Her answer came a fortnight later.
My dear Miss Bridgerton—
Ah, but it is a sort of friendship, isn’t it? I confess to a certain measure of isolation here in the country, and if one cannot have a smiling face across one’s breakfast table, then one might at least have an amiable letter, don’t you agree?
I have enclosed another flower for you. This one is Geranium pratense, more commonly known as the meadow cranesbill.
With great regard,
Phillip Crane
Eloise remembered that day well. She had sat in her chair, the one by the window in her bedchamber, and stared at the carefully pressed purple flower for what seemed like an eternity. Was he attempting to court her? Through the post?
And then one day she received a note that was quite different from the rest.
My dear Miss Bridgerton—
We have been corresponding now for quite some time, and although we have never formally met, I feel as if I know you. I hope you feel the same.
Forgive me if I am too bold, but I am writing to invite you to visit me here at Romney Hall. It is my hope that after a suitable period of time, we might decide that we will suit, and you will consent to be my wife.
You will, of course, be properly chaperoned. If you accept my invitation, I will make immediate plans to bring my widowed aunt to Romney Hall.
I do hope you will consider my proposal.
Yours, as always,
Phillip Crane
Eloise had immediately tucked the letter away in a drawer, unable to even fathom his request. He wanted to marry someone he didn’t even know?
No, to be fair, that wasn’t entirely true. They did know one another. They’d said more in the course of a year’s correspondence than many husbands and wives did during the entire course of a marriage.
But still, they’d never met.
Eloise thought about all of the marriage proposals she’d refused over the years. How many had there been? At least six. Now she couldn’t even remember why she’d refused some of them. No reason, really, except that they weren’t . . .
Perfect.
Was that so much to expect?
She shook her head, aware that she sounded silly and spoiled. No, she didn’t need someone perfect. She just needed someone perfect for her.
She knew what the society matrons said about her. She was too demanding, worse than foolish. She’d end up a spinster—no, they didn’t say that anymore. They said she already was a spinster, which was true. One didn’t reach the age of eight and twenty without hearing that whispered behind one’s back.
Or thrown in one’s face.
But the funny truth was, Eloise didn’t mind her situation. Or at least she hadn’t, not until recently.
It had never occurred to her that she’d always be a spinster, and besides, she enjoyed her life quite well. She had the most marvelous family one could imagine—seven brothers and sisters in all, named alphabetically, which put her right in the middle at E, with four older and three younger. Her mother was a delight, and she’d even stopped nagging Eloise about getting married. Eloise still held a prominent place in society; the Bridgertons were universally adored and respected (and occasionally feared), and Eloise’s sunny and irrepressible personality was such that everyone sought out her company, spinsterish age or no.
But lately . . .
She sighed, suddenly feeling quite a bit older than her twenty-eight years. Lately she hadn’t been feeling so sunny. Lately she’d been starting to think that maybe those crotchety old matrons were right, and she wasn’t going to find herself a husband. Maybe she had been too picky, too determined to follow the example of her older brothers and sister, all of whom had found a deep and passionate love with their spouses (even if it hadn’t necessarily been there at the outset).
Maybe a marriage based on mutual respect and companionship was better than none at all.
But it was difficult to talk about these feelings with anyone. Her mother had spent so many years urging her to find a husband; as much as Eloise adored her, it would be difficult to eat crow and say that she should have listened. Her brothers would have been no help whatsoever. Anthony, the eldest, would probably have taken it upon himself to personally select a suitable mate and then browbeat the poor man into submission. Benedict was too much of a dreamer, and besides, he almost never came down to London anymore, preferring the quiet of the country. As for Colin—well, that was another story entirely, quite worthy of its own paragraph.
She supposed she should have talked to Daphne, but every time she went to see her, her elder sister was so bloody happy, so blissfully in love with her husband and her life as mother to her brood of four. How could someone like that possibly offer useful advice to one in Eloise’s position? And Francesca seemed half a world away, off in Scotland. Besides, Eloise didn’t think it fair to bother her with her silly woes. Francesca had been widowed at the age of twenty-three, for heaven’s sake. Eloise’s fears and worries seemed terribly inconsequential by comparison.
And maybe all this was why her correspondence with Sir Phillip had become such a guilty pleasure. The Bridgertons were a large family, loud and boisterous. It was nearly impossible to keep anything a secret, especially from her sisters, the youngest of whom—Hyacinth—could probably have won the war against Napoleon in half the time if His Majesty had only thought to draft her into the espionage service.
Sir Phillip was, in his own strange way, hers. The one thing she’d never had to share with anyone. His letters were bundled and tied with a purple ribbon, hidden at the bottom of her middle desk drawer, tucked underneath the piles of stationery she used for her many letters.
He was her secret. Hers.
And because she’d never actually met him, she’d been able to create him in her mind, using his letters as the bones and then fleshing him out as she saw fit. If ever there was a perfect man, surely it had to be the Sir Phillip Crane of her imagination.
And now he wanted to meet? Meet? Was he mad? And ruin what had to be the perfect courtship?
But then the impossible had occurred. Penelope Featherington, Eloise’s closest friend for nearly a dozen years, had married. And what’s more, she’d married Colin. Eloise’s brother!
If the moon had suddenly dropped from the sky and landed in her back garden, Eloise could not have been more surprised.
