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Chapter Text

Mayfair, London— Fall, 1814

The very air of Mayfair had curdled into mourning. Not a whisper stirred the hedges of Grosvenor Square; not a bird dared trill from the boughs of the elms that lined the cobbled lanes. Even the sky—once so proud in its cerulean finery—had drawn a veil of leaden grey, as though ashamed to witness what unfolded below. The clouds, heavy with unshed tears, hung low and motionless, their silence more deafening than any dirge.

Through this sepulchral stillness crept a funeral cortege unlike any London had seen in living memory. No nobleman’s passing, no dowager’s dignified exit—this was for a girl who had never been seen, only felt: a presence so faint she was mistaken for the wallpaper, so quiet her voice had never risen above the rustle of silk skirts at Almack’s. And yet, by royal decree, the Queen herself had commanded this somber parade through the heart of the ton’s most gilded quarter.

All wore black—deep, unrelenting black—as though colour itself had been outlawed in grief. Veils obscured faces, hats were doffed and left behind, canes tapped hollowly against the damp earth like the ticking of a deathwatch beetle. The only splash of hue in this monochrome nightmare rode atop the lead carriage: a grotesque bouquet of yellow roses and larkspur, wilting already beneath the weight of sorrow. Yellow—the colour of betrayal, some whispered. Others knew better. Yellow was the only brightness she had ever dared wear.

From shuttered windows, the curious peered—children with wide, uncomprehending eyes, matrons with pinched lips and narrowed gazes. They watched, unmoved, as if attending a spectacle rather than a requiem. Their murmurs, once sharp with gossip, now fell flat and meaningless against the oppressive hush. Even the clatter of carriage wheels and the distant clip-clop of hooves seemed muffled, as though the world itself held its breath.

Inside the Queen’s own carriage, the air was thick with unspoken dread. Queen Charlotte sat rigid as a marble effigy, her spine straight, her gloved hands clenched in her lap. Her face—usually a mask of imperious calm—was etched with something far more dangerous: doubt. Suspicion. A gnawing, serpentine unease that coiled in her gut and refused to be banished.

Beside her, Lady Danbury wept—not with the performative sobs of society mourners, but with the raw, ragged grief of a woman who had watched too many young lives snuffed out before their time. Her black lace handkerchief, embroidered with a single, trembling larkspur in golden thread, was sodden through. She pressed it to her lips, as if to stifle the truth she dared not speak aloud.

“She was but a wallflower,” Lady Danbury murmured at last, her voice hoarse, as though dragged through gravel. She did not look at the Queen, but out through the slit in the black-draped window, where the cortege wound its slow, funereal path toward St. George’s. “Never danced. Never courted. Never seen. And yet… they killed her anyway.”

Queen Charlotte’s jaw tightened. “Killed?” she echoed, her voice low, dangerous. “There has been no verdict. No body even recovered—only that… that satchel.” She could not bring herself to describe its contents: the torn chemise, the lock of honey-blonde hair matted with something dark, the single slipper floating in the Serpentine like a discarded toy.

“Aye,” Lady Danbury said bitterly. “No body. Only proof enough to silence a girl who never made a sound.”

Silence stretched between them, taut as a hangman’s rope.

Then, softer, “Cressida Cowper’s lie did this.”

The Queen’s eyes flashed. “That viperous girl spun a tale of treason—of secret liaisons with that French-sympathising rogue who sought to undermine the Crown. She claimed… she was his confidante. His lover, even.” Charlotte’s voice dripped with contempt. “Preposterous. That girl could barely hold a conversation without blushing into her fichu. She spent eight Seasons pressed against the wainscoting, for God’s sake! What secrets could she possibly have traded?”

“None,” Lady Danbury said flatly. “And that is precisely why it was so easy to destroy her. No allies. No defenders. Not even a suitor to raise his voice in protest.” She turned then, her dark eyes boring into the Queen’s. “Except, perhaps, those who should have.”

A beat. Then, with icy precision: “The Bridgertons did not come.”

Queen Charlotte’s lips thinned. “They live but a stone’s throw from her family’s townhouse. They dined with them. Danced with them. Their youngest daughter called her friend.”

“And yet,” Lady Danbury whispered, “not a single Bridgerton stands in this procession. Not even Eloise, who once clung to her arm like a second shadow. They hide behind their hedges and their propriety, as though grief is contagious.”

The Queen’s fingers tightened around her fan—closed, unused, a weapon she could not wield. “I had spies everywhere,” she admitted, voice barely audible. “In every ballroom, every garden party, every servants’ corridor. Not one report—not one—ever linked her to seditious talk, to coded letters, to midnight assignations. She wrote nothing but letters to her mother about lace trimmings and the price of oranges.”

“Then why?” Lady Danbury’s voice cracked. “Why would Cressida accuse her of such a thing? Why would anyone believe it?”

“Because she was invisible,” the Queen said, the words tasting like ash. “Because no one would defend a ghost.”

Outside, the carriage passed Madame Delacroix’s modiste shop. The old Frenchwoman stood in the doorway, weeping openly, clutching a bolt of black crepe and a half-finished mourning dress—its bodice embroidered with tiny, golden larkspurs. She pressed it into the arms of a woman whose face was ravaged by sorrow: a mother who had buried not a daughter, but a memory.

Lady Danbury watched her go, then turned back to the Queen, her usual fire banked to embers. “You ruled her ruined with a single rumour. Exile would have been mercy. But this…” She gestured to the silent street, the veiled mourners, the empty carriage rolling ahead like a phantom. “This is murder dressed as misfortune.”

Queen Charlotte said nothing. But in her eyes flickered something new—not just grief, but guilt. And beneath it, a cold, sharpening resolve.

For if a wallflower could be plucked and crushed so easily, then no one in Mayfair was safe.

And the Queen would not suffer liars to bloom in her garden.

St. George’s stood hollow beneath its vaulted arches, its gilded saints and stained glass weeping saints casting long, accusing shadows over the nave. The grandeur of the church—its marble columns, its soaring ceilings, its intricate carvings—felt like mockery now. No incense could sweeten the air thick with grief; no candlelight could pierce the gloom that clung to every pew like damp velvet.

The Featheringtons moved as spectres through the aisle. Portia, leaden-eyed and trembling, clutched a hair ribbon—faded yellow, frayed at the edges—as though it might still carry the warmth of a pulse. Philippa followed, bearing a pair of dancing slippers, never worn for lack of invitation. Prudence carried a small, leather-bound journal—blank, save for a single pressed larkspur tucked between its pages. Each object a relic of a life uncelebrated, now offered to an altar that held only emptiness.

For there was no body

Only a polished mahogany coffin, absurdly grand for a girl who had never claimed a single moment of splendour, sat before the altar like a cruel jest. No face to kiss one last time. No hand to hold as the soul fled. Just wood and silence.

Portia collapsed into the front pew, her breath hitching in ragged, animal sobs. She reached for Philippa’s hand, but recoiled as if burned—what comfort could flesh offer when her own child’s was gone, scattered or sunk beneath the black waters of the Serpentine? She had feared seeing her daughter cold and still. But this—this void—was a torment far worse. How could she mourn what she could not bury? How could she release a soul when no one could say for certain it had even left?

Around the coffin, young gentlemen of the ton laid bouquets of yellow roses and larkspur, their gestures solemn, their faces grave. But Portia saw only hypocrisy in their pretty bows and polished boots. Where were you when she needed a dance? her mind screamed. Where were you when she stood alone, ignored, ridiculed for her freckles and her silence? These flowers were not tribute—they were absolution sought too late, offered by men who had once called her “that Featherington girl” with a sneer.

High in the gallery, veiled in widow’s black though she mourned no husband, Lady Danbury watched the scene below with eyes sharp as flint—and just as cold.

“Not a single Bridgerton,” she hissed, her voice a blade wrapped in silk. “Not Violet. Not Anthony. Not even Eloise—who called her sister in all but blood. I have said it a hundred times: that girl was theirs as much as she was Featherington’s. She sat at their table. Walked their gardens. Shared their secrets.” Her knuckles whitened around the railing. “And now? They hide behind their curtains like cowards.”

Queen Charlotte, seated beside her, kept her gaze fixed on the altar, though her posture betrayed unease. “Grief takes many forms, Agatha,” she murmured, though her tone lacked its usual steel. “Perhaps they mourn in private. Perhaps they cannot bear to face this… this emptiness.”

“Private?” Lady Danbury scoffed, though tears still tracked through her powder. “When the Queen commands a public procession? When the entire ton gathers to witness the burial of a lie? No. This is not grief. This is cowardice. Complicity.”

Charlotte did not answer. But her silence was heavy.

Below, the priest stepped forward, his cassock stark against the gloom. His voice, when it came, was not one of comfort, but of quiet condemnation.

“We gather not to bury a body, but to mourn a failure,” he intoned, his eyes sweeping the congregation. “A failure of charity. A failure of sight. A failure of love. For what is society if it permits the quietest among us to vanish without outcry? What is God’s grace if we do not extend it to those who ask for nothing but a place at the table? This empty coffin is not merely the absence of a soul—it is the indictment of a world that saw her, and chose to look away.”

Prudence, seated beside her mother, bowed her head. She remembered the girl who’d mended her torn glove before her first ball, fingers nimble despite their shaking. She remembered how, when Prudence had been mocked for tripping during a quadrille, it was she who’d whispered, “They’ll forget by tomorrow,” and meant it as kindness, not pity. And now—now she was gone, and Prudence had never even thanked her.

Philippa, beside her, pressed a hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. She recalled the nights they’d shared a bed during country visits, when thunderstorms would rattle the windows and she would hum tunelessly—off-key, always off-key—just to calm Philippa’s nerves. She remembered how, during her own engagement announcement, the girl had smiled so brightly it hurt to look at her, though her own prospects had long since withered. “I’m so happy for you,” she’d said, and meant it. Always meant it.

And now there would be no more humming. No more mending. No more quiet, steadfast love offered without expectation.

Portia watched the yellow petals accumulate around the coffin like fallen stars, and felt her heart splinter anew. Each bloom was a reminder of her daughter's pain. You did not see her. You did not save her. You let her drown in silence. She only wanted love.

