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There was a tradition in the Bridgerton family that the Bridgertons themselves knew, or at the very least pretended to know, nothing about, which was precisely the point of it.
Twice a year, in the same private room at the same discreet club off St. James’s, a room they had used so long the staff kept it reserved without being asked and had learned to serve the wine and then vanish, the eight people who had married into the family gathered without a single Bridgerton present, closed the door, and let out, collectively, a breath each of them had been holding for six months. No one could quite agree when it had started, though everyone agreed it had been Kate’s doing, because it was exactly the sort of ruthlessly practical scheme Kate would devise, and it had continued unbroken through weddings and christenings and the arrival of more Bridgerton grandchildren than any of them could reliably count, because it was, they had all privately concluded, the single load-bearing structure of their sanity.
“To absent spouses,” said Kate, lifting her glass, opening the proceedings as she always did. “God love them. God keep them. God keep them elsewhere, specifically, for the next three hours.”
“Hear, hear,” said seven voices, with real feeling.
The club was a good choice, discreet and warm and unfashionable enough that no Bridgerton would ever think to look for them there, and there was, in that closed room, a quality of ease none of them felt anywhere else in their lives, because everywhere else they were, in some fashion, performing being married to a Bridgerton, keeping up with the noise, remembering which child belonged to which sibling, being reliably delighted by a family that had never once, in the collective memory of the table, grasped the concept of a closed door. Here, and only here, they set it down. Here they were eight people who had made the same magnificent, ruinous, wonderful decision, and lived.
They settled into it the way they always did, the food arriving without ceremony, the wine arriving without pause, and the complaints, beloved and well-worn, arriving with the soup.
“Simon looks tired,” Sophie observed, kindly.
“Simon is tired.” The Duke of Hastings, once the most feared young man in London and now a silver-haired grandfather addressing a bowl of soup, set down his spoon like a man laying down a burden. “Daphne has resolved that we host the entire family at Clyvedon this summer. The entire family. I did the arithmetic. I ran out of fingers. And toes. There will be upward of forty Bridgertons beneath my roof and I shall be expected to enjoy it, and to play pall-mall, and to lose at pall-mall, because if I win, Daphne does not speak to me for a day and a half.”
“You have to lose on purpose…sometimes,” Kate said. “It’s the only way. Twenty-six years and I’ve lost to my husband twice. Believe me, both of those times were intentional. And likely saved my marriage.”
Gareth set down his glass with the slow horror of a man to whom a great truth is being revealed. “You threw them.”
“Of course I threw them.”
“I’ve been trying to win.” Gareth looked around the table, betrayed. “For fifteen years. I thought I was simply dreadful at it.”
“Oh, Gareth.” Lucy patted his hand. “No. You’re not dreadful at it. You’re being managed. We’re all being managed. A Bridgerton must win at pall-mall or the day is spoiled, and our sacred duty is to lose gracefully and let them believe it was sport. I sorted it out in my first year.” She sipped her wine, serene. “Gregory is the second-youngest of eight. He lost at everything his entire childhood. Pall-mall is the one arena in which he triumphs, and so I let him, always, and he is happy, and I have never once in twenty years played that wretched game to my actual ability, which would, for the record, flatten every last one of them into the lawn.”
“Would it,” said Michaela, delighted.
“I was a terror at lawn games as a girl. It is one of the quiet sorrows of my marriage that I’ve had to conceal it. Gregory will go to his grave believing he can beat me. It’s my gift to him.” Lucy sighed, philosophically. “The things we surrender.”
A murmur of recognition went round the table, tender and rueful, the recognition of people who had each made themselves a little humbler, in some small way, to fit the vast loving shape of a Bridgerton, and did not regret it, quite, but felt sometimes the ghost of the thing they’d set down.
“I surrendered ever finishing a sentence,” said Phillip, gloomily. He was a large quiet man who had married the loudest, most argumentative Bridgerton in existence and wore the settled melancholy of one who had made his peace with a permanent noise. “Eloise. I love her. I would die for her. I have not completed a full thought aloud since 1824. She finishes them for me. Usually wrong. Occasionally better, which is somehow worse.”
