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1830, London
The door opened before Benedict could knock.
Colin stood at the foyer of their townhouse in his shirtsleeves, jacket abandoned somewhere behind him, not the best decisions in this cold. He looked like a man who had been pacing furiously, his hair astray, his eyes stormy. Pacing was precisely what he had been doing since Dunwoody had returned from delivering the flowers, and every hour thereafter for the better part of a week. The decision to send them had been impulsive. The reckoning that followed had not been.
"I think it is time we have a conversation, Benedict." Colin said, his voice much calmer than his demeanour.
Benedict looked at him for a long moment. His hat was still in his hand, his coat halfway on as he readied himself for the small walk to Colin’s house. He had been looking forward to the walk, giving himself time in the biting cold of the morning air to bring him some perspective. Or perhaps, just steel his nerves which were already on alarm. He’d thought he had at least half an hour to prepare himself for the conversation. But Colin had been anything but predictable.
"We cannot talk here." Benedict said calmly.
Colin frowned. "This is your home."
"Yes," Benedict said with the patient tone of a man choosing his words with extraordinary care, "This is also where Agatha will be awake in ten minutes if we’re lucky. And once she is awake, she will find me, and once she finds me, I will not be leaving for another two hours." He paused. "If we want an uninterrupted conversation — and I think we do — it cannot be here. Besides…" Benedict trailed off suddenly.
Colin studied him. There it was, that particular hesitation Benedict had always possessed — that careful withholding, the half-formed thought he swallowed before it reached air.
"Stop doing that," Colin said.
"Doing what?"
"Stopping yourself from saying something you would, if I wasn't standing in front of you." His voice was clipped but carried the severity of his words.
“Fine,” Benedict said in defeat, putting on his coat all the way, “Penelope is asleep, and I intend to let her get some rest. There will be no rest if the children wake up and find the mysterious uncle they’re terribly fond of.”
“We’ll walk to mine then.” Colin said resolutely, and with a measured nod Benedict stepped out, closing the door behind him.
They walked in silence through the London morning, both of them keeping a careful, deliberate calm. It was the kind of quiet that exists between two people who have too much to say and are each waiting for the other to say it first. The streets were not yet fully awake, the city still stretching itself into the day, and their footsteps on the cobblestones were the only sound that accompanied them.
They walked the remaining distance in the same careful quiet.
The fire was already laid at the townhouse. Dunwoody, to his eternal credit, asked no questions and brought coffee without being requested. Colin settled into the chair nearest the window and Benedict took the one across from him, and for a moment they simply sat — two brothers on opposite sides of a hearth, looking at each other properly for the first time in years.
"How is she?" Colin asked. "Penelope." He added, as it merited him to point who he asked for.
Benedict considered the question. Not because he was uncertain of the answer, but because Colin could see him deciding how honestly to give it.
"She is with child. Again, our third. It is not an easy one this time," Benedict said finally. "The pregnancy. She is tired in a way she was not with the others. It means the children cannot have as much of her as they want, and so they want more of me. Agatha especially." He turned his coffee cup in his hands. "It will pass. She is well, she is — she is perfectly well. Only tired."
"I see."
A moment of silence passed, before Benedict cleared his throat and sat up in his armchair, leveling his brother with a firm gaze.
"The flowers, Colin."
"I know."
"You will never send flowers to my wife again." It was not a question, and it was not quite anger. It was the single, clear line of a man who had drawn it in the ground and intended it to stay there. "Never again. Do you understand me?"
"Yes." Colin held his gaze. "I do. And I won't." He set down his own cup. "It would be a great deal easier, I find, if I could look at Penelope the way I look at Kate."
"Yes," Benedict said quietly. "I imagine it would."
A beat passed.
"Say, Ask, what you want," Benedict said then, leaning back. "I will listen. And I will answer."
Colin looked at him for a moment — this brother of his, older, grayer at the temples now, still so profoundly himself — and felt something in his chest loosen, fractionally.
