Chapter Text
Like many things he endured as a Bridgerton, Anthony mused as he turned off his phone, this could conceivably be considered all Colin’s fault.
It was part of a list that included a collection of tacky souvenir shot glasses Colin carted back from outposts around the world to torment Anthony with, along with the extreme aversion he’d developed to clam chowder, after succumbing to the worst food poisoning he’d ever suffered from a night out with Colin somewhere in Maine. There was also the time he ran out of gas on the highway because Colin forgot to refill his tank after borrowing his car, and the scar on his left elbow from a bout of chickenpox Colin had passed on to him and Benedict when they were children.
Then again, Anthony was forced to admit as he looked around at the blur of camera people, bright lights, and glittering mansion behind him, Colin would retort that Anthony was the one to take him up on this hare-brained suggestion, and that he couldn’t deny.
“I can take that for you,” a crew member said at his elbow, hand out for his cell, and Anthony had to take several gulping breaths until his panic subsided before releasing it into her grasp.
In the past fourteen years, he'd never had his phone off for more than a few minutes, not even in a movie theater. Even when he’d gone out for the night, notifications silenced, he checked his phone obsessively, ever alert to the possibility of an emergency, a sibling in need. More than one woman had called him rude or stormed off in a huff at his continual habit of glancing at his phone, but there were always other women, and he had little patience for anyone who expected more from him. The women he sought out were an escape from expectations, after all; he hardly needed new ones to drown under.
Which, he supposed, were exactly the desperate times that brought him to these specific measures in the first place.
And perhaps the most fair place to lay blame was not at Colin’s feet, but his own mother’s.
For years, Violet Bridgerton had disapproved of his dating life, as she delicately put it. (“His sex life, you mean,” Benedict liked to correct her, grinning.) She frowned over every mention of a late night out, made thinly veiled comments about how he was getting too old for such a lifestyle, and once she found a lacy thong lost beneath the front seat of his car and gave him such a look of disgust that he felt smaller than his youngest sister Hyacinth. Yet all of that had been manageable. But ever since Daphne announced her engagement, his mother had turned the full force of her focus on him, and between begging him to go on blind dates with her friends’ daughters, lamenting about the poor influence he was on the rest of his siblings, and expounding on the joys to be found through true love and partnership, he’d gradually been worn down.
She always knew exactly what buttons to push. And, as with everything else he had done for his family, he swallowed and agreed.
Yes, he promised her, he would take dating seriously. Yes, he would set a good example for the rest of his sisters and brothers. Yes, he would plan to settle down. To himself, he vowed to find a suitable partner, someone tolerable and pleasing to look at, and then no one could say he hadn’t done his duty.
And, he’d thought, it really should have been that simple.
After all, Anthony had no problem meeting women or getting their numbers. He dated women constantly, and he was exceptional at getting them to take him home with them. When the pressures of his life, the relentlessness of his duties, would not let up, he found some small measure of release in being someone else—the handsome stranger, the one night stand, the best fuck of someone’s life who’d never call. It didn’t mean he particularly liked who he was, with the women he slept with. But it kept his head above water.
And then Daphne had married Anthony's best friend Simon on a balmy July afternoon, and at the reception, his mother had turned to him with a particular glint in her eye. He was already hungover from the night before, worn down from spending all day managing Hyacinth's and Gregory's bickering, and still smarting from the barb his latest several-night-stand had thrown at him when he tried to break it off—you have no idea how to love someone, Anthony, and you’re going to die alone. Simply put, he was in no mood for her meddling, but he was also exhausted.
“Don’t you think it’s about time you settled down too?” Violet had said, taking a pointed sip of her drink and looking to where Simon was twirling Daphne on the dance floor.
Everyone dies alone, he’d responded to the girl, cruel and clipped, before excusing himself from her apartment for good.
To his mother, he’d said wearily, “All right, Mum, yes.”
He didn't promise to find love. In fact, he was determined to take love out of the equation entirely. He'd seen what had happened to his mother—what had happened to his whole family—after his father died unexpectedly. He knew firsthand that love was a cyclone, that no matter the highs, it would only leave chaos in its wake, everything in its path twisted, broken, forever changed. He'd known from the moment he stood over his father's casket, eyes stinging with unshed tears, that he couldn't be the cause of such pain in anyone else.