From the gallery, Lady Danbury turned sharply to the Queen, her voice trembling not with age, but with fury. “They called her a wallflower, Charlotte. But walls do not bleed. Walls do not weep. And walls do not float face-down in the lake because some viper whispered poison into the ears of fools.”

The Queen finally looked at her—really looked—and in her eyes flickered something rare: fear.

“Then we shall find out who pushed her,” Charlotte said, low and lethal. “Even if we must tear Mayfair apart, stone by stone.”

But below, in the echoing nave, no one heard her. Only the priest’s lament, the rustle of black silk, and the sound of a mother’s unending grief filled the hollow church—where a daughter’s name would never again be spoken aloud, though her absence screamed louder than any eulogy.

Lady Danbury did not sit back down.

She remained standing in the shadowed gallery, her spine rigid as a duelling sword, her gloved hands gripping the carved balustrade until her knuckles blanched white beneath the silk. Below, the priest’s voice had softened into prayer, but Lady Danbury heard none of it. Her gaze had fixed—not on the empty coffin, not on the weeping mother—but on the absence where he should have been.

Colin Bridgerton.

The boy—no, the man—who had laughed with her in moonlit gardens while the rest of the ton danced obliviously inside. The only man who had willingly danced with her at every ball and event. The one who had walked her home from Vauxhall more than once, his arm offered not out of duty, but quiet companionship. The only gentleman in all of London who had ever looked at her—really looked—and not seen a wallflower, but a woman.

And now he was nowhere.

Not in the pews. Not among the mourners. Not even lurking in the churchyard like a penitent ghost.

Lady Danbury’s breath came sharp and uneven. She turned abruptly to Queen Charlotte, her voice a broken rasp, barely louder than the rustle of crape against stone.

“He was to marry her,” she whispered, the words raw, as though torn from her throat. “You know it as well as I. Not by contract, not by announcement—but by the way he watched her. By the way he listened. When she spoke—rare as it was—he leaned in. Not out of pity. Out of regard.” Her voice cracked. “And she… oh, Charlotte, she loved him. Not with the shrill desperation of a debutante chasing a title, but with that quiet, stubborn devotion that only the overlooked ever learn to give. She never said it. But her eyes… her eyes ached for him.”

A tear spilled over, tracing a path through her powder. She did not wipe it away.

“And now?” She let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. “Now he hides. Like a boy who’s broken a vase and hopes no one will notice the shards. As if absence erases guilt. As if silence absolves him of having let her vanish without so much as a word.”

Queen Charlotte shifted uncomfortably, her fan still closed in her lap. “Agatha—”

“No,” Lady Danbury cut in, her voice rising just enough to tremble the air between them. “Do not ‘Agatha’ me, Your Majesty. You saw it too. At Lady Ledger’s garden party last summer—he brought her lemonade when she’d been standing in the sun too long. At the Featherington ball, he danced with her when no one else would, even though it cost him two waltzes with Miss Thompson, who’d been batting her lashes at him all evening. He saw her. And then… he let her be erased.”

She pressed her handkerchief—still embroidered with that solitary larkspur—to her mouth, her shoulders shaking.

“I should like to give that boy a proper beating,” she hissed through her tears. “Not with a cane. Not with words. But with the truth. Let him feel what it is to be unseen. Let him know what it is to love someone in silence and lose them to the cruelty of those who speak too loudly. Let him stand before that empty coffin and explain—explain—why his boots are not muddied from running to her side when the rumours began. Why his voice was not raised in her defence when Cressida Cowper spat her poison like a viper in silk.”

Queen Charlotte reached out, laying a gloved hand over Lady Danbury’s trembling one. “He may yet come,” she said softly, though even she did not believe it.

“He will not,” Lady Danbury said flatly. “Because he is ashamed. And shame, Charlotte, is the coward’s shroud.”

Below, Portia Featherington finally rose, swaying slightly, and placed the yellow ribbon atop the coffin. It lay there, small and frail against the dark wood—a final offering from a mother who had nothing left to give.

And in that moment, Lady Danbury knew: Colin Bridgerton would carry this silence to his grave. And it would rot him from the inside out.

She turned away from the altar, from the weeping family, from the ton that had failed them all.

“Let the Queen pardon whom she will,” she murmured, her voice now cold as winter stone. “But I shall not forgive him. Not while I draw breath.”

Time did not move in St. George’s that afternoon—it bled.

Each second stretched like taffeta pulled too thin, fraying at the edges with the weight of unspoken grief. From behind the heavy, moth-eaten velvet drapes that shrouded the sacristy alcove—a place meant for vestments, not witnesses—she stood. Hidden. Alive. And utterly, devastatingly alone.

The rough wool of the acolyte’s robe itched against her skin, coarse and ill-fitting, a cruel contrast to the fine muslins and silks she had once worn in silence at balls where no one asked her to dance. But she had chosen this disguise. Chosen the discomfort. Finding solace in the shadows.

Her blue eyes—once bright with secret wit, now dulled by exhaustion and sorrow—fixed on the scene before her as though watching a play in which she was both ghost and author.

There, at the foot of the empty coffin, knelt her mother. Portia’s shoulders heaved with sobs so deep they seemed to tear at her very ribs. She clutched the edge of the pew as if it were the only thing keeping her from collapsing into the abyss. Behind her, Prudence and Philippa clung to each other, their faces buried in black lace, their tears falling onto the cold stone floor like rain on a grave that held no body.

And the ton? The ton watched. Not with pity, but with the detached curiosity one might afford a tragic opera—safe in their boxes, untouched by the real blood on the stage.

Higher up, in the gallery draped in mourning crepe, Lady Danbury dabbed her eyes with that handkerchief—the one embroidered with the larkspur, her flower. Beside her, Queen Charlotte spoke in low, measured tones, her expression unreadable, her attention clearly more invested in calming her old friend than in the funeral unfolding below.

Of course, she thought bitterly. Why would they truly mourn her? She was never real to them. Only a rumour. A cautionary tale. A wallflower who dared to exist too quietly—and paid for it with her name, her reputation, her life.

Her breath hitched as her gaze swept the nave once more, searching—always searching—for them.

The Bridgertons.

Not a single one.

No Anthony with his solemn brow. No Benedict sketching in the margins of his prayer book. No Daphne, soft-eyed and kind. Not even Francesca or Hyacinth, who had once shared lemon tarts with her in the garden. And Eloise—Eloise, her dearest friend, her confidante, the sister of her heart—nowhere. Vanished, as though their bond had been nothing but ink on a page, easily blotted out by scandal.

And Colin…

Her chest tightened so fiercely she nearly doubled over.

Colin, who had once walked her home beneath a sky dusted with stars, who had laughed at her terrible jokes, who had looked at her—really looked—as if she were more than freckles and silence. He had turned away when the whispers began. Not with anger. Not even with disbelief. Just… absence. A slow, quiet withdrawal, as though she had already ceased to exist.

The bouquet of yellow roses and larkspur piled around the coffin mocked her now. These are the flowers I dreamed of filling your drawing rooms with, she thought, her throat burning. The ones I imagined you’d send when you finally saw me. Not now. Not when I’m gone.

But they had waited. They had all waited—until she was nothing but a rumour wrapped in black silk and tragedy.

A tear slipped down her cheek, hot and shameful. She wiped it away with the back of her trembling hand, the rough fabric of the robe scratching her skin. She could not afford to be seen. Not now. Not ever again.

This was her final act of love. Her last gift.

Let them believe her dead. Let Mayfair bury the ghost of Penelope Featherington, wallflower and ruined spinster. In her death, her family would be reborn—cleansed of scandal, freed from debt, lifted from the mire of ridicule. Portia would wear finer gowns. Prudence and Philippa would find suitors unafraid of association. And Eloise… perhaps Eloise would finally understand the cost of silence.

She took one last, shuddering breath, and stepped back from the curtain.

Her heel caught on a loose stone, and she stumbled backward, her shoulder colliding with something solid.

She whirled, heart hammering, ready to flee and found herself staring into the red-rimmed, tear-swollen eyes of Genevieve Delacroix.

The modiste stood there in a simple black dress, her hands dusted with chalk from measuring tape, her face pale but resolute. Without a word, she reached out and cupped the girl’s face, her thumbs brushing away fresh tears.

“Oh, my darling,” Genevieve whispered, her French accent thick with emotion. “You must go. Now.”

She guided her swiftly through the narrow sacristy corridor, past shelves of tarnished chalices and folded altar cloths, toward a side door that opened into the overgrown churchyard. There, waiting beneath the skeletal branches of a weeping willow, stood a carriage—plain, unmarked, its paint chipped, its wheels caked in dried mud. No crest. No flourish. Perfect.

Inside, the space was sparse but sufficient. Three heavy trunks sat strapped to the floor. One held every shilling she had earned over twelve long years of writing—every guinea scraped from the ton’s vanity, every pound saved from the shadows. The others held her papers, her journals, the few dresses she dared take—simple, serviceable things, nothing that would draw attention. In a hidden compartment beneath the seat lay her mother’s locket, her father’s pocket watch, and a single pressed larkspur between the pages of a blank ledger.

Genevieve helped her inside, then knelt on the muddy ground to adjust the hem of her cloak, her fingers lingering on the fabric as if memorizing its texture.

“The ship leaves at dusk,” she said softly, her voice trembling. “The cartel knows your pin—the silver quill you gave me last week. Show it, and they’ll take you aboard without question. From there… New York. Boston. Charleston. Wherever your heart leads.”

“I don’t know if I have a heart left,” the girl whispered.

Genevieve looked up, her eyes glistening. “Then let the sea give you a new one.”

They embraced then—fiercely, desperately—as two women who knew this was not goodbye, but au revoir. No words could hold the weight of what they shared: the secret of Lady Whistledown, the truth of the satchel planted in the lake, the lies that had forced a living girl into a coffin of silence.

“Write to me,” Genevieve choked out. “As soon as you are safe.”

“I will,” she promised, her voice breaking. “Every week. Even if you never reply.”

Genevieve squeezed her hand one last time, then stepped back, pulling the carriage door shut with a soft click that echoed like a tomb sealing.

Through the grimy window, the girl watched as her only true ally raised a trembling hand in farewell. The horses snorted, restless, as if sensing the gravity of their charge. With a low creak, the carriage lurched forward, wheels groaning over the wet earth, carrying her away from Mayfair, from her name, from everything she had ever known.