"Did you know," Colin started, and then stopped. Started again. "Before the wedding. Did you know that Penelope and I had spoken? Did she tell you what was said between us?"
Benedict shook his head slowly. "She did not. I knew she had seen you — Eloise mentioned it, in the way Eloise mentions things she thinks you already know. But the substance of it, no." He paused. "I remember telling Penelope, around that time, that if she wished to end the engagement I would not stop her. That I would not walk out on her, but that the choice was hers." He looked at Colin steadily. "She did not end it."
"She chose you," Colin said. The words cost him something still, but less than they once had. "Even then. Before she had any reason to believe that I — she chose you before she knew, Benedict. I need you to understand that. I need to understand that as well."
Benedict was quiet for a moment. "I know."
"I was afraid," Benedict admitted, after a pause that held considerable weight. "When you returned. When the letters started between you both and she came alive in a different way at your name — I was afraid that now she knew. That knowing you had loved her might undo something." He shook his head, a short, rueful movement. "It did not. It has not. I know that. And yet."
"And yet," Colin prompted.
"I owe you an apology," Benedict said.
Colin looked up sharply. "You do not."
"I do. Not for marrying her — I will not apologize for that, I am constitutionally incapable of it. But for—" He stopped. Pressed his fingers briefly to his eyes. "For the years I let you stay away without saying plainly that I missed you. Not Penelope's husband. Not the man who perhaps took something that in some other world was yours. My brother. I missed my brother, Colin, and I spent a great deal of time feeling too guilty and too afraid to simply say so."
Colin said nothing. The fire crackled between them.
"Penelope was never mine," Colin said at last, and the words came from somewhere quiet and settled within him, somewhere the years abroad had slowly, painfully built. "I know that now. I constructed a world — a whole elaborate world — where she was supposed to be mine. Where I was the one who was meant to see her, to choose her. And I lived in that world for so long that I began to believe it was true." He exhaled. "It wasn't. I think she was always yours. I think I just arrived too late to know the difference."
"At least in this life," he added, with a small laugh.
Benedict looked at him with an expression that was difficult to read — grief and relief and the complicated tenderness of a man who has been both wronged and wrongdoer and knows himself to be both. "I cannot carry it any longer," he said quietly. "The guilt. It feels like a betrayal to them — to Agatha and Charles and the baby yet to be born. To Penelope. To love them as fully as they deserve and still be standing in a shadow of blame that was never rightly mine to carry."
"Then don't," Colin said. "Put it down, Ben. I am telling you now, plainly — put it down."
The room was very still.
And then something cracked open, as things do when they have been held too tightly for too long.
It was Benedict who moved first — standing abruptly, crossing the distance between their chairs, and pulling Colin to his feet with both hands on his shoulders. Not graceful. Not composed. The grip of a man who had spent five years watching his family diminished by an absence he felt partly responsible for.
"I have missed you," Benedict said, and his voice was not steady. "Every damned day, Colin. Not in the way one misses a person who is simply elsewhere. In the way one misses — a part of oneself. I taught you to climb the oak in the south garden in Aubrey Hall, I held you when you couldn't sleep as a child, and when you fumbled I was there to catch you . You are the only person alive who knows about the incident with Anthony's port in 1812. You are my brother, and I have missed you, and I am — I am so very sorry that I did not say it sooner. That I let you stay gone for so long without — without—"
He stopped. Colin, who had not cried in front of another person since Anthony's shoulder in 1826, found that he was not entirely dry-eyed either.
"Do you remember," Colin said, his voice rougher than intended, "after Father died. That first week. Anthony locked himself in the study and would not come out and mother was — mother was—"
"And we slept on the floor outside Anthony’s room every night," Benedict finished, low and immediate. "Until he came to get us. None of us could bear to be alone."
"Anthony cried first," Colin said. “He seemed to be the only one to truly understand what had just happened”
"He will deny it until his dying breath."