So he would be sensible. He didn't need to find love, just a wife. How hard could that be?
It was proving impossible.
“I'm not asking for much,” Anthony complained to anyone who would listen. (Most frequently, it was Benedict, if only because he paid for his drinks.) He had what he believed to be a reasonable checklist: someone intelligent, decent to look at, with no exceptionally annoying tics. Ideally, he would find someone who could hold a conversation with him, live her life independently, and not be miserable if he didn't love her.
And yet, as summer wound into autumn and then into the first snowfalls, for all the eligible women Anthony met and took to dinner and sent flowers to and behaved like a perfect gentleman with, he found every one of them wanting.
Which brought him, defeated, to the dwindling afterparty of Simon and Daphne’s New Year's bash, watching Colin beat Benedict at cards and staring at the last sip of scotch in his glass.
“Explain it again,” Benedict said, nursing his own near-empty glass. And even though Benedict was clearly just amusing himself at Anthony’s expense, Anthony repeated,
“I need a wife.”
“So get a wife,” Colin had put in boredly, still focused on reshuffling the deck. “Don’t they do that by mail now?”
Anthony scowled. “Be serious. Whoever I marry will become a Bridgerton. Basically your sister—”
“We've got plenty of sisters already,” shrugged Benedict, tipping his chair onto its back two legs.
“You don’t understand, Ben,” Colin tsk-ed, nose in the air, clearly mocking him. “Anthony is the firstborn son of a firstborn son of a firstborn son, et cetera, ad nauseum, back to merry old England. Only perfection will do.”
“Someone with impeccable etiquette, I suppose,” Benedict jumped in.
“—exquisite taste—”
“—witty, but not too witty—”
“—can’t have her outdoing Anthony, after all—”
“Will the both of you shut up,” Anthony had said scathingly, emptying his glass at last. “And I'm not looking for perfection. Just someone tolerable. Moderately attractive. Ready to settle down. Someone our family won't scare away, and someone I can stand to be in the same room as for longer than two hours.”
“Are you having a midlife crisis?” Benedict inquired. “Maybe a stroke? When the clock hit midnight, did we regress all the way back to last century?”
“I'm simply accepting my—”
“Nineteenth century, I’d say,” Colin interrupted, as if Anthony had never spoken. He added, as he liked to call Anthony when he thought he was being particularly pompous, “Lord Bridgerton.”
“Mum's convinced it’s time I settle down.” Anthony frowned at both of them. “And I wouldn’t get too comfortable, because I’m sure you’re both next.”
“You know she only meddles because she ‘wants to see us happy,’” Colin said, in a passable imitation of their mother at her most affectionately annoyed, in the midst of one of her favorite lectures. He added, leaning into the performance, “Now then, is it such a crime to want your children to be happy?”
“There you have it, straight from the woman herself,” Benedict said, finally dropping his chair back onto all four legs and reaching for more scotch. “Go on, let Mum set you up.”
Anthony grimaced. “The last date she sent me on was with someone who openly admitted the last book she’d read was The Great Gatsby. In high school.”
“Like you read.”
“That's beside the point. Either way, her setups aren't a good idea.”
“You mean you’ve already rejected the daughters of everyone she knows.”
“Ever so picky, our Ant,” Colin snickered.
“I don’t see either of you getting married.”
“Married to my art,” Benedict said quickly.
“Married to my travels,” Colin chimed in.
Anthony eyed them. “You’re lucky you’re not firstborn sons.”
Colin groaned. “Not this again.”
Benedict had also rolled his eyes, adding, “Why does it matter, Ant? I know Mum’s always on about finding love and what she had with Dad, but there’s not some ridiculous family line at stake. And besides, Daff said at dinner that she and Simon are trying to get pregnant.”
“She’s a Basset.”
“Bridgerton-Basset," Benedict corrected. "Besides, she’ll always be a Bridgerton, isn’t that what you always say? And she’d tell you to stop being so old-fashioned.”
“I don't expect you to understand.”
“It’s too much for our puny second and third son brains to cope with, Ben,” said Colin.
“Ah, yes, thank god for Anthony, for saving us from such a dreadful fate.”
