Chapter Text
I don't know why I am the way I am
There's something in the static, I think I've been having revelations
Not Strong Enough - boygenius
*
The fight is horrible.
She knew it would be, she knew it was an inevitability. But part of her had convinced herself that the bond she shared with Eloise, their over a decade of close friendship, would overpower Eloise's hurt feelings and sense of betrayal.
That is not what happens. Eloise learns, from what source Penelope isn’t sure, that the infamous gossip blog that posts about London’s high society social climbers and celebrities, is run by none other than her best friend and she goes, what can only be described as, nuclear.
Penelope’s first mistake is trying to reason with her. Of course the person posting about upper class society has to be from the upper class. (The Featherington family is old, if no longer wealthy, and hold onto their place in society by the skin of Portia’s conniving teeth, but still, they have it.) Penelope tries to point out that everything written about the Bridgertons had been largely positive and only situationally negative and Eloise shouts, “What the fuck does situationally negative even mean, Penelope?”
So she switches tactics, moving to apologizing and telling Eloise that she’s right, of course, and has every right to be angry and if they need to take some time to work through things—
“Time?” Eloise says, suddenly quiet instead of shouting which is honestly the scariest part of all. “How about space?”
“Sure,” Penelope says. “Anything.”
“This is my apartment,” Eloise says. “I want you out of it. I want you gone by morning.”
So that’s where she is now. Booking an Airbnb on her phone while she sobs. Packing her essentials while she sobs. Ordering an Uber while she sobs. She writes a long note explaining how sorry she is once more, how a hobby had become her best source of income, how she loves Eloise and loves her family, how she’ll arrange for movers to come clear out the rest of her things.
And then she leaves.
She gets one last text from Eloise early the next morning.
I’m blocking you. My entire family is blocking you. If you need to relay important information about retrieving your things, you may do so through Simon. After you’re completely out of my apartment, Simon will block you. Have a good life.
And that’s it. That’s how Penelope Featherington loses the Bridgertons. Quick, like a blade falling in a guillotine. She is severed from them completely.
***
The first six months are honestly a blur. Because there is no lie strong enough to explain her falling out with one of London’s most high profile families, she tells her sisters the truth. The London Whistler blog belongs to her and every single article on the site, always written under the byline of A Shady Lady, was penned by Penelope. She built the site from scratch, maintained it single handedly for years before the traffic grew so much that she’d had to hire out a company to do the back end stuff.
The site is so popular that now most of her content comes from submissions from people out and about who spotted one of the Royal granddaughters snogging some commoner at a nightclub or juicy celebrity gossip from anonymous production assistants or restaurant servers or any number of regular people who have a chance encounter.
Instead of outing her to their mother, Prudence and Phillipa surprise Penelope by supporting her. It’s the one good thing to come out of her friendship with Eloise and her family turning to ash. Now The London Whistler is run by all three sisters and it’s growing even more. Prudence is the cattiest among them and can write the most acerbic, but most popular articles, focusing mostly on blind items. Phillipa has branched out into fashion review, something that Penelope could have never managed on her own. Penelope reduces her role to a weekly round up of submissions and editing everything her sisters write. The site never talks about the Bridgertons anymore.
She’s working less and making more and she’s absolutely miserable. It’s the most depressed she’s ever been. She hops from long term rental to long term rental, each one a little farther from her old neighborhood. She orders take out, she never leaves her flats. She lives in ratty sweats and buns, trolling the internet for gossip and torturing herself by checking up on the Bridgerton socials. True to Eloise’s word, everyone had blocked her on everything. Too mortified by that, she’d deleted all her own socials and created a finsta, telling herself that she wouldn’t look at them, but she does.
She’d blocked Colin herself, though. She couldn’t bear the thought of his anger, his disappointment, or his pain. He is so protective of his family and she’d hurt them. She deserves the lecture he has for her, no doubt, but she’ll save him the trouble.
And then, at some point, she realizes she can do her job anywhere. She never leaves her rentals anyway and London is expensive. She could simply leave and start over somewhere else and never see another Bridgerton ever again. Never worry about running into one at the flower market or the ice cream parlor or walking along the river. She doesn’t go to any of those places, but that’s because she’s afraid of seeing them. They’d all surgically removed her from their lives like a cancer and she’s still fretting about upsetting them with her presence in a city of over eight million people. It’s madness. Something has to change.
