because that would have required that she remove her attention from the all-important Bridgertons, whose ranks, Penelope was quickly figuring out, included the man presently covered in mud.
“I hope your son isn’t injured,” Mrs. Featherington said to Lady Bridgerton.
“Right as rain,” Colin interjected, making an expert sidestep before Lady Bridgerton could maul him with motherly concern.
Introductions were made, but the rest of the conversation was unimportant, mostly because Colin quickly and accurately sized up Mrs. Featherington as a matchmaking mama. Penelope was not at all surprised when he beat a hasty retreat.
But the damage had already been done. Penelope had discovered a reason to dream.
Later that night, as she replayed the encounter for about the thousandth time in her mind, it occurred to her that it would have been nice if she could have said that she’d fallen in love with him as he kissed her hand before a dance, his green eyes twinkling devilishly while his fingers held hers just a little more tightly than was proper. Or maybe it could have happened as he rode boldly across a windswept moor, the (aforementioned) wind no deterrent as he (or rather, his horse) galloped ever closer, his (Colin’s, not the horse’s) only intention to reach her side.
But no, she had to go and fall in love with Colin Bridgerton when he fell off a horse and landed on his bottom in a mud puddle. It was highly irregular, and highly unromantic, but there was a certain poetic justice in that, since nothing was ever going to come of it.
Why waste romance on a love that would never be returned? Better to save the windswept-moor introductions for people who might actually have a future together.
And if there was one thing Penelope knew, even then, at the age of sixteen years minus two days, it was that her future did not feature Colin Bridgerton in the role of husband.
She simply wasn’t the sort of girl who attracted a man like him, and she feared that she never would be.
On the tenth of April, in the year 1813—precisely two days after her seventeenth birthday—Penelope Featherington made her debut into London society. She hadn’t wanted to do it. She begged her mother to let her wait a year. She was at least two stone heavier than she ought to be, and her face still had an awful tendency to develop spots whenever she was nervous, which meant that she always had spots, since nothing in the world could make her as nervous as a London ball.
She tried to remind herself that beauty was only skin deep, but that didn’t offer any helpful excuses when she was berating herself for never knowing what to say to people. There was nothing more depressing than an ugly girl with no personality. And in that first year on the marriage mart, that was exactly what Penelope was. An ugly girl with no—oh, very well, she had to give herself some credit—with very little personality.
Deep inside, she knew who she was, and that person was smart and kind and often even funny, but somehow her personality always got lost somewhere between her heart and her mouth, and she found herself saying the wrong thing or, more often, nothing at all.
To make matters even less attractive, Penelope’s mother refused to allow Penelope to choose her own clothing, and when she wasn’t in the requisite white that most young ladies wore (and which of course didn’t flatter her complexion one bit), she was forced to wear yellow and red and orange, all of which made her look perfectly wretched. The one time Penelope had suggested green, Mrs. Featherington had planted her hands on her more-than-ample hips and declared that green was too melancholy.
Yellow, Mrs. Featherington declared, was a happy color and a happy girl would snare a husband.
Penelope decided then and there that it was best not to try to understand the workings of her mother’s mind.
So Penelope found herself outfitted in yellow and orange and the occasional red, even though such colors made her look decidedly unhappy, and in fact were positively ghastly with her brown eyes and red-tinged hair. There was nothing she could do about it, though, so she decided to grin and bear it, and if she couldn’t manage a grin, at least she wouldn’t cry in public.
Which, she took some pride in noting, she never did.
And if that weren’t enough, 1813 was the year that the mysterious (and fictitious) Lady Whistledown began publishing her thrice-weekly Society