chapter Summary

But where has Penelope been?

Chapter Notes

So. I tried to look into how the War of 1812 might have affected some of the events of
this chapter, but...I didn't get very far. So let's not look too closely at that. Or the specific
details of passenger travel by packet ship, which may not have been a thing until 1817?
(Also really digging deep to remember my 4th grade unit on Maryland state history
here.) Anyway! I am not a historian. And also, this is Bridgerton.

Let’s see what Penelope has been up to.

Fireworks were still bursting in the sky over the house when Penelope sat down at her desk to
write. Tears burned behind her eyes and in her throat, but she refused to let them fall. She
would pour the pain into her column instead.

She'd written little more than "Dearest Gentle Reader," though, when her mother burst
through the door.

"Has the maid already been in?" she asked, taking in the mess Eloise had made of Penelope's
bedchamber.

Penelope set down her pen. "The maid?" she asked.

"To begin packing your things."

Penelope shook her head. "What do you mean? Why would my things be packed?"

Portia bit at her lip, and panic swooped low in Penelope's belly.

"What is happening, Mama?"

"We are leaving," Portia said. She turned away from Penelope, taking in the rest of the room
and refusing to look at her daughter. Her hands hovered, anxious, in the air around her face.
"Tonight. For America."
"You want to leave?" Penelope asked. She stood up, pushing her chair away from her writing
desk. "With Cousin Jack?"

Portia shook her head. "We've no other choice, Penelope. The scandal...we'll be ruined."

"It was Jack that stole from the ton, not us!"

"We will be guilty by association."

Portia’s gaze finally returned to Penelope, and she crossed the room to take her hands in an
uncharacteristic show of compassion. "It will be a fresh start for us, Penelope. We won't be
burdened by all of this...history."

"We'll be fugitives!"

"We'll be free!"

Penelope felt like she might vomit. The night had already been such a whirlwind, and she
was dizzy from the adrenaline.

There had been a moment, tonight, when her hand had fit into Colin's, and he'd told her how
special she was to him, that she'd really believed something was changing, that the way she
loved him might actually be requited. For that moment, giving up Whistledown hadn't hurt so
much. She'd seen a future where she could be happy without it.

But it had lasted all of five minutes before the Bridgertons—Eloise and Colin both—had
smashed it all to pieces.

Colin didn't want to court her. It shouldn't be a surprise, really. It didn’t surprise her. Tonight
may have led her to believe otherwise, but Colin had never shown any real interest in her, not
as anything more than a friend. He was kind, but that didn't mean he loved her. Not the way
she did him.

Still, it had felt like her heart was being crushed, hearing him say as much to his friends.

Hearing him laugh at the very idea.

But even that could not compare to the pain of her fight with Eloise. With Eloise telling her
she never wished to see or hear from her again. Colin was a fantasy, but Eloise was real. And
now she was gone, too.

Penelope took in the mess of the room around her, and the desperate gleam in her mother's
eyes. Colin didn't want her. Eloise didn't want her. What reason had she to stay?

"Alright, Mama," Penelope said. "I'll go."

In the end they settled in Maryland.

Cousin Jack had reasons for not returning to Georgia, though he didn't bother to explain what
they were, and it didn't make any difference to the rest of them. All of it was foreign.

The crossing had been rough. Penelope had been forced to share tight quarters with her
mother and Prudence. Prudence spent most days alternating between experiencing severe
nausea and causing it. She was morose over her broken engagement ("No need for it now!"
Cousin Jack had announced—with barely concealed glee—while their trunks were loaded
onto the ship that first morning) and sea-sick from the toss of the ship. The room was bare,
windowless, and stank, and they had no choice but to spend most of their time there.

By the time they reached Annapolis it had been well over a month since the Featheringtons
threw their ball. Penelope tried not to dwell on what might be happening at home. It was
August now, and London would be quiet, but her new home was anything but. For all her life
she'd longed to see the world, experience the things she'd only read about in her books, or in
Colin's letters, and now it was finally happening.

But Penelope was lonely.

She longed to write home, to tell the Bridgertons everything she had seen and done in the
weeks since she’d last seen them. To tell them that she was alright, that she’d made it all the
way to this new home in a new city in a new country so very far away from home. She
wondered if they were thinking of her—worrying after her—or if Eloise’s anger and Colin’s
indifference allowed them to think of her at all.

Ultimately, she sent only one letter, to Genevieve, telling her that she was well, and that she’d
gone to America. For all that she longed for a friend, she included no return address, lest
someone intercept the letter. The Featheringtons were still fugitives after all.

They weren't the Featheringtons anymore, though, and they certainly weren't English nobility.
Jack and Portia wed quietly in New York (sending Prudence into a tailspin), and Jack
introduced them to Maryland society as the Fell family, landed gentry with plenty of money,
but no title, and no strong opinions, one way or the other, on American statehood. The Fells
took up residence in a large manor near St. Anne's Parish, and started throwing parties
immediately, so that Jack could ingratiate himself with Annapolis society, laying the
groundwork for his next scheme.

Portia thrived.

And if Penelope didn't thrive, well...at least she was content. For a time. The city was full of
interesting people and culture. Away from the rules and expectations of the peerage, her
mother gave her more freedom, and she often spent her days walking along the shore of the
Chesapeake Bay, or eavesdropping on the conversations between St. John's students, or
reading in the sun.

Her fingers itched to write, but she knew she could not take up Whistledown again without
her family catching on. Instead, she journaled, filling notebooks with everything she heard
and everything she saw, with the people she met, with her mother's and sisters' antics. She
wrote to her journal as though it were a dear friend, because she hadn't any real friends left.
And if sometimes she allowed herself the indulgence of pretending a Bridgerton was at the
other end of her pen, well...who was to know but her?

They lasted six months in Annapolis before Jack got in too deep and they were forced to
move on to Philadelphia, then Washington, then Charleston.

Phillipa and Albie had a baby girl, and decided to stay on in Pennsylvania.

Prudence met a (surprisingly) handsome and (shockingly) kind clerk in Washington and
married him, so they left her there.

Soon it was just Penelope left to follow her mother and cousin Jack.

If she'd been content before, she was miserable now. There was no opportunity to settle into
her life in any city before Jack and Portia became embroiled in another enterprise. Penelope
felt every bit the accomplice, though she never participated in their schemes. More than that,
she felt like a burden.

And then opportunity knocked.

Literally knocked, as it were, when a neighbor in Charleston came calling on a Tuesday

afternoon and spent an hour in their drawing room complaining about her difficulty in finding
suitable help to educate her daughters. While Portia cooed and sympathized, Penelope's mind
started turning over the idea.

She couldn't go work for their neighbor, the rules of society wouldn't allow it (and besides
that, the woman was sure to discover that Jack had conned her out of quite a bit of money
soon), but that didn't mean she couldn't work.

It took her weeks to make arrangements—weeks that took the family from Charleston all the
way north to Boston—but eventually she had a plan mapped out. She would return to
England (her passage already booked on a packet ship from New York to Liverpool), and
then find a position as a governess. She still had her Whistledown money, nearly all of it left
untouched since they fled London, and it would be more than enough to keep her until she
could find a position.

She drafted a letter to her mother, apologizing for her abrupt departure, and left in the middle
of the night.

Two months later she was home.

Well, not home.

She found a position with the family of an Earl in Cumbria, the Morrows. In her letter to
them she played up her genteel upbringing (leaving out her father's title, or her true name),
and the quality of the education she'd received from her own governess. She was more than
qualified to teach their daughters to read and write and to perform basic sums. To speak a
little French and play the pianoforte. She was plain enough that the mother didn't find her a
threat, and the father didn't find her a temptation. They paid little, but provided her a place to
sleep and food to eat, and they were relatively kind. Penelope was lonely, but she had her
journal.

It had been two and a half years since she left England. Even so far from London, there was a
familiarity to Cumbria that surprised her. On rainy days she often found herself standing out
in the garden, her face upturned to the mist, relishing the return to the familiar.

She had three charges: 12 year old twins, Rebecca and Margaret, and their 16 year old sister,
Eleanor, all of whom were intelligent and well-behaved. Without any children of age, most of
the family rarely left their country estate, and that suited Penelope, who had no strong desire
to return to London.

But of course, 16 year olds become 17 year olds, and 17 year olds become 18 year olds, and
soon it was time for Eleanor's debut.

Morrow House sat across Berkeley Square from number 5, far too close for Penelope’s
comfort. From the window in the nursery, Penelope could see down into the square, and for
the first few days after they arrived in London she struggled to tear her eyes away from it,
searching every passer-by for a familiar face.

Of course she saw several, but none of the ones she was looking for.

She kept indoors as much as possible. It wasn’t hard—the season got off to a rainy start, and
she could justify keeping Rebecca and Margaret in the dry. When the skies cleared up, she
came down, quite conveniently, with a cold that made wandering Mayfair inadvisable. And
when she did eventually run out of excuses, she braided her hair into a tight plait, tucked it
into a bonnet that hid much of her face, and kept her eyes pointed down.

But all the while that she was keeping out of sight she was listening: to the chatter of the
house servants, to conversations between the Morrows, to the tales Eleanor told her when she
returned, fluttering and swooning, from her first few balls.

She didn’t intend to write a Whistledown. It started as an entry in her journal, but the words
spilled out of her in Lady Whistledown’s wry voice, and before she could stop herself she
was transferring the whole thing—clean and neat—to a fresh sheet of parchment.

She thought about going to Genevieve first, but then she thought of Eloise. If Whistledown
started printing again, surely Eloise would come looking for her—would try to shut her down
—and Eloise knew that Genevieve had helped her before. She didn’t want to put her friend at
risk.

So she waited, cloak pulled tight around her, in the shadows outside Mr. Lacey’s print shop,
until she saw him duck out, and then she slid the column—with strict instructions on how it
should be printed and distributed—onto his table, and went home.

And then she waited.

“There’s a new Whistledown!”

She’s up in the nursery with Rebecca and Margaret when she hears the news ripple through
the house, starting with Lady Morrow’s shout. The Morrows weren’t in London when she
was writing before, but her readership spilled well into the countryside by the end—
apparently all the way to Cumbria! A delighted shiver runs through her. How she has missed
this feeling.

It’s an hour or two before a copy makes its way in front of her, passed off by Eleanor’s
Lady’s maid. There are her words, once again in print instead of scrawled in her own hand,
and her old logo at the top—how wonderful that Mr. Lacey still has it!

The twins are more than a bit curious about the column, and she allows them to read it as an
indulgence, so long as they swear they won’t say it came from her. They giggle over her
words, ask questions about the named parties she pretends she can’t answer, and speculate on
who the writer might be.

She keeps her lips tightly pinned.

She knows this issue will have set several things in motion. Eloise will probably start looking
for her, yes, but so will the Queen. She hadn’t planned to make an enemy of royalty all those
years ago, but there was something thrilling about having some tiny amount of power over
her, and she hadn’t been able to resist playing with that power a bit. Taunting her. Some risks
were worth taking.

And then there was everyone else, all the people she’d left behind five years ago. What had
Lady Bridgerton thought, reading her own name in Whistledown’s column after all these
years? She doesn’t know if Eloise has even kept her secret. Perhaps the whole Bridgerton
family hates her now.

Perhaps Colin hates her now.

But she doesn’t allow that thought to linger. It doesn’t matter what Colin thinks of her—what
any of the Bridgertons think of her, really. Not anymore. She’s just a governess, here for the
season, and in a few months she’ll be back to her real life in Cumbria. Lady Whistledown is
just something to pass the time while she’s in town. Maybe she won’t even write a second
issue.

She does write a second issue, and delivers it the same as the first. She doesn’t want Mr.
Lacey to see her face again, not if he ever suspected that Lady Whistledown’s Irish maid was
the writer herself. Surely he’ll be Eloise’s first stop, anyway. She doesn’t want to give him
too much information.

But she does think it might be time to pay Genevieve a visit.

She waits until the night of the Mondrich Ball. The adult Morrows are all in attendance, and
once the twins are in bed she takes her opportunity. The ton will be quiet—how odd, she
thinks, that a boxer and his wife have turned into the ton’s most popular citizens in her
absence—and Genevieve will surely be at the shop, working on gowns for the next big party.

The hack she hires drops her at the end of the street, from which she can indeed see a light on
in the modiste’s window. She makes quick work of the block, but once she’s standing outside
Genevieve’s door she freezes up. There’s a prickling feeling working its way up her spine,
like nervous energy trying to ground itself, and she takes a few deep breaths, watching the
candlelight flicker on the other side of the glass.

When she finally knocks, she senses movement inside right away, and then she can see her
friend making her way to the door. She starts to pull down her hood as Genevieve’s face
appears, a smile spreading across her face. She didn’t realize how much she’d missed this
either. A friend!

But Genevieve’s own smile shifts quickly as she spots something over Penelope’s shoulder.
She turns to see what it is just as his name leaves Genevieve’s mouth.

He must recognize her at the very moment she turns—at the very moment she recognizes
him.

Colin Bridgerton is here.

 got a sense I'd been betrayed
Chapter Summary

A confrontation (or two).

Chapter Notes

If you're watching the chapter count on this thing change every time I post and
wondering what's up...so am I. I'll figure it out eventually.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

For a moment he thinks time might actually have stopped.

Colin is frozen, mid-stride, in the middle of the dark street. He can see Penelope, just a few
meters in front of him, and he knows he should say something, but he must have left his brain
in the shadows somewhere behind him, because he just cannot form a word. He isn’t even
sure if he knows any words.

“Colin.”

She’s the one who speaks first.

Her lips purse around his name, and her voice is as familiar as if he’d heard it yesterday, low
and warm and arriving in his ear as soft as a breath. It breaks the spell that’s holding him in
place.

“You’re Lady Whistledown?”

He says it far too loud and he knows it—would have known it even if she hadn’t flinched at
his words—but he’s still trying to catch up, to figure out exactly what it is that’s unfolding in
front of him. He’s so far behind that he can’t even process an emotion, let alone the twenty or
thirty that are all competing in his heart and his brain.

Penelope Featherington, his sister’s best friend, his friend, the wallflower at every ball, the
fugitive, his pen pal and his loss and his responsibility, has returned to Mayfair. Penelope!
Featherington!

And also, she’s Lady Whistledown.

Penelope?
“Penelope?” This he says far too quietly.

“Why don’t we all go inside,” Madame Delacroix says and, right, the modiste is here, too.
Colin had quite forgotten.

She swings the door open, ushering Penelope into the room behind her, and Colin really has
no choice but to follow, not if he wants any sort of answers, so he goes too, into the dimly lit
dress shop.

The modiste has always been his mother and sisters’ terrain, he’s never been inside, and he
can’t help but take it in with curiosity: the lush fabrics and snaking ribbons. The dressmaker’s
stands that look as though they should be at the Mondrich Ball themselves.

But the most interesting thing in the room is Penelope.