Genevieve stood until the carriage vanished into the mist-shrouded trees, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Then, steeling herself, she turned and slipped back into the church through the side door, melting into the shadows just as the priest raised his hands for the final benediction.

She took her place behind the same altar curtain where her friend had stood moments before, pressing her back against the cold stone wall, her breath shallow.

Below, the priest’s voice—deep, mournful, edged with righteous sorrow—filled the nave.

“And so we commend to Almighty God the soul of Penelope Featherington,” he intoned, her name ringing through the church for the first time that day, clear and terrible in its finality. “A daughter of silence. A sister of patience. A woman who asked for so little—and was given less. May the Lord, who sees the unseen, grant her the peace this world denied her.”

At the sound of her name, Genevieve’s knees nearly buckled. She clutched the curtain for support, tears streaming freely now—not just for the girl who had just fled into exile, but for the mother shattered before the coffin, for the sisters weeping into each other’s sleeves, for the ton that had failed her so utterly.

And for Mayfair itself—a gilded cage where truth was currency, and the quietest voices were the first to be silenced.

“Rest in peace, my dearest,” Genevieve whispered into the dark, her voice lost beneath the swell of the congregation’s murmured “Amen.”

Outside, the wind picked up, scattering yellow petals from the coffin across the stone floor—fragile, fleeting, already forgotten.

But somewhere beyond the fog, a carriage rolled on through the forest fog and mist. Inside a crying dead woman no longer knowing her future. And a new life began in the shadow of a name no one would ever speak again.

Chapter Text

Boston, Massachusetts — Summer, 1824

The sun had barely kissed the rooftops of Beacon Hill when Vivienne Dubois rose—not with the timid rustle of a debutante startled from slumber, but with the languid grace of a woman who owned her hours as surely as she owned the silk sheets tangled about her legs. She stretched beneath the counterpane, one arm flung above her head, the other idly tracing the gilded edge of last night’s unfinished manuscript. Her bedchamber smelled of orange blossom water, beeswax, and the faint, smoky tang of ink—her trinity of indulgences.

By half-past seven, she was seated at her escritoire, wrapped in a peignoir of French lace the colour of claret, her dark auburn hair—no longer the mousy brown of her youth, but richly deepened by walnut dye and time—piled in a loose chignon that threatened to tumble with every turn of her head. Before her lay the morning’s correspondence: invitations (three), marriage proposals (two, both from men she’d never met but whose portraits she’d admired at last month’s assembly), and a slim packet from Paris—her latest proofs for Le Journal des Dames, where her serialized column, still signed Lady Whistledown, had taken Parisian salons by storm.

She sipped her coffee—black, strong, and scandalously unsweetened—and unfolded the first letter with a smirk.

“Madame Dubois—your presence at the Horticultural Society’s Spring Soirée would lend it the very bloom it lacks…”

She set it aside. She would attend, of course. Not for the flowers, but for the whispers that bloomed beneath them, she did love a good gossip. The women of Boston never ran out of them.

By half past nine, she was bathed in rosewater, corseted not for constraint but for silhouette, and dressed in a morning gown of butter-yellow muslin—high-waisted, short-sleeved, daringly open at the throat and down to the softness of her bosom. She breakfasted alone in the sunroom: kippers, toast with blackberry jam, and strong coffee brewed Turkish-style, a habit picked up during her brief sojourn in New Orleans. Beside her plate lay the latest proofs of her new serial, The Duchess of Doubt, to be published under her beloved pseudonym next week in The American Observer. 

She made a note in the margin: “Clarify—does she truly love him, or merely the idea of being loved?”

At ten, the callers began.

But not as you may think. For Vivienne Dubois did not receive suitors as often as she received widows and young women aspiring to be just like her. Oh what delight!

First came Mrs. Abigail Thorne, wife of a shipping magnate, fluttering in like a sparrow in lilac silk. “My dear Vivienne! You simply must attend the Foundling Hospital gala—they’ve commissioned a portrait of you for the foyer! They say you’ve donated more than any other patron this year.”

Vivienne accepted the praise with a languid wave. “Charity is the only inheritance worth passing on, Abigail. Tell them I’ll wear the sapphire gown—the one with the back cut to scandal.”

After that, Vivienne received word from Eliza who'd come around to readjust her gown.

“Supposed today, Abigail is the only to call for me?” Vivienne winced as she felt her corset push her bosom up higher as Eliza adjusted her gown.

“You’ll have more callers before noon, ma’am,” Eliza warned, fastening the last button at her back. “Mrs. Winthrop’s already sent word she’s bringing her niece—the one with the pianoforte and the wandering eye.”

“Then I shall be ready to dazzle,” Vivienne replied, adjusting a sapphire pendant at her throat—a gift from a sea captain who’d once tried to sail her to Barbados. She’d declined the voyage but kept the jewel.

Indeed, by half-ten, the drawing room hummed with feminine energy. Mrs. Winthrop, plump and perfumed, sat beside her doe-eyed niece, Miss Clara, who blushed furiously whenever Vivienne so much as glanced her way. Around them gathered a coterie of Boston’s most spirited matrons and widows—women who’d long since tired of pretending modesty was virtue.

“…and then he had the gall to say my novel was ‘too forward for a lady’s pen!’” Vivienne laughed, fanning herself with a hand painted with Cupid and quiver. “As if ink has gender!”

The room erupted in knowing titters. Mrs. Pembroke, a widow thrice over and twice as wealthy, leaned in conspiratorially. “They say Lady Whistledown’s next column will expose the governor’s affair with that French opera singer. True?”

Vivienne’s eyes sparkled. “My dear, I never confirm or deny the speculations of others, I merely speculate of my own! But I do find it curious that the governor’s wife has taken to wearing mourning black… though no one has died.”

A collective gasp—half horror, half delight—rippled through the room.

At noon, she descended into the city.

Accompanied by two maids—Bridget, Irish and sharp-tongued, and Eliza, freed from slavery in Virginia and now Vivienne’s most trusted confidante—she walked through the bustling streets of Boston’s commercial quarter. She wore a straw bonnet tied with emerald ribbons, gloves of pale kid, and carried a parasol that did little to shield her from the sun but much to enhance her silhouette.

At Faneuil Hall Market, she haggled playfully with fishmongers over the price of Dover sole, accepted a sprig of lavender from a flower girl with a wink, and paused to admire a new shipment of French lace at Madame Leclerc’s stall.

“Madame Dubois!” called a voice—deep, honeyed, edged with flirtation.

She turned. Captain Nathaniel Graves, late of the Sea Nymph, stood in his navy coat, boots polished to a shine, hat tucked under one arm. His eyes—grey as storm clouds—raked over her with open admiration. “I read your comment on Lady Whistledown's latest column. ‘A gentleman who cannot dance is no gentleman at all.’ Harsh, my lady. I’ve been practicing.”

Vivienne arched a brow. She'd been dancing with the man at Lord Vanderbilt's birthday party before she'd released the column, he'd nearly stepped on her toe at least four times. Of course, Lady Whistledown would have seen that, it was out of humor that she often mentioned herself in her anonymous writing. Like a puppet show only she could control and giving both of her pseudonyms power of sorts. “And did you step on your partner’s toes, Captain?”

“Only once. And she forgave me—after I bought her a bottle of Madeira.”

She laughed then—a rich, throaty sound that turned heads down the cobbled lane. “Then perhaps you’re not entirely hopeless.” She gave him a slow, appraising glance, lingering just long enough to make his cheeks flush. “But do try not to rely on wine to excuse your clumsiness. Some of us prefer grace without bribery.”

He bowed deeply, grinning. “I live in hope of earning your approval, madam.”

“Hope is free, Captain,” she tossed over her shoulder as she moved on. “But my dances are not.”

Her maids exchanged knowing looks. Bridget muttered, “Another one smitten.”

Eliza merely smiled. “She lets them look. But none ever touch.”

Back at the townhouse by two, Vivienne changed into a riding habit of forest green and took her mare, Thrittle, for a gallop along the Charles. The wind tore at her bonnet, her hair escaping in wild tendrils—but she didn’t care. Here, she was not a widow, not a writer, not even Vivienne Dubois. She was simply free.

She returned flushed and breathless, dismissed her staff for the afternoon, and retired to her study. There, she lit a single beeswax candle, uncorked a decanter of port, and sat before her writing desk.

From a locked drawer, she withdrew her current manuscript—Lady Whistledown’s American Scandals, Vol. III—and began to write.

Dearest gentle reader,

    One might assume that across the Atlantic, society has shed its pettiness like an old pelisse. Alas, vanity is not a British export—it is a human condition. This week, we turn our gaze to Beacon Hill, where a certain sea captain believes a well-polished boot and a practiced smirk are sufficient to win the heart of a woman who has read every novel from Austen to Radcliffe… and found them all wanting in true heroes.

   Do try harder, gentlemen. We are watching. 

She signed it with a flourish of her name, Lady Whistledown.

Outside, the city hummed with life. Carriages rolled, children laughed, lovers quarrelled and reconciled beneath gaslit trees. And in her study, surrounded by books, letters, and the quiet power of a name no one knew was hers, Vivienne Dubois—widow, heiress, author, enigma—sipped her port, smiled to herself, and prepared to break another heart with nothing but ink and truth.

For in Boston, she was not merely desired.

۝ 

The sun was shining up in Boston as Vivienne walked along with Pacifica, arm in arm whilst they observed every couple and pair and family walk along the cobble path and trying their best to see eye to eye with every possible match. Vivienne reminisced as this was no different than her younger days and she giggled when Pacifica made a comment about Lord Marcos’s new conquest, one of the many spinster Vivienne knew of that had absolutely no intention of settling.

“Do you suppose Lord Marcos has finally gained his so called long lost inheritance?” Pacifica mutters underneath their parasol, held by her maid Celisse. “I can't fathom that Lady Astor would willingly promenade and be seen with him and his…golden… teeth?”

Vivienne snorts— an undignified rumble that she tries to quickly cover with her gloved hand. Eliza, her maid, too, shares a chuckle. “Pacifica, why must you bring up the old man’s teeth.”

“It is simply his most beguiling trait,” Pacifica shrugged, happy to have made her friend laugh. 

Vivienne readied her retort until Lord James Vanderbilt and his wife Lady Celestine Vanderbilt had intercepted them, to which both ladies showed their smiles and curtsied with practiced grace and poise.

