He’d thought he’d have to push his way into his parents’ room, but the servants parted as if they were drops in the Red Sea, and when Anthony pushed open the door, he knew.
His mother was sitting on the edge of the bed, not weeping, not even making a sound, just holding his father’s hand as she rocked slowly back and forth.
His father was still. Still as…
Anthony didn’t even want to think the word.
“Mama?” he choked out. He hadn’t called her that for years; she’d been “Mother” since he’d left for Eton.
She turned, slowly, as if hearing his voice through a long, long tunnel.
“What happened?” he whispered.
She shook her head, her eyes hopelessly far away. “I don’t know,” she said. Her lips remained parted by an inch or so, as if she’d meant to say something more but then forgotten to do it.
Anthony took a step forward, his movements awkward and jerky.
“He’s gone,” Violet finally whispered. “He’s gone and I…oh, God, I…” She placed a hand on her belly, full and round with child. “I told him—oh, Anthony, I told him—”
She looked as if she might shatter from the inside out. Anthony choked back the tears that were burning his eyes and stinging his throat and moved to her side. “It’s all right, Mama,” he said.
But he knew it wasn’t all right.
“I told him this had to be our last,” she gasped, sobbing onto his shoulder. “I told him I couldn’t carry another, and we’d have to be careful, and…Oh, God, Anthony, what I’d do to have him here and give him another child. I don’t understand. I just don’t understand….”
Anthony held her while she cried. He said nothing; it seemed useless to try to make any words fit the devastation in his heart.
He didn’t understand, either.
The doctors came later that evening and pronounced themselves baffled. They’d heard of such things before, but never in one so young and strong. He was so vital, so powerful; nobody could have known. It was true that the viscount’s younger brother Hugo had died quite suddenly the year before, but such things did not necessarily run in families, and besides, even though Hugo had died by himself out-of-doors, no one had noticed a bee sting on his skin.
Then again, nobody had looked.
Nobody could have known, the doctors kept saying, over and over until Anthony wanted to strangle them all. Eventually he got them out of the house, and he put his mother to bed. They had to move her into a spare bedroom; she grew agitated at the thought of sleeping in the bed she’d shared for so many years with Edmund. Anthony managed to send his six siblings to bed as well, telling them that they’d all talk in the morning, that everything would be well, and he would take care of them as their father would have wanted.
Then he walked into the room where his father’s body still lay and looked at him. He looked at him and looked at him, staring at him for hours, barely blinking.
And when he left the room, he left with a new vision of his own life, and new knowledge about his own mortality.
Edmund Bridgerton had died at the age of thirty-eight. And Anthony simply couldn’t imagine ever surpassing his father in any way, even in years.
Chapter 1
The topic of rakes has, of course, been previously discussed in this column, and This Author has come to the conclusion that there are rakes, and there are Rakes.
Anthony Bridgerton is a Rake.
A rake (lower-case) is youthful and immature. He flaunts his exploits, behaves with utmost idiocy, and thinks himself dangerous to women.
A Rake (upper-case) knows he is dangerous to women.
He doesn’t flaunt his exploits because he doesn’t need to. He knows he will be whispered about by men and women alike, and in fact, he’d rather they didn’t whisper about him at all. He knows who he is and what he has done; further recountings are, to him, redundant.
He doesn’t behave like an idiot for the simple reason that he isn’t an idiot (any moreso than must be expected among all members of the male gender). He has little patience for the foibles of society, and quite frankly, most of the time This Author cannot say she blames him.
And if that doesn’t describe Viscount Bridgerton—surely this season’s most eligible bachelor—to perfection, This Author shall retire Her quill immediately. The only question is: Will 1814 be the season he finally succumbs to the exquisite bliss of matrimony?
This Author Thinks…
Not.
LADY WHISTLEDOWN’S SOCIETY PAPERS, 20 APRIL 1814
“Please don’t tell me,” Kate Sheffield said to the room at large, “that she is writing about Viscount Bridgerton again.”
