Chapter Text
In a hundred years, Edie could not imagine she would find herself alone in the company of Benedict Bridgerton, whiling away the hours as he found peace between the pages of drawing paper and coloured pencils.
But here she sat, in the parlor of her uncle’s home, working on a bit of embroidery while Benedict sat across from her.
She found no rapturous joy in between stitches and thread, but it offered enough of a distraction that she was not constantly watching the man across from her.
After another gulp or two of whiskey between them, she’d offered up some drawing paper to let him find some ease without the aid of further libation. While she did not necessarily oppose entertaining a Bridgerton at her Uncle’s residence, she would certainly not deal with a drunk one.
Once every few moments, her eyes found his form again, still astonished that he’d come to her in the wake of a bloody duel. She silently took in his pose, back still somehow straight against the settee, his legs crossed and a bit of drawing paper propped up against his thighs. His knees were high up so his sketch paper was closer to his face, which was drawn into a concentrated little frown.
“So are your fool brother and fool brother-in-law-to-be safely away from firearms, or should we keep an ear out for shots?”
Benedict didn’t divert his attention from his work. “Both such fools are safely in bed in a drunken stupor, I imagine.” When he spoke, his words slurred a little. At the end of it, his eyes flashed up briefly, darting over her form and then returning to the sheet.
Edie cracked a little grin, pulling her needle through the fabric. “As you shall be soon enough.” she murmured.
“Beg pardon?” Benedict looked up from his paper, blinking owlishly at her.
“Nothing.” She hummed, keeping her eyes firmly on her own work. It was a piece she had not taken up for some time, having been left to gather dust in a sewing basket. Looking at it now, as she pulled her threat taught, she wondered why she had lost interest in the piece: a beautiful marigold stretched proudly towards the heat of the sun, and its leaves stretching like weary arms looking for relief. Edie was not a great embroidery enthusiast, but this marigold was currently commanding her attention in a way she did not expect.
She had given up on the sketch she’d laboured away on, less than a half an hour past, the image of a foot dipping into a pond commanding no other action from her fingers and rendering her frustrated and in need of an outlet. Luckily, her half finished embroidery had offered a suitable pass time.
She glanced up once more at Benedict, pinching her lips together to prevent the smile that wanted to break through to see him scoff and draw another line, much more aggressively.
It was odd how easy this felt. How natural.
She had spent so long in solitude, in silence, she had forgotten what it felt like to wile away the hours with a man across the way from her. There was no need for talking or gestures. He was enthralled in his work, as was she.
It struck her suddenly how only a few weeks prior, she would have idled away the hours in silence, alone and quite enjoying her solitude. She was not irritated at Pointy’s presence, and that fact unsettled her. It would be best not to get too attached, too used to his company when the novelty of their tentative friendship wore thin. No one in Edith’s life stayed for very long.
But, clearly she was a glutton for suffering, because she pushed her wariness away and turned a blind eye to the cracks in her carefully woven defences. Instead, she looked up again at Benedict, letting her curiosity take up the forefront of her mind.
“What are you drawing over there?” She asked curiously, pulling her needle through the fabric with a soft, satisfying whisper.
“You shall see.” He replied, not looking up from his drawing pad.
“You know, I am still waiting for you to present me with a finished work.”
“Indeed.” He hummed, his voice sounding a hundred miles away. Edie scoffed in frustration, but then, a thought suddenly occurred to her, and she fought the smile that pulled at her mouth.
“Well, what commands your attention?” she asked, exasperated with his deflections.
“A curiously talkative young woman that seems determined to distract me.” He pulled his pencil from the paper, and used the pads of his index and middle finger to smudge across the page. He did not notice when she stood up, slowly closing the distance between them. It was strange to feel…playful. She had not felt this way for a virtual stranger in ages, but somehow, she did not think Benedict would misuse the fragile trust one had in another, to simply be silly.
“If I wanted to drive you to distraction,” she mused, watching him carefully for the perfect moment to strike. “I would have done this !” With a sure hand and the speed of a racehorse, Edie’s hand reached forwards and grabbed the work from his hands, darting away just as quickly with her prize graped between her fingers.
“Wh–Edie!” he exclaimed softly.
Edie’s smirk of victory turned into a laugh of genuine amusement at his indignation as she danced away from him, fluttering his work at him in a tuanting moment. “Now, let us see what masterpiece Britain’s next great artist has been so studiously laboring away on.” Edie grinned in excitement, curiosity stirring as she looked down at the paper in her hands. Her smile and curiosity then both withered like a bloom in the first frost when she saw it.