The only answer is to start over somewhere else. She’s tired of not having a place to call her own. She’s tired of paying for rentals and a storage unit. She’s tired of her only contribution to society being gossip.
So nine months after the falling out, she looks at a map of the world and tells herself to pick somewhere. The south of France or the Sydney harbor or America is pretty big. She scans a map of the endless amount of states and thinks, no one would find me in a place called Kentucky.
A quick google search tells her Brexit has complicated her ability to pick up and move to the continent and immigrating to the United States is not easily done. She’s better off going to Northern Ireland or Scotland. She has some relatives still in Northern Ireland from her mother’s side. An aunt and some cousins, at least, but after Portia married into the nobility, she’d not stayed particularly close with that side of her family and so Penelope doesn’t know them well enough to invite herself to their country and burrow herself into their lives.
Anyone who knows her at all will want to know why she decided to leave London and there’s not a good answer. Better to move to somewhere no one knows her. Scotland it is.
At first she’s going to go as north as she can stomach, Aberdeen, perhaps, but as she’s flicking through the Scottish offerings on Airbnb, she sees the world’s most charming looking cottage near Edinburgh is available at a reduced rate, likely because someone had canceled the booking last minute and she snatches it up. It’s small. One bedroom, one bath, a living space and a kitchen. Two weeks in the country will be good for her, she thinks. She’ll have WiFi, so she can work, but no one she knows will be lurking around corners. Every corner of London is haunted and she must get out.
She clears out of her latest flat, tossing everything in her car. She swings by the storage unit and grabs the rest of her clothing, leaving the furniture behind. Maybe Phillipa and Al will want her old stuff or be willing to sell it on her behalf if they can keep the money. She’ll ask them when she’s already in Scotland.
When she arrives, the cottage has a seafoam green door and the place is spotless. She hauls her things inside, collapses onto the bed and has a cry, like she does every time she gets to her latest rental. Then she showers off the sweat and the tears, orders take out from one of the three restaurants available to her in this small village, and settles in for a night of editing and watching Love Island.
It’s ironic, really. All this bouncing around reminds her of Colin and the kind of life he must lead constantly traveling, always in new places, new hotels, or unfamiliar beds. Away from the people who love him the most.
Colin is the one Bridgerton she doesn’t ever check up on. It’s tempting now, to open instagram and type @colinabroad into the search bar, but like always, she doesn’t.
Instead, she reaches over to the nightstand and turns off the lamp.
The village is so quiet, though it’s just after ten o’clock. She hears nothing and the silence settles over her like snow falling in the night. Softly enveloping her and wooing her to sleep.
***
After four days of adjusting to being this removed and remote, she drives the twelve miles into Edinburgh to have a poke around. Her mistake, she thinks, is visiting this city for the first time in October. It’s so relentlessly beautiful and autumnal that all thoughts of moving farther north to Aberdeen disappear. This city is too historic and lovely to ever leave. Edinburgh makes London look like a grimy cesspool. Edinburgh is magic. She takes herself to the National Museum and spends the whole day there, wandering around exhibits and staring at artifacts and pondering the death of Mary Stewart.
She takes herself to the castle the next day, and peers at the crown jewels. It’s the thing to do in Edinburgh, so she does it. After that, she plants herself at a nearby coffee shop and searches for flats. Edinburgh is a little cheaper than London, though not as much as she might have liked. She’d do better to search farther out, like the smaller village she’s staying in. Buy a condo, perhaps, or a small house. The problem is, her only income is from the blog and if she purchases property, she will have to keep on with the blog to afford it.
The Whistler is her baby, in a way, but in another way, it’s the thing that has destroyed her, so obviously her feelings about it are mixed. Does she want to spend her whole life peddling gossip? Making fun of celebrity’s outfits? She’d accidentally broken the news of one celebrity divorce by piecing together several submissions and blind items and then had felt horrible about it, despite the spike in traffic making it so she could give her sister’s bonuses for the holidays.
It’s one thing to talk about a socialite being drunk and rude to the help and quite another to have an actor blast your blog on the Graham Norton show.
Maybe Eloise had been right. A festering though Penelope has often.
She extends her rental for another week and is walking down a small lane just outside the city center when she comes across a little bookstore with a navy blue storefront. It’s called Rare Bird Books and in the window is a small sign that says For sale.
***
Penelope purchases the shop from an octogenarian called Hamish who is finally ready to retire. What seals the deal for her is not the lovely old man alone, but the fact that the shop comes with the flat over it which means purchasing both her own home and a business to bring in income. Hamish is honest about the flagging sales.
