Chapter Text
In the good they'll never know
It can see us through these dark days
Though they seem to darken as we go
Dark Days - Punch Brothers
*
The same day she gets her period is the first time she also sees red. At least, that's the first time she can remember it happening. It's a Friday, so she's sleeping over at Bridgerton House with Eloise. She's not sure when she fell into it being a weekly thing, but she's awfully glad that it has because it's the one evening of reprieve she gets a week from her mum and sisters. Her dad is out of town more often than not these days and he's really no help or hindrance to her. At best he’s a neutral, silent observer. Her mum runs the show and they all know it.
But on Fridays, she comes home with Eloise and isn't expected to leave until after breakfast on Saturday. Each week, she counts down the days until Friday rolls around again, pathetically, desperate for the warmth of Eloise and her family.
She’s almost thirteen now, but Penelope has always been a late bloomer. Her mum holds out hope that she might shoot up a few more inches, to be tall like Prudence or shed her baby weight like Phillipa has done, but so far, she remains short and round. The only thing her mum ever compliments is her bust size.
She's been lying to Eloise for at least five months about the arrival of her period, too embarrassed to admit she hasn't gotten it yet when Eloise got hers in her last month of being eleven. Now, they get home from school and change and Penelope finds the gusset of her pants are damp and brown and her boobs hurt and actually, she does feel kind of off and weird, hovering at the edge of tears.
A glance around the downstairs guest loo proves fruitless so she wads up some toilet roll and uses that as a barrier between her already ruined underwear and herself.
Violet always makes an afterschool snack for everyone. Because there are so many Bridgertons, it’s a bit of an ordeal, so Penelope doesn’t feel like she can ask Violet for any favors or supplies. Instead she sits quietly, hopeful that toilet roll will tide her over until such time she can make excuses and return home to confess this milestone to her own mother at the expense of her night away. Penelope knows how it will go. Portia will be terse, annoyed that Penelope is late to yet another thing. Portia will expect her to know what to do because she’s grown up with sisters, like either of them have ever given Penelope the time of day outside of teasing her. And then Penelope will stay up late and sneak downstairs onto the computer, searching for answers on the internet, figuring out how to solve things herself like always.
“Penelope, dearest,” Violet says. “Can you help me in the other room?”
Most of the Bridgertons stop and glance between Violet and Penelope. Usually, Violet barks orders at her older boys. Or Daphne, who is her mother’s shadow and second-in-command. Or Eloise, when she’s being too loud and Violet wants to redirect her energies. Penelope usually slips under the radar, or is expected to go along with whatever Eloise has been asked to do. She can’t remember the last time Violet singled her out for anything. Her birthday, perhaps. She glances around. Anthony and Colin are both not home yet from their respective sports practices and Benedict has his nose in a book. Maybe his mother didn’t want to interrupt such a rare occurrence.
“Sure,” Penelope says, slipping out of her seat and following Violet out of the dining room and into the kitchen. There’s a swinging door that separates the rooms and Violet lets it fall closed. Instead of giving Penelope an order, she leans against the counter and reaches out her hand to press against Penelope’s forehead. Violet’s touch is so gentle and cool it’s hard not to lean into it.
“Are you feeling alright?”
Penelope could have completed a chore easily enough. She could have even managed a scolding. But the kindness Violet shows, paired with the fact that she’d actually noticed Penelope, is too much and she starts to cry, blubbering out the truth quickly.
“Oh, you poor thing. Come with me,” she says and leads her up the back staircase to the bathroom nearest to Daphne’s room. She takes the time to explain the different options, leaving her with a pad and a tablet of paracetamol and waits for her in the hall to walk her back downstairs.
When they return to the dining room, Anthony and Colin have arrived home and Penelope gets this strange flash in her vision, like a bright light that briefly saturates the room. It’s disorienting for a moment and when her vision restores itself, the color red is different. It’s more, somehow. Deeper, lusher, redder. Can a color be more of itself? She’d never found it to be lacking before, but now, in comparison, how she remembers it seems a pale copy of what she looks at now. A bowl of apples in the middle of the table, a man’s jacket in a painting on the wall, and Colin’s football jersey.
Colin is looking at her and his head tilts.
“Are you okay?” Violet asks her.
“Just a little dizzy, I’m fine,” she says, slipping back into her seat. Two chairs over from her, Colin leans across Anthony.
“Did you change your hair?” he asks. Anthony shoves him back but Colin has gotten taller and stronger and holds his eldest brother off with a firm arm while he waits for her answer.
“Just washed it,” she says, embarrassed. She can feel his eyes on her, but she won’t meet them, afraid of his glowing shirt. Finally, Anthony breaks free.
“Get off me, you nit,” he grumbles. “You stink.”
