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For as long as she can remember, Penelope Featherington has been quiet.
She remembers sitting in the drawing room with her father when she was just a child, in utter silence, while her mother and her sisters went shopping for clothes, or out to the park, or anywhere they thought Penelope would be a bother with her quiet disposition and observing interest.
She was too quiet to be of note, but too present not to be there, and wasn’t that just the crux of her every issue? Despite her best attempts over the years, she has never mastered nonexistence. Not in the way that books allow her, at least – those people she can observe, unnoticed and unjudged, no disapproving heads turning in her direction if she so much as chuckled. Her books take her in, as an unnoticed participant, letting her be a part of them, watching calmly as her heart shapes the words before her into something she keeps carefully locked within herself. They hurt her sometimes, too, but never in a way that she can’t control by simply putting the book down.
Many of her years have not been kind to Penelope, and so it comes as no surprise that none of them have thought to teach kindness to the people around her, either. Yet some things she has never had the courage to take fall right into her path – such as it is with the Bridgertons. Friendships that pull her away from the silence, even if just for a short time, and a love that comes around to stay. Is it love? Penelope likes to think so. Even if nothing could ever come of it, wasn’t it a wonder? Penelope Featherington in love? She has always been the hopeless romantic, but Penelope Featherington has loved not loving at all, being able to observe the feeling from a careful distance, treating it with careful indifference.
She has loved the silence faithfully, but still she so deeply longs for noise. Not the loud chatter of ballroom halls, not the fireworks, the minuets, the clinking of glasses or the practised giggles. She wants, so hard it aches within her sometimes, the rustle of another body next to hers in the quiet morning hours, she wants the wind in her hair and a whisper along with it – never too much, because when has she ever dared to deserve anything at all? Her birthright is one of distance, one of watching, one of letting the silence take her whole. She was born unassuming, undemanding and quiet – the nursemaids worried for her when she wouldn’t scream and instead merely watched them with big, fearless eyes. Fear was learned, silence came easy, but it sank itself into her blood far too long ago to be parted from her now. There are many things Penelope promised herself long ago, in the uncompanionable company of the night and a thousand quiet stars, to never reach for.
Love, for one. Because even with Eloise or Colin, her dearest friends in the whole world, she is unseen. There are too many things, even as she loves them both fiercely and is loved right back, they will never know about her. Her loneliness is her undoing and a construct of her own careful making. She is a lonely bird in a gilded cage, waiting for the door to open, but staying put with meticulously forged docility when it does. Some things are safer when they are trapped, and she will keep the door to her true self firmly closed, because even just one temptation might be enough to bring her crashing down.
But Penelope is so lonely it aches, so of course she cannot hide away forever. Of course her wings itch to fly, of course the door is opened by careful, familiar hands – and of course she flies, except that the door stays open carefully, and she comes sailing right back in. Because here is the wonderful, most horrible thing: When Penelope slips up and lets her thoughts run free, when she says what she wishes she wasn’t thinking, nobody hears her. Her family, her friends, the ton.
Eloise will listen, sure, but she will not understand. Colin will too, but her words dance a merely little jig around themselves when he is near anyway, so what would be out of the ordinary?
One day, some fortnights after having entered the marriage mart and not having been looked at twice, Penelope conducts an experiment. Multiple experiments, in fact, but all asking one big question: How long would it take someone to notice her? She was born into a shallow grave, but in her life, all she has learned to do is dig. Could she even peer over the earthen edge of the pit?
She bids her mother, her sisters and her father goodnight one evening, and then does not speak another word to them unless directly spoken to. A week goes by, and nobody has noticed a thing.
She stands in a corner at a ball, watching and waiting. Nobody save for Eloise, her mildly mocking sisters and her openly mocking mother speak to her the entire night. She, as she always has, hears the ton talk about each other and themselves. Even about her, on occasion, with no reserve, as though she wasn’t even there. A wallflower would get more attention than this.
She remembers being presented in front of Her Majesty the Queen, and distinctly remembers someone yawning off to where she was walking toward the royal woman and her towering hair. She could hide a circus in that hair and nobody would notice until the lights started flickering, she remembers thinking. She had to stop herself from smiling too gleefully.
She talks to Eloise one evening, and asks her, “Don’t you feel lonely sometimes?” Her friend looks at her in the darker dusk and replies laughingly, “No, never. With a family like mine, I should never hear the end of it!”
Penelope looks up, and she cannot even see the sky above her own head anymore. She is trapped and alone, and it has been so many years since she disappeared that nobody will think to go looking for her.
And of course, as it has always been the case, she is too afraid to shout.
So she does what she does best, and in a scratchy silence, writes down the thoughts she doesn’t trust herself to speak out loud. The only thing that grows in volume is the voice inside her head, when nothing around her is enough to quiet it – so the paper begs to take it in, and she obliges.
