The Viscount Who Loved Me

I picked this up right after finishing The Duke and I because I wanted more time with the Bridgerton crowd. This one centers on Anthony, the eldest brother. The Viscount Who Loved Me was published in 2000 by Avon, 354 pages in mass market, ISBN 9780062353643, written by Julia Quinn as the second book in the Bridgerton series. It follows Anthony Bridgerton as he decides to marry at last and fixes on Edwina Sheffield, only to be blocked at every step by her older sister Kate. I read it fast and then spent a long walk turning over what worked and what stung.

Anthony is twenty nine and known as a rake. He drinks with Benedict and Colin, races too fast in the park, keeps a mistress in Bloomsbury, and smiles through balls while avoiding any girl who might expect a proposal. Lady Whistledown teases him in print for dancing and never offering. His mother Violet wants him settled. His sister Daphne, now married to Simon Basset, wants him settled. Anthony agrees, but on cold terms. He will choose a wife who suits the post. She must be pleasant and sensible, and above all someone he will never love.

That rule comes from grief. When Anthony was eighteen his father Edmund died in front of him from a bee sting at Aubrey Hall. Edmund was thirty eight and strong. A bee landed on his arm during a morning walk. His throat closed within minutes. Violet was pregnant with Hyacinth at the time. Anthony held his father as he struggled to breathe and then went still. From that day Anthony kept a private count. If Edmund died at thirty eight, he assumes he will die at thirty eight too. He lives as if time is short. He avoids close ties and refuses to picture a child watching him die the way he watched Edmund die.

A viscount with a deadline

What makes Anthony sad rather than only arrogant is how this fear runs his plans. He tells himself he has about nine years left to secure the title and produce an heir. Love would make death cruel, so he plans to skip it. He wants good family and good temper, someone who will run his house and smile at his mother and never ask for his heart. He thinks this is fair. I read it as self protection that hurts everyone near him.

The Bridgerton house scenes show what he is dodging. Breakfast is loud. Benedict teases him about gray hairs. Colin steals his toast. Eloise asks why any woman would marry a man who looks bored by music. Daphne watches him with new married calm. Simon stays quiet. Violet reads Whistledown aloud and corrects manners between sips of tea. Anthony moves through that warmth like a guest who will not unpack.

Then the Sheffields arrive and spoil his neat plan. Mary Sheffield is a widow with two daughters. Edwina, seventeen, is declared the season's Incomparable within a week. Fair hair, sweet laugh, polite to servants, patient with debutante nerves. Whistledown praises her gowns. Mothers push sons toward her. Kate, twenty one, is her older half sister. Kate is brown haired and quick tongued, fond of books, blunt in talk, and fiercely protective of Edwina. She walks with a stout little corgi named Newton who waddles after her and steals biscuits wherever he goes.

Kate carries her own old scare. Her mother died when Kate was three after a long illness, during a rainy night when Kate was caught out in the storm. She still shakes at thunder. Her father married Mary when Kate was small and loved both girls without favor. He died a few years before this season, leaving modest funds and strong ties. Edwina adores Kate and refuses any suitor Kate dislikes. That fact ruins Anthony at once, because Kate dislikes him on sight.

The Sheffields crash the season

Their first meeting goes badly. Anthony sees Edwina across a musicale and decides she fits his list. He turns charm on Mary. Kate watches from beside a potted palm with Newton at her feet. When Anthony speaks to Kate, he is smooth and a little condescending. Kate answers with a bright smile and a direct hit about his reputation with opera dancers and widows. She has read Whistledown and heard drawing room talk. She tells him Edwina deserves better than a man shopping for a wife he plans never to love.

Anthony is stung. He is used to mothers approving and girls blushing. Kate does neither. She questions him about books and finds his answers thin. She blocks his calls on Edwina and invents errands whenever he arrives with flowers. Mary likes him because he is a viscount with fine manners when he tries. Edwina likes him because he dances well. Kate holds firm. She says no sister of hers will marry a man who boasts that love has no place in marriage.

So Anthony shifts in a way that is clever and a little mean. If Kate guards Edwina, he will court Edwina through Kate. He calls when Kate will be home. He asks her view on music and listens. He carries a muddy Newton back in the park without complaint while Kate laughs despite herself. He learns Kate reads travel accounts and hates needlework and can imitate Lady Danbury well enough to make Eloise choke on tea. Slowly Kate starts to enjoy his company even as she repeats that he is wrong for Edwina.