Nothing could compete.

She’s slipped out of her coarse green cloak, and she's twisting its fabric around in her hands.
He’s used to seeing her in elaborately decorated gowns in bright citrus colors, but tonight
she’s just got a simple blue dress on. Her hair stands out against it, a flaming cloud of curls
that frames her face and falls over her shoulders. She’s got her bottom lip tucked right
between her teeth, and she won’t—can’t?—look at him.

She looks terrified. He’s terrified her?

This was not the plan, not at all. Colin should be at the Mondrich Ball, or at number 5, or out
of the country, or anywhere but here, standing just a few feet from her in Genevieve’s shop.

He looks…well, he looks good. She can’t help that a part of her will always seize up at the
sight of him, at his chestnut hair falling across his brow and his oh so blue eyes and that grin
that seems to capture his whole face (though there’s no sign of it right now). The years apart
have only made him more handsome, his features more defined, and if he weren’t looking at
her with such…anger? Confusion? Fear? she would be so…so happy to be here at last with
Colin Bridgerton.

Despite herself, she still longs for him.

“What the devil is going on, Penelope?”

She takes a step back, right into Genevieve, who places one hand on her shoulder and uses
the other to pull her cloak from her grasp. She turns her head to look at her friend, and
Genevieve leans in to give her a quick, encouraging hug, (a whispered “I shall be right here,
if you need me.”), before disappearing into the back.

It’s fortifying.

“Colin, I can explain,” Penelope says, and it comes out far steadier than she would have
expected. She has no idea, though, what her next words will be.
He’s gazing at her expectantly. “Pen?”

It’s the old nickname that does it, that breaks her. He says it so gently.

“I don’t—I’m not sure where to start,” she says.

“Start…” He looks like he’s not sure either, but then he squares his shoulders and issues a
command. “Start with where you’ve been the last 5 years.”

She sighs, and something inside of her eases. It’s perhaps the easiest question he’ll ask her
tonight.

“America, at first,” she tells him. “And then Cumbria, when I returned to England. I work as
a governess for a family there.”

“You’re a governess?”

She bristles. “I saw an opportunity to make a life for myself. A life apart from my mother.”

“Why did you not…why did you go with her in the first place?” He’s leaning down, towards
her, almost close enough for her to touch.

“What other option did I have, Colin?”

“You could have…you could…”

“I was 19,” she reminds him. “Unmarried. I had no prospects. How could I have stayed
behind?”

She watches him shift back—uncomfortable, maybe, with the reminder that she hasn’t been
afforded the same freedoms he has—but it does nothing to quell his questions. “But why did
you never write to us?” he asks. “Do you have any idea how worried we were? Eloise—”

“Eloise—” she spits the name out as anger courses fresh through her blood—anger she
thought she’d put aside years ago “—told me quite explicitly that she never wished to see or
hear from me again.” She takes a breath. “I took her at her word.”

This information seems to stun him, and she wonders if he truly didn’t know of their fight.
Has Eloise pretended to mourn her absence all these years?

He shakes his head, moving on. “Why not write to me, then? I was your friend, too.”

Her throat tightens. “‘I would never dream of courting Penelope Featherington.’” She chokes
it out. The words burn. “‘Not in your wildest dreams.’”

He pales.

“That was what you said that night, when you thought I couldn’t hear you. I assure you I
remember every word of it. It’s not the sort of thing one forgets.”
“I did not—”

“Of course I had never asked you to court me, nor did I ever expect you would.” She sniffs.
“But still, it is such a cruel thing to hear from someone you consider to be a friend. And you
were laughing.”

“Penelope—”

“I did not think I mattered one way or another to the Bridgerton family—not to you, and
certainly not to Eloise—so I did not waste the postage.” She steps away from him, turning to
place her hands on the cool wood of the counter. “I let Genevieve know I was alright.”

“Genevieve?”

She gestures to the back of the shop. “Madame Delacroix.”

He nods. “Right,” he says. “Your friend, the modiste.”

She spins back around to face him. “Genevieve has always been kind to me.”

“And she abetted your double life.”

They were back to that. Of course.

“I’ll tell you whatever you wish to know about Whistledown, Colin. Just ask your questions.”

Penelope is changed.

It strikes him more and more as they speak, and especially as he watches her grow angrier—
lose her patience with him. The difference is not in her appearance—she has the same red
curls, blue eyes, porcelain skin, and soft curves, matured a bit, but only in ways that make her
more…well, beautiful is the first word that comes to mind. (He’s not sure if he ever actually
noticed the blue eyes or the porcelain skin before.) But while the Pen he knew could be witty
and wry, she was also…accommodating.

This Pen is not.

This Pen pushes back, holds her own. He can’t sway her the way he used to. It’s oddly
fascinating.

He has been hit by so much information over the last twenty-odd minutes that he can’t keep
track of any one thought, and instead chases new ones back and forth across his brain.
“Where has Penelope been?” and “Why didn’t she ever write?” go one direction, but “How is
she Lady Whistledown?” and “Why did I not know?” bounce the other way.

Suddenly, several things she’s said coalesce in his mind.

“Eloise knows.”
It’s not a question. He’s absolutely certain that his sister put together Penelope’s secret. Eloise
knows, and she’s known for years.

Penelope hangs her head, her curls bouncing around her shoulders, and if he didn’t already
know it to be true he does now.

“She learned the night I left,” Penelope says, her voice quieter. He leans forward to hear her
better. “We had an awful fight, and…”

“And that is why you left.”

She looks up, and suddenly he’s aware of just how close they are. “As I said, I did not have
much of a choice in the matter. But certainly it made leaving easier. As did your words.”

He feels like an ass. Like the largest ass he’s ever felt.

Dimly, he remembers the words to his friends—they’d been ribbing him over dancing with
Penelope at yet another ball, and he’d been…he’d been embarrassed. It was awful behavior
on his part, words he’d said without any thought whatsoever to how cruel they might sound
to the wrong ears. And truly, he hadn’t even meant them, not the way she’d heard them
anyway, or at least he would have responded the same way to accusations that he was
courting anyone in those days. He’d been like a wounded bird after Lady Crane.

It’s no excuse.

“I am sorry, Pen,” he says, his voice soft. “I did not know you were listening, but even if I
had…”

She shrugs it off, takes a half step back, away from him. “What other questions have you?”

What questions does he have? He tries to lay them all out in his mind.

“How did it start?” he asks first. “Whistledown.”

“I was miserable,” she says. “It was my first season, and I felt terribly alone and awkward
and shy. No one talked to me, no one but you and your brothers danced with me, and even
that was only out of pity.”

He wants to protest, but he knows he shouldn’t. He’d danced with her out of more than pity,
but not much more, and certainly that was what had motivated Anthony and Benedict. Pity
and their mother’s prodding.

“But I…observed. No one noticed me, but I noticed them, and watched them, and listened to
them.”

“And then you wrote it all down.”

She shrugs. “I tried to be fair. And I was as unkind to myself as I was to anyone else.”
He thinks of some of the things that Lady Whistledown had said about Penelope over the
years, all the insults she’d made towards Penelope’s clothes, and her awkwardness. He feels a
confusing anger building against her, on her own behalf, that she believed those things to be
true enough to write them down. But it wasn’t just Penelope who took a beating in her
column.

“The things you wrote about Lady Crane—”

“Marina was trying to entrap you,” she says.

“You could have come to me directly!”

She steps towards him. “I tried, Colin. You would not listen!” Candlelight glints off of her
eyes, and her cheeks flush. Had she tried? He can’t remember.

“And Eloise?” he asks. “She was your best friend, how could you—”

“The Queen cornered Eloise a few days before I printed that column.” Her voice is lower
than before, and quieter. “She plucked her right off of the street and told her that she believed
Eloise to be Lady Whistledown. She would not listen to reason on the subject. Did you know
that?”

Colin shakes his head. Eloise, it turns out, has been keeping rather a lot of secrets.

“I would not make the same choice now,” Penelope says, “but it was all I could think to do at
the time. The Queen would never believe Eloise would expose herself to such scandal. It
cleared her name instantly.”

“It destroyed Eloise.”

Penelope shakes her head. “I do not see how that could be. It was a scandal, certainly, but not
ruinous.”

“You have not seen El these last five years. She is not the same as she was.”

Penelope looks up, directly into his eyes. “What do you mean?” she asks.

“I mean what I say. Eloise used to be outspoken and curious and…vivacious. She’s none of
those things now. She hasn’t been since the scandal. Not until this week, when she started
hunting for you.”

Penelope steps back. “Hunting for me?”

He shakes his head. “Well, she told me she was hunting for Lady Whistledown, although I
see now that she was withholding quite a bit of detail. That’s why I was outside tonight—she
said that she believed Lady Whistledown was working with the modiste.”

Penelope nods. “I was, although not since I returned.”

“I believe Madame Delacroix must have told her as much when Eloise confronted her.”
Something flames in Penelope’s eyes. “She wants to stop me writing.”

“That’s not—she told me that she hoped Lady Whistledown could…that she might know
what became of you.”

“Me?”

“That is why I offered to help her.”

Penelope’s mouth snaps shut, her lips a tight pink purse against her pale face.

“Of course it’s clear now why she thought Lady Whistledown might know.”

She flushes, the blood rising in her cheeks and up her neck.

“She’s been worried, Pen.” Her eyes widen. “We both have. You just disappeared.”

She blinks, and he watches the pale column of her neck tense as she swallows. “I had no
choice. As I’ve said.”

She looks up at him. She’s so close, really, just a breath away. He can see exactly how blue
her eyes are.

The room is stuffy, despite the cool evening outside. He longs to tug at his cravat. He feels,
quite suddenly, like he can’t breathe.

Penelope takes another step.

He steps back.

“Colin,” she starts to say, but he shakes his head.

“I must—” he brushes past her, moving towards the door “—I should go.”

“But—”

“It is late. I…I’ll be missed.” He can see her reflected in the glass of the door. Her hair hangs
over her face. He forces himself to stop and turn. “I should escort you home,” he says. “It’s
not safe.”

She tilts her face up to look at him. She’s several paces away now, a far safer distance. “No,”
she says. “I’ll be fine.” She waves her hand towards the door, dismissing him. “You should
go.”

He should insist, he thinks. If this were five years ago, he would. But Penelope crossed an
entire ocean—twice. Penelope kept a great secret from the ton whilst no one managed to keep
one from her. Penelope is more than capable…she is, in fact, more capable than he is. He
turns, again, to go.

“Pen,” he says to the doorknob in his hand, “are you going to disappear again?”
He watches her reflection. Waits.

“No,” she says at last.

Something deep inside of him unknots.

And then he’s gone.

Genevieve is just around the corner, bent over a bolt of gorgeous sea-green silk, trying very
hard to seem like she hasn’t been listening to their every word.

“I’m sorry our reunion was interrupted,” Penelope says, coming to sit on the chair across
from her. “It was you I came to see.”

Genevieve looks up and offers her a smile. “I am very glad you did,” she says. “That’s the
most entertainment I’ve had in my shop since I had to tell Miss Cowper I’d just sold the last
scrap I had of red velvet last season.”

“Was she apoplectic?”

Genevieve leans over like she’s telling a secret. “I thought she was going to breathe actual
fire.”

Penelope giggles. “I have missed you, Genevieve,” she says.

Her friend smiles, and sets aside the dress she’s working on. “Are you alright?” She leans
over to wrap her fingers, oh so gently, around Penelope’s forearm. “That must have been
quite a shock.”

Is she alright? Penelope places her hand over Genevieve’s, holding it against her skin. She’s
not sure she remembers the last time she was touched with such warmth. “I suppose it is a
relief, in some ways,” she says. She looks up to meet Genevieve’s eye. “And I knew I
wouldn’t stay hidden away for long, once I started publishing again.”

“So why did you?”

“I couldn’t not.”

It’s the nearest thing to the truth, the thing Penelope can’t quite put into words, but Genevieve
nods, as though she understands perfectly. Penelope lets go of her hand.

“Tell me how you have been,” she says, settling back into her chair. “I have missed so much.”

Genevieve picks her sewing back. “Oh,” she says. “Where should I even start?”

.
It's late when he returns to Number 5; everyone should be tucked into bed, weary from
dancing and drinking and socializing. He can see the flicker of a candle under Eloise's door,
though, and knows she must be up. Eloise would not risk falling asleep with a lit candle.

She's quick to let him in when he knocks, and he waits until she's seated at her writing desk,
looking at him expectantly, before he says a word.

In truth, he's not quite sure which words to say, or in what order to say them.

"You knew," is what finally spills from his mouth, all accusation and confusion.

"Knew what, brother?"

He swallows, his throat tight. "Penelope is Whistledown."

Eloise pales. "She--"

"And she tells me you've known since the night she left London."

Eloise gasps—stands. "You saw her?" she asks. "With your own eyes?"

Colin nods, his neck as tight as his throat. "She looks well."

"Where has she been?"

"Cumbria, apparently. And America before that."

“Cumbria?”

It is not the reaction he was expecting. “You’re more surprised by Cumbria than America?
She crossed an ocean, El.”

Eloise bites at her lip. “I may not have shared everything I learned at the modiste, brother,”
she confesses. “She did tell me that Penelope wrote to her, years ago.”

“You have kept rather a lot of secrets, sister,” he says.

He watches Eloise’s face. She looks chastened, but not particularly regretful. He wants to
shake her, wants to make her spill everything it is that she apparently knows.

Colin is staring down at her in the way only an older brother can, his expression somehow
both angry and beleaguered. She’d like to smack it right off his face, but of course she’s
earned this expression. "Why would you keep this from me, Eloise?" he asks.

It's a fair question, she knows. Penelope's secret life is the burden she's carried for five years
now, and perhaps sharing it with her family might have helped to ease the weight. Perhaps
Colin deserved to know more than most.
"I think I should have felt like a very disloyal friend," she says, "if I had shared Penelope's
secret." As she says it she knows it's true. As angry as she was—as angry as she still is—she
doesn't think she could have broken Penelope's trust. "I'm sorry, brother."

Colin looks positively irate. "Did you not think it would make a difference to me?" he asks.
"Penelope was my friend, maybe not as much as yours, but still. And Whistledown…I…I
don't know how to reconcile the two."

"Perhaps now you can understand what has haunted me these last years."

Something softens in Colin's eyes. "Have you reached any sort of…peace with it?"

Has she? She pauses, trying to decide. "I think…I believe that she had her reasons for the
things she wrote. That she thought she had no other choice." Eloise reaches for her brother's
hand. "And I know that—that her life has not been like yours or mine. She's..." Eloise
flounders. "I think it must not be easy, to be so often overlooked, even by your family."

Colin shakes his head. "I know that."

"But I still wonder if I ever truly knew Penelope. I thought I did, but then…” She drops his
hand. “Do you know where I can find her?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “All she told me is that she’s a governess for a family in Cumbria. They
must be in town for the season.”