It starts therefore, as many things do, in a diary. Penelope discovers a wondersome thing, in those empty, free pages: She may always have had a voice, and simply lacked the means to make herself heard. She never needed a voice as shrill as her mothers or a dress as colourful as Cressida’s or opinions as strong as Eloise’s or love as guiding as Lady Bridgerton’s or rakishness as inappropriate as Anthony Bridgerton's. She just needed an empty page, a printer, and the ability to remain unseen as she shakes society for all it must, at this point, owe her.
If they could talk about her behind their back with not a shred of remorse, if she has listened to them speak ill of her all these years, has she not earned this, if nothing else? Can she not finally, mouth sown shut, frantically reach out with ink-stained fingers, instead?
And perhaps, with all she has learned over the years about the ton and their scrupulous, cruel, haughty ways, this was her most selfish, innate assumption: She truly thought, deep down, that nobody would care what she wrote. She was Penelope Featherington, after all. What did she matter?
But now, she was someone entirely else: She was Lady Whistledown. And wasn’t it something? How suddenly everyone wanted to listen to what she had to say? For as long as she remembers, listening has been easier than talking, and look what it has gotten her. Something unexpected, certainly, but something she holds onto with fierce jealousy, hiding it the way she has hidden everything else up until now – with shocking ease. She keeps going, because what way is there to go but down?
So down, down she goes, with the ship she herself chose to captain. She is almost found out, society does as society will always do, and Colin leaves. It devastates her, and she tells no one.
She does however exchange letters with him, and within them, she thinks she finally sees Colin. She has a taste for irony, and so she certainly lingers on how, in all her haste to make others see her, she has never truly seen Colin, either. How he speaks of the world in expansive wonder and underlines every word, oh so silently, with a hollow note that almost-but-not-quite matches the one she has carried within herself for so long. They never speak of it openly, but they see each other in a way nobody has ever seen either of them, and it has to be enough.
Until he returns, and it turns out he never wanted her. Yet he saves her, so that must mean something, right? But the one person who ever truly tried to see her turned out to be just like the rest of the ton, prone to its whimsy and cruelty, and she ruins Eloise to save her, so everything seems to be leading her back onto her old oft-trodden path that she has always walked alone. It is nothing if not a faithful wayfarer, this loneliness.
Colin sends her letters even when she doesn't respond to any of them, and she reads them all, because she has built strong walls all around herself but has never learned not to be weak within them. Eloise still will not talk to her and instead spends all her time giggling with Cressida at the edges of elaborately decorated ballrooms, and she tries to let it go. She traces her fingers over parchment filled to the brim front and back with that too-familiar handwriting. She handles the letters with soft hands and care she cannot let go of, crying when she lets herself and trying to not let it get to her when Colin comes back and suddenly wants to help her in find a husband.
Because Penelope Featherington, against all odds and expectations, wants a husband. Something has slipped through the cracks in her foundation, and a little beast of want, grappling for anything it can get, has gotten free.
The sardonic voice within her writes all about it in her little paper read by the whole town, and she doesn’t feel like it could possibly be her own hand leading the quill across the paper any longer. She is split in two, and yet she has never been more herself. She wears dresses that make her feel just the smallest bit prettier, and she feels foolish, but she has never been one for letting something remain only halfway finished.
Yet hers and Colin’s plan seems to be working, until she realises that above all else, the one trait that has never let her be is this foolish hope of hers. Perhaps her mother had been right all these years to attempt to dissuade her from reading books of romance and dreaming and love at first sight and ‘til death do us part and joined gravesites. Of declarations, of something she now knows to be real, because Colin Bridgerton looks at her like she hung all the stars in the sky in that carriage. He touches her, softly and reverently, like she was brought here not to be silent, but to bring ruin to him and him alone. Like when she whispers, he hears it magnified, even through the noise of a crowd.
So he asks her to marry him, but she doesn’t feel like she’s hearing the words, not really. She has been the observer, the reader, the writer, but never the protagonist. She has never learned to be anything but there, watching silently.
She has been silent, and cruel, and waiting, and foolishly hopeful, and more lovely than anyone knew what to do with. There is a part of her that is more honest than all the others, maybe only made so by its hiddenness, so it will bring her freedom and leave her a wreck. She is the dragon, hoarding her pile of gold, only waiting to set aflame those who would threaten her. Whoever could tell from outside the corridor to her cave, looking at her shadow and only seeing a girl standing lonely in the corner? She has dared to want, and all she has burned is herself, sitting there with singed limbs that the gold will never soothe.
For as long as she can remember, Penelope Featherington has loved, and it has finally cost her. She gives Colin his answer, and waits for him to see the cruellest and truest part of herself, or for Eloise to tell him about who she really is. It is only a matter of time, but she has loved him too fiercely to be afraid of the fall.
And the ton will surely enjoy Lady Whistledown’s article on the matter, of that she is certain.