“Most people order on their computers these days,” he explains, like perhaps Penelope has been unaware of the internet thus far. (Part of her wishes it was true.) But it doesn’t take long to suss out that Hamish is having trouble managing the stairs to the flat. He’s going to move in with his nephew in Avonbridge where there is only one story.
The bookstore is dark and dusty and the stock is old. But the shop has a large window and plenty of space and she thinks if she can freshen up the space, get some new stock in, and maybe order some other things to sell like stationary supplies or little trinkets good for gifts, her foot traffic will increase.
“How is your website?” she asks.
Of course, there isn’t one.
Hamish stays with her for another month after the purchase goes through. She moves to a rental in town. He’s lived above his shop for decades, so she doesn’t find it right to rush him out. In return, he teaches her how to work the old register, how he’s kept the books, how to place orders, and how to process payroll. She does have a university degree, but it’s in literature so while she feels perfectly qualified to order the books, she’s grateful for the crash course in running a small business.
When Hamish moves out and Penelope moves in, she closes the bookstore for two weeks so she can refresh the space. She takes all the books off the shelves and cleans them, scrubbing the years of dust out of the corners. Then she sands them. Then she paints them all a pale blue. It makes sense to her that a book shop called Rare Bird would have the color scheme of a robin’s egg but it’s only after three long days of back breaking labor that she realizes she painted her shelves Bridgerton blue and bursts into tears.
***
The flat upstairs is another issue entirely. It’s largely untouched by time and, unfortunately, light. The lack of windows and taller building across the street do an effective job of making sure no light ever gets into the four rooms and she quickly realizes that if she’s going to survive here after growing up in Mayfair, living with a posh Bridgerton, and bopping around between several newly renovated rentals, she’s going to have to give as much love to the flat as to the shop.
It’s all starting to feel overwhelming. Phillipa calls her and says, “You know we haven’t seen you in a while.”
She wondered how long it was going to take them to notice. It’s not like they spent a great deal of time together anyway, but her response times have changed too. She’s not constantly staring at her phone or laptop these days.
“Yeah,” Penelope says, tucking her phone against her ear and looking down at the old carpet, wondering if there were wooden floors underneath. “I moved to Scotland.”
“What?” Phillipa asks, her tone piercing. “When? Why?”
“Like almost two months ago,” Penelope says. “I was tired of paying London prices.”
“You can’t just move to Scotland without telling anyone. Who did you move with?”
“Who… Who did I move with? No one, Pip. I moved with me.” Penelope looks at her phone in exasperation. What a stupid thing to ask.
“Mum asked about you the other day,” Phillipa says. “Am I supposed to tell her to call you via Scotland?”
Penelope hasn’t seen her mother in a year and hasn’t spoken to her in nearly that long. Portia made some snide comment about the number of chins Penelope had and it was no worse than any of her snide comments but for some reason became the straw that broke her back. Penelope went low-contact and then, after a particularly frustrating phone conversation where Portia was convinced that she was the victim, no-contact.
“I would prefer you not tell anyone I moved to Scotland, least of all Portia.” Penelope did a lot of research about adult children going no contact before she’d pulled the trigger and someone commented on one of the articles that calling their parent by their given name helped them. Penelope does find it helpful, actually.
“Not even Prudence?”
“She won’t care,” Penelope says. “But she will tell Portia, so maybe just try to avoid the subject.”
“What about The Whistler?” Phillipa asks, sounding worried. Prudence stopped working once she got married, but Penelope knows that Phillipa still has her job at the nursery school. The extra income really helps her make ends meet.
“Nothing has to change,” Penelope reassures her. “I can work from anywhere. Besides, you and Prudence do eighty percent of the work now anyhow.”
“Good,” Phillipa says, sounding relieved. “Well, I mean… Good luck in Scotland?”
Penelope pries up the corner of the carpet and releases a cloud of dust into her own face. She’s going to need good luck.
***
The first few months are lonely and they’re slow. Even with the shop open, there’s so little foot traffic that she can continue to work on the interior. She tries to focus mostly on keeping the front window looking inviting, but it takes time for the new books to come in, so mostly she focuses on hanging up inviting lights to brighten the space, bringing in some plants, some new tables, and packing up some of the old books to either send off to a charity or simply recycling some of the more hopeless ones, yellowed and brittle with age.