“You stink!” Colin says and then there’s a shoving match and Penelope is able to escape notice once more, staring at the bowl of gleaming red apples until Eloise, finished with her snack, invites her upstairs to play.
***
Penelope figures, upon waking and finding that reds are still saturated, that it’s simply part of becoming a woman. A secret part she’s never heard mentioned before. She could ask Eloise, she knows, but then her carefully guarded secret of faking her period might spill out into the open and it’s too embarrassing to consider. She has to use Daphne’s bathroom again, timing it when Eloise uses the one she shares with Francesca, pretending like she can’t wait, just so she can change her pad without notice.
Actually, she likes having a little secret, she finds. She doesn’t like lying. She didn’t feel good about the fib she told Eloise, but now that she is bleeding, it doesn’t feel like a lie any longer, just a stoic withholding. She’s on her period and Eloise doesn’t even know. The brown gusset of her pants has bloomed into bright red blood against the white pad and she stares at it for too long, fascinated before realizing what she’s actually looking at and grossing herself out. She sees in the mirror that her own hair does look lusher, burnished auburn instead of the plain orange ginger she’s used to seeing.
In the morning, she eats her breakfast quickly. This time Colin sits across from her, nursing a mug of tea while he waits for his waffle. Penelope skips the waffle, though they do smell divine, opting for fruit and toast instead. Her stomach still hurts and she wants to go home, surprisingly, and tuck herself into bed for the rest of the day, doing her homework and reading her book from the library.
When she looks up, Colin is still watching her.
“What?” she asks, finally, worried she’s got something on her face. Creases from the pillow or sticky fruit juice.
“You just seem different, that’s all,” Colin says.
His mother deposits a waffle in front of him and says, “Leave her alone.” And then she winks at Penelope, like they’re in on a little secret, which she supposes they are.
When she goes home, the deep lucious reds start to fade a little, and by Monday morning, she’s buttoning up her school shirt and decides that things look surprisingly drab indeed. Maybe it’s not her tipping into womanhood that made reds redder. Maybe it’s simply the Bridgertons. Maybe the world really is brighter and more beautiful for them and Penelope has finally hung around long enough that it’s started to penetrate into her as well.
Or maybe, she just had a migraine. Maybe as the blood seeped from her body, the red had to show up somewhere else brighter and now that the blood is slowing, the world is sighing back into everyday life.
At school, when they go to the library to return their books and get new ones for the week, she chooses quickly, already knowing what she wants and finding it on the shelf with a practiced ease. Once it’s checked out, she asks the librarian if she can use the computer to do a search.
“I’m sorry, your teacher said no computers today,” the librarian says. “But if you have a query, I can help you do a search.”
“Um,” Penelope says, considering this. At home, she and her sisters share a computer and Penelope almost never gets to use it unless she’s typing up homework or doing a project and then she has to sit in the kitchen where her mother can keep a watchful eye on her. The school library is her best bet. “Okay.”
“Okay,” the librarian says with a smile. “What would you like to know?”
“I’d like to know about the color red,” Penelope says.
The librarian wears thick glasses and has dark black hair, as straight as Penelope’s is curly. The glasses make her expression hard to decipher. “Red,” she says. “Do you mean paint? Or color theory?”
“Colors have a theory?” Penelope asks.
“Sure. It’s about how colors interact with one another and how people perceive them,” she says, typing something into her computer. “I’m afraid our collection isn’t really meant for that kind of question. You might be better off going to the public library.”
There is an absolute zero chance of that happening. Her mother will never agree to such an outing and her father hasn’t taken her anywhere in years besides school, and then only occasionally.
“Um, okay,” Penelope says.
“What about the color red specifically interests you?”
“I guess it’s about how people see it. Like, um, if I see red and then you see red but it’s not the same?”
The librarian laughs, though it’s amusement, not derision. Penelope has long learned the difference. “I think that’s a question most people think about at one point or another. We can’t know for sure, but we know we see colors as a result of how our eyes perceive light. Each color sits at a different frequency of light, see?” She turns her monitor to show Penelope an illustrated image of light reflecting through a prism and coming out a rainbow. She knows this. She’s learned about this in science before.
“Right,” she says, trying not to feel impatient. It’s not her fault she’s not communicating to the librarian what she really wants to know. “I guess what I want to know is if sometimes a person can see red a certain way and then that same person sees it differently.”
The librarian’s brow furrows. “Can a person see red differently than they used to?”
Penelope nods.
“That’s an interesting question, Penelope,” she says. “I don’t know the answer!”
“Oh.” She’s a little disappointed. And a little bit surprised. Grown-ups don’t usually admit when they don’t know something, in Penelope’s experience.