Eloise blinks in surprise. “She’s a governess?”

“That is what she said.”

“Penelope?”

He nods.

Perhaps it should not seem so strange. Penelope has always been highly intelligent—she
would make a fine governess. But…Eloise cannot imagine going from this life, with all of its
trappings, to that one.

It must, she realizes, have taken tremendous courage.

Colin turns away from her, his hand on her doorknob.

“Brother,” she says, trying to stop him.

“I am too weary to continue this conversation, El. We can discuss it in the morning.”

He slips out into the quiet hall.

.
It’s not until much later, when she’s tucked into her bed at the Morrow house, that Penelope
allows herself to play over the conversation again.

Allows herself to think about Colin’s face in the dim shop, the way the candlelight played
over his features and flickered in his eyes.

Allows herself to think about his words, his anger, his confusion. To think about him missing
her, all of these years. Wondering after her.

To think about Eloise.

She falls asleep with his words replaying in her head. “She’s been worried, Pen. We both
have.”

We both have.

Most of the family is at the breakfast table when it arrives, warm in Mrs. Wilson’s hands.

“A message from the palace,” she says, handing a thick, cream-colored half-sheet over to
Lady Bridgerton.

Eloise watches her mother’s eyes slip quickly over the page.

“What does it say?” Hyacinth asks, eager at their mother’s elbow.

“It’s probably just an invitation to a ball you’re too young to attend,” Gregory says, digging
into the eggs on his plate.

“As if you’re attending balls,” Hyacinth spits back at him.

“I’m old enough, I just choose not to.”

Hyacinth rolls her eyes.

“What does it say, mother?” Eloise echoes, raising her voice to be heard over her younger
siblings.

Colin enters the room just as Lady Bridgerton says “The Queen.” She hands the sheet over to
Eloise. “She’s offering quite a reward.”

Eloise’s eyes race over the words, then, wordless, desperate, she shoves it into Colin’s hands.

“‘Dearest members of my most esteemed ton,’” he reads aloud. “‘I hereby declare that
whoever brings legitimate evidence of Lady Whistledown’s identity to the palace shall
receive a £5,000 reward.’”

He glances back at Eloise, and she knows she must be looking back at him with the same
expression she can see on his face; she can feel the panic and fear rising through her body.
 “‘Yours truly,’” he finishes, “‘Her Majesty Queen Charlotte.’”

They must find Penelope.

Chapter End Notes

Thank you all so much for the kind comments! I'm so glad people are reading and
enjoying and I love hearing your thoughts.
 your fingers on my hairpin triggers
Chapter Summary

Some speculation, some table setting.

Chapter Notes

So I definitely didn't intend to go 3 months between chapters. I went on vacation (to

Cumbria, actually! and also London! I walked around Mayfair and Hyde Park listening
to the season 3 score on an endless loop and saw the actual number 5, which is actually
a pub, and Rotten Row, and Grosvenor Square. research!), and then...several months
passed, and here we are. I do fully intend to finish this fic (and have some idea of
where/how it ends), and I will try not to take quite so long getting chapter 6 out. I hope.
(I'm also writing something else, but it's not Pen/Colin, and also I don't know if I'll ever
post it. But I'm having fun!)

Anyway, here's "Wonderwall."

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Breakfast is a lively affair for most of the Bridgerton clan. All those in London (which is all
save Francesca) end up stopping in to join them, and much of the meal is taken up with
speculation and accusations as to Lady Whistledown's true identity.

Eloise keeps her mouth shut and does her best not to look at Colin, to avoid drawing attention
to his pale and panicked face, while Hyacinth, the loudest of the speculators, declares that she
will be the one to solve the mystery.

Violet then declares that she absolutely will not.

"I still believe Lady Featherington must have been involved somehow," Hyacinth grumbles
into her eggs, and Eloise feels Colin shake as he nearly chokes on a bite of sausage.

"Lady Whistledown did more damage to the Featherington family than they ever did to
themselves," Anthony reminds his sister.

"Which is truly saying something," Benedict adds.

"You must admit," Daphne says, "the timing was awfully suspicious. Didn't the
Featheringtons run off just about the time that Lady Whistledown stopped printing?"
“After everything that happened with Lady Crane, I cannot imagine it would be her. Do you
think Lady Featherington would ever threaten her daughters’ prospects by exposing them to
such scandal?” Lady Bridgerton asks.

There’s a momentary shuffling about the table as everyone now tries not to look at Colin,
who clears his throat, but doesn’t say anything.

“Well, what about Phillipa?” asks Hyacinth. “Or Prudence?”

“Phillipa Featherington couldn’t identify the nib end of a quill if you shoved it up her nose,”
says Benedict.

“A lovely picture for our breakfast, brother,” says Anthony.

Sophie grins at her husband from across the table. “Vivid imagery is his specialty.”

Benedict grins back at her.

“And Prudence?” Kate asks.

“Prudence Featherington is far too cruel,” Daphne says. “Remember that I would be Daphne
Berbrooke right now if Lady Whistledown had not intervened.”

Several Bridgertons shudder over their plates, and it’s Anthony’s turn to shift uncomfortably
in his seat. “Well,” he says, “we can all be grateful that you are not.”

“Quite,” Simon agrees, a bit of tension behind his teeth.

Daphne nods at them both.

Hyacinth ponders for a moment. “Could it be Penelope?”

Colin stands then, abruptly, startling the rest of the Bridgertons. “None of the Featheringtons
have been seen in London in years,” he says. “Including over the last few weeks. It is not any
of them.”

He shoves his chair away from the table.

“I have an errand to run.” A moment later he’s gone.

“What has gotten into him?” Gregory asks, reaching over to steal an untouched bun off
Colin’s deserted plate. “He did not even finish his breakfast.”

“He has always been sensitive when it comes to Whistledown,” Benedict says, grabbing the
bun out of Gregory’s hands and taking a bite. “And Penelope,” he says through his food.

Gregory glares at him, as does Violet.

“I think I will go, too,” Eloise says, scraping her chair back to stand. “I should like to visit the
modiste this morning.”
Violet nods to her. “Shall I come?” she asks.

“No.” Eloise shakes her head. “I’ll bring Rose.”

She pauses just outside the breakfast room, waiting to hear how the conversation between her
siblings will shift in her absence, if they will discuss her once she’s out of the room, or
Penelope, but they move on to talking about the upcoming Longfellow ball, and she goes to
find her lady’s maid.

His first thought, as he sets out from Number 5, is to visit the modiste again. To interrogate
her, to make her tell him where he might find Penelope. He’s halfway there by the time he
comes to his senses—in the harsh light of day, his presence in her shop would raise far too
many questions. Whistledown herself would have to write about it.

He detours for Whites instead. He’ll have a coffee in a quiet corner and mull over the
situation. He knows Penelope works for a family with an estate in Cumbria, a family that has
decamped to London for the season, so surely he can ask the right questions and create a list
of possibilities. The gentlemen who frequent the club during daylight hours are often far
worse gossips than their wives. It will be an excellent source of information, and perhaps an
even better place to unwind the tension that has coiled its way up his spine over the last
twelve hours.

The club is relatively quiet when he enters. Weak sunlight filters in through the long windows
along the far wall, trying to pierce through the room’s shadows. The wood is dark, the drapes
are heavy, and if Colin didn’t know better he’d think it was nearly evening. He picks up a
discarded copy of today’s Times from the bar and takes it to an empty table. When he opens
it, a creased pamphlet slides out: yesterday morning’s Whistledown.

Colin sighs.

He’s still trying to make sense of all this, of how Penelope—his Penelope—could possibly be
Lady Whistledown. How she could have kept that secret through two seasons, pretending to
be his sweet, innocent friend, when all along she was the one dragging so many people’s
names through the mud in her column. Even the Bridgerton name. Even her own.

How could she?

It’s clear to him now, though, that Penelope is not sweet or innocent. She is not a meek
wallflower. Or, at least, she is not just those things. She has a wit sharp enough to pierce right
through society, a blade so shiny as to be a mirror, reflecting the ton back at itself. He knew
she was intelligent, that she was observant, that she loved a bit of gossip, but for the first time
he is seeing that she is also ambitious, and fearless, and independent in a way he’s never seen
in any other woman of his acquaintance. She traveled the Atlantic Ocean without so much as
a chaperone. Mocked the queen to her face. She is formidable!

And, for the first time, he is realizing that she is a woman. Not a girl, not a debutante, not a
Lady. Try as he might to push the image from his mind, he cannot help but picture her the
way she looked last night, her pale skin and startling blue eyes washed in candlelight. Her
bosom had heaved as she’d spit his own cruel words back at him, and he’d tried—truly, he’d
tried—not to notice it, but that dress she’d been wearing had skated over all her curves in
ways her old gowns never had, and what curves they were. Was that figure always hiding
beneath the elaborate confections her mother forced her into? If it was, it had certainly never
caught his notice, though now he can’t imagine how.

Colin clears his throat and redirects his attention to the pamphlet on the table in front of him.

He had read the issue when it arrived yesterday morning, poring through it looking for clues,
but now he re-reads it with new eyes.

Whistledown’s wit has always been sharp, that’s not new information. In the early days,
before she’d ruined Marina—or, at least, exposed Marina’s ruin—he’d enjoyed the column,
laughed at her turns of phrase, and admired her keen observations. The ton traded in gossip,
with or without Whistledown, and Colin enjoyed it just as much as anyone else, at least when
he wasn’t its subject. It was remarkable how Whistledown seemed to know everything first,
as though the most important members of society discussed their secrets in front of her freely,
and now Colin can see that it’s because they did. To most, Penelope Featherington was
invisible, the third daughter of a disgraceful baron and a tactless baroness, unloved even by
her miserable family—no one but the Bridgertons thought much of her at all.

And the Bridgertons…well. Clearly they had not always treated her as well as they ought to
have. He certainly has not.

Colin wants to be angry. He thinks that would be much simpler, to let himself descend into
the ire he’s felt towards the scribe for years. But it is one thing to be angry at the faceless
silhouette of Lady Whistledown, inked at the top of the page, and another thing entirely to be
angry at Penelope. He tries to grab at his fury, but it remains just out of reach.

And so does Pen.

Madame Delacroix sighs when Eloise enters her store. It rolls right off El’s shoulders—she’s
hardly the first to have grown exhausted by Bridgertons.

Eloise doesn’t linger this time. She goes to stand directly in the modiste’s eyeline and waits
for Lady Twombley’s fitting to conclude. Genevieve pins rapidly, and then ushers the widow
out the door.

“What is it you want this time, Miss Bridgerton,” she asks, dropping her accent with the click
of the lock.

Eloise juts her chin out, feigning at authority. “I must find Penelope.”

“She will come to you when she is ready.”

“She is a wanted woman!” Eloise cries. “She needs our help.”

Genevieve shakes her head. “Miss Featherington is nothing more than a Governess, and no
one is bothering to look her way. You, however, draw attention to yourself in your search. If
you are not careful, the queen will go after you again.”

“The queen,” Eloise says, “does not suspect me. Penelope saw to that.”

“Yes. She did. So perhaps you ought to be more grateful.”

Eloise makes a sound, low in her throat, that could best be called a growl. There is a
temptation—a small one!—to bare her teeth, but she fights it.

The modiste just laughs at the display.

“Miss Bridgerton, I am not interested in getting in the middle of your petty squabble with
Penelope. She promised your brother that she would stay put. I am sure you will see her
before long.”

“You believe I should trust her word?”

“Lady Whistledown is many things, but she has never been a liar.”

“Lady Whistledown may not be a liar,” Eloise says, “but Penelope Featherington can make
no such claim.”

She pushes past Genevieve, disengages the lock, and storms back out into the street.

Colin must admit that his day at Whites is not especially productive. The gentlemen of the
ton may love to gossip, but it is hardly about their governesses, and they can be rather
cliquish. If Colin does not know any of the families from Cumbria it is unlikely that any of
his friends will.

He would be better off consulting Debrett’s.

Which, he realizes around three pm, is precisely what he should be doing.

He opts for the library at Bridgerton House over the one at Number 5, despite the longer
walk. There are simply too many prying eyes in his mother’s house, and they will all want to
know why, exactly, Colin has suddenly developed an interest in the history of the peerage.
Anthony’s home will be quieter—or at least the prying eyes there have not yet learned to
read.

He is halfway to Grosvenor Square when he encounters Eloise and her lady’s maid on the
street.

“Have you had any success?” he asks his sister, falling into step beside her while her maid
hangs back.

“None. You?”
He shakes his head. “I had an idea, though,” he says. “Come with me.”

Eloise slips into the library at Bridgerton House with Colin and Charlotte, who, all of two
years old, had grabbed onto Auntie Eloise’s skirts in the drawing room and refused to let go.
It is just as well—Charlotte cannot possibly be more distracting than her older brothers, who
are still yodeling down the hall while their mother tries to calm them. Getting her out of the
way was their excuse to slip off.

The copy of Debrett’s that Colin pulls from the shelf is battered and earmarked and ten years
past date. “Must be Kate’s,” he says, setting it on the table in front of them. “I once heard her
say she memorized it when she was training Edwina to be a gently bred young lady.”

Eloise snorts. She is fairly certain this is the first time she’s cracked open a copy of Debrett’s
in her life.

“Someday, sister, you might realize how lucky you are to have been allowed to reach the age
of three and twenty without being forced to marry.”

“And you, brother, might realize how lucky all men are to be allowed infinitely more
freedom, with or without a spouse.”

“I am well aware that I’ve been afforded luxuries you have not.”

“But still you think I should be grateful for my own small life, merely because it could be
smaller.”

Her brother sighs and turns back to the tome on the table.

Eloise huffs at his sigh.

Charlotte burbles spit bubbles into the heavy fabric of Eloise’s skirt.

“Where should we start?” Eloise asks as her brother flips the book open.

“At the beginning, I suppose. I’m not sure there’s another way.”

So they do.

They’re still at it two hours later, with Charlotte dozing across both their laps. They’ve been
passing the book back and forth as they scan through the peerage, making note of any
Cumbrian family seat they come across. It’s a dull, arduous task, and Eloise thinks Charlotte
probably has the right idea, but she can’t deny that they’re making some headway. She’s got a
list of six names scribbled in her journal.

“Is that Debrett’s?” Anthony asks when he finds them. “What on earth are you doing with
that?”

“It is…research,” Colin says, and Eloise winces.

“Research for what?”

Her brother looks to her in desperation. They really ought to have figured out their excuse
ahead of time. “We thought it might help,” Eloise says, floundering just as much as Colin. “In
the hunt for Whistledown.” She winces again, this time at her own words.

“You are hunting for Lady Whistledown?” Anthony asks. He folds his arms across his chest
and looks down his nose at the both of them, every bit the Viscount Bridgerton. “You seek
the queen’s reward?”

