Anthony Bridgerton had always known he would die young.
Oh, not as a child. Young Anthony had never had cause to ponder his own mortality. His early years had been a young boy's perfection, right from the very day of his birth.
One thing you have to give the author of the Bridgerton series credit for, if nothing else: she knows how to craft an opening line. Or, as it is called in the business, a grabber. She has a way of grabbing a reader’s attention with opening lines without ever repeating herself. Which is a good thing because there are a lot of Bridgertons to get through and they all have their own romance. Okay, so she repeats herself basic plot outline, but the devil is in the details in these kinds of stories and the details are never the same, either. Always with the question hanging is the Bridgerton series opening: why does Anthony does have a such a morbid expectation of time limits on his mortality and how will that impact the course of true love?
Anthony left Daphne sitting in the hall and took the stairs three at a time up to his parents' bedchamber. Surely his father wasn’t dead. A man couldn’t die from a bee sting. It was impossible. Utterly mad. Edmund Bridgerton was young, he was strong. He was tall, his shoulders were broad, his muscles were powerful, and by God, no insignificant honeybee could have felled him
Well, there it is. Why is Anthony Bridgerton morbidly convinced his time on earth will be short and his days are numbered? Well, wouldn’t the father who seemed an unconquerable mountain of strength was felled by a honeybee? That would be like if your father was Albert Einstein and he was duped out of all his money by some corrupt real estate developer’s con. Inconceivable is the word one may be looking for. Imagine the psychological effect of thinking your father was as close to indestructible as is possible for human flesh. Big, broad, strong and the most solidly dependable thing in your life. And a tiny, almost invisibly insignificant stinger from a bee is what does him in? Yeah, that could probably do some trauma to one’s existential certainty.
“Were you listening this afternoon in the drawing room? It’s bad enough that Edwina has any number of rakes and rogues sniffing about her. You cannot imagine the amount of time it has taken me to sort the good suitors from the bad. But Bridgerton! He’s quite possibly the worst rake in all London. You cannot want her to marry a man like him.”
So, what does a young man of hardy sexual appetite do if he believes he is going to die at an early age? Well, if he is living in this time period among this English lexicon and he’s one of the most desirable bachelors (meaning money) in the land—and supposing he is not a closeted homosexual—he became a rake. Or, at the very least, he assumes a posture which leads others to describe him as rakish. Whether rake or rakish is beside the point to Kate Sheffield, however, because they amount to the same thing: a blaring siren accompanied by flashing red lights that says loud and clear, “Mitts off my sister, Mister” And therein lies the conflict driving the drama of the romance. Older spinster-to-be Kate Sheffield has been endowed with veto power over potential husband material by usurper of her role as first-to-marry, younger sister Edwina.