“But I’ll tell you what. Let me do a little research on the subject and when I see you next week, I’ll let you know what I find.”
Penelope nods. “Yeah, okay! Thanks!”
***
She gets yellow next. She and Eloise are in the garden, chased out of the house by a row between Anthony and Benedict. They’re supposed to be watching all the kids together, a united front, while Violet volunteers at the women’s shelter as she does once a week. But according to Eloise, Ant and Ben have been fighting all week, so the older kids who don’t need supervision flee outside. Perhaps it’s not right to leave Greg and Hy alone in the house with the yelling, but Penelope has trained herself to follow Eloise’s lead lest she lose her access to the Bridgertons all together.
Anyway, Francesca sits on the back stoop, her nose in her book and Eloise and Penelope run around the garden, shaking off nervous energy until Penelope stops abruptly, looking at a spray of yellow flowers.
They’re so bright. Yellower, surely, than any flower she’s ever seen. There’s a fat bee buzzing around the sunny blooms, droning softly as it gathers pollen on its legs. Even the pollen seems to glow.
A ball rolls by her. Colin emerges from near the fence where there’s the most land for him to kick a ball into a net. He’s looking at the flowers too and says, “I knew you were here.”
“What?” she asks, looking him over. He’s in his football kit again, forever going to or coming from some practice or game, it seems. Eloise told her once that their dad had joked that he’d had so many boys to increase the chances of one of them becoming a professional football player and apparently it’s Colin who has taken this to heart. He is very good, actually. Penelope tags along to his games sometimes. He’s fast but swift, dexterous on his feet and skilled when maneuvering the ball. Maybe he can go professional. People do. It’s a big dream, but not an impossible one. Nothing is impossible for a Bridgerton.
Anyway, his shirt is so red that she thinks it might start dripping color and the flowers are so yellow she wants to squint and he’s talking to her again.
“It’s like… It’s like when a cloud moves away from the sun,” he says. “That’s what it feels like when you’re here.”
It’s a sweet thing to say but on some level she knows it’s not a metaphor and so she does not allow herself to be swept away by the words. Colin is her best friend’s older brother and she has no illusions that he sees her as anything other than his sister’s chubby friend because that’s what she is. He’s her favorite male Bridgerton, though. That’s a secret she carries, one that never tries to spill out. Anthony is nice enough to her, but has no sense of humor and is always brooding around. Benedict is nearly too light-hearted, his silly nature and constant joke flinging feeling more like he’s trying to shield himself against anyone really getting to know him. And Gregory is just a little boy, too young for Penelope to really think about.
But Colin is sweet. Colin is the most handsome. He’s quiet, but not brooding. Funny, but not off-putting. Tall and lithe.
“You mean the colors?” she asks. This is, apparently, the right thing to say because his expression changes to one of surprise and relief.
“Yeah!” he says. “They change, right?”
“Sometimes,” she says, frowning. “Not all the time. They go back and forth.”
“Penelope,” he says. “It only happens to me when you come over.”
She feels a little foolish once he says it. She’d known it only happened to her when she came over to the Bridgertons but she’d ascribed it to the house or to the family in general, but then again, sometimes she came over and it didn’t happen and she could never figure out why.
But it’s not the Bridgertons. It’s just Colin.
“Just red,” she admits softly, like it’s her deepest secret. “And yellow, now.”
Eloise has been talking to Francesca over at the backdoor but she’s hurrying over to them.
“What does it mean?” he asks, a low whisper.
She shakes her head. “I dunno.”
And then Eloise grabs her hand and pulls her away and she allows it, watching Colin’s face shutter back down again as they’re pulled apart. He picks up his ball and kicks it against the fence. She returns inside.
***
At the school library, the librarian presents her with a book on color theory and art, borrowed from the public library under the librarian’s own card.
“I trust you,” she tells Penelope. “You return your books every week without fail and I trust that you’ll do the same with this one.”
It’s a large book, heavy with glossy pages bursting with color. She struggles to get it into her bag, but it fits, though by the end of the day, her shoulder aches from lugging it around. At home, she looks first at the table of contents and then the index. There’s a chapter on the phenomenon of color that could be interesting and another on discord and dissonance, which are two words she has to look up in her dictionary (disagreement and tension) which doesn’t seem quite right because what she experiences (according to the book, saturation) is pleasant.
Before hunkering down to read a whole chapter of a book meant for grown-ups that isn’t even a made up story, which she prefers, she looks through the index in the back. The word phenomenon jumps out at her again and also the term physiological effects but when she flips to that page, it’s all about emotional reactions and that’s not what happened to her. Unless confused is the emotion they are talking about.
Back to the index. She scans the rest of the alphabet until she lands on Social Issues and under that heading, Soulmates.