"He absolutely will."
It was not quite a laugh. But it was close enough. And then it was a laugh, real and sudden and helpless, the particular kind that exists on the near side of grief. Benedict pulled him into an embrace that was less elegant than it was fierce, and Colin held on in equal measure, and for a moment they were not two men standing on opposite sides of a complicated history — they were simply brothers, as they had always been, as they would go on being.
The waves had gone. What remained was only the sea, gentle and wide, and the quiet knowledge that he was no longer adrift within it.
They drank with Anthony that evening.
Not at any establishment of particular distinction, but at the small, slightly disreputable club Anthony had been a member of since his twenties and continued to frequent with the quiet stubbornness of a man who saw no reason to change what worked. The three Bridgerton brothers occupied a corner table, and Anthony — who had been informed only that Colin and Benedict wished his company and that under no circumstances was he to ask questions — seemed to understand, in the perceptive way he had always understood things, that this was not an evening for questions.
They talked, instead, about everything and nothing. About Gregory's latest and inadvisable business venture, which had Anthony pressing his fingers to his eyes in the way he only did when a sibling was concerned. About Hyacinth's children, who Colin had not yet met and who Benedict described with the fond alarm of a man who had weathered enough Bridgerton childhood to know when the next generation was going to be spectacular trouble. About the children in general — there were so many of them now, so many small bright people who carried various Bridgerton features in various improbable combinations.
When Benedict spoke of his own — and he did, with the natural ease of a man for whom they were the organizing principle of his existence — Colin listened. He did not look away, did not reach for his glass as a defense. He listened, and asked questions, and when Benedict mentioned that Agatha had recently discovered a talent for drawing that Benedict attributed entirely to himself and Penelope attributed entirely to stubbornness, Colin laughed without reserve.
"She has your eyes," Colin told him, suddenly, surprising even himself. "Agatha. I remember thinking so when I first met her. Everything else is Penelope, but the eyes are yours."
Benedict looked at him with an expression that was warm and a little undone. "Yes," he said simply. "Yes, she does."
Anthony refilled their glasses with the air of a man who had been waiting years for an evening precisely like this one, and said nothing at all, which was the most eloquent thing he had done all night.
A Few Weeks Later
The lunch at Anthony and Kate's had been exactly the kind of occasion that the Bridgerton family excelled at producing — sprawling, loud, punctuated by the sound of children and the smell of too much good food, with at least two separate arguments running simultaneously in different rooms. Colin had eaten more than was wise and laughed more than he had in months, and when the afternoon began to wind down and the little ones were ushered away for their naps, he found himself in the garden, his coat over the back of a bench, the late winter sun making a reasonable effort overhead.
He heard her footsteps before he saw her. He turned to greet her, and watched as she paused slightly looking at him. Asked with a tilt of her head if she was welcome. Colin couldn’t imagine a world in which she wasn’t welcome but nodded nonetheless.
Penelope settled on the other end of the bench with the careful, deliberate movements of a woman in the middle months of pregnancy, exhaling softly when she was settled. She looked well — tired, as Benedict had said, but with the particular luminescence that had always been particular to her. Her hair was coming loose from its pins. It always was.
"Thank you," she said, without preamble, giving him a small smile. "For speaking with Benedict."
"He came to me."
"I know. But whatever was said — it helped him. It helped us." She folded her hands in her lap. "I have not seen him that much himself in weeks."
Colin nodded. A small silence settled between them, comfortable enough now, worn smooth by years of correspondence and careful navigation.
"Why did you never tell him?" Colin asked. "About the morning of your wedding. What we said to each other."
Penelope turned to look at him with a small, considering expression. "Because I had no doubts," she said. "And I did not want him to have any either." She paused. "You were my past, Colin. The future was Benedict. It was always going to be him, I think — I simply needed to live long enough to arrive at it."