“Not as such—” Colin says, just as Eloise sputters “not for the money!”

Anthony sighs. It’s a familiar sigh to Eloise, the long-suffering, exhausted one he saves
exclusively for his siblings. She’s heard it all her life, though it does seem to have grown
wearier and more dramatic with time. Certainly more practiced.

“Why, pray tell, are you in search of the scribe, if not for the reward?”

“We thought it would be…” she starts.

“Sporting!” Colin interjects.

“You’re hunting down Lady Whistledown for a lark?” Anthony asks. “The both of you?”

They look at each other, and then turn back to Anthony, nodding their heads. “You know I
was always quite invested in learning her identity, Brother,” Eloise says.

“And I thought I might be of some…help,” Colin adds.

Anthony eyes them both for a moment, and she can see him trying to decide whether he’s
going to believe them, but then his shoulders drop, along with his stern facade, and he
swoops forward to scoop his sleeping daughter off their laps. “As you were,” he says, and
moves to leave the room, but he turns back at the door. Charlotte’s drool is already leaving a
damp patch on his shoulder. “But if this is about some kind of revenge,” he says to them, and
there is a steely flint back in his eye, “I hope you will both think better of it.”

Anthony does leave them then, sliding the library door closed behind him, and they go back
to their book, and their list.

The twins keep Penelope busy all day, and it's not until the tray with her supper is delivered
to her bedchamber that she has a moment to let herself think about the night before. She
shovels a fork full of peas into her mouth and lets it all replay in her mind's eye: the anxiety
she’d felt at Genevieve’s door, the swoop in her belly at Colin’s sudden appearance, the burn
of her temper—and her passion—as they’d talked.

She's not sure how to feel about any of it.

She'd known there was a risk, coming back to London, reviving Whistledown. She'd known
that Eloise would likely try to track her down, that being just across the square from the
Bridgertons was far too close. But she'd also known that she'd never had any difficulty
disappearing in plain sight. She'd been gone five years, and surely even the Bridgertons—
none of whom had seemed to want her around anyway—would look over her now.

So there's a thrill in knowing she still means something to them—to Colin and to Eloise—
though what she means to them is yet to be determined.

And there's a thrill, too, to having been so close to Colin last night. There's a part of her heart
that still longs for him, that beats an extra beat when he is near, and he was oh so very near.
Close enough to reach out and touch.

Not that she did. She is still a gentleman's daughter. (Not a very good gentleman, true, but
that shouldn't matter. She is not sure that she was a very good daughter, either.)

She's so busy thinking about the roiling deep-ocean blue of Colin's eyes in the candlelight
that she almost misses the parchment that's been tucked under her plate, but a glint on the
gold foil edge catches her eye and she pulls it out.

It must have been delivered to the house, probably something the cook thought would interest
her, and, well, it does interest her. It concerns her. In more ways than one.

Dearest members of my most esteemed ton,

I hereby declare that whoever brings legitimate evidence of Lady Whistledown’s identity to
the palace shall receive a £5,000 reward.

Yours truly,

Her Majesty Queen Charlotte

Her heart is beating a bit too fast now. Not the way it does for Colin, but the way it used to in
the early days of Whistledown, on those first few nights she ventured out alone into London.
It's fear and panic and a hint of nausea. It is one thing to taunt the queen as a teenage girl
from a noble family—risky, certainly, but insulated. It is another thing entirely to taunt the
queen from the servant class. She could be on a boat to Australia tomorrow, this small but
precious life she's built for herself torn away.

She drags in a breath, tearing it over her teeth and down her throat, until she can feel it hitting
her lungs. Does it again, and again. She rises to pour herself a glass of water, her hands
shaking and drops spilling across her gray day dress. She takes careful, tiny sips.

Penelope can count the people who know she is Lady Whistledown on one hand: Genevieve,
Eloise, Colin. Of the three, only Genevieve knows exactly where she is right now, could
name the house and the family she works for.

But she wouldn't.

 Eloise and Colin…Penelope longs to believe that her secret is safe in their hands, that the
years of friendship between them will outweigh the betrayal. She knows neither of them has
any need for the reward money, and, after all, Eloise has already kept her secret for five
years.

But Colin? She does not know what he is thinking. He feels incredibly far away, though she
could be at his door in less than five minutes.

Five years ago, Colin hated Lady Whistledown. She was at the root of his ruined
engagement, exposed his family to scandal on more than one occasion, and then, in her final
issue, she tore down his beloved sister. Colin had every reason to hate her.

But…she does not think she saw hate in his eyes last night. Anger, certainly, and hurt.
Concern. But Penelope spent years cataloging Colin Bridgerton’s every facial tic, trying to
read her own hope into them, and she still carries that catalogue with her. Flips through it
sometimes, late at night, when she can’t sleep. This is Colin happy, this is Colin sad. This is
Colin’s kindness.

This is Colin’s cruelty.

Last night she saw his hurt and his anger and his concern. She also saw what she thought
might be his relief. And she saw something else, something she didn’t know how to read at
all. But she didn’t see his hatred.

It takes her a long time to fall asleep, tired as she is. The queen’s words sit just behind her
eyelids, every time she closes them. It’s Colin’s face she’s picturing when she finally does
drift off, though.

She needs to find him again.

She finds Eloise first.

Chapter End Notes

As always, I greatly appreciate your comments and kudos and tumblr messages etc etc
etc

Thank you for reading! And also for your patience. Next up: another reunion, at last.
 my hand was the one you reached for
Chapter Notes

Spent the night on an airplane and it finally gave me the excuse? opportunity? kick in
the butt? to finish this chapter I've been doodling my way through for weeks. (Probably
shoulda slept instead.) I like it! Hope you do, too!

See the end of the chapter for more notes

It’s a rare day that Penelope is given the opportunity to wake late, to let her body sink into her
mattress until it feels like she’s become one with it, but this morning Lady Morrow has taken
the twins to visit with her sister, and Penelope’s day is uncommonly, blessedly free.

She hardly feels at ease, though. She wakes sweaty and fluish from the hours she spent
tossing and turning the night before. Her braid has come loose, and there are curls plastered
to the back of her neck, and to her forehead, and for a moment she thinks she may need to
vomit. She takes several deep breaths, and then pulls herself out of the bed.

She breaks her fast in her small bedchamber, consuming little more than a weak cup of tea
and a stale biscuit. With the family away for the day, the kitchen has sent her yesterday’s
crumbs. She doesn’t mind, though—the thought of anything richer turns her stomach.

It’s hard for Penelope to say if she’s sick, or just sick with worry. With fear. She made an
enemy of the Queen of England at seven and ten, and then, when given the chance to walk
away from all the risks that entailed, she decided to further antagonize her. Penelope is a very
smart girl—a very smart woman, now—but also, she thinks, she can be very, very stupid.

Colin and Eloise disagree over next steps.

They secreted Kate’s copy of Debrett’s back to No. 5 last night, and Colin believes they
should spend the day holed up in the study, digging through it for more names.

Meanwhile, Eloise cannot bear the thought of another day spent in another dimly lit study,
when they could instead start investigating the names they already have.

Rather than attempt to reach some sort of agreement, Eloise tells Colin that she must refresh
herself, and instead slips out the front door, her lady’s maid at her heels. The first name on
their list, the Earl of Morrow, keeps a house in town, just across Berkeley Square. It seems an
ideal place to start.

.
An hour after rising, Penelope stands on the west side of Berkeley Square, staring east, in the
direction of Bruton Street, and taking more deep breaths. She’s dressed in a lavender day
dress—simple, but one of the nicer options in her small wardrobe—and she’s tucked her red
curls up into her straw bonnet. Today, she thinks, would be an especially bad day to be
recognized. Surely the whole ton is on high alert for anything—or anyone—out of the
ordinary. Anything they might be able to report back to the queen.

For ten minutes now she’s been trying to work up the courage to march towards Lady
Bridgerton’s dower house. She thinks this shouldn’t be so hard, now she’s spoken with Colin
once, but of course he won’t be the only one there, and the thought of coming face to face
with Eloise, or of having to confess her sins to any of the other Bridgertons, has her anxious
and unbalanced. Maybe she should be heading for the docks right now, looking to book
passage on the next ship back to the Americas. Or perhaps in the other direction—she has
always longed to see the Continent after all.

She promised Colin, though, that she wouldn’t run. She wants to keep that promise. She
wants to prove herself an honest person. A friend. She has nurtured all manner of anger and
hurt for Colin and Eloise Bridgerton these last five years, and still she cannot let go of her
need for their love, nor that of anyone else that shares their name.

She takes another deep breath and inches her left foot one step closer.

Eloise is a great fan of shortcuts. Why take the long way around the square when she can go
straight across? She waits for a carriage to pass and then hurries across the street and into the
garden, dust kicking up along the hem of her skirt.

Rose follows her.

(She likes Rose. Rose doesn’t ask many questions. Really, she doesn’t speak much at all.)

Perhaps, Eloise thinks, she ought to give more thought to what she will say when she reaches
Lord Morrow’s door. Does she introduce herself? She ought to have brought her calling
cards, though in truth she’s not really sure what she’s done with them. Should she simply ask
to speak to the governess, without preamble? What if there isn’t one? What if there is, but
she’s not Penelope?

Eloise doesn’t allow the uncertainty to slow her, though. She is nearly halfway across the
square now.

She’s not sure if it’s because the sight is so familiar, or because it has been so very long since
she last saw it, but Penelope does not realize that Eloise Bridgerton is barreling straight
towards her until her one-time dearest friend has nearly run her right over.

Physically, Eloise has changed little. Penelope has but a moment to note that Eloise’s
chestnut hair is pulled back from her face in the same style she’s worn since they were girls.
She’s in a pale blue dress with a navy spencer, and her slippers and the bottom of her dress
are coated in a layer of dust. She is moving with absolute purpose in Penelope’s direction, but
she does not seem to be aiming for Penelope exactly. With a start, Penelope realizes that
Eloise has not recognized her.

She is so tempted to let her friend pass her by. She is not ready to speak to Eloise, to return to
the fight they started five years ago. If Eloise is out of the house then she cannot pose a threat
to a conversation with Colin (though of course there are several other Bridgertons who might
be home). Penelope can just let her go, let her head off towards whatever mission she finds
herself on this morning.

But then she thinks of what Colin told her. “You have not seen El these last five years. She is
not the same as she was.” She needs to know what that means.

“Eloise,” she says instead.

It is almost like hearing a voice from beyond the grave.

Eloise has her eyes set on Lord Morrow’s house, a stately home on the west end of the
square. She is so focused on her destination that she hasn’t bothered to spare a glance at her
surroundings. Surely that is the only excuse for her inability to recognize Penelope
Featherington right in front of her.

But there Penelope is.

“Eloise,” Penelope says, and Eloise’s heart…flutters. Like a bird stretching its wings. She
stops moving so quickly that she nearly falls over.

It is strange. Eloise has had five years to imagine this moment. She has often turned it over in
her mind, late at night, trying to determine exactly how it would feel to see her friend again.
She was so angry the last time they met, the taste of Penelope’s betrayal still fresh on her
tongue, and she had thought she’d meant the things she said at the time. The reality of never
seeing or hearing from Penelope again, however…that had proved quite different from the
theory. With time, her fear that something terrible had befallen Penelope twisted itself into
her anger, and those two things grew together, a knotted braid wrapped tight around her heart.

Both Colin and Madame Delacroix have reassured Eloise of Penelope’s well-being in the last
two days, but it is not until she sees her with her own two eyes that Eloise truly believes that
Penelope has returned to London. That she is alive and that she is here. Something unwinds
itself then, lets go, and she’s left with just the anger.

And with a shocking, destabilizing amount of joy, shooting through that anger like rays of
sunlight.

“Penelope,” she says.

Penelope looks different. Maybe it’s because her tight orange curls are tucked away under her
bonnet, or maybe it’s the pale purple dress she’s wearing, that suits her far more in color and
cut than anything her mother forced her into all those years ago. But Eloise thinks it’s
something in her face—a tightness in her jaw, and behind her eyes. Penelope is afraid.

Penelope is afraid of her.

“I—”

“Why did you come back?”

It is not what Eloise means to ask her. Or maybe it is. It is certainly not said the way Eloise
intends to say it, all bite and accusation, but the anger spills out of her first. The fear in
Penelope’s face flickers like a candle.

“It’s no business of yours,” Penelope says. It comes out just as angry. “I don’t answer to you,
Eloise.”

“I’m the one who knows your very valuable secret, Pen,” Eloise says, “so I should think
you’d want to exercise a bit of caution.”

The color drains from Penelope’s face. “Are you threatening me?”

“I am merely reminding you of where things stand.”

“I’ve hardly forgotten.”

“You’re certainly behaving as though you have nothing to fear, parading about Mayfair in
broad daylight.”

“If you could not recognize me, what makes you believe anyone else would?”

“How am I meant to recognize someone I do not know at all.”

Penelope gasps, a small sound at the back of her throat, and that’s all it takes for Eloise’s
anger to disappear. To burst and dissipate. It’s like it was never there at all.

“Pen,” Eloise says. “I—”

A single tear slides down Penelope’s face, and Eloise falls upon her, burying her nose in her
friend’s neck to hide her own sobs.

Together, they sink down onto the dirty path, clinging to each other and crying.

“I am so sorry, El,” Penelope moans into her hair.

“I am sorry, too,” Eloise replies.

“I did not want to leave you.”

“I have missed you so much.”

“I should have written.”

“I wish you would have.”

“I did not think you wanted to hear from me.”

“I wanted to know you were alive.”

Eloise is dimly aware that they are making a scene, and also that Rose is still present,
hovering somewhere nearby, but she cannot bring herself to care. Penelope is here, and she is
well, and somehow they seem to have forgiven each other. She thinks it is improbable—
maybe impossible—and it might not last, but for now she has Penelope in her arms, and the
world has righted itself.

Eloise is here, her face pressed tight against Penelope’s neck, her tears hot where they meet
Penelope’s skin, and Penelope cannot possibly let her go, even though they are both sitting in
the middle of the dusty path that crosses Berkeley Square, surely drawing an excessive
amount of attention to themselves on the very day Penelope would least like to draw
excessive attention to herself.

She does not care.

Eloise is in her arms.

Eloise has forgiven her.

Surely nothing else could be truly wrong if she and Eloise have found one another again.
Have met as friends again.

She’s not sure how long they sit there, clinging to each other in the dirt, but eventually
Penelope becomes aware, between her tears, that there is a pair of boots standing just a few
feet away. Somewhere above the boots a throat clears and she looks up.

Colin.

Colin is here, standing over the weeping pile of limbs that Penelope and Eloise have become.

At first, with the sun behind his head, Penelope cannot see his expression, but then he shifts,
and light floods the shadows of his face, and she can see his smile, soft and gentle. Warm.