“Ladies,” Lord James greets, in his arm held Lady Celestine who was grinning excitedly at them. “I see you two are having a wonderful day?”

“Oh truly,” Vivienne side glanced at Pacifica which prompted her friend to hold in a laugh. She graced the Lord with an amused and slightly apologetic smile that shared the humor to them. “It is a wonderful morning to watch the young lovers before the start of the social seasons.”

“It is, isn't it?” Lady Celestines says with a wonderful sigh. “And surely you must have had a full day of prospects yesterday, Lady Dubois.”

“Oh merely raging mamas bringing their daughters in before their debuts," Vivienne fans herself with a big smile. “I must say there are quite a number of lovely pearls this time, I feel great of the upcoming balls.”

“Oh yes,” Pacifica finally joins in, her hold on Vivienne's arm tightening in excitement. “I feel utmost excitement knowing that the opening of this year's season will be in time for Lady Dubois’s birthday. Turning thirty-and-eight, matter of fact.”

“And still so refined and young,” Lady Celestine flustered and it brought a chuckle out of Lord Vanderbilt.

Vivienne scoffed playfully and fanned herself. Her cheeks flushing, she really did love the compliments when she felt them genuine, these were one of them as Lady Vanderbilt rarely ever spoke ill, she'd know. “Compliments get you far, Lady Vanderbilt. I shall see the both of you at my social gathering then at Boston Common?

“Boston Common?” Lady Celestine’s eyes sparkled. “You've rented the whole park, Lady Dubios?”

“Well yes,” Vivienne smirked. “I am not Boston’s elite socialite if I didn't hold grandiose with my gatherings, now would I?”

Lord Vanderbilt clears his throat then, just in time to stop his wife from full on gushing over Lady Dubois. Such a fanatic, that on, Viviene thinks. “Well, as that such case, we will be there. It is an open opportunity for us to expand businesses.”

“Surely,” Pacifica grins. “She's bringing various business accomplices from France this time, a visit from Genevieve Delacroix is due. Did you know they were friends?”

Lady Celestine had not been able to hold back her excitement. As she immediately jumped into a frantic flustering babbles.

Lady Celestine’s words tumbled forth in a breathless cascade, her gloved hands fluttering like startled doves. “Madame Delacroix! The very Madame Delacroix of Parisian renown? The modiste who dressed the Duchess of Orléans? Oh, Lady Dubois, you simply must introduce me! I have worn nothing but her silhouettes since I was but 19 though, of course, only through intermediaries, as one does when separated by an ocean! But to meet her in the flesh? At your gathering? In Boston? It is too wondrous!”

Vivienne, ever the practiced hostess, allowed her smile to bloom—warm, gracious, yet edged with the faintest glint of amusement. She gave Pacifica a subtle nudge with her elbow beneath the shelter of their shared parasol, her eyes narrowing just enough to convey: You wretched instigator.

Pacifica, for her part, merely arched a brow, her lips twitching as she affected the picture of innocence. She fanned herself with languid elegance, though the mischievous sparkle in her dark eyes betrayed her utter delight in the chaos she had unleashed.

“Indeed,” Vivienne replied smoothly, her voice honeyed with practiced charm, “Genevieve is rather like a sister to me. We’ve corresponded for years—ever since my dear late husband and I wintered in New Orleans. She’s agreed to sail over for the season, and I’ve promised her a proper American welcome.” She paused, then added with a sly tilt of her head, “Though I warn you, Lady Celestine—she detests flattery. She’ll stitch you into a gown so perfect you’ll weep, but if you so much as call her ‘ma chère,’ she’ll send you home in muslin.”

Lady Celestine gasped—not in offense, but in rapture. “Oh! A woman of principle! How utterly divine!”

Lord James cleared his throat again, though this time with less urgency and more fond exasperation. “My wife has already commissioned three new gowns for the season, Dubois. If Madame Delacroix is in attendance, I fear I shall be bankrupt before the first ball.”

“Then consider it an investment, my lord,” Vivienne said lightly, her eyes dancing. “For nothing draws business like a well-dressed wife.”

Pacifica let out a soft, musical laugh. “And nothing draws scandal like a poorly dressed one. You’d do well to heed Lady Dubois’s wisdom.”

At this, Lady Celestine clutched her husband’s arm, her cheeks flushed with mirth and anticipation. “We shall be there without fail! And I shall wear my sapphire taffeta—the one with the Brussels lace. Genevieve simply must see it!”

Vivienne inclined her head, the picture of serene satisfaction. She basked in the warmth of their admiration—not because she needed it, but because it was so deliciously earned. Here, she was not a ghost. She was not a cautionary tale whispered behind fans. She was Vivienne Dubois: formidable, generous, and utterly in command of every room she entered—even a sun-dappled path in Boston Common.

Still, as the Vanderbilts took their leave with effusive promises and fluttering curtsies, Vivienne turned to Pacifica and murmured beneath her breath, “You are a menace, Paci. Stirring up poor Celestine like a pot of boiling cream.”

Pacifica linked their arms once more, unrepentant. “And you, my dear, thrive on it. Admit it—you live for the moment someone’s eyes widen at the mention of your name. You’ve built an empire on astonishment.”

Vivienne did not deny it. Instead, she lifted her chin, watching the Vanderbilts disappear into the throng of strolling couples, their laughter trailing behind them like ribbons in the breeze.

“Perhaps,” she said softly. “But I’d rather be astonishing than overlooked.”

Pacifica squeezed her arm. “No one has overlooked you in a decade, Vivi. Not here. Not ever again.”

Vivienne said nothing. But beneath her gloves, her fingers curled slightly—just once—around the memory of a girl who once stood in Grosvenor Square and prayed to be seen.

Then she straightened her spine, adjusted her parasol, and smiled.

“Come,” she said, her voice bright once more. “Let us find that lemon ice before the sun claims us both. And do try not to mention Lord Marcos’s teeth to Mrs. Pembroke—she’s still nursing a broken heart over him, golden molars and all.”

“Beguiling smile, indeed,” Pacifica quips one last time as they continue off.

And Lady Vivienne Dubois’ laughter echoed along the air.

⁠۝ 

She had not intended to weep on her thirty-eighth birthday.

Indeed, she had begun the evening in fine spirits—perched upon a worn oak stool at the Green Dragon, a tavern tucked far from the polished parlours of Beacon Hill, where the ale was strong, the laughter louder, and no one cared whether one’s gloves matched one’s bonnet. She’d just returned from a brisk gallop through the outskirts of town with Pacifica, both of them clad in riding trousers and boots, their hair tucked beneath caps like a pair of wayward highwaymen. It had been Vivienne’s impulsive turn down Hash Street that led them here—away from the simpering debutantes and their prancing geldings, away from the hollow pleasantries of Boston’s so-called elite.

At first, she’d been amused.

A gaggle of young men at the far table—students, merchants’ sons, perhaps a poet or two—were deep in debate over some absurd wager involving ants and Scottish farmers. One, red-faced and earnest, insisted, “Aye, but you have runners! They have ants! I’m not saying it to slight your intellect, mind—but the Highland crofters keep jars of the creatures and will pour the whole lot over a thief’s head if caught pilfering turnips!”

Vivienne had snorted into her brandy, the sound unladylike and unrepentant. She caught their reflection in the glass as she set it down—flushed cheeks, wild gestures, the easy camaraderie of youth who had never known true loss. For a moment, it was charming. Almost endearing.

Then Pacifica appeared at her side, sliding onto the stool with the grace of a woman who’d long since abandoned propriety for truth. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbows, suspenders taut over a crisp white shirt, her low bun hidden beneath a leather cap. She placed a fresh glass before Vivienne with a knowing look.

“You miss home,” she said simply.

The words struck like a bell in an empty chapel.

Vivienne’s gaze drifted again to the table of young men—and now she saw them differently. Not as jesters, but as family

 Among them sat two young women, laughing as one mimicked a professor’s lisp, the other tucking a stray curl behind her ear with familiar impatience. They leaned into each other, shoulders touching, sharing bread, stealing sips from the same tankard. Sisters. Or perhaps dearest friends. It hardly mattered.

For in that instant, Vivienne was no longer in Boston.

She was back in Mayfair. She was watching Prudence and Philippa bicker over lace trimmings. She was stealing lemon tarts with Eloise beneath the Bridgerton garden arbour, their fingers sticky with jam, their whispers full of dreams too large for their corsets. She was listening to her mother’s footsteps pace the drawing room at dusk, waiting—always waiting—for a suitor who never came.

Her chest tightened, that old, familiar hollowness yawning wide, as though her ribs were merely a cage for a heart that had long since fled.

Pacifica saw it. Of course she did. She always did.

The bartender brought bread and cheese—thick slices of rye, sharp cheddar, a dollop of honeycomb. Pacifica thanked him with a generous coin and a warm smile, then turned back to Vivienne—and her expression faltered.

“Viv,” she murmured, reaching out to take her friend’s hand. “It’s your birthday. You mustn’t wear that look. It suits you ill.”

Vivienne blinked rapidly, but a tear escaped anyway, tracing a hot path down her cheek. She did not wipe it away.

“I miss home,” she whispered, the words raw, stripped bare of all pretense. “Not Boston. Not New Orleans. Home. The house with the crooked banister. The garden where the lilacs bloomed too early every spring. The sound of my sisters arguing over who borrowed whose ribbon. The way Eloise would knock on my window at midnight just to read me a poem she’d written.” Her voice cracked. “I miss being known.”

Pacifica’s own eyes glistened. She rose, pulled Vivienne into her arms, and pressed a kiss to the crown of her head. “Oh, my darling girl,” she breathed. “I’m so sorry.”

Vivienne clung to her for a moment, breathing in the scent of leather and lavender, letting the sobs stay trapped behind her teeth. She would not break—not here, not fully. But the dam had cracked.

When she pulled back, she offered a trembling smile. “I’m alright.”

But Pacifica knew better. She sat again, her voice gentle but insistent. “You’re not. And you needn’t be. Not today.”

Vivienne stared into her brandy, the amber liquid catching the firelight like old tears. Then, quietly, bitterly: “I hate her.”

“Who?”