It’s an extremely old fashioned notion, that. Her mum doesn’t believe in them at all, filing the concept away with con-artists and get rich quick schemes. People fall in love or they don’t. But the Bridgerton children always joke that Eloise’s dad and mum were soulmates. They had a high level of compatibility, that’s true. Some couples were so compatible it had an effect on their physical bodies. Fertility is the example Penelope knows about the Bridgertons, though it’s weird to think about Eloise’s mum in that way. Some people age slower, she knows that. Some people have improved health with a very compatible partner.
But soulmates? Real, true, blue made-for-one-another soulmates? That cannot possibly be real, right?
She flips eagerly to the page listed in the index and scans down the page until she finds the correct paragraph. Mostly the page is about what companies use which color to try to elicit the right kind of response from people. Hospitals using blue because it’s calming. Political groups using a bold red. Nursery schools using a happy yellow. But in the last paragraphs, it mentions that in historical documents, color was mentioned as a sign of finding one’s true soulmate. The last reported occurrence of it happening was in 1896 in someone’s diary. When the man met his wife, he knew she was the one because the colors changed. Shades got deeper and richer.
In a way, it’s a comfort that there is some sort of record of this type of thing happening to another person, even if it was… she uses a pencil to work out the math on the back of her library receipt… one hundred and thirteen years ago. But then a strange realization hits her.
Colin said it only happened when Penelope came around. He said it was like when the cloud covered the sun and then the sun moved away. It’s happening to him and it’s happening to her, too.
Colin Bridgerton is her soulmate?
She slams the book closed.
***
They only go to the library as a classroom once a week, but Penelope simply cannot be expected to wait that long, so during the first five minute period between classes, she hustles to the door of the library only to find it locked.
She tries again at lunch time and the door opens. She’s never come to the library at lunch before. She had to avoid Eloise, holding the book on color theory in front of her face as she passed where they always met for lunch. The library isn’t empty, as she expected. There are several students milling around. Some are even eating their lunch at the tables. Most of them sit alone, reading quietly. Some kids are on the computer. Penelope eyes them enviously, unaware that it was an option available to her.
The librarian is new to the school this year. She does have a name, Ms. Crocombe, but mostly they call her Ms. Cee. She’s young by teacher standard, wearing jeans and hip jumpers. She’s got a tattoo on one of her arms. She’s sitting at the desk, keeping an eye on the students in the building, but she’s got lunch too. A container of leftover something, not anything from the cafeteria or a sandwich in a brown bag.
“Penelope!” she says, when Penelope approaches the desk. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon!’
“I’m finished with this,” she says, handing the book back across the desk.
“Already? Are you sure? You read the whole thing?”
“I read the part I needed,” Penelope assures her. “Thank you for lending it to me.”
“And did you figure out what you needed to know about the color red?” she asks. Ms. Cee is amused; Penelope can always tell when adults are amused by a child’s antics. The woman finds her precocious. Adults are always finding her precocious because she reads a lot and knows a lot of words and is content enough to keep to herself, as if there are a myriad of other options available to a girl like her.
“Sort of,” she says. “I mean. I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Actually, do you have any books on soulmates?” Penelope asks, trying not to blurt the sentence out. Sometimes when she gets overly excited or nervous, the words run into each other or come out in the wrong direction.
“Hmm.” Ms. Cee turns to her computer. “Do you mean like love stories? Romances?”
“No I mean, like real ones,” she says, her voice dropping.
She gets the precocious expression again.
“I know they’re not… real, or whatever.” Penelope shrugs. “But the only thing in the color book that sounds remotely like what I saw mentioned soulmates so I thought maybe reading about the history of it all might help.”
Now Ms. Cee is interested. Penelope can tell because her face stops looking condescending and she looks fascinated instead.
“You mean you’re the one who saw red differently?” she asks, her voice soft now too, like they’re gossiping together and don’t want to be caught. Penelope nods, embarrassed to tell a teacher anything personal about herself, but information is important and this woman is the best option Penelope has.
“I always considered soulmates to be a little like, oh I don’t know, personality types or astrology or psychics,” she says typing. “But I read an article once that said soulmates were probably real once upon a time. And what we have now, compatibility, is just an evolution of that.”
“I don’t understand,” Penelope says, lost in Ms. Cee’s excitement and unfamiliar vocabulary.
“Listen, two hundred years ago, there were maybe a billion people on the planet. That’s a lot, right?”
“A billion of anything is a lot to me,” Penelope says.
“Now, there’s over six billion which is way more.”
“Yeah.”
“And two hundred years ago, it was a lot harder to get around. No cars, no planes, barely trains. People used carriages or ships to sail, so while people did travel to new places, mostly, you kind of stayed where you were born.”