“At least she listens,” said Michaela. “Francesca drifts. Mid-sentence. I’ll be telling her something of consequence and I look over and she’s composing in her head, I can see it, her fingers start playing an invisible pianoforte on the arm of the chair. I could tell her the house was ablaze and she’d say ‘mm, lovely, darling,’ and reach for a quill.” She said it with such helpless devotion that no one could mistake it for complaint. “I adore her. It is maddening. Both. Always both.”
“That’s marriage to a Bridgerton in five words,” said Sophie. “Maddening and adoring. Always both.”
They drank to that.
It was Michaela, a few courses in, who steered them, as someone always did, to the great shared marvel and terror of the family, which was not any individual Bridgerton but the woman who had produced the whole overwhelming lot of them.
“I saw Violet on Tuesday,” she said. “She has taken an interest in my youngest’s marriage prospects. My youngest is nine.”
A groan of profound fellow-feeling went round the table.
“She’s begun on my grandchildren,” said Simon, darkly. “My grandchildren, Michaela. She has a list. I’ve seen it. She keeps it in a little book and she updates it and she will not be stopped, she has been marrying people off for thirty odd years and she is not going to let a trifle like running out of her own children slow her down, she’ll marry off the entire British aristocracy from her chair if we let her.”
“She marries people because it works,” Penelope pointed out mildly, from the end of the table. “That’s the maddening part. She’s almost never wrong. She looked at me across a room when I was seventeen and no one, and I mean no one, thought I would ever, and she simply, decided. And here I am.” Penelope smiled. “She’s terrifying because she’s right. If Violet Bridgerton takes an interest in your nine-year-old’s marriage, Michaela, I would start saving for the wedding now.”
“She did it to all of us, though, didn’t she,” said Sophie, quietly, and the table quieted, because Sophie speaking seldom always meant she was about to say the thing underneath. “When you think of it. Every one of us at this table. She could have wanted her children to marry sensibly. Grandly. Correctly. She had eight of them and every advantage and she could have made eight brilliant matches with eight suitable families and been the most powerful woman in England.” She turned her glass in her fingers. “And instead she let Simon marry Daphne when half of London thought he’d ruin her. She let Anthony have Kate, the wrong sister, when he’d been courting the right one. She let Benedict marry me. A woman she believed, at the time, to be a lady’s maid. She sat across from a servant her son had fallen in love with and she was kind to me, when she had every reason in the world not to be, and she made me feel, for the first time in my life, that I might be allowed to belong somewhere.” Her voice had gone soft. “She never once, any of us, told her children to marry correctly. She only ever wanted them to marry people they loved. And so she ended up with this, with eight impossible outsiders at her table, a duke and a servant and a wallflower and a rake and the wrong sister and God knows what all, and she loved every one of us as though we’d been born to it. She’s the reason we’re here. All of us. She’s the reason there’s a table to sit at.”
The room was quiet a moment.
“To Violet,” said Kate, and her voice was not quite steady, though she covered it, as she always did, with briskness. “Who could have made eight sensible matches and instead collected eight lunatics. God keep her. She’s the finest woman I ever met and I include my own mother in that, God rest her.”
“To Violet,” they echoed, and drank, and it was a warmer, truer toast than the first one. “Do you know what I still think about,” said Michaela, refilling her glass and Penelope’s in the same motion, “is 1824. The year they married the three of us off at once. Can you imagine. Three of them in a single year.”
“Don’t,” said Simon, with feeling. “I was there for all three. I have never recovered.”
“It was carnage,” Penelope agreed placidly. “Beautiful carnage. Colin and I in the spring, and then Eloise and Phillip, and then Francesca and Michaela before the year was out, and Violet in the middle of it all like a general directing a war, three weddings, three breakfasts, three sets of settlements, and she never dropped a stitch, she was in her absolute glory.”
“She lost half a stone,” said Sophie. “From the sheer joy of it. I’ve never seen a woman so happy to be so exhausted.”