“Cressida Cowper.” The name fell like a curse. “That viperous, simpering lying bitch! She looked me in the eye at Lady Ledger’s ball and called me ‘dear Penelope’—as though we were friends!—and three days later, she told the Queen I was conspiring with traitors. That I’d been meeting a French agent in the garden maze. All because I refused to lend her my copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho! She would not even have read it if it weren't for her trying to charm Lord Debling.”

She laughed then—a sharp, broken sound. “And the worst of it? No one questioned her. Not the Queen. Not the Bridgertons. Not even Colin, who once walked me home beneath the stars and told me I had the cleverest mind in Mayfair. I had thought he would be my strongest ally…but he had believed her. They all believed her. They didn't let Eloise near me. Because I was nothing. Just a wallflower. Just a girl no one would miss.”

Her fingers tightened around the glass. “So I let them think me dead. I left a satchel by the lake, filled with scraps of my dress, a lock of hair, a slipper. Genevieve helped me after I had run to her crying. And I vanished. Not because I wanted to— I was already as good as dead being the one to dawn shame and ruin to my family. I had to leave, I had nothing left and it would not be fair to bring my mother down with me. I couldn't bear it.”

Pacifica reached for her hand again, her grip firm. “You survived.”

“I did,” Vivienne whispered. “But at what cost? I will never see my mother again. Never watch Philippa marry. Never hear Prudence scold me for reading in the rain. Eloise thinks I’m dead after I had ran away, Paci. She mourns me. And I… I read her letters to Genevieve, folded between fabric swatches, and I cannot even write back to say, I am here. I am alive. That I miss them all more than I ever have it wrecks every bone of my body. It haunts my dreams to watch my mother cry over a casket meant for me.”

She looked up, her blue eyes blazing with a decade of suppressed fury and grief. Her chest tight and hot and utterly incensed. “Cressida Cowper dances in my favourite shade of yellow. She wears pearls I could never afford. And she walks through Mayfair untouched, unchastened, unpunished— while I am a ghost in my own life.”

Pacifica said nothing for a long moment. Then, softly, “Then let her have Mayfair. You have Boston. You have your books. You have me.”

Vivienne exhaled, the fight draining out of her like a tide from shore. “I know,” she said. “And I am grateful. Truly. But tonight… tonight I wish I could be Penelope Featherington again. Just for an hour. Just long enough to say goodbye properly.”

Pacifica did not speak at once. She let Vivienne’s words settle in the smoky air of the tavern like ash after a fire—bitter, but honest. The fiddle outside trilled a merry tune, absurdly cheerful against the weight of what had just been confessed. She watched her friend stare into the dregs of her brandy as though it might offer absolution.

Then, slowly, an idea unfurled in Pacifica’s mind—not reckless, not impulsive, but deliberate, like the turning of a key in a long-locked door.

“What if,” she began, her voice low but steady, “you went back?”

Vivienne’s head snapped up. “Back? To Mayfair?” She let out a brittle laugh. “Don’t be absurd, Paci. I’m dead there. Buried with yellow larkspur and royal tears. If I so much as set foot on English soil, I’d be arrested for fraud—or worse, forced to explain myself to a society that prefers its ghosts silent. They would think me pathetic.”

“But you wouldn’t go as her,” Pacifica pressed, leaning forward, her eyes alight with the kind of daring only true friendship could inspire. “You’d go as Vivienne Dubois. The American heiress. The widow. The writer. The woman who owns bookshops from Boston to Charleston and hosts salons that make even radicals blush.”

Vivienne opened her mouth to protest—but Pacifica held up a hand.

“Think,” she urged. “You arrive in London as a foreign curiosity—wealthy, enigmatic, unattached. No one expects you to know the Featheringtons. No one connects you to a ghost. You wear a veil, as you did when you first came to Boston—claiming mourning for your late husband, or delicate health, or simply ‘continental fashion.’ Half the ton will assume you’re French. The other half will be too busy scheming to invite you to their balls to care.”

Vivienne’s fingers stilled on the rim of her glass. “A veil…”

“Yes,” Pacifica said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial hush. “You watch. You listen. You see your mother—truly see her—not through Genevieve’s letters, but with your own eyes. You hear Eloise laugh. You witness your sisters’ lives. You learn if Colin ever looked for you. And if Cressida Cowper still struts about in yellow, you’ll be there to watch her falter when a certain anonymous column appears in The Morning Post—signed, of course, by Lady Whistledown.”

Vivienne’s breath caught. “I couldn’t… It’s too dangerous.”

“Is it?” Pacifica tilted her head. “Who would suspect a wealthy American widow of being a dead English spinster? You’ve changed, Viv. Your voice is deeper. Your posture—commanding. Your hair is darker, your skin sun-kissed from Boston summers. And your eyes…” She paused. “Your eyes no longer beg to be seen. They demand it.”

Vivienne looked away, toward the fire. The idea coiled in her chest—not as hope, not yet, but as possibility. A thread, thin and trembling, but there.

“I’d be lying,” she whispered. “Again.”

“You’ve been lying since the day you left,” Pacifica said gently. “But this time, you wouldn’t be running. You’d be returning. Not to reclaim Penelope Featherington—she’s gone, and you’ve mourned her well. But to give Vivienne Dubois the one thing she’s never had. Closure.”

Silence stretched between them, filled only by the crackle of the hearth and the distant clink of tankards.

Finally, Vivienne exhaled. “It’s madness.”

“Perhaps,” Pacifica conceded, a small smile playing at her lips. “But haven’t you always thrived in the shadows of madness? After all—you are Lady Whistledown.”

Vivienne didn’t answer. But she didn’t dismiss it either.

And as she lifted her glass for one last sip, her reflection in the mirror behind the bar no longer showed a woman drowning in grief.

It showed a woman considering a reckoning.

The seed was planted. And in the fertile soil of a heart long denied justice, it would not take much to make it grow.

Chapter Text

The afternoon sun slanted through the tall library windows of Vivienne Dubois’s Beacon Hill residence, gilding the dust motes that danced above her mahogany desk like errant fairies caught in a reverie. Seated in her favourite wingback chair—its upholstery worn soft by years of clandestine reading and deeper contemplation—Vivienne held open a volume whose spine had long since surrendered to her frequent attentions.  

It was a travelogue, bound in faded green leather, its title stamped in gold: Wanderings Through the Hellenic Shores. 

She had owned it for three years. Read it thrice. And yet, each time, she found herself arrested not by its descriptions of ancient ruins or azure seas, but by its author’s peculiar priorities.

“…and it is, although not my first moment of sentimental longing, to me a wonderful place to settle. The clear water of the beaches, the white sands that kiss the soles of children’s feet, the laughter that flies along with the gulls in the air—and of course, the occasional blundering curses from getting shat upon by these bastard birds—one would think, I sure do, that Athens is a place to begin and breed family. I so hope, dear reader—and pray with me here—that I may find a wife to bring along in my next publishing.”

Vivienne’s nose wrinkled as though she’d just inhaled a particularly pungent whiff of overboiled cabbage. She set down her teacup—fine bone china, painted with sprigs of larkspur—and regarded the page with an expression hovering between exasperation and reluctant fondness.

“Good heavens,” she murmured, her voice rich with dry amusement, “the man has penned more similes for the curve of a woman’s ankle than he has metaphors for the Parthenon. One might suppose he journeyed to Greece not to admire antiquity, but to catalogue the local milliners—and the décolletage of their clientele.”

She took a slow sip of Darjeeling, her eyes still fixed on the offending passage. There was no lyricism here—no evocation of the Aegean at dusk, no meditation on the weight of history in the stones of the Acropolis, not even a single line about the way the light might gild the olive groves at dawn. Instead, the author waxed poetic about tavern wine and;

“a particularly winsome laundress in Piraeus whose smile outshone Apollo’s chariot.”

Vivienne snorted into her teacup. “Outshone Apollo’s chariot? My dear author, if that is the best your romantic sensibilities can muster, I daresay you’d be better suited to writing farces for Covent Garden than travelogues for the discerning mind.”

And yet—she did not close the book.

She turned the page, her fingers lingering on the margin where she had once, in a moment of unguarded sentimentality, underlined the phrase “to begin and breed family” in the faintest pencil stroke. She had erased it the next day. But the ghost of the line remained, like a watermark on her soul.

A soft tap at the window startled her from her reverie.

She looked up—and there he was.

Her sparrow.

The same impudent little creature who had first appeared during her second week in Boston, pecking insistently at her fogged glass as though demanding entry into her solitude. At first, she had thought him a nuisance. But when he returned—on grey days, on birthdays, on nights when the wind howled like a banshee—he became something else entirely, a companion. A silent witness to her exile.

She rose, her silk slippers whispering against the rug, and opened the casement just enough to scatter a handful of millet onto the sill. The bird hopped forward without fear, cocking his head as if to say, Took you long enough.

“You’re terribly demanding for a creature with no rent to pay,” she chided gently, watching him peck with industrious glee. “If you were a gentleman, I’d say you’ve the manners of Lord Marcos—but with better teeth.”

The sparrow ignored her, as was his wont.

Vivienne leaned against the window frame, the afternoon breeze lifting the loose tendrils of hair that had escaped her chignon. Below, Boston bustled—carriages rattled, merchants called, children shrieked with laughter as they chased hoops down the cobbled lane. It was a world away from Grosvenor Square. And yet…

She glanced back at the open book on her desk, at the initials embossed so modestly on the cover.

A sigh escaped her—soft, wistful, utterly unguarded.

“Some men,” she said to the sparrow, “write entire volumes about the world… and never notice the one soul who was always watching them in it.”

The bird gave a chirp—sharp, bright, indifferent—and took flight into the golden haze of the afternoon.

Vivienne closed the window, returned to her chair, and picked up her teacup once more.

But she did not open the book again.

Instead, she stared into the amber liquid, as though it might reveal the past—or the future.

Vivienne smiled and sighed once more—this sigh dipped beneath her chin and fell with the full weight upon her shoulders, even as she leaned back into her exceedingly lovely and, she must confess, rather absurdly expensive chair, upholstered in damask of a shade so deep it bordered upon scandal. She wondered, not for the first time, how in heaven’s name she had contrived to become so thoroughly inebriated at the Duchess Baston’s soirée—or, more pertinently, how deep into her cups she must have been to wager so prodigious a sum (a figure she steadfastly refused even to name within the privacy of her own thoughts, so profound was her mortification) upon her very first night of truly accepting herself as a new woman.  

