A Little More Convincing

Chapter Three: Some Sisterly Solidarity

Penelope forced herself out of bed at half past six in the morning, which would usually seem like an ungodly hour to wake unless she had a very good reason — such as getting her column delivered if she hadn't managed to get it out the night before — but she had no such reason these days, unless one counted her strange situation with Colin Bridgerton, of all people.

She stared at the roses on her nightstand, fretting.

She'd held herself under her covers for an hour before this, telling herself this was no urgent matter and treating it as such was only making it worse. Yet she couldn't help it. She must speak to Briarly!

Briarly had turned a blind eye so many times, in so many situations. As careful as she was when sneaking out and back in, he'd still let her in through the back door nearly a dozen times, and pretended to believe her when she claimed she'd gone to retrieve her gloves from the carriage and got herself locked out, or that she'd left her shawl at the ball and had rushed back to retrieve it, or that she'd knocked her spectacles out the window and that was why she was wandering in from the back alley.

He must think her very forgetful, indeed, since her bedchamber faced the front, and since she didn't even wear spectacles. And that wasn't counting the necklaces with broken clasps that she somehow found in the gardens at midnight, the reticules she needed to retrieve from her last party...

A dutiful butler might make note of these moments, perhaps alert her mother that Penelope's forgetfulness was most concerning, but Briarly never did. Even on those nights when Penelope stayed awake, shaking in her bed, thinking he'd finally tell her mother all, she'd always come down to breakfast to find the same blissful ignorance of her doings that she'd come to depend upon.

Penelope was positive that Briarly knew all, including where the sudden windfalls that benefited the Featherington family came from. If nothing else, the day when he'd chased her halfway down the street with a previously rolled-up Whistledown draft that had fallen from her pocket might have tipped him off. It become quite unraveled, after all, and much too visible by the time he handed it off. But she also suspected that, as those same windfalls kept him employed, he wouldn't ask too many questions.

Briarly might very well be the best keeper of secrets in all of London. She'd once thought that title should belong to her, with all her years of hiding so successfully, but she'd slipped yesterday.

If she'd not been so set upon her mission to discredit Cressida, she might have looked more carefully in both directions before stepping into her hired hack. Such precautions had saved her in the past, when she'd found her mother, her sister, or Eloise in the vicinity.

She might have noticed Colin watching her, if she'd thought to look for it. But how could she? She'd so long thought herself invisible to the other sex, so much that the only warning signs she looked for on Mount Street involved bonnets. Even Briarly, on the rare times he seemed to see her stepping into a hack, quickly turned away, bless him.

But Whistledown wasn't the secret she needed kept today. And she worried that this secret would be beyond Briarly. He'd made a show of pretending he didn't see her mussed hair and her breathless state, but his eyes were always far too knowing. She must know what he'd witnessed yesterday!

"Yesterday?" he echoed, seeming to search his mind after she cornered him in the butler's pantry. "I saw nothing untoward when you returned from your... outing."

She let out a kept breath. "I'm so relieved. You see, Mr. Bridgerton was only... Well, he was..."

"I thought it very kind of him to take you home," he said when her words failed her.