Colin was quiet for a moment. "Did you love me?" he asked. "Ever.” He added softly, his voice cracking just so slightly.
She met his eyes with the directness that had become her hallmark. "I loved you the way one loves a first and impossible dream," she said. "With everything I had, because I had not yet learned to love differently. It was real. It was also — it was also not what I have now." She shook her head slightly. "I could not have known that then. One cannot know what they have not yet experienced."
"No," Colin agreed. "One cannot."
He was leaving for India in a fortnight. He thought she probably knew. He had told Benedict, and things told to Benedict had a way of finding their way to Penelope through the particular osmosis of a long marriage.
"Perhaps that is enough," Colin said, looking out at the garden. The words settled around him as he spoke them, testing their weight. "To have been loved by you, even as a whisper. Even as a fleeting thing. I think — I think I will carry that and be glad of it, rather than sorry for what it was not."
Penelope looked at him for a long moment. And then, gently, "I only ever wanted you to be happy Colin. I have wished for it since the day I knew you.”
"Yes," he said. "I know."
He turned to look at her then — this woman he had loved so violently it had nearly destroyed the architecture of his entire self. She looked back at him, and there was kindness in her face, and care, and the particular fond sorrow of someone saying a quiet goodbye to a chapter they have long since closed but will never entirely forget.
"Does he love you?" Colin asked, and it was the last time he would ever ask it.
Penelope smiled. Not the careful, diplomatic smile of their early conversations. The full one. The real one. "Terribly so," she said.
“Do you love him?”
“Oh, yes.” She ran her hand over her bump as she smiled at him.
He stood, and she tilted her head up at him as he offered his hand. She took it and he helped her to her feet, and then he pressed a kiss to her cheek — light, brief, the way one bids farewell to someone beloved. Against the soft skin near her temple he whispered, so quietly it was almost only for himself:
"In another life, Perhaps”
She squeezed his hand once and gave him a look he couldn’t hold onto for too long. With a look of sorrow and resignation, she let his hand go.
Benedict appeared at the garden door, Charlotte on his hip pointing imperiously at something in the distance that apparently required his immediate attention, and Penelope turned toward him with her whole self — the particular, unconscious gravity of a person moving toward their true north.
Colin watched her go.
And found, to his own quiet astonishment, that the knife had gone dull. The wound was still there — it would, he suspected, be there until his last breath — but it no longer cut. It had become, instead, something he could hold. Something that had made him who he was.
He picked up his coat from the bench and went inside to find Anthony.
Five Years Later — 1835
Breakfast at the Bridgerton household — the one belonging to Benedict and Penelope, which had expanded twice over the years in the architectural sense and considerably more in the human sense — was not, by any conventional definition, a peaceful affair.
Agatha, eleven now and possessed of an authority that her father found amusing and her mother recognized with a sort of resigned pride, was presiding over the far end of the table with the air of a small general. Charles, nine, was conducting an experiment involving a boiled egg and a spoon that had already drawn a sharp word from the footman. Thomas, six, was eating with both hands and apparently saw no reason to stop. Alexander, four, was asleep against Penelope's arm with the boneless totality of small children, managing somehow to eat toast in his sleep. And Violet — two years old, named for her grandmother, and almost comically identical to Benedict at the same age, down to the stubborn set of her chin — was standing on her chair.
"Sit down, Vi," Benedict said, without looking up from his correspondence.
She sat. For approximately four seconds.
Penelope, who had perfected over eleven years of motherhood the art of managing chaos with the serene composure of someone who had simply stopped being surprised by it, passed the toast rack to Charles with one hand and extracted the spoon from his experiment with the other, while simultaneously directing Agatha to pour more tea and confirming to Thomas that yes, he could have more, and no, not with his hands.
Benedict looked up from his letter and across the table at her. She caught his eye. Something passed between them — not a word, not even quite a look, more a frequency that had been established between them over years of a shared life and had never once gone silent.