That night had marked her complete transformation: the first dawn of Vivienne Dubois, and the final dusk of the girl who had perished in yellow larkspur and royal decree. Pacifica, ever her co-conspirator in liberation, had spirited her away to the Duchess’s establishment, where they had ensconced themselves in a chamber far removed from the main revelry, surrounded by the low hum of chatter and the sharp clink of glasses. There, amidst clouds of cigar smoke and the rustle of silk, they had played at cards, raising their stakes with every juicy morsel of gossip gleaned from the passersby in the corridor. Vivienne could no longer recall the precise nature of her wager—only that it had cost her dearly, and in return, she had won naught but a Grecian-style chair of such ostentatious design that it now occupied a corner of her library like a monument to folly. She could never quite forgive herself for the extravagance, yet she would not—could not—claim to regret that night.  

For it was on that very evening that she had laughed for the first time. Loud, boisterous, unyielding, and utterly free—unshackled from the cage of expectation, unburdened by the ghost of a name she had buried beneath the Atlantic. She had danced with abandon, twirling through the arms of half a dozen gentlemen without a care for propriety. The following morning, callers had lined her street, their cards piling high upon her silver salver. Thus began the life of Vivienne Dubois: a widow whose mourning was finished, whose fortune was unquestioned, whose lineage—though spun from the gossamer threads of invention—was accepted without demur by the highest echelons of American society. She was a published author, still writing under the unflappable and ever-anonymous guise of Lady Whistledown; an heiress of impeccable (if fabricated) ancestry; and a social luminary from Boston to Charleston. She was no longer the dead girl in yellow. She had left that spectre behind—ten full years ago, to be precise.  

Yes, she had. She had changed. She had chosen this life, forged it with her own hands, and she was, by all outward measures, a happy woman. She needed not reminisce. She no longer required the luxury—or the torment—of mourning a life she had deliberately and irrevocably ended. She would not return. She never could. She must not allow her thoughts to drift toward Grosvenor Square, nor toward the willow tree beneath whose weeping boughs she had once hidden with a man whose name she dared not speak, whose glances had set her soul alight even as they broke it. She ought not recall the lemon tarts she had pilfered from the plates of siblings she had loved as though they were her own flesh and blood; nor the shared giggles with Eloise Bridgerton, whose friendship had been the sun to her moon; nor the quiet afternoons spent in companionable silence with her mother, listening to her endless, tender ramblings about the necessity of securing a husband before it was too late.  

And yet—  

There it was again.  

That aching pang in her chest, sharp as a stiletto and twice as cruel, which caused her throat to constrict, her hands to tense upon the arms of her chair, her spine to stiffen as though bracing against an invisible blow, and her mind to empty itself of all thought save for the veiled, suffocating grief she had laboured so long and so diligently to banish.  

She missed home.  

She misses home.  

She yearns—oh, how she yearns—despite every artifice of contentment she has constructed, despite every triumph she has claimed, despite every ball she has hosted and every column she has penned with icy precision. She yearns for her mother’s tender touch, for the familiar cadence of her ceaseless, loving nagging about suitors and seasons and the proper shade of ribbon to wear with one’s complexion. She misses her sisters—their morning squabbles over who borrowed whose gloves, their vanity, their flightiness, their unwavering, if exasperating, devotion. She wonders, with a sorrow so deep it borders upon physical pain, whether her room remains untouched in the Featherington townhouse. Are the blinding corridor wallpapers—those dreadful floral monstrosities she once loathed but now would give anything to see again—still in place? Do her portraits hang somewhere, gathering dust in a forgotten hallway, or have they been consigned to the attic, wrapped in linen and memory? Are her bookshelves kept clean, her favourite volumes still arranged by author and not by colour, as Philippa insisted they ought to be? Does some faithful maid, once in a while, dust the empty closet where her yellow gowns once hung, now folded away like relics of a saint no one remembers?  

And the servants—the butler with his stiff bow, the cook who always slipped her an extra biscuit, the chambermaid who knew which side of the bed she preferred—did they mourn her too? Did they, in the quiet hours of midnight, still set out a small platter of tea and sweets upon the tray outside her door, just in case she should return?  

She did not know.  

She would never know.  

“Pardon for my intrusion, Miss,” came Eliza’s voice—a soft, familiar chime that sliced through Vivienne’s reverie like a silver needle through velvet.  

Vivienne startled, her body twisting in the chair as she turned toward the door, where her maid stood, hands folded neatly before her, eyes warm with gentle concern. “I have been knocking on your door,” Eliza continued, stepping just inside the threshold. “I worried you’d fallen asleep over your books again.”

Vivienne offered an apologetic smile, though it did not quite reach her eyes—those windows to a soul still adrift in the tempest of yesterday’s conversation with Pacifica. Ever since that reckless, intoxicating suggestion at the Green Dragon—that she might return to Mayfair, not as a ghost, but as Vivienne Dubois, veiled and enigmatic—the library had become her refuge and her prison. She had not truly read a single page; the books lay open like altars to a past she dared not resurrect. The very notion was madness. Glorious, seductive madness—but madness nonetheless. She was not that desperate. She could not be. She had buried Penelope Featherington with her own hands. To dig her up now would be sacrilege.

“Miss?” Eliza prompted gently.

Vivienne blinked, jolted once more from the quicksand of her thoughts. She smoothed her robe with trembling fingers and summoned another smile—this one brighter, more convincing. “I am quite alright, Eliza. Merely… reading.”

But Eliza, who had served her since those first fragile months in New York, who had held her hair back during nights of weeping, who had stitched her first American gown with hands both deft and tender—Eliza knew better. She saw the shadow behind the sparkle, the tremor beneath the poise. Yet, as always, she said nothing more. She knew when to press, and when to let silence do its work.

“Very well, Miss,” she said evenly. “I only came to inform you that Miss Delacroix has finally arrived—and is waiting for you in the drawing room.”

The words struck like lightning.

Vivienne’s breath caught. Her eyes widened. In one fluid motion, she sprang from her chair, sending the forgotten travelogue tumbling to the floor with a soft thud. The teacup rattled in its saucer.

“Genevieve has arrived?” she gasped, her voice leaping an octave in sheer, unguarded delight. She swept toward Eliza, her silk robe billowing behind her like the train of a queen. She seized her maid’s hands in both of hers, her grip fervent, her smile radiant. “Oh, Eliza! You cannot imagine—she is the dearest soul in all the world! The only one who ever saw me—truly saw me—before I even knew how to look at myself!”

Eliza’s cheeks flushed pink with pleasure at her mistress’s uncharacteristic effusion. “She is very much in her excitement to see you, Miss. And as you once described her—high-fashioned, indeed. Her gown alone looked as though it had been spun from moonlight and Parisian air.”

Vivienne laughed—a bright, bubbling sound that had not graced the library in days. “Oh, that is Genevieve! She could dress a scarecrow in silk and make it weep with envy.” She released Eliza’s hands only to spin in place, already mentally rifling through her wardrobe. “Quickly, Eliza! Help me into something worthy of her. Not too grand—she’ll scold me for ostentation—but something fresh, something joyful. We have not seen each other in ten years! The pastel green muslin, I think. The one with the embroidered vines at the hem. And the pearl combs—she gifted them to me on my first birthday in Boston, remember?”

“Yes, Miss,” Eliza said, already moving toward the dressing room with the quiet efficiency of long practice. “And shall I have Cook prepare the lemon tarts? The ones with the lavender glaze?”

Vivienne paused, her hand at her throat. A lump rose there—sudden, sweet, aching. “Yes,” she whispered. “The lemon tarts. Though I doubt we will even bother with the tarts, we’ll be far too busy catching up.”

For Genevieve Delacroix was more than a modiste. More than a friend. She was the keeper of secrets, the architect of escape, the woman who had pressed a satchel of bloodied fabric into Vivienne’s hands and whispered, “Run, my darling. And never look back—unless it is to write about them.” 

She had stayed in Mayfair only a year after the funeral, long enough to ensure the Featheringtons were not utterly ruined, long enough to watch Lady Danbury’s grief harden into quiet fury, long enough to see Cressida Cowper strut through Almack’s in yellow without consequence. Then she, too, had vanished—reappearing in Paris as Madame Delacroix, the modiste to duchesses and revolutionaries alike, her salons whispered about from Vienna to St. Petersburg.

And now she was here. In Boston. In her drawing room.

As Eliza helped her out of her robe and into the green muslin—light as spring leaves, cool as hope—Vivienne felt something shift within her. Not just joy. Not just relief. But the first true stirring of home in ten long years. Genevieve, as she's realized, would be the closest she’s ever been tethered to her past. A past not even Eliza could know or comprehend. Genevieve is her past, a huge part of her as the dead woman in Mayfair. And she was excited to see the woman she's come to know as her closest ally left.

“Hurry, Eliza,” she urged, already halfway to the door, her slippers forgotten, her hair half-pinned. “She must not wait another moment.”

For if anyone could understand the madness of returning to Mayfair—if anyone could stitch together the tattered edges of past and present with needle and thread and unwavering love—it was Genevieve.

And Vivienne, for the first time since Pacifica’s suggestion, felt the seed not as a threat—but as a possibility. One she both dreaded and anticipated. Surely Genevieve would talk her out of it, she knows it. And that's what she needs as of now, a sane comfort and not a maddening suggestion as Pacifica prompted.

Vivienne descended the grand staircase with a swiftness that bordered on impropriety—her slippers whispering against the polished banister, her pastel green skirts swirling like spring leaves caught in a joyful gust. She did not walk; she rushed, her heart hammering against her ribs as though it, too, longed to leap into the arms of the woman waiting below.

And there she was.

Genevieve Delacroix stood in the center of the drawing room, backlit by the afternoon sun streaming through the tall windows, one gloved hand resting on the back of a Chippendale chair, the other clutching a reticule embroidered with golden bees—a motif she had adopted since opening her Paris salon. She wore a gown of deep plum silk, cut in the latest French style, with a fichu of ivory lace that framed her face like a halo. Her dark hair was swept into an elaborate chignon, studded with jet beads that caught the light with every turn of her head. She looked every inch the celebrated modiste of Rue Saint-Honoré—elegant, formidable, and utterly radiant.