Edwina is not blind. She likes the attention but sees his eyes move to Kate during cards. She tells Kate in a quiet bedroom scene that she feels like a prize in a game the older two are playing. Mary worries. Violet hears it through Daphne and worries more. Lady Danbury tells Violet that Anthony has picked the wrong sister and knows it. Whistledown hints the same without names, which makes London watch the trio closer at every ball.

Pall Mall and Aubrey Hall

The country weekend at Aubrey Hall breaks things open. Violet invites the Sheffields to the Bridgerton country home in Kent. Daphne and Simon are there. Benedict sketches guests without permission. Colin loses at bowls. Eloise hides with a novel. Gregory and Hyacinth run wild with Newton, who arrives in a hamper and at once eats a dropped meat pie. Supper runs long. Someone suggests Pall Mall on the lawn.

Quinn writes Pall Mall as war by courtesy. The course runs across slopes and around old trees with iron wickets in the turf. Each player gets a colored ball and mallet. Anthony takes black. Kate takes orange and grips it like a weapon. Daphne insists on playing despite being newly pregnant. Eloise argues about rules. Edwina plays neatly and laughs when her ball rolls into rough. Kate and Anthony block each other and trade insults that sound like flirting to everyone watching. When Kate's ball lodges by a root, Anthony hangs back to watch her free it with a wild swing that sends turf flying. That swing tells you more about Kate than any ballroom scene. She would rather miss loudly than stand still.

After, hot and grass stained, they walk back together while Newton chases ducks. Kate says she loves the country because London air gives her headaches. Anthony says Aubrey Hall still smells like his father, pipe smoke and rain on stone. He asks about her father. She tells him about reading aloud during his last winter. He almost tells her about Edmund and stops. Kate notes his face and later writes in her diary that the viscount is less hollow than she thought, then crosses it out.

Newton helps the next morning by raiding the pantry for sausages, which lets Anthony help Kate drag him out while servants laugh. It is silly and homelike. Edwina watches them return with straw in Kate's hair and Newton's lead in Anthony's hand and goes quiet. She later tells Mary she feels unseen beside Kate when Anthony is near. Violet pulls Anthony aside and asks what he intends. He says he intends to marry Edwina. Violet looks at him flatly and says he intends to make three people miserable.

The bee scene comes after an outdoor luncheon. The party lingers on blankets with cold chicken and lemonade. A bee lands on Kate's chest near her neckline. Kate freezes. Anthony sees it and goes white. The hum brings back Edmund gasping on the path and Violet screaming. He moves without thought, brushes the bee aside, and when it stings her near the throat he tears her bodice to reach the spot. He presses his mouth to the sting to draw the venom. It lasts seconds. To him it is panic and rescue, not seduction.

To the women who round the hedge at that second, it looks like ruin. Violet stops dead. Portia Featherington gasps loud enough to bring others. Edwina stands behind them, pale. Kate shakes as she tries to cover herself while Anthony shouts that it was a bee. In their world a viscount with his mouth on an unmarried girl's skin in daylight, witnessed, means scandal. Portia will talk. Everyone knows it.

He kept saying it was only a bee, as if saying it enough times could put her dress back together.

A compromised wedding

There is no real choice after that, and Quinn does not pretend otherwise. Violet and Mary meet with cold tea. Portia has already told two friends. A special license is arranged. Anthony offers at once, stiff with guilt. Kate sits straight and says she understands duty. Inside she is sick. She wanted respect at least, and now she will marry a man who wanted her sister and who flinches at buzzing windows. Edwina cries in Kate's arms, sorry and glad at once. Kate holds her and means it when she says Edwina deserves a man who looks only at her.

The wedding is small and fast. Benedict gives Kate a quick sketch. Colin toasts too long. Daphne squeezes her hands and says Anthony is better than his talk. Lady Danbury gives Kate a hard stare and a soft kiss. The couple leaves for Anthony's London house. Kate wears a blue dress Mary altered overnight. Anthony is polite to the point of cold.

