Her screams echoed through every corridor of Bridgerton House, fighting for dominance over the harsh howls of wind battling against the windowpanes. For winter ravaged the world lingering just beyond the frosted window glass and the thick doors of intricately detailed wood, that concealed the numbing temperatures of the night. Shadows engulfed the London skies, obscuring the stars that faded into the blanket of deep indigo as if they hadn't even seen the sky that night and hid away the sliver of a crescent moon in the coverage of dense clouds, that sprinkled a heavy snow upon the cobblestone streets below.
Completely coating the land in a powdery coverage that in it's own way, made up for the lack of moonlight. For it twinkled, even in the shrouding darkness, with it's own light that illuminated the Earth as it remained dormant in the clutches of a snowstormy night. The last of the year in fact, as each hour of the evening ticked by, a new morning on the breath of a brand new year, inched itself one hour closer. But as Anthony Bridgerton sat in his study, just a floor below the bedchamber that echoed with his wife's anguished screams, morning seemed a forever away.
For even as he listened to the growing howls of wind forced against the siding of the house, whipping it's icy precipitation against the sturdy brick and the dormant land below, her cries were louder than the sky's gusts of terror and they struck him in a way he'd never felt in his life. For he had been a child never fearful of thunder or the frightening storms that followed, he was a man unshaken by the resounding bang of gunfire, Anthony had yet to find a sound or sensation that could rattle his very bones, until this very night when one shot through his chest and punctured his very heart.
Anthony sat slouched in his large chair of sleek umber brown upholstery, behind the mahogany wood of his wide desk and watched the flames flickering in the adjacent fireplace twist and twirl as if they were spinning together in a form of a dance. Crackling embers illuminating the room in a citrine hue that bathed his tense form in a breath of fiery warmth, but as Anthony's eyes stared absentmindedly into the blistering flames, he could barely feel the heat of the fire through the thin material of his ivory muslin shirt. Even as his sleeves were furiously rolled up beneath his elbows, exposing his bare flesh and the pulsing veins running just below the surface to the glowing warmth, Anthony could hardly feel a thing. As he sat immersed in a room that felt suffocatingly silent, as night engulfed the land, all the while, listening to it echo off of the walls with the horrid screams of his wife's painful labor.
With seven siblings under his belt, Anthony was more than familiar with the labor process, as he'd heard his mother's screams many times during the span of her child bearing years. The night dear Hyacinth emerged into the world, having been the worst of them all. As not only was her arrival the most complicated of all her siblings that came before her, but the fact that his father was no longer with them to meet the infant who screamed her way into the world that fateful night.
Anthony remembered the echoes, after he should have been long asleep, waiting anxiously and at times excitedly for the newest arrival, with his other siblings who were also too excited to even attempt to feign sleep. He'd remembered the exhaustion on his beautiful mother's face, after his parents had introduced the newest Bridgerton addition to the rest of the family. The glisten of sweat and the reddened hue of exertion, but the smile she adorned, Anthony believed he recalled that sight most of all.
But as Anthony sat still in his overbearing chair, all the while, feeling as though he had enough adrenaline coursing through his veins for five grown men, he realized that the echoes of his wife's were completely different than the way his mother's had hit him as a young adolescent. For every ounce of his heart ached with each of her growing cries, feeling helpless in a way he'd never felt before. For he was a man swift to action, especially when it pertained to his family, he had the answers before they could beg to ponder the very question and he aimed to rectify all he could as quickly as he could. But now, as he sat alone with nothing else he could possibly do but wait, left him with an unsettling feeling that made him uneasy and rather sick to his stomach.