But the moment her eyes found Vivienne on the stairs, all pretense of continental poise vanished.

“Mon Dieu!” Genevieve cried, her voice rich with laughter and tears in equal measure. She swept forward, arms outstretched, her French accent curling around the English words like smoke around flame. “Vivienne! Ma chère, ma folle, ma courageuse Vivienne!”

“Genevieve!” Vivienne gasped, and the last step was taken in a near-leap.

They collided in the center of the hall—arms wrapping, hands clutching, faces pressed close as though to confirm the other was real and not some fevered dream conjured by longing. Genevieve smelled of orange blossom and bergamot, of Parisian rain and ink-stained letters. Vivienne buried her face in her friend’s shoulder, breathing her in, and for a moment, neither spoke. They simply held—two souls who had carried each other across oceans of silence.

Then the words came—fast, frantic, tumbling over one another like children racing down a hill.

“You are too thin!” Genevieve scolded, pulling back only to cup Vivienne’s face in her hands, her thumbs brushing away tears neither had realized had fallen. “And your hair—mon Dieu—it is longer! And that green! It suits you like the first blush of spring!”

“And you!” Vivienne laughed, squeezing her hands. “You look like you stepped out of a Gainsborough painting—only with better posture and far more dangerous opinions!”

Genevieve threw her head back and laughed—a full, throaty sound that echoed off the marble floors. “Dangerous? Non. I am merely honest. And in Paris, honesty is the new scandal.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “Though I did tell the Duchess of Orléans that her new gown made her look like a startled pheasant. She hasn’t spoken to me since. Worth it.”

Vivienne clutched her arm, giggling like a girl. “Oh, I’ve missed you! Every letter, every parcel of fabric, every cryptic note tucked inside a new bonnet—you kept me alive, Genevieve. Truly.”

“And you,” Genevieve said softly, her voice dropping, her eyes glistening, “you made me believe in miracles. A wallflower who became a storm. A ghost who built an empire. Regarde-toi!” She gestured to the grand house around them. “This—this is your doing. Not fate. Not luck. You.”

They fell into step together, arms linked as they wandered toward the settee, neither willing to let go. A maid appeared with a tray of tea, but Vivienne waved her away with a smile. “Later. We have a decade to catch up on.”

“Indeed!” Genevieve settled onto the sofa, patting the space beside her. “Tell me everything. The bookshops—do they sell your novels under glass like relics? The salons—have you converted any ministers to feminism yet? And the men—mon Dieu, Vivienne, do not tell me you’ve remained celibate all these years! Even nuns have secrets.”

Vivienne blushed furiously. “I am a widow, Genevieve—not a saint.”

“Ah! So there has been someone?” Genevieve’s eyes sparkled with wicked delight.

“Perhaps,” Vivienne demurred, fanning herself with a hand that trembled just slightly. “But none worth writing home about.”

“Pah!” Genevieve scoffed. “You wrote The Wilting of a Wallflower! If a man is not worthy of a footnote in your life, he is not worth a second glance.”

They laughed then—long and loud, the kind of laughter that heals old wounds simply by existing. Outside, the world carried on: carriages rolled, birds sang, Boston bustled. But in that drawing room, time folded in on itself. Ten years vanished. Two women, once bound by secrecy and survival, were simply together again. If only for a moment while.

Genevieve leaned back against the silk-upholstered settee, her teacup cradled delicately between gloved fingers, her gaze fixed on Vivienne with an expression that hovered between wonder and quiet sorrow. The afternoon light caught the fine lines at the corners of her eyes—lines earned not just by laughter, but by years of holding secrets too heavy for one pair of shoulders.

“My dear,” she began, her voice softer now, stripped of its earlier theatrical flourish, “when I saw you at the top of those stairs… I scarce believed my eyes. You move like a woman who owns the earth beneath her feet. You speak as though the very air bends to listen. And your presence—mon Dieu—it fills a room as though you were born to command it.”

She paused, her dark eyes searching Vivienne’s face with an intimacy only shared between those who have witnessed each other’s unraveling—and rebirth.

“I remember,” she continued, her voice dropping to a near-whisper, “a girl who once stood in the corner of my shop, eyes downcast, fingers twisting the hem of a gown two seasons out of fashion, afraid even to ask for a thimble’s worth of kindness. She spoke so softly I had to lean in to hear her. And yet… even then, there was a fire in her. Quiet, yes—but there. Like a candle behind thick glass. Unseen by most, but burning all the same.”

Vivienne’s smile did not falter, but it grew fragile at the edges—like porcelain held too tightly. She looked down at her own hands, now adorned with a single emerald ring, no longer the freckled, ink-stained fingers that once trembled while penning society’s doom under cover of night.

“She was very young,” Vivienne said softly, her voice steady, though her chest tightened with that familiar, hollow ache—the one that never truly left, only slept between heartbeats. “And very afraid.”

Genevieve reached across the small space between them and covered Vivienne’s hand with her own. “And now?”

“Now,” Vivienne replied, lifting her gaze, “I am not afraid. But I am… tired, sometimes. Not of this life—never that. But of carrying the ghost of who I was, even when no one else remembers her.”

A silence settled between them, thick with unspoken names of Grosvenor Square. The lake. The yellow roses. The empty coffin.  

Genevieve’s thumb brushed gently over Vivienne’s knuckles. “Do you ever wonder,” she asked carefully, “what might have been… if the lie had not been spoken? If the ton had seen her—truly seen her—not as a scandal, but as she was? Clever. Kind. Worthy of love without condition?”

Vivienne’s breath hitched. She looked toward the window, where the Boston sky stretched wide and free—so unlike the gilded cage of Mayfair’s sky, which had always felt like a ceiling, not a horizon.

“I wonder,” she admitted, her voice barely above a whisper, “if she would have danced at her own wedding. If she would have worn yellow on her wedding day—not as a symbol of ruin, but of joy. If she would have had children who laughed like Eloise, and argued like Prudence, and rolled their eyes like Philippa.” She swallowed hard. “I wonder if her mother would have lived to see her happy.”

Genevieve’s eyes filled with tears, though she did not let them fall. “She was happy,” she said fiercely. “In the end. She chose herself. And in a world that demanded she vanish, that was the most rebellious, beautiful act of all.”

Vivienne turned back to her, and for a moment, the mask of Vivienne Dubois—the heiress, the author, the social lioness—slipped entirely away. What remained was something raw, tender, and achingly familiar: the girl who had once trusted Genevieve with her life, her pen, and her broken heart.

“I miss her,” Vivienne whispered. “Not as a memory. But as a part of me I had to bury to survive.”

Genevieve squeezed her hand. “Then let her rest in peace, ma chère. But do not forget her. She is why you are here. Why you write. Why you give. Why you live so boldly.”

Vivienne nodded, blinking rapidly. Then, with a slow, deliberate breath, she straightened her spine, smoothed her skirts, and offered Genevieve a smile that, though tinged with sorrow, was undeniably real.

“And now,” she said, her voice regaining its familiar lilt, “you shall tell me everything about Paris. And I shall tell you why Boston society is far more scandalous than London ever dared to be.”

Genevieve laughed—a sound both relieved and loving—and lifted her teacup in salute. “To ghosts,” she said softly, “and the women they became.”

“To ghosts,” Vivienne echoed.

The wine arrived not long after—deep ruby claret, decanted with care by Eliza, who set the tray down with a quiet curtsy before retreating, ever mindful of the sacred privacy between mistress and confidante. Vivienne poured two generous glasses, the rich liquid catching the firelight like liquid garnet, and handed one to Genevieve with a flourish.

“To ten years of letters, lies, and larkspurs,” Vivienne toasted, her eyes glinting over the rim of her glass.

“To survival,” Genevieve countered, clinking her glass against Vivienne’s with a soft, resonant chime.

They settled deeper into the plush settee, the wine warming their hands and loosening their tongues. Laughter soon followed—light, bubbling, effortless—as Genevieve regaled Vivienne with tales of Parisian duchesses who demanded gowns that “defied gravity and modesty in equal measure,” and Vivienne countered with stories of Boston matrons who tried to host salons on temperance while secretly keeping brandy decanters hidden behind potted ferns.

Then, with a mischievous tilt of her head, Genevieve gestured around the opulent drawing room—the gilded mirrors, the Turkish rugs, the crystal chandelier that scattered light like scattered stars—and said, “You know, ma chère, your mother would be so proud.”

Vivienne nearly choked on her wine. “My mother? Portia Featherington would faint at the sight of this chandelier alone!”

“Ah, but consider!” Genevieve leaned forward, eyes dancing. “The feathers in the draperies—exactly her taste. The boldness of the colour palette—scarlet and gold, like a peacock’s dream. The sheer audacity of hosting a banquet for two hundred in a garden strung with lanterns shaped like quills? Oh, Vivienne—” She laughed, shaking her head. “You may wear French silk and quote Mary Wollstonecraft at breakfast, but in your soul, you are so your mother’s daughter.”

Vivienne opened her mouth to protest—but stopped. A slow, rueful smile tugged at her lips. “Good Lord. You’re right.”

“Of course I am,” Genevieve said smugly, taking a sip. “And do you know what else she would adore? That you’ve turned Lady Whistledown into a brand. Bookshops! Pamphlets! A serialized column in three colonies! Portia Featherington would have sold tickets to your debut as a scandal-mongering heiress.”

They both dissolved into laughter—Vivienne’s rich and unrestrained, Genevieve’s bright and lilting—until the mirth softened into something quieter, more reflective.

Then, as if the wine had loosened more than just her tongue, Genevieve added, almost offhandedly, “Though I daresay Eloise would have loved your salons even more. And Colin—well, he always did prefer a woman with a sharp mind and sharper tongue.”

The words hung in the air like smoke.

Vivienne’s glass stilled halfway to her lips. Her breath caught—just once—but it was enough.

Genevieve’s eyes widened slightly. “Oh,” she murmured. “I… I did not mean to—”

“No,” Vivienne said quickly, setting her glass down with careful precision. Her voice was calm, but beneath it thrummed a current of something raw, urgent. “It’s alright. I… I would like to know. If you are willing.”

Genevieve studied her for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “I left London a year after you did. I could not bear it—the whispers, the silence, the way your mother would come into my shop and simply… stand by the fabric bolts, as though waiting for you to appear and ask for yellow again.”