“The three of us are a cohort, you realize,” Michaela said, gesturing between herself, Penelope, and Phillip. “The class of ‘24. We married in together. We stood at the edge of the same chaos in the same year.” He raised his glass to the other two. “Comrades in arms. There’s a bond in it. Phillip and I barely knew each other and I’d have died for the man by Christmas, purely on the grounds that we’d survived the same year.”
“I remember standing at your wedding, Michaela,” Phillip said slowly, “having just survived my own six weeks earlier, and thinking, that poor woman has no idea what she’s walked into, and feeling I ought to warn you, and deciding it would be kinder not to.”
“It would not have helped,” Michaela assured him. “Nothing helps. You simply have to be in it.”
“The class of ‘24,” said Gareth, lifting his glass, mock-solemn. “You brave, doomed fools. Married in threes, like they were trying to get it over with in bulk.”
“Violet’s most productive year,” said Kate. “She’s never topped it. Believe me, she’s tried.”
The talk loosened again after that, the way it did, and drifted, inevitably, to the ever-fascinating subject of Penelope, who sat at the end of the table being quietly, unnervingly herself.
“I still can’t quite believe it, you know,” said Gareth, cheerfully, gesturing at her with a fork. “That it was you. All those years. I read every word you ever printed. I dreaded you. I’d wake up and think, God, what’s Whistledown said today, and it was you the whole time, sitting in the corner at the musicales being ignored, taking us all to pieces on paper. It’s the best joke I’ve ever heard and I’m still, frankly, in awe.”
“Gareth, we’ve established this,” said Kate, patiently. “We established it a decade ago. You establish it fresh every dinner. You’re like a man discovering fire twice a year.”
“I can’t get over it.” Gareth was unrepentant. “You can’t expect me to just, absorb a thing like that and be calm about it. She was the most powerful person in England for a decade and she used to darn Colin’s socks.”
“I still darn Colin’s socks.”
“See? See?” Gareth appealed to the table. “How is anyone calm about this?”
“Some of us have simply had longer to adjust,” said Simon dryly. He had known the longest; he was married to Daphne, who had figured it out before nearly anyone, and he treated Penelope’s history with the settled easy respect of a man long past awe. “Gareth married in late. He’s still catching up.”
“I am not still catching up, I have merely retained an appropriate sense of wonder, which the rest of you have lost—”
“Phillip didn’t fully understand it until three years ago,” offered Lucy, helpfully.
“That’s not,” Phillip began, with dignity, “I understood it, I simply hadn’t, Eloise had explained it but she explains everything at once, in a great rush, and I’d rather assumed the Whistledown business was one of the several dozen things she’d told me that I’d failed to fully absorb, and it was only when I said something to Penelope directly and she gave me that look—” he shuddered “—that I understood it was true and not merely another thing Eloise had said while I wasn’t finishing a sentence.”
“You went quite pale,” Penelope agreed pleasantly. “I remember. You’d realized, all at once, everything you’d said in front of me over the years.”
“I had said a great deal in front of you over the years.”
“You had. It was all very dull, Phillip, don’t fret. Botanists rarely give me anything to work with.” Penelope patted his hand. “You were never in any danger. You’re far too kind to be interesting, which is the highest compliment I know how to give.”
Phillip appeared unsure whether he’d been complimented or filed, which was, the table agreed, the correct response to any sentence Penelope ever spoke.
The evening went on, warm and loose and unguarded in a way it never was anywhere else, and they made their way through the old familiar country, the meddling, the noise, the sheer arithmetic of the family, the impossibility of a private grief or a private joy or a private anything in a clan that could sense an unshared feeling from across a county and arrive, uninvited, with soup and opinions and, often, Violet. And underneath the complaining, always, the thing none of them ever said directly but all of them meant, that they would not trade one hour of it, that the noise and the meddling and the endless loving were the warmest thing that had ever happened to any of them, that they had each been, before the Bridgertons, in some fundamental way, cold, and were not cold anymore.
It was Sophie, near the end, who said it, because it was always Sophie.