He smiled at her. And added a wink for good measure.
She shook her head at him — because he was about to say something that would make the children louder, she could always tell — but she was smiling too.
"Colin is coming home," Benedict said.
The table erupted in chaos.
They were at Violet's dowager house that evening, all of them, the way they assembled for announcements and occasions, a riot of Bridgertons and their attendant spouses and children filling every available surface. Violet herself had been told only that there was news, and she had spent the preceding two hours in a state of trembling anticipation that Kate and Daphne had been managing in shifts.
The letter had been brief. Colin was returning from India. He was bringing someone with him. He hoped, the letter said, that they would be happy for him.
He was, the letter said, engaged to be married.
The sound that came from Violet Bridgerton upon hearing this news was not easily transcribed. It was somewhere between a sob and a cry of pure joy, and it lasted long enough that Anthony eventually had to sit her down and press a glass of water into her hands while she collected herself.
"Engaged," she kept saying, to no one in particular. "My Colin. Engaged."
"You are going to be entirely impossible for the next several weeks," Hyacinth told her, not unkindly.
"Hush," said Daphne.
Across the room, Penelope watched Benedict. He had read the letter first — had been, she suspected, partly responsible for its contents, given the long conversation he and Colin had exchanged over the past several months. He stood now in the midst of the family celebration with an expression she had not seen on him in years. Not the effortful contentment of a man working to be glad for his brother. Something cleaner than that. Something that had, at last, come through to the other side.
He found her eyes across the room.
She mouthed: Are you happy?
He laughed — his real laugh, the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes — and nodded, and then waded through the assembled family to reach her side, dropping a kiss on her temple.
"Happier than I thought I would be," he murmured. "Which is saying a great deal."
Netra arrived in England in the month of October, on a morning that could not quite decide between rain and something that approximated winter sunlight.
She was not what any of them had expected — or rather, she was everything and nothing they might have predicted. Composed, watchful, possessed of a stillness that had nothing of coldness in it and everything of a person who has learned, through considerable difficulty, when to speak and when to simply be present. Her English was careful and precise, acquired over years of it being necessary rather than ornamental. Her eyes were dark and extraordinarily perceptive, and within the first ten minutes of her arrival at Bridgerton House she had assessed every person in the room with a quiet accuracy that reminded Penelope, startlingly, of herself.
She had lost her husband five years ago, Colin had written. A man she had loved deeply. The grief of it had not left her — grief of that kind did not leave — but she had found, in the strange geography of loss, someone who understood it. Someone who knew what it was to love a person you could not have and survive it.
"You must be Penelope," Netra said, when they were introduced. Her voice was warm, unhurried. "Colin speaks of you a great deal."
Penelope was aware of the particular weight of the sentence, and suspected Netra intended her to be. "All of it undeserved, I'm sure," she said.
Netra smiled — slow, knowing, without a trace of performance in it. "He says you are the finest friend he has ever had," she said, "and that you were wasted on him entirely."
"That," Penelope said, "sounds exactly like him."
"It does," Netra agreed, with the particular equanimity of a woman who had made her peace with the full complexity of the man she loved.
Penelope liked her immediately.
Later, she watched Netra and Benedict stand together over the fireplace while Colin was monopolized by his mother and both of them were temporarily stranded. They spoke with the ease of two people who had already, somehow, arrived at an understanding — perhaps through Colin, who had clearly told each of them enough about the other that the formal introductions were merely confirmation.
"She suits him," Benedict said that night, when the house was finally quiet.
"Yes," Penelope agreed. "She does."
"I thought I would feel—" He stopped. "I don't know what I thought I would feel. Something complicated."
"And?"
He was quiet for a moment, his hand resting absently at her waist in the way it always did when he was thinking. "And I don't. It simply feels right. Like the last piece settling into a place you didn't know was empty."
She turned to look at him, already groggy with sleep, the added warmth of him only pulling her closer to slumber. "Yes," she said softly. "It does."