“Okay,” Penelope agrees.
“So your pool for finding a soulmate was smaller and your community was closer, so all in all, finding your perfect match was, mathematically, a lot easier. But even then, it was extremely rare.”
“Uh huh,” Penelope says.
“So today it would be almost impossible! We don’t know what causes compatibility, but we think environmental factors are a big part of it. Proximity, genetics, nutrition, psychology, socio-economics, all those things can factor into your compatibility.”
Penelope shakes her head. “You’re really smart.”
Ms. Cee smiles. “I think the same thing about you, kiddo.”
Penelope is unused to praise and feels herself flush. Also, her stomach is rumbling. This is taking longer than she expected. Eloise is going to be annoyed and she’s going to miss the chance to eat her lunch.
“All I’m saying is it’s very unlikely that anyone finds a real soulmate anymore, even if they ever existed at all.”
“Yeah,” Penelope says. “Except for the colors changed.”
“I thought it was just red.”
“It happened again with yellow,” Penelope admits.
“Huh,” Ms. Cee says. “Well, I certainly believe you saw what you say, but honey, soulmates are a two person thing. If colors changed for you, they’d have to change for someone else too.”
Penelope bites her lip nervously and says, “They did.”
Ms. Cee sits up straight. “Let me… let me do some more research, okay? Let me see what I can find.”
Penelope nods, relief blossoming in her chest. “Thank you.”
***
Green happens next.
This time, she’s sitting in her own garden, playing with her watercolor set. Her mum doesn’t like when she makes a mess inside, so she’s brought her sketchbook and paints and brushes outside. It’s a nice day, sunny enough for early spring, though the wind will bite through her jacket every so often. She’s painting red and yellow stripes. Neither of them have ever been high on her list of favorite colors. She prefers green, the darker the better, or even the light airy blue that she associates with Violet Bridgerton and her bottomless well of kindness.
Red is too bold a color and she already hates her own hair and yellow is her least favorite color because it’s her mum’s favorite. Her mum finds it cheerful; Penelope mostly associates it with an inexplicable sense of foreboding which is just how one feels growing up in the Featherington household, she supposes.
Anyway, she’s painting away and then her stripes become more, like how it feels when the thing with the colors happen and she frowns, because it’s never happened in her own yard or house before and that’s troubling. That really throws a wrench in the single theory she has.
But then, green. The grass, the trees, the leaves on the hedges all burst into a vibrancy so startling and beautiful that she gasps and starts to cry. Because it’s one thing for an apple to get redder and another thing for a flower to tinge yellower but the world is so green and she’s been seeing it wrong! Her favorite color has been wrong the whole time and her little heart can’t hardly bear it.
She sobs, her face in her hands and then he’s there, crouched before her.
“Hey, hey, hey,” he says. “You okay?”
She looks up, surprised to see him but then why should she be? Sure, he’s her friend’s brother and not her friend specifically and sure, he’s never been to her house or garden before that she can remember but then again, everything is green in a way that makes her feel like maybe the world isn’t such a bad place after all so of course he’d be here. He’s the reason it’s happening, isn’t he?
“What are you doing here?” she asks, rubbing her eyes with her sleeve.
“Learning about the color green, apparently,” he says, looking around. Colin Bridgerton is sixteen going on seventeen, just like the song. He’s the most beautiful person she’s ever seen and she thought it before the colors started to change, but now, he’s even more beautiful.
“Your eyes are green,” she says, looking at him closely. “Did you know that?”
“I thought I did,” he says. “Anyway, I didn’t mean to surprise you, I just wanted to see if it would happen again.” He tilts his head. “It’s Friday. You didn’t come home with Eloise.”
“No, she’s cross with me,” Penelope admits. “I didn’t meet her for lunch today and I didn’t tell her why.”
“Ah,” he says, sitting across from her properly now, his legs like a pretzel. He’s got bruised shins from football, no doubt. “That would explain it. What were you doing instead?”
“Library,” she says.
“Homework?”
“No.” She sets her paintbrush down finally, letting it rest in a cup of water. “I wanted to learn more about colors.”
He’s quiet for so long that she looks up to find him grinning. “Clever girl,” he says. “And what did you discover?”
“I’m… I’m not sure yet. The librarian is helping me but I don’t have enough information to say.” She’s desperate to tell him, actually, but she knows how it’s going to sound and what kind of thirteen-year-old girl who looks like her walks up to an almost seventeen-year-old boy who looks like him and says that they might be soulmates? He’ll think she’s mental.
“Sure,” he says. “But when you have more, will you tell me?”
“Okay,” she says, shyly.
“Why don’t you come across the street with me?”
“No, she’s too upset.”