Her half-sister Edwina, younger by almost four years, looked up from behind the single-sheet newspaper. “How could you tell?”
“You’re giggling like a madwoman.”
Edwina giggled, shaking the blue damask sofa on which they both sat.
“See?” Kate said, giving her a little poke in the arm. “You always giggle when she writes about some reprehensible rogue.” But Kate grinned. There was little she liked better than teasing her sister. In a good-natured manner, of course.
Mary Sheffield, Edwina’s mother, and Kate’s stepmother for nearly eighteen years, glanced up from her embroidery and pushed her spectacles farther up the bridge of her nose. “What are you two laughing about?”
“Kate’s in a snit because Lady Whistledown is writing about that rakish viscount again,” Edwina explained.
“I’m not in a snit,” Kate said, even though no one was listening.
“Bridgerton?” Mary asked absently.
Edwina nodded. “Yes.”
“She always writes about him.”
“I think she just likes writing about rakes,” Edwina commented.
“Of course she likes writing about rakes,” Kate retorted. “If she wrote about boring people, no one would buy her newspaper.”
“That’s not true,” Edwina replied. “Just last week she wrote about us, and heaven knows we’re not the most interesting people in London.”
Kate smiled at her sister’s naïveté. Kate and Mary might not be the most interesting people in London, but Edwina, with her buttery-colored hair and startlingly pale blue eyes, had already been named the Incomparable of 1814. Kate, on the other hand, with her plain brown hair and eyes, was usually referred to as “the Incomparable’s older sister.”
She supposed there were worse monikers. At least no one had yet begun to call her “the Incomparable’s spinster sister.” Which was a great deal closer to the truth than any of the Sheffields cared to admit. At twenty (nearly twenty-one, if one was going to be scrupulously honest about it), Kate was a bit long in the tooth to be enjoying her first season in London.
But there hadn’t really been any other choice. The Sheffields hadn’t been wealthy even when Kate’s father had been alive, and since he’d passed on five years earlier, they’d been forced to economize even further. They certainly weren’t ready for the poorhouse, but they had to mind every penny and watch every pound.
With their straitened finances, the Sheffields could manage the funds for only one trip to London. Renting a house—and a carriage—and hiring the bare minimum of servants for the season cost money. More money than they could afford to spend twice. As it was, they’d had to save for five solid years to be able to afford this trip to London. And if the girls weren’t successful on the Marriage Mart…well, no one was going to clap them into debtor’s prison, but they would have to look forward to a quiet life of genteel poverty at some charmingly small cottage in Somerset.
And so the two girls were forced to make their debuts in the same year. It had been decided that the most logical time would be when Edwina was just seventeen and Kate almost twenty-one. Mary would have liked to have waited until Edwina was eighteen, and a bit more mature, but that would have made Kate nearly twenty-two, and heavens, but who would marry her then?
Kate smiled wryly. S
he hadn’t even wanted a season. She’d known from the outset that she wasn’t the sort who would capture the attention of the ton. She wasn’t pretty enough to overcome her lack of dowry, and she’d never learned to simper and mince and walk delicately, and do all those things other girls seemed to know how to do in the cradle. Even Edwina, who didn’t have a devious bone in her body, somehow knew how to stand and walk and sigh so that men came to blows just for the honor of helping her cross the street.
Kate, on the other hand, always stood with her shoulders straight and tall, couldn’t sit still if her life depended upon it, and walked as if she were in a race—and why not? she always wondered. If one was going somewhere, what could possibly be the point in not getting there quickly?
As for her current season in London, she didn’t even like the city very much. Oh, she was having a good enough time, and she’d met quite a few nice people, but a London season seemed a horrible waste of money to a girl who would have been perfectly content to remain in the country and find some sensible man to marry there.
But Mary would have none of that. “When I married your father,” she’d said, “I vowed to love you and bring you up with all the care and affection I’d give to a child of my own blood.”