Eloise was happy for Penelope. Truly, she was. And she was happy for Colin, too. They were quite possibly her two most favorite people in the entire world, and she was thrilled that they had found happiness. No one deserved it more.
But that didn’t mean that their marriage hadn’t left a hollow spot in her life.
She supposed that when she’d been considering her life as a spinster, and trying to convince herself that it was what she really wanted, Penelope had always been there in the image, spinster right beside her. It was acceptable—almost daring, even—to be twenty-eight and unmarried as long as Penelope was twenty-eight and unmarried, as well. It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted Penelope to find a husband; it was just that it had never seemed even the least bit likely. Eloise knew that Penelope was wonderful and kind and smart and witty, but the gentlemen of the ton had never seemed to notice. In all her years in society—eleven in all—Penelope had not received one proposal of marriage. Nor even a whiff of interest.
In a way, Eloise had counted on her to remain where she was, what she was—first and foremost, Eloise’s friend. Her companion in spinsterhood.
And the worst part—the part that left Eloise wracked with guilt—was that she’d never given a thought to how Penelope might feel if she married first, which, in truth, she’d always supposed she would do.
But now Penelope had Colin, and Eloise could see that the match was a splendid thing. And she was alone. Alone in the middle of crowded London, in the middle of a large and loving family.
It was hard to imagine a lonelier spot.
Suddenly Sir Phillip’s bold proposal—tucked away at the very bottom of her bundle, at the bottom of the middle drawer, locked away in a newly purchased safebox, just so that Eloise wouldn’t be tempted to look at it six times a day—well, it seemed a bit more intriguing.
More intriguing by the day, frankly, as she grew more and more restless, more dissatisfied with the lot in life that she had to admit she’d chosen.
And so one day, after she’d gone to visit Penelope, only to be informed by the butler that Mr. and Mrs. Bridgerton were not able to receive visitors (uttered in such a way that even Eloise knew what it meant), she made a decision. It was time to take her life into her own hands, time to control her destiny, rather than attending ball after ball in the vain hope that the perfect man would suddenly materialize before her, never mind that there was never anybody new in London, and after a full decade out in society, she’d already met everyone of the appropriate age and gender to marry.
She told herself that this did not mean she had to marry Sir Phillip; she was merely investigating what seemed like it might be an excellent possibility. If they did not suit, they would not have to marry; she’d made no promises to him, after all.
But if there was one thing about Eloise, it was that when she made a decision, she acted upon it quickly. No, she reflected with a rather impressive (in her opinion, at least) display of self-honesty, there were two things about her that colored her every action—she liked to act quickly and she was tenacious. Penelope had once described her as akin to a dog with a bone.
And Penelope had not been joking.
Once Eloise got her claws into an idea, not even the full force of the Bridgerton family could sway her from her intended goal. (And the Bridgertons constituted a mighty force, indeed.) It was probably just dumb luck that her goals and those of her family had never crossed purposes before, at least not over anything important.
Eloise knew that they would never countenance her going off blindly to meet a man she’d never met. Anthony would have probably demanded that Sir Phillip come to London to meet the entire family en masse, and Eloise couldn’t imagine a single scenario more likely to scare off a prospective suitor. The men who’d previously sought her favor were at least familiar with the London scene and knew what they were getting into; poor Sir Phillip, who had—by his own admission in his letters—not set foot in London since his school days, and never participated in the social season, would be ambushed.
So the only option was for her to travel to Gloucestershire, and, as she came to realize after pondering the problem for a few days, she had to do it in secret. If her family knew of her plans, they might very well forbid her to go. Eloise was a worthy opponent, and she might prevail in the end, but it would be a long and painful battle. Not to mention that if they did allow her to go, whether after a protracted battle over the subject or not, they would insist upon sending at least two of their ranks to accompany her.
Eloise shuddered. Those two would most probably be her mother and Hyacinth.
Good gad, no one could fall in love with those two around. No one could even form a mild but lasting attachment, which Eloise thought she might actually be willing to settle for this go-around.
She decided that she would make her escape during her sister Daphne’s ball. It was to be a grand affair, with hordes of guests, and just the right amount of noise and confusion to allow her absence to go unnoticed for a good six hours, maybe more. Her mother had always insisted that they be punctual—early, even—when a family member was hosting a social event, so they would surely arrive at Daphne’s no later than eight. If she slipped away early on, and the ball did not wind down until the wee hours of the morning . . . well, it would be nearly dawn before anyone realized she was gone, and she could be halfway to Gloucestershire.
And if not halfway, then far enough to ensure that they wouldn’t find it too terribly easy to follow her trail.
In the end, it had all proven almost frighteningly easy. Her entire family had been distracted by some grand announcement Colin planned to make, and so all she’d had to do was excuse herself to the ladies’ retiring room, slip out the back, and walk the short distance to her own home, where she’d hidden her bags in the back garden. From there, she needed only to walk to the corner, where she’d arranged to have a hired coach waiting.
Goodness, if she’d known it would be this easy to make her own way in the world, she would have done so years ago.
And now here she was, rolling toward Gloucestershire, rolling toward destiny, she supposed—or hoped, she wasn’t sure which—with nothing but a few changes of clothing and a pile of letters written to her by a man she’d never met.
A man she hoped she could love.
It was thrilling.
No, it was terrifying.
It was, she reflected, quite possibly the most foolhardy thing she’d done in her life, and she had to admit that she’d made a few foolish decisions in her day.
Or it might just be her only chance at happiness.