She took a steadying breath. “Eloise… she was devastated. For months, she wore black. Not mourning black—protest black. She refused to attend Almack’s or any social seasons after that. She wrote letters to your mother every week. I saw one once—left behind on a chair. She called you ‘my sister in all but blood.’” Genevieve’s voice softened. “She never believed the rumours, you know. Not for a moment.”

Vivienne’s throat tightened. She looked down at her hands, twisting the emerald ring round and round.

“And Colin?” she asked, the name barely a whisper.

Genevieve sighed. “He left London not long after the funeral. Went travelling—Greece, Italy, the Levant. Wrote a travelogue, last I heard. Came back a year later, quieter. Older. He never married. There were rumours… that he searched the Serpentine for weeks. That he questioned the boatmen. That he confronted Cressida Cowper at Lady Danbury’s ball and nearly called her out—until Lady Danbury herself intervened and dragged him away by the cravat.”

A small, broken sound escaped Vivienne before she could stop it. She covered her mouth with her hand.

“He never spoke your name in public,” Genevieve continued gently. “But once, at a bookshop in Piccadilly—he bought a copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho. The clerk told me he stared at it for ten minutes before paying. And when he left… he left your favourite lemon drop on the counter. Just one. As though leaving an offering.”

Tears welled in Vivienne’s eyes, but she did not let them fall. Not yet.

“And my family?” she asked, her voice trembling. “My mother? My sisters?”

“Portia remarried—quietly, to a widower in Bath. She’s well. Philippa remaines with Lord Finch. Prudence… oh, Prudence caused a scandal by eloping with a painter after a fall out with Lord Dankworth! But they’re happy now. And your mother…” Genevieve reached out, touching Vivienne’s wrist. “She keeps your room exactly as it was. The yellow gown still hangs in the wardrobe. The bookshelf is dusted every Sunday. And on your birthday… she sets a place for you at dinner. Just in case.”

Vivienne closed her eyes. The ache in her chest was no longer hollow—it was full. Full of love, of loss, of a decade of moments she had missed and could never reclaim.

“I should have written,” she whispered. “Even just once.”

“You couldn’t,” Genevieve said firmly. “To write would have been to risk everything. And you gave them a chance at peace. That was your final act of love.”

Vivienne opened her eyes, glistening but resolute. “Do they… do they ever speak of me?”

“Only in whispers,” Genevieve said. “But always with love.”

Silence settled between them, filled only by the crackle of the fire and the distant chime of a clock striking the hour.

Then, with a slow, deliberate breath, Vivienne reached for her wine again.

“Tell me more,” she said softly. “Tell me everything.”

Genevieve set her wineglass down upon the lacquered table with a soft, deliberate click, her expression turning contemplative as she folded her hands in her lap. The firelight caught the fine gold embroidery along her cuffs, casting flickering shadows that danced like memories across the walls.

“There is more,” she said, her voice low and tender, “if your heart can bear it.”

Vivienne’s fingers tightened ever so slightly around her own glass, but she did not look away. “Tell me.”

“Not long after I left Mayfair—perhaps a year into my new life in Paris—I received a letter. From Eloise.” Genevieve’s eyes softened. “She wrote on thick cream paper, sealed with the Bridgerton crest, though the ink was smudged in places—as though her tears had fallen faster than her pen could move.”

She paused, drawing a slow breath. “She told me the Featheringtons had moved. Not far—only to a quieter townhouse in Clarges Street. Smaller, more manageable now that it was just Portia and the girls. But Grosvenor Square… they left it untouched. Not abandoned—preserved. The staff still cleans it weekly. The curtains are drawn against the sun, the silver polished, the hearths swept. Your mother insists upon it. ‘In case she returns,’ Eloise wrote. ‘Even if it is only her ghost.’”

Vivienne’s breath hitched, but she said nothing. She simply listened, as though each word were a thread weaving her back into a life she had thought forever lost.

“Prudence,” Genevieve continued, a fond smile touching her lips, “married Mr. Harry Dankworth—a kind man, steady as oak, persistent as stain, with a quiet sense of humour that suits her dramatics perfectly. He'd won her over again after she returned from her eloping with an unsuccessful engagement. They have a daughter now, little Patricia—nearly five now if I count right. Eloise says the child is the very image of you in your youth: round-cheeked, bright-eyed, with that same stubborn chin and a laugh that rings through the house like bells. She even has your… chubbiness, as Prudence so delicately put it in her last letter. ‘She eats like an army,’ she wrote, ‘and refuses to wear anything that isn’t yellow.’”

Vivienne let out a soft, trembling laugh. “Oh, Prudence.”

“And Philippa,” Genevieve went on, her voice warming, “wed Mr. Albion Finch—a scholar now, gentle and thoughtful. They live near Bath, in a house with a walled garden and a library that would make you weep with envy. Their daughter, Philomena—Philomena!—is three now. Golden curls, yes, but it is her eyes that startle them: the same blue as yours, Eloise says. And she is already an avid reader. She sits in your old window seat at Grosvenor Square during their visits and reads from your books—your books, Vivienne. The ones you left behind. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Evelina. Even your battered copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Philippa says she whispers the lines aloud, as though expecting you to answer from the next room.”

Vivienne’s hand flew to her mouth. A tear slipped free, tracing a slow path down her cheek.

“And Eloise,” Genevieve said gently, “has found love. With Mr. Phillip Crane—a barrister, well-read, with a dry wit and a deep respect for women’s minds. They met at a lecture on education reform. He asked her opinion on Mary Wollstonecraft before he asked her name. Eloise says he reminds her of you—‘not in looks, but in spirit. He sees people. Truly sees them.’”

Vivienne closed her eyes. “She always deserved someone who saw her.”

“She does,” Genevieve affirmed. “And she carries you with her. In everything.”

She leaned forward slightly, her voice dropping to a near-whisper. “And Vivienne… they spoke of you. Often. The year before I left France, I returned to London briefly—under a different name, of course—and I met Eloise in secret at Gunter’s. She brought Portia, Prudence, and Philippa. They all came. And over ices and quiet tears, they told stories. About your kindness. Your quiet courage. The way you always saved the last lemon tart for Prudence. How you stayed up all night helping Philippa with her French verbs. How you once walked Eloise home in the rain and gave her your shawl, even though you caught a chill for a week.”

Genevieve reached out and covered Vivienne’s hand with her own. “They never believed the lies, my dear. Not for a moment. And they never stopped loving Penelope Featherington.”

Vivienne bowed her head, her shoulders trembling just slightly. When she looked up again, her eyes were glistening—but also clear, as though a long-held storm had finally passed.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “For remembering her… when I could not.”

Genevieve lifted her glass once more, the claret catching the firelight like liquid amber. “To Penelope,” she said softly. “Whose name still lives in lullabies, in bookshelves, and in the laughter of little girls who wear yellow without fear.”

Vivienne raised her own glass, her voice steady now, resonant with quiet grace.

“To Penelope,” she echoed. “And to the family who kept her alive.”

Outside, the Boston night deepened. But within the drawing room, warmed by firelight and friendship, a ghost was not mourned. She was cherished.

Vivienne dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her sleeve—Genevieve would have scolded her for such a breach of etiquette, had she not been laughing too hard to care—and then, with a sly glint returning to her eyes, tilted her head.

“You know,” she began, her voice light now, teasing, “for a woman who claims to be eight years my senior, you carry your age with rather suspicious grace. Are you quite certain you haven’t made a pact with some Parisian witch? Or perhaps you’ve discovered the secret to eternal youth in the lining of your bonnets?”

Genevieve gasped in mock outrage, pressing a hand to her chest. “Eight years? My dear Vivienne, I am precisely four years your elder—and even that is a generous estimation on your part! Besides,” she added, smoothing her plum silk bodice with theatrical dignity, “Frenchwomen do not age. We merely… refine. Like a fine Bordeaux. Or a particularly scandalous sonnet.”

“Ah, yes,” Vivienne countered, refilling their glasses with a flourish, “and yet I recall a certain modiste in Mayfair who once fainted dead away upon hearing Lady Danbury declare that peplum sleeves were ‘back in fashion.’ You were forty then, Genevieve. Forty! And you swore you’d retire to the countryside with nothing but a cat and a copy of La Nouvelle Héloïse.”

“I did no such thing!” Genevieve protested, though her eyes sparkled with mirth. “I said I’d retire with two cats—and a very handsome footman to read Rousseau aloud while I napped.”

They dissolved into laughter again, the kind that curled the toes and loosened the soul, the weight of earlier confessions now softened by the warmth of shared history and well-worn affection. The fire crackled companionably. The wine glowed like captured sunset in their glasses. And for a while, there was only this: two women, bound by secrets and survival, finally safe enough to jest as though the world had never tried to break them.

When the laughter subsided, Vivienne grew quiet. She set her glass down and turned fully toward Genevieve, her expression softening into something deeper than mirth.

“Thank you,” she said simply.

Genevieve raised a brow. “For what? Reminding you that you once cried over a torn hem at your first ball? Or for convincing you that yellow could, in fact, be a colour of power?”

Vivienne shook her head, her smile tender. “For everything. For standing with me in that rain-soaked alley behind St. George’s when I was shaking so badly I could scarcely hold the satchel. For stitching my first gown as Vivienne Dubois with your own hands. For writing to me every month—even when I couldn’t write back. For never letting me forget that I was more than what Mayfair called me.”

She reached out and took Genevieve’s hand, her voice dropping to a whisper. “And for coming all this way… to celebrate my thirty-eighth birthday tomorrow. June 12th. The very day Cressida Cowper first whispered her lie.”

Genevieve’s eyes filled, but she did not look away. “I would cross oceans for you, ma chère. And I would do it again.”

Vivienne squeezed her hand. “Then tomorrow, we shall toast not to the girl who died… but to the woman who rose.”

Genevieve lifted her glass once more, her smile radiant through her tears. “To Vivienne Dubois—heiress, author, rebel, and my dearest friend.”

“To Vivienne,” Vivienne echoed.

And as the clock struck the hour, its chime echoing through the grand house, two women sat in the firelight—no longer haunted, but whole.  

Tomorrow, the world would see a glittering birthday banquet, a hostess in emerald silk, a legend in her own right.

But tonight, in the quiet, there was only gratitude.