Chapter Text
Anthony Bridgerton sat in the solicitor’s office, painstakingly making his way through the small mountain of payments and correspondence that Mr. Randall had organized for him.
The notes were numerous and varied - here was a letter from a tenant detailing a land dispute with a neighbor, and there was another letter from the neighbor calling the first tenant a thief and a liar. Advance requests from a few dependents in Kent as the winter had been very hard and the farmland wouldn’t yield enough to sustain them. Promissory notes for some of the livings in the parishes and direct payments for all the household staff for signature. Multiple letters from the stewards of the lesser properties, notices from local authorities as to trouble between some of his farmers - Anthony wondered how in the hell all this work had gone undone and knew he must seek his father's counsel in prioritizing and allocating these requests.
Then it came back, that rush of a strange, burning pressure to his chest, choking him, reminding him. His father was dead.
He couldn’t quite put a name to this wild, fulsome thing that roiled inside him at the oddest moments. It happened as recently as this morning: he’d been trying to shove Gregory into some clothes as the nursemaid was ill and his mother wouldn’t leave her bed, and he’d grumbled ‘where is your father?’ to his fussy baby brother. Then that fierce vibration filled his chest, reminding him that Edmund was gone; for all intents and purposes, Anthony was now Gregory’s father, and something so poisonously noxious filled his mouth it threatened to cut off his air supply right there in the nursery.
“Lord Bridgerton?” A dim voice broke through his melancholy as if someone was shouting at him underwater. “My Lord?”
Anthony swallowed, shoving the burning block he couldn’t name down, and dragged his eyes up to meet his father’s solicitor - no, his solicitor - seated opposite him across the large oak desk.
“Yes, Mr. Randall?” Anthony finally managed to find his voice as his quill scratched his signature on another note - his name and not his father’s.
The solicitor looked over at his new employer with no small degree of sadness. Master Anthony was an incredibly bright, charismatic boy, possessed of a wicked wit and enough inventive mischievousness for the six other Bridgerton children combined, but there was no sign of that young man in the lifeless, dead-eyed version who had arrived at his office today. Randall only hoped what he had to say would not hurt the boy further.
“I am loath to bring this up, my Lord, but considering recent circumstances, I dare not delay any longer. Your father has set himself a task this year, and it is of the utmost urgency and importance that you complete it.”
The young Viscount finally looked up at him, quill paused between the inkwell and the paper. “What task is this?”
Mr. Randall cleared his throat and steeled himself. The Bridgertons were in a precarious position, and it was best to act quickly before any more misfortune occurred.
“The former Viscount had yet to set livings for your brothers, or for your mother in case of his death or your marriage, nor had he decided dowries for your sisters. I would advise finalizing all these amounts as soon as possible.”
His words rang out in the silence of the small office as loudly as church bells. Anthony was staring at him, eyes wild, mouth tight. “What do you mean ‘He had yet to set livings’? Is not all that dictated by precedent and the limits of the property?”
Randall shook his head. “Normally, the title would allow for two or three livings without significant adjustments, but with all your brothers, a mother, and a full three dowries, not to mention the additional expense of the last child, we will have to carefully consider how to meaningfully provide for everyone in a sustainable manner.”
Randall’s voice sounded very far away to Anthony, muted by a ringing in his ears. It was impossible that his father hadn’t already made these arrangements - that it should be left up to Anthony to decide how much money his siblings should have to live upon marriage or maturity was beyond the reach of reason. He could sign notes, he would answer letters, he was willing to settle tenant’s disputes, but this could not be his job. This was a father’s job, that of a patriarch, not the work of an 18-year-old son who had barely learned how to maintain a ledger.
“You must be mistaken, Mr. Randall. My father must have already made these decisions and neglected to tell you.”
Mr. Randall gazed sadly at Anthony over the rim of his spectacles, choosing to ignore the panic in the young man's voice. “I am sorry, Lord Brigderton. I discussed this with the former Viscount a few months ago and we agreed that as soon as you were safely off to Oxford, he would settle these lingering questions.”