Married life starts stiff and then warms in flashes. Kate learns the house with help from the housekeeper. She orders coal and answers notes and visits Violet with cake. Anthony is fair about money and distant in rooms that matter. They share a bed and find real pleasure there, which puzzles both. Quinn writes those scenes with humor and plain care. Kate jokes about his pride in his shoulders. Anthony learns she likes her hair brushed slowly and remembers. Outside bed, he works late and rides alone.

The storm night cracks the wall a little. Rain hammers the windows and thunder shakes the glass. Kate wakes in panic, back in childhood rain, hands over ears. Anthony finds her on the floor of the dressing room. He sits with her on the rug and talks about drains and Newton chewing shoes until the shaking stops. Kate asks why he is kind in storms and cold at breakfast. He has no good answer. Next day he sends her travel essays without a note. She reads them in one day and leaves a pressed flower inside on his desk. Neither mentions it.

Thunder, crashes, and saying it plain

The carriage accident forces what talk could not. They drive in Hyde Park when a fast storm rolls in. Lightning strikes close. Horses shy at a crack and a falling branch. The carriage skids on wet gravel and tips hard. Kate is thrown against the door and trapped by a split panel that cuts her leg and knocks her head. Anthony kicks out the far door, cuts his hands on glass, and drags her free into mud while thunder keeps cracking. He presses his coat to her leg and shouts for help, then carries her to a keeper's hut. For those minutes he forgets counting to thirty eight. He only thinks that Kate must keep breathing.

Kate heals at home with a bandaged leg and stitched brow. Violet brings broth. Eloise reads aloud badly and makes her laugh. Edwina visits, calm and grown, and says she has accepted a kind scholar who looks only at her. Kate weeps with relief. Anthony hovers, white faced, then hides in his study. He tells Benedict he cannot face that fear again. Benedict, usually light, says he is calling fear wisdom to excuse coldness.

Violet corners him in the library and speaks plainly. She tells him about Edmund's death from her side, widowed in an afternoon while pregnant, raising eight children and laughing again. She says Edmund would be ashamed to hear his son use his death to starve a marriage. Edmund loved loudly, she says. He would have picked risk over this neat half life. Anthony admits he loves Kate and that love feels like watching a bee drift closer. Violet answers that numbness also charges a price, paid by Kate each day.

Kate decides she will not beg. She tells Anthony in the morning room that she broke his bargain by loving him. She will not live as a tolerated guest. If he wants an heir and empty talk, he should say so. If he wants a wife, he must accept that life wounds without warning. She knows storms kill and bees kill and roads turn in rain, and she still walks out and still loves him. Her voice shakes. That steadiness reaches him more than tears would.

He leaves for a night ride in rain and comes back soaked. He finds Kate in the library with her leg propped and Newton asleep on her feet. He kneels and speaks without polish. He says he lived since eighteen as a man already buried. He says the bee brought back his father's last breaths and the carriage brought back terror at losing her. He tried to love no one so grief could not find him, and it found him in halls and in bed and on the Pall Mall lawn. He loves her, late and badly, and asks if late can be enough. Kate says late is enough if he stays for storms. Newton snores through it, which feels right for them.

I should be fair about faults. Anthony courts Edwina while wanting Kate for too long, and Edwina reads as an obstacle rather than a hurt girl for much of the middle. She gets one clear scene of pain and then a quick match off page, which felt rushed. The bee rescue reads as sudden exposure with little room for Kate to be angry about being seen half dressed. Anthony repeats his dread of dying young in his head long after we grasp it, and I skimmed those loops. Kate forgives his cold weeks faster than I would. I wanted a longer hard talk before the final ride.

Still, the strengths held me. Pall Mall is one of the funniest set pieces Quinn has written, full of cheating and shouting while Daphne refuses to sit out. Newton stealing food gives the book a running joke. Benedict sketching Kate unposed, Colin bringing oranges for her leg, Eloise asking if marriage always starts with scandal, Lady Danbury thumping her cane at sulking, Whistledown opening each chapter with sly gossip, all keep the pages warm. The light period texture of calls and licenses and housekeeping sits firm without lectures. Consent in their married bed is asked and given in words, which I noted with relief. When Kate later stands by a window in distant thunder and breathes through it while Anthony holds her hand without comment, I believed they had learned how to live with fear. I am already watching Eloise in the margins and wondering how Quinn will handle her.