illicit affairs | BRIDGERTON

chapter one

Emily Bridgerton could only stare through bleary eyes as her twin sister kept pacing in front of her. Eloise would march to the widow, grunt, march to the opposite wall, groan, and repeat the cycle all over again. She couldn't help but wonder if the tightly wounded corset or the dizziness of Eloise's restlessness would put her to sleep first.

She hoped the corset did it. At the least, she could get out of this debut that way.

"You know," Emily said suddenly, her voice breaking the nervous tension between them. "You have been pacing since last night, disturbing my sleep. At the very least, grant me respite from your endless stomping before we are about to be fish bait to the lords of the ton."

Eloise groaned, slumping down in the coach opposite of Emily. "How are you not crawling out of your skin?"

"I am," Emily said, perfectly composed.

"Oh," Eloise snorted. "Right. Hence why you look unaffected."

"Well, El, maybe if you hadn't turned your nose up at all our lady lessons," Emily drawled, "you would be able to look as I do. I find the acting classes quite helpful."

"You use your lessons to lie to Mama, didn't you?" Emily asked, brows raised, legs spread indecently.

I lie to everybody, myself included.

Emily smirked, mimicking her sister's seating arrangement. "I have no idea what you are talking about."

"Don't make me do this, Em," Eloise plead, lifting from her seat, throwing herself next to Emily. "Let's run away together. The windows are open; I'm sure we can tie the blankets together to form a rope and climb our way down. Become the writers we always dreamt of becoming. We can dress as men and sneak into university as we talked about doing. Anything to not join the ridiculousness that is the season."

Emily moved closer to her sister, taking her gloved hands in her own. While Emily wasn't quite as vocal or confrontational about it, she wholeheartedly agreed with Eloise's opinion of the season. The entire idea that women were only worth their ability to have children was ridiculous. Even more, their whole society was built upon the strange notion that women were the ones who were hysterical or incapable of doing the things men could do. Somehow, women have been deemed the weaker sex, as if it was not them who bled every month since they were twelve; as if it was not them who birthed the men they deemed superior to their mothers.

Where would the world be if it was not built on the forced silent women?

Yet, no amount of ranting or screaming would get them out of the situation they currently found themselves in.

"Eloise," Emily sighed, feeling much older than she was. "I, too, want to be more than a wife or a mother. I would love to run away and join university classes, but..." she trailed off, unsure of what the right words were.

"We are not girls anymore," Eloise completed her sister's thoughts.

The grief those words caused was a feeling no man, no matter how kind, would be able to understand.

We never were; the words remained unspoken but not unheard. Girls were never just girls the way boys were just boys. Being a boy was a time of fun and leisure, a period before they were men, where their actions had little consequence, free to learn things women were forbidden to know until their wedding night. Girls were young women, a stasis in their life where they were prepped into becoming something men could like looking at and sometimes see as a person worth listening to – but only when they were singing pretty songs – spending days gazing jealously out of windows as their brothers pranced in the garden and laughed freely, instead of hiding their joy.