“I see you have found each other,” he says. “Did I read three hundred pages of Debrett’s for
nothing?”

“Debrett’s?” Penelope asks between sniffles.

“We did not have much information to go on,” Eloise explains. “It seemed the best place to
start looking for a Lord from Cumbria.”
Eloise stands, pulling Penelope up with her.

“The Earl of Morrow lives just there,” Eloise says, pointing towards the manor Penelope
departed this morning.

“Well, you were certainly on the right track,” Penelope laughs. “If only I hadn’t left the house
before you reached it.”

Colin gapes at her. “You have been just across Berkeley Square?”

She runs the palm of her hand under each of her eyes, swiping leftover tears away. “Only
these last few weeks,” she reassures him. “This is the first time I have been back to London.”

Colin nods, though he still looks startled by the information, as though he should have been
able to sense her presence.

“We should find somewhere to speak,” he says, looking around the garden. “Somewhere
more discreet.”

Penelope glances back at the Morrow house. “My employers are away,” she says, “but the
staff is not.”

Colin nods. “Number 5?” he asks Eloise.

“We would have to sneak her in.”

“I do not wish—” Eloise and Colin both turn to look at her, and she feels herself shrink a bit
under their shared gaze. “I do not wish to do anything that would put your family at risk,” she
says. “Any more risk than I have already.” She can feel a flush spreading across her check
and up her neck.

“We want to help, Pen,” Colin says.

She surveys their surroundings. There are a few neighbors circling the square, though they’re
all too far to hear her, and Eloise’s lady’s maid is keeping her distance. The Bridgertons have
always kept very loyal staff. “I have angered the queen,” she whispers. “I will be lucky if she
only ships me off to Australia.”

“She will not be shipping you anywhere,” Colin asserts. “I’ll take her in through the servants
entrance,” he says to Eloise. “You go in the front and distract Mother, and then we’ll meet
you in the study.”

“Your mother is home?” Penelope feels weak. “I cannot see her.”

“You won’t,” Eloise assures her. “I am sure the state of my skirts will be more than enough to
keep her occupied for a while. It’s Hyacinth we need to watch out for.”

Colin nods in agreement. “Perhaps we can bribe her.”

“Hyacinth?” Penelope asks. “Why would you need to bribe her?”

“She is determined to unmask Lady Whistledown,” Eloise says, as though that is not the most
frightening thing Penelope can think of. “It is only for the glory, though,” Eloise insists. “She
cares not a wit for the reward.”

“Then how shall bribing her work?”

“She is easily distracted by shiny baubles,” Colin says with a shrug.

“What she truly needs is a project,” Eloise says. “Something to keep her occupied while we
find a solution.”

Colin nods his agreement. “Come, we’ll brainstorm on the way.”

It is easier than he expects, sneaking into Number 5 with Penelope.

Eloise goes in first, stomping her way up the steps and into the front hall with Rose (whose
pockets are weighed down a bit more than they were an hour ago). He has every faith his
sister will be able to draw as much attention as she desires.

Once the door has closed, he pulls Penelope around the side of the house, into the back
garden. Her hand is small in his, and he can feel its warmth through her glove. But he is
trying not to think too much about it—about her—because he finds the subject quite
distracting and now is not the time to be distracted.

He’s prepared to bribe more of the staff once they’re inside, but they don’t meet anyone else
on the way to the study. He can hear Eloise’s voice pouring from the drawing room as they
pass at the end of the hall, and Pen lets out a soft giggle as Eloise all but shouts something
about how dust is a perfectly natural side-effect of a diverting promenade, and really,
shouldn’t her mother want her to take in some fresh air? She is always complaining that
Eloise does not get out of doors enough these days.

Colin squeezes Penelope’s hand a bit tighter and tugs her along.

Once the study door closes behind them it is much harder to forget that he is with Penelope.
Hyacinth is not the only Bridgerton in need of diversion. He drops Pen’s hand and strides
across the room to where he left Debrett’s open on the desk when it became clear that Eloise
was not merely refreshing herself. He closes it, and when he looks up, Penelope is tugging off
her bonnet.

Her hair unfurls in a cloud of copper curls, and he feels his breath catch in his chest. Her
dress is as dusty as Eloise’s, but still he thinks she looks…radiant. He thinks he should be
more surprised by that fact, but no. It seems as natural as a sunrise, as bird song. The sky is
blue, the grass is green, and Penelope Featherington shines.

It’s possible he is losing his mind.

They wait in silence at first.

Colin takes a seat behind the desk. He folds his hands under his chin and watches her.

Penelope selects the chair farthest from him, and keeps her gaze turned away. She watches
the door.

He wants to know what it is that she’s thinking, but he can’t bring himself to ask. He wants to
know if she would tell him the truth if he did.

He wants to say something to her, if only to feel her eyes on him again, to draw her attention
or even her anger. It ran through him like an electric current the other night, and he wants to
feel that again.

She remains focused on the door, however, her eyes not even blinking. It must be intentional,
an unwillingness to engage with him one on one. His palm still sparks and tickles where it
pressed up against hers a few minutes ago. Does she still feel it, too? He’d like to press his
palm up against other parts of her.

How could he not have seen what was right in front of him for so long?

Colin is staring at her.

She has kept her eyes off of him ever since they landed in this quiet study, tucked away in
Lady Bridgerton’s home. She doesn’t want to see his face, doesn’t want to try and interpret
his every expression. She’s still floating on the joy of her renewed friendship with Eloise and
she will not allow Colin’s opinion to drag her back down. Not right now.

But it is taking El an awfully long time to join them. She’s afraid Lady Bridgerton may have
insisted on a bath.

This is her first time inside Number 5, Bruton Street. She’d learned through Whistledown
channels about Violet Bridgerton’s decampment to a dower house after Anthony’s second son
was born. The viscount was married, with an heir and a spare, and it was time to leave
Bridgerton House in his and Kate’s hands.

Number 5 is washed in a familiar charm, though. The walls are painted in varied blues, and
the furniture is stylish, but comfortable. The windows let in plenty of warm spring light.
More than that, though, the house feels like a home, like the Bridgertons’ love for each other
is a part of the decor.

Penelope has missed it.

“Pen…”

Colin’s voice startles her enough that she turns to look him in the eye. She’s not sure what
she expects to find there. Anger, maybe? He hadn’t seemed angry when they were outside,
but that was in public, that was with Eloise there to act as buffer. Now they are alone, and
Colin might say anything to her.
It’s not anger in his eyes, though. It’s something more akin to awe, and fascination, and a
peace she wasn’t expecting.

“Pen, I would like to…to apologize for the way I spoke to you the other night,” he says, and
she tries not to let her jaw drop. “I was so…surprised—not that that’s an excuse—and I’m
afraid I ran my mouth before I had the chance to properly think about my own reaction.”

She swallows. “And now?” she asks. “Now that you’ve had some more time?”

“I—”

She can see him struggling to find the words.

“I am quite impressed by you,” he finally says. “You have done something incredible.”

She blinks at him. He thinks her work incredible? “You are not angry?” she asks.

“I will not pretend that I have not…taken issue with some of the things you chose to print,”
he says, “but…I suppose I can understand why you printed them.”

He stands then, and comes around the desk before settling in the chair closest to her.

“I was not a very good friend to you,” he says, his face turned down to look at his hands in
his lap. “I did not realize it at the time, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I don’t think I
ever thought of you as…a whole person, I suppose. Separate from your friendship with
Eloise. Or with me.”

Tears burn the back of her throat. She opens her mouth to reply, but nothing comes out.

“I am very sorry for that. It wasn’t fair to you.”

She closes her mouth, still a bit dumbstruck.

That’s when Eloise comes in.

“She made me bathe,” Eloise announces, once the door has closed behind her. “Like a child
still in leading strings who has been playing in the mud!”

Penelope and Colin are facing each other, each of them with a tense, drawn expression across
their face, and it’s a moment before whatever spell is holding them snaps and they turn to
give her their attention.

“I’m sorry, El,” Penelope says, while Colin jabs at her.

“Were you not covered in mud?”

“It was dirt,” she reminds him. “There’s a distinction.”

She glances between them.

“What were you discussing?”

Penelope shakes her head. “We were just wondering what became of you.”

It’s a lie. Eloise wants so much to push against it, like an angry purple bruise. She holds
herself back, though. Now is perhaps not the best time to start a disagreement with Penelope.
She decides to give them a little grace, for once, and move on.

“I had an idea,” Eloise says, “while dealing with Mother. But I’m not sure if you’ll like it.”

Penelope glances at Colin again, then turns back to her. “What is it?”

“I think we give Hyacinth a project. I think we give everyone a project.”

It’s no easy feat to assemble all the Bridgertons under one roof. Or at least to assemble them
all and capture their attention on a single point. They’re a flighty, distractible bunch at the
best of times, and just before supper is never the best of times. But Colin tries.

“Family!” he announces, pulling Gregory across the room from where he’s bickering with
Hyacinth and snatching the sketchpad out of Benedict’s hands. “Will you please sit for just
one moment?”

“What is it, dear?” Violet asks. She’s got Miles and Charlotte in her lap. Colin’s not sure what
all the children are doing here, but trying to send them off to the nursery now will surely only
delay things further.

“I need you all to focus. This will not take long.”

“Where is your sister?”

He sighs. “She’ll be in in just a moment.”

Eloise is still in the study with Penelope. He wishes he were the one in the study with
Penelope, but they’d all agreed that he’d have a better shot than El at this part of the plan.
The Bridgertons, as a collective, aren’t great at listening to either of them, but Colin—who is
older and, as El loves to remind him, male—carries somewhat more weight than Eloise does.

Besides, he suspects that Pen trusts El more. That Eloise will do a better job of keeping her
calm while they wait. And Eloise will have more luck getting her into the room when the
time comes. And it’s probably best not to alert his family to how much time he spent with
Pen this afternoon, unchaperoned.

But he hadn’t expected it to be quite so hard, letting Penelope out of his sight again. Even if
she’s just down the hall. Even if he knows where to find her now, should she make a break
for it. It’s the most peculiar feeling—like he left a piece of himself in the study with her. Like
he doesn’t feel whole without her here.
(He needs time, he thinks, to sort through a myriad of thoughts he’s had over the last few
days. To organize and assemble all the strange things he’s felt since the moment he saw
Penelope’s face on the street the other night. But that time isn’t now, not while she’s in
danger.)

“Family!” he calls again, and this time he sticks two fingers in his mouth and whistles. It’s
quite loud. The room goes silent. “Please, just five minutes of your time.”

“What on earth is going on, brother?” Daphne asks.

“That is precisely what I’m trying to tell you.”

He glances right, through the doors into the hallway, and the muscles along his spine un-knot.
Relax. From here he can see Penelope again, in that lovely purple day dress (still a bit dusty,
but not as bad as it was before Eloise beat at it with a book for several minutes), her hair
curling around her shoulders and down her back. She’s got her hands tightly clasped in front
of her, her fingers tangled together in a great anxious knot, and it looks like she’s nearly bit
through her lower lip, but she’s there. She hasn’t run. And El has an arm tight around her
shoulder, too.

“There is someone here who…well, who needs our help,” he starts. “And I’m just asking that
you keep an open mind to what she’s going to tell you.” His mother’s face twists in interest at
the pronoun. Of course it does. “Perhaps learn from my mistakes.”

He gestures out to the hall. “El?”

They spent the whole afternoon talking this through, convincing Penelope that it was the
right idea. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the Bridgertons, it was that she feared doing anything
that might harm them. She kept insisting it would be safer to flee before anyone could
discover she’d returned at all.

He wouldn’t hear of it, and neither would El.

(“You belong here, Penelope,” Eloise had said. “Whatever the queen says.”

“Let us lend you our support, Pen,” Colin had said. “You can’t hurt us as much as we can
help you.”)

It’s a beat before Eloise makes it through the door into the drawing room, pulling Penelope
behind her by the wrist. (He can see the pressure of her vice grip from where he stands.)
Then, with a sharp tug, Penelope tumbles into the room after her.

“Penelope!” It’s Hyacinth who exclaims first, but all of the Bridgertons follow her lead, a
chorus of voices shouting variations of “Pen!” and “Miss Featherington!” The children all
gawk at them in confusion, having no context for this strange redheaded woman who all their
parents and aunts and uncles seem to know. And then his mother is on her feet, handing the
grandchildren in her lap off to whichever of her children are closest (Gregory and Sophie, as
it so happens) and then she’s got Pen wrapped in her arms. It’s a heartwarming thing to
behold.
 “Are you alright, my darling?” he hears his mother asking, her voice low and warm in a way
he knows so very well. A voice of pure comfort.

“Yes, Lady Bridgerton,” Penelope responds, and her voice trembles. He knows that tremble
so well, too.

“Oh, I have worried over you so much these last five years.”

“I never meant for anyone to worry. I—I should have written. I should…I’m so sorry.”

His mother shakes her head and pulls Penelope a bit tighter. “Don’t apologize, my dear. I’m
just so happy you’re home now.”

He’s starting to realize that they didn’t plan this very well. That, while he may have (finally)
managed to get his family seated and focused before Penelope came into the room, any hope
of regaining that focus is now long gone. There’s a gaggle of Bridgertons lined up to greet
Penelope, all of them eager to display as much affection for her as propriety will allow (and
some more—he can’t help but notice that Gregory pulls her into a hug that he may have been
able to justify at thirteen, but certainly not at eighteen).

But eventually his mother clears her throat. It’s a small noise, but perhaps the only thing that
can actually capture the attention of every single person in the room; even Charlotte, who
was sent into toddler hysterics in Sophie’s arms at the explosion of sound when Penelope
came in, quiets to a whimper.

“You said Penelope needed help, Colin?” she asks, and suddenly everyone is back in their
seats, their gazes turned to where Penelope, Eloise, and Colin stand.

“Yes,” Colin says, “She does.” He turns to Penelope then, and she meets his eye. She looks
calmer than she did before. She’s been soothed by the warm welcome. She nods at him, and
then turns to face the rest of the Bridgertons.

She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it, then opens it again. “I—”

She looks to Eloise, then, and whatever she sees in El’s face must steel her, because the next
time she opens her mouth she manages to say it, her voice as strong as the message she needs
to convey:

“I am Lady Whistledown.”

Chapter End Notes

Thank you so much for reading! As always, you can find me on tumblr at
windowsandfeelings.
 we survived the great war
Chapter Notes

It's here, it's here, it's done at last! I hope you enjoy.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

“I am Lady Whistledown.”

The room is stone silent for the longest three seconds of her life. 12 sets of eyes stare back at
her, blinking, the mouths beneath them gaping.

And then Benedict lets out a loud, delighted giggle just as Hyacinth shouts “I knew it!”

After that it is chaos, every Bridgerton speaking at once. Penelope looks to Eloise and Colin
for direction, but they just smile at her.