“I bet if you say sorry, she’ll forgive you,” he says. “And even if you aren’t that sorry, it’s one small fib. And then we can keep seeing green and yellow and red.”
“Why does it happen one at a time?” she asks.
He shrugs. “Why does it happen at all?”
The backdoor opens and her mother comes outside. “Penelope?”
Penelope twists, suddenly scared. She scrambles to her feet, brushing the grass off her backside. “Yes, mama?”
“Who are you talking to?” Portia comes out and squints and says, “You’re one of the Bridgerton boys?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “My mum sent me over to walk Penelope across the street.” He glances at her. “Only if she wants to.”
For a long moment, Penelope is sure her mum is going to say no simply because she seems to enjoy it, especially when it comes to Penelope. But then, she relents.
“Yes, alright.”
Penelope is free. She smiles up at Colin who winks at her. As they cross the street, he says, “You have a pretty smile, you know?”
It feels the same as everything turning green. Like her heart might actually explode.
***
Instead of going to the library, Penelope receives a note to go see one of the school counselors. She’s seen kids get those kinds of notes before but it’s usually kids who are tardy or rude or don’t do their homework. She feels like she’s in trouble, actually, and her teacher must be able to see it because she tells Penelope that if she has to miss the library, it’s fine and she can just go to her next class instead.
Her hand shakes holding the note all the way to the office.
The counselor is a man, balding and wearing a knitted pullover on top of a rumpled white button down shirt and his office smells like soup and he introduces himself as Mr. Mallard. His office is littered with tiny duck figurines. She supposes with a name like that, one would have to lean into it.
“And you’re Penelope Featherington,” he says when she doesn’t reply. She nods.
“I hear you love to read,” Mr. Mallard says, looking over some notes. “Is that right?”
She nods again.
“What kind of things do you like to read?” he asks.
It takes her a long time to find her voice and even when she does, she can only manage a tiny, “Anything.”
Which isn’t exactly true. Eloise likes scary books and she doesn’t like those and her sisters both read glossy magazines and she doesn’t care about those either. But Penelope is certainly less discerning than most, willing to give anything a go.
“Do you like fantasy stories? Dragons, knights, and princesses? That sort of thing?”
She shrugs. “I guess.” She likes stories about children who escape their childhoods to find their true purpose. Matilda, Anne Shirley, or Lyra Belacqua.
“Do you like love stories?” he asks, which is a weird question, in her view, for a frumpy old man to ask a young teen girl, but of course she can do nothing except sit there.
“Sure,” she says.
“What about nonfiction?”
“Sometimes.”
“Can you tell the difference between nonfiction and fiction?”
Now that question is simply offensive and snaps the fear out of her a little. “Sorry, what is this about? Exactly?”
He leans back. “I find that sometimes our more voracious readers sometimes have trouble telling fact from fiction and I just wanted to check in with you to make sure you aren’t having trouble telling real life from what you read in stories.”
And then, for some reason, she understands. It’s about Ms. Cee. It’s about what they’d talked about. She thought she was talking to a trusted adult and that adult now thinks she’s crazy. Penelope is embarrassed and she’s hurt and she’s angry but she’s not crazy. Naive, perhaps, in retrospect, to think she could ask for help in the way that she had. She won’t make that mistake again.
“Nope,” she says. “I don’t have trouble with that at all.”
It only takes a few more questions for Mr. Mallard to realize that he’s lost her. That she’s shuttered herself off from his clumsy questions and that he will be receiving terse, single word answers so he tells her she can rejoin her class in the library for the remainder of the period, but she doesn’t go. Instead, she finds a bench to sit at and wait for the bell. She’ll be damned if she gives Ms. Cee the satisfaction of seeing her upset.
The following week, she brings her own book from home instead of checking anything out and she refuses to make eye contact with that librarian who’d told her she was smart and then made her feel so, so stupid.
***
At fourteen, she’s allowed to ride her bicycle into town to visit the public library. At fourteen, she’s allowed to use the laptop more often because Prudence is off at uni and no one expects Phillipa to take A-Levels. It should be a grand old time.
But of course, it isn’t, because Colin goes off to Oxford and the world is dull, dull, dull.
He’s not happy about it either if his letters are any indication. He’d wanted to skip university and keep playing football. Anthony told him Bridgerton men go to Oxford and they had a football club and he could play for them if he must. But no professionals are scouted out of Oxford. He’d be better off going to open trials.
It’s what his letters say, anyway. Anything Penelope has learned about football has been by proximity to Colin. She’d started going to his games regularly once they’d gotten green. They’d started spending more time together in general, wondering how long it would take them to get the rest of the colors, if they even would.
It wasn’t long after green, actually, because he’d scored two goals in his game and he’d raised his hand for a high five after when he was sweaty and exhausted and she’d slapped his hand and the entire rainbow had exploded.