The ringing in Anthony’s ears grew so loud his hands flew to cover his ears involuntarily. His breaths felt as if he had broken glass stuck in his lungs, and he tried desperately to swallow the bile rising in his chest, but it was no use. His throat opened, and Anthony bolted to the bin next to the desk and retched, gasping and spitting and shaking on his knees as the rest of his life closed in around him. His mother’s wellbeing, his siblings’ comfort, health, security, and happiness, the thousands of souls dependent on him as the Viscount to ensure their homes and livelihoods, the entirety of the Bridgerton lineage, good name, and success were now in his woefully inadequate keeping. It was all his responsibility.
Christ, how was he to look his brothers in the eye after deciding how much money they would get to live on? What if he couldn’t afford enough of a dowry for his sisters? How was he to ever face his own mother - his pregnant, heartbroken mother - now that he had to decide her monthly allowances? Every feeling revolted: that the life his father had cultivated and pursued - a wife and soon to be seven other children - was now entrusted to Anthony's care and safekeeping, while his own life, the life he would have chosen for himself was buried in the family crypt, bound up forever with his father’s decaying corpse.
The wild, wretched acid rose again in Anthony’s chest, and he was finally able to put a name to this damnable feeling dogging his every step since the funeral.
Rage.
Anthony was furious.
He was so angry he felt he must be going mad.
“Are you all right?” The solicitor had his hands outstretched, hovering, with the same sad countenance he’d seen in every single face since Edmund had passed.
“Don’t you dare pity me.” He snarled, jumping to his feet, his heart pounding so loudly he could feel it in the tips of his fingers.
Startled, the solicitor took a few steps back, shaken at the frenzy in the young viscount’s voice.
“My apologies, My Lord. We can continue this discussion at another time, but this should not be put off any longer, for the sake of your family--”
Anthony crossed the distance between them, hands shooting out and gripping Randall by his coat, silencing him. “They’re not my family,” he hissed, throwing each word out as if they were knives. “They’re his.”
The words hung in the air between them, vile and macabre and childish and true, and something inside of Anthony snapped. He let go of Randall and bolted for the door, slamming it shut behind him.
Hours later, well past nightfall, he slipped off his horse outside the Bridgerton graves in the Kent parish. It was foolhardy and dangerous, making the trip from London to Kent on horseback at this hour, especially in the rain, but the vibrating furor inside him paid no heed to reason. He walked inside the largest of the family mausoleums, eyes adjusting to the darkness until he found himself in front of his father’s crypt. It was still nameless, as the masons wouldn’t be finished with the markers for another few weeks, but Anthony would know the stones encasing his father's body anywhere.
“I cannot believe you.” The words sprung from him, unbidden. “A bee, father. A fucking BEE.”
His hands clenched in his hair as he paced the small stone floor.
“At the very least, could you not have made it dramatic? Or explainable, for fuck’s sake? Lost at sea? Off at war? Assassinated for political leanings? A simple cold turned influenza? Something, ANYTHING that makes actual sense?”
A wild laugh bubbled up inside him, releasing something huge and incoherent he hadn't known was there. Words began falling out his mouth, tumbling, one after the other. Words of every shape and size and stripe. Angry words, begging words, curse words and questions, epithets and apologies and pleas. He hurled them all, one by one, at his father’s grave, relishing the shape of them, their harshness, their raw simplicity, a relief to his ears after weeks of swimming in tentative whispers and weak, half-empty sentiments. He yelled and screamed and reasoned and shouted and begged and pleaded until he was exhausted, and he collapsed against the wall of the crypt, spent and emptied out of everything.
“God, Papa”, he whispered, his voice scraped raw. “What am I to do?”
Anthony swiped at his eyes and let his head fall back against the stone, cold and damp and unforgiving.
“You took my future from me, and gave me yours instead.” He sniffled a bit. “I know I must forgive you, but I simply don't know how."
Tears pricked at his eyes like needles. He let them fall.
“I’m afraid, Father", he choked out. "I’m afraid of everything I don’t know, of all the ways I will fail, of the enormous empty space you left that I’ll never be able to fill.”
The boy twisted his hands together, fingers pulling at the family ring, then feeling the outline of his father’s watch in his waistcoat pocket. Anthony pulled out the watch and held it tightly to his chest, the seconds ticking asynchronously against his heartbeat, and cried.
He wept for hours, curled up against the stones holding his father’s corpse and the life Anthony would never have until the sun crept over the horizon.