It is Anthony’s reaction she fears most. Lord Bridgerton has always been…foreboding at
best. Eloise had reassured her this afternoon, had insisted that Anthony is a changed man
since his marriage, but she struggles to imagine he has changed so much that he’ll allow the
family he loves to become embroiled in her rivalry with the queen. When she looks to him,
though, he does not look angry. Surprised, perhaps, and a bit perplexed, but his gaze is
assessing more than irate.

“You once called me a ‘capital R Rake,’” he says.

The room quiets.

“You cannot possibly be trying to claim she was wrong,” Kate says, a laugh in her voice.

Her husband smirks at her.

“You saved me from a terrible marriage to Berbrooke,” Daphne notes.

“That was your mother’s doing,” Penelope insists. “I just helped to get the message out.”

“And thank God you did,” says Simon. He smiles at her.

Things cannot be too terrible if the Duke of Hastings is smiling at her.

“Eloise—” Daphne starts to say, but El cuts her off.

“It’s fine,” she says. “I am fine. Maybe I was not at the time, but…Penelope had her reasons
for writing what she did, and…and we have put it behind us. I ask that none of you hold it
against her now.”
Even though Penelope has already heard this, it is a comfort to have it repeated. To have it
asserted to the rest of the Bridgertons. She is still reeling from this day, from all that has
happened since she woke up feeling sick with fear in her small bedroom across the square. It
is as though her entire life has upended itself.

“Penelope,” Lady Bridgerton says, “what can we do to help you?”

Penelope swallows. “Well, I…I have a bit of a target on me, as you may have noticed.”

Benedict snorts, and she sees Eloise shoot a hard glare his way.

“I confess I did not really think things through when I first started publishing. I—I was little
more than a child when Whistledown began, and, foolishly, I barely saw the risk. And when I
came back…I believed that I could return and no one would notice, that the invisibility that
had allowed me my secret identity before would continue. I was—” she glances towards
Colin “—wrong.”

Colin smiles at her, a grin that splits his face wide open.

“But I want you to know, I do not wish to burden you—”

“Pen—” Eloise starts.

“No, El. I mean it, truly. I could not bear it if any of you suffered for my mistakes. I never
wanted to hurt you, not with my actions or my pen, but whatever my intentions, I know I
have done so. The consequences of that are my responsibility alone.”

“Penelope,” Colin says, bending close to her, his voice low as though he does not wish his
family to hear. “You are not the only person in this room responsible for another’s pain.”

She shakes her head at him and turns back to his family.

“Eloise and Colin have suggested that—that you may be able to help us—me—to find an
idea, a way that I can end my conflict with the Queen. Hopefully without facing exile. They
thought that—goodness—12 heads might be better than 3.”

There is silence for a moment, all the Bridgertons looking around at one another, everyone
thinking hard.

She can’t tear her eyes away from them.

For years Penelope has longed for this room—or the one so like it at Bridgerton House. She’s
longed to be back with this family, to feel the warmth they’ve always cast against her
otherwise cold life. She had thought, when she revealed her great secret to them, that the fire
would be doused, that she’d be out in the cold once more, but that hasn’t been the case.

Across the room from her, Anthony is muttering ideas to his wife, and Daphne to her
husband. Lady Bridgerton is deep in thought, her gaze locked on the portrait of herself and
Edmund Bridgerton. Benedict and Gregory look as though they could be twins, their chins
propped in their hands. Even Benedict’s wife, Sophie, a woman Penelope has never met
before tonight, seems to be sorting through ideas in her head as she cradles a dozing
Charlotte in her arms.

All of them hard at work to help Penelope—to pull her out of the mess of her own creation.

It’s Hyacinth who is first to speak, however. She jumps to her feet with a shout, drawing the
attention of the whole room.

“I know precisely who we need!”

Colin wants to be the one to walk Penelope back across the square to the Morrow house, but
his mother won’t hear of it.

“Penelope is already in a precarious position, dear,” Violet says, as though he’s not well
aware. As though the fear of losing her hasn’t gripped his heart all day. “We must do
whatever we can not to make it worse.”

So Colin watches as she takes Benedict’s arm instead, and disappears out into the night.

Again.

It’s days before he sees her again.

Colin spends the intervening days thinking. About his life, about his travels, about his family.

About Penelope.

It’s not that he ever stopped thinking about Pen. In the years since the Featheringtons fled
London she’s crossed his mind often. That first summer without her, when he left on his
travels again, he wrote to her nearly daily, filling pages with everywhere he had been and
everything he had seen. Pen had always been so curious, and he knew she’d want to hear
about the effect of light on the water off the Mediterranean coast, or the colors of the sunrise
he witnessed after a sleepless night spent in Vienna. She would want to know who he had
talked to and what stories each of them had told him. She always wanted to hear it all.

But he had nowhere to send the letters.

He still has them, a bundle at the bottom of his trunk. He has even added to them since then
—not daily, not like he did that first year, but sometimes he sees something so spectacular, so
special, that he feels compelled to tell Penelope of it. So he does.

The morning after Benedict walks Penelope home, Colin finds himself digging out the bundle
of letters. The ones at the bottom—the earliest of the bunch—have the smudged, soft look
that comes with having been handled often, and Colin supposes they have been. He’s pulled
them out, now and then, and re-read the words he wrote to her. The newest letters, at the top
of the pile, are still crisp. There are two from his latest journey.
Colin has never really thought about why he still writes to Pen. When he first started sending
her letters, back in his Eton days, when they were both still young enough to claim some
ignorance over the breach of propriety, he would have said that it was because she wrote to
him. And that was true enough, though it was Colin who wrote the first letter. The first three,
in fact

And when he left on his first tour, he heard from her often. She asked questions about his
journey, about the sites, about the people. She told him the goings on back home, what his
family was up to, what the latest gossip was. She rarely wrote about her own doings, not
unless they involved his sister, but she still shined through on every page. He looked forward
to each letter, would save them to read last. His siblings sent perfunctory messages, short
scribbles with little substance. His mother wrote him long missives, every week like
clockwork, and he treasured them, but Penelope’s letters sparked and danced with her wit and
warmth.

His travels after that always felt a bit empty without her voice in his ear.

The last few days have left Colin reeling. Joy at Penelope’s return, anger at the revelation of
her deception, sorrow and shame over discovering how deeply he hurt her all those years ago.
And in the middle of all that, there’s a spark that has ignited somewhere deep inside of him,
and burned higher and higher with every intervening day. He feels it in his chest, he feels it in
his head. He feels it in his loins.

There is a reason Colin never stopped writing to Penelope Featherington. There is a reason
Colin started writing to her in the first place. He is more than a bit embarrassed to discover it
after all this time.

He is in love with her.

It feels like a hopeless prospect. The Penelope that has returned to London is not the same
one who left all those years ago. She has grown. She has chosen and nurtured an independent
life. She does not need him.

And he has hurt her. She has been clear about that. It will take work to earn her trust again.
To earn her affection. He does not know if she will ever grant it.

He does not know if she will ever love him back.

But he sits in the study in his mother’s home and he thinks about little more than what he can
do to change his circumstances. To win her heart.

It consumes him.

Eloise is responsible for the next phase in their plan.

Well, Eloise and her mother and Hyacinth.

They start the morning after Penelope tells the Bridgertons her secret. Violet calls for the
carriage to be readied for them before Eloise is even out of bed, and they all pack into it right
at the start of calling hours. Hyacinth is giddy to be included—she had insisted on it, given
that the whole thing was her idea to begin with—and Violet exudes her typical preternatural
calm.

Eloise is a mess.

There are just so many things that can go wrong.

But things start well enough.

Lady Danbury greets them with a wide smile, the one she reserves for Hyacinth alone, and
Eloise realizes the benefit of having allowed her baby sister to tag along. To nearly everyone,
including most of the Bridgerton siblings, Lady Danbury is foreboding. Severe. She arches a
brow and peers over her cane and even Anthony and Benedict cower a bit. But with
Hyacinth, she becomes more pliant.

They need her pliant now.

She doesn’t start asking questions until the tea has been poured and the cakes have been
plated and they’re all sat facing each other in her drawing room. That is when the arched
brow comes out.

“Not that I don’t enjoy a surprise visit from the Bridgerton ladies, but may I ask what it is
that has brought you all here today?”

Eloise exchanges a look with her mother.

They talked quite a bit, both last night and this morning, about how to approach this
conversation. About what to tell Lady Danbury and what to keep to themselves. About what
questions to ask. About the order in which they would tell their tale. They are prepared. Still,
Eloise’s stomach tightens with nerves. Violet sets her teacup down in its saucer, the porcelain
rattling ever so slightly, and takes a deep breath.

“We have learned some information,” she says. “Information the queen would find…
valuable.”

“Ahh.” Lady Danbury leans back on her settee, her cane tilted away from her. “This is about
Whistledown.”

Eloise swallows. Hard.

“It is,” Violet says.

“The queen has been granting an audience to anyone with information. There is no need for
you to go through me.”

“There is not a need, no. There are reasons, however, to exercise a bit of caution.”
“You worry about what will become of her? The scribe?”

“We do,” Eloise says. It is the first she’s spoken since they arrived. She was meant to remain
silent, to let her mother handle the conversation, but she is so very afraid of what will become
of Penelope—terrified that she will lose her dear friend when she has only just got her back
—and she cannot keep her mouth closed a moment longer. “Do you know what the queen
plans to do to her?”

Lady Danbury sits quietly for a moment, her eyes dragging over each of them in turn. Then
she blinks, sits forward, and taps her cane twice against the floor.

“When did Miss Featherington return to London?” she asks.

Hyacinth and Violet let out sharp gasps on either side of her, but Eloise merely shifts her
body forward on the settee, her eyes locked on the old woman’s. “You knew?”

“I suspected.”

“How?”

“Most people do not see a wallflower, but surely you must know by now that I see
everything, Miss Bridgerton. Penelope Featherington had the access, and the short-
sightedness of the ton gave her the invisibility. And the timing always struck me as
significant, the Featheringtons disappearing just about the same time Whistledown put down
her quill.” She shrugs her shoulders. “None of it was definitive, however, I see you, too, Miss
Bridgerton, and there is no one else for whom you would worry so. Ergo…”

Eloise winces.

“If Penelope were to come forward,” Violet says, “what would the queen do to her?”

Lady Danbury sits back in her seat. “I do not know,” she says. “Her majesty can be…
unpredictable. She has not confided her plans in me. I imagine it will depend, to some extent,
on her whims that day.”

It is as though the bottom goes out of Eloise’s stomach. The queen’s whims are far too risky
for them to trifle with.

“The Bridgerton family will do whatever we can to see Penelope protected,” Violet says. “As
would the Duke and Duchess. We would appreciate any guidance you could bestow.”

Lady Danbury sets her own teacup down then, and pulls herself up onto her feet. She paces
the length of the room more than once before stopping in front of Eloise.

“Bring Miss Featherington here,” she says. “I’d like to speak with her myself before I offer
any advice on the matter.”

“She has a position within the family of an earl. I do not believe she can get away during
calling hours.”
Lady Danbury laughs. “Works now, does she? Well, that’s no matter. I am an old lady, and
sleep little. Bring her here at night if you must.”

It is strange, returning to her life as a governess after everything that transpired on her day
off.

After Benedict walks Penelope home to the Morrows’—perhaps the most time she has ever
spent with Benedict, and he passes the whole of it heaping praise upon her, telling her just
how delighted he is to learn her secret identity—she struggles to fall asleep. Her head is
spinning with the events of the day and her heart is pounding with fear and with something
else, something she thought she’d left behind years ago.

Hope.

Love.

Love for the Bridgertons, for the way they give themselves to her so freely.

Love for Eloise, whose forgiveness feels like the greatest gift she has ever received.

Love for Colin.

Always, still, and forever love for Colin. So much love it’s like she’s choking on it.

But morning comes and reality beckons, and soon Penelope is in the nursery with the twins.
They work on sums, and then she takes them out into the garden. They’ve been reading Much
Ado About Nothing, and she has the girls act out scenes together, and while they’re distracted
with Beatrice and Benedick’s bickering, Penelope allows her mind to wander.

There is a life she hasn’t allowed herself to imagine in the five years since her family fled
London. Many lives, really.

One where she and Eloise landed on the shelf together, eventually, the way El always wanted.
Where they have a cottage somewhere, full of books and papers and cats, most likely. And
they are content with each other’s company and an independent life.

One where she did marry, eventually. Not for love, but for stability, and safety, and the
promise of children. One where her husband gives her the space to continue her writing,
even. Where she is satisfied.

And the one she only ever imagined in the darkest depths of moonless nights. The life she
dreamed of more than any other, where Colin Bridgerton finally saw her the way she had
always seen him. Where she is, at last, a woman in his eyes. Where she is, at last, worth
loving in his eyes. Where he courts her, and he marries her. Where she shares his bed and
carries his children.

Where she is happy. So happy.

These lives she used to imagine flood back to her in the Morrows’ garden, while Rebecca
stutters over “a bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours.” For the first time in years
they feel close at hand again—even her dream of a life with Colin—and it terrifies her.

Because there is another life, too. One where she is bested by the queen—sent farther even
than America. Or hidden away somewhere to rot. Where this return to London is little more
than a brief respite from the cold world she was born into, and will return to. Where she
never sees Eloise again, or Colin. Where she is, again, alone.

There is still the option to run. Her life is small, she can pack it away in a satchel and flee.
But is that not just another prison—one of her own making?

“Miss Fell?”

While she’s been distracted, Rebecca and Margaret have finished their scene. They are
splayed out on the grass, their skirts dirty in a way Lady Morrow will surely object to.

“Apologies, ladies,” Penelope says, pushing aside thoughts of ships and cells and loneliness.
Pushing aside, too, thoughts of family and home. “I’m afraid you’ve caught me
woolgathering.” She smiles at them. “Where were we?”

It would be a lie to say Eloise does not take some pleasure from the clandestine operations
involved in the Bridgertons new scheme.

Her mother’s involvement means El can’t sneak off to deliver messages in the middle of the
night, but she does convince Benedict to accompany her across Berkeley Square after dinner
that evening. He stands guard while she sneaks around to the servants’ entrance, and she slips
a bit of coin to one of the kitchen maids to deliver a note to Penelope. Perhaps the subterfuge
is not necessary, but her nerves are so high otherwise that she has to find a bit of fun where
she can.

“Have you completed your mission?” Benedict asks when she rejoins him on the street.

“I have passed along the missive, yes.”

Her brother smiles at her, and she loops her hand around his arm.

“I am glad to see you so improved these last few days, El,” he says as they begin the stroll
back to Number Five. “I know you do not appreciate it when we comment on your
disposition, but it is clear that Penelope’s return has been good for you.”

Eloise would like to scowl at him, to insist that she is well, and has been well, and that he
does not know of what he speaks, but it would be a lie. She is much improved from just a few
days ago. Penelope’s return has been good for her. It feels a bit as though she’s woken up
from a long and fitful sleep.

