to London anymore, preferring the quiet of the country. As for Colin—well, that was another story entirely, quite worthy of its own paragraph.
She supposed she should have talked to Daphne, but every time she went to see her, her elder sister was so bloody happy, so blissfully in love with her husband and her life as mother to her brood of four. How could someone like that possibly offer useful advice to one in Eloise’s position? And Francesca seemed half a world away, off in Scotland. Besides, Eloise didn’t think it fair to bother her with her silly woes. Francesca had been widowed at the age of twenty-three, for heaven’s sake. Eloise’s fears and worries seemed terribly inconsequential by comparison.
And maybe all this was why her correspondence with Sir Phillip had become such a guilty pleasure. The Bridgertons were a large family, loud and boisterous. It was nearly impossible to keep anything a secret, especially from her sisters, the youngest of whom—Hyacinth—could probably have won the war against Napoleon in half the time if His Majesty had only thought to draft her into the espionage service.
Sir Phillip was, in his own strange way, hers. The one thing she’d never had to share with anyone. His letters were bundled and tied with a purple ribbon, hidden at the bottom of her middle desk drawer, tucked underneath the piles of stationery she used for her many letters.
He was her secret. Hers.
And because she’d never actually met him, she’d been able to create him in her mind, using his letters as the bones and then fleshing him out as she saw fit. If ever there was a perfect man, surely it had to be the Sir Phillip Crane of her imagination.
And now he wanted to meet? Meet? Was he mad? And ruin what had to be the perfect courtship?
But then the impossible had occurred. Penelope Featherington, Eloise’s closest friend for nearly a dozen years, had married. And what’s more, she’d married Colin. Eloise’s brother!
If the moon had suddenly dropped from the sky and landed in her back garden, Eloise could not have been more surprised.
Eloise was happy for Penelope. Truly, she was. And she was happy for Colin, too. They were quite possibly her two most favorite people in the entire world, and she was thrilled that they had found happiness. No one deserved it more.
But that didn’t mean that their marriage hadn’t left a hollow spot in her life.
She supposed that when she’d been considering her life as a spinster, and trying to convince herself that it was what she really wanted, Penelope had always been there in the image, spinster right beside her. It was acceptable—almost daring, even—to be twenty-eight and unmarried as long as Penelope was twenty-eight and unmarried, as well. It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted Penelope to find a husband; it was just that it had never seemed even the least bit likely. Eloise knew that Penelope was wonderful and kind and smart and witty, but the gentlemen of the ton had never seemed to notice. In all her years in society—eleven in all—Penelope had not received one proposal of marriage. Nor even a whiff of interest.
In a way, Eloise had counted on her to remain where she was, what she was—first and foremost, Eloise’s friend. Her companion in spinsterhood.
And the worst part—the part that left Eloise wracked with guilt—was that she’d never given a thought to how Penelope might feel if she married first, which, in truth, she’d always supposed she would do.
But now Penelope had Colin, and Eloise could see that the match was a splendid thing. And she was alone. Alone in the middle of crowded London, in the middle of a large and loving family.
It was hard to imagine a lonelier spot.
Suddenly Sir Phillip’s bold proposal—tucked away at the very bottom of her bundle, at the bottom of the middle drawer, locked away in a newly purchased safebox, just so that Eloise wouldn’t be tempted to look at it six times a day—well, it seemed a bit more intriguing.
More intriguing by the day, frankly, as she grew more and more restless, more dissatisfied with the lot in life that she had to admit she’d chosen.
And so one day, after she’d gone to visit Penelope, only to be informed by the butler that Mr. and Mrs. Bridgerton were not able to receive visitors (uttered in such a way that even Eloise knew what it meant), she made a decision. It was time to take her