She’d never touched Colin before, apparently. They’d been getting their colors piecemeal, wafting in and out of one another’s orbit. If they’d only shaken hands or something. Brushed by one another in the wide halls of Bridgerton house, then maybe the whole thing would have been less confusing, but no, they’d slapped their hands together in front of his whole family and the sky erupted blue and Eloise’s dress was so purple and even her hair and his were brown like rich chocolate and they’d both gasped because it was overwhelming, all that splendor in an instant.
“Don’t slap her so hard it hurts her, you moron,” Eloise said and they’d let that be the reason. Why not? They never really spent a lot of time talking about keeping it secret, but she did tell him about the librarian and the school and the book about colors and what that old diary said and he’d taken it all in stride, except to say, “We should probably keep this between us.”
So they do. And for once she doesn’t feel like she’s the secret, like when her mother introduces her older sisters to a new acquaintance and tacks Penelope on the end with a disappointed sigh, or when the girls she was friends with before Eloise suddenly all pretended one day like they’d never seen her before. Instead, it’s a secret they share together, cupped in their hands like a new spring bunny, trembling and so, so soft.
They spent a lot of time together right up until he left for Oxford and she hoped she would get to keep the colors even after he left but no. She doesn’t. The ride to the library is drab, Mayfair is drab, her school is drab, the walls of every room she’s in are drab.
It’s just harder now, knowing how much better things are when he’s around. The drab world was bearable when she didn’t know there was something missing. Now she feels it like a hole in her heart. All the joy leaks out of her.
Mostly Colin writes emails because he says people are less likely to find them than real letters on paper. She’s not worried about anyone finding her secret things. She has a loose floorboard in her room where she hides stuff, but maybe he’s worried about his friends at uni learning that he writes letters to a fourteen-year-old. When it’s just the two of them, the four year age gap doesn’t matter, but the second another person is added to the equation, it matters tremendously. Even if it’s Eloise or his mum or a stranger walking by them on the street. He is too old. She is too young.
It won’t always be that way but it will be that way for a long time, so they need to get used to it.
She’s even too young to start thinking seriously about compatibility. Most girls start tittering on about it the moment they reach adolescence but Penelope never put much stock into it and neither had Eloise which helped them to become such good friends. They didn’t care about the quizzes in magazines or the perfumes sold in shops that were supposed to make you more compatible even though mostly they just made your neck smell like chemicals. They didn’t care about compatibility experts or the websites that advertised on television that promised to find the most compatible partner for you.
Now, though, now. At fourteen, blooming late once again, Penelope does care. Not about the gimmicks, but about the history. How did compatibility come to be? How was it one hundred years ago? And really, really, the question burns inside her day and night: are soulmates real?
She locks her bicycle up outside of the library and marches right to the hold shelf. Two books wait for her: a modern day guide to compatibility and a book she’d been delighted to find on the history of soulmates. She’s learned a lot about the public library in the last year, thanks to her stoic protest of her school library. But she’s figured it out mostly on her own, because she doesn’t trust librarians anymore, or adults for that matter. She trusts the Bridgertons mostly, and Colin most of all.
The soulmate book has a call number in the one hundreds which tells her that it’s considered a soft science, shelved next to books about psychology, witchcraft, and self-help. Not, she considers, the most respectable shelf when all of the math and science books are over in the five hundreds. But pickings had been slim and she’s grateful to have what she’s found. She checks them out at the self-check, and then logs into one of the public computers. She’s been lurking around a message board for soulmate believers. She doesn’t post and in fact has to click a button that says she’s over eighteen before she can enter the site and that always makes her feel a little bit bad.
Colin is over eighteen and she thinks of them as a set now, even though he’s older and even though he’s in Oxford, and even though they’re not romantic. Just the idea of holding his hand gives her the shivers. In a good way, though. But she’s too young. They both know that.
The message board has several new posts. Most of the action is from people listing symptoms and wondering if it could be an indication of finding their soulmate and then moderators offering canned responses that when you find your soulmate, you’ll know.
And Penelope finds that to be true. She’s always been drawn to Colin. She’s always found him handsome and kind and the fact that being near him physically alters her perception of the world should be scary, but instead she just feels so sure that he’s meant to be in her life.
Instead, she goes to a pinned message that she returns to time and time again. It’s a list of experiences that indicate someone has found their true soulmate. She expands the post.
shared thoughts/telepathy
matching birthmarks
slowed aging
extreme fertility
unshakable sense of inner peace when near one another
increased color saturation
shared dreams
invisible string/proximity
improved health and vitality
She always feels a prickle of warmth when she reads increased color saturation because it’s validating. But some of them she doesn’t really understand, like the invisible string and some seem too wild, like sharing dreams or telepathy.
