Page 14 of Caroline Bingley’s Last Chance At Love

In. Out. In. Out.

The quality of the morning light through the curtains was the same as it had been five minutes ago, and yet the world was blurry, completely incomprehensible to her now.

You do not have to be like her.

No one had ever said that to her. Not in all her twenty-one years. She had heard, over the course of those years, a remarkable variety of things said about her, many of them unkind and several of them considerably more creative than necessary, but no one had ever stood in front of her and said that particular sentence. Not in that particular tone. Not with the particular calm certainty of someone who believed it entirely.

Who said it not as consolation but as a fact.

Caroline was lost.

The part of her that was her mother's daughter told herself that Jane Bennet was a sheltered optimist who had no earthly understanding of the shape of the world, and should therefore be dismissed accordingly.

The other part of her, the part she rarely acknowledged, the part that had been six years old once and staring at perfume bottles to get through the morning. That part wanted to do something she was not entirely prepared for.

It wanted to believe her.

Caroline pressed her fingertips to the bridge of her nose and took one long, careful breath, and then another, and by the third she had composed herself enough to see the world for what it was again.

In. Out. In. Out.

It made no difference whether she wished to believe in Jane. Wishing had never served her well.

The part of her that believed in fairytales had long since withered away. Around the same time she finally acknowledged that no matter how long she waited, no one was ever coming to save her.

Chapter 7

August 9th

The trouble with Jane Bennet, Caroline had decided somewhere between the third and fourth time she had replayed their conversation from the previous morning, was that she was entirely too perceptive for a woman who seemed, on the surface, to be nothing more than dull. A woman that pleasant simply had no business possessing eyes quite that clear, and the particular ability to say five words that split a person straight down the center and then walk away with the serene composure of someone who had done nothing more remarkable than comment on the weather.

She disliked her greatly for it.

Caroline pressed her fingertips to her temple and stared at the ceiling with the resigned expression of a woman who had spent the better part of a night and a morning attempting to locate the precise corner of her mind in which unwanted thoughts might be properly stored and has discovered, to her considerable irritation, that no such corner exists.

She had tried reading. She had abandoned it at page four when she realized she had read the same paragraph six times without absorbing a single word. She had tried correspondence. Three letters remained half-finished on the writing desk, each of them abandoned at approximately the moment she had found herself writing something other than what she had intended. She had tried simply sitting in dignified silence, which had lasted approximately four minutes before the silence revealed itself to be not the least bit dignified and a great deal more populated with Jane's voice than she could tolerate.

It was not, she insisted to herself for the eleventh time, as though the words had meant anything in particular to her. Jane Bingley was a woman of warm dispositions and charitable assumptions and approximately no practical understanding of how the world operated. She was the sort of woman who looked at a damaged thing and believed, with entirely unjustified confidence, that it might be repaired by the application of sufficient gentleness. Caroline had met this variety of person before. They were invariably well-intentioned and invariably exhausting and invariably wrong. There was absolutely no reason for their well-intentioned wrongness to linger in one's chest for two days as though it had set up residence there without consulting the landlord.

She was on the verge of her twelfth repetition when someone knocked at her door.

"I told the maids I was not to be disturbed this morning," Caroline said once again, to the door, to the ceiling, to anyone in earshot with the basic competence to receive information and act upon it.

"Begging your pardon, Miss Bingley." It was the soft, slightly tentative voice of the youngest of the Netherfield upstairs maids, who had thus far demonstrated a commendable ability to deliver messages with minimum conversational accompaniment. "There is a gentleman downstairs, miss. A Mr. Edward Reinhart. He is calling for you."

Caroline sat up so quickly she felt the room tilt.

Edward Reinhart.

She had, in the extraordinary emotional upheaval of the past twenty-four hours, managed to forget entirely about Edward Reinhart. This realization struck her as equal parts mortifying and astonishing, given that he had occupied a rather significant portion of her thoughts for the preceding week and had been, until Jane had arrived at her door yesterday morning and dismantled her from the inside, the primary occupant of her mental landscape. And yet here she was, entirely unprepared for him, still in her dressing gown, with her hair only half arranged.

They had agreed to meet today hadn’t they? How could she have possibly forgotten?

"Tell him," Caroline said, rising from the bed with the brisk efficiency of a woman coming back to her senses, "that I shall be down shortly. Offer him refreshments, and apologize for the delay on my behalf." She crossed to the door, opened it, and addressed the maid directly. "And send up Mary to assist me, if you please. Quickly."

The maid curtsied and retreated with admirable haste. Caroline turned back to her dressing table and regarded herself in the mirror with the dispassionate assessment of a general surveying terrain before a campaign.

Ten minutes later, she descended the stairs at a pace that was composed without appearing hurried, which was, she felt, one of her finer accomplishments.