“Neither of us could bear such weighty responsibility—”
“Otherwise,” added Benedict, “we too would develop that bulging vein in our foreheads—”
Anthony rubbed at the aforementioned vein with a sigh.
He knew they had no idea what it had been like, when their mother was so lost to grief she could hardly look up from her breakfast and Colin was whining about unsigned permission slips and Hyacinth was screaming in his arms and Eloise and Daphne were at each other’s throats over a borrowed sweater or something else inconsequential. How the year he’d deferred college was a blur of untangling bank account statements and his father's will; attempting to interpret the Bridgerton Holdings shareholder reports that now came addressed to him; and changing diapers in between carting his siblings to and from various after school activities, grief counseling appointments, and friend's houses; only for him to then lie awake late into the night replaying whatever outraged howl had come from at least one of them that day: Leave me alone! You aren’t my father!
Benedict was the only one who had some idea of what Anthony had borne for them, but Anthony had tried to protect him from the worst of it. After all, at least one of them should get to simply be an older brother, a son to their mother, and it couldn't be Anthony.
Daphne understood in her own way. When their mother could scarcely leave her bed, Daphne had been the one to help him dress and bathe and shop for the girls and Gregory. She'd taught him how to separate lights and darks in the laundry and rescued him when he first tried to make a cake for Eloise's and Frannie's birthday and nearly set the kitchen on fire. But even she knew little about the weight of the financial decisions that haunted him, as he tried to make sense of his father's investments, the amounts he should put in trust, whether they should sell the summer house now that they'd lost Edmund’s income, and on and on and on.
No, keeping the family afloat had always been his burden to hold, and with that came the twin responsibility of hiding the true weight of it from the rest of them. It was intentional, so he didn't interrupt their mocking, and said only,
“To get back to the point, do either of you have a useful suggestion for who I can marry? Quickly?”
Benedict paused to think, then began, “I might have a friend who—”
“Quickly,” Anthony emphasized. “If she isn’t right, by the time I start over, months will have passed.”
Benedict was staring at him with an amused sort of horror. “I’m sorry, is the act of finding love not efficient and logical enough for you?”
“I’m not looking for love,” Anthony said impatiently. “Simply someone to marry.”
“Ah,” said Benedict. “A clear distinction.”
And then—
“I know,” Colin said, snapping his fingers and pointing at Anthony. “We should host a competition! You can have them all compete for your love and affection, and choose the best one. Like a beauty pageant or something.”
Benedict saw the look on Anthony’s face and said, warningly, "Colin, isn’t that a bit—"
“Or, no,” Colin continued, slow grin overtaking his face, “hang on. That already exists.”
“Col—”
"Anthony," said Colin, undeterred, “you should just become the next Bachelor.”
Anthony turned to him, brow furrowed, and said, “Tell me more.”
And now, nine months later, here he was, standing on set in the fading Malibu sunset as crew members hosed down the driveway and a PA scurried away with his phone.
He'd been assured that the initial pool of applicants had numbered in the thousands, and that the process to narrow that down to the final thirty had been a rigorous one. More importantly, even Eloise—who had berated him for months on how sexist the franchise was, yet seemed to know a frightening amount about it—promised him that most contestants who arrived on the show weren't there looking for love, no matter what they said on camera, so there was little risk of him leading anyone on. It would be a transaction for both of them, a decision made without any interfering emotions, a partnership that would yield mutual benefits and a pleasant enough existence for his remaining years.
This plan was going to work.
He’d given the list of contestants a quick perusal, enough to know the roster seemed promising. The producers had their own short list, atop which was Edwina Sharma, 22, from Somerset, MA. She was astonishingly pretty, perhaps a bit young for him, but supposedly mature for her age. Provided she was as perfect in person as she appeared on paper, she’d do nicely. And if not her, there would be someone else.
He'd timed it out, after all. Filming would take two months, and then there would be a handful more waiting for episodes to air. All told, he could be married by his thirty-fourth birthday. He would do his duty, set an example for his siblings, try to live up to his mother's exasperated expectations, and avoid causing any undue heartbreak.
And then—because he couldn't fathom outdoing Edmund Bridgerton in anything, even in years lived—Anthony imagined he could die at peace.