“What is this?” She whispered, fingers tightening around the paper. She could not tear her eyes away, taking in her own ugly likeness illustrated with careful lines and soft shading, one side of her face deceptively smooth while the other half was carved in two.
“Well I…” He trailed off, the pride in his voice evaporating as he looked up at her face. She had taken on a cold, stony expression which kept his eyes fixed on her face. Not a moment before, he had been drawing her form by memory, recalling soft curved features, a barely there smile that he knew was dimmed for the sake of others. The few times he’d really seen her smile, he had noticed how her scar carved a bit deeper into her skin. “I had a thought…y-you looked…I wished to capture your likeness.”
“What gives you the right?” She snapped, stepping away from him, her eyes still fixed on the paper. He noticed with unease how her hands tightened around the paper, her fingertips blanching with tension. He hadn’t embellished, he had not spared any detail, captured every painful detail of her marred countenance that reminded her of her ruined life. Edie decided to do to this drawing what she always wished she could do to the damage of her once beautiful face.
Destroy it. Make it a fiction, a rumor. She would be nothing but a whisper lost in time.
In a flash she was moving, her housecoat flaring up in a deep blue wave as she stomped towards the fireplace.
“Wait, don’t! ” Benedict cried, rushing to his feet, but it was too late. Edie had already thrown the offending piece into the orange flames, the paper immediately catching. For a long moment, he was silent, staring at Edie’s trembling shoulders as she watched his work turn to ashes. “How could you do that?!”
She did not look at him as she turned around, stomping once more behind the settee she’d been sitting on, far from his reach. “I could not bear to look at it a second longer!”
“Edith,” Hugh had sighed, as though suffering through an infantile conversation. “Honestly, the look of you alone…it douses my fires. I can abide you in the dark, but in the day…how could you think I’d enjoy you in the light of day?”
“It was not even finished !” Benedict countered, as though it mattered a great deal. “I’d wanted to add some colour! Make a gift of it–” This was to be his finished work, he had decided half way through his outline of her face. He had no real grasp of why this should be the piece he presented before her critical eye, but…it seemed right , somehow. Now, he just felt like a thoughtless ass.
“It does not matter !” She cried, wheeling around to face him. It startled him how wide eyes were, how wild and blue they were. How had he not noticed it before? They were the colour of the sea before a great storm… “Why would I ever want such a thing?! It must not be, not…No, I will not allow it. Do not ever do it again, Bridgerton. Do you understand me? Ever !”
“Alright!” He replied hastily, eyes wide and confused in the face of her sudden hysterics. “I won’t!”
She calmed, somewhat, her shoulders losing some of their tension and her wildness calming. It still took a moment for her breaths to slow, for her entire body to loosen and relax, but even that made him sad. Because she did not look leisurely, she looked tired, wrung too tight until she was exhausted and needing a while to herself.
In another moment, her hands came to rest on the back of the settee, and her head fell between her shoulders. He could hear her breathing deeply.
A long moment passed them, and Benedict was considering just donning his coat and leaving her to her peace, when she spoke.
“No one has…” She broke off, the words choking her.
Truthfully, no one had depicted her likeness since before the Incident. No one had wanted to, not even Edie herself. She had mirrors enough as it was, and for an honest artist to accurately depict the ruin of her face was more than she could bear. The alternative would be to ignore the scar entirely, to illustrate her as she had been and never again would be. Then the art would have been dishonest and that went against everything Evie believed art should be. Art was an expression of the soul. Yet that honesty, it would be a blow she did not think she could recover from. A glimpse into a person she had once dreamed of becoming and would never have the chance to grow into.
She sucked in a breath, and she found the courage to lift her chin, still stoutly refusing to meet his eye.
“Do-do not do it again, Bridgerton.” She said at last, turning her head towards him, avoiding looking at him directly. “Please.”
“On your order, I will not.” He promised. One day, he vowed, when she was ready, he would show her that she was still beautiful, still whole, even with her scars. But not until she gave him permission.
“Thank you.” She choked back, more out of habit than any real appreciation.
Benedict sat in silence, regarding her with slowly dissolving shock and newly emerging shame and pity. He understood far too late why Edith might react so to her likeness being captured, even in something as harmless as a sketch of her embroidering before the fire. “My apologies for my foolishness, Miss Granville. I did not think.”