They found a minute alone at the end of a dinner in the weeks to come, Colin and Penelope, in the small anteroom off the main hall where the coats were kept and the noise from the drawing room was reduced to a comfortable murmur.
"You are happy," she said. It was not a question.
"I am getting there," Colin said honestly, which was, she thought, a better answer. "She is — she is remarkable, Pen. She has been through more than most people will ever be asked to bear, and she is still — still so entirely herself. I find I cannot explain it without sounding like every bad poem I have ever read."
Penelope laughed. "Then don't explain it. I can see it."
He looked at her, this woman who had been the landscape of his longing for so many years. She was forty now, or near enough, and she was lovelier than she had been at twenty. Not in the obvious ways — not in the ways the ton measured such things — but in the way a person becomes lovelier when they have been thoroughly, consistently loved. When they have been seen, day after day, by someone who finds them worthy of looking at.
The knife was dull. The wound was old. What remained was something he had come, slowly, to regard not as a scar but as a map — evidence of the distance he had traveled, and proof that he had arrived somewhere.
"I desperately want to be a father," Colin said, and was surprised to find that the words came easily. "I think I have wanted it for a very long time and not known where to put the wanting."
Penelope's expression softened into something that was purely, generously warm. "You will be wonderful," she said. "I have no doubt of it."
"You have always had more faith in me than I deserve."
"Probably," she agreed, and he laughed.
Voices came in from the hall. Netra's low, amused tone, and the sound of Agatha apparently explaining to her, with the unsolicited authority of an eleven-year-old, the correct protocol for being welcomed into a Bridgerton household. Netra was listening with every evidence of sincere attention.
"She will be wonderful with them," Penelope said, nodding toward the sound.
"Yes." Colin smiled. "I think she will."
Benedict appeared in the doorway, scanning the room and finding Penelope with the particular ease of a man who can locate his wife in any crowd, in any room, in any configuration of the world.
"They are asking for you," he told her. "Mother, specifically. She wants to tell you something about the wedding breakfast that apparently cannot wait."
Penelope pressed her lips together in the way that meant she was suppressing a strong opinion. "Of course she does."
She turned to Colin. He saw it in her face then — not the complicated, weighted farewell of their last goodbye, but something simpler. An arrival, perhaps. The particular peace of a story that has, at last, finished.
"Does she love you?" Penelope asked, and he recognized the question, recognized it from years and years of conversations that had begun and ended with some version of it. Unknowingly, a smile crept up on his face.
Colin thought of Netra's face when he had told her he was afraid he was not yet entirely whole. Her response, unhurried and honest, had been that she wasn’t either. Perhaps we will be less broken together than apart.
"Yes," he said. "I think so. In the way that is new and uncertain and entirely its own."
"And do you love her?"
He considered it. Truly considered it, the way he had not always done with the important questions. "Yes," he said. "Not as I have loved before. But yes. With the part of me that is still capable of it — yes."
Penelope smiled at him, and in it he saw everything they had been, laid gently to rest.
She went to Benedict, who put a hand at the small of her back with the unthinking ease of someone who has done it ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more. They disappeared into the noise and warmth of the hall.
Colin stood in the quiet anteroom for a moment.
He thought of waves, and of being adrift, and of all the years he had spent looking for something solid to hold onto. He thought of a kiss that tasted of honey and salt. He thought of unsent letters, and India in the summer, and a child with auburn hair he had dreamed of as his own. He thought of his brother's arms, fierce and imperfect. He thought of Anthony's hand on his shoulder.
He had loved her since he was young enough not to know what love cost. He would love her still, in whatever quiet and diminished way, until he could not love anything at all. That is simply what it is.
In another life, Penelope would have been his.
But this was the life he had been given. And at last — at long, hard last — he found he was glad of it.
He went to find Netra.
"And in the end, we are not the loves we lost. We are everything we became in the losing."