Wooing Lady Whistledown - A Bridgerton Story

Chapter 9: Of Suns and Skies, of Earth and Rain

Patrick smiled sympathetically as Penelope once again recounted the evening of their engagement, when Eloise had left Bath with only a note to say goodbye. In the weeks since, his new fiancée had been inconsolable, uncharacteristically morose even as she tried to host him graciously. Penelope had not told Patrick of the entire contents of the letter left on her pillow, only that Eloise had grown dissatisfied with her short visit to Bath, and did not want to get in the way of the engagement. Patrick was privately quite relieved. Where Penelope found his quips charming, Eloise always managed to find fault in them. With Eloise by her side, he had no longer been confident that Penelope would continue to enjoy his company in the coming weeks. He did not relish Penelope's sorrow, but in the same way Eloise could not manage to find joy in Penelope's engagement, Patrick could not find it in himself to mourn Eloise's departure.

And so he comforted her with the kindest words he had, promising her that she would see Eloise once again soon before departing the Featherington home. But Penelope's pain was not in the uncertainty of when she would see her friend again, but rather in the anguish she seemed to cause Eloise. She had never seen her friend quite so emotional, so uncomfortable, as if there was something crawling beneath her skin she could not identify.

As the weather grew cold, Penelope found that the warmth she felt for Patrick cooled ever so slightly with it. He changed not at all, constant in his wit, his affections, and his kindness. But with Eloise having come and gone, Patrick's brightness seemed somehow dimmer. Penelope could not help but compare his every remark, joke, lament, and laugh to Eloise's, and without exception, Patrick failed to outshine the absent girl. To Penelope, it was as if a second, brighter star had joined the sun in the sky only for a moment before once again disappearing. The sun remained the same, but the sky was somehow darker and the air inexplicably colder.

Patrick's earnestness and humor suddenly felt like facsimiles of Eloise, and try as she might, Penelope could not help but let resentment suffocate the affection she had for the man. Patrick could feel it almost as well as Penelope-- Eloise's presence had felt overbearing and distracting, but somehow her absence was worse, a vacuum that demanded attention, a hole that opened up in the Earth without cause or mercy. Even when Penelope was in a good mood, Patrick would inevitably say something that reminded her of Eloise, which either resulted in her telling him a story of her friend (usually one he had heard before) or her again becoming morose.

It was not so terribly sad for Patrick, then, when he and his brother were called away to Manchester on business. He would miss Penelope, of course, but he could not help but to hope that his absence would make her grow fonder of him, and that she would rejoice at his return to Bath, their engagement reignited. While Patrick and Penelope said heartfelt goodbyes, Branwell and Phillipa seemed to both weep in earnest, with Branwell requiring both his own handkerchief and that of his fiancée to preserve his composure.

--

A week after Patrick had gone, Penelope expected to feel the same pain she had felt in the days following Eloise's departure, but it never came. She missed him, certainly, but it was a scratch compared to the wound Eloise had let fester in her absence. Portia left Penelope to herself, understanding she was best left alone in her despondence, though she misidentified the cause as the abrupt end of Patrick's visits. But it was not the pillow that Patrick had slept on that Penelope held tightly at night, or the note that Patrick had left that stayed always in her pocket. Somehow, Eloise leaving hurt much more than when Penelope had left Eloise in London for Bath--perhaps it was simply that this time, it had been Eloise who had chosen to leave Penelope.

Had Eloise cried this much when Penelope had left London? Did she mourn for her in the same way? Penelope would not have thought so before Eloise had wept in her arms the night before she left Bath, but the memory of her friend sobbing into her shoulder made Penelope think that under all of Eloise's mocking laughter and sarcasm there was a heart more vulnerable to hurt than even her own. Penelope had not understood the fervor of Eloise's words until now, when the pain of her absence made the girl cherish the warmth of her friend's presence.

Learning to love Patrick was enjoyable, pleasant. His trip took away his companionship and the happiness Penelope derived from it, but it did not break her. Her afternoons were more dull without him, but she found other ways of entertaining herself, even if they were not quite the same as a conversation with Patrick. But Eloise's departure was an entirely different, undiscovered species: it felt like one half of Penelope's soul had left her, had been ripped from her being. There was an incompleteness, a partialness to her being without Eloise that she only now understood: the air seemed to have less oxygen, and sleep left her unrested. While she had only ever used one side of her bed, the side Eloise had slept on now seemed like a foreign enemy come to mock her, the coolness of the pillow and flatness of the bedsheet reminding her that she was to fall asleep again, alone. This feeling had been manageable before Eloise had come to Bath-- Penelope did not mourn the tragedy of moving away for too long, believing that in accepting it she could find happiness even in these strange new circumstances. But when Eloise came to and left Bath, that feeling that she had so well managed before overwhelmed her.

Only in the midst of mourning Eloise's absence did Penelope begin to understand what her friend had tried to tell her that last night. Penelope's fondness of Patrick was indeed like a flower, blooming slowly and cautiously. It was unremarkable at first, but if taken care of, it very well might become something beautiful. Penelope had been quite content with that blossoming romance. Patrick had not expected her to be smitten, to be lovestruck, only to continue to water their blossoming flower alongside him. Only with Eloise's absence did she understand how insignificant a mere flower could be. If her relationship with Patrick was a beautiful flower slowly blooming, her relationship with Eloise was simultaneously the Earth beneath and the rain above. I might love a flower, thought Penelope, but I cannot live without the Earth, without the rain. She understood Eloise's silence that night; there was no word for this kind of feeling, no word for this kind of love past metaphors of suns and skies, of earth and rain. She smiled, not at her own thought, but at the image of Eloise's face if Penelope ever told her such a thought, laughter bubbling up from her lungs uncontrollably at such sentiment. But as she thought longer on the subject, Penelope became more and more certain Eloise would not laugh at all. Perhaps she would sit quietly as Penelope told her of these feelings, nodding attentively before embracing her, kissing her cheeks with her sunflower smile. Perhaps she would interrupt Penelope halfway through her sentence, as she had done hundreds of times before. Perhaps she would do something else entirely. The infinite 'perhaps' would kill Penelope if she did not abandon it for truth, for the face of the real Eloise staring back at her.

The more Penelope thought about what the scene might look like in which she reunited with Eloise, the more she felt every minute she spent in Bath was wasted. She did not know what would words she would use to try explaining her heart to Eloise, but she was absolutely certain that Eloise would know the moment they reunited that Penelope had come to understand the same feeling for which Eloise had found no words.

When asked, Phillipa immediately agreed to Penelope visiting London; she had grown concerned for her daughter, who had become more and more isolated. It seemed of no harm to her for Penelope to visit Eloise while Branwell and Patrick were away, and she hoped that when her daughter returned, she would be in much better spirits. And thus Penelope set out for London, praying that each turn of the carriage wheels would bring her soul closer to its missing half.

//

My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.

- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights