Chapter Text
In the lead-up to her second season, Edwina felt her sugary-sweet facade begin to crack infinitesimally wider with each passing breakfast at the Bridgerton table. She imagined herself wearing a pink candied bird mask, and wondered what might hatch when it shattered. Faberge eggs, perhaps - pretty and ornamental? She wanted to be a pishachini instead of a pink confection - all bulging red eyes and devouring teeth - morphing from phantasm to phantasm, no shape quite the same as the next. Invisible, unobserved, sucking up all the life-force she'd denied herself for so long.
"I hear Prince Friedrich of Prussia is seeking his bride again this year," said Didi. To anyone else she would have sounded delighted indeed, a new wife in the first flush of her marriage. Only Edwina heard the strain in her voice. Once they would have turned to each other and delighted in secret smiles. Didi would have glowed at her and beamed with pride, as though at some rare pheasant she had hand-reared, and Edwina would have preened under her affection.
"The Queen's nephew? When I saw him at the ball last year, he was all pomp and circumstance. I should not be satisfied with such an empty-headed husband - or any husband at all, for that matter," scoffed Eloise, closing her book and looking superior. "Alas, I cannot swan off abroad and become England's first woman engineer."
If she thought the Prince an idiot, what must Eloise, with all her suffragette ideas, think of Edwina? She and Didi were so close, and both so alike - headstrong, assertive, self-sufficient and intelligent. Perhaps there was something to be said for being a woman of independent means.
"Nor should I, Sister," Edwina said, pointedly not meeting Didi's eye. "I have had enough of husbands to be going on with. Certainly there are advantages to being unattached. The Mumbai School of Natural Sciences is beginning to admit women botanists and zoologists, I hear."
Eloise's answering smile was so contagious, Edwina could not help feeling a spark of joy amidst her own bitterness. "Perhaps I will return abroad with you after our season together," Eloise said, "and learn Marathi. There is so much to learn."
And yet you have learnt none of it, only prated nonstop about how unfair the world is, thought Edwina. Here stand I, twice on the marriage mart, and more accomplished than you twice over. If a small voice asked who had taught her those hard-won lessons, who had sacrificed her own girlhood for Edwina's erudition, she quashed it in a fresh surge of anger. She knew she was being uncharitable and relished her thoughts the more for it. She was finished with charity, finished with giving of herself to a pretty fantasy that would never come to pass.