“No, you did not.” She agreed, still speaking softly. “Odd, since that seems to be all you do when you’re drawing.”
The two were quiet for a long while, and Edie was surprised by how relieved she felt when Benedict did not storm out. She understood how much it must have hurt him to lose his carefully tended to drawing to the fire. Deep in her gut, she felt a twinge of shame at her reaction, but at the same time, her shoulders felt lighter to watch that portrait slowly wither away into ash, flames licking up the sides, charring and destroying the face within.
“Well…” he began quietly, fiddling with his pencil. “It has been a long night.”
Then suddenly, Edie couldn’t help the giggle that bubbled up in her throat, an unrestrained smile breaking over her scarred face, carefully concealed, turned away from the man behind her.
“God help you Bridgerton.” She sighed once her mirth had faded. “If this is your eldest sister’s first season, then I pity the lot of you for the trouble the younger ones will cause. Not to mention your elder brother will need a suitable wife, before long.”
Benedict chuckled. “Do not tell Anthony that. He has avoided the marriage mart these long years.”
“As have you.”
“I am the second son, ‘tis my right.” He replied with a soft smirk.
“The miracle of being the spare, I suppose.” She said as she moved to sit on the settee that had been her shield moments before. “Had I been born a man, I would not be so eager to undertake such a journey as being a husband. But as the eldest and, as it turns out, only daughter…well there was quite a bit of fuss on the subject since I was very small. Even now,” She mused, reaching forwards to take up her glass to gulp back the last little bit of alcohol at the bottom. “Old and ugly as I am.”
“To whom?” Benedict demanded, his brow arching.
“Some old cretin. Ashby, I think.” She sniffed, swallowing dryly at the memory of the old creature.
Benedict thought for a moment, and then, suddenly recalling the man, his jaw dropped and his eyes became wide. “No!”
“Yes.”
“But he’s–!”
“Older than my father. A truly miserable looking fellow. I am halfway certain his wife willed herself to die to be free of him.”
“Your uncle could aim higher.” Benedict grumbled, shifting in his seat to sit straighter.
“I imagine he wants me to be a very well off widow, although I keep having to remind him that the old bat has four grown sons, so my imaginary inheritance is already claimed.”
“Might be a comfort, really, to marry a man who is soon to die.”
Edie fixed him with a smile that was barely bitten back. “You’re a funny drunk, Pointy.”
“I am nowhere near drunk, dear lady.”
Once more, she giggled. “We finished off an entire bottle, and I am perfectly coherant.”
He joined in her mirth, before pausing, seeming to be thinking. “And…well, to be frank, Edith, I do not think any of the men who flaunted themselves before you would have been able to handle you.” It was strange how he could recall that time with such clarity, when it had been so trivial and dull at the time.
“What?”
“Your suitors, back in your first season. Pfft, idiots, the lot of them.”
Her brows narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Well…Mister Yang is rather meek. He yields to his mother-in-law at every word, and his wife finds it all too amusing.”
“Not such a bad thing to be free of a domineering boar.”
“Mister Graham, on the other hand, still bends to his mother’s will and it is plain she does not much like his wife. And Mister Inman is often heard berating his wife for his lack of sons. Four daughters now and still complaining, and thankfully the four of them favor his wife in looks. Lastly, Mister Simon spends more time with his mistress than his wife and children.”
Edith bit back another chuckle. “You have very strong opinions on your peers.” She noted with a tone of great mirth.
“Strong they may be, but I respect most of these men and count them as friends. And I count you as a friend, and can say with all sincerity, none of them would have made you a suitable husband.”
“Am I so terrible?” She asked with a smile.
“No. You’re talented, opinionated, passionate. I cannot see any of them making you halfway happy.”
“I am too old to be looking for happiness. Anyway, being as I am, I am allowed to be picky over whether or not I will marry. And I will not marry the old creature my uncle keeps pushing me towards.”
“As you should.” Benedict replied. A long silence came then, but Edith didn’t feel trapped, or eager to end it. But she glanced at the clock and knew she had to find her bed.
“I think it is past time for us to go to bed.”
“I think you may be right. I shall take my leave.”
She shook her head. “No, just sleep here. ‘Tis far too early.”
When she woke, Benedict was gone. And in his place, on her drawing pad, her little sketch of feet dipping into a pond had been expanded. A faceless woman sat on the edge of a little dock, embroidering.