It doesn’t take her long to ditch the old register and replace it with something smaller, sleeker, and half the size. It also knows about credit cards, so once she figures out how to get that all in working order, she declares the empty shop now part of the twenty-first century.
The only hope she has for foot traffic is thanks to the family run cafe next door. The daughter, Saanvi, does the daily managing of the shop and she and Penelope have become almost friendly. The smell of her chai had finally lured Penelope in and now she stops by most days to get one. Saanvi’s parents, however, are old. They haven’t been here as long as Hamish was but it was still a long stretch and Saanvi confesses that they have been thinking about selling as well.
For the first time, Penelope starts to worry that she’s made a mistake and taken on more than she can handle. If the coffee shop, which is easily seen from the corner, isn’t there to pull people down the little lane, her foot traffic could quickly fall from slim to none. And while she has the blog to generate income, she’d dumped most of her savings into this new life plan. She needs it to be at least a little successful.
Her new project quickly becomes the website for the shop. She’d thrown together something rudimentary while she was still training with Hamish, mostly to secure a URL and have the basics listed: shop hours, phone number, and street address. Now, she has to quickly figure out ecommerce. She stops purging the collection and instead starts putting the really old things up on the site for sale. Not the yellowed paperbacks, mass market and badly produced, but the things with the leather spine that smell like her grandfather’s study.
She creates an instagram for the shop, and then figures any social platform is more exposure than she’s getting now, and creates accounts everywhere she can think of.
Once her new stock of books starts coming in regularly, and her stationary supplies, the shop picks up a little. She hires a local artist to decorate her front window and that helps too. She posts once a day on at least two socials, and by the time she finishes her sixth month of book shop ownership, she turns a very small profit.
She’s exhausted, and a little lonely, but mostly happy and proud of herself. There was a day this week where she didn’t think about the name Bridgerton once. That feels like the hardest won victory of all.
***
Two years after her fight with Eloise, something she thinks of distantly as the event whenever it flits across her mind, Penelope comes downstairs to the shop around eleven. They’ve been open for two hours already, but Penelope’s lone employee, a woman in her early sixties called Mrs. Cameron, opens most mornings and Penelope takes over after lunch. For a long time she did the whole shift six days a week, closing only on Mondays for life maintenance, but she’d quickly realized that it was no kind of life. Once she’d earned enough to hire a part-time employee, she had.
Deirdre Cameron was a great choice. She’s no nonsense, but warm, practical and reliable in the way only maternal older women can be. She reminds Penelope of Violet a tiny bit, though not so much that it stings to look at Mrs. Cameron.
“Morning,” Penelope greets softly, her hair still damp from her shower. There are three customers in the store, which is always a reassuring first sight to see.
“Morning,” Mrs. Cameron says.
Penelope is dressed down today in denim and a loose-fitting button down shirt. It’s old and already splattered with paint. She’s going to pull down the spring display from the window and put up something a little more summery. Summer is not her favorite season in Edinburgh. She misses those long weeks of summers in Kent, warm and floating in a lake. Edinburgh tends to get stuffy, but never so warm she’d want to don a swimming costume outside. Still, summer is one step closer to autumn, which is her favorite time of year.
But before she gets into all of that, she says, “Would you like something from next door?”
“No thanks,” Mrs. Cameron says, gesturing to a mug of tea she has near her at the counter. Sometimes Penelope will come back with a couple pastries for them, so she’ll see what Saanvi has left in the case this late in the morning.
She takes a deep breath of air and walks a few steps to the next door, about to pull the handle when she sees him.
Sitting at a small round table on the far side of the shop. There’s no mistake. She’d know him anywhere. Those wavy brown locks and that perfect, breathtaking profile. He’d been the love of her life at one point, even if he’d been completely unaware of the fact.
Colin Bridgerton.
She lets go of the handle and turns, her hand in front of her face so she can bolt back to her own shop.
“What happened?” Mrs. Cameron asks. “You only just left!”
“I remembered I have coffee at home!” she calls as she bolts up the stairs.
Of all the coffee shops in all the cities in all the countries in all the world, why is any Bridgerton, let alone that one, here?
It’s a coincidence, it has to be. Because if it isn’t, it would mean Colin is looking for her and there’s simply no reason that would ever happen.
She’ll simply hide up here for an hour or so until she has to relieve Mrs. Cameron and by that time Colin will be gone and he’ll never even know she was here.