Chapter Text
“Someone in this room has something to hide, and I shall not leave until they come forward and reveal themselves.”
You. It’s you. Confess. Confess. Confess. Co—
She feels as though she has been taken by the sea, lost and adrift with not a acre of land to feel security from. Penelope breathes through her nose and it is not enough. It’s like there’s no air around them, around her. Only water. Filling her ears. Filling her lungs. She cannot breathe no more than she could move.
Despite the waters invading her, she feels her mouth dry.
The Queen’s voice makes it through one ear and out the other. “The longer you delay, the greater my irritation. Step forward.” Her eyes, so speculative, suspicious, and all the wrong things one’s eyes should hold on what should’ve been the happiest day of her life. “Confess.”
Colin is looking at her. His hand is poised ever so tilted towards her body, inconspicuous. He will hold her back if need be.
Should I? Should I, should I, should I?
Her legs shake and she’s afraid a small wind could take her down.
The tension in the air chokes her, makes her feel raw and exposed although only two people in the room know why.
Penelope—Penelope is not made of steel. Not like Lady Whistledown is.
Lady Whistledown, she is—she is brave and cruel and malicious in words and in spirit. She is a gossipmonger of the highest order; a fictional woman Penelope has created from the depths of her mind and brought to life by pen, parchment, and prayers. She is every bit of soul that Penelope wished and dreamed she could have. She is Penelope’s mind. All the ugly parts of it, the selfish and the hateful.
Lady Whistledown is armor rusted and molded to her skin. One cannot be without the other.
She is ruinous. Penelope Featherington, under a different name, had sparked flames over the coal of people’s lives and watched as they burst. It had been a game for her, one that scarred her more than it made her smile, but for once in her life, her entire life, it had been a game she could actually win.
There is no winning now. The Queen’s simmering annoyance and teetering wrath had dragged all the silver from Lady Whistledown and left only what remains of a girl who has lost more than she had loved.
To pretend she hasn’t lost is a fool’s game. To do so in front of the Queen is asking for a blade of her choosing. There is nothing left. There is nothing but her skin that clings to bone and her heart and mind encased in blood.
Her eyes shoot up and meet Colin’s in what she could only hope to be akin to a dead man asking for forgiveness before he is to walk to his death.
Penelope Featheri—Bridgerton twitches forward, and Colin’s hand shoots to clasp her trembling one.
“Colin.” She whispers shakily, trying for naught to pry her hand away. He shakes his head.
He is—God, he is good. Better than she has been as of late. Colin took her hand even when he was begging her to do the impossible. To give up what she has created in her mind and in society. He hadn’t forsaken her, even when everything went wrong, and what has she done? She ruined his family, over and over, all in the name of protecting them.
How can he look at her as though she was still worth saving?
Look at her and think that she deserves a life better than the one she created for herself?
They have captured the attention of everyone else in the room. The Queen, regal and proper as she, raises her chin higher as she watches the brazen display from her husband.
Penelope wants to cry, because this is it. The one thing she has fervently fought for and has been irritatingly stubborn on is going to be taken away from her. The one comfort she’ll have is the fact that she did it herself, but Colin is making it so difficult to walk two paces forward.
They are trapped in a stalemate, with Penelope tugging her hand close to her body and Colin pleading with nothing but his soul to let him hold it.
“Mr Bridgerton,” They both nearly jump out of their skins when her Majesty speaks once more. “Shall I find you complicit in this matter?”
“No!” Penelope’s voice comes before her thoughts. Queen Charlotte pries her gaze away from Colin and back to her. Penelope withers and tries to pretend she hasn’t. “He—He is not, your Majesty.”
“Well?” Queen Charlotte places one gloved hand over the other, raising a fatal brow as she flounders under her question. “I haven’t got all day, Mrs Bridgerton.”
Lightning shoots up her spine, nearly making Penelope shiver, but for the sake of propriety in front of her Majesty, the Queen herself, she resists it.
Meeting Colin’s eye for another time, her eyebrows furrow in a silent plea. Let go. Please. She tries, begs to say. His hand clenches once more around her wrist, but with a pained sigh and an even more tragic sheen in his eyes, Colin releases her.
One step forward. Another.
A respectable distance from the Queen. Apart from the others enough to be singled out, but not so much so that it seems like she’s challenging her Majesty.
“My Queen,” she starts with a shuddering breath, trying to project Whistledown’s confidence in her body. “I confess before you today, not as Penelope Bridgerton, but rather…”
Her hands shake as her eyes flutter shut, as if bracing for impact. Nails dig into flesh, and she knows the exact moment they stop feeling like those of a girl of twenty.
The second her nails make dents deep enough to draw blood, her eyes shoot open and she meets the Queen with self-possessed ease.
“But rather, as Lady Whistledown.”