“I used to sit at those enormous dinners in the early years,” she said, “and feel so outside it. So certain they were all secretly wondering what Benedict had been thinking, marrying down so far. So sure I’d never truly belong.” She looked around the table. “And then I understood, slowly, that none of us were born to it. Every person at this table married in from somewhere outside. The duke with the ruined father. The wallflower who was secretly the most feared woman in London. The formidable almost-spinster with the sharp tongue and the sad history. The widower who can’t finish a sentence. The woman whom society did not have room for. The girl with more sense than charm and eleven children. The rogue. And the servant.” She smiled, eyes bright. “Eight outsiders. Every one certain we’d never fit. And it turned out the family we were all so sure would never take us in is the one family in England that specialises in taking people in. They don’t marry their own kind. Have you noticed? Not one of them married some suitable correct match. Every Bridgerton went and found the least suitable, most impossible person they could and dragged them home and loved them until they belonged. That’s the family business. Not the estates. Not the titles. Not the wretched pall-mall. Taking in the outsiders. We’re not the exceptions to the Bridgertons. We’re the point of them. And Violet taught them how, by doing it eight times over, on purpose, with a smile, when she could have done the sensible thing instead and been half as happy.”
The room was still.
“That’s the most sentimental thing anyone’s said at this table in ten years,” said Kate, whose eyes had gone bright, “and I’ll thank you not to make a habit of it, we come here to complain, not to weep into the wine.” But she squeezed Sophie’s hand, and Sophie squeezed back, and everyone politely failed to notice that Kate, the driest and sharpest of them all, had to look away for a moment.
“To the outsiders,” said Simon, lifting his glass, rescuing them all as he always did. “The eight of us. The wrong choices. The ones who never belonged.”
“To the outsiders,” they said, and drank, and it was the truest toast of the night.
“There’ll be a new one soon,” Penelope observed, into the settling quiet. “You realize. The next generation. Young Charlotte’s married her surveyor, and a good thing too, and there’ll be a new one at this table before long. A new outsider. The newest wrong choice, sitting where Gareth’s sitting, wondering if he belongs.”
“A drainage-man’s son,” said Gareth, with relish. “Married the viscount’s daughter. Oh, I like him already, sight unseen. He’ll fit right in with this collection of disasters.”
“He climbed out of a river to save her,” said Kate, and there was fierce pride in it, because Charlotte was hers. “And she brought him through the front door, dripping wet, in front of the whole family, and dared a single one of us to say a word. Nobody did. My daughter.”
“She did exactly what her father did,” Simon pointed out. “Married the difficult choice in front of all of London and dared them to object.”
“She did, didn’t she.” Kate looked enormously pleased. “It runs in the blood. The good part.”
“Then we make room,” said Sophie warmly, lifting her glass one final time. “For the ninth. When he’s ready, bring him. Let him find out he’s not the odd one out at all, he’s simply the newest member of the only club in England worth joining. And when there’s a next, and another, when the whole next generation starts dragging home its own impossible outsiders, the way they will, because it’s in the blood, we make room for every one of them. May the table never be empty. And may Violet Bridgerton, wherever she is, however old she gets, never once stop marrying people off, because God help us, she’s always right.”
“To the outsiders,” they said, all eight of them, the outsiders who had become, across the long warm years, a family inside the family, bound not by blood but by the same glorious mistake.
And in the closed warm room, with the candles low and the wine going round and no Bridgerton within a mile of them, the people who had married the Bridgertons laughed, and complained, and toasted the matriarch who had gathered them and the maddening beloved spouses they’d each of them die for, and every one of them thought, privately, in the way you think the thing you’d never say aloud, that marrying into that overwhelming impossible family had been the best thing they had ever done, and that they’d do it again in a heartbeat.
Pall-mall and all.
Even losing on purpose. Even for thirty years. Even never once being caught.
That was the secret of loving a Bridgerton, and none of them would ever say it, and all of them knew it. You lost on purpose, over and over, your whole life long. And somehow it felt, every single time, exactly like winning.