“I learned about Whistledown the night she fled,” Eloise confesses. “We fought—a horrible
fight—and I said things to her that I—well, in truth I did mean them then, but I did not expect
them to be the last words I would ever say to her.”

Benedict, good brother that he is, allows her to speak without trying to interrupt.

“For a long time I thought she had—I thought she might be dead. It was awful to think about,
not least because I was still so…so angry with her. It is a terrible thing, to be angry with a
ghost.”

“You are not angry anymore?”

They are halfway across the square now, enclosed in the quiet of the small park, not far from
the spot where Eloise let five years of anger go just the day before. She tugs her brother a bit
closer. “I am not,” she says.

In the moonlight, she can see his smile. “I am glad for you, sister. Forgiveness is a beautiful
thing.”

She has to agree.

Eloise’s note is sorely lacking in information.

“Must meet with LD. Friday eve. Will collect.”

Penelope sighs and reads it over again, hoping more words will appear. She gathers that
Eloise will come to collect her on Friday evening, to meet with Lady Danbury. What she does
not gather is what time Friday evening, or what to expect with the audience. Is the countess
angry? Is she willing to help? Is Penelope walking into some sort of trap?

Come Friday, once the girls are abed and her services are no longer required, Penelope
gathers her cloak and slides out into the warm evening air. The Morrows’ garden is lovely,
even at night, and she passes some time wandering through it, waiting for El to appear.

There is something about a spring evening that always pulls Penelope through time, and
tonight is no exception. She could be seventeen years old now, freshly debuted, and sneaking
off to deliver an early Whistledown.

She thinks, sometimes, of the girl she was then. How very brave she was, deciding to carve
her own path through the world. She wonders now how she ever summoned the courage.

“Pen!” The whisper comes from across the garden, startling Penelope out of her reverie. She
glances up to see El’s pale face peering around the side of the house. The rest of her is
wrapped in a dark cloak.

Penelope is surprised to find Colin waiting for them in the carriage.

“He fought Anthony over it and actually won,” Eloise says. “Though Mama thinks it is a
mistake.”
“It will be perfectly fine,” Colin insists. He gives Penelope a smile. “Besides, we are hardly
alone.”

Penelope smiles back at him.

It is strange, she thinks, how quickly she relaxes once the carriage begins to move. The fear is
still there, underpinning every moment, but she is off on an adventure with her dearest friends
—friends who are proving, at every turn, that they would do anything for her. It is hard not to
let go, just a little bit.

“Tell us about your day, Pen,” Colin says while they rattle through the streets. “What does
Miss Featherington get up to with her charges?”

Penelope laughs. “Miss Featherington does not get up to anything, I’m afraid, but their
governess, Miss Fell, has been introducing them to the Bard.”

“Miss Fell?” Eloise asks.

“My alias,” Penelope says. “I could hardly rejoin the ton under my true name.”

Eloise looks at her appraisingly, while Colin says, “no, I suppose not.”

“It is the name my family adopted in America,” Penelope explains. “It seemed simple enough
to carry on with it when I returned. Though my mother and Uncle Jack are hard at work
damaging this one, too.”

“Was it awful?” Eloise asks. “America?”

“It was…” Penelope struggles to find the words to explain. “Lonely,” she says at last. “I
missed you terribly—both of you.”

Both Bridgertons blink back at her with damp eyes.

The lamps are still lit at the Danbury residence, and a footman steps forward to hand them
down as soon as the carriage pulls to a stop. Penelope finds herself frozen, however, once
they are standing before the doors.

In her memory, Lady Danbury is foreboding, watchful, sharp. She has her particular
favorites, certainly, the Bridgertons among them, but Penelope hardly knows the countess.
Why on earth would she want to put her neck out for a Featherington?

She’s not given long to fret, though. Eloise tugs her along, through the heavy doors and into
the dragon’s path.

“Ahh, Miss Featherington.”

Lady Danbury is waiting for them at the end of the long entrance hall, perched atop her cane,
her face unreadable at a distance.

“Lady Danbury,” Penelope says, dipping her head.

She waits patiently as the three of them make their way up the hall to her. Penelope can feel
Eloise and Colin at her back like twin support beams, keeping her upright.

How did she survive so long without them?

They both keep close when they reach the end of the hall. Lady Danbury seems to stare down
her nose at Penelope, her gaze steely and uncompromising, and for a long moment Penelope
thinks this might be it, that they have trusted the wrong person, that the queen’s guards will
spill out around the corners and take her into custody. But instead:

“You are a very impressive woman, Miss Featherington.”

Penelope thinks her knees may collapse beneath her.

“Excuse me?”

“I had my suspicions that you were the scribe, but you seemed so young to be behind such a
thing.”

She flushes, blood rushing into her cheeks and her neck, cascading across her chest. She
knows she must be tomato red.

“I wish to hear everything, and then I will tell you my plan.”

It is quite late when they return to the Bridgerton carriage. Colin is tired from the hour, from
the stress of the last few days, from the peaty scotch Lady Danbury poured them while she
told them all her plan. His head is spinning, but at the same time he feels a curious lightness
in his chest.

Something like…hope.

“Do you think it will work?” Eloise asks as they trundle off. “Truly?”

The plan is deceptively simple: tomorrow, Lady Danbury will take Penelope for an audience
with the queen, where she will confess. It’s what happens after that has required more
planning, the precise order in which they will step forward in Penelope’s defence. Penelope
has a duke and a viscount willing to stand up for her, to face the queen for her, but they do
not want to play all their cards at once.

“Go to tea, not to war,” Lady Danbury had said. “We do not want her guard up too high.”

So Simon and Anthony will hold back for now, as will the rest of the Bridgertons. Only Lady
Danbury will stand at Penelope’s side. (Still, Colin can think of worse people to have at your
side for a confrontation with the queen.)

“I believe it will,” Colin says. And he does. He believes in Penelope.

She looks far less certain. Tucked in the corner of the carriage, he watches her worry at her
lower lip, watches her brow knit and unknit and knit again. He imagines she is playing out all
the possibilities, all the ways things might go wrong.

He wants to run this thumb over her brow, to smooth the wrinkles there. Wants to pull her lip
away from her teeth.

“Are you alright, Pen?” he asks instead.

She looks up, meeting his gaze, and his breath catches in his throat. Even in the low light of
the carriage he can see the blue of her eyes, the way they sparkle. “I am anxious,” she says. “I
wish I had your confidence.”

“You will simply have to borrow some from each of us,” Eloise says, sliding closer to Pen on
the bench. “We are not going to let anything happen to you.”

“I’m afraid you may not have a choice,” Penelope reminds her.

He knows that she is right, that no matter how many Bridgertons stand behind her there is a
chance the queen will refuse her any mercy, but he finds he cannot help his optimism.

The carriage stops at Morrow House, and Colin steps down to help Penelope out. Once her
hand is in his, however, he struggles to let it go.

“I will walk you around the back,” he says, quickly shutting the carriage door before Eloise
can jump down.

Penelope offers him a small smile.

The garden is quiet, the only light coming from a lantern at the servants’ entrance. Colin
walks Pen all the way to the door, trying to make sense of the mess of thoughts in his head.
Thoughts that grow louder with every step.

He opens his mouth to say something, unsure what will even come out, but she speaks first.

“Tomorrow—” she starts.

“Do not worry about tomorrow, Pen,” Colin says. “You have my brother standing behind you,
and Simon, if you need them. And Lady Danbury will be with you the whole time. She is the
queen’s dearest friend!”

“I know, but—”

“But nothing. What is there to fear?”

She looks very small, huddled before him in the doorway to the Morrows’ servants’ entrance.
“I am just a governess, Colin. I don’t even have my own family’s name to protect me
anymore.”
“You are Lady Whistledown, Pen. Your quill is stronger than any other in Mayfair. It is the
queen that fears you.”

“But that is precisely my point—people do terrible things out of fear. My quill is not so
powerful that she can’t harm me. She could throw me in prison. She could send me to
Australia.”

“She won’t do either of those things. It would only anger the ton, to see you punished.”

“She is their queen.”

“And a queen is nothing without the loyalty of her subjects. All will be well, Pen.”

But Penelope still does not look like she believes him. She worries at her lip with her teeth
again, and he can see where the skin is fraying. He wants to reach out and soothe it with the
pad of his thumb. With his own lips.

“There is…there is something else I could give you, Penelope,” he says. “Not by tomorrow,
but perhaps the promise of it…”

Her face is wide open beneath him, so open he feels he could reach out and pull out every
one of her secrets. He thinks he would enjoy that, holding whatever secrets she has left.
Untangling them.

“I could give you my name, Pen. Since you do not have your own anymore. I could promise
you—I could make you a Bridgerton, too. I think—I think I would very much like to.”

She does not understand what he means at first. He can see it, in the little divot between her
brows, in the quirk of her lip. She does not know what it is that he is offering her—asking
her.

“Marry me, Penelope,” he says. “Please marry me.”

She gasps, just a small thing, an involuntary little intake of air, and her cheeks flush with a
warm rush of color. She is so very pretty. “Colin,” she says. “I—”

“I may not be a duke or a viscount, and I promise I will understand if you do not wish to give
up the independent life you have made for yourself. I know you do not need me, Pen. But I…
I think that I have loved you for a very long time, far longer than I ever realized, and I think
that maybe…you could grow to love me, too. If you gave it a try.”

“Colin,” she says again. There are tears in her eyes now, and glistening in her lashes. “I may
be exiled tomorrow.”

“Then I will simply have to follow you,” Colin says. He means it, too. “I have had to lose
you before, Penelope, and I know I bear no small amount of responsibility for that, but I
won’t do it again. I can’t.”

.
He says such pretty things to her—every pretty thing she has ever dreamed he would. That he
loves her. That he has loved her. That he could not bear to lose her. That he wants to give her
his name.

To marry her.

She cannot stop the sob that rises in her throat.

“Penelope!”

There is a panic in his eyes as his hands come up to cradle her face. His thumbs slide across
her cheekbones, clearing away the tears that have gathered on her face and lashes, and it
makes her…it makes her brave.

“Colin,” she gasps. “I have—I have loved you for…for all of my life, I think. For as long as I
have known you and maybe longer than that.”

His eyes swim before her, with her tears, and with his.

“I want nothing more than to accept you—it has been my greatest dream for so long, but—”
the sob chokes her “—but I cannot until I know my fate.”

“Pen—”

“I do not need your name, Colin,” she says. “I only need you. The promise that you will be
here, if I somehow make it through tomorrow.”

“You will, Pen. I promise you will.”

“Then I will answer you then,” she says, and she presses one small hand against his heart,
feels it thump thump beneath her palm.

Colin’s eyes search hers, a blue as dark as the stormy sea. She is not sure she has ever been so
close to him, close enough to read everything in them.

“Will you kiss me, Colin?” she asks. “I have never been kissed before, and if tomorrow does
not go the way we hope—”

“It shall, Pen—”

“But if it does not, I—I do not want to meet my consequences having never been kissed.”

Colin’s gaze darts across her face. She does not know what question he is asking, but he must
find his answer, because a second later he is dipping his head and his lips are pressed against
hers.

It takes her by surprise. She had asked, of course, but she had not truly expected Colin to kiss
her. For a moment she stands in shock, cataloging each sensation as it washes over her.

His lips are soft, tender where they meet hers.

He tastes of sugar and smells of fire.

His hair, which she finds suddenly tangled between her fingers, though she’s not sure how it
came to be there, is soft and thick.

He shifts away from her, ever so slightly. “A kiss is for two people, Pen,” he says.

And then she is pressing up onto her toes, bracing herself against his body, sliding her own
lips over his, and Colin groans into her mouth.

She has never felt such power.

In all the years Penelope has loved Colin Bridgerton—including the years she told herself she
did not love Colin Bridgerton—she has fallen asleep many a night dreaming of what it would
be to kiss Colin Bridgerton. It was always a curious dream, built of memories of what it felt
like to dance with him, their bodies moving and shifting together to a quadrille or a jig or
even, just once, a waltz. Of his scent on the air, of his smile—the one he always reserved just
for her. And of her own imagination—of her lips pressed against a cool pillow, or the back of
her own hand.

Kissing Colin Bridgerton—the real Colin Bridgerton—is nothing like that.

Oh, the dance is there. Something in her body knows how to move against his body, knows
the choreography of this first, perfect kiss. But there is so much else, so much she could not
imagine. The warmth of his lips, the way they give and take. Or his hands, which find their
way around her waist and then back up her body, until they are cradling her face, pulling her
closer, the tips of his fingers sinking into her hair.

She loses all sense of time, kissing Colin. Has it been a moment or an hour? Is the world still
ticking along without them? She could not say. She does not care. She could stand here
forever.

“Ahem.”

The world has been ticking along without them, and Penelope jolts as the realization that
Eloise has come looking for her brother. It is too dark to read her expression, to know how
she feels about finding them like this.

“I will see you tomorrow,” Colin says, as his hands slide away from her. “All will be well.”

She so wants it to be true.

“El,” he starts when they are back in their carriage.

“I do not want to hear it, brother,” Eloise says.

He nods. It will have to wait.

.

Penelope hardly sleeps that night. Her fingers trace idly over her lips while she lays in bed,
her eyes blinking up into the darkness.

She is a mess of nerves, itchy with fear over the morning ahead, and she tosses and turns
while the hours pass. She wants to believe that Colin is right, that the queen will show mercy
when faced with the true Lady Whistledown. That, if needed, the support of the Bridgertons,
and the Duke of Hastings, and the queen’s own oldest friend will tip the scales in her favor.

But she has so very much to lose now.

Eventually, when the first bit of light starts to pink the sky, Penelope slides out of bed and
dresses. Today is her day off, they have chosen it for that reason, and so Penelope is next
expected to rouse the girls, or keep them occupied this morning. Instead, she slips out into the
Morrows’ back garden, the grass still cool and damp with dew, and sparkling with the
memory of her first kiss, and she leaves the house behind.

She is not sure if she will ever return.

There is still a part of Penelope—a very small part—that thinks about running. It is so early,
she could make it to the docks and board a ship by the time Lady Danbury has said she’ll
come for her. She cannot let go of her fear that her secret will only hurt the Bridgertons. That
it will land back on Eloise or Colin. She could not bear it if she caused them more pain.

But would her leaving not hurt them, too?

It is hard for Penelope to believe that she holds that sort of power over Colin, but she also
knows that her last departure did hurt him. That it was not Eloise alone that reeled when she
fled. And she knows now that he loves her—that he says he loves her. She wants so badly to
believe him. She wants so badly for him to ask her to marry him again, when this day is over,
and even more she wants to accept him.

She wants him to kiss her again.

She does not run.