She closes her eyes and thinks Colin, Colin, Colin with all her might but nothing happens and she feels silly, logging off and riding her bicycle home.
Still, that evening, her mother says there’s a phone call for her which is unusual. Eloise tends to simply knock on the front door.
“It’s that Bridgerton boy,” her mum says, looking displeased. That is her usual expression, but Penelope tries not to let it be directed at her. “Why would he call you?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t talked to him yet,” she says softly, following her down to the kitchen where there’s still a landline mounted to the wall. She doesn’t have her own mobile phone yet. Her mum says she can have one when she’s sixteen, but she’s not holding her breath. Her mother stands next to her as she says, “Hello?” Portia gives her no privacy; not even the illusion of it.
“Pen,” he says. “Hi.”
“Hi,” she says, warmth infusing her down her fingers and through her whole body, tingling in her toes.
“Hi,” he says, again, sounding a little fuzzy himself.
“Is everything okay?” she asks, glancing at her mother who is frowning already.
“I was calling to ask you that,” he says. “Earlier in class I just had this strange sensation.”
“Like what?”
“Um, just… Like, for a minute it just felt like you needed me.” He laughs. “It sounds stupid now that I’m saying it but I really did feel like that.”
“How long ago?”
“Uh, two… two and a half hours?”
That’s when she was at the library. That’s when she thought at him very, very hard.
She laughs, fake sounding enough to herself that she thinks he’ll pick up on it. “Oh Colin, we can talk about that later. Anyway, I have to go!”
“Oh,” he says, sounding a little sad. “Wait, is your mum there?”
“Yep,” she says cheerfully.
“Oh okay. Will you email me?”
“Absolutely. Okay, bye!”
“Okay,” he says. “Bye Pen.”
She hangs up.
Her mom stares at her and finally says, “Well? What did he want?”
“Just to say hello,” she says.
“Why would he want to say hello to you?”
She shrugs. “He’s my friend.”
“It’s bizarre if you ask me,” she says. “Maybe I’ll have to speak to Violet about her sons being too familiar with my daughters.”
Her sons couldn’t be less interested in Prudence or Phillipa and she doesn’t think Violet will care one bit about her boys being friendly toward Penelope, so the threat rings hollow.
“If you think that’s best, mama,” she concedes, which does take the wind out of Portia’s sails. “I have to do some homework. Can I use the computer?”
“Go on,” Portia says, wandering back to the living room to watch her show.
She emails Colin everything. The link to the message board, the books she checked out, the time she’d thought about him intentionally, reaching out with her brain, feeling silly, all of it. She always holds back a little bit, afraid of being thought of as ridiculous or vain or crazy, but it feels wrong to hold back from him. It feels like when Prudence used to grab her arm and twist her skin in opposite directions. Colin, I don’t even know if I believe it myself but I think we might be soulmates. For real.
They’ve danced around it, but now she’s laid it all out in the open. Her thoughts, her soul bared to him.
She sends the email and then does work on her paper for her literature class for a little while until her inbox dings a new message. He’s written her back.
Pen,
I’m so glad you said that. I’ve felt like that for some time. I think we are too. I’ve been looking things up for a while now. I want to see you. I want to come home for a weekend soon. Are you and Eloise still having sleepovers? Can you spend the night at our house in three weeks? I’m coming home to see you. Please say yes.
Colin
Her heart soars, her cheeks flush, her eyes fill with happy tears.
She replies immediately.
Yes, please!
The Bridgertons are a family built for love and overflowing with beauty. Beautiful, wealthy, successful people having beautiful, smart, talented children. Penelope is not like that. She’s plain and clearly built for survival because surviving is all she seems capable of doing.
Being close to them is usually enough for Penelope. Now, though, the thought of being tied to the family? To Colin specifically? Maybe she is like Matilda after all. Maybe with enough grit and determination and luck, she can escape the Featherington household and fold herself, somehow, into something better. Something special.
She wants to be special, of course, because who doesn’t? But more than that she wants someone to love her on purpose.
Her mother comes into the kitchen and frowns at her.
“Go to bed, Penelope,” she says. “I can’t bear all that clickety-clacking! I swear, you’re such a menace with that thing. I put up with a lot from you, you know.”
“I know, mama,” she says, closing the laptop. She could point out that if she were allowed to use the computer in her bedroom that her mum wouldn’t have to hear it. She could point out that out of her three daughters, Penelope is the quietest, smartest, and most well-behaved. She could even point out that it’s barely nine o’clock and she’s fourteen and why should she have to go to bed already?
But she doesn’t. She takes her lumps, climbs the stairs, and shuts the door to her room, grateful to be alone.