Eloise is waiting in the garden of Number 5. She is slumped in a swing, her head against the
rope, her eyes closed, when Penelope approaches and sinks into the second swing beside her.
She does not know what to expect from her friend. Does not know what El will have to say
about what she saw in the garden.

“El,” she says.

Eloise grunts, her eyes cracking ever so slightly.

“What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you,” El says. Mumbles, really. “Figured you would not be able to sleep.”
Penelope’s heart blooms. Even after all these years, after all the pain and suffering they both
endured, Eloise knows her better than anyone. And she cannot be too angry if she has waited
like this.

“I am glad you did not run,” Eloise says. She sits a little straighter. “I…I confess I thought
you might.”

Penelope swallows. “I confess I considered it.” She reaches out her hand to take El’s. “I did
not want to leave you again.”

Eloise gives her a watery smile.

For a long time, they sit in silence, the day breaking around them. The birds begin to chirp
and then squawk their spring songs, and the air warms. Penelope worries at her bottom lip,
tasting her own blood there. The memory of Colin’s taste worn away by her nerves.

“Can I tell you something, El?” she asks, as the last bit of pink disappears from the sky.

“Is it about my brother?”

“It is,” she says. “Last night he…Colin asked me to marry him.”

Her words startle Eloise right out of her swing, and she lands on the ground below it in a
cloud of dirt, pulling Penelope along with her. “What did you say?” she asks.

“He proposed,” Penelope says. “To me.”

For a long moment El just gapes at her, her mouth opening and closing like that of a fish.

“Why would he do a thing like that?” she finally asks. It shoots through Penelope’s heart like
an arrow. “I thought you just—I thought you only kissed!”

“He says that—that he loves me.”

Eloise scoffs, and that shoots through Penelope like a bullet.

It must show on her face, because something in Eloise’s changes, grows more serious. “Does
he?” she asks.

“I…I believe that he thinks he does,” Penelope tells her. “I do—I want to believe him.”

“You do?”

Penelope nods. “I do, El.”

It is as though all the blood drains from Eloise’s face.

“You love him, too?”

Penelope nods, a tiny jerk of her head but an acknowledgement to be sure.

“Is this all…have you just been…is this why you have been my friend?”

"Eloise," Penelope says, "not at all! I—I have loved your brother since the moment I met
him. Sometimes I think I loved him even before that. But I never believed that he would ever
reciprocate my feelings." She takes Eloise's hands in her own again. "And I have loved you,
too. Perhaps even longer."

"You met Colin first,” Eloise reminds her.

She shakes her head. "Colin is just a man. A very dear one, to be sure, but a man nonetheless.
You are my closest friend. As close to me as a sister. Much closer, in fact, given my actual
sisters."

The smallest flash of something rather like amusement crosses Eloise's face.

"I could not bear for you to believe I was ever using you for...for some sort of access to your
brother."

“You have accepted him, then?”

“No, I—I told him I could not give him an answer. Not until after…after everything. I am in
no position to make him promises now.”

“But you will.” It is not a question. “Once you have been pardoned—”

“If I am pardoned—”

“You will accept him.”

She closes her eyes, more scared of this truth than perhaps anything else. “If I am free to live
my life by my own terms, here on English soil, and if he still wants me, then yes. I will
accept him.”

She looks up and Eloise is smiling at her. “Then I will support you, Pen. I will think you
insane, but I will support you.”

Queen Charlotte looks…fragile. Frail. It is Penelope’s first thought when she and Lady
Danbury are shown into the receiving room a few short hours later.

She is not the woman Penelope expects to find—hardly the statuesque monarch who presided
over the Mayfair social scene five years ago. She has heard the rumors that her majesty’s
health has been poor for a while, but still, she had not expected the difference to be so
extreme. Even the wig atop her head is smaller than those she used to wear, as though she
hasn’t the strength to hold up anything larger.

But frail or not, she is still the queen, and Penelope finds herself shrinking the closer she gets.
“Who is this?” Queen Charlotte asks once they are face to face. She peers down her nose at
Penelope, still imperious.

“Miss Penelope Featherington, your majesty.” Penelope dips into her best curtsy.

“Featherington?”

“Yes, I—my father was the Baron Featherington, though he passed on several years ago.”

The queen nods slowly, as though she cannot quite place the name, but can neither admit to
ignorance.

“My family left London for America five years ago.”

She hums. “And yet you are here.”

“I returned.”

“On your own?”

“I wished for my own life, free from my mother’s influence. I made my return to England,
and took a job as a governess.”

The queen narrows her eyes. “And why, precisely, am I granting an audience to a governess
today?”

Penelope bites at her lip, her teeth digging in until she finds the faint metallic taste of blood.
She soothes it with her tongue.

“Because I am Lady Whistledown,” she says.

Queen Charlotte blinks at her.

The silence seems to go on forever, seconds ticking by into minutes. Finally, after an eternity,
the queen turns to Lady Danbury.

“She is the scribe?” she asks.

Lady Danbury nods. “She is.”

“She is but a child.”

“A rather impressive one, I should think.”

“What was your age when you started the gossip sheet?” the queen asks Penelope.

“I was seven and ten, your majesty.”

“Seven and ten!”

“Yes, your majesty.”

Penelope feels as though her stomach has flipped itself over—as though it is continuously
flipping itself over, like a windmill or a whirligig. She wonders how she is still standing, how
she has not collapsed before the queen the way her sister Prudence did at their debut.

She feels a sudden rush of empathy for Prudence.

“How is it that you came to publish such things at such a young age?”

This is the question Penelope is prepared for.

“I was a…a wallflower, your majesty,” she says, a slight tremor in her voice. “It is incredible
how easily a wallflower can slip through the ton unnoticed. A-all my life the wealthy and t-
titled and scandalous men and women of society have discussed their greatest secrets right in
front of me, as though I si-simply was not there.”

She catches Lady Danbury’s gaze, then, and the slight uptick of her lips at the corner. Her
spine straightens.

“The first sheet was not intended as such. It was the scribbling diary entry of a child—a list
of all the things I had heard in the first few days after my family returned to town that season.
The secrets I’d uncovered over ices at Gunters and fittings at the modiste and whilst everyone
was trying not to listen to the music at the Smythe-Smith family’s annual musicale.

“But I left it out on a table in my father’s study one afternoon, while I ducked out to refresh
myself, and when I returned his solicitor was reading it. He was…he was laughing. He
thought it scathing and brilliant and even a bit shocking, and he thought I should publish it.

“He helped in those earliest weeks. Found the printer, established the scheme. And just as
soon as my first issue got traction, he dropped dead.”

Penelope knows she can tell a story. She knows that Lady Whistledown would not have been
met with nearly as much success if she didn’t possess the skill to weave a tale. Still, it is one
thing to be riveting on the page, to craft a sentence and then hone it. The pages of her scandal
sheet are ripped to shreds before they are printed. It is quite another thing to rivet an audience
in person. To tell a story without the option to go back and edit your words.

But she can tell the queen is riveted, that she has snagged her attention with only the words
from her lips—no quill in sight.

“I did not expect Lady Whistledown to be a success. I had gone along with the solicitor’s
scheme because he was an authority, not because I had any faith in myself, but even without
his assistance it became clear that I had a talent. For the first time in my life I had a voice
others wanted to listen to. It was…intoxicating to feel my own power. I imagine you have
some idea what that is like.”

Queen Charlotte does not smile, exactly, but something does shift in her expression, some
acknowledgement that what Penelope says is true.
“I made a great many mistakes, hurt people I cared for and who cared for me, and there are
many things I would change now, if I had the chance. And I know that I antagonized you,
especially.” Penelope swallows, then, her nerves resurfacing as she draws attention to the
very heart of the queen’s ire. “I have no good excuse for the things I wrote,” she says, “except
that, once I had a taste of power, I craved more of it.

“For all that did change for me in publishing the sheet, on the outside my life was no
different. I was still a wallflower, still little loved by a family that could not or would not
understand me. And I was terribly in love myself, with a man who was constantly turning my
head and my heart upside down.”

Lady Danbury smirks at this, and Penelope knows that, to the countess at least, the identity of
her great love is no secret.

“At the end of my second season, my dearest friend discovered my identity,” she says. “It
broke her heart. That same night, the man I loved uncovered a scheme my uncle had been
perpetrating against the ton. He demanded my uncle leave London, and he did, but he took
my family with him. He took me with him. I was too young and too powerless to find a way
to stay behind. So Lady Whistledown went with me.”

She carries on with her story, explaining her family’s flight to America, her loneliness there,
every step that brought her back to England, and then to London. Her life as a governess
under an assumed name.

“I did not intend to revive the column,” she says, “but it spilled out of me one night—all the
gossip I had heard from the servants in the house, and from the family I worked for. And
once I had started again I could not stop.

“I believed myself to be even more invisible than before. Penelope Featherington was long
gone, and the woman that returned in her place was barely more than a servant, certainly not
anyone worthy of notice. I thought I could keep going with no one the wiser.

“But I was not as invisible as I believed myself to be. I was found by old friends, and they
have pulled me back into the light. They have…they have helped me to discover that the light
is where I wish to be.

“Your majesty, I have grown tired of hiding in the shadows, hugging the walls. I know you
will do with me as you wish, and that there will be consequences for my actions, but I hope
very much that you will show me mercy. I will put down my pen, if that is your request. I will
do anything you ask. But please do not send me away.

“I—the man I loved for all those years, he has…he has asked me to marry him. Knowing all
my secrets, he wants to make me his wife. My dearest friend has granted me her forgiveness
—a thing I never thought possible. For all the mistakes I have made with my pen, I am still
proud of the work I have done, and of the life it allowed me to build for myself. A life of
adventure and independence that is almost unheard of for a woman. But it has been lonely.

“I do not wish to be lonely any more.”

She looks up then, meeting the queen’s eye. The woman before her is quixotic, and Penelope
cannot read her expression, cannot begin to guess what is hiding behind her eyes.

She takes a deep breath.

Penelope is shaking when she climbs into the carriage. Eloise pulls her down onto the bench
beside her.

“What happened?” she asks. If Penelope is here and not locked away in some old dungeon
beneath the palace then surely it cannot be too terrible, can it?

She looks to Lady Danbury, who merely shakes her head.

“Pen?” she asks. “Tell me what the queen said.”

But Penelope just shakes.

Lady Danbury raps her knuckles against the roof of the carriage and they jolt forward.

They are well on the road to Number 5 by the time Penelope makes so much as a sound.
Eloise is trying for patience, practicing every lesson she was given in the subject between the
ages of four and, well, now, if she’s honest. Her mother has never quite given up on her there.

At last, though, Penelope gasps, and says, her voice high and disbelieving, “she let me go.”

Eloise did not realize how tense she was until Penelope’s words. She feels it as each of the
muscles in her shoulders and belly release.

“You are free?” she asks. “Truly?”

Penelope nods. “She said…she said she will be watching me, but that I…that I am free to
continue writing.”

Eloise gapes at her. This is a far greater success than she had dared to hope for. “We did not
even have to call in Simon!” she says. “Or Anthony!”

“Miss Featherington proved more than equal to the task,” Lady Danbury says, a tight but
genuine smile across her face. “We ought not to have doubted her way with words.”

Penelope continues to shake all the way to Number 5, out of the carriage and into the house,
all the way to the drawing room. Eloise keeps a tight grip on her hand.

The rest of the family is gathered there, waiting for news, and there is an immediate
commotion as they catch sight of Penelope—as they realize that she has not been taken into
any kind of custody. It is Colin that Eloise tracks, however, from where he stands by the
mantle. He meets her eye, a question in his face, and she nods at him.

He grins.
If Colin and Penelope are in love, well…Eloise cannot say that she is thrilled about it. The
idea that she will lose Penelope to marriage so quickly after finding her again is far from
happy news, especially now they are so close to the dream of a shared spinsterhood. But of
all the men Pen could choose to marry, Eloise supposes Colin is an…acceptable option.

And there are worse things than having Penelope as her true sister.

Colin crosses the room quickly, and suddenly he is standing before the both of them, his eyes
fixed on Penelope’s face. Pen is staring right back at him, and Eloise cannot help but note
that she has finally, finally stopped shaking.

“She has let you go?” he asks.

“She has. She has even given me permission to continue printing.”

“That is incredible, Pen.”

“Her one condition was that I…that I live my life in the light, going forward. No more
aliases, no more hiding in the shadows. She means to hold me accountable.” She blinks. “I do
not know how I will explain any of this to my employer.”

“Perhaps they will consider it a boon,” Colin says. “Who else can say they had Lady
Whistledown under their roof?”

She laughs, a wet laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. Eloise releases her hand.

“Let me get you something to eat, Pen,” she says. “I will be back in just a moment.”

She steps away then, towards the other side of the room where Lady Danbury is regaling the
rest of the family with the story of Penelope and the queen, but she turns back to watch when
she hears her brother drop his voice.

“So, Penelope Featherington,” he says, and she can see from here how soft his eyes are,
tracing Pen’s face, “are you going to marry me or not?”

Penelope smiles.

Dearest Gentle Reader,

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Bridgertons marry for love.

While we have watched much of the Bridgerton alphabet partner off with love matches over
the years, Mr. Colin Bridgerton has remained unattached, choosing to pursue his love of
travel over that of a gently bred lady. No more. It would appear that Mr. Bridgerton has, at
last, found his own love story, and in the most unlikely of places.

A governess.
 Not just any governess, however, for while Mr. Bridgerton’s childhood friend, Miss Penelope
Featherington, fled London in shame five years ago, the governess for the Earl of Morrow, a
Miss Penelope Fell, could be her twin, and it is this lady that has captured Mr. Bridgerton’s
heart.

If Miss Fell shares more than a face and a name with Miss Featherington it matters not, for
she’ll soon be Mrs. Bridgerton anyway—rumor has it Lord Bridgerton has already requested
a special license from the Archbishop, and the two will be wed before the week is out.

And if a discerning reader or two should happen to notice that this scribe stopped printing
right around the time Miss Featherington left London, and that she began again just after
Miss Fell arrived in London, then she ought to know two things:

1. An outside observer rarely knows the full story—as a curator of gossip, I know this better
than most

and

2. Time changes almost everything

(Perhaps also 3. There are few things the average citizen learns before the queen. This is not
one of them.)

But whether this lady is a Fell or a Featherington or a Bridgerton, whether she’s a Miss or a
Mrs, one thing shall remain true.

I will always be

Yours,

Lady Whistledown

Chapter End Notes

Thank you to everyone who stuck with this fic while I tried to figure out how to close it
out. (May I never try and tell a Whistledown reveal story again.) I would love to hear
what you thought about it!

Next up: probably the Benelope While You Were Sleeping modern AU I've been toying
with the last few months. Keep your eyes peeled!
End Notes

Feedback is always appreciated! Find me on tumblr @windowsandfeelings where I am

always happy to talk Bridgerton (among other things).

Please drop by the Archive and comment to let